Antonio Negri - The Common-Polity (2023)

The Common
Antonio Negri
The Common
Translated by Ed Emery
polity
Copyright © Antonio Negri, 2023
This English edition © Polity Press, 2023
The article ‘The Revolution Will Not Be an Explosion Somewhere Down

the Road: An Interview with Antonio Negri’ by Antonio Negri, Filippo Del
Lucchese and Jason E. Smith is reproduced by kind permission of MIT Press.
© 2010 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Contents
Preface: From the Public to the Common vii
I. Advances
1. State, Public Spending and the Decrepitude of the
Historic Compromise3
2. Inside the Crisis: Symptoms of the Common 41
II. The Fundamentals

3. In Search of Commonwealth55
4. The Common as a Mode of Production 70
5. The Law of the Common 81
6. Federalism and Movements of the Common 92
7. Disarticulating Ownership? Common Goods and the
Possibilities of Law 102
III. Discussions
8. What Are We Willing to Share? Reflections on a Concept
of the Common in the Interregnum We Are Living 115
9. The Metaphysics of the Common 127
10. The Revolution Will Not Be an Explosion Somewhere down
the Road: An Interview with Antonio Negri 133
11. On the Institutions of the Common: Prolegomena for a
Constituent Inquiry 151
IV. In Conclusion
12. From the Commune to the Common 165
Notes179
Preface
From the ‘Public’ to the ‘Common’
Is democracy, as it is interpreted and experienced today in the West,

a guarantee of freedom for citizens? The general and generic answer
is, more or less, yes. But, as soon as you try to define this ‘freedom’
and ask yourself what are the effects of its hegemony in the charters
of democratic regimes in the West, that consensus vanishes and you
get instead confusion and differences of position. This is because
that freedom, as embodied in Western democracy, is the freedom of
the individual, of the desire to appropriate that defines the individual
more than anything else does, of the contract that the individual
produces in order to build the collective moment that is necessary
for the development of social life. (I use here the term ‘collective’
rather than ‘public’ because the latter retains a juridical origin that
makes it ill-suited and hardly does justice to the fulness of its usage
in social life.)
In the face of growing scepticism, one wonders in fact whether this
constitutive process of the collective as a product of individualism
responds adequately to the current situation in which citizens live and
produce – whether it is capable of bringing about the transformation
of individual freedom into the collective freedom that citizens need,
in short, whether it can build a civil society free of even greater dif-
ficulties and obstacles. As I restate and clarify my position on whether
western democracy, in taking individual freedom as its watchword,
can be an effective guarantee of a good life for society, my answer has
to be in the negative. There is no connection of individual freedoms
on a collective terrain, as long as appropriative individuals, together
with their contractual prostheses, are held at the centre of society’s
constitutive process. The appropriative individual, private property,
contractual mechanisms and private law are not machines that form
viii Preface
a free society; rather they are machines that imprison the desire for
sociability and the need to live a good life together – a life that is col-
lectively ordered, a true democracy.
This awareness of society’s civil rights crisis and obstacles in the
search for freedom itself is ceaselessly renewed in the experience
of productive life, which constitutes the backbone of modern soci-
ety. During the last century of capitalist development, production
became increasingly socialized, to the point of crossing a threshold:
beyond this point it is no longer the result of a socially invasive pro-
cess, of alienation and consumption, but has become the collective
basis and common foundation of every new order of reproduction
in society. We have called this new condition ‘postmodernity’ – this
society where production is completely socialized. The continuous
interchange between the private and the collective has reached a
point of tendential hegemony of the latter over the former and can be
seen in the forms of life that have consolidated in the twenty-first cen-
tury. And these new forms of life, themselves contradictory, demand
to be questioned.
The postmodern order can be described as a heavy (and some-
times horrible) domination exercised by the few over the very many
who work, produce and create the wealth of living socially. The tran-
sition from modernity to postmodernity, from the industrial mode to
the informatics-led and immaterial mode of production, often takes
place by preserving the continuity of the old domination. This is due
to the inertia of the past or to the ebb and blockage of the new move-
ments of transformation. While life and production have changed,
and while the sense of the collective and a thriving socialization have
come to a standstill, command remains the same. Representative
democracy – which had a hard time portraying values of freedom and
participation (and all too often did so deceptively) – is definitively on
the decline. The collective has to find means of political expression.
This is the only way to save democracy – through self-renewal. But
how is that to happen?
In the interregnum in which we were living, it did not take much
for a positive ‘key’ to be introduced in the debate – an element to help
us traverse these times and win some space in the conflicts that run
through it. (Nothing much was to be expected from those who, like
the Marxists who criticized operaismo, had come up with proposals
for reading the great transition from modernity to postmodernity.) A
theoretical key that arose from a reflection on the transformations in
the production of life and from perceptions of the advanced degree
of its socialization.
Preface: From the Public to the Common ix
We were sunk in a state of confusion and indistinction. The com-

plete socialization of the form of life gave the sensation of being in
a common dark condition. But in order to live one had to turn on a
light and shake and question that dead assemblage of lives. We had
suffered a becoming common that now confused us. Life rose up and
wanted to regain meaning. That ‘becoming common’ had to be ana-
lysed; and immediately it appeared to have two senses. On the one
hand, it was a common like a collective of production and consump-
tion in which the domination of capital had been completely realized
and that presented itself now in totalitarian form. On the other hand,
it was a common that, in addition to the recognition of capitalist
socialization, appeared as a capacity of the cooperation of workers
and citizens to be effective and as their political power. The matura-
tion of this opposition was the sign of the limits of capitalism in our
time; the common showed itself as the active force that recomposed
production, society and life into a new experience of freedom.
It may be objected that, at least since the birth of socialism, this
trend towards the growing socialization of production has been taken
to be a prerequisite of progress towards the common. And the objec-
tion is correct. But there are writers, still today, who do not make the
distinction but rather emphasize the continuity of eras and see the
common as an ideal to be realized across them – one and the same,
from the birth of the first workers’ leagues to the self-revelation of the
worker as a communist in the more advanced informatics networks.
This is not true. When we speak of ‘the common’ today, we do not
speak about a utopia to be realized, or an ethical–political princi-
ple, or a metaphysical truth that could unite humanity in a project
to come. Rather we speak of a being-together, already powerfully
realized in daily life, and thus of a real condition (presupposition,
foundation) in every form of contemporary life: the common has
become the ontological structure of living.
The subject of production, like that of the polis, is collective. As
such it is organized as labour power and commanded by the order of
exploitation. But in this condition, as a subjectivity hitherto objecti-
fied, it can – by rebelling, recognizing and assuming the power that
constitutes it – break the relationship that binds it to the capitalist
order and open up to the order of the common.
The function that keeps these two conditions apart and opposed to
each other is private property. The juridical order of property is what
constitutes the line of fortification of modern individualism against the
postmodern common. And this is an efficacious operation. In this way
the common is born in the cage of private property, and when it comes
x Preface
out it is once again caged, put in new chains and in new containers.
This is where socialist reformism has done all its misdeeds. But one
cannot expect that the power of the common will not explode sooner
or later, demolishing all the miserable constraints that hold it back,
and that the common will not appear, subjectivated and rearticulated,
in institutions that will strengthen, along with freedom, the equality
and ability of every citizen to participate in the making of the city.
This book brings together a number of articles, previously not
translated into English, in which I continue and deepen at the politi-
cal level the theoretical work that I conducted with Michael Hardt
from 2008 on, in the volume Commonwealth (published in 2009),
precisely on the subject of the common. As will be seen, my concern
in these writings is to ground the concept of the common in a mate-
rialist fashion. Only one essay published here, the first, precedes the
others: it was written in 1975. But it is useful both because it links the
discussion of the common to the Marxist critique of the concept of
state (on this account it was part of the political materials produced
in the struggles of Italy’s long red decade) and because it brings out
with clarity, from the beginning, the materiality of the concept of
common – which is thus set outside any modernist assimilation to
the concept of public. I would therefore say that the pieces in this
collection were written against the new metaphysics of the common,
against its idealization. We do not know the common as an ideality,
except in the hybrid form it takes in financialization – the ultimate
expression of the alienated common, the common of money. Or in
law. Or – and here we go back to basics – in private property. Each of
these aspects of the odyssey of the common is taken into considera-
tion here, as are the steps in a rediscovery of its new materiality: the
common as a mode of production – that is, within or against the pro-
duction of the common: the common as a starting reality from which
a new communist project becomes possible.
*
I want to conclude this sixth volume of essays for Polity Press with a few
words about Ed Emery – the translator of these trilogies and of many more
of my writings. Having come to the end of a life of study and political activ-
ity devoted to building a society of free and equal human beings, and having
learned how strong the repression of these passions is, the more I feel friend-
ship – or, better, brotherhood – for a man like Ed, who has always been by
my side – in sharing intelligence and in overcoming difficulties.Thanks, Ed.
In addition I would like to offer a big thank you to Manuela Tecusan for
her precious editorial work on these texts.
Part I
Advances
1
State, Public Spending and the
Decrepitude of the Historic
Compromise*
In this article I continue my exploration of public spending, a discus-

sion that began with my article ‘On Some Trends of More Recent
Communist Theory of the State: A Critical Review’ (now in my
volume Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context at Polity, 2021).
This is also something of a bibliographic review (many materials
not mentioned in the first review, or that have come to my attention
subsequently, are presented here). My purpose is simply to set out a
proposal for debate.
This deepening of the discussion doesn’t come without a polemic
– against those who use Marxist terminology to discuss the state but
have never read a state budget; against those who philosophize about
the state or about the ‘autonomy of the political’ but do not act in a
Marxian way against the concrete modalities of exploitation guaran-
teed or organized by the state.
1. The problem, broadly outlined: conditions in the

literature and conditions in reality
In the major capitalist countries, public spending (of the state and of
the public sector) currently approaches or exceeds half of the gross
national income. The rate of growth of public spending, as com-
pared with the rate of growth in national income, is an unstoppable
* First published as ‘Stato, spesa pubblica e fatiscenza del compromesso storico’

(1975), in Antonio Negri, La Forma Stato: Per la critica dell’economia politica della
costituzione, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977, pp. 233–47 and 251–60.
4 Advances
upward trend.* ‘Despite this, in the Marxist literature there are only
isolated studies that examine the causes and effects of this unprece
dented growth.’1 And where these studies do exist, only rarely do
they capture the specificity of the new situation; rather they find the
explanation in the old objectivism of the theory of state monopoly
capitalism, with results that are entirely unsatisfactory.
In the theory of state monopoly capitalism, government spending
appears as a simple financing of private capital or of its direct public
projections. The crisis effects related to the expansion of public
spending are both unexplained and inexplicable.
Now, the interpretations of the crisis in the advanced capital-
ist countries that avoid the problems of public spending, in their
indisputable individuality, seem to me rather like Don Ferrante’s
explanations of the plague!
Yet, while the communist theory of the state has rejected the theses
of the theory of state monopoly capitalism and its parallel versions,
recently it has not refused to take on board the new relationship
between the state (as centre of real and collective attribution of the
capitalist ideal) and the critical contortions of the capitalist econ-
omy;2 and there seems to be no doubt now that the state moves as
a political and at the same time economic force at the centre of the
process of circulation of capital – not a subordinate force but one
with essential functions. The trend noted by Marx and Engels is now
coming to its completion. And the complementary component of the
tendency is also being realized: the action of the working class has a
definitely unbalancing effect on the system.
The more the double face of the commodity and of the process of
producing commodities is revealed in the antagonism that constitutes
them, the more the mechanism of circulation of capital – production
plus reproduction – takes place and reaches global proportions in the
advanced capitalist state.
But theoretical awareness generally stops here. If the state assumes
this central role, as they say, its spending, which means public
spending, should be considered as a wage bill of the state as factory
[fabbrica-Stato].
And when criticism of political economy commits violence against
political economy (as communists should), the fight over public
spending should be seen as a crucial battleground. But no. The stat-
ist mythology of the social democratic and revisionist tradition gets
* ‘upward trend’ in English in the original.

Decrepitude of the Historic Compromise 5
the upper hand again and intimidates criticism when it cannot avoid
it, or forces it to bow to the capitalist fetishes of balance and financial
evaluation! Marx is replaced by Schmidt and Gotha triumphs over
critique.
So Jim O’Connor, who has pushed forward the identification of
wages and public spending more than anyone else,3 dithers about the
distinction between state as social capital and state as social spend-
ing, an analytically useful but entirely abstract distinction, and also
a wrong one if it tends to assert that the production and reproduc-
tion of elements of variable capital (as is today the chief function of
public spending) need to be viewed as unproductive spending. On
the contrary, in the second section of Marx’s schema for the structure
of reproductions,4 this spending for the reproduction of elements of
variable capital is indirectly productive and thus is productive of sur-
plus value, all the more so as the mechanism of capitalist production
extends over the whole of society.5 The gap* that O’Connor rightly
registers between directly productive state investments and indirectly
productive state spending is not in itself a determinant of economic
imbalance (as seems implicit in his position): it becomes one insofar
as working-class and proletarian action unbalances the relationship in
terms of power, of continuous and unrelenting pressure, of continu-
ous struggle.
Even less is it possible to continue to maintain that the crisis
induced on state budgets by increased public spending is inter-
nal, and indeed determining, in relation to the profitability crisis
of mature capitalism.6 Such a relation no doubt exists, but it is cer-
tainly not linear: the crisis does not consist in the increase in public
spending, nor does it insist on the fact that this spending is itself in
contradiction with private accumulation. Public spending becomes
an element of contradiction because working-class and proletarian
power upsets the relationship with the state’s system of domination
– in the capitalist relation the latter is, on the contrary, a balancing
element – and upsets it in the irrationality of proletarian pressure and
workers’ struggle.
So then, addressing the relationship between state and public
spending means eliminating from the outset any simplification that
might derive from objectivisms of the type generated by the theory of
state monopolist capitalism. It means assuming once and for all that
the state is both terrain and subject of the fundamental c ontradiction
* ‘gap’ in English in the original.

6 Advances
that capitalist development registers in the face of the social emer-

gence of the proletarian class. It means finally recognizing that the
mechanisms of crisis follow, in Marxian fashion, from the ‘explosion’
(as Marx called it) of the relation that capital is, in other words from
the relation between the two classes in struggle, since ultimately
everything rests on the ‘proportion between necessary labour and
surplus value or, if you please,* between the different moments of
objectified labour and living labour’7 around the problem of exploita-
tion and its proportions. Public spending is the public and statal form
in which the relationship of statal exploitation of the workers’ soci-
ety of productive labour is misrepresented: public spending is social
wage, and the analysis and unbalancing action of the working class
must develop on it.
Finally, addressing the relationship between state and public
spending means disposing of any residue of social democratic and
revisionist statism, of any illusion about the state as a neutral and
relatively autonomous mediator, and also of the alleged dual nature
of the state – ‘good’ when it assists private capitalists, ‘bad’ when
it finances them! Unfortunately the state is not Manichean; it is an
organic structure of the power of the ruling class. ‘Whatever its form,
the state is essentially a capitalist machine. State of capitalists, an
ideal capitalist collective.’8 The chapter on the state in Capital that
Marx did not write was written by the later capitalist development,
but it follows the indication left by the Marxian tendency. The duty
of critique falls on us.
So much for public spending. A revolutionary use of direct wages,
of relative wages, has always been part of the working-class experi-
ence: ‘the struggle against the reduction of relative wages also means
struggle against the commodity character of labour power, that is,
against capitalist production as a whole. The fight against the fall
in relative wages is no longer a battle carried out on the terrain of
mercantile economy but a revolutionary attack on the foundations
of this economy; it is the socialist movement of the proletariat.’9 But
a chapter of struggle that remains unknown, or in any case has not
reached a sufficient level of militant awareness, is the one that needs
to be written on the social wage versus the state.
This is a programme that concerns society’s productive labour
power in its entirety, at the level of capitalist development that Marx
describes as a phase in which the potential of the entire community
* ‘if you please’ in English in the original.

of labour is opposed to capital as a simple mediator of circulation–

realization.10 Here the critique of political economy turns immediately
into a critique of politics, because the proletarian assault on the social
wage invests public spending as a capitalist terrain of the organiza-
tion of the relationship between production and consensus, between
development and domination, between political constitution and
proletarian social struggles.
Here the theoretical practice of capital is a step ahead on a terrain
that the proletariat confronts only episodically and spontaneously,
when it comes to struggle.
Of course, working-class spontaneity is enormous and deadly: in
all mature capitalist countries there is not a single municipal budget
that holds – I mean, at the level of the relation of mediation and
direct control exercised by the state as employer [Stato-padrone]. The
capitalist attempt to extort social surplus value in order to mediate
and contain the level of social struggles is everywhere in crisis. The
mechanism of authorizations and controls – this fundamental key
to the administrative rationalization of the state-based command of
capital – has been thrown into crisis everywhere, by waves of struggles
of appropriation.11 But even as the levels of working-class struggle are
high and strong, capital, too, works continuously on readjustment, on
the concentration of control, on administrative planning and spend-
ing. Properly speaking, capital and its science do not anticipate the
problem but win out on the transition from working-class determi-
nation to capitalist closure of the crisis; they anticipate its outcome.
‘They’ are all working flat out on this. How to close the gap between
the state budget and public spending has become the fundamental
problem; how to rearticulate together, in one unit, the differences
and asymmetries between the mechanism of financial control and the
urgencies of political intervention is the second essential problem,
correlated to the first.12 Where the principle of bureaucratic–rational
legitimation is insufficiently grounded and incapable of being
applied to a too deep and widespread a conflict, one has recourse
to charismatic legitimacy, to political pressure, and to participatory
mystifications of the ‘pink councils’ [‘giunte rosa’], so that the level of
inputs* in the demand for public spending be reduced.
But the stakes around these issues are big. Even when the theories
of communist writers do not lead us to define the scale of the prob-
lem, the behaviour of the two parties in struggle would necessarily
* ‘inputs’ in English in the original.

8 Advances
take us there, anyway: the proletarian insistence in this area, and the
capitalist attempt at repressive anticipation. At this point, ‘public
spending’ becomes a central element of the debate. Around it we have
to try to understand whether that category includes and transforms
some important problems of analysis and of proletarian struggle –
namely problems related to the quality and intensity of exploitation
– and whether, from the point of view of an overall working-class
theoretical practice, the eventual new relations do not modify our
assumptions on the definition of the state and the communist strug-
gle against the state.
Of course, an analysis around this theme could be conducted alto-
gether differently; it could be focused on the material dimensions,
chez nous, of public spending and of the possibilities of working-class
attack.
I am aware that many comrades are working on this question, and
I hope that the results of their work will soon be made public.
2. An initial analytic approach: elements of evaluation

regarding the trend towards the social unification of
productive labour
In discussing public spending it is perhaps necessary, more than in

any other case, to place oneself firmly on the Marxian ground of
analysis of the process of circulation of capital, as a sphere of produc-
tion and reproduction (and innovation) not only of commodities but
also of social relationships, and thus – in the Marxian tendency – of
the subject and of revolutionary antagonism. This is difficult when, as
happens even in the writers most definitely associated with the class
point of view, the neoclassical and Keynesian mystification of the
commodity system continues to dominate the horizon.
Take for example the categorization of public spending proposed
by J. O’Connor.13 In his definition, public spending involves the fol-
lowing categories. ‘(1) Social investments, consisting of projects and
services that increase the productivity of given amounts of labour,
and, all other factors being stable, increase the rate of profit. This
is social constant capital. (2) Social consumption, consisting of pro-
jects and services that lower the reproduction costs of labour power
and, all other factors being stable, increase the rate of profit. This
is variable social capital. (3) Social spending, consisting of projects
and services required to maintain social harmony.’14 Now, this dis-
tinction – which is both analytically useful and insecure15 – becomes
angerous when it is unilaterally assumed to define the gaps* and the

d
reasons for imbalances between sectors of spending. For in this way
imbalances, crises, and especially inflation are seen objectively and,
to put it in Keynesian language, as arising from dysfunctions in the
organization of distribution. But the analysis does not go beyond that
tiny barrier. It limits itself without venturing to address the materiality
and strength of the social relations that preside over the diversifica-
tion of sectors and over the disproportions that occur in spending or
distribution. ‘Necessarily’ – as Hirsch notes,16 when writing about
the work of Offe – ‘in this way the concept of “society” is reduced to
a phenomenological concept of structure’ and the state is stripped of
the class character which characterizes its (political) structural inter-
vention in society for domination over the relations of reproduction.
Instead, what needs to be immediately attacked is the terrain of the
proletarian subject and the location of that subject within the capital-
ist circulation of goods, because here the changes have been so large
as to destroy the possibility of neoclassical and Keynesian interpreta-
tions of the asymmetries and imbalances in public spending. In short,
my hypothesis is that these are not simply imbalances of distribution;
they reveal a much weightier and deeper structure, which is manifest
first in the modification of the place and nature of productive labour
in mature capitalist society and, second, in the level of struggle and
demand for power expressed by the new proletarian subject. I shall
attempt to demonstrate this claim.
At the root of the theory of disproportions in public spending and
of the theory that inflation is an effect of increase in public spending
(especially in the sector that O’Connor defines as ‘social spending’)
lies the belief that ‘all or most of state sector jobs are unproduc-
tive’.17 But the possibility that even employees who work in the sector
of ‘social consumption’ (as O’Connor calls it) are non-productive
seems definitively excluded by the consideration – already mentioned
– that they are subsumed under the second wing of the Marxian
schema of reproduction. This leaves the employees of the third group
mentioned by O’Connor – the ‘social spending’ group, which one is
imperceptibly led to identify with work in the production of ‘luxury’
goods – anyway, not producers of value, as one remembers from
Marx.18
But what does this compartmentalization mean at the present level
of capitalist integration (through the state) of civil society? Are the
* ‘gaps’ in English in the original.

10 Advances
workers who contribute to the production of ‘social harmony’ really

unproductive? Or is not rather the concept of productive work that
needs to be modified in relation to the Marxian definition,19 but in
the direction of the Marxian tendency? ‘The cooperative character of
the working process necessarily broadens the concept of productive
labour and of its vehicle, that is, of the productive worker. To work
productively nowadays, one need not get to work in person; it is
enough to be an organ of the collective worker, to carry out some part
of its subordinate functions.’20 In this way the concept would widen
its conceptual scope, to match the extension of domination and of the
capitalist mode of production.
Now, summing up the results of a long discussion between British
Marxist economists on this matter,21 I. Gough concludes: ‘all state
workers who produce either components of the real wage, for example
social services, or elements of constant capital, for example research
and development work, are directly productive for capital’, in other
words, they produce surplus value.22
Bob Rowthorn, for his part, raises the bar and adds that there is
no doubt ‘that educational and certain other State sectors, although
“unproductive”, may compel workers to perform surplus labour,
some or all of which is transferred to the capitalist sector where it
appears as surplus value in the hands of the capitalists’.23
In what sense? In the sense that the productive integration of
capitalist development increasingly imputes to the state a totalizing
function of support with respect to the activity of production. The
state does not organize in Keynesian style mercantile relations but
productive ones – directly or indirectly, and in any case effectively:
productive of goods, and especially of relations of production.
The increase in public spending, its huge growth, is not antagonis-
tic with the development of capital but is organic and necessary to
the current, productive figure of capital. Even more, public spending
is today the essential prerequisite of every moment of accumulation.
Consequently it does not make sense to speak of public spending as
being in itself inflationary: at this level of socialization of production
and command, the law of value could have an essentially positive test
run. If this explodes, if inflationary mechanisms are set into motion
unstoppably, that does not depend on the organic relationship that
government spending establishes with the composition of capital
(over which state command prevails nowadays), but on the break-up
of this organic relationship imposed by the working-class and prole-
tarian struggles, on the antagonism that reopens at this point between
the organic composition of capital and the political composition of
the proletarian class (at this level of unification of labour power which
anyway is productive).
The crisis is not in the disproportion between the three forms of
spending identified by O’Connor; above all, it does not consist in
the contradiction between directly productive and reproductive –
hence indirectly productive – spending of labour power on the one
hand and, on the other, political state spending, which produces not
surplus value but consensus and social harmony. This contradic-
tion does not exist, because consensus and social harmony, if given,
are given as functions internal to the relations of direct or indirect
production. The crisis consists in capitalism’s inability to control
the different components that make up capital at this level of class
struggle and development of capital; it consists in the irreducibly
antagonistic presence of the working class and the proletariat.
But why does collective capital risk extending the crisis from the
level of direct production to that of social production? Why does cap-
italist development involve itself in a dimension that it cannot control
directly and in which the problem of public spending (otherwise
entirely functional to private capitalization)24 opens to general con-
tradictions that are relentlessly effective in their social generality?25
While the precise Marxian definition of the concept of productive
labour needs to be modified (and we have seen in what direction),26
shouldn’t there be also a modification of the Marxian analysis of the
tendency, one in which the definition and the place of productive
labour take another direction as well? This direction consists in allow-
ing the contradiction of the rate of profit to develop. As the individual
profit motive declines (for reasons known to anyone who studies the
concentration process and the continuous capitalist reform of organic
composition in the direction of a greater intensification of constant
capital),27 capital organizes levels of social productivity, steals surplus
value from cooperation in production, and replaces the value lost
through the permanent and direct assimilation of all the forces of
production (and their reduction to constant capital) with the value
produced through the general social productivity of proletarian sub-
jects, through the integration of the whole of society into the factory
of the collective capitalist.28 From this point of view, public spending
represents the cash flow* of the state as enterpreneur and is played
entirely on the structural gap between fall in the rate of profit of
enterprises and pressure to increase the general productivity of the
* ‘cash-flow’ in English in the original.

12 Advances
system. The fact that there may be inflationary events within this gap
is secondary: the structural gap in public spending does not define
its actuality but simply the possibility – a possibility brought about
exclusively by the intensity and level of working-class and proletarian
struggles.
If all this is true, a number of immediate consequences follow. First
of all, public spending manifests itself as a real moment of productive
spending, and therefore analysis of it should be entirely correlated
with the levels of the circulation of capital in contemporary society.
Second, public spending, in its constituting as quantity of money (i.e.
means) available to the state for direct or indirect production, weighs
as surplus value, extorted from the community of social labour power
taken as a whole and from the specificity of the value extracted from
social cooperation. Third, it follows that a public spending consti-
tuted in this way represents a social exploitation fund for capitalist
accumulation and that, as such, it must be both contracted as a wage
fund and destroyed as a fund for the financing of capital: and the two
moments cannot be split, if Marx’s reflections on the relative wage
are true.29 This is, at any rate, a vital terrain of class struggle at this
level of development of capitalist exploitation.
It is therefore no coincidence that, in this area, one feels reformist
‘theory’ pushing heavily forward and pre-emptively defending itself
from Marxian critique. As always, here too those in the most intelli-
gent and therefore most dangerous positions regard public spending,
correctly, as social surplus value extorted by the collective capitalist.30
What follows from this? It follows that, just as the economic expro-
priation of workers may turn into a political claim of citizens (in the
project of the historic compromise, obviously), so, as citizens, they
can get their hands on what they were denied as producers! It is clear
that the disproportion between the correctness of the analysis and
the wretched opportunism of the conclusion can reside only in the
author’s lack of experience of such propositions.31 If this were not so
– as it is in the far fewer episodic authors of the politics of reformism
– we would be dealing here with a shameful ideological mystification
and a vile practice of betrayal of the masses.
3. A second analytical approach: on social

accumulation, state administration and the
contradictions of the capitalist foundation of legitimacy
In the good old days, the enterprise accumulated and the state (pref-
erably a state of right [stato di diritto], but it was fine even if it wasn’t
that) legitimated. Historically, the state as a ‘business committee of
the bourgeoisie’* has existed as part of capitalist development; and
here we need only look at Marx’s pages on the use of public debt in
the early stages of accumulation and at critical stages of development
to prove this more than amply.32 At this level of capitalist develop-
ment, to legitimate means grounding the title (on the basis of which
an effective and legal relationship is established between the exercise
of power and civil consent) in the representative forces of capitalist
enterprise, in the values of economic development, and in the directly
capitalist mystification of the general interest: the state legitimates
inasmuch as it guarantees that the general interest in development
is being pursued. At the present level of capitalist development, the
situation seems to have changed. A totalizing socialization of capital-
ist production, rampant processes of abstraction and tertiarization
of labour, a general absorption of the so-called forces of production
(social cooperation, science, technology and so on) into overall capi-
tal, incentivization of the inherence of the infrastructure of social and
political services in direct production – all these bring about a struc-
tural depth to the state’s functions of mediating the process of overall
production. Both in terms of organizational functions and in terms of
the mass of socially extorted surplus labour, the share due directly to
the state has increased enormously. As I have indicated, this process is
concurrent with the operation of the law of the tendency of the rate of
profit to fall – at the level of the enterprise.33 The state’s accumulation
of social surplus value thus appears in the first instance as a compen-
sation for the fall in corporate profits,34 but in the second instance
these new state functions increase in intensity and in determining
power: the state begins to present itself as a hegemonic force in the
ambit of the capitalist mode of production; the state accumulates in
an overriding and determining manner.35
* This formula appears in Chapter 1 of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The
Communist Manifesto: ‘The executive of the modern state is but a committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (https://www.marxists
.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto).
14 Advances
How does the principle of legitimacy take form at this level of

capitalist development? In the process of general fall in the rate of
profit, state accumulation does not make a contribution except in the
sense – traditional for countertendency functions – of increasing the
mass of profit. This can no longer be a principle of legitimacy: capi-
talist exploitation has the key feature of tending towards the general
interest, in the expectation of development. The mass of profit is not
enough to offer legitimacy; it is the rate of profit that, in the capitalist
mode of production, gives the power to command and imposes the
duty to obey. Now, even if the state of mature capitalism has largely
gone beyond the Keynesian functions of regulation of the market, if it
has made itself directly productive and if, through quasi-oligopolistic
investments in public spending, it tends to achieve regimes of high
productivity in the management of services, if the state tries to
reorganize the withdrawal of social surplus labour according to a pro-
gressive and rational taxation (according to the law of value) – well,
even if the state proceeds on this ground, it is far from being able to
impose a correct appreciation of the rate of profit.36 The obstacle is
the very nature of social labour in its diffusion and abstractness, that
is, in its specific quality at this level of development: the obstacle is
that in this case the very possibility of calculation (in relation to the
law of value) is, as Marx showed, on the one hand impeded by the
spontaneous, value-creating quality of this fact, as for example in
cooperation, and on the other outdone when labour time becomes a
poor basis for the measurement of the expression of higher capacities
of production.37 Besides, indirectly productive labour, which is the
kind of labour largely assigned to the state, yields extremely differen-
tiated and complex possibilities of internal planning.38 At this point,
state intervention in support of the mass of profit is totally ‘arbitrary’
in terms of the law of value. And there is more: econometric arbi-
trariness, otherwise fundamental from the point of view of planning
overall capital, appears to be totally irrational from a class point of
view; and the use of the law of value in this masquerade [ridotto] of
capitalist resistance is reduced – seems to be reduced, from the pro-
letarian point of view, and that’s what counts – to a simple practice
of command,39 all the more if you think that, if capital is essentially
a category of relation among class forces in struggle, then the falling
rate and the accumulation of mass profit mean, in class terms, a fall
in the quota of capital valorization in the face of an implacable mas-
sification of proletarian struggles.
So then, on what principle of legitimation – of power and
consensus, of discriminating and participatory force, taken together
– can capitalist development direct its movement today? No princi-

ple of legitimacy is in the ambit of social state accumulation, this is
certain. The state’s accumulation of social surplus labour is based
on a growing antagonism: capital mystifies this awareness in its own
structure and calls the effects of this antagonism a problem of the pri-
orities and selectivity of public intervention.40 In fact the tax system
[la fiscalità] is odious. And the exploitation of social cooperation, of
indirectly productive labour, of marginalization, of mass scientific
innovative capacities – all of this is equally odious. The state’s capi-
talist class understands this situation.41 So it is that, in this total crisis
of credibility, the only moment of real legitimacy is again referred to
the principle of enterprise, to the highest level of extortion of surplus
labour and production of productivity by the capitalist. The exten-
sion of the capitalist mode of production in the form of the state has
to subject itself to these levels of productivity as essential moments in
the qualification of capitalist reproduction. Regaining high levels of
profit (of productivity, of exploitation mystified into profit) becomes
a condition and a differentiation of the principle of social develop-
ment through the state. Here the characteristic situation of the initial
phase of capitalist development is overturned: accumulation goes to
the state, legitimacy goes to the company [impresa]; this drives (in
terms of productivity) consensus, the fundamental element of legiti-
macy of the capitalist state at its most mature level of development.
Here the enterprise becomes the carrier [Träger] of development in
the Marxian sense, its quality and qualification. Productivity as a
value-producing element of the social relation of production, this is
the legitimating term of the overall process.
Let us return to public spending. If it is one of the figures of the
capitalist appropriation of social surplus – perhaps the fundamental
one – then it must bend to the norms of productivity of the enter-
prise. Of course, as we have noted, this is not possible, and for
structural reasons. But with this we have not solved the problem. It
is within this contradiction that the process offers itself: New York’s
fiscal crisis in the name of enterprise productivity does not mean that
the directly recuperable productive capacities rise to the quantities of
accumulation–reproduction of capital; it only indicates that a rule of
dominion – repressive, exclusive, terroristic – is reproposed against
the uncontainable quality of cooperative, intellectual and innova-
tive labour. At this level of capitalist development, the levels and the
quantity of public spending must be statements of authority from the
firm, not because this changes the average productivity of the system,
locked as it is in the antagonism between the mass of accumulation
16 Advances
and of social struggles and the fall in the rate of profit, but because it
imposes, reproposes, and legitimately sanctions the rule of capitalist
domination.
As always, all the contradictions of capitalist development have a
double face. This overturning of the relationship between accumula-
tion and legitimation – in such a manner that the first is attributed to
the state, while the second is determined by the enterprise – this over-
turning of the relationship shows, then, in its working-class aspect,
new features and possibilities of proletarian struggle. A huge space of
rupture opens for proletarian struggle at the exact moment when the
enterprise opens up to the wage in order to ensure productivity and
the rate of profit, returning to the state the responsibility to guarantee
socially the effectivity of the wage itself and to recover the wage in the
social movement of goods. This is the space – the gap* – that exists
between the productivity of the enterprise, a project of legitimizing
developed capital, and the real terrain of accumulation, a terrain of
total social cooperation controlled by the state.
If we wish to deepen and expand the contradiction that this pro-
posal faces at the level of the capitalist plan itself in order to relate
it to the antagonism between working-class interests and capitalist
development, this can be done in various ways, by lowering company
productivity, as the workers have always done, by accentuating the
dysfunctions in the social accumulation of the capitalist state, as pro-
letarians spontaneously begin to do. . .
. . . Or by doing both together. This seems indeed to be the main
line of working-class analysis. In the tendency of labour power to
recognize itself as a proletarian unit of insubordinate labour, duali-
ties, ambiguities and crises are innumerable. Working-class analysis
dialecticizes and unifies the process, from contradictions within the
proletariat to class antagonism.
Now, the factory wage and the social wage are the two poles of the
figure in which the working class is mediated and subsumed to the
social and state-based figure of capital. Capital tends to separate
the two figures, to play the factory wage, treated as an element of
legitimacy of the capitalist state, against the emergence of produc-
tive unity in social labour; on the contrary, the articulation of the
struggle between factory wage and social wage becomes a power
that devastates the capitalist contradiction, which is functional to the
domination of capital.
* ‘gap’ in English in the original.

But there is one last element to consider; it is not tactical but theo-
retical this time. In this process, the relative character of the wages
contracted by workers explodes. In fact the ‘relativity’ of the wage
contracted by factory workers has to do with the ambiguous relation-
ship, dominated by capital, between the real wage and the monetary
wage. Business capital dominates the calculation of the wage at com-
pany level, and in the calculation renders it relevant and politically
functional. On the other hand, the proletarian struggle over the social
wage upsets the capitalist brain and blocks its capacities to calcu-
late and control it. So it appears quite clearly here that it is not at
all important whether real wages go up or down: from a Marxian
perspective, there can be very few illusions about it! The important
thing is to relate the wage component back to the role of independ-
ent variable, and this is possible in the action of the proletariat on the
social terrain.42
Recognizing society as a factory, recognizing the state as a boss,
breaking the fetish of productivity as legitimacy and understanding
legitimacies in the context of all the needs of the proletariat – today
all this is the task of subversion. And this could be enough because,
when the relativity of the wage is destroyed, when the causes of divi-
sion and of domination through division are cancelled out by force,
the emperor appears as the children’s story powerfully portrays him:
naked and mad.
4. The public spending crisis in Italy, restructuring, and

the role of the state
The crisis of public finance in Italy in the years after the wave of
struggles of the 1960s and the institutional panic that ensued are
amply documented43 and there is a wealth of detailed analysis of
these events.44 How can one summarize them? This is what hap-
pened: after 1970, the state’s funds and the public administration
funds exploded into an overall net deficit, which rose from 2.5 per
cent of the national product in that year to 7.9 per cent in 1973. This
happened after a strong increase in current spending, which between
1971 and 1973 was progressively higher than that of the national
product, and then as a result of insufficient dynamics in tax revenues.
Those years saw the steady formation and consolidation of a situation
of negative savings, alongside extreme rigidity in capital spending and
in transfers in this field. By 1974 the situation changed in appear-
ance rather than in reality, but without any possibility of structural
18 Advances
easures, so that there was evidence only of a cyclical action in sup-

m
port of employment, albeit on the basis of a slight improvement. But
this support was performed in a minimal and uncoordinated manner,
given that the resources continued to be heavily eaten up by the
structural deficit.
There is no doubt that during this period public administration
was on the ropes as a result of proletarian action and that the levels
of exploitation of the social productivity of the system had in con-
sequence been blocked. From a capitalist perspective this situation
required an energetic response and a strategy of adjustment was
clearly beginning to come into view, although somewhat tentatively.
But on what terrain? The terrain was a further step towards the
rationalization of circulation, understood as spending restraint and
impetus to investment, as well as towards the restoration of global
control in all decision-making centres – along with plans for the
consolidation of their debt and the reaffirmation of the criterion of
legitimacy in public spending. This criterion had to be based on a
controlled mediation between deficit* reduction and the definition
of a standard† of productivity that matched corporate rules. At a
time when the proletariat was discovering the entire social terrain
of its exploitation, capital was forced to accept that terrain, but only
when the terrain saw the rule of corporate command being repro-
posed. Break the bad sequences, get your hands on the totality of
control, qualify rupture and control in relation to the rule of capital-
ist enterprise: this is ‘good governance’ today. And the rethinkings
and contortions of science and finance offices are very similar in this
respect to those of the scientists and the planning offices, indeed they
are assimilated to them.
Let us look at what happens at the level of restructuring intervention:
a blockage of spending that comes down to avarice and provoca-
tion; total disorganization of the development sequences pathetically
conceived of by planning theorists during the past decade;45 and
especially an active policy of stagnation in social labour power and
the creation, at this level and in the new proportions and quality of
the labour market, of a kind of ‘industrial reserve army’ in the form
of exclusion and parking of entire social layers.46 In short, restructur-
ing has to bring about the division of the unity of productive labour
along internal lines. This labour is potentially revolutionary but in its
* ‘deficit’ in English in the original.

† ‘standard’ in English in the original.
present condition, through its claim to recognition and to political

existence, it is totally destabilizing47 – to the point where, on the basis
of this devastation of the processes of formation of the new political
composition of the working class and the proletariat, corporate rule
can be effectively reimposed, along with the suffocating legitimacy of
the norm of capitalist appropriation of all surplus labour, no matter
how it is produced.
And Italy is not an isolated case. Although in other mature capi-
talist countries the levels of government deficit in relation to the
national product are lower than those recorded in Italy,48 in some of
them this deficit is nevertheless substantial; and in any case there is a
profound similarity in the readjustment policies and forms of restruc-
turing that are being implemented, because what is being fought is
not so much the deficit as the new political class composition that the
increased government spending and the eventual deficit register.49
And in all mature capitalist countries, insofar as the dimensions of
the labour market are significant, things are moving around the same
project of consolidating social accumulation and legitimizing it in
terms of corporate productivity and of mediating the project through
measures intended to ruin the struggles of the emerging proletarian
subject.50 This capitalist trend affirms a figure of a highly centralized
and functional state; and the norms, behaviours, and procedures that
emerge from it concretize the new terrain of legitimacy through the
close relationship that joins it to different moments in the process
of social accumulation of capital and makes it function. In short,
state intervention for the straightening out and orientation of public
spending is only a mirror that reflects the consolidation of a principle
of legitimacy, not new but exclusive, not previously ineffective but
today assumed as a priority efficiency: the principle of corporate pro-
ductivity on behalf of the social accumulation of capital and against a
tendentially unified proletariat, which is expropriated from it.
It is no coincidence, then, that the law – the countersign of the
validity of the state’s juridical action – must bow more and more to
the discriminating materiality of the legitimate action of the state.
The formal interpretation and the very formal definition of juridical
regulation are increasingly in crisis and give way to functionalist theo-
ries,51 whose most important quality – especially if we don’t pay heed
to American and German theorists – is insistence on the discriminat-
ing criterion of administrative action.52 Paradoxically from the old
juridical point of view, legality can be reconstituted only ex post, on
the basis of the performance of the substantive functions that are part
of the law’s ability to direct. It would be possible to develop a rich
20 Advances
case history on this subject, but this is not the place. Important here is
rather that what is being gradually restored, on the basis of this legal
and administrative initiative, is not the old legality but a structure of
new rules of behaviour and intervention. In this context, capital and
its state tend to make their own the utopian efforts [conatus] of all
the currents of ‘alternative jurisprudence’ and to render them effec-
tive, demonstrating an open-mindedness unknown to their original
mentors.53
However, this is only a first step. When the new principle of legiti-
macy is posited with such heaviness and exclusivity, the lacunas that
begin to emerge in local regulations are so common and continuous
that even the broad use of evolutive and alternating criteria fails to make
it possible to recompose the horizon of traditional legality. Then a very
well-known sociopolitical law reappears, with an urgency that always
characterizes its functions: intervention becomes exceptional and
extraordinary when lacunas in regulation and the urgent nature of the
situation require it. In crisis, these functions multiply in frequency and
extent: extraordinary administrative interventions, terror-preventing
measures, preventive terror, and anticipatory initiatives offer support
for and innovation towards evolving, finding alternatives, and fixing
new horizons of legality – this time effectively.54 The formalistic com-
mand over the production of new legislation and over the roles of
management of the law must unfold from these functional and violent
ruptures. After having broken, with devastating intelligence, the old
administrative routines, then the principle of legitimacy can permit
itself to lie under the same blanket as the new legality.55
So let us try to see what capitalist command wants and expects
from its functionaries today. It wants to rationalize (i.e. render con-
sequent and continuous) the content of jurisdictional decisions,
however and wherever they are proposed, adjusting it to the new
principle of legitimacy – in other words to the material discriminant
of corporate productivity. The entire complex of social labour is to
bend to this imperative: there should be coercive social norms when
possible and normative jurisdictional regulatory behaviours in the
majority of cases. So then: what remains of the normative systems set
up by the working-class and proletarian struggles against the state?
Nothing, unless they can be bent to the will of capitalist command,
here and now. The Workers’ Statute [Statuto dei lavoratori] was ship-
wrecked in Law 300, and the progressive practices of certain sectors
of administrative law were perverted into repressive procedures.
What makes law today and determines coherence, certainty and
innovation in criminal law is the exceptionality of the (Oronzo) Reale
law. As for jurisdictional and more generally state operators, their job
is necessarily one of mediating between the old law and the terroristic
innovations in the state system of law: they have to explain rationally
the new principle of legitimacy. Rationally and progressively.
If we return to the question of government spending, we need to
be aware how fresh the reflections are that its problematic proposes.
It’s always useful to rediscover a terrain on which the Marxist and
working-class thematic of the wage finds further spaces of applica-
tion: it’s useful, first, for showing how the science and practice of
capital are constrained to the heaviest of repressive operations for the
sake of eliminating the subject that the social wage reveals; second,
for finding a terrain of struggle on which all the practices of the
hostile power, starting with the social wage, tend to unity from the
(massified) point of view of the proletariat; and, third, for determin-
ing a further terrain of analysis of working-class hatred.
5. The new proletarian subject in the crisis and

restructuring
In a few fundamental pages in the Grundrisse, Marx makes various

notes on the concept of class composition. As a producer, even the
human being, he emphasizes, must be considered, ‘from the point
of view of the immediate process of production, as production of
fixed capital’, as an accumulation and perfection of capacities of pro-
duction: gradually the subject that enters into the process of direct
production is transformed by it – so that the same process of direct
production ‘is, as a whole, discipline, if considered in relation to the
human who becomes, and exercise, experimental science, materially
creative and objectivating science, if considered in relation to the
human who has become, whose brain carries the accumulated knowl-
edge of society.’ As Marx put it,
as the bourgeois economic system develops, so does its negation, which
constitutes its final result. For now we have to deal again with the pro-
cess of direct production. If we consider bourgeois society in its broad
outlines, as a final result of the social process of production, society
itself is always in the picture, or humans themselves, in their social
relations. Anything that has a definite form, such as the product and
so on, appears only as a moment, a transitory moment, of this move-
ment. The process of direct production appears here only as a moment.
The conditions and the objectifications are themselves moments of it in
equal measure, and its subjects are only individuals – but individuals in
22 Advances
r eciprocal relationships, which they reproduce and also produce ex novo.

