Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Editors’ Introduction
social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and
consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing increas-
ingly means constructing cooperation and communicative commonalities.
*/Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
These observations by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri frame, but by no means limit
or confine, the investigations, understandings, and interventions of the contributors
to this special issue of Rethinking Marxism, THE COMMON AND THE FORMS OF THE COMMUNE.
Operating within and beyond each of the offerings contained in these pages is a
profound play on precisely the question posed: What is the operative notion of the
common today? Even the singularity of that question’s basic assumption is challenged
by the scope of these inquiries for, indeed, a paradox begins to emerge when we
consider them as a collection, one might even say as a common production of
knowledge: recognition that the very foundation of a concept of the common*/its
particularity*/may well be articulated in a multiplicity of ways. That is to say, can
postmodernity*/or whatever we wish to designate our present condition*/tolerate a
single ‘‘operative notion’’ of the common, or does it rather demand a constellation of
understandings that contribute simultaneously to our experience of the common and
to its neoliberal other, the promotion of individuation?
The first query posed by Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk to Étienne Balibar and
Antonio Negri in their conversation ‘‘On the Common, Universality, and Communism’’
goes to the heart of this paradox when it asks how we can ‘‘distinguish the affects,
desires, and forms of cooperation that produce the common from those that reproduce
capitalistic cooperation.’’ Although Negri and Balibar differ noticeably in their
analytical emphases, each in his own way pushes back on the presuppositions of that
question. Negri asserts that under current conditions of production the ‘‘problem of
distinguishing between the ‘common,’ the ethico-political whole constituted by
singularity and produced by the making-multitude, on the one hand, and the
‘communism of capital,’ the form of capital accumulation and the symmetrical
the problems surrounding our thinking about the common and the forms of the
commune. Truly a ‘‘free association,’’ the various portions of this piece weave into
and out of collectivity and the ‘‘common.’’ From the ‘‘veiled conversations’’ that
promote candor and a feeling of anonymity and safety to the ‘‘vernacular of work’’ to
the piece’s epilogue (which asks, ‘‘There is nothing to share when everything is
common . . . Where does the ‘the commons’ end and ‘the gift’ begin?’’) together with
its other sections/divisions/areas, this piece confronts us with the austerity, the
potential futility, the always already vexed conditions of the ‘‘common’’ and the
‘‘collective’’ in a world that both fetishizes and undervalues those modes of being.
The next section of this issue, ‘‘Commodity Fetishism and the Common,’’ takes the
discussion of the common and the forms of the commune in new directions by
focusing on the concept of commodity fetishism and its relation to the formation of
the social. David Ruccio and Antonio Callari’s ‘‘Rethinking Socialism: Community,
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Charusheela’s motivation for her analysis begins with the question, ‘‘How do we
‘think’ difference in relation to economy?’’ The answer, she points out, is that in
feminist scholarship this has been done by examining differences in economic
location within a pre-given structure of capitalism. Yet as she finds, this will not
serve, for rather than consider women’s labor in terms of its deviance from ‘‘the
classic male wage compact of capitalism,’’ such analyses actually address exploita-
tion ‘‘by erasing difference and promoting capitalist modernity.’’ Consequently, the
very mode against which much feminist scholarship is directed does not adequately
encompass a great deal of the gendered labor required for its maintenance. Her
answer to this dilemma*/and those others compounded by assuming a capitalist
ground for the beginning of critique*/is to take up a gendered analysis of labor in
those earlier moments of development when economies were transitioning into
capitalism. In using the example of India, she invokes the modes and transitions
debates, the question as to whether feudalism ever actually existed in India (at least
as understood by the West), and thus whether it is adequate for examining the
historical facticity of the subcontinental transformation. Through her analysis,
Charusheela argues for the need of ‘‘a dialectical integration of both capitalist and
feudal ethical imaginaries,’’ thus allowing ‘‘the potential for a radical politics in the
space of economic difference that exceeds a simple rights-based imagination.’’
Similar to Charusheela, Kenneth Surin, in his ‘‘On Producing (the Concept of)
Solidarity,’’ suggests that our grounding for understanding community no longer
obtains. He contends that we have two dominant models for conceiving solidarity.
The preindustrial bases its links to the organic, shared interests of the community,
which is typically localized and perceived as relatively small. The industrial model, he
argues, is the other option, and in this model solidarity relies on a perception of a
shared situation of exploitation. As his title suggests, for Surin the discursive function
of solidarity (or community) as a center of meaning plays a pivotal role in his analysis.
Repudiating the dominant models available to him, he offers two alternatives. The
first is founded on Raymond Williams’s notion of experience that is shared and
understood in a similar way by all: his famous ‘‘structures of feeling.’’ The second
derives from the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their formulation of the notion of
the ‘‘anomalous,’’ those irregular, disruptive potentialities of transformation that are
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 301
without identity because they are in a state of perpetual motion. For Surin, each of
these models entails thinking beyond a telos that prescribes ‘‘any pregiven laws to
shape or entail this outcome’’ of a revolutionary project.
Kathi Weeks’s response to these two essays, ‘‘Pedagogies of the Common,’’ posits
several questions to each author. Weeks asks Surin, for instance, if Deleuze and
Guattari’s ability to offer us ‘‘a philosophical account of our energies and capacities’’
can extend to a contribution to political pedagogy on the level of affect. To
Charusheela she poses the problem of ‘‘how to think about the political viability of [a]
communal imaginary . . . in relation to both the complicated relationship between
aspiration and imagination and the thorny distinction between reproducing hegemony
and proposing alternatives.’’ She also extols the authors for their ‘‘gesturing toward
some imaginary of being-in-common rather than common-being’’*/that is, the
attempt to move outside the confines of our inherited modes of conceptualizing
and ‘‘to think about solidarity or the communal in ways not beholden to notions of
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project produces the neoliberal subject (or fails to do so) or how the subject herself
participates in the constitution of her subjectivity’’ are lacking. Particularly absent,
they find, are discussions of the constitutive role of jouissance in the formation of the
subject. And for them, following Žižek, ‘‘there is no common which is not smeared by
jouissance, and hence, marked by the constitutive impossibility of the social.’’ Offering
two ways of relating to jouissance*/the feminine and masculine, by way of Lacan’s
discussion of feminine and masculine modalities of dealing with the partial jouissance
the subject experiences upon entering into the sociosymbolic order*/Madra and
Özselçuk move to ‘‘propose communism as an ethico-political shift that gives up the
enjoyment of achieving an ideal ‘form of the commune’ that can ultimately ‘fix’ the
production and division of surplus,’’ perhaps the most distinctive of all the suggestions
offered in this collection of articles.
In an eloquent final comment, Alvaro Reyes responds to the essays by Curcio and by
Madra and Özselçuk in ‘‘Subjectivity and Visions of the Common.’’ Hailing their work
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The Editors
RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
This issue brings together papers that tackle a series of problematics which are
formulated around the concepts of common, commune, community, and communism,
and which engage with the field of critical Marxism. The discussions include the
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1. The support of the Franklin Humanities Center and the conversations that took place during
its annual seminar, ‘‘Alternative Political Imaginaries,’’ played a vital role in this organization.
that rethinks the renewed conditions of possibility for communism under changing
social relations as well as constantly subjecting to critique the mistakes and failures
of its historical and existing forms.2 This issue is motivated by the idea that such a
communist thinking is necessary today in the midst of the global economic crises.
On the one hand, it is necessary to disrupt the ideological attacks and reactionary
aversions toward proposals for any substantial collective transformation, which
continue to claim their legitimacy by invoking the events of the collapse of state
capitalism in the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the other hand, it is
also necessary to take seriously the idea of a crisis of communism, although directing
this critique in a radically different direction, to find sources and languages for its
renewal and actuality within the myriad contemporary efforts to organize and
institute new ways of collective life.
In order to locate more broadly this revival of the question of communism, we turn
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to the conjuncture at the end of the war when a new political and historical phase
was in gestation. On the one hand, the anticolonial movements were articulating
ideas of socialism and communism with a project of national independence for
emancipation. On the other hand, the events of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and
the Prague spring of 1968 as well as the onset of the distinct experience of the
Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 were presenting not only an insurgent desire for
breaking with the socialism of the Soviet bloc, but also a different imagination of
communism. In addition to the rising struggles shaped by changing class composition
(i.e., the rise of the ‘‘mass worker’’),3 in Western Europe and the United States
emerging political subjects (student, woman, black struggles) were expressing new
forms of political practices based on autonomy and self-organization. Communist
parties, although maintaining a stronghold in countries such as France and Italy where
these struggles gained momentum, were unable to grasp the social transformations
surrounding these movements and connect with them, if not openly attempting to
repress them.4
In this stirring moment, operaismo and Althusserian Marxism, weaving together
a rare combination of collective intellectual, institutional, and (especially in the case
of operaismo) organizational practices, reopened a space for Marxism beyond the
traditional paths of various orthodoxies (most notably of Stalinism and the Second
International) and revisionisms (not only associated with Khrushchev and European
social democratic parties, but also with their humanist and historicist critics).
Nevertheless, the significance of these names far exceeds the function of marking key
episodes within Marxism’s past. They are ‘‘movements of thought,’’ if we may borrow
a proper phrase from one of our contributors. That is, they are active fields of
discourse being constituted anew, albeit unevenly, through the committed reformu-
lations of a number of problematics that, since the 1960s, they have helped to foster.
They are ‘‘movements’’ also because they continue in different ways to demarcate
the shifting positions of antagonism within the social and to exert their relevance for
thinking and intervening in our present.
Being cognizant that neither discourse is reducible to some unified position, but
rather is internally differentiated and divided, the symposium did not aspire to be
representative or comprehensive. Instead, the organizing motive was to propose
certain questions and provide a selective discussion of the lines of convergence and
divergence between these two forces of thought. We started from the premise that
these movements share significant theoretical sources and conceptual entry
points*/among which one can cite Marx’s critique of political economy, Spinoza’s
reflections on knowledge and being, a critique of Hegelian dialectics, a break with
the idea of communism proceeding from a transitional socialism, a reconfiguration of
class that radically departs from sociological categorization, and a rethinking of
the concepts of labor and value. Some of these shared references are also taken as
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political imaginary circumscribed by the relation between public and private; and the
antagonistic nature of class as a process or composition.
At the same time, there are certain productive divergences in the manner in which
strains of thought that feed from operaismo and Althusserian Marxism approach
the issues of epistemology and ontology and in the ways in which they reconceptua-
lize class, subjectivity, antagonism, production, value, and labor. Indeed, when we
chose as our title the distinct but kindred concepts of the common and forms of
the commune, we wanted to raise questions for our contributors in an attempt
to stimulate them to explore both the convergences and the divergences of these two
fields. We come back to some of these questions shortly. At this point we want to
stress that, while the contributing essays might resume from a problematic inherited
from operaismo or Althusserianism and/or weave their arguments around the
conceptual language of either field, there are indeed many instances in which they
complicate this division. In some cases, this happens by drawing together concepts
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and insights that came to be associated more intimately with one field; at other
times, by using the same concept in different ways; and yet in other examples, by
drawing from different philosophical sources and bringing into existence a broader
intellectual plane within which these problematics can be situated. Therefore, these
essays confirm for us not only the multiplicity of positions within each field but also
the porosity of their boundaries.
We now turn to the concepts of the common and the commune in order to arrange
some of the problematics that contributions to this issue address, both in direct
reference to these concepts and through a set of related concepts such as community,
solidarity, communism, and others. The history of these distinct concepts of
collectivity and the shifting differences in their use remain open questions that
certainly deserve a much more detailed study.6 This issue renders into existence
particular ways of thinking about their relations. In particular, what makes the
distinct contributions to this issue convene is an idea of ‘‘being-in-common’’ which
aims to depart from various ideals of unity that exist within both liberal and socialist
traditions. These ideals reduce heterogeneity and difference to a chain of
equivalence through subjecting them to the same ‘exceptional transcendental’
that in the critical expositions of various contributors takes the different forms of
‘‘exchange value,’’ ‘‘bourgeois citizenship,’’ ‘‘State,’’ ‘‘law of value as a calculus of
labor,’’ and (private or public) ‘‘property.’’7 Nonetheless, the concepts of the
6. Lawrence Krader (1972, 73) makes this point to argue how such a study is needed to more
systematically understand the ways in which Marx’s uses of communism and socialism are
informed by concepts of collectivity, collectivism, commune, community.
7. The critique of these ideal abstractions parallels Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism,
a connection also drawn by a number of papers*/if what is understood by commodity fetishism
is not simply that relations between people take the appearance of relations between
commodities, but more broadly, as the fetishistic reference to an exception as the necessary
cause and representative of social relations.
308 CURCIO AND ÖZSELÇUK
common and commune carry with them distinct problems; that is why we want to
focus on them separately.
Starting with the concept of the common, two questions promptly arise. What can
be said about what is shared in common? And, how are we to think of the relations
between ‘individuality’ and collectivity or, put differently, among differences in the
common? In responding to the first question, a common premise to start from is that
what is shared is not a substance that is natural, fixable, or given, but one that is to
be produced and re-produced and one that is open and multifarious. In fact, one can
conceive of this as a ‘‘substanceless substance,’’ keeping in mind that there are
different ways of making sense of this notion. Indeed, contributors, feeding from
separate philosophical sources, practices, and ontologies, approach this question
from different angles, in the figures of a ‘‘pure difference,’’ a ‘‘technical interaction
with nature,’’ a ‘‘production of subjectivity in struggle,’’ an ‘‘ethical attitude attuned
to the irreducibility of antagonism,’’ a ‘‘common notion,’’ a ‘‘collusion,’’ and so on.
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At the same time, disrupting the usual assumptions about the common, various
contributors propose that what is common need not demand presence and proximity
but can operate through absence and separation, need not anticipate communitarian
affinities but can happen through anonymity, need not involve willingness and
pleasure but could be experienced as an obligation and something we are forced to:
to quote again one of our contributors, common as ‘‘a half yes and a half no.’’8
Before moving to the next question, let us note a certain tension over the issue of
the ontology of labor. While the production of what is in common remains an open
question, there is also a prevailing tendency that understands the common in
reference to social interdependency through labor, a social cooperation, which, with
the historical transformation of production relations and new forms of laboring
subjectivities this brings along, is argued to assume an increasingly socialized form.
The way in which this ontology of labor and production converses with the ontology of
overdetermination is an unresolved problem, one that also possibly marks the
irreducible differences between the philosophical and political investments and
inheritances of operaismo and Althusserian Marxism. This does not mean, however,
that this tension is simply to be accepted, but rather it may be elaborated and worked
on toward different directions. In this vein, what this issue suggests is a certain
detour of one perspective through the other, which can displace this tension toward
a productive encounter. That is, at the expense of sounding blunt, if the ontology of
overdetermination, in its refusal to reduce being into any common substance,
including that of the ontology of labor, poses the question of an irreducible common
to operaismo, then the ontology of technical and political compositions of living labor
poses to Althusserian Marxism the question of how changing forms of labor and
production overdetermine other dimensions of subjectivity.
The second problem that the common puts forward pertains to the relationality it
animates, which is diversely presented as the relation between the partial and the
8. To bring out the paradoxical togetherness of community and separation (solitude) in the
constitution of the social bond, Jacques Rancière (2009) conjures up the concept ‘‘being
together apart’’ in his discussion of aesthetic communities. It seems productive to intersect this
concept with ‘‘being-in-common,’’ borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy.
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 309
common and between one and many. However, it is singularity that perhaps best
qualifies this relation as it distances it both from dissolving into an abstract sameness
and from isolation as an atomic difference. Singularity breaks with the very terms of
the question of the part and the whole, a question that presumes unity even before
posing the problem of the relation. In other words, it displaces the question of ‘‘how
can we form a unified whole out of individual parts?’’ into ‘‘what is the idea of the
whole*/if we might even call that*/which singularity expresses’’?9 Some contributors
conceptualize this as the common that is produced ‘‘by and through difference from
a condition of incommensurability,’’ through a process of heterolingual translation,
and in this way sharply distinguish it from the ‘‘production of equivalence.’’ At the
same time, they stress that this process of translation always exists in tension
with various social dynamics of particularization (e.g., neoliberal individuation) and
universalization (e.g., statist citizenship), giving cause to the need for an intermin-
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9. See the insightful article by Warren Montag (1996) for a development of this point.
10. Badiou also captures the ambiguity in Marx’s account as he wavered between celebrating the
Commune for dissolving the nation-state and simultaneously explaining its failures by reference
to its lack of ‘‘statist capacities.’’
11. For this exchange and a discussion about it, see the important work by Theodor Shanin
(1983). We should note that there are other discussions of the Russian commune that contest this
position. Also, there are many other places one can find in Marx’s writings that clearly depart
from a teleological narrative, including passages from Ethnological Notebooks.
310 CURCIO AND ÖZSELÇUK
of appropriating the ‘‘past’’ also inherit a certain tension that exists between the
investments of Althusserian and Autonomist Marxisms: while the former is moved to
theorize economic difference from capitalist relations, a problem carried over by
concepts of articulation of modes and overdetermination, the latter is incited to
theorize difference within capitalist relations, a problem that concepts of real
subsumption and immanence carry with them.12 The political stakes in this
difference, which this issue only begins to formulate, is certainly an important topic
for further elaboration.
The third commune that this issue takes up, somewhat more explicitly than the
aforementioned two, involves Marx’s discussion of the original, Asiatic, and Germanic
forms of the commune in Grundrisse. Contributors to this theme refuse to treat the
‘‘forms of the commune’’ as precursors in the logical succession to capitalism, a
widespread position that certainly reduces the incentive to approach these forma-
tions in their own specificities. Rather, they propose to read this section in terms of a
Marxian problematic of subjectivity and fetishism. This discussion suggests that there
could be different forms of subjectivity (‘‘individual’’ or ‘‘collective’’) that are
associated with the commune. Better said, ‘‘forms of the commune’’ precisely refers
to the various formations of subjectivities that are constitutive of class. That a
seemingly ‘‘individual’’ activity*/such as the appropriation of surplus by the house-
hold head or the despot*/is a site of condensation of a broader sociality and
collectivity destabilizes any obvious way of demarcating production by ‘‘individuals.’’
Simultaneously, it raises the question of how to think about difference among forms
of collective subjectivities. A particular formulation of this difference is that if one
form remains within the paradigm of commodity fetishism, positing an exception to
constitute unity, another refuses to posit any exception, relating to an inconsistent
‘‘whole’’ of diversities, a non-all.13 It is also at this point that perhaps we can find
a meeting point between the commune of non-all and the common of heterolingual
translation.
12. See J. K. Gibson-Graham (2006) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009) for two recent
and notable works that respectively develop and take into new directions these frameworks.
13. See Jacques Lacan (1998) and Joan Copjec (2002) for the concept of non-all.
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 311
In their imaginative essay ‘‘What is a Concept?’’ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
speak of concepts and their becoming. For Deleuze and Guattari, not only do all
concepts come with problems to which they are connected, not only do they carry
‘‘bits or components that come from other concepts, which corresponded to other
problems,’’ but they also ‘‘branch off’’ to other concepts and ‘‘link up with each
other, support one another, coordinate their contours, articulate their respective
problems, and belong to the same philosophy, even if they have different histories.’’
In this way they ‘‘participate in a co-creation’’ (1994, 16/8). We hope this issue to be
similarly generative of such a conceptual common.
References
Badiou, A. 2006. The Paris Commune: A political declaration in politics. In Polemics,
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In this conversation Étienne Balibar and Toni Negri address the question of how to
understand and practice communism in our conjuncture*/specifically, in the context
of our contemporary global economic crisis. While taking this question as their entry
point, they articulate a series of important philosophical and political convergences
and divergences between their frameworks. These points of productive intersections
and tensions open to a plurality of readings of Marx and Marxism. At the same time,
the conversation maps a terrain that includes the question of social ontology and its
relation to the political and the ethical; the conceptual status of labor and
production and the place of anthropological differences within Marxism; and the
politics of equaliberty and its relation to the common and its new institutions.
Introduction
by
Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk
multiplied as they are continuously put in relation to their own internal tensions as
well as the ever changing present.
Communism is the specific idea around which we want to structure this
conversation. Scholars drawing from Autonomist and Althusserian traditions have
for long complicated totalizing considerations on commune-ism and opened the way
to nonessentialist reflections on community that do not demand allegiance to a
common being or a historical necessity or both. Moreover, their reappraisal of
communism has so far taken a detour through a shared set of proper names: Marx’s
critique of political economy, Spinoza’s ontology, and a critique of Hegelian
historicism. Nevertheless, there are certain productive divergences in the manner
in which these traditions imagine commune-ism that are worth exploring. Our
intention is to explore both the shared ground and the productive divergences.
In Toni Negri’s recent writings with Michael Hardt (Hardt and Negri 2001, 2005,
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2009), communism is thought from an ontology of the common. The common is both
the presupposition and the product of social cooperation. It is a potential of
expanding social cooperation which attends the paradigmatic transformation
of productive forces toward immaterial production and the prominence of new
forms of labor in contemporary capitalism such as affective labor, creative labor, and
the increasingly socialized production of knowledge and communication more
generally. The common refers to a form of socialization that breaks down the former
divisions between work and life, between production and reproduction, and between
material and immaterial.
In Étienne Balibar’s and some post-Althusserians’ recent writings, communism
and related concepts of social emancipation are thought in relation to a
paradoxical idea of universality, one that is simultaneously impossible to realize
and yet necessary for politics. Against the false universalisms of communitarianism
and commodity fetishism, this paradoxical universal both presumes and politicizes
the internal limits of any formation. Balibar’s name for this ‘‘ideal universal’’ is
equaliberty (égaliberté). By stating that equality and liberty are inseparable, the
principle of equaliberty questions the limit of any discourse and extends the
emancipatory potential of rights beyond their current exercise (see Balibar 1994,
2002).
We want to explore the theoretical and political implications of these two
approaches for how we understand and practice communism in our conjuncture
*/more specifically, in the context of the current global economic crisis. There
are two aspects of this crisis that we find particularly interesting for discussion. First,
the current crisis renders visible the extent to which the financial processes have
colonized the social body. Second, as the Empire begins to formulate a response to
this crisis, the shape it takes borrows heavily from Keynesian demand management,
invokes the New Deal as a point of reference, and yearns for a green (post)Fordism.
The two questions we formulate below, and with which we want to initiate the
conversation between Toni Negri and Étienne Balibar, take these two aspects of the
crisis as their points of entry.
314 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
Question 1
Question 2
As the response to the current crisis borrows from the protocols of Keynesian demand
management, not only do discourses on equality begin to be articulated in the public
sphere (both by its conservative detractors and liberal proponents) but also calls for a
moderation of the unbridled pursuit of private property begin to be voiced (both by
conservative moralists and liberal humanists). It seems to us that these pronounce-
ments of equality and moderation support a particular regime of distribution and
stabilization that will not necessarily do away with the historically overdetermined
social hierarchizations and regimes of ‘‘internal exclusion’’ on the basis of race,
gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. In this conjuncture, through what
political demands can we extend and intensify the emancipatory potential of
equaliberty? In what ways might these demands be continuous with, or depart
from, those social rights that constitute the public under the welfare-state form?
Could we imagine communism as a supplement of class struggle that pushes
equaliberty beyond the horizon of Keynesian pragmatics, entitlements, and morality
(i.e., beyond liberal capitalist democracy)?
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 315
Toni Negri: I think that in order to get straight into the questions we have to draw
a distinction, in the concept of the multitude, between the singular subject regarded
as labor power*/living labor in social production*/and the subjected individual
identified in the political order of citizenship. At this stage of the crisis of
financialization and in the processes of struggle that emerge in such a situation,
although the distinction I draw does not exist in reality (the two are indistinguishable
in fact because they function in relation to one another), it permits us to confront the
questions posed by Michael Hardt and me (and we do not claim to represent the
current of operaismo as a whole) and by Étienne Balibar (who tries to distinguish
himself from the Althusserian tradition with right resolve).
Let us start with the second figure: the individual who is subject to the civic and
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political order can be identified in a relation of equaliberty to the extent that she is
assumed as the material condition of a juridical and/or constitutional conjuncture
and as a ‘non-actual’*/unstable and unsatisfied*/tension. In my view, the paradox
underlying the definition of equaliberty as a universality that is impossible to realize
and yet necessary to democratic and progressive politics can be related to spheres
other than just those of equality and liberty; these are the political-economic spheres
of the capitalist order of society*/brutally defined as ‘wage’ related because income
is generally regarded as the condition of direct or indirect participation in capitalist
social relations. We are speaking of the figure of the citizen as historically integrated
in the biopolitical order of welfare.
If we take the nexus connecting the figure of the citizen to that of the worker, both
of whom are subjected to the measure of a ‘necessary wage’, to that historical
measure of the satisfaction of needs indispensable to producing and surviving, the
definition of this measure/quantity of needs leads us straight to the heart of
the problem. We need to ask how, starting from this determination, it is possible to
raise the question of maintaining, increasing, politically identifying, or changing that
mass of needs that only a given level of ‘necessary income’ is able to satisfy.
We know that the current transformation of labor power (living labor is increasingly
immaterial and cooperative) and its socialization (the valorization of labor can now
be captured only at the level of money and finance) changes the terms of this
question. The problem is taken away from the analysis of the length of the working
day and subjected to the laws of finance. Consequently, the economic struggle to
subvert the rules of the relative wage becomes a sociopolitical struggle to subvert
the rules that govern the financial distribution of income in the welfare state. Liberty
and equality have a cost. They are independent values with an always determinate
economic base. As labor becomes intellectual, liberty is indispensable to it; similarly,
as it becomes cooperative, equality qualifies it. Today, without liberty and/or
equality, there can be no productive labor.
In this respect, the problem of distinguishing between the ‘common’, the ethico-
political whole constituted by singularity and produced by the making-multitude, on
the one hand, and the ‘communism of capital’, the form of capital accumulation and
the symmetrical representation of new processes of social and cognitive production
316 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
of value, on the other, no longer exists. In this context, any action aimed at securing
a higher level of necessary income and any reference to financial capital have to do
with exchange value and exchange value only, with commodities and commodities
only. Identifying an alternative to the current character of the world of capital, the
so-called communism of capital, is no longer possible at the level of wages and
welfare in general. Therefore, to approach the question of finance from the
standpoint of a theory of equaliberty, or any reference to it in political economy,
can only amount to a proposal arising from within the issue of exchange value,
completely from the inside of the problem of the commodity.
However, if we open the question to the aforementioned point of view that faces
the effective nature of labor power*/the particular technical and political composi-
tion of labor power*/then we can start talking about the worker as participating
in the multitude.
Then we can insist on the new figure of the productive subject who has conquered
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a relative autonomy both in the forms of cooperation she expresses and in the
complexity of cognitive, intellectual, relational, and affective materiality of the
labor power she puts to work. On this terrain there begins to emerge a specific excess
linked to the becoming common of labor and of human reproductive activity, a surplus
with respect to the difficulties of alienating the subjectivity inherent to autonomous
production or expropriating the objective excess of such a production.
At this point our reflection must go deeper. The presupposition is that capital is
always a relation between constant and variable, dead and living elements, and
that this relation is always dialectical from the standpoint of capital. Capital must
reduce this opposition to a unity by sucking dry its living power. Our question is
whether this capital relation can be broken and the elements that make up the
synthesis of capital can be divided. Every time there is a capitalist crisis, this
rupture and division becomes evident, but capital recomposes this process. Now,
can the new structure of living labor, the new technical composition of the labor
force and the making-multitude, can the new possible political composition
definitively keep the technico-political structure of capital open? Can it break the
capital relation?
We can begin to answer this question by looking at the issue of the nonhomogeneity
between becoming ‘common’ (the making-multitude of singularity) and ‘the com-
munism of capital’ (global domination in the figure of financial capital).
From the standpoint of the ‘communism of capital’, we can only see the chance of
moving within the realm of exchange value: the struggles for necessary income. The
rupture that can be determined in this realm follows these struggles, but the nature
of value stays the same: it is always exchange value. When income or welfare is the
object of our demands, commodities and currency can be redistributed without
affecting their nature. This struggle is fully inserted in the dynamics of the exchange
of value: that is to say, of exchange value.
The only point where the determined rupture is ontologically relevant is when it
relates to new figures of labor power, as outlined above, and insists on the labor
power that produces excess at the productive level of the relations, affects,
language, and communication that exalt the new cooperative nature of labor. What
emerges from this is the common, and here the rupture is pushed toward the
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 317
conversion of values (from exchange value) and the seizure of a mode of production
oriented toward the production of man for man also at the level of welfare: the social
wage and citizen income are no longer a quantity but the image of a new progressive
breaking point of the capital relation and the power (potentia) of the autonomy of
labor. I think that there are analogies with the process of equaliberty here, but the
problem is to take hold of a figure of the production of man for man and of a radical
change in the structure of production.
I truly believe that the current crisis, if it is really what it seems to be*/that is, a deep
crisis, a global crisis, a crisis not only of certain, say, economic mechanisms, but as
President Lula of Brazil wrote a few days ago [March 2009] in an op-ed that I believe
was published more or less everywhere in the world, a crisis of civilization including
the kind of world order in which we live*/this will force us to more or less completely
rethink, revise, redimension the political and theoretical categories with which we
have been working in the last period. It was always like that in similar historical
conjunctures. This was particularly the case several times during the dramatic history
of Marxism as a theoretical and political project. And each time, to put it in the words
of Althusser, it meant that you did not only have to think about the conjuncture by
applying or trying to implement as intelligently as possible already existing
categories, but you had to start again thinking within and under the conjuncture,
under the constraints of the conjuncture. In particular, we will have to determine
which are the strategic dimensions of this crisis. Of course, each of us has guesses and
hypotheses about that, but, in fact, we do not know. And therefore, everything we
can say today about alternatives, even alternative languages, be it based on the
ontology of the common and the political philosophy of the multitude as global
revolutionary subject, or on a certain conception of nonexclusionary citizenship and
‘‘democratizing democracy’’ that I try to attach to the category of ‘equaliberty’, will
probably have to be completely reexamined.
Now, second and third, to return to Toni’s ideas and positions which he once again has
very forcefully expressed: There are at least two great ideas that, from my point of view,
not only are positive contributions, but are crucial elements of our attempt at thinking
alternatives in the late capitalist moment in which we live. I do not go into details, but I
want to name them. The first of them is his idea of ‘‘constituent power.’’ I think that in
fact on this point perhaps we have slightly different terminologies, but, in reality,
tracing back to a historical legacy, a revolutionary tradition that we broadly share, what
I try to say in terms of ‘‘equaliberty’’ and what Toni tries to say in terms of ‘‘constituent
power’’ are fundamentally convergent. And it has to do, of course, with the idea that
only struggles, as Toni just repeated, a conflictual nature of social relations*/and I
absolutely agree with the idea that capital, indeed, is a relation*/can account for the
transformation of institutions, be they economic or political, civic, and, therefore,
318 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
represent the motor of historical changes. And the important point is, of course, not
only this primacy of the insurrectional or the constituent over the constituted, which
does not deny the necessity of institutions and constituted power. But it is also the fact
that the materiality of the struggle is always to emerge again in the very places where a
certain established, official discourse, the discourse of the state and the dominant
class, the hegemonic discourse will deny its presence and do its best to convince us that
in fact it does not exist*/either because it was eliminated or because it is bound to
remain marginal. And the range, the breadth, of such spaces in history, culture, society
where the constituent power, the insurrection as the driving force of history emerges
and reemerges, is truly fascinating. And I see no difficulty, at least in the first moment,
to put that under the umbrella ‘multitude’ if there remains a question mark: if the
multitude is not taken for an existing subject, but rather, I would say, a regulatory idea
of a possible convergence of these insurrectional elements.
The second element that I find central in Toni’s reflection concerns his thinking on
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labor and productive power. My great divergence, to put it in quick terms, is that
I have long abandoned the ontological prerequisite of Toni, which is the absolute
primacy, not to say the uniqueness, of productive force as an anthropological
foundation for politics and historical change. So I see a number of other dimensions of
culture and society which cannot be reduced to an analysis in terms of productive
force and which we need if we want to understand something about the struggles of
the societies in which we live. But I agree with Toni, and this is something that he
really pushed to the fore on the background of a number of inquiries which combined
psychology, sociology, labor relations, and in the end, of course, political theory, that
the concept of labor with which Marx himself had been working was much too narrow
and, from that point of view, did not account for the reality of the development of
labor relations in past capitalism, and certainly not in contemporary capitalism. By
insisting again on something that was present only marginally in Marx, on the
importance of the dialectic of material and intellectual labor, the role it plays in the
permanent contradiction between the individualistic and the cooperative aspect of
labor, and above all, by reminding us that labor is not only intellectual, or manual, but
also has an affective dimension and, for that reason, is intrinsically connected to all
the social passions, which build or destroy the common, Toni really has revolutionized
a certain narrow, perhaps utilitarian, view of labor that Marx had retained. Now
I think these two things are absolutely inevitable and in everything I could say myself
I would try not to forget or to deny that.
Finally, just one quick remark: my problem is with Toni’s ontological understanding
of all these problems. He’s even pushed the ontological dimension or one-sidedness
around the definition of men as productive animals to a greater length, which allows
him to resume the neat narrative that sees communism at the end, as the telos of the
progressive socialization of labor. He’s pushed that to another extreme, which, from
my point of view, is completely metaphysical. And from that point of view, of course,
what I miss*/he won’t be surprised, this is the old Althusserian tune*/is politics.
There cannot be politics where everything is always already determined in advance by
an ontological framework. You cannot have the uncertainties of politics. You cannot
have the unexpected character of the political conflicts or crises that are rooted
either in the economic phenomena or in the ideological dimensions of contemporary
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 319
politics. Where is religion, where is nationalism, where are all the ideological
discourses and practices that will heavily weigh on any and every turn in the historical
moment in which we are living and that make it absolutely irreducible, from my point
of view, to a simple alternative between the more or else irresistible rise and
emergence of the common as the futuristic dimension of labor, on the one side, and
the ‘‘communism of capital,’’ on the other? A beautiful oxymoronic formula that
I salute, but which says nothing about the conjuncture.
Empire with Michael and many other comrades, the political dimension is exalted
rather than reduced. Insofar as labor becomes biopolitical, liberty and equality are
internal to human productive activity, be it economic or political.
Third, the political is not just a superstructure of social cooperation. Therefore it is
innovated by values that differ from market values and exceed and go beyond their
order and measure.
To open wide the question of politics, I want to return to the problem of the crisis
of sovereignty and government in particular. Inside this crisis of sovereignty and
government it becomes possible to express ‘‘constituent power.’’ This requires that
we confront the problems of capitalist civility (whether liberal or socialist) and global
organization with proposals, as Michael and I have been doing for over a decade now.
If what has been said so far has any meaning, when we speak of the common as a new
use value that opposes the capitalist rule of profit and command, we come to
understand the current political crisis as one that is eminently political in a strict
sense, as a crisis of government and sovereignty, of modern politics par excellence.
I would rather avoid going back to the crisis of sovereignty and its transformation in
the imperial age here; I have already amply discussed it elsewhere, but with regard to
the crisis of government and its modern figure, it is clear that state administration
has radically changed. It is less the design of a unitary and articulated decision that
descends from the law and more a dynamic, pluralist, and disarticulated system of
decisions, contracts, and conventions established among multiple subjects. Govern-
ance is coming to substitute for government. From the perspective of political
science strictly speaking, we ascertain the same alternative that we found in political
economy: the critique of political economy and the critique of political science are
juxtaposed. If we consider the problem from the point of view of juridical right
(which always presents itself as a formal science and as the coherent prise de
conscience of a singular ordainment), we face the same difficulties: not only does
government detach itself from the juridical qualifications of sovereignty, but
governance and administration assume a distance from constitutional and/or
administrative right, too. To clarify, these transformations occur because there are
surpluses that resist or are placed in alternation with the juridical or administrative
order everywhere. Government is always subjected to this play. You might have won
320 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
the elections with a large majority over your adversary, but you will be equally
subjected to the alternatives of governance. Examples of this are numerous and could
include the experiences of constitutive government today (as demonstrated by
Obama). At this point the problem becomes that of understanding whether this
surplus and alternative designs can be brought back to new forms of subsumption
within the renewed structures of sovereignty and capitalist government, or whether
these contradictions could be the basis on which to configure a space for constituent
power. Like Mao we are saying: one divides into two. Obviously the reference to Mao
is entirely ironic, but still effective if we think of the little irony with which the idea
of the political-theological One was proposed, from Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt,
throughout modernity, and is still being suggested.
This is only a hypothesis. For the time being, we need to understand whether
capitalist command will manage to reconstruct its internal equilibrium within the new
conditions of development and crisis, and whether the subjects that seek a new
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common prospect and new figures of liberty and equality will manage to build
institutions able to oppose the structures of government of capital over the common.
It is possible to clearly discern and identify a sort of institutional dualism with a
degree of precision in governance as well as other spaces that were opened by the
weakening of practices of sovereignty at the level of empire. We probably have to
sharpen this dualism and accumulate surplus only on one side of this relation of crisis:
that of the demands of the common.
