Special Issue on the Common and the Forms of the Commune

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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)


Editors’ Introduction We want to ask, rather, what is the operative notion of the common today, in the midst of postmodernity, the information revolution, and the consequent transformations of the mode of production. It seems to us, in fact, that today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism. The fact is that we participate in a productive world made up of communication and social networks, interactive services, and common languages. Our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing increasingly 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? ¨ zselc ´tienne Balibar and The first query posed by Anna Curcio and Ceren O ¸uk to E 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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030296-07 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490332


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representation of new processes of social and cognitive production of value, on the other, no longer exists.’’ Balibar similarly refuses the simple opposition inherent in the concept of ‘‘common.’’ Instead he insists on the term’s ‘‘equivocity,’’ its ‘‘variety of meanings and applications’’ as well as its evocation of a ‘‘permanent tension between opposite meanings.’’ At bottom, Negri and Balibar tentatively agree that the current global crisis is a calamity not merely of economic mechanisms, but of civilization, and that, as Balibar puts it, ‘‘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,’’’ which Balibar attaches to a concept of ‘‘‘equaliberty’ . . . will probably have to be completely reexamined.’’ In the meantime, however, the spirited exchange between Balibar and Negri accentuates the ontological, epistemological, and ethical stakes of their work. In his important contribution to unpacking one aspect of the ‘‘equivocacy’’ of the ‘‘common,’’ Jack Amariglio offers an analysis of Marx’s use of the ‘‘forms of commune’’ in the Grundrisse. For Amariglio, Marx’s discussion of the specific forms of the commune (the Asiatic, Germanic, ancient, original, and Slavonic) does not identify discrete modes of precapitalist production, but rather recognizes different articulations of the operations of the commune. Despite their geographic and temporal distinctions, all these forms coalesce around a communal class process that is, in each case, dominant and fundamental. Further, argues Amariglio, these various forms of the common can occupy the subjective space of both producer and appropriator of surplus, and are thus not simply demonstrations of the ‘‘paths out of ‘primitive communism,’’’ as so many other commentators on this portion of the Grundrisse have asserted. ‘‘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 dure é in precapitalist history,’’ writes Amariglio. Central to this analysis is his understanding of how certain aspects of subjectivity that appear to be tied to individual production and appropriation can be accommodated by the forms of the commune. In actuality, the commune itself retains the role of both producer and appropriator of surplus. Held in contradistinction to the collective, of course, is the individual, whose subjectivity*/ suggests Amariglio*/relies on the ability to produce and appropriate surplus, and whose role in modernity as a ‘‘self’’ goes hand in hand with the rise (and subsequent dominance) of capitalism. For Amariglio this capacity to produce and appropriate surplus may well be the key to understanding the formation of the subject, but it is also a potential capacity of the commune itself in the forms Marx identified. The conversation between Balibar and Negri and the trenchant essay by Amariglio serve as eloquent beginnings to the discussions that follow. ‘‘The Common and Its Production,’’ the first of four discrete sections into which the remainder of the articles in this issue are organized, opens with Michael Hardt’s essay, ‘‘The Common in Communism,’’ which focuses on yet another dialectical tension of ‘‘the common.’’ Beginning with the Communist Manifesto, Hardt points out that, for Marx and Engels, ‘‘the theory of communism is the abolition of private property.’’ Such a statement, of course, privileges the common and access to it. But Marx was also aware of a sea change taking place in his own time, a change that would see movable property*/the


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material commodities produced by industrialization*/displace the dominance of immovable property like land. Hardt asserts that in our own time we are on the verge of another transformation in which we are discarding the material, movable property produced through industrialized labor in favor of ‘‘immaterial and biopolitical’’ productions of property. Or, as he puts it, ‘‘whereas Marx focused on the mobility of property, today centrally at issue are scarcity and reproducibility, such that the struggle can be posed as being between exclusive versus shared property.’’ Just as property in the preindustrial and industrial systems insisted on a separation between individual ownership and the common, the new form of production that is replacing the industrial model relies on the universal claims that can be made on its commodities even as it clings to a specific concept of ‘‘property.’’ For Hardt this is propitious as, for him, any communist project must begin with a critique of political economy that is extended to a critique of property. And a critique of property tends toward an understanding that ‘‘what private property is to capitalism, and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism.’’ As capitalism increasingly depends on the biopolitical form of production and immaterial commodities that demand accessibility, the common becomes ever more available and thus the conditions of communism become ever more attainable. ‘‘Five Theses on the Common,’’ by Gigi Roggero, extends Hardt’s assertion that our current mode of production has moved beyond the production of movable property to the creation of ‘‘immaterial’’ commodities. Working within the framework of ‘‘cognitive capitalism,’’ Roggero begins by insisting on historicizing and situating the question of the commons. In asserting what might loosely be denoted as ‘‘characteristics’’ of the common, he strategically focuses on its operations in our own moment of capitalism. Even when he is at his most descriptive, as with thesis 3 (the common is not a natural good), Roggero is at pains to demonstrate that it is the processes of the common that must be taken into account and the social relationships that it defines epistemologically as well as ontologically. His broad-ranging essay moves nimbly from the double status of the common as both ‘‘a form of production and the source of a new social relationship’’ to the function of the common as a class concept that institutes ‘‘a new relationship between singularity and multiplicity’’ to a call to organize the common into a new theory and practice of communism. ¨ zgu In ‘‘Response: A Common Word,’’ Aras O ¨n masterfully fixes upon the paradox informing the discussion of property and its relation to the social in Hardt and Roggero’s essays, succinctly bringing together some of the main concerns of this ¨ zgu section of the special issue. O ¨n lucidly points out that, in rejecting ‘‘public property’’ for the sake of a ‘‘communist project,’’ Hardt and Roggero also remove the term ‘‘‘public’ from its hegemonic status as expressing an abstract collective will/ ¨ zgu body/thing.’’ For O ¨n, this opens up the possibility of a critique of political economy that is not dependent upon the ‘‘political terminology of liberal democracy.’’ As such, he writes, ‘‘‘common’ is not only ‘not property’ but is also not public.’’ The collective that is articulated is different from*/and not a substitute for*/the public. No longer bound by the oppositional binary of ‘‘classical liberal and socialist discourses,’’ we are free to ‘‘imagine a different form of ‘collectivity’.’’ The thoughtful, provocative ‘‘Free Association/Means in Common,’’ contributed by the 16beaver group, offers a collection of aesthetic insights on and articulations of



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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, Democracy, and Social Agency’’ begins the conversation by ‘‘broadening’’ those ‘‘unidimensional’’ notions of ‘‘the economy’’ and ‘‘the social’’ that have been foundational to much ‘‘orthodox thinking.’’ For Ruccio and Callari, the imperative is to create the possibility of economic and social forms ‘‘beyond capitalism’’ and to envisage ‘‘nontotalitarian,’’ inclusive economic and political ‘‘institutional forms’’ of ‘‘noncapitalism.’’ For them, this can only take place by rethinking and rearticulating a new understanding of the relations among the individual, community, and society. In insisting upon a multidimensional social space, Ruccio and Callari also recognize the interplay of differences that necessarily preclude a univocity for the democratic process. As they put it, this process must be conceptualized as one founded on ‘‘attempted translations between languages, cultural identities, forms of consciousness, social activities and locations, and so on.’’ The implications for the identities and social beings that emerge from these transactions of difference necessarily lead to more nuanced, multidimensional notions of the relation of those subjects to the social whole(s). Heterogeneous forms of agency coalesce into ‘‘concrete and particular (and thus ever changing) collective subjectivities*/society being thus a collection of ‘subjectivity collectives.’’’ Deborah Jenson’s ‘‘The Common without Copies, the International without Cosmopolitanism: Marx against the Romanticism of Likeness’’ examines Marx’s repudiation, thoughout his work, of imitation and copying. As she points out, ‘‘the irony of the mirror runs through the work of Karl Marx.’’ For Marx, there is a slavishness associated with the mimesis that he found everywhere. As Jenson writes, ‘‘Marx saw not only self-parody but pathos in the likeness of new forms of social life to old: ‘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.’’’ In her insightful analysis, she draws attention to Marx’s*/and later Marxism’s*/determination to conceive of a ‘‘space of the common without copies,’’ despite the fact that ‘‘if commodity processes are on some level expressive, 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.’’ Certainly, it became an important aspect of other nineteenth-century theorists of the social. Yet, the importance of the Marxian conception of the


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commons is in how we recognize ourselves in others: not in ‘‘the mirroring of minds’’ but rather in the collisions that restore freedom to the ‘‘laboring multitudes.’’ In ‘‘The Nature of the Common,’’ Federico Luisetti responds to these two articles by suggesting that they share ‘‘a deeper and 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.’’’ He aptly identifies the question at hand in the two articles: ‘‘What is the space of the common? . . . how can we describe a revolutionary political space and imagine an alternative relation with the ‘means of production in common’?’’ Moving beyond Simondon and invoking Bergson, Luisetti believes that we must accept ‘‘Nature’’ into our anticapitalist, post-Marxist imagination if we are to move forward and ‘‘collectively reconstruct an affirmative politics of the common.’’ S. Charusheela opens the section on ‘‘‘Modes’ of Community’’ with her insightful and wide-ranging article, ‘‘Engendering Feudalism: Modes of Production Revisited.’’ 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 exploitation ‘‘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



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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 unity and sameness.’’ The final section takes up the paradox of ‘‘Difference in Common,’’ which is indeed a motif that moves through every essay in this issue. Anna Curcio’s ‘‘Translating Difference and the Common’’ opens this discussion by arguing for what she calls ‘‘heterolingual translation’’ of difference as a means of disrupting the capitalist discourse of value. The focus of Curcio’s article is on racialized and gendered subjectivities, and their potential (through cooperation) for undoing capitalist imposed hierarchies. Drawing upon a broad range of scholars whose work has highlighted how capitalism has valorized (and thus exploited) difference, Curcio, like Amariglio and Charusheela, revisits an analysis of primitive accumulation. From her analysis, as she points out, it becomes evident that ‘‘the common cannot be taken for granted but must be constantly produced within the antagonist tension animating the relations of production.’’ For Curcio, the production of the subject is also linked to these agonistic tensions and, because of this, the formation of the subject is a ‘‘twin process’’ that ‘‘describes both forms of subjection and irreducible subjectivities producing the common.’’ That is to say, the subject is the product of capital and its power (and thus dominated by it), on the one hand, while on the other it has the potential to be an ‘‘autonomous and resisting force that exceeds power relations and capitalist production.’’ It is in this potentiality of resistance*/the struggle between labor and capital*/that ‘‘the construction of a different form of common living’’ can be*/indeed must be*/produced. Yet Curcio also recognizes that ‘‘the production of the common finds its potentia in the composition of the multiplicity of differences,’’ an observation that once again stresses the dialectic of singularities/homogeneity in the political construction of the common. ¨ zselc Yahya M. Madra and Ceren O ¸uk’s ‘‘Jouissance and Antagonism in the Forms of the Commune: A Critique of Biopolitical Subjectivity’’ is the penultimate contribution to this special issue and, like Curcio, their focus is upon the tension between the formation ¨ zselc (and operations) of the subject and the production of the common. Madra and O ¸uk are pointedly interested in the lacunae they identify in the literature on subjectivity and the common that has resulted as a discussion, via Foucault, of biopolitical governmentality. Although they agree with analyses that frame ‘‘neoliberalism as a constructivist political project,’’ they find that explanations ‘‘of how this political


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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 ˇiz subject. And for them, following Z ˇek, ‘‘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 ¨ zselc O ¸uk 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 ¨ zselc Madra and O ¸uk in ‘‘Subjectivity and Visions of the Common.’’ Hailing their work as ‘‘wonderful examples of the turn within contemporary Marxisms toward the centrality of questions regarding subjectivity,’’ he substantially engages with the ¨ zselc assumptions grounding each project. For instance, he wonders if Madra and O ¸uk inadequately address the possibility of the existence of the common as a discourse whose ‘‘central problematic’’ is that of producing subjects rather than being concerned with ‘‘the adequation of the subject to itself.’’ Yet he also accedes that ‘‘we must take seriously the task of illuminating the existence of communism within select social practices in the here and now, and not as a future Utopian schema.’’ His comments on Curcio’s article pick up on the theoretical implications of her discussion of resistance when he writes, ‘‘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 . . . while simultaneously claiming that this resistance is derived from that power.’’ According to Reyes, this ‘‘mirroring of power and resistance’’ is ‘‘particularly troubling’’ because ‘‘it parallels a similar mirroring between resistance and power in our political moment more broadly.’’ Citing the appropriation/production by the Obama campaign of the ‘‘¡Si se puede!’’ slogan, he notes how it ‘‘performs the dual function of delinking the force of the migrant marches from their political principles and, through the circulation of the image of Obama as rather literally embodying multiculturalism and multiracialism,’’ it shifts the ‘‘enthusiasm and social energy generated by those marches’’ onto his persona. For Reyes, the ‘‘central site of struggle over the construction and destruction of communism and the common’’ must focus on the increasing ‘‘de facto repression of the black and Latino (especially female) proletariat and subproletariat population.’’ The intellectual vigor and commitment evident in these articles speaks to the importance of the topic of this special issue, and Rethinking Marxism is exceptionally pleased to publish such a truly impressive array of expressions on the common and the forms of the commune. Despite the multiplicity of viewpoints and voices, the variety of approaches, and the assortment of Marxian pedigrees that are represented, the timeliness of these interventions is evident. Thus it is with enormous gratitude that we thank all who contributed to this forum.

The Editors

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Introduction: The Common and the Forms of the Commune


¨zselc Anna Curcio and Ceren O ¸uk 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 critique of property and commodity fetishism; the relation between ‘modes of production’ and ‘modes of subjectivity’; the rupture with a bourgeois political imaginary circumscribed by the relation between public and private; and the antagonistic nature of class as a process or composition. While an organizing aspiration has been to stage an encounter between operaismo and Althusserian Marxism, contributors complicate this divide by drawing from different philosophical sources and bringing into existence a broader intellectual plane within which these problematics can be situated. Key Words: Common, Commune, Operaismo, Althusserian Marxism, Communism

This special issue presents a collection of theoretically attuned articles. Early versions of these articles were first presented at ‘‘The Common and the Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social Imaginaries,’’ a symposium organized at Duke University and held 9/10 April 2009.1 The aim of the symposium was to stage a conversation between two strains of work, operaismo (Autonomist Marxism) and Althusserian Marxism, which stand out in their fecundity within the field of critical Marxism. For us, these names signify nothing less than the inauguration of new sites of Marxian thought that strongly affected forms of life and production of knowledge in the post/World War 2 conjuncture. One major influence has been the revival of the question of communism, which also informed the concerns of the symposium and this special issue. This question opens up the idea of communism, not only to its myriad conceptualizations*/such as a nonexploitative collective organization of class, a transformative struggle within relations of production, an ethical axiom, a political and transformative form of subjectivation (though it certainly invokes all of these)*/but also, in a manner that infuses and divides all these meanings, to a ‘‘critical and revolutionary tendency’’ 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. ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030304-08 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490344


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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 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 reformulations 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 ´tienne Balibar’s precise formulations (1996, 116). 2. We owe this insight to E 3. See, for instance, Pozzi and Tommasini (1979). 4. See Wright (2002) and Elliot (1987) for two highly informative studies that situate the formation and development of operaismo and Althusserian Marxism, respectively.


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¨ ZSELC CURCIO AND O ¸ UK

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 objects of engagement in this issue. Most important of all, both movements share a practice of ‘‘reading Marx, against Marxism,’’ as operaismo evocatively suggested. What immediately comes to mind is the ‘return’ to the Grundrisse by the central figures of operaismo and to Capital by Louis Althusser and his students, both of which represent profound attempts to break Marxism free from its essentialist and determinist closures (of economism, humanism, and historicism). What we discern from these novel experiences is a practice of reading that, far from pursuing a purification of an idea, or excavating arguments and seeking authority to justify a position, approaches reading itself as a practice of taking a position within the conjuncture. Indeed, various scholars have argued that the very gesture of a ‘return to reading Marx’ suspended the sacred authority of the readings propagated by the then communist parties and their allied intellectuals and movements.5 Approached from a different angle, besides putting in question the interpretive monopoly of the orthodoxy, what ‘a return to Marx’ attests to is the multiplicity in Marx himself, or, better said, the uncontrollable effects of his works, thus their interminable potential that is released insofar as each ‘return’ situates these works in relation to their own internal tensions as well as the social conditions of the times. Perhaps it is with this spirit that many of the contributors to this issue similarly ‘return’ to the various texts of Marx*/from the better-known Communist Manifesto, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Grundrisse, and Capital to the lesser-known Theories of Surplus Value, Critique of the Gotha Programme, The Ethnological Notebooks, and more obscure correspondence and newspaper manifestos. As they take up pressing issues, which, to a significant degree, owe their current expression to the initial, unfinished, and at times contradictory formulations by Marx, the contributors demonstrate that returning to Marx is not only extremely actual, but also necessary to engage with our contemporary world. Among these issues, we can mention the critique of property and commodity fetishism; the relation between ‘modes of production’ and ‘modes of subjectivity’; the rupture with a bourgeois 5. For example, Elliot (1987, 56) makes this argument.



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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 reconceptualize 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 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.

Common and the Commune 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.


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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. 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 Rancie `re (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.



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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 interminable process of struggle. In turning to the second concept, the commune, we are guided by a number of different references within Marx’s texts, advancing a multiplicity of connected issues and questions. An obvious reference is the Paris Commune which, in The Civil War in France, Marx designated as the ‘‘glorious harbinger of a new society.’’ In a recent exposition, Alain Badiou (2006) recovers the significance of the Commune by locating its genuine political invention in its complete break with statist reoccupations.10 As Badiou’s account brings to light, the significance of the Paris Commune is that it calls to consideration an instantiation of communism as it emerges from the conjunctural coming together of a political subjectivation and an organizational capacity that was able to think politics beyond the (nation) state form. Proceeding from the Paris Commune, the conditions and the material of political subjectivation remain an open problem. This and the connected issues of the nature of ‘‘constituent power’’ and ‘‘disidentification,’’ and how these relate to the sphere of production; the hold of investments and jouissance that shore up capitalist relations and stunt subjectivation; the necessity to invent institutions and organizations that do not identify with the state, are all raised as pressing problems in a number of papers. On the other hand, the Russian commune that Marx engages in his correspondence with Russian revolutionary populists, especially in his exchange of letters with Vera Zasulich, is illustrative of the way in which the teleological narrative of class transition (which has to go through the necessary stage of capitalism), so often deployed to reduce Marxism to determinism, is put into question.11 Today, when the debates on ‘‘transition’’ and ‘‘articulation of modes of production’’ seem to have long waned, the remainder of a telos continues to creep surreptitiously into critical 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.


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accounts of capitalism*/if no longer as the explicit guarantor of communism, then as an implicit limitation that tacitly posits capitalism as a comprehensive and conclusive totality, thus inhibiting imaginations of community other than modernist and capitalist forms of social relations. Some of the contributors to this issue offer conceptualizations to undo such limitation through revisiting the mode-of-production problematic and recovering its varied antideterminist aspirations, embodied in ideas of overdetermination and the primacy of class struggle, in order to deconstruct, in different ways, the ‘‘prehistory’’ of capitalism. If one such way is to reintroduce feudal as a timely concept in order to render visible contemporary, resistant, nonmodern and noncapitalist subjectivities, another is to conceive primitive accumulation as a persistent process of capitalist dispossession and class struggle (in its articulations with race and gender) as its dynamic constituent, thus to highlight resistant subjectivities within capitalist relations. At the same time, however, we pose whether these two conceptualizations 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 formations 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 household 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.


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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, trans. S. Corcoran, 257/90. New York: Verso. ´. 1996. Structural causality, overdetermination, and antagonism. In Balibar, E Postmodern materialism and the future of Marxist theory, ed. A. Callari and D. F. Ruccio, 109/19. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Copjec, J. 2002. Imagine there’s no woman: Ethics and sublimation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1994. What is a concept? In What is philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, 15/34. New York: Columbia University Press. Elliot, G. 1987. The detour of theory. New York: Verso. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Krader, L., ed. 1972. The ethnological notebooks of Karl Marx. Assen: Van Gorcum. Lacan, J. 1998. The seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XX, encore: On feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge, 1972/1973. Trans. B. Fink, ed. J.-A. Miller. New York: W. W. Norton. Montag, W. 1996. Beyond force and consent: Hobbes, Spinoza, Althusser. In Postmodern materialism and the future of Marxist theory, ed. A. Callari and D. F. Ruccio, 91/106. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Pozzi, P., and R. Tommasini, eds. 1979. Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale: intervista sull’operaismo/Toni Negri. Milan: Multhipla. Rancie `re, J. 2009. The emancipated spectator. Trans. G. Elliot. New York: Verso. Shanin, T. 1983. Late Marx and the Russian road: Marx and ‘‘the peripheries of capitalism.’’ New York: Monthly Review Press. Wright, S. 2002. Storming heaven: Class composition and struggles in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

On the Common, Universality, and Communism: A Conversation between ´ Etienne Balibar and Antonio Negri


Introduction by Anna Curcio and ¨ zselc Ceren O ¸uk In this conversation E´tienne 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. Key Words: Communism, the Common, Equaliberty, Economic Crisis, Readings of Marx

Introduction by ¨ zselc Anna Curcio and Ceren O ¸uk When we contemplated this event, our desire was to facilitate a conversation between two vibrant strains of work within the Marxian tradition. In naming these strains Autonomist Marxism and Althusserian Marxism, our intention was not to treat them as mutually exclusive or unified schools of thought. Similarly, we do not wish to ´tienne Balibar as representative, respectively, of each of position Toni Negri and E these extremely internally varied traditions. Balibar once said, ‘‘I am not a representative of the ‘Althusserian School’*/for the simple reason that that school never existed as such’’: that is, as a ‘‘unified doctrine.’’ We share his insight and recognize the internal diversity as well as the cross-disseminations in the development of each of these movements. For us, what make these traditions meaningful today are the problematics and ideas that they helped to raise as well as the unrealized possibilities of these problematics and ideas, which are materialized and ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030312-17 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490356



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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, 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. ´tienne Balibar’s and some post-Althusserians’ recent writings, communism In E 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 (e´galiberte´). 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 ´tienne Balibar, take these two aspects of the conversation between Toni Negri and E crisis as their points of entry.

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Question 1 A particular argument proposed in Multitude and further developed in Commonwealth is that financialization crystallizes the way in which the value of (the present and future) social cooperation and living labor is homogenized, subjected to abstraction through money, and expropriated by capitalism. In this process of financialization, we locate a particular subjective support. As a substitute for the disappearing welfare state, the process of neoliberal financialization interpellates individuals as managers of their consumption and retirement plans as well as entrepreneurs of their own human capital. In the face of this subjective support of financialization, how do we distinguish the affects, desires, and forms of cooperation that produce the common from those that reproduce capitalistic cooperation? In this sense, is there not a role for ethics (beyond an ontology of the common) in the production of the common? Could we imagine communism as the name of such an ethics? Furthermore, given the displacement of the welfare state by the process of privatization and individuation, how does the idea of the common enable us to rethink, or perhaps think beyond, the relationship between the state and the public?

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 pronouncements 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)?