This is their peculiar, unending process of movement, through which
they renew both themselves and the world of wealth that they create.56
Of interest here is not the philosophical relevance of Marx’s mate-

rialist definitions, but how to apply his thinking to our present times
and stress the specific dialectic between being moved by and moving
capital: this dialectic is based on the emergence of the working class.
Because it is here that the new quantity of the wage and the new qual-
ity of working-class needs, desires and behaviours are determined,
together. And if it is true that in capitalist development the system
of needs always takes the form of exchange value and that only
utopia can hope to break immediately this alienating relationship, the
progressive socialization of labour and its growing abstraction and
productivity nevertheless can and must break the specific form of
social exploitation. Capital itself moves the class on this terrain, being
itself moved there: this is the direction of the extraordinary develop-
ment of society’s productive potential. From this point of view, the
more the form of exploitation turns social and the more the form of
wage mystification of exploitation turns social too, the more deeply
the negation sinks into the body of capitalist society and becomes a
determining factor.57
Now, moving on to more specific considerations, it seems that
behind the expansion of public spending as spending for social wage
lie behaviours that suggest a more advanced level of class composition
(in the Marxian sense). More and more extensively, in advanced cap-
italist countries, work* and pay† do not coincide58 and working-class
consciousness more and more extensively accrues levels of salarial
presence [presenza salariale] that, albeit not organized from a political
point of view, are nevertheless unassailable.59 The process of ‘worker
education’, on which so much revisionist and neo-Gramscian litera-
ture has expressed views,60 has certainly not been left at the mercy
of capital and reformism but, reorganized by the struggles, is now
structurally rooted in behaviours and needs that only a generalized
level of social wage and of political guarantees can now pick up and
satisfy.61 The capital–working-class dialectic, continuously socialized,
has brought about a level of political composition of class that charac-
terizes our era in an absolutely new and irreducible manner.
* ‘work’ in English in the original.

† ‘pay’ in English in the original.
Yet here the capitalist policy on public spending wants to negate

what it shows. As we have seen, it is forced to do so – and without
great success, if it is true that, more than managing the containment
of levels of income and a marginalizing repression, state action suc-
ceeds at most in fanning new relative differentiations, but within
permanent levels of guaranteed income. In this, as we shall see again,
it plays on the relationship between functions of social accumulation
and functions of corporate legitimacy (the mythology of productivity
and of ‘communist’ cooperation against laxity, absenteeism, and. . .
the ‘ability to enjoy’ discussed by Marx).62 But the effort to negate the
new reality of class composition through a squeeze on public spend-
ing is no less effective.
This is all the more so as indirectly productive tertiary sector work,
scientific work, and in short all the components of social knowledge
come into play on top of the living labour used directly (or momen-
tarily not used in this form). A very extensive literature has now made
us aware of the topicality of the Marxian tendency on this terrain.63
Social knowledge enters with increasing clarity and certainty in the
synthesis of the given historical formation: the mechanism of social
reproduction tends to make itself scientific in all its fundamental
structures, both economic and infrastructural, both informational
and political. It is in the continuity of the process of social reproduc-
tion of capital that knowledge [conoscenza] and knowing [sapere],
both of them social, become real and progress today. But this accu-
mulation of indirectly productive human activity, this ensemble of
living labour that gets exchanged with commodities on the terrain of
the production and reproduction of capital, is dominated, divided,
differentiated, torn by capitalist command: it is taken on board as a
totality from the point of view of exploitation, that is, from the point
of view of the realization of the social circulation of exchange values;
but it is pushed to the margins of social insignificance insofar as it
represents itself as productive labour. Of course, capital, too, may
give some conditions for the ‘spontaneous’ reproduction of this accu-
mulation of social productive labour, but more and more in terms of
a ‘natural condition’ of reproduction whose value is mystified and
at the same time greedily sucked into the capitalist recomposition of
command (and only of that).64 The fact is that the opposition, com-
pletely objectivistic and reflecting one moment in the development of
capitalist relations of production, between forces of production and
relations of production (where ‘forces of production’ means science,
general social knowledge, quality of work, sociality of work, nature,
machinery, organization of work, etc.)65. . . – this opposition was
24 Advances
completely resolved in a total subordination of the forces of produc-

tion to the relations of production and of capitalist command. In this
context, public spending is one hundred per cent capitalist spending,
investment for capitalist reproduction. The capitalist negation of the
creative ensemble of social labour power could not be more thorough.
And this is why in the wage dimension, in the sector of the reproduc-
tion of social labour power as such, we find the characteristics of
the capitalist action on the wage in general: a continuous attempt to
reduce necessary labour and a continuous quest for the extraction of
the highest mass of social surplus value, pursued with the same greed
and monstrous cruelty that we recognize in every factory.
So the struggle for the relative wage opens here, on this ground:
it goes from the working-class struggle for the direct wage to the
working-class struggle for the social wage. Here, on this ground, fall –
even more heavily, if this is possible – a series of traditional divisions
of struggle, of economic and political struggle, of union struggle and
of struggle for power. But something more is at stake here, on this
ground: the response to the working class’s urgent call to reappropriate
social productivity as against its expropriation by the state, the need to
recognize the new subject of production as a revolutionary subject.66
This field of struggle opens both as an articulation and as a totality,
and from two points of view, that of capitalist command and that of
the proletariat. On the first point we must ask, from the working-class
point of view, ‘whether it is possible that the working class could use
the forces of production to valorize itself against capital, as an antago-
nistic class. Whether an alternative use of highly developed forces of
production is possible.’67 Even more deeply, one might ask whether at
this point the concept of class composition, as well as being a descrip-
tive and analytical category, can be translated into an operational
category, into an organizational schema of conscious reappropriation
of the forces of production to the class.68 But, as always, these ques-
tions have – can only have – a partial answer: this process is under
way, but the articulation is meaningful only on the terrain of relations
of force in their entirety. This is because the successive appropriation
of the forces of production by the class has all the power of capitalist
destruction of working-class vanguards and articulations of struggle
unleashed against it. Public spending, its ramifications and trends, its
planned priorities, and the rationality of command that runs through
it are among the key weapons of capital. Public spending brings to
social accumulation and to workers’ social struggle a legitimation of
the capitalist enterprise that is based on the rate of profit, the state
guarantee of an accumulation for profit. Public spending organizes
the community of labour so as to destroy a possible political form

and to subject it entirely to the legitimacy of the rate of profit; a new
working-class world capable of communism has to bend to the dead
fetish of a falling rate of profit.
Thus the effects of state action against the revolutionary recompo-
sition of the new subject of production can be counteracted only on
the terrain of totality. The only thing that can address the legitimacy
of the restructured capitalist state is the living collective legitimation
of a communist reappropriation of the forces of production by the
proletariat, by that independent force of production that is living
labour. And when the legitimacy of the capitalist state is, of necessity,
articulated on terror and on power to devastate the working class,
only the power [potere] struggle – power against power, terror against
terror – gives the working class and the proletarian struggle dignity.
The whole capitalist restructuring is bent on the project of destroy-
ing the new composition of social productive labour and its political
potential. The whole institutional restructuring is just as coherently
oriented towards mediating between old formal assertions of legality
and new emergent functional needs as to be effective anyhow. The
normative soul of these rules of capitalist restructuring is the law of
the falling rate of profit, an awareness (to echo Marx) that tolls the
death knell for the civilization of capital. Here the tension between
the state and the new proletarian subject cannot but be destructive.
But while on the capitalist side everything is short term and the will
to destroy stinks of pessimism and delusion, on the workers’ side
the will to destroy is terrible, because it is sustained by the hope and
certainty that in the long run we shall all live. Today the analysis
of power from the class point of view is less and less interesting.
Fundamental is instead that we pay attention to the behaviours of the
new proletarian subject, in other words to the permanent illegality of
this subject’s daily actions, and that we pay attention to the analysis
of power only afterwards, as the ‘reply’ of the employing class.
6. More on the functions of accumulation and

legitimation of public spending
Planning is done by big business for big business:* this is not true
today, just as it was not true yesterday. Neither économie concertée
* ‘Planning is done by big business for big business’ in English in the original.
26 Advances
[‘concerted economy’] nor the various forms of mixed economy* have

ever been reduced to this. The fact that enterprise logic dominates
and legitimates the processes of planning does not mean that these
were ever simple projections of an immediate interest of big capital.
Planning is rather to mediate between social forces, to determine the
materiality of the infrastructures of production, to incentivize the
overall productivity of the system, to ascribe centrally, to the power
of the state, the power – active or passive – to organize the social cir-
culation of commodities. Public spending is the cost of these overall
operations and, as a feature of the wage aspect of state activity in the
field of programming, it certainly cannot be just subsumed to the
will of big capital.69 Planning means above all to repropose, through
organizational mediation, a terrain for the composition of class
conflicts – once it is established that, at these levels of class struggle,
the dual development intrinsic to the capitalist logic of domination is
completely affirmed.70
And yet all this was. . . once upon a time! There was a reform-
ist hope that the conflicts could be mediated in reality and that the
reorganization of the labour market by mediating between productive
functions of a social nature and welfare† could be sustained within
foreseeable and controllable proportions. In fact there is no highly
developed capitalist country that has not experienced the crisis of this
project. The economic potential of the new proletarian subject has
got embroiled in the project of planning, and even if it has not man-
aged to appear as continuous struggle, it has nevertheless appeared as
qualitative and quantitative insubordination at the level of the wage.
Keynesianism, the Keynesian utopia, and the alternative utopia of
the Keynesian left are all burned out on this side of the class strug-
gle.71 On this point, social accumulation and corporate legitimacy are
mutually hostile: public spending finances social struggles rather than
the mediation between social accumulation and corporate legitimacy.
It is at this point that capital translates crisis into restructuring, or
rather plays the former for the latter on the basis of these assumptions.
The fundamental element of capitalist strategy consists in shattering
the link between social accumulation and legitimation and therefore
in transforming public spending into a schema of devastation (when
possible; otherwise of containment) of the massive presence of the
proletariat in society and of incentivization of models of produc-
* ‘mixed economy’ in English in the original.

† ‘welfare’ in English in the original.
tion matched to the profit rates required. The project is to block the
increase of the cost of social labour and to exploit it across the board
without paying for it – or rather by paying simply for the expenses of
a ‘natural’ reproduction of social labour, by compressing necessary
social labour and by increasing surplus social labour. At this point
public spending – an incentivized sort extraordinarily expanded on
the basis of a class pressure together with the capitalist recognition
of the essential character of general social labouring – itself breaks
its ambiguity: it gradually has to become an expression not of value
theory but of its capitalist destruction; it must be a current element
in the capitalist practice of command.
Let us return more concretely to the basic terms of the discussion.
This means taking the discourse to the highest level of abstrac-
tion. It means showing that essential dialectical transition that is the
working-class (and capitalist) overcoming of the barrier of the law of
value when – in fact at the very moment in which – it is realized.72
Historically, the socialization of productive labour and the complete
domination of society by the law of value bring into being a complex
of statal activities that negate the spontaneous valence of the law of
value: and this happens in ‘socialist’73 as well as in highly developed
capitalist societies.74 In both, the operation of the law of value is
given only under the state’s ‘enforced control’:* we call this ‘bureau-
cratization’ in socialist societies and ‘authoritarianism’ in capitalist
societies, and the result is the same. Nor are ‘Weberian’ illusions
permitted – as if the introduction of a charismatic innovation could
fluidify the functioning of the law of value and guarantee the plan.
The fact is that, in the dialectic between relations of production and
forces of production, the law of value acts as a fundamental term
in the organization of exploitation; its realization realizes exploita-
tion and brings about the onset of absolutely particular conditions
of insurgence – that is, conditions such that the spontaneity of the
operation of the law has to be heavily corrected, because it is not a
definitive production asset but a blockage to the expansion of the
force of production that its self-realization brings about. At this
point, then, only command, without the plausibility of the self-
expression of social labour, represents the validity of the law of
value, whereas all the action of the new proletarian subject spon-
taneously expresses intolerance of and rebellion against this barrier
that is set up against the force of production.
* ‘enforced control’ in English in the original.

28 Advances
Capital and its collective brain know all this, and act accordingly.
It is here that public spending reforms itself into the repressive irra-
tionality of capitalist command. But here, too, the critique of political
economy, having been emptied out through the draining of the law
of value, leaves room for the critique of politics tout court: not a cri-
tique of politics that simply addresses the political forces but one that
confronts especially the problem of command and of its institutional
organization, which is functional to social production. And here it is
possible to show the functional and structural contradictions that the
fall of the law of value and the replacement of market calculation75
with the political law of the plan (of restructuring) open for working-
class struggle.
This is where the problematic of public spending becomes a terrain
of working-class critique inasmuch as the struggle over the relative
social wage can be immediately functional to the deepening of insti-
tutional contradictions and to the struggle against the institutions.
Critique of political economy versus critique of politics versus cri-
tique of administration, of planning, of restructuring: this is the path
we are taking.
On the other hand, all the determinations of state action against
the working class – determinations that take place in the specific
context of restructuring but already qualify as medium-term trends
– converge on this point: to destroy any illusion of planning as far as
the realization of the law of value is concerned and, on the contrary,
to act along internal lines towards the devastation of the unitary
potential of the proletariat as a productive and revolutionary force.
Public spending must essentially guarantee a process of arbitrary
segmentation of labour power, destroying any relationship between
production and qualification,76 any value-making sequence between
overall social formation [formazione] and production value, and
bringing about not so much a split between the employed labour
force and the industrial reserve army77 as a fierce split between the
various layers of labour power that stand at oppose ends of the
wages spectrum.78 Overall rigidity in public spending – a point now
conceded – must be rearticulated here according to the schemas of
command or restructuring, not so much with a view to recovering
profits as for the sake of the ongoing existence of the capitalist mode
of production.
This is a situation in which any reformist operation, however con-
ceived, runs out of credibility in the space of a morning. In effect
no room is left here to set the state in contradiction with the objec-
tives of the working class concerning the social wage: this space was
burned when public spending was entirely subsumed to the criterion

of corporate legitimation. Every case of reform shows as its outcome
the capitalist attack on working-class socialization, the attempt to
devastate the social form of production. All the dysfunctions and
disarticulations of the administration, in which reformist action gets
more and more dramatically mired, are defined not on an abstract,
rational terrain but on a functional one – insofar as it is determined
by specific structural needs, and these are exclusively determined in
their turn by the relations fixed by the class struggle.79 Administrative
action is decisively irrational, since its rationality cannot reside in
the social functioning of the law of value but simply in the practical
power [potenza] of capitalist command. Here administrative rational-
ity does not become terror, it is terror. Remove from capitalist society
its only rationality, which is the one founded on the greed of exploi-
tation, and you will have this baroque monster of provocation and
devastation.
Restructuring does not resolve the capitalist crisis; it accentuates
it. The analysis of public spending shows this in the clearest form.
This is, then, the relationship that does not hold: the relationship
between the need to respond in some way to the salarial demands of
a more and more massive social labour power – between the urgent
need to collect the processes of social accumulation under salarial
form – and the rule of capitalist profitability; in other words between
the fall of the historical barrier of the law of value and the capitalist
determination to enforce the law of value at all costs, in fixed propor-
tions. It is within this contradictory relationship that public spending
is placed. It doesn’t matter how shaky are the supports that reform-
ism can offer. There are fewer and fewer possibilities of mediation
between these two terms: between the emergence of a new mode
of production, internalized to a new working-class and proletarian
composition, and the enforced* permanence of the capitalist rule of
command.
The crisis of public spending should be privileged in our analysis
because it presents together both the positive (workers, collectives)
and the negative factors (the bosses’ command) of the general crisis.
But it is clear that here the analysis of the crisis brings us back directly
to the figure of the state, to the collapse of its dignity as a mediator of
capitalist production. The Marxian paradox is realized in this case,
too: the more the state resolves civil society and the power to com-
* ‘enforced’ in English in the original.

30 Advances
mand social production fully by itself and the more this resolution
looks dialectically uncertain, the more the working class demon-
strates its real hegemony over society. The revolutionary project of
communism lives this contradiction and this possibility.
7. The historic compromise: ideological decrepitude

and repressive actuality
Insofar as it is an institutional movement, the labour movement

appears today to be revisionist in ideology, reformist in project and
technocratic in practice. Let us examine the effects of this situation
point by point.
The ideological revisionism of the institutional labour movement
has a long history in Italy. In some respects this history sees itself as
Gramscian. In fact the concept of hegemony in and over civil society
is strongly innovative in relation to Marxist–Leninist paradigms of
the conception of the state.80 First and foremost, there is a space of
ideological mediation for this concept, a space to be entrusted to the
social power of the labour movement as the precondition of a revolu-
tionary process that attacks the social forces of production, according
to models of overall adhesion. All this has a dignity that revisionism,
which affects the proposal, cannot negate; and it also corresponds
to a given stage (the pre-fascist stage) in the development of the
forces of production in Italy, and consequently reproposes itself as
a response to the need for political antifascist action. So it is not the
revisionism of the Gramscian proposal that renders the thematic of
the institutional labour movement ideologically dangerous; rather it
is the present-day use of formulas that are more or less Gramscian
in origin. The proposal of hegemony requires a definition of civil
society. But today civil society is dead; it has been subsumed to
capitalist development and reshaped by the social unity of productive
labour. In this situation, a hegemonic process is completely subordi-
nated to the solid imperative of capital’s social command on profit,
a command that reorganizes civil society and causes it to exist only
as a projection of the process of production and of the structures of
power. Conceptions of alliances, policies manoeuvred in the mixed
economy, and ideological pressure on the middle classes, all unfold
on the crumbling image of civil society, whereas the reality of class
struggle shows instead continuity on the terrain of insubordination
and a tendential unification of proletarian subjects in the struggle
against the state.
On the other hand, what remains of the discourse concerning

institutional relations and mediations, a discourse proposed by revi-
sionism that is necessary and complementary to the discussion of
tactics? What remains of the discourse concerning the continuity of
the democratic struggle and of the struggle for socialism? And what
remains of the predisposition of existing constitutional structures to
support this continuity of struggle? The framework of relations, not
only social but also institutional ones, has so much fallen apart in
the crisis of the late capitalist state that the terrain of constitutional
reality is necessarily transcended and overturned by the power of the
bourgeoisie, the fundamental principles of democratic coexistence
are selected with a view to consensus, and the problem of consensus
is systematically resolved according to an anticipated tendency to
certain types of behaviour, be they authoritarian or terrorist. Today
more than ever, the framework of legitimacy, the sources of authority,
the very process of material validation of power are placed so much
outside of the schema of democratic legitimation that, as Luxemburg
predicted, radical democratic struggle, far from being a first stage,
becomes the foundation of working-class struggle.
The fact is that socialism becomes impossible at the moment when
the working-class struggle causes a definitive crisis in the functioning
of the law of value – not only in the sense that through its action it
determines and strengthens the functioning of the tendential law of
the falling rate of profit but also in the sense, which goes even deeper,
that it throws out of balance the very terms on which the law oper-
ated, removing that sense of a relationship between necessary labour
and surplus value on which ultimately everything is based. Socialism,
all the utopias of socialism, would like to represent the actualized
reality of the law of value, its realization, which is like saying the
complete real subsumption of the social labour of capital. But this is
possible only in relation to a dialectic of the classes, only as a moment
of class struggle. At this point all the variants of the socialist utopia,
both objectivist (socialism as socialization of the means of production
and as rationality of command) and subjectivist (a new way of doing
production, cooperation, participation, co-management and so on),
sink into crisis, because the law of value is not realized except by
splitting itself – by imposing, at a very high level, the new antagonism
between capitalist labour and command, no matter how legitimated,
and the totality of the social productive force of the proletariat.
The decrepitude of the reformist model, linked as it is to the ideol-
ogy of the planned realization of the law of value, becomes even more
apparent at this point. One need only look again at the problematic
32 Advances
of public spending, at how it sets itself in the p erspective of reform-

ism, and at the new antagonisms to which the reformist option will
give space. Reformists see public spending as an expense, produc-
tive both directly and indirectly. They tend, rightly, to rationalize its
management, to bend it to the rigidity of the schema of priorities,
to guide development through it, and to influence its direction.
But, as we have seen, beyond these formal criteria there is a con-
tradiction between the form of social accumulation and the source
– measure, proportion – of its legitimacy, a class contradiction that
reveals the tendential unification of the social and productive subject
and thereby the irrationality of the proposed criterion of corporate
legitimation. Subjectivizing itself in terms of class, the contradiction
becomes explosive. The pressure on public spending turns in fact
into wage pressure, the political struggle of the working class for the
relative wage and (especially and specifically in our times) against
capitalist work – a working-class allusion to the newly emerged force
of production, which wants to be paid in this capacity.
In this tangle of contradictions, the attempt to rationalize public
spending becomes immediately repressive: such rationalization
necessarily has to follow corporate parameters and to explicate the
corporate figure of the state. It becomes repressive not so much
because it uses for this purpose the tools of the repressive power of
the state and of all its multiplying separate bodies [corpi separati], but
because it uses them within the intensity of an unresolvable structural
contradiction. If socialism is impossible, then reformism is all the
more so. Any reformist action is immediately repressive.81
Here it begins to be apparent that the revisionism and the reform-
ism of the official labour movement are subject not only to the
repercussions of the decrepitude of the conception of class relations
that underlies them. The unreasonable nature of their project fuels
an unreasonable will, which is intent on the realization of the old
design no matter the cost. The support that communist reformism
gives to the project of capitalist restructuring derives from the need
to repress forcefully a proletarian subject that has achieved unity,
exerts pressure on the state budget, demands payment for the social
labour extorted from itself, and also presses against the barriers of
an order that has been established for the purpose of legitimizing the
imperial rule of corporate profits across all aspects of social coopera-
tion. Actively repressing the proletarian front, restructuring the social
subject of production, segmenting the markets of labour power, guar-
anteeing mobility processes that destroy working-class power and
achieving a terroristic marginalization of entire social strata: these
operations become both the foundation and the content of reform-

ism, in Italy as in all capitalist countries under social democratic
management. Here is the content of the ‘first phase’ of reformism,
which perpetuates itself everywhere as the base of the determination
to repropose an impossible socialism! The decrepitude of the ideo-
logical project is here totally indistinguishable from the repressive
actuality of the action of reformism.
Hence we get those operations of class division, especially in the
sector of productive intelligence – which, by socializing and tertiariz-
ing itself, has begun to represent the true connective tissue and the
central nervous system of the processes of social accumulation of
capital, as we have seen. For capitalists, it is fundamental to deny
and conceal especially the class nature of these new roles and sec-
tors, to mystify their functions by falling back on the old trope of
the ‘middle classes’. Fundamental, but not painless, because these
directly social functions of the force of production perceive them-
selves to be less and less socially legitimated; rather they feel more
and more strongly how the authoritarian legitimation of their role
is imposed on them. The proposal, which is imposed on them, is
that they be the bearers [Träger] of the bureaucratic and terroristic
mediation of a socialism with an authoritarian face, of a productive
rationality that reproduces the dead logic of corporations, mystifies
the social density of the process of accumulation, and negates the
very nature of productive work, subjecting it to the parameters of
command, of a subordinated and subordinating function. The roles
of state administration are increasingly caught up in this contradic-
tion, which they themselves create, all the more so as in this situation
the crisis of reformism must be contained. The technocratic figure
that is increasingly attributed to these roles is, subjectively, in crisis
the more the functionality of their rationalizing action appears to be
directly terroristic.
In Italy, the historic compromise represents entirely a figure of the
advanced form of the social democratic state for the management of
the capitalist crisis. The entry, of undoubted historical importance, of
Italian communism (and probably of all the communist parties of the
Latin Mediterranean area) into the power block of European social
democracy changes all the political terms of the class struggle. As for
the figure of the state, we have begun to see the sense in which it is
increasingly defined by the urgencies of command.
The point of intersection between the development of reformism
and the structure of the state has probably been reached already.
From now on, the class point of view must retain this new p olitical
34 Advances
synthesis: here is finally the enemy to be fought, and over a long

period.
8. An old tactic for a new strategy
Let us return to public spending. Why did I choose this topos to

demarcate a terrain for general discussion? Because the analysis of
the objective contradictions into which capitalist restructuring and
the state of reformism are forced can transform the question of public
spending into a subjective terrain – potentially it is that: it is the ter-
rain of the wage struggle, with all the political implications that, in
true Luxemburg spirit, should be attributed to the struggle over the
relative wage. Public spending amounts to being on the one hand a
social production terrain and on the other a social wage terrain. In
short, it is an aspect, always more relevant, of the self-expression of
social capital in its internal dialectic. This means that dealing with
public spending is equivalent to raising the problem of working-class
antagonism in the relationship between society and the state. It indi-
cates a form of capitalist subsumption of labour and at the same time
the fabric on which the antagonism can subjectively be determined.
It is therefore not enough to highlight – as does Alfred Sohn-Rethel
(and very well, too) in a recent essay82 – the opposition that opens
up now, in the society of mature capitalism, between the accom-
plished structure of the relations of domination for exploitation and
the working-class society that creates, continuously and completely,
the totality of social wealth – or between a formed economy [Lat.
economia formata] and an economy in formation [Lat. economia for-
mans]. Nor is it enough to highlight the enormous progress of social
industriousness [laborosità], directly and indirectly productive, and
to set it against the process of social accumulation, which lies firmly
in capitalist hands. Marx had already seen all this, and with great
lucidity: ‘These are pages,’ comments Rosdolsky in speaking of what
he takes from the Grundrisse on this point, ‘that (albeit written more
than a century ago) can only be read with bated breath, because they
contain one of the most daring visions of the human mind.’83 The
end of the material barrier of the law of value, automation of the force
of production, and the liberation of invention power: Marx sees,
describes and projects on all this, as a direct and material precondi-
tion for the building of communism.
But this is not enough: here subjectivity is, must be, cannot but
be the keystone of the process. Within the possibility of communism
there is an enormous set of needs and desires that begin to liberate

themselves. We, individually, can have only ‘rough’ prefigurations –
adds Marx84 – the only prefiguration that we can operate collectively
is given through struggle. Taking on a terrain of struggle is not to
exhaust the totality, it cannot be that; nor can it allude to a significa-
tive set of realized needs. Assuming the struggle is, in the first place,
to assume the negativity of the need for destruction. The wage is
a terrain of struggle that, reproposed at this level, can in principle
explode the entire potential of needs, the Saint Barbara of desires.
And then, only at this point, quantity passes into quality (in Marxian
jargon) and innovation, project, and an eager desire are unleashed.
Our task cannot be to prophesy the future; it is to identify the contra-
diction on which the future is being realized, in a dimension and with
an intensity that no individual can master, but that the masses know
how to produce. Thus the slogan ‘social wage against the state’ is not
a strategy but the practical identification of a terrain of struggle. Such
identification starts from the determination of the contradictions that
reformism and power cannot resolve and is carried out in the theo-
retical certainty that today any open and conscious class struggle is
immediately and necessarily a struggle for communism. In the field
of public spending, the old tactic of struggle over the relative wage
opens the proposal that the strategy of communism needs. Today
any mass space built through struggle can be only a breach from
which arises the mass of desires that are contained and repressed by
the social mode of production for capitalist accumulation. We can
see in everyday life how many and how intense these desires are, and
how impatient and communicative their force of expression is. All
this is due to the very form of capitalist production, to the socializa-
tion of exploitation, to the heaviness and totality of the process of
capitalist irrationalization of social relationships; but it is also due to
resistance and awareness of the complexity of exploitation, both of
which are now present among the great mass of workers. The wage is
the category with the help of which capital collects and mystifies, in
basic form, the complex of political and social, historical and human
expectations of the proletariat. Today capital has been forced to col-
lect the wage, or a large part of it, in the form of public spending, and
this is the first place where contradictions can explode: social wage
against the state.
A number of elements show that contradictions are already explod-
ing, in a new form. Resistance to the expropriation of the surplus
value of social production is no longer exercised in the simple old
forms of trade union defence, directly implanted in large factories;
36 Advances
it finds new forms of propaganda and attack by immediately tack-

ling the social levels of accumulation. The forms of the struggle for
self-reduction* are first and foremost an expansion of the working-
class wage struggle.
But not only that. Gradually, as class consciousness grows, aware-
ness of the new terrain of struggle grows too, at the general social
level. The working-class reappropriation of working time and time of
freedom, which has always developed in factories, takes place today
within the struggle for social reappropriation, for the social wage.
Self-reduction is the latest, highest form of the struggle of the mass
worker and the first figure in which the social reappropriation of
wealth takes place in the name of the new proletarian subject of the
class struggle: negation and sublimation of the mass worker.
The transitions from the dialectic of class composition are given
here in a subjective form. Resistance, self-reduction, appropriation:
these forms of struggle follow the same path as the transformation of
class composition. The terrain is, without doubt or hesitation, that of
the social wage. The political will is to exacerbate the contradictions
that capitalist leadership is experiencing on that terrain. The forms
of struggle progress in succession: the second struggle transforms the
limits of the first into points of attack, and the third does the same
to the second. Within these qualitative transitions the composition
of the proletariat is transformed into reality and expands as political
consciousness and will. Wealth becomes palpable; class conscious-
ness turns its engine into an objective of its own and with this solves
the bad features of a dialectic that otherwise is always unfinished
and inconclusive. Mediation and immediateness get closer to each
other when the material terrain of the mediations of consciousness is
expressed in the direct recuperation of wealth and power.
All this applies extensively, in line with the growth of the social
worker, with the overturning of capitalist socialization and its trans-
formation into a social recomposition of the proletariat, and with
the subjectivation of abstract labour. But there are also a number
of examples related to the progress of the communist struggle over
the social wage in large factories, in the middle of the most active
and conscious proletarian struggles. Here the relationship between
social power of production and capitalist command runs along the
organization of labour and the structure of fixed capital. Now, in this
* Self-reduction [autoriduzione] of prices is a practice of refusing to comply with

price increases and a movement of reducing and controlling them collectively.
situation too, during the latest struggles, in the strikes in reverse,* the
collective will for reappropriation has been able to express itself as
potere. Taking over workplaces and putting them back into operation,
not to produce but to test positively the class’s associative produc-
tive potenza to prepare the best possibilities for sabotage and struggle
in the immediate future – this is what has been done. Working-
class consciousness has not produced a prefiguration but has focused
on its own collective and mass deepening in order to define a fur-
ther path of struggle. The will for reappropriation realizes, at the
social level and at the level of the factory, the working-class tendency
towards communism to the extent that it liquidates, in mass action,
the implacably hostile power of the socialist mediation of the rela-
tions of social domination. When individual episodes rise to the level
of appropriation, the struggle for the social wage reveals the working-
class tendency to transform the use of the specific new contradictions
of the capitalist mechanism of social accumulation into a struggle
over power, a struggle for communism.
Another element of extreme importance as regards the political
and structural contradictions of public spending derives from the
analysis of the state and of the administrative roles of its manage-
ment. In other words it derives from a deepening of the critique
of the political economy of administration.85 If it is true, as I have
pointed out many times, that the role of the state becomes more and
more structural and internal to the development of accumulation,
we shall have to see what are the contradictions to which the state-
administrative roles of social capital are subjected. Now, on the one
hand, the fact that these roles become immediately productive is
already demonstrated, paradoxically, by the heavy pressure on them
for productive action – for an always more rationally productive
action. Simple bureaucratic rationalization? It doesn’t look like it:
here the functionality becomes indirectly productive – productive in
the proper sense, of surplus value – because through the functional-
ity of the administration the processes of social accumulation are
connected to the processes of corporate legitimation. The role of
employees in the administration becomes at this point immediately
contradictory: on the one hand they are a moment in the social
labour process, on the other they are called to manage it for the sake
* A reverse strike, un sciopero alla rovescia, is ‘a unionist form of protest around

the execution of work not requested or forbidden by the employer’ (https://www
.diatomea.net).
38 Advances
of profit. The increase in the productivity of public administration

means in the last resort that this contradictoriness is solved in totally
capitalist terms of efficiency. But the contradiction is big. At one
end, awareness of being a participant in the social fabric of produc-
tion extends even further, being driven by the very improvement
of the machinery of the state; at the other end, the general absence
of reasonableness in capitalist command over the state apparatus
induces logics of crisis and sometimes of effective insubordination.
Of course, the ideology of participation, of technocracy, of reform-
ist and bureaucratic socialism has a far from insignificant impact
on these social elements. Perhaps this is not yet decisive, but they
are likely to be confronted and defeated on the basis of a further,
broad progression of the contradictions and antagonisms of capital-
ist socialization. In any case they are susceptible to being contested
and opposed and, in some cases, reversed by the action of agitation
and proletarian organization.
In what sense? To speak of reappropriation in this instance, too, is
meaningless; it would be to indulge in notions of an alternative, in the
illusion of an alternative in the command of the state! What must be
conquered at this level is rather an awareness of the participation of
some of the people who fulfil administrative roles in the social com-
munity of working-class production – and therefore an awareness of
the possibilities of struggle that may exist even in the enemy’s terri-
tory. To be a sniper, an informant on the movements of the enemy,
a provocateur: this is the only alternative that class consciousness can
introduce among the roles of productive administration from above
and can oppose to the socialist utopia of alternative uses of state com-
mand, with its delirious proposal for a ‘revolution from above’ – a
frantic last mystification of ‘salami theory’ (taking power in slices) of
the classical social democratic tradition.
‘The strategic dimension of refusal and the tactical dimension of
abnormal usages’ (as the slogan goes) need to be offered here as a
terrain of class struggle in administration; and they are possible if
this type of struggle is part of being aware that the administrative role
often becomes a specifically productive role – productive indirectly,
yes, but still productive of surplus value.86
When it comes to the roles of the productive administration of the
state, is there not a function more directly connected to the complex-
ity of the social proletarian form of production and of the production
of struggle? Is not a purely negative and destructive indication of
tasks implicitly inconsistent with social labour’s definition of some
of these roles? These doubts and these questions require deeper
research and, above all, a documented basis of behaviours and strug-

gles, in order to produce a different answer from the one given thus
far. What is certain is that, whatever tendency the struggles in these
sectors will reveal, the only fixed point of analysis will be an extension
rather than a negation of what has been said. And it is not impossible
that, with the extension of the behaviours of refusal, there will also
be qualitative leaps in the struggles of administrative personnel in
the state. But, until we reach that point, the Leninist teaching on the
hostile nature of the capitalist state remains perfectly complementary
to the development of the Marxian tendency of integrating the state
and the global ideal capitalist.
The only certain thing that one can add is that the potential for
destruction, for a struggle against capital carried out by some roles
in the productive administration of the state, is revealed by the cri-
tique of the political economy of administration to be extremely high
and strong. It is therefore no coincidence that reformism’s will to be
integrated today turns again with such vigour to the capture of the
middle classes, mostly in a desire to repress a class identification that
was certainly happening in the most recent phase of struggle.
Last but not least:* starting from the consideration of public spend-
ing, one can begin to unify tactical indications and lines of strategy
for the struggle, and above all one can begin to relaunch an analysis
of political class composition, paying particular attention to the new
layers, which are invested simultaneously by the socialization of the
mode of production and by the proletarianization of their conditions
of life and struggle. As public spending policy extends as a system of
social control, on the one hand it invests new social sectors, poten-
tially taking them towards a clash with the state, and on the other it
introduces class contradictions in the machinery of the state, among
the operators of state administration. Seeing this clearly and pro-
ceeding far more analytically than could have been done here, both
in research and in unrest, can lead to significant innovations in the
science of social class. The Marxist terms of a possible discussion
are more or less given. But the creative intensification of research
is still to happen. It is necessary to ascribe the continuation of this
discussion to the subjects of administration themselves, to the com-
rades who work there and are subjected to exploitation, but who also
transmit capitalist command. This should be done for an analysis
of the state, for a critique of politics and administration, for a new
* ‘Last but not least’ in English in the original.

40 Advances
step forward in the analysis of political class composition at this

level of the development of the forces of production – and against
the reformist conception of power, of the state, and of the roles of
administration.
2
Inside the Crisis
Symptoms of the Common*
In a philosophical debate a while ago I had occasion to comment on

an observation made by Hannah Arendt: the treasure of the freedom
of action is impossible to transmit in a world that does not attribute
meaning to acting in public. Now, while I was preparing the present
article, this observation sprang to my mind as an opportunity for
discussion. If taken positively, it tells us that we are free only if we
live a common experience, in other words if we succeed in achieving
a space–time in which freedom can not only express itself but also
become concrete, and action [l’agire] is able not only to expand but
also to make itself an institution.
But there are at least two terms in this observation of Arendt’s
that need to be underlined: ‘transmit’ and ‘public’. When we say
‘transmit’, our meaning is customary and clear; there is a deposit
and a passage, an accumulation and a common enrichment, a sub-
jectivity from which a lived experience, or a language, can be passed
on to someone else. But today, in the economic and social crisis that we
inhabit, what would this mean, for instance to the younger generations,
which do not have a future and are struggling in a situation of uncertainty
and danger? When we then pick up the term ‘public’, this brings us
to a really difficult aspect of our present times: the difficulty we have
in using this term, as Arendt points out, is that the concept of public
has probably detached itself from the meaning it once had in our
tradition, in which the passage from the private to the public was
* From the lecture ‘Vivre dans la crise’, delivered at the Centre for Art and
Media, Karlsruhe, 13 June 2013. This is the translation of an unpublished Italian
version supplied by the author.
42 Advances
linear and went through the democratic figures of public and state
institutions. Behind that term stood the idea of a centralized political
representation of popular interests: on the one hand there was the
freedom of private individuals and the freedom of the markets; on the
other, there was the popular solidity of the values of equality and free-
dom and the guarantee given these values by great public institutions
– precisely public – and by the state. But perhaps there is something
else behind the difficulties that Arendt indicates, something that
today is no longer unspoken: by ‘the public’ she means more than what
is legally and institutionally public, namely the fact of being together,
of producing together, of building together: in short, what we now
no longer call ‘the public’ but ‘the common’. This difference is not
simply one of meaning; it also probably has an ontological relevance.
So let us start by asking: has the public really been weakened? And,
if it has, how far has this weakening gone? How deep has it gone, this
loss of confidence in political representation and in the state’s ability
to act in the general interest? Above all, has a new sentiment of the
common really begun to assert itself through a function of opposi-
tion to the public and a new feeling of the common, as if it were a
new expression of natural law? And, if it has, to what extent? I feel
that this sense of the common is becoming generalized, especially at
this moment: this current crisis (economic, social and political) is
something of a broomstick from God that cancels out long historical
periods and old conceptualizations and lands us in a situation of deep
uncertainty and disorientation – but also of great expectation. It is
full of doubts, however, and leaves us facing some kind of unknown
– the exhaustion of a life experience, of a culture that seems to have
reached a limit: and then what will happen? It is within this experi-
ence that the concept of the common can help us with discussing and
planning an attempt to find an ethical and political way out of the
current crisis – as we move with caution.
The public and its institutions are exhausted and freedom cannot
be transmitted through the publicness of experience and contempo-
rary life. But why does the sense of the common seem to be expressed
in a naïve and powerful way? Now the aspiration to the common
seems to arise out of the difficulties of living the crisis. With poverty,
it imposes the need to resist, to do things together, to rediscover a
‘we’ – and this desire is not simply reactive to the critique of the mar-
kets’ action, which seems increasingly irrational, and of capitalism
and big business, which seem to have simply become an experience
of enjoying rents. They gamble on completely disembodied financial
markets where various phantasmagorias are exercised – of money
Inside the Crisis: Symptoms of the Common 43
that produces money, of an unstoppable rent, of a perpetual expan-

sion of speculation – and there is nothing left to remind us of the
heroism or, less romantically, the risk of the entrepreneur. Is it in the
light of this disaster that the desire for the common is born?
In attempting an answer, I would like to propose four behavioural
types for the human being who lives in today’s society and suffers the
crisis: the ‘indebted’ person, the ‘mediatized’ person, the ‘securitized’
person, and the (politically) ‘represented’ person.
The indebted person is not hard to find. There is a debt situation
that arises from the normal conditions under which we live today: in
the reality of our working lives we move in a situation of precarious-
ness, which becomes morally heavy and often unsustainable as a way
of life. Today there are fewer and fewer situations of production in
which one is normally employed, directly productive and normally
waged. Rather there are situations of unemployment and precarious
employment, always mediated by debt (involving banks, family and
friends) and dominated by a totally irrational social distribution of
income, in which any reasonable measure of work and consideration
for the social value of labour are sidelined. In such conditions, when
you work (and also when you are on the dole) it almost feels as if you
were in debt to society, and you experience a kind of fragility of your
working condition and a liquefaction of the value of your labour.
Since the dissolution of big industry and of the Fordist structuring
of labour, capitalist value creation has expanded so as to affect the
whole of life (and the kind of labour required is one in which the cog-
nitive and social components of production have become increasingly
important). Accumulation no longer occurs simply in factories, in the
places and at the times of direct labour, but occupies the entire length
of a person’s lifetime; and capital’s occupation of the entire space of
life has also transformed all services and all communications into
structures of production. The economy has become a bioeconomy,
politics has become a biopolitics. It is in this condition that we come
to understand what exploitation is today: something that occupies
the whole of life but that, in our own lives, expresses itself as precar-
ity and poverty, debt and uncertainty, lack of a future and absence
of hope.
As for the mediatized person, we are and will continue to be more and
more immersed in mediatization, on the one hand because cognitive
labour, the work of the brain, the work of communication – in short,
immaterial labour – are increasingly the key to productive work, and
therefore to accumulation; on the other hand, because in mediatiza-
tion we not only work but also are held prisoner. We are surrounded
44 Advances
by a world of ghosts, by opinions that try to shape us, by messages

that artificially condition our emotions, our concepts, and above all
our patterns of consumption. Is it possible once again to describe this
situation with a word that has rather fallen into disuse – alienation? I
believe so, given that, in these communication-saturated spaces that
we inhabit, we no longer have a sense of actual truth. What I am
arguing against here is not just a naïve perception of reality that can
be resolved in the nostalgic re-finding of natural or innate truths; it is
rather a desire for a criterion that, in this mediatized horizon where
we are prisoners of sorts, could help us to express relationships and
affects and to rebuild values. The problem is thus how to find again,
in and only in a world that has been radically transformed, real rela-
tionships of language, of values, in order to be able to take action.
Then there is the securitized person, the person who is ferociously
dragged, in every moment of their life, towards a sense of being
‘endangered’. ‘You are in danger!’ This is the warning on which
power has always been built: fear and more fear, constructed as a
fundamental relationship that is realized in relations between people.
From this point of view, human beings, citizens, are introduced into
a world of terrifying phantasms that haunt them continually (checks,
searches, demands for attention, dangers threatened or whispered,
remote control, theft of personal data and so on); the state should
free them from these ghosts. In reality it always pushes them back
into fear, angst, the nightmare of misery, crime, crisis and – why
not? – war. We have only to think of the spectres that haunt the
processes of migration, both in the heads of those who migrate and
in the heads of those who receive them. This is a world shaken by
demons, around which horrible feelings coagulate that then express
themselves socially and politically.
The last type is that of the represented person, in other words the
person who seeks a residual safety, or at least a guarantee of security,
in the political sphere, in political representation. The represented
person is the person in pursuit of happiness, to use American con-
stitutional terms; and what do they get under today’s constitutional
conditions? Inefficiency, corruption, falsehood, irresponsibility – in
short, all the disgraces that current ‘democratic’ politics offers us.
Behind these experiences there now lies an increasingly intense, mas-
sified suffering. There is therefore something that crushes life into
money and afflicts it in debt, something that lends an air of hysteria
to the domination of the media, to the worry of insecurity and to the
failure of decent political representation – in short, something that
leaves us in a very unhappy situation.
Yet at this point, from which there is no escape, we have to ask

once again: how can one be free?
Perhaps it would be worth analysing the four situations that I have
described, to ask whether in them, beyond the negativity that charac-
terizes them, there are not powers [potenze] that can allow us better to
understand the kind of resistance that is necessary, and therefore to
approach the question raised at the outset: what is this desire for the
common that emerges today in the crisis? Debt and the dominance of
financial structures, what are they in fact? They are in the first place
a recognition that working life or productive life has never been as
cooperative as it is today: we depend on one another in an absolutely
profound way. What capital calls debt is in fact our mutual depend-
ence in cooperation. Today production no longer develops through
command, but through cooperation. Cognitive labour has become
hegemonic in the process of value creation. But what is cognitive
labour? It is a putting together of singularities in labour; certainly this
is a model, often fraught with perverse or pathological repercussions – but
it is very true that, when we examine the current organization of
labour, we can recognize that there is less and less need for capitalist
command to organize them: it is the workers, in their cognitive pro-
ductivity, who organize their work among them, autonomously. This
is a fine trend and it is real and actual; it is as a result of this trend that
society has become more productive.
A reflection is required at this point. This is not to say that exploi-
tation has disappeared; neither has it become any less horrible. What
has changed is the powers to resist and the hope for liberation. In a
productive society in which every use value has become an exchange
value, in which the boss’s domination reaches into every corner of
life, in which it is the financial measure, defined by an anonymous
power, that establishes the general relationship with the mass of
labour that is captured by society – in such a society the rebellion can
become stronger, building on awareness that from now on people
produce not only if they are organized by the boss; they can also
produce cooperatively, organizing themselves autonomously. At the
very moment in which it makes you unhappy, debt also reveals that
today’s production is done in an eminently cooperative way.
This is how even the fear that holds you subjected can be over-
come – through the trust that we have in others and in the forms of
life that we organize and in which we take militant action to defend
ourselves from the bad things that are heaped upon us. We know that
the attacks we suffer, the immiseration that precarity and unemploy-
ment impose, are capable of being resisted – because it is we who
46 Advances
are the strength of life, its quality, and its productivity. We, too, are
the strength of the common we build. Education and the processes
of construction of common forms of life and production can give us
the guarantee of a society in which people do not have to live in fear
of one another.
This lived affirmation of the common goes alongside a trans-
formative activity that requires that private property and its public
guarantee be removed and that the common and its use become a
fundamental right of citizens. Here enormous constitutional prob-
lems arise, because in modern constitutions the common does not
exist; there is just the private – and the public that protects it. We
therefore have to begin to think that in a constitution of the common
the concept of property is no longer something that invests and forms
institutions, but something subordinate to the purposes of common
use and management of production and wealth. The common means
overcoming poverty and misery; it is a reaction to the conditions of
exploitation and alienation that now condition not only the weakest
parts of society but the whole of life – subsumed as it is under the
domination of capital. Common means an ability to express wealth
through free cooperation. This is the common! Today the exercise of a
constituent power that renews society and the state and inaugurates
the common is the only way in which the problems of freedom can
be addressed – the imagining of a new society, founded no longer on
a freedom that is subjected to private property but on a freedom that
consists in the ability to establish a common relationship between
singularity and multitude.
But let us return rather to that being out of joint* – labour in our
society. It is the transformation of labour that has put life in crisis
and that therefore requires a renewal of the form of work and life.
This all started with the 1970s. During the crisis of that decade,
the technical composition of labour underwent deep changes. As I
have already stated, capital extended the valorization processes to
the whole society. In so doing, it pushed forward a slow but continu-
ous transformation of material labour into immaterial labour. It also
developed the conditions for cognitive labour to become hegemonic
within the processes of production. Second, it brought the biopoliti-
cal fabric of society into production. To accomplish this, it developed
exploitation by outsourcing work from the factory, by making it
precarious, by collecting the benefits of its social diffusion and by
* ‘out of joint’ in English in the original.

capturing its cooperative nature. These two processes – the cogni-

tivization and the socialization of labour – make the great transition
that we have definitively witnessed of late. Here what is required by
capital as an essential basis for valorization is the very production of
workers’ subjectivity. I need hardly point out how radically the tem-
poralities, the temporal standards* of labour have been transformed
by these changes: if the whole life is put to work, then temporality
is no longer a measure but the liquid envelope in which workers
produce.
So at this point financialization ends up as the only horizon for
capturing and measuring social labour in this new mode of produc-
tion. Inasmuch as finance (and only it) constructs and imposes the
measure of social labour, and inasmuch as it invests life and forms
of life and configures them within the measure of money, it is clear
that ‘profit’ and ‘wages’ are now given in the form of ‘rent’ or ‘debt’.
And it is also clear (for those who wish to see) that, by operating in
this way, finance invades the sphere of public regulation of society
more than ever before in the history of capitalism. The result is
a progressive private patrimonialization [patrimonializzazione] of the
public, of the public domain, as well as of the domain of regulation.
The welfare state† is privatized and sovereignty is patrimonialized,
to such an extent that the life of citizens is put totally into pro-
duction. This is the point of the ultimate paradox, at which the
structures of welfare (school, health, demographic reproduction and
so on) and social cooperation (communication, culture, transport
and so on) become a terrain for accumulation and for the value
creation of capital.
But at this point resistance arises, too. We have already seen this
in part. Now let us look at it again, not only in its genealogy but
also in the dispositifs that it produces. We know that capital, like
any political institution (because capital is a political institution,
as Marx established, taking over the concept of power developed
by Machiavelli and Spinoza, and as Foucault later reiterated), is
a relationship: as a power, it is the outcome of an action on the
action of another, of a command that encounters resistance, of the
action of fixed capital against the working class and the proletariat.
Therefore, if every action produces a reaction and if in socialized
capitalism capital presents itself as biopower, then proletarian resist-
* ‘standards’ in English in the original.