Balibar: I want to start with an epistemological reflection on the uses of the very
category ‘common’. And I feel the need to try to articulate what Anna and Ceren very
generously pointed to as my signature intervention in these debates with the central
concern about common and communism. The first thing*/and I do not think Toni and
I would disagree on that, or we all agree on that in a sense, witness precisely his
provocative use of the formula ‘communism of capital’*/is that we have to take into
account the fact that the ‘common’ is a category that covers what I tend to call in
French ‘equivocity’ or equivocal meanings: that is, not only a variety of meanings and
applications but a permanent tension between opposite meanings.
And I see at least three directions in which any reflection on the common could go,
which I think are never completely reducible to one another. One has to do with the
issue of ‘universality’ and ‘the universal’. I argued in the past that the notion of the
universal itself was an intrinsically divided and conflictual one, with extensive and
intensive aspects, and, above all, especially in the West, torn between philosophical
and political traditions, centered on the idea of universalizable rights of the
individual person, certainly also linked to a certain homogeneity of the market or a
certain system of equivalences dominating the market, on the one hand, and claims,
attempts at rethinking the universal in a more differentiated and, for that reason,
dialectical, manner, on the other hand. That is the whole problem of the universal of
singularities, which are ultimately rooted in certain deep and enigmatic anthro-
pological differences: sexes, races, and cultures, the oppositions of health and
disease, the whole issue of normality and abnormality, however it becomes defined.
So, to summarize, I see here an essential dimension in which any reflection on the
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 321
common has to go, which is roughly speaking the attempt at rethinking the universal
as such in terms of anthropological differences.
For the universal in that sense, which remains essentially a regulative idea, or a
permanent aporia, there is very little chance of coinciding immediately with either
the project of building a state or a system of public institutions, or the problem of
promoting a communitarian dimension of social relations, which takes the many
forms that we know: national, religious, and also revolutionary. These two problems
concern the public, the citizen, whether identified with the state or critical with
respect to a statist dimension*/which has its importance. There would be no rights if
there had been no states in our societies, and the communitarian dimension. Again,
I hardly see how humans could live outside communities, but the problem is that the
communities are mutually incompatible so none of these dimensions is reducible.
Communism is the third and most enigmatic direction in which I see a reflection of
the common to go. Communism is a notion or a name that I would not disown or
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abandon myself, if only at the ethical level that you were mentioning, but, more
profoundly perhaps, also at the logical level. The problem with communism, however,
is that it is being not only devaluated and scorned, but profoundly shaken and
internally destroyed by the history of the twentieth century so that any discourse of
communism today not only has to be formulated in terms of an alternative to
exploitation and various forms of oppression*/and, in the end, to capitalism*/but it
must be formulated in terms of an alternative to the alternative as it was historically
realized. If it does not understand the reasons why the communist project based on
Marxian concepts, however distorted, ended in its absolute opposite, it will produce
nothing, or once again it will lead to the worse. That was not because Lenin and Stalin
were bad guys or because Mao was a tricky ruler who fooled the people. The problem
is: why did masses, ‘‘multitudes,’’ understand communism like that and, therefore,
find themselves caught in the incapacity to reorient what they thought was an
emancipatory movement and proved to be a road to hell? So any communism today
has to be alternative to the alternative as well. And it is from that point of view of
course that we all try to rethink communism: Toni does it in his way, by returning to
a Christian inspiration (more precisely Franciscan; this is one great ‘communism’ in
history, the communism of poverty, love, and fraternity); and I do it by returning to
a radical bourgeois or civic form of pre-Marxist communism, the communism of
‘equaliberty’. It is not the communism of the market, of course. It is the communism
of the Levellers, of Blanqui and Babeuf. This is a political idea of communism which
preceded its Marxian fusion with socialism. This is what we are all doing, in the hope
of addressing in a critical manner the equivocities of the notion of the common in our
contemporary world. I repeat the three dimensions any reflection on the common has
to attend: (1) the issue of universality to come, (2) the issue of a public sphere beyond
the state, but not necessarily beyond citizenship or rights, and (3) the issue of how to
deal with communities and their mutual incompatibilities.
Negri: The three proposals Étienne presented to sum up the discussion correctly
address the questions we must concentrate on.
(1) We have to refer the search for a universal quality back to the concrete process
of the construction of the universal and to the Spinozist perspective of a constitution
322 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
us to move forward. But I do not believe that the ideas or Utopias of pre-Marxist
socialism and/or communism help us solve this problem any more easily than the
events of the confrontation with the movements inspired by revolutionary Marxism.
Even when democratic radicalism, in a felicitous synthesis with Marxism, is assumed
as the ground on which to build institutions of the common, resistance to exploitation
and the exercise of violence in the construction of liberty and equality could still be
necessary. As Rosa Luxemburg said, irenism and the construction of a democracy of
the oppressed are not always in agreement.
To conclude, the current economic crisis indicates that the overcoming of capitalist
domination might be easier than we ever hoped. So the equilibrium of governance
might be broken or subverted and the ‘common of the multitude’ might have the upper
hand over the ‘communism of capital’. This situation would not be tragic; it would
simply be a democratic solution to the crisis*/even though we are sure that 99 percent
of political scientists and academics who deal with this matter would scream about the
danger of a dictatorship and the threat of socialism (i.e., Stalinism). But it would not be
a dictatorship: it would simply be the hegemony of one pole that has been subordinated
over another which has been dominant until now. Obviously, nobody holds a monopoly
over the rule or the balance of governance, and yet it is up to everyone to
democratically safeguard the rule. Given that political science has extensively
discussed capitalist government, I propose to develop, in line with Étienne’s third
theme, a discussion of the issue of new institutions of the common. It would suffice, for
instance, to start from a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where Hegel develops
the institutions of the objective, bourgeois, and public spirit in three great chapters on
family, civil society, and the state. From the standpoint of the common, I propose to
open a critical debate on the future of the family and its possible destruction as an
instrument of identity in the spheres of education, reproduction, and inheritance (what
a monstrosity!) while facing the economic situation, and to outline more adequate and
happier forms of conjugal and filial relationships. Instead of markets and enterprise,
I propose to discuss social production and its democratic organization; instead of
guilds, unions and the ‘general classes’, I want to talk about the de-structuring of
communication networks and welfare; and finally, in place of possessive individualism,
banks, and financial communism, let us think about new forms of production of man by
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 323
man. All this needs to be done until we build and imagine the exercise of constituent
proposals of a new form of right that is no longer public or private, but common. Well,
this seems to me a great work project to be discussed and developed by many.
Balibar: So many things in what Toni has said would deserve elaborated responses!
I will try and imitate his careful enunciation of points of convergence and divergence,
each of them being just elements for a continuation of the discussion. This is in fact
a form of ‘common’ intellectual work. There are five questions (mainly) on which
I would like to continue and from which I would like us to reexamine our tacit
assumptions in the reading of Marx, or in the interpretation of contemporary events.
(1) First there is the dialectical thesis, which Toni resumes (ironically) from Mao:
‘‘One divides into Two.’’ Without such a thesis, there is no possibility of immanent
critique, no politics that radicalizes the contradictions produced by history and reacts
upon them, no liberation of the forces generated by collective experience, and so on.
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We agree on that general principle and, in a sense, this is not surprising, given the
Marxian background on which we both work. But clearly there are different ways of
understanding it. One of them was rooted in the juridico-political notion of
‘sovereignty’ (or its reversal in the problematic of the class struggle as civil war,
the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.); it culminated in the idea of ‘double power’
characterizing a more or less interminable ‘phase of transition’. We no longer think
in these terms (and I have to admit that it took me long to understand why it was
inseparable from the catastrophic outcome of the past ‘communist revolutions’).
Another way, probably not so simple itself, is the idea of ‘bifurcation’. I developed it
some years ago on the basis of a fresh reading of Marx’s analysis of ‘reproduction’ and
it seems to me that it is not without affinities with what Toni and Michael Hardt
describe as the opposition between the production of the ‘common’ and the
‘communism of capital’. But indeed this mimetic rivalry should be further discussed.
(2) This leads quite naturally to another point in Toni’s theorization that is quite
fascinating for any Marxist: his description of the ‘excedent’ or ‘surplus’ produced by
the social labor process, which is not quantitative but qualitative, and nevertheless
quantitatively appropriated by the financial capital. As we know, this idea derives
from Marx’s description of the effects of cooperation after the industrial revolution,
but it substitutes financial capital for productive capital as ‘subject’ of the
appropriation. On the one hand, this allows Toni to conflate the idea of the excedent
with another Marxian concept*/namely, the idea that the production process not only
‘produces’ commodities but also ‘reproduces’ the social relationships of production.
Taken together, they lead to the idea that in the current developments of capitalism,
the ‘relations’ that are reproduced in the labor process are, in fact, no longer
capitalist but already ‘communist’, or they recreate ‘commons’. On the other hand,
this leads to the idea that, now that its cycles and trends directly command the labor
process, the function of financial capital is not one of organization of this process,
but only one of plundering its results and political constraint over its agents. A similar
idea was brilliantly developed by Michael Hardt in his contribution to this issue in
terms of the accumulation of financial capital being today more akin to rent than to
profit, therefore external to the collective ‘living labor’. I see this as a deep
ambiguity in their use of the concept of ‘life’, which they use to bridge the distance
324 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
between a Marxian notion of living labor and a Foucaultian notion of biopolitics. Life
is simultaneously taken as an ontological category that designates the immanence of
the whole process of production (within which the political moment is organically
included) and an ethical category that authorizes a dualistic antithesis between the
‘living’ and the ‘dead’ (or the artificial, the repressive, the intervention of power,
etc.). I really don’t think that one can blur the ideological tensions of the notion of
‘life’ like this.
(3) I have no difficulty with the idea that there is a directly political element in the
organization of production, which is also an element of struggle and violence. On the
contrary, as I said before, I take it to be one of the most precious and indisputable
legacies of the operaista tradition. Therefore, I also have no objection to the idea
that there is no ‘distance’ between the labor process and the political interventions
of the state, but a direct interaction (again this is something that can be traced back
to Marx in passages that depart from the architectural metaphor of base and
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superstructure or the legacy of the Hegelian distinction between civil society and
state). The importance of this idea is enhanced when, like Toni, one insists on the fact
that the production process is no longer enclosed in the space of the ‘factory’ or the
‘workplace’. Something like a new era of ‘putting out’ is taking place, which also
involves a considerable broadening of the category of (living) labor. But when I say,
‘‘I don’t see the politics in Negri,’’ I have another aspect in mind. To me, Toni’s
philosophy represents an extreme form (spectacular for that reason) of the reduction
of ‘society’ to a productive organism, and the understanding of every anthropological
relation (and difference) as a function of human labor (which also involves, of course,
that ‘living labor’ becomes a very complex reality*/in fact, a totalization of the
human). As a consequence, Toni’s attitude with respect to the old problematic of
socialism versus communism is very strange: he criticizes harshly, and rightly in my
view, the idea of a ‘socialist transition’ toward communism (‘‘Goodbye, Mister
Socialism!’’), but he pushes to the extreme the idea that communism, or the
emergence of the common, results from the ‘socialization of the productive forces’
whose ‘final’ stage is reached through the primacy of immaterial over material labor
and the reintegration of the affective dimension into the productive activity. I
strongly object to this, and it is the basis of my remarks on his implicit teleology. It
seems to me both empirically wrong and theoretically ruinous to suppose that all
anthropological differences (sex/gender, normal/pathological, cultural/racial, etc.)
are reducible to differences within ‘labor’ (or, in more ethical terms, ‘production of
man by man’). Although I admit that they constantly interfere in practice, I think that
the anthropological differences remain heterogeneous; there is an essential plurality
of agencies here or, in Althusserian jargon, overdetermination: not so much the
overdetermination of base and superstructure, but the overdetermination of social
relations themselves. For that reason, I refer ‘politics’ not only to the element of
conflict, but to the diversity of struggles, emancipatory values, collective agencies of
which the ‘social producer’, however important, is only one. This is also one of the
reasons why I believe that contemporary radicals (including Toni himself, in fact)
‘return’ to pre-Marxist models of communism: it is also a way of disentangling the
question of the common from the onto-teleological absolutism of labor (and, indeed,
I do not agree that ‘equaliberty’ is an expression of the logic of exchange value; this
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 325
(with several others: Rancière, for example). Then comes the institutional problem of
governance and its tendency to substitute ‘sovereign power’ in the construction of
the political space of capitalism; therefore, also the interpretation of the changes
produced by globalization, and the virtual bifurcation of a neoliberal governance and
a governance of the multitude (which essentially for Toni would be its self-
organization or its self-institution: are we really far here from somebody like
Castoriadis?). We certainly must have a thorough discussion on governance and
‘governmentality’. I agree that the figures of the political are currently changing,
that the role of the nation-state, as it was maximized by the Keynesian welfare state,
is challenged by other structures based on networks rather than territory. But I am
amazed at the idea proposed by Toni that financial and transnational governance
should be, if not exactly less violent than imperialist state power, at least a more
favorable condition for the institution of communism, as the financial crisis would
demonstrate. Again the metaphysics of the virtual autonomy of the multitude
preempts concrete analysis. Not only does it seem to me that the introduction of
these forms of governance, and the corresponding technocratic discourse, now all-
pervading, has not purely and simply eliminated the political centrality of the state
and its ‘territorializing function’ (the crisis also demonstrates that), but I believe that
neoliberal governance develops forms of ‘real subsumption’ of individuality under
capitalist relations, which also have psychological dimensions, or generate ‘voluntary
servitude’. So, I don’t really believe that a communist politics has become easier or
more spontaneous than it ever was. Hopefully it is not, in fact, the opposite: a
communist politics has become more difficult. In any case, this is a violent internal
contradiction to cope with, if the discourse of the ‘common’ is not to appear wishful
thinking.
(5) My question finally*/the one I would hope we would keep thinking about when
speaking of democratic forces or anticapitalist movements in this ‘globalized’
world*/would be the following: not ‘‘what is communism?’’ (how is it defined? how
is it ontologically grounded? what are its material or immaterial bases?), but rather,
‘‘who are the communists?’’ (therefore also where are they? what are they doing?).
I cannot but remind you that the final section of the Communist Manifesto is devoted
not to a definition of communism but to a ‘pragmatic’ answer to this interrogation:
326 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
who are the communists*/that is, what distinguishes them from ‘‘other parties of
opposition,’’ and what do they support or stand for? This is in many respects the most
political moment in Marx’s way of writing about communism, even if it does not
exhaust the theoretical questions. It also suggests that ‘the common’ is essentially
the result of a political practice, located in a specific historical conjuncture, or in
a ‘difference of times’, especially through Marx’s insistence on the fact that the
‘communist party’ does not so much propose its own agenda as reveal the possible
unity of all the ‘movements’ against the dominant order. It seems to me that this
attitude is well worth imitating in our current discussions of a communist revival
beyond the ‘catastrophe’ of ‘really existing socialism’. Of course the communists,
defined in practical terms, are not necessarily where the name Communism is
invoked. We can also try to reflect on how we would reformulate what Marx
designated as the two crucial dimensions of this politics: the critique of property, and
the internationalist attitude. For Marx, their unity was grounded in the situation of
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the proletariat, but this has become very problematic for us and much too narrow in
terms of defining the forms of exploitation and oppression against which to revolt.
Beyond the critique of property, there exists a problem of inventing the modalities of
‘sharing’ the means of existence and distributing the subjective dimensions of life
between the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ poles of personality, both necessary
(this is in particular where I believe that ‘equaliberty’ remains an important idea).
And beyond internationalism, a reiteration of the old cosmopolitan ideal that did not
tackle the roots of nationalism, tribalism, racism, religious antagonism (because Marx
thought that these ‘ideologies’ no longer mattered to the proletarians), there exists
a problem of creating a new cosmopolitanism that, in particular, transforms the clash
of cultures into a mutual capacity of translation. I am tempted to say that the
‘communists’, however they call themselves, are those who practically contribute to
these goals, which perhaps are not entirely isolated.
Negri: I would like to conclude without concluding, just to put forward some brief
comments on Balibar’s conclusions.
(1) OK, Balibar’s interpretation is right: Mao’s thesis, ‘‘one divides into two,’’ is not
dialectical; it is a bifurcation. The path, not just the path we walk on, but the
direction objectively bifurcates. Given the situation determined by the accumulation
of surpluses of immaterial, cognitive and affective labor, capital finds it harder and
harder to operate a fixed synthesis between its command and the autonomous
development of labor power.
(2) OK, Balibar’s position on this point seems correct, but rather than a contra-
diction we should see it as a condition. Life is the ontological substratum where each
human event unfolds. Life is the immanence of every behavior, but also the place
where every value emerges. To live is good; it is the ethical goal. The enemy presents
itself as, and consists of, anything that deprives life of its potency and returns it to
death. Life is good, evil is non-life. I think that there is something of Spinoza in this
affirmation.
(3) As above. Society is certainly a productive synergy and becomes so more
intensively as the capitalist artifice and manipulation of life controls, models, and
blocks productive powers. But this capitalist invasion of life is nonetheless a productive
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 327
relation, that is, an antagonistic relation. The capitalist invasion of life augments, and
does not eliminate, the antagonism of social relations. Here, it would be easy to object
that when there is no manifest political opposition, this antagonism cannot be seen. But
I see it as a possibility, a tendency and the accumulation of forces that forewarn of a
resolutory event. It is worth pointing out that in this widening of the scope of capitalist
domination and around the primitive and originary labor power resistance to capitalist
exploitation, other human activities (against colonial power, gender domination, etc.),
behaviors that arise as antagonistic figures, posit themselves in the position (and
eventually as the option) to resist. If equaliberty could in praxis develop as a tendency
to recompose resisting subjectivities, this would be good news.
(4) Subjects organize themselves as institutions along the line of exodus that
prolongs the bifurcation. In the biopolitical realm, subjects always appear as
institutions (production of subjectivity, accumulation of subjectivity, multitude of
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singularities); if they didn’t, they would be mere shadows (like fetishes inside
capitalist domination, as Derrida taught us). In the biopolitical realm, subjects are
never individuals; they are always ensembles of resistance. Here lies the difficulty of
seeing the constitution of subjects as a transindividual process. This constitution is
certainly determined by a horizontal relationship between ‘individualities’ (subjects,
singularities, etc.), but it is also overdetermined by the surplus of this encounter. And
to add a last remark: we are not from the Frankfurt School; we do not experience real
subsumption as a destiny. Rather than linear, real subsumption is always fragmented
and discontinuous. We see it as a contradictory process where the relation between
action and reaction, and resistance and oppression, is never given once and for all; it
is always open. Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx, and the operaists have always refused
teleology (especially catastrophism). For us, resistance is the key to all development.
(5) We seem to be more or less in agreement on this too, but my problem as a
communist is not only seizing power, but also what to do with it once it’s seized (and
the whole history of class struggle, both before and after the seizure of power, is
clearly a process of transition from this standpoint). So, what to do with power? Our
discussion on communism starts here. In addition, I am convinced that we need to
solve two fundamental problems: property and internationalism. And on these points
we must face some difficulties: how to build the common and institute it within
democratic structures, how to overcome public as well as private law and invent new
figures of the constitution and the expression of the common. The same applies to the
shift ‘beyond internationalism and toward a cosmopolitical common’, so to speak.
This poses the problems of peace and freedom of commerce, of the defense of the
environment and the conquest of space, of the fight against misery and death, and so
on. The need for a world association of states that goes much deeper than the
internationalism of the past two centuries is already asserted in the current
constitutions of the ‘communism of capital’. The questions inherent to ‘being
communists’ today are those of how to govern the exodus from capitalism, push the
bifurcation outside the two, in multiplicity, to conquer a form of life where the
common can develop and constitute itself as a web of singular rights. These questions
constitute communist militancy not simply as problems, but as the fields, tensions,
and desires of political experience.
328 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
Acknowledgments
This conversation, in which Toni Negri participated through videoconference, was
the opening address at ‘‘The Common and Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social
Imaginaries,’’ a symposium held at Duke University, 9/10 April 2009. Through a series
of subsequent exchanges, the authors have revised and expanded on the original
transcript, the result of which is the text that appears in this issue. Arianna Bove
translated Toni Negri’s section of the conversation from Italian.
References
Balibar, É. 1994. Masses, classes, ideas: Studies on politics and philosophy before and
after Marx. Trans. J. Swenson. New York: Routledge.
*/**/ /. 2002. Politics and the other scene. New York: Verso.
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Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
*/**/ /. 2005. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin.
*/**/ /. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
Jack Amariglio
typology of ‘‘forms of the commune.’’ Original, Asiatic, and Germanic forms of the
commune share a fundamental communal class process. These forms of the commune
differ in how variations of the ‘‘primitive’’ commune (based upon kinship/clan rules)
or of the ‘‘individual’’ (who performs and appropriates surplus labor only as a kin/
clan/commune member) appear as direct producers and/or appropriators. Communal
appropriation occurs even when the appropriators, such as Germanic heads of
households or Asiatic ‘‘despots,’’ extract surplus as ‘‘representations’’ of the ‘‘unity’’
of the clan/commune. This article argues that in Marx’s later writings, all manner of
concepts of individuality and collectivity/communality are produced by Marx to
determine and differentiate class processes.
How do conceptions of subjectivity help fill the space of a central Marxian concept,
that of class, as it is specified in Marxian traditions of class discourse? This question
guides my journey through that part of Marx’s notebooks, the Grundrisse, that treats
what he called ‘‘forms of the commune.’’ Bringing this question together with Marx’s
discussion, I seek to show that Marx was flexible, in a disciplined and focused way, in
describing how various forms of human subjectivity could transform the meaning and
possibilities for an array of distinct class processes and the positions that they make
possible. In this paper, I deal with several familiar concepts of subjectivity that can
occupy and overdetermine the discursive space of class within the type of Marxian
class analysis first put forth by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff in their
pathbreaking Knowledge and Class (1987).1 I stick mainly to the categories of class
and fundamental class process produced within the Marxism affiliated with Resnick
and Wolff, and what I offer below is intended as a friendly addendum to this kind of
class theory. My viewpoint of how subjectivity concepts are crucial to diverse readings
1. For my appraisal of Resnick and Wolff’s immense contribution to Marxian theory, see my
foreword to their New Departures in Marxian Theory (2006). For a similar judgment, see Norton
(2001, 23).
of class discourse draws directly on Marx’s writings about the discursivity of class and
his use of various forms of subjectivity*/in particular, the individual and the
collective/communal*/that have a long-standing prominence in Western social
thought.2
Marxian concepts of class and the (fundamental) class process have as one of their
discursive conditions of existence concepts of the ‘‘direct producer’’ and the
‘‘appropriator of surplus labor.’’ These are, in my view, designations for (eco-
nomic/class) subject positions. What subjectivities are implied in the Grundrisse?
In this text, Marx avers that forms of social life that may appear quintessentially,
irreparably divided and individuated are, instead, communal. Within some forms of
the commune, the direct producer and first appropriator may appear to be an
individual (as head of household, for example), but Marx treats this apparent
individual appropriation as carried out by the commune and rarely, if ever,
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2. For readers who know my past work, it may come as a shock that the forms of subjectivity I
introduce here are excessively narrow, conventional to mainstream discourses of subjectivity,
prestructuralist, and pre-postmodern. Perhaps most surprising may be the complete exclusion of
the Althusserian-inspired ‘‘decentered subject’’ about which I have written at length in earlier
articles and books (e.g., Ruccio and Amariglio 2003). I am intrigued by Marx’s assertion in part 1
of Theories of Surplus Value (1969, 408/9) that subjective decentering, or the splitting of the
self into two or more contending parts, is a main feature of a modern, commodity-producing,
capitalist society in which the unity of subjects is primarily accidental and separation is the living
norm for capitalism’s subjects.
3. I see my essay as a companion piece to the fine article by Serap Kayatekin and S. Charusheela
on feudal subjectivities. Kayatekin and Charusheela state that a chief goal of their article is to
‘‘ask how subjectivity is partly an effect of the class process and similarly how class is one of the
effects reproduced and rearticulated by subjectivity’’ (2004, 380). They regard their analysis as
largely incorporating ‘‘culture and subjectivity into the definition of feudal class processes’’
(382). I share with Kayatekin and Charusheela the desire to rework basic conceptions of
particular class processes by starting with types of subjectivity not usually introduced into class
positions of direct producer and/or appropriator.
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 331
dominant, fundamental class process. Third, each commune contains distinct forms
of individual subjectivity in production that do not (for Marx) suggest that
some noncommunal fundamental class process is predominantly taking place.
The existence of some kinds of ‘‘individuality’’ does not imply the absence of the
‘‘collective’’ subject as the direct producer and appropriator.
For example, while in the Germanic form of the commune, independent households
may be the direct producers, and the patriarch may appear as the ‘‘appropriator,’’
Marx contends that these households and their legendary collective ‘‘assembly’’ are
constituted as communal bodies. Insofar as the performance and appropriation of
surplus labor occur within and by these communal bodies, even this most independent
form of production*/what others call ‘‘peasant household production’’*/is rendered
by Marx as communal production and appropriation. In this example, as with the
Asiatic form, the commune is the direct producer and appropriator of surplus labor.
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In his only sustained theoretical treatment of early socioeconomic life, Marx produces
an analysis of continuity and rupture based on the premise of an ‘‘original commune.’’
While others read this section of the Grundrisse as demonstrating various paths of
transition out of ‘‘primitive communism’’ and, therefore, specifying precapitalist
modes of production as an advance over this original commune, I believe there is
little to indicate that Marx’s main preoccupation here was the formation of class and
state from classless and stateless communism. Instead, class and state, or at least
class processes and centralized/concentrated political organization, are always/
already parts of the different forms that the commune may take during its longue
durée in precapitalist history.
Marx names different forms of the commune: ‘‘original,’’ Asiatic, ancient,
Germanic, and Slavonic, though this last category is not given any specificity. While
the context of his discussion is, as Marx explains, the historically logical process
whereby the ‘‘free laborer,’’ on one hand, and ‘‘capital,’’ on the other, come to face
each other, but are also dialectically connected, as relatively separate ‘‘objective’’
entities, the narrative of changing life in communes highlights the historical
peculiarity of the most recent phase, capitalism, in which productive laborers are
propertyless, ‘‘free,’’ and hence identified as isolated individuals rather than clan,
family, or community members. Necessary and surplus labor are not analyzed in each
variation of the commune (one exception occurs in his comments on surplus labor
time in ancient Rome [Marx 1973, 476]). Instead, Marx elaborates forms of property
and, less so, forms of the labor process that were extant in communal life. Marx
asserts that it is only through many transformations and finally the breakdown of
communal bonds that the alienation of the individual worker from his or her
conditions of production occurs, predicated upon the separation of this individual
from clan/commune ties.
Marx’s presentation of forms of the commune is undertaken to show that there
were diverse paths along which ‘‘individuals’’ treated the ‘‘natural conditions of
labor’’ as their private property. Conversely, Marx claims that these diverse forms of
332 AMARIGLIO
of the fundamental communal class process. But while these changes happen, at no
point do they amount to transcendence of communism. The overdetermination of
the fundamental communal class process by these manifold nonclass processes and
their transformations never amount to class-based transition, though they imply
immense changes and differentiations that matter deeply in the lives of commune
members.
Marx recounts the many ‘‘nice’’ and not-so-nice ways that communism can come
into this world. Communism is not distorted, for example, when there is despotism
(as his analysis of the Asiatic form of the commune shows), but, rather, it is
fallacious to assume that the communal class process must line up with other
processes of inclusion and empowerment of commune members. Marx deromanti-
cizes communist class processes at least insofar as they imply, necessarily, any other
kind of social and political life. Marx’s dedication to a widely defined communism
that might eventually heal the wounds by applying communal salve to each bleeding
pore in the body of capitalism required additional commitments and struggles. In his
description of forms of the commune, there are some that are more ‘‘democratic’’
(Germanic) than others (Asiatic), but they are communism, in economic class terms,
nonetheless.
In the section on forms of the commune, Marx discusses the commune primarily in
terms of social relations of kinship/clan. The ability of laborers to maintain themselves
within early communism as independent, interrelated proprietors/possessors de-
pended on their inscription within kin/clan networks and on the reproduction of the
clan. Alternative forms of the commune produce differences in how laborers appear as
either co-possessors or independent proprietors. In the ‘‘original’’ commune, laborers
‘‘relate naively’’ to the natural conditions of labor, here predominantly land, ‘‘as the
property of the community’’ so that ‘‘each individual conducts himself only as a link, as
a member of this community as proprietor or possessor’’ (1973, 472). The original
commune is based on ‘‘the family, and the family extended as a clan or through
intermarriage between families, or combinations of clans’’ (472). Thus, the clan
community ‘‘appears not as the result of, but as a presupposition for the communal
appropriation (temporary) and utilization of land’’ (472). Since in the ‘‘original’’
commune, the unity of the clan community is the result of ‘‘the communality of blood,
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 333
4. I have left out the crucial issue of the subsumed class and nonclass payments that occur
within the family and in which direct producers and other family members not engaged in direct
production or nonlaborers receive shares of the already appropriated surplus from male heads of
households.
5. Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselçuk (2010) read Marx’s discussion on the forms of the commune
similarly. They state: ‘‘perhaps surprisingly, Marx suggests the possibility of a communal form
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 335
about the ‘‘objective’’ existence of the commune in state or communal land, the
‘‘subjective’’ existence of the commune is not relegated to the realm of ideology, or at
least that version of ideology in which the imagined relation of agents to their ‘‘real’’
relations of production distorts those real relations. Marx’s discussion is exemplary
regarding the materiality of the ideological, and the ideological is portrayed as a ‘‘real’’
reflection of the imagined but objective community*/that of ‘‘blood’’ and kinship*/
which stands as its initial presupposition.
No distinction is drawn between the real, empirical direct producers and the
commune*/an imagined unity with a form of representation in a person/body that
may not ‘‘actually’’ perform necessary and surplus labor. In Marx’s discussion, the
appropriating body is the Asiatic commune, and, following his lead, we can call this
kind of class process ‘‘communal’’ since it is the commune via both the despot and the
villages that is appropriating surplus on the basis of clan rules. Tribute may be a way
of transferring surplus among communal sites/entities, but it is not, in itself,
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where the social surplus is appropriated by a despot in the name of the commune and for the
commune: the despot would have the right to appropriate the surplus because he or she would
be socially designated as ‘a particular entity’ that realizes the higher and ‘comprehensive unity’
of ‘the many real particular communities’. . . Marx also discusses the peasant forms of the
commune where the male head of the household is the communally designated appropriator of
the surplus produced in the household. In considering these forms of ‘property’ as communal
forms . . . Marx differentiates between the actual physical act of appropriation and its social
signification.’’
336 AMARIGLIO
individual, among others.6 In different places, Marx intends some of these terms to
be polar opposites, indicating that some types of individuality denote independence
and separation while others do not. Marx often provides a historical analysis whose
aim is to show that individuality never arrives on the scene full-blown but is
constituted differently within alternative historical conjunctures.
Nor should we ignore the adjectives that precede the various kinds of individuality
that Marx posits in his writings. It is misleading, I think, to treat the adjectives as
mere descriptors that embellish an essential definition of the individual. Marx brings
out the opposition in some individuality terms, making it difficult to sustain the
argument that there is a transcendent, stable concept of individuality. Marx regards
some ideations as mystifications of the real conditions of individuals in concrete
societies, but other formulations he regards as signifying just those conditions.
In this vein, we can understand Marx’s presentation in the Grundrisse (1973, 83/4)
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6. In his foreword to the Grundrisse, Martin Nicolaus reduces Marx’s discussion of the forms of
individuality to just two. He says: ‘‘the Grundrisse speaks of two very broadly and generally
defined types of human individuality. The first is the ‘private individual,’ meaning the individual as
private proprietor, both as owner of the means of production and as ‘owner’ of the commodity,
labor-power; the individual within the exchange-value relation. The abolition of the relations of
private property is the abolition of the conditions which produce and reproduce this kind of
individual. The place of this type is taken by the social individual, the individual of classless
society, a personality type that is not less, but rather more, developed as an individual because of
its direct social nature. As opposed to the empty impoverished, restricted individuality of
capitalist society, the new human being displays an all-sided, full rich development of needs and
capacities, and is universal in character and development’’ (1973, 51).
7. This quote was rewritten by Marx for volume 1 of Capital: ‘‘For an example of labour
in common, i.e., directly associated labour, we do not need to go back to the spontaneously
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 337
Under the patriarchal system of production, when spinner and weaver lived
under the same roof*/the women of the family spinning and the men
weaving, say for the requirements of the family*/yarn and linen were social
products, and spinning and weaving social labour within the framework of
the family. But their social character did not appear in the form of yarn
becoming a universal equivalent exchanged for linen as a universal
equivalent, i.e., of the two products exchanging for each other as equal
and equally valid expressions of the same universal labour-time. On the
contrary, the product of labour bore the specific social imprint of the family
relationship with its naturally evolved division of labour . . . It was the
distinct labour of the individual in its original form, the particular features
of his labour and not its universal aspect that formed the social ties. In this
case, the social character of labour is evidently not effected by the labour of
the individual assuming the abstract form of universal labour or his product
assuming the form of a universal equivalent. [It is clearly community] on
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developed form which we find at the threshold of the history of all civilized peoples. We have
one nearer to hand in the patriarchal rural industry of a peasant family . . . The different kinds of
labour . . . such as tilling the fields, tending the cattle, spinning, weaving and making
clothes*/are already in their natural form social functions; for they are functions of the
family . . . The distribution of labour within the family and the labour-time expended by the
individual members of the family, are regulated by differences of sex and age as well as seasonal
variations in the natural conditions of labour’’ (1976, 171).
8. David Ruccio sees in Nancy as well as in Corlett (1989) a rethinking of the concept of
community along nonessentialist lines. Since many traditional concepts of community in the
Marxian literature posit community as an immanent or organic totality, the postmodern turn in
deconstructing and decentering all forms of subjectivity has resulted in new conceptions of
community that, as Ruccio tells us, are ‘‘conceived in multiplicity and difference in an open
social reality’’ (1992, 19). Ruccio adds that these new concepts of decentered community can be
productive of a new stratagem of seeing ‘‘collective subjectivity’’ in the midst of societies based
on commodity exchange as well as ones in which communism is said to exist.
338 AMARIGLIO
are what they are to the extent that they are articulated upon one another,
to the extent that they are spread out and shared along lines of force, of
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We may pause again and ask the question: what would it mean to place in the
positions of direct producer and/or appropriator of surplus labor either the concept
of the ‘‘singular being’’ that Nancy derives from his reading of Marx or the concept of
the ‘‘articulated community’’ that he likewise produces? Nancy’s characterization of
these singular beings captures the separateness and uniqueness that are usually
reserved for the isolated or private individual of the most alienated, yet advanced
form of capitalism. It also posits this individual as similar to the concept of the
‘‘common being.’’ But Nancy judges Marx’s contribution as an alternative to both
these conceptions of subjectivity: ‘‘the singular being is neither the common being
nor the individual’’ (77).
Positing this form of subjectivity in the place of the direct producer could elicit the
idea that the ‘‘individual’’ is the subject that acts as the producer/performer of
surplus labor. But this is neither what Nancy implies, nor what Marx is saying since, for
Marx, the immediate ‘‘sociality’’ of the individual’s labor induces one instead to gaze
toward the commune (in the form of the family) rather than toward the private
individual for producing/appropriating/distributing agents.
Furthermore, Marx’s description in Capital of ‘‘an association of free men, working
with the means of production held in common and expending their many different
forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’’ (1976,
171) explicates a collectivity forged by relatively independent individual activity.
Marx compares this association with Robinson Crusoe’s activity in that ‘‘all the
characteristics of Robinson’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference
that they are social instead of individual’’ (171). This comparison has led some, like
Jean-François Lyotard, to complain that Marx’s vision of advanced communism
(the communism after capitalism) is nothing more than a ‘‘collective Crusoe-ism’’
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 339
positions are matters of individual choice, in which case the exploitation of the direct
producer, whether by ‘‘self’’ or by others, is by self-election. This does not by itself
mean that the form of performing and appropriating surplus labor is always that of
‘‘self-exploitation,’’ but it does remain a possible interpretation depending on how one
theorizes choice-making labor.
why a ‘‘self,’’ understood even within prosaic, bourgeois narratives of the individual,
cannot do this thing to oneself. It is no more, nor less, absurd than descriptions of most
other self-actions or self-thoughts that present a divided or multiple self, capable of
occupying simultaneous positions of potential or actual contradiction, conflict, and
even violence. Such commonly voiced sentiments as ‘‘being of two minds’’ about a
certain course of action, or complaining that one part of a self’s body or mind is capable
of and is engaged in attacking another part, speak to the impression of a troublingly
divided self. I am willing to accept all such ‘‘self’’ concepts as having an ontological
referent that potentially avoids ridicule.
However, it is also true that Marx does describe exactly something like ‘‘self-
exploitation’’ in part 1 of the Theories of Surplus-Value. In a remarkable set of
paragraphs, Marx explains that it may happen in a ‘‘capitalist mode of production’’
that ‘‘the independent peasant or handicraftsman is cut up into two persons’’ (1969,
408). He proceeds: ‘‘As owner of the means of production, he is capitalist; as labourer
he is his own wage-labour. As capitalist he therefore pays himself his wages and draws
his profit on his capital; that is to say, he exploits himself as wage-labourer, and pays
himself in the surplus-value, the tribute that labour owes to capital’’ (408). In this
case, ‘‘the labourer is the possessor, the owner, of his means of production. They are
therefore not capital, any more than in relation to them he is a wage-labourer.