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Conversation between Toni Negri and ´ Etienne Balibar 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 ´tienne Balibar (who tries to distinguish current of operaismo as a whole) and by E himself from the Althusserian tradition with right resolve). Let us start with the second figure: the individual who is subject to the civic and 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 ethicopolitical 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


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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 composition 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 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 communism 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


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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. ´ Etienne Balibar: I will return to the issue of equaliberty. I am always a little uncomfortable with explaining or defending my own ideas but, after all, this is something probably an intellectual, or a public intellectual, has to do. So, I will try to do it and answer Toni’s criticism, which I perfectly understand. But right now, in reaction to Toni’s positions, let me say three things. First of all, starting again from the question about the crisis and financialization: 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,


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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 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


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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. Negri: First, I do not believe that historical materialism is a constrictive ontology, a determinism, or a teleology. I think that in historical materialism and its ontological condition we must include chance, the clinamen, alternative productions of subjectivity, the aleatory connections of modes and so forth: Spinozist ontology integrates and qualifies the horizon of materialism. Second, my impression is that when we talk about labor, as we started doing in 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. Governance 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


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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 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 anthropological 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



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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 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. ´tienne presented to sum up the discussion correctly Negri: The three proposals E 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


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of ‘common notions’. The epistemological and ontological questions need to be kept tightly together. (Here I am also referring to the aporia*/that was ‘actually’ not an aporia*/proposed by Derrida in his Specters of Marx.) ´tienne’s proposal, I insist that it is important to avoid excluding (2) With respect to E the principles of right and citizenship by relegating them to a sphere that, however common, lies beyond the state; they have to be strictly linked to the new rights of living labor. If we fail to perform this conjunction, I am afraid that the new rights of citizenship and equaliberty will cease to exist. (3) Central to this problem are the making-multitude and building of the common, not only in the dialectical terms of mediation but also in constituent and ethico´tienne highlights a very difficult problem indeed. It is no less than political terms. E the problem of social conflict and its solution, one that needs to be seen in a continuous perspective up to the ever present hypothesis of civil war. Perhaps, as we have argued, a realist definition of governance and its internal articulation can help 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 ´tienne’s third discussed capitalist government, I propose to develop, in line with E 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


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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. 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


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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 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



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was Marx’s reductionist understanding of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition from which he wanted to distantiate himself). (4) This would lead us to another interesting confrontation on the issue of institution and its relationship to what I called the model of bifurcation. I welcome the idea that, not only should communists make ‘propositions’, appear as a ‘creative’ force (not only a ‘reactive’ or even a ‘resisting’ force), but these propositions should concern alternative institutions. Perhaps this insistence on institutions, and the disjunction of the institutional dimensions of politics from an ‘artificialist’ view, is something that comes from Hume, through the intermediary of Deleuze. But it also has a Spinozist and Rousseauist dimension. Marxism, traditionally, has been almost unable to cope with the dilemmas of the institution (for example, participation versus representation), even when these played a key role in its own political experiences (the ‘party’, the ‘social movement’, the ‘councils’, etc.). All this clearly relates to the reunification of the issues of communism and democracy that we both advocate (with several others: Rancie `re, 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 selforganization 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 allpervading, 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:


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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 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 contradiction 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



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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 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.

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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 ´. 1994. Masses, classes, ideas: Studies on politics and philosophy before and Balibar, E after Marx. Trans. J. Swenson. New York: Routledge. */* */ /. 2002. Politics and the other scene. New York: Verso. 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)

Subjectivity, Class, and Marx’s ‘‘Forms of the Commune’’


Jack Amariglio Forms of subjectivity are implied by the concepts of ‘‘direct producer’’ and ‘‘appropriator of surplus labor’’ in Marxian class theory. The section of Marx’s Grundrisse that discusses ‘‘forms that precede capitalist production’’ elaborates a 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. Key Words: Class, Subjectivity, Commune, Grundrisse, Individuals

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). ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030329-16 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490357


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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 (economic/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, ‘‘individually.’’ In my gloss on Marx’s presentation, I consider two poles in modern notions of subjectivity: individuality and communality (or collectivity). I look at how the concept of class is made ready for action by concepts of the individual or of the commune/collective as direct producer and/or appropriator.3 But there are innumerable concrete ways of conceiving of individuals and collectives as subjects for class. In the history of ideas, Marx is prolific in producing alternative concepts of individuality and collectivity and using them as raw material in working up concepts of class or their close relations (e.g., notions of property ownership), and perhaps he does this best in the section of the Grundrisse that pertains to ‘‘forms of the commune.’’ My reading of Marx’s ‘‘forms of the commune’’ highlights certain ideas. First, Marx is describing ‘‘original,’’ Germanic, Asiatic, and ancient forms of the commune, and not distinct modes of production or different class processes. Second, these alternative forms of the commune can each be the subject that fills conceptual spaces of the direct producer and the appropriator of surplus labor. This gives rise to my position that what Marxists have termed ‘‘primitive communism’’ comes in a variety of forms, all of which, though, contain a communal class process as the 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.


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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.

Forms of the Commune 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 dureé 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


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proprietorship correspond to variations in the basic nature of the commune. What is striking, given the attention Marx pays elsewhere in the Grundrisse to occasions in which necessary and surplus labor exist and assume a variety of forms*/they may even disappear! (see Marx 1976, 525/33, 604/10, 705/6)*/is that he does not trace within the ‘‘logical’’ movement from one variant of the commune to another any change in the prevailing mode of performing/appropriating surplus labor. No supersession of what can be understood as a ‘‘communal’’ form of performing and appropriating surplus labor occurs within Marx’s story though all the following transform during the commune’s historical development: forms of property; different subjectivities; forms of the labor process; political relations among commune members; unique geographical and climatic conditions; a variety of social sites, such as family, clan, tribe, or community; and different degrees of the social division of labor. These can all be seen as so many different conditions of existence 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 deromanticizes 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 depended 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,



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language, customs,’’ the commune comes to represent itself, subjectively, as a unity in which proprietary rights reside. In this form of the commune, surplus labor performed predominantly on communal land is appropriated by the entire clan. Marx does not privilege the idea that the direct producer of surplus is an individuated, laboring subjective entity over a subjectivity in which, or through which, the commune/clan is the unity to which the term direct producer can be applied. The notion of a direct producer, or worker, is seen as a historical product. As he says, ‘‘the positing of the individual as a worker, in this nakedness, is itself a product of history’’ (472). When Marx turns to the ‘‘Germanic’’ form of the commune, then we encounter laborers as independent proprietors, something approaching the ‘‘Crusoeism’’ of the ‘‘free association of men’’ that Marx imagines in the first chapter of Capital (1976, 171). Yet, in the Grundrisse, these laborers/proprietors are first and foremost members of a clan/commune, and it is only by virtue of that membership that they attain such independence and their claim to ‘‘ownership’’ of their conditions of production and reproduction. Marx distinguishes the independence and proprietorship*/the putative freedom*/of laborers when the commune is mostly a thing of the past from the circumstance in which physical, geographical, and ideological separation, mostly by family, occasions the appearance and reproduction of the community itself. The segmentation of the clan into distinct family units does not imply collapse of the commune, nor does it imply different, noncommunal forms of appropriation of surplus labor. To the contrary, it is the kinship principle, in Marx’s discussion, that permits separation in the first place, and it is that principle in practice that guarantees an agent’s ability to ‘‘individually’’ appropriate, and never for ‘‘himself’’ (Marx considers the historic Germanic commune from the standpoint of patriarchy, in which the ‘‘head of the household’’ is the reigning male figure) but on behalf of his family. This last point helps us understand why Marx insists on characterizing Germanic sociality as a form of the commune and not as a noncommunal ‘‘mode of production.’’ For Marx, the male head of household within the Germanic form is one representation of the commune/clan, and it is solely as the representation of the clan’s unity*/realized in the allegedly ‘‘democratic’’ assembly of male patriarchs*/that the householder and his family are entitled to appropriation of their own surplus. There is unfortunate ambiguity in Marx’s discussion of individuality within the Germanic form of the commune, as he toggles between family and male head of household as the prevailing subject of production/appropriation. This has given rise to the misattribution of surplus appropriation to a particular type of individual producer (a male peasant, say) instead of the family unit, deeply embedded in communality. I don’t think the Grundrisse, though, supports the notion of individual male heads of families appropriating ‘‘on their own.’’ Instead, Marx implies that heads of households do not achieve ‘‘self-exploitation’’ of their ‘‘own’’ surplus, nor do they additionally exploit, according to a different class process, other family members. While the history of patriarchy involves all manner of violence against subjugated family members, in Marx’s description of the Germanic commune,


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appropriation is a family affair, and family is a molecule of the self-representation and existence of the commune.4 At a different pole, Marx discusses the ‘‘Asiatic’’ form of the commune, based upon his reading of ‘‘despotic’’ empires that he believed reigned at different points of especially Chinese and Indian history. (I leave aside here the literature on so-called oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production, though Marx’s writings in the Grundrisse and elsewhere are very much at the center of disputes and have been lambasted for their ‘‘orientalism.’’) Marx places the Asiatic form of the commune closer to the ‘‘original’’ commune than the Germanic. What distinguishes the Asiatic commune from ‘‘original’’ communism is that, in the Asiatic commune, the cohesion of the commune is represented by a ‘‘comprehensive unity’’ that often takes the form of a despot who, Marx claims, is seen by the members of the commune*/organized in village communities*/either as the ‘‘father of the many communities’’ (473) or as an intermediary for an ‘‘imagined clan-being, the god’’ (473). In terms of proprietorship, Marx says this ‘‘higher unity’’ represented in and by the person/body of the despot ‘‘appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor, the real communities hence only as hereditary possessors’’ (472/3). Yet, Marx unequivocally states that it is the clan and the existence of communal property that is represented by the despot. The ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘objective’’ commune, as opposed to its ‘‘imaginary’’ representation in the person/body of the despot, is the village community, which Marx characterizes as self-sustaining because of its ‘‘combination of manufactures and agriculture’’ (473). The village community ‘‘contains all the conditions of reproduction and surplus production within itself’’ (473) with the important exception of the capacity to represent the unity of the commune to itself. On this basis, a portion of surplus labor ‘‘belongs to the higher community,’’ the despot, and takes the form of tribute and/or ‘‘common labor for the exaltation of the unity’’ (473). Marx’s discussion implies that appropriation by the Asiatic state/despot is undertaken by the commune itself. The Asiatic state appropriates surplus labor along with the village communities because it is the highest representation of Asiatic clan unity. Note the particular novelty and also difficulty Marx introduces. While scornful of despotism, Marx does not produce an analysis of the Asiatic commune based upon the notion of ‘‘false consciousness,’’ in which case it is fairly easy to argue that the cynical appropriation by despots in the name of the ‘‘higher community’’ and the unity that they supposedly represent is nothing but a sham, disguising exploitation that is far removed from communal appropriation. Yet Marx, the grand demystifier, does not take that tack; the Grundrisse is eye-opening for Marx’s insistence on taking seriously the notion that there is no meaningful difference between the ‘‘real’’ and the ‘‘imaginary’’ when it comes to the actions of the clan/commune on its own behalf.5 Though he writes 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. ¨ zselçuk (2010) read Marx’s discussion on the forms of the commune 5. Yahya Madra and Ceren O similarly. They state: ‘‘perhaps surprisingly, Marx suggests the possibility of a communal form



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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, noncommunist exploitation of peasants by the Asiatic state. It may, of course, be a subsumed class payment, but it is in relation to a communal fundamental class process. Should the Asiatic commune dissolve and should that same person/clan retain its place as the appropriator of surplus labor, then a new form of surplus extraction would be born, and the claim of the despot to appropriate the surplus would move toward more private appropriation. The change in representation*/from communal to individual*/and the change in who or what is considered a direct producer or appropriator makes a world of difference for class analysis, if the Grundrisse is followed.

The Individual as the Subject of Class In his discussion of forms of the commune, Marx makes constant reference to ‘‘individual,’’ ‘‘collective,’’ and ‘‘communal.’’ Marx depicts the variations in individuality and collectivity that arise within the context of ‘‘primitive’’ communism, and this leads to changes in these terms’ meanings. Individual, collective, and communal have been defined in so many different ways that it is dizzying to make sense out of what is included or excluded from any particular rendition. This problem is not remedied by reference to Marx since in his writings there are various, contending conceptions of each of these terms. Sticking to conceptions of individuality, a survey of Marx’s ‘‘late’’ writings finds the isolated individual, private individual, real individual, social individual, and natural 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.’’


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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) where he excoriates the ‘‘Robinsonades’’ that posit the ‘‘Natural Individual’’ as a consequence of the state of nature rather than as socially, historically produced. The farther back one goes in historical time, the more one sees the ‘‘producing individual’’ as belonging to a social grouping. Positing ‘‘the individual’’ without reference to different historical epochs runs the risk of naturalizing and eternalizing the most recent form of individuality. What it would mean to have in the subject position of direct producer the isolated individual that emerges, Marx says, as one whose relative independence is secured by the reign of freedom and expropriation that betokens the rise of ‘‘civil society,’’ is a different matter if one places in that role a less isolated type of individuality. As we have seen in Marx’s discussion of forms of the commune, some kinds of individuality give rise to the idea that direct producers are independent and separate or isolated from the collective, while others beckon toward a more ‘‘social’’ form of individuality. Marx cautions against reading individual labor as identical in each setting, since the individual direct producer where labor is isolated, divided and socially separated, as in the case of the freed (hence, dispossessed) worker, is different from the direct producer, which Marx also calls ‘‘individual,’’ that is positioned by his or her place within a family or community. To get another idea of the difficulty here, I quote from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy7 (my citation is taken from Jean-Luc Nancy [1991]). 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



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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 which this mode of production is based, [that] prevents the labour of an individual from becoming private labour and his product the private product of a separate individual; it [is community that] causes individual labour to appear . . . as the direct function of a member of the social organization. (Marx, quoted in Nancy 1991, 74)

Here, Nancy understands Marx to be remarking on ‘‘the social character of labors in primitive communities,’’ and this is important because Nancy’s reading is unlike that of many others who have regarded this and related comments by Marx, especially similar formulations in the Grundrisse, as being about noncommunal ‘‘modes of production.’’ Nancy’s identification of Marx’s discussion of the ‘‘rural patriarchal system’’*/which accords best with either Marx’s description in the Grundrisse of the Germanic and ancient forms of the commune or his discussion of peasant households within ‘‘primitive communes’’*/illuminates that, for Marx (and Nancy), the division of social labor into separated households and the division of labor within a household do not contravene assigning these households to the category of the commune. Nancy’s exegesis in this passage bears further commentary.8 For Nancy, community, as Marx discusses it, ‘‘means here the socially exposed particularity, in opposition to 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.

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the socially imploded generality characteristic of capitalist community’’ (1991, 74). In Nancy’s view, the concept of community that Marx is opening up is that of an ‘‘articulation of singularities,’’ or, as he puts it, ‘‘‘sociality’ as a sharing, and not as a fusion, as an exposure, or as an immanence’’ (75). Marx’s concept of community here, in the ‘‘primitive commune’’ he is describing, ‘‘is formed by an articulation of ‘particularities,’ and not founded in any autonomous essence that would subsist by itself and that would reabsorb or assume singular beings into itself’’ (75). Nancy redefines, using Marx as his guide, concepts of community and individuality in order to posit a form of subjectivity that is not captured by ‘‘essentialist’’ notions of these concepts. Toward this end, he introduces the idea of the ‘‘singular being’’ as that which Marx is describing as the inhabitants of primitive communes. These beings 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 cleavage, of twisting, of chance, whose network makes up their being-incommon. This condition means, moreover, that these singular beings are ends for one another. It even goes so far . . . as to mean that together they relate, in some respect or in some way, from the very heart of their singularities and in the play of their articulation, to a totality that marks their common end*/or the common end (community) of all the finalities that they represent for one another, and against one another. (75) 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-Franc ¸ois Lyotard, to complain that Marx’s vision of advanced communism (the communism after capitalism) is nothing more than a ‘‘collective Crusoe-ism’’



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(1993, 135). Lyotard questions this concept of community as reinscribing totalizing concepts of subjectivity that structure ‘‘political economy.’’ But Marx’s free association is one of various forms of collectivity that he intimates can serve as the subject of a communal fundamental class process, despite the fact that, along the lines of Lyotard’s complaints, one could see the situation as a sprawling constellation of little, brightly lit Crusoes in which some different fundamental class process (perhaps self-exploitation) could be theorized. There is no obvious division between characterizing production by ‘‘individuals’’ versus by ‘‘collective’’ forms of subjectivity. Likewise, there is little possibility of halting the proliferation of class positions that depend on this or that reading of subjectivity as it overdetermines the concept of class. Indeed, from certain perspectives within Marxism, every social formation could be characterized without too much angst as having communism as its dominant class form. What this move requires is to take utterly seriously notions of sociality and community that are thought to circumscribe all individual activity. This is no minor point: it may be politically important to some struggles for community to imagine communities as originary direct producers and appropriators even though some within those communities uphold their own ‘‘right’’ to private appropriation based on their labor or private ownership of means of production. Such movements as the new communitarianism or shareholders’ rights suggest not only a new politics of distribution, but a reconsideration of whether it is ultimately the community or some private entity that performs and/or appropriates surplus labor.9 Thus, even capitalism may be a variant of communism (this idea is grasped by Nancy in his ironic mention of ‘‘communist capitalism’’*/of course, he also suggests the idea of a ‘‘capitalist communism’’ [1991, 75]), if one were to argue that it is the form of the commune that positions some of its members as titular owners of productive property and others as dispossessed. While this is not my argument here*/I am opposed to it*/I do not think that a reading of Marx completely prohibits this formulation, just as I think perusing Marx yields a preponderance of material to attack this view. But it is not unfathomable how one could reduce some ‘‘social’’ forms of production and exploitation to something like what is described by the term ‘‘self-exploitation.’’ And this would include communism as well. What this last idea requires is the disbelief that there exists any form of subjectivity that fills the role of direct producer and/or appropriator other than Marx’s isolated individual. It is not long past that there was much interest in a school of Marxian political economy for which all forms of sociality and collectivity are disaggregated to reveal, at bottom, the individual and his or her preferences and activities. The search for ‘‘microfoundations’’ of Marxian class theory and the ‘‘methodological individualism’’ that it implied can be extended, if one wishes, to the notion of class process. This could engender a theory of class in which all class 9. On the politics of distribution involved in shareholder rights struggles, see Gibson-Graham (2006). George DeMartino tells me that some institutionalist economists view production and consumption as essentially communal activities in all societies, despite the claims of some that their private labor or right of ownership makes it only fair for them to receive the rewards of ‘‘their’’ work.

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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.


What Self Exploits (Itself)? To come at this question otherwise, if we conceive the direct producer as an individual isolated and separated from all other producers, then perhaps self-exploitation is indeed possible. While critics of this concept are drawn primarily to the term beyond the hyphen (exploitation), I find more worthy of discussion, because problematic, the image of ‘‘self’’ that this concept projects. In defense of the concept, I see no reason 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 ‘‘selfexploitation’’ 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



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labour’’ (408/9). In Marx’s interpretation, it is the ownership of the means of production that is decisive in this craftsperson/peasant taking ‘‘possession of his own surplus-labour and thus bear[s] to himself as wage-labourer the relation of being his own capitalist’’ (409). Marx is cognizant of his application to the situation at hand of the ‘‘internal’’ ideology of the capitalist era, in which means of production surface as capital and confront labor as an ‘‘independent force.’’ This application turns out to be a major contribution, or concession, if you like, to his analysis of the content and character of class processes throughout human history. The thought categories that grow up with ‘‘the determinate social character of the means of production in capitalist production’’ (408) have such pervasive force that they must be apprehended and utilized as accurate descriptions and concrete starting points even when, as with the supposed ‘‘real’’ inseparableness of means of production and labor within or in relation to the peasant’s/craftsperson’s self, the historically true categories 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.

How Class May Constitute Concepts of Subjectivity 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


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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 Westernstyle 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 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 characteristic 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.



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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 one of the elements at the core of modern notions of ‘‘productivity,’’ as humans become increasingly conscious subjects through the ever rising production of surpluses*/then we can say provisionally that the notion of a distinctly human subject since the seventeenth century has depended on the capacity of humans to consciously produce and appropriate surplus. The production and appropriation of surplus are what may ultimately determine relative ‘‘independence,’’ so important to this concept of subjectivity. While recent social theory emphasizes other peculiarly human elements, such as desire, in describing subjectivity, surpluses and their appropriation/consumption may be indispensable for determining notions of subjectivity.

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, ¨ zselçuk, Anna Curcio, and Jenny Cameron, Yahya Mete Madra, Kenan Erçel, Ceren O 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.


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Gabriel, S. 1990. Ancients: A Marxian theory of self-exploitation. Rethinking Marxism 3 (1): 85/106. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. The end of capitalism (as we knew it). Oxford: Blackwell. Hotch, J. 2000. Classing the self-employed: New possibilities of power and collectivity. In Class and its others, ed. J. K. Gibson-Graham, S. A. Resnick, and R. D. Wolff, 143/62. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jennings, F. 1975. The invasion of America: Indians, colonialism, and the cant of conquest. New York: W. W. Norton. Kayatekin, S. A., and S. Charusheela. 2004. Recovering feudal subjectivities. Rethinking Marxism 16 (4): 377/96. Lyotard, J.-F. 1993. Libidinal economy. Trans. I. H. Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ¨ zselc Madra, Y., and C. O ¸uk. 2010. Jouissance and antagonism in the forms of the commune: A critique of biopolitical subjectivity. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3): 481/97. Marx, K. 1969. Theories of surplus-value. Part 1. Trans. E. Burns, ed. S. Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress. */* */ /. 1973. Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. New York: Vintage. */* */ /. 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. Trans B. Fowkes. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin. Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The inoperative community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Norton, B. 2001. Reading Marx for class. In Re/presenting class: Essays in postmodern Marxism, ed. J. K. Gibson-Graham, S. Resnick, and R. Wolff, 23/55. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Resnick, S. A., and R. D. Wolff. 1987. Knowledge and class: A Marxian critique of political economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. */* */ /, eds. 2006. New departures in Marxian theory. New York: Routledge. Ruccio, D. 1992. Failure of socialism, future of socialists? Rethinking Marxism 5 (2): 7/22. Ruccio, D., and J. Amariglio. 2003. Postmodern moments in modern economics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Smith, P. 1988. Discerning the subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tully, J. 1980. A discourse on property: John Locke and his adversaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Common and Its Production


Michael Hardt Gigi Roggero ¨ zgu Aras O ¨n

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

The Common in Communism


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 transformed into either private or public property. The task is to institute free access and circulation of the common. Key Words: Common, Communism, Karl Marx, Critique of Property, Biopolitical Production

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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030346-11 – 2010 Michael Hardt DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490365


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concepts themselves to restore or renew their meaning. In the case of communism, this requires an analysis of the forms of political organization that are possible today and, before that, an investigation of the nature of contemporary economic and social production. I will limit myself in this essay to the preliminary task of the critique of political economy. One reason the communist hypotheses of previous eras are no longer valid is that the composition of capital*/as well as the conditions and products of capitalist production*/have altered. Most important, the technical composition of labor has changed. How do people produce both inside and outside the workplace? What do they produce and under what conditions? How is productive cooperation organized? And what are the divisions of labor and power that separate them along gender and racial lines and in the local, regional, and global contexts? In addition to investigating the current composition of labor, we also have to analyze the relations of property under which labor produces. Along with Marx we can say that the critique of political 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 midnineteenth 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 characterized 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,


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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 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 midnineteenth 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,



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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 labor, but I cannot treat them in this essay.1 If we focus on the new struggle between two forms of property implied by this transition, we can return to Marx’s formulations. Whereas in Marx’s time the struggle was between immobile property (such as land) and movable property (such as material commodities), today the struggle is between material property and immaterial property*/or, to put it another way, whereas Marx focused on the mobility of property, today centrally at issue are scarcity and reproducibility, such that the struggle can be posed as being between exclusive and shared property. The contemporary focus on immaterial and reproducible property in the capitalist economy can be recognized easily from even a cursory glance at the field of property law. Patents, copyrights, indigenous knowledges, genetic codes, the information in the germplasm of seeds, and similar issues are the most actively debated topics in the field. The fact that the logic of scarcity does not hold in this domain poses new problems for property. Just as Marx saw that movement necessarily triumphs over immobility, so too today the immaterial triumphs over the material, the reproducible over the unreproducible, and the shared over the exclusive. The emerging dominance of this form of property is significant, in part, because it demonstrates and returns to center stage of the conflict between the common and property as such. Ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, and even affects can be privatized and controlled as property, but it is more difficult to police ownership because they are so easily shared or reproduced. There is a constant pressure for such goods to escape the boundaries of property and become common. If you have an idea, sharing it with me does not reduce its utility to you but usually increases it. In fact, in order to realize their maximum productivity, ideas, images, and affects must be common and shared. When they are privatized their productivity reduces dramatically*/and, I would add, making the common into public property, that is, subjecting it to state control or management, similarly reduces productivity. Property is becoming a fetter on the capitalist mode of production. Here is an emerging contradiction internal to capital: the more the common is corralled as property, the 1. On immaterial and biopolitical production, see Hardt and Negri (2009, chap. 3).


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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 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, 2. For an excellent analysis of neoliberalism’s focus on extractive industries in Africa, see Ferguson (2006).