† ‘welfare state’ in English in the original.
48 Advances
ance is biopolitical and, in confrontation, plays upon the irreducible

potential of cognitive and cooperative excedence – developing it in
forms that are constituent.
This series of statements obviously needs to be developed. Here is
not the place to do so (but in the tradition of workerist thought these
concepts have already been constructed and demonstrated many
times in practice, and the developing researches on the relationship
between Marx and Foucault confirm this). However, it should be
added that, again from a phenomenological point of view, the poten-
tial for resistance exhibits a constant (albeit relative) autonomy.
In fact knowledge is not unilaterally constructed or produced by
capital in the cognitive subjects, in the immaterial workers; in most
cases they form themselves autonomously, and the more precarious
the cognitive workforce is, the more it can (and perhaps knows how
to) present itself as ‘independent’. We then simply note that the
new technical composition of the cognitive proletariat may entail a
new political potentiality. It is not certain that this will happen; but
if it does, the break that the cognitive workforce determines merely
by not being built in rarity, in scarcity, in the necessity of capitalist
command (as happened in the factory-society) but by forming itself
autonomously – in autonomy, with an excedence of power (as intelli-
gence always is), up to the creation of independent structures – could
bring about the definitive splitting of the ‘One’, of capitalist power.
In this case, the drive towards plurality would be given in an irresist-
ible way, in the face of a capitalism, now revealed as biopower, which
tends systematically to constitute itself as oneness [unità].
It is in this perspective that the movements of 2011 expressed new
political modalities in the face of the problems raised by the crisis. I
therefore want to develop some further considerations on them, to
conclude this phenomenology of living in the crisis. Let’s start again
from the alienation of the represented person. Represented persons
are deprived of the possibility of expressing themselves politically,
that is, of expressing their will and knowledge of the social rela-
tionship, of directing it towards happiness. Political representation
today, or rather representative democracy itself, is an instrument of
domination formed and subjected by money, by wealth, by the 1 per
cent over the 99 per cent. Political representation has been reduced
to capital assets. Rebelling against this representative subjection to
the money of the powerful and to the measures of wealth means
rediscovering that freedom, equality and solidarity live on a common
ground, which is that of life built by the workers, by those who pro-
duce and who want, quite simply, to be free and equal.
I don’t have an answer to this question. But let us proceed on the

basis of the experiences that are beginning to embody, and to give
shape and language to, new figures of radical democracy. In the
movements that appeared in 2011, we can identify two fundamental
characteristics.
The first involves the expression of an autonomous temporality.
Anyone who has followed the history of social and political move-
ments in the West since the Second World War, and especially
since 1968, will have noticed how often (almost always, in fact) they
emerged in the form of a reaction, in other words in response to
unforeseen historical events or incidents. Then the development of
these movements usually advances in the rhythm of a response to the
decisions of power. The motions of power have almost always antici-
pated those of the democratic movements. The movements of 2011,
on the other hand, have shown a marked independence and auton-
omy in the management of their own development, in the grading of
their constituent power. These movements exhibit new characteris-
tics in their definition of temporality, but also in the determination of
their own spatial location. This suggests that a dynamic ontology of
social being can be proposed here in original and radical forms.
For example, when one examines the long and expansive tempo-
rality of the Arab Spring, it might seem that a conception of time is
surreptitiously introduced that is different from the insurrectional
acceleration of events that normally defines the beginning of any
struggle. But this is not the case: the decision process in open, hori-
zontal assemblies, a process that has characterized all the ‘camps’ of
2011, is also very slow. What is interesting and new in these strug-
gles is not their speed or slowness, but rather the political autonomy
with which they manage their own temporality. This marks a huge
difference from the rigid or hysterical rhythms of the alter-global
movements, which were following the meetings* of government sum-
mits at the beginning of this century. On the contrary, in the 2011
cycle of struggles, speed, slowness, deep intensity and superficial
accelerations are combined and mixed. At each moment, time is
snatched from the programming imposed by external pressures and
by the timings of elections, and rather establishes its own calendar
and rhythms of development. This notion of autonomous temporal-
ity helps us to clarify why we see these movements as presenting
alternatives. In fact an alternative is not an action, a proposal, or a
* ‘meetings’ in English in the original.

50 Advances
discourse simply opposite to the programme of power but rather a

new dispositif, rooted in an asymmetrical point of view. This point of
view lies elsewhere. Its autonomy renders coherent the rhythms of its
own temporality, and in this perspective it produces new subjectivity,
struggles and constituent principles.
And here we have the second characteristic of these constituent move-
ments. The temporal determinations of a constituent action fluctuate
between latency and rapidity in relation to other factors as well. The
most important thing is how contagious, or rather epidemic, each
constituent action can be. Asking for freedom in the face of a dictato-
rial power, for example, introduces and spreads the idea of an equal
distribution of wealth – as happened in Tunisia and Egypt; placing
the desire for democracy against the traditional structures of political
representation also raises the need for participation in transparency,
as in Spain; protesting against the inequalities created by financial
control also leads to the demand for a democratic organization of the
common and for free access to it, as in the United States; and so on.
The defence of a park in Istanbul becomes a struggle against the cler-
icalism of thought and power throughout Turkey; the protest against
rising transport prices in São Paulo becomes a protest throughout
Brazil against the watering down of the Lulist anti-poverty revolu-
tion and against the exclusion of a recently emancipated multitude.
Temporalities are fast or slow, according to the viral intensity of
communicating ideas and desires that, in every case, establish sin-
gular syntheses. There is obviously no ‘autonomy of the political’ in
the Schmittian sense here; the constituent decisions of the protest
camps are formed through complex constructions and negotiations
of knowledge. There is no leader or central committee that decides.
Method becomes essential, as does the programmatic discourse: the
Spanish indignados and the occupiers of Wall Street combine in their
discourse and action the critique of representative political forms and
a protest against social inequality and domination by finance.
The struggles of 2011 took place in markedly different places, and
their protagonists lead very different kinds of lives. Why, then, do
we consider these struggles to be part of the same cycle? First, it is
obvious that they face the same enemy, characterized by its power in
matters of debt: the media, security regimes and a corrupt system of
political representation. The first point to emphasize is that practices,
strategies and objectives have been able to connect and combine
various plural struggles into a singular project, to create a common
ground, albeit with differences. The glue that holds it all together
can initially be linguistic, cooperative- and network-based, but this
common language soon spreads through horizontal decision-making

processes.
The process requires temporal autonomy. This often begins with
small communities or neighbourhood groups (in Tel Aviv the Israeli
indignados reproduced the spirit and political form of the kibbutz
tradition). . . Such movements have tried to find support and inspi-
ration in federalist models. Small groups and communities connect
with one another and create common projects without abandoning
their differences. Federalism thus constitutes an engine for recom-
position. Of course, very few elements of the theory of the state and
federalist sovereignty are to be found here; rather there is the residue
of the passions and intelligence of a federal logic of association. It
is no coincidence, on the other hand, that many of the weapons
developed against these movements are animated by the project of
breaking the connections of these federalist logics. Religious extrem-
ism often serves to divide movements in the Arab countries; vengeful
and racist forms of repression have been used to divide insurgents in
Britain; and in North America, Spain and elsewhere in Europe police
provocations aim to push non-violent protests into violence as a way
of creating divisions.
Here, through these movements, politics is conquering a pluralistic
ontology. A true pluralism of struggles emerges from different tradi-
tions and expresses different objectives, which combine in a federative
and cooperative logic to create a model of constituent democracy;
in this model differences have the ability to interact and build new
institutions – from below but with great effective power, just as

Spinoza wanted: against global capital, against the dictatorship of
finance, against the biopowers that are destroying the earth, and
for free access to and self-management of the common. At the next
stage, these movements will not only live new human relationships
but also participate from below in the construction of new institu-
tions. While up until now we have built the politics of plurality, from
now on we will have to set in motion the ontological machine of
plurality itself. A plural ontology of politics has been set in motion,
from 2011 until today, through the encounter and recomposition of
militant subjectivities.
For me, this is what it means to live the crisis: to discover, within
it, a new conatus and a new cupiditas of happiness.
Part II
The Fundamentals
3
In Search of Commonwealth*
1. Many problems remained open after Empire and Multitude. There

is no point in restating them here, just as it had been useless to try
to close them. Rather it was a question of starting over again, on the
basis of the concepts that had been established, in order to go deeper
into the question: what is politics today? What is subversive poli-
tics, what sharing [partage] of the social does it envisage? How can
capital be fought today? The unsolved problems can be faced with
new strength, but only if we press forward; of this I am convinced.
However, at the end of ten years of work on Empire and Multitude
we† had a strong sense – a perception by now mature – that our pre-
sent had redefined itself, that the time when this present could be
determined under the prefix ‘post-’ was over. We had definitely lived
through a transition; so, now, what were the symptoms of its end? It
seemed to us that the central point on the agenda was the concept of
democracy. The concept had been exhausted in the American wars,
through the frenzied propaganda made on that front by neoconserva-
tives. Other things, which the concept of democracy could no longer
encompass, emerged in the field of political science. I need only refer,
by way of illustration, to Rosanvallon and what he tries to grasp and
describe in his latest book, La contre-démocratie: La politique à l’âge
de la défiance: something profound has gone, he tells us – from the
republic, from the modern behaviour of populations; and it is now
impossible to find it. It is something obscure, which we can no longer
* First published as Antonio Negri, ‘À la recherche du Commonwealth’, Rue

Descartes, 6.17 (2010): 6–17. doi: 10.3917/rdes.067.0006.
† Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, co-authors of Empire, Multitude and
Commonwealth.
56 The Fundamentals
explain. This is how he tries to account for the feelings of mistrust and
powerlessness, the figures of depoliticization that shape contempo-
rary democracy. And he adds – reluctantly, one feels – that ‘political
democracy’ has become a sign behind which a ‘mixed regime’ has
now been consolidated that had to include a counter-democracy, a
‘democracy of exception’.
This attempt, in political science, to effect a synthesis on such an
uncertain reality is repeated in economic science. There the effort
is to reinvent, not a measure of development (long unavailable after
the crisis of the classical law of labour value), but a new effective
convention, since it is now recognized that the liberal–libertarian con-
vention and the Fordist, Keynesian, or welfare state convention are
in crisis. (For example, we often hear of an ‘energy convention’,
but nobody really knows what that means, except that, when it also
includes nuclear power, as is often said, it is opposed to the ‘eco-
logical convention’, and consequently perhaps also to the democratic
convention. Al Gore seems to have asked this question.)
Finally, the attempt at reflection in international politics (along
with the search for a global political science) involves reinterpreting
the global dimension of power multilaterally today, when American
unilateralism (that is, what remained of the old imperialism), having
been defeated, is in profound crisis. Note how the criticisms that had
been levelled at us – of not recognizing the continuity of imperialism
in the global action of the American government – are now demysti-
fied. In fact, after the crisis of unilateralism, we still remain within a
global order. Its effects – exhaustion of the nation state, dissolution of
international law, multilateral governance* of a single global market
– begin to be admitted inasmuch as historical actors are forced to act
within this new reality, which previously they hypocritically denied.
The recognition of the new order is therefore practical rather than
theoretical, but nonetheless effective!
So we have passed through a long period of ambiguity and para-
doxes: the postmodern was a culture of transition and represented,
in the figures of randomness and uncertainty, alternatives of an
unsolvable complexity, internal to this period of transition. Today
the transition has been completed. There has been a definitive break,
and it is one that has paradoxical consequences. For example, within
the perceived aleatory nature of history and the supposed complex-
ity of its systems, the ideologies of the right and the left, far from
* ‘multilateral governance’ in English in the original.

In Search of Commonwealth 57
disappearing, have superimposed themselves on one another and are

now mixed and confused. The neutralization of the political has come
about through the most diverse positions’ rush towards an extreme
centre: a real extremism of the centre appeared in this way. In each
experience and place of democracy, an attempt is made to consoli-
date a post-ideological point, a neutral centre, in order to get out of
the chaos. Can one perhaps say that, just as the baroque thermidor
and the Counter-Reformation invented sovereignty at the end of the
Renaissance revolution, between Machiavelli and Bodin, so today we
are trying to invent something new, useful and matched to the new
exigencies? But what is that something?
To begin to orient ourselves, to try to find a sure way between
these uncertainties, these caesuras, and these questions, let us say
that we start from the contemporary, pure and simple. The crisis has
run its course. It is impossible to go back. We have to begin to move
within the determinations of the new era, but without ever losing
sight of the episode of the transition.
2. What is it that the objective determination of the new historical

condition rests on, through and after the crisis of the modern order?
What follows is a first attempt at analysis.
From the point of view of state critique, the point is that the sov-
ereign synthesis is in crisis. That the crisis is definitive is shown by the
process of becoming precarious – or, better, by the deficit in the
deductive mechanism of the law, as defined in judicial modernity, in
nineteenth-century constitutionalism, and in the theories of the state
of right [stato di diritto] or rule of law.* Both in their hard continental
version and in their Atlantic jurisprudential version, these sovereign
practices are no longer able to construct and guarantee the government
of the concrete. Legitimacy and effectiveness of the law are now at a
distance from each other.
The Weberian model that considers sovereignty or legitimacy from
a rational–functional point of view has run its course. The hypermod-
ern attempt to restore instrumental logics to the government of the
concrete is also incapable of arriving at sensible conclusions. The fact
is that the government of the concrete has ceased to be what it was for
‘modern’ constitutionalism and administrative action. The concrete
is not the individual end point of a juridical decision, but a substan-
tial and living network – biopolitical, we might say – and acting on it
* ‘rule of law’ in English in the original.

58 The Fundamentals
means gathering its activity. At one time the juridical act imposed
itself on the real; now the juridical act confronts biopolitical reality,
collides with it, and reshapes itself through contact with it.
In the view of the most watchful constitutionalists and adminis-
trators, for example the likes of Luhmann and Teubner, and also
according to jurists who operate in the more open fields of labour
and business law (domestic and international alike), juridical action
will no longer have the capacity to be deployed deductively; it will
rather consist, on each occasion, in the solution of a singular conflict
– a solution whose form traditional dogmatics does not foresee – and
therefore in the determination of a provisional mediation, of a transi-
tory dispositif. The concrete is split, no government activity can be
given in a linear way any more. Only governance* is given. Warning:
when we speak of governance, we move in a minefield. Governance
is not in itself a democratic tool; it is rather a managerial dispositif.
What opens this machine to democracy is use matched to democratic
interests, and thus a democratic exercise of force that effectively
opposes another exercise of force (possibly oriented non-democrati-
cally). The importance of this instrument and its possible democratic
opening derive not from ‘nature’, but from the sociopolitical consist-
ency of the actors. At this point, the constitutionalists sometimes
go as far as to introduce the concept of a constitutionalism without
a state, in other words the practice of a permanent and continuous
redefinition of subjective right, of the rights of the parties, and in
general of the conventions of agreement. But, if one is less optimistic,
it is now necessary to recognize that the old conception of law and
the new biopolitical consistency of reality are at odds. Every solution
leads back to biopower – but this is without measure, and is therefore
capable only of exception; and then the biopolitical instances arise
and propose alternatives to great effect.
The one has divided into two: here is a good first paradigm of con-
temporaneity. To say this is not to say ‘no’ to the multiple. The
paradigm implies only an ability (and perhaps strength) to question
whether another horizon might now be forming through every terrain
of jurisprudential plurality and constitutional articulations: a horizon
in which new constituent powers [poteri costituenti] are expressed, and
hence a terrain on which the classic definition of constituent power as
an original, extra-juridical power is abandoned in favour of a juridical
conception of constituent power as a potenza internal to the legal
* ‘governance’ in English in the original.

system and indefinitely whole. This is a central point in our book

Commonwealth, when it comes to defining political contemporane-
ity. We will see later how the very concept of revolution has to bend
to this renewal of constituent power and thus to its definition as an
‘internal source of right’, and therefore also to the possibility that the
revolution acts within the constitutions, in other words within consti-
tuted power, in an untiring way. On the other hand, here one can say
that temporality comes to be reinserted centrally into the definition
of right.
3. Now we need to deepen the objective determination of the new

contemporary condition, opening – so to speak – its second movement.
So far we have followed the transition from a political–institutional
point of view: crisis of sovereignty, governance, redefinition of con-
stituent power. Now we have to raise the problem from the point of
view of labour, of its organization, of the power relations that traverse
it.
Who is it that produces? In today’s world, it is the machine of the
multitude. Production is social. The hegemonic form of produc-
tive labour is cognitive labour. We have definitively arrived at a new
sequence: living labour, cognitive labour, cooperative production
(i.e. social cooperation), biopolitical fabric of production, and so
on and so forth. The relationship between the technical composi-
tion (TC) and the political composition (PC) of labour power has
been extraordinarily transformed and complicated. At one time the
TC represented the potential – often only virtual, sometimes real
– of a matching PC. Now, in today’s world, in the regime of cogni-
tive labour, virtuality and potentiality are mutually implicated in the
relationship and constitute its nature and dynamics. Rather than
corresponding to each other and creating isomorphisms, TC and PC
hybridize, crossbreed. There was a certain dialectic, for example in
the workers’ narratives of the historical relationship between class
(on the side of TC) and party (on the side of PC) that took place
during the class struggle, with its periodical ups and downs and
especially its cyclical dimensions. Now, in the current biopolitical
condition, this dialectic no longer exists – or exists much less. The
biopolitical fabric confuses the relationship between TC and PC,
but at the same time extends it and breaks that dependence on the
industrial organization, over which direct capitalist command was
still exercised with great effectiveness.
Bearing these observations in mind, we are able to grasp the
moment of crisis: in the great transformation under way, command
60 The Fundamentals
leaves out the new figure of living labour. Living labour has become sin-
gularized in the biopolitical and is now socialized independently of the
capitalist organization of labour. This brings us to a second paradigm
of contemporaneity.
At the very moment when capital, qua biopower, subsumes society
entirely, the process of integrating labour power into capital is fully
revealed and the disjunction between labour power and capital is
radicalized. Workers express their biopolitical and productive capac-
ity within the entire circuit of social production. Here the bodies
become socially active and the soul materializes in productive labour;
consequently, it is the whole that gives meaning to the singular labour
contribution, just as, by way of comparison, it is the singular lin-
guistic contribution that gives meaning to a linguistic whole. Capital
and labour power are played out entirely in bios (‘life’), but precisely
here capital and labour are also separated, as a system of biopowers
against the biopolitical fabric or power.
Consequently the worker is no longer faced with capital, except in
the most indirect and abstract form of rent, in other words as capital
that multiplies the more general, territorial expropriation, or in the
financial figure, that is, as expropriator of the whole social valoriza-
tion of labour, monetarily expressed. If you look at it from this angle,
given the relative interdependence of cognitive and socially coopera-
tive labour, it is not just profit that workers are faced with, but profit
transformed into rent: they are no longer faced with the individual
capitalist as the organizer of exploitation but with the collective capital-
ist as financial mystifier of social labour.
Just as Marx had spoken of a ‘socialism of capital’ in connection
with the birth of joint stock companies, today we can metaphorically
propose a kind of communism of capital, in which capitalism pro-
duces the absolute mystification of a valorization that, given what was
said earlier, is immediately common and exploits directly the social
participation in valorization – that is, the sociality of the worker.
We can add a further question: does this happen in a parasitic way?
Perhaps. It is certain that, if capital exploits and mystifies the common
wealth, it ceases organizing its production process. Capital continues
to present itself as power and, since production is immersed in life,
as biopower. Exploitation therefore passes today through the social
organization of biopowers. Whether this organization is parasitic or
not makes little difference.
But to this reflection on the autonomy of the productive subject
we must add – and this is what we do in Commonwealth – other
reflections, on the autonomy of the resistant subject. I want briefly
to introduce here another argument that has been developed in

part, but not sufficiently: its relative absence from our past work
has been rightly accounted as negative, and even deplored as a
substantial limitation of our research. I don’t think that this is how
things are. In fact I would like to point out that, in order to add to
our work (Empire and Multitude) the ‘missing chapter’ on the colo-
niality of power (for this is, obviously, what was meant), it would
have been necessary first of all to excavate and rediscover the truth
about a non-identitarian solidity and movement of anti-colonial
struggles and of the subjects who were active in them. It was
therefore necessary to pass not only through the theories of post-
coloniality but through the emancipatory and liberating practices of
colonized peoples and of movements of political liberation in the
non-regressive continuity of their development. A revisiting of Frantz
Fanon’s lesson was essential for us in this regard. But not only that:
the contribution to this process made by the Zapatista movement
was fundamental precisely because it avoided any insistence on
identity, removed any misunderstanding about national–popular
alternatives, illustrated the ambiguity, sometimes simply reaction-
ary, of certain indigenist theories, and insisted on the constituent
potentialities that came from the accumulation of resistance. To
repeat myself, it was certainly possible, if not easy, to address that
revision, which we had to make, from a historiographical point of
view; on the other hand, it would have been impossible to give
it the intensity of a theoretical reading, of a political proposal, as
long as the anti-colonial resistance movements and the democratic
consistency of the liberation processes developed by them had
not displayed the characteristics of contemporaneousness. Theory
follows the real. It is therefore not identity but constituent resist-
ance that testifies to the success of the march of freedom. To find
legitimacy, postcolonial theories have to move beyond the herme-
neutics of past struggles and indicate, well beyond the archaeology,
the genealogy and course of the present revolution. This is what is
happening, and it is what every revolutionary theory of transforma-
tion in the contemporary world has to assume as a method. With
this, once again, the ontological autonomy of the multitude, the
continuity and accumulation of the production of subjectivity, and
the irreducible antagonism of biopolitical power against biopower
– in this case, colonial biopower – come to be documented. That
subject, which managed to resist the coloniality of power through a
very singular experience of exodus (continuous distancing from the
colonizer, possible tactics and episodes of hybridization, pressing
62 The Fundamentals
insurrections, etc.) – well, that subject reveals itself more and more
to be a c onstituent force.
This completes the objective topography that, in Commonwealth,
displays the insuperable obstacles to the stabilization of capitalist
power in the contemporary world.
NB. From a philosophical point of view, in paragraphs 2 and 3 we

share the experience – in our contemporary times, in the face of
living cognitive labour and postcolonial resistance – and we elaborate
on the impossibility for capital to conclude the process of exploita-
tion, that is, the very realization of capitalist domination. In this
respect, the end of the dialectic is no longer an abstract instance but
a phenomenological determination. It follows that, with the irrevers-
ibility of this transition, the new horizon of subjectivity is fixed in the
present: singularity is contingency, difference, autonomy, resistance
– and therefore constituent power.
4. Let us now deal with the subjective dispositifs of the new political
condition in the contemporary world. Here is a first movement.
Activity on the biopolitical terrain reveals itself in the form of a
production of subjectivity. But what does ‘production of subjectivity’
mean? Given the conditions defined so far, the production of subjec-
tivity is an expression of forms of life and, through these, a process
of production and valorization of the common. We have in fact seen
that the production of forms of life today has to take place, inevitably,
in the dimension of the common. Only the common, in fact, is the
form and content of constituent action. Nothing would be consti-
tuted unless the common gives meaning to the singularities and the
singularities give meaning to the common. But if this is what the pro-
duction of subjectivity is – namely an enhancement of the common of
life, of the totality of all forms of life (which passes through education,
health, social peace, security of wages and reproduction, urbanism
and everything else) – then the production of subjectivity also opens
up a terrain of contestation of biopowers, of capital’s attempt to sub-
sume and exploit the common products of life. Thus the antagonism
between biopower and biopolitical powers starts here; and then the
production of subjectivity is tendentially defined as exodus from capital.
It is a biopolitical action that exits from the articulations of biopowers.
Can we then define exodus as a process of reappropriation of the
common?
Let me set a Spinozan machine in motion. As we know, for Spinoza
the production of subjectivity (or the unfolding of the process that
leads from sensible conatus to rational amor) tends to appear as a

production of the social. But there is something more, in Spinoza’s
judgement: a transformation of the social into the common. This
means that the production of subjectivity, which integrates and
enriches the cooperative production of the social, can become pro-
duction of the common, when it imposes on itself a radical democratic
management of society.
Faced with this Spinozan appropriation of the common (which,
in modernity, constitutes an internal and powerful alternative), it is
necessary to recall here how the hegemonic categories of private and
public came to be formed in modernity. These categories were built
on the concept of labour. In fact Locke’s definition of the private is
a definition of the singular appropriation of the labour performed
by the individual. The private is what is one’s own, consolidated in
juridical form; it is private property.
As for the concept of the public, in the culture of modernity it,
too, moves within these same parameters. It is a paradox, but one
no less effective: the public alienates ‘its own’ in order to safeguard
its consistency. Therefore the concept of what is one’s own is still
at the basis of the concept of what is public. The mystification of
modernity rests on an almost permanent repositioning of two terms
that correspond to two ways of appropriating the common of human
beings. One is the use of the category ‘private’; the other is the use
of the category ‘public’. Concerning the former, property – repre-
sented, as Rousseau said, by the first man who said ‘this belongs
to me’ [ceci est à moi] – is an appropriation of the common by an
individual, which means an expropriation of all others. Today pri-
vate property consists in the denial of the common right of humans
to that which only their cooperation can produce. But our good
Rousseau, who is so harsh on private property as to make it the
source of all corruption and human suffering, loses his head when
it comes to the other category – the public. Here is the problem of
the social contract – the problem of modern democracies: since pri-
vate property generates inequalities, how can one invent a political
system in which everything, while belonging to everyone, does not
belong to anyone? ‘Does not belong to anyone’: that’s where the public
is. It is that which belongs to everyone and to nobody – in other
words that which belongs to the state. But the state is not what we
produce in common, what we invent and organize as a common.
The state refers us to our identity and our nature, gathering from it
the concept of common. But then, given that the common no longer
belongs to us (since to be is not to have), the state’s getting its hands
64 The Fundamentals
on the common under the name of public management, delegation

or public representation is in reality the creation and justification of
another form of alienation.
In short, what is public is still based on what is one’s own, making
it general; the public bases itself on the ‘one’ – the unit – as an organic
assembly of individuals. The public is the identity of the private, and
thus of liberal ideology in the most traditional and profound sense.
It is against the private – and therefore against its public subsump-
tion – that the concept of the common is raised as a dispositif of radical
democratic management of everything that constitutes the fabric
of social activity: reciprocity among individuals, the cooperation of
singularities, the freedoms of producers. The common is the nega-
tion of one’s own through the recognition that only this cooperation
constitutes the social and that only the common management of it
guarantees its continuous renewal.
It is clear that no place remains for traditional political reformism,
which contains an idea of progressive reappropriation of wealth by
individuals or groups and, consequently, a continuous mediation
in relations of capital; none of this is appropriate any more. We are
now immersed in a new condition. A new method is established on
this terrain: that of the ‘march of freedom’. This march is based on
and is articulated by biopolitical dispositifs for the construction of
the common: it is a risky but ontologically determined project. There
is no guarantee that this process can develop, apart from the con-
tinuous, pressing, and militant and constituent undertaking that the
subjectivities – the multitude of singularities – put to work. The very
definition of being a multitude – and, implicitly, of making multitude
– confronts here the difficulties – but also, obviously, the power – of
constructing or producing the common.
Here a further problem opens up, namely understanding how, to
varying degrees, the independence of living labour is articulated with
the dependence that in reality it continues to suffer in the transition
phase. But have we not already been through that phase? We have,
of course – but not through it as a revolutionary transition that sees
the constituent power of living labour and its exodus measured in a
work of ontological metamorphosis. Hence continuities and discon-
tinuities must always be defined. Basically, when we talked about the
hybridization of the technical composition and political composition
of today’s proletariat and of the impossibility of capturing them in
a linear concatenation or in isomorphic correspondences, we were
already alluding to these processes of metamorphosis. But here I
need to be more precise and emphasize that, from the point of view
of political action, this step is crucial. Exodus is not only a process

of distancing but also one of passing through, and distancing is often
built into passing through. Exodus is always transitive, or rather tran-
sitional; and the more it is so, the more constituent it is. All this needs
to be placed on the foundation of what I have described so far: the
ontological irreversibility of the multitudinous paths of living labour in
the contemporary world and in the process of building the common.
I might add, in the hope of expanding on this topic on another occa-
sion, that the concept of narrative – of grand narrative – is p roposed
here as an ethical requirement, as a discursive design, and as a wish
for a new schematism that is (not transcendental, but) effective – and
I mean capable of matching the definition of contemporaneity and
the urgencies of constituent practice. How heavy and atrocious was
the postmodern claim to get rid of every historical and ideal nar-
rative! It was perhaps useful – an act of methodological scepticism
or, better, of libertine abstention – at the moment of defeat of the
hope for transformation, at the end of the short century. . . Useful, in
that it allowed an instant of reflection. But it was also an operation
designed to spread poison endemically and to produce impotence.
Today, again, we have the possibility of rebuilding broad horizons of
freedom (it is interesting to note how, already in German historicism,
Dilthey had counterposed to relativism the production of subjectivity
as much as he had developed a relativist polemic against the eidetic
Husserl).
With this we fix the third paradigm of contemporaneity: that of
exodus.
5. And so we come to the question of the legitimation and use of

force.
The new method, the one based on biopolitical dispositifs for
the production of subjectivity and thus for the construction of the
common – the Spinozan method that, starting from misery and
poverty, builds the social with the ontological power of solidarity,
common work and love – well, this method requires strength. It does
because the resistances that oppose the process of civil constitution
– this expression of the new constituent institutions – are strong too.
One must always construct a political diagonal and endow it with
force, when one traverses the biopolitical diagram – that is, when the
march of freedom opposes from the inside the arrogant presumption
of the biopowers.
It is necessary to recall here the theme of theodicy and reflect for
a moment on the question of evil. In our Commonwealth we devote
66 The Fundamentals
a long note to this question, arguing against any substantial, nega-

tive or ontological conception of evil. We insist more on a privative
concept: the bad is that which is opposed to the realization of the
good. Thus force is necessary to overcome evil and constitutes it as
an essential element in solving the dilemmas of theodicy.
Here again, a paradox needs to be explored: the constituent dis-
positif contains force. So the line that leads from constituent power
to constituted power, from poverty to social wealth, through living
labour – that line, built as it is on the recognition of the other and of
the common forms of life through solidarity and love or, in a situa-
tion of struggle, on the recognition of the other through anger and
the exercise of force against every obstacle. . . well, that line orients
the constituent powers towards the common; and these powers are
always in transformation. Thus force builds institution.
Is it possible to describe the genealogical dynamics of the institu-
tion from the bottom up, that is, from the action of the individual
and from the common competence of the singularity? I think it is,
provided that we define this process as a progressive work of common
construction that, having started from processes of collective learn-
ing that are so important for self-formation today, manages to build
continuously, without fear of possible crises, a normative power
fully consistent with the social movements. We are not dealing here
just with any institution, then; it is an autonomous institution – it
succeeds in creating an organizing space for the movements and pro-
poses lasting normative directions.
As we have just seen with the transition from the public to the
common, the institution that produces norms and exercises com-
mand must be more than legitimized by the continuous opening of
the constituent power; it must be continually renewed through the
effective and efficacious participation of the subjects. Money and
weapons, said Machiavelli, are the forces that defend the republic. I
think it’s not a bad idea for us to be on that same line. Money is the
productivity of the common; and when res publica is replaced by res
communis, the doing of the multitude becomes common doing. No
money is left that is not common – and res publica, too, must be cri-
tiqued in this respect, as a mystification of capitalist command. This
is why, in Commonwealth, we developed a long argument against the
republic, revisiting how it was born in seventeenth-century England
and showing that it was a case of wealth against poverty and the
people against the multitude.
And the weapons, then, what are they? For Machiavelli, they are
the people’s weapons, designed to defend society internally, to ensure
the continuous development of the constituent power (of constituent

powers) within and beyond the constituted power and to organize
defence against all enemies.
So then: this is the fourth paradigm of contemporaneity. After the
‘one’ divided into two, which is a critique of sovereignty, after the
autonomy of living labour, which is the definition of the terrain of
biopolitics on which to lay the debate, and after exodus as reappro-
priation of the common, which attempts to envisage the teleology of
the common – now ‘weapons for the multitude’.
Weapons for the people serve essentially to eliminate war. This is
one of the latest paradoxes to which contemporaneity introduces us.
Against war: if the forms of asymmetrical warfare are studied exactly
in the way in which the constitution of the common – as against the
public – is studied, one understands the subversive significance of
the call for weapons for the multitude, as a revelation of the radical
conjoining of force and love. No more war. A recognition that asym-
metric warfare is a winning weapon. Asymmetric warfare is armed
democracy. Enough of war, as well as enough of sovereignty: they
were a monstrous pair of twins.
NB: From a philosophical point of view, in paragraphs 4 and 5 I

have tried to follow conceptually the dispositifs of the constitution
of the multitude in its self-making: I have pursued that potential for
construction of the common, organization of force, and lawmaking
that the multitude moulds progressively, maybe discontinuously but
according to the powers and tendencies of a materialist teleology, from
below and from within. Here the constituent power of the multitude
presents itself as a dispositif of subjectivation ever more internal to
the forms of life, and capable of making changes.
6. Can we speak of a multitudinous class struggle? If we do, this is only

in the terms already defined by the new transition – in other words in
affirmative, positive terms, in recognition of a new ontological power
that builds new forms of life – new organizations, new institutions
– and in this sense recomposes the dimension of politics. At this
point it is worth remembering how and to what extent the metropoli-
tan territory is necessary for the production of subjectivity. Why the
metropolis? Because the metropolis is encounter and antagonism,
producing versus being produced; it actually overturns the act of
producing against the fact of being produced, and does so in a space
that represents, for the multitude, what the factory represented for
the working class.
68 The Fundamentals
It is evident that we shall have to remain on this ground, press

forward and deepen our research for a long time to come. The met-
ropolitan organization is still far from being able to assert itself, yet
it is there that the time of multitudes is spatialized and concretely
determined. Within this temporality, completely tied to the necessity
of capitalist exploitation, labour power (living labour) will be able to
develop resistance and constituent power.
Poverty and love are built in the metropolis: it is in the tension
of poverty that the subjectivity of the multitudinous class struggle
is being built. Poverty is not simply misery, it is rather the power of
living labour that has not yet found its realization. From this point
of view, the precariat constitutes the highest representation of those
‘birds of the forest’ people whom Marx recognized when he studied
the case of proletarians expelled through enclosures.* As for love, it is
the ontological engine that leads from solitude to community, from
poverty to wealth, from subjection to freedom. It is by being put
through these tensions that the multitudinous class struggle can be
rebuilt – in the metropolis, where precisely the relationship within the
proletariat finds the key to its revolutionary project in the necessity of
being in solidarity.
7. Back to basics! I have already referred to the opportuneness of

returning to the grand narratives of the future: when we go beyond
the postmodern, the elements of resistance must be reassembled in a
design that hope extends towards a future temporality. What does it
mean to go back to basics? It means discerning in the past, in the long
history of modernity, the particular line of thought that has turned
into an action of transformation. We know the two lines of modernity
that developed after the Renaissance: on the one hand the line of
immanence, on the other the authoritarian reproposal of the trans-
cendent. For us, the dividing line passes, radically, between these two
lines, and the choice inclines towards the line Machiavelli–Spinoza–
Marx. This is the genesis and development of the enlightenment
[Aufklärung] of the multitude.
And yet, in an attempt to recompose modernity in the broadest way
and to propose bridges towards it, we re-offered a reading of Kant –
again, in Commonwealth. Not a new ‘return’ to Kant but a reading, in
other words a discriminant that passes through his thinking.
Two terrains of research can be found in Kant. On the one hand
* ‘enclosures’ in English in the original.

there is a critical, transcendental line. On this terrain, two tensions that

precede it clash intensely and confront each other over the interpreta-
tion of the nature of the Aufklärung. First of all, Habermas reduces
the transcendental to a fabric of communication; then Foucault, in
his project of constituting the future, assumes that Aufklärung is an
indication to be bold, to put in place dispositifs that press forward
and into action. But in Kant the critique opens to the schematism of
reason, in other words to an ontological projection of knowledge and
desire. On this terrain, too, there are two tensions that live and run
through these dimensions of critique. On one side there is Heidegger,
who leads Kantian schematism towards the annihilation of being,
towards inoperability, towards Gelassenheit as an atopic and neutral-
izing conclusion of all desire for transformation; on the other side,
Kantian schematism produces the ‘community of ends’, which is an
ethical industriousness. It seems to me that here Foucault intersects
with Lucien Goldman and Andre Gorz. . . but also with many others:
all those who rethink and renew the ethical project of a ‘strong’
Spinozism.
4
The Common as a Mode of
Production*
People are beginning to speak of ‘the common’ as a noun. Until

recently (and still exclusively in jurisprudence and law) it was spoken
of only in a formal way, as something outside any possible ontological
definition – something that only the mode of appropriation, private
or public, certified and therefore made to exist. Thus we are coming
out of a long history (is it coterminous with the era of modernity?),
and now the common appears to us as a reality – or, better, as produc-
tion. In what follows I shall resume discussion on this definition. For
the moment, I return to our theme: the private appropriation of the
collective and the common.1
In the era of neoliberalism, the private appropriation of the common
is manifest in two particularly noticeable forms: the appropriation, by
private individuals, of what is public (state property, public goods
and public services, etc.); and, second, the appropriation of what
we call nature – the goods of the earth and of the environment, the
physical powers [potenze] of life and so on. That those assets can be
transferred to private individuals seems obvious and does indeed
happen. They are material and natural goods, and the fact that they
are appropriated does not seem to concern their substance. But these
appropriations need to be qualified more carefully. In the first place,
because both public and natural goods are inseparable from the his-
torical conditions and the forms of life that shape them and by which
they are shaped. There is here a ‘common’ determination, histori-
* First published as ‘Il comune come modo di produzione’, Sudcomune, 1–2