Nevertheless they are looked on as capital, and he himself is split in two, so that he,
as capitalist, employs himself as wage-labourer’’ (408).
Marx poses how this situation is ‘‘looked on’’ against a seemingly objective and
external observation of the status of the handicraftsperson’s means of production
being ‘‘capital,’’ used by capitalists to put to work and thence exploit productive
workers. And it is this ‘‘looking on’’ that leads Marx to the bold statement that the
craftsperson/peasant is indeed ‘‘split in two’’ and that an ‘‘actual’’ capitalist is
operating on this terrain, employing an ‘‘actual’’ worker, him- or herself. Anticipating
a chorus of outraged dissent regarding what an individual can and cannot do (‘‘Exploit
oneself? No, ma’am, that is too much!’’), Marx continues his defense of this idea by
claiming that ‘‘in fact this way of presenting it, however irrational it may be on first
view, is nevertheless so far correct, that in this case the producer in fact creates his own
surplus-value’’ and so is ‘‘able to appropriate for himself the whole product of his own
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 341
of capital and labor-exploited (by capital) stand ‘‘in direct contradiction to it’’
(408). Here, Marx enlivens his discussion of exploitation with a category*/
self-exploitation*/that only enters the thought-concrete in those societies in which
‘‘separation’’ and not ‘‘unity’’ of selves ‘‘appears as the normal relation’’ (409). This
is a fine example of Marx utilizing the ‘‘normal’’ thought of an epoch to serve as an
object of radical critique, but it is also a beginning conception, in this case, of a form
of subjectivity*/the separated or separable self*/that, when injected at the outset,
can alter an otherwise well-defined notion of a class process: in this case, the
capitalist fundamental class process. If the direct producer in capitalism is a divided
self, if it is inscribed with this particular form of subjectivity, then a self-exploiting
capitalist/worker can come into full view.
With this formulation, Marx does not identify a unique form of exploitation and
class process under the name of ‘‘self-exploitation.’’ To the contrary, he stands by his
description as delineating one variant form of capitalist exploitation. While it may be
possible to produce such a distinct concept (and I take this to be the work, starting
from different directions and coming to somewhat different conclusions, done by
Satya Gabriel [1990] and Janet Hotch [2000]), these paragraphs would have to be
radically deconstructed to show that what they say is ‘‘different’’ from itself, in order
to derive from Marx’s example self-exploitation that is a variant of neither capitalism
nor, at another pole, communism. This impression of self-exploitation as a variant of
communism is founded on the view that if the craftsperson comprises the entire
personage populating a site of socially divided production, then it is only a matter of
number, but not much else, not even its particular assignment in a social division of
labor, that makes an individual self recognizable as something other than a commune
or collective, and self-exploitation or appropriation different from communism.
Most subjectivity concepts depend upon a location in a social field and are bisected
by processes that include labor, cognition, power, and much else. The differentiation
that forms of subjectivity often connote is erected upon the distinction between
342 AMARIGLIO
individuality and collectivity as two related but distinct and often opposed
subjectivities. Among leading positions regarding individuality is the definition of
the individual as one who possesses free will, who is defined by dint of his or her labor
and is therefore entitled to take possession of things in the object world, and who has
the ability to act on his or her own behalf as a subject of representation (especially
in the realm of politics). Once we specify this particular subjectivity, we find that
production under conditions of ‘‘selfdom’’ is often crucial to positing the attributes of
freedom, entitlement, enfranchisement, and proprietorship that define Western-
style individuality. From Locke through Marx and Engels, much effort has gone into
establishing a relation to nature through labor and the appropriation process as a key
component of what it means to be ‘‘an individual.’’ Though the distinction between
necessary and surplus labor may not be specified as a major part of understanding
labor and production, in respect to Lockean notions of property and individual
subjectivity, the possibility of producing/appropriating a surplus may be decisive in
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discriminating between those who merely reproduce their animal existence and those
who claim a right to the results of their labor because of their productivity.10
In this way, the right of European colonists to land in North America was advanced
by the affirmation that colonists had improved the land through agricultural activities
that led to the production of surpluses, whereas (some) Native Americans, by living
off the land in hunting and gathering bands and thereby neglecting to ‘‘improve’’ the
land, by which was meant, ‘‘didn’t add’’ or ‘‘give back’’ more to the land than was
extracted, were denied proprietary rights. The denial of this fundamental right to
hold property was linked to the idea that freedom and individuality could not thrive in
the context of such primitive collectivities.11 And that one distinguishing character-
istic of these collectivities*/what made them ‘‘primitive’’ in the first place*/was the
inability or lack of motivation for individuals to produce surpluses. Thus, in an
indirect way, the existence of class processes above and beyond those supposedly
found in primitive communes was critical to the opinion that forms of individual
subjectivity were preferable. The notion of the individual subject as relatively
independent (from family, clan, and community) had as its historical presupposition,
and this is hammered home by Marx, the development of class processes in which the
production and appropriation of surplus were organized on a basis generally opposed
to the commune.
The emergence of the concept of the subject may develop from a tension between
activity and passivity. In Discerning the Subject, Paul Smith distinguishes the concept
10. For an in-depth discussion of Locke’s notion of property rights, see Tully (1980). A productive
line of inquiry is one in which the question of class process might determine conceptions of
property and subjectivities that inform these conceptions. One could pursue Tully’s suggestion
that, for Locke, property is a right that is derived from ‘‘the right or property that all men have
to things necessary for subsistence,’’ which, in turn, is ‘‘a consequence of the right which all
men have to their preservation’’ (3). It would be interesting to explore the connection between
the ability to reproduce one’s subsistence and the performance and appropriation of surplus
labor. It might be shown that Lockean notions of property presuppose a class process.
11. See Jennings (1975) and Cronon (1983) for how European conceptions of property, based
largely on interpretations (or distortions) of natural law philosophy and Lockean defenses of
proprietorship, promoted conquest of Native Americans.
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 343
of the individual, which has a much more active and unifying element in its definition,
from the subject, which, as in the idea of being ‘‘subjected,’’ connotes general
passivity and the tendency toward fragmentation. This differentiation aside, in
modern, Western notions of the subject, conscious activity, either in reaction to
forces outside the subject or as creation, is a critical part of its definition.
During the past three centuries, one part of the Western debate on what makes
humans unique and distinguishable from other animals is this possibility of conscious
activity, that is, of being a ‘‘subject.’’ The agency that this distinction represents
arises in the dialectic between consciousness and labor, in which one or both of these
elements are definitive of what is peculiarly human. And since ‘‘humanness’’ is mostly
understood as subjectivity (and sometimes individuality), what is at stake here is the
possibility for humans to act independently, which, in turn, suggests the possibility of
their freedom, at least from the forces of brute nature. Since the possibility exists in
productive activity for surplus labor to be performed and appropriated*/this may be
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Acknowledgments
This paper has its origins in my 1984 doctoral dissertation and, as a separate work,
has undergone numerous shifts in focus. One version was presented at the
‘‘Workshop on Class’’ held 20/2 June 1996 at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. I wish to thank Julie Graham, Richard Wolff, Kathy Gibson, Steve Resnick,
Carole Biewener, Harriet Fraad, David Ruccio, Steve Cullenberg, Rebecca Forest,
Jenny Cameron, Yahya Mete Madra, Kenan Erçel, Ceren Özselçuk, Anna Curcio, and
Christina Hatgis for their helpful comments. I am grateful to Ceren and Yahya for
strongly encouraging me to contribute to this collection.
References
Amariglio, J. 1984. Economic history and the theory of primitive socio-economic
development. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
*/**/ /. 2006. Foreword to New departures in Marxian theory, ed. S. A. Resnick and
R. D. Wolff. New York: Routledge.
Corlett, W. 1989. Community without unity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Cronon, W. 1983. Changes in the land: Indians, colonists, and the ecology of
New England. New York: Hill and Wang.
344 AMARIGLIO
Michael Hardt
Gigi Roggero
Aras Özgün
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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
Michael Hardt
This essay reflects on the concept of the common as both natural good and human
product. The common, in other words, refers to the land, water, and air as well as to
language, knowledges, ideas, images, and affects. The primary argument is that
capitalist production is increasingly reliant on and oriented toward the production of
the common and yet the common is destroyed (and its productivity reduced) when
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transformed into either private or public property. The task is to institute free access
and circulation of the common.
The economic and financial crisis that exploded in fall 2008 resulted in an
extraordinarily rapid sea change in the realm of political imaginaries. Just as a few
years ago talk of climate change was ridiculed and dismissed in the mainstream media
as exaggerated and apocalyptic but then, almost from one day to the next, the fact of
climate change became the nearly universal common sense, so too the economic and
financial crisis has rearranged the dominant views of capitalism and socialism. Only a
year ago any critique of neoliberal strategies of deregulation, privatization, and the
reduction of welfare structures*/let alone capital itself*/was cast in the dominant
media as crazy talk. Today Newsweek proclaims on its cover, with only partial irony,
‘‘We are all socialists now.’’ The rule of capital is suddenly open to question, from
Left and Right, and some form of socialist or Keynesian state regulation and
management seems inevitable.
We need to look, however, outside this alternative. Too often it appears as though
our only choices are capitalism or socialism, the rule of private property or that of
public property, such that the only cure for the ills of state control is to privatize and
for the ills of capital to publicize*/that is, to exert state regulation. We need to
explore another possibility: neither the private property of capitalism nor the public
property of socialism but the common in communism.
Many central concepts of our political vocabulary, including communism as well as
democracy and freedom, have been so corrupted that they are almost unusable.
In standard usage, in fact, communism has come to mean its opposite*/that is, total
state control of economic and social life. We could abandon these terms and invent
new ones, of course, but we would leave behind, too, the long history of struggles,
dreams, and aspirations that are tied to them. I think it is better to fight over the
economy is, at its heart, a critique of property. ‘‘The theory of the Communists,’’
Marx and Engels write in the Manifesto, ‘‘may be summed up in the single sentence:
Abolition of private property’’ (1998, 52).
In order to explore the relationship and struggle between property and the
common, which I consider to be central to communist analysis and proposition, I want
to read two passages from Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. By
referring to the Manuscripts I do not intend to pose the early Marx against the late,
celebrate Marx’s humanism, or anything of the sort. These are arguments, in fact,
that continue throughout Marx’s work. Nor is it necessary to appeal to the master to
renew the concept of communism. The Manuscripts provide an occasion for reading
the common in communism, which is increasingly relevant today, but also for
measuring the distance between Marx’s time and our own.
In the first passage, titled ‘‘The Relation of Private Property,’’ Marx proposes a
periodization that highlights the dominant form of property in each era. By the mid-
nineteenth century, he claims, European societies are no longer primarily dominated
by immobile property, such as land, but instead by mobile forms of property,
generally the results of industrial production. The period of transition is character-
ized by a bitter battle between the two forms of property. In typical fashion Marx
mocks the claims to social good of both property owners. The landowner emphasizes
the productivity of agriculture and its vital importance for society as well as ‘‘the
noble lineage of his property, the feudal reminiscences, the poetry of remembrance,
his high-flown nature, his political importance, etc.’’ (1975, 338). The owner of
movable property, in contrast, attacks the parochialism and stasis of the world of
immobile property while singing his own praises. ‘‘Movable property itself,’’ Marx
writes, ‘‘claims to have won political freedom for the world, to have loosed the
chains of civil society, to have linked together different worlds, to have given rise to
trade, which encourages friendship between peoples and to have created a pure
morality and a pleasing culture’’ (339). Marx considers it inevitable that mobile
property would achieve economic dominance from immobile property. ‘‘Movement
inevitably triumphs over immobility, open and self-conscious baseness over hidden
and unconscious baseness, greed over self-indulgence, the avowedly restless and
versatile self-interest of enlightenment, over the parochial, worldly-wise, artless,
348 HARDT
lazy and deluded self-interest of superstition, just as money must triumph over the
other forms of private property’’ (340). Marx, of course, mocks both these property
owners, but he does recognize that movable property, however despicable, has the
advantage of revealing ‘‘the idea of labor as the sole essence of wealth’’ (343). His
periodization, in other words, highlights the increased potential for a communist
project.
I want to analyze a parallel struggle between two forms of property today, but
before doing that I should note that the triumph of movable over immobile property
corresponds to the victory of profit over rent as the dominant mode of expropriation.
In the collection of rent, the capitalist is deemed to be relatively external to the
process of the production of value, merely extracting value produced by other means.
The generation of profit, in contrast, requires the engagement of the capitalist in the
production process, imposing forms of cooperation, disciplinary regimes, and so on.
By the time of John Maynard Keynes, profit has such dignity with respect to rent that
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Keynes can predict (or prescribe) the ‘‘euthanasia of the rentier’’ and thus the
disappearance of the ‘‘functionless investor’’ in favor of the capitalist investor who
organizes and manages production (1936, 376). This conception of a historical
movement within capital from rent to profit also corresponds to the purported
passage in many analyses from primitive accumulation to capitalist production
proper. Primitive accumulation might be considered, in this context, an absolute
rent, expropriating entirely wealth produced elsewhere.
The passages from rent to profit and from the dominance of immobile to that of
mobile property are both part of a more general claim by Marx that by the mid-
nineteenth century, large-scale industry has replaced agriculture as the hegemonic
form of economic production. He does not make this claim, of course, in quantitative
terms. Industrial production at the time made up a small fraction of the economy
even in England, the most industrialized country. The majority of workers toiled not
in the factories but in the fields. Marx’s claim instead is qualitative: all other forms of
production will be forced to adopt the qualities of industrial production. Agriculture,
mining, even society itself will have to adopt its regimes of mechanization, its labor
discipline, its temporalities and rhythms, its working day, and so forth. E. P.
Thompson’s (1967) classic essay on clocks and work discipline in England is a
wonderful demonstration of the progressive imposition of industrial temporality over
society as a whole. In the century and a half since Marx’s time, this tendency for
industry to impose its qualities has proceeded in extraordinary ways.
Today, however, it is clear that industry no longer holds the hegemonic position
within the economy. This is not to say that fewer people work in factories today than
ten or twenty or fifty years ago*/although, in certain respects, their locations have
shifted, moving to the other side of the global divisions of labor and power. The claim,
once again, is not primarily quantitative but qualitative. Industry no longer imposes
its qualities over other sectors of the economy and over social relations more
generally. That seems to me a relatively uncontroversial claim.
More disagreement arises when one proposes another form of production as
successor to industry as hegemonic in this way. Toni Negri and I argue that immaterial
or biopolitical production is emerging in that hegemonic position. By immaterial and
biopolitical we try to grasp together the production of ideas, information, images,
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 349
knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, and the like. This
designates occupations throughout the economy, from the high end to the low,
from health care workers, flight attendants, and educators to software programmers
and from fast food and call center workers to designers and advertisers. Most of these
forms of production are not new, of course, but the coherence among them is perhaps
more recognizable and, more important, their qualities tend today to be imposed
over other sectors of the economy and over society as a whole. Industry has to
informationalize; knowledge, code, and images are becoming ever more important
throughout the traditional sectors of production; and the production of affects and
care is becoming increasingly essential in the valorization process. This hypothesis of
a tendency for immaterial or biopolitical production to emerge in the hegemonic
position, which industry used to hold, has all kinds of immediate implications for
gender divisions of labor and various international and other geographical divisions of
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1. On immaterial and biopolitical production, see Hardt and Negri (2009, chap. 3).
350 HARDT
more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the common undermines the
relations of property in a fundamental and general way.
One could say, in rather broad terms, that neoliberalism has been defined by the
battle of private property not only against public property but also, and perhaps more
important, against the common. Here it is useful to distinguish between two types of
the common, both of which are objects of neoliberal strategies of capital. (And this
can serve as an initial definition of ‘‘the common.’’) On the one hand, the common
names the earth and all the resources associated with it: the land, forests, water, air,
minerals, and so forth. This is closely related to seventeenth-century English usage of
‘‘the commons’’ (with an ‘‘s’’). On the other hand, the common also refers, as I have
already said, to the results of human labor and creativity such as ideas, language,
affects, and so forth. You might think of the former as the ‘‘natural’’ common and the
latter as the ‘‘artificial’’ common, but really such divisions between natural and
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artificial quickly break down. In any case, neoliberalism has aimed to privatize both
these forms of the common.
One major scene of such privatization has been the extractive industries, providing
access for transnational corporations to diamonds in Sierra Leone or oil in Uganda or
lithium deposits and water rights in Bolivia. Such neoliberal privatization of the
common has been described by many authors, including David Harvey (2005) and
Naomi Klein (2007), in terms that mark the renewed importance of primitive
accumulation or accumulation by dispossession.2
The neoliberal strategies for the privatization of the ‘‘artificial’’ common are much
more complex and contradictory. Here the conflict between property and the
common is fully in play. The more the common is subject to property relations, as
I said, the less productive it is; and yet capitalist valorization processes require
private accumulation. In many domains, capitalist strategies for privatizing the
common through mechanisms such as patents and copyrights continue (often with
difficulty) despite the contradictions. The music and computer industries are full of
examples. This is also the case with so-called biopiracy*/that is, the processes
whereby transnational corporations expropriate the common in the form of
indigenous knowledges or genetic information from plants, animals, and humans,
usually through the use of patents. Traditional knowledges of the use of a ground seed
as natural pesticide, for instance, or the healing qualities of a plant, are made into
private property by the corporation that patents the knowledge. Parenthetically I
would insist that piracy is a misnomer for such activities. Pirates have a much more
noble vocation: they steal property. These corporations instead steal the common and
transform it into property.
In general, though, capital accomplishes the expropriation of the common not
through privatization per se but in the form of rent. Several contemporary Italian and
French economists who work on what they call cognitive capitalism, Carlo Vercellone
most prominently, argue that just as in an earlier period there was a tendential
movement from rent to profit as the dominant mode of capitalist expropriation,
today there is a reverse movement from profit to rent (see Vercellone, forthcoming).
Patents and copyrights, for example, generate rent in the sense that they guarantee
an income based on the ownership of material or immaterial property. This argument
does not imply a return to the past: the income generated from a patent, for
instance, is very different from that generated from land ownership. The core insight
of this analysis of the emerging dominance of rent over profit, which I find very
significant, is that capital remains generally external to the processes of the
production of the common. Whereas in the case of industrial capital and its
generation of profit, the capitalist plays a role internal to the production process,
particularly in designating the means of cooperation and imposing the modes of
discipline, in the production of the common the capitalist must remain relatively
external.3 Every intervention of the capitalist in the processes of the production of
the common, just as every time the common is made property, reduces productivity.
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Rent is a mechanism, then, to cope with the conflicts between capital and the
common. A limited autonomy is granted the processes of the production of the
common with respect to the sharing of resources and the determination of the modes
of cooperation, and capital is still able to exert control and expropriate value through
rent. Exploitation in this context takes the form of the expropriation of the common.
This discussion of rent points, on the one hand, to the neoliberal processes of
accumulation by dispossession insofar as primitive accumulation can be called a form
of absolute rent. On the other hand, it casts in a new light the contemporary
predominance of finance, which is characterized by complex and very abstract
varieties of relative rent. Christian Marazzi (2008) cautions us against conceiving of
finance as fictional, in opposition to the ‘‘real economy,’’ a conception that
misunderstands the extent to which finance and production are both increasingly
dominated by immaterial forms of property. He also warns against dismissing finance
as merely unproductive in contrast to an image of productivity roughly tied to
industrial production. It is more useful to situate finance in the context of the general
trend from profit to rent, and the correspondingly external position of capital with
respect to the production of the common. Finance expropriates the common and
exerts control at a distance.
Now I can bring to a close and review the primary points of my reading of this first
passage from Marx’s early manuscripts, in which he describes the struggle between
two forms of property (immobile versus movable) and the historical passage from the
dominance of landed property to that of industrial capital. Today we are also
experiencing a struggle between two forms of property (material versus immaterial or
scarce versus reproducible). And this struggle reveals a deeper conflict between
property as such and the common. Although the production of the common is
increasingly central to the capitalist economy, capital cannot intervene in the
production process and must instead remain external, expropriating value in the form
of rent (through financial and other mechanisms). As a result, the production and
productivity of the common becomes an increasingly autonomous domain, still
exploited and controlled, of course, but through mechanisms that are relatively
external. Like Marx, I would say this development of capital is not good in itself*/and
the tendential dominance of immaterial or biopolitical production carries with it
a series of new and more severe forms of exploitation and control. And yet it is
important to recognize that capital’s own development provides the tools for
liberation from capital, and specifically here it leads to the increased autonomy of
the common and its productive circuits.
The brings me to the second passage from the Manuscripts that I want to consider,
‘‘Private Property and Communism.’’ The notion of the common helps us understand
what Marx means by communism in this passage. ‘‘Communism,’’ he writes, ‘‘is the
positive expression of the abolition of private property’’ (1975, 345/6). He includes
that phrase ‘‘positive expression’’ in part to differentiate communism from the false
or corrupt notions of the concept. Crude communism, he claims, merely perpetuates
private property by generalizing it and extending it to the entire community, as
universal private property. That term, of course, is an oxymoron: if property is now
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common. This formulation does not grasp, in other words, the dominant forms of
capitalist production today. If we look back at the passage in the early Manuscripts,
however, and try to filter out Marx’s youthful humanism, we find a definition of
communism and the common that does highlight the immaterial or, really, biopolitical
aspects. Consider, first, this definition of communism, which Marx proposes after
having set aside the crude notion: ‘‘Communism is the positive supersession of private
property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human
essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as
a social, i.e. human, being’’ (1975, 348). What does Marx mean by ‘‘the true
appropriation of the human essence through and for man’’? Clearly he is working on
the notion of appropriation against the grain, applying it in a context where it now
seems strange: no longer appropriation of the object in the form of private property
but appropriation of our own subjectivity, our human, social relations. Marx explains
this communist appropriation, this non-property appropriation in terms of the human
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sensorium and the full range of creative and productive powers. ‘‘Man appropriates
his integral essence in an integral way,’’ which he explains in terms of ‘‘all his human
relations to the world*/seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, con-
templating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving’’ (351). I think the term ‘‘appropriation’’
here is misleading because Marx is not talking about capturing something that already
exists, but rather, creating something new. This is the production of subjectivity, the
production of a new sensorium*/not really appropriation, then, but production. If we
return to the text we can see that Marx does, in fact, pose this clearly: ‘‘Assuming
the positive supersession of private property, man produces man, himself and other
men’’ (349). On this reading, Marx’s notion of communism in the early manuscripts is
far from humanism: that is, far from any recourse to a preexisting or eternal human
essence. Instead, the positive content of communism, which corresponds to the
abolition of private property, is the autonomous human production of subjectivity,
the human production of humanity*/a new seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking,
a new loving.
This brings us back to our analysis of the biopolitical turn in the economy. In the
context of industrial production, Marx arrived at the important recognition that
capitalist production is aimed at creating not only objects but also subjects.
‘‘Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for
the object’’ (1973, 92). In the context of biopolitical production, however, the
production of subjectivity is much more direct and intense. Some contemporary
economists, in fact, analyze the transformations of capital in terms that echo Marx’s
formulation in the early manuscripts. ‘‘If we had to hazard a guess on the emerging
model in the next decades,’’ posits Robert Boyer, ‘‘we would probably have to refer to
the production of man by man’’ (2002, 192). Marazzi similarly understands the
current passage in capitalist production as moving toward an ‘‘anthropogenetic
model.’’ Living beings as fixed capital are at the center of this transformation and the
production of forms of life is becoming the basis of added value. This is a process
in which putting to work human faculties, competencies, knowledges, and
affects*/those acquired on the job but more importantly those accumulated outside
work*/is directly productive of value (Marazzi 2005). One distinctive feature of the
work of head and heart, then, is that paradoxically the object of production is really
354 HARDT
a subject, defined, for example, by a social relationship or a form of life. This should
make clear at least the rationale for calling this form of production biopolitical, since
what are produced are forms of life.
If we return to Marx in this new light, we find that the progression of definitions of
capital in his work actually gives us an important clue for analyzing this biopolitical
context. Although wealth in capitalist society first appears as an immense collective
of commodities, Marx reveals that capital is really a process of the creation of surplus
value via the production of commodities. But Marx develops this insight one more step
to discover that in its essence capital is a social relation*/or, to extend this even
further, the ultimate object of capitalist production is not commodities but social
relations or forms of life. From the standpoint of biopolitical production we can
see that the production of the refrigerator and the automobile are only midpoints for
the creation of the labor and gender relations of the nuclear family around the
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refrigerator and the mass society of individuals isolated together in their cars on the
freeway.
I have highlighted the correspondence or proximity between Marx’s definition of
communism and the contemporary biopolitical turn of the capitalist economy, both of
which are oriented toward the human production of humanity, social relations, and
forms of life*/all in the context of the common. At this point I need to explain how
I regard this proximity and why it is important. But before doing so let me add one
more element to the mix.
Michel Foucault appreciates all the strangeness and richness of the line of Marx’s
thinking that leads to the conclusion that ‘‘l’homme produit l’homme’’ (using, like
Marx, the gender-defined formulation). He cautions that we should not understand
Marx’s phrase as an expression of humanism. ‘‘For me, what must be produced is not
man as nature designed it, or as its essence prescribes; we must produce something
that does not yet exist and we cannot know what it will be.’’ He also warns not to
understand this merely as a continuation of economic production as conventionally
conceived: ‘‘I do not agree with those who would understand this production of man
by man as being accomplished like the production of value, the production of wealth,
or of an object of economic use; it is, on the contrary, destruction of what we are and
the creation of something completely other, a total innovation’’ (1994, 74).4 We
cannot understand this production, in other words, in terms of the producing subject
and the produced object. Instead producer and product are both subjects: humans
produce and humans are produced. Foucault clearly senses (without seeming to
understand fully) the explosiveness of this situation: the biopolitical process is not
limited to the reproduction of capital as a social relation but also presents the
potential for an autonomous process that could destroy capital and create something
entirely new. Biopolitical production obviously implies new mechanisms of exploita-
tion and capitalist control, but we should also recognize, following Foucault’s
intuition, how biopolitical production, particularly in the ways it exceeds the bounds
of capitalist relations and constantly refers to the common, grants labor increasing
4. In the English version of the text, see pages 121/2. At this point in the interview, Foucault is
discussing his differences from the Frankfurt School.
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 355
autonomy and provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of
liberation.
Now we are in position to understand the point of recognizing the proximity
between the idea of communism and contemporary capitalist production. It is not
that capitalist development is creating communism or that biopolitical production
immediately or directly brings liberation. Instead, through the increasing centrality of
the common in capitalist production*/the production of ideas, affects, social
relations, and forms of life*/are emerging the conditions and weapons for a
communist project. Capital, in other words, is creating its own gravediggers.5
I have attempted to pursue two primary points in this essay. The first is a plea for
the critique of political economy or, rather, a claim that any communist project must
begin there. Such an analysis makes good on our periodizations and reveals
the novelties of our present moment by conducting an investigation of not only the
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References
Boyer, R. 2002. La croissance, début de siècle. Paris: Albin Michel.
Ferguson, J. 2006. Global shadows: Africa in the neoliberal world order. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
5. It would be interesting at this point to investigate the relation between this economic
discussion of the common and the way the common functions in Jacques Rancière’s notion of
politics. ‘‘Politics,’’ he writes, ‘‘begins precisely when one stops balancing profits and losses and
is concerned instead with dividing the parts of the common’’ (1999, 5). The common, according
to Rancière’s notion, is the central and perhaps exclusive terrain of partage*/that is, the process
of division, distribution, and sharing. ‘‘Politics,’’ he continues, ‘‘is the sphere of activity of a
common that can only ever be contentious, the relationship between parts that are only parties
and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole’’ (14). Perhaps communism,
as I conceive it here, is the only form that qualifies for Rancière’s notion of politics: the partage
of the common. I explore the role of the common in Rancière’s thought briefly in ‘‘Production
and Distribution of the Common’’ (Hardt 2009).
356 HARDT
Foucault, M. 1994. Entretien (with Duccio Tromadori). In Dits et écrits, vol. 4, 41/95.
Paris: Gallimard. Published in English as Remarks on Marx. New York: Semiotext(e),
1991.
Hardt, M. 2009. Production and distribution of the common. Open: Cahier on Art and
the Public Domain, no. 16: 20/31.
Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Harvey, D. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keynes, J. M. 1936. The general theory of employment, interest and money. London:
Macmillan.
Klein, N. 2007. The shock doctrine. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Marazzi, C. 2005. Capitalismo digitale e modello antropogenetico di produzione. In
Reinventare il lavoro, ed. J. L. La Ville, 107/26. Rome: Sapere 2000.
*/**/ /. 2008. Capital and language. Trans. G. Conti. New York: Semiotext(e).
Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. London: Penguin.
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Gigi Roggero
I present five theses on the common within the context of the transformations of
capitalist social relations as well as their contemporary global crisis. My framework
involves ‘‘cognitive capitalism,’’ new processes of class composition, and the
production of living knowledge and subjectivity. The commons is often discussed
today in reference to the privatization and commodification of ‘‘common goods.’’
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This suggests a naturalistic and conservative image of the common, unhooked from
the relations of production. I distinguish between commons and the common: the
first model is related to Karl Polanyi, the second to Karl Marx. As elaborated in the
postoperaista debate, the common assumes an antagonistic double status: it is both
the plane of the autonomy of living labor and it is subjected to capitalist ‘‘capture.’’
Consequently, what is at stake is not the conservation of ‘‘commons,’’ but rather the
production of the common and its organization into new institutions that would take
us beyond the exhausted dialectic between public and private.
Discussing the common, it is unclear whether we can say: one year before was too
early, one year later will be too late. Yet, the question of the common must be
historicized and situated*/that is, located within the transformations of social
relations of labor and capital as well as within their contemporary crisis. My analysis
proceeds from the framework some scholars refer to as ‘‘cognitive capitalism’’
(Vercellone 2006). I approach cognitive capitalism as a provisional and exploratory
concept. While I am not interested in delving too deeply into the debates surrounding
this term, a brief clarification is necessary. Cognitive capitalism does not refer to a
supposed disappearance of manual labor. Nor is it synonymous with other categories
(for example, the knowledge or creative economy). Contrary to the approach that
focuses on a central ‘‘post-Fordism’’ and a peripheral ‘‘Fordism’’ (Harvey 1989),
I concentrate here on the tension between the individuation of specific workers in the
labor market and the wider process of the cognitization of labor, which provides a
‘‘watermark’’ that allows us to read and act within the contemporary composition of
living labor as well as forms of hierarchization and exploitation at the global level.
Historicizing the common is a matter of methodology. From my perspective, there
is no production of common knowledge that is not situated knowledge. In other
words, I am not interested in a dead philology of what Marx or other revolutionary
thinkers ‘‘truly’’ said about the common. My concern is rather to interrogate what
these thinkers have to say to us now, in the present historical conjuncture. This
provides my starting point in analyzing the conflict between the production of the
common and contemporary capitalist forms of accumulation and crisis. Let me clarify
that I do not intend to oppose philology and politics. Rather, I am proposing that there
can be no living philology if we do not situate the reading of Marx and other militant
theorists in their historical conjuncture, based on their tactical and strategic aims.
There must be a process of translation to move such strategies and tactics onto our
peculiar battlefield.
Mario Tronti wrote, ‘‘Knowledge comes from struggle. Only he who really hates
really knows’’ (1966, 14; translation mine). Operaismo and Marx assume this
revolutionary viewpoint on the partiality of knowledge and the radical conflict that
is part of its production. Using Deleuze’s terms, we must distinguish between a school
of thought and a movement of thought. The former is a set of categories that are
produced and defended in order to patrol the borders of an academic, disciplinary,
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and/or theoretical field: it is the way in which the global university works today to
depoliticize thought and reduce living knowledge to abstract knowledge (edu-factory
collective 2009). In contrast, a movement of thought aims to use categories as tools
to interpret reality and to act within and against the political economy of knowledge.
It is a theoretical practice immanent to the composition of living labor and based on
militant inquiry and co-research (Roggero, Borio, and Pozzi 2007). In other words, it is
only by taking a partial position that it becomes possible to understand the whole and
to transform it*/that is, to organize the common.
Thesis 1:
The common has a double status
When knowledge becomes central as a source and means of production, the forms of
accumulation change. For Marx, knowledge was crucial in the relationship between
living and dead labor but, due to its objectification in capital, it became completely
separated from the worker. The incorporation of the knowledge of living labor into
the automatized system of machines entailed the subtraction of labor’s capacity, its
know-how (Marx 1973). Today the classical relationship between living and dead labor
tends to become a relationship between living and dead knowledge (Roggero 2009). In
other words, the category of living knowledge refers not only to the central role of
science and knowledge in the productive process but also to their immediate
socialization and incorporation in living labor (Alquati 1976). The composition of
cognitive labor has been shaped by the struggles for mass education and flight from
the chains of ‘‘Fordist’’ factories and wage labor (Vercellone 2006). In this process, on
the one hand, the cognitive worker is reduced to the condition of the productive
worker, and, on the other, he tends to become autonomous from the automatized
system of machines. This leads to a situation in which the general intellect is no
longer objectified in dead labor (at least in a stable temporal process). That is,
knowledge can no longer be completely transferred to the machines and separated
from the worker. The previous process of objectification is now overturned as the
worker incorporates many of the aspects of fixed capital. He incessantly produces and
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 359
reproduces, vivifies and regenerates the machine. At the same time, a permanent
excess of social and living knowledge continuously escapes dead labor/knowledge.
In this framework, the necessity to reduce living labor/knowledge to abstract
labor/knowledge*/that is, the imperative to measure work despite the objective
crisis of the law of value*/forces capital to impose completely artificial units of time.
To use the words of Marx, it is a ‘‘question de vie et de mort’’: the law of value does
not disappear, but it becomes an immediately naked measure of exploitation: that is,
law of surplus value. The capital has to capture the value of the production of
subjectivity ‘‘in both senses of the genitive: the constitution of subjectivity, of a
particular subjective comportment (a working class which is both skilled and docile),
and in turn the productive power of subjectivity, its capacity to produce wealth’’
(Read 2003, 102). In this way, the common is not a mere duplication of the concept of
cooperation: it is simultaneously the source and the product of cooperation, the
place of the composition of living labor and its process of autonomy, the plane of the
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production of subjectivity and social wealth. It is due to this fact that today the plane
of the production of subjectivity is the production of social wealth that capital is less
and less able to organize the cycle of cooperation ‘‘upstream.’’ The act of
accumulation, the capture of the value produced in common by living labor/
knowledge, takes place more and more at the end of the cycle. From this standpoint,
we can conceive of financialization as the real and concrete, though perverse, form
of capitalist accumulation in a system that has to place value on what it cannot
measure. To use the words of some authors close to The Economist, financialization is
the ‘‘communism of capital’’*/it is the capture of the common.
In the context of the common as just discussed, the classical distinction between
profit and rent becomes quite problematic: when capital appropriates cooperation
that to a large extent takes place without the presence of direct capitalist
organization, these two terms assume similar characteristics. Today, rent is the
form of capitalist command that captures the autonomous production of living labor.
This does not mean that capital is exclusively a parasite: it has to organize this
capture. The corporate figure of the ‘‘cool hunter’’ is illustrative in this regard. In the
1920s Henry Ford said: ‘‘Buy any car, on the condition that it is a black Model T,’’
summarizing the (however unattainable) capitalist dream to push needs ‘‘upstream.’’
Today, in contrast, the cool hunter acts ‘‘downstream,’’ capturing autonomous life
styles and subjective expressions. The ‘‘center’’ goes to the ‘‘periphery’’ in order to
capture its common productive potentia.1
This analysis helps to answer a central question for those familiar with the
literature on networks and the Internet: why is it that neoliberal scholars exalt the
characteristics (free cooperation, centrality of non-property strategies, horizontality
of sharing, etc.) highlighted by critical theorists and activists with regard to the
production of knowledge? Starting from the description of the cooperative and self-
organized practices on the Web, Yochai Benkler (2006) hypothesizes the rise of
a horizontal production based on the commons. In this way, Benkler describes
1. While by ‘‘upstream’’ I refer to the organization of social cooperation and relations by and
through capital, by ‘‘downstream’’ I refer to the organization of capitalist capture of social
cooperation that exists in a partial autonomy of capitalist relations.
360 ROGGERO
2. Katéchon is a concept that Carl Schmitt borrows from Saint Paul to describe a force that
restrains evil.
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 361
Thesis 2:
The common is not a natural good
In the international debate, the common is usually referred to in the plural*/that is,
as the commons. It is usually identified as something existing in nature (water, earth,
environment, territory, but also information and knowledge). We could attribute a
theoretical referent to this interpretation of the common: Karl Polanyi’s (1944)
analysis of the ‘‘great transformation.’’ Polanyi reconstructs the rise of capitalism
along the line of a tension between the expansion of a self-regulating market and the
self-defense of society geared toward reestablishing control over the economy.
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workers’ movements, proposed by Beverly Silver (2003), also is unconvincing. For her,
Polanyi-type struggles are characterized by a pendulum-like movement between the
processes of expropriation and proletarianization and the reaction of workers against
these processes; and Marx-type struggles are thought to be inscribed in relations of
exploitation that undergo a succession of stages, in which the organization of
production changes. But we have to recognize that in cognitive capitalism we run into
a situation in which the resistance to the expropriation of knowledge is immediately
the struggle against the relations of exploitation because this resistance poses the
question of the collective control of the (cognitive) production of the common
against capitalist capture.
