Introduction: The Common and the Forms of the Commune

Abstract

This issue brings together papers that tackle a series of problematics which are formulated around the concepts of common, commune, community, and communism, and which engage with the field of critical Marxism. The discussions include the critique of property and commodity fetishism; the relation between ‘modes of production’ and ‘modes of subjectivity’; the rupture with a bourgeois political imaginary circumscribed by the relation between public and private; and the antagonistic nature of class as a process or composition. While an organizing aspiration has been to stage an encounter between operaismo and Althusserian Marxism, contributors complicate this divide by drawing from different philosophical sources and bringing into existence a broader intellectual plane within which these problematics can be situated.

Keywords:

• Common
• Commune
• Operaismo
• Althusserian Marxism
• Communism

Notes

¹The support of the Franklin Humanities Center and the conversations that took place during its annual seminar, “Alternative Political Imaginaries,” played a vital role in this organization.

²We owe this insight to Étienne Balibar's precise formulations (1996, 116).

³See, for instance, Pozzi and Tommasini (1979).

⁴See Wright (2002) and Elliot (1987) for two highly informative studies that situate the formation and development of operaismo and Althusserian Marxism, respectively.

⁵For example, Elliot (1987, 56) makes this argument.

⁶Lawrence Krader (1972, 73) makes this point to argue how such a study is needed to more systematically understand the ways in which Marx's uses of communism and socialism are informed by concepts of collectivity, collectivism, commune, community.

⁷The critique of these ideal abstractions parallels Marx's critique of commodity fetishism, a connection also drawn by a number of papers—if what is understood by commodity fetishism is not simply that relations between people take the appearance of relations between commodities, but more broadly, as the fetishistic reference to an exception as the necessary cause and representative of social relations.

⁸To bring out the paradoxical togetherness of community and separation (solitude) in the constitution of the social bond, Jacques Rancière (2009) conjures up the concept “being together apart” in his discussion of aesthetic communities. It seems productive to intersect this concept with “being-in-common,” borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy.

⁹See the insightful article by Warren Montag (1996) for a development of this point.

¹⁰Badiou also captures the ambiguity in Marx's account as he wavered between celebrating the Commune for dissolving the nation-state and simultaneously explaining its failures by reference to its lack of “statist capacities.”

¹¹For this exchange and a discussion about it, see the important work by Theodor Shanin (1983). We should note that there are other discussions of the Russian commune that contest this position. Also, there are many other places one can find in Marx's writings that clearly depart from a teleological narrative, including passages from Ethnological Notebooks.

¹²See J. K. Gibson-Graham (2006) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009) for two recent and notable works that respectively develop and take into new directions these frameworks.

¹³See Jacques Lacan (1998) and Joan Copjec (2002) for the concept of non-all.