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

Abstract

In this conversation Étienne Balibar and Toni Negri address the question of how to understand and practice communism in our conjuncture—specifically, in the context of our contemporary global economic crisis. While taking this question as their entry point, they articulate a series of important philosophical and political convergences and divergences between their frameworks. These points of productive intersections and tensions open to a plurality of readings of Marx and Marxism. At the same time, the conversation maps a terrain that includes the question of social ontology and its relation to the political and the ethical; the conceptual status of labor and production and the place of anthropological differences within Marxism; and the politics of equaliberty and its relation to the common and its new institutions.

Keywords:

• Communism
• the Common
• Equaliberty
• Economic Crisis
• Readings of Marx

Acknowledgements

This conversation, in which Toni Negri participated through videoconference, was the opening address at “The Common and Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social Imaginaries,” a symposium held at Duke University, 9–10 April 2009. Through a series of subsequent exchanges, the authors have revised and expanded on the original transcript, the result of which is the text that appears in this issue. Arianna Bove translated Toni Negri's section of the conversation from Italian.