Thesis 3:
The common is not the universal, it is a class concept
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Implicit in the different interpretations of the common and the commons is the
question of the subject. The society, the community, the individual, the ‘‘prosumer,’’
all these subjects reintroduce in different ways the idea of the universal that seeks to
defend humanity from capital and commodification. Marx splits the historical subject
of modernity, the citizen, with the concept of labor power. And yet, Marxist and
socialist traditions reintroduced a new figure of the universal through the concept of
class as the carrier of the general interest. Operaismo, like Marx, once again splits
this subject and proposes that the working class cannot be interested in a general
human destiny as it is a partial subject constituted within and against capitalist
relations. The abstract One is split into the antagonism of two parts: the working class
is the potentia that wants to exercise power; capital, on the other hand, is the power
that exploits potentia. The former is the master, the latter is the slave. But there is
no dialectical Aufhebung possible between them. In fact the dialectic, which also
necessitates the universal subject, dies in the partial insurgence of the workers’
struggle.
In situating the question of the common in class antagonism, I do not refer to a
sociological or objective image of class as it does not exist outside struggle. To recall
Tronti, ‘‘there is no class without class struggle’’ (2008, 72; translation mine). In a
similar way, late in his life Louis Althusser (2006) asserted that struggle should not be
thought to arrive retroactively, but rather is constitutive of the division of classes.
Based on this idea, we use the category of class composition which, in operaismo,
indicates the conflictual relations between the material structure of the relations of
exploitation and the antagonistic process of subjectivation (Wright 2002). The operaisti
distinguished between technical composition, based on the capitalistic articulation
and hierarchization of the workforce, and political composition*/that is, the process of
the constitution of class as an autonomous subject. Within this framework, there is no
idea of an original unity of labor that is then divided and alienated by capital and
therefore in need of recomposition, nor is there a concept of consciousness that must
be revealed to rejoin the class-in-itself with the class-for-itself. Because class does not
preexist the material and contingent historical conditions of its subjective formation,
there can be neither symmetry nor dialectical overturning in the relation between
364 ROGGERO
technical and political composition. Subjectivity is at one and the same time the
condition of possibility for struggle as well as what is at stake in it.
Operaismo forged these categories (i.e., technical and political composition of
class) in a very particular context, marked by the space-time coordinates of the
‘‘Fordist’’ factory and consequently a specific figure of the worker. Today we need to
radically rethink these categories due to the fact that the composition of living labor
has been unrecognizably transformed by the worldwide struggles of the last four
decades. Workers, anticolonial, and feminist struggles have forced capital to become
global.
Therefore, there is no more outside nor is there a dialectic of inclusion and
exclusion. This is the new time-space plane upon which the formation of class within
and against the capitalist relations takes place. The composition of living labor is
constitutively heterogeneous as it is based on the affirmation of differences that are
irreducible to the universal.3 Capital commands this heterogeneity of the workforce
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3. Here I refer to the historicist understanding of universalism: that is, the mainstream
interpretation of the concept within modernity. However, we can state that the common is
related to a not-transitive relation between partiality and universal. That is, the universal does
not determine partiality, but the insurgence of partiality continuously creates new universalism.
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 365
new line of development immanent to the organization of the potentia of living labor.
Autonomy and the powerful development of singularities are not the outcome of a
classless society, but that which is at stake in an antagonistic social relationship. The
insurgence of partiality characterizes the composition of living labor, but this does
not imply the impossibility of conjoining these partialities into the common. In fact,
the common is the institution of a new relation between singularity and multiplicity
that, unlike the empty universal, does not reduce differences to an abstract subject
(the individual in liberalism and the collective in socialism, each undergirded by a
particular relation to the state). A singularity can compose itself with other
singularities without renouncing its difference. To summarize, what we are proposing
here is multiplicity, not nature; singularity, not the individual; and the common, not
the universal.
Thesis 4:
The common is not a Utopia: it is defined by the new temporality
of antagonism beyond the dialectic
between private and public
We already stated that financialization no longer has the role classically attributed to
it by economists. Today financialization pervades the whole capitalist cycle: it cannot
be counterpoised to the real economy because it becomes the real economy precisely
at the point when capitalist accumulation is based on the capture of the common. Is it
possible to apply the traditional schema of the capitalist cycle to the current
transition implied by the new time-space coordinates of cognitive labor and global
capitalism? Observing the increasingly rapid succession of crises in the last fifteen
years (the collapse of the Southeast Asian markets, the Nasdaq crash, and the
subprime crisis), the empirical answer would have to be no. That is, the crisis is no
longer a stage in the cycle of capital; it is the permanent condition of capitalist
development. We have reached a point perhaps best described following Marx’s
insight in volume 3 of Capital where he points to the ‘‘abolition of capital as private
property within the confines of the capitalist mode of production’’ (1981, 567): today
366 ROGGERO
4. It is also within this context that we can interpret the theory of New Public Management,
which is a movement, ‘‘thought,’’ and ‘‘philosophy’’ that has sought to justify the introduction
of corporate means and logic into the public sector, receives its valence.
5. The latter has been put in crisis not only by neoliberal capital, but also by social and political
movements. Actually, the Italian Anomalous Wave and transnational student movement slogan
‘‘we won’t pay for your crisis’’ also means ‘‘we won’t pay for the public university crisis.’’ See
www.edu-factory.org
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 367
public and private, between state and corporation. That is, the mobilization must
provide an alternative within, and not against, the historical development of capital.
Indeed, the appeal to the public is based on the restoration of the figure of civil
society and the supposed general interest, which necessitates the reduction of
differences (especially class difference) to the empty image of the universal. To
reclaim the public in this fashion means to reclaim the state, the transcendental
recomposition of a supposedly original unity coincident with the modern figure of
political sovereignty. The common, in contrast, has no nostalgia for the past. Rather,
it is collective decision and organization immanent to the cooperation of living labor,
the richness of collective production. To recall Marx, ‘‘the working class cannot
simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery’’ (1966) (i.e., the public); ‘‘all
revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it’’ (1963, 121/2).
In these transformations of global capital, I would like to highlight the issue of
temporality in order to identify the new quality of antagonism beyond any illusory
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Thesis 5:
Institutions of the common as a new theory and practice of
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communism
Due to the parameters of our new context, there is another central category of
operaismo that we have to rethink: the tendency. More precisely, we have to rethink
the category as well as renovate its method. The tendency is the identification of a
field of nonprogressivist possibilities within the framework of the heterogeneity of
the composition of living labor and the differential temporalities that capital
captures, in order to repeat endlessly its origin*/namely, primitive accumulation.
Everyday capital has to ‘‘translate,’’ to use the language of Walter Benjamin (1995),
the ‘‘heterogeneous and full time’’ of the cooperation of living labor into the
‘‘homogenous and empty time’’ of capitalist value. Parallel to Benjamin, Sandro
Mezzadra (2008) proposes to use the distinction made by Naoki Sakai between
‘‘homolingual translation’’ and ‘‘heterolingual translation’’ as a political tool. In the
former mode, the subject of enunciation speaks to the other assuming the stability
and homogeneity of her own language as well as that of the other. She acknowledges
differences, but assigns those to a supposed original community. This form of
translation functions as a representation and mediation that reaffirms the primacy
and sovereignty of the language of the enunciator. In heterolingual translation, in
contrast, the stranger is the starting point for all parties involved in speech, making
this form of translation independent of all ‘‘native language’’ and producing a
language of mobile subjects in transit. In heterolingual translation, differences
compose themselves only in a common process: therefore, language is not simply
a means, but precisely what is at stake.
Thus the common is always organized in translation, either through homolingual
translation*/that is, through the reduction of living labor/knowledge into abstract
labor/knowledge*/or through heterolingual translation, making a class composition
possible within the irreducible multiplicity of new subjects of living labor. In a certain
sense, the heterogeneity of struggles renders obsolete the idea of their communi-
cation; however, it does not suggest the impossibility of their composition. On the
contrary, composition takes place in the process of translation into a new language:
into the language of common. In other words, the differences are not in themselves
vehicles for antagonism: an inevitable antagonism arises when differences are
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 369
reduced to identity, to an abstract origin, and consequently when they speak only as
difference and only of their difference. In this way, they are successfully
decentralized and domesticated (Mohanty 2003), and are consequently accumulated
by the capitalist machine and translated back into the language of value. It is the
interruption of this capitalistic translation that opens the space for the political
composition of the autonomy of living labor. In other words, our problem is to
disconnect in a radical way historical materialism from a historicist narration. The
critique of capitalist development is not the empowerment of a supposed non-capital
(Sanyal 2007); rather, it is based on the autonomous potentia of the cooperation of
living labor. In fact, the principle is class struggle. From this perspective, to claim
that talking about production relations is economism is precisely to have an
economistic viewpoint on production relations. If the tendency is defined in the
concatenation of points of discontinuity, which compose a new constellation of
elements, then the ‘‘general illumination’’ (Marx 1973) of the tendency and its planes
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marginalized the more radical militants of the black power movement. We can see in
this example how capitalist institutionalization is a form of capture and domestica-
tion of the institutions of the common.
The other example is the university movement Anomalous Wave in Italy. Its
development is not tied to the defense of the public university, but rather to the
construction of a new university based on recent experiences of ‘‘self-education’’
(edu-factory collective 2009) and the ‘‘self-reform’’ of the university, another term
that Anomalous Wave mobilizes. It is not a proposal that is addressed to the
government or some representative actor, nor does it allude to a reformist practice
that tries to soften radical claims. It is precisely the contrary: it is the organized form
of radical issues in order to construct autonomy in the here and now.
As in the case of black studies, ‘‘oppositional knowledges’’ (Mohanty 1990) and
experiences of self-education are not immune from capture: in fact, academic
governance and the political economy of knowledge live on their subsumption. In
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other words, the problem of governance is not that of exclusion, but rather
domestication of the most critical and radical elements. In fact, we might claim
that capitalist governance is the institutional form of the capture of the common.
From this standpoint, before governance there is resistance. In other words,
governance is not based on the fullness of control, but rather it is reproduced in
a permanent crisis in that it is structurally dependent upon the creative potentia of
its enemy, making governance an open process that is endlessly reversible.
To sum up: in modernity the public was what was produced by all of us but did not
belong to any of us as it belonged to the state. The institutions of the common are the
organizational force of the collective appropriation of what is produced by all of us.
Thus, as Carlo Vercellone (2009) says, we have to in a certain way mimic finance: we
have to find how it might be possible to take the state and corporations ‘‘hostage.’’
In other words, how might it be possible to collectively reappropriate the social
richness, sources, and forces frozen in the capitalistic dialectic between public and
private? This is the question of the construction of a ‘‘new welfare,’’ which would
involve the reappropriation of what is captured by capitalistic rent. It is not a
coincidence that this is a central topic in the university movements.
Now we can redefine the contradiction between forces of production and relations
of production in an antidialectical fashion. When the common is the center of social
relations, the distinction proposed by Michel Foucault between struggles over
exploitation and struggles over subjectivation has to be reformulated since, from
the perspective of the common, struggles over the production of subjectivity are
simultaneously struggles against exploitation. It then becomes possible to rethink
liberty in a materialist way. When liberty is embodied in the relationship between
singularity and the common, in the collective control of the production of the
potentia of living labor, it becomes a radical critique of exploitation. This is the
liberty of the forces of production that, by breaking capitalist development, it opens
the way for a different becoming: that is, a different tendency. It is a common liberty
because it is partial/of part. The breaking of the ‘‘capitalist common’’ and of
exchange value does not necessitate a return to the use value contained in the
mythological notion of ‘‘common goods.’’ Rather, this break is the construction of a
new social relationship that reinvents a radical composition of liberty and equality
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 371
In this context it is difficult to remember that just twenty years ago these same actors
proclaimed the ‘‘end of history.’’
With regard to the apparent passivity of subjects, it would be wise to keep in mind
Marx’s (1950) reply to Engels on 9 December 1851. In response to his friend, who
lamented the ‘‘stupid and infantile’’ behavior of the Parisian people who failed to
oppose Louis Bonaparte, Marx replied, ‘‘the proletariat has saved its forces.’’
According to Marx, the proletariat had in this way avoided engaging in an insurrection
that would have reinforced the bourgeoisie and reconciled it with the army, inevitably
leading to a second defeat for the workers. Similar to the ways in which the operaisti
of the 1950s and 1960s found the potential of resistance within the so-called
alienation and integration of what would become the mass worker, we have to find
the possible lines of reversibility in the apparent passivity of the contemporary
subjects of living labor. In order to build up a new theory and practice of communism,
we must learn the new language of the common, starting with the optimism of the
intellect.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk for inviting me to participate in the
symposium ‘‘The Common and the Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social
Imaginaries’’; and to Sandro Mezzadra, Michael Hardt, Brett Neilson, and Alvaro
Reyes for suggestions and help with translation.
References
Alquati, R., ed. 1976. L’università e la formazione: l’incorporamento del sapere
sociale nel lavoro vivo. Aut Aut 154.
Althusser, L. 2006. Sul materialismo aleatorio. Trans. V. Morfino and L. Pinzolo. Milan:
Mimesis.
Beck, U. 1992. Risk society: Towards a new modernity. New Delhi: Sage.
372 ROGGERO
A Common Word
Aras Özgün
This response aims to discuss Michael Hardt’s and Gigi Roggero’s conception of the
‘‘common’’ vis-à-vis the modern notion of ‘‘public,’’ and to comment on the
ideological, linguistic, and affective social implications of their political-economic
explication.
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Michael Hardt’s (2010) and Gigi Roggero’s (2010) works are a part of the recent
discussions of reviving or reformulating ‘‘communism’’ once again as an alternative
ethico-political construction. The contemporary failure of neoliberal politics in every
field it pertains to (as well as an overall social program) testifies to the timely nature
of these debates and makes such an alternative utterly urgent. At this point,
renegotiating the ‘‘public good’’ against ‘‘private interests’’ and retreating into the
comforts of liberal democracy in an orderly fashion is no longer an option (Brown
2003). This impossibility arises not because of the absence of a general, naı̈ve, and
vague nostalgia about the good old New Deal, but because today the social
antagonism inherent to capitalism has transformed beyond what could possibly be
contained within the limits of a fine balance between ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private,’’ as was
once implied by the political ethics of liberal democracy.
Recent literature produced around the notion of ‘‘common,’’ by scholars coming
from the Autonomist Marxist critique (to which Hardt and Roggero’s works belong),
constitutes a distinctly important contribution to radical political philosophy in this
respect.1 In the search for ‘‘communism,’’ the idea of turning back to Lenin appears
as the diametrical opposite of the naı̈ve New Deal nostalgia surrounding these
debates. Michael Hardt’s intervention, on the contrary, suggests to shift the
discussion from political decision to the critique of political economy*/or, move
from Lenin to Marx, so to speak. For Hardt, the post-fordist transformation of
the production relations and labor and capital compositions force us to reevaluate the
foundations of communist project*/the critique of political-economy. In the way
1. Among these are Casarino and Negri (2008), Dyer-Witheford (2006), and Hardt and Negri
(2009).
Yet, perhaps our references should not be limited to ‘‘from Lenin to Marx’’ while
rethinking communism. If, as Hardt articulates so properly, the ‘‘common’’ as such is
‘‘antithetical to property,’’ and a communist hypothesis has to be recentered as a
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project for its abolition (rather than its transformation into ‘‘public property’’), we
can find further sources and inspirations in various strains of radical and revolutionary
political theories which historically remained critical to the statist tendencies
dominating Marxism, from Marx to Lenin.
Joseph Proudhon, in 1840, asked the question ‘‘What is property?’’ and arrived at an
answer, ‘‘property is theft!’’ Proudhon’s treatment of the notion of property perhaps
did not carry the same analytical sophistication when compared with Marx’s analysis
of capitalist production, but his position was quite similar to the rejection of the
dichotomy between ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ property we find today in Hardt’s
formulation of the ‘‘common.’’ ‘‘The right to property,’’ for Proudhon, could not be
a ‘‘natural right’’ because it diminished the possibility of (what he called) ‘‘social
equality’’ that was promised by ‘‘labor.’’ Labor constituted the ‘‘social’’ whereas
property diminished it.2 According to him, ‘‘Property and society’’ were ‘‘utterly
irreconcilable institutions’’ (1840, chap. 1, pt. 1).
The ‘‘right to property’’ that Proudhon attacked so fiercely has to be considered as
an a priori disposition of liberal governmentality; the subordination of political
practice to the economic rationale could be established only after such disposition.
Marx would dismiss Proudhon’s position/argument as ‘‘unnecessarily confusing’’ and
‘‘self-refuting’’ (among other things, rebuking his ignorance of Hegel) by arguing that
‘‘theft,’’ as a form of violation of property, could only presuppose ‘‘property’’ (Marx
1865). But Proudhon’s mutualist vision clearly refused ‘‘property’’ as a violation of
the ‘‘social’’ as a product of ‘‘labor’’*/in other words, as a violation of the ‘‘common,’’
as we prefer to call it today*/and therefore he chose to call it ‘‘theft.’’ Finally, in the
Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels would advocate the state’s exclusive,
monopolistic control over rent as well as other forms of ‘‘public property,’’ and affirm
‘‘public property’’ as the main pillar of their ‘‘communist’’ project.
2. Proudhon’s distinction between ‘‘possession’’ (as the direct product of labor, or a result of
social exchange, which takes place in direct relation to labor process) and ‘‘property’’ (as
directly related with surplus accumulation) is worth reexamining in the context of this debate.
376 ÖZGÜN
Hardt’s call to ‘‘look back into the critique of political economy’’ in order to define
new grounds for the communist project involves tracing a ‘‘minor Marx’’; his intention
seems to be more toward identifying and adopting the precedent concerns and
problematics in Marx’s original critique rather than rehashing the traditional formulas
of Marxist political economy. This is an invitation for returning again to what labor is,
how it articulates to capital, and how it creates our social world, how it produces
commodities on the one hand and commons on the other.
Autonomist criticism actually emerged from ‘‘looking back’’ into the critique of
political economy. As a result of such reevaluation, post-operaismo scholars
identified post-Fordism as a new mode of capitalist production and ‘‘immaterial
labor’’ as a hegemonic form of labor in this new phase. ‘‘Immaterial labor,’’ as a
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capitalism across all theoretical fields, but which was actually a product of
eighteenth-century liberal governmentality. ‘‘Public’’ becomes the master signifier
of socialism in its opposition to ‘‘private property,’’ but it still carries a reference
to ‘‘ownership’’ relations. ‘‘Public property’’ is everyone’s ‘‘capital,’’ but it is still
‘‘capital’’ in the sense that it is a part of the restricted economy and its ‘‘use,’’ or
‘‘productivity,’’ is still restricted with the terms imposed by ‘‘public ownership’’ and
limits of the definition of ‘‘public.’’ For example, you may have to be a ‘‘citizen,’’ a
‘‘taxpayer,’’ or even a taxpaying citizen dwelling in a specific neighborhood to use the
‘‘public education’’ provided by the state or city. ‘‘Public’’ never denotes ‘‘every-
body’’; it always signifies a limit set by a certain social, linguistic, or jurisprudential
criterion, refers exclusively to a specific population. As such, it not only always
excludes ‘‘somebody’’ and creates outsiders, but also abstracts a ‘‘majority will’’ out
of a shared social situation. In this respect, the term ‘‘public’’ does not undo the
specific set of social relations around ‘‘property’’ (or dispose the restrictions
stemming from ownership) but delegates these relations to an abstract collective
body.
Hardt’s and Roggero’s rejection of ‘‘public property’’ for the sake of a ‘‘communist
project’’ brings the displacement of the term ‘‘public’’ from its hegemonic status of
expressing an abstract collective will/body/thing. Therefore, the rejection of ‘‘public
property’’ within the critique of political economy invites a novel political logic,
which can now be conceived without having reference to the political terminology of
liberal democracy. ‘‘Common’’ is not only ‘‘not property,’’ but it is also ‘‘not public’’;
it signifies a collective social form that is different from the ‘‘public’’*/it doesn’t
‘‘substitute’’ the ‘‘public’’ but transcends it. Such a theoretical intervention allows us
to speak a political language that is not structured with the binary opposition imposed
by classical liberal and socialist discourses, and thus makes it possible for us to
imagine a different form of ‘‘collectivity.’’
5
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Proceeding from immaterial production and pointing to its paradoxical nature, Hardt
and Roggero find an affirmative moment in the post-Fordist mode of capitalism for
a new ‘‘communist’’ project; challenged by its very productive force, post-Fordist
capitalism has to invent new property and production relations. If communism is
the abolishment of ‘‘property,’’ if commons is antithetical to property, this new
mode of production is affirmative of this project. Yet, such pragmatic ‘‘affirmation’’
in the realm of political economy can only be the material basis for a ‘‘communist
project’’*/if what we understand from this ‘‘project’’ is a constitutive political
ethics. While post-Fordist capitalism relies on ‘‘commons’’ as its productive force, it
does so by subordinating these ‘‘commons’’ to its political/economic logic through
various ideological and linguistic dispositions. Communism, then, has to be
formulated as a different set of linguistic and ideological dispositions.
The word ‘‘property’’ has two meanings in English. The first refers to ownership,
belonging, possession*/the thing as ‘‘property’’; while the second refers to a set of
qualities, attributes, and characteristics through which we define things*/the
‘‘properties’’ of things. These two meanings fold into each other only in a very
specific context: when ‘‘property’’ (ownership) defines the identity (properties) of
someone*/in other words, when ‘‘what we own’’ defines ‘‘who we are.’’ This is a
specific context; it belongs to that exclusive language that prioritizes property
relations as the existential basis for social relations, ‘‘ownership’’ as the basis of
‘‘citizenship.’’ Yet, language is wider than that; while in this specific semantic
context the two meanings of ‘‘property’’ fold into each other and refer to ‘‘identity,’’
the second meaning of ‘‘property’’ continues to reside in it without the need to refer
to the first meaning. The attributes, qualities, and characteristics of ‘‘things’’*/their
‘‘properties’’*/create the fabric of ‘‘social language’’ beyond ‘‘identity’’ issues.
While discussing the ‘‘property relations’’ that post-Fordism entails, Hardt and
Roggero confine their discussion to the foundation of ‘‘common’’ as an economic
form that challenges the first meaning of the term. The organizing concept in their
discussion, immaterial labor, already points to a ‘‘general economy’’ of life beyond
the restricted meaning of the term around commodity production; post-
Fordism entails a set of ‘‘property relations,’’ which already extend outside
tangible commodities and things. The difference between industrial production and
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 379
4. Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language comes to mind in this context. Marazzi points to the
fact that the post-Fordist financialization of production also clearly posits the very direct
dominance of performative linguistic and affective process over rent (2008).
380 ÖZGÜN
Once we redefine the notion of ‘‘common’’ as such, not on the basis of repetition
and sameness but within the ontology of difference, it has to be inserted back
into other words and related contexts, which requires a ‘‘common’’ prefix;
‘‘communication,’’ ‘‘community,’’ and so on.
‘‘Communication’’ postulated in such a ‘‘communist’’ ontology would be something
that is entirely opposite to the lingering Habermasian notion of ‘‘ideal communica-
tion’’*/which posits a necessary agreement among the communicating subjects in the
basic terms of communication*/a ‘‘common language.’’ It would rather resonate with
Gregory Bateson’s idea that ‘‘information is a difference that makes a difference’’
(1972, 448/66): one can truly communicate only when confronted with a language
(a ‘‘difference’’) that s/he does not yet know and has to learn (that ‘‘differentiates’’);
one can only repeat and exchange the ‘‘order-words’’ rather than ‘‘communicate’’
within the same language (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 1987). Or, the notion of
‘‘community’’ imposed by such communist ontology is more likely to be what Jean-Luc
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Nancy (1991) describes as ‘‘inoperative community,’’ where the social ‘‘bond’’ is neither
a shared ‘‘identity’’ nor an ideological/linguistic device, but a temporal and affective
presence*/being there, sharing the same moment, touching a stranger’s shoulder.
Hardt and Roggero’s works (despite their emphasis on starting with the ‘‘political
economy,’’ with property relations and productive forces) inevitably bring the
discussion of ‘‘political logic and will’’ as such. The common, in their exposition, is
readily produced as an ‘‘economic form’’ that is the ‘‘antithesis of property’’ within
biopolitical production. Moreover, it is the hegemonic ‘‘productive force’’ upon which
post-Fordist capitalism relies; that is why this new form of capitalism is more
affirmative for a communist project than its predecessor. If this is the case, then we
can assume that what challenges such a communist project is not organized within
the sphere of ‘‘economic production’’ (in the narrow sense of the term), nor will the
presence of commons as the hegemonic productive force in this sphere automatically
result in political transformation. So far capitalism has been quite successful in
recapturing, subordinating, and regulating the ‘‘productive force,’’ which tends to
escape from it eternally. It did so by capturing the desires of social subjects, by
cultivating various forms of insecurities in a meticulously crafted ontology of fear,
and by rewarding docility with ‘‘protection’’ from the world it created. Therefore,
‘‘communism’’ has to respond by offering another language and another ontology.
What about a ‘‘common word’’? In an unfamiliar place, one finds herself listening to
the conversations flowing around, while hoping to pick up a word that sounds familiar.
Picking up a word does not make anything understandable. Rather, it ‘‘commu-
nicates’’ a difference as an entry point. ‘‘Oh, we say that too, what does it mean in
your language?’’ For example,‘‘Jhan’’ in Armenian means ‘‘body’’: it is also used as a
diminutive suffix to names (like Norajhan, Nazarethjhan, and so on). ‘‘Can’’ in
Turkish, pronounced exactly the same way and also used as a diminutive suffix (like
Nurcan, Mehmetcan, and so on) means ‘‘soul.’’ Such is a ‘‘common word’’; it always
means something slightly different, and it is that difference that fulfills the meaning
THE COMMON AND ITS PRODUCTION 381
References
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine.
Brown, W. 2003. Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy. Theory and Event
7 (1).
Casarino, C., and A. Negri. 2008. In praise of the common: A conversation on
philosophy and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New
York: Viking.
*/**/ /. 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
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FREE ASSOCIATION
Means in Common
16beaver group
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In this essay, we show how Marxian theory can contribute to the ongoing rethinking of
the concepts of ‘‘community’’ and ‘‘democracy,’’ especially in relation to the
question of ‘‘social agency.’’ Our discussion is organized around a particular reading
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of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and broadens the notions of ‘‘the social’’
and of ‘‘the economy’’ beyond the unidimensional concepts that have undergirded
much of orthodox thinking, transforming them into spaces that are both multi-
dimensional (consisting of plural agencies) and polymorphous (comprising plural
forms of agency).
In this essay, we lay out a principled/strategic way in which Marxian theory can
contribute to the ongoing rethinking, in social theory, of the concepts of ‘‘commu-
nity’’ and ‘‘democracy,’’ especially in relation to the question of ‘‘social agency.’’ If a
Marxist contribution to this rethinking can serve to channel it onto the tracks of
‘‘socialist/communist’’ aspirations, however reformulated in light of current critical
social theory, that would meet our goal. Our discussion is organized around a
particular reading of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and broadens the notions
of ‘‘the social’’ and of ‘‘the economy’’ beyond the unidimensional concepts that have
undergirded much of orthodox thinking, transforming them into spaces that are both
multidimensional (consisting of plural agencies) and polymorphous (comprising plural
forms of agency). The project of broadening the social space imagined in Marxist
theory is, of course, not new with us: much of the work done after, or in response to,
the more structuralist constructions of the Althusserian school can be understood, we
think, as contributing to that project. This essay can be seen as following up on that
work, and we offer our reflections as an attempt to find in Marx the theoretical
conditions for it.
The need to focus on the question of ‘‘agency,’’ on the social identities that agents
possess (or that are attributed to them) and the types of economic and political
behavior associated with such identities, is both political and theoretical. Politically,
this focus is made necessary not just by the desire to counter the hegemonic project
of contemporary capitalism (so intent on negating those human needs that do not fit
the cash nexus) but also by a desire to extract, and thus to preserve, the democratic
and humane aspirations of the socialist tradition from the historical experiences of
‘‘really existing socialism.’’ The project of creating a space for economic and social
forms beyond capitalism, and of conceiving of nontotalitarian and more open
economic and political institutional forms of noncapitalism, can only proceed through
elaborating a new vision of the relationships among the individual, community, and
society. Theoretically, the development of a theory of social agency appropriate for
articulating a new conception and practice of socialism would fill a vacuum created
within Marxism by the widespread rejection of economic determinism. Our reflec-
tions are meant as a direct response to arguments, among many economists (both
mainstream and heterodox), that forms of economy and society other than capitalism
are no longer on the agenda (because the goal is to challenge and move beyond one
particular form of capitalism, identified as neoliberalism), and, within the Left, that
the discussion of noncapitalism has nothing more to learn from Marxism and
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1. Among the many schools of thought encompassed by heterodox economics, Austrians have
historically been least interested in imagining and developing alternatives to capitalism.
However, in recent years, Austrian conceptions of postcapitalism or socialism have received
increased attention. See, for example, the debate among Stephen Cullenberg, David Prychitko,
Peter Boettke, and Theodore Burczak, titled ‘‘Socialism, Capitalism, and the Labor Theory of
Property: A Marxian-Austrian Dialogue,’’ in Rethinking Marxism (1998).
2. Our formulation of a polymorphous and multiplicitous ontology of social being undergirding
the Marxist imaginary moves also, we think, along lines somewhat different from those followed
by the Autonomist school of Marxism, as developed in the work of Antonio Negri and Michael
Hardt. Whereas they attempt to break out of the traps and impasses of classical Marxism by
transforming the concept of labor (from material to immaterial), we propose to do so by creating
a space for the representation of social being in addition to and beyond the one dimension of
labor (whether material or immaterial).
COMMODITY FETISHISM 405
at least in its ad litteram mode), a vision from within a bourgeois social order of a
noncapitalist space that looks beyond and exceeds such an order. In this sense, our
approach is based on the idea that analyzing existing forms of society is inextricably
related*/as both condition and effect*/to the imagining of other social relations, of
another economic and social order.
Of course, the existence of a relationship between the analysis of society as it is
and a vision of society as it could be is not only true of Marxism, in which a
noncapitalist or socialist Utopian vision is a necessary ground for the critique of
political economy; it is also true of other economic and social theories, both
mainstream and heterodox. Each such theory or analytical framework presumes
another possible world. In the case of mainstream economics, both neoclassical and
Keynesian economists posit a vision of market equilibrium, productive efficiency, and
the maximum growth of commodity wealth. The debates within mainstream
economics (over the appropriate tools of economic analysis as well as the efficacy
of various government policies) take place against the backdrop of such a vision: the
general presumption is that a market economy, in principle, provides the means
whereby individual agents can achieve maximum well-being, for themselves and for
others.4 Questions are raised and disagreements arise not about the vision itself but,
3. What we are referring to as the school of postmodern Marxism is closely related to the journal
Rethinking Marxism whose editors have, over the course of the past two decades, built on and
extended the elements of the ‘‘melting vision’’ initially articulated by Marx and Engels in the
Communist Manifesto*/elements that need to be read against the grain of a more deterministic
approach which can also be located within that text. See, for example, the work of Stephen
Resnick and Richard Wolff (1987), David F. Ruccio and Jack Amariglio (1994), Stephen Cullenberg
(1994), Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio (1996), and J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996).
4. Our focus here is on economists’ Utopian visions vis-à-vis the economy and society. Closely
connected (but not in any simple or direct manner) is their Utopian vision of the role of
economists themselves. The ‘‘official’’ view is that economic scientists are*/or, at least, aspire
to be*/rational, objective, distinterested, and so on (with associated debates about how these
qualities can best be secured, usually invoking one or another version of the ‘‘scientific
method’’). Dissenters argue that economists are often guided by intuition, connectedness,
ethics and values, and so on*/and that, in the best of worlds, economists would recognize how
their work is both enabled and constrained by these qualities.
406 CALLARI AND RUCCIO
rather, on such issues as how and why the analysis is carried out (e.g., individual
decisions or aggregate behaviors, partial or general equilibrium, game theory or
econometric modeling, free decision-making or social engineering) and what the
proper mix of markets and state intervention should be (e.g., should the state be
charged with sanctioning private decisions or achieving macroeconomic targets,
enforcing the rules or guiding the outcomes, closer to the protocols of the
International Monetary Fund or to the World Bank?)*/in other words, in how far the
actual world approximates or departs from the Utopian vision of local and global
markets shared by mainstream economists.
Heterodox economists, as befits their diversity, offer a wide variety of alternative
visions: from stable forms of economic growth and more equitable distributions of
income and wealth through structures of democratic participation in economic and
political life and adequate social provisioning to collective or communal appropria-
tion and distribution of the surplus. In some cases, the vision that informs heterodox
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economics departs only slightly from the mainstream one; the major difference lies in
the extent to which actual market economies (governed by neoliberalism or the
‘‘Washington Consensus’’) can be reshaped to provide the promised benefits. In other
cases, the break is more radical; heterodox economists envision possible worlds*/sets
of economic and social institutions and agencies*/that differ from and serve as
alternatives to the Utopian vision of equilibrium, efficiency, and economic growth
proffered by neoclassical and Keynesian economists.
In a general sense, then, what we want to suggest is that the future of critical social
thinking*/inside and outside economics*/is dependent on recognizing and rear-
ticulating its Utopian visions. Such visions play a key role in defining the distinctive
character of not only the conclusions but also the methods and procedures (including
the how and why) of economic and social theory. Even more important, that future
depends on the extent to which heterodox Utopian visions, separately and together,
effect (and continue to maintain and develop) a decisive rupture from the one
currently articulated within mainstream (both liberal and conservative) economic and
social theory. So, let us then get to the task of elaborating the vision of noncapitalism
that inspires us Marxian economists, starting with the idea of commodity fetishism.
With the concept of commodity fetishism, Marx linked his analysis of market relations
with a particular form of consciousness, which he summarized as the reification of
social relations and the personification of things. Crucial to the phenomenon of
commodity fetishism was the conception of a social distribution of labor according to
the law of value. In a market system, since the regulation of production takes place
through fluctuations in the prices of commodities that occur ‘‘independently of the
will, foresight, and action of the producers,’’ Marx argued, ‘‘the relations [among
producers] . . . appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but
as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations
between things’’ (1967, 75, 73).
COMMODITY FETISHISM 407
Let us see what this imagined socialist condition of humanity was and how it took
shape. Marx’s own discussion of commodity fetishism in capitalism included a
comparison of bourgeois relations with the relations of production to be found in
‘‘precapitalist’’ societies, such as those of ‘‘the European middle ages shrouded
in darkness,’’ where the members of ‘‘the patriarchal . . . peasant family’’ labor ‘‘in
common,’’ and those of an imagined ‘‘community of free individuals, carrying on
their work with the means of production in common.’’ In contrast to the case of
bourgeois society, these noncapitalist productive arrangements are such that ‘‘the
social relations between individuals in the performance of their labor, appear at all
events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape
of social relations between the products of labor’’ (Marx 1967, 77).
Marx’s reference to the ‘‘community of free individuals’’ came to embody the
prototype of socialism in the constructions of classical Marxism. The common
ownership of the means of production*/‘‘the property question,’’ in the words of
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supports for this structure. (These two conceptions are also obviously related in a
teleological conception of history, whereby capitalism appears as the last type of
class society precisely because it breaks down all bonds of social dependence,
replacing them with the single bond of economic dependence which, then, the
institutions of socialism would remove. In this same scheme, the transition between
capitalism and socialism is led by the exploited producers who, alone among social
agents, are defined by the capitalist bond of economic dependence and are uniquely
capable of seeing beyond it.)5
In conclusion, the conception of socialism/communism as a condition of pure
intersubjectivity among producers, with the planned (conscious) distribution of labor
constituting completely and transparently the field of social relations, and the
economistic construction of capitalism both are reflections of a uniform, unidimen-
sional social space, with the ontology of homo faber at the basis of this space. The
discussion of the relation between individuals and society here does not go beyond
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this unidimensional space of social being for either capitalism or socialism. Capitalism
is posited as an economic structure in which there is a disjuncture between the
individual and society, with the disjuncture being theoretically negotiated and
overcome with the concept of commodity fetishism. On the other hand, the conscious
direction of production in socialism/communism produces a direct union between the
individual and society or, better, a total absorption of the private into the social, the
public*/guaranteed by the common ownership of the means of production which
removed the economic, the only remaining, form of social dependence.
5. Thus, from the Communist Manifesto: ‘‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand,
has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other
nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’’’ (Marx and
Engels 1976, 487).
410 CALLARI AND RUCCIO
extent that they arise ‘‘spontaneously’’ within an open social space and seize, by
interpellating and actualizing, the agencies of individuals and groups.
Shortly after offering the example of a ‘‘community of free individuals,’’ Marx
himself strongly linked the practice of reducing ‘‘individual private labor to the
standard of homogeneous human labor’’ to the ‘‘cultus of abstract man’’ of
‘‘Christianity . . . especially in its bourgeois developments’’ (1967, 79). For Marx,
then, abstract notions of humanity, especially in their economic manifestations of an
abstract labor calculus, were expressions of the bourgeois form of consciousness that
he had just described as commodity fetishism. It is difficult, then, to sustain that the
Marxian conception of social life is inextricably connected to the idea of the
‘‘community of free individuals’’ based on the labor ontology of social being. It is
more reasonable to consider the example of a community of free individuals as a
rhetorical device used by Marx to illustrate, by way of contrast, the commodity
fetishism of bourgeois society.