(2017): 22–8. Sudcomune is an Italian journal published by DeriveApprodi in
Rome.
The Common as a Mode of Production 71
cally consistent, which could not be removed. But a qualification

of this ‘common’ emerges that is at once formal (because purely
extrinsic) and vulgar (because absolutely generic) and that adapts to
these acts of appropriation. The discourse becomes more meaning-
ful in the latter instance. I mean that, even if, during the evolution
of modernity, natural and public goods have become commodities
and, in this condition, present themselves immediately as products
of capital – that is, precisely as commodities – this reduction consti-
tutes a problem (and often produces repugnance). In fact, although
those goods, collective or natural, constitute the very matter of the
productive process in the age of mature capitalism, insofar as they
are natural, they seem to us nevertheless to belong to a sphere that
should be kept intact and free from claims of possession and, insofar
as they are public, they seem to us to be for the most part a histori-
cal residue of will and collective struggles – and hence they, too, are
illegitimately appropriated by private individuals.
They ‘seem to us’. . . Yet we must give in to the evidence and
recognize that on this subject habit has appeased the anger and the
industrial advantages have cancelled out the moral reservations.
Those goods constitute the privileged object of capitalist appropria-
tion – the objective of the private or public juridical dispositif that
realizes ‘property rights’. It is a juridically legitimate appropriation,
which does not differ from, but rather integrates, capitalist appro-
priation in general – as an appropriation of the value of labour, as an
extraction of value and as a legal and political hypostasis of collective
production in the form of private and public property. This domina-
tion over individual and collective activities that have established
public or natural goods as attractive and usable in the construction
of forms of life is the very characteristic of capitalist production. And
the domination is accentuated, in mature capitalism, by the ever-
increasing overlap between the mode of production and forms of
life.
True, for some goods (public or natural), there has been talk of
a ‘common’ type of appropriation of ownership in the case of some
goods (public or natural) – and for some decades now. Much rhetoric
has been expended in this regard; the proposal has been to define a
‘third kind’ of ownership, a new form of appropriation, beyond those
practised today. Yet these definitions have no solidity, because they
are based illusorily on an expansive conception of property rights
during the period of capitalist maturity: the common is here con-
ceived of either as a functional extension of private property or as
a participatory and democratic institution of the public capacity for
72 The Fundamentals
appropriation. Our proposal is rather to consider the common not

as a third kind of property but as a mode of production. In the light of
the ‘vulgar’ definition mentioned earlier, this seems to be a proper,
scientific definition of the common.
Before addressing the theme of the common as a mode of produc-
tion, let us try to deepen the substantive definition of the common.
Now, it seems to me that the common constitutes an ontological
base, produced by the human activity of work in the course of history;
a bedrock [soubassement], an ontological background of social real-
ity, produced by work. What exactly does this mean? It means that
the common is always a ‘production’; it is nature regulated or trans-
formed, or simply produced. The common is therefore a resource only
insofar as it is a product – a product of human labour, and therefore in
the capitalist regime immediately traversed by power relations.
In the age of cognitive labour, the common subsumes and highlights
the qualities of cognitive labour. And, to avoid misunderstandings, let
me repeat that, when I speak of ‘cognitive labour’, I always speak of
labour or work, and thus of an expenditure of physical and mental
energy – at any rate, of labour that takes place in the continuity of the
capitalist relationship and in the asymmetrical form of this relation-
ship: a discontinuous continuity, which means a continuity forced into
a cyclical rhythm by the movements and struggles that are always
open in capitalism, between command over labour and the resistance
of labour power. This relationship is asymmetrical because the capital
relation is always unequal and irreducible to identity. It is by virtue
of this asymmetry that capital is productive – there is an asymmetry
in the forces that confront one another in that relationship of capital;
and productivity is the result of a complicated intersection and con-
flict between the power of ‘living labour’ and the accumulation of
‘dead labour’. In the age of general intellect,* which presupposes the
hegemony of cognitive labour in capitalist production, the new social
organization of work is conditioned by an ever greater productive effi-
cacy of cognitive labour, and therefore by an ontological pre-eminence
of living labour over dead labour in the relation of capital. Now, in
this relation, cognitive labour expresses an organizational initiative of
cooperation and an autonomous management of knowledge by compari-
son with what happened in the industrial age. This means that work
has singularized itself and that labour power produces according to
its own subjectivation. Nowadays labour power does not manifest
* Here and passim, ‘General Intellect’ in English in the original.

itself, in the capitalist relationship of production, just as variable capi-

tal. It appears to you as subjectivity, as a singular power. The capital
relation, then, will not be crossed by a material, objective contradic-
tion, but also by (in fact primarily by) a subjective antagonism. An
autonomous action – strongly subjectivated – is therefore immanent
in the capital relation and qualifies its productivity. (Gramsci had
already intuited this when, studying the capitalist crisis of the 1920s,
he pointed to political movements and to the material resistance of
the working class as the antagonist engine of the transformations
in production. He concluded that the ‘passive revolution’ – which
accompanied the birth of Fordism – implicitly contained the con-
struction of the individual worker’s ‘hegemony’ over production.)
It is on these premises that it will be possible to proceed to the con-
struction of the concept of the common as a mode of production.
The ‘common’ character of production is rendered substantive by a
bedrock [soubassement] that is not just historical but active, subjective,
cooperative, founded on and preconditioned by a cooperative and
communal organization of work. So here we are at the beginning of a
path of substantive definition of the common in the age of cognitive
labour.
This path is difficult, as is always the fate of those who move
forward in an era of transition. We are immersed in a process of
transformation that takes us from the industrial age (Fordism) to
the post-industrial age (the age of general intellect). We are living
in a transitory phase, being forced once again into a kind of passive
revolution in which the cognitive workforce builds its own space of
production and shows its ability to prefigure and prepare the modali-
ties of production. We can recognize this transition as a moment in
a trend in which production exhibits forms that can increasingly be
described as biopolitical – and thus as a moment
(a) when ‘political’ designates a life that is indistinguishable from

productive activity, in the entirety of time and space of a given
society. This condition transforms and reconfigures the structure
of the working day, making work and life overlap;
(b) when bios designates a tendential totalization of production
across the earth’s surface. The world of production thus becomes
ecological in an etymological sense: production subsumes not only
bios but also nature.
Many other specific conditions are being defined within this trend.
It follows, for example, that the law of value is in crisis as a law of
74 The Fundamentals
exploitation based on the temporal measurement of labour values

and their abstraction. That law imposed
(a) a measure of temporality (within a homogeneous working day)

with which the time of ‘necessary labour’ and that of ‘surplus
labour’ could be separated;
(b) a closed spatial condition or a concentration of labour, a massi-
fied cooperation such as was guaranteed by the scientific organi-
zation of work in the factory;
(c) a narrow view on the relationship between productive and unpro-
ductive labour. For example, female work, whether domestic or
care work, was not normally taken into account in the quantifica-
tion of value, in the very definition of ‘labour power’;
(d) a naïve ecological condition or the approach to nature as an
independent reality, not yet crossed by capitalist valorization and
valorized by productive labour.
So this is the foundation on which the classical theme of the abstrac-

tion of value was built – or, better, of values fixed in time, spatially
determined, qualitatively discriminating and ecologically limited.
The capitalist appropriation of the global value of social produc-
tion – for which we can repeat the epithet of ‘vulgar common’ – was
thus determined through the exploitation of labour and through the
abstraction, mediation and equalization of values on this scale. On
the other hand, the common – now, in the age of cognitive and
cooperative work, of general intellect – has a biopolitical figure and
is structured by the production of subjectivity. It is ‘common’ in
the proper, scientific sense. It follows that capitalist appropriation
presents a completely transformed figure and the appropriation of
surplus labour is no longer exercised through the direct exploitation
of labour and its consequent abstraction, but rather through a new
mechanism of appropriation, characterized by the extraction of the
common as the constitution of the overall social production. And if
this common covers every time and every social space of valorization,
if there is no more space outside capitalist production, and if every
labour function is subservient to valorization, this extractive exploita-
tion is preconstituted by the autonomous organization of cooperation
done by cognitive subjectivities – an independent power within a
ferocious machine of exploitation. To put it another way: in the capi-
tal relation with its asymmetry, this ‘capitalist common’ is subjected
to an ever more antagonistic tension. Every life has become produc-
tive; the extraction of value is performed across the global biopolitical
sphere and is not limited to spaces and times explicitly devoted to

work.
This overall picture is made possible by the fact that the nature of
labour power has changed. Without wishing to reconstruct the entire
history of capitalist development in the last century, we can recall
how the working-class struggles in capitalist metropolises put the
industrial mode of production into crisis in the first half of the twen-
tieth century and how automated production and the socialization of
information technology, by investing the society as a whole, deter-
mined the progressive consolidation of general intellect in the second
half. The massification of labour in factories has been replaced by
the singularization of work performance; factory command has been
replaced by the cooperative organization of social labour; and the
physical effort of manual labour has been replaced by the intellec-
tual undertaking of cognitive activity – in a word, the mass has been
replaced by the multitude. If the new mode of production arises in
these conditions, it can be assumed (as I have repeatedly anticipated)
that the common comes before the capitalist labour market and before
the capitalist social organization of labour – the so-called social divi-
sion of labour. If the new mode of production, like all capital’s modes
of production, is a terrain of struggle, in this space the position of
cognitive labour is relatively privileged today by comparison with the
past, in that it holds power [potere] over cooperation, over the organi-
zation of work and over the organization of productive knowledge. It
follows that capital has to adapt to the common. It suffers its mode of
production, changing the characteristics of exploitation and passing
from the abstraction of industrial values to the extraction of the social
value of production. However, it loses its entire capacity of command
within this new relationship.
And yet, when one studies the theories of value creation [valoriz-
zazione] through extraction, one cannot fail to notice that this is not
something entirely new. In particular, in the chapters of Capital on
primitive accumulation, Marx gave a broad description of the forms
in which common lands and common rights had been obliterated and
lands and rights appropriated by nascent capitalism. Without this
privatistic appropriation of the common, as Marx correctly observed,
the initial accumulation of capital that allowed the start of the man-
ufacturing era, the basis of an industrial society, would not have
been possible. But it is clear that there can be no analogy between
that pre-capitalist common, whose expropriation is necessary for the
construction of capitalism, and the common as it appears in our
experience today.
76 The Fundamentals
A second formulation of the theory of valorization, by means of

extraction (which often reflects Marx’s primitive accumulation), can
be found in ‘western Marxism’, from the Frankfurt school to worker-
ism [operaismo] and postcolonialism, when labour and production are
considered in the light of real subsumption in capital. The passage
from formal subsumption to real subsumption is represented by a
cycle of subjection and progressive appropriation, by the capitalist,
of the labour processes and of productive society itself, in its entirety.
In a first, formal phase, capital absorbs spaces and temporalities that
have differences; in the second, real phase, capital imposes a homo-
geneous regime of production, consumption and so on. It can be said
that in this case we are passing from the regime of profit to a regime
of rent. But this is a rent that has been profoundly modified from its
definition in the classics. What is this modification? It is the fact that
this rent is extracted directly from a productive common. The capital-
ist appropriation of the common in the real subsumption of society in
capital can be recognized as a producer of rent only when we assume
(and verify) that this appropriation acts on a society prefigured and
preconstituted by a substantive activity that produces the common.
Hence, even in this case, there is no analogy with the (traditional)
definitions of both absolute and relative rent.
How did this new framework come about? The transformation
took place essentially in two figures:
(a) One happened when the mode of production became entirely

biopolitical. The capitalist command over production penetrated
life in its entirety. We have already discussed this. That is, we
are witnessing a totalization of exploitation, structured around
cognitive labour and its ability to implement cooperation autono-
mously. It is from this antagonistic condition that the web of
life forms is captured by capital. Languages, codes, needs and
consumptions, the structure of knowledge and that of desire, in
the richness of their singularization, are made available for the
extraction processes of capital.
(b) The second figure in which this new form of exploitation is
embodied is financialization. This represents the form in which
capital measures the extraction of the common. The measure
is expressed by command in its monetary function, that is, by
money [denaro]. It could be said here that money is the perverse
figure of the common and its total mystification. In fact we live
immersed in money: this is the same as experiencing that we live
as subjected beings in the vulgar common, as prisoners of that
common productive structure that cognitive labour has created

and continues to produce, and that money measures and com-
mands. From this perspective it is clear that the processes of the
world of finance are not parasitic but immanent in the organiza-
tion of valorization.
By way of conclusion, I will say that capital develops the right of pri-
vate appropriation and its public mediation, in the construction of a
financial command for the exploitation of the common (but we will have
to talk about this on another occasion).
Once the capitalist appropriation of the common has been
described in this way, we have to return and consider the transforma-
tions that have taken place in labour power and in technologies, and
also those of capital that invests in life and is invested by it. As I have
already said, the line of development of capitalist exploitation is dis-
continuous and the capital relation is asymmetrical. When we take the
common as a mode of production, we are describing the result of a tran-
sition from the industrial phase to the cognitive phase of productive
labour. It goes without saying that this transition is neither linear nor
homogeneous. Rather it reproduces discontinuities and asymmetries
in bringing its own path to an extreme limit and in representing it in
the extraction of the common. Capital here loses its dignity, which
consisted in organizing production and in imprinting development
on society. Here capital is also forced to reorganize itself and to show
its antagonistic nature in an extreme form. This means that the class
struggle develops around the common. And, from what I have said so
far, it appears clearly that there are two figures of the common: one is
that of a common subjected to the capitalist extraction of value, the
other is that of a common as an expression of the cognitive and pro-
ductive capacities of the multitude. Between these two forms of the
common there is not only objective contradiction but also subjective
antagonism.
I have already pointed out the steps that made the mode of pro-
duction turn from an industrial figure to a post-industrial figure,
from ‘big industry’ to ‘socialized industry’ in the course of the twen-
tieth century. I have also pointed out that these passages contain
the transformation of labour power from labour power of the mass
worker through labour power of the social worker to labour power of
cognitive labour. It would now be worth pointing out that ‘cognitive
labour’ does not refer only to intellectualization of work and deepen-
ing of expanded cooperation in production, but also to production of
subjectivity, or rather subjectification of production as an expression
78 The Fundamentals
of cognitive labour and of a rise in the quotas of living labour in the

relation of production. Thus valorization increases, both in units of
value and in the totality of production. The relation between constant
capital (command, dead labour) and variable capital (living labour)
is radically transformed. Cognitive labour power has asserted itself
as more productive – and is subjectively stronger – than industrial
labour power ever was.
It thus imposes a radical change on capital itself, not only in the
transition from abstraction to extraction but also in its technical struc-
ture, as we have seen. Among the thousands of possible examples, let
me take the technologies and the technical composition of biocapital.
There is plundering of nature and bodies here, but one also finds
a rich circulation of medical knowledge, a monopolistic concentra-
tion of research, subordination to it of the public organization of
health services, and, furthermore, a continuous increase in life expec-
tancy (along with thousands of other antagonistic compositions of
biopower); and all these constitute in the end a machine set up for the
development of a biomedical project for the governance of health that
is, simultaneously, capitalist despotism over nature and natural goods,
appropriation of cultural and public goods, and production of subjec-
tive devices for the production of a biopolitical common.2 The same
can be said of the technologies of digital capital. There too, each algo-
rithm extracts value from the cognitive labour that is monopolized by
the large media structures; but at the same time it has to deal with the
irreducible knowledge power [potenza] of the operators, who are the
real assemblers and builders of the algorithms.3 The political problem
arises at this level. How can the extraction process be challenged,
resisted, blocked? We should remember that the juridical categories
of property (private and public) are legitimizing figures for the capital-
ist appropriation of the common. And yet we also remember that the
processes of privatizing the common are extremely fragile, given that
the relations of power in the mode of production of the common have
changed. Faced with a capital forced into a relationship of production
that is discontinuous and antagonistic, the power of cognitive and
cooperative work produces continuous alternatives.
The first weak point of the capitalist command is created by the
affirmation of the autonomous power of productive cooperation, that
is, by the virtual hegemony of collective labour vis-à-vis command.
Note that today cooperative and cognitive work constitutes a truly
singular mass, before which capitalist command vacillates: a mass
made up of a multitude of singularities. Whereas capitalist command
over the mass was consolidated in the industrial process of produc-
tion, dominion over the multitude and the pursuit of the singularities
that constitute it represents an indefinite horizon, and sometimes an
insoluble problem for capital. The paradox consists in the fact that, in
cognitive capitalism, production requires a multitude of singularities
(because productivity resides in them). Singularization, subjectiva-
tion and productivity constitute the ‘inside’ or the ‘against’ that the
working class of today sets against constant capital, against the boss
(and it does so not only as variable capital but as a multitude, as an
ensemble of singularities, of linguistic and cooperative networks).
Hence the continuous fragmentation of the process, hence the radical
difficulties of command, hence the crisis of the institutions of repre-
sentative democracy, born as they are in a material constitution still
determined by the mechanisms of abstraction of values and control
that characterized industrial society.
A second weak point consists in the fact that cognitive living labour
continuously reappropriates fixed capital, the instruments of labour,
and productive knowledge. In this way the technical composition of
cognitive living labour is continually enriched and increasingly tilts
the capital relation in its favour. (On this topic – the appropriation of
fixed capital by living labour – I take the liberty of referring readers to
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, Assembly, 2017).
New resistances to the capitalist appropriation of the common
appear inside these weak points. Obviously I cannot cover all of
them here, but I can list a few dispositifs of action that have begun
to develop:
(a) first of all, democratic practices of appropriation and manage-

ment of ‘common goods’;
(b) insistence, in trade union, fiscal and political negotiations, on
the recognition of the common as a basis of the social reproduc-
tion of labour; and insistence on the entrepreneurial skills of the
singularities put to work. The struggles over welfare go in this
direction, and in this case resistance behaviours take on entrepre-
neurial and alternative qualities;
(c) new measures of the common, which finally begin to be proposed
in the quest for new coins whose value is established not by ref-
erence to capital’s command but as a measure of social needs.
The demand for a guaranteed income and the development of
alternative currencies are often articulated from this perspective.
To conclude, when the common is removed from capitalist accumu-

lation and valorization, it appears open to the use of the multitude. It
80 The Fundamentals
can then be relegated to an administrative regulation of a democratic

and participatory character. The important thing is to recognize the
common as a mode of production in our society and as a fundamental
product of the work of all. At this point, the private appropriation of
the common is not something that the commune of worker-citizens
wish for.
5
The Law of the Common*
Dissolvings
Experts in law have highlighted some fundamental characteristics of

global governance: the tendency of governance processes and prac-
tices to extend outside of the rigidity of legal systems and regulatory
structures; the fragmentation of legal systems under the pressure of
conflicts in the global system; and the collision between different
kinds and species of laws. Governance† renders vain any attempt to
unify global legal systems; rather there is a need to operate a modular
logic with which to manage conflicts and ensure the juridical compat-
ibility of the fragments of the global world. In this sense, governance
is effectively a government of the state of exception (obviously in
the opposite sense to that theorized by Schmitt when he defined
sovereignty).
It seems to me that this conclusion is correct and that in the
globalized world the deconstruction of traditional forms of law
and sovereignty is unavoidable. In short, we have to accept that
global governance is ‘post-democratic’ in that it no longer relies
on the apparatus of the representative system that has supported
and guaranteed the legitimacy of the state; in that the bodies,
techniques and practices of governance possess the flexibility and
fluidity necessary to adapt constantly to changing situations; and
in that its enforceability is attributable to a plurality of forms of
* First presented as ‘Il diritto del commune’ at the Euronomade 2.0 conference
and IUC–Turin seminar, 10 March 2011.
† ‘Governance’ in English in the original.
82 The Fundamentals
regulation controlled, often indirectly, by oligarchies, in particular

the economic ones.
OK. But this analysis of the crisis of law and sovereignty in globali-
zation, with the strong deconstructionist content that characterizes it,
does not take into account the other term that (contemporaneously,
if not synchronously) needs to be addressed in the context of globali-
zation: the theme of the common.
We should note first that ‘global’ and ‘common’ are not coex-
tensive as terms. When they are viewed as such, they are vulgarized
(Nancy, Esposito etc.). On the contrary: whatever the political and
legal overlaps, ‘global’ is a spatial term, while ‘common’ is a term
related to production with a strong and significant impact at the level
of ontology. So why examine them in the same frame? Is it because
globalization is the cause of this transition? Of course, it is such in a
primary sense, but that does not make it a defining dispositif, much
less a dispositif of constitution of the common. Indeed, globalization
is a motor of chaotic fragmentations and unpredictable connections,
which are often still determined by residual yet effective flows of sov-
ereign action.
Assuming that we don’t take an ideological approach, we can per-
haps suppose that the term ‘common’ enters the discussion as a
central theme when, in globalization and in the juridical practices
that accompany it, we see as a definitional sign a weakening of the
transcendentals of private law and public law and of their associ-
ated legal practices. It seems that there are aspects, dimensions,
profiles of the common that, while not providing an answer to that
crisis, requalify the terrain. I shall return to this question later. Let
us therefore ask ourselves: at a time when there is a dissolving, not
only jurisprudential but also conceptual, of the categories of the old
system of law, how is the theme of the common situated?
History
The majority view is that the old right* [diritto] is essentially defined
on the basis of the concept of private property. Is it not possible to go
beyond this horizon? And more, given the dissolutions that take place
in a global governance of right, how is the permanence of right to be
configured? No matter from what perspective you develop a historical
* Or ‘system of law’.
The Law of the Common 83
analysis around this topic, it seems confirmed that behind the dis-
solvings that globalization has brought about there are episodes that
reveal, through their current crisis, that it is impossible for private
law and public right to evolve towards another kind of right, towards
a third kind [tertium genus], let alone explicitly towards a right based
on the common [diritto del commune]. It should be added immediately
that here the term ‘right’ is as equivocal and problematic as the term
‘common’.
This is confirmed first of all when we consider continental law.
In the West, the juridical dimension became fundamental from the
moment when it was articulated around the figure of the property-
owning individual. The institutional and conceptual framework of
western law finds its roots in the needs of individuals – modelled
as they are in the conflictual (zero-sum) relationships they have
with their procedural counterparts. The establishment of Justinian’s
Corpus iuris serves as the epilogue of a juridical evolution in the
Roman world that gave rise to two thousand years of subsequent
juridical history. After that, Roman law was to be taken up and
redeveloped according to the needs of nascent capitalism, and
here it works to interpret and organize appropriately the primitive
accumulation of capital. Characteristic of this history is that legal,
procedural and jurisprudential procedures consolidate the right of
the individual owner and produce a uniform mechanism of validation
for property – the market – and for sovereignty – the state. Both
these systems produce a concentration of power in the individual and
exclude any other decision-making subject in the given jurisdiction.
Hic Rhodus, hic salta [Here is Rhodes; jump here]. In this context, to
seek a transition beyond the strictly privatistic conception of the law
and its procedures of application and verification would be in vain.
Consequently, seeking a definition of the common in this area is
entirely inappropriate. Continental law does not allow for the recog-
nition of the common, no matter how interpreted. For the moment,
the frontiers of the zero-sum conflict in the public and private sectors
leave no room for the definition of a third pole.
The same conceptual void arises when one follows the tradition of
old English law called ‘right of common’* – which could be translated
as right ‘to’ the common. This is the archaic system of law closely
tied to the municipal structures of medieval cities. When Maitland
and Pollock analyse this right to the common, they recognize that, far
* ‘right of common’ in English in the original.

84 The Fundamentals
from being a right ‘of’ the common, it is an individual right, a right

that does not break with juridical individualism, by which I mean
with proprietary interest. Indeed, it is a right that the individual can
oppose to a collective government of the commons, a right that can in
no way lead the need of the common back to the need of equality in
the coproduction of non-state legal norms – as the right of common
[il diritto del comune] has recently been formally defined. It is no coin-
cidence that those ancient definitions of the common were adopted
in the 1950s, for example by Hayek, and we know perfectly well in
what direction they were taken.
It therefore seems that it is very difficult to recognize a legal system
of the common that arises from within the old juridical structures
and emancipates itself from them. And it is even more difficult if one
thinks, as is often theorized by juridical socialism, that the evolu-
tion of public law, which is in an antagonistic relation to private law,
may offer a basis for the transition to the law of the common. In this
regard, the reference to the Soviet experience is interesting. Evgeny
Pašukanis, the greatest jurist of the Soviet era, saw this immediately
with great clarity. There is no such thing as proletarian law, he
declares; once the transition to developed socialism is accomplished,
the disappearance of the categories of bourgeois law will indicate
extinction of the law as a whole, or the gradual disappearance of
the juridical moment in the relations between people. As for the
Soviet state, it is defined as proletarian state capitalism. According
to Pašukanis, in proletarian state capitalism there are two realities of
exchange and law. One is an economic life that takes place according
to ‘public’ modalities (general programmes, production and distribu-
tion plans, etc.); the other is an interconnection between economic
units that carry out their activity in the form of the value of circulat-
ing goods, and therefore in the legal form of the contract. Now it is
evident that the first tendency (that of public law and planning) does
not involve any progressive perspective and opens only to a gradual
general extinction of the juridical form, translating it into the eco-
nomic management of society. The second tendency is the one that
could develop towards the common, by taking up the autonomy of
economic forms and considering them in their cooperation.
It is interesting to note how the impossibility of extracting the law
of the common from public law is underlined in the Soviet discourse
– minoritarian, but correct from a Marxist point of view – of someone
like Pašukanis; that discourse considers instead the possibility of play-
ing on the cooperation of collective labour not only as an exit from
proprietary law but as a construction of new forms of non-capitalist
life and social organization (Arrighi’s Chinese, peasant-based and

common-based market without capitalism is a model with the same
resonances).
And does our present history, the one in which the procedures of
governance are asserting themselves, give us any positive indication
on the path towards the common? Is it possible to glimpse in the pro-
cedures of governance a tendency towards decentring that opposes
the strong tendency towards global concentration of capitalist power,
towards fragmentation of powers instead of retention of their solid
economic unity, towards the possibility of a diffuse control exercised
by an active public opinion, towards an experimentation from below
of mechanisms of participation in the social division of labour and in
the redistribution of the product? With a lot of optimism, one could
perhaps conjecture all this; but with realism it’s clear that there is a
lot of utopia in the model of a governance conceived of as an exercise
of power and production of legal norms, as an open, flexible, insti-
tutional modality with a variable geometry, in a juridical programme
that has no centre and is left to mechanisms of conflict between
norms and of competition between legal systems. And it’s clear that
our current history shows rather the impossibility of a linear develop-
ment of the current juridical systems towards the common.
Factual considerations
Given what has been said so far, it remains to ask why the global
evokes the common. It evokes it because globalization immediately
puts us before what we might call a ‘bad’ common: the common of
capital. The transformations of the law of value – when the tempo-
ral measure of labour is replaced by the power of cooperation, and
the mechanisms of the circulation of goods, productive services and
communication come to be agents of capitalist valorization; when
the process of real subsumption happens, that is, the transition from
industrial production of commodities to control of a social life made
to work through productive automation and computerization – well,
all this presents capital as a global biopower. The new basis on which
exploitation is established involves a gradual transition of capital-
ist command from the factory (the Fordist organization of industry
and the disciplining of the Taylorized working mass) to the whole
of society (through productive hegemony over immaterial labour,
valorization through cognitive labour, financial control, etc.). This
means that the new basis on which capital operates is the exploitation
86 The Fundamentals
of cooperation, languages and common social relations (generally it

depends on so-called social externalities, internalized into capitalist
production on a global scale).
Here is just one example, taken from the current global economic
crisis. Many readings of it have been proposed. In any case, whether
they came from the right or from the left, the reasons for the crisis
have been linked to a separation between finance and ‘real produc-
tion’. If we take on board the new conditions discussed so far, which
express the emergence of a new ‘common’ quality of living labour
and its exploitation as such, we have to say that the financialization
of the global economy is not an unproductive or parasitic devia-
tion of increasing shares of surplus value and collective savings, but
rather a new form of capital accumulation, symmetrical to the new
processes of social and cognitive production of value. There is no
point in deluding oneself that the answer to getting out of this crisis
can avoid building new rights of social ownership of common goods;
and these rights are obviously opposed to the right of private property
and require a break from that system of public law that represents
the legal force of private property. (To repeat what I have elaborated
upon in the Uninomade seminars, if until now access to a common
good has taken the form of private debt (and it is precisely around
the accumulation of this debt that the crisis has exploded), from now
on it is legitimate to claim the same right in the form of a social rent.
Having these common rights recognized is the only way – and the
only right way – to get out of the crisis.)
Approaches 1
So then: traditional law fails to define, or even address, the common.

In the current crisis, it is always forced to an action of governance that
is, so to speak, restrictive and condemned to substantial ambiguity. In
reality, governance can do no more than render social exchange fluid
and optimize the fluidity of flows. This means transcribing sovereignty
into the language of negotiation, de-hierarchicizing the structures
of decision-making, introducing a perspective of fragmented and
polycentric relationships, and weakening the traditional separation
between public and private; but it can do no more than this. As
Chignola reminds us, following in the footsteps of John Fortescue
and Judge Coke, from its very beginning the term ‘governance’ refers
both to the government – to the prince’s personal right of command
and to the hierarchy of administrative offices that depend on him
– and to the dense set of laws, customs, statutes and liberties that
characterize the ‘intertwining’ of rights and powers in a political–civil
organization. The setting sun of the state of right rehearses the lights
of dawn.
As we alleviate the suspicion with which governance has been
treated so far, let us admit, though, that in constituent terms it can
open up beyond the conditions in which it currently operates. Let
us assume that the terrain of the common appears closer to us, as a
terrain of transition from the public to the common, and that govern-
ance adapts to it by traversing the narrative plot of this transition.
The question to ask at this point could be: if traditional right is not
able to define (control, transcribe, institute) the common, how can
governance approach it? Which is to say: will it be governance that
will construct the new system of law – ambiguously, expressing a sort
of conatus?
Approaches 2
From a reflexive point of view, or from the point of view of the phi-
losophy of right, we can try to raise the problem of how to define the
common. I offer here some examples that represent extreme cases
(there are infinite combinations among them), but that could perhaps
help us to advance.
So the common has been defined at one end in the language of a
sociopolitical Darwinism, as the effect of economic–political relations
of coproduction. Along this line, we know the famous formula of Saint
Simon embraced by Marx and Engels, in which the administration
of things will take the place of the government of humans. Here the
common appears as the economic administration of society by itself.
To the self-balancing of interests that the liberal market proposes,
socialism responds with the conscious economic self-organization of
people. This formula recurs all the time in socialism, at least up to
Lenin. It is obviously a teleology of the common, built on industrial
technological rationality. The common is a fact [fatto], participle of
the verb ‘to do’, ‘make’ [fare] – a real movement that abolishes the
present state of things.*
* This is a paraphrase of the famous definition of communism in The German

Ideology: ‘We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present
state of things.’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed.
C. J. Arthur, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970, pp. 56–7.
88 The Fundamentals
An opposite model of definition of the common is sociological–

institutional. The development from civil society to forms of public
organization and to a common conceived of as a corporate or associa-
tive outcome is seen precisely as the product of a continuous activity.
The economic and technological necessity of the first model is here
opposed to a procedural and social activism. Examined in its most
recent figurations, the ‘institutional’ common is defined (for exam-
ple by Luc Boltanski) by abandoning sociologies that emphasize the
vertical dimensions and opacity of the actors’ alienated consciousness
in favour of a sociology that stresses horizontal relationships (and,
obviously, networks) and in situ performance from actors guided by
strategic motivations or moral needs. The elements of performativity
of the social are brought to the fore and, when also the public (the
state) is evoked and assumed to be a balancing element in the pro-
cesses, this pragmatic sociological institutionalism recognizes both
the contradictions in which the process is locked in this way and the
power of its open dispositifs. In short, a real movement that acts on
the present state of things.
A third interesting model (which represents a median between
the two extremes), still with a view to a definition of the common, is
the philosophical return of a weak dialectical theory of relationship.
Habermas’s formalism advanced on this path, and Honneth’s realism
proceeds on it too. The common is seen here as a (weak) Aufhebung
without necessity; the difficulty of realizing it consists in determining
the co-possibility of differences in the indefinite framework of condi-
tions. We experience here, among other things, the difficulties that
are now evident in the development of the Foucauldian project when
we consider it as an epistemological model rather than as a political
dispositif.
These approaches remain just that. All attack the idea that the
common can be somehow presupposed, and all affirm that we can
think only of social practices of production of the common. How
will governance be able to interpret these premises and possibly go
beyond, on a path that leads to the common?
In order to avoid further obstacles, we can ask ourselves whether,
when we proceed further on this terrain, the common determination
of acting in common must necessarily take the form of an ‘institu-
tion’. Responding negatively to that question, one can say that the
production of rules that do not have the quality of law can take the
form of producing negotiated usages, of practices of the common
that can arise only through concrete determinations and relations of
power. In this context one may further ask: how can one articulate
the terrain of ownership with that of uses? What are the conditions
of co-possibility of individuals and singularities? How is it possible
to prevent the solidity of identities from foreclosing any possibility of
the co-presence of singularities? What are the processes of subjectiva-
tion that traverse these constitutive processes? Could the constitution
of a commune that is not ‘additive’ and not even ‘integrative’, of a
commune that is not a ‘sum’ and not even an ‘organism’, arise from
a dialectical progression (or regression, strong or tenuous) that has a
Hegelian stamp?
To answer this question, let me introduce some further questions
and experiments.
Experiment 1
If we assume that the context of governance in which the plurality of

actors develops its action lacks any determination of finality or value,
and if every determination is a power [potenza] that wins (or loses)
vis-à-vis other powers, the first juridical example that can be adduced
in the search for the common is the one traditionally represented by
the international law system of war. Here the common paradoxically
reconnects with the global. It is certainly a terrain free of formal-
isms. In fact, if one attempted to operate in this area with the liberal
concepts of rule of law [Stato di diritto], or with doctrines of justice
anchored in the abstract schemes of metaphysical rationalism, one
would run obvious risks. But by doing so one reduces juridical prac-
tice to the mere recording of fact, which is how sociology and realistic
empiricism proceed; one enters an area – labelled by Carl Schmitt,
for international law, as non-law – where governance is defined in the
absence of any possibility of nomos. We are once again immersed in
dissolution. The experiment of international law does not change the
dissolutions, it only shifts them. Here a new reflection must be made
on the terrain of globalization – a reflection that recognizes the basic
antagonisms between which the process of global reorganization is
moving, in every sense; a reflection that eliminates any homology
with the past, any reference to the old international constitutions;
a reflection that seeks to build provisional and effective regulations
in new spaces and on new themes – biopolitical, media-related, and
especially financial.
A second example is that of trade union law in the class struggle.
In the transition to post-Fordism and in the course of the economic
crisis, as the German labour compromise and generally industrial
90 The Fundamentals
contractualism (more or less corporative) collapsed, the problem of

the regulation of social labour and that of the redistribution of the
gross domestic product have been freed from any juridical condition-
ing, displaced from the terrain of direct production to that of social
production. In this case, too, any homology with past trade union
law is empty; again, a constituent initiative is to be opened. But in
this case, too, the terrain is characterized by determinations similar
to those defined by international law – a true disaster of traditional
juridical forms. For the moment, only tactical operations of resist-
ance seem possible.
Experiment 2
This is the line of Commonwealth. It leads us to tackle the problem of

a possible system of law of the common from the point of view of the
ontology of the common.
This path starts with the recognition of the construction and func-
tional subjugation of the common by global, financial and military
capitalism. Far from proposing processes of pure recognition or
appropriation of the structures and figures of the ‘communism of
capital’ and its state, this line proposes to think of the processes of
governance as tools for a further destructuring of traditional law and,
second, gives itself the objective of calling for the emergence of new
figures of productive cooperation in this process of destructuration.
Thus the only way out of these problems seems to be as follows:
(1) The first condition is to repropose the theme of the common on

a terrain that is not socially homogeneous, that envisages neither
pre-established institutionalization nor homologies, but that is
traversed by originary antagonisms: on the one hand there is an
increasingly precarious labour power that recognizes its auton-
omy from capital; on the other hand, there is the relationship of
command that capital continually seeks to renew. The solution of
these conflicts cannot be given according to any teleological or
dialectical determination. One moves in a Machiavellian context.
Every determination is a power that wins (or loses) over other
powers. The sense of the process is assimilated and produced by
the power of collective decision.
(2) In this framework, the common cannot be posited in continuity
with the juridical tradition, cannot be configured as a terrain on
which ideas of justice are proposed from the outside. . . it can
contain and build only uses and can govern them in immanence,
in their reciprocity and commonality. International law (precisely
as non-law) is from this point of view the model we can point to,
but in reverse to how Carl Schmitt posed the problem.
(3) The overturning of the Schmittian perspective – not recovery
of the ‘exception’ but insistence on the ‘excedence’ of cognitive
labour – the acceptance of a matching biopolitical context and so
on, in short, the study of doctrines and practices that deconstruct
western law and the exercise (within the deconstruction of the
law) of constituent power, are the only way out that can be fol-
lowed today in these matters.
In the 1920s Pašukanis had proposed some extremely interesting

lines. He was claiming that the logic of juridical concepts corresponds
to the logic of the social relations in a society that produces com-
modities and that the root of private law as a system resides in these
relations rather than in permission from authority. Thus the logic of
relations of domination and subordination falls only partially under
juridical concepts. Consequently the juridical conception of the state
can never become a theory and will always remain an ideological
alteration of the facts. To imagine a common law [diritto del com-
mune] (but why still speak of law?), it will then be necessary, once
the property-owning constitution has been destructured, to wind
back from plurality, from the network of labour relations, to forms of
regulation that take in and develop the potential of social productive
relations – and these constitute, in equality and co-production, non-
state juridical norms for the regulation of common life.
For example, it will be necessary to follow phenomena of coopera-
tion of labour power, of self-valorization, that introduce a surplus of
productive capacity of the single, collective labour power; it will be
necessary to explore the set of financial phenomena, revealing from
the inside the power of the symmetrical relations between social pro-
duction and the system of signs – probably reinventing at this level a
theory of labour value and of its measure. Only in this case will it be
possible to establish lines that, for example, track back from welfare
to the common, and not just tactically but strategically, at long last.
And in this light the common begins to define itself as an arena of
democratic participation plus distributive equality.
6
Federalism and Movements
of the Common*
1. The contemporary state is in crisis. It seems that the figure that

Hobbes inaugurated by giving his account of the state machine has
become completely obsolete. The quantity of material processes that
characterize our present times spills beyond the outline of that image
– in relation to institutions, on the one hand, and, on the other, in
relation to subjectivities. The nexus between the form, the material
and the power of the state is being thoroughly transformed. The even-
tual configurations are still undecided but mark a decisive shift, and
they reposition the political problem to another level.
As a simple example, take the disarticulation and subsequent
rearticulation of the nexus between command, territory and systems
of law [diritti] brought about by globalization and by the reconfigura-
tion of world spaces. Instead of having a system of international law
derived from European public law [ius publicum europaeum], we now
have spaces defined by globalism; markets that are differentiated
within the imperial unicum; zones of territorialization of the flows of
global investment; global metropolises as nodes of the network that
dictates their orientation (transnational and subcontinental areas of
influence. . .); processes of non-state law-making that disturb and
stand outside the hierarchies of normative sources and order rela-
tions at the planetary level (patent law, a new commercial law [lex
* First recorded as ‘Federalismo e movimenti del comune’, outline of a

presentation for the summer seminar of Euronomade 2.0, 2014.
Federalism and Movements of the Common 93
mercatoria], the semi-constituent role of private international law);

the growing relevance of non-representative powers that marginal-
ize democratic self-determination (the IMF, the European Central
Bank); a tendential drop in participation in the electoral or repre-
sentative process in the mature democracies; disintegration of the
relation between territory, national market and state, with accom-
panying consequences for the deconstitutionalization of social rights;
the growing prominence of global migrations as lines of flight and of
deterritorialization of subjectivity.
The nation state no longer presents itself as the sole determining
source of law but clearly appears to be in crisis. As Saskia Sassen has
shown, the new and complex ‘assemblages’ of power, law and terri-
tory have now transmuted into a system of global law centred on a
multiplicity of partial regimes that answer to the needs of specialized
sectors. In the same spirit, Günther Teubner speaks of a ‘corporate
constitutionalism’, in other words of juridical forms expressed by
various singular groups in civil society.
Obviously, given all the challenges that face the classical figure of
the state form, the theory of federalism is also affected and finds itself
having to deal with increasingly deterritorialized and mobile diversi-
ties. So we have to raise with extreme clarity the question of how to
think about a federalism beyond the state. The entire phenomenology
of federalism has to be read not merely in structural terms but by
privileging its procedural dimension: this is in the first place about pro-
cesses of collective learning that cannot be predetermined by the letter
of constitutive pacts but are open to experience and experimentation.
2. Let us now look at this whole dissolutive process from another

point of view: I mean, not from the point of view of statute-based
law but from that of the constituent powers that emanate from the
movements. I am thinking of the great movements of 2011 – not
the Arab movements as much as those that developed in Europe and
the United States. The critique that these movements have raised
against the classical organization of the state is that, given all the
phenomena outlined so far, the traditional powers and their separa-
tion (within reciprocal control) have been completely transfigured.
With this they say nothing that has not been already recognized
in part by the constitutionalists. Among US constitutionalists, for
instance, there is Bruce Ackerman, who is concerned that the expan-
sion of executive power creates a danger of dictatorship; or Sheldon
Wolin, who claims that the dynamic democratic capacities of the
American constitution have already been emptied to the point of
94 The Fundamentals
creating an ‘inverted totalitarianism’: while the totalitarian state con-

trols capitalist structures, in inverted totalitarianism the capitalist
structures control the structures of the state directly. In Europe even
Rosanvallon and Giddens, the fathers of the ‘third way’, admit now
the impossibility of state control over financial power. On the other
hand, what do the movements add to this general awareness? They
consider republican constitutions, representative practices, and the
whole system of powers to be incapable of reform, and they begin
to propose the first elements of a new constituent power. In this
context, the reference to federalism – considered not a pyramidal
organization but a spatial network – is fundamental to characterizing
the new figures of constituent power, in anticipation of any figure of
legislative power. It has to be conceived of as the outcome of a real
federalism that, by enhancing the plural and procedural dimensions,
deconstructs the rigidity between representation (politics, interests,
etc.) and organicity (of the administrative, of the executive function,
etc.) of the state and reinterprets the dialectic between resistance
and participation in an open way. Will it still be possible to recover
these ‘post-state’ virtualities of federalism and to make them the key
to a constituent power and to a legislative proposal that does not
end up in a perverse and equally powerless centralism, in a renewed
Jacobinism? Just as, through the continuity of constituent power, the
legislative power seems to adapt to the contemporaneity of social
movements, so by adopting a federal structure it will be able to adapt
to the (local and diffuse) spatial dimension of the movements. At this
point complexity becomes productive: the network will in fact be able
to measure its links in relation to the always singular dimensions of
legislative governance.*
All this means that, at this point, any movement that sets itself
against representation makes proposals that are constituent – as well
as being, obviously, destituent. When expressed in this form, the
movements press forward new constitutional principles. It should be
remembered that in 2011 the constituent thrust preceded the revolt,
so to speak; it was intrinsic to the resistance – it governed it and pre-
figured it. It did not ask that the state turn aside from its monopoly of
violence, or that capitalism become good, or that the banks stop spec-
ulating; rather it imagined new forms of production and social order.
It is clear that, in contrast to what happened in the 1930s in the
face of a crisis of similar intensity, politics is unable to develop a

constituent design capable of providing an adequate solution to the

intensity of the economic and social crisis. Neither a Keynes nor a
Roosevelt have yet appeared on the scene, and in any case it is hard
to see how their recipes, valid for the era of industrial production,
could be adapted to the post-industrial era. What this crisis needs is
a qualitative leap, a change of paradigm: the current liberal policies
do not offer anything at this level. Nor do they propose anything that
so much as matches the history of constitutionalism and of modern
constitutions. This has always been a history of mediations, built
first around mercantile relations of exchange (liberal constitutions)
and later around the capital–labour dialectic (welfarist constitutions).
Now it is really hard to imagine what mediations can be built around
the financialization processes that live at the heart of contempo-
rary capitalism. Categories such as representation and democracy,
not to mention national sovereignty, cannot be redefined outside
the recognition that the financial and global markets have become
the headquarters par excellence of an autonomous production of
legality and politics. The command exercised by financial capital
tends increasingly to sidestep the institutional mediations of modern
democracies and is based on the blackmail made possible by the fact
that, in the last resort, the guarantees of enjoying essential rights
(from housing to health), and also of wages, depend irreversibly on
the dynamics and continuous turbulences of the financial markets.
In this situation, the movements move with unique constituent
characteristics. For example, they have an ‘alternative temporality’.
‘Alternative’ is not an action or a purpose or a discourse based on
the radical asymmetry of the point from which the alternative will is
expressed; it is another place. Now, this singular place has an autonomy
that makes its functioning coherent in time, producing subjectivities,
struggles and constituent principles within a process of independent
wills. Temporality is subsumed by this independence – and it is alter-
native because it is independent. Within this temporality, in the viral
expression of the constituent requests, you will find different powers
[potenze]: not only demands for democracy and freedom, for equality
and access to the common, but complex constructions (of knowl-
edge and projects, of generalized expertise*. . .) and constructions of
common ventures.
But you will also find the exercise of counterpower when social
needs, economic urgencies or environmental threats require it. The
* ‘expertise’ in English in the original.

