The new communists of the commons: Twenty-first-century Proudhonists

Abstract

If Proudhonism in the nineteenth century was, as Marx argued, a petty bourgeois ideology, this paper argues that the new communism of the commons propounded by Badiou, Hardt and Negri, and Žižek is a twenty-first-century avatar of it. It speaks not for what Poulantzas called the ‘traditional petty bourgeoisie’, as Proudhon did, but for the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ of ‘non-productive wage-earners’, which has also lately styled itself the ‘creative class’. A failure to comprehend the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and a general antipathy to any general organization of labour in society, and thus to any serious politics, are common to both. In addition, the paper shows that the protection of the cultural commons, the core of the project, is but a programme aiming for the continued reproduction of the creative class within capitalism. It is also prey to a series of misunderstandings – of the concept of the commons itself, of contemporary capitalism whose dynamics forms the backdrop of their project and key economic and political ideas of Marx whose authority they seek to attach to their project.

Keywords:

• commons
• idea of communism
• creative class
• Proudhonism
• Marxism

Acknowledgements

This paper originated in my work for a workshop on ‘Diminishing Returns? Feminist Engagements with the Return to the Commons’ at the Kent Centre for Law, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Kent in Canterbury. I am grateful to the workshop organizers, particularly Stacy Douglas, Donatella Alessandrini and Brenna Bhandar for their invitation and to all the participants for stimulating discussions. It provided a welcome opportunity to sort out my own thinking on the new communism of the commons. Riccardo BelloFiore's timely and thoughtful interventions greatly improved the discussion of zombie workers above. Alan Freeman's comments on an earlier draft were both enthusiastic and penetrating. Outstanding problems remain, of course, my responsibility.