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For Marx, in our view, the reduction of laboring activity to abstract quantities of
labor is but an expression of a commodity/capitalist conception of social being not to
be uniquely mapped onto the analysis of the existing social order or of the concept of
socialism. The abstract notion of labor is Marx’s concept of how ‘‘bourgeois’’ culture
and practices tend to shape the contours of social being for agents implicated in
commodity exchanges, not an encompassing conception of the materiality of social
being. If the concept of commodity fetishism embodies a critique of bourgeois forms
of consciousness, it does so because it rejects the construction of social being along
the lines of uniformity that subject human consciousness and forms of identity and
agency to the needs of commodity exchange.
All this of course implies that Marx could not have derived the commodity
fetishistic form of consciousness and social being from a pregiven economic
structure. Rather, the construction of the reified form of consciousness characteristic
of commodity society must be conceived as the overdetermined, and hence
historically specific and conjunctural, outcome of certain cultural, political, and
economic processes. Jack Amariglio and Callari (1993) show that the need for the
reification of social relations and commodity relations must be explained by the
intersection of economic processes with, inter alia, autonomously existing identities
of rationality, equality, private proprietorship, and objectification. Far from resting
on the presumption of the economy as a self-regulating structure, then, both the
Communist Manifesto and Capital can be read as texts that offer a critical analysis of
the uniformity of social life that the rule of commodities and capital presumes and
attempts to construct and impose hegemonically. They comprise, in short, a critique
of the emergent and expansive but always incomplete bourgeois project.
Marx’s analysis does not presume that capital or the working class exists as a given,
or that these two forms of agency exhaust the field of social being/relations. The
commodity form and capitalist class relations implicate agents in reified relations, but
they do not exclude either the existence of other, independent forms of social agency
or the possession of forms of consciousness other than the commodity and capitalist
class forms even by those who are implicated in the network of capitalist commodity
relations. In fact, nothing logically precludes the intersection of nonlabor forms of
consciousness and social being in the very acts of commodity exchange and
COMMODITY FETISHISM 411
production; the intersection of social identities such as those of race, gender, and
sexuality with the otherwise homogeneous space of commodity values can, and often
does, produce particular agents of commodity exchange as well as discriminatory
practices. Thus, while it seems that Marx did conceive of the space of commodity
relations and of capital accumulation as homogeneous and unidimensional qua
products of bourgeois hegemony, this conception cannot be extended to the totality
of the social space; there is no necessity for the production of all use-values to consist
of the production of commodities, whether capitalist or noncapitalist (ancient, slave,
communal, and so on), and social agents will always already be implicated in activities
other than labor and production. The assignation of a reified form of consciousness to
agents implicated in commodity relations does not imply either the absence of other
forms of consciousness held by these agents or the nonparticipation of these agents in
processes other than commodity processes or, for that matter, the subordination of
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6. In a parallel project, Deirdre McCloskey has chided ‘‘Samuelsonian economics’’ for focusing
exclusively on individual self-interest and forgetting about the other dimensions of market-
based social agency*/talk, humor, respect, honesty, and so on*/which she summarizes as
‘‘bourgeois virtue’’ (1994, 1996, 1998). While we are sympathetic to her critique of the ‘‘vices’’
of bourgeois economics and her argument that bourgeois culture is both a condition and product
of commodity exchange, her project is diametrically opposed to our own in at least two
respects: first, whereas she concludes that a ‘‘world market . . . run by the bourgeoisie’’ has
existed for centuries, we (along with Marx and Polanyi) see a capitalist market system (defined
by the commodification of means of production, consumption goods, and labor power) as
emerging much more recently; and second, she fails to see the existence of capitalist
exploitation and, thus, to imagine the emergence and development of noncapitalist virtues
other than those labeled as aristocratic and peasant.
412 CALLARI AND RUCCIO
in general as a mass of use-values. Ironically, it may have been the very projection of
socialism onto the unidimensional social space of labor that, by failing to foster a
sustained search for ways of negotiating the intersection of one set of productive
activities with varied forms of subjectivity (both inside and outside production),
contributed to the failure of this socialism to compete successfully with the imaginary
associated with capitalist forms of production.
Of course, the idea of a ‘‘communal’’ direction of production, especially in its class
dimensions (such that the collectivity of direct producers is not excluded from the
appropriation and distribution of surplus labor), and of the conscious direction of
production to the satisfaction of social needs (both needs that were unmet under
capitalism and new needs that would emerge within socialism), remain central to a
conception of socialism. These require the development of institutions and forms of
property that can negotiate the intersection of production/distribution with varied
forms of subjectivity. The public ownership of the means of production, if mapped
onto a multidimensional space, does not in itself preclude the existence of a sphere
of the private or the development of institutional forms through which to negotiate
the intersection of private and public. Other forms of property, including personal and
community (although not necessarily private) possession of or control over resources,
are not incompatible with the socialist control of production, although it is clear that
uses of property for purposes of exploitation, in the traditional sense of the
exclusionary appropriation and distribution of surplus labor (in capitalist and other
forms), would not be contained within the acceptable set of practices.
Severing the connection between socialism and economistic conceptions of social
agencies and identities also leads to a reinterpretation of communal control and of the
notion of community itself. Instead of thinking community in the idealistic terms of a
‘‘common being,’’ the expression of a common agency grounded in a unidimensional
social space, to which all other consciousnesses are necessarily subordinated or from
which they are excluded, it is now possible to reinscribe community as a ‘‘being in
common.’’7 The latter notion serves to distance the idea of community from the
homogenizing conception of human beings as producers, as a laboring multitude.
7. The distinction between ‘‘common being’’ and ‘‘being in common’’ is due to Nancy (1991).
414 CALLARI AND RUCCIO
8. A Utopian vision, the idea that there is an alternative to the present economic and social
order, is not equivalent to a blueprint of noncapitalism, at least in the Marxian tradition. While
Utopian (and, of course, dystopian) visions have mostly been associated with modernist thinking,
there has always been a postmodern ‘‘hesitation’’ in Marxian thought, which refuses to elaborate
in any detail the preferred or feasible alternatives to capitalism. Actual noncapitalist
alternatives depend on the aleatory process of actual social struggles, including the complex
and combined theories (critiques and Utopian visions) that orient and inform such struggles. As
Daniel Bensaı̈d has elegantly explained, ‘‘Marx . . . refused to draft blueprints for posterity, or to
stoke up the fire under the cooking-pots of the future. He did not construct plans for a perfect
society that charlatans would gladly flog on the black market. He was content to wedge open the
door through which a faint glimmer of the future filtered’’ (2002, 27).
9. To be clear, we are not criticizing the presence or effects of individual markets or controls,
within either capitalism or socialism. Indeed, the postmodernism of our Marxism suggests that
there is no market (or, for that matter, control over or intervention into markets) ‘‘in general.’’
Indeed, we can imagine many concrete circumstances in which markets can secure the
conditions of existence of noncapitalist (collective, communal) forms of production and
subjectivities. Our concern is, rather, with the bourgeois project of creating a ‘‘market system,’’
of imposing capitalist markets and market-based solutions*/and corresponding agencies and
consciousnesses*/in any and all arenas of social life, and with suggestions that controls over
particular markets (within such a system) are sufficient to achieve social justice.
COMMODITY FETISHISM 415
Much has been written of late about the need to make the project of socialism
congruent with a commitment to democracy. The desire for democracy reflects
a reaction against the totalizing effects of the unidimensional social space that
economic determinist Marxism constructed theoretically and to some degree
effected in the practices of the Stalinist model. The desire for democracy, as we
see it, is the political counterpart of the theoretical project of constructing society as
an open space rather than a given, uniform structure. As such, it is fully compatible
with the multidimensional social space that we have argued is implicit in Marx’s
critical analysis of commodity fetishism as a particularly bourgeois form of
consciousness.
The conception of society as a multidimensional space, the existence of many
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forms of agency and identities, implies the presence of differences, tensions, and
conflicts that need to be resolved. As we have argued above, the productive network,
rather than being conceived as a dispersal of functions over a unidimensional social
space, would have to be constructed as a number of negotiated intersections
between various kinds of productive activities and varied forms of agency and
consciousness. The concept of democracy provides a paradigm for the construction of
political structures adequate to the project of negotiating a socialist structure of
production over the differentiated terrain of many forms of agency*/that is, the
creation of a communist hegemony.
Clearly, in this conception, democracy denotes a political space different from that
characteristic of economistic, unidimensional constructions of socialism. Interpreting
democracy as a concept of a ‘‘self-governing community,’’ and interpreting socialism
as a community of producers of transparent social relations, economistic construc-
tions equated democracy with socialism itself: as a community of producers who
consciously directed their social existence, the socialist social space was interpreted
as democratic by definition. It is on these grounds that the argument could be made
that the relations between citizens and the state were direct and unmediated by such
mechanisms and institutions as political parties and social movements. Since the only
space on which ‘‘difference’’ can be conceived in economistic constructions is the
homogeneous space of labor, and since the only type of social difference conceivable
on this space is a class difference, those who worked with this conception could, as a
matter of principle, see in the existence of different organs of political organizations
(e.g., parties and movements) only a projection of the existence of class relations
(Hindess 1991). If, however, the political space of a socialist society is conceived as
mapped onto a space of different forms of agency and consciousness, then it is
necessary to conceive of this political space as embodied in institutions and practices
that can, to repeat a term we have used throughout, negotiate these differences, and
these institutions can include, although they would not be limited to, political
parties.
But, of course, the concept of democracy appropriate to our reconstruction of
socialism is also different from the bourgeois concept of democracy, and certainly
from the classic bourgeois concept of democracy as a form of political organization
416 CALLARI AND RUCCIO
10. For all that Amartya Sen has challenged the mainstream definition of economic
development as ‘‘an immense accumulation of commodities’’ and thus has contributed to a
multidimensional conception of development in terms of various human capabilities (e.g., Sen
1999), he still presumes a uniform social space and associated form of consciousness (even if, in
the spirit of Adam Smith, the ‘‘success of capitalism’’ is predicated on motivations other than
pure self-interest). See Callari (2004).
COMMODITY FETISHISM 417
Much of what we have said here about economy and society as open spaces, about the
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social space and forms of community as multidimensional and dispersed, could easily
have been said by others working (or claiming to work) outside the Marxian tradition
(or claiming to have abandoned Marxism). Indeed, we would claim (but don’t in this
essay have the space to articulate in any detail) that the multiple traditions of
heterodox economic and social thought*/from radical and feminist to postcolonial,
post-Marxist, and beyond*/are defined, at least in part, by the extent to which their
key concepts challenge the closed, homogeneous space of economy and society
presumed and articulated by bourgeois economic and social thought.11 And
contemporary developments within Marxian theory owe much to contributions
made by these traditions.12
The question is: if what was said here could be said without Marxism, then what is it
that Marxism adds? What Marxism provides, and what no other form of contemporary
social theory with which we are acquainted can provide, are two things: First, a
theory of class without which, in fact, the concepts of socialism and communism
make little sense. We have not developed this particular aspect in our essay.13 But
second, Marxism also provides a concept of the homogenizing effects of commodity
relations on the social space and therefore a way of criticizing the fetishism
embedded in the bourgeois concept of economic rationality. Marxism is a theoretical
approach that heterodox economists (and, more generally, anticapitalist thinkers and
activists) can use to understand both the effects of class relations and to be on guard
against the forces that make for the cultural hegemony of bourgeois forms of
rationality.
11. In other words, each tradition, in its own way, has sought to deconstruct ‘‘the economy’’ as
represented within bourgeois economics and to explore the relations between the spaces and
agencies of commodity value and the other spaces and agencies that exist, both within and
outside the economy.
12. In fact, not only do we, working in and around the discipline of economics, value the kinds of
interactions with other traditions of heterodox economic thought, we think that heterodox
economists (both Marxist and non-Marxist) would do well to become aware of developments in
other fields*/from anthropology and sociology to literary theory and cultural studies*/in order
to deconstruct the close space of ‘‘the economy’’ as well as of the discipline of economics.
13. See, for example, the work of Amariglio (1984), Wolff and Resnick (1988, 2002), Saitta
(1988), and Ruccio (1992).
418 CALLARI AND RUCCIO
These, then, are Marxism’s two main contributions to rethinking the common: an
ongoing critique of political economy, in the form of a vision that allows us to see
beyond the hegemony of capitalism and bourgeois economic discourse, and a
reminder that a real future for a democratic communism can only come about as
the result of a decisive break from the vision that is proffered by all forms of
economistic thought.
Acknowledgments
We want to thank Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk, the organizers of ‘‘The Common
and the Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social Imaginaries’’ conference, for the
kind invitation to present our work there. We also want to acknowledge the generous
and helpful comments by Deborah Jenson, Frederico Luisetti, and the other
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participants in the session and, in revising our essay for Rethinking Marxism, the
suggestions made by Özselçuk. This essay is a revised version of ‘‘Socialism,
Community, and Democracy: A Postmodern Marxian Perspective,’’ published in
Future Directions for Heterodox Economics, edited by John T. Harvey and Robert F.
Garnett (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). We want to thank the press
for permission to publish it here.
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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
Deborah Jenson
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The irony of the mirror runs through the work of Karl Marx. This ironization is
exemplified in the trope of francequillonnerie, which Marx described in an 1848
letter as ‘‘a scornful expression in Flemish, meaning stupidly copying anything that
is French’’ (Marx 1848).1 Although francequillonnerie most literally signaled a
1. Marx, identified in this letter to the editor of La Réforme as ‘‘Vice-President of the Brussels
Democratic Association,’’ used the term francequillonnerie in a complex manner. French editors
of Belgian newspapers dismiss a Belgian revolution, he writes, as ‘‘merely an imitation of a
francequillonnerie [a scornful expression in Flemish, meaning stupidly copying anything that is
‘‘It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the
counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they bear a
certain likeness’’ (1988, 60). Even in the history of philosophy, the historian’s job was
to avoid the fate of Flaubert’s tragicomic figures Bouvard and Pécuchet, by separating
‘‘essential from unessential, exposition from content; otherwise he could only copy,
hardly even translate, and still less would he be entitled to comment, cross out, etc.
He would be merely a copying clerk’’ (Marx 1975b, 1:506). Marx’s mimetophobia
extended in his comments on ‘‘Freedom in General’’ to a definition of the ‘‘eye and
the ear’’ as ‘‘organs which take man away from his individuality and make him the
mirror and echo of the universe’’ (Marx 1842). To be alike, to be a vehicle of
representing likeness, was to lose a certain freedom.
Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, addresses Marx’s attempt to expel, if not
mimesis per se, spectral traces of precedents for revolutionary ideas. As Joan Brandt
explains, ‘‘Derrida shows, although he never addresses this question directly, that the
paradoxical logic of the spectral that Marx uncovered is like that of mimesis itself: the
search for the radically new takes imitation as its point of departure while trying
ultimately to erase the traces of that process’’ (Brandt 1997, 239). Marx sought to
out-think imitative points of departure in quests for the radically new, according to
Derrida, because ‘‘[a]s soon as one identifies a revolution, it begins to imitate, it
enters into a death agony’’ (Derrida 1994, 115). Margaret Rose takes a different,
biographical approach to the same renunciation of imitation in her reading of Marx’s
early penchant for parody. Marx’s juvenilia, which was ‘‘typically ironic and self-
reflective as well as imitative of the Romantics’’ (Rose 1978, 152), set the stage for a
crisis of consciousness on the political (in)efficacy of parodic imitation: ‘‘the dilemma
resulting from the experience of using parody as a means to imitation rather than
innovation was . . . the ‘crisis’ which preceded the change to a more direct method of
criticism in The German Ideology in 1846’’ (137). To these models for understanding
the Marxian antipathy for mimetic relationality one can add Marx’s attempt to
differentiate his thought from French romantic models of socialism and communism,
and also his ongoing embrace of Epicurean models of atomistic atheistic individuality.
The Marxian engagement with the common is thus marked by a potentially
paradoxical, yet ultimately illuminating, resistance to the notion of the like. Marx’s
antimimetic stance finds a certain heraldic symbolism in the rhetoric of france-
quillonnerie because it serves to counter the harmonious mimetic principles of
French romantic Utopian socialism and the epistemology of likeness on which they
depend. Marx’s convergences and divergences with French social romanticism reveal
a conception of the common in which the multiple yields a principle of revolutionary
collision rather than harmonious identity*/colliding atoms rather than the politics of
imitation, competitive appropriation, and egalitarian resemblance championed in
French socialism. This stance foretells the choice of Louis Althusser (and Alain Badiou
and Giorgio Agamben in their related work) to ‘‘banish any residual idealism from the
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citadel of historical materialism’’ (Casarino and Negri 2008, 221) in the theory of
‘‘aleatory materialism’’ (Althusser 2006, 260), in which it is only through the
collisions and swerving of atoms, only as ‘‘’the world comes into being through a
series of contingent encounters*/that one can speak of necessity’’’ (Casarino and
Negri 2008, 223).
Psychological Economies
Tension between the like and the common, which can appear homologous*/what we
have in common makes us alike, or reflects likeness*/is partly intrinsic to the general
problem, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe it, of the telescoping of the
individual elements of the multitude into the common: ‘‘How can the material and
immaterial production of the brains and bodies of the many construct a common
sense and direction, or rather, how can the endeavor to bridge the distance between
the formation of the multitude as subject and the constitution of a political apparatus
find its prince?’’ (2001, 65). The relation of political singular to organic plural is also
outlined as a problem of linguistic class-being in Giorgio Agamben: ‘‘It transforms
singularities into members of a class, whose meaning is defined by a common
property (the condition of belonging)’’ (1993, 9). But the Marxian resistance to the
like is also different from the relation of singular to plural in the common. Although
the likeness of a group and the commonality of a group both involve shared
properties, likeness demands definition in relation to characteristics that are internal
to the subject*/what the individual is like, characteristics which in turn allow him or
her to be like others*/whereas what is held in common may be external to the
subject, although it binds the group together. What individuals have in common is
more easily related to the material historical positioning of the individual than to the
internal characteristics of the individual, at least outside the context of evolution. (In
the context of evolution, even external conditions held in common come to shape the
characteristic identity of the subject.)
An ethos involving an idea of what the individual is like arguably can be more
easily associated with liberalism, which tries to accommodate the varieties of
COMMODITY FETISHISM 423
the striking metaphor of sovereign authorities that are ‘‘in the state and
posture of gladiators’’ standing guard at the ‘‘frontiers of their kingdoms.’’
. . . Both as a container and an excluder, boundaries work to foster the
impression of a circumscribed space in which likeness dwells, the likeness of
natives, of an autochthonous people, or of a nationality, or of citizens with
equal rights. Likeness is prized because it appears as the prime ingredient of
unity. (Benhabib 1996, 32)
Within the politics of the common, the function of the individual is strongly
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related to the material conditions of production rather than the liberal space of
individual sovereignty, conditions that in turn influence historical forms of
consciousness, at which point the common and likeness may once more be difficult
to distinguish. Valentin Vološinov’s 1927 critique of the petit bourgeois liberalism of
psychoanalysis or ‘‘Freudianism’’ is a good example of the Marxian insistence on the
different epistemologies involved in the consideration of likeness among individuals
versus within the material historical space of the common. Vološinov rejects the
psychoanalytic emphasis on ‘‘premises in individual psychology,’’ which he sees as
dominating views of the social to the point that ‘‘no room is left for the reflection of
objective socioeconomic existence with its forces and conflicts’’ (1987, 59).
Although Vološinov is interested in the biological forces that inform social likeness,
commenting that ‘‘[t]he endeavor to imitate is, as it were, the psychical surrogate
for the more ancient ingestion’’ (47), he nevertheless insists that psychoanalysis
distracts its aficionados from the ideologically and economically derived space of
the common. ‘‘Psychoanalysis forces the actual mechanism of ideology formation
into the narrow frame of the individual’s subjective psyche, whereas in Marxism that
mechanism is objective and societal. It presupposes the interaction of individuals
within a collective that is organized on economic lines. Therefore, neither
physiology nor psychology can reveal the complex objective process of ideology
formation’’ (127).
The near confluence but ultimate difference of likeness and the common is mapped
around the motor of desire through which individuals, regardless of what they do or
do not share in common economically and ideologically, aspire to be like each other,
and especially when that imitation is competitive. Competitive or appropriative
imitation is ambitious; it aims to differentiate the copying subject from the larger
multitude, paradoxically enough, by equaling or surpassing the imitated model, as
Sigmund Freud, in his theory of the Oedipus complex, and René Girard, in his
conception of the triangular mediation of desire, and many others have argued.
Girard contends that the association of mimesis with representation, from Plato
onward, had targeted ‘‘types of behavior, manners, individual or collective habit, as
well as words, phrases, and ways of speaking,’’ but that it had inappropriately
minimized the primordial role of ‘‘appropriation from imitation’’ (1987, 8).
424 JENSON
The desire for likeness or imitation can prove indistinguishable from counter-
imitation and the self-differentiation that results from rejecting the model, as
Gabriel Tarde contended in 1890 in The Laws of Imitation. Tarde defined a society as
‘‘a group of people who display many resemblances produced either by imitation or
by counter-imitation’’ (1903, xvii), with counterimitation standing as just as effective
a route to assimilation as imitation. He also identified science itself with the study of
‘‘repeated actions’’ (Freidheim 1976, 69), thus framing imitation not just as an object
of scientific study but as a part of any scientific epistemology. Although he was drawn
to dialectical models, he rarely engaged with the work of Marx on the dialectic,
possibly because of Marx’s negative stance toward mimetic influence.2 In Psychologie
économique Tarde noted that he was, however, struck by a ‘‘certain ontological*/or
mythological*/turn that Marx derived from Hegel. Capital, value, are for him beings
that he animates with his passion and his life’’ (1902, 1:203/4; translation mine). This
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2. Tarde’s relationship to other social models of the time is quite provocative with regard to
contemporaneous alignments of areas of emerging social science with or against mimetic
contagion, as Lynn McDonald shows in The Early Origins of the Social Sciences (1993, 295).
COMMODITY FETISHISM 425
The spring of 1848 when Marx ironized ‘‘francequillonnerie’’ was the spring of the
French poet Alphonse de Lamartine’s ascendance, as an icon of social romanticism,
to his role as a leader of the provisional government of the Second Republic. Marx
increasingly abhorred the views of this ‘‘poetic socialist’’ (Marx 1976, 6:404) whose
work, notably the 1831 Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, had helped to inaugurate
the concept of harmony. As Frank Paul Bowman notes, ‘‘The word harmony recurs
frequently in Romantic writing, as the title of a poem or a collection of poems and
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3. This quote is the version provided in a contemporaneous French newspaper article that was
cited by Marx in ‘‘Lamartine and Communism’’ in Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on 26 December
1847. In the work of Lamartine, a variation appears in the Cours familier de littérature
(Lamartine 1863, 273).
426 JENSON
disguised by poetic floridity and rhetorical tinsel,’’ wrote Engels in the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung of February 1849. Lamartine represented the February revolution
with ‘‘its imaginary results, its delusions, its poetry, and its big words’’ (Engels 1978,
10:356). Marx waxed surprisingly poetic himself in his critique of the Lamartinian
illusion.
Lamartine was the imaginary picture which the bourgeois republic had of
itself, the exuberant, fantastic, visionary conception which it had formed of
itself, the dream of its own splendour. It is quite remarkable what one can
imagine! As Aeolus unleashed all the winds from his bag, so Lamartine set
free all spirits of the air, all the phrases of the bourgeois republic, and he
blew them towards the east and the west, empty words of the fraternity of
all nations, of the impending emancipation of all the nations by France and
of France’s sacrifice for all the nations. (Marx 1978, 7:480)
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The ‘‘tender philanthropical tunes’’ (Marx 1849) of the soft-soaping Aeolian windbag
were so frequently cited that Lamartine became virtually a Marxian rhetorical figure
for a problematic conception of the common, and remained so, still savored in 1885 by
Engels as ‘‘the eloquent Lamartine, the Foreign Minister who was so readily moved to
tears’’ (Engels 1885). Although Marx theoretically distrusted Lamartine because of his
bourgeois identifications, Richard Sennett claims that Lamartine’s ability to mobilize a
cult of personality around his poetic eloquence was a threatening rival to the power of
class struggle: ‘‘Marx made an appalling error in dismissing the ‘poetry and fine
phrases’ of this revolutionary moment [1848] as irrelevant to the ‘real struggle,’
because it was poetry and fine phrases which defeated the class struggle’’ (1992, 230).
Certainly within Marx’s writings, the treatment of Lamartine is indicative of a
larger tendency to associate the romantic with the illusory, as in his 1843 letter to
Arnold Ruge, in which ‘‘illusion’’ is presented as a synonym for ‘‘romantic belief’’
(Marx 1975a, 1:396). He linked romanticism with an obfuscatory, poetic defense of
property, asserting that ‘‘[t]he landowner lays stress on the noble lineage of his
property, on feudal souvenirs or reminiscences, the poetry of recollection, on his
romantic disposition, on his political importance, etc.’’ (Marx 2008, 66) and referring
to ‘‘the landowner’s romantic illusions*/his alleged social importance and the
identity of his interest with the interest of society’’ (64). The romantic liberal
fallacy, in which every man’s private domain is his castle, extended for Marx to the
contemporary medievalist vogue for the architecture of feudal oppression: ‘‘Roman-
tic castles were the workshops’’ (67) of ‘‘baseness, cruelty, degradation, prostitution,
infamy, anarchy, and rebellion’’ (67).
Even in cases in which romantic harmonian or social mimetic paradigms did not lead
to an implicit or explicit defense of property, as in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous
1840 notion of property as theft, they shared an underlying engagement with the
imitative and appropriative dynamics of the common. In France, the movement of
‘‘social romanticism’’ was, as I have argued in Trauma and Its Representations: The
Social Life of Mimesis in Post-Revolutionary France, a moment of departure from
purely aesthetic conceptions of mimesis or representation, in favor of the extension of
artistic concepts of likeness to contiguous political and social domains involving
similitude, such as equality (Jenson 2001). French romanticism valorized likeness as
COMMODITY FETISHISM 427
instrumental in the social and political fields, not least through the contagious effect of
literary representation on the self-representation of communities. It privileged
Utopian socialist modalities and tropes of likeness including similitude, unity,
emulation or competitive imitation, passionate attraction, and analogy. In this, French
romanticism anticipated some of the current anthropologically inspired definitions of
mimesis by scholars including Gunther Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, who explore Walter
Benjamin’s concept of nonsensuous similarity in terms of the subject’s necessary social
and developmental mimetic internalization of an ‘‘outside.’’ For them, the
and needs to take shape in the process. They blend irretrievably with
phenomena coming in from the outside. (Gebauer and Wulf 1995, 275)
Although Marx initially had been favorably disposed to the thought of the Saint-
Simonians and other French socialists, his ultimate renunciation of romanticism, and
his scorn for the French romantics, had a determining influence on his conception of the
community. Harmonian thought in French romanticism valorized analogical thinking in
fields as varied as mathematics and theology, which were merged in the abbé Lacuria’s
The Harmonies of the Divine Being Expressed in Numbers, and economics, as in
Frédéric Bastiat’s 1850 Economic Harmonies. Marx uncharitably dismissed the
economic harmonies of Bastiat as the musings of the ‘‘dwarf economist’’ (Marx 2007,
94); he argued against Proudhon’s insistence on the primary role of competition in the
economic field; he was wary of what Engels would later call the ‘‘social poetry’’ of the
Saint-Simonians, and to a lesser degree, of Charles Fourier’s plan to establish a new
cottage industry of analogy production as well as his founding of communal living
institutions based on principles of passionate attraction, such as the phalanstère.
Proudhon’s 1846 The Philosophy of Poverty had proposed, as Marx saw it, that
competition, and competitive emulation (following Fourier), were ‘‘a necessity of the
human soul’’ (Marx and Engels 1908, 211). In 1847 Marx reconfigured Proudhon’s title in
the neat parodic anagram The Poverty of Philosophy*/the perfect model of critical
counterimitation. Competitive emulation was a principle Engels already had warned
against in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy: ‘‘Subjective competition*/the
contest of capital against capital, labor against labor, etc.*/will under these conditions
be reduced to the spirit of emulation grounded in human nature’’ (Engels 1844, 54).
One might contend that Proudhon was privileging a fetishism of the common itself,
rather than the commodity, in his discussion of mimetic competition. Proudhon was
fascinated, like Lamartine, by what could possibly lead people to compete for the
common elements: ‘‘The sun, the air, and the sea are common: pleasure taken in these
objects represents the highest possible degree of communism’’ (Proudhon 1867,
2:262).4 This location of communism within enjoyment of the commonality of the
elements led Proudhon to describe community as indefinable: that which shines on one,
after all, cannot describe one. After noting that only ‘‘immense distance, impenetrable
depths, and perpetual instability’’ could possibly have made these common elements
‘‘subject to being appropriated,’’ he concluded that ‘‘property is whatever can be
defined’’ whereas ‘‘community is what eludes definition’’ (2:262). If a resource is truly
common to all, in other words, its identity cannot be circumscribed by the members of
its community, who are simply the universal boundlessness of its presence and
availability. What, he asked, after establishing this indefinability of community, ‘‘could
the point of departure of communism’’ be (2:262)?
The common in Proudhon to a certain degree resembles the common in Marx, to the
extent that it has little truck with false universalism. Those who share in the common
do not thereby share a universal identity. To the contrary, they simply share a role as
phenomenological witnesses of common elements; they may participate in compe-
titive trends in their uses.
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Proudhon, after the publishing skirmish with Marx on the philosophy of poverty and
the poverty of philosophy, would return to problems of appropriation in several areas.
In De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église, he invoked a chiasmic relationship
between pleasure, appropriation, and community: ‘‘All pleasure in effect involves an
appropriation, and all appropriation involves a community’’ (1858, 204). Unlike
Lamartine, who saw this omnipresent appropriative human activity as presupposing
property, Proudhon was intent on preventing the reduction of mimetic appropriation
to property. In his book on the problem of perpetual copyright, Les Majorats
littéraires, first published in 1862, he blasted the legislative movement to
appropriate the contents of the mind, the movement of ideas, as property. Although
he agreed with contemporaries like Frédéric Passy that human beings are active,
willful, intelligent, and fatally oriented toward appropriation, he utterly disagreed
that appropriation was therefore sovereign, or that it could serve as a naturalization
of intellectual property laws. Instead, he ironically defended the rights of ‘‘counter-
feiters, imitators, copiers, quoters [citateurs], and commentators’’ to vie with ‘‘the
supposedly original authors’’ in the economy of thought, in a literary marketplace
without property holders (1868, 98).
Why, then, was Marx so insistently ironic with regard to Proudhon and so many other
French romantic socialists? One way to account for Marx’s wholesale critique of
likeness and social appropriation as the ground of the common relates to his distrust
of the transformation of the ‘‘real collision’’ of historical material conditions into
romantic harmony.
Marx had been preoccupied by the notion of collisions since his 1841 doctoral thesis
on Epicurean philosophy and the declination of atoms. Was Democritus right in his
theory that the ‘‘vortex resulting from the repulsion and collision of the atoms’’ was
‘‘the substance of necessity,’’ and that the repulsion revealed ‘‘only the material
side, the fragmentation, the change, and not the ideal side, according to which all
relation to something else is negated’’? (Marx 1841). Marx’s attraction to Epicurean
COMMODITY FETISHISM 429
thought was clearly a movement away from the potential tyrannies of religious
epistemologies; in the thesis he cites Lucretius’s praise of Epicurus as the voice who
lifted humanity back up when it lay ‘‘‘crushed to the earth under the dead weight of
religion whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals.’’’
In the Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, he noted Lucretius’s view of the relation
among atoms as an uproarious and hostile contest, a vision he seems to evoke fondly:
‘‘The formation of combinations of atoms, their repulsion and attraction, is a noisy
affair. An uproarious contest, a hostile tension, constitutes the workshop and the
smithy of the world’’ (Marx 1975b). In his Notes for a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right, Marx also specifically connected disaggregated social atoms with political class
activity: ‘‘These multitudes, or this aggregate not only appears but everywhere really
is an aggregate dispersed into its atoms; and when it appears in its political-class
activity, it must appear as this atomistic thing’’ (Marx 1843).
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It is in Marx and Engels’s 1844 Holy Family that we learn that, in Marx’s work on
Epicurean thought and Hegel’s philosophy of right, an implicit rejection of Philippe
Buonarroti’s idea of the aggregated atoms of communism was also at stake. The
Italian Utopian socialist Buonarroti, whose career in France included a plot with
Babeuf under the Directory and the founding of the Masonic group ‘‘The Sublime
Perfect Masters,’’ and who influenced French socialist revolutionaries such as Auguste
Blanqui, had theorized that communism necessarily bound together the selfish atoms
of society. Marx and Engels associate communism in France with Buonarroti’s project
of a ‘‘new world order’’ in France after the July Revolution of 1830, in which the
‘‘‘pure egoism of the nation,’’’ complemented by ‘‘recognition of a supreme being,’’
would ‘‘‘hold together the individual self-seeking atoms’’’ (Marx and Engels 1845/6).
French communism is thus linked to nationalist, deistic reinforcements of the ego of
the ‘‘general state system,’’ in relationship to which atoms must be bound together.
Marx and Engels counter:
Speaking exactly and in a prosaic sense, the members of civil society are not
atoms. The specific property of the atom is that it has no properties and is
therefore not connected with beings outside it by any relationship
determined by its own natural necessity. The atom has no needs, it is
self-sufficient, the world outside it is an absolute vacuum, ie., is content-
less, senseless, meaningless, just because the atom has all fullness in itself.
By contrast, members of civil society cannot be purely atomistic, since they are
‘‘egoistic human beings’’*/they may ‘‘inflate’’ themselves into self-sufficient beings,
but ‘‘each of his senses compels him to believe in the existence of the world and of
individuals outside him, and even his profane stomach reminds him every day that the
world outside him is not empty, but is what really fills’’ (Marx and Engels 1845/6).
Atomistic epistemology is necessary to protect revolutionary collectivities from the
use of religious symbolism to harness aggregates of individuals to a state ego. On the
other hand, anyone who believes himself to be an atom unto himself is deluded that
he is not in a relationship of natural necessity to beings outside him, like a stomach to
the world that fills it.
430 JENSON
The terms of this aporia were reintroduced in 1845/6 in Marx and Engels’s critique
of the anarchist Max Stirner’s conception of the sovereignty of the individual in The
German Ideology.
holy. Thus he manages to transform the real collision, the prototype of its
ideal copy, into the consequence of this ideological pretence. Thus he
arrives at the result that it is not a question of the practical abolition of the
practical collision, but only of renouncing the idea of this collision, a
renunciation which he, as a good moralist, insistently urges people to carry
out. (Marx and Engels 1845/6)
One can read in this parody that the atoms, allegorical of the multitude of
proletarians, who are in ‘‘real collisions’’ with regard to other individuals and their
conditions of life, risk being conflated in any subject-based paradigm into ‘‘mere
contradictions and collisions of the individual with one or the other of his ideas’’*/or,
on the other hand, with a mimetically harmonian social collectivity. Foreshadowing
Althusser’s paradigm of aleatory materialism, if the real collision is reduced to the
prototype of its ideal copy*/a harmonious facsimile*/then one could renounce the
idea of the collision and therefore avert it. But Marx was intent on working with the
fact that atoms collide and swerve, and that dialectics of the political and of
revolution depend on these antimimetic, contingent encounters. Likeness, analogy,
emulation, attraction, harmony were all inadequate paradigms to enable collision
rather than union in a common place. They furthermore risked functioning as mock
forces of union since it would be difficult for the source of the cognitive
embrace*/the harmonian subject*/to distinguish between his own ideas and
the multitude of individuals outside his subjective field. The real collision was the
disharmony that appeared precisely where Utopian socialists had announced the
imminence of harmony: ‘‘All over the world, the harmony of economic laws appears
as disharmony’’ (Marx 1973, 886).
Similarly, the idealized plural polis of cosmopolitanism, and its intention to avoid
collision and achieve Kantian ‘‘perpetual peace,’’ was suspect for Marx. While Marx
and Engels acknowledged the ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ dissolution of national economic
cultures in modernity, and even the yielding of ‘‘national and local literature’’ into
‘‘world literature,’’ they did so without sanctioning the implicit pluralism of a cosmic
political identification as a legitimate instantiation of the communist international.
Marx viewed cosmopolitanism as a kind of trick played by international money on the
identity of the commodity owner, who finds himself newly minted as a cosmopolitan
COMMODITY FETISHISM 431
reprovingly describes the delusions of fetishism as the ‘‘social relation between men
that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’’ (2007,
83). On the other hand, this ‘‘misty’’ or religious analogical projection of the social by
men onto commodities also works in the obverse sense to explain the role of mirroring
in the relations of men among men: ‘‘In a sort of way, it is with man as with
commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in hand, nor
as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom ‘I am I’ is sufficient, man first sees and recognizes
himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity by first comparing
himself with Paul as a being of like kind’’ (61 n.1).