96 The Fundamentals
American constitutional affirmation of the right of resistance must be

assumed here: many struggles, in many far distant places, with pro-
tagonists with different styles and forms of life; struggles sometimes
to overthrow tyrants, sometimes to denounce poverty, sometimes
to destroy or to appropriate goods; struggles whose protagonists
sometimes demand the right to vote and free elections, sometimes
propagandize abstention and exodus from politics – and so on. How
and why might these struggles be seen as expressions of the same
cycle? How might we think that they are so original as to break the
rigid continuity of the forms of capitalist domination and offer a radi-
cal subversion of the democratic model? We live in a plural political
world, but a profound homogeneity nevertheless traverses the dif-
ferent forms of struggle and the different places of their onset. The
political ontology of global capitalist domination, and the struggles
within and against this globality, are undoubtedly a horizon on which
variously textured forms and planes of constituent struggles and wills
stand out. We are interested in moving through these differences not
only to confirm the same foundation (the global world of neoliberal-
ism and of one-way thinking [pensiero unico]) but also the common
goal in which differences recognize and recompose themselves in the
process of struggle and movement.
I have already argued that all these experiences are born inside
a laboratory of communication. It seems that their glue is initially
informatic, linguistic and cooperative (and it is clear that in all and
each of these experiences the hegemony of cognitive labour is a
given). I have also noted how this cooperation is built into the slow
times of constructing a common language, into the rhythm of a
complex spatial diffusion of the messages produced – but most of
all of a self-control, a self-limitation, a self-management of political
temporality. There should be nothing that has not been decided by
consensus: the decision-making of the multitude requires the auton-
omy of a constructed temporality. It is no coincidence, then, that this
autonomous communication of slogans and of militant will enforces
its powers of viral diffusion (initially, at least) on small communities
and political affinity groups. The Israeli indignados camping out in
the main streets of Tel Aviv claimed to have rebuilt not only the spirit
but also the political form of the old kibbutz. The Spanish indignados
showed – in their little tent towns, in the commissions that cooper-
ated in the construction of a political programme – how a constituent
discourse that moved from below, from the simple and small-scale
communication of affects and reasons, could be carried through into
general assemblies and there create a decision-making machine.
It is no coincidence that the novelty of these movements and of

their constituent proposal tends to find support and a symbol in
a renewed model of federalism. Small communities connect and
build their unity not in the renunciation but in the integration of
differences; thus federalism becomes an engine of recomposition.
Obviously we test here the continued existence of very few elements
of a theory of the federalist state or sovereignty; nevertheless we find,
on the small scale, the strong passions of an associative intelligence
that have sustained federalist ideologies on the large scale. Here ide-
ology turns into practice: a practice of resistance. How far and how
long this will last no one knows. And yet the resistance is real . . . the
response of capitalism proves it: to break the federal unity that the
movements build in the struggle, capitalism is normally forced to
carry out sophisticated operations, which cost the ruling elites a lot
(recourse to a religious alternative, Islamic in the case in point, in the
countries of the Arab Spring; ferocious repression against the 2011
English riots* and use of racist weapons; provocations concerning
the border between violence and non-violence, where the movement
has reached a high maturity of association, thanks to Spain and the
United States).
A plural ontology of the political: this is the reality in which the
initiative of the movements appears and takes place. This plural-
ism indicates federative cooperation and assembly of struggles that
differ in inspiration and in project and a constituent democracy that
upholds differences as a terrain for synthesis and further proposals.
It is a plurality of movements against global capital, against finance
capital, for the reconquest of the common and for the production of
a constitution of the common: these things are in our minds by now.
But it is important to live them, it is essential to participate in their
construction while being aware of it. In the face of a plural ontology
of the political we have so far analysed the political and plurality . . .
now it is necessary to enter the ontological machine. This penetration
is not an impossible task: it consists in getting ready for [disporsi] the
production of subjectivity, becoming its dispositif. Communicating,
learning and teaching, studying and communicating, being activists
and participating in struggles – such is the dispositif of the production
of subjectivity. Militancy constitutes its central axis. A plural ontol-
ogy of the political finds its synthesis at the intersection and in the
recomposition of militant subjectivities.
* ‘English Riots’ in English in the original.

98 The Fundamentals
In short, to conclude, this is an example redolent of what I mean

by the spatiality of the common: a residing together of bodies. The
indignados as well as Occupy Wall Street give a full demonstration of
this dimension of the common.
The struggles in Val di Susa are a good illustration. They offer
clarification on a whole series of elements described thus far:
(a) within–against expertise;

(b) exercise of counterpowers;
(c) democratic decision-making processes (general assemblies, etc.);
(d) elaboration of singular tactics within a general strategy;
(e) attack on institutional representation and possible relegitimiza-
tion of representatives through struggle, and so on.
II
1. It’s time to return to the theories of federalism – of federalism

understood as a category of public law. Now, we are acquainted with
two traditions of federalism. The first, which is hegemonic, is associ-
ated with Pufendorf. It casts federalism as a process of assimilation
of local and state differences. It is traversed by the idea of sovereignty
and has to deal with the dilemma of Calhoun. In this way the federal-
ist conception slips into the tradition and difficulties of sovereignty.
Olivier Beaud sees federalism as being a form of the state.
At the other end is the conception of Althusius (and partly of
Harrington). This conception treats the federal constitution, or rather
the federalist model, as another way of thinking about politics, as a
dualism of power: on the one hand, sovereign power; on the other,
the powers that are subject but always resistant, locally determined.
In the Althusian view, the form of federation appears as a dialectic
of sovereignty against resistance and participation, and this relation-
ship is considered as a ‘dualistic ellipse’. How, then, can we imagine
a government whose necessity derives precisely from the radical and
irrepressible plurality of the political entity? We can try stepping into
a horizon of radical criticism of democracy. We must abandon here
the idea that the identity of the rulers and the governed must live as
a regulative idea in the constitutional organization of the government
function. While in the conception of legitimate power the citizens are
totally submissive because the power to be obeyed is understood as a
power of all, in Althusius’ conception plurality persists as a political
and constitutional factor before the government and thus guarantees
continuity in the political action of the governed. Government is

therefore possible only as the product of a dualism of power.
2. But beware. If we look at this process within a biopolitical con-

dition, that is, in a place where the genealogy of the function of
government is closely linked to the genealogy of the economy, sev-
eral difficulties arise. In the twentieth-century welfare state, citizens
are no longer evaluated as simple, private legal entities, collectively
recomposed through political representation, but are reclassified
as portions of the population – and such reclassification requires
other knowledge and social planning. In this context, federalism risks
becoming functional to neoliberal governmentality all over again.
Biopolitics, when we talk about it in connection to a government
function that carries out its regulatory action in territorialized areas,
is certainly open to a challenge against those who resist; but this chal-
lenge can always be bent to the functional exigencies of command.
How, then, can the Althusian point of view be reaffirmed, on the
one hand against the functional degeneration of governance and, on
the other, in the face of the countertendency of local parties to shut
themselves into populist or identitarian positions?
What resists the dispositifs of sovereignty and escapes the classic
forms of representation is freedom: a freedom that, as the alternative
face of subjection to governance processes, configures other needs
and other desires in biopolitics. It seeks to install other forms of life.
If the new technologies of power organize themselves with a view
to capturing and governing a freedom no longer related to the state
but constantly in excess and centrifugal, we find ourselves facing the
perpetual dissident. ‘Perpetual dissidents’ are those citizens who do
not direct their desire for security and order to their own sovereign
but are determined to be governed as little as possible and to govern
themselves as much as possible.
Is it possible to recognize in the instances of federalism today the
expression of a radical tendency to exodus, the trace of authentic
lines of flight, a radical tendency of political subjectivation around
claims* that cannot be prosecuted via the filter of representation? In
this context, what are the cooperative networks of cognitive capital-
ism’s general intellect,† the form of accumulation within which the
production and control of knowledge become the fundamental stake
* ‘claims’ in English in the original.

† Here and passim, ‘general intellect’ in English in the original.
100 The Fundamentals
in the valorization of capital? How do the social times necessary for

the constitution of knowledge – crucial nodes in the valorization of
production – aggregate when these powers tend more and more to
overflow the boundaries of individual companies? Here federalism
begins by presenting itself as an elusive reality in the network, in the
common.
3. This doesn’t leave us with much in our hands. . . but we have some
leads. Thus far I have worked on the constituent temporality of the
common; the discussion of federalism then led to a discussion of
spatiality, to the spatial figure of the common, which constituent lan-
guage must make its own.
So let me return to the concept of federalism, privileging the proce-
dural dimension, as I have already said, and thus casting it in political
forms appropriate to the common. Let me refer in particular to a
work by Daniel Elazar, who sees the category of federation as a pro-
cess and not as a formal fact.1 Elazar’s most important contribution
is thus the emphasis he places on the fact that federalism organizes
its political space in the structure of a matrix, thereby radically dis-
tancing himself from the pyramidal criterion on which is based the
historical and theoretical model of the modern state form. The main
experiences of ‘real federalism’ actually involve a hierarchy, a pyra-
mid of governments with gradations of power that flow from the top
down or from a centre to the periphery. But what I want to empha-
size here is that the matrix structure of the federal political space
evokes the image (and the reality) of the network, which in the great
transformation of recent decades has established itself as a dominant
figure, both in the field of new communication technologies and in
that of the organization of work and commerce, both in the analysis
of new governance processes and in that of the powers that organize
the old and new ‘global cities’ – to give just a few examples.
It is clear that, when analogies of this type (e.g. between federalism
and network) are made, it is difficult to draw from them a thought
concerning the potentials and the contemporary horizons of a federal-
ism beyond the state. In such cases there is a permanent risk of slipping
into ideology and utopianism. Terms such as solidarity, subsidiarity
and communication risk not being materially qualified. But more
than anything we risk forgetting that the financialization processes
have made possible, at least since the crisis of the early 1970s, a
formidable non-centralized concentration of power. In other words
they have made it possible to compensate at the level of power and
strategic decision for that very strong decentralization that has char-
acterized the great transformation undergone by the capitalist mode

of production in recent decades, and has done so both intensively (in
the area of human qualities and skills valorized by capital) and exten-
sively (territorially and spatially).
By saying this I seem, again, to throw into doubt all the premises
from which my discussion of the dynamic and procedural nature of
federalism started. Here are the questions. What forms can the con-
trol of the power of finance take, and in what spatial coordinates? Is
a constitutionalization of this power generally possible? How should
we think about a reappropriation of the immense wealth ‘frozen’ in
financial incomes, and how should we then answer these questions
as we traverse federalist thinking? It is clear that the only answer that
can be given to these questions is one that reopens the game of coun-
terposed forces. Federalism, interpreted as I have interpreted it, can
allow us to broaden the field of contestation and to extend the guer-
rilla warfare for the reappropriation of the common.
7
Disarticulating Ownership?
Common Goods and the Possibilities of Law*
Let me begin by recalling a brief passage in the young Marx:
Work is the living foundation of private property, private property as

a creative source of itself. Private property is nothing but objectified
labour. If, then, one wants to give private property a fatal blow, it
must not be attacked only as an objective condition, but as an activity,
as labour. It is one of the biggest misunderstandings to speak of free
human and social work, of work without private property. Hence aboli-
tion of private property comes to reality only when it is conceived of
as abolition of work, an abolition that naturally becomes possible only
through work, that is, through the material activity of society.1
Marx adopts here, from the Lockean tradition, the ‘classic’ definition
of private property, secular and liberal. This is the very definition of
possessive individualism.2 As we know, Macpherson has made an
extensive study of possessive individualism. From this perspective,
individuals were considered free insofar as they owned their own
person and their own capacities; human essence consisted in not
depending on the will of others and liberty was a function of what one
possessed as an individual. (This view was not very different, inciden-
tally, from Harrington’s and Winstanley’s conception of freedom; and
I am happy to refer to these authors because the collective telos of
their reasoning incentivised a communist project.)
So then, society consists of relations of exchange between prop-
erty owners. Political society becomes a machine designed to defend
* First presented as ‘Disarticolare la proprietà? Beni comuni e possibilità del

diritto’ at the Faculty of Law of the University of Perugia, 8 October 2013.
Common Goods and the Possibilities of Law 103
private property and maintain an orderly relationship in matters of

exchange. If we broaden our gaze and place Hobbes, as Macpherson
rightly does, at the theoretical centre of possessive individualism,
where it is developed in universal terms, we are in position to appreci-
ate the definition of individual freedom elaborated by him with great
rigour – and consequently the definition of property as the economic
translation of freedom itself: ‘The Value, or Worth of a man, is as of
all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given
for the use of his Power. . .’3
But we know how profoundly work has changed today with respect
to the definition of possessive individualism. The question is, will the
concept of private property change too? Or rather in what sense, in
what direction should we transform the critique of property? In order
to answer, let us first take a look at how work or labour changes; and,
to avoid simple-minded references to Italian critical sources (which
in Italy are always tiresome, God knows why), let us reread Robert
Castel, Manuel Castells4 and countless others, well summarized by
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiappello in a book that draws a conclusive
analysis of the new forms of productive labour today.5 Labour is
realized and valorized in a world where the visibility of communica-
tion networks and information connections is continuously growing;
consequently people work nowadays in ever more flexible and mobile
arrangements, which are precarious from the angle of payment – and
the world of work is increasingly marked by indeterminacy of times
and spaces, by anxiety and by anomie. As for the creation of value,
it takes place in cooperative flows where languages and affects are
subsumed under the material processes of production, and labour –
what we call variable capital – is very frequently interchangeable with
machinery – what we call fixed capital. In other words, the quality
of labour is progressively marked by singular figures that combine
to cooperate with constant capital, since they autonomously appro-
priate fractions or times, or uses or functions of fixed capital. Thus
work has changed radically from the way it was described and stood
ontologically in the age of possessive individualism. So then: have the
forms of the relationship between activity and property also changed
radically? Of course. What remains, then, ontologically speaking, of
the concept of private property?
It is worth pointing out that it is not the first time that such changes
have occurred: already in the industrial age (that is, when the archae-
ology of original accumulation fades and the hegemony of large-scale
industry is imposed, with modernity) there had been a major change
in the relationship between labour and private property. Gradually
the entrepreneurial and managerial theories of industry had shifted

the concept of ownership towards a function of management. Early
twentieth-century American realism charted these changes very
clearly.
With the latest modification, as indicated by Boltanski, the trans-
formation of the concept of property (insofar as it connects to the
transformation of work) becomes ontologically extreme and a purely
ideological survival; and it is not clear why the definitive obsolescence
of the Hobbesian definition (and, partly, of the Marxian one) is not
recognized. However, one should stress the insuperable advantage
that the Marxian discourse shows over the Hobbesian, if only in over-
coming its concept of labour. In fact Marx not only holds tight the
ideas of freedom and property but also connects the idea of labour
with that of property by giving the concept of property a dynamic
reading, and in this way allows us to move well beyond possessive
individualism. So let us, in our turn, proceed further on the terrain
of defining property, bearing in mind the Marxian labour–property
equation.
So then: the change in the world of labour for which I cited
Boltanski fundamentally renews the concept of private property. It
appears on an ambiguous terrain, where the elements of material and
immaterial activity (physical and intellectual labour), the individual
and social dimensions, and the singular and cooperative qualities
are confusedly interchanged in processes of production (and all the
more in processes of exploitation) and where, as I have stated, even
portions of fixed capital are from time to time appropriated by labour
power or snatched (extracted) from the bosses’ command over the
metamorphosis of productive labour. Furthermore, independent
processes of subjectification function within these transitions of
capitalist accumulation, inducing in them unique excedences and
innovations.
At this point one has to wonder whether the concept of private
property still makes sense ontologically. In reality, the relationship
between labour and property seems to be constituted in the network
society now, when the walls of the factory give way, when work tends
to reconfigure itself as a service relationship, when productive con-
nections are expanded in the metropolis, when value is extracted at
the entire social–productive level: in such a situation private property
seems to have become a contingent concept, devoid of necessity. It
is in fact money, and thus financial capital and public action, that
seem to establish here any relationship between labour and command
(property?).
A new property convention is thus created, and the rule of finance

is imposed here to redefine ownership. It is the possession of money
– the financial convention – that is established as the regulating norm
of social and productive activities and in consequence as access to
a ‘proprietary reality’ whose conceptual confusion does not detract
from its effectiveness. Property becomes paper-based, monetary or
share, movable or real estate; it has a conventional and juridical
nature. André Orléan and Christian Marazzi have usefully high-
lighted this transformation.6 This is about considering the financial
convention as a command that is independent of any ontological
determination: the convention establishes and consolidates a ‘propri-
etary sign’ in terms of ‘private property’ (see in particular Heinsohn
and Steiger),7 and it holds fast even when it appears as a crisis, as
excess – and not just vis-à-vis the old and static determinations of
labour value but especially in relation to that continuous anticipation
and increment that characterize its dealings with the financial capture
of socially produced value and its operations towards its extension at
the global level.
Let me make it clear, then, that in this new configuration of the
property regime the material basis of the law of value remains.
Nevertheless, we are not dealing here with individual labour that
becomes abstract, but with immediately social and common labour,
directly exploited by capital. The rule of finance can be posited
hegemonically, because in the new mode of production the common
has emerged as an eminent power [potenza], as the substance of the
relations of production, and is invading the entire social space as
a norm of valorization. Financial capital pursues this extension of
profit, tries to anticipate it, presses on movable and real estate rent
and anticipates them as financial rent. As Harribey puts it in discus-
sion with Orléan, if value does not appear here in substantial terms, it
does not look like a simple accounting phantasmagoria either: it is the
sign of a productive common, mystified but effective, which develops
more and more intensively and extensively.8
So, rather than talking about the social function of property, it
would perhaps be better to speak of the social properties of labour,
since the social function of property seems to have flowed back
towards capital, to the point of configuring itself as its financial
figure. We are immersed in that structure, which is enveloping but
also highly chaotic.
Only the recognition of the social properties of labour can change
this picture. But we cannot consider them without first attempting to
unravel a series of paradoxes that the current condition of capitalist
development proposes. Which paradoxes? What do I mean by para-

doxes? I mean contradictions that are difficult to overcome in this
chaotic environment. They are subjected to exceptional forms of
governance,* in the attempt, always critically unresolved, to restore
conceptual equilibrium and functional effectiveness.
Now, a first paradox regards production and consists in the fact that
financial capitalism represents the most abstract and detached form
of command, even as it concretely invests the entirety of life. The
‘reification’ of life and the ‘alienation’ of subjects are created by a pro-
ductive command that, in the new mode of production organized by
financial capital, has become completely transcendent – a p roductive
command over a cognitive workforce that nevertheless turns out to
be autonomously productive when it is obliged to produce surplus
value, precisely because the latter is cognitive, immaterial, creative,
and not immediately consumable.
The paradox is completely clear when we consider that, as produc-
tion is essentially based on social cooperation (whether in information
technology, in care work, in the service sector, or elsewhere), the
valorization of capital comes into conflict not simply with the mas-
sification of variable capital but with the resistance and autonomy
of a multitude that has reappropriated for itself a portion of fixed
capital (thus presenting itself, if you like, as a ‘machinic subject’) and
a continuous ‘relative’ ability to organize networks of social labour.
This paradox and contradiction very violently counterpose constant
capital (in its financial form) and variable capital (in the hybrid form
it assumes once it has incorporated fixed capital) – and therefore ten-
dentially implement the verticalization of command.
The second paradox is that of property. Private property (what we
define juridically as such) tends to be subjected more and more to
the figures of rent. Rent arises today essentially from processes of
monetary circulation that take place in the services of financial capital
and of real estate capital – or from processes of valorization that take
place in industrial services.
Now, when (private) goods present themselves as services, when
capitalist production is valorized essentially through services, pri-
vate property blurs its traditional characteristics of ‘possession’ and
appears rather as command over (and exploitation of) the coopera-
tion that constitutes those services and makes them productive.
For what we call public powers [poteri pubblici], this is the source

of an urgency to manifest themselves as sovereign powers [poteri

sovrani] in an extreme, transcendent manner, in order to restore to
private property the value-creating [valorifica] and legal (juridical)
function that the transformation of social production tends to remove
from it. However, in post-industrial societies the public mediation
of class relations becomes increasingly difficult, because sovereignty
itself has been privatized – patrimonialized by finance capital – for
the same reason why private property has dissolved: it is no longer
a possession, it is the use of a service. Thus the sovereign public [il
pubbico sovrano] clashes now not with corporations, trade unions, or
collective bodies of labour (which represented themselves as private
subjects, too), but with the cooperation and social circulation of fig-
ures that continually compose and recompose themselves in material
production and in cognitive production: in short, with what we call
the ‘common’. So what destroys the institution of public property is
not exclusively the progressive ‘private patrimonialization’ of public
goods but also the ontological dynamic that this phenomenon sets in
motion after the dissolution of the private – in other words the con-
tinuous drift of public management towards emergency, the slippage
of emergency into corruption, and the destruction of the common
through the power of exception.
The sovereign public now stands only in a paradoxical way, or
rather it dissolves in the face of the common, which emerges precisely
within processes of social production and valorizing cooperation.
Insofar as it still features, the sovereign public is a pure mystification
of the common.
The third paradox is one that biocapital confirms in its confronta-
tion with the bodies of workers. Here the clash, the contradiction and
the antagonism are fixed when, in the post-industrial phase, in the
era in which cognitive capital becomes hegemonic, capital is obliged
to put human bodies directly into production, making them become
machines so that they cease to be just labour commodities. Thus,
in the new processes of production, bodies become specialized and
gain autonomy with increasing efficacy, so that, through the resist-
ance and struggles of the machinic labour power, the demand for
a production of humans for humans [dell’uomo per l’uomo] – that is,
for the human being as a living machine – develops more and more
explicitly.
At the moment when workers reappropriate a part of fixed capital
and present themselves, in variable and often chaotic manner, as
cooperating actors in the processes of value creation, as precarious
yet autonomous subjects in the valorization of capital, a complete
inversion occurs in the function of labour in relation to capital: work-

ers stop being just the instrument that capital uses to conquer nature
– which means, trivially, producing goods. Having incorporated the
tools, having metamorphosed anthropologically, and having regained
use value, they act rather machinically, in an alterity and autonomy
from capital that they want to make total. The class struggle that we
can now call ‘biopolitical’ is situated between this objective tendency
and the practical dispositifs in the constitution of these machinic
workers.
All these three paradoxes remain unresolved in the action of capi-
tal. Consequently, the stronger the resistance, the harsher the state’s
attempt to restore power. Every act of resistance is thus condemned
as an illegal exercise of counterpower; every manifestation of revolt is
defined as devastation and pillage. Another paradox (and this time it
is pure mystification) is that, in exercising maximum violence, capital
and its state need to appear as inevitable and neutral figures: maxi-
mum violence is exercised by instruments and by ‘technical’ bodies.
As Thatcher proclaimed, ‘there is no alternative’.
How do we act politically within these paradoxes? Confronting
the paradox of production means, fundamentally, developing self-
valorization and reappropriating, progressively and more and more
decisively, the fixed capital employed in social production processes.
So it means resistance, self-valorization and appropriation, as against
the multiplication of operations of capture and privatization that
begins to develop. Reappropriating fixed capital means building a
‘common’ – a common against the capitalist appropriation of life,
a common as development of civic and political uses, as capacity of
management. Knowledge and income are the objectives that funda-
mentally qualify the cognitive proletariat; these are right from the
start political objectives just as much as the wage increase was for the
industrial worker. In Rosa Luxemburg’s words,
The struggle against the reduction of relative wages [and thus, today,
for a social income] also means struggle against the commodity char-
acter of labour-power, that is, against capitalist production taken as a
whole. The struggle against the fall in the relative wage is no longer a
battle at the level of the mercantile economy but a revolutionary attack
on the foundations of this economy; it is the socialist movement of the
proletariat.9
The experiences gained during the militant [Italian] referendum

campaigns for the recognition of ‘common goods’ need to be taken
up, studied, and repeated under this banner.
Now, when it comes to the paradox of property, there seem to be

no ways except those that end in confrontation and clash with the
monetary and financial powers. If money is a means of account and
exchange that is difficult to eliminate, it cannot be allowed to be an
instrument of accumulation of power against the producers. How
can one impose on the central bank the objectives of a production of
humans for humans – that is, of bending to a biopolitical configuration
of the social assets? The problem is not so much to separate deposit
banks from investment banks, as it is to direct savings and invest-
ment towards balances that guarantee the production of humans for
humans. This is a political battle to be waged immediately. It consists
in rejecting the monetary governance* of biopower, this time without
ideological reservations and without delay, that is, in introducing the
possibility of a rupture and in giving it a democratic dimension. A
‘currency of the common’ is one that guarantees the reproduction
and the amount of income that every citizen needs and the support
for the forms of cooperation that constitute the multitude.
Let us now turn to the final paradox – the one between biocapital
and workers’ bodies. Here the contradiction cannot be overcome
without eliminating one of the two poles; and, since capitalists cannot
do without the worker, if they want to build profit, and the worker is
never completely manipulable ‘bare life’ but is always living labour,
the paradox will be overcome only by eliminating the capitalist.
Hence this is the proper terrain of politics, the terrain of deciding
on the undecidable, with all its comings and goings, its pulling in and
letting out, its killing and bringing to life, its fascism and democracy.
So much on the side of power. But it is also the constituent terrain
of all the machine-bodies, which are very peculiar, monstrous in
their action. To these bodies, making politics means constituting
the multitude institutionally, that is, plucking the singularities out of
their solitude and setting them up in the multitude, or transforming
the social experience of the multitude into a political institution. This
transition materially takes the place of the idealistic operation that
used to colour the concept of class consciousness. But it must also
overcome the modern bourgeois – and twentieth-century – model of
the relationship between constituent power and constituted power,10
not because the constituent action fails, but because it can no longer
be closed into the reconstruction of the ‘One’ of power. Uprisings
are done not to seize power but to keep always open a process of

c ounterpowers, challenging the ever new dispositifs of capture that

the capitalist machine produces. It is on this ground that sovereign
representation goes into crisis, because – drawn as it is into the
mechanism of sovereignty and filtered through the sordid and magi-
cal alchemy of elections – it does not bear comparison with the truth
and richness of the new social composition.
My impression is that, on the European constitutional front today,
we need to build real buttresses against the neoliberal constitutions
that they want to impose on us. We need to build a conflictual ‘coun-
ter-democracy’, which thrives on demands and protest, on resistance
and anger. Away with normative constitutionalism: we need – and
we build – biopolitical democracies, economic and material constitu-
tions that do not live by turning into oppressive machines through
the filter of legality and legal form but are run through investments of
common money aimed at the continuous rebalancing of social rela-
tions; and these put the poor in the place of the rich and create a life
shaped by humans in the service of humans.
And here it must be stated clearly, in the face of all the Nobel Prize
winners in economics, that even growing productivity comes about
only in an equal and happy society – a society of refusal of work.
But let us return to ourselves at this point. Let us try to understand
what it means, in this new situation, to want to be property owners,
and what it might be – for a worker, for each of us – to be an owner.
All this, starting from a reality of work that takes place in the environ-
ment of interconnections and networks, services and subjectivations
that I defined earlier. Here labour activity is immediately immersed
into a network of cooperation. The labour of the individual can be
valorized – but also realized simply on the market – only when it
cooperates with other singularities that participate in the fabric of
production. By way of generalization, we call this active community a
‘multitude’, in other words a set of cooperating singularities, and we
note that the multitude becomes productive when such a condition
of cooperation is realized.
Hence the observation that the constitution of the multitude in
production takes place in a very complex way. In fact in this coop-
eration each singularity reappropriates for itself a specific portion of
fixed capital, but this reappropriation can become productive only
when it is immersed within the structure of social cooperation.
So what is this claim to a quantum of appropriation that the sub-
ject, once immersed in social production, can express? We recall a
controversy of decades ago between Kelsen and Pašukanis,11 when
Kelsen, interpreting the latter, accused him of considering all law to
be private law. Indeed, Pašukanis was still assuming that possessive

individualism was the basis of the entire legal structure of society,
starting from private law, and therefore in his view sovereignty was
a projection of private property just as much as private property was
a condition of sovereignty. But it is clear that, insofar as Pašukanis
was living the political reality of a nascent socialism, these relations
acquired in his eyes the urgency to find, in the labour of the individ-
ual citizen and through the demand for private property, the need for
the common. As for us, when we express a desire for ownership, we
have in mind the financial structures and the concept of private prop-
erty as they stand today; all we do is express the need to be together,
to produce together. And it is with this sense that we probably need
to get back to Harrington and Winstanley.
When finance constitutes the totality of social labour – insofar as
the latter is given as relational continuity in the time and space of a
mobile, flexible and precarious labour – the request of ownership
claims for labour a value that consists in its socialization.
It should be noted here that, in affirming this changeable relation-
ship between labour and property in the formation of the concept of
the common and in the establishment of an ontology of the common,
I exclude any totalizing figure, any medievalizing nostalgia for prop-
erty, be it private or public – but also common. It is labour that
creates and modifies property. Therefore property cannot be given
as a substantial concept any more, nor can the relationship between
labour and property be fantasized as Gemeinschaft (just as, from this
perspective, there is no place for concepts such as mass, people,
nation, etc.).
So here the paradox of private property clashes with the reality
of the common: a common that not only defines, like before, the
dynamics of the forces of production, of the productive singularities
immersed in the social relationship, but also represents that same
process and renders it institutional from a monetary point of view.
There is therefore, so to speak, a ‘bad’ ontology of the common that
can manifest itself as a monetary function of property, as an anomic
massification of labour, and as a populist identity of subjectivities;
but there is also (and this begins to strengthen in people’s awareness)
a ‘good’ figure of the common, one that manifests itself as a desire for
multitudinous cooperation among the singularities employed in the
production process, of democratization from below of the activities of
government, and of new constitutions of communal living.
It seems to me that the conclusions we have reached can be (easily)
translated into those reached by Rodotà. We both believe, I would
say, that the subject lays claim to the collective and to solidarity; and
we both see the collective as being composed of singularities (not a
mass or a flattening of differences, but a multitude or a composition
of differences). If the common does not want to be organic, if it does
not want to take on an identitarian essence, it needs to be desired as
a way out of solitude, as a way to produce in cooperation and to exist
in equality and solidarity. The right to have rights and to realize them
takes root, and it has its source here.
In this respect I can return to the quotation from Marx with which
I began, once again recognizing the power of its revolutionary intel-
ligence. In fact I can say now that labour, transformed via labour,
has become the foundation not of the affirmation of private property
but of its abolition, and of having deprived it of the capacity to be a
creative source of itself. The elimination of individualized and massi-
fied labour in favour of social and cooperative singularization entirely
changes the reality of the organization of work. It will be my task to
advance on this social terrain in order to bring to light the definitive
emptying-out of the powers linked to private property.
Part III
Discussions
8
What Are We Willing to Share?
Reflections on a Concept of the Common in the
Interregnum We Are Living*
Some time ago I was invited to a conference in which I was asked the
question: ‘What are we willing to share?’ I was not able to attend the
conference, but the question kept going round in my head. Here are
some notes that I had written to open a discussion on the ethics of
‘sharing’ – a very fashionable topic today. Such is its fault – and yet it
is a discussion that opens to further questions under the influence of
technological development itself.
What are we willing to share? With a touch of irony we could say
that this is a question that invites either reticence or hypocrisy. In
today’s realities, what can we share, what do we want to share, for
instance with migrants? St Francis of Assisi offers us direct action,
fraternal help or, better, giving (some of this resonates today in Pope
Francis). And there is more. St Francis also claims that there is joy
in giving, in giving oneself. The outcome? Everyone quotes him
and is moved, yet nothing happens. But what happens if we take a
secular position and say – without complacency but with a sense of
responsibility – that we are willing to transfer a percentage of public
welfare to refugees, or to help the poor here, chez nous, by offering
communities of volunteers and some means of subsistence? In short,
if we are willing to share – not very Christian, this – only the surplus?
Is there a real sense of sharing in such behaviour? Or isn’t this kind
of sharing yet another opportunist and formal disposition? An initial
response is required to these questions: under what conditions is it
* First published as ‘Che cosa siamo disposti a condividere?’ in Nikolai Blaumer,

Johannes Ebert, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann and Andreas Ströhl, Teilen und Tauschen,
Frankfurt: Fischer, 2017, pp. 290–310. The bracketed paragraphs are the
author’s later additions.
116 Discussions
possible to share? Second, nowadays there is a lot of rhetoric around

vulnerability and individual suffering. These are things that require
care and sharing.* That may be so. But once you move out of the
noise of box-ticking and neutralizing emotion, what does this mean?
Care and sharing according to what criteria? For whom and in which
direction? Put in these terms, the question again seems to be char-
acterized by a high dose of insincerity. In my opinion the question
becomes relevant only if it is put not in moral, individualistic terms
but rather in ethical terms, which can claim some generality; if we
interrogate not just benevolent singularities or minorities disposed
towards emotional empathy and its derivatives, but a collectivity that
is willing to produce through sharing; and if the question is addressed
to the majority of men and women. The matter will then be one of
sharing democratically, that is, according to the rule of negotiating
the distribution of wealth – as when they made the Magna Carta;
but in this case it would not be established between barons and city
guilds but between the poachers and artisans of the ‘forest’–suburb
[banlieu] of Sherwood.†
But let’s leave aside historical antecedents and turn to ourselves. I
would like to proceed carefully, looking at earlier positions that have
been expressed in this discussion. Max Weber makes a reasonable
distinction, according to which any ethics-oriented activity can be
brought under two divergent principles, in fact mutually incompat-
ible; and this depends on whether the activity in question is oriented
towards an ethics of responsibility or towards an ethics of conviction.
Faced with this oppositional definition, classic and yet falsely neutral
in the bourgeois world, I am rather in agreement with the bourgeois
realism of good old Hegel, who thought of the transition from a
morality of conviction (of love) to an ethics of responsibility not as
a linear opposition but as a necessary gap in a logic that, by ascend-
ing to the universal, to the normative foundation, makes sure (in his
view) that civil society itself exists and consists.
[As he illustrates the actions of the woman, the mother, the mater
familias – agents of social actions (care, sharing) that he properly
recognized as expressions of love – Hegel in fact adds a very char-
acteristic argument in developing a suspension – Aufhebung – of the
morality of conviction. The community creates its own subsistence
* ‘care’ and ‘sharing’ in English in the original, here and passim.

† Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire has historical associations with Robin
Hood and royalty (here amalgamated with the urban notion of suburb).
What Are We Willing to Share? 117
only by destroying family bliss and by dissolving its own conscious-

ness into that of a universal self. Along this road, it turns general
femininity into an internal enemy, on account of what femininity
represses (which is also essential to it). In the plot, this feminin-
ity – eternal irony of the community – alters the universal end of
government by making it private and perverts the universal prop-
erty of the state by making it a possession, a family ornament. And
now that I have underlined the scandalous and infamous irrelevance
with which women are evaluated in the metaphysics of the highest
philosophical representative of the bourgeoisie, let us return to our
argument: according to Hegel, sharing cannot but be regulated from
above, which is where conviction and responsibility can be trans-
lated and based on historically validated and state-guaranteed norms
and institutions. This ‘Hegelian way’ turned out to be fundamental
much more than the ‘Franciscan way’ (or the ‘Weberian way’, that
of responsibility), and was normalized in the praxis of modern bour-
geois thought. But now that ethics has been invalidated in the crisis,
or rather has been overwhelmed by a ferocious implosion after its
nineteenth-century apogee. One could speak here of an ‘irony of his-
tory’ much more properly than Hegel did.]
It is then useful to show how much, in this critical implosion of
modernity, sharing has lost its individual–relational characteristics
and acquired rather relational–collective dimensions. Without over-
stating this transition, I should note that ‘sharing’ is now combined
with ‘production’ when, in the transition from modernity to post-
modernity, from the industrial to the post-industrial, the disciplinary
(sharing) regime is replaced by sharing as a productive dispositif,
according to which free subjectivities are prepared for collective pro-
duction. In this they are controlled from above – when ‘above’ no
longer means the authority of the state but the necessity of the market.
Returning now to morality in this new situation, I wonder whether
the problem should not be raised in a radically different way today by
comparison with the good old days: we should perhaps recognize that
those classic solutions falter – when they are not plainly invalidated
by a new way of reasoning, according to common sense. And we
should also appeal to new technological reasons. Actually the invita-
tions to care and sharing seem to me to be – disguisedly, equivocally
– symptoms that reveal this uncertainty. Moving beyond those older
positions, I would now like to ask how it is possible to introduce a
new ethical order when the rules of ancient morality are generally
disregarded and, when it comes to sharing, every form of distributive
justice (which those rules presuppose) has disintegrated. In fact we
118 Discussions
have to assume now the crisis of any definition of morality in the face
of the current state of social life, in triumphant neoliberalism, and
in the face of the decline of all traditional community loyalty. The
market has won and ethics is subordinated to it. How is it possible to
‘share’, when any other act, being devoid of an ethical norm, has lost
the capacity to be immediately referred to a responsible subject and is
subjected to a heteronomous relationship, to a command that is often
illogical, to a social ontology that is called ‘market’? How is it pos-
sible to ‘share’, when the moral will that demands of us to conform
to the norm and asks itself about its own value, therefore requiring
an ethical foundation, fails to orient its intentionality? Doesn’t the
moral will itself dissolve? This is what happens today: insecurity
and fear. Regimes of coexistence and affective regimes are immedi-
ately subjected to market rules; thus they become more and more
alienated and alienating. If selfishness is preached as a virtue of the
market, the transition from morality to ethics is, so to speak, blocked.
Whatever the form of the norm – whether it’s placed in the regime of
conviction, in that of responsibility, or in that of state command (of
biopower, we can say today, since we are convinced that Hegel’s nor-
mative vulgate can be reduced, mutatis mutandis, to that concept) – in
the face of a fragile and in any case heteronomous ethical perspective,
then, all that remains is to take refuge in an individualistic morality
of uncertain character. We are forced to behave with extreme selfish-
ness, as if we had to face a condition of savage rarity – a condition in
which one is allowed to let the other die in order to save oneself.
[This is the condition of acosmism, of passion against the other (as
if the other did not constitute the cosmos) that Arendt denounces
and posits as a possible base of all totalitarianism. In a beautiful book
– Un monde commun1 – Étienne Tassin sees this condition affirming
itself in the multiple forms of violence that determine social exclu-
sion. Balibar thinks that this same condition is capable of producing
a tendential division between ‘zones of life’ (of a good life) and ‘zones
of death’ (most often a dirty death).]
Thus we touch on the intolerability of the current condition. The
question ‘what are we willing to share?’ has to be readdressed at this
level. There is no point in complaining about its brutality. Sometimes
– to qualify it – there is talk of a revival* of the state of nature. Always
the same story! But this reference is crude and illusory, since brutal-
ity, violence and exclusion have now increased out of all proportion:
* ‘revival’ in English in the original.

they are given as part of the biopolitical fabric of a collective existence

constructed by capitalist industry, and their effects are as profound
and extensive as the capitalist invasion of bios. To put it differently:
in relation to the state of nature, violence is incommensurable today,
because here forms of life and production are built – and, especially,
are perverted – that have already become collective and need to be
ethically and politically recognized for what they are; but they are not
and cannot be.
[Saskia Sassen protests against the ignorance of this condition in
her Expulsions, after documenting the most terrible cases of ‘expul-
sions’ from homes, communities and nations, the violence of the
North against the South and of the rich against the poor, the effects
of technologies and the pathologies of financialization during the
never-ending crisis that started in 2008. And she asks that all this be
conceptualized, in other words no longer hidden – in short, that it be
addressed as a problem in the social sciences. According to her, the
spaces of those who have been expelled demand conceptual recogni-
tion. From a conceptual point of view, these spaces are underground
sites that need to be brought back to the surface. But these are also,
in principle, spaces full of potential for creating local economies, new
stories, new ways of sharing.2]
Let’s return to ourselves. The dissolution of morality as an indi-
vidual determination of good and evil, according to a transcendental
rule, and the emergence of an intractable egoism make it necessary
not only to resist but, if possible, to restore a path between moral sin-
gularity and collective ethics. I think we can begin to do this by asking
ourselves what is the collective today. Formally, the transition from
an individualist morality to ethics implies in any case the construction
of a societas, of a being together – whether weak or strong – and thus
leads to the idea of a community, of a collective. It is this collective
that is in question right now. The crisis of individualist morality and
its weakened transfiguration into ethics have in reality thrown into
doubt the very idea of collectivity.
In an attempt to deepen the critical perception of the collective, I
would like first to reconsider the mode of production – the figure in
which human beings produce their lives and means of survival. We
know that today such a mode of production can be called biopo-
litical. In it, cognitive work, relational activities and productive
cooperation have by now acquired clear prevalence over the forms
of the old mode of production, where massified material labour was
hegemonic. Those forms of command defined themselves through
confrontation with that hegemony, by implanting themselves into
120 Discussions
that ontology. Now, conversely, the productive collective appears

rather in multitudinous forms, as a set of singularities that com-
municate through networks and put their brains to work. They base
themselves on a common productive substratum, on a commons*
of knowledge and cooperation. To analyse processes of production
today – bearing in mind that they are qualified in biopolitical terms
– means becoming aware that it is not the massified individual who
constitutes the productive collective, as was the case in industrialism,
but the singularities in the network that recognize the collective, and
recognize it as a common network rather than as a mass. Thus the
‘collective’ is founded on the ‘common’ – on a common that it con-
tinually produces and reproduces, a common that reveals itself in this
way as the substantive foundation of the collective. And here it could
be helpful to point out that, from 1968, this transformation began to
be recognized in the development of (democratic) public opinion,
too, and with increasing visibility after the rise of the movements
in 2011. These are no longer masses or a collective hypostatized en
masse; they are subjectivities that recognize that they are founded in
communication, in the network, in making themselves common and
that, by moving as just such subjectivities, build fields of social valori-
zation and constituent political movements.
[Powers of cooperation constitute ‘the sense of the social’ [le sens du
social], argues Franck Fischbach in a book of this title. And he urges
us to go further and realize that in modernity work is more than the
vector of the common (and not its gravedigger): it is the kind of entity
that grants the common its specifically democratic form. Democratic
capacity is inherent in work insofar as it essential to it – insofar as it
is the political expression of this ‘granting’ property. This would be
its cooperative dimension. Thus work is intrinsically political, and a
politics intrinsic to work has an essentially democratic form.3]
A change in ethics certainly follows from this. Let us start by look-
ing at it phenomenologically, without taking sides. We have been
living for some time in a condition in which every moral problem
unfolds socially. This, as we have seen, happens because the capital-
ist production of society and of life has become biopolitical, in other
words has invested the social subjects, determining a totalization of
domination that leaves no other space. We can recognize this produc-
tion from the point of view of both power and the subjects. We know
of course that in any case life, bios, is always marked by the dualism
* ‘commons’ in English in the original.

of commanding and resisting – even in the case of the real subsump-

tion of society under capital. But let us not insist on this now. Let
us consider rather that, on both these sides, there is a qualification
of the collective that seems to have homogeneous aspects, at least
at first sight. Whatever the point of view – capitalist or antagonist
(working-class, social, etc.) – it seems clear that, in order to define
the ‘I’, we must descend from the ‘we’, in other words that the social
‘we’ precedes the individual ‘I’. To put it in the language of modern
philosophy, in order to define itself, morality gets now displaced onto
the terrain of ethics. In today’s political and cultural crisis, in this
interregnum that marks the transition between industrial and post-
industrial and thus between various historical eras and civil cultures
(a feature that should not be underestimated), we probably witness a
breakdown of individual moralities (even if associative) in favour of
new forms of ‘making common’. In short, we witness a translation of
sharing* (and distributive justice) into communing† (and participa-
tory justice). As for the commutative justice of the markets, let’s put
it aside for now, because it is ungraspable in its financial incommen-
surability and seems capable of producing only social catastrophes.
Beyond distributive justice, a participatory justice is therefore pro-
posed, one articulated between singularity and communing. In this
light, citizenship is communing, and this implies a radical new form
of ethics.
[It is, however, tragic that the more the humanitarian reason [la
raison humanitaire]4 develops and a new moral economy asserts itself
in NGOs and in the voluntary sector, the more the ambiguity of all
the forms of solidarity that exist in the capitalist world comes to the
surface. Of course, as Fassin tells us, the tension between inequality
and solidarity, between relations of domination and relations of assis-
tance, is constitutive of all humanitarian governance, but the problem
is not there; the problem is that the exchange is profoundly unequal.
The people targeted – the subjects of this humanitarian attention –
are well aware that they are expected to display the humility of the
obligee rather than the stance of a person who has full rights.]
Second, let us return to multitudinous singularities and their
mode of production via cooperation and cognitive power. This
means returning to the antagonistic point of view in the biopolitical
* ‘sharing’ in English in the original.

