guardian.co.uk home
Michael Hardt
*
Reclaim the common in communism
Capitalism and socialism present the world as private or public property.
Shared, immaterial creation offers an alternative
The financial crisis that exploded in autumn 2008 has rearranged the dominant
views of capitalism and socialism. Until recently, any critique of neoliberal
strategies of deregulation, privatisation and the reduction of welfare
structures let alone of capital itself was cast in the dominant media as
crazy talk. In early 2009, however, Newsweek proclaimed on its cover, with only
partial irony, "We are all socialists now". The rule of capital was suddenly
open to question, from left and right, and, for a time at least, some form of
socialist or Keynesian state regulation and management seems inevitable.
We need to look, however, outside this alternative. Too often it appears as
though our only choices are capitalism or socialism, the rule of private
property or that of public property, such that the only cure for the ills of
state control is to privatise and for the ills of capital to publicise, that
is, exert state regulation. We need to explore another possibility: neither the
private property of capitalism nor the public property of socialism but the
common in communism.
Many central concepts of our political vocabulary, including communism as well
as democracy and freedom, have been so corrupted that they are almost unusable.
In standard usage, in fact, communism has come to mean its opposite, that is,
total state control of economic and social life. We could abandon these terms
and invent new ones, of course, but we would leave behind too the long history
of struggles, dreams and aspirations that are tied to them. I think it is
better to fight over the concepts themselves in order to restore or renew their
meaning.
One of the reasons that the communist hypotheses of previous eras are no longer
valid is that the composition of capital as well as the conditions and
products of capitalist production have altered. How do people produce both
inside and outside the workplace? What do they produce and under what
conditions? How is productive cooperation organised? And what are the divisions
of labour and power that separate them along gender and racial lines and in the
local, regional, and global contexts?
Since the middle of the 19th century large-scale industry held the hegemonic
position within society, not in the sense that most people worked in factories
(in fact, a small percentage did, even in the dominant countries) but rather in
that the qualities of industry were progressively imposed over other economic
sectors and eventually over society itself. Today, however, it is clear that
industry no longer holds such a hegemonic position. This is not to say that
fewer people work in factories today than 10 or 20 or 50 years ago although,
in certain respects, their locations have shifted, moving to the other side of
the global divisions of labour and power. The claim, once again, is not
primarily quantitative but qualitative. Industry no longer imposes its
qualities over other sectors of the economy and over social relations more
generally. That seems to me a relatively uncontroversial claim.
More disagreement arises when one proposes another form of production as
successor to industry and dominant in this way. Toni Negri and I argue that
immaterial or biopolitical production is emerging in that hegemonic position
the production of ideas, information, images, knowledges, code, languages,
social relationships, affects and the like. This designates occupations
throughout the economy, from the high end to the low, from healthcare workers,
flight attendants and educators to software programmers; and from fast food and
call-centre workers to designers and advertisers. Most of these forms of
production are not new, of course, but the coherence among them is perhaps more
recognisable and, more important, their qualities tend today to be imposed over
other sectors of the economy and over society as a whole. Industry has to
informationalise: knowledge, code and images are becoming ever more important
throughout the traditional sectors of production; and the production of affects
and care is becoming increasingly essential in the valorisation process.
Marx recognised, parallel to the rise to dominance of industrial production, a
struggle between two forms of property: immobile property (such as land) and
moveable property (such as material commodities). Today, with the rise of the
biopolitical economy, the struggle is between material property and immaterial
property. Or, to put it another way, whereas Marx focused on the mobility of
property, today at issue is scarcity and reproducibility, such that the
struggle is between exclusive versus shared property. Consider, for example,
debates over patents, copyrights, indigenous knowledges, genetic codes, and the
information in the germplasm of seeds. Just as Marx saw that movement
necessarily triumphs over immobility, so too today the immaterial triumphs over
the material, the reproducible over the unreproducible, and the shared over the
exclusive.
The emerging dominance of this form of property is significant, in part,
because it demonstrates and returns to centre stage the conflict between the
common and property as such. Ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages and
even affects can be privatised and controlled as property, but it is more
difficult to police ownership because they are so easily shared or reproduced.