If commodity processes are on some level expressive of cognitive and psychological
recognition of commonality among people, one might expect that likeness would be
featured as a crucial ground of the common in Marxian thought as it would be later in
the nineteenth century for Tarde, whose sociology attempted to ‘‘measure’’ the
social power ‘‘of the profound need to imitate’’ (Tarde 1904, 73; translation mine), a
need that is itself ‘‘transmitted through imitation’’ (210; translation mine). Instead,
Marxian thought, evolving in resistance to economic harmonies and their potentially
theological underwriting, prescribes a space of the common without copies. In this
space of the common without copies, the international is not cosmopolitan, and poets
of romantic likeness are banished. Man recognizes himself in other men, not through
the mirroring of minds but in the collision that will restore, rather than take away,
‘‘every atom of freedom’’ (Marx 2007, 462) from the laboring multitudes.
References
Agamben, G. 1993. The coming community. Trans. M. Hardt. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Althusser, L. 2006. Philosophy of the encounter: Later writings, 1978/87, ed.
F. Materon. New York: Verso.
Benhabib, S. 1996. Democracy and difference: Contesting the boundaries of the
political. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Bowman, F. P. 1990. French romanticism: Intertextual and interdisciplinary readings.
Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
432 JENSON
*/**/ /. 1975a. Letter to Arnold Ruge. In Marx-Engels collected works. New York:
International Publishers.
*/**/ /. 1975b. Notebooks on Epicurean philosophy. http://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1839/notebook/index.htm (accessed 7 October 2009).
*/**/ /. 1977. The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Selected writings, ed.
D. McLellan. New York: Oxford University Press.
*/**/ /. 1978. English-French mediation in Italy. http://www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1848/10/22a.htm (accessed 7 October 2009).
*/**/ /. 1988. The civil war in France: The Paris commune. New York: International
Publishers.
*/**/ /. 2007. Capital: A critique of political economy. New York: Cosimo Classics.
*/**/ /. 2008. Antithesis of capital and labor. In Marx’s philosophy of price and profit,
ed. S. Chaudary. New Delhi: Global Vision Publishing House.
Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1845/6. The Leipzig Council: Saint Max. In The German
ideology. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/
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Federico Luisetti
This commentary discusses essays by Deborah Jenson and by Antonio Callari and David
Ruccio as instances of a ‘‘naturalistic’’ political ontology of the common. It then
elaborates on the main features of this topological displacement of Marxism:
a nonhumanistic conception of nature and technicity, a constructivism of relations
that moves beyond the opposition of economism and aestheticism.
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Given the complexity of the essays by Deborah Jenson (2010) and by Antonio Callari
and David Ruccio (2010), I admit that I feel in the uncomfortable position of being
unable to provide a short, yet comprehensive discussion of their theoretical
frameworks. Yet, I suspect that a myopic taxonomist would rush to classify them as
admirable examples of ‘‘postmodern Marxism’’ and misleadingly cluster most
concepts around a limited set of idées reçues: the critique of representational
thought, the deconstruction of identity, and subjectivity; the politics of multiplicity;
the resistance to both economism and aestheticism; the orientation toward an
ineffable yet immanent logic of ‘‘the common.’’
In my opinion, what is shared by both essays is, instead, a deeper and more
eccentric movement toward a new political ontology of the common, a trajectory
accompanied by an immunitary displacement of the old alternatives of ‘‘the social’’
and ‘‘the economic,’’ ‘‘the political’’ and ‘‘the cultural.’’ Not surprisingly, because of
the inextricable bond of movement and space, this theoretical strategy leads Jenson
as well as Callari and Ruccio to vibrant topological readings of Marx.
For Jenson, Marxian thought is what ‘‘prescribes a space of the common without
copies.’’ Not a contingent political program but a new ‘‘location of communism,’’ a
space ‘‘in which the international is not cosmopolitan,’’ a revolutionary locus outside
the ‘‘social poetry’’ of French social romanticism, far from the ‘‘mock forces of
union’’ of an idealized community of commodity owners. For Callari and Ruccio,
Marxism is a ‘‘multidimensional ontology of social being and social space,’’ opposed
to the ‘‘unidimensional space of the commodity’’ and ‘‘unidimensional social space of
homo faber.’’
From the vantage point of topology, both essays succeed in casting new light on the
standard topics of materialism, commodity fetishism, and cosmopolitanism: Marxist
materialism is seen as an inversion of the bourgeois architecture of ‘‘the ideal’’ and
‘‘the real’’; ‘‘commodity fetishism’’ and the ‘‘mystical character of the commodity’’
are traced back to the reversal of ‘‘heterogeneous forms of agency and conscious-
ness’’ performed by the capitalistic ‘‘unidimensional social space of labor’’;
cosmopolitanism is unmasked as a tricky relocation of ‘‘the commonality among
people’’ in the abstract waves of ‘‘international money,’’ an illusionistic shifting of
relations out of their proper, contradictory, yet ‘‘real’’ social dimension.
If we interrogate the ‘‘affirmative’’ portions of these essays, we may detect a
divergence of accents between Jenson’s praise of ‘‘laboring multitudes’’ and
‘‘collisions that will restore,’’ and Callari and Ruccio’s interest in the discipline of
the ‘‘political process,’’ in the mechanisms of ‘‘translation’’ between ‘‘languages,
cultural identities, and forms of consciousness.’’ However, both contributions are
posing the unavoidable question of our post-Marxist age: ‘‘What is the space of the
common,’’ its yet-to-be-articulated topology? If ‘‘commodity fetishism’’ is the most
appropriate name for the ‘‘fantastic form’’ assumed by social relationships within
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References
Balibar, É. 2009. The aporia of the community: The ‘‘French’’ debate*/Blanchot,
Nancy, Derrida. Seminar at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University,
Spring.
Bergson, H. 1935. The two sources of morality and religion. Trans. R. A. Audra and
C. Brereton. New York: Henry Holt.
Callari, A., and D. F. Ruccio. 2010. Rethinking socialism, Community, democracy, and
social agency. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3): 403/19.
Jenson, D. 2010. The common without copies, the International without cosmopo-
litanism: Marx against the romanticism of likeness. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3):
420/33.
Simondon, G. 1989. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier.
‘‘Modes’’ of Community
S. Charusheela
Kenneth Surin
Kathi Weeks
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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
S. Charusheela
with Serap Kayatekin, this paper urges renewed attention to feudal subjectivity, as a
way to work through this problematic and to build a communal politics.
The social relations of work found at a diversity of sites do not fit into the capitalist
form. Take the informal sector, which ranges over an astonishing variety of social
1. See, for example, Salzinger 2003; Mohanty 1997; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; and
Ramamurthy 2004.
relations, from wage labor and putting out to own-account work. We encounter debt-
bondage in own-account work and the equivalent of sharecropping in some
manufacturing and service-sector activities. These forms should have disappeared
with the advance of capitalism; they grow. They should enact capitalist modernity in
subject formation; they do not.
Many of the flashpoints around gender and labor occur where women’s work
deviates from the classic wage compact of the capitalist form. Unpaid labor in the
household has always been a point of tension for Marxist feminists, as it falls
outside the wage form. For paid labor, we find attention to housewifization in
home-based production (Mies 1999, Mohanty 1997), the anomalous work statuses of
transmigrant nannies and maids (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004), and the
problematic of the rise of bonded and slave labor under capitalist globalization.
These literatures find that the social relations of work, and the subjectivities they
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they are very far from agreement as to how Marxist methodology should be applied to
the Indian case. It is taken for granted that Marxist historical models exist; there is no
consensus as to the nature of these models.’’
At stake in the debate was the definition of capitalism. To answer the question,
‘‘do we see the emergence of a capitalist mode of production in agrarian India?’’
scholars had to answer a prior question: What is capitalism? Which features define
capitalism, and at what point do enough of these features accrue to identify its
emergence?
While most observers now take the debate to be settled in favor of Patnaik’s
position that capitalism has arrived in Indian agriculture, the analytical and political
issues are hardly settled. As Thorner observes (1982, 2063):
The modes-of-production debates were, in the end, about how to account for
economic difference. They were simultaneously political debates, tracking argu-
ments on the Indian left over whether peasant revolts were revolutionary or counter-
revolutionary. The debate died away partly due to Rudra’s sudden declaration that
India was no longer feudal (or semifeudal) but capitalist, and that in consequence
peasant revolts were progressive movements worthy of left support. But the issues
that sparked the debate were never settled. What is important for our purposes is
‘‘MODES’’ OF COMMUNITY 441
that while the focus of the debate was on how to define capitalism, the default
assumption was that whatever failed to map into capitalism was feudalism. The
‘‘feudal’’ functioned as the sign of economic difference, as exploitative-yet-
differently-ordered-than-capital.
Rudra’s shift parallels work by Marxist feminists who bypass, suppress, culturalize
or localize economic difference within a capitalocentric frame. Absent any other way
of addressing the problem of exploitative relations that are different-from-capital,
the only way forward is to understand difference as localized variation.
What has enabled so many diverse forms of social organization, with diverse
particular cultural modes of subjectification, to be gathered under the rubric of
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the feudal? Part of the answer is that once the Asiatic mode was set aside, the Marxist
analyst was left with three exploitative modes: slave, feudal, and capitalist. In this
system, slavery is visible, openly coercive exploitation, while capitalist exploitation is
masked to the point of invisibility by markets and an ideology of equality. As I argue in
Charusheela (2007, 14, emphasis added), feudalism
has been used as a catchall category for everything else: all cases in which
there is exploitation that is neither fully ‘‘masked’’ by the languages of
equality and market valuation nor upheld through the exploited being
completely and formally owned by the exploiter . . . ‘‘[F]eudal’’ spans that
vast terrain where we see exploitation that is not fully masked (i.e., where
the exploitation is ‘‘out in the open’’, as it were), and those who are
exploited seem to consent to this openly recognized performance and
appropriation of surplus despite not being completely and formally owned
and controlled by the exploiters. ‘‘Culture’’ then becomes the necessary
terrain for defining the feudal form/mode*/people caught in tradition,
religious belief, role, who seem to keep accepting their subordinate position
despite the absence of either a direct and visible control as with slavery, or
invisibility and pretense of equality as under capitalism. In short, the
slavery/feudalism/capitalism typology functions as a way to avoid, or at
least to contain, the problem of subjectivity.
the internal ethical imagination of social formations that are often described as
feudal, and focuses on their capacity to generate radical political imaginaries. In the
article that provides the title for this section, Serap Kayatekin and I (Kayatekin and
Charusheela 2004) sought to reimagine feudal subjectivity as a differential space of
exploitative subject formation.2
As noted above, a key feature that made ‘‘feudalism’’ attractive for describing a
variety of exploitative relations was that, in imagined opposition to the covertness of
capitalist surplus extraction, feudalism makes no bones about exploitation: it names
social spaces characterized by socially mandated, open control over the product and
labor of the worker. To explain why open hierarchy and exploitation could be so
widely accepted by all parties, including the exploited, the analysts turned to
‘‘traditional’’ culture.
But the ‘‘feudal’’ is hardly unique in possessing ‘‘cultural processes’’ that normalize
exploitation. Kayatekin and I concluded that it is not the fact of culture that marks
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the feudal, since all class-based societies, including capitalist ones, entail processes
of hegemony that solicit consent (Gramsci 1975). Rather, scholars using the term must
be marking off the modalities by which feudal hegemony normalizes exploitation*/as
opposed, for example, to the ways capitalist hegemony normalizes it. Thus, we
argued that feudal hegemony solicits consent from the exploited via modalities that
normalize hierarchy.3 That is, feudal hegemony rests on consolidating consent even
as it posits hierarchical orders within a society, with the attributes of groups linked to
the roles they perform.4 This is in contrast to the modality of capitalist consent,
which masks hierarchy by presenting the social order as formally equal.
How does a hierarchical order generate consent? The relationship between groups
is understood as reciprocal, generating social harmony. The exploited defer to the
exploiters, but such deference must be reciprocated by the caring love given by the
exploiter. Drawing on Kayatekin’s work on sharecropping in the U.S. antebellum South
(2004), we can see the operation of this imagination in Thompson’s (1975, 211)
description of the relationship between tenant and landowner:
The plantation thus came to resemble the patriarchal family with authority
and affection, subordination and personal responsibility existing side by
side. The planter often boasted of what he did for his people and of his
defense of them. He often regarded a wrong done to his slaves as an outrage
to himself and championed their cause against others. A sense of
magnanimity and noblesse oblige thus developed more or less directly out
of the planter’s original exuberation of strength and individuality.
2. The original paper presented at the symposium provided substantial discussion from this
article. I have cut out much of that discussion here, including the detailed discussion of the
European case which formed a key portion of our analysis, since it is already available in print.
3. This consent operates in addition to any physical coercion.
4. Georges Duby (1978) and Jacques Le Goff (1988) depict a tripartite society in medieval
Europe*/those who pray to secure the kingdom of God on earth, those who fight, and those who
till the land. ‘‘The members of the highest order turn their attention heavenwards, while those
of the two others look to the earth, all being occupied with the task of upholding the state. . .
The intermediate order provides security, the inferior feed the two’’ (Duby 1978, 1).
‘‘MODES’’ OF COMMUNITY 443
Conclusion
turn to the ‘‘cultural’’ to explain the constitution of such economic difference marks
a point of contact. Feminists emphasize that cultural conceptions of gender are not
superstructural but essential to the constitution and consolidation of gendered visions
of labor.
The approach that Kayatekin and I take cuts through the issue of economic
difference by placing the logics of differentially ordered subjectivity at the center of
analysis. We also provide ways to recuperate a radical politics in the face of economic
difference. One example can be seen in the value of the concept of ‘‘social parity’’
for feminist politics. Comparable worth debates, for example, differ from equality
debates precisely by highlighting parity over equality. Similarly, efforts to recover
ideas of dignity and end hierarchy without losing the moral order of reciprocity
(which is not the same as ‘‘equal pay’’) can be seen in the difference between the
feminist care literature and the literature, on unpaid labor: the former values
reciprocity rather than asking only for ‘‘equal wages’’ for household labor.
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References
Chakrabarti, A., and S. Cullenberg. 2003. Transition and development in India. New
York: Routledge.
‘‘MODES’’ OF COMMUNITY 445
Kenneth Surin
In the West/North, there have been two dominant models for understanding
community and its associated bonds of solidarity. One is preindustrial and invokes
the notion of the village with its ‘organic’ ties of neighborliness and so on. The other
is industrial and views community in terms of the shared situation of exploitation
that is the basis of the constitution of the industrial working class. Neither model
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applies any longer in the West/North: in most places the village has become a
dormitory suburb, and industrial production has increasingly been deproletarianized.
This paper will pose the question of an alternative conception of social solidarity.
Indispensable for the formation of community is its ability to function as a center of
meaning for its members, and the question of how our new forms of production
(informatically driven and globalized) allow these new centers of meaning to be
developed. This paper will consider two models for this alternative conception. One
is derived from Raymond Williams and takes ‘experience’ as its organizing category;
the other is taken from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and uses ‘desire’ as its key
category.
It is virtuality axiomatic for many schools of thought*/not all of which are readily to
be identified with the marxist tradition*/that a project of liberation or emancipation
can be advanced only if and when certain substantive forms of social solidarity are
able to take root in the society in question. Making this axiomatic claim is easy; what
is more difficult is ascertaining how these forms of social solidarity are to be
generated and sustained, and, as the corollary of this question, how such forms can
be protected in situations in which they are likely to be thwarted or threatened. In
dealing with this question we confront (among other things) the well-known dialectic
between structure and agency, or being and act. Do we need the requisite structures
or apparatuses to exist before the bonds of solidarity can come into being, or do
agents acting in solidarity have to exist in order to bring these structures and
apparatuses into existence? As we know only too well, these chicken-and-egg
arguments are not only irresolvable but also completely unproductive, and, besides,
the appropriate answer to this kind of question is never one or the other of the
chicken or the egg but, quite simply, both. Moreover, any remotely persuasive answer
to this question invariably requires reference to a set of conditions or a state of being
antecedent to both structure and agency (or act and being) as a way to account for
the operations of structure and agency in their creation of the bonds of social
solidarity. Or, to use a jargon phrase: recourse has to be made to social ontology if we
are to answer the question how structure and agency act conjointly in order to
produce social solidarity. Thus, and these are examples of what is meant here by this
recourse to ‘social ontology’, Michel Foucault had to resort to the concept of a
‘practice of subjectivation’ in order to account for the way an épistème actually
worked at the level of subjectivity; Raymond Williams coined the expression
‘structure of feeling’ as a way of delineating the more concrete and practical
realities of social transformation and stasis; Louis Althusser ‘s late outlining of an
‘aleatory materialism’ mitigated the structuralist overemphasis evident in his earlier
treatment of the ideological state apparatuses; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
used the concept of a ‘desiring production’ to cut the Gordian knot of the
(irresolvable) dialectic of structure and agency.1 The aim in all these exemplary
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instances was to do justice to the intricacies of the processes of agent and subject
formation, in this way countering any tendency that required too much weight to be
placed on the causal significance of the system, apparatus, structure, or formation
(as opposed to the agent or subject). The theory of liberation, in dealing with its
objects (which are at once practical and theoretical), has to avoid the Scylla of
viewing the subject in ways that satisfy a shallow empiricist immediacy as well as the
Charybdis of regarding the system or apparatus as being no more than an endlessly
awkward abstraction*/according to the typical scenario associated with this seeming
conundrum, the individual subject, qua subject, is at all times ‘next to me’ in its sheer
immediacy (how could it be otherwise?); the system qua system, well, the system is
always ‘too much out of the way where I’m concerned’ in its inevitable and perhaps
necessarily subtle distanciation (again, how could it be otherwise?). But first a digression
on the notion of conceptual production.2 This focus on conceptual production is intended
here to facilitate the specific analysis of the positions of Williams and of Deleuze and
Guattari undertaken later in this essay, but it also presumes that this is a productive way
to analyze any relation between theoretical concepts, cultural objects, and the
conditions under which these objects come to expression.
Producing a theoretically grounded concept of solidarity requires the producer of
this concept to begin by distinguishing adequately between:
1. The discussion regarding the production of singularities and countervailing constituent power
at the end of this essay relates to this idea of ‘desiring production’. Desiring production, when
not derailed or undermined, will ensue in a countervailing constituent power and its associated
singularities.
2. A more elaborate account of this notion of conceptual production is to be found in Surin
(2009), from which several of my formulations are taken.
448 SURIN
In the case of the practices, institutional formations, and strategies associated with
the myriad forms of solidarity, the application of (1)/(3) above would yield the
following.
a. This is the theory whose object could be any form of consistent mutuality or social
support, regardless of the ways in which it is expressed, or the number or nature
of the protagonists involved, etc. There can be a theory of the solidarity that
binds a band of robbers just as there can be one of the bonds that may exist
between saints and heroes. There can be a theory of the solidarity that united the
(estimated) crowd of two million people which precipitated the overthrow of the
Shah of Iran as well as one that purports to account for the ties that exist within a
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Miami.3 The ‘thing’ being an assemblage of effects and affects, and there being in
principle a huge variability in the way in which these assemblages can be organized,
no expressivity (qua the title of the assemblage in question) can eliminate in advance
its competitor names and the assemblages designated by them. For instance, the
failures of the U.S. banking system associated with the current economic recession
have been placed by business commentators and analysts into a number of such
assemblages: these failures have been characterized as ‘a resultant of an American
housing market collapse’; ‘an evaporation of liquidity in the U.S. banking system’;
‘the American species of crony capitalism at work’; ‘the bursting of the latest U.S.
speculative bubble’; ‘the result of inadequate banking regulation’; ‘the outcome of
the greed and venality of financial-institution CEOs’; and so forth. A theory of the
failures of the current U.S. banking system is not therefore about this system per se,
but about the concepts that are generated by the U.S. economic system and its
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denizens and even its critics, or indeed by anyone through which the effectivity of
this system is bespoken. These concepts are in turn related in a variety of ways to
other assemblages of practices. Hence, the concepts generated by the conditions
associated with contemporary U.S. capitalism can, in the relevant context, be related
by an appropriate theory to the concepts or expressivities associated with the
assemblage of practices and strategies identified with ‘neoliberalism’ as an economic
doctrine (in the manner formulated by economists such as Robert Brenner or the late
Andrew Glyn), or ‘American culture’ (in the way analyzed by Thomas Franks, Naomi
Wolf, and others), and so forth. Hence a theory of U.S. capitalism does not bear
directly on American capitalist formations as such, but rather on the concepts of this
or that manifestation of American capitalism and its associated agents and figures,
and these concepts (what we have called ‘expressivities’) are just as actual and
effective as the condition or set of conditions that is American capitalism itself.4
Theories operate on expressivities, and expressivities in turn are connected with
the conditions that enable them. The correlations established between expressivities
and their enabling conditions depend for their effectiveness on always specific,
because contingently ordained, distributions and orderings of power. Theories are
thus the outcome of a productive process, no more or no less than the putative object
of this process, the expressivities that mediate the conditions which they express
even as they are enabled by the conditions in question. A theory is a practice, just as
the conditions mediated by an expressivity are always provisional multilinear
assemblages of practices structured by arrangements of income, assets, status,
power, and so on. A theory, in short, is a practice of concepts located in a macrosocial
field with its own practical possibilities and outcomes from these possibilities.
The concepts associated with solidarity are not given in the ensembles of practices
that constitute it, and yet they are solidarity’s concepts, not theories about
psychology, and aesthetics). Each domain of thought is defined by its own internal
variables, variables that have a complex relation to their counterpart external
variables (such as historical epochs, political and social conditions and processes, and
even the brute physical character of things).5 It is an implication of this account of
conceptual practice that a concept comes into being or ceases to be operative only
when there is a change of function and/or field. Functions for concepts must be
created or invalidated for the concepts in question to be generated or abolished, and
new fields must be brought into being in order for these concepts to be rendered
inapplicable or illegitimate.
With these preliminaries on the production of concepts now addressed, our initial
subject*/the impasse between the individual subject and the system or appara-
tus*/can now be considered.
The proposals for dealing with this impasse have been several and various over
many decades. In the remaining part of this paper I’ll try to deal with two significant
‘projects’ that seek to find a way out of this seeming deadlock between the
ostensible immediacy of the subject and the constitutive non-nearness of the
apparatus or system. The first can be identified with Raymond Williams, the second
with the nomadology of Deleuze and Guattari. Let’s deal first with the proposals that
we’ll identify with the work of Williams, after which I’ll consider the suggestions
associated here with Deleuze and Guattari (both ‘Raymond Williams’ and ‘Deleuze
and Guattari’ signify in this argument something like a form of consciousness as
opposed to an explicit and individually specifiable intellectual biography with its
allied and largely academic formulations).
While there is no obvious affinity between the work of Williams and that of Deleuze
and Guattari, I bring them together in this essay because their respective projects
exist in a kind of creative tension. Williams always saw the project of solidarity in
terms of a class-based politics (though toward the end of his life he did register the
emergence of the new social movements) whereas the work of Deleuze and Guattari
has as its context the situation after May 1968, when the new social movements
mature and consolidate themselves. The category of ‘experience’ is central to
Williams, but he leaves it relatively untheorized, whereas the more philosophically
adept Deleuze and Guattari theorize their key categories, but seem to have relatively
little room for the notion of ‘experience’.
Raymond Williams (a decade or so ago the name had an immediate and virtually
automatic resonance, but I’m not so sure about that these days, this being a time
when Williams is more likely to be revered than read) provided a distinctive
specification of the basis from which the forms of community and solidarity were
to be constructed. Williams’s working-class background (his father, a veteran of the
First World War, was a railway signalman) led him to conclude, on the basis of his
decisive early experiences, that any form of advancement, be it intellectual or
material, was doomed to failure if it did not involve the pursuit of a common culture,
of the positive commonalities provided by a viable community, as well as a
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recognition that social equality has to be an inextricable part of any society whose
raison d’être is supplied by the principles of justice. As he saw it, after he went to a
largely upper-class Cambridge as an undergraduate just before the Second World War,
no culture was worth having if it excluded the social world of his working-class
parents. Rejecting the notion that education was simply about maintaining ‘the finest
human values’ (thereby implying that his parents did not and could not possess these
values by virtue of belonging to ‘the laboring classes’), Williams said of his working-
class experience and its connection with the Leavisite phrase ‘the finest human
values’:
It [his early working-class experience] did not tell me that my father and
grandfather were ignorant wage-slaves; it did not tell me that the smart,
busy, commercial culture was the thing I had to catch up with. I even made a
fool of myself, or was made to think so, when after a lecture in which the
usual point was made that ‘neighbour’ does not mean what it did to
Shakespeare, I said*/imagine!*/that to me it did. (When my father was
dying, this year, one man came in and dug his garden; another loaded and
delivered a lorry of sleepers for firewood; another came and chopped the
sleepers into blocks; another*/I don’t know who, it was never said*/left a
sack of potatoes at the back door; a woman came in and took away a bit of
washing). (Williams, quoted in Smith 2008, 220)6
To capture the motivating impulses that underlay the life of a Welsh working-class
community like the one into which he was born in 1922, Williams coined the notion of
a ‘structure of feeling’.
In principle, it seems clear that the . . . conventions of any given period are
fundamentally related to the structure of feeling in that period. I use the
phrase structure of feeling because it seems to me more accurate, in this
context, than ideas or general life. All the products of a community in a
given period are, we now commonly believe, eventually related, although in
practice, and in detail, this is not always easy to see. In the study of a period
we may be able to reconstruct, with more or less accuracy, the material life,
the general social organisation, and, to a large extent, the dominant ideas.
It is not necessary to discuss here which, if any, of these aspects is, in the
whole complex, determining; an important institution like the drama will, in
all probability, take its colour in varying degrees from them all. But while we
may, in the study of a past period, separate out particular aspects of life,
and treat them as if they were self-contained, it is obvious that this is only
how they were studied, not how they were experienced. We examine each
element as a precipitate, but in the living experience of the time every
element was in solution, an inescapable part of a complex whole.7
Culture, therefore, is a ‘‘whole way of life,’’ which is constantly being remade and
reappropriated by its citizens, who are at once the agents of change and the
recipients of such change. This creativity and agency is indispensable for the
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constitution of community, and community is more likely to flourish when its guiding
principles are grounded in mutual, supportive, and democratic social relationships.
For Williams it was axiomatic that only a democratic socialism could provide these
enabling human relationships.
This then is an account of genuine community, which locates the basis of such
community in the common or garden solidarities of British working-class life in the
early to middle decades of the twentieth century. This is not to dismiss Williams (as
some commentators have) for his working-class sentimentalism, wooly-minded
idealism, and so on. That Williams was after something much less sedate and
provincial than British working-class life of the middle of the last century is evident
from the following passage in his manifesto Towards 2000.
It is not some unavoidable real world, with its laws of economy and laws of
war, that is now blocking us. It is a set of identifiable processes of
realpolitik and force majeure, of nameable agencies of power and capital,
distraction and disinformation, and all these interlocking with the em-
bedded short-term pressures and the interwoven subordinations of an
adaptive commonsense. It is not in staring at these blocks that there is
any chance of moving past them. They have been named so often that they
are not even, for most people, news. The dynamic movement is elsewhere,
in the difficult business of gaining confidence in our own energies and
capacities . . . It is only in the shared belief and insistence that there are
practical alternatives that the balance of forces and chances begins to alter.
Once the inevitabilities are challenged, we begin gathering our resources for
a journey of hope. If there are no easy answers there are still available and
discoverable hard answers, and it is these that we can now learn to make
and share. This has been, from the beginning, the sense and impulse of the
long revolution. (1985, 268/9)
There is nothing hazy or slack in the proposals made by Williams in the above
passage. Yes, the revolution will be long (some of us who were university students in
7. See Michael Orrom and Raymond Williams’s Preface to Film (1954), quoted in Smith (2008,
365; emphases in original).
454 SURIN
1968 did not like hearing that from him, but so far he has turned out to be right on this
matter). It is clear that a political pedagogy is an integral part of the long
revolution*/to quote Williams again, ‘‘If there are no easy answers there are still
available and discoverable hard answers, and it is these that we can now learn to
make and share.’’ How do we identify the ‘‘hard answers’’ we need ‘‘to learn to make
and share?’’ Williams was not a philosopher by training, and the question of the
philosophical basis of this political pedagogy is one that he did not address. However,
it is one I wish to address in the rest of this paper, using Williams’s proposals as a kind
of containing framework for my discussion.
The kind of philosophical exploration being proposed here will require considera-
tion of what the jargon calls ‘social ontology’*/that is, it will seek to find ‘axioms’
that furnish the basis of a political pedagogy of the kind proposed by Williams.8 Here I
have to be brief. Williams invites us to challenge the ‘‘inevitabilities,’’ or rather, what
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8. Axioms are constitutively foundational in that their presuppositions are not derivable in
principle from other statements. They function as protocols, in this way enabling other
statements to be organized or orchestrated in specific ways. The resulting statements derive
their meaning and saliency from the axioms that underpin them. Differentiating between
different axiomatic formations can sometimes be difficult; the most common way of making this
differentiation is to study the resulting statements. If these statements are in a relationship of
contradiction or incompatibility with regard to each other, then, all else being equal, it is likely
that they are resting on different axiomatic formations. Axioms do not always possess a lawlike
character since legal codes may themselves be premised on a particular axiomatic base. A social
ontology is premised on an axiomatic base, from which two things follow: (1) the axiomatic base
underlying the ontology can be inferred from the nature and function of the ontology in
question; and (2) two seemingly incompatible ontologies (in this essay, the ontology associated
with Williams is based on ‘experience’, the one with Deleuze and Guattari on ‘desire’) invariably
require the presumption that two different sets of axioms underlie the ontologies under
consideration. The task of theoretical reflection is then to find a conceptual idiom that enables
these different sets of axioms to be reconciled (if this is deemed desirable, which is not always
the case). This essay, however, attempts to find a way to enable this reconciliation between the
respective ontologies of Williams and of Deleuze and Guattari. Williams’s axiomatic, embodied
in the category ‘structure of feeling’, has two key components that permeate each
other*/namely, ‘(class-based) experience’ and ‘democratic socialism’. Deleuze and Guattari
use ‘desire’ where Williams uses ‘experience’ and, in place of ‘democratic socialism’, their
preferred notion is ‘nomad politics’ (in essence, the politics of the so-called new social
movements).
‘‘MODES’’ OF COMMUNITY 455
The realm of the anomalous, for Deleuze and Guattari, lies between the domain of
‘‘substantial forms’’ and that of ‘‘determined subjects’’; it constitutes ‘‘a natural play
full of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose
individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive
them’’ (255). In an interview on Foucault and his work, Deleuze refers to this movement
between ‘‘outside’’ and ‘‘inside’’ as something that involves ‘‘subjectless individua-
tions.’’ The claim that individuations in the realm of the anomalous are altogether
different from the well-formed subjects that are their ‘‘containers’’ implies that each
individual is a potentially infinite multiplicity, the product of a phantasmagoric
movement between an inside and an outside (Deleuze 1995, 116). These ‘‘subjectless
individuations’’ are a defining feature of the anomalous, which is taken by Deleuze and
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Guattari to be present wherever ‘‘lines of flight’’ are to be found. The domain of the
Anomalous is this coextensive with the countervailing constituent power whose
political project is the undermining of capitalism’s own constituent power. The
implications of this conception of the anomalous for the constitution of the state are
drawn by Deleuze in the following passage from his dialogues with Claire Parnet.
The State can no longer . . . rely on the old forms like the police, armies,
bureaucracies, collective installations, schools, families . . . It is not surpris-
ing that all kinds of minority questions*/linguistic, ethnic, regional, about
sex, or youth*/resurge not only as archaisms, but in up-to-date revolutionary
forms which call once more into question in an entirely immanent manner
both the global economy of the machine and the assemblages of national
States . . . Everything is played in uncertain games, ‘front to front, back to
back, back to front . . .’ (Deleuze 1987, 147)
All this amounts to the lineaments of a new and interesting theory of the place of
the ‘subject’ in the cultures of contemporary capitalism. Capitalisme et schizo-
phrénie approaches this theory of the ‘subject’ via a theory of singularity,
‘singularity’ being the category that more than any other goes beyond the ‘collective’
versus ‘individual’ dichotomy that is essential to the Hobbes-Rousseau-Hegel
tradition of reflection on the state or sovereign. This account of singularity, and
here I have to be very brief and schematic, can in turn be connected up with the
theory of simulation given in Deleuze’s Logique du sens and Différence et répétition,
since for Deleuze simulation (or the simulacrum) is the basis of singularity.
In a universe of absolute singularities, production can only take the form of
singularity: each singularity, in the course of production, can only repeat or
proliferate itself. In production each simulacrum can only affirm its own difference,
its distanciation from everything else. Production, on this account, is a ceaselessly
proliferative distribution of all the various absolute singularities. Production, in
Deleuze’s nomenclature, is always repetition of difference, the difference of each
thing from every other thing. Capitalism, though, also embodies a principle of
repetition. The axiomatic system that is capitalism is one predicated on identity,
equivalence, and intersubstitutivity (this of course being the logic of the commodity
456 SURIN
It would like for us to believe that it confronts the limits of the Universe, the
extreme limit of resources and energy. But all it confronts are its own limits
(the periodic depreciation of existing capital); all it repels or displaces are its
own limits (the formation of new capital, in new industries with a high rate of
profit). This is the history of oil and nuclear power. And it does both at once:
capitalism confronts its own limits and simultaneously displaces them, setting
them down again farther along. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 463)
9. There are evident affinities between the Deleuzean notion of the anomalous used in this
essay as the basis of an account of a countervailing constitutive power, and Antonio Negri’s
characterization of ‘the political monster’. Negri’s political monster emerges from a power that
cannot be circumscribed by a putative essence and, as a result of this primal lack of
circumscription, is able to produce singularities that have the potential to be revolutionary. See
Casarino and Negri (2008).
‘‘MODES’’ OF COMMUNITY 457
But its constituent power remains precisely that, a power, and this power conduces to
the undertaking of a certain risk, the ‘playing of uncertain games’ that hopefully will
amount to the ‘revolutionary-becoming’ of people who have not yet made the
revolution their explicit political project.
I view the writings of Williams and of Deleuze and Guattari, despite their very
significant theoretical differences, as compendiums of political knowledge, premised
on the decisive need for a countervailing power to the current capitalist and liberal-
democratic dispensation, a compendium that furnishes ‘axioms’ for the pursuit of this
revolutionary project with its accompanying pedagogies. These authors indicate that
there are no pregiven laws to shape or entail this outcome: only struggle, and failures
always accompany struggle, can do this. The only other alternative is resignation in
the face of the current finance-led, equity-dominated capitalist regime with its
concomitant American militarism. The choice is stark indeed: either a politics that
produces yet more Dick Cheneys and Bernie Madoffs, or one that is capable of
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References
Casarino, C., and A. Negri. 2008. In praise of the common: A conversation on
philosophy and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 1987. On the superiority of Anglo-American literature. In G. Deleuze and
C. Parnet, Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, 36/76. New York:
Columbia University Press.
*/**/ /.1995. A portrait of Foucault. In Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A thousand plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Smith, D. 2008. Raymond Williams: A warrior’s tale. Cardigan, Wales: Parthian Press.
Surin, K. 2009. Freedom not yet: Liberation and the next world order. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.
Williams, R. 1985. Towards 2000. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
Kathi Weeks
This response to Ken Surin’s ‘‘On Producing (the Concept of) Solidarity’’ and
S. Charusheela’s ‘‘Engendering Feudalism: Modes of Production Revisited’’ explores
some points of intersection between the two papers, including a comparable
investment in the work of political pedagogy and a shared commitment to the
possibilities of immanent resistance.
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I would like to thank Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk for organizing this issue and the
symposium from which it emerged, and for inviting me to comment on these two rich
and provocative papers: Ken Surin’s ‘‘On Producing (the Concept of) Solidarity’’
(2010) and S. Charusheela’s ‘‘Engendering Feudalism: Modes of Production Revisited’’
(2010). My initial strategy for this brief response was to approach the two papers in
relation to the distinction between Autonomist and Althusserian Marxisms, which
serves as one of the symposium’s frames. But I find myself less interested in their
differences than in their convergences. So what I will do is identify a few points where
I find some similarities or points of commonality in their projects and from there go
on to make note of some divergences. Along the way I will pose a question or two for
the authors and, as a way to link these essays to the overall themes, incorporate as
well a couple of the questions offered by the conveners in their organizing
document.1 I will talk a little more about Surin’s paper at first and more about
Charusheela’s later.
Return
Each of the papers enacts a specific kind of return in order to collect tools for the
communist imaginary. (I will follow the lead of Özselçuk and Curcio (2010), who use
the term communism to name ‘‘a transformative form of being-in-common,’’ the
terms of which we might, of course, imagine differently.) Ken Surin returns to
1. Here and in the rest of this essay, I refer to the initial organizing document for the symposium
on ‘‘Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social Imaginaries,’’ circulated by the convenors among
the symposium participants.
Political Pedagogy
Surin returns to Raymond Williams for a specific political pedagogy, the philosophical
basis of which he finds in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s social ontology. This
political pedagogy is a matter of challenging those ‘‘inevitabilities,’’ as Williams calls
them, that deplete the political imagination and keep us tethered to the present; it
is, to cite my favorite passage from Williams in the paper, a matter of ‘‘the difficult
business of gaining confidence in our own energies and capacities.’’ Both papers, it
seems to me, are deeply invested in this political pedagogy; both are struggling with
this project of inciting and fueling the will to a different future and constructing
alternative imaginaries of anticapitalist resistance, noncapitalism, and communism.