† ‘communing’ in English on the original (here and in all subsequent occurrences
in this chapter).
122 Discussions
(capital) relationship, and therefore to the ‘two’ of the class struggle.

It seems to me that, when the mode of production is considered in
this light, it must be recognized that it shakes and can sow crisis at
all the levels [paliers] of liberal civilization and capitalist structure of
society – by which I mean private property and the market, corpo-
rate organizations and political representation. These institutions are
closely linked: there is no market without private property and no
political representation without multiple social coalitions of inter-
est, corporations, parties, lobbying agencies and so on. Changing
the combinations does not change the result. The crisis that these
institutions are undergoing today is profound and chaotic. And if
the transition to new forms of sociality, to communing, is given in
an out-of-phase and dramatic manner, that is, within a long interreg-
num – if, as has already been said, the suffering of the individual and
the non-suffering of the other, coupled with violence against oneself
and the other, arise again in this unfinished transition, and the forces
of implosion and exclusion become predominant – this means that
the ethics of conviction, of responsibility or of authority, the ethics
based on individualism, has not survived the transition. In this crisis,
the desire for sharing and its spontaneous practices become confused
and lose all sense of orientation. The moral propensity to move from
the ‘I’ to reach the ‘we’ lacks a real foundation. That foundation
resides only in the moral perception of a ‘we’. We have to reverse
the path of liberal individualism and to project its crisis onto a larger
screen, looking at it as a deficiency of individualism in relation to the
affirmation of the common.
The fact is that there are two ways of naming the collective and
recognizing its ontology. Let us start from the simplest form of collec-
tive: the collective in production. Now, our cognitive experience and
our moral question (at the extremes of that interregnum whose chaos
we suffer but whose new diameter is known to us) mainly capture the
form of the collective that is linked to industrialism. Why? Because in
the crisis of industrialism and in the phenomena of globalization that
are connected to it we can take into account the suffering and dis
orientation of that immense majority – the people who work in order
to live and who suffer the command of capitalism and the huge and
intolerable injustices of the global market. Well, the industrial col-
lectivity has a history that begins with the completion of the primitive
accumulation of capital, is confirmed in manufacturing, and develops
along the entire period of big industry (we can use this useful Marxian
terminology in describing this development). This story is therefore
that of capitalist accumulation of surplus value and exploitation of a
massified workforce. The mass: this is the fundamental characteris-

tic, the essence of the collective as we knew it during the long age of
industry. In this collective, individuals worked in proximity to other
individuals, all being combined and put to work by objective powers,
massified as equivalent agents of a task whose objectives were not set
by them but that was commanded to them. It was a workforce that
became a statistical whole, subsumed under capital. At the other
pole of this critical arc I’m describing, at the level of that future to
which the interregnum opens up, there is the multitudinous com-
bination of singularities put to work. Here the productive collective
is no longer a mass but a multitude. Here the one is not equivalent
to the other but is singularly active. The one is defined by the other
in an active relationship; the other by the others (each of whom is a
singularity) in a common network in which they are composed and
recomposed. Singularities (plural) and collective (singular) are mutu-
ally constructed: what can be seen here is a common collective. While
in the massified collective the transition ran from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’,
from individual morality to an abstract and repressive ethics, which
crushes individuality into the flatness of equivalence, the multitudi-
nous collective has nothing to do with arithmetic equivalence. It is a
dynamic principle open to a concrete universality.
[This in no way means that this second figure of the collective is
free from capitalist exploitation. In the so-called sharing economy, the
collective use of goods does not seem to be able to change life. And
in reality nothing changes. The common of Uber or Airbnb does not
transform individual consumption into an economy of shared experi-
ences, but renews individualistic egoism by multiplying it and further
commercializes the time of sociality. So this means that exploitation
can now be exercised in a manner that suits a new subject and a new
form of productive association; that this subject will be characterized
by a high autonomy, not collective but corporate; and, finally, that,
for this reason, the violence of the capitalist relation becomes enor-
mous and is perceived by the subject as intolerable.]
The radical difference that affects the concept and practices of
sharing emerges with great clarity from this. In the massified collec-
tive, sharing is an exchange between individuals, a re-editing of the
market, where individuals act according to interests (i.e. according
to egotism). Here the sharing follows the opportunist characteristics
that we have seen to create a crisis in individualist ethics. Here the
‘I’ acts as a prince, only to suffer the repercussions of a ‘we’ that is
uncertain, if not unreachable. On the other hand, when we move
to the terrain of the common collective, the possibility of building
124 Discussions
an ethics of sharing opens up to us. It is good, then, to recognize

sharing in our existence and reciprocity in our being both products
and producers of life. This well-being is continually rebuilt through
our acting together; its value comes from our common production.
Distributive justice no longer starts from the retracing of social strati-
fications (and from the quest for a balance among them); it is based
on a common that produces and is produced by social development
and that determines the conditions for participatory action. On this
terrain, the distribution of goods is interpreted according to a schema
of active and democratic equality.
[We should say that the word ‘participation’ should probably not
be adopted here, because in the last decades it has been compro-
mised in many utopian and mystifying experiences. Participation
cannot be reduced, as has often happened, to a peripheral and sub-
ordinate addition to the administrative or productive machinery; it
must be radical and ontologically constitutive from the perspective of
the common. The collective is produced here as a political action of
the ‘we’, in other words of ‘doing together’, of the construction and
revelation of the common.]
In this context there are important experiences of sharing that take
place in the digital arena. They are associated with activities such as
Wikipedia or Free Software, for example, but can also be observed
in other recent areas, which see experiences of sharing specialized
knowledge, of producing money and cooperation in banking, and so
on in addition to sharing cars, apartments and suchlike. Particularly
interesting is the project of (productive) sharing cooperatives pro-
posed by Trebor Scholz. Alongside those sophisticated activities,
there are millions of cooperative sharing experiences that range from
the cultivation of marijuana in social centres to the rebuilding of
companies that have fallen into bankruptcy and are left out of the
market. This is the realm of ‘minorities’ – what Guattari and Deleuze
indicated as a ‘place of ethicity’. The problem is obviously one of
transforming these places of minor surplus into major surpluses of
productive and political power [potenza].
As we have seen, from the division between forms of the collective
that has been drawn here it does not follow that the second model of
collective can be represented as a subject removed from exploitation
or, more generally, that it can be given as an autonomous power, free
of the negative. Too often, however, dominant opinion reacts to any
forefronting of open possibilities, of pulsating virtualities, of trends in
the making by caricaturing these claims as miraculous and by asking
for their ‘realistic’ (sic!) reduction (in no way caricatural). This is
neither more nor less than an attempt to suppress those powers of the
real, as if they were reduced and marginal forms of experience, and to
confirm the insurmountable consistency and insurmountable form of
the exploitation of every collective at work. Well, leaving aside those
insulting reductions, I, too, refused to grant here, deceptively, an
autonomous consistency to the cooperative collective that emerges
in the new mode of production, or to establish the independence of
these subjectivities. No: this new collective, too, exists in a historical
situation that is characterized by the totalization of capitalist com-
mand. It therefore undergoes the latter’s determinations. But at the
same time we have to say that, while a certain homogeneity emerges
between the two types of collective in the current historical cycle – in
the interregnum, in the temporal tension in which they are placed
– there exist nevertheless virtualities of rupture of all convergence
and of departures in the directions of development. So each time
the power relationship (concretized in command over production)
is modified – in the struggles that constantly traverse the capital
relation – the dual consistency of the collective (which is currently
subordinated but virtually reactive) could either be transformed by
and incorporated into the violent mutation of capital (and the ten-
dential autonomy of cooperation could be consequently destroyed)
or be qualified by the social struggles of class liberation each time the
power relationship goes in the opposite direction – and this would
determine the cancellation of the massified model of cooperation
and of the domination of capitalist exploitation. These conditions of
rupture have exploded and these powers of the ‘second’, the ‘other’,
the ‘double power’ – that of the class struggle – have been historically
realized at other times in the development of capitalist accumulation,
in other cases of exploitation and in other figures of resistance. This
is what happened in the initial phases of the great revolutions of the
Short Century.
[In the succession of struggles against the post-2011 crises, at the
height of that condition of interregnum that we were living through,
the transition to communing has manifested itself very powerfully.
From many quarters there came a call to reread distributive justice as
participatory justice, or rather to attribute to the constitutive dynamics
of distributive justice a dispositif that might recompose the singular-
ity and the common. Here the anthropological and ethnographic
exploration of the indigenous common has played an important role.
The concept of living well [buen vivir] – when we remove it from the
alienating publicity that has invested it and bring it back to the heart
of indigenous cultural experiences, when we liberate it from the form
126 Discussions
of a welfare for indigenous people (and thus from being subjected to

the misery of financial regulation) – seems very much to represent
one of the faces of communing.]
But, when framed this way, our argument still seems to configure a
utopian horizon – even when ‘utopia’ designates a rational dispositif
that, traversing the real, opens to the future – rather than a material
index of new ethical behaviours. So let us now return to ourselves,
to the questions I asked at the beginning of this lecture. What, then,
are we willing to share? Bearing in mind the elements we know out-
lined here, this is clearly a question of ‘sharing life’. So let us ask
ourselves once more the core question: what does sharing mean,
when it comes to refugees? What does sharing mean in the face of the
enormous increase in the precariat, in its poverty and in its powerless
power? What is required today is not an act of conviction (or love)
or of Weberian responsibility; rather we need to go beyond these two
forms of ethics of associated life, denouncing their ineffectiveness and
hypocrisy. We cannot continue to play off abstract terminological
opposites and mystify the choice in a game that necessarily ends up
being opportunist. Here sharing means recognizing everybody’s right
to life – not out of love or as an act of responsibility, and not because
we are commanded to do so, but simply because life, along with pro-
ducing, is a common thing. The right of refugees to cross borders and
become citizens and that of precarious workers to become workers is
established within this common. Any other choice, whether made out
of conviction or responsibility, out of love or reason, is a choice that
amounts to ‘not letting live’; and this can end up in ‘making people
die’. It is within these dimensions that the theme of sharing needs to
be addressed today.
It is reasonable to recognize that sharing life with others and put-
ting it in common is the only basis on which one can live an ethical
life. But this recognition is also tragic because, while making people
die has become trivial, living together and sharing without market
and hypocrisy – in short, realizing the common – is too often viewed
as irresponsible and not the thing to do, a ‘bad thing’, if not actually
a crime. In this situation it is right and urgent to rebel!
9
The Metaphysics of the Common*
Present Times
The new book by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval deals with the
theme of ‘the common’. It details meticulously the theoretical paths
that have characterized the topic. But it limits reflection to a terrain
where there is no room for a critique of the real forms of exploitation
and private expropriation of collectively produced wealth.
After Marx, prénom Karl,† Dardot and Laval offer us a ‘Proudhon,
prénom Pierre-Joseph’. In Italy such a title would be enough to
guarantee the book’s failure; it would recall the reactionary opera-
tion carried out in the 1970s by Pellicani and Coen (among others)
in Mondo Operaio, under the inspiration of Craxi. But this book is
certainly not like that. It introduces the debate on the common in
France, and hopefully reopens it in Europe. So let’s turn to the book.
While the book on Marx was characterized by a resolute detele-
ologization of socialism (I mean, a reasoned critique of any socialist
theory that wanted to encapsulate the final project and force of com-
munist liberation within capitalist development), this second book‡
is characterized by a resolute dematerialization of the concept of
socialism. Such is the operation developed in this ‘essay on revolu-
tion’: it is a real liquidation of historical materialism, of the Marxist
* First published as ‘La metafisica del comune’, Il Manifesto, 6 May 2014, p. 8.

† Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, prénom Karl, Paris: Gallimard, 2012.
‡ Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, On Revolution in the 21st Century, London:
Bloomsbury, 2019.
128 Discussions
critique of the political economy of mature capitalism, in the name of

a new ‘principle’. Common: not ‘commons’, not ‘the’ common, but
‘common’, as a principle that animates both the collective activity
of individuals in the construction of wealth and life and the self-
government of these activities.
To achieve such liquidation, a precise framework of ideas is pre-
sented and discussed. The point of departure is the priority of the
common as a principle of transformation of the social. This priority
is asserted before establishing the opposition of a new right of use
to the right of property. Next, the authors state that the common is
the principle of liberation of work and that common enterprise and
association must prevail in the sphere of the economy. They also talk
about the need to re-establish social democracy, the need to trans-
form public services into an ‘institution’ of the common and the need
to form or ‘invent’ a ‘global federation of commons worldwide’.
An idealistic vision
This political clarification of the principle of the common is preceded

by a long work of critical and constructive analysis that develops
in two stages. The first stage, ‘The Emergence of the Common’,
reconstructs the historical context that has seen the affirmation of
the new principle of the common and critiques the limits of concep-
tions offered in recent years by economists, philosophers and jurists
as well as by activists. The second part, ‘Law and the Institution of
the Common’, seeks to re-establish the concept of the common more
directly by placing it on the terrain of law and institution. The book,
which is the outcome of the seminar ‘Du public au commun’ (amply
and contradictorily developed at the Collège international de philos-
ophie from 2011 to 2013), deepens the idea of the common mainly
by reference to the current of associationist socialism, which goes
back from Proudhon to Jean Jaurès and Maxim Leroy, then forward
to Mauss and Gurvitch, and finally to the late Castoriadis of The
Imaginary Institution of Society, without ever escaping the attempt to
absorb some traits of Marxian thought into this ‘idealistic’ develop-
ment of the project of a future socialism. The effect produced by the
critique and reconstruction of the concept of the common, as can-
vassed in this book, is unavoidably idealistic because, continuing the
theme of Proudhon against Marx, the correct and increasingly effec-
tive break with any telos of socialism is followed by a no less obsessive
dematerialization of the concept of capital and of the context of the
The Metaphysics of the Common 129
class struggle – so that by the end of the book it is no longer clear how
the common is to be claimed, where the subjects who build it are to
be found, or what figures in the development of capital constitute its
background.
An icy wind blows across this idealist scenario – a strong pessimism,
almost a resigned realization that the production of subjectivity on
the capitalist side is materially implacable and historically irresistible.
Before us lie the subjugation of the workers and the internalization of
command, which is increasingly harsh in the age of cognitive capital
– as the current science of management* would have it and as the new
suffering experienced by the workers themselves bears witness (with
the aid of labour psychology). So how can we define the ‘common’?
As a community of shared suffering? Or a god who has to save us?
In my view, in order to re-establish the concept of the common, we
should begin by following a path similar to that followed by Dardot
and Laval. The critique they offer of the notion of ‘common’ in its
theological, juridical and ecological figures – in sum, in all its forms
of objectification or reification, which tirelessly repeat themselves in
this respect – and also of the philosophical notion, which tends to
trivialize the ‘common’ into a ‘universal’, is correct. A true concept of
‘common’ can be arrived at only through a conscious political praxis
and must therefore consist of an instituting process [processo istitu-
ente], of a dispositif of institutions of the common. The common
has its origin not in objects or metaphysical conditions but only in
activity.
Beyond the tragedy of the commons
In this context, Dardot and Laval’s critique of Elinor Ostrom’s ecol-

ogy of the commons† is undoubtedly masterful, because it clarifies
the liberal and individualistic nature of that ecology: a system of
norms is set in order to deal with the ‘tragedy of the commons’, in
other words to safeguard the accessibility and preservation of the
commons on the capitalist side, as ‘natural assets’. But if one follows
the path indicated by Dardot and Laval, one soon reaches a junction,
which opens up when one realizes that the common is not simply
the product of generic (anthropological and sociological) activity but
* ‘management’ in English in the original.

† ‘commons’ in English in the original (here and next).
130 Discussions
the outcome of productive activity. Here the confrontation with Marx

becomes inevitable and decisive.
And yet Dardot and Laval seem overwhelmed by the complexity
of the question. On the one hand, their radically desubstantializing
(idealist?) hypothesis of the common pushes them to underestimate
the same ‘social’ dimension of the common as the one proposed by
Proudhon; on the other hand, it makes them accuse the Marxists who
have tackled the theme of the common (taking into account the new
‘social’ nature of exploitation) of being ‘unconsciously’ Proudhonists.
Let us examine a few points that might take us beyond this confu-
sion. It is obvious to all (and undoubtedly also to Dardot and Laval)
that capitalist development has reached a level of ‘abstraction’ (in
the Marxian sense of the definition of value) and therefore a capacity
for exploitation that extends over the whole of society. Within this
dimension of exploitation a sort of perverse common is being built:
that of an exploitation that is exercised over and against the whole of
society, over the whole of life. Capital has become a global biopower.
To Dardot and Laval, awareness of this global reach and invasiveness
of biopower, or rather of the power of the perverse common, recalls
the arguments of the critique of teleology denounced in Marxist
socialism, as if the fact of biopower constituted a new teleological
drift. But can the correct underlining of Marxian limits to the dia-
lectical analysis of capitalist development perhaps erase the current
dimensions of capitalist biopower, or perhaps make us forget them?
Dardot and Laval’s critique of David Harvey’s exploitation by
dispossession and of all the neo-Marxist analyses that have glimpsed,
in the Marxian model of original accumulation, analogies with what
happens now at the global level – namely an extractive exploitation
– is equivocal because it denies the problem while criticizing its solu-
tion. And all the more as this critique totally ignores the function of
finance capital (or the productive function of money, interest and
rent) when it accuses other Marxist authors – authors concerned with
the recomposition of rent as an instrument of exploitation and as a
new figure of profit – of having reduced profit, à la Proudhon, to the
‘theft’ of a substantialized, common ‘thing’.
A theft of surplus labour
Here, in developing their critique, Dardot and Laval seem to forget

the most basic features of Marxian thought – especially that capital
is not an independent essence, a Leviathan, but a production-based
The Metaphysics of the Common 131
relationship of exploitation and that, in the current condition, finan-

cial capital invests a world of production that is socially organized,
accumulating in the extractions of surplus value both the direct
exploitation of working-class labour along with the expropriation
of natural assets, territories and structures of the welfare state, and
the indirect extraction of social surplus value through the exercise
of monetary domination. If you want to call all this ‘theft’, I would
not be scandalized: using this word doesn’t make you a Proudhonist,
as long as you give it the meaning that capital gives it today, namely
a mode of accumulation directly grafted onto the new forms of the
labour process and its socialization – both in the individual dimen-
sion and in its associative figure. When Marx says that the capitalist
appropriates the excess of value that cooperation between two or
more workers brings about, he certainly does not deny that at the
same time capital has also appropriated the surplus labour of individ-
ual workers. Here ‘theft’ includes the exploitation of surplus labour
and renders capital even more indecent than it has always been in
developing production.
In Dardot and Laval’s Marx one sensed a touch of Foucault (I
mean, of a historical approach that pays attention to agent subjectivi-
ties). But now this streak has faded away – and in doing so it has also
removed the fruit, which was a lively and dynamic look at the history
of capitalism. Here, in the absence of a historically reflexive method-
ology, lies beyond doubt a Durkheimian – perhaps even categorial
and Kantian – approach to capitalist development. Capital appears
to be a timeless and all-powerful machine. Real subsumption is not
seen as the conclusion of a historical process but only as a figure in
the process of enlarged reproduction of capital.
Without class and capital
Alongside this, however, a certain historicity is reintroduced when the

two authors discuss, in a historically extensive manner, the destructive
and ever more real efficacy of the capitalist production of, and on, the
subjectivities at work. Class struggle would no longer exist. This seems
to be the final hypothesis in a conception that began by excluding the
class struggle – understood in Marx’s sense – from the constitution
of the concept of capital. It appears that the dematerialization of the
common, so heavy-handedly carried out, and the exclusive definition
of the common as ‘action’, as a principle of activity, correspond-
ingly imply the dematerialization of the class struggle, as if even the
132 Discussions
excessive insistence on a capitalist production of labour subjectivities

internally subjected to command implied the negation of productive
subjectivity as such.
But without productive subjectivity there is not even a concept of
capital. So, in the end, in the face of the historical change of exploi-
tation (which is here misunderstood), in the face of capital’s being
defined more and more as ‘social power’ (which is here denied), in
the face of such an extensive emergence of the common, imposed
by the creation of a new mode of production (and it should be noted
that this emergence has already brought about new forms of labour
process) – in the face of all this we forget that only living labour is
productive, that only subjectivity is resistant, that cooperation alone
is powerful, and that, in consequence, the common is not simply
‘activity’, but an activity that produces wealth and life and transforms
labour. The common is not an ideal (although it may be that, too)
but it is the very form in which the class struggle is defined today. I
have a question for Dardot and Laval: if today the common is not a
desire implanted in the critique of productive activity, and if it shines
only before our consciousness numbed by the violent penetration of
biopower, if it is simply a ‘principle’ – what is there that incites us
to struggle? Dardot and Laval seem to reply that the principle of the
common is a category of activity, of the institution – it is not based on
the real but founds the real – it cannot be conquered but eventually
you administer it (they argue for this at length, and the concept will
be taken up elsewhere). So why struggle?
But, beyond any criticism, this is a book that reopens the debate on
the common, and no one will be surprised that it has also reopened
the debate on communism.
May 2014
10
The Revolution Will Not Be an
Explosion Somewhere down the
Road
An Interview with Antonio Negri*
Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason E. Smith
fillippo del lucchese and jason e. smith For some years now,
your most important works have been written with Michael Hardt,
and his contribution has become increasingly clear, especially in
your most recent book, Commonwealth.1 This evolution is even
more evident for those who know your prior work, marked as it is
by a thought and a form of writing that are highly original and by a
style that emerges through your political and cultural experiences.
How do you work together, and what are the most important
elements that result from this encounter?
antonio negri Our way of working is well known. We have long
discussions, and we develop schemas together, after which the
work is divided up. After having written our respective parts, we
revise them together. The final version is written in Italian or in
English and translated as we proceed. The mechanism therefore
involves a continuous ‘collusion’ of arguments and manners of
expression.
Being the oldest, I am probably the one who was most involved
in the beginning. But the process has become increasingly equal
between us. There is no doubt that a certain argumentative style –
rather American – is typical of Michael and his character. He does
not like, for example, polemics that are too forceful. I believe there
is a real effort, and not only in terms of language, to respect certain
* First published in Grey Room, 41 (2010): 6–23, under the same title.
134 Discussions
forms of academic writing. In any case, it is always through discus-

sion and debate that we arrive at the precise form our theses will
take. This is a significant change from my earlier books. My form
of writing was more directly linked to political confrontation. But,
above all, it was more solitary: after all, many of my earlier books
were written in prison.
fdl/jes At the same time, a large part of the elaboration of your
theses is due to the concrete experience of the struggles of recent
years.
‘The intellectual’, you write in Commonwealth, ‘is and can only
be a militant, engaged as a singularity among others, embarked on
the project of co-research aimed at making the multitude’ (p. 118).
In what way does the accumulation of struggles and experience
enter into your work?
an The relation to these struggles is undoubtedly not as close as
it was for me in the past, above all in the 1970s. And our relation
is more balanced, less tied to the immediate adherence to certain
interpretative paradigms or certain slogans. As often happens in
militant situations, you have to be harder, less refined. Above all,
there is no doubt that an accumulation of experiences is at the
foundation of our discourse. This osmosis is more closely tied to
this accumulation than to the immediacy of the political relation.
Some time ago, I had a debate with some comrades about the last
pages of Foucault’s final course, on cynics and militant thought.2
These are remarkable pages, but I find that I’ve moved away from
them a little at this point. . . maybe because of age. These are pages
I no longer read in ethical terms. I insist more emphatically on the
extraordinary theoretical elements they contain.
fdl/jes Is it possible to invert Althusser’s beautiful phrase – calling
himself a ‘political agitator in philosophy’ – in speaking of your
role as an intellectual, defining yourself instead as a ‘philosophical
agitator in politics’?
an Yes, but precisely in its inverted form. Althusser was a teacher
and a friend, but his attempt to be the ‘political’ in philosophy
always bothered me. I am convinced, as he said, that philosophy
is a Kampfplatz, a battlefield where theoretical positions clash.3
And yet with him there was always the excessive abstraction of the
‘professor’ or of the subject who engages in politics in and through
philosophy, and that I do not share. The fact that, ultimately, for
him both philosophical language and the history of philosophy are
posited as theoretical references also bothers me. To be a philoso-
pher in militancy reverses this perspective, allowing you to take on
An Interview with Antonio Negri 135
the problem concretely rather than abstractly. This is where the

difference between a philosophy solidly planted in the biosphere,
real life, and an abstract philosophical sphere becomes clear. And
this is also the case from the point of view of language as well as of
the ends, tactics, and way problems are confronted and addressed.
fdl/jes In Commonwealth we find a reactivation of two terms – the
common and commonwealth – which evoke, to an Anglophone
ear, the period of the English Civil War and the messianic commu-
nism of the Levellers and Diggers. Why is it important to reactivate
these two concepts? Are we, as has been proposed by Paolo Virno,
entering a new seventeenth century?4
an In all probability, yes. This means – it’s an idea that I always had
in mind (at least when I published Political Descartes in 1975)5 –
that the crisis of the Renaissance has analogies with the phase of
the crisis of modernity we live in; that the crisis of the modern cor-
responds to this current phase of the invention of. . . what should
it be called?. . . of communism. Actually it’s better to speak of the
age of the postmodern, or of the ‘common’ – because the new
form of accumulation of capital currently functioning repeats for
the first time the processes of expropriation of the common typ-
ical of the beginnings of modernity. It’s a process that attacks
life and the common that the century of worker struggles before
us built: the ‘commons’ that have become the basis of our exist-
ence, from welfare to the new capacities to produce, act and build
common languages other than the technoscientific. Resistance acts
against this new accumulation, and this is the central point of
Commonwealth. We call it ‘the one divides into two’, indicating
a bifurcation that resistance builds in the present. An absolutely
central bifurcation, then, which is founded on the defence of the
common and the attempt to valorize, against the new primitive
accumulation, the value of the commons.
Can this be represented in eschatological terms, as it was during
the English Revolution? Unlikely. Every eschatology refers to an
‘outside’, whereas the elements of destruction appearing today,
the coming apocalypse, are totally internal. There is no more
transcendence. We move on a plane of complete immanence.
Consequently, the apocalyptic or eschatological elements show-
ing up today – various conceptions of radical evil, for example
– can only be a weapon in the hands of the enemy. The first ele-
ment is therefore the perception of a rupture, or of a bifurcation
that today appears within capitalist development: the matter used
within the production process today is, in fact, a matter that is
136 Discussions
not consumed or used up. It’s intelligence. Its liberatory force,

the force deployed in the defense of the common and in a con-
struction starting from the common, is virtually irresistible. And
if virtuality is not actual, it represents all the same a possibility.
There is always resistance.
fdl/jes Let’s stick with this liberation, while remaining at the con-
ceptual level. One of the more intriguing arguments you make in
Commonwealth is that the idea of communism must be completely
divorced from the ‘illusions’ of socialism, understood as a form of
public management of production and as a disciplinary regime of
work. You found this distinction on the asymmetry between the
‘public’ and the ‘common’: ‘what the private is to capitalism and
what the public is to socialism, the common is to communism’
(p. 273). Can you elaborate on this distinction between the public
and the common? What does it mean to be a communist today?
an To be a communist means to struggle against private prop-
erty and ultimately destroy it, and to build the institutions of the
common. However, this means also and equally thinking that it
is no longer concretely possible to develop production and thus
create the collective without freedom and equality – abstract
universals – being integrated into the heart of the process of the
common, of the concrete, historical institution and constitution of
the collective. These universals should become concrete or, better,
common. Multitude, communism: it’s the idea of a collective, but
of a collective as an articulation of singularities. To be communist
means, consequently, building forms of ‘norming’ the real that are
dynamic, political constitutions that modify themselves in view of
the continuous modifications of the production and reproduction
of the multitude. It’s a ‘making the constitution’ around the neces-
sity of a common production, accompanied by the need to conquer
happiness.
Russian historical communism (maybe Chinese communism)
was – this is its good side – a socialism, a public management of the
production of wealth. It was defeated, but it offered us the image
of a real possibility. I believe this sentiment courses through the
whole book. It is not the utopian sentiment of an ideal possibility.
To the contrary, it is the consciousness of a Faktum that cannot
be defeated or undone, of a reality that cannot be refuted, of an
irreversible process. The Future Has an Ancient Heart was the title
of a novel by Carlo Levi (an apologia for the Soviet Union).6 It’s
a phrase I have always heard with a great deal of irony – and I still
do – but in which there is, at bottom, something true.
fdl/jes If we no longer consider the project of ‘building socialism’

as an intermediate phase between the capitalist mode of produc-
tion and the collective appropriation of the common, how are we to
reconceptualize the idea of transition? Is it possible to pass directly
from the biopolitical production of contemporary capitalism to
communism in the sense you understand it?
an We no longer have any need whatsoever for a transition. What
counts today is the bifurcation. This means that we already live
through a radical and profound transformation, but it also indicates
something fundamentally different from the idea of transition such
as it has been theorized in preceding socialist experiences. The cur-
rent movement is not a transition from one mode of production to
another but the construction of the other, the development of the
alternative from now on visible from within our history, clarified
through antagonism.
This perception leads to another fundamental node, more meth-
odological than metaphysical: the refusal of the dialectic.
When we speak of bifurcation in Deleuzian or Foucauldian terms,
we speak of the construction of a dispositif that detaches itself from
the determined historical course because it produces subjectivity.
(It would certainly be possible, at the limit, to repropose, from
within this detachment, a certain dialectic: the relation tactics–
strategy, for example, often implies dialectical elements.) However,
the origin of this detachment, of this movement of bifurcation, is
not oriented towards a totality or a new global subsumption or
an Aufhebung.* What we have here is a difference, which affirms
itself, and is exalted, in a dispositif, a path, a trajectory, in which
institutional elements are born. It is not the institutionalization of
civil society that Hegel exalts and that anarchists detest. It is also
not the traditional concept of institution that drags along with it
theologico-political characteristics. It is not a necessity but a con-
struction. And what’s more, it possesses the capacity to continually
renew itself.
Bifurcation demands an institution. This is how the new is built
through a ‘common’ accumulation that gives a sense to the world
that today surrounds us. To desires, to work. We have torn them
away from capital. Simply think of the quantity of fixed capital we
carry within us. Some time ago I had a discussion with some com-
rades who said, like Karl Heinz Roth, that fixed capital is something
* Abolition, annulment.
138 Discussions
suitable only for a slave.7 The slave is a fixed capital, they argue, not
the contemporary, cognitive, intelligent, mobile worker. . . It’s not
true! There is another fixed capital, one we are not, like the slave,
a mere projection of – a fixed capital that we have reappropriated,
that we have turned inside out, into our capacity for mobility and
intelligence. Even while we are enslaved by capital, we are rebel-
lious, we flee. To be mobile, intelligent, to possess languages, to be
capable of freedom – these are not natural givens. It is a power, a
potentiality, the product of a creative resistance.
fdl/jes Let’s speak about the horizons and possibilities of strug-
gle in the era of biopolitical production. You start from analyses
of operaismo that underline the priority and anteriority of worker
struggles over capitalist development – and therefore from strug-
gles as the motor of development and restructuration of capital,
always compelled to respond to worker offensives. This priority and
anteriority is even more visible today in the conditions of biopoliti-
cal production, where ‘one divides into two’ and the multiple and
plural subjectivity of the multitude – as productive – separates
and definitively flees a management that has become sterile and
parasitic.
In this context, how and against what, concretely, is it possible
to rebel? In prior struggles we had the revolt against work, against
the time of work, which was exploited, in view of raising wages and
increasing free time. Today how is it possible to refuse work, if work
coincides with life? How is it possible to ‘sabotage’ work without
renouncing one’s own essence? How can we destroy work without
destroying society, or destroy the time of work without destroying
free time?
an I recently read a book by Daniel Cohen, who today is among
the best-known economists in France (when he was younger, I
dedicated Marx beyond Marx to him, as well to some others).8
Cohen argues that the new anthropological figure of the worker,
the ideal type of the worker, after this crisis, is the intellectual–
cognitive worker, and that the elements of community are built
around these elements. The cognitive and the mobile are therefore
the two cardinal points of the contemporary anthropology of the
worker: the productive, mobile point of a multitudinous intersec-
tion. Production – and the political constitutions that emerge from
it – would therefore have to be imagined on this basis. From this
point of view (within projects of resistance and constitutive power),
the refusal of work, today still, is (as it was, in the same way, for
the Fordist worker) and will be a determined refusal. No one has
ever spoken of an absolute refusal of work. If we take the most

beautiful documents on the refusal of work, for example those of
the Marghera petrochemical workers in the 1970s – in the journal
Lavoro zero (Zero Work), for example – we see that it was a com-
pletely determined refusal, through which it was possible to contest
working hours, wages, the subjection of free time, rents and so on.
It’s the same thing today: the refusal of work is an absolutely deter-
mined refusal.
Over the past few days I participated in an investigation into
recent suicides in large French firms. It turns out that what the
employees were refusing was a determined way of organizing
work. Their stories speak of new conditions of work in gigantic
‘open spaces’: the workers are confined to the circumscribed space
of their cubicle, facing their computers. In a total fragmentation
of the production process, the worker is forced to invent while
not knowing where his cognitive activity is going. No conscious-
ness of the ensemble of the production process is permitted. And
the fragmentation is then accentuated, clashing with marketing
processes that are separate from and in contradiction with the
production process. All this is bathed in a noisy hum not unlike
that found in the old Fordist factory. This is the theatre of a multi-
plication of alienation and emergence of madness that the worker
is forced to drag along with her, in her life outside the firm. And
vice versa, for the cognitive worker, everything that happens in her
life outside the firm immediately lands on her work desk, as a new
source of alienation and worry, to the point where a family trag-
edy, a boss’s heavy-handedness, or simply a lack of career success
provokes suicide. This is the terrain to which we should bring the
refusal of work, in the sense of a determined refusal of these work
conditions.
In addition to all this, what makes work still more unbearable is
the fact that we have a capacity to develop a high productivity and
to build new worlds: vital productivity, the capacity to apply desire
to matters of life. It is in this contradiction that struggles should
today be invented. Indeed, struggles don’t just spring up out of
nowhere. They go slowly and are progressively built, with difficulty,
starting from determined contradictions. Built, organized, as hap-
pened in the time of Fordism: strikes were never spontaneous but
always constructed, progressively, around a combination of wage
objectives and the protests of life against work. You can have an
excellent objective, but if you do not succeed in cohering around
the life of workers, the objective and the struggle fail.
140 Discussions
The same thing goes today. But how to organize this new
subject?
How is the new form of exploitation perceived by the cognitive
workers of large firms? Everyone immediately says that the tradi-
tional unions are no longer useful for anything. In the first place
because it is necessary to operate on an international and global
plane, and the unions have not managed to do this yet. And then
because the unions have not been able to grasp the complexity of
the vital whole that is at the root of these struggles. The unions con-
cern themselves with employment, and are in this sense corporate
(and thus precisely not political: this is where the disaster lies). It is
necessary therefore to indicate new, alternative forms of organiza-
tion. What can we do to organize this intelligent raw material and
make it bifurcate, bringing it outside the direction of capital?
This is where new forms of mutualism and propositions for
alternative organizations of work emerge, as well as for alterna-
tives to the wage system. These are not Proudhonian discourses!
These are proposals for organizing cooperatives and other mutual-
ist forms that directly attack the financial levels of the organization
of work. Struggles that are not doomed to defeat can be organized
only at this level. We are moving through a phase in the cycle of
worker struggles that has demonstrated the exhaustion of the old
forms and that stakes a claim for a different strategic intelligence:
the intelligence to interconnect struggles from various and diverse
fronts. They can come from ecology, the factory, social work, ser-
vices and so on. It is, in sum, a matter of reuniting all the sectors in
which the new conditions of production are developing. The dis-
course we hold in our book on the intersection of struggles is, from
this point of view, fundamental. I do not believe that today there is
any possibility of seizing a central point on the horizon of struggles:
only their intersection has a strategic significance.
fdl/jes For you, the institution of happiness is not only a political
process; it is an ontological one as well. It is on this point that you
propose, in a strong philosophical gesture, to bring together mate-
rialism and teleology or, better, to formulate a materialist teleology
that would nevertheless entail no ultimate ends that would guide
this process (p. 378).
How does this process dodge the risk of thinking the encounter
among singularities in and by the multitude not as aleatory, as
Machiavelli, Spinoza, and then later Althusser do, but as necessary
and teleologically guided? It sometimes seems that the ‘advent’ of
the multitude as subject of the common is only a question of time,
or that it is already given, or that the fact that it has not happened
is an exception and not the rule.
an The problem of the relation between teleology and materialism
is a little like that of the chicken and the egg: easy to verify and hard
to explain. It is clear there was a phase during which a large part
of contemporary critique was unleashed against teleology (particu-
larly ferocious with regard to the critique of communism and of
the golden future the Soviet revolution was to have brought about),
considering it to be the philosophical figure of an opportunist,
instrumentalist finalism that was increasingly discredited. Then,
little by little, the discourse against teleology became a discourse
against materialism. Now the discourses have been taken back
up and clarified. As far as I am concerned, there is no need to
worry about dialectical materialism, the famous diamat. Historical
materialism is something else entirely. In historical materialism,
the finality of action is bound in no deterministic way to the suc-
cess of its realization. That would be Hegelianism. The relation
between act and end is always aleatory in historical materialism.
We remove from the idea of telos every sense of necessity. But this
does not mean that we remove the telos from action. The subjectiv-
ity–singularity must, therefore, now take it on. That said, why not
seize the possibility of constructing a universality through common
action? That this universality might entail ambiguous elements and
drift towards the irrational is obvious enough. It is nevertheless
possible that this universality can be implemented in a process of
common construction. I think that it is the process of constructing
common notions and common institutional wills, as is witnessed
in other experiences of materialist thought. On this point, the alea-
tory is not excluded but is rather proposed for open discussion, in
a confrontation between diverse finalities, on the basis of which
we can claim that a communist institutionalization or the force
of the common – which becomes increasingly fundamental – can
triumph. In conclusion, there is no ‘advent’ of the multitude, and
still less of communism. All we do is aleatory. But construction is
always possible. We express the desire of the common, and no one
can stop us from doing so.
fdl/jes On many occasions, in the latter part of Commonwealth
you claim a fidelity to the great tradition of anthropological real-
ism of Machiavelli and Spinoza, among others (p. 185). These are
philosophers not of resignation and pessimism, but of polemical
realism, of the theory of indignation, of conflict as the essence
of the multitude. On other occasions, however, you speak of the
142 Discussions
necessity of a transformation of the human to come (p. 378), of the

creation of a new humanity (pp. 118, 361), of the construction of
a new world (p. 371). With these terms you claim to be developing
Foucault’s assertion l’homme produit l’homme, that is, ‘what ought
to be produced is not man as nature supposedly designed it, or as
his essence ordains him to be – we need to produce something that
doesn’t yet exist, without being able to know what it will be’.9 A
concept, therefore, that is profoundly foreign to the realist tradition
and that cannot be found in the pages of Machiavelli and Spinoza.
Is it a question, on this point, of going ‘beyond’ these authors?
How do you redefine anthropological realism?
an We have been impressed by some of the work done in Latin
America; for example, that of Viveiros de Castro, who is a great
figure of anthropology coming in the wake of the structuralism
of LéviStrauss. The biopolitical context of anthropological muta-
tions is here completely restored, with a great deal of insistence on
the productivity of living in common. On the other hand, we have
always held, on a Marxist terrain, that the technopolitical modifica-
tion of the current form of capital would determine modifications
that would affect not only the form of work but the subjects of work
as well. The passage from the peasant to the non-skilled worker,
then from the skilled worker to the worker of the large company,
and so on, all of that relates to the anthropological plane. It is still
more evident today, in the era of globalization. It concerns a modi-
fication (probably a veritable metamorphosis) that we have not yet
managed to define fully but that obviously cuts across this new
composition of work, this multitude that works and the singulari-
ties of which it is composed.
I mentioned this report by Daniel Cohen that really struck me:
the relation between the cognitive and mobility as the fundamental
characteristic of the new way of producing, as the deepening of the
intersection of work in the webs of information, which intensifies
to the point that a new mode of production is configured – whence
the figure of a new worker subject, actor of the emergence of
subjectivity in the productive context: a characteristic profoundly
different from that of the typical worker of our and our fathers’
generation. It is this revolutionary anthropological modification
that should be studied. Languages themselves now constitute a
bias, and this presents itself as event and as institution. The present
work is an attempt to redefine the materiality of the transforma-
tions occurring now, to understand the common as something
invented, as something that institutes itself. We can say that here
we have a passage ‘from quantity to quality’, indicating not only

the intensity of the leap that we are witnessing, the force of the
constituent power that becomes constituted, but just as much the
ontological hardness of this event, a new Wirklichkeit (reality). It
is therefore important to avoid Badiou’s abstraction, which con-
structs an enormous machine in order to take away all ontological
consistency from the event!
fdl/jes In the 1960s we spoke of the ‘needs’ of workers; in 1977 we
spoke of proletarian ‘desire’. Today, however, you propose neither
need nor desire as the affective core of an ontology of being-in-
common, but love. To what extent is this series of mutations, from
need to desire to love, historically determined?
an What we have tried to do (in what is also a polemical gesture) is
give the concept of love a strongly anti-religious, anti-idealist and
anti-psychoanalytic tonality. We are therefore opposed to the isola-
tion of love from the ontological totality. But we also try to conceive
of it in Spinozian terms; that is, not only as the supreme accomplish-
ment of knowledge but also as a force that traverses the terrain that
moves from needs to desires. Love, for us, is attached to desire, in all
its forms and with all its powers. This is why this new quality cannot
be evaluated in terms of psychological drives or analytic libido but as
a force of cohesion and construction of the common. Love is a flee-
ing from solitude, from individualism, not for religious, idealist or
psychoanalytic reasons but through open and powerful dispositifs.
From this point of view, having recourse to Deleuze and Guattari
is fundamental. Here ‘love’ is. . . I would no longer call it love but
collective and constitutive force: an attempt to bring the collective
back to singularities and to grasp the way in which this ensemble
of singularities becomes an institutional capacity, a capacity to be
together, by way of love as a materialistic construction. With joy.
fdl/jes This simultaneously political and ontological dimension of
love is in tension with the tradition of political ‘friendship’ that
begins with Aristotle and leads to Derrida. Love seems to be able
to do without what is present in this other tradition, namely the
concept of the enemy and enmity. Can love as an instrument of
political struggle do without the figure of the enemy?
an No doubt. This is not really a Levinasian version of the recogni-
tion of the other. It is a material dimension of the common. Love
and the common go together.
No, we have no need for an enemy, even if in our case love, being
a force, can develop a destructive function – because, after all, the
enemy exists.
144 Discussions
fdl/jes At the end of the chapter ‘Beyond Capital?’ you propose a

