Commonwealth

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780674060289, 9780674035119
• eBook ISBN: 9780674254336
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth.

Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the "common" to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call "governing the revolution."

Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri's thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization.

PART 1

REPUBLIC (AND THE MULTITUDE OF THE POOR)

I’m tired of the sun staying up in the sky. I can’t wait until the syntax of the world comes undone.

—Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies

1.1

REPUBLIC OF PROPERTY

The two grand favourites of the subjects, liberty and property (for which most men pretend to strive), are as contrary as fire to water, and cannot stand together.

—Robert Filmer, “Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques”

Thus, at its highest point the political constitution is the constitution of private property.

—Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

On an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Politics

A kind of apocalypticism reigns among the contemporary conceptions of power, with warnings of new imperialisms and new fascisms. Everything is explained by sovereign power and the state of exception, that is, the general suspension of rights and the emergence of a power that stands above the law. Indeed evidence of such a state of exception is easy to come by: the predominance of violence to resolve national and international conflicts not merely as last but as first resort; the widespread use of torture and even its legitimation; the indiscriminate killing of civilians in combat; the elision of international law; the suspension of domestic rights and protections; and the list goes on and on. This vision of the world resembles those medieval European renditions of hell: people burning in a river of fire, others being torn limb from limb, and in the center a great devil engorging their bodies whole. The problem with this picture is that its focus on transcendent authority and violence eclipses and mystifies the really dominant forms of power that continue to rule over us today—power embodied in property and capital, power embedded in and fully supported by the law.

In popular discourse the apocalyptic vision sees everywhere the rise of new fascisms. Many refer to the U.S. government as fascist, most often citing Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Faluja, and the Patriot Act. Others call the Israeli government fascist by referring to the continuing occupations of Gaza and the West Bank, the use of assassinations and bulldozers as diplomacy, and the bombing of Lebanon. Still others use “islamofascism” to designate the theocratic governments and movements of the Muslim world. It is true, of course, that many simply use the term “fascism” in a general way to designate a political regime or movement they deplore such that it comes to mean simply “very bad.” But in all these cases when the term “fascist” is employed, the element it highlights is the authoritarian face of power, its rule by force; and what is eclipsed or mystified, instead, is the daily functioning of constitutional, legal processes and the constant pressure of profit and property. In effect, the bright flashes of a series of extreme events and cases blind many to the quotidian and enduring structures of power.¹

The scholarly version of this apocalyptic discourse is characterized by an excessive focus on the concept of sovereignty. The sovereign is the one who rules over the exception, such authors affirm, and thus the sovereign stands both inside and outside the law. Modern power remains fundamentally theological, according to this view, not so much in the sense that divine notions of authority have been secularized, but rather in that sovereign power occupies a transcendent position, above society and outside its structures. In certain respects this intellectual trend represents a return to Thomas Hobbes and his great Leviathan that looms over the social terrain, but more fundamentally it replays the European debates of the 1930s, especially in Germany, with Carl Schmitt standing at its center. Just as in the popular discourses, here too economic and legal structures of power tend to be pushed back into the shadows, considered only secondary or, at most, instruments at the disposal of the sovereign power. Every modern form of power thus tends to be collapsed into sovereignty or fascism, while the camp, the ultimate site of control both inside and outside the social order, becomes the paradigmatic topos of modern society.²

These apocalyptic visions—both the scholarly analyses of sovereign power and the popular accusations of fascism—close down political engagement with power. There are no forces of liberation inherent in such a power that, though now frustrated and blocked, could be set free. There is no hope of transforming such a power along a democratic course. It needs to be opposed, destroyed, and that is all. Indeed one theological aspect implicit in this conception of sovereignty is its Manichean division between extreme options: either we submit to this transcendent sovereignty or we oppose it in its entirety. It is worth remembering that when Left terrorist groups in the 1970s claimed that the state was fascist, this implied for them that armed struggle was the only political avenue available. Leftists today who talk of a new fascism generally follow the claim with moral outrage and resignation rather than calls for armed struggle, but the core logic is the same: there can be no political engagement with a sovereign fascist power; all it knows is violence.