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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. 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 3. See Marx’s discussion of cooperation in chapter 13 of volume 1 of Capital (1976, 439/54).


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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 universal, extended to the entire community it is no longer really private. He is trying to emphasize, it seems to me, that in crude communism, even though the private character has been stripped away, property remains. Communism properly conceived instead is the abolition of not only private property but property as such. ‘‘Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it’’ (351). What would it mean for something to be ours when we do not possess it? What would it mean to regard ourselves and our world not as property? Has private property made us so stupid that we cannot see that? Marx is searching here for the common. The open access and sharing that characterize use of the common are outside of and inimical to property relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common. Marx does arrive at a version of the common (as the abolition of property) some twenty years later in volume 1 of Capital, when he defines communism as the result of capital’s negative dialectic. The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. (1976, 929) Capitalist development inevitably results in the increasingly central role of cooperation and the common, which in turn provides the tools for overthrowing the capitalist mode of production and constitutes the bases for an alternative society and mode of production, a communism of the common. What I find dissatisfying about this passage from Capital, though, aside from its dialectical construction, is that the common Marx refers to*/‘‘co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production’’*/grasps primarily the material elements in question, the immobile and movable forms of property made



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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 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, contemplating, 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


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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 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 exploitation 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.



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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 composition of capital but also class composition*/asking, in other words, how people produce, what they produce, and under what conditions, both in and outside the workplace, both in and outside relations of wage labor. And all this reveals, I maintain, the increased centrality of the common. The second point extends the critique of political economy to the critique of property. And, specifically, communism is defined by not only the abolition of property but also the affirmation of the common*/the affirmation of open and autonomous biopolitical production, the self-governed continuous creation of new humanity. In the most synthetic terms, what private property is to capitalism and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism. Putting my two points together*/that capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and that the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism*/indicates that the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task of organizing it.

References Boyer, R. 2002. La croissance, de´but de sie `cle. 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 Rancie `re’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 Rancie `re’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 Rancie `re’s notion of politics: the partage of the common. I explore the role of the common in Rancie `re’s thought briefly in ‘‘Production and Distribution of the Common’’ (Hardt 2009).


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Foucault, M. 1994. Entretien (with Duccio Tromadori). In Dits et ećrits, 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. */* */ /. 1975. Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In Early writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton. London: Penguin. */* */ /. 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London: Penguin. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1998. The communist manifesto. London: Verso. Rancie `re, J. 1999. Disagreement. Trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, E. P. 1967. Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism. Past and Present 38 (1): 56/97. Vercellone, C. Forthcoming. Crisi della legge del valore e divenire rendita del profitto. In Crisi dell’economia globale, ed. A. Furnagalli and S. Mezzadra. Verona: Ombre corte.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Five Theses on the Common


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.’’ 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. Key Words: Common, Class Composition, Cognitive Capitalism, Financialization, Operaismo

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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030357-17 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490369


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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, 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



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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 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 selforganized 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.


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a movement from a system based on intellectual property to a system based increasingly on open social networks. From Benkler’s analysis we can see that the commons are at the same time becoming a mortal threat to, and a powerful source for, capitalism. Due to the fact that in the context just described, intellectual property risks blocking innovation, capitalism tends to become ‘‘capitalism without property.’’ We can follow this development not only in the case of the Web 2.0 but also in the clash between Google and Microsoft and the alliance between IBM and Linux. We can say then that command is now based on a sort of capitalist ‘‘common right’’ which is beyond the relationship between private and public right and which today is the central axis of normative development. Take as an example the on-line client assistance of many software companies and cell phone providers, which is based on the ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘open source’’ cooperation of the ‘‘consumer’’ or ‘‘prosumer,’’ to quote the widespread rhetoric of the ‘‘information society.’’ This cooperation of the ‘‘prosumer’’ is directed toward the zeroing of workforce costs, which is offloaded onto clients. In this way, free software means free labor; the ‘‘prosumer’’ is in fact a worker without wage. The only waged workers of the companies are the people who control what the ‘‘prosumers’’ are allowed to write. Capitalism might be able to give up property, but never command! Given this context, in order to recompose command and govern cooperation ‘‘downstream,’’ capital is now forced to continuously block the productive potentia of living labor with intellectual property and with precariousness. This is the contemporary expression of the contradiction between forces of production and relations of production and the basis of the contemporary crisis: that is, the crisis of the ‘‘communism of capital’’ (Fumagalli and Mezzadra 2009). Therefore, since capital cannot organize social cooperation ‘‘upstream,’’ it has to remain content with simply containing the latter’s dangerous power and retroactively capturing the value of cooperation. Today capital takes the figure of the kate ćhon,2 restraining the ‘‘evil’’ of living labor potentia. In the context of the transformations of labor and capitalist accumulation just described, the common assumes a double status: it is both the form of production and the source of new social relations; it is what living knowledge produces and what capital exploits. This tension between autonomy and subordination, between self-valorization and expropriation, takes the form of a transition. Rather than being a linear passage from one stage to another, this transition is an open process of contestation among different paradigms of production, composed of different forces, possibilities, and temporalities, and coexisting in a prismatic battlefield ‘‘illuminated’’ by social struggles. The transition to cognitive capitalism presents itself as a primitive accumulation (Mezzadra 2008) that has to repeatedly separate, as Marx wrote, the workers from the means of production and the conditions of the realization of work. Today these means of production are not land but knowledge. The primitive accumulation of cognitive capitalism separates living labor from the production of the common: its temporality is the continuous re-proposition of its prehistory. But this 2. Kate ćhon is a concept that Carl Schmitt borrows from Saint Paul to describe a force that restrains evil.


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permanent transition is also the continuous reopening of the possibility of a break, of the actuality of communism and the autonomous organization of common production.


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. Transformation is premised on the conflict between economic liberalism and social protectionism, between utilitarian principles and communitarian cohesion, between commodification and the defense of natural elements (i.e., the commons). In this framework, capital is represented as an inhuman ‘‘Utopia,’’ an outside that tries to appropriate an otherwise naturally self-regulated society. Consequently, in this formulation, capital is not a social relationship, but a historical accident and a deviation from the self-regulating norm. The great transformation then is a struggle between economic means and social aims. From the Polanyian perspective, the central site of antagonism is the market and commodification, not exploitation and the social relations of production. In recent years, many ‘‘Polanyian’’ positions have appeared in social movements and among activists and critical scholars*/for instance, with reference to networks. In this genre of approach, the struggle is identified between the monopolists of information and the libertarian or neoliberal engagement for the free circulation of knowledge. From this perspective, for instance, Web 2.0 is the affirmation of an alliance between a ‘‘hacker ethic’’ and ‘‘anarcho-capitalism.’’ However, this perspective does not see that the defense of a ‘‘virtual community’’ against monopoly and intellectual property may also mean the continuity of relations of exploitation. The problem for us is to relocate the question of the common from one centered on property relations to one focused on relations of production. Exalting the importance of ‘‘culture’’ and the ‘‘anthropological commons,’’ many Polanyian scholars conceive the centrality of the concept of mode of production for Marxian and operaista perspectives as a form of ‘‘economism’’ (Revelli 2001; Formenti 2008). But it is precisely their interpretation of this concept, as well as of labor, that is ‘‘economistic.’’ Since for Polanyian scholars capital is not a social relation, it therefore becomes one among the many actors that society must control. However, when we analyze the material transformations of labor and production in recent decades, we could say ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘anthropology,’’ that is, forms of life and expressions of subjectivity are endlessly captured and assigned a value. There is no longer an outside to the relations of production: they are the site of capture and exploitation, but also of resistance and liberation. They are the location of the double status of the production of the common.


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Therefore, in what we have defined as a Polanyian vision of the commons, the subjects are the individual and society, both of which conserve an uncontaminated anthropological and natural space against the external invasion of capital and commodification. The concept of the individual is continuous with the universal subject of Enlightenment modernity, the concept of society is an organic whole: both are bearers of the general interest that coincides with the conservation of humanity in the face of the risk of catastrophe. In instances where the alliance between the hacker ethic and anarcho-capitalism fails, or in cases of the capture of the former by the latter, the same scholars invoke the troubling ghost of the state. For them, the state becomes the guarantor of ‘‘society’’ against ‘‘economy,’’ or rather, a substitute for society’s incapacity to defend itself. From within these parameters, then, community, in a reactionary way, must protect its identity, its mythological commons, from the invasion of globalization. That is, it must protect these commons not only from capital and commodities, but also from labor and its embodiment in the mobility of migrants. As a consequence, politics becomes a negative Utopia and a normative ćhon politics. What is at project geared toward avoiding the worst*/that is, a kate stake is not the organization of the potentia of the common but rather its limitation and the issue of its ‘‘de-growth.’’ Due to the misunderstanding that capitalist development consists of processes of growth and de-growth, the image of the commons is made to mirror the juridical concept, which is based on the principle of scarcity and which stands in sharp contrast with the richness and abundance characteristic of knowledge production. In opposition to this approach, following Marx we can state: capital, rather than the presumed scarcity of the commons, is the limit. From my perspective, it is imperative that we denaturalize knowledge in cognitive capitalism. We must recognize that it is not because it is a preexisting natural excess that knowledge is common; rather, it is common because it is embodied in living labor and its production. Therefore, what singularities have in common is not an abstract idea of humanity, but their concrete and specific relations in the ambivalent and conflictual process of their constitution. Even the life appropriated by ‘‘biocapital’’*/that is, the processes of capitalist valorization invested in the social relations of biotechnology (Rajan 2006)*/is not identifiable with a natural element. What is patented is not the genome itself or particular parts of the body, but rather the production of knowledge of these elements. In biocorporations, valorization through knowledge and data takes place at the level of the production of life itself. So the genome, as an abstraction of life created through the deployment of information, is then combined with the abstraction of money in the financialization process. The combination of these two abstractions forms the ‘‘capitalist common,’’ capturing the production of living labor, and is therefore today more important in the valorization process than the intellectual property system itself. From this perspective, living labor has nothing else to defend apart from the autonomous cooperation, the common, it continuously produces and reproduces. Also, there is nothing natural about the apparently natural commons since they are endlessly produced and defined on the plane of tension determined by the relations between the autonomy of living labor and capitalist command. In this sense, the binary scheme between ‘‘Polanyi-type’’ and ‘‘Marx-type’’ unrest in the history of


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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 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


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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 through a process of ‘‘differential inclusion.’’ However, is it only capital that can compose the differences in living labor? Does this heterogeneity prevent the possibility of the common composition of living labor? It is to these questions that I want to turn now while rethinking the concept of class under conditions where the common becomes central to the system of production. Differences are articulated in a disjunctive sense as the singularities are fixed in their supposed origin and category of belonging (ethnic, gender, communitarian, territorial, occupational, of social group, and so on). We can say that this is the technical composition that sustains the mechanisms of segmentation and differential inclusion in the labor market*/that is, capital’s response to govern the crisis of living labor determined by a specific political composition. Without putting this hierarchy into question, however, claims for recognition of particular positions and differences risk being transformed into identity politics. In contrast, we could redefine political composition as a process, to use a concept of Jacques Rancie `re (1999), of ‘‘dis-identification’’ from the positions naturalized through the mechanisms of differential inclusion. It is the disarticulation of the technical composition and recomposition in a line of force that has its definition in the production of the common. Class is this line of force. In this sense, we cannot talk about class as a being, but as a becoming. Nevertheless, the asymmetry between technical and political composition does not suggest that these two categories are dissociated. Rather they are open processes in continuous formation within tension produced by the multiple forms of subjectivity and mechanisms of capitalist valorization. It should be noted then that technical composition is not solely composed of capitalist domination; rather, it is the snapshot of a conflictual dynamic and it is endlessly open to subversion. Similarly, it should not be thought that political composition is somehow external to corporative claims or

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.



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new closures of identity politics: rather, like technical composition, it should be thought of as a marker of a new field of power determined by struggles over the production of the common. So the crux of the matter is to situate and historically determine the open and reversible relation of these two processes. On the one hand, this relation is complicated by the end of the space-time linearity of the relationships between workers and capital based on the ‘‘Fordist’’ factory. On the other hand, this relation is now characterized by the struggle between the autonomy of living labor and capitalist subordination, between the production of the common and capitalist capture. Taking this perspective, we can then see that technical composition in part overlaps with and in part radically diverges from political composition, making the autonomous organization of the common both close to and far from the ‘‘communism of capital.’’ The possible reversibility among these elements is not meant to imply a dialectical overturning. Rather, it points to the possibility of a break and a radically 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


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the ‘‘communism of capital’’ is the capture and transfiguration of the common through rent, where rent is the power of the appropriation of value that is increasingly created by social cooperation without the direct intervention of capital. From this standpoint, the ‘‘communism of capital’’ goes beyond the dialectic between public and private as these are two sides of the same capitalist coin. As an example, consider the contemporary transformations of the university which are often referred to through the category of corporatization. With regard to the melding between public and private in the development of corporatization, we can refer to the American context in which the public university raises private funds while the private university consistently receives state and federal funds. In Italy, in contrast, the trend toward corporatization is paradoxically enabled by a sort of ‘‘feudal power’’ in the state university system. But there are no contradictions between these two elements as this feudal power is the peculiarly Italian way toward the aim of corporatization. Nonetheless, we should clarify that corporatization does not simply mean the dominance of private funds in the public university, nor does it refer to the university’s juridical status. Rather, corporatization is meant to signal that the university itself has become a corporation, which now, based on the calculation of costs and benefits, the profit logic, input and output, competes in the education and knowledge market. In this context, knowledge corporations*/from universities to biotechnology multinationals*/are central actors in the hierarchies of global education and knowledge markets that derive a significant proportion of profit, valorization, and measure from the stock exchange and its rating agencies.4 Let us take the related question of debt, a central source of the contemporary crisis, and a great example of the intimate intertwining of the ‘‘knowledge economy’’ and financialization. It would be a mistake to think that increasing university fees indicate a return to the classical mechanisms of exclusion. Rather, a more careful analysis will demonstrate that these increases are accompanied by a simultaneous rise in rates of enrollment. The debt system is rather a selective filter to lower the wage of the workforce before that wage is actually received. Due to the fact that education and knowledge are irreducible social needs, the financialization of this social good is a way to individualize this need and facilitate the capture of what is produced as common. But financialization is also a symptom of the permanent fragility of contemporary capitalism. In fact, the increased defaults on debt repayment stand as one of the central subjective causes of the global economic crisis. If financialization as the ‘‘communism of capital’’ is the overcoming of the modern dialectic between private and public, then the mobilization against the corporatization of the university cannot be a defense of the public model.5 The opposition to corporatization must pose the question of how to go beyond the alternative between 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



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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 appeal to the public against the private. Contemporary temporality is ambivalent. On the one hand, this temporality collapses on a sort of endless present in which the precariousness of life dissolves the ‘‘space of experience,’’ compelling us to continuously reinvent ways of living to survive in the present (Koselleck 2007). On the other hand, this temporality opens a new space, no longer marked by the linearity of historicist narration. In fact, it is the conflicts and claims over the new living labor composition that foster the shift in the temporal framework and accelerate the collapse of the normative relationship between the past and the future, reopening history infinitely in the present. Let us look at this more closely. Within historicism, the immutable value given to the past as well as the passive longing for the future and its supposed progressive destiny*/condensed in the eschatological perspective shared by both the Catholic and socialist traditions*/have served to stabilize and conserve the existing institution. There is an evident similarity between this and, quoting again Koselleck (2007), the ‘‘iterative structure of apocalyptic waiting’’: the end of the world and the ‘‘sun of the future’’ are continuously postponed, neutralizing the conflicts and claims for liberty in the present. Therefore, nostalgia (both for the past and the future) risks being reactionary, or, at the very least, is ineffective. In the new temporality, in contrast, the concept of politics finally assumes a new quality. Indeed, this relation between temporality and politics is already identified by many postcolonial scholars as a field of radical challenge to historicist thought: to the traditional progressive model of time that has confined ‘‘subaltern’’ subjects to the ‘‘ante-room of history’’ (Chakrabarty 2000). The ‘‘stage’’ of this pre-politics, or impolitic, to use a rhetoric widely used by those who think that the only form of politics is the representational one, is irrevocably pierced by the insurgence of the ‘‘now’’ as the time of subjectivity and of its political constitution. Without the necessity of waiting for the ‘‘not yet’’ and for the teleological arrival of their moment of action, and without being forced to delegate their action to representational actors or to state sovereignty, the contemporary figures of living labor are in a position to overturn the absence of the future in the fullness of the decision in their present. In their breaking of the normative relationship of the future to the present, the last idealistic remainders of consciousness also dissolve. The social transformation is no longer the linear

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progression of historical necessity and consciousness: it is entirely immanent to the production of subjectivity and the common, happening along the tension between the autonomy of living labor and capitalist capture. So the common is not a Utopia: it is not a place that is yet to exist or that will exist in the future. The common exists here and now, and it is striving for liberation. In this context, what we refer to as ‘‘the event’’ is never an origin: the beginning is always the organization of the present and its power to make history. This is a reverse pathway with regard to some ˇiz contemporary radical philosophers*/for example, Alain Badiou or Slavoj Z ˇek*/who dream the theological event of an abstract and metaphysical communism, without subject and process, that is, deprived of bodies, conflicts, and potentia.

Thesis 5: Institutions of the common as a new theory and practice of 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 communication; 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



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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 of development are determined by class antagonism and the various dispositifs of translation within common production. This is the context in which we can pose the question of the institutions of the common, starting from the antagonistic relationship between autonomy and capture. Certainly, these institutions should not be conceived as ‘‘happy islands,’’ or free communities sealed off from exploitative relationships. As already mentioned, there is no longer an outside within contemporary capitalism. Institutions of the common rather refer to the organization of autonomy and resistance of living labor/ knowledge, the power to determine command and direction collectively within social cooperation and produce common norms in breaking the capitalist capture. These institutions embody a new temporal relationship*/not linear or dialectical, but heterogeneous and full*/between crisis and decision, between constituent processes and concrete political forms, between event and organizational sedimentation, and between breaking of capitalist capture and common production. To refer to the wellknown categories of Albert Hirschman (1970), exit and voice are no longer mutually exclusive alternatives: exit is immanent to the antagonistic social relations, and voice is simultaneously what nourishes and defends the production of the common. Since they are based on the composition and temporality of living labor, the institutions of the common are continuously open to their subversion. Institutions of the common are not an origin, but the organization of what becomes. I would like to examine this issue through a couple of examples that have appeared within student movements. The first is the rise of black studies as well as ethnic, women’s, and LGBT studies, all of which are rooted in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, just as the genealogy of postcolonial studies can be located within anticolonial struggles (Mohanty 2003). Black studies not only signaled the process of massification of the university and higher education; it was also the radical affirmation of the collective autonomy of the black community and of black students within and against the university as expressed through the control of the institutional forms of knowledge production. Beyond repression, power was deployed as a means of inclusion. This is well exemplified in the strategy of the Ford Foundation at the end of the 1960s (Rooks 2006), which provided disparate funding for black studies programs in order to support leading advocates for racial integration and


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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 domestication 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 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



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based on and continuously constituted by the common. Therefore, beyond the capitalist dialectic between private and public, to rephrase Marx (1976), the common is ‘‘collective possession as the basis of’’ singular ownership. Beyond the capitalistic dialectic between private and public, there is an autonomous right to and property of the common. This political gamble might appear too unrealistic for those who in the past three decades have talked incessantly about the passivity of the new subjects of living labor, which were claimed to be dominated by ‘‘monological thinking’’: that is, by so-called invincibility and the totalitarian aspects of neoliberal capitalism. In the aftermath of the global movements and the onset of the global crisis, this assessment no longer makes sense: neoliberalism is over. This does not mean that the effects of neoliberal politics have disappeared, but they are no longer able to constitute a coherent system. This is the crisis of capitalism as it is openly acknowledged every day by the mainstream media, notable economists, and even moderate governments. 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 ¨ zselçuk for inviting me to participate in the My thanks to Anna Curcio and Ceren O 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’universita ` 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.


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Benjamin, W. 1995. Angelus Novus. Saggi e frammenti. Trans. R. Solmi. Turin: Einaudi. Benkler, Y. 2006. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Formenti, C. 2008. Cybersoviet. Utopie postdemocratiche e nuovi media. Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore. edu-factory collective. 2009. Toward a global autonomous university: Cognitive labor, the production of knowledge, and exodus from the education factory. New York: Autonomedia. Fumagalli, A., and S. Mezzadra, eds. 2009. Crisi dell’economia globale. Mercati finanziari, lotte sociali e nuovi scenari politici. Verona: ombre corte. Harvey, D. 1989. The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural changes. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hirschman, A. O. 1970. Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Koselleck, R. 2007. Futuro passato. Per una semantica dei tempi storici. Trans. A. M. Solmi. Bologna: Clueb. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1950. Carteggio Marx-Engels. Vol. 1. Trans. M. A. Manacorda. Rome: Edizioni Rinascita. Marx, K. 1963. The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers. */* */ /. 1966. The civil war in France. Peking: Foreign Languages Publishing House. */* */ /. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. Trans. M. Nicolaus. New York: Vintage. */* */ /. 1976. Capital. Vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. New York: Penguin. */* */ /. [1981] 1991. Capital. Vol. 3. Trans. D. Fernbach. New York: Penguin. Mezzadra, S. 2008. La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale. Verona: ombre corte. Mohanty, C. T. 1990. On race and voice: Challenges for liberal education in the 1990s. Cultural Critique 14: 179/208. */* */ /. 2003. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Polanyi, K. 1944. The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time. Boston: Beacon. Rajan, K. S. 2006. Biocapital: The constitution of postgenomic life. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rancie `re, J. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and philosophy. Trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Read, J. 2003. The micro-politics of capital: Marx and the prehistory of the present. Albany: State University of New York Press. Revelli, M. 2001. Oltre il Novecento. La politica, le ideologie e le insidie del lavoro. Turin: Einaudi. Roggero, G. 2009. La produzione del sapere vivo. Crisi dell’universita ` e trasformazione del lavoro tra le due sponde dell’Atlantico. Verona: ombre corte. Roggero, G., G. Borio, and F. Pozzi. 2007. Conricerca as political action. In Utopian pedagogy: Radical experiments against neoliberal globalization, ed. M. Cote ´, R. J. F. Day, and G. de Peuter, 163/85. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.



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Rooks, N. M. 2006. White money/Black power: The surprising history of African American studies and the crisis of race in higher education. Boston: Beacon. Sanyal, K. K. 2007. Rethinking capitalist development: Primitive accumulation, governmentality and post-colonial capitalism. New York: Routledge. Silver, B. J. 2003. Forces of labor: Workers’ movement and globalization since 1870. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tronti, M. 1966. Operai e capitale. Turin: Einaudi. */* */ /. 2008. Classe. In Lessico Marxiano, ed. A. del Re et al., 65/76. Rome: manifestolibri. Vercellone, C., ed. 2006. Capitalismo cognitivo. Conoscenza e finanza nell’epoca postfordista. Rome: Manifestolibri. */* */ /. 2009. Crisi della legge del valore e divenire rendita del profitto. Appunti sulla crisi sistemica del capitalismo cognitivo. In Crisi dell’economia globale. Mercati finanziari, lotte sociali e nuovi scenari politici, ed. A. Fumagalli and S. Mezzadra, 71/99. Verona: ombre corte. Wright, S. 2002. Storming heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

A Common Word ¨zgu Aras O ¨n


This response aims to discuss Michael Hardt’s and Gigi Roggero’s conception of the ‘‘common’’ vis-a `-vis the modern notion of ‘‘public,’’ and to comment on the ideological, linguistic, and affective social implications of their political-economic explication. Key Words: Communism, Public, Property, Common, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

1 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, naı¨ve, 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 naı¨ve 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). ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030374-08 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490372


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Michael Hardt describes, ‘‘common’’ is the foundation of biopolitical production that we have before us, upon which ‘‘communism’’ has to be built as an ethico-political construction. By formulating the communist project around ‘‘common’’ as such, as a ‘‘collective productive resource’’ that is not ‘‘property’’ (neither ‘‘private’’ nor ‘‘public’’), Hardt’s project breaks away from past interpellations of communism which prioritized the determination of a vanguard socialist state/public.


2 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 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.

