Five Theses on the Common

Abstract

I present five theses on the common within the context of the transformations of capitalist social relations as well as their contemporary global crisis. My framework involves “cognitive capitalism,” new processes of class composition, and the production of living knowledge and subjectivity. The commons is often discussed today in reference to the privatization and commodification of “common goods.” This suggests a naturalistic and conservative image of the common, unhooked from the relations of production. I distinguish between commons and the common: the first model is related to Karl Polanyi, the second to Karl Marx. As elaborated in the postoperaista debate, the common assumes an antagonistic double status: it is both the plane of the autonomy of living labor and it is subjected to capitalist “capture.” Consequently, what is at stake is not the conservation of “commons,” but rather the production of the common and its organization into new institutions that would take us beyond the exhausted dialectic between public and private.

Keywords:

• Common
• Class Composition
• Cognitive Capitalism
• Financialization
• Operaismo

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk for inviting me to participate in the symposium “The Common and the Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social Imaginaries”; and to Sandro Mezzadra, Michael Hardt, Brett Neilson, and Alvaro Reyes for suggestions and help with translation.

Notes

¹While by “upstream” I refer to the organization of social cooperation and relations by and through capital, by “downstream” I refer to the organization of capitalist capture of social cooperation that exists in a partial autonomy of capitalist relations.

² Katéchon is a concept that Carl Schmitt borrows from Saint Paul to describe a force that restrains evil.

³Here I refer to the historicist understanding of universalism: that is, the mainstream interpretation of the concept within modernity. However, we can state that the common is related to a not-transitive relation between partiality and universal. That is, the universal does not determine partiality, but the insurgence of partiality continuously creates new universalism.

⁴It is also within this context that we can interpret the theory of New Public Management, which is a movement, “thought,” and “philosophy” that has sought to justify the introduction of corporate means and logic into the public sector, receives its valence.

⁵The latter has been put in crisis not only by neoliberal capital, but also by social and political movements. Actually, the Italian Anomalous Wave and transnational student movement slogan “we won't pay for your crisis” also means “we won't pay for the public university crisis.” See www.edu-factory.org