Although Surin organizes the argument around a two-part model with a political
pedagogy gleaned from Williams and its philosophic basis crafted from Deleuze and
Guattari’s nomadology, I was struck when reading the account of Deleuze and
Guattari’s concepts of the anomalous and of singularity by their*/I am not sure what
to call it, but perhaps*/‘‘extraphilosophical impact,’’ at least on me. I think there is
something about struggling with these difficult concepts that carries with it its own
political pedagogy. In part I mean to acknowledge with this observation the political
value of highly theoretical work. But another part of this is about Deleuze and
Guattari’s work more specifically, though certainly not exclusively. So here is my
question: what is it about the encounter with these categories that*/to recall the
passage from Williams*/does not just identify ‘‘energies and capacities’’ but might
also instill ‘‘confidence’’ in them? I am interested here in the affective life or impact
of these ideas, these figurations of ontological possibility. So here is another way to
pose the question: Surin argues that Deleuze and Guattari can offer us a philosophic
account of our energies and capacities; what, if anything, might they offer this
political pedagogy at the level of affect?
Whereas Surin struggles against these ‘‘inevitabilities’’ that help to bind us to the
status quo on an ontological register, Charusheela struggles against them on a
460 WEEKS
‘‘Other,’’ feudalism. So I thought that the analysis of feudal orders and subjectivities
works especially well as a form of political pedagogy that can teach us to recognize a
wealth of energies and capacities.
Immanent Resistance
I understand both papers as efforts to, among other things, imagine the possibilities
or terms of resistances immanent to particular sites and struggles. In this sense I read
the papers as responses (even if unintended) to one of the most important questions
posed by the symposium’s conveners: ‘‘how do we conceptualize this paradoxical
state of being different and opposed yet within?’’ Both papers are locating*/or
inventing, exploring, and making room for*/the possible seeds of different futures. In
this respect I appreciated the concept of the anomalous that seemed to be part of
Surin’s way of working through this condition of ‘‘being different and opposed yet
within,’’ a way to disrupt mechanistic or predictive models of time’s passing and help
us to imagine the future not only in a relationship of tendency but as rupture.
Charusheela’s paper, by my reading, finds these seeds of a different future in modes
or codes of resistance immanent within feudal order and the specific languages of
agency and political imagination she finds there. I have a question about this at the
end, but I find very provocative the notion that this exploration might help us to
approach questions about women’s labor and current controversies over several
forms of work in new ways, and serve to counter projects invested in the political and
economic modernization of women.
As part of this contribution to the work of thinking immanent resistance, each
usefully challenges or dismantles some other Marxist analytics that are not helpful in
this respect. In the early part of his paper, Surin notes the problem with some
accounts of the relationship between structure and agency that err either on the side
of structural determinisms that allow no room for subjects and agents or on the side
of those modes of empiricism that take subjects only as they are but not also as they
could become. Charusheela, to open up the possibility of finding inspiration in feudal
forms and subjects, interestingly takes on the capitalocentrism that is produced by
‘‘MODES’’ OF COMMUNITY 461
get from the feudal form or how its notions would be brought into this very specific
conjuncture. To the extent that the focus is on actually existing feudalisms wherever
they might be found or feudal legacies alive in current contexts, I see their value; it
was the reference to the historical literature on European feudalism*/which I liked
very much in the way I described earlier*/that blocks me in thinking about its political
relevance to other contemporary sites and struggles.
For the second question I will draw again from Curcio and Özselçuk’s organizing
document for the symposium. Here I paraphrase: in what ways do these resistances
reproduce hegemonic discourses of domination; in what ways might they propose an
alternative imaginary? This came up for me at the end of Charusheela’s paper when it
was suggested that ‘‘if there remains one true space of communal imagination in the
West in terms of mass public imagination, it is, oddly, in the home’’*/that is, in the
home that she describes her students imagining and hoping for as a site of parity,
dignity, and reciprocity. This, she suggests, we should take seriously as an aspirational
imagination. On one hand, I agree, and thought of this along the lines of Fredric
Jameson’s reading of popular cultural forms as at once reproducing ideological codes
and expressing Utopian desire. On the other hand, I am not sure what to do politically
with this aspiration fixed as it seems to be on the current institution and ideology of
the family. While I would agree that there is an aspiration there, I am not so sure that
there is necessarily a powerful imagination of something different. So my question
here is about how to think about the political viability of this communal imaginary
that finds figuration in the family*/or, for that matter, any communal imaginary*/in
relation both to the complicated relationship between aspiration and imagination and
to the thorny distinction between reproducing hegemony and proposing alternatives.
Being-in-Common
I will finish my comments with one more point of intersection between these two
papers. Not only do both authors affirm the political value of alternative political
imaginaries, but I found further resonances in some of the ways they imagine the
common, or the communalism of communism. My sense is that both are, in very
462 WEEKS
References
Charusheela, S. 2010. Engendering feudalism: Modes of production revisited.
Rethinking Marxism 22 (3).
.Özselçuk, C., and A. Curcio. 2010. Introduction: The common and forms of the
Anna Curcio
Yahya M. Madra and Ceren Özselçuk
Alvaro Reyes
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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
Anna Curcio
This essay explores how racialized and gendered subjectivities might produce a
common space of social cooperation that can break down the capitalist hierarchiza-
tion of society. It analyzes both the capitalistic valorization of difference and the
production of resistant and militant subjectivities that exceed and overturn
capitalistic segmentation and dispossession. Within this framework I consider the
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production of the common through praxis and mode of organization, bringing to light
the necessity for heterolingual translation of difference in order to interrupt the
homogeneity of the capitalist language of value. The aim of this article is twofold. On
the one hand, there is the need to better understand the present time and its violent
contradictions. On the other, there is the necessity to bring to the fore race and
gender differences in order to neutralize the social valence of in-difference and to
challenge and transform the current social order.
There’s more of us they drowned than there is all of them ever lived from
the start of time. Lay down your sword. This ain’t a battle; it’s a rout.
*/Toni Morrison, Beloved
What happens when race and gender become sites of contestation in a political
battlefield? When racialized and gendered subjectivities call for a new and different
organization of social relations? The current times present several trajectories for
pursuing this line of inquiry. The migrant workers’ uprising in spring 2006 in the United
States, and the distinct kinds of support drawn by the candidacies of Barack Obama and
Sarah Palin in 2008, show how claims around race and gender issues may or may not
interrupt the functioning of capitalist exploitation and the hierarchical stratification of
difference. These examples help us to explore the production of the common through the
possible or impossible composition of subjectivities and (race and gender) difference.
When I refer to the common, I have in mind not only nature (such as air, forests, and
the sun), nor just an artificial common (such as knowledge or language), but also the
common as an autonomous*/however partial*/social cooperation that involves the
conflictual process of the breaking down of hierarchies and exploitation (Hardt and
Negri 2009). This is an open and never ending process, always susceptible to being
reversed, which therefore always has to be produced anew.
In the current time, we face not only powerful and dangerous racist and sexist
trends, but also a no less dangerous ideology of the neutrality of difference*/that is,
in-difference over race and gender. On the one hand, the ideology of color and gender
blindness is the explicit neoliberal strategy to efface race and gender issues. On the
other hand, there is a broad process of racialization and gendering of the global labor
force, a worldwide strategy of the nation-state aimed at controlling labor mobility
and regulating the new figures of labor. This involves the marginalization and
illegalization (De Genova 2005) of women and migrant workers through race and
gender blackmail and exploitation.
The deportations of migrant workers from the United States and political asylum
seekers from Italy, and the exploitation of workers through the body shopping system
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in Asia, South Asia, and Australia attest to this trend, as do attacks on the right to
abortion in the so-called North and on birth control in the so-called South, the rape
and killing of women during Tata Group’s land dispossessions in India, domestic
violence, and the trafficking of women all over the world.
As the long history of women’s struggles and feminist thought has made clear, no
social change is possible without a change in gender relations. Similarly, as critical race
theory has illustrated, race works as the ‘‘miner’s canary’’ in that the marginalization
and suffering around race are the precursors of a danger that threatens society as a
whole (Torres and Guinier 2002). Unemployment and foreclosures brought on by the
recent economic crisis have surgically followed color and gender lines, denying large
numbers of women and minorities employment, social security, and basic rights.
In what follows, my aim is twofold: to better understand the present time and its
contradictions, as well as to bring to the fore race and gender differences to diminish
in-difference and to challenge and transform the current social order. To the latter
end, I would like to explore how race and gender difference might produce a common
space of social cooperation and break down capitalist segmentation and hierarchiza-
tion of society.
First I dwell on interactions between class, race, and gender, followed by a
discussion of race and gender difference within capitalism and an exploration of the
production of subjectivity*/taken as both subjection as well as a subjectivity that
exceeds the capitalist mode of production. Then I consider the production of the
common with a focus on its potential to interrupt capitalist valorization as well as on
its praxis and mode of organization. I conclude with a discussion of the antagonistic
relationship between ‘‘the one’’ and ‘‘the multiple’’*/that is, the tension between
‘‘unity’’ and ‘‘multiplicity’’ in the production of the common.
Before delving into a discussion of class, race, and gender, let me explain what
I mean by difference. Race and gender shape the whole of subjective experience and
are part and parcel of the subject’s life. While other kinds of difference, such as
466 CURCIO
culture, religion, and nationality, are also constitutive of the capitalistic organiza-
tion of society and also contribute to processes of racialization and gendering (for
example, Islamophobia), they fall outside the scope of this paper.
My deployment of race and gender does not refer to the idea of natural or biological
difference. Race and gender are sociocultural constructions, and I propose to focus
the discussion on how difference operates within relations of production*/this is
to say, how difference operates within the antagonistic tension that shapes the
functioning of the labor market, and how it figures in the production of both the
common and hatred toward others in the form of sexism and racism.
As recent studies drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois have emphasized, racism works as
a sort of internal, supplementary force in the determination of the labor market
(Roediger 1991), and sexism (that is, the undervaluing of the female) has historically
shaped the sexual division of labor within the workplace, the family, and the rest of
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1. In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois wrote important pages on the division between
white and black workers. He noted that ‘‘[the white workers,] while they received a low wage,
were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public
deference and titles of courtesy because they were white’’ (1998, 700).
2. I am here mainly referring to Gayle Rubin’s ‘‘The Traffic in Women’’ (1975), which argues that
the functioning of the capitalist mode of production is not enough to understand the oppression
of women and that greater attention is needed to ideology and culture. Nevertheless, this
contribution risks removing the productive dimension from the understanding of women’s
oppression. Therefore, I consider another argument within feminist critiques of Marx, which
refers the theme of production/reproduction as pointed out by the 1970s international campaign
‘‘Wages for Housework’’ (an argument mainly taking root in the works of Mariarosa Dalla Costa
and Selma James [1972] and later developed by Alisa del Re [1979]). This critique brought to
light the cost and the productive dimensions of reproductive labor, the neglect of which (also by
Marx) has largely supported and boosted the undervaluing of women’s labor and justified their
exploitation.
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 467
the dynamics behind oppression and subordination on the basis of race and gender
difference.
Alongside the introduction of property, modern philosophy, which largely aided the
rise of capitalism, produced a split among human beings, distinguishing, as John
Locke clearly pointed out in the Second Treatise on Government (1980), who owns
and who is ‘‘the object’’ of ownership*/that is, the proprietor and the property. On
the one hand, there is the juridical subject of the white wealthy man and, on the
other, all the women, the poor, and the nonwhite workers. Among these, slaves
in the plantation system and women in domestic and reproductive labor were
subjected*/although by different forms of submission*/to unpaid labor, the former as
the property of the settler and the latter as the property of the patriarch.
Thus, for centuries property has worked to manage the inclusion/exclusion of race
and gender difference within the sphere of rights. Nowadays, after powerful
twentieth-century feminist struggles and anticolonial movements, and following
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the increase in labor mobility in the globalized world, the organization of the labor
market and social relationships has changed. Processes of segmentation based on race
and gender difference are by no means absent from ‘‘postcolonial capitalism’’
(Mellino 2009). However, these mechanisms, rather than socially excluding subjectiv-
ities on the basis of race and gender, are now organizing and including such
subjectivities hierarchically within the labor market and the space of citizenship, a
process that some scholars refer to as ‘‘differential inclusion’’ (Hardt and Negri 2000,
196; Mezzadra 2008).
As this discussion goes to show, race and gender differences should not be handled
in isolation from class difference; rather, they should be thought as part of class
segmentation, as tools of capitalist hierarchization of social relationships. We should
also note that treatments of race and gender without class risk falling into biologicism
or an abstract multiculturalism oblivious to the role race and gender play within
people’s everyday experience.
However, talking about class requires more specification. I refer to class as a
political concept, as the political composition of subjectivity: a concept that always
exceeds ‘‘the prison of economy’’ (Tronti 2008, 69). This concept refers to the
production of subjectivity as both subjected to, and resisting from within, the
relations of production. Neither a strictly economic explanation nor a sociological
description, class is rather the subjective experience and the socioeconomic
condition entangled with race and gender difference that hold the potential to
contribute to the production of the common. This is not an identity that implies
homogeneity, but rather one that deals with the multiple differences that shape
people’s lives. Therefore, the concept of class I have in mind is the combined
functioning of class, race, and gender difference.
In this regard, at least three different approaches have been formulated. Since the
1980s, an extensive debate has discussed intersectionality, highlighting how race,
gender, and class are interlocking categories of experience, affecting all aspects of
human life. That is to say, differences intersect all determining hierarchies and
subordinations as well as producing emancipation and conflicts. This account
developed mainly from African American feminist critique (see Anderson and Collins
1992), although other scholars have approached the same topic in useful ways.
468 CURCIO
Some decades earlier, Louis Althusser (1965) suggested we go beyond the Marxist
idea of the duality of ‘‘base’’ and ‘‘superstructure,’’ and introduced to that end the
concept of ‘‘overdetermination.’’ This concept designates the correspondence as
well as the contradictory nature of the whole set of practices constituting the social
formation. This is the reflection on the multiple, often opposed, forces active in
social relations and of their conditions of existence within the complex whole. As a
consequence of the multiple forces that act upon subjective experience, class, race,
and gender differences should not be thought as simply ‘‘contradictory’’ or acting
separately. Rather, they must be understood as both complementary and contra-
dictory, as part of an overdetermined process that comprises both supporting and
opposing forces and that defines the whole of subjective experience.
Finally, Stuart Hall proposed to discuss the combination of differences as a question
of ‘‘articulation’’ in light of the Marxian problematic of the ‘‘complex determination
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of the structure.’’ ‘‘What is ‘determined,’’’ Hall argues, ‘‘is not the inner form and
appearance of each level, but the mode of combination and the placing of each
instance in an articulated relation to the other elements’’ (1980, 326). Capital, as he
points out, ‘‘reproduces the class, including its internal contradictions, as a
whole*/structured by race’’ (341). Expanding on Hall’s analysis on race, I would
like to argue that difference is today lived as an experience that is articulated with
the processes within the labor market and capitalist production.
There is a common thread running through these different approaches: inter-
sectionality, overdetermination, and articulation are ultimately different names for
the close interaction, or combination, among class, race, and gender within the
concrete experiences of people’s lives. It is not my aim here to go into these different
approaches,3 but I do want to emphasize the impossibility of understanding the
production of subjectivity without taking into account the role of class in race and
gender difference. In this regard, Chandra Mohanty unequivocally affirms that ‘‘[a]t
this particular stage of global capitalism, the particularities of its operations
(unprecedented deterritorialization, abstraction and concentration of capital,
transnationalization of production and mobility through technology, consolidation
of supranational corporations that link capital flows globally, etc.) necessitate
naming capitalist hegemony and culture as a foundational principle of social life.
To do otherwise is to obfuscate the way power and hegemony function in the world’’
(2004, 182/3).
However, the capitalist mode of production is not a level playing field. Rather, it is
the space of the antagonistic tension between labor and capital, between labor
management by capital and social cooperation exceeding capital. Therefore, class,
race, and gender differences affect the production of subjectivity in terms of both
exploitation and the composition of practices of resistance. They establish subjective
positions within class relationships, working as tools for social hierarchies, on the one
hand, and challenging capitalist social relations, on the other.
workers and justified labor exploitation and enslavement on the grounds of race. In
this way, the racial division of labor laid the ground for capitalist accumulation. Black
workers’ enslavement, together with the brutal dispossession of Native Americans,
ushered in the capitalist era in America.
By ‘‘primitive accumulation,’’ however, I mean not only the violent expropriation of
land, disciplining of bodies, and denial of freedom in a precapitalist era, but also the
equally violent daily encounter between labor and capital on the wage-labor market.
In this regard, I take the insights of different fields of study (e.g., French and Italian
critical Marxism as well as postcolonial and feminist criticism) which read history with
respect to its disconnections rather than its continuities, and refer to primitive
accumulation not as the starting point in a linear process*/progressing from a
primitive to a more evolved process of accumulation*/but as the condition of
possibility for the production of the (‘original’) material condition of the exploitation
of labor on a daily basis. This is the ‘‘actuality of the origin,’’ as Étienne Balibar
pointed out in his contribution to Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1970).
The ‘‘actuality of the origin’’ is the persistent dispossession and ongoing exploita-
tion that recent studies have identified within the globalization processes: from
expropriation and resistance processes in the Indonesian pluvial forests (Tsing 2005)
to the constitution of a national labor market through processes of hierarchization
and exploitation of migrant workers, which takes place today on a global scale
(Mezzadra 2008). Another good case in point consists of the women who were charged
with witchcraft and killed in contemporary rural India because they happened to be
landowners during the large land dispossessions in the country (Ravi 2009).4 Thus, the
actuality of the origin concerns the conditions of possibility that, on a daily basis and
a global scale, reproduce the exploitation of labor that characterized the early
history of capitalism. This is a daily, violent process that, while separating labor
power from the means of production, reveals the constant need to reproduce the
conditions that make the encounter between labor and capital possible (that is, the
production of labor power itself).
4. Certainly, this example also reveals the long history of colonialism, exploitation, and
disruption that has characterized the history of India.
470 CURCIO
In the past as much as today, this encounter requires, as discussed above, processes
of segmentation and hierarchization of labor power through race and gender
differences as one of its conditions of existence. Thus, racialization and gendering
have long since worked as instruments of worker exploitation and capitalist
accumulation. They have established the forms and conditions of the relations
among subjectivities and differences and paved the way to the reduction of living
labor to abstract labor. However, racialization and gendering are never fixed
processes; rather, they comprise a set of relations always present in different forms
or degrees and always open to reversion.
In the nineteenth century United States, after the Civil War, as African Americans
began to enter the labor market in large numbers, the social discrimination exercised
against Irish migrant workers was displaced onto them (Ignatiev 1995). Similarly,
in the early twentieth century, widespread racism against Italians gave way
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5. On the feminization of labor, I am mainly referring to the work of Christian Marazzi (2006) and
Cristina Morini (2007).
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 471
possibility for the reproduction of capital does not exclude a priori the nonreproduc-
tion of that possibility itself. Or, to put it differently, the breaking up of capitalist
relations is always a possibility, just as much as their perpetuation and hegemony.
Thus, primitive accumulation, while generating dispossession, also gives rise to the
production of the common as the place from which to forge (new) assemblages of
desire, experiences of resistance and struggles, and sets of singularities beyond the
capitalistic hierarchization of difference.
The analysis of primitive accumulation developed so far implies that the common
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cannot be taken for granted but must be constantly produced within the antagonistic
tension animating the relations of production. The common takes form through the
action of a powerful and militant subjectivity constituted precisely by the desire
to overturn capitalist dispossession and to interrupt the capitalist valorization of
difference: that is, to block the conversion of difference into the capitalist language
of value.
This subjectivity is a completely materialistic one, entirely located within the
antagonistic tension between labor and capital. In late capitalism, libidinal invest-
ments as well as the unconscious do not take place outside the mode of production
(Jameson 1981). Rather, they are strongly linked to the historical constellation of the
material conditions of labor and social relations. While enjoyment, pleasure, and
desire, as well as dissatisfaction, fear, and similar affective concerns, inform the
entire experience of the subject, their textures are defined and shaped along the
lines of color and gender division within capitalism.
Take the xenophobia that is present in all modern societies. This concern about
foreigners as an infection of the national social order has gone on throughout history,
side by side with fears of other figures that ideologies of capitalism have designated
as alien. Likewise xenophobia is reflected in the constant denial of the Other as a
result of colonialism and orientalism. This is a process of detachment, discharge,
segmentation, and hierarchization by which the Western subject has constituted its
other and concomitantly itself (Said 1978).
At the beginning of capitalism, aliens were women*/usually from the lower
classes*/accused of being witches, as mentioned above. They were persecuted
because of the control they had over reproduction and because of the fear that
the power they wielded could undermine the existing social order. Similarly, the
exploitation of African slaves and the dispossession of Native Americans at the
beginning of U.S. history were largely justified on the grounds of their classification
as aliens for practicing a different form of social organization.
In the following centuries, the aliens were migrant workers, although this was not
peculiar to America. The phobia of migrants, be they Irish or Italians, arose in
America during the forging of a new low-cost labor force that drove the transition
between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In the post/World War II period,
the enemy became Latinos. These mainly illegal workers, reserved for ‘‘unskilled’’
472 CURCIO
jobs, constituted the exploited and blackmailed labor force upon which the U.S.
economy continues to be based. In the aftermath of 9/11, the people of Middle
Eastern descent and all the nonwhite foreign workers in the country have become the
new national enemy as possible or potential terrorists, and the ‘‘war on terror’’ at
home and abroad supports new forms of labor exploitation.
Fears, as well as desires and aspirations, continue to reflect the apprehensions and
beliefs of subjects that are always contingent upon their particular social and
political conditions while simultaneously being accountable for them. For instance,
the massive support given to Obama’s candidacy expresses a kind of ‘‘hope’’ that
would be incomprehensible in a different period. Significant in this regard is the way
‘‘hope’’ stands for restoring the injured sense of identity and alleviating the long
legacy of guilt (around being charged as racists) that American society has
experienced, especially during the period of the Bush administration. Furthermore,
‘‘hope’’ assumed a range of different meanings. The expectation to restore the
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injured American identity was conjoined with African Americans’ hope of overturning
entrenched discrimination as well as with migrant workers’ aspirations for better
conditions of life. More than a summation of different kind of expectations, then,
‘‘hope’’ was a slogan, an empty signifier into which everybody could place his or her
desires independent of whether those desires were part of the White House
candidate’s political agenda.
Similarly, the contemporary mobility of labor is based on neither a pure economic
need nor a romantic idea. Rather, labor mobility brings to light the reshaping of the
international division of labor and enables us to make sense of the concrete
materializations of globalization. Nevertheless, such mobility also strongly expresses
the desires and aspirations of contemporary subjectivity to resist, travel, connect
experiences, and discover new worlds and possible forms of life.
It is true that contemporary subjectivity is complex and multifaceted. She
expresses positions and contradictions that must be recognized as constitutive of
the production of the common (Revel 2004). While I affirm this complex subjectivity,
however, I want to situate the production of subjects’ desires with respect to class
struggle and antagonism within the mode of production. Dynamic rather than static,
contemporary subjectivity traces the anthropological mutations of modernity which
are always determined in class struggles and transformations of the mode of
production. That is to say, she is inseparable from the labor/capital relations that
make her possible, although she is much more than a mere effect of the relations of
production.
The production of subjectivity, Jason Read (2003) points out, should be thought by
the double meaning of its genitive as simultaneously involved ‘‘in’’ and constituted
‘‘by’’ the mode of production. This twin process describes both forms of subjection
and irreducible subjectivities producing the common. On the one hand, there is the
production of subjectivity by capital (that is, subjection and production of the
dispositifs of power): capitalistic command over living labor and the capturing (by
racialization and gendering as well as by disqualification and precarization) of social
cooperation. On the other hand, there is the productive power of subjectivity (that is,
subjectivation and production of the common) as an autonomous and resisting force
that exceeds power relations and capitalist production.
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 473
Therefore, while capital translates difference into the language of value and uses
race and gender as tools in the segmentation and hierarchization of labor power, a
political subjectivity takes the form of flight from the dominant social order. Such
subjectivity, irreducibly situated in the capitalist hierarchical organization of
difference, is exactly positioned where she can break up the internal equilibrium of
the functioning of capitalist social relations and practice a new political and
subjective experience that can produce the common: a cooperative ground of
practices, discourses, and imaginaries beyond the confines capital sets up along the
lines of race and gender difference.
imaginaries happens through the interruption of the relations of production with the
refusal of racialized and gendered subjectivity to engage in capitalist valorization.6
The production of such an autonomous and resistant political subjectivity, who will be
the agent of this interruption, is both the result and the condition of possibility of the
production of the common. There is no class without class struggle, Mario Tronti
explains in analyzing the labor/capital relationship in post/World War II Italy (1966,
228/34). ‘‘There are no class struggles without the production of the common’’ is how
we might update his statements for a contemporary communist manifesto at the
height of the capitalist mode of production and globalization processes.
Today, as in the late twentieth century, there is no political consciousness that is to
be developed at an indefinite future, but rather there are subjectivities embodying
difference that could hic et nunc organize the production of the common as a site of
radical transformation and social change. Class as a political concept arises as the
composition of subjectivity and difference in a common ground of imageries,
language, and expectations.
Within such a production of the common, differences work as the thematic
variation that at any time makes the interruption of capitalist valorization possible
through the construction of affinities between and across differences and through the
composition of multifarious desires, motivations, and beliefs together with their
conditions, limitations, and effects. This process of flight from the capitalist
valorization of difference is never completed, but is a ceaseless endeavor.
A political subjectivity, in that sense, constructs ties where capital produces
separation, interruption, and fractures. She practices what Jacques Rancière (1999)
has defined as ‘‘disidentification’’ from an imagined belonging*/whether ethnic,
sexual, religious, or territorial*/that gives the subjectivity the chance to break from
the politics of recognition that seeks to fix difference by means of reducing it to the
capitalist language of value. However, the disidentification I have in mind is not
événementielle; it does not take the form of an event. Rather, it refers to a process
of organization and production of the common through which this political
6. The idea of refusal I am using is Tronti’s: that is, refusal as the interruption of the relations of
production (1966, 234/52).
474 CURCIO
express the discontent and indignation felt toward the capitalist organization of
social relations. This means to ‘‘go against’’: to go against the ‘‘sameness’’ of the
capitalist language of value by crossing the material and immaterial borders along
race and gender lines that capital erects around us. This is the production of the
common, a different form of common living that organizes the social relations
‘‘by all’’ and ‘‘for all’’ and flees from hierarchies and exploitation.
The construction of ‘‘a different form of common living’’ has to be produced from
within the antagonistic tension between labor and capital. Against the homogeneity
of the capitalistic language of value that reduces subjectivity and ‘‘difference’’ into
‘‘sameness,’’ we need to push the language of living labor that speaks of the
inexorable heterogeneity of social cooperation. To produce the common, this
heterogeneity must be organized. The subjectivities that embody difference should
gather together in a common substance. This is not a linear and smooth process.
Rather, the relationship between the self as singularity (i.e., partiality of labor and
subjectivity) and others as multiplicity stands in continuous tension with the
homogenizing process of capitalist valorization and with the encroachments of the
logic of sameness. Therefore, to produce the common, difference as partiality and
the common (as the coming together of subjectivities and differences) have to
engage with each other and invent various forms of articulation for the valorization of
the other.
However, we need to keep in mind that the production of the common could
operate in an ambivalent manner, both greeting and denying the other. If to greet
refers to a genuine engagement with difference, to deny means closure in defense of
difference as a supposed identity. On the one hand, there is the production of ties*/as
‘‘being-between’’*/among subjectivities that embody difference, as we have
7. Here I have in mind the reflections on subjectivity by subaltern studies and, in particular,
Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work (2000) and the analysis of Chandra Mohanty (2004).
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 475
witnessed in the U.S. migrant workers’ marches in 2006 or in the civil rights
movement of the 1960s. On the other hand, there is difference as an identity to
defend, such as in the ‘‘Hockey Moms for Palin’’ initiative that supported the McCain-
Palin ticket in the last U.S. presidential campaign or, a worse case, in nativists’
patrolling of the U.S./Mexico border.
Seen in this light, to be in common requires the building up of a bridge between
singularity and multiplicity without disregard for difference. This is what some
postcolonial scholars describe as a process of translation that maintains difference
rather than repressing it in going beyond the capitalist language of value. According
to Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, while capital classifies and hierarchically organizes
differences (in what they call the homolingual address of translation), being in
common occurs each time anew in what they call the heterolingual address of
translation. This is the mode in which ‘‘you are always confronted, so to speak, with
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8. I want to thank Alvaro Reyes for suggesting that I develop this point.
476 CURCIO
a broad range of activists and advocates, was able to mobilize black and Latina/o
janitors (from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico) together with a large network of
migrant workers (Trevizo and Montag 1990; Milkman 2006). Moving beyond insular
identities and belongings, these workers shared knowledge, languages, and political
expertise coming from different country-specific experiences and political traditions.
The struggle produced a common ground of imaginaries, expectations, and political
practices that exemplified how the composition of race, gender, and class difference
could broadly work to produce the common.
It was a similar heterolingual production of the common that was at play in the
composition of the migrant marches of 2006 in the United States, which translated
the enormous differences among workers’ experiences and demands into the common
slogan ‘‘¡Si, Se Puede!’’ The migrants acted precisely by interrupting the homo-
geneous language of capital. They invented and practiced forms of self-organization
and autonomous cooperation that destabilized the traditional, homogenous form
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A crucial question that emerges in this discussion is the question of the relationship
between ‘‘the one’’ and ‘‘the multiple’’*/in other words, the relationship between
‘‘unity’’ and ‘‘multiplicity,’’ between the holistic homogeneous subjects of the
entire history of capitalism and the heterogeneous subjects in the production of
the common. To put this in other words, this is the antagonistic tension between the
homolingual translation of the capitalist language of value and the heterolingual
translation as the production of the common.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, social and political struggles have shown the rise of a
‘‘new’’ subjectivity that is neither apolitical nor ineffective. Rather, it is a testament
to the inability of the traditional labor movement, the homogeneous subject of
social transformation, to follow desires, languages, and the forms of life of con-
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank Miguel Mellino, Sandro Mezzadra, and Gigi Roggero for reading and
commenting on this paper. I also would like to express my gratitude to Kenan Erçel,
Yahya Madra, and especially Ceren Özselçuk for their precious remarks.
References
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oppression in Anglo-America. New York: Verso.
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 479
Read, J. 2003. The micropolitics of capital: Marx and the prehistory of the present.
New York: SUNY Press.
Revel, J. 2004. Fare moltitudine. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore.
Roediger, D. 1991. The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American
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*/**/ /. 2008. How race survived U.S. history: From settlement and slavery to the
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Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Random House.
Sakai, N., and J. Solomon. 2009. Translation, biopolitics and colonial difference. In
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Torres, G., and L. Guinier. 2002. The miner’s canary: Enlisting race, resisting power,
transforming democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, University Press.
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September/October, 3/7.
Tronti, M. 1966. Operai e capitale. Turin: Einaudi.
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manifestolibri.
Tsing, A. L. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press.
RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
work of Michel Foucault, presents subjectivity as the decisive locus of both the rule
of neoliberal capitalism and the production of the common. While sharing its central
focus of subjectivity, we are concerned with what this literature leaves out (due to
what we discern to be certain implicit tendencies of behaviorism): the constitutive
role that subjective investments and ‘‘enjoyment’’ (jouissance) play in the crisis-
ridden formations of capitalism and in the constructive turns to communism. We
proceed from the premise that there is no balanced relation to jouissance and that
class antagonism is irreducible. From this perspective, we propose to approach
capitalist and communist subjectivities in terms of two different ‘‘forms of the
commune’’: that is, as two distinct subjective orientations toward enjoying the
impossibility of instituting the common once and for all.
that has come to describe social formations since the Second International (Olsen
2009). While the post-Althusserian field is highly diverse and the various directions
taken in the aftermath of Althusser’s break from economic determinism may even be,
on occasion, orthogonal to each other, the field is structured around the theoretical
problematic of understanding the reproduction of capitalism in order to explain its
historical resilience while taking seriously the irreducible contingency (negativity) of
social overdetermination in order to think about the possible paths toward subjective
reorientation (revolution) (Özselçuk 2009). In particular, the psychoanalytically
inflected Marxian approach taken in this paper locates subjectivity at the heart of
the reproduction of capitalism by making the latter contingent upon the singular
affective investments of social subjects.
In this post-Althusserian field, we find the surging Foucaultian literature on
neoliberalism as a biopolitical form of governmentality very productive and convincing
in its basic description of some of the more salient features of contemporary capitalism.2
This literature takes Foucault’s seminars on governmentality from the late 1970s as its
point of departure and, using his readings of Ordo-liberalism in post-war Germany and
American neoliberalism of the Chicago School of Economics, locates the question of
1. For insightful surveys of various Althusserian legacies, see Elliot (1994), Kaplan and Sprinker
(1993), Lezra (1995), and Callari and Ruccio (1996).
2. We consider the governmentality literature post-Althusserian not only because the
governmentality approach developed in the Anglo-American context in tandem with post-
Althusserian tendencies (Lemke 2002), but also because the concept of governmentality is
Foucault’s answer to what we referred to above as the post-Althusserian theoretical
problematic. When Foucault proposes to treat capitalism as ‘‘a singular figure in which
economic process and institutional framework call on each other, support each other, modify and
shape each other in ceaseless reciprocity,’’ he simultaneously refuses to treat ‘‘the problem of
the survival of capitalism’’ as a foregone conclusion ‘‘determined by the logic of capital and its
accumulation.’’ Instead, he insists that ‘‘[t]he history of capitalism can only be an economic-
institutional history’’ (Foucault 2008, 164/5). In other words, Foucault explains the rule of
capitalism as a function of a nondialectical, strategic logic of articulation that establishes
connections across (conjugates) a heterogeneous field of institutions, dispositifs, regimes of
truth, disciplines, and so forth without reducing the field into a homogeneous unity (secured, for
instance, by the dialectical logic of capital accumulation) (42/3).
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 483
subjectivity at the heart of social reproduction.3 In particular, it argues that the figure of
homo economicus, the particular representation of the subject as a rational and
calculative monad that we find in neoclassical economics, is the mode of subjectivity
that reproduces capitalist accumulation. ‘‘Neoliberalism,’’ writes one author, ‘‘is thus a
‘restoration’ not only of class power, of capitalism as the only possible economic system,
it is a restoration of capitalism as synonymous with rationality’’ (Read 2009, 31).
According to this literature, because ‘‘social policy is no longer a means of encountering
the economic [and protecting the social], but a means for sustaining the logic of
competition’’ (Donzelot 2008, 124) in all possible areas of social life, homo economicus
and its particular rationality of cost-benefit analysis have become the universal model of
all social behavior, eventually even turning the subject herself into an object of her
calculations as demonstrated in the human capital theory of Chicago economist Gary
Becker (1976).
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3. The emergence of the governmentality literature in the Anglo-Saxon context could be traced
back to publication of The Foucault Effect, a collection of essays edited by Burchell, Gordon,
and Miller (1991). Subsequently, among others, we can refer to Barry, Osborne, and Rose (1996),
Lemke (2001, 2002), Brown (2003), Donzelot (2008), Read (2009), and Binkley (2009) as
contributors to the governmentality literature.
484 MADRA AND ÖZSELÇUK
functions of biopolitical power work over the subject*/or, more precisely, we do not
find an analysis of subjective investments that produce passionate attachments which
provide the conditions not only of the maintenance of singular capitalisms, but also of
the refusal of the rule of capital and the constitution of communism. In fact, we think
certain forms of behaviorism accompany these literatures and render it difficult even
to pose the question of subjective investments. Unless the register and role
of subjective investments are explicitly theorized, we fear that the promise of
communism will remain micropolitically ungrounded as it lacks the articulation
of an ethical orientation that guides the material processes of the traversal of (the
fantasies of) capitalism. Before we embark on our own conceptualization of
subjective investments, however, a more precise look at what we refer to as the
implicit behaviorism of the biopolitics literature will be proper.
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Behaviorism in Biopolitics
Yet it seems that the governmentality literature more often than not misses this
point and proceeds as if the behavioral assumption from which neoliberal reason sees
and attempts to engineer the world is seamlessly realized in actuality without any
mediation and through full subjective capture. In other words, they tend to deduce
the actual state of subjectivity under neoliberalism from the neoliberal notion of
homo economicus ‘‘as someone who is eminently governable’’ (270). In one instance,
Wendy Brown (2003) makes this jump when she argues that, by developing
‘‘institutional practices and rewards for enacting’’ its normative claim about the
pervasiveness of economic rationality, neoliberalism ‘‘produces rational actors.’’ For
the governmentality approach, ‘‘the fundamental understanding of individuals as
governed by interest and competition is not just an ideology . . . but is an intimate
part of how our lives and subjectivity structured’’ (Read 2009, 34/5). So the
governmentality literature appears to solidify as the new and accomplished ontology
of being what for us remains an open question of subjectivation. This is why we think
it inquires very little into how neoliberalism succeeds or fails in taking hold in the
social subjectivity. Nor is there deliberation on the conditions of possibility of an
ethico-political orientation.5
When we turn to the post-Fordist literature for an analysis of how biopolitical
governmentality takes hold in social subjectivity, in multitude, we find a post-Fordist
network subjectivity, a subjectivity who is expected to negotiate ‘‘flexible, mobile
and precarious labor relations’’ (Hardt and Negri 2004, 112), process information, and
cooperate over ‘‘innumerable and indeterminate relationships of distributed net-
works’’ (113). It is important, however, to note that this ‘‘networking subject’’ is not
simply a one-to-one materialization of homo economicus. Rather, it is a subjectivity
that is immanent to the becoming ontology of the immaterial, biopolitical production
and as such constitutes the common by creating ‘‘social relationships and forms
through collaborative forms of labor’’ (95). While this network of ‘‘singularities’’
shares ‘‘a common potential to resist the domination of capital’’ (107), it is
nonetheless simultaneously subjected to the capture of neoliberal governmentality
5. An important exception is Sam Binkley’s work on the self-help bestseller Rich Dad Poor Dad
(2009).