series of ‘reforms’ to ‘save capital’ (p. 310), reforms that are ‘nec-
essary to biopolitical production’ (p. 307), including education
in the use of new technologies, opposition to the privatization of
ideas, the proliferation of the instruments of participatory democ-
racy and, above all, the introduction of a minimum guaranteed
income.
The very idea that you would propose such reforms might seem
regressive in the context of the more ample revolutionary strategy
that your discourse as a whole implies. What is the rhetorical strat-
egy behind these seemingly disconcerting proposals to ‘save capital
from itself’?
an You have to keep in mind that this book was written before
Obama, during the Bush era. We could say that the coup d’état
against empire failed, that from American unilateralism we would
quickly pass on to more pluralistic forms of organization of globali-
zation. After these things, written before the emergence of Obama
on the political stage, comes the crisis. Now, these propositions
might appear to be retrograde positions: we are however convinced
that there are certain destructive limits that it is best capital not
reach. There is, perhaps, in our discourse at this moment a syn-
dicalist spirit, which is part of my old militant’s bad taste. On the
other hand, there is Michael’s good sense, which is realist and
sometimes attracted by my syndicalist overtures. The debate is
always ample between us on these points, and these things do not
get written easily. That said, if we stop with the jokes and return to
our subject, I remain convinced that, in the rupture of the global
capitalist process, in the rupture and bifurcation of systems of
power and government, we must work on the inside. The problem
is knowing how to manage the crisis, the rupture of capitalist devel-
opment. All this leads us to seek out a path. It is less interesting
to know if these paths are more or less feasible; what is important
is to point out a route along which the revolution will not be an
explosion somewhere down the road but can only be defined a
posteriori. The revolution is not a boom but always a construction.
It is in this sense that these propositions might seem – and in a
certain sense are – retrograde. Not that much, though, if you take
into account the moment in which this book was written. In fact,
we see that Obama is not able to deliver what he promised, and it
certainly wasn’t the revolution. What is important is to repeat that
the revolutionary process is always a construction, the product of a
‘making the multitude’.
fdl/jes In recent years there has been an insistence on the dichotomy

between the real economy and financial speculation. This seems to
correspond to the two subjectivities you speak of: the multitude as
productive force on the one side and a sterile and parasitic capital
on the other. However, in your discussion of contemporary crises,
you conclude with this question: ‘Might the power of money (and
the finance world in general) to represent the social field of produc-
tion be, in the hands of the multitude, an instrument of freedom,
with the capacity to overthrow misery and poverty?’ (p. 295). In
what sense is it possible to think money outside of its function as
command and control of production and of the multitude as a
productive force?
an Before all of that, we should refer to the critical reflection
on political economy carried out by researchers like Christian
Marazzi, Carlo Vercellone and so on, and in general the entire
‘regulation’ school.10 The first element to underline is that finance
has become a central element of the production process. The tra-
ditional distinction between monetary policy on one side and the
‘real’ productive level on the other is an impossible distinction,
politically and practically, from a point of view internal to economic
processes. Today capitalism is ruled by rent. The large industrial
firm, rather than reinvesting profit, banks on rent. The lifeblood of
capital is today called rent, and this rent covers an essential func-
tion in the circulation of capital and maintenance of the capitalist
system: maintenance of the social hierarchy and of the unity of the
command of capital.
Money in this way becomes the sole measure of social pro-
duction. In this way we have an ontological definition of money
as form, blood, internal circulation, in which money as socially
constructed value and as measure of the economic system is con-
solidated. Whence the total subordination of society to capital.
Labour power, and thus the activity of society, is included in this
money, which is at the same time measure, control and command.
Politics dances on this rope.
If this is the situation, it is logical that the rupture – every r upture
– take place in this frame. We should imagine – and I say this to
provoke, but not only that – how it is possible today to form a
soviet, that is, bring the struggle, force, the multitude, the common
to bear in this new reality. The multitude is not simply exploited: it
is exploited socially, just as the worker in the factory was. Mutatis
mutandis, we can propose therefore the validity of the struggle over
wages at the social level (of money). Capital is always a relation
146 Discussions
(between those who command and those who work), and it is in

this relation that the subsumption of labour power into and under
money is established. But this is also what determines the rupture.
The current crisis can be interpreted starting from these presup-
positions. The crisis starts out from the necessity of maintaining
order while multiplying money (the subprime loans and the entire
mechanism these imply served to buy off the proletarians, to pay for
social reproduction from the point of view of a capital and a bank-
ing system that dominate this world). It is therefore necessary to lay
one’s hands on this thing in order to destroy the capacities of capi-
talist direction. There can be no equivocation on this point. Many
readings of this crisis have been proposed, but Marazzi’s is the one
to keep in mind, as we do ourselves in large part11 – because here,
unlike in all those formulations that locate the reasons for the crisis
in the gap between finance and real production, there is an insist-
ence on the fact that financialization is not simply an unproductive
and parasitic deviation of surplus value and collective investment
but the very form of accumulation of capital within new processes
of social and cognitive production of value. The current financial
crisis is therefore interpreted as a blockage of the accumulation of
capital (on the proletarian side) and as the implosive result of a lack
of capital accumulation.
How to get out of a crisis of this sort? Only by means of a social
revolution. Today any new deal must consist in the construction
of new rights of social ownership of common goods – a right that
would be opposed to the right to private property. In other words,
if up until now the access to a common good has taken the form of
private debt, from now on it is legitimate to demand the same right
in the form of social rent. Making these common rights recognized
is the sole and correct way to get out of this crisis. Some (Rancière,
Žižek and Badiou) will consider these reforms to be completely
useless and costly for workers. Fine. Why don’t we try them out?
Why don’t we propose them to Wall Street?
fdl/jes One of the classical critiques addressed to your previ-
ous books, Empire and Multitude, concerns the apparent tension
between the hypothesis of the passage from a situation of formal
to real subsumption, in which nothing can be produced outside
capital because nothing is exterior to it, on the one hand, and the
paradoxically ‘external’ (because sterile and parasitic) character of
capital relative to biopolitical production.
In Commonwealth you speak of a more complex coexistence of
mechanisms of subsumption, of a ‘reciprocal movement also under
way in the process of globalization, from the real subsumption to

the formal, creating not new “outsides” to capital but severe divi-
sions and hierarchies within the capitalist globe’ (p. 230). There is
no question of a return to the past but of the coexistence of diverse
models in the ‘striated geography’ of contemporary capitalism,
more in relation, for example, to the Marx of the sixth, unpub-
lished chapter of Book 1 of Capital. Is this ‘striated geography’ a
new phenomenon or a rereading of the hypotheses guiding your
earlier works? In what manner do borders, for example, as well as
migrations, territorializations, the flexibility and mobility of work
– especially in the case of immigrants – play an increasingly impor-
tant role in your analysis?
an We speak of a formal subsumption that is reappearing today, but
in reality it is not reappearing. There has always been this ambigu-
ity of diverse levels. The world itself is diverse and differentiated
– the Chinese situation or the Bolivian situation. . . there is no
doubt that these striations of the world exist!
As for the extreme deployment of the discourse on formal and
real subsumption, as well as its immediate transference into the
concept of biopower, this occurred in the 1990s, and even prior
to this in my case. It was, in reality, a hypothesis guiding research,
a way of undoing a set of ideas that had been consolidated and
seemed fallacious to me. In the current context, in return, the
attenuation of this extreme articulation allows for a deepening of
the analysis, above all, obviously, when the problem becomes one
of organization, and therefore of the capacity to adapt the analysis
to diverse terrains in order to be able to stay close to these diverse
realities. I have always been a little scared of these things, because
I know that opportunism is always lying in wait whenever we speak
of adapting thoughts to diversity. There are those who say that
you should be attentive to the zones of formal subsumption and
then, on the basis of these lovely preoccupations, change the script.
Just look, for example, at the re-emergence today of the strong
Eurocentrism when it comes to debates about ecology, where we
often encounter Eurocentric attitudes.
We must, then, always be attentive to discourses on these sub-
jects, for we too easily pass from one terrain to another. On the
terrain of political economy and modes of government, the dis-
course on formal and real subsumption continues to function as
the key to understanding them. It will no doubt have to be rearticu-
lated from the perspective of a strategy for constructing political
objectives, as well as from the perspective of tactics and practice,
148 Discussions
for it is clear that formal and real subsumption will have very dif-
ferent effects on the dynamics of governance.
As for migrations and immigrant labour, these themes are
becoming increasingly central. Immigration represents a tendency,
and when we speak of cognitive and mobile labour we realize that
the figure of the immigrant is closely related to the new form of
work. It is not simply a residue, a background noise. It is the true
nature of work. In this modification we encounter lots of problems
but, just as much, we find the possibility for another happiness.
fdl/jes On the basis of this novel aspect, Commonwealth would
seem to introduce a nuance into another critique aimed at your
earlier works, namely a supposed underestimation, both quantita-
tive and qualitative, of the role played by forms of material labour
in relation to a new cognitive labour. In Commonwealth, however,
you seem at times to maintain this prevalence of immaterial labour
over more traditional forms of work (and the corresponding forms
of exploitation). In what sense is the affirmation of biopolitical
production a synonym, for you, of the priority – tendential, say – of
immaterial and cognitive labour over other forms of production?
an I don’t know if we managed to explain it, but there is no doubt
that when we speak today of cognitive work we speak of it in the
terms that I used at the beginning of the interview; that is, not
only as the central hegemonic element in the production of value
but also as the consolidation of all the vices of material labour and
all the difficulties endured in the past (alienation, fragmentation,
fatigue, etc.) that are found in the cognitive worker as well. The
cognitive worker is not a privileged worker. He or she is in certain
ways, because he or she does not have dirty hands or a dirty shirt,
but this hardly means the exploitation has diminished. He or she
is still concretely rooted in bios, and the body suffers physically.
This means that we should have a realistic and complex image of
work, and therefore that liberation concerns not only fatigue but
all those aspects that hurt not only the body but the mind or spirit
as well: physical, mental and, above all, social aspects. Let’s take
up the theme of debt, for example, the fact that you should live on
the basis of debt, on this damned credit card. Already in the 1980s,
when I began to investigate precarious labour, I began to see the
same type of problem. It was the first encounter with cognitive
work I had. All the conditions of the precarity of work and of forms
of life were already there.
When we spoke of cognitive labour, then, we never spoke of a
labour in which there is no suffering. The criticisms directed at
us have been unjust. But the problem is not there. They attack
us because a lot of our comrades, nostalgic for the old images of
worker power, do not acknowledge immaterial–cognitive labour’s
capacity for resistance and rebellion. The privilege of cognitive
labour consists in the fact that the means of work, intelligence, is
not consumed in the work process and is immediately common.
Will we succeed in transforming this community into a common
revolutionary weapon?
To conclude, allow me to insist on two other themes that, in my
opinion, are central in Commonwealth, themes we have not yet
addressed.
The first is the polemic against every sort of identity politics and
– even before all politics – against every metaphysics or ideology
of identity, described as an organic or natural presupposition. For
us, all drives to identity are the plague of thought and of political
practices: from nationalism to patriotism and to racism, from fun-
damentalism to ecological localism, from possessive individualism
to syndicalist corporatism, and let’s not forget sexism or the reli-
gion of the family: yes, precisely this institution of the family that
liberalism, the state and Hegel consider the basis of civil society. It
seems to us that, after the withering of civil society, on which we
insisted in Empire and Multitude, we should follow with the extinc-
tion of the family as the basis of naturalist sexism and of every
other juridical institution based on the private. The cooperative
intersection that we recognize in cognitive labour power and its
mobility is opposed to any identity that would want to represent
itself as a subject. We have spent a lot of time recognizing that the
multitude is an ensemble of singularities. But every singularity is
equally a multitude.
The second theme is poverty. If the necessity of bifurcation
imposes itself on capital, as well as that of recognizing the rup-
turing of the dialectical process that constitutes it, then constant
capital and capitalist management find themselves on one side,
labour power and variable capital on the other. Whence the first
consequence of bifurcation: an unlimited augmentation of poverty.
Like suffering, poverty is now part of the coerciveness of work. It’s
an ineluctable passage, a terrible one, for whoever analyses the cur-
rent conditions of the proletariat, but also for those who militate
for the communist cause. Militating with and among the poor has
become, today, fundamental. Proletarians, workers, the precari-
ous, they are all poor. But, included as the poor of biopower, the
poor are not simply excluded: poverty – in the global world, in the
150 Discussions
world of social production – is always inclusion, an inherence in a

relation to capital that invests society and puts it to work. In the
biopolitical relation, the existence of the poor must be considered
in its entirety. We think that in these conditions the revolts of the
poor, real jacqueries, are today events that occur and present them-
selves as inevitable comings; they are due in order to construct a
constitutive terrain, a political opening for the forces struggling
against capitalist domination, that is, for the construction of a free
commonwealth.
11
On the Institutions of the Common
Prolegomena for a Constituent Inquiry*
With Judith Revel
toni Opening the discussion on the institutions of the common,

I would like to retrace an experience that was fundamental for
me: that of the Comitato Operaio di Porto Marghera [Porto
Marghera Workers’ Committee]. Porto Marghera was an indus-
trial centre that grew alongside Venice between the two wars. It
contained primary processing, engineering and chemical factories.
The beginning of the 1960s saw the opening of the Petrolchimico
plant, which initiated a technologically renewal throughout a kom-
binat. Soon Petrolchimico had 15,000 direct workers and almost
as many in its associated industries. The Porto Marghera district,
which comprised the original Zone One and Zone Two, established
around the Petrolchimico plant, soon reached 60,000 workers. The
intervention of the comrades from Potere Operaio [PO; Workers’
Power], the political group of which I was a member, was already
operational at the end of the 1950s, and it was about to become
decisive in the class struggle events of the 1960s through the
construction of the Workers’ Committee. What was the Workers’
Committee? It was an institution of the common.
The qualitative leap came when we began to organize at the
Petrolchimico plant, at Sice, and at Chatillon, a large factory
subsidiary to Petrolchimico. We did this after the first mass
strike at Petrolchimico in 1963, which was a struggle against the
reduction of holiday entitlements. That morning, it was reported,
* Originally published under the title ‘Sulle istituzioni del comune: prolegom-
eni per un’ inchiesta costituente: conversazione fra Toni Negri e Judith Revel’,
Uninomade/Esc, Rome, 15 February 2008.
152 Discussions
the w orkers stayed outside the plant ‘spontaneously’: there were

5,000 of them on the campaccio.* When production stopped,
the accumulated gases coming out of the chimneys flared up at
dawn with a flame that illuminated Marghera and the whole of
the Venetian lagoon in a way never seen since. That moment was
the beginning of workers’ autonomy. The workers, together with the
militants of PO, embarked on an active working-class research
investigation [inchiesta], that is, a detailed analysis of the cycle
of production in the factories concerned. At the same time the
Marghera Workers’ Committee was established. This brought
together representatives from the Petrochimico plant and the
adjacent factories. Many of them were members of various trade
union bodies; some were also members of political parties (both
the Socialist Party and the Communist Party). The Committee
met at least once a week in open assembly, but comrades from
the factories and students who were coming from Padua or
Venice could be found in its office almost every day. Note that
this was the period from 1962 to 1967, during which working-
class autonomy organized its own political line: a discourse that
was systematically verified in discussions on the shop floor, in
confrontation with the trade unions at plant level and, when pos-
sible, also in confrontation with various levels in the provincial
organization of the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. It
goes without saying that, especially in the first years of activity
of the Workers’ Committee, the clash with the trade unions and
political organizations in the older Zone One was very strong. In
Zone Two it was less problematic, but still solid. Occasionally this
clash would end up in scuffles at the factory gates; unfortunately
developing an open and productive discussion was possible much
less often. Very early on, the trade union and political hierarchies
declared a ban on the forces of autonomy. The language was
Stalinist: we were described as ‘provocateurs and fascists’! It was
only when the Committee began to manage the struggle directly
– and thus to exclude from it the trade union and party leader-
ship – that the latter sought contact and discussion. But by then
we were on the verge of 1968.
Gradually, however, the differences between the lines of organi-
zation and struggle proposed by the Committee and the lines of
action proposed by the union started to be apparent and became
* A rough patch of land.

On the Institutions of the Common 153
more sharply antagonistic. But this was not just a matter of tactical
alternatives. In the Committee we asked ourselves more and more
frequently what it meant to exercise counterpower in the factory
and whether the workers’ idea of power could be homologated to
that of the boss – which was basically what was preached by the
‘productivist’ union and party officials. Workers began to question
the organization of the working day: was it right to have to go to
work every day for a living? And then there was the denunciation of
the ‘death regime’ – the insane health hazards that loomed every-
where in the chemical factories. Every so often someone would
bring to the Committee office a cage containing a mouse or a
canary that had died because of gas leaks in the factory. The cages
were kept at the workers’ feet because, when there was a leak, the
gas accumulated at ground level. The mouse dies, but the worker
can escape. As a result, the alternatives to the union strategy – a
strategy that aimed simply to bring about further development –
were getting stronger and stronger and the discourse regarding
the refusal of work began to circulate as an effective organizing
tool. It was clear that here the Committee was bringing into the
struggle a behaviour-related option that went far beyond the trade
unionist and socialist conception of development in the exercise
of command; in particular, it went against the idea that Italian
Communist Party hierarchies and trade union bureaucracies might
simply replace the bosses. It was this ‘real socialism’ – not only in
the Soviet version but in the Togliattian version, in fact especially
there – that was called into question. The consequences of this
choice would become fully apparent after 1968, during the course
of the 1970s.
The Workers’ Committee in the 1960s embodied a paradox. On
the one hand, it was building, or in any case facilitating, general
conditions of rooting, development, extension and trade union-
ism – especially in a region such as the Veneto, where the labour
movement was very underdeveloped; on the other hand, it was
building the conditions for a political break with the official labour
movement – and this was to become decisive for the movement’s
own destiny in the years that followed. The break took place espe-
cially on the terrain of the organization of the struggle. We wanted
incisive struggles, of the kind that hurt the bosses; and we also
wanted to have direct effects on the corporate and national econ-
omy. An initial platform of struggle objectives was established.
The issue was not only quantitative: apart from wage rises, there
were also increasing trends towards egalitarianism (e.g. the famous
154 Discussions
5,000 lire, equal for all workers, from the first to the last; and
we should recall that in 1969 this demand was transmitted from
Porto Marghera to the Workers’ Committees of the Fiat factories
in Turin). Other demands aimed at reducing the number of work-
ing hours (e.g. new structures were designed for a 36-hour working
week) and at recomposing all the sectors and strata of the class
(e.g. the struggle to take on the books workers from the subsidiary
companies and also precarious workers). The other essential issue,
always present among workers’ demands, was, as I mentioned,
health and safety at work. After the condemnation that even the
Court of the Italian Republic has been obliged to express over
the shameful delay related to the countless murders committed
by Petrolchimico in the past thirty years, perhaps today it can be
publicly stated that the union’s monetization of health hazards was
a criminal policy. The Committee had understood this right from
the start, and the cross with a mannequin on it that wears a gas
mask – that crucifix that was raised in front of the main gates of
the Petrolchimico plant – remains as a shocking reminder. It also
symbolizes a consciousness of struggle the likes of which we have
not seen since.
The Workers’ Committee was a real institution of the common. Its
history can be read as the story of the genesis of a new power. So
here I would like to open reflection on the definition of the autono-
mous workers’ institution (AWI) – a definition that will have to
be discussed when we begin to write the history of the Workers’
Committees of Porto Marghera as an institution, as well as the his-
tory of its actions between the 1960s and 1970s.
What I mean in this context by an ‘autonomous institution of
workers’ is an organization characterized by
(a) the workers’ independent ability to propose themes of struggle

and a consequent and coordinated indication of instrumental
actions, and thus AWI’s own normative capacity;
(b) an autonomous capacity to organize and manage wage and
political struggles in a significant industrial and social sector,
and thus an autonomous capacity to exercise force in support of
organized action;
(c) the success of the struggle for recognition from other institutions
(trade union and political, of the labour movement and of the
employers) within the same industrial and social sector, and
therefore a certain social legitimation of AWI’s normative capacity
and use of force.
If we want to deepen this characterization, we would have to

show how the normative capacity of the AWI is formed through
self-learning processes from the bottom up, by moving from the
political and technological experience of the workers towards an
alternative conceptualization and projectuality and from linguis-
tic production to the construction of one (or several) matching
forms of praxis. When I speak of the organizational capacity of the
AWI I mean collective intelligence already implicit in the processes
of self-formation, which considers the workers’ inquiry [inchiesta
operaia] or, better still, co-research as a basis for the construction
of common concepts that can be transformed into dispositifs of
action.
As for political legitimacy, on the one hand the AWI recognizes
itself as an instituent capacity, in other words as being reflexive and
tendentially normative, and on the other hand, from a political
point of view, it affirms itself as a constituent power [potenza] and
can develop into a political subject. For more than a century now,
both law and the political sociology of labour – from Sinzheimer to
Eugen Ehrlich, without leaving out the theory of soviets, especially
in its Luxemburg formulation – have indicated the productivity of
these definitions.
But all this took place in the Fordist era, when the factory was
the privileged location of the revolutionary experience. What does
the AWI become, in the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism
and to a new mode of production? It has to become an institu-
tion that is even more open to the common than it was in the
former, Fordist mode of production, since the mode of production
is now more common. We therefore hypothesize a new institution:
an autonomous common institution (ACI) or autonomous multi-
tudinous organization (AMO).
This new institution is located on the relational horizon (com-
municational, informational, etc.), which is characteristic of the
new mode of production. This horizontal dimension is further
characterized by its being networked. The network comes to be the
basis of the new common institution. At this point, however, it will
not be easy to recognize, within this transition and within this new
formation, characteristics of autonomy in the sense indicated above.
The ACI can indeed be defined as an expansive and networked
institution, but another side of it will reveal itself to be a dissipative
force. When the outer perimeter of the factory gives way, when the
given spaces of exploitation of labour power are exceeded, when
the whole of civil society is put to work, every common institution
156 Discussions
risks seeing its own (exodic) expansive form destroyed and dis-
solved in the mass. As a result, that first element of institutionality
(networked, exodic) risks lacking any specifically normative char-
acteristic: this means that no element is present that might enable
us to focus, alongside the recognition of the horizontal dimension,
on a vertical passage, established on the basis of an autonomous
organizational capacity and effective recognition by other institu-
tions – hence by a self-legitimating power.
I offer a philosophical hypothesis. Any kind of institution and
government, from the most concentrated to the most diffuse, is
always based on a relationship between forces that develop genea-
logically, along a horizontal dimension, and then find themselves
in a vertical relationship. I could add that any definition of ‘public
institution’ is given as a balance point on a right-angled plot that
places networked consensus [consenso reticolare] and adhesion to
the structure on the x axis (i.e. the horizontal line) and networked
consensus and the exercise of command on the y axis (i.e. the verti-
cal line). The definition of ‘public institution’ as fixing a point on
this plot chart is obviously exposed to a series of quantitative and
qualitative differentials, both on the y axis of cohesion and on the x
axis of command. In the schema that I have described, the public
appears as a moment of equilibrium between the networked set of
singularities reduced to epistemic unity on the ordinate axis and
the concentration of force established on the vertical axis.
Now, this definition of ‘public institution’ is unsatisfactory from
the point of view of the ACI because it fails to represent the expan-
sive moment of the network – that which is proper to living labour.
It captures the exodus, so to speak, only in its intensive dimension.
To put it better, this definition fails to transfer the expansive power
of the singularities from the forms of resistance to the modes of
decision, or rather from episteme to ontology; in short, it fails to
form force.
judith To find a solution to this problem, let us start from the
established fact that a transformation of the mode of production
is a given. If one looks at this transformation from the point of
view of what is usually called the ‘technical composition’ of labour,
production has become a common – and, tendentially, a highly coop-
erative one. From the point of view of the political composition of
labour, it would then be necessary for this common composition
to be matched by new political and juridical categories, capable of
organizing the common, of stating its centrality, of describing its
new figures and its internal functioning. Now, these new catego-
ries do not exist – and we miss them. The fact that it is possible to
mask the new insurgencies of the common and that we continue to
think in obsolete terms, as if the place of overall production were
still only the factory, or as if the network were nothing more than
a flat figure of communication. . . in sum, the fact that we continue
to act as if nothing had changed about the technical composition
of labour power – this is the most perverse of all the mystifications
of power.
This mystification rests especially on the ideological reproposal of
two terms that function as lures and cages, as fictions and illusions,
but that at the same time correspond to two ways of appropriat-
ing the common of humans. The first of these terms resorts to the
category of ‘private’; the second resorts to the category of ‘public’.
In the first case, property – as defined by Rousseau: and the first
man who said ‘this is mine. . .’ – is an appropriation of the common
by one only; it is an expropriation of all the others. Today private
property consists precisely in denying people their common right over
what only their cooperation is capable of producing.
The second category that concerns me here is that of the ‘public’.
The reasoning of good old Rousseau, who was so hard on pri-
vate property, rightly making it the source of all corruption and
human suffering, breaks down at this point. Problem of the social
contract, problem of modern democracy: since private property
generates inequality, how can we invent a political system where
everything, while belonging to everyone, nevertheless belongs to
no one? N’appartienne pourtant à personne... The trap closes on
Jean-Jacques, but it also closes on us. In fact this is what ‘the public’
is: what belongs to everyone but belongs to nobody, in other words
what belongs to the state. And, since we should be the state (which
obviously we are not – especially when we can’t get to the end of
the month. . .), they have to invent something to sweeten the pill of
its having laid hands upon the common. In other words, we have
to be made to believe that the state represents us and that, if it
arrogates to itself rights over what we produce, it does so because
that ‘we’ (which we actually are) is not what we produce in common
and what we invent and organize as a common, but is what allows
us to exist. The common, the state tells us, does not belong to
us, since we do not really create it: the common is our soil, our
foundation, what we have under our feet: our nature, our identity.
And if that common does not really belong to us – because to be is
not to have – the state’s laying hands on the common will not be
called appropriation or exploitation, but (economic) management
158 Discussions
and political and delegation representation. QED: the implacable

beauty of political pragmatism, the transformation of what we are,
that is, common, into nature and into identity.
At this point we can readdress the formal presentation of the
Cartesian coordinates on which we reopened the discussion: that
formal presentation needs to be open to examination.
(a) First of all, that form is, as we have seen, very real. That point of
balance is a utopia of power, an attempt to castrate the common
in order to reduce it to a set of privations, to a model of the private
that is called ‘public’. Here we find the reactionary tendencies
that are nested in democracy – continuity of property and the
rhetorical tradition of individualism; habitus (à la Bourdieu)
in the ruling classes and the habit of banal life; exception, not
as the mythology of an extreme and exasperated power but as
the expression of a full power, nourished by all pre-existing
law and customs: extremism of the centre (Göring’s beautiful
industrial and military dispositifs rather than the madness of
Hitler). That balance is therefore very real and is immediately
our enemy, just as all the (more or less) transcendental or reli-
gious coordinates are our enemies, from ecclesiastical natural
law to the blabberings of the katheˉkon.
(b) Secondly, that form is contradictory in itself, because, in order
to prevent the network of relations from shifting its expres-
sive and cooperative potential from the horizontal level to the
vertical level of power, it is forced to negate any possibility of
translation, and therefore any power of singularity. In other
words, it is forced to deny not only the relational, coopera-
tive element but also the innovative one, which resides in the
biopolitical determination of the network. The naturalist and
identitarian hypostases find here the most suitable place for
them to become fixed.
(c) For us, then, nature and identity are mystifications of the
modern paradigm of power. To regain possession of our common,
we first have to produce a drastic critique of these mystifica-
tions. We are in no sense participants in them; and we do not want
to be part of them. ‘We’: that is not an essence, a ‘thing’ of which
it is necessary to proclaim that it is ‘public’. Our common, on
the contrary, is not our foundation; rather it is production, an
invention that is always restarted. ‘We’ is the name of a horizon,
the name of a becoming. The common is always before us; it is
a process. We are this common: doing, producing, participating,
moving, sharing, circulating, enriching, inventing, relaunching

and so on.
For nearly three centuries, we have thought of democracy as the

administration of public affairs – that is, as the institutionalization
of the state’s appropriation of the common. Today democracy can
be thought of only in radically different terms: as the common
management of the common. This management implies a redefini-
tion of space as networked (without limits; but this does not mean
without hierarchies and internal borders, to the point of cosmo-
politanism) and a redefinition of temporality as constituent. There
is no question now of defining a sort of contract that ensures that
everything, belonging to everyone, nevertheless belongs to no one. No:
everything, being produced by everyone, belongs to everyone.
toni It is quite evident from the foregoing that this ‘belonging
to all’ is a becoming. It is the very process of constitution of the
institutions of the multitude, in their dynamic, which is non-
teleological – a finality constructed through dispositifs that are
productive within a chaotic whole cannot be defined as teleological
– but rather ‘dys-utopic’.
In fact there is no possible prefiguration of the institutions of
the common if we do not recognize that a constituent power is in
action. This opens up some other problems that cannot be under-
estimated, given the temporal and ontological pre-eminence that
we have attributed to constituent power since we saw it in action
in the AWI.
On the other hand, in the mainstream* literature, constitu-
ent power is primarily considered to be a juridical category. This
potenza is trapped (and in fact definitively castrated) by public
law. How can one retrieve it? Of course, historical analysis remains
fundamental and shows us how constituent power, whenever it
has exploded, has had ontological effects – creative and libertar-
ian. But I am not interested here in a critical history of law; I am
concerned to identify the political dispositif, the latent and expres-
sive intentionality of constituent power [potere] as a machine that
produces institution in the current conjuncture – in other words as
a machine to be used for the construction of a common law [diritto
comune] against public law [diritto pubblico]. Raising the matter of
institutions of the common in these terms becomes a question of
* ‘mainstream’ in English in the original.

160 Discussions
affirming constituent power as a permanent, internal source of the

process of political–juridical constitution of society.
(a) In this research, the relationships that social movements impose

on governments and the material determinations that movements
express in constitutional arrangements have to be evaluated.
Constituent power as an internal source of public and consti-
tutional law was especially evident in the new constitutions of
Latin America in the twenty years after the 1990s: it determines
entirely novel relationships and new constitutional dynamics in
terms of both government and governance, thus reactivating the
common law of the multitudes that has hitherto been excluded from
power and transforming the entire ideal-type fabric of the demo-
cratic constitution.
(b) In this research, the temporalities that implicitly or explicitly link
the action of movements to constitutional determinations must
also be analysed afresh. When we look at the new dynamics that
have linked multitudinous forms and institutional arrangements
in the transition processes that take place in new economic areas
(China, India, Brazil, etc.), we have to recognize that new insti-
tutional figures are being born in the experiences of postcoloni-
ality, and these figures cannot be brought back to the models of
European modernity.
But note that these research indications arise also from the objec-
tive analysis of the chaotic situation in which public institutions find
themselves today, both in Europe and in the United States, which
means in the states of capitalist modernity. Advance signals and
traces of constituent potenza are to be found in the crisis into which
the public institutions have been plunged. In this regard, case stud-
ies could be constructed that concentrate on the highest peaks of
critical and self-critical analysis in the legal sciences (Teubner and
the new course of legal institutionalism) and in the social sciences
(Boltanski and the new course of sociological institutionalism). I
believe that, in order to remodel the issue and redefine a possible
ideal type of institutions of the common, we have to reopen and
reinvent the inquiry [inchiesta] and make it address various aspects
of the new capitalist constitution of the social.
Here is, then, what we have to assume in this phase of inquiry:
(1) cognitive capital as a characteristic of the valorization process;

(2) the metropolis as a new focal point of exploitation;
(3) finance capital as a new figure of overall capital, or rather of the

command form: Christus–fiscus, this really was a terrain of
antagonistic investigation (Christus–subprimes, etc.);*
(4) boundaries, hierarchies and fragmentations as an analytics of
the multitude (and possibly of war);
(5) the understanding of struggles and institutions as a terrain of
possible political ‘dys-utopia’.
The constituent inquiry has the capacity to define the political

method of critical analysis and militant insubordination at this
stage. So here we have a new algebraic table (considering that
everything happens in the network) that will perhaps allow us to
grasp the element of innovation between the humps and the differ-
ences that the network itself proposes. But if the geometry of the
multitude cannot be flattened on that of the network, the geometry
of the revolution will probably correspond to the geometry of the
institutions of the common. In any event, this is the hypothesis that
the constituent inquiry will have to assume as it proceeds on its
course.
* This is a reference to the Latin tag Quod non capit Christus, rapit fiscus: ‘What
Christ does not receive, the exchequer seizes’.
Part IV
In Conclusion
12
From the Commune to the
Common*
The Commune as a historical event
Let us begin with the Paris Commune as a historical event. What

is your thinking as to what the Commune meant in that historical
moment, as an event of its time? How did Marx read the Commune?
And what kind of transformations did it produce in political thought,
and also in the workers’ movement?
It is such a formidable event, but at the same time so complex, that it

is always difficult to define it. There are two books, one old and one
new, that offer a starting point: at one end, Histoire de la Commune
de 1871, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray’s old book, the most important
and most objective thing ever written about the Commune, written
with the freshness of a fighter and the truth of a refugee from the
Commune itself; at the other end, Common Luxury, Kristin Ross’s
new book, which is the most recent offering on the subject. Ross’s
book arose from an academic thesis on the poet Arthur Rimbaud
that starts from that impressive poem, ‘L’orgie parisienne ou Paris
se repeuple’ (‘The Parisian orgy, or Paris is re-peopled’), written
during the bloody week [la semaine sanglante] – the week in which the
Commune was massacred by the victors of Versailles.
There is a particularly beautiful verse that I recall:
Quand tes pieds ont dansé si fort dans les colères

Paris! Quand tu reçus tant de coups de couteau,
* First published as ‘Dalla comune al comune’, interview with Niccolò Cuppini,

Euronomade 2.0, 16 March 2021.
166 In Conclusion
Quand tu gis, retenant dans tes prunelles claires

Un peu de la bonté du fauve renouveau
[When your feet danced so vigorously in anger,
Paris! When you received so many knife cuts,
when you lay, keeping in your clear pupils
a little of the goodness of the fawn renewed]
What a powerful recollection of that communist uprising! These

are lines to which I am really attached. I used them in an interview,
‘Dominio e sabotaggio’ (‘Domination and Sabotage’). In that poem
Paris is revolutionary madness. Paris the madwoman. Paris is the
martyr, under the knives of Versailles, of a mad and wild renewal.
Fauve – ‘wild’ – sums it all up.
The Commune is the event par excellence, in every sense. On
the one hand, because around the insurrection there was an accu-
mulation of most of the forces that had organized themselves in the
preceding fifty years – starting from the 1830s, the years described
in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and thus from the rise of ‘subversive
liberalism’ against the Restoration. On the other hand, the Commune
was the product of the affirmation and consolidation of corporations
of workers in struggle – the same corporations that had made a first
organized appearance in the revolutionary and armed struggles of
June 1848. For instance, the building of barricades was a new experi-
ment in citizen architecture – and is recounted in Les Misérables, by
the way (a book that I recently reread, I don’t even know why; I was
done studying, so I plunged into these thousands of pages and read
them all, even the really boring bits, for instance those pages on the
techniques of building barricades, which is not the easiest thing to
do). So the Parisian proletariat was behind barricades, and this terri-
fied the bosses.
There, in the Commune, there was a democratic–radical expan-
sion of the socialism of the workers’ movement. And alongside this
process ran another line, namely the consolidation of intellectual and
proletarian energies in struggle – a foundation of communism for the
centuries to come. We know its consequences on establishing the
importance of this experience in its most revolutionary form, when it
was to be rescued through the reflection of Marx and others.
This experience was organized around the two elements that are
still present and by now classic in the action of communists: on the
one hand, the quest for a progressive democracy that goes beyond
representation and defines itself as council-based democracy, direct
democracy, immediately participative democracy. This is the first
From the Commune to the Common 167
element; and, as a consequence of this radicality, the revocability

of mandates, the payment of wages for the roles undertaken – just a
median wage, one would say the wage for necessary social labour; and
by this token the representatives become simple mandataries, con-
trolled for the duration of their function and on an equal footing with
those whom they represent: this is direct democracy. On the other
hand there is the issue of wages in production and reproduction,
where political participation must reveal its abstract presupposition –
namely the fact of productive cooperation – and repay it concretely,
through a redistribution of profit, even if in the legislative dynamics
of the Commune this is put in a very narrow perspective. This is
because in reality there was just a reduction in the working hours
of bakers: previously they worked all night, whereas now a reduced
working time is applied; this reform signals the attention that was
paid to conditions of work and to wages and income during the
Commune, short-lived as it was.
In the history of the Commune, these two elements – direct
democracy and income for all – will combine in singular forms, as
especially Kristin Ross has highlighted. This does not arise simply
from the involvement of a democratic intellectual class in the pro-
letarian Commune and its management, but from the investment
that the Commune extends over daily life: today we identify here
its biopolitical character. This seems fundamental to me. A question
from the working citizens arises here, and is put in very progressive
terms: how can people manage to live together? How can people live
together as if they were partying? Being together means having the
possibility to be so, freely and equally, and also in exuberant form,
with equally shared possibilities, and thus having the possibility to
form our common passions under the sign of happiness. Here you
are: this seems to me to be the historically exceptional and unique
form of the Commune.
So let’s go back to what the Commune actually represented in its
own time. In Paris, 1871 was also a year of resistance. We should not
forget that the Prussian army was still surrounding the city and that
the Prussians had made peace with the versaillais* who were under
the walls. . . but the Prussian army was still behind, by the side [à côté].
So, for the Commune, it was not just a matter of fighting but also of
fighting against the Prussians. It was no coincidence that in 1871
* The versaillais (lit. ‘residents of Versailles’) were members of the political

coalition that suppressed the Commune in 1871.
168 In Conclusion
the Garibaldians, too, joined the fight against the Prussians. Around
Belfort, in the borderlands between Switzerland and France, in the
lower Rhineland, the bands of Garibaldians were the only ones that
kept the Germans in check, bringing the voice of the Commune there
too. Almost everyone, from Garibaldians to anarchists, was fight-
ing for the Commune and against the Prussians and the versaillais;
and then the anarchists easily adopted the model of the Commune,
carrying it all the way through to the Marxists. But I think that, for
the Commune to stand out with the brilliance it acquired, it took the
workers’ movement, as it came into being through the theoretical
action of Marx. Yet the Marxists actually took this event in a com-
pletely different direction from the anarchists; or maybe not? Maybe
the Commune functions as a matrix of all lineages, of all races, of all
genders? The Commune, to put it in the language of Spinoza, is like
the substance from which all the ways of being communist emerge.
For me, this is what it represents.
The Commune over time
Let us move on in history. How did the Commune event reverberate in

the workers’ movement and in the other workers’ movements? There is
a story of Lenin dancing in the snow-covered square when the Russian
Revolution had outlasted the Commune in number of days. But we
should also think of the political imaginary in France in 1968 and of
the writings of Lefebvre. Or perhaps I could ask whether, in your own
experience of the Italian movement of 1977, there were references,
anchorings to the Commune and, more generally, how the Commune
has worked as a political theory and as an imaginary that it has itself
sedimented.
When Lenin celebrated having surpassed the days of the Commune

he was still in Petrograd. He still had to conquer the whole of Russia.
And this was undoubtedly a revival, engineered by Lenìn (I still say
Lenìn, with the Emilian pronunciation, as the older members of my
family used to say it), of what Marx had built: the Commune as an
example of the extinction of the state. This is where the universality of that
slogan was established. By establishing a continuity with anarchism,
Lenìn – but perhaps already Marx – posits ‘taking the state’ as a tacti-
cal moment vis-à-vis the communists’ strategy, which is still that of the
abolition of the state. For anarchists, the tactical moment is a transi-
tion of little account: taking the state is not followed by a period of
transition – the state is destroyed and that’s it. For Lenìn (and also for
Marx), on the other hand, there is instead a period of transition, when

obviously enormous problems arise; this is all the more visible today
after what happened in the Soviet Union, when the so-called period
of extinction of the state became a terrible Stalinist mechanism of
centralization of the state itself. What happened there has obviously
created some problems for the Marxian theory of the state, precisely
as regards its extinction! However, I am interested in the communard
theme of the extinction of the state – and I say this in a radical way. I
don’t think it possible to call oneself a communist if one gives up on
this concept. Of course, the extinction proposal has to be taken as a
theoretical and practical task, and thus – to cast it in Weber’s language
– without any devaluation of the institutional realities and centraliza-
tion functions typical of the complexity of the intertwinings between
state and capitalism and of the processes of equalization that occur
in the great transformations of social, economic and civil life, where
cooperation has become both more widespread and more intensive.
Just as happens today.
But at the very moment when these needs and urgencies are taken
into account, there is also – as a duty in a radical ethics – the commit-
ment to destroy any idea that the state has a monopoly on legitimate
violence. Let us say it clearly: to destroy the very concept of legiti-
macy of power and to introduce the idea of the possibility of a plural
dispositif of powers, of councils, of articulations that implement the
dissolution of capitalist complexity and maintain command over this
dissolution – these are the stakes to which all communist issues must
yield and with which they have to play. This is true all the more
today, when the discourse on class struggle and the state focuses with
increasing resolution on a hypothesis and a theory of counterpower
in action, a counterpower capable of producing the extinction of the
central moment of power – the one clustered in the state.
There remains the problem of what a transition should be: from A
to. . . what? Probably the very formula of the transition will constitute
the social form of communist organization, and hence the form of
that activity of constructing an interlacement of powers with which
and through which it will be possible to affirm the maximum of free-
dom and the maximum of equality – and, of course, the maximum of
productivity in its adaptation to the general conditions (physical and
ecological) of survival of the human community.
Having said this, when we return to the Commune and to the
two dynamics I mentioned earlier, the theme of the councils and the
theme of equal wages are fully present throughout the communist
experience. They live first of all in Lenìn. I like to dig into what Lenìn
170 In Conclusion
says – and it seems clear to me that, when he says ‘soviets + electric-

ity’, he is saying exactly this: soviets as destruction of the state; and
replacement of the state’s functions by a regime of councils. On the
other hand, he is saying electricity, which in that phase is the way to
produce conditions for wage earners, the way to produce wealth, the
way to give life to those who are to participate in power and in the
survival of all. In communal life, life always precedes power – always,
every single time. The Commune is central on account of this indica-
tion alone.
As regards Lefebvre. . . He is very important as a writer, even if, in
my view, in order to judge him we need to dig a little deeper into the
great polemics of the post-war period – those on Marxian human-
ism in particular – in which he fell foul of the French Communist
Party and was thrown out by Althusser. We need to dig a little
because recovering a certain version of communist humanism, prob-
ably with Lefebvre’s help, remains a central task for me. Kristin
Ross’s book, behind all its postmodern elegances, actually extricates
this Lefebvrian element – the humanism of the Commune as well as
the humanism of the early Marx – from obtuse and ancient polemic.
We should be careful here, because – it has to be admitted! – when
Lefebvre dealt with the early Marx, he did it too much with the con-
nivance of what had been a reactionary fashion at the beginning of
the post-war period. In this framework, the humanism of Marx’s
writings of 1844 was invoked polemically against Marx’s stance in
Capital. In Italy it was Norberto Bobbio who became the hero of the
1844 Marx, naturally flirting with Roderigo di Castiglia (Togliatti’s
pseudonym in the magazine Rinascita). In Germany there was Iring
Feschter, a colossal revisionist, well supported by the reactionary soul
of the entire Frankfurt School. Lefebvre got caught up in this game
and, since the French Communist Party was not as nice as the Italian
Communist Party, he was not treated with kid gloves, like Bobbio,
but was isolated and shamefully expelled from the party. Much to
the contrary, Althusser interprets the ‘pure Marx’ against the youth-
ful Marx, the logician against the humanist, and makes room for a
caesura by virtue of which Marx became a materialist Marxist only
after 1848. Neither interpretation is correct, as we know. But politics
is above the truth! Lefebvre was half right, but got caught up in a
bigger game and paid the price, because despite being undoubtedly
the most intelligent person in the French Communist Party, despite
being open to biopolitical humanism, to the analysis of ways of life
and to the invention of a new materialist phenomenology of living in
common, and despite making one of the most important contribu-
tions to our whole experience and analytical skills as communists

– despite all this, he was cut off from the very entourage that inter-
ested him most.
And what is there to say about the Commune and the Italian
movement of 1977? That movement could be seen as part of the
tradition of the Commune. But 1977 was very ignorant. It was really
dumb; its sources were comics. However, it is beyond doubt that
1977, in its ludic and political expressions and in the organization of
its spaces – another very recent theme, the spatiality of movements
– was part of this tradition. The space of the Commune, too, was in
some ways the space of the streets and of the barricades, the space
to which Haussmann would respond with his urban reform. . . which
was designed to carve out this space and make it horizontal, like the
firing of machine guns, and by so doing to make it less viable for
the proletariat. And yet the space of the Commune was, and still is,
the space of workers’ organizations [corporazioni] and of shopkeep-
ers, a pre-established space. Since it seems to me that research and
polemics among urban thinkers have recently concentrated around
the preconstituted space or the newly constituted, neo-constituted
space, I completely agree that the theme of the neo-constituted space
is fundamental to thinking about struggles and movements; but I
have a hard time finding it in the historical past – probably down
to 1977. In my own experience, among the communard spaces in
Milan, only the Ticinese neighbourhood could have been described
like that to some extent; or probably, on occasion, Quarto Oggiaro
or Giambellino. And in Rome this level was reached only rarely (I
am thinking of Trastevere, of the attacks on the Nixon cavalcade,
for example). But it didn’t go beyond that, whereas later on things
changed: one begins to think of such spaces in Seattle in 1999, and
they appear in full light in the great struggles of the 2011 cycle, in the
Arab revolts and in Spain’s Puerta del Sol uprising. This idea of the
spatiality of movements obviously creates important organizational
problems. I tried to study them with Michael Hardt in Assembly,
but I don’t think we were able to give a sense of what it means deep
down. We took on this leitmotif, this refrain of ‘Go. . .’, of ‘Call and
respond’* – a refrain in the singing of the black slaves when they went
to work. One launched the question, the other gave the response:
here is a pattern that could somehow fix into the movement, into the
march, a mechanism of organization of the discourse. But even this
* ‘Go’ and ‘Call and respond’ in English in the original.