The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane. We need to stop confusing politics with theology. The predominant contemporary form of sovereignty—if we still want to call it that—is completely embedded within and supported by legal systems and institutions of governance, a republican form characterized not only by the rule of law but also equally by the rule of property. Said differently, the political is not an autonomous domain but one completely immersed in economic and legal structures. There is nothing extraordinary or exceptional about this form of power. Its claim to naturalness, in fact its silent and invisible daily functioning, makes it extremely difficult to recognize, analyze, and challenge. Our first task, then, will be to bring to light the intimate relations between sovereignty, law, and capital.

We need for contemporary political thought an operation something like the one Euhemerus conducted for ancient Greek mythology in the fourth century BC. Euhemerus explained that all of the myths of gods are really just stories of historical human actions that through retelling have been expanded, embellished, and cast up to the heavens. Similarly today the believers imagine a sovereign power that stands above us on the mountaintops, when in fact the dominant forms of power are entirely this-worldly. A new political Euhemerism might help people stop looking for sovereignty in the heavens and recognize the structures of power on earth.³

Once we strip away the theological pretenses and apocalyptic visions of contemporary theories of sovereignty, once we bring them down to the social terrain, we need to look more closely at how power functions in society today. In philosophical terms we can think of this shift in perspective as a move from transcendent analysis to transcendental critique. Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy puts an end to all the medieval attempts to anchor reason and understanding in transcendent essences and things in themselves. Philosophy must strive instead to reveal the transcendental structures immanent to thought and experience. “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori.”⁴ Kant’s transcendental plane thus occupies a position not wholly in the immediate, immanent facts of experience but not wholly outside them either. This transcendental realm, he explains, is where the conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience reside.

Whereas Kant’s transcendental critique is focused primarily on reason and knowledge, ours is aimed at power. Just as Kant sweeps away the preoccupations of medieval philosophy with transcendent essences and divine causes, so too must we get beyond theories of sovereignty based on rule over the exception, which is really a holdover from old notions of the royal prerogatives of the monarch. We must focus instead on the transcendental plane of power, where law and capital are the primary forces. Such transcendental powers compel obedience not through the commandment of a sovereign or even primarily through force but rather by structuring the conditions of possibility of social life.

The intuition that law functions as a transcendental structureled entire schools of juridical and constitutional thought, from Hans Kelsen to John Rawls, to develop Kantian formalism in legal theory.⁵ Property, which is taken to be intrinsic to human thought and action, serves as the regulative idea of the constitutional state and the rule of law. This is not really a historical foundation but rather an ethical obligation, a constitutive form of the moral order. The concept of the individual is defined by not being but having; rather than to a “deep” metaphysical and transcendental unity, in other words, it refers to a “superficial” entity endowed with property or possessions, defined increasingly today in “patrimonial” terms as shareholder. In effect, through the concept of the individual, the transcendent figure of the legitimation of property is integrated into the transcendental formalism of legality. The exception, we might say, is included within the constitution.

Capital too functions as an impersonal form of domination that imposes laws of its own, economic laws that structure social life and make hierarchies and subordinations seem natural and necessary. The basic elements of capitalist society—the power of property concentrated in the hands of the few, the need for the majority to sell their labor-power to maintain themselves, the exclusion of large portions of the global population even from these circuits of exploitation, and so forth—all function as an a priori. It is even difficult to recognize this as violence because it is so normalized and its force is applied so impersonally. Capitalist control and exploitation rely primarily not on an external sovereign power but on invisible, internalized laws. And as financial mechanisms become ever more fully developed, capital’s determination of the conditions of possibility of social life become ever more extensive and complete. It is true, of course, that finance capital, since it is so abstract, seems distant from the lives of most people; but that very abstraction is what gives it the general power of an a priori, with increasingly universal reach, even when people do not recognize their involvement in finance markets—through personal and national debt, through financial instruments that