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3 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 pivotal concept in Autonomist criticism, surpassed Marx’s categorical distinction between ‘‘productive’’ and ‘‘unproductive’’ labor by pointing to the subordination of (what had been previously conceived as) ‘‘reproductive’’ or ‘‘unproductive’’ types of labor under post-Fordist production regimes. To the degree that Marx’s fundamental categorical distinction also structured a whole series of political analyses and strategies following his critique of political economy, the shifting of the organizing concept from ‘‘productive labor’’ to ‘‘immaterial labor’’ also required the reformulation of some of the key notions in radical political theory. As such, immaterial labor has been the organizing concept for the key terminology of autonomist theory and politics (which includes ‘‘empire’’ as the political organization of post-Fordist capitalism, and ‘‘multitude’’ as the diffused and heterogeneous subject of global class struggle). Along with other recent contributions to this debate, Hardt’s and Roggero’s treatments of the ‘‘common’’ become a conclusive step in the analysis of the postFordist biopolitical fabric. ‘‘Immaterial labor’’ still appears as an organizing concept in this analysis; the common today can only be understood in relation to the labor process that constitutes it, in relation to the productive force behind it. For Hardt and Roggero, the definitive characteristic of the hegemonic productive force in postFordism is its ‘‘social’’ constitution*/its open, shared, collective, and cooperative form. The linguistic, informational, cognitive, and affective constituents of immaterial production are necessarily collective social resources, and these are what immaterial labor also reproduces in the course of capitalist production. In its postindustrial moment, the capitalist contradiction evolves into a new track; the productive force which capitalist production relies on at this moment can only be ‘‘productive’’ for capitalism to the degree that it can produce and circulate ‘‘commons’’; its productivity diminishes when it is appropriated and restricted as ‘‘property.’’ For Hart and Roggero, post-Fordism is marked by this paradox and, as such, capitalism today has to develop new techniques of rent extraction and new property and production relations, such as licensing, branding, freelancing, crowd sourcing, and so on.


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4 Going back to ‘‘property relations’’ is a highly strategic theoretical maneuver in Hardt’s and Roggero’s works. The real interest with this maneuver does not seem to be in settling accounts with the notion of ‘‘private property’’ yet again because, since the nineteenth century, all forms of ‘‘communisms’’ have rejected this fundamental notion of capitalism in their antagonistic formulations. The critical nuance in their attempt is to formulate common as antithetical not only to ‘‘private property’’ but to ‘‘property in general,’’ including ‘‘public property.’’ This points to a larger target. While socialism historically appeared as a critique of liberal economic and political discourses, it took certain primary theoretical devices from these discourses and reversed the power relations they deployed.3 ‘‘Public’’ has been one of those theoretical devices that defined socialist alternative visions in their opposition to 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 ‘‘everybody’’; 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.’’

3. In this context it is important to be reminded that Marx’s categorical distinction between productive and unproductive labor, which I mentioned above, also was adopted from Adam Smith.

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It is very predictable that abandoning the notion of ‘‘public’’ (or, rather, transcending it) will take a lot of heat from a larger part of the socialist camp. This was clearly the case on multiple occasions following the theoretical interventions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. But isn’t it the very necessary thing to do, especially at this moment, when all possible uses of the term are already systematically contaminated by neoliberal politics, and whatever ‘‘public’’ entails */‘‘public good,’’ ‘‘public sphere,’’ ‘‘public opinion,’’ ‘‘freedom of expression,’’ and even ‘‘democracy’’ at the bottom line*/have become rhetorical instruments for the justification of various forms of expropriation, appropriation, and exploitation of whatever collective resources are left?


5 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; postFordism entails a set of ‘‘property relations,’’ which already extend outside tangible commodities and things. The difference between industrial production and



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biopolitical production is that, in the latter form, capitalist production tends to extend into and subsume social life in its entirety: it turns the social relations that used to take place outside the confined production spaces into ‘‘productive’’ relations.4 Therefore, what we have to understand from ‘‘economy’’ is life structured according to capitalist production relations through certain linguistic, legal, moral, architectural, governmental dispositions properly called ‘‘biopolitical production.’’ For that very reason, in order to conceive ‘‘communism’’ as an ethico-political construction, we have to extend the discussion to encompass the second meaning of the term ‘‘property.’’ ‘‘Common’’ is not only a word for shared economic resources (against the notion of ‘‘property,’’ as ‘‘not property’’), but also a word for organizing linguistic, cognitive, and affective relations, ‘‘affinities’’ and ‘‘commonalities,’’ such as what we mean by ‘‘a common word.’’ ‘‘Looking back at political economy’’ and settling the accounts with ‘‘property relations’’ inevitably calls for ‘‘looking forward’’ to ‘‘properties of relations’’ and linguistic postulations, to economies of desire, affections, subjectivation processes, social codes and identities. ‘‘Common property’’ surely does not mean ‘‘public property,’’ but in a ‘‘communist’’ context it should not even mean ‘‘the same thing’’ at all. Both Hardt and Roggero strongly emphasize heterogeneity and multiplicity as the distinguishing characters of immaterial labor. The dominant form of labor in biopolitical production escapes capitalist measure and creates ‘‘commons’’ easily because it has a fundamental advantage, which challenges the calculative and normative logic of capitalism. That is its heterogeneous constitution; it cannot be rendered to, evaluated through, and exchanged against chronological time, and as such it refuses to become a homogenous form of ‘‘labor power.’’ Moreover, its constituents are necessarily diverse and multiple. The worker in the Fordist factory only needed to know how to assemble a variety of mechanical parts together whereas the worker in the Toyota factory needs to know how to use a computer; has to have social skills, language skills, and probably managerial ones, perhaps has to have engineering skills as well as a capacity to make aesthetic decisions, and certainly has to have a well-developed sense of humor to relate to the fact that he is still a worker. The ‘‘commons’’ generated by this heterogeneous force, then, carries a similar heterogeneity. The ontology of commons has to reflect the ontology of labor while ‘‘communism’’ as a project, as a constitutive political logic, has to be postulated by affirming such heterogeneity. What we have in ‘‘common’’ is not a shared set of attributes, social identities, linguistic or cultural characteristics and codes, but a potential difference, our capacity and desire to host and express a multiplicity of these on the same social body at the same time, our potential difference from each other and our desire for another. Common, then, should not be defined around an abstract, transcendental, and always incomplete universal master signifier repeating in each and every subject and marking them with ‘‘individuality,’’ ‘‘partiality,’’ and ‘‘lack,’’ but around that potential difference, that ‘‘excess’’ which makes signification possible. 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).


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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 communication’’*/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 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.

6 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 ‘‘communicates’’ 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


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of the ‘‘word’’ and makes it ‘‘common.’’ Perhaps ‘‘communism’’ should not be a ‘‘project,’’ but just a ‘‘common word.’’


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. Dyer-Witheford, N. 2006. The circulation of the common. http://slash.autonomedia. org/node/5259. Hardt, M. 2010. The common in communism. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3): 346/56. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. */* */ /. 2004. Multitude. War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin. */* */ /. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital and language: From the new economy to the war economy. Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e). Marx, K. 1865. On Proudhon. Letter to J. B. Schweizer, 24 January 1865. Der SocialDemokrat, 1, 3, and 5 February. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1865/letters/65_01_24.htm. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1964. The communist manifesto. Trans. P. Sweezy. New York: Monthly Review Press. Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The inoperative community: Theory and history of literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Proudhon, P. J. 1840. What is property? http://www.marxists.org/reference/ subject/economics/proudhon/property/ch02.htm. Roggero, G. 2010. Five theses on the common. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3): 357/73.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

FREE ASSOCIATION

Means in Common


16beaver group Appearing in the order of: Martin Lucas Rene Gabri Ayreen Anastas Paige Sarlin Pedro Lasch Benj Gerdes Jesal Kapadia

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030382-20 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490381




















Commodity Fetishism and the Common


Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio Deborah Jenson Federico Luisetti

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Rethinking Socialism: Community, Democracy, and Social Agency


Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio 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 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). Key Words: Socialism, Communism, Common, Democracy, 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 ‘‘community’’ 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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030403-17 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490395


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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 reflections 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 something important to lose by a continued association with it (because of its essentialist, economic or class, formulations).1 We believe that Marxism*/once freed from all its economistic and essentialist formulations*/can continue to have a unique and enriching contribution to make to the discourse on noncapitalism, community, and democracy; indeed, we believe, that distancing anticapitalist discourses and political practices from Marxism actually impoverishes them.2 Heterodox economics (as well as forms of critical thought in other disciplines) can be thought of as a big tent under which various distinct identities and issues congregate (allow us to call this congregation a ‘‘gathering of tribes’’), united by a yearning for a more just social and economic order. Along with Marxian theory, then, critical social theory needs a theory of ‘‘the subject’’ not only because of the categorical sense of the worth of ‘‘personal space’’ that sustains every struggle of liberation, but also because of a practical problem of political organization. The ability to coalesce different groups and identities into a project that looks beyond capitalism*/we prefer to continue to call it ‘‘socialism’’*/depends on a prior theoretical conception of a social space that recognizes the autonomous existence of these identities. Indeed, the need to reconceptualize ‘‘economy’’ and ‘‘society’’ as open spaces and to abandon the reduction of either to a structure, a unidimensional and homogeneous space of social activity, is being energetically pursued from various schools and in diverse ways: we need only think of the concerns of feminist 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).


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scholarship or of the postcolonial critics of modernist ‘‘industrialization’’ projects or of the scholarship on the tense energies around the local/global fault line. The school of ‘‘postmodern Marxism’’ with which we have long been associated represents one such effort to reconceptualize economy and society as open spaces.3 Rejecting the modernist Marxist reduction of social processes and forms of consciousness to a uniform structure of economic relations, a postmodern approach to Marxist social theory can produce a decentered and materialist vision of community, including ‘‘personal space,’’ in its relation to a multidimensional social space. As we intend to argue, Marxist social theory emerges out of, and thus works to reaffirm, a space of democracy and community that works well with our critical energies. Our Marxist vision involves both a reinscription of society as it is*/the real, lived world around us*/and an imagining of society as it could be*/a project of envisioning an alternative way of organizing economic and social relations. It is therefore part of an unabashedly Marxian Utopian vision (yes, we do abandon Engels’s formulation, 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-a `-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.


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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 appropriation and distribution of the surplus. In some cases, the vision that informs heterodox 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 rearticulating 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.

Commodity Fetishism in Modernist Marxism and the Unidimensional Space of Social Being 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).


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Now, in its construction of commodity fetishism, the economistic tradition of modernist Marxism went further than describing a connection between the structure of market relations and a certain form of consciousness. It posited, rather, a causal relationship between the two, placing the theory within the shell of the base/ superstructure model and explaining the form of consciousness as the product, and inverted reflection, of the economic structure itself. This reflective theory of consciousness implied a theoretical conception of ‘‘the market’’ as a self-regulating mechanism, a structure capable of reproducing itself in accordance with a purely ‘‘economic’’ logic*/the conception that Karl Polanyi so well captured with the expression ‘‘the self-regulating (and disembedded) market system.’’ ‘‘Commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must therefore have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners,’’ wrote Marx (1967, 84). For the economic determinist reading to conceive of these owners as having a form of consciousness that makes their behavior conform to the objective rules of commodity exchange, these rules must be thought of as being inscribed in a preexisting and independently defined economic structure. If there is no such structure, no self-regulating economy, there cannot be a reflective theory of consciousness. As is well known, the economic determinist reading of Marx has seen Capital as offering just such a conception of ‘‘the economy,’’ extending the law of value to capitalist relations and spinning out the logic of an inexorable process of capital accumulation and capitalist growth. To pass to the history of Marxism and to questions of socialist strategy and practices, there is little question that certain problematic practices and identities have been affected (if not effected) by this economistic conception. If the reproduction of capitalism as such an independently constituted, centered, and unified economy could be described purely in terms of a calculus of labor values, then the dynamics of social change could also be analyzed, in principle, purely in terms of the forms of production, the kinds of labor, and class dynamics, with other social processes being viewed as incidental, secondary, or functionally dependent on the structure of the economy. Consequently, and reflectively, nonclass forms of consciousness and agency (and, for that matter, class forms other than those of capitalism) could also be symmetrically subsumed to capitalist class consciousnesses and agencies. It is because of this concept of the economy as a disembedded and selfregulating structure that economistic Marxism could sustain a unidimensional view of society, social agents, and social change. But why did, and how could, this concept of ‘‘the economy’’ play such an important role within Marxism? In our view, the privileging of the economy is a bourgeois ideological operation, and modernist Marxism, perhaps inevitably influenced by bourgeois conceptions, imported this privileging operation into its own discourse. But, of course, this introduces the question of what the discursive condition(s) might have been that made it possible for this bourgeois dominance of the economy to be reproduced by the economic determinist tradition in Marxism. This condition, we want to argue, is/was an ontological concept of labor and, with it, a certain idealistic concept of humanity and a certain image of socialism*/or, to be more precise, concepts of humanity and socialism that do/did not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois imagination of society as a projection of the bourgeois individual.


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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 the Communist Manifesto*/was conceived as the institutional guarantee of a prohibition against forms of class exploitation, and all bonds of personal dependence and community came to be constructed as a consciously directed expenditure of labor power in the production of use-values. Contained in this vision of socialism is a concept of labor in general as the essence of human nature, the concept of homo faber. In this conception of socialism, humanity is ontologically constituted as pure laboring activity, freed from all bonds of social dependence and limited only by nature. This view presented socialism as a solution to the problem of exploitation in both capitalist and other class forms of society. Moreover*/and this is the key theoretical move*/it also presented socialism as a solution to the problem of consciousness and did so symmetrically with respect to both commodity/capitalist forms of consciousness and other forms of consciousness, including ideas about forms of personal dependence and ideas about nature, characteristic of noncapitalist societies. In this socialism, not only reified consciousness but also all other forms of consciousness that can intervene in, or interfere with, the carrying out of the directed plan of social production had to vanish, to be replaced by a direct consciousness of intersubjectivity among producers. To the familiar condition of a withering away of the state, one might thus add as a condition of this ideal conception of socialism the withering away of all forms of consciousness other than that of the interdependence of agents constituted as producers, as laboring individuals. There is a close relation between this particular concept of socialism and the economic determinist concept of ‘‘capitalism.’’ The two concepts mutually justify, support, and reflect each other. According to this conception, the space of social being is completely described by the changing forms of laboring activity, the network of relations between humanity in general and nature in general, and accordingly the concepts of capitalism and of socialism are deployed symmetrically on this space. If socialism is conceived as a unity of free producers*/‘‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’’ (Marx and Engels 1976, 506)*/capitalism is conceived as a unity of (unfree) producers, and the concept of ‘‘the economy’’ as a self-regulating structure is the theoretical equivalent of this ‘‘unity,’’ leaving no room for forms of agency not functionally reducible to


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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, unidimensional 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 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.

The Subjects of a Multidimensional Social Space A strong argument can be made, however, that this unidimensional construction of social space is not essential to Marxism (or, for that matter, to other critical traditions inside and outside economics). Taken literally as a conception of society, the reference to a ‘‘community of free individuals’’ is an extreme idealism hard to reconcile with Marx’s materialist conception of social life. Contrary to the view implied by the simple base/superstructure model, Marx’s materialist conception was not about material production as such (whether defined in terms of labor or technology or both) but about the changing social boundaries of human activity, not reducible to individual intentions and forms of consciousness or fully grasped by theoretical constructions and teleological ends. Materiality refers not to the process of production as such (there are many idealist conceptions of production both inside and outside the Marxian tradition), but to the irreducible concreteness and historical/ conjunctural specificity of all the forms of social being with which humans shape their existence: forms of consciousness and identity are material forces precisely to the 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).


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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. 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


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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 noncommodity/noncapitalist forms of consciousness and activity to those of capitalist commodity production. In principle, then, not only the social space as a whole but individual agents can be*/and, in our view, must be*/conceived multidimensionally.6 The statement by Marx (1967, 10) that he treated individuals ‘‘only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular classrelations and class-interests’’ has been used to argue that Marxian theory leaves no room for a nonreductionist conception of social agents/individuals/persons. That argument would be tenable if indeed Marxist theory had to treat the uniform space of commodity relations as exhaustive of the field of social relations. But, as we have seen, the reading of Marx proposed here is far from positing a uniform social space or ontology. The traditional argument thus can be reversed, and Marx’s refusal to cast his discourse in terms of individuals, his choice of focusing on processes and structures, can be read as an index of the fact that he refused to reduce concrete individuals to the unidimensional space of commodity and class relations. Social being in Marxian theory can then be conceived as ontologically multidimensional. Capitalism can be constructed not as an immanent or universal structure but as the hegemonic imposition of bourgeois forms of calculation on the set of economic activities constructed by private property relations. The Marxian labor theory of value is thus a way of both encapsulating and criticizing those forms of commodity calculation, not a more or less accurate representation of the forms of labor and production that may obtain at any point in time within the system 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 marketbased 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.

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of commodity relations*/and certainly not an assertion of any ontological reduction of material relations to calculations of labor times. The next step involves answering the following questions: What conception of socialism can we develop on the basis of this multidimensional ontology of social being and multidimensional social space? If a problem of capitalism*/and we believe that this is a problem inextricably connected to the capitalist form of class relations*/is the bourgeois construction of the social as a unidimensional space, then how can socialism be conceived so as to represent a solution to this problem?


Toward a Different Conception of Socialism The foregoing discussion suggests a conception of socialism significantly different from the ‘‘community of free producers’’ mapped onto a unidimensional field of transparent production relations and unadulterated by other forms of agency and consciousness. Rather, a Marxian conception of socialism must be elaborated in the multidimensional space of many forms of consciousness, many forms of agency, and many forms of labor and productive activity, not reducible to the privileged logic of a homogeneous calculus (of commodities/things or of labor). In opposition to the notion of a withering away of nonproduction forms of social agency, a socialist economy will have to remain embedded in many concrete, historically specific forms of agency. A socialist structure of production constructed on a multidimensional social space would thus be rich with a variety of forms of agency and consciousness, and a variety of institutional forms to accommodate these different forms. This would distinguish it from the ‘‘one model’’ type of socialism that we have come to know (and reject) and would support the concept of different roads to socialism and, therefore, different socialisms. This social structure of production would be socialist partially to the extent that it would not require producers to filter their identities through some abstractly determined homogeneity imposed on the space of economic calculations and to have their social status fixed in the myth of a necessary (not political/ethical/ historical) form of rationality. (Our theoretical prejudice suggests, in any case, that behind this myth there will always be some particular interest, some violent erasure of identities.) This socialist structure of production would not require the absorption of particular forms of consciousness and of associated needs into a uniform larger social logic, and hence their marginalization or dismissal on those grounds. The traditional concept of socialism saw in the common/public/state ownership of the means of production a principal guarantee of a communal class structure and of the conscious direction of production to the satisfaction of social needs (whether defined in terms of consumption or accumulation). Because it reduced the question of the relation between public and private to the one question of the immediate conditions under which labor is performed, this conception proposed that the disjuncture between public and private*/which indeed is effected by private property in capitalism, but only partially so*/would be totally removed by the simple abolition of private property and the instauration of public ownership. The uniformity/ unidimensionality of the social space left no room for a conception of ‘‘the particular’’ and of an institutional sphere in which the intersection of one set of


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productive activities and other forms of agency and consciousness could be negotiated in a number of different ways, each being particular to the form of consciousness and/or agency in question. The projection of socialism onto a uniform social space made it possible for this socialism to reject the bourgeois form of ‘‘the private,’’ one kind of particular, but did not allow the existence of other forms of the particular or private or personal. This is at the basis of the view that socialism/communism constructs society*/economically, culturally, and politically*/in a totalitarian way. It also goes some way toward explaining the great emphasis that the (efficient) production of ‘‘goods’’ came to acquire in official ideological pronouncements of ‘‘really existing socialism’’ and the consequent near total collapse of that camp: the definition of the socialist/communist project in terms of a uniform field of laboring activity left no concrete tasks to be accomplished other than the manifestation of laboring activity 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).


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Instead, community can be conceived in multiplicity and difference, negotiated and constructed in and through diverse subjectivities, in an open social space. This is the foundation of a sense of community, a ‘‘community without unity’’ (Corlett 1989) or a ‘‘community at loose ends’’ (Miami Theory Collective 1991), that can thrive on and even cultivate*/rather than attempt to regulate, control, and even marginalize or eliminate*/different agencies and identities. Such a notion of community is not dictated, whether by capital or noncapital. It is not given in an ontology of labor or production or the expression of a fundamental desire to be in common. Instead, as we understand it, it is the changing condition and result of particular projects of transformation, a coming together as a collective for the purpose of living in and changing the world. We are not in a position here to speculate on the specific institutional arrangements that would give body to such socialist forms of production or forms of community.8 The role of firms, cooperatives (both of producers and of consumers), financial institutions, markets, planning organs, and so on would have to be rethought through the concepts of a multidimensional social space and of an emergent ‘‘subjectivity collective,’’ for concrete places and times. So, while it is impossible to say what this will mean specifically, now or in the future, in the United States or elsewhere, this rethinking would have to take us beyond merely imagining some ‘‘controls’’ being imposed on some key sectors of a bourgeois economy, such as the labor, money, and capital markets (e.g., Davidson 1994; Stiglitz 2002). The imposition of such controls, in our view, would not get us beyond the hegemonic (of the type that is culturally accepted and powerful, not crass and easily removable) bourgeois construction of the social space where private property rules and where ‘‘controls,’’ though their goal may be to protect some individuals or groups, are more likely to be seen in their function as ‘‘limitations’’ upon a fundamental right than in their function as ‘‘facilitators’’ of a just society.9 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 Bensaı¨d 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.

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Socialism and Democracy 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 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 constructions 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


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for a mass of disconnected, atomistic individuals. This concept of democracy is little different from the economistic concept in that it also is predicated on a uniform social space, that of the individuals of bourgeois society who, though they may have different preferences and interests, are all reducible to a common model of selfinterested rationality. The preconception of a homogeneous social space that characterizes economistic constructions of socialism also characterizes this ‘‘liberal’’ bourgeois conception of democracy. The concept of democracy deployed here is different from both types of economistic constructions, bourgeois and traditional socialist, in that it presumes not a homogeneous social space but a heterogeneous one, not a field of similar forms of consciousness and agency but a field of difference. In doing this, we are proposing an etymologically defensible, and perhaps preferable, reconstruction of democracy. The traditional definition of democracy is ‘‘government by the people.’’ The etymology of the word, however, makes possible a significantly different construction: democracy from (‘‘da’’division/difference)(‘‘mod’’ council/assembly/ conversation)(‘‘kar’’strength/power/leadership). Democracy can be constructed here as ‘‘an assembly of those who are different for the purposes of rule or leadership.’’ The virtue of this definition, which is fully compatible with the vision of socialism and community we have proposed, is that it does not slip into any assumptions about a uniform social space, which leaves us with the unhappy choice of either capitalism or the economistically constructed form of socialism. This particular concept of democracy, however, has certain implications for how we understand the process of social change. As we have seen, both the bourgeois concept of democracy and the economic determinist construction of the immediacy of representation in the socialist community of free producers rest on the positing of different individuals and forms of agency upon a uniform social space. Democratic interaction, posited upon this space, can only appear as a matter of discussions among individuals who, so to speak, converse in the same language, have the same form of consciousness, though different individuals exhibit proficiency and expertise to different degrees. (Those who have found themselves exhibiting forms of consciousness significantly different from the ones assumed to predominate have, consequentially, found themselves marginalized*/though by very different means*/in both capitalist and ‘‘really existing’’ socialist societies.) The democratic process has hence appeared as simply a process of discussion, a political marketplace of ideas.10 The concept of democracy proposed here, however, is different in its assumption of difference rather than uniformity at the level of consciousness and identity. This means that the democratic process must be conceptualized not as a discussion within one language, but as a process of attempted translations between languages, cultural identities, forms of consciousness, social activities and locations, and so on. This 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).

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conception of the democratic process is, in fact, better understood as a conception of the political process, where the word political carries the connotation of a process not amenable to representation or regulation as are other social processes predicated on uniform types of rationality (e.g., the economic process in bourgeois society). Rather, this notion of socialist democracy speaks to a practice of coalescing heterogeneous forms of agency into concrete and particular (and thus ever-changing) collective subjectivities*/society being thus a collection of ‘‘subjectivity collectives.’’


Marxism, the Common, and the Future of Critical Social Theory Much of what we have said here about economy and society as open spaces, about the 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).