172 In Conclusion
does not correspond to the experience of the streets that I witnessed

and studied in 2011. I participated a little in the Spanish movements
in Spain; I studied closely the Brazilian movement of 2013 (a move-
ment of extraordinary importance); and I am left with the uncertainty
of not knowing how to define the new spatiality of the movements
from a political point of view. But assuredly, since then, spatiality
has become central. Black Lives Matter, Gilets Jaunes, and today’s
women’s movements in Belarus – these are three very strong exam-
ples. Probably, then, it is worth keeping the metaphor and saying that
we want to repeat the Commune in order to maintain a relationship
between the council and the movement.
These difficulties do not take anything away from the imaginary
of the Commune, even if – returning to the social struggles, in the
spaces they occupy, and to Rimbaud, to the poetry I read before –
while granting full respect to Kristin Ross, we must remember that
the class struggle is also a struggle of mourning, ruptures, losses and
death. I don’t know whether you have ever been to Père-Lachaise,
the cemetery of the Commune, where the execution wall and the
mass graves can be seen. It is something that makes you want to cry
when you go there; but this, too, has to be remembered: the class
struggle is beautiful, but it is also a matter of life and death, and for
the Commune it was so too. Lissagaray tells it well.
The planetary commune
Let us try to frame the Commune as a political form, recalling other

geographies and times in which the Commune has been recalled – I’m
thinking in particular of the Commune of Shanghai and of that of
Oaxaca. Even remaining with the Paris Commune, recent studies tend
to trace a genealogy that is not attributable just to the city perimeter of
Paris but broadens it within that constitutively transnational dimen-
sion in which political phenomena take place, and hence looks at the
Parisian event also in a colonial–decolonial dimension of struggles that
extend beyond the specific moment. But the Commune becomes, spe-
cifically, also a political dimension that does not reproduce itself as
much as proposes itself as a political form. What does this reappearance
of the Commune tell us, despite the obvious differences in contexts?
The Commune has had enormous significance in political thought

precisely inasmuch as it has been treated as a political form. But every
real political experience we live recalls it as an event, and often as a
defeated event. So we have on the one hand the political model of the
Commune as a model of council-based activity, as direct democracy.

And on the other we have the experience of a real political form, of a
real political event, which is an event of defeat, of crude repression.
When I was young, I remember that, when I talked about the
Commune with the old cadres of the Communist Party – and
obviously I did so with the enthusiasm of a neophyte – they, derid-
ing me, would remind me that the Commune had been defeated but
its defeat had been largely redeemed by the triumph of the Russian
Revolution and of the Red Army in the defence of Stalingrad and
the conquest of Berlin. . . things that were far from derisory. . . and
then there was China, and so on. One third of the world was
included in this act of redemption. This triumphalist teleology soon
proved itself to me to be false. More and more I found myself in
need of going back to basics and building on the new experiences
of struggle. Here the problem was to combine the ideal of the Paris
Commune with that of Shanghai or Oaxaca and with the global
reality in the history of proletarian revolutions. I think this would
have been one of Marx’s great problems, and in some ways it was,
as can be seen from the publication of his researches in old age,
especially the anthropological writings – or, to put it better, after
Capital, when he began his anthropological studies and sought to
find some continuity in community forms of organization between
the past and the future. I have never been keen on these kinds of
intellectual adventure, because I think that there is a logical impos-
sibility in connecting a form of utopia, albeit a concrete utopia, to a
historical path. I have the scepticism of an old-time materialist. But
Marx was a materialist too, and yet he tried to find in the Russian
obscina, as appears in the letters to Vera Zasulic, the possibility of
determining a historical continuity of the communist model. As for
Mao: he was against the Shanghai Commune, but he built com-
munes in the mountains of Henan: a truly living and armed dual
power, with its factories but also with its schools, in which commu-
nist cadres were produced by transforming illiterate peasants into
the future leaders of the Chinese socialist state – and anyway by put-
ting them through the exercise of arms. This was an extraordinary
experience, one of the few that took place in a state of exception – I
don’t mean the constitutional exception, but the exceptional story
of two Maoist wars, the civil war and the war against Japan, which
are mutually interrelated. And here, in the middle, there is a first
realization of a counterpower.
Now, these are the broader dimensions in which I believe the theo-
retical model of the common needs to be reproposed and adapted to
174 In Conclusion
reality. Otherwise I’m very afraid of utopias, of any utopia. When I

look around, I see ethically and politically formidable experiences,
the various ZADs [zones à défendre, zones to defend] and other spa-
tialized experiences of class conflict. However, I do not believe that
with this we are on an adequate terrain, at the level of the current
needs of revolutionary thought. What is needed is to understand
what it means to bring into being a dual power [doppio potere] that
does not dissolve complexity but succeeds in preserving it, manages
to overcome and use it, and at the same time destroys it; a power that
does not nestle within the complexity of power but becomes a virus,
which attacks the main nerve centres.
This in turn raises the problem of how the Commune can repre-
sent a political model and how it could have been valid, for example
in experiences of decolonialization during the great struggles against
colonialism. When you read, say, the work of Indian academics in
subaltern studies,* Ranajit Guha in particular, you find descriptions
of formidable experiences of class struggle in the wars of liberation
against British colonialism in India. Whole states were involved in
uprisings where millions and millions of people fought in ways that
closely resembled those of the Commune.
But we should be careful. Today fortunately we have entered a
postcolonial era. And I would not want to reiterate the illusion that
this has created a smooth and unified world – an illusion to which I
came very close in Empire – after the illusion that globalization has
rendered this world homogeneous (the first, the second, the third).
There are huge differences on all sides, it cannot be helped; but the
unified global or imperial–global scope remains. Thus, if these dif-
ferences exist, they must be understood at a single level. And what is
needed at this level is not the discovery or rediscovery of old formulas
or old experiences: not small utopias but rather a constituent imagi-
nation. The problem of power has to be addressed in its entirety – as
they did in the Paris Commune.
So let us ask ourselves: how can a counterpower be constituted, or
rather a practice of rupture that traverses and destroys the complex-
ity of capitalist power? We are not talking here only about taking the
state; what is to be destroyed is sovereignty, capitalist sovereignty.
Unfortunately that’s a different matter altogether. And this transition
is something damn difficult, even from the point of view of imagin-
ing it; but it is nevertheless the terrain on which we must press to the
* ‘subaltern studies’ in English in the original.

limit our capacity for analysis and our experiences – with the cer-
tainty that every time you create a break on this link the whole chain
breaks, every time you break that transition everything else collapses
almost automatically, as it always does when something breaks under
tension. Having said this, it is clear that all individual problems con-
glomerated in power (for instance the ecological problem is central
today) have to be linked together in the destruction and transforma-
tion that take place in a prospective chain, in a single dispositif. This
is what the Commune teaches us.
I always say this to my closest comrades: today we have to imagine
a kind of Pinocchio and build him in such a way that he gradu-
ally acquires a sense of complexity – a bit like in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century fairytales where a flower was placed in front of
a Pinocchietto, in order for us to imagine how smell could awake
the other senses. Today the point is to experience not the senses but
passions, common passions. We have to invent the cyborg of the
common. We have to be capable of combining the postmodern – its
economy, technology, social and cultural relationships, and every-
thing in it – with the humanist passion of the Commune, of being
together, of building together, in freedom and in equality.
The Commune today
A few last points. What can it mean to think of the present and of
the political future through the lens of the Commune? I mean this
in two senses. What can the Commune mean today politically and
organizationally, as secession, separation of pieces of metropolis, of
territory, of territoriality – what does it mean to think of this dimen-
sion of secession, of rupture, of parts. . . Earlier you mentioned the
ZADs as an example of low-level micro-dynamics, as small pieces of
territory in secession; but can we think of this dynamic of separa-
tion and of rupture at metropolitan level? As a counter-construction
of other powers? Is this intuition of the Commune thinkable today?
On the other side of the problem, how can the semantic area of the
concatenation between Commune, commons, communism, common
and community be anticipated, even in the light of experiences such
as those of 2011 and 2013, or of the more recent ones in Chile
and the United States, or again by looking at the Gilets Jaunes,
with their spatiality made of expansive and widespread territoriality,
their roundabouts that became molecular camps on French soil and
then focused on the intensity of Saturdays, on the assaults on the
metropolis . . .?
176 In Conclusion
Three things have made a great impression on me in recent years.

One is Black Lives Matter, the second is the Gilets Jaunes move-
ment, and the third, which I find amazing (also because I was lucky
enough to have direct contact with it), is the women of Belarus.
What’s happening there is incredible: women, and only women, come
and demonstrate every Sunday, filling the streets up to hundreds
of thousands. These women have produced an irresistible political
movement, while the policemen of power are exclusively male. This
movement of women occurs in a country that is far from wretched
and has succeeded in maintaining a considerable level of heavy and
light industry, which is linked to Russia but has sufficient autonomy
to be, for example, employed in Chinese style (and this also explains
many of the anxieties of the West), as a subordinate workforce, by
the large western pools.* These women demonstrate to demand a
democratic transformation of the political order in a society with a
traditionally good level of welfare, and obviously they already include
in their struggle the defence and development of all their needs as
women. It is a formidable thing – the first time a political move-
ment consists entirely of women. I don’t want to upset my women
comrades, who will rightly observe that any movement of women
(especially the ones we have recently witnessed here and in Latin
America) is political; but this is a ‘political’ that looks directly at the
common, at the state, and at the latter’s radical transformation.
As for the American movements, nothing remains to say that has
not been said already . . . while there is no doubt that the Gilets
Jaunes movement – for all the ambiguities it has gradually revealed
(accompanied today, unfortunately, by an evident inability to bounce
back) – has shown a very high level of perception and proposal of the
common, and not simply as a recollection of the Commune (which
is always there in France, in any subversive movement). And this is
where we saw a perception and proposal of the common: in a strange
moment, when it seemed that struggles were completely blocked
and Macron’s Republic had, so to speak, removed their plausibil-
ity, the Gilets Jaunes suddenly popped up, with their invention of
a space of mobilization on Saturdays, on the day when people rest.
A mobilization on the day of rest. . . The first few times when I saw
them I asked myself: ‘What are these people doing, are they going
to Mass?’ It really looked a bit like that. In short, the movement
revealed something that decidedly surpassed any claim or possibility
* ‘pools’ in English in the original.

of being reduced to a liturgical fact; it became a permanent inven-

tion, because this coming together turned out to be (and I think this
applies to the Commune in general) a real forge of powers [potenze],
a moment of formidable expression. To succeed in getting together
in a society where everyone said that politics was finished, that poli-
tics was dead. . . what nonsense! What we saw was an exceptional
bottom-up politicization. It was a coming together and a marching
on Saturday afternoons, and this gave rise to a road map in which all
the complexity of capitalist domination was picked through, one page
after another, as in plucking a daisy. This was the first communard
aspect, the analytical Commune.
The second communard element in the Gilets Jaunes was that, as a
partial and open engine of subversion, this movement brought about
the convergence of all other forces – remarkably, even of the trade
unions. . . always jealous of their corporate interests (but less so today
and more often in defence of their very survival, because precisely
that corporate aspect has reduced them to being a simple expres-
sion or sub-expression of the power of the state). The Gilets Jaunes
succeeded in awakening the corporate trade union forces too, and
invited them to moments of convergence of struggle, but above all
they produced a new discovery of the terrain of struggle, the struggle
over the common. What are in fact the proposals of the Gilets Jaunes?
They are referendum – not at all in the style of the Five Star move-
ment, but one that means ‘we want to intervene in the legislative
process directly’; and, second, we want to decide on public spending,
on the tax–wage relationship, and on the redistribution of income. This
last element, economic–salarial, is an essential one that corresponds
to another, democratic – so that one cannot be without the other.
You cannot ask for absolute, direct democracy if you do not ask for
equal wages distributed to all. The Commune again?
Final problem: we live in a society in which the mechanism of pro-
duction brings about a profound cooperation of living labour, and
proposes a common ontology of work. The question is how to make
this ontology speak. The political model that the Paris Commune
produced came before the emergence of the common as a power of
production; we are probably instead in a situation where that pro-
ductive power of the common precedes, has consolidated, and is
our environment. This should represent an anthropological privilege.
But capital has appropriated it. And yet the common as an anthropo-
logical privilege is by now implanted in our nature and can become
explosive. It is clear that, if we succeed in expressing it, everything
blows up. And we have to be very careful with that, because we must
178 In Conclusion
always remember what Lissagaray said about the class struggle. . .

even in the face of just one single rupture, capital responds with all its
forces. Capital is bad, and I don’t say it lightly. It knows that it must
destroy one to prevent many, too many, from destroying it. So long
live the common, and may it bring us good!
Notes
Notes to Chapter 1
1 Ian Gough, ‘State spending in advanced capitalism’, New Left Review, 92
(1975), p. 53.
2 See the controversy opened by S. von Flatow and F. Huisken’s
‘Zum Problem der Ableitung des bürgerlichen Staates’, Probleme des
Klassenkampfs, 7 (May 1973) and pursued by H. Reichelt, ‘Einige
Ammerkungen Flatows von und zu S. F. Huiskens Aufsatz. . .’, Gesellschaft:
Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie, 1 (1974), pp. 12–30; H. Hochberger,
‘Probleme einer materialistischen Bestimmung des Staates’, Gesellschaft:
Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie, 2 (1974), pp. 155–203; H. Gerstenberger,
‘Klassenantagonismus, Konkurrenz und Staatsfunktionen’, Gesellschaft:
Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie, 3 (1975), pp. 7–26. Other recent contri-
butions can be found in these articles’ bibliographies, which I have not
consulted so far.
3 Jim O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, New York: St Martin’s Press,
1973.
4 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1992,
chs 20–1.
5 Gough, ‘State spending’, p. 57.
6 Following in Mandel’s footsteps, see D. Yaffe, ‘The crisis of profitabil-
ity’, New Left Review, 80 (1973), and D. Yaffe, ‘The Marxian theory of
crisis, capital and state’, Conference of Socialist Economists Bulletin (here-
after CSEB), winter 1972. It seems that J. Kirsch, ‘Zur Analyse des
politischen Systems’, Gesellschaft, 1 (1974), pp. 78–131, but esp. 95 and
97, also falls into such ambiguities.
7 Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie [Foundations of
a Critique of Political Economy], translated here from the Italian edition,
vol. 2, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970, p. 60. [Given the nature of the
material, all subsequent references to Marx will be to Italian translations,
180 Notes to pp. 6–8
which are also the source of the English versions presented in this chap-
ter.]
8 Friedrich Engels, Antidühring, translated here from the Italian edition,
Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1950, p. 303.
9 Rosa Luxemburg, Ausgewählte Reden und Schrijnen, translated here from
the Italian edition: Rosa Luxenburg, Scritti politici, vol. 1, Rome: Editori
Internazionali Riuniti, 2012, p. 720.
10 Marx, Grundrisse, vol. 2, pp. 396ff. It should be noted that observa-
tions and reservations were raised to the interpretation given by Roman
Rosdolsky, especially to the concept of ‘overall capital’ [capitale comp-
lessivo], in his fundamental The Making of Marx’s Capital, London:
Pluto, 1977; and they came from all sides. See particularly W. Schwarz,
‘Das “Kapital im allgemeinen” und die “Konkurrenz” im ökonomis-
chen Werk von Karl Marx’, Gesellschaft, 1 (1974), pp. 222–47 – which
remains the most important contribution. In this instance, Rosdolsky
is seen as having confounded several levels of the scientific abstraction
operated by Marx, confusing the level of total capital (a mere logical
category) with that on which competition operates, a category that is not
logical but historical and historically effective. It is obviously necessary
that the studies on the Grundrisse should proceed to an entire reverifica-
tion of Marx’s argument here, and there is no doubt that some passages
in Rosdolsky need to be revised – but certainly not, in my opinion, those
relating to the concept of overall capital, which is fundamental to Marx’s
thought and is explained by Rosdolsky as the tendential category that
begins to approach its actuality today. On the other hand, in Marx the
relationship between logical categories and historical categories seems a
little more complex than in Schwarz’s definition of it.
11 For documentation concerning the most significant examples of public
spending and welfare policy in the United States and of the workers’
struggle in this area, see especially the articles of P. Carpignano, ‘Note su
classe operaia e capitale in America negli anni Sessanta’, in S. Bologna,
P. Carpignano and A. Negri, Crisi e organizzazione operaia, Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1974, pp. 73–98, and P. Carpignano, ‘Disoccupazione made
in USA’, Sociological Criticism, 35 (1975), pp. 115–28. The literature on
this question is starting to be extensive in English-speaking countries,
and I think that it is likely to multiply very soon, given the problems
raised by the impending bankruptcy of New York City Hall.
12 On these problems in general, see again O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of
the State, esp. p. 9 and the last chapters. For Italy, from a point of view
of a critique and rationalization written from within the system, see
F. Reviglio, ‘La crisi della finanza pubblica (1970–1974): indicazioni per
una diagnosi e una terapia’, Rivista di diritto finanziario, 1 (1975), n.p.
13 O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, p. 7.
14 In the distinctions he makes, O’Connor is probably inspired by Claus
Offe’s analysis of the political structures of the state. For an in-depth
Notes to pp. 8–11 181
view of Offe’s work on these questions, see particularly Claus Offe,

Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972,
esp. pp. 27ff. and 123ff, and Claus Offe, ‘Krisen des Krisenmanagement:
Elemente einer politischen Krisentheorie’, in M. Jänicke, ed., Herrschaft
und Krise, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1973, pp. 192–223, esp.
116ff.
15 Gough, ‘State spending’, p. 71, note.
16 Joachim Hirsch, Wissenschaftlich-technischer Fortschritt und politisches
System, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970, pp. 87, 91, 93.
17 Yaffe, ‘Crisis of profitability’, p. 52.
18 See esp. Marx, Capital, in the Italian edition, Rome: Rinascita, 1954: vol.
2, pp. 64–70, and also vol. 1, pp. 38–9. See the whole ch. 3 in vol. 1.
19 Marx’s definition of productive work runs throughout his mature work,
with a notable coherence of emphasis. See Marx, Grundrisse, vol. 1,
pp. 244–54, 261–2, 274–5, 277–8, 279–82, 291–2, 294–8, 317–18,
336–9, 363–70 and vol. 2, pp. 84, 384, 397–415, 456–7, 461–3, 483,
555, 575–7, 648–54; Marx, Capital, esp. vol. 1, ch. 2, pp. 221–2; Karl
Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, in the Italian edition: Florence: La Nuova
Italia, 1969, pp. 57–8, 73–94; Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, in
the Italian edition: Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961, pp. 269–470, 585–
613. But later on Marx’s thought on productive labour ended in very
reductive positions among his followers (his definition of it was charged
with class struggle intentionality; see Friedrich Behrens, Produktive
Arbeit und technische Intelligenz, a self-published study from 1970).
There is not much help for proceeding in the debate in the article by
E. Altvater and F. Huisken, ‘Produktive und unproduktive Arbeit als
Kampfbegriffe, als Kategorien zur Analyse der Klassenverhaltnisse und
der Reproduktionsbedingungen des Kapitals’, Sozialistische Politik, 8
(1970), pp. 47–92 (http://www.elmaraltvater.net/articles/Altvater_Articl
e1a.pdf), translated into Italian in 1975 as a book, under the title Lavoro
produttivo e improduttivo.
20 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 2, pp. 221–2.
21 See Ian Gough, ‘Marx’s theory of productive and unproductive labour’,
New Left Review, 76 (1972), pp. 47–72; John Harrison, ‘Productive and
unproductive labour in Marx’s political economy’, CSEB, 2.6 (1973),
pp. 70–82; B. Fine, ‘A note on productive and unproductive labour’,
CSEB, 2.6 (1973), pp. 99–102; Paul Bullock, ‘Categories of labour
power for capital’, CSEB, 2.6 (1973), pp. 82–99; Paul Bullock, ‘Defining
productive labour for capital’, CSEB, 2.9 (1974) ), pp. 15–29.
22 Gough, ‘State spending in advanced capitalism’, p. 83.
23 Bob Rowthorn, ‘Skilled labour in the Marxist system’, CSEB, 1 (1974),
pp. 25–45, here p. 36.
24 See Marx’s research and conclusions on public debt in primitive accu-
mulation.
25 A particularly interesting point in the aforementioned discussion
among British economists concerns the extension of the concept of

productive labour to domestic work. See John Harrison, ‘The politi-
cal economy of housework’, CSEB, 3 (1973), pp. 35–51; Ian Gough
and John Harrison, ‘Unproductive labour and housework again’,
CSEB, 4.1 (1975), pp. 69–75. All these issues are available at https://
journals.sagepub.com/page/cnc/collections/bulletin.
26 We are awaiting an article on this subject by Luciano Ferrari Bravo
that should soon appear in Aut Aut and should offer a useful philo
logical approach to developing an analysis of the insufficiency (and
tendentiousness) of Marx’s definitions of productive and unproductive
labour.
27 The fragment on machines in Marx, Grundrisse, vol. 2, from p. 388 on.
28 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ch. 2, pp. 215–16 (conclusion of the discussion on
the factory legislation).
29 See the conclusions in Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital,
pp. 342 ff.
30 E.g. F. Galgano, Le istituzioni dell’economia capitalistica, Bologna:
Zanichelli, 1974, esp. pp. 33–8.
31 R. Guastini, in his review of Galgano, disputes – in my opinion, in ways
that are too hasty and traditional – a certain analytical correctness of the
approach of the author under consideration. See R. Guastini, ‘Stato del
capitale e neotogliattismo’, Sociologia del diritto, 1 (1975), pp. 143–4.
32 Marx, Capital, esp. vol. 1, ch. 2; also more specifically vol. 3, ch. 2
(pp. 74–5 and 154–5).
33 But see esp. the analysis in Elmar Altvater, ‘Notes on some problems of
state interventionism’, Kapitalistate, 1 (1973), pp. 96–108; 2 (1973), pp.
76–83. https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/altvater/1972
/probsstate.htm.
34 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, ch. 1, pp. 285–95 and 296–324.
35 Hirsch, Wissenschaftlich-technischer Fortschritt, stresses very well and with
great appropriateness the continuing inherence of socialization processes
in the structure of the contemporary state (see in particular pp. 89,
91, 93, 103). On this line see also the recent contribution of J. Agnoli,
Überlegungen zum bürgerlichen Staat, Berlin: Wagenbach, 1975, in par-
ticular the chapter ‘Der Staat des Kapitals’.
36 Wolf-Dieter Narr and Claus Offe, eds, Wohlfahrtsstaat und Massenloyalität,
Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1975 is a useful contribution, summa-
rizing and partly didactic, on the difficulties faced in this area by state
administration. J. Esser, Einführung in die materialistische Staatsanalyse,
Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1975 brings a balanced view on the criticism
of Offe’s sociological and structuralist objectivism and a proper assess-
ment of the merits of Krisentheorie in comparison with other positions in
the German environment.
37 The reference is again to Marx, Grundrisse, vol. 2 (the fragment on
machines).
38 On this subject, see essentially Rowthorn, ‘Skilled labour’.

39 A. Negri, Crisi dello stato-piano, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974; see also
A. Negri, ‘Partito operaio contro il lavoro’, in S. Bologna, P. Carpignano
and A. Negri, Crisi e organizzazione operaia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974,
pp. 99–160.
40 The attempt to relate the fundamental problems of political science and
planning science back to the fundamental antagonisms of the socializa-
tion of production is very clear in Hirsch, Wissenschaftlich-technischer
Fortschritt, passim (esp. pp. 85 and 128).
41 On this ‘negative’ conscience, see particularly the texts of the so-
called Planungsdiskussion (‘joint discussion’) that developed in Western
Germany around the 1970s. Bibliography can be found in Hirsch,
Wissenschaftlich-technischer Fortschritt, pp. 80, 93–4.
42 Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital, pp. 330–64.
43 Mediobanca, ed., La finanza pubblica, 1968–72, 2 vols, Milan:
Mediobanca, 1974.
44 See again Reviglio, ‘La crisi della finanza pubblica’. Some of the consid-
erations that follow come from this study.
45 The latest testimony is a bitter one: Giorgio Ruffolo, Riforme e controri-
forme, Bari: Laterza, 1975.
46 M. Paci, Mercato del lavoro e classi sociali in Italia, Bologna: Il Mulino,
1973.
47 For an in-depth study of this topic, see A. Negri, Proletari e Stato, Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1976 – a booklet published in the Opuscoli Marxisti series.
48 Reviglio, ‘La crisi della finanza pubblica’, pp. 177–8.
49 See for example the documentation regarding Germany in H. J. Weissbach,
Planungswissenschaft: Eine Analyze der Entwicklungsbedingungen und
Entwicklungsformen der Arbeitsmarkt – und Berufsforschung, Giessen:
Achenbach, 1975.
50 J. Agnoli and P. Bruckner, Die Transformation der Demokratie, Frankfurt:
Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), a book no longer new, was com-
pletely prescient regarding this development. On the reorientation of
political science and the practices of power in this area, see Narr and
Offe, Wohlfahrtsstaat und Massenloyalität, with references.
51 See N. Bobbio, ‘Intorno all’analisi funzionale del diritto’, Sociologia del
diritto, 1 (1975), n.p.
52 Concerning Germany, I refer here mainly to the work of Niklas Luhmann
(see A. Febbraio, ‘Sociologia del diritto e funzionalismo strutturale
nell’opera di N. Luhmann’, Sociologia del diritto, 2 (1974), n.p.). As for
the United States, a reference to the work of James Willard Hurst seems
apposite here; see E. Lombardi, ‘La logica dell’esperienza di J. Willard
Hurst’, Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica, 2 (1972), pp. 519–
86.
53 But the communists are challenged to prove themselves (albeit with many
ambiguities) regarding this ‘heterogony of ends’; see J. Seifert, Kampf
um Verfassungspositionen: Materialien über Grenzen und Möglichkeiten von

Rechtspolitik, Cologne: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1974.
54 A piece of research useful in this respect seems to me T. Krämer-Bordoni
et al., Die Kommune in der Staatsorganization, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1974. This volume, put together by a team of young authors, contains
an important piece, with a somewhat rigid but critical content, which
argues against Offe’s theory of crisis: T. Kramer-Badoni, ‘Krise und
Krisenpotential im Spätkapitalismus’, pp. 115–30.
55 A reference to the dramatic pages written in the 1930s by F. Neumann
on the democratic state and on the authoritarian state is indispensa-
ble here. No less interesting are the notes and analyses offered around
these same themes in A. Sohn-Rethel, Ökonomie und Klassenstruktur des
deutschen Faschismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973 (with a preface by
J. Agnoli, B. Blanke and N. Kadritzke).
56 Marx, Grundrisse, vol. 2, pp. 409–11 (again, all passages are translated
here from the Italian).
57 On these questions, and esp. on the reconstruction of class composition
and on the dialectic of needs, I refer again to Negri, Proletari e stato.
58 See R. Theobald, ed., The Guaranteed Income, Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1966.
59 J. H. Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker, 3 vols., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1968–9 is fundamental in this regard.
See also W. G. Runcinam, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
60 One could think here of Oskar Negt – of his works on education and on
working-class consciousness in a technological society, as well as of the
mass of ideology produced around the ‘150 hours’ programme. [This
was a well-known achievement of worker education in Italy in the 1970s.]
61 Interestingly, there has been a recent reprise of the topic of class
composition by German authors. See in particular C. Eckart et al.,
‘Arbeiterbewusstsein, Klassenzusammensetzung und Ökonomische
Entwicklung: Empirische Thesen zum instrumentellen Bewusstsein’,
Gesellschaft, 4 (1975), pp. 7–64.
62 Some hints about this can be found in Claus Offe, Leistungsprinzip und
industrielle Arbeit, Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1970 (see esp.
the Introduction).
63 Finally, on these questions, see U. Rödel, Forschungsprioritäten und tech-
nologische Entwicklung, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972; Carl Rolshausen,
Wissenschaft und gesellschaftliche Reproduktion, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1975; and J. H. Mendner, Technologische Entwicklung und Arbeitsprozess,
Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975.
64 M. Cacciari, ‘Lavoro, valorizzazione e “cervello sociale”’, Aut Aut, 145–6
(1975), pp. 3–40.
65 R. Alquati, Sindacato e partito, Turin: Edizioni Stampatori, 1974, p. 165.
66 See B. Wahrenkamp, ed., Technologie und Kapital, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1973 (esp. A. Sohn-Rethel’s chapter ‘Technische Intelligenz zwischen

Kapitalismus und Sozialismus’).
67 Alquati, Sindacato e partito, pp. 165–6.
68 I should say here that when I speak of productive potential I don’t mean
Sweezy and Baran’s notion of surplus, as configured in underconsumer-
ism theory. My notion is quite opposite to theirs. The question I ask
in the text came to me when I reread an old typescript by Ferruccio
Gambino (from 1970, I think), entitled ‘Forza invenzione e forza-lavoro:
ipotesi’. This essay ends by defining a project that seems to me of great
interest and on which there is still work to be done: ‘The so-called pro-
ductive potential that presides over Sweezy and Baran’s notion of surplus
has to be included in the capacity (still to be built) of the working class to
dominate social knowledge as a whole: to dominate it endemically, down
to the elimination of political mediations.’ This is precisely the question,
and today we are beginning to approach it.
69 For a definition of the planning model, which takes into account the
terms of political science, see S. S. Cohen, Modern Capitalist Planning:
The French Model, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. The
discussion of this model in H. G. Haupt and S. Leibfried, ‘Planung im
Kapitalismus: das französische Modell’, Leviathan, 2 (1974), pp. 313–22
contains a large critical bibliography on planning.
70 On this question it is perhaps useful to recall the fundamental contribu-
tions of N. Kaldor, Causes of the Slow Rate of Economic Growth of the UK:
An Inaugural Lecture, London: Cambridge University Press, 1966, and
M. Morishima, Marx’s Economics: A Dual Theory of Value and Growth,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
71 On this theme, it is sufficient to see the pathetic proposals of the
Cambridge Political Economy Group and Claus Koch, ‘England Krise:
Ursachen und Abhilfen’, Leviathan, 3.3 (1975), pp. 338–69 (the article
came to my attention in this German translation).
72 See the arguments and the reconstruction of Marx’s thinking in the
Epilogue to Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital.
73 See R. Damus, Wertkategorien als Mittel der Planung: Zur Widerspruchlichkeit
der Planung gesamtgesellschaftlicher Prozesse in der DDR, Erlangen:
Politladen, 1973. But one can deduce – at least from the news of work-
ing-class and proletarian struggles in the Soviet Union that began to filter
through – that enforced control must occur even in the USSR planning
process. See, among others, M. Holubenko, ‘The Soviet working class:
Discontent and opposition’, Critique, 4 (1975), pp. 5–25.
74 See e.g. H. Haussermann, ‘Die administrative Organization als Problem
politischer Innovation’, Leviathan, 2 (1974), pp. 23–62 (a piece I came
upon recently).
75 For contributions on these issues, see Claus Offe, ‘Rationalitätskriterien
und Funktionsprobleme politisch-administrativen Handelns’, Leviathan
3 (1974), pp. 333–46; G. Schmid and D. Freiburghaus, ‘Techniken
politischer Planung: vom Mertkalkul zum Plankalkul?’, Leviathan, 3

(1974), pp. 346–82; W. Ehlert, ‘Politische Planung: und was davon übrig
bleibt’, Leviathan, 1 (1975), pp. 84–114; V. Ronge, ‘Entpolitisierung der
Forschungspolitik’, Leviathan, 3 (1975), pp. 307–37.
76 F. Gerstenberger, ‘Produktion und Qualifikation’, Leviathan, 2 (1975),
pp. 251–79.
77 Carpignano, ‘Disoccupazione, made in USA’ reports some very effective
statements of American leaders on the impossibility of proceeding in this
direction.
78 The wealth of the dual labour market is not new, but enjoyed an innova-
tion in the 1970s, when it became an active part of labour policy – that is,
of the segmentation of the labour market. See Michael J. Piore and Peter
B. Doeringer, ‘Unemployment and the dual labour market’, Public Interest,
38 (1975), pp. 67–79; D. Freiburghaus and G. Schmid, ‘Theorie der
Segmentierung von Arbeitsitsmarkten’, Leviathan, 3 (1975), pp. 417–48.
79 In Claus Offe, Berufsbildungsreform: Eine Fallstudie über Reformpolitik,
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, the author’s structuralistic conception and
class tension seem to reach a new level of equilibrium, in which the
moments of antagonism typical of the socialization processes can occur
more insistently.
80 Norberto Bobbio, ‘Gramsci e la concezione della società civile’, in Studi
gramsciani: Atti del convegno tenuto a Roma nei giorni 11–13 gennaio 1958,
Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1958, pp. 73–86. (Republished a few times, e.g.
in Norberto Bobbo, Gramsci e la concezione della società civile, Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1976, pp. 17–43, and now also available at https://marioxma
ncini.medium.com/gramsci-e-la-concezione-della-società-civile-defcbb4
e216a).
81 One can find an analysis of the situation in Germany in Karl H. Roth,
L’ ‘altro’ movimento operaio, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976 and in C. T. Bol
brinker, Klassenanalyse als Organizationsfrage, Giessen: Focus Verlag, 1975.
82 Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Die ökonomische Doppelnatur des Spätkapitalismus,
Luchterhand, Darmstad: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1972. See also
Sohn-Rethel, ‘Technische Intelligenz’ and, for the remarkable contribu-
tion they bring to the present discussion, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Warenform
und Denkform, Aufsätze, Vienna: Europe Verlag, 1971; Alfred Sohn-
Rethel, Geistige und korperliche Arbeit (2nd edn), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1972; and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Materialistische Erkenntnistheorie und
Vergesellschaftung der Arbeit, Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1971.
83 Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx’s Capital, p. 490. Again, see the frag-
ment on machines in Marx, Grundrisse, vol. 2.
84 The reference is to ‘Private and communal property’, in Karl Marx, 1844
Manuscripts, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959, and to ‘Communism’,
in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, edited by
C. J. Arthur, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970.
85 It is clear that when I talk of a necessary openness of scientific interest to
Notes to pp. 38–103 187
criticism against politics – understood as a development of the critique

of political economy, at the current level of development of the class
struggle – I mean essentially an analysis that moves at two levels. The
first level is that of the critique of the everyday; the second level is that of
the critique of administration, in which institutional political forces are
necessarily included. In my judgement, addressing this second level has
nothing to do with the chatter about what is called ‘the autonomy of the
political’; on the contrary, carrying out today a critical analysis of politics
in Marxian terms means developing a critique of political economy in its
own right and removing any residual autonomy (however relevant) from
the state and from all those who participate in the organization of capital-
ist exploitation, starting from the state.
86 A ‘strategic dimension of the refusal’ and a ‘tactical dimension of abnor-
mal usages’ are, on the other hand, indications that have circulated for
some time among scientific researchers and employees in research estab-
lishments, in work that indirectly produces surplus value.
Notes to Chapter 4
1 For a critical review of the political economy of the common, see Carlo
Vercellone et al., Managing the Commons in the Knowledge Economy. Report
D3.2, D-CENT (Decentralized Citizens ENgagement Technologies).
European Project 2015. May 2015. http://dcentproject.eu/wp-content
/uploads/2015/07/D3.2-complete-ENG-v2.pdf.
2 See Sandro Chignola, ‘Vita lavoro linguaggi: Biopolitica e biocapital-
ismo, EuroNomade, 12 October 2015.
3 See Laurent de Sutter, ed., Accélérations, Paris: PUF, 2016.
Notes to Chapter 6
1 Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1987.
Notes to Chapter 7
1 Karl Marx, Über Friedrich Lists Buch Das nationale System der politischen
Ökonomie, Paris: Études et Documentation Internationales, 1975
[1845]. Translated here from the Italian.
2 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes
to Locke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
3 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 10.16.
4 Manuel Castells and Robert Castel, Les métamorphoses de la question
sociale: une chronique du salariat, Paris: Fayard, 1995 (also Paris: Folio-
Gallimard, 2000); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society,
Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009.
188 Notes to pp. 103–138
5 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiappello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris:

Gallimard, 1999.
6 André Orléan, L’empire de la valeur, Paris: Seuil, 2011; Christian Marazzi,
E il denaro va, Milan: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998.
7 Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, ‘The property theory of interest and
money’, in J. Smithin, ed., What Is Money? London: Routledge, 2000,
pp. 67–100.
8 Jean-Marie Harribey, book review of André Orléan, L’empire de la valeur,
Revue de la Régulation, 10 (2011). http://regulation.revues.org/9483.
9 Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Introduction to political economy’, in The Complete
Works of Rosa Luxemburg, vol. 1, London: Verso, 2013, p. 286.
10 Heinsohn and Steiger, ‘Property theory of interest and money’; Harribey,
book review.
11 See Antonio Negri, ‘Rileggendo Pašukanis: note di discussione’, in his
La forma stato, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977, pp. 161–95.
Notes to Chapter 8
1 Étienne Tassin, Un monde commun, Paris: Seuil, 2003.
2 Saskia Sassen, Expulsions, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2014.
3 Franck Fischbach, Le sens du social: La puissance de la cooperation,
Montréal: Lux, 2015.
4 I picked this formula from the title of Didier Fassin’s beautiful new book:
La raison humanitaire: une histoire morale du temps présent, Paris: Seuil/
Gallimard, 2010.
Notes to Chapter 10
1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009. For subsequent references to this work,
pagination is provided in the main text.
2 Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité, vol. 2: Le gouvernement de soi et
des autres, Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2009. A different version of these lec-
tures, delivered at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, can be
found in Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, edited by Joseph Pearson, Los
Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2001.
3 See e.g. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans-
lated by Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 56.
4 Branden W. Joseph, ‘Interview with Paolo Virno’, translated by Alessia
Ricciardi, Grey Room, 21 (2005), p. 34.
5 Antonio Negri, Political Descartes, translated by Matteo Mandarini and
Alberto Toscano, London: Verso, 2007.
6 Carlo Levi, II futuro ha un cuore antico, Turin: Einaudi, 1956.
7 Karl Heinz Roth, Die ‘andere’ Arbeiterbewegung und die Entwicklung der
Notes to pp. 138–146 189
kapitalistischen Repression von 1880 bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: Trikont

Verlag, 1974. This book was widely discussed in the Italian extraparlia-
mentary left in the mid-1970s.
8 Daniel Cohen, Globalization and Its Enemies, translated by Jessica B.
Baker, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006; Antonio Negri, Marx beyond
Marx, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano,
New York: Autonomedia/Pluto, 1991. Marx beyond Marx is the pub-
lished form of nine lectures given at the École normale supérieure in
1978. Cohen was a student there from 1973 to 1976.
9 Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and juridical forms’, in The Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3: Power, edited by James D. Faubion, New
York: New Press, 2000, p. 7.
10 See e.g. the essays collected in Andrea Fumagelli and Sandro Mezzadra,
eds, Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and
New Political Scenarios, Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2010. Included in this
collection is Carlo Vercellone’s essay ‘The crisis of the law of value and
the becoming-rent of profit’, whose argument forms an important point
of reference in the third chapter of Commonwealth.
11 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capital, translated by Kristina
Lebedeva, Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2009.

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The Common

This English edition © Polity Press, 2023

The article ‘The Revolution Will Not Be an Explosion Somewhere Down

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4426-4- hardback

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Preface: From the Public to the Common vii

II. The Fundamentals

Is democracy, as it is interpreted and experienced today in the West,

We were sunk in a state of confusion and indistinction. The com-

In this article I continue my exploration of public spending, a discus-

1. The problem, broadly outlined: conditions in the

* First published as ‘Stato, spesa pubblica e fatiscenza del compromesso storico’

* ‘upward trend’ in English in the original.

* ‘gap’ in English in the original.

that capitalist development registers in the face of the social emer-

* ‘if you please’ in English in the original.

of labour is opposed to capital as a simple mediator of circulation–­

* ‘inputs’ in English in the original.

2. An initial analytic approach: elements of evaluation

In discussing public spending it is perhaps necessary, more than in

­ angerous when it is unilaterally assumed to define the gaps* and the

* ‘gaps’ in English in the original.

workers who contribute to the production of ‘social harmony’ really

* ‘cash-flow’ in English in the original.

3. A second analytical approach: on social

How does the principle of legitimacy take form at this level of

– can capitalist development direct its movement today? No princi-

* ‘gap’ in English in the original.

4. The public spending crisis in Italy, restructuring, and

­ easures, so that there was evidence only of a cyclical action in sup-

* ‘deficit’ in English in the original.

present condition, through its claim to recognition and to political

5. The new proletarian subject in the crisis and

In a few fundamental pages in the Grundrisse, Marx makes various

r­ eciprocal relationships, which they reproduce and also produce ex novo.

Of interest here is not the philosophical relevance of Marx’s mate-

* ‘work’ in English in the original.

Yet here the capitalist policy on public spending wants to negate

completely resolved in a total subordination of the forces of produc-

the community of labour so as to destroy a possible political form

6. More on the functions of accumulation and

[‘concerted economy’] nor the various forms of mixed economy* have

* ‘mixed economy’ in English in the original.

* ‘enforced control’ in English in the original.

burned when public spending was entirely subsumed to the criterion

* ‘enforced’ in English in the original.

7. The historic compromise: ideological decrepitude

Insofar as it is an institutional movement, the labour movement

On the other hand, what remains of the discourse concerning

of public spending, at how it sets itself in the p­ erspective of reform-

operations become both the foundation and the content of reform-

synthesis: here is finally the enemy to be fought, and over a long

8. An old tactic for a new strategy

Let us return to public spending. Why did I choose this topos to

there is an enormous set of needs and desires that begin to liberate

it finds new forms of propaganda and attack by immediately tack-

* Self-reduction [autoriduzione] of prices is a practice of refusing to comply with

* A reverse strike, un sciopero alla rovescia, is ‘a unionist form of protest around

Preface: From the Public to the Common vii

of labour is opposed to capital as a simple mediator of circulation–

angerous when it is unilaterally assumed to define the gaps* and the

easures, so that there was evidence only of a cyclical action in sup-

r eciprocal relationships, which they reproduce and also produce ex novo.

of public spending, at how it sets itself in the p erspective of reform-

of profit. The increase in the productivity of public administration

exploitation based on the temporal measurement of labour values