486 MADRA AND ÖZSELÇUK
6. On one occasion, in his analysis of financialization, Christian Marazzi argues that we must
take the ‘‘public’’ in ‘‘the public demand for financing’’ literally: ‘‘[I]t was no longer just the
investment banks, or business, or nation-states, but also wage-earners and salaried employees
who wanted to participate as small investors in the big party organized by the securities
markets’’ (2008, 39; emphasis added). While the image of ‘‘the big party’’ invokes a possible
form of enjoyment that comes along with partaking in financialization, we find nowhere in
Marazzi a discussion of why the ‘‘wage-earners’’ or ‘‘salaried employees’’ ‘‘wanted to
participate’’ in the big party in the first place. Is this yet another manifestation of mimetic,
herd behavior? Or is it a manifestation of innate desire for more wealth?
7. Marazzi borrows some components of this notion of subjectivity from behavioural finance and
behavioral economics*/two emerging ‘‘cyborg’’ branches of economics that have been
developing under the influence of cognitive sciences (Mirowski 2002)*/and others from André
Orléan’s (1999) reading of J. M. Keynes’s ‘‘beauty contest.’’
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 487
Marx’s writing on the ‘‘Forms which precede capitalist production’’ (1993, 471/514) is
a particularly important text for those who are interested in understanding the ways
in which subjectivity both constitutes and is constituted by class. In these passages,
differentiating between private and communal ‘‘property,’’ Marx offers a discussion
of the different forms of the commune. In particular, and perhaps surprisingly, he
suggests the possibility of a communal form where the social surplus is appropriated
by a despot in the name of the commune and for the commune: the despot would
have the right to appropriate the surplus because he or she would be socially
designated as ‘‘a particular entity’’ that realizes the higher and ‘‘comprehensive
unity’’ of ‘‘the many real particular communities’’ (472/3). Marx also discusses
the peasant forms of the commune where the male head of the household is the
communally designated appropriator of the surplus produced in the household. In
considering these forms of ‘‘property’’ as communal forms (as opposed to the
bourgeois form), Marx differentiates between the actual physical act of appropriation
and its social signification. Yet, as Jack Amariglio convincingly argues in his reading of
these passages, there is no appropriation outside its social signification.
This argument highlights the social constitutivity of subjectivity by making the case
that who appropriates surplus labor cannot be named independent of the processes of
identification of the commune members. The processes of identification constitute as
collective appropriation what at first sight appears to be a physical act by an
individual (or an individual household). At the same time, it highlights the social
constitution of the subjectivity of commune members through the collective
production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor as well as through the
cultural processes of kinship, family, and clan. This analysis certainly needs to be
extended to all forms of social organization of surplus, including capitalism. Under
capitalism, members of modern bourgeois society are exchanging commodities
(including land, labor, and capital) not because of their ‘‘innate desire to truck,
barter and exchange,’’ as Adam Smith and the philosophical anthropology of classical
political economists would have it, but rather because of their social constitution as
calculative, equal, and proprietor ‘‘individual’’ citizens (Amariglio and Callari 1993),
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because the exchanging subjects effectively treat ‘‘wealth as the aim of production’’
(Marx 1993, 488). This wealth production is ‘‘capitalist’’ because of its ‘‘bourgeois
form,’’ because the socially constituted bourgeois subjectivity described above
constitutes, gives shape to, and organizes this particular form of production,
appropriation, and distribution of surplus as a capitalist one. In fact, Marx asks,
‘‘when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the
universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc.,
created through universal exchange?’’ (488). He continues on to describe a notion
of ‘‘wealth’’ beyond ‘‘the bourgeois form’’: ‘‘The absolute working-out of his creative
potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development,
which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers
as such the end in itself, not measured on a predetermined yardstick? . . . Strives
not to remain something he has become, but is in absolute movement of
becoming?’’ (488).
When Marx strips the ‘‘wealth’’ from its bourgeois form, he finds a ‘‘commune’’ in
its path to becoming. This stripped ‘‘wealth’’ as the commune’s ‘‘absolute working-
out of its creative potentialities’’ evokes the idea of ‘‘the common’’ that Hardt and
Negri find at the heart of postmodern capitalist production. Yet, precisely
at this point, there are at least two paths that could be followed from Marx’s
discussion of the forms of the commune, which lead respectively to two very
different problematics of class antagonism and two different imaginations of
communism.
The first path involves a humanist problematic of fetishism where this latter is
conceived as the structural effect of ‘‘misrecognizing’’ the product of social
cooperation as the work or intrinsic property of a ‘‘higher unity,’’ be it the Asiatic
despot or the capitalist (with all the humanist presuppositions of an ultimate recovery
of a harmonious origin). In this approach, the form of the commune is not constitutive
but epiphenomenal, an external and alien force of the common’s own creation that
dominates it. Accordingly, communism emerges as the rectification of the mis-
recognition or alienation of the common, a revolutionary transformation in which
social harmony between social production and distribution is reestablished, class
antagonism is resolved, and the ‘‘community’’ is fully reconciled.
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 489
The other path is to read the ‘‘forms of the commune’’ as Marx’s attempt to make
sense of the different forms of social relations of production.8 From this perspective,
there is no common outside its particular ‘‘form,’’ and different forms of the
commune are different ways in which societies organize ‘‘class antagonism.’’ Here we
use ‘‘class antagonism’’ not as the antagonism between capital and the common, or
the despot and the commune, but rather as the irreducible impossibility of instituting
harmonious and fully reconciled organization of the production, appropriation, and
distribution of social surplus (whether it takes the form of labor, the value form, or
use values).9 To put it in a language that also addresses the title of this special issue,
we can define class antagonism (qua the Real) as the irreducible impossibility of
giving the common (of production) a final shape through ‘‘the forms of the
commune,’’ the impossibility of a harmonious and fully reconciled organization of
the production of surplus by and its distribution to the ‘‘community.’’ In this
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framework, the ‘‘forms of the commune’’ stand for the institutions, mentalities,
interfaces, social technologies, and narratives that attempt to provisionally stabilize
the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus.
Therefore, while surplus is generative of the social, while, as Hardt and Negri posit,
the common is the beginning, the middle, and the end of production, its form is
always retroactively given by the ‘‘forms of the commune.’’ Nonetheless, none of
these forms should be understood as the originary, normal, or pristine one that could
fix the organization of class for once and all, including, we should add, the communist
form. Given that it is impossible to balance out ‘‘enjoyment’’ (jouissance), it is
impossible for us to imagine the social interdependency of the common without the
presence of class antagonism. In the remainder of this essay, we turn to psycho-
analysis to develop a framework that takes into account the role that jouissance plays
in the reproduction as well as the dissolution and transformation of the capitalist
form of the commune. Picking up from our critique of the biopolitical literature on
governmentality, we intend to account for the ways in which subjective investments
8. This path entails not rejecting Marx’s problematic of fetishism per se, but rather assuming
a nonhumanist interpretation of it. Indeed, following Étienne Balibar’s original treatment of
Marx’s discussion of ‘‘the forms of the commune’’ in Reading Capital, we understand the
problematic of fetishism not in its restricted and humanist definition (that is, as the
misrecognition of the relations between men as the relation between commodities in
capitalism), but rather, in its more generalized and materialist application to both
‘‘precapitalist’’ and capitalist modes of production. The way Balibar’s reading severs Marx’s
critique of fetishism from the humanist framing of misrecognition is through repositioning it as a
mystification of social determination: ‘‘whenever the place of determination is occupied by a
single instance, the relationship of the agents will reveal phenomena analogous to ‘fetishism’’’
(Althusser and Balibar 1970, 218). We understand Balibar’s position on the forms of the commune
to be similar to that of Amariglio in that the form embodies an understanding of subjectivity as
both socially constitutive of and socially constituted by the social relations of production. What
Balibar adds to the discussion of ‘‘the commune,’’ it seems to us, is the ‘‘fetishistic’’ form that it
can take.
9. If anything, such ‘‘particular’’ antagonisms between the occupants of various class positions
are secondary antagonisms that are formed through particular articulation of the libidinal
economies of the participant social subjects (Özselçuk and Madra 2005).
490 MADRA AND ÖZSELÇUK
shore up and inhibit the formations of capitalism as well as formulate the coordinates
for a subjective reorientation to communism.
with the legalistic meaning of jouissance (‘‘to enjoy, take advantage of, benefit
from’’), Lacan theorizes jouissance in relation to law: ‘‘‘Usufruct’ means that you can
enjoy (jouir de) your means, but not waste them. When you have the usufruct of an
inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you don’t use up too
much of it. That is clearly the essence of law*/to divide up, distribute, or reattribute
everything that counts as jouissance’’ (Lacan 1998, 3).
For Lacan, ‘‘law’’ refers to the sociosymbolic order within which the subjects are
represented by signifiers to other signifiers (or positioned relationally within the
differential/formal structure of the sociosymbolic order). While the presymbolic
jouissance as ‘‘the Real of the immediate life-substance’’ (Žižek 1997, 47) is
inaccessible, jouissance reemerges within the symbolic, in the subject’s unstable
relation to a law that demands the subject to enjoy, but not to do so excessively.
Nevertheless, a prohibition is never just a prohibition. Lacan quickly reminds us,
‘‘Nothing forces anyone to enjoy, except the superego. The superego is the imperative of
jouissance*/Enjoy!’’ (1998, 3). In fact, in a rather paradoxical manner, this transgressive
superegoic injunction to enjoy, which underlies the prohibitive and regulative role of
public law, is what really makes the subject ‘‘stick’’ to the law. Yet, the psychoanalytic
experience strongly indicates that jouissance itself does not ‘‘stick.’’ While economic
organizations and discourses (i.e., governmental rationalities) try to administer and
domesticate jouissance, these efforts inevitably fail since it is impossible to balance out,
apportion, or stitch together jouissance. In this sense, it is important to emphasize the
ambiguous, excessive, and unstable nature of jouissance and not to fall into a form of
reproductionism where jouissance glues all the cultural, political, and economic
processes snugly together in an everlasting ‘‘institutional equilibrium.’’
In his famous Seminar XX on feminine sexuality, Lacan articulates the concept of
jouissance in relation to his formulas of sexual difference. Sexual difference is
neither the biological seat of subjectivity nor only a cultural product that results from
the subject’s identification with a gendered subject position. Rather, sexual
difference, or sexuation, refers to two distinct modalities in which speaking beings
fail to achieve a stable and secure (sexual) identity. Sexuation occurs as the subject
enters into the sociosymbolic order in one of two ways. In either case, the subject will
be barred forever from achieving a complete and coherent subjectivity and will be
limited to what Lacan calls ‘‘phallic jouissance’’ (1998, 7/8), castrated (or partial)
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 491
jouissance that emerges after the subject enters into the sociosymbolic order (see
also Fink 2002). What Lacan calls ‘‘masculine’’ and ‘‘feminine’’ modalities of failure
correspond to two different ways of relating to this form of partial jouissance.
The masculine modality of relating to partial jouissance is structured by a
particular constitutive exception, by the constitutive belief in the existence of
another, noncastrated, full jouissance. Because it posits an exception, because there
is an element of the set that remains outside (subtracted from the set) for the
purposes of occasioning a closure and guaranteeing the consistency of the set as an
all, the masculine logic fails to be complete. As Joan Copjec notes, on the side of
masculine failure, ‘‘it will always be a matter of saying too little’’ (1994, 231). The
exception sustains the false promise that full enjoyment (e.g., consistency and
completeness, social harmony, equilibrium, satisfaction) could be restored, and
places us all under the superegoic injunction to strive toward reaching this ideal state
(e.g., the development of human capital, efficiency, attainment of wealth,
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constitute a consistent whole, yet suffers from incompleteness as its elements always
measure themselves against the idealized exception and come short (e.g., the
Entrepreneurial injunction). In fact, as Alenka Zupančič noted, while for the
masculine mode of subjectivity ‘‘the inaccessibility of [exceptionalized] enjoyment
is the very mode of enjoyment’’ (2000, 292), there is a part of feminine subjectivity
that ‘‘puts an end to ‘exceptional enjoyment’ in all meanings of the words’’ (296). In
Zupančič’s formulation of sexual difference in the context of subject’s relation to
jouissance, we find not only a good starting point for an analysis of the affective
dimensions of the subjective hold of contemporary capitalism but also the possibility
of an ethico-political reorientation that refuses the utilitarian blackmail of the
exception: if you put an end to the exception, you will foreclose your own possibility
of achieving an exceptional status someday.
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Interpassivity
Before exploring the refusal of the exception as the enactment of the communist
axiom, let us take a closer look at how the attachment to capitalist exception is
contingent upon the subject’s unstable and extimite (intimate yet externalized on to
the Other) relation to jouissance. Slavoj Žižek’s (1997) psychoanalytical reading of
commodity fetishism enables us to discern the constitutive decenteredness of the
subject. Žižek argues that the bourgeois subject knows very well that ‘‘beneath
‘relations between things,’ there are ‘relations between people,’’’ but acts as if he
does not know this and ‘‘follow[s] the fetishist illusion.’’ Every time we engage in a
market transaction, we perform our ‘‘belief’’ even if we don’t really believe in it.
Such is the nature of conventions, rules, norms, and so forth that make up the
sociosymbolic order we live in. Precisely for this reason, Žižek argues that belief is
constitutively displaced. Our belief in the economy, for instance, is always a belief in
others’ belief in the economy (as manifested in the historically changing institutional
forms from macroeconomic planning to the Fed’s monetary policies and stock market
indexes). Nevertheless, the constitutive decenterment of the subject, which begins
with the signifier (S1) who represents the barred subject to other signifiers (S2), also
characterizes the subject’s relation to jouissance. In the context of the capitalist
form of the commune, this decenterment gets concretized in the manner in which
surplus becomes the object cause of desire (object a) for the subjects of the
capitalist-all: In struggling over the bits of surplus, subjects strive toward a fantasy of
economic success and achievement (e.g., the popular discourses on ‘‘upward
mobility’’ and ‘‘trickle-down economics’’ are two such fantasies that frame this
desire) (Özselçuk and Madra 2005, 2007). In this masculine logic of exception, the
inaccessible surplus enjoyed by the Entrepreneur becomes ‘‘the excentered center of
the subject of desire’’ (Zupančič 2000, 292). Under the superegoic injunction to
achieve full enjoyment (i.e., an idealized economic success), the subject continu-
ously strives toward attaining it but always comes short of it (McGowan 2004). In a
sense, ‘‘this very direct order [to enjoy] hinders subject’s access to it much more
efficiently than any prohibition’’ (Žižek 1997, 49).
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 493
Žižek argues that the subject relieves herself from the suffocating injunctions of the
superego to enjoy by displacing her duty to enjoy onto the big Other (or onto particular,
privileged, exceptional others). Following Lacan’s discussion of the Chorus in Greek
tragedy as the entity that emotes (enjoys) on behalf of the audience (1992, 247), Žižek
names this condition ‘‘interpassivity’’ (1997). The board members of Fortune 500,
CEOs, the brokers, the speculators, the Hollywood stars, in short, the top 1 percent of
the population that owns more than a third of the U.S. households can be conceived as
those who enjoy (and deserve this enjoyment) on our behalf, relieving us of our duty to
measure up to the idealized figure of the Entrepreneur. In developing the concept of
interpassivity in order to make sense of the resilience with which social subjects remain
committed to capitalism, Stephen Healy argues that questioning any part of this
capitalist order, whether it be the ‘‘scientific’’ idea that the market mechanism
rewards performance and productivity or the spontaneous ideology of ‘‘greed is good,’’
‘‘interrupts this interpassive condition and causes consternation’’ (2010, 9).
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Communism as an Axiom
Our concluding thesis is that traversing the fantasy of capitalism (or any other
masculine form of organizing economy) involves the simultaneous move of, on the
one hand, letting go of the investment in the exception, and, on the other, ‘‘wanting’’
to forge a ‘‘common,’’ which is inconsistent and impossible to totalize (because there
is no exception). Could we then propose communism as an ethico-political shift that
gives up the enjoyment of achieving an ideal ‘‘form of the commune’’ that can
ultimately ‘‘fix’’ the production and division of surplus*/both in its right-wing and
left-wing bourgeois forms? While this might sound different than how communism has
come to be imagined*/for instance, in terms of massive political insurgence and
rupture*/the ethico-political shift practiced is no less radical and, in fact, might be
posed as a constitutive dimension of such moments of communist insurgence.
In fact, we can read Marx as gesturing toward such a conceptualization of
communism, as a new mode of relating to the void of appropriation, and of surplus,
494 MADRA AND ÖZSELÇUK
in his famous Critique of the Gotha Programme. In this critique, Marx launches
a devastating attack on the predominant communist morality underpinning the
Programme of the German Worker’s party. Specifically, he dissects in great detail
the opening party statement that ‘‘the proceeds of labor belong undiminished with
equal right to all members of society’’ (Marx 1966, 6). After recognizing the ‘‘proceeds
of labor’’ as ‘‘the co-operative proceeds of labor’’ (‘‘the total social product’’), Marx
enumerates a list of social distributions and consumptions from the surplus that will
inevitably ‘‘diminish’’ what is supposed to go to the workers. And, when he finally
arrives at the means of consumption that are distributed to ‘‘the individual producers
in the co-operative,’’ he raises the question of the criterion that is to regulate this
‘‘final’’ distribution. The principle he invokes here, ‘‘[f]rom each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs’’ (7), is his final stab at those attempts that seek
to preserve the value equivalence between what the individual worker contributes to
society in terms of labor-time and what she is to receive back in the form of means
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10. For two extensive and original discussions of Nuestras Raices and the ethical dynamics of a
community economy that it fosters, see Healy and Graham (2008) and Graham and Cornwell
(2009).
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 495
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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
Alvaro Reyes
The essays by Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselçuk (2010) and by Anna Curcio (2010) are
both wonderful examples of the turn within contemporary Marxisms toward the
centrality of questions regarding subjectivity. Despite this common element, each
article approaches these questions from rather disparate (and perhaps irreconcilable)
theoretical avenues, each with the capacity to powerfully illuminate our contem-
porary moment and both raising further questions as to the way subjectivity is
imagined and what that can tell us about the viability of alternatives to contemporary
forms of neoliberal capitalism.
Madra and Özselçuk approach contemporary discussions of the common and its
relation to the biopolitical from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective that, as it
must, holds in tension the ideas that subjectivity is always ‘‘socially produced and
historically overdetermined’’ with the insight that, due to the ‘‘constitutive
impossibility of society,’’ the relation of subjectivity to institutions, mentalities,
and narrative is always one of a ‘‘transference.’’1 Given this outlook, they are able to
powerfully critique a certain imaginary surrounding the common (a common that they
locate in the social interdependency and cooperative production that constitute all
forms of the social organization of surplus, a point I will return to below) in which,
as they say, ‘‘communism emerges as the rectification of the misrecognition or
alienation of the common, a revolutionary transformation in which social harmony
1. The comments in this section refer to a previous version of the article by Madra and Özselçuk.
each other, Madra and Özselçuk are careful to point out that their own outlook is far
from a social ‘‘reproductionism’’ in that, as they indicate, all attempts to
domesticate enjoyment necessarily fail. Masculinist enjoyment, in their view, is but
one attempt at establishing institutional equilibrium that must be constantly
reinforced through the cultivation of certain subjective investments. According to
Madra and Özselçuk, this is a process that, in contemporary capitalism, is best
explained by what they refer to as ‘‘interpassivity.’’ This process today consists of our
intense identification with the exceptional nature of the enjoyment of the
‘‘primordial father,’’ now instantiated as the corporate ‘‘Board of Directors’’ (who,
unlike everyone else, ‘‘get something for nothing’’).
Although the vicarious enjoyment implied by ‘‘interpassivity’’ helps us to explain
certain contemporary phenomena, it seems that the use of that concept in this
context limits our vision of the extent to which forms of contemporary capitalist
subjection are in fact struggles over investments interior to a given subject (and not
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Directors’’ should certainly not be discarded as one mechanism that can help to
clarify the maintenance of the contemporary capitalist exception, a more careful
examination would have to include parallel processes at the very heart of our
moment. While the contemporary capitalist exception involves a long-term process
that is clearly disadvantageous to workers, this exception has recently developed
moments of enjoyment beyond identification, moments where ambivalence is
wielded as a weapon by very concretely forcing workers, even if only temporarily,
to occupy the position of the ‘‘Board of Directors.’’3
Finally, as an alternative to the masculine logic of exceptionality shared by certain
formulations of the common and contemporary capitalism, Madra and Özselçuk offer
us communism as the axiom, ‘‘from each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs,’’ originally formulated by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme
(a move which Madra and Özselçuk note is inspired by the work of Alain Badiou).
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3. A strong argument could be made that this development was in fact forced into being by the
radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
502 REYES
Although the parameters of this debate in the United States have always been
extremely varied, we hear with increasing frequency, especially after the recent
‘‘crisis,’’ comments such as those of David Harvey, claiming that ‘‘within much of the
academy [issues of race and gender] have taken priority of place at the expense of class
analysis and political economy’’ (Harvey 2009a). According to Harvey, this is a question
of misplaced priorities due to the fact that ‘‘[r]acism and the oppression of women and
children were foundational in the rise of capitalism. But capitalism as currently
constituted can in principle survive without these forms of discrimination and
oppression’’(Harvey 2009a; 2009b, 212). Thus, for Harvey, not only are race and
gender elements exterior to ‘‘class,’’ but contemporary capitalism presents us with the
imperative of returning to the examination of ‘‘class’’ absent forms of race and gender
oppression. In sharp contrast to this vision, Curcio presents a rather different approach
to the nature of class. Building from the Italian tradition of operaismo, and more
specifically from Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital, Curcio tells us ‘‘there is no class
without class struggle.’’ In this tradition, in sharp distinction to Harvey, ‘‘class’’ is not
merely a concept within ‘‘the prison-house of political economy’’ nor is it a matter of
‘‘sociological description.’’ As Curcio argues, it is rather a directly political concept,
internal to which one can find both the capitalist class’s attempt to impose its order (to
reduce the working class to exploitation) and the revolutionary strategy of the working
class to build autonomous social cooperation that exceeds capital (and destroys its own
existence as exploited). In other words, in this tradition, working-class struggle cannot
stand as some element external to other categories of social differentiation, as if
working-class struggle could have any meaning independent of that activity which
‘‘puts ‘the rules of the game’ of capitalist society into question’’ (Cleaver 2000, 76, 84).
‘‘Class,’’ then, as Curcio reminds us, is not a location or identity; it is an activity that
necessarily deals with ‘‘the multiple differences that shape people’s lives.’’ In sum, the
question for this tradition cannot then be whether race and gender should be
prioritized over class or whether class should be prioritized over race and gender.
It is, rather, the much more interesting proposition of examining how each of these
categories is deployed against working-class struggle and by working-class struggle.
From this perspective, then, it makes sense that Curcio divides her article into an
examination of both sides of the question of subjectivity. She first examines the
deployment of race and gender as elements in the reproduction of the capitalist
DIFFERENCE IN COMMON 503
relation (subjection), and then evaluates their use in the practical production of those
subjectivities that ‘‘exceed that capitalist mode of production’’ (subjectivation). That
is, Curcio’s article, unlike Madra and Özselçuk’s, presents us with the possibility of
approaching the common outside the framework and problematics that concern a
philosophy of adequation and its impossibility. By extending the insights of operaismo,
Curcio presents the construction of the common as neither the return of a ‘‘thing’’ to a
preexisting subject (dis-alienation) nor as something located exclusively in the idea.
Rather, she approaches the common as that which is inextricable from those practices
(in this instance, ‘‘heterolingual translation’’) and that produces new subjectivities
(subjectivation) that bridge singularity and multiplicity.4
Curcio’s work in understanding race and gender hierarchies as central to the
development of management techniques to create antagonistic stratifications within
the working class, and thus as inseparable from any analysis of the contemporary
composition and decomposition of ‘‘class,’’ seems today more necessary than ever. But
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perhaps an even more intriguing section of her work is her historicization of a split
internal to the subject of ‘‘humanity’’ and its relation to the formation of whiteness
(which is certainly, we must recognize, the most extensive and vicious form of identity
politics to date). As Curcio points out, the modern juridical subject is born at that point
where the capacity to ‘‘own’’ property begins to serve as the criterion to make a
‘‘religio-racist’’ distinction between white males and others (Roediger 2008, 16/8).
That is, this criterion hinges on the existence of a social split within ‘‘humanity’’
between those who own property and those who are the subject of property. We might
extend this insight further (although there is only space here to treat this matter
suggestively) and attempt to show that such a distinction (between those who own and
those who are the objects of property) was in fact a secondary distinction created by a
more originary split thought to exist only among (and within) certain subjects. That is,
the religio-racial distinction (those who own and those who are the objects of property)
was in fact made between those subjects who understood themselves as internally
divided (as simultaneously an I and a proprietor of that I) and those who were imagined
incapable of such a division. That is, there were those who were owners of themselves
and could thus objectify their labor through the mediation of money, and there were
those who were incapable of such self-objectification (17).5 As Curcio importantly
4. A philosophy of production in a strict sense, which stands in sharp contrast to a ‘‘theory of the
productive forces’’, is most extensively elaborated by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and
Repetition. He attempts to carefully distinguish a philosophy of singularity from a number of
ontologies that attempt to tie difference to representation (Deleuze 1991, chap. 2). Although
the complexities of such a philosophy are certainly too extensive to examine more fully in this
article, the very general parameters of such a philosophy are well summarized by Kenneth Surin.
‘‘In a universe of absolute singularities, production can only take the form of repetition: each
singularity, in the course of production, can only repeat or proliferate itself. In production each
simulacrum can only affirm its own difference, its distanciation from everything else.
Production, on this account, is a ceaselessly proliferative distribution (of all the various
absolute singularities). Production is always repetition of difference, the difference of each
thing’’ (Surin 1994, 26).
5. For an impressive analysis of the formation of this internally split subject and its relations to
the formation of racialization, see generally Da Silva (2007); for the specific role that Locke
played in the formation of this vision of the subject, see chapter 3, pages 37/68 of her book.
504 REYES
points out, it is only after the overwhelming presence of the anticolonial and feminist
movements that women and nonwhites were no longer automatically imagined as
exterior to the capacities of this split subject, but rather, as Étienne Balibar explains,
hierarchized along a spectrum of differential inclusion to this subject location
(although it is far from clear that inclusion in any form was what these movements
were after) (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 17/28; Balibar 2004, 172).
Although Curcio does in fact explore the idea of ‘‘heterolingual translation’’ as a
particular practice of resistance that constructs the common (as subjectivation), I am
left with a series of concerns as to the location (the site of libidinal investment) from
which this resistance arises. That is, this work presents a tendency to make capitalism
an ontologically inoperative, but historically watershed, event. On the one hand,
there is the desire to claim, as Curcio does, that capitalism has no real force in an
ontological sense as its capacities are purely negative (i.e., to ‘‘separate, interrupt,
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and fracture’’). On the other hand, historically, through the moment of primitive
accumulation (although, as Curcio explains, primitive accumulation never loses its
actuality), it is thought to ‘‘give[s] rise to the production of the common as the place
whence to forge (new) assemblages of desire.’’ If we were to place this in a more
Foucaultian language, we might say that Curcio attempts to affirm the ontological
primacy of resistance over power (as, according to her, only resistance is capable of
the ontologically affirmative action of ‘‘constructing ties’’) while simultaneously
claiming that this resistance is derived from that power (i.e., the production of the
common arrives only after the moment of primitive accumulation). This mirroring
effect between power and resistance (between capitalism and the common) has
deleterious effects in our contemporary political context that I will examine below.
First, I would simply point out that it is not clear why this mirroring is necessary if we
take seriously the point made by Madra and Özselçuk that ‘‘the common as social
interdependency and cooperative production’’ is far from unique to capitalism, but
is rather ‘‘constitutive of all forms of social organizations of surplus.’’ Keeping this
point in mind, as well as the process of primitive accumulation as analyzed by Marx in
chapters 26/8 of volume 1 of Capital, it would seem more appropriate to claim that,
far from being derivative of the processes of capitalism, the common as social
cooperation is the historical and ontological precondition for capitalism.6
This mirroring of power and resistance within Curcio’s work becomes particularly
troubling in that it parallels a similar mirroring between resistance and power in our
political moment more broadly. Consider, for example, the latent threat posed to
heterolingual translation by the figure of the adept translator. This is a translator that
might surreptitiously stand as a mediating subject between and above the conjoined
differences that Curcio mentions. Such a threat is powerfully exemplified by the
Obama campaign’s appropriation of the social force generated by the migrant
protests of the spring of 2006 (which included the largest single-day protest in the
history of the United States on 1 May 2006) through the (mis)translation, total
decontextualization, and transformation of this movement’s motto ‘‘¡Si se puede!’’
into Obama’s campaign slogan and into what he has alternatively referred to as ‘‘that
American creed’’: ‘‘Yes, we can!’’ It is important to take note of how the agent of
repression identified by the migrant movement as their object of protest (i.e., that
polity called the United States of America) in Obama’s hands becomes the originating
subject of the statement of protest (‘‘America’’). The ‘‘puede’’ of ‘‘¡Si se puede!’’
which marks the potentiality created through resistance (a more faithful translation
would be, ‘‘Yes, it can be done!’’) is replaced in Obama’s discourse by the self-
satisfied subject of power, ‘‘we.’’ But ‘‘¡Si se puede!’’ is not an ‘‘American’’ creed as
Barack Obama would like us to believe; it is rather the creed of those who today are
brutally kept in the shadows and refused by ‘‘America.’’ Yet, this sleight of hand
performs the dual function of delinking the force of the migrant marches from their
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political principles and, through the circulation of the image of Obama as rather
literally embodying multiculturalism and multiracialism, it attempts to place the
enthusiasm and social energy generated by those marches onto the persona of the
adept translator.
The power of the ambivalence of phenomenon like that of Obama (of the adept
translator of multiracialism) has been read by Harvey and others as further evidence,
as we mentioned above, that although capitalism in the past may have necessitated
racism and sexism, ‘‘as currently constituted [it] can in principle survive without
these forms of discrimination and oppression.’’ That is, it has been read only in light
of its ‘positive’ aspects.7 Yet, the force of any future work around the relation
between racism and gender to that of ‘‘class’’ will depend on the ability to break the
spell of the adept translator of multiracialism and to look beyond that translator in
order to uncover the role played by the exponentially increasing police, judiciary, and
dispersed de facto repression of the black and Latino (especially female) proletariat
and subproletariat population. Such an investigation will reveal that this is a central
site of struggle over the construction and destruction of communism and the
common.
References
Balibar, É. 2003. We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship.
Trans. J. Swenson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Balibar, É., and I. Wallerstein. 1991. Race, nation, class. New York: Verso.
Cleaver, H. 2001. Reading Capital politically. San Francisco: Antithesis.
Curcio, A. 2010. Translating difference and the common. Rethinking Marxism 22(3):
464/80.
Da Silva, D. F. 2007. Toward a global idea of race. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
7. For a similar point that powerfully details the ‘‘other side’’ of ‘‘hope’’ in the postracial era,
see James (2009).
506 REYES
Notes on Contributors
JACK AMARIGLIO
Teaches Economics at Merrimack College. He is currently the co-editor (with Yahya
Madra) of the art/iculations section of Rethinking Marxism. He is also the co-editor
(with Joseph Childers and Stephen Cullenberg) of Sublime Economy: On the
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ÉTIENNE BALIBAR
Has been teaching at the Universities of Algiers, Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Leiden,
and Nanterre (Paris 10). He is Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the
University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the
University of California, Irvine. He is author or co-author of numerous books including
Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (with
Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas, The Philosophy of Marx, Spinoza and
Politics, Politics and the Other Scene, and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on
Transnational Citizenship. He is a member of Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (Paris), with
a particular interest in the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. He is co-founder of
Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and acting chair of Association Jan Hus France.
ANTONIO CALLARI
The Sigmund M. and Mary B. Hyman Professor of Economics and Director of the Local
Economy Center at Franklin and Marshall College. He has published widely in the areas of
the history of economic thought, postcolonialism and economics, and Marxian theory.
S. CHARUSHEELA
Editor of Rethinking Marxism and Associate Professor, Women’s Studies, University of
Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Structuralism and Individualism in Economic
Analysis (Routledge 2005) and co-editor of Postcolonialism meets Economics. Recent
publications include ‘‘The Diaspora at Home,’’ ‘‘Gender and the Stability of Consump-
tion: A Feminist Contribution to Post Keynesian Economics,’’ and ‘‘Social Analysis and
the Capabilities Approach: A Limit to Martha Nussbaum’s Universalist Ethics.’’
ANNA CURCIO
Teaches in the Political Science Department, University of Messina. She works at the
intersection of sociology, political science and post-coloniality within the framework
of post-Operaista debate. She has published in the areas of social movements and
labor struggles, focusing mainly on the issues of subjectivity, class, race and gender.
Her articles and book chapters appeared in Italian and international publications. She
authored La paura dei Movimenti. Evento e genealogia di una mobilitazione
(Rubbettino 2006) and co-authored Precariopoli. Parole e pratiche delle nuove lotte
sul lavoro (manifestolibri 2005). She is a member of the edu-factory collective and
the Uninomade project.
MICHAEL HARDT
Teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author with Antonio
Negri of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.
DEBORAH JENSON
Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University. She works on 19th century French
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FEDERICO LUISETTI
Associate Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Estetica dell’immanenza. Saggi sulle
parole, le immagini e le macchine (Aracne, 2008), Plus Ultra. Enciclopedismo
barocco e modernita’ (Trauben, 2001), and various articles and book chapters. He has
edited three collections of essays on visual culture and the avant-gardes.
YAHYA M. MADRA
Teaches political economy and history of economics at Gettysburg College. He is an
associate editor of Rethinking Marxism. He has published on the methodology and
philosophy of economics, and the intersection between Marxian political economy
and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His writings have appeared in Journal of Economic
Issues, Rethinking Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Society and Culture, Toplum ve Bilim (in
Turkish) and edited volumes. Currently, he is working on the intellectual genealogy of
neoliberalism and its variants.
ANTONIO NEGRI
Is a central figure of the Italian revolutionary current Operaismo. He began his
academic career as a professor of Political Science and State Doctrine at the
University of Padua and has since taught at a number of European institutions
including University of Paris VIII. He is author of over 30 books, including monographs
on Hegel, Descartes, Spinoza and Lenin, as well as books of contemporary political
theoretical analysis such as (in English translation) Books for Burning, Marx Beyond
Marx, and The Politics of Subversion. Negri has also co-written Labor of Dionysus,
Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth with Michael Hardt.
ARAS ÖZGÜN
A media studies/sociology scholar, and a media artist living in New York. He is currently
finishing his Ph.D. dissertation on the political economy of contemporary cultural
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 509
production in the Sociology Department of The New School for Social Research where
he also teaches digital media and media theory-related courses at the Media Studies
Department. He produces experimental, documentary and interactive media works.
CEREN ÖZSELÇUK
Teaches at the Sociology Department, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul. Her current
research intersects the fields of post-Althusserian thought, Marxian political economy
and psychoanalysis. In particular, she explores the relationships between the processes
of subjectivation and the ethico-political questions around economic transformation.
She is a member of the editorial board of Rethinking Marxism. She has authored and
co-authored articles in a number of academic journals in English and Turkish, such as
Rethinking Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, and Toplum ve Bilim.
ALVARO REYES
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GIGI ROGGERO
Has a Ph.D in the Sociology of Labor from the University of Calabria, and is currently a
postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Politics, Institutions, and History at the
University of Bologna. He is on the editorial board of the transnational edu-factory
project and the Uninomade collective, and a regular contributor to Il Manifesto. He is
the co-author of Futuro anteriore (2002), Precariopoli (2005), and Gli operaisti
(2005), and the author of Intelligenze fugitive (2005), L’archivio postcoloniale
(2008), La produzione del sapere vivo (2009), and The Production of Living
Knowledge (Temple University Press, Forthcoming).
DAVID RUCCIO
Professor of Economics and Policy Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He was the
editor of Rethinking Marxism from 1997 to 2009. His most recent book is Economic
Representations: Academic and Everyday (Routledge, 2008).
KENNETH SURIN
Teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University. His latest book is Freedom Not
Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Duke University Press, 2009).
KATHI WEEKS
Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University. She is the author of
Constituting Feminist Subjects (Cornell University Press, 1998) and co-editor of The
Jameson Reader (Blackwell, 2000). Her current interests include anti-work feminist
theory and post-work politics.