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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 ¨ zselçuk, the organizers of ‘‘The Common We want to thank Anna Curcio and Ceren O 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 participants in the session and, in revising our essay for Rethinking Marxism, the ¨ zselçuk. This essay is a revised version of ‘‘Socialism, suggestions made by O 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.

References Amariglio, J. 1984. Forms of the commune and primitive communal class processes. Association for Economic and Social Analysis Discussion Paper 19, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Amariglio, J., and A. Callari. 1993. Marxian value theory and the problem of the subject: The role of commodity fetishism. In Fetishism as cultural discourse, ed. E. Apter and W. Pietz, 186/216. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Bensaı¨d, D. 2002. Marx for our times: Adventures and misadventures of a critique. Trans. G. Elliott. New York: Verso. Callari, A. 2004. Economics and the postcolonial other. In Postcolonialism meets economics, ed. E. O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela, 113/29. New York: Routledge. Callari, A., and D. F. Ruccio, eds. 1996. Introduction to Postmodern materialism and the future of Marxist theory: Essays in the Althusserian tradition, 1/48. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Casarino, C., and A. Negri. 2008. In praise of the common: A conversation on philosophy and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Corlett, W. 1989. Community without unity: A politics of Derridean extravagance. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Cullenberg, S. 1994. The falling rate of profit: Recasting the Marxian debate. London: Pluto. Cullenberg, S., et al. 1998. Socialism, capitalism, and the labor theory of property: A Marxian-Austrian dialogue. Rethinking Marxism 10 (2): 65/105. Davidson, P. 1994. Post Keynesian macroeconomic theory: A foundation for successful economic policies for the twenty-first century. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.


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Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1996. The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. */* */ /. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin. Hindess, B. 1991. Imaginary presuppositions of democracy. Economy and Society 20 (May): 173/95. Marx, K. 1967. Capital, Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers. Marx, K., and F. Engels. 1976. Manifesto of the Communist party. In Collected works, vol. 6, 477/519. New York: International Publishers. McCloskey, D. N. 1994. Bourgeois virtue. American Scholar 63 (Spring): 177/91. */* */ /. 1996. The vices of economists*/The virtues of the bourgeoisie. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. */* */ /. 1998. Bourgeois virtue and the history of P and S. Journal of Economic History 58 (2): 297/317. Miami Theory Collective, ed. 1991. Community at loose ends. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murphy, T. S., and A.-K. Mustapha, eds. 2005. The philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in practice. Ann Arbor: Pluto. Nancy, J.-L. 1991. The inoperative community. Trans. P. Connor et al., ed. P. Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negri, A. 2008a. Reflections on Empire. Cambridge: Polity. */* */ /. 2008b. Goodbye Mr. Socialism. New York: Seven Stories. */* */ /. 2009. Empire and beyond. Trans. E. Emory. Cambridge: Polity. Resnick, S., and R. Wolff. 1987. Knowledge and class: A Marxian critique of political economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. */* */ /. 1988. Communism: Between class and classless. Rethinking Marxism 1 (Spring): 14/42. */* */ /. 2002. Class theory and history: Capitalism and communism in the USSR. New York: Routledge. Ruccio, D. F. Failure of socialism, future of socialists? Rethinking Marxism 5 (Summer 1992): 7/22. Ruccio, D. F., and J. Amariglio. 1994. Postmodernism, Marxism, and the critique of modern economic thought. Rethinking Marxism 7 (Fall): 7/35. Saitta, D. 1988. Marxism, prehistory, and primitive communism. Rethinking Marxism 1 (Winter): 145/68. Sen, A. 1999. Development as freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Stiglitz, J. 2002. Globalization and its discontents. New York: W. W. Norton.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

The Common without Copies, the International without Cosmopolitanism: Marx against the Romanticism of Likeness


Deborah Jenson This paper connects a stylistic hallmark of Marx’s work*/a dramatic antipathy to imitation and copying*/to his rejection of the epistemology of likeness or ‘‘harmony’’ in French romantic social Utopian thought. A space of the common without social mimesis*/not just representation and imitation but competitive appropriation, likeness-based equality, social unity, cultivated resemblance, and so on*/is in some ways paradoxical. But Marx upholds a vision of the common as collision, foreshadowing Althusser’s notion of aleatory materialism, through a discourse of the atom. He moves from atheistic Epicurean models of abstract individuality and opposition to false universalism, to Hegelian ideas of the disaggregated atoms of political class activity, to a rejection of Buonarroti’s ambition to harness self-seeking atoms in the collectivity, to a championing of real rather than ideal collisions. Acutely aware of social mirroring processes in the paradigm of the fetishism of the commodity, Marx puts the Lucretian ‘‘uproarious contest’’ and ‘‘hostile tension’’ of atoms at the core of the nonromantic sociality of the common. Key Words: Karl Marx, Mimesis, Social Romanticism, Cosmopolitanism, Atoms, Common

Mimesis, as Marx said of capital, is a social relation of production. */Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions 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 Re´forme 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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030420-14 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490396


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resistance on the part of the exiled French in Belgium to a potential Belgian revolution, which, if ever realized, might amount to a mere copying of the French, Marx was also ironizing the ostensible ‘‘original,’’ the February 1848 revolution in France itself. In a reversal of Edmund Burke’s ethos of political respect for the ancestors, for Marx, ‘‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living,’’ precisely because of the Hegelian tendency of history to occur ‘‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’’ (Marx 1977, 300). The nightmarish quality of the secondhand not infrequently, for Marx, could be described through the outlandishness of imitation, compounded for rhetorical effect by the outlandishness of otherness. The wannabe Napoleonism of the Second Empire, for instance, was framed as attendant upon the drag-like relationship of the second Haitian empire to the Haitian Revolution: ‘‘Bonaparte still hid his longing to signify Napoleon, for Soulouque did not yet play Toussaint Louverture’’ (Marx 2003, 68). Marx saw not only self-parody, but pathos, in the likeness of new forms of social life to old: ‘‘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 Pe ćuchet, 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 selfreflective 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 French . . .].’’ If a Belgian revolution is resisted as an imitation of a copying, the resistance to imitation is ultimately framed as antirevolutionary. Yet Marx simultaneously aligns himself against reactionary opposition to a Belgian revolution, and, through his employment of an antiFrench rhetoric, with the injunction against copying what is French.


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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 francequillonnerie 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 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

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individualism*/and especially through a protobourgeois privacy from the state*/than with the Marxian politics of the common. Seyla Benhabib describes the way that the sovereignty of the space of the individual indirectly leads to valorization of likeness and to a likeness-based unity in the admittedly complex case of Hobbesian thought. Hobbes uses


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 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 Volosˇinov’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. Volosˇinov 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 Volosˇinov 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 Rene ´ 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).


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The desire for likeness or imitation can prove indistinguishable from counterimitation 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 ećonomique 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 Marxian repression, ironization, or spectralization of personification and other forms of imitative identifications in social life has long been critiqued by theorists highlighting the economic dynamism of imitation; C. A. Ellwood, in 1911, cited Tarde in his argument that Marx underplayed ‘‘the fundamental imitative tendencies of man, [in which] examples of social activity and institutions tend to be copied almost regardless of economic conditions in society’’ (Ellwood 1998, 208). The fetishism of the commodity is perhaps the area in which Marx most clearly outlines the stakes of a psychology of likeness for the common. Commodities as ‘‘social things’’ are clearly mimetic productions (‘‘productions of the human brain [that] appear as independent beings endowed with life’’), that enter into ‘‘relations’’ both among mimetic productions as a personified field, and among humans in their relationships with mimetic productions (Marx 2007, 83). Marx introduces this field of ‘‘analogy,’’ however, not to integrate the drive for likeness inherent to commodified desire, but to expel the fetishistic dimensions of desire from the space of the common. This expulsion or rejection of the psychosocial logic of likeness arguably derives not simply from the problematic relationship of psychology to the economic field, since Marx does not shy away from conundrums of capital that are related to intentionality; it also derives from his competitive determination to differentiate his own theory of the common from the more likeness-based ideas of the common in French romantic Utopian socialism. Thus while it might be most intuitive to begin with Marx’s mature thought in Capital to establish the terms of a philosophy of the common without likeness, I will be starting instead from Marx’s self-differentiation from the ideal of likeness in French romantic Utopian socialism during the 1840s: from, in other words, the era of his own developmental avoidance of ‘‘francequillonnerie’’ amid the ‘‘easy come, easy go’’ of ‘‘bourgeois revolutions,’’ in which the ‘‘answer to the coup de main of February 1848 was the coup de teˆte of December 1851’’ (Marx and Engels 2006, 90). Marx’s resistance to tropes of romantic harmony and likeness within the French intellectual environment led to a key epistemological 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).

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break defining what we associate with communism*/despite the existing, earlier definitions of communism within the romantic environment.


Social Romanticism and Romantic Socialism 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 poe´tiques 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 also in socialist texts, in theology, in philosophy, even in science’’ (1990, 125). In these disparate fields, the notion of harmony represented ‘‘a quest for consonant relations between dissimilar entities’’ (125). Harmony designated a kind of fusionist epistemology, as in Louis de Tourreil’s 1845 comment that ‘‘[a]ll beings emanate, absorb, and appropriate to themselves’’ (cited in Bowman 1990, 152). Despite the lachrymose charity of harmonian thought, social romantic ideas of competitive appropriation have a startling pertinence to our own era, through their innovative application of the paradigm of consumption to such dissimilar things as air and time. Lamartine, the founder of the French ‘‘social party’’ as a deputy to the National Assembly in the early 1830s, believed that virtually all human activity could be understood economically, but he interpreted the human dynamics of consumption as a sign of the essential social, cognitive, and even biological character of the appropriative human relationship to property, with property defined as anything that could be appropriated. Lamartine therefore considered communism to be a fundamental threat to a property-based universal life principle, as Marx summarized his position: The fact that man appropriates the elements to himself, . . . is a law of nature and a precondition of life. Man appropriates the air by breathing, space by striding through it, the land by cultivating it, and even time, by perpetuating himself through his children; property is the organisation of the life principle in the universe; communism would be the death of labour and of the whole of humanity. (Marx 1976, 6:404)3 Dismissing the interest of Lamartine’s model of the consumption of air, space, and time, Marx satirized Lamartine’s take on communism as ‘‘too beautiful a dream for this bad world’’ (Marx 1847). He, along with Engels, could hardly get his fill of mocking Lamartine’s poetico-political principles. ‘‘The scoundrel Lamartine with his high-flown declarations was the classical hero of this epoch of betrayal of the people 3. This quote is the version provided in a contemporaneous French newspaper article that was cited by Marx in ‘‘Lamartine and Communism’’ in Deutsche-Bru¨sseler-Zeitung on 26 December 1847. In the work of Lamartine, a variation appears in the Cours familier de litte´rature (Lamartine 1863, 273).

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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) 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: ‘‘Romantic 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

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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 human being is not bound and restricted by instinct to a single environment. Its nonspecialized impulse structure is directed toward the external world and crystallizes itself only in interaction with the world, through the images, sounds, smells, and touch sensations of its perception. The external world penetrates into the internal one and establishes itself there, causing wishes 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 SaintSimonians 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 abbe ´ Lacuria’s The Harmonies of the Divine Being Expressed in Numbers, and economics, as in Fre ´de ´ric 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 phalanste `re. 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 4. All translations from Proudhon are mine.


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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 competitive trends in their uses. 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 re´volution et dans l’e´glise, 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 litte´raires, 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 Fre ´de ´ric 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 ‘‘counterfeiters, 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.

The Atomistic Common 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


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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). 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 contentless, 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.

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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. ‘‘Another example,’’ namely, a more general example of the canonisation of the world, is the transformation of real collisions, i.e., collisions between individuals and their actual conditions of life, into ideal collisions, i.e., into collisions between these individuals and the ideas which they form or get into their heads. This trick, too, is extremely simple. As Saint Sancho earlier made the thoughts of individuals into something existing independently, so here he separates the ideal reflection of real collisions from these collisions and turns this reflection into something existing independently. The real contradictions in which the Individual finds himself are transformed into contradictions of the individual with his idea or, as Saint Sancho also expresses it more simply, into contradictions with the idea as such, with the 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


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through his possession of circulating commodities and his relations to other commodity owners: ‘‘As money develops into international money, so the commodity-owner becomes a cosmopolitan. The cosmopolitan relations of men to one another originally comprise only their relations as commodity-owners. Commodities as such are indifferent to all religious, political, national and linguistic barriers’’ (Marx 1859). Engels cited Ludwig Bo ¨rne’s perception of cosmopolitanism as effete in its nonapplicability to the world of mains d’oeuvre (working hands); he wrote of ‘‘the shame of cosmopolitanism, which merely had impotent, more pious wishes’’ (Engels 1841). Engels also noted Bo ¨rne’s critique of cosmopolitanism with ‘‘the words of the Cid: Lengua sin manos, como osas fablar? (Tongues without hands, how dare you speak?).’’ The place where Marx most directly engages with an epistemology of likeness such as that which underpinned French Utopian socialism is in his view of the commodity economy and the social processes and forces that undergird it. On the one hand, he 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.


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Brandt, J. E. 1997. Geopoetics: The politics of mimesis in poststructuralist French poetry and theory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Casarino, C., and A. Negri. 2008. In praise of the common: A conversation on philosophy and politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. 1994. Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the New International. Trans. P. Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Ellwood, C. A. 1998. Marx’s ‘economic determinism’ in the light of modern psychology. In Karl Marx: Critical responses, ed. R. Marchionatti, 205/12. New York: Routledge. Engels, F. [F. Oswald, pseud.]. 1841. Ernst Moritz Arndt. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1841/01/arndt.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). Engels, F. 1844. Outlines of a critique of political economy. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/outlines.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1849. Democratic pan-Slavism. Neue Rheinische Beitung, no. 222, February. */* */ /. 1885. On the history of the Communist League. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1885hist.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1978. Two years of a revolution: 1848 and 1849. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1850/05/two_years_revolution.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). Freidheim, E. A. 1976. Sociological theory in research practice. Cambridge. Mass.: Schenkman. Gebauer, G., and C. Wulf. 1995. Mimesis: Art-Culture-Society. Trans. D. Reneau. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Girard, R. 1987. Things hidden since the foundation of the world. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Greenblatt, S. 1992. Marvelous possessions: The wonder of the new world. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Jenson, D. 2001. Trauma and its representations: The social life of mimesis in post-revolutionary France. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lamartine, A. 1863. Cours familier de litte´rature. Paris: Chez l’auteur. Marx, K. 1841. The difference between the Democritean and the Epicurean philosophy of nature. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ ch04.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1842. On freedom of the press. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1842/free-press/ch06.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1847. Lamartine and communism. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1847/12/26.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1848. Letter to the editor of La Re´forme, March 8. http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1848/03/08.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1849. The revolutionary movement. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1849/01/01.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */. 1859. Means of payment. In A contribution to the critique of political economy. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/index.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (Rough Draft). Trans. M. Nicolaus. Baltimore, Md.: Penguin.


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*/* */ /. 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/ ch03.htm (accessed 7 October 2009). */* */ /. 1908. Mise`re de la philosophie: Re´ponse a` la philosophie de la mise`re de M. Proudhon. Paris: Giard et Brie `re. */* */ /. 2006. The communist manifesto, ed. G. S. Jones. New York: Penguin. McDonald, L. 1993. The early origins of the social sciences. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Proudhon, P.-J. 1840. Qu’est-ce que la proprie´te´?, ou, recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement. Paris: Chez J.-F. Brocard. */* */ /. 1858. De la justice dans la revolution et dans l’e´glise. Nouveaux principes de philosophie pratique. Paris: Garnier Fre `res. */* */ /. 1867. Syste`me des contradictions ećonomiques. Philosophie de la mise`re. Paris: Librairie Internationale. */* */ /. 1868. Les Majorats litte´raires. Examen d’un projet de loi ayant pour but de creér, au profit des auteurs, inventeurs et artistes, un monopoli perpe´tuel. Paris: Librairie internationale. Rose, M. A. 1978. Reading the young Marx and Engels: Poetry, parody, and the censor. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield. Sennett, R. 1992. The fall of public man. New York: W. W. Norton. Tarde, G. 1902. Psychologie ećonomique. Paris: Alcan. */* */ /. 1903. The laws of imitation. New York: Henry Holt. */* */ /. 1904. Les lois de l’imitation. Paris: Fe ´lix Alcan. Volosˇinov, V. 1987. Freudianism: A critical sketch. Trans. I. R. Tutunik. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

The Nature of the Common


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. Key Words: Common, Homo Faber, Nature, Political Ontology, Topology

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 ideés 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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030434-03 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490397


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‘‘the real’’; ‘‘commodity fetishism’’ and the ‘‘mystical character of the commodity’’ are traced back to the reversal of ‘‘heterogeneous forms of agency and consciousness’’ 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 capitalism, how can we describe a revolutionary political space and imagine an alternative relation with the ‘‘means of production in common’’? Since the answers to these questions would amount to a complete reinvention of the vocabulary of politics*/that is, to the vision of a new politics of the common, I will add just a few remarks on the topological presuppositions I would suggest to a political ontology to come. ´tienne Balibar’s One of the many insights that we had the privilege to learn from E (2009) seminar at Duke University concerns the paramount importance of relations within the political debate on community and communism. Balibar has reminded us that what is ultimately at stake in the French dialogue on community is the conceptualization of the nature of relations: ‘‘ecstatic relations,’’ ‘‘negative relations,’’ ‘‘passive relations,’’ ‘‘interruptive relations,’’ ‘‘nonsymmetrical relations.’’ This is the vocabulary of the subtle exchanges between Nancy, Blanchot, and Derrida which, in turn, is also the vocabulary of any post-Marxist theorization of the common. It is certainly not my intention to add my voice to this intricate debate. What I would like to suggest instead are the basic features of a ‘‘naturalistic’’ ground for rethinking relations and therefore reframing a political topology of the common. Jenson has very interestingly recalled Proudhon’s ‘‘location of communism within the commonality of elements’’: ‘‘The sun, the air, and the sea are common: pleasure taken in these objects represents the highest possible degree of communism.’’ Despite Marx’s criticism of Proudhon and also his irony about the ‘‘dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by Nature,’’ I am convinced that the relation with the natural outside of the political subject is exactly what is missed by most post-Marxist political thinking. Furthermore, I maintain that this omission does not imply a fallback into some romantic ‘‘social poetry’’ or New Age weak aestheticism. On the contrary, nature as the outside of the common is precisely the element that deconstructs the opposition between inner and outer relations, thus providing a new ground for thinking human actions beyond what Gilbert Simondon would call ‘‘the temporal regime of labor.’’ In L’individuation psychique et collective, Simondon introduces a crucial distinction between zoon politikon and zoon teknikon: ‘‘In a determinate society there is antagonism between the communitarian effort and the technical effort . . . An


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automaton is communitarian . . . a pure community would behave as an automaton’’ (1989, 249; my translation). According to Simondon, while the ‘‘communitarian effort’’ is bound by the intrinsic normativity of the community, which presides at its unfolding, ‘‘technical effort’’ experiences the ‘‘reactivity of the act’’; it’s a continuous relation with the outside of human vitality. Since it bypasses all processes of ‘‘communitarian integration,’’ any technical interaction with nature projects society into the open and impersonal realm of ‘‘trans-individual relations’’ (250). In Simondon, the distinction between zoon politikon and zoon teknikon leads to the divergence between labor and technicity, closed society and open society: while labor is communitarian and exhausts itself in socially mediated work, a ‘‘technical invention’’ remains immanent to the relation with the object, which accumulates human efforts in a transindividual dimension of technicity, free from communitarian imperatives. Simondon relies on an almost orthodox Bergsonian lexicon: closed society and open society, automatism and dynamism, the overarching notion of ‘‘effort,’’ technicity as a machinic, impure, biotechnological form of action*/the union of ‘‘mechanics and mysticism’’ in Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Most important, Simondon’s unworking of the connections between labor and nature is a good example of the visionary constructivism of relations preserved and nurtured by the nonhumanistic paradigm of the Bergsonian homo faber. So let’s examine the most startling consequence of this naturalistic conception of relations: since homo faber does not reside in the space of labor, he does not operate in a ‘‘unidimensional social space,’’ be it capitalist or socialist. On the contrary, homo faber is placed by Bergsonism in the multidimensional realm of Nature, at the vertiginous intersection of time-space ‘‘continuous multiplicities’’*/which obviously include the forces of labor and the class organization of society. It is my belief that it is precisely Nature*/according to Bergson, ‘‘the name we give to the totality of compliances and resistances which life encounters in raw matter’’ (1935, 300)*/and not Society or History, that must be accepted by our anticapitalist and post-Marxist imagination as the topological ground on which we can begin to collectively reconstruct an affirmative politics of the common.

References ´. 2009. The aporia of the community: The ‘‘French’’ debate*/Blanchot, Balibar, E 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 cosmopolitanism: 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

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Engendering Feudalism: Modes of Production Revisited


S. Charusheela How do we understand economic activity outside capitalist wage relationships? Capitalocentric analyses assign it to the local or cultural. This replicates previous approaches that assigned such activity to the ‘‘feudal.’’ Drawing on collaboration 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. Key Words: Feudalism, Capitalism, Communism, Difference, Subjectivity, Feminism

Marxist Feminism and the Locus of Difference How do we ‘‘think’’ difference in relation to economy? Marxist feminism demonstrates two ways: early writings stressed women’s class background, thereby emphasizing differences between women. Writings of the 1970s on unpaid labor and housework understood women as a class, thus emphasizing women’s difference from men. More recent feminist literature on the international division of labor has examined the interaction between these two. Marxist feminists have also begun to integrate insights about the role of discourse and culture in the social constitution of gender.1 Despite their richness and variety, these literatures have largely explored economic difference in terms of a pre-given structure of capitalism, illustrating the hold of what J. K. Gibson-Graham (1996) term capitalocentrism. The next section makes the case for a Marxist feminism that takes on board the critique of capitalocentrism, on the grounds of both realism and transformative politics.

Capitalocentrism as Political Limit 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. ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030438-08 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490401


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relations, from wage labor and putting out to own-account work. We encounter debtbondage 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 draw on and reproduce, cannot be understood in terms of a classic capitalist wage compact. Typically, these deviations are read as symptoms of culture or local tradition, standing in opposition to, or mobilized amorally by, globalizing capitalism. The invocation of the cultural or local marks a point where capitalocentric analyses seek to address the other-than-capitalist in the social relations organizing work. The typical political response to this type of difference is to seek its elimination through boycotts and legal bans, and to fix up social relations so they match the universal capitalist template. There are global campaigns to end ‘‘modern-day slavery,’’ and efforts to standardize workdays, wages, overtime, and occupational health and safety. If this cannot be accomplished through negotiation with employers, often because clear employers are absent, campaigners turn to a redistributive politics of social safety nets. This kind of effort addresses exploitation by erasing difference and promoting capitalist modernity: It seeks to make the work done by women and other marginal groups more closely resemble the theoretical description of the classic male wage compact of capitalism. This problem is not unique to paid labor. We seek to ‘‘count’’ unpaid female labor and ask for wages for housework, in the process imagining unpaid and affective labor in and through the value categories of capitalist abstract labor. When we find it hard to code own-account work as labor, we imagine women as minicapitalists: Microcredit looks to rework the social relations of own-account formarket work to make it more nearly resemble the financial relations of capitalist production. Analytically and ethically, capitalocentric approaches understand any politics that finds value in the different-from-capitalist as romantic, if not reactionary, nostalgia. It cannot engage political imaginaries that emerge from noncapitalist exploitative social relations (Charusheela 2000). This paper argues for an approach that can formulate economic difference differently. It explores the political imaginaries that open up outside a capitalocentric frame, and argues that they are essential for a Marxist feminist politics of communal social relations. To get there, we take a detour through transition debates.

