The Common in Communism

Abstract

This essay reflects on the concept of the common as both natural good and human product. The common, in other words, refers to the land, water, and air as well as to language, knowledges, ideas, images, and affects. The primary argument is that capitalist production is increasingly reliant on and oriented toward the production of the common and yet the common is destroyed (and its productivity reduced) when transformed into either private or public property. The task is to institute free access and circulation of the common.

Keywords:

• Common
• Communism
• Karl Marx
• Critique of Property
• Biopolitical Production

Notes

¹On immaterial and biopolitical production, see Hardt and Negri (2009, chap. 3).

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

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

⁴In the English version of the text, see pages 121–2. At this point in the interview, Foucault is discussing his differences from the Frankfurt School.

⁵It would be interesting at this point to investigate the relation between this economic discussion of the common and the way the common functions in Jacques Rancière's notion of politics. “Politics,” he writes, “begins precisely when one stops balancing profits and losses and is concerned instead with dividing the parts of the common” (1999, 5). The common, according to Rancière's notion, is the central and perhaps exclusive terrain of partage—that is, the process of division, distribution, and sharing. “Politics,” he continues, “is the sphere of activity of a common that can only ever be contentious, the relationship between parts that are only parties and credentials or entitlements whose sum never equals the whole” (14). Perhaps communism, as I conceive it here, is the only form that qualifies for Rancière's notion of politics: the partage of the common. I explore the role of the common in Rancière's thought briefly in “Production and Distribution of the Common” (Hardt 2009).