There is a constant pressure for such goods to escape the boundaries of
property and become common. If you have an idea, sharing it with me does not
reduce its utility to you, but usually increases it. In fact, in order to
realise their maximum productivity, ideas, images and affects must be common
and shared. When they are privatised their productivity reduces dramatically
and, I would add, making the common into public property, that is, subjecting
it to state control or management, similarly reduces productivity. Property is
becoming a fetter on the capitalist mode of production. Here is an emerging
contradiction internal to capital: the more the common is corralled as
property, the more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the common
undermines the relations of property.
Neoliberalism has been defined by the battle of private property not only
against public property but also, and perhaps more importantly, against the
common. Two types of the common have been the object of neoliberal strategies
of capital. On the one hand, the common names the earth and all the resources
associated with it: the land, the forests, the water, the air, minerals and so
forth. On the other hand, the common also refers, as I have already said, to
the results of human labour and creativity, such as ideas, language, affects
and so forth. One major scene of such privatisation has been the extractive
industries, providing transnational corporations with access to diamonds in
Sierra Leone or oil in Uganda or lithium deposits and water rights in Bolivia.
Many authors, including David Harvey and Naomi Klein, have described this in
terms that mark the renewed importance of primitive accumulation or
accumulation by dispossession.
The neoliberal strategies for the privatisation of the "artificial" common are
much more complex and contradictory. The more the common is subject to property
relations, as I said, the less productive it is; and yet capitalist
valorization processes require private accumulation. In many domains,
capitalist strategies for privatising the common through mechanisms such as
patents and copyrights continue (often with difficulty) despite the
contradictions. The music industry and computer industry are full of examples.
This is also the case with so-called biopiracy, that is, the processes whereby
transnational corporations expropriate the common in the form of indigenous
knowledges or genetic information from plants, animals and humans, usually
through the use of patents. Traditional knowledges of the use of a ground seed
as a natural pesticide, for instance, or the healing qualities of a particular
plant, are turned into private property by the corporation that patents the
knowledge. (Piracy is actually a misnomer for such activities. Pirates have a
much more noble vocation: they steal property. These corporations instead steal
the common and transform it into property.)
The development of capital is clearly not good in itself and the tendential
dominance of immaterial or biopolitical production carries with it a series of
new and more severe forms of exploitation and control. But we should also
recognise how biopolitical production, particularly in the ways it exceeds the
bounds of capitalist relations and constantly refers to the common, grants
labour increasing autonomy and provides the tools or weapons that could be
wielded in a project of liberation. .
This notion of the common can help us understand what communism means or what
it could mean. Marx argues in his early writings against any conception of
communism that involves abolishing private property only to make goods the
property of the community. Instead communism properly conceived is the
abolition not only of private property but of property as such. It is
difficult, though, for us to imagine our world and ourselves outside of
property relations. "Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided," he
writes, "that an object is only ours when we have it." What would it mean for
something to be ours when we do not possess it? What would it mean to regard
ourselves and our world not as property? Has private property made us so stupid
that we cannot see that? Marx tries to grasp communism, rather awkwardly and
romantically, in terms of the creation of a new way of seeing, a new hearing, a
new thinking, a new loving in short, the production of a new humanity.
Marx here is searching here for the common, or, really a form of biopolitical
production put in the hands of the common. The open access and sharing that
characterise use of the common are outside of and inimical to property
relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognise the world as
private or public. We have become blind to the common. Communism should be
defined not only by the abolition of property but also by the affirmation of
the common the affirmation of open and autonomous production of subjectivity,
social relations, and the forms of life; the self-governed continuous creation
of new humanity. In the most synthetic terms, what private property is to
capitalism and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism.
Reclaim the common in communism | Michael Hardt
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 12.15 GMT on Thursday 3
February 2011. It was last modified at 12.23 GMT on Thursday 3 February 2011.
------------------------------------
Post message: [email protected]
Subscribe : [email protected]
Unsubscribe : [email protected]
List owner : [email protected]
Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
[email protected]
[email protected]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[email protected]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