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The Indian ‘‘Modes of Production’’ Debates The question of how to think difference-from-capital was at the center of a variety of transition and development debates. One such debate about transition was the Indian modes-of-production debate: From the late 1960s to the 1980s, Marxist scholars debated whether there was a transition to capitalism in Indian agriculture (see Patnaik 1990; Thorner 1982; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003, chaps. 2/5). The debate opened with a dispute about the extent and nature of agrarian transition between Ashok Rudra and Utsa Patnaik. Rudra argued that Indian agrarian relations were semi-feudal; Patnaik that capitalist agrarian relations were emerging. The debate turned not only on empirical questions, but also appropriate modes of analysis. Thorner (1982, 1961) found that participants: ‘‘deal with the same body of subject matter, and they share a common theoretical commitment to Marxism. But 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): Yet master-servant types of behaviour, extra-economic constraints, rackrenting and usury have by no means disappeared. A particular feature of the Indian scene is the vast mass of un- or under-employed, who, if they cannot emigrate and find jobs outside of agriculture, exercise upward pressure on the rental price of land, and downward pressure on wage rates. The school of thought which tried to take account of these aspects by labeling Indian agriculture semi-feudal has withdrawn from the debate after about the middle of the 1970s, but there is still talk of the persistence of feudal and semi-feudal relations of production. Similarly, the original proponents of a colonial mode have themselves dropped the term, while the term ‘‘dual mode’’ has, to my knowledge, attracted no followers. But the concepts of the preservation/destruction of earlier modes of production by capitalism, and of the articulation of different modes within a single social formation continue to figure in the discussion. The modes-of-production debates were, in the end, about how to account for economic difference. They were simultaneously political debates, tracking arguments on the Indian left over whether peasant revolts were revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. 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


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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-yetdifferently-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.


Rethinking the Terrain What has enabled so many diverse forms of social organization, with diverse particular cultural modes of subjectification, to be gathered under the rubric of 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. A consequence is that ‘‘feudalism’’ ends up defined negatively as any exploitative system that is neither slave nor capitalist (Charusheela 2007, 15). Once slavery is put aside, as in the transition debates, ‘‘feudalism’’ emerges as the space of the noncapitalist or nonmodern. In more recent literatures on globalized capitalism, the ‘‘cultural’’ or ‘‘local’’ steps in to do the detritus-gathering work that was done by ‘‘feudal.’’

‘‘Recovering Feudal Subjectivities’’ To assign noncapitalist exploitative relations to these backward detritus categories is to assume that they lack radical dynamism. My preferred alternative takes seriously


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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 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).



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The feudal subject’s consent to this hierarchical order is neither a passive acceptance of fate nor an unthinking acceptance of a pregiven order via a simple or simplistic notion of false consciousness, fatalism, and such. Using the concept of consent (rather than the conceptions of ‘‘norms’’ or ‘‘traditions’’) orients our attention to the actual ‘‘common sense’’ and ‘‘modes of reasoning’’ by which consent emerges. Thus, we argued that acceptance of hierarchy and subordination is generated out of a moral perception of the justness through which members in the hierarchy perform their roles. The moral order through which a ‘‘feudal’’ mode constitutes consent can be a potent source of ethical imagination, generating an internal subjective framework for reflecting on social relations. This can generate internal challenges that require no recourse to modernist conceptions of ‘‘individual’’ or ‘‘equality.’’ Consider three radical imaginaries that the mechanisms of consent within a hierarchically organized order can throw up: dignity, parity, and reciprocity. Each provides an alternative to capitalist-modernist concepts of justice, grounded in equality among abstract universal individuals. Hierarchical orders attend to fine-grained nuances of interpersonal behavior. Continuing with the example of sharecropping in the U.S. South, consider struggles over appropriate and dignified titles for U.S. blacks. It is by marking off someone as not having the right to dignified interactions at a personal level that feudal hegemony cements itself. Demands for dignity can emerge from feudal principles of reciprocity. Hierarchical orders are attuned to difference, and take difference as a ground for subjectivity. But as a result, in addition to concepts of ranks above and below, they provide concepts for ‘‘same rank.’’ Since hierarchical orders entail fine-grained attention to the interaction between groups, they throw up concepts about the appropriate ways to engage not only with those who are above (deference when benevolence is appropriately provided) or below (benevolence when deference is appropriately provided), but also with those of equal rank (reciprocal shows of courtesy, modes of greeting that recognize equivalent rank while acknowledging difference). Much radical activism entails using concepts of social parity to ‘‘re-rank’’ a social grouping within the order. These modes of conceptualizing equivalence-indifference we term social parity. Parity works across difference, in a context where difference is openly acknowledged. That is, it does not seek to bypass or elide difference within a sea of sameness. It therefore gives us a possibility of imagining parity outside the ‘‘equality versus difference’’ dilemma (Scott 1988).

Conclusion Can rethinking feudalism contribute to a transformative feminist politics? Gendered difference*/whether it is women’s difference from men, or difference between women*/operates on precisely this terrain, naming a boundary of difference from capitalist modernity’s universalist self-imagination. It is not accidental that we find such a strong role for gendered metaphors in imagining the order of hierarchical reciprocity within feudalism: The demesne is imagined as a home, the feudal lord is a patriarch, the serf is a feminized dependent. In terms of theorizing gender itself, the


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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. These imaginaries of parity, dignity and reciprocity also point to alternatives to capitalism. A purely capitalist imagination of equality and rights traps us in a liberal, limited imagination; any blanket rejection of feudal imaginaries limits our capacity to imagine communal alternatives. (If one is going to argue that any cultural form connected with exploitation is irretrievably tainted, then one must on the same principle toss out all ideas of individual rights connected with capitalist modernity.) Once we connect this discussion to feminism, we see the potential for a radical politics in the space of economic difference that exceeds a simple rights-based imagination. If there remains one true space of communal imagination in the West in terms of mass public imagination, it is, oddly, in the home. It is in the homes that they will create that my students expect and desire a communal form, where they imagine they will have a system not of just equality and rights, but also of parity and dignity and reciprocity, where they consider ‘‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’’ an essential ethical guide. They may be too optimistic about their ability to achieve this ideal. But when it is treated not as anti- or post feminist patriarchal ideology, but as aspirational imagination, something different becomes possible. So, when confronted with the transition debates, an approach that avoids capitalocentrism can finally enable a fully communal imagination as it rejects hiving off the ‘‘feudal’’ imaginary as ‘‘romantic nostalgia.’’ Indeed, a genuine communal imagination requires a dialectical integration of both capitalist and feudal ethical imaginaries. After all, when asked whether they prefer equality or caring-indifference, the correct feminist answer is not one or the other, but both and neither. We want both, but we want neither as constituted under the current social organization.

References Chakrabarti, A., and S. Cullenberg. 2003. Transition and development in India. New York: Routledge.



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Charusheela, S. 2000. On history, love, and politics. Rethinking Marxism 12 (4): 45/61. */* */ /. 2007. Transition, telos, and taxonomy. Rethinking Marxism 19 (1): 8/17. Duby, G. 1978. The three orders: Feudal society imagined. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ehrenreich, B. and A. R. Hochschild, eds. 2004. Global woman: Nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. New York: Owl Books. Gibson-Graham, J. K. 1996. The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. New York: Blackwell. Gramsci, A. 1975. The prison notebooks. Vols. 1/2. Trans. and ed. J. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. Kayatekin, S. A. 2004. Hegemony, ambivalence, and class subjectivity: Southern planters in sharecropping relations in the post-bellum United States. In Postcolonialism meets economics, ed. E. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela, 235/52. New York: Routledge. Kayatekin, S. A., and S. Charusheela. 2004. Recovering feudal subjectivities. Rethinking Marxism 16 (4): 377/96. Le Goff, J., ed. 1988. The medieval imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mies, M. 1999. Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labour. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books. Mohanty, C. 1997. Women workers and capitalist scripts: Ideologies of domination, common interests and the politics of solidarity. In Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, ed. M. J. Alexander and T. Mohanty, 3/29. New York: Routledge. Patnaik, U. ed. 1990. Agrarian relations and accumulation: The ‘‘mode of production’’ debate in India. Published for Sameeksha Trust, Mumbai, by Oxford University Press. Ramamurthy, P. 2004. Why is buying a ‘‘Madras’’ cotton shirt a political act?: A feminist commodity chain analysis. Feminist Studies 30: 734/69. Salzinger, L. 2003. Genders in production: Making workers in Mexico’s global factories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Scott, J. W. 1988. Deconstructing equality versus difference; or, the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism. Feminist Studies 14: 33/50. Thompson, E. T. 1975. Plantation societies, race relations and the South: The regimentation of populations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Thorner, A. 1982. Semi-feudalism or capitalism?: Contemporary debate on classes and modes of production in India. Parts 1 and 2. Economic and Political Weekly 17 (49): 1961/8, and 17 (51): 2061/6.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

On Producing (the Concept of) Solidarity


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 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 Fe´lix Guattari and uses ‘desire’ as its key category. Key Words: Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Williams, Structure, Solidarity, Subjectivity, Agency

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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030446-12 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490402



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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 e´piste`me 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 Fe ´lix 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 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. those concepts that constitute a theory of X, or Y, or Z. 2. those concepts that belong to a particular manifestation of X, or Y, or Z, and that constitute the ‘‘expressivity’’ of X, or Y, or Z, and that can become the objects described and analyzed by the aforementioned theory of X, or Y, or Z. These concepts can appropriately be designated as X*, or Y*, or Z* (the superscripted asterisks indicate that these terms are manifestations of X, or Y, or Z). 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.

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3. the state or condition that is X, or Y, or Z as such, a condition that overdetermines the expressivities yielded by this state or condition.


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 convent of a half-dozen nuns. b. The objects in (a) receive expression through the words and texts of a very diverse range of agents and organizations (robbers, saints, heroes, members of parliament, Russian oligarchs, American university sororities and fraternities, a platoon of the Israeli army, a drug cartel in Mexico); the writings of academics, novelists, playwrights (Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, the Journal of Social Philosophy, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, etc.); films (Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and so on)*/all these constituting the expressivities that are, or can be, ‘theorized’ by this or that theory of solidarity (i.e., [a] above). c. But the expressivities in (b) have as their basis a diffuse array of material conditions whose overall effect is to overdetermine the expressivities in question. A currently existing conceptualization is always provisional and can therefore be superseded by a newer one: no conceptualization expresses or determines the condition or situation that it brings to expression in a way that is completely exhaustive. An expressivity works by naming things, but the thing named is never the thing itself, but is rather the panoply of effects associated with the thing in question. (This is the basis for the famous Althusserian refrain: ‘‘the concept of sugar is not sweet,’’ ‘‘the concept of water is not wet,’’ etc.). Spinoza was of course the thinker who first turned this insight (‘‘an expressivity is the effect of a thing’’) into a philosophical axiom, and Althusser and Deleuze (Deleuze admittedly somewhat later than Althusser) are to be credited with the systematization of this insight. The ‘thing’, in this scheme, is a concrescence of its effects (it is the event of this concrescence), and the effects in question vary with the totality of interactions that have that particular thing as their point of focus. It should be stressed that the process of experiencing an effect gives rise to an ‘affect’ so that there is here a close causal link between ‘effect’ and ‘affect’. Hence, say, the German shepherd dog used by U.S. army interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison is a very different ‘thing’ (especially for an interrogated Iraqi prisoner) from the pampered pooch owned by a wealthy widow living in a luxury condominium in



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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 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 3. On this point, see Deleuze (1987, 60). 4. This is why Slavoj ˇzizˇek has been right to insist in his various writings that it is both futile theoretically and unsatisfactory politically to seek to distinguish between ‘ideology’ and some brute facticity represented by ‘economy’. To be confronted by the concepts or expressivities of capitalism is to confront the reality of capitalism (even if the ‘reality’ overdetermines the expressivities in question) and vice versa.


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solidarity. Hence the formulations of Charles Tilly or Roberto Mangabeira Unger constitute a theory ‘about’ this or that form of social solidarity, while the concepts of solidarity are likely to include concrete notions (which may be inchoate or halfformed) of the shared ownership of property in Amish culture, child-rearing strategies in an Israeli kibbutz, the place of cooperatives in rural Bangladesh, the distribution of alms by the church in medieval England, and so forth, that actually are operative in those particular societies in their specific times. Every concrete rendering of solidarity generates for itself its own ‘thinkability’ (and concurrently its own ‘unthinkability’ as the obverse of this very thinkability), and this even if this or that condition for the production and maintenance of solidarity is not taken to be such by those whose condition it happens in fact to be. Thus the Bangladeshi smallholder (of today) or the Prussian junker (in the time of Bismarck) in their respective historical and social conjunctures*/the former (say) by joining other smallholders in refusing the exactions of a rich landowner and the latter (say) by swearing that Bismarck is ‘one of us’*/contribute to the thinkability of a particular instantiation of social solidarity, even if the individuals in question are unable explicitly to acknowledge that this refusal of deference (in the case of the Bangladeshi smallholder) or blind adherence to Bismarck (in the case of the Prussian junker) are precisely the kind of conduct that enables a particular embodiment of social solidarity to remain viable. It is this Bangladeshi smallholder’s or this Prussian junker’s concepts or expressivities that constitute the thinkability of the condition in which (s)he is inserted, even though (s)he may be unable to perform the requisite operation of transcoding that renders a particular refusal of deference to a wealthy Bangladeshi landowner or routine thinking about Bismarck’s supposed virtues into an explicit marker or symptom (in something like the Lacanian sense) of a particular system of social solidarity. Another way of making this point would be to say that a particular manifestation of social solidarity, like each and every social and cultural condition, has to secrete its multiple expressivities precisely in order to be what it is, and that its concepts*/in ways that are inescapably selective, confining, and even arbitrary*/are thematizations or representations of these expressivities and their attendant conditions. Or more briefly, that the concepts of a particular form of solidarity are its expressivities limned in the form of that order’s thinkability. Theories of social solidarity, by contrast, are the outcome of a theoretical operation whose object is the natures, functions, and so forth of these expressivities. Theories of social solidarity operate on a particular social order’s thinkability and involve a kind of transcoding. It is possible to ask the question ‘‘What is the form of social solidarity operating in this dispensation?’’ but there is another kind of question, involving quite another kind of theoretical operation, that can be asked as well, in this case: ‘‘What is (a) theory (of solidarity)?’’ Social solidarities involve a prodigiously varied and complex practice of signs and images with an accompanying orchestration of affectivity, whose theory thinkers like Margaret Mead or Max Weber must produce, but produce precisely as conceptual practice*/in this case a practice that generates, always in a metalanguage, concepts that reflect upon the concepts and expressivities of the denizens of this or that form of social solidarity, expressivities which therefore



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constitute what is in effect a basal or first-order language that comes subsequently to be transcoded. No theoretical intervention, no matter how refined or thoroughgoing it may be, can on its own constitute the concepts of this or that solidaristic formation: the concepts of the denizen of solidarity are expressed in advance and independently of the personage, invariably an academic, who reflects on the concepts of those whose situations are typically those of the peasant, billionaire banker, factory worker, homemaker, retiree, refugee or asylum seeker, common criminal, and so on. Theorists and intellectuals, qua theorists and intellectuals, can only traffic in theories of social solidarity (or culture or capitalism or whatever). The concepts that theorists produce can be operative in more than one field of thought, and even in a single field it is always possible for a concept to fulfill more than one function (an obvious example would be the concept of ‘value’, which features prominently in the discourses associated with economics, sociology, ethics, 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 apparatus*/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 5. It is possible to view this complexity in ways akin to Althusser’s notion of an ‘overdetermined’ relation between formations, and between formations and the points from which subject positions are constituted.


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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 recognition that social equality has to be an inextricable part of any society whose raison d’e ˆtre 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 workingclass 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 6. I am deeply indebted to Smith for my subsequent formulations. Given access to Williams’s papers, Smith furnished the definitive account of the life and work of Williams.


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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 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 embedded 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).


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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 consideration 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 are perceived to be ‘‘inevitabilities.’’ Any alternative to these inevitabilities will have, necessarily and unavoidably, the character of something strikingly novel and even anomalous. Gilles Deleuze and Fe ´lix Guattari have a discussion of what they call ‘the anomalous’ (l’anomal), and it is to this that I now wish to turn. The anomalous, according to Deleuze and Guattari has nothing to do with the preferred, domestic, psychoanalytic individual. Nor is the anomalous the bearer of a species presenting specific or generic characteristics in their purest state; nor is it a model or unique specimen; nor is it the perfection of a type incarnate; nor is it the eminent term of a series; nor is it the basis of an absolutely harmonious correspondence. The anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it only has affects, it has 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).


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neither familiar nor subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 244) 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 individuations.’’ 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 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 surprising 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 schizophreńie 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 Diffe´rence et re´pe´tition, 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

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form as analyzed by Marx), in which case, repetition in capitalism is always repetition of the nondifferent; or, rather, the different in capitalism is always only an apparent different, because it can be overcome and ‘returned’ through the process of abstract exchange, to that which is essentially the same, the always fungible. Capitalism, as Capitalisme et schizophreńie indicates, effects an immense series of transformations (‘deterritorializations’) only to make possible more powerful recuperations and retrenchments; the Utopia of a financier like Bernard Madoff is precisely to live and function like a J. P. Morgan*/that is, a nineteenth-century robber baron. Capital breaches limits only in order to impose its own limits, which it ‘mistakenly’ takes to be coextensive with those of the universe. To quote the authors of Mille Plateaux, If Marx demonstrated the functioning of capitalism as an axiomatic, it was above all in the famous chapter on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Capitalism is indeed an axiomatic, because it has no laws but immanent ones. 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) The power of repetition in capitalism is therefore negative, wasteful, and ultimately nonproductive. (Capitalistic repetition can therefore be said to be nonbeing in Spinoza’s sense, a conclusion that Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri, do not hesitate to draw.) Capital, in the scheme of Capitalisme et schizophreńie, is constitutively unable to sustain a culture of genuine singularities even though, of course, it creates the conditions for the emergence of a culture that could, with the requisite transformations, mutate into a culture*/a culture that will however necessarily be ‘postcapitalist’*/which has the capacity to produce such singularities. The conditions that enable capital to survive are the self-same conditions that generate a countervailing constituent power that brings forth the agents and forces needed to resist it. This constituent power provides a basis for the construction of solidarities, worlds in which a new kind of politics can find its raison d’e ˆtre. A countervailing constituent power is irreducibly anomalous, a dynamism based on an excess or exteriority, and whose ensuing productivity is defined by neither a foundation or a pregiven order. It is a power that cannot be reduced to a constitution even while it remains constitutive and therefore enabling.9 This will be a politics capable of taking us beyond ‘actually existing capitalism’. This politics still awaits its models of realization*/this, after all, is a long revolution. 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).



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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 liberaldemocratic 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 producing citizens who strive to emulate Rosa Luxemburg or C. L. R. James. The choice is nothing less than world historical.

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)

Pedagogies of the Common


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. Key Words: Pedagogy, Immanence, Resistance, Political Imaginaries

¨ zselc I would like to thank Anna Curcio and Ceren O ¸uk 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 ¨ zselc communist imaginary. (I will follow the lead of O ¸uk 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. ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030458-05 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490404



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Raymond Williams, an author who is today, he observes, ‘‘more likely to be revered than read,’’ and S. Charusheela to the model of feudalism figured as the antecedent Other to capitalism. Each of these returns has been coded, and thereby cautioned against, as ‘‘romantic.’’ Thus, both authors ‘‘go back’’ at the same time as they seek to trouble the temporalities that would block our access to those sources. I will say more a little later about Charusheela’s challenge to models of historical stages that disallow feudalism as a potent and also potentially contemporary imaginary of communism. For his part, Surin reminds us of the power and resonance of an author, Raymond Williams, thought by some to be out of fashion or out of date. Although Surin does begin by locating Williams in a specific time and place by way of some biographical asides, with his concept of a structure of feeling and account of community, he argues that Williams was nonetheless ‘‘after something much less sedate and provincial than British working-class life of the middle of the last century.’’ Indeed, what Surin retrieves from this return to Williams is something far more untimely: a persistent political desire and hope for alternatives.

Political Pedagogy Surin returns to Raymond Williams for a specific political pedagogy, the philosophical basis of which he finds in Gilles Deleuze and Fe ´lix 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


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historical terrain in relationship to models of historical stages and transitions, and especially the feudal/capitalist binary, that limit where we might find anti- or noncapitalist tools and imaginaries. As a political pedagogy that can teach us something about our energies and capacities, what I found most instructive in Charusheela’s rethinking of feudalism was the model it provides for the analysis of antagonism more generally. There is, it seems to me, an important lesson*/to continue with the language of pedagogy*/that Charusheela’s analysis offers in this respect, a forceful reminder that relations of exploitation are also sites of resistance with their own possibilities for critical thought, social solidarity, and political claims making. Particularly when the reference is to historical scholarship on the imaginaries of medieval European cultures, the analysis is effective also as a provocation: a call to learn to recognize modes of resistance immanent to all social forms and to do what it takes analytically, not to mention politically, to be open to modes of agency and to communal imaginaries in a variety of locations and struggles, even in capitalism’s ‘‘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



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commitments to linear and progressive stages of history that cast noncapitalism as necessarily either pre- or postcapitalist. Here I have two questions for Charusheela about the possibilities and limits of the political imaginary she gleans from the feudal. First, while I appreciate in many ways this project of rethinking the feudal, I am not always sure how to assess the political efficacy of these tools. For example, the paper suggests at one point an interesting coincidence between, on one hand, a feudal notion of social parity and, on the other, comparable worth discourses that talk about parity rather than equality, or pose parity as a way to reconceive equality. So perhaps I should just ask for a clarification: is it that these tools can be brought usefully into struggles for comparable worth or that through the lens of parity as it functions within feudal orders we can understand differently the codes of struggle that are already being used, for example, in contemporary campaigns for comparable worth? In either case I wonder why it would not suffice to draw on comparable worth struggles for the idea; I am not sure what we 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. ¨ zselc For the second question I will draw again from Curcio and O ¸uk’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

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different ways, gesturing toward some imaginary of being-in-common rather than common-being. That is, I think each tries to find a way to think about solidarity or the communal in ways not beholden to notions of unity and sameness. Where Surin draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of singularity to help imagine differences in relation, or communism as a proliferation of differences, Charusheela, as I read it, is interested in the notion of social parity as a means to help think being-in-common in terms of nonhierarchical difference. Neither author, it should be noted, poses or assumes an account of the transition that places communism at the end of history or that would reduce it to some image of capitalism’s dialectical overcoming. Rather, each is engaged in a far more difficult and rewarding project: returning to theoretical and historical archives that have much to teach us about logics of change, codes of struggle, and the political potential of alternative imaginaries.

References Charusheela, S. 2010. Engendering feudalism: Modes of production revisited. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3). ¨ zselc .O ¸uk, C., and A. Curcio. 2010. Introduction: The common and forms of the commune. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3). Surin, K. 2010. On producing (the concept of) solidarity. Rethinking Marxism 22 (3).

Difference in Common


Anna Curcio ¨ zselc Yahya M. Madra and Ceren O ¸uk Alvaro Reyes

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Translating Difference and the Common


Anna Curcio This essay explores how racialized and gendered subjectivities might produce a common space of social cooperation that can break down the capitalist hierarchization 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 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. Key Words: Common, Class, Race, Gender, Subjectivity, Translation, Communism

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

Difference and the Common 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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030464-17 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490407


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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 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 hierarchization 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.

Class, Race, and Gender 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


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culture, religion, and nationality, are also constitutive of the capitalistic organization 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 society.1 Therefore, my emphasis on race and gender is informed by class difference, which I see to be the crux of the matter of sexual and racial discrimination. In other words, race and gender act as the tools by which capital organizes the labor market and social relations and, therefore, they cannot be understood as separate from class difference. In this vein, David Roediger has productively introduced the idea of ‘‘racial management’’ to explain How Race Survived U.S. History (2008). This entails the deployment of race to segment labor power and to produce labor subordination and hierarchies along the ‘‘color line.’’ Similarly, throughout the history of capitalism, a sort of gender management has been at work leading to female subordination. Karl Marx, in his study of Victorian anthropology*/published as part of Ethnological Notebooks (1972)*/explains the subordination of women as historically determined by the introduction of property, which fundamentally reshaped the female/male relationship. The blood relations founded on women’s reproductive faculty were remodeled by property, undermining the power women used to have owing to their control over reproduction. In this way, new forms of women’s subordination were introduced. Although Marxian thought has come under legitimate criticism from feminist quarters,2 I think late Marx provides a useful framework for understanding 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.



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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 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 subjectivities 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.


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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 contradictory, 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 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: intersectionality, 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.

3. I discussed this topic in Curcio (2008).


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Difference and Dispossession To gain insights into the capitalist valorization of difference, it might be helpful to go over some studies on the capitalist articulation of difference in the context of primitive accumulation. Silvia Federici (2004) illustrates how the war against women waged in the form of witch hunts during the Middle Ages inaugurated a new sexual pact. The persecution and disciplining of the female body foreshadowed the sexual division of labor and the capitalistic rationalization of social reproduction. In this way, sex and gender differences were put to work to manage the socioeconomic and political shape of the development of capitalism. This is similar to how race difference operated in the American colonies of the seventeenth century. In The Invention of the White Race (1997), Theodore Allen points to the violent process of social engineering that conferred privileges on white 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 ´tienne Balibar of labor on a daily basis. This is the ‘‘actuality of the origin,’’ as E pointed out in his contribution to Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1970). The ‘‘actuality of the origin’’ is the persistent dispossession and ongoing exploitation 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.


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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 to discrimination against Latino workers in tandem with the subduing of labor militancy among Italian American workers and the decrease in the number of Italian migrants in contrast with the surge in Latino population (Guglielmo and Salerno 2003). Today, Vietnamese are perceived as ‘‘whiter’’ than Cambodians by virtue of their entrepreneurial prowess, and the Chinese minority of the Hmong, no longer ‘‘gooks,’’ are accepted even by veterans of the Korean War*/such as the character played by Clint Eastwood in the recent film Gran Torino, who continues to hold in contempt all other racialized minorities. In a similar way, while the feminist struggles of the late twentieth century brought women out of the household, new forms of exploitation of women have taken shape: the rise of double exploitation at home and at work; the racialization of domestic and affective labor, largely outsourced but still carried out by women; the emergence of the so-called feminization of labor*/that is, capitalist valorization of human aptitudes historically associated with the feminine, such as language, affectivity, and abilities in interpersonal relations, as well as the casual and flexible condition of women’s labor and so on.5 These examples describe how primitive accumulation functions in concrete, historical contexts. The historical shift from one racialized and gendered capitalist regime of difference to a new one comes as a result of social struggles; however, these examples also describe how the challenges to capitalist accumulation arise from within it. More important, despite its violent force, primitive accumulation is always prone to being undone. It is the condition of possibility for both capitalist valorization and its disruption. As Marx avers in the Grundrisse, ‘‘the production of capitalist and wage laborers is thus a chief product of capital’s realization process’’ (1976a, 512; emphasis in the original). If we combine our discussion on primitive accumulation with Marx’s insight, we can say that the production of capitalist and wage laborers is both a condition of existence for and a result of capital. To put it in a slightly different language, the production of capitalism comes before capital itself. Therefore, the condition of 5. On the feminization of labor, I am mainly referring to the work of Christian Marazzi (2006) and Cristina Morini (2007).


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possibility for the reproduction of capital does not exclude a priori the nonreproduction 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 Production of Subjectivity: Within and Against the Mode of Production The analysis of primitive accumulation developed so far implies that the common 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 investments 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’’


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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 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.


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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.


Producing the Common The production of the common as a cooperative plane of language, practices, and 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 Rancie `re (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 e ´ve ńementielle; 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).


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subjectivity expresses her singularity beyond identity and belonging. Disidentification is a process through which subjectivity voices herself, not to express her undeniable difference, but rather to articulate a multiplicity of differences through the experiences in her life, as postcolonial critique has highlighted.7 Such a disidentified subject practices, in the service of the production of the common, ‘‘intervals of subjectification’’ (Rancie `re 1999, 137), the space in between identities, conditions, statuses, names, and belongings. This ‘‘interval’’ is the rupture or interruption of capitalist valorization, the space and the condition of the refusal that makes possible the transgression of borders standing between separate identities and places. This is ‘‘the construction of ties that bind the given to what is not given, the common to the private, what belongs to what does not belong’’ (138) and that subvert the capitalist organization of society and its hierarchies, reminding us that the common is a process of organization that always needs to be produced. The transgression of subjectivity and the rupture of exploitation and hierarchies 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.

Translating Difference: The Praxis of the Common 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).



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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 McCainPalin 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 foreigners in your enunciation’’ (2009, 137). Heterolingual translation might be the mode in which immanent subjectivity combines difference and valorizes the creative potential of the other. This is the production of the common by and through difference from a condition of incommensurability (i.e., heterolingual address of translation) as opposed to the production of equivalence (i.e., homolingual address of translation). This way, difference as singularity, rather than as identity, could become the terrain*/although tactical and situated*/for the translation of languages, experiences, and imaginaries in the political composition and organization of the common. However, this is not a process immune to the encroachment of identity; rather, it is always threatened by the possibility of its reversal. It is at one and the same time joined with and different from the composition of homolingual translation, although continuously overlapping with it. A linguistic example could be helpful to describe this complex process of heterolingual translation as translation of the common.8 The speech among Latino and Chinese workers in the United States is heterolingual because they speak a new configuration of languages that looks like English but is not English. Nor is it Chinese or Spanish or Span-English. It is a new language (uncodified and free from identity) in which the Latino and the Chinese worker act more as inventors than translators, composing (and producing) a new, heterogeneous means of communication that builds up ties among different languages, cultures, and experiences, although it continuously deals with the homogeneity of English. In the production of the common, where heterolingual translation does happen, race, gender, and class affinities compose each other, disjoining former identities and constructing a new fabric of social identity. This was the case with the Justice for Janitors campaign in the Los Angeles business district. Started in the early 1990s by the coming together of a group of undocumented workers, mainly Latino women, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 399, this self-organized campaign produced a wide alliance in support of janitors’ struggles for better wages and working conditions. This citywide alliance, supported by the media and involving 8. I want to thank Alvaro Reyes for suggesting that I develop this point.


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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 homogeneous language of capital. They invented and practiced forms of self-organization and autonomous cooperation that destabilized the traditional, homogenous form of representative democracy. They suspended capitalistic relations of production, playing with the heterogeneity of language, imageries, and political practices instead of going along with the empty and violent homogeneity of the political institutions of capital. Nevertheless, this powerful political experience was never completely devoid of the risk of being assimilated by homogenous and representative practices. The identity backlash was always a distinct possibility, reminding us that heterolingual translation is constantly at stake. Therefore the translation, as well as the production, of the common is a battlefield, a plane of tension on which homogeneity and heterogeneity compete. The case of the coalition for Obama is exemplary: it was the outcome of a process of composition of differences and openness to new alliances around a common goal. It has also run the risk of redirecting difference into an ‘‘identity politics’’ or, worse, into the ‘‘neutrality of race’’ (Curcio, Hardt, and Wiegman 2008), that is the capitalistic valorization of difference. This is the capturing of the common into a form of system functioning and compatibility, not heterolingual translation. Rather, it speaks the language of multiracialism and multiculturalism, emptying difference of its political meaning while relativizing it. As an ambivalent process, translation could embrace the partiality of singularity as an incommensurable difference or it could impose the homogeneity of identity, lapsing into essentialism. Identity refers to a form of (dialectical) recognition of difference*/based on the homogenization of the Other*/that denies the disparity of translatability and untranslatability, and fails to recognize the hierarchical organization of social relations around difference. Identity is intimately connected with the empty idea of (universal) equivalence of difference that underpins the notion of the neutrality of race and gender. Singularity, on the other hand, is the (immanent) subjectivity producing the common as the possible form of communism in the twentyfirst century. Thus, to imagine and practice communism today requires, first of all, a shared responsibility for the other. It calls for the rejection of solitude and individualism, and the development of new forms of common coexistence in resistance and organization. This way, we may still put to work the idea of a ‘‘social surplus’’ from the Grundrisse as a fundamental part of communism, notwithstanding the limits of the


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Marxist theorization of communism, especially in its concrete application in ‘‘real socialism.’’


Organizing the Common The production of the common as the rupture of a capitalist valorization of difference requires the invention of forms of political organization able to translate desires, needs, and forms of life into a common constituent dynamic. The common, as Hardt and Negri argue, ‘‘is an inexhaustible source of innovation and creativity’’ (2009, 111/2). It interrupts capitalist relations of production, inventing a process of organization of singularity in the common. Therefore, to produce the common means to create self-organization (that is, the autonomous organization of the self as singularity in a collective way), replacing delegation and participation within representative democracy as the leading forms of social and political organization. Within this framework, the production of the common aims to be an open process of politicization that challenges the traditional forms of politics, recognizes singularity and difference, and opens up a space for agency. Valorizing singularity in self-organized practices goes beyond the process of dialectical recognition by an external and homogeneous identity (i.e., homolingual translation through a party or a union) that is characteristic of representative democracy. It sparks unconventional forms of politics and organizations. These practices act as the common constituent dynamic, meaning they are free from the institutional production of power. Several examples of this unconventional form of political organization take form in recent history. These are, among other examples, the aforementioned social unionism experiences such as the Justice for Janitors campaign and the political practices expressed by the migrants’ uprising in spring 2006. Another such form is found in the Workers Centers: self-organized and independent (from unions and parties) political experiences founded on workers’ agency and taking voice. These centers combine ‘‘different types of organizations, from social service agencies, fraternal organizations, settlement houses, community organizing groups, and unions to social movement organizations . . . working at the intersection between race, gender and low-wage work’’ (Fine 2006, 12/3). All these experiences involved the organization of the contemporary cheap (mostly displaced migrant) labor force by autonomous political practices with assistance from advocate groups, social movements, churches, neighborhood groups, associations, and so on. Nevertheless, to produce the common, these experiences have to allow room for a militant subjectivity to make her voice heard. They need a militant subjectivity that breaks with the political recognition required by representative democracy and valorizes differences, inventing new forms of politics. Working in this way, the production of the common emerges as heterolingual translation, bringing together and valorizing subjectivities and practices that have multiple historical and geographical origins. Also, the production of the common enables experimental practices within the unions, contributing to the renewal of the labor movement internally by challenging the traditional form of representative democracy.

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The One and the Multiple 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 contemporary*/heterogeneous*/ subjectivities. These struggles, wary of pessimism and political impasses, openly challenged the universal subject of political transformation some time before academia and postmodernism decreed the ‘‘death of the subject.’’ The student struggles in 1968, the feminist protests during the 1970s, and the African American fight for civil rights, together with the more recent examples above, prove, among other things, the possibility of a nonhomogeneous composition of subjectivities within the common. These were none other than autonomous and self-organized practice and social cooperation in action. They describe the rise of a political subject that takes the partiality of difference as the central force in social transformation and confronts the holistic homogeneity of the traditional political subject: namely, the parties and unions. Working on the potentiality of rupture expressed by difference, this political subject composes singularity on a common plane of action and challenges the capitalistic organization of social relations and the presumed universal homogeneity of the political subject. This is organization of the common by the partiality of difference. That is to say, the production of the common finds its potentia in the composition of the multiplicity of differences. However, the composition of the multiplicity of differences is not a smooth plane, but a constant struggle. It raises the question how singularities and differences could be both the bases for, and what are at stake in, the production of the common. This is the conundrum that a political praxis oriented toward communism has to resolve.

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, ¨ zselçuk for their precious remarks. Yahya Madra, and especially Ceren O

References Allen, T. W. 1997. The invention of the white race. Vol. 2, The origin of racial oppression in Anglo-America. New York: Verso.



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Althusser, L. 1965. For Marx. London: Andersen and Collins. ´. Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. New York: Verso. Althusser, L., and E Andersen, M. L., and P. H. Collins, eds. 1992. Race, class and gender: An anthology. Florence, Ky.: Wadsworth. Chakrabarty, D. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Curcio, A. 2008. Along the color line: Racialisation and resistance in cognitive capitalism. Darkmatter 2 (February). http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/ (accessed 1 April 2009). Curcio, A., M. Hardt, and R. Wiegman. 2008. Le presidenziali americane all’ombra della crisi finanziaria: Quale rappresentanza per le presidenziali americane. Posse, October. http://www.posseweb.net/spip.php?article239 (accessed 1 April 2009). Dalla Costa, M., and S. James. 1972. The power of women and the subversion of the community. London: Falling Wall Press. Del Re, A. 1979. Struttura capitalistica del lavoro legato alla riproduzione. In Oltre il lavoro domestico: il lavoro delle donne tra produzione e riproduzione, ed. L. Chiste, A. Del Re, and E. Forti. Milan: Opuscoli Marxisti, Feltrinelli. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860/1880. New York: The Free Press. Federici, S. 2004. Caliban and the witch: Women, the body and primitive accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Fine, J. 2006. Worker Centers: Organizing communities at the edge of the dream. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Guglielmo, J., and S. Salerno, eds. 2003. Are Italians white? How race is made in America. New York: Routledge. Hall, S. 1980. Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance. In Sociological theories: Race and colonialism, 305/45. Paris: Unesco. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Ignatiev, N. 1995. How the Irish became white. New York: Routledge. Jameson, F. 1981. The political unconscious: Narrative as socially symbolic act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Locke, J. 1980. Second treatise on government. Indianapolis: Hackett. Marx, K. 1972. The ethnological notebooks of Karl Marx (studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock). Trans. and ed. L. Krader. Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum. */* */ /. 1976a. Grundrisse. London: Penguin. */* */ /. 1976b. Capital. Vol. 1. Trans. B. Fowkes. London: Penguin. Mellino, M. 2009. Postcolonial citizenship as symbol and allegory of postcolonial capitalism. Paper presented at ‘‘Postcolonial Capitalism,’’ a symposium at Goodenough College, London, held 15/6 October. Mezzadra, S. 2008. La condizione postcoloniale. Verona: ombre corte. Milkman, R. 2006. L.A. story: Immigrant workers and the future of the U.S. labor movement. New York: Russell Sage. Mohanty, C. T. 2004. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rancie `re, J. 1999. Disagreement: Politics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ravi, S. 2009. Village ‘‘witches’’ beaten in India. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/south_asia/8315980.stm (accessed 9 November 2009).


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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Jouissance and Antagonism in the Forms of the Commune: A Critique of Biopolitical Subjectivity


¨zselc Yahya M. Madra and Ceren O ¸uk In recent years a growing literature on biopolitical governmentality, prompted by the 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 crisisridden 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. Key Words: Subjectivity, Biopolitical Governmentality, Jouissance, Common, Forms of the Commune

What is the role of subjectivity in the maintenance and transformation of capitalist social relations as well as the breaking away from capitalism and producing communism? Or, to put it in slightly different terms, what are the subjective conditions that cultivate a passionate attachment to the bourgeois axiom, ‘‘to each according to their contribution,’’ and what are the subjective conditions under which an ethico-political reorientation can realize the communist axiom, ‘‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’’? In order to be able even to formulate the question of subjective reorientation, it is necessary to rethink the social ontology of subjectivity. At a very basic level, it is necessary to grant subjectivity its constitutive role as the locus where the social link is forged*/that is, to treat subjectivity neither as an epiphenomenal effect of some underlying class structure nor as an ideological supplement that merely facilitates the smooth functioning of the ‘‘rule of capital,’’ but rather, to identify subjectivity as that which constitutes sociality. Yet, at the same time, it is equally necessary to acknowledge squarely the social constitution of subjectivity*/that is, to operate with the hypothesis that subjectivity is not grounded in some ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030481-17 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490409


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transhistorical understanding of human nature but rather is overdetermined by economic, cultural, corporeal, and political processes and open to ethico-political reorientation. Since the 1970s, starting with Louis Althusser’s (1971) widely read essay on ideological state apparatuses, the Marxian tradition, or at least a vibrant subset of it, has opened itself not only to Continental philosophers other than Hegel, but also to such contemporary critical philosophers as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Gilles Deleuze. Through this opening it began to theorize subjectivity not only as being socially constituted, but also as being constitutive of the social.1 While the question of subjectivity in Althusser’s essay remained, in the final analysis, a question of the reproduction of the circuit of capital, his emphasis on the materiality of ideological practices and the very gesture of foregrounding the question of ideology enabled his readers to begin to call into question the architectural metaphor 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 ¨ zselc reorientation (revolution) (O ¸uk 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 postAlthusserian 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 economicinstitutional 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).



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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). Those who write within the problematic of governmentality understand the particular shift in capitalism from the Keynesian/New Deal regime of accumulation to the neoliberal regime of accumulation as primarily a shift at the level of subjectivity even if this shift is induced by the state and its various agencies, procedures, regimes of truth, and principles of formalization. For some, however, this account fails to relate the shift in the social constitution of subjectivity to the dynamics of production in biopolitical society. One of the most developed theorizations that addresses this relation can be found in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s argument pertaining to the production of subjectivity in the very heart of immaterial production. Hardt and Negri and other theorists of the Italian post-Fordist movement similarly acknowledge subjectivity as the locus of the shift in the regime of accumulation, but then historicize the constitution of subjectivity and find the origins of post-Fordist subjectivity in the social networks of immaterial production. For this Autonomist Marxian literature, immaterial production is biopolitical because its locus of production (both in its technologies and products) covers the whole of life. In fact, within the biopolitical relations of immaterial production, Hardt and Negri find the common both as its presupposition and result: ‘‘The common, in fact, appears not only at the beginning and end of production but also in the middle, since the production processes themselves are common, collaborative, and communicative’’ (2004, 148). For Hardt and Negri, immaterial production, and in particular the common, has the potential to be the locus of resistance and ‘‘positive social transformation’’ (66). Thus, the post-Fordist literature offers something that the governmentality literature does not*/a possibility of imagining the refusal of the rule of capital and resisting expropriation of the common. Nevertheless, both approaches go only so far in addressing our concerns. While we do agree with both literatures that neoliberal governmentality operates at the level of subjectivity, we have not found a convincing explanation of how the capillary 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.

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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.

Behaviorism in Biopolitics According to our reading, both literatures on biopolitics, in slightly different ways, understand neoliberal governmentality as the governance of the social body through the systematic manipulations of its institutional environments. Nevertheless, the successful (nonrandom and systematic) control of the social body requires that concrete individuals should be capable of responding to these induced changes in their environment in predictable (hence governable) ways. We think that both literatures approach this behavioral condition almost as a state that is already realized in actuality rather than as a problem of ‘‘ideological interpellation’’ that begs explanation. In so doing, both approaches suffer from two distinct yet similar kinds of behaviorism. Our thesis is that the implicit behaviorism of the governmentality approach emanates from its too quick ontologization of the behaviorist propositions of Chicago neoclassicism. Foucault locates the behaviorist tendency of this self-proclaimed methodological individualist tradition in one of the earlier essays of Becker (1962). In fact, Becker’s essay was the latest (but definitely not the last) in a series of essays by Chicago economists who were trying to make a case for the usefulness of the homo economicus assumption in economic theory in the face of a growing skepticism regarding the realism of this theoretical construct (Alchian 1950; Friedman 1953). The common thrust of these papers was that, even though economic rationality may not hold at the level of the individual and even though concrete individuals behave in random ways, competitive dynamics, functioning like a selection mechanism, will make sure that economic rationality gets realized at the level of markets.4 Indeed, the figure of homo economicus, found in the writings of Chicago economists as 4. Foucault offers a very interesting definition of (Chicago-style) economics as a behavioral science: ‘‘economics [is] the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables’’ (269). Where we slightly depart from Foucault in our reading of the texts by Alchian (1950), Friedman (1953), and Becker (1962) is that, for these Chicago economists, the entity that responds in a nonrandom and systematic manner is not the individual (who is explicitly assumed to respond randomly, erratically, or habitually), but rather, the market (Madra 2007).



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someone ‘‘who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment [economic incentives]’’ (Foucault 2008, 270), does not ‘‘imply an anthropological identification of any behavior whatsoever with economic behavior’’ (252). Rather, the figure of homo economicus, and Foucault is very clear about this, is a working assumption of neoliberal governmentality; it is the grid of intelligibility, ‘‘the surface of contact between the individual and the power exercised on him’’ (252/3). Foucault is very careful not to subsume the ‘‘whole subject’’ under homo economicus, and treats the latter as an interface between the individual and the government (252/3). In short, in his 1978/9 seminars, Foucault does not offer us an analysis of the micropolitics of subjective capture by or resistance to neoliberal governmentality; he offers an analysis of ‘‘‘governmental reason,’ of those types of rationality that are implemented in the methods by which human conduct is directed through a state administration’’ (322). 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 networks’’ (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).


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of Empire. Accordingly, Hardt and Negri redefine exploitation as ‘‘the private appropriation of part or all of the value that has been produced as common’’ (150). Post-Fordist subjectivities resemble homo economicus only as ‘‘semblances’’ that ‘‘originate in and derive a certain legitimacy from certain quite real and persistent aspects of today’s mode of production’’ (Virno 2007, 42). Replacing ‘‘the wage’’ as a ‘‘socially necessary semblance’’ that (re-)produced Fordism, Paul Virno and others find imaginaries of self-employment, professionalism, entrepreneurialism, and individualism as the new ‘‘socially necessary semblances’’ of post-Fordism grounded in the exigencies of flexible, mobile, and precarious immaterial production. What strikes our attention, once again, is the absence of an explanation of the ‘‘hold’’ that these ‘‘semblances’’ have at the level of subjectivity. For instance, there is very little discussion of why this post-Fordist subjectivity would not resist (for there are many who don’t) and perhaps even derive enjoyment from this game of ‘‘economic incentives,’’ the neoliberal universe of individual responsibility, pursuit of selfinterest, and transgressive consumption.6 Nor do we find a discussion of the subjective investments and affective regimes that will enable these post-Fordist subjectivities to reorient themselves ethico-politically to resist the capture of Empire and move beyond the rule of capital. Instead, we find another form of behaviorism. The post-Fordist literature argues that the neoliberal economization (not only financialization but the entire neoliberal reform and expansion of the economic interface including, but not limited to, the labor market, housing market, school market, defined contribution plans, insurance market, and consumer credit market) of the ‘‘life in common’’ requires and successfully elicits from the social subject a particular kind of immaterial labor (e.g., accounting practices, financial planning, time management, price search, cost/benefit analysis) that ‘‘forcefully suggests’’ a subjectivity that more and more resembles homo economicus qua entrepreneur*/albeit hindered by and rendered susceptible to media manipulation or herd behavior due to the ‘‘bounded’’ nature of his or her ‘‘mimetic rationality’’ (Marazzi 2008, 19/27).7 In general, while we agree with both literatures in their description of neoliberalism as a constructivist political project, we think neither approach successfully explains how this political project produces the neoliberal subject (or fails to do so) or how the subject herself participates in the constitution of her subjectivity. 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 Andre ´ Orle án’s (1999) reading of J. M. Keynes’s ‘‘beauty contest.’’



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If, however, we read Foucault’s genealogy of homo economicus not as a representation of the anthropological truth of the social subject, but rather as a ‘‘grid of intelligibility’’ or an ‘‘interface’’ between the government and the individual (Foucault 2008, 252/3), then we will be able to open room for theorizing the role that passionate attachments and affective regimes play in determining the success and failure of the neoliberal project of social harmony. For this reason, in what follows, we propose to approach subjectivity in terms of social fantasies that, by organizing and channeling subjective libidinal investments, enable the constitution of a social link (in Althusserian terms, a ‘‘society effect’’ or, in psychoanalytic terms, ‘‘social transference’’) in the face of its central and constitutive derailment by the smear of jouissance. In particular, we argue that there is no common that is not smeared by jouissance, and hence marked by the constitutive impossibility of the ˇizˇek 2007). In the section below we begin, through a reading of Marx’s social (Z discourse on the forms of the commune, to develop our understanding of the common as the locus of both social interdependency and antagonism.

From the Forms of the Commune . . . 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. [T]his notion of peasant appropriation substitutes the supposedly ‘‘objective’’ observation of the physical act of appropriation by ‘‘one-sided’’ agents for the theorization of the social constitution of the process of appropriation and of the agents who produce and appropriate surplus-labor. That is, if peasants appropriate surplus-labor through membership in the commune (and, therefore, are communally designated as the producers and ‘‘immediate appropriators’’ of surplus-labor), then we treat this appropriation as communal appropriation. Thus, what is often treated as ‘‘individual’’ appropriation, we consider merely a form of communal appropriation, since this appropriation takes place in and through the culturally designated bodies of family, clan, and commune. (Amariglio 1984, 374)


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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), 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 workingout 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 misrecognition 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.



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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 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 psychoanalysis 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 ´tienne Balibar’s original treatment of a nonhumanist interpretation of it. Indeed, following E 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 ¨ zselc economies of the participant social subjects (O ¸uk and Madra 2005).

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shore up and inhibit the formations of capitalism as well as formulate the coordinates for a subjective reorientation to communism.


. . . to Two Ways of Relating to Jouissance We find in the Lacanian concept of jouissance the possibility of making sense of both the success and the failure of the different forms of the commune. The manner in which Jacques Lacan mobilizes the term endows it with a rich and internally split set of meanings that exceed the possible evocations of its direct English translation, enjoyment. First, jouissance connotes not only pleasure but pain and always does so simultaneously. Second, it is located both in the real of the body (as it refers to ‘‘to come’’) and the symbolic order of the public law (as it refers to ‘‘usufruct’’). Playing 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 ˇiz jouissance as ‘‘the Real of the immediate life-substance’’ (Z ˇek 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)



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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, consumption of the correct commodities). This institutes an infinite movement of desire within a delimited frame (Zupanc ˇic ˇ 2000, 285). Marx’s analysis of capitalist exploitation in modern joint-stock corporations enables us to understand how an institution can be organized around the masculine logic of exception. For Marx, the capitalist corporation constitutes an all around an exceptional X, a legal entity (whether it be filled by the figure of the mythical Entrepreneur or the Board of Directors) that gets ‘‘something for nothing,’’ that has the exclusive right to appropriate the surplus performed by direct laborers. This exception to the rule of the exchange of equivalents that supposedly governs the capitalist market economy is very much akin to the masculine fantasy of the primordial father who had access to another kind of jouissance, a noncastrated jouissance. In bourgeois economics, the mythical figure of the Entrepreneur fills in the empty place of the exceptional position of the appropriator of surplus: the Entrepreneur is the innovator who can take risks like no other, who will create jobs by undertaking investment, and who will be the engine of economic growth and efficiency, providing thereby the supply-side ‘‘base’’ for the consumption-led ‘‘superstructure’’ of a late capitalist Utopia. Certainly, from a Marxian perspective, the unquestionable status of this exception is a mere imposture for under capitalism, innovation, risk, and investment are all thoroughly socialized processes undertaken by complex institutional dispositifs. Nonetheless, the Entrepreneur is a fiction with material effects. On the feminine side, on the other hand, since there is no exception, there is no form of jouissance that is not partial. Yet, precisely because there is no exception, because there is no idealized, fantasmatic notion of exceptional jouissance that would occasion a closure and guarantee its consistency, the social field under consideration (e.g., the set of Woman) fails to be constituted as a consistent whole. The feminine, according to Lacan, is non-all (pas tous) precisely because ‘‘she is totally, that is, limitlessly inscribed within the symbolic that she is in some sense wholly outside it, which is to say the question of her existence is absolutely undecidable within it’’ (Copjec 1994, 227). That is, the feminine logic of non-all fails to constitute a consistent whole because it is immanent to the symbolic order. In contrast, the masculine logic of all does

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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 Zupanc ˇic ˇ 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 Zupanc ˇic ˇ’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.

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 ˇiz the Other) relation to jouissance. Slavoj Z ˇek’s (1997) psychoanalytical reading of commodity fetishism enables us to discern the constitutive decenteredness of the ˇiz subject. Z ˇek 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 ˇiz sociosymbolic order we live in. Precisely for this reason, Z ˇek 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 ¨ zselc desire) (O ¸uk 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’’ (Zupanc ˇic ˇ 2000, 292). Under the superegoic injunction to achieve full enjoyment (i.e., an idealized economic success), the subject continuously 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 ˇiz efficiently than any prohibition’’ (Z ˇek 1997, 49).



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ˇiz Z ˇek 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 ˇiz tragedy as the entity that emotes (enjoys) on behalf of the audience (1992, 247), Z ˇek 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). Nevertheless, as the ‘‘populist anger’’ against the ostentatious bonus given to financial executives attests, this condition of interpassivity may not be so stable, especially because the attachment to the impossible promise of efficient markets constantly fuels dissatisfaction. In this sense, it is quite possible to read the recent backlash against the ‘‘greed’’ of Wall Street and finance capital as a breakdown of the condition of interpassivity. Yet, perhaps, a more careful reading should question whether the ‘‘populist rage’’ has the potential to traverse the fantasies of capitalism and break away from a more generalized condition of interpassivity. Perhaps a more realistic and sober analysis would bet on the hypothesis that the backlash against the ‘‘greed’’ of Wall Street is an attempt to isolate it as the symptom that blocks the fulfillment of the fantasy of a truly fair, efficient, and scientific capitalism. Approached this way, the shift is rather from an interpassive relation to privileged subjects who are supposed to enjoy on our behalf to another interpassive relation, this time, to the privileged expert subjects of the Obama administration who are supposed to know how to remedy and regulate the failures and excesses of competitive markets.

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,


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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 of consumption. While Marx’s particular object of critique is the bourgeois fantasy of equal exchange, and while Marx recalls the historical development of the forces of production (i.e., the ‘‘second stage of communism’’) for the materialization of this principle, there is no reason his maxim cannot be extended to critique all forms of the commune (including the communistic ones) that posit a final reconciliation of labor with value, and of the ‘‘common’’ (of production) with distribution. That is why, reading Marx against himself and inspired by Alain Badiou’s formulation of the axiom (of equality) (1999), we read ‘‘from each . . . to each’’ as a historical instantiation of an axiom of communism. Taken as an axiom, it can no longer be read as a description of a Utopian social organization of surplus that restores collective justice or the completeness of social being once workers reunite with what is alienated from them. Neither can it be postponed to a distant future (the realization of which is conditioned upon either the development of forces of production or the organization of privileged political actors). Rather, it becomes a universal demand that is actualized as it encounters the function of exception in various concrete contexts here and now. We want to emphasize the axiomatic nature of communism rather than particular content we borrow from Marx. Nonetheless, it is all the more relevant to read Marx’s maxim today in opposition to the neoliberal governmentality that elevates a very particular ideal of economic efficiency to an exceptional status by linking the distribution of economic values to a fantasmatic notion of productivity. ‘‘From each . . . to each’’ has a ‘‘negative’’ dimension as it seeks a break with the neoliberal economy of masculine enjoyment. It also involves the ‘‘positive’’ dimension of making the ‘‘void’’ of surplus appear in concrete experiments*/what, following Hardt and Negri, we might call the ‘‘experience of reappropriation’’ by the multitude. One such experiment is a community project, Nuestras Raıćes, a grass-roots organization that promotes economic, human, and community development in Holyoke, Massachusetts, through projects relating to food, agriculture, and the environment (http://www.nuestras-raices.org/en/support).10 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).



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Reading through Nuestras Raıćes’ statement of community support for sustaining and expanding the commons, we are struck by the resemblance of its vision to an economy of non-all, instituted each and every time through the communist axiom ‘‘from each according to ability, to each according to needs.’’ The organization approaches each possible community contribution ‘‘one by one,’’ as a decision of inclusion of a singular skill, talent, experience, and goal (e.g., conducting research, organizing workshops, helping with business ventures and planning, photo/video documentation of events, and so on) which it tries to ‘‘match up with a project that needs doing.’’ The example of Nuestras Raices also demonstrates that the non-all that the communist axiom guards does not mean the infinite inclusion of every demand. And this is not because of a belief in the reality of homo economicus, that without a limit, free riders would deplete the common. The non-all is infinite and inconsistent not because it includes all that exists, but rather, lacking an exception, it is open to each concrete demand of inclusion with the partial enjoyment of experimenting and without the suffering of falling short.

References Alchian, A. 1950. Uncertainty, evolution, and economic theory. Journal of Political Economy 58 (3): 211/21. Althusser, L. [1971] 2001. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation). In Lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. B. Brewster, 85/126. New York: Monthly Review Press. ´. Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. London: Verso. Althusser, L., and E Amariglio, J. L. 1984. Economic history and the theory of primitive socio-economic development. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst. Amariglio, J. L., and A. Callari. 1993. Marxian value theory and the problem of the subject: The role of commodity fetishism. In Fetishism as cultural discourse, ed. E. Apter and W. Pietz, 186/216. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Badiou, A. 1999. Philosophy and politics. Radical Philosophy 96: 29/32. Barry, A., P. Osborne, and N. Rose, eds. 1996. Foucault and political reason. London: UCL Press. Becker, G. 1962. Irrational behavior and economic theory. Journal of Political Economy 70 (1): 1/13. */* */ /. 1976. The economic approach to human behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Binkley, S. 2009. The work of neoliberal governmentality: Temporality and ethical substance in the tale of two dads. Foucault Studies 6: 60/78. Brown, W. 2003. Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy. Theory and Event 7 (1). Burchell, G., C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds. 1991. The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Callari, A., and D. F. Ruccio. 1996. Postmodern materialism and the future of Marxist theory: Essays in the Althusserian tradition. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Copjec, J. 1994. Read my desire: Lacan against the historicists. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.


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Donzelot, J. 2008. Michel Foucault and liberal intelligence. Economy and Society 37 (1): 115/34. Elliot, G., ed. 1994. Althusser: A critical reader. London: Blackwell. Fink, B. 2002. Knowledge and jouissance. In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s major work on love, knowledge, and feminine sexuality, ed. S. Barnard and B. Fink, 21/4. Albany: State University of New York Press. Foucault, M. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Colle `ge de France 1978/1979, trans. G. Burchell, ed. M. Senellart. London: Palgrave. Friedman, M. 1953. The methodology of positive economics. In Essays in positive economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graham, J., and J. Cornwell. 2009. Building community economies in Massachusetts: An emerging model of economic development? In The social economy: International perspectives on economic solidarity, ed. A. Amin, 37/65. London: Zed. Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin. Healy, S. 2010. Traversing fantasies, activating desires: Economic geography, activist research, and psychoanalytic methodology. The Professional Geographer: in press. Healy, S., and J. Graham. 2008. Building community economies: A post-capitalist project of sustainable development. In Economic representations: Academic and everyday, ed. D. F. Ruccio, 291/314. London: Routledge. Kaplan, E. A., and M. Sprinker, eds. 1993. The Althusserian legacy. New York: Verso. Lacan, J. 1992. The seminar. Book VII: The ethics of psychoanalysis. Trans. D. Porter. New York: W. W. Norton. */ /. 1998. The seminar. Book XX: Encore, on feminine sexuality, the limits of love */* and knowledge. Trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton. Lemke, T. 2001. The birth of biopolitics’’: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Colle `ge de France on neoliberal governmentality. Economy and Society 30 (2): 190/207. */* */ /. 2002. Foucault, governmentality, and critique. Rethinking Marxism 14 (3): 49/64. Lezra, J., ed. 1995. Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the labor of reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Madra, Y. M. 2007. Late neoclassical economics: Restoration of theoretical humanism in contemporary mainstream economics. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst. Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital and language: From the new economy to the war economy. Trans. G. Conti. Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e). Marx, K. 1966. Critique of the Gotha programme. New York: International Publishers. */* */ /. 1993. Grundrisse. Trans. M. Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin/NLR. McGowan, T. 2004. The end of dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the emerging society of enjoyment. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mirowski, P. 2002. Machine dreams: How economics became a cyborg science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olsen, E. 2009. Social ontology and the origins of mode of production theory. Rethinking Marxism 21 (2): 177/95. Orle án, A. 1999. Le pouvoir de la finance. Paris: Odile Jacob. ¨ zselc O ¸uk, C. 2009. Post-Marxism after Althusser: A critique of the alternatives. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst. ¨ zselc .O ¸uk, C., and Y. M. Madra. 2005. Psychoanalysis and Marxism: From capitalist-all to communist non-all. Psychoanalysis. Culture and Society 10 (1): 79/97.


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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Subjectivity and Visions of the Common


Alvaro Reyes This article highlights the important contributions as well as unresolved questions presented in Yahya Madra and Ceren O¨zselçuk’s and in Anna Curcio’s work on subjectivity and the common. Madra and O¨zselçuk’s psychoanalytic approach and Curcio’s approach from within postoperaismo, despite their differences, allow us to address important issues regarding the relationship between contemporary capitalist production and subjectivity. Key Words: Subjectivity, Common, Communism, Libidinal Investment, Race, Gender

¨ zselc The essays by Yahya Madra and Ceren O ¸uk (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 contemporary 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.

Communism and Forms of Enjoyment ¨ zselc Madra and O ¸uk 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 ¨ zselc 1. The comments in this section refer to a previous version of the article by Madra and O ¸uk. ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030498-09 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490411



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between social production and distribution is reestablished, class antagonism is resolved, and the ‘community’ is fully reconciled.’’ Yet, for the authors, this imaginary sidesteps the fact that the common is always necessarily instituted by the intervention of ‘‘forms of the commune.’’ That is, the common (as an ideal future state) is always instantiated by a ‘‘form of the commune’’ (an existing social practice), and thus, given the constitutive impossibility of the reconciliation of society, none of these ‘‘forms’’ (including the communist one) can ever ‘‘reconcile’’ labor with value or the common with distribution. This particular imaginary of the common shares with capitalism an investment in masculine enjoyment, the belief in the existence of an exception which represents a noncastrated or ‘‘full’’ enjoyment (i.e., of future social harmony). This exception then attempts to give consistency to the existing set (of social relations), presenting it as a complete set, when in fact it must necessarily fail given the ‘‘constitutive’’ role played by the exception to that set within this logic. Such a critique of the potential pitfalls of the common arising from the perspective of a philosophy of adequation and its impossibility (of a subjects’ adequation to itself as well as between subjects and objects) is particularly powerful with regard to theoretical outlooks that surreptitiously view the common as a ‘‘thing’’ (means of production, commodities, technical composition of labor) that must be reunited with its rightful owner (a preexisting social subject). Although a review of the literature would show that a notion of the common as full enjoyment is in fact present within ¨ zselc various strains of contemporary theory, Madra and O ¸uk do not clearly delineate their object of critique. (Is the masculine logic of enjoyment equally implicated in all the varying conceptions of the common? Is it present in the tradition of ‘‘the commons’’ handed down historically and studied primarily through the discourse and practices of the Diggers and True Levellers? What about in the historico-philosophic concept of the common which has as its primary referent the work of Baruch Spinoza? Do we find it in the use and revival of the common in contemporary forms of Italian post-Fordist thought?) This leaves the impression that internal variations within conceptions of the common have been elided in order to make an important, but partial, point about masculine enjoyment. That is, it seems that the possibility of the existence of the common, not as a discourse that concerns itself with the adequation of the subject to itself (as some future moment of dis-alienation in any traditional sense), but rather as one which has as its central problematic the production of new subjectivities, is simply not addressed (a possibility that is clearly present in Curcio’s work, although not unproblematically, and to which I will turn below).2 Despite the fact that the philosophical backdrop of the psychoanalytic split subject and certain theorizing around the production of new subjectivities might speak past 2. On a closely related topic, although there is an approximation in Louis Althusser’s attempt to rethink the Marxist concept of ‘‘ideology’’ to a certain problematic in the work of Michel Foucault (Montag 1995), I think more work would have to be done in order to show that Foucault’s notion of biopolitics as ‘‘interface’’ is assimilable to the use of it made here by Madra ¨ zselc ¨ zselc and O ¸uk. Although not the subject of Madra and O ¸uk article, I think it would be fruitful to investigate more directly the parallels and tensions between what Foucault termed his ‘‘ontology of the present’’ and the contemporary deployment of theories of ‘‘articulation.’’


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¨ zselc each other, Madra and O ¸uk 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 ¨ zselc Madra and O ¸uk, 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 simply a matter of investing in an ‘‘identification’’ with an exterior element). That is, we should not underestimate the ways in which schemas of control force contemporary subjects to simultaneously occupy the position of exploited and exploiter, to wield the mechanisms of power (even if only conjuncturally) while simultaneously being distanced from the capacity to exert social power more generally. We must consider in this regard the pension fund ‘‘revolution,’’ which was interestingly pioneered during New York City’s 1975 fiscal crisis and in effect cut off a potential alliance between black city workers and the black poor, where the future security of public employees was tied to the purchase of ‘‘city bonds’’ that were in turn invested in private corporations. This was in addition to the parallel process of an increasing number of jobs where payment for labor came in the form of company stock (Marazzi 2008, 17). In this light, the limitations of ‘‘populist rage’’ and the desire for a ‘‘fairer,’’ more ‘‘efficient’’ capitalism pointed to by Madra and ¨ zselc O ¸uk are more likely attributable to the fact that the income and capacity to retire of millions of workers are now directly dependent on the ‘growth’ and ‘stability’ of the very markets that on an ideological level they may despise, than it is to the process of ‘‘identification.’’ In addition, we might consider in this regard the countless ‘‘cooperative’’ managerial schemes where workers are encouraged to cultivate the enjoyment of control over fellow workers rather than receiving an actual increase in wage (what is frequently referred to as the ‘‘title’’ raise as opposed to the ‘‘wage’’ raise). Third, we might consider the massive extension of credit that for the past thirty years has allowed for the increase of enjoyment through consumption while simultaneously serving as a mechanism of deferral with regard to wage demands and collective workplace power. Finally, we would have to take seriously the wages of ‘‘whiteness’’ (W. E. B. DuBois) and masculinity (extending DuBois), where such dispersed and disparate apparatuses as homeowners associations, community policing programs, and antiabortion activism promise a more substantive participation in public institutions in exchange for the cultivation of a vicious identity politics within the working class. This is a politics of the enjoyment provided through the exertion of repressive force against the bodies and lives of black, Latino, and female subordinates (but most specifically black and Latino female subordinates). Thus, although ‘‘identification’’ with the enjoyment of the ‘‘Board of



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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 ¨ zselc formulations of the common and contemporary capitalism, Madra and O ¸uk 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 ¨ zselc (a move which Madra and O ¸uk note is inspired by the work of Alain Badiou). ¨ According to Madra and Ozselc ¸uk, by approaching communism as an axiom, it can be viewed as an immediately available universal demand, actualizable in the here and now and thus diametrically opposed to the masculine fantasy of a future Utopian social order. It is, as they say, a way of simultaneously disinvesting in the exception through the deployment of a feminine non-all while ‘‘wanting’’ to forge a common. Again, although the deployment of communism as axiom certainly has the salutary effect of countering the masculine fantasy of communism as future Utopian equilibrium, the reduction of communism to the noncontradiction made possible in formal logic creates a troubling gap between that notion of communism and political practice. That is, the feminine non-all presented here has the immediate limitation of making itself present only in the idea. Although the possibility of the non-all in formal logic can certainly provide ethical criteria distinct from contemporary capitalism and thus serve as a certain guidepost, it cannot take the place of collective daily practices. (And there is no need to view communism as the result of an ‘‘ecstatic’’ moment of insurrection to recognize that communism requires collective practice). It is thus necessary to explicitly theorize the links between the ‘‘truth’’ available in this axiom and the appearance of that same ‘‘truth’’ in practices distinct but parallel to that of thought. Despite the fact that we no longer find convincing Marx’s solution for relating theory to practice*/the historicist thesis that the ‘‘development of productive forces’’ is a necessary social precondition for the practical actualization of the communist axiom*/it hardly feels like an advance to simply sever all bridges between the practice of the production of ideas and all other social practices. In order to consider alternatives to this severing, it would be necessary to go beyond an ¨ zselc examination of the discursive practices of movements (as Madra and O ¸uk do with Nuestras Raices) that simply restate the logic of the non-all, to an analysis of other practices of those movements that might express the truth of that axiom in a different mode. Such an analysis is necessary unless we believe that communism as non-all is available only in the idea, in which case we have not really rid ourselves of masculine enjoyment but simply found a new location for the exception (i.e., the 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.

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enjoyment previously derived from a belief in a future Utopian harmony is now to be derived from the exceptional character of thought). We must take seriously the task of illuminating the existence of communism within select social practices in the here and now, and not as a future Utopian schema. This task has become all the more difficult due to the deployment of ambivalence as a weapon, as discussed above, undoubtedly making the clarity available within the realm of the idea seem all the more appealing. Yet the consequences of ignoring such a task seem rather grave.


Singular Differences in Common Curcio’s article, ‘‘Translating Difference and the Common,’’ is a welcome contribution to the debate over the relation between issues of race and gender and those of class. 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



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relation (subjection), and then evaluates their use in the practical production of those subjectivities that ‘‘exceed that capitalist mode of production’’ (subjectivation). That ¨ zselc is, Curcio’s article, unlike Madra and O ¸uk’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 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.


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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 ´tienne Balibar explains, exterior to the capacities of this split subject, but rather, as E 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, 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 ¨ zselc take seriously the point made by Madra and O ¸uk 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 6. For a discussion of cooperation as an ontological precondition of capitalism in the related context of the status of cooperation within ‘‘formal subsumption’’ versus ‘‘real subsumption’’ in the work of Antonio Negri, see Surin (1994, 21/2, as well as a series of notes on this very subject in Surin 1993). For a general critique of the tendency within certain theorizations of communism to reduce communism to a derivative phenomenon to capitalism as well as its relation to a certain process of racialization, see generally Robinson (2001).



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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 selfsatisfied 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 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 ´. 2003. We, the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship. Balibar, E Trans. J. Swenson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ´., and I. Wallerstein. 1991. Race, nation, class. New York: Verso. Balibar, E 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).


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Deleuze, G. 1991. Difference and repetition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. James, J. 2009. The dead zone: Stumbling at the crossroads of party politics, genocide, and postracial racism. South Atlantic Quarterly 108 (3): 459/81. Harvey, D. 2009a. Organizing for the anti-capitalist transition. www.davidharvey.org. */* */ /. 2009b. Commonwealth: An exchange. Artforum, November. ¨ zselc Madra, Y. M., and C. O ¸uk. 2010. Jouissance and antagonism in the forms of the commune: A critique of biopolitical subjectivity. Rethinking Marxism 22(3): 481/97. Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital and language: From the new economy to the war economy. New York: Semiotext(e). Montag, W. 1995. The soul is the prison house of the body: Althusser and Foucault, 1970/75. Yale French Studies 88: 53/77. Robinson, C. 2001. Anthropology of Marxism. Surrey: Ashgate. Roediger, D. 2008. How racism survived U.S. history: From settlement and slavery to the Obama phenomena. New York: Verso. Surin, K. 1993. Transform the world, change life: Michael Taussig’s poetics of destruction and revelation. South Atlantic Quarterly 92: 261/94. */* */ /. 1994. Reinventing a physiology of collective liberation: Going ‘‘beyond Marx’’ in the Marxism(s) of Negri, Guattari, and Deleuze. Rethinking Marxism 7 (2): 9/27.

RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 22

NUMBER 3

(JULY 2010)

Notes on Contributors

Editors’ Introduction written on behalf of the Editorial Collective by JOSEPH CHILDERS.


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 Intersection of Art and Economics (Routledge, 2009).

´TIENNE BALIBAR E Has been teaching at the Universities of Algiers, Paris I (Panthe ón-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 Consumption: 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 ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030507-03 – 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490413

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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 and Haitian literature and culture, as well as on theories of ‘‘social’’ mimesis in domains ranging from Romanticism to neuroscience.

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.

¨ ZGU¨ N ARAS O 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

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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.

¨ ZSELÇUK CEREN O


Teaches at the Sociology Department, Bogazic ¸i 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 Post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He works at the intersection of Comparative Ethnic Studies, Marxism, and Globalization. His most recent project centers on the relation between sovereignty and territory in post-1960s Black and Latino radical organizations and the consequent creation of a new spatial imaginary of emancipation. Alvaro has also written and published on issues regarding Zapatismo, as well as related autonomous theories and practices.

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.

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Special Issue on the Common and the Forms of the Commune

The Commune of Paris

The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State

The Muslim World: A Special Issue on Islam and Buddhism

V.I. Lenin on the Paris Commune

The Commune, the Church & The State

The Classroom Facilitator: Special Issue Questions

Aristotle on the Common Sense

Aristotle on the Common Sense

Paris and the Commune, 1871-78: The Politics of Forgetting

Special Issue on Emerging Bacterial Toxins

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the Paris Commune

Alcohol And the Gastrointestinal Tract: Special Issue: Digestive Diseases 2005

Library Management - Volume 26 Issue 4 5 2005: Special issue on the Semantic Web

Revolution and Reaction The Paris Commune 1871

The Method of Normal Forms

The Theory of Jacobi Forms

The Origin and Evolution of Larval Forms

Evolution and the Common Law

Evolution and the Common Law

Evolution and the Common Law

the twilight of common dreams

THE COMMON SENSE OF SCIENCE

The Genius of The Common Law

Science and the Common Understanding

Evolution and the Common Law

The Book of Common Prayer

Surveillance (A Special Issue of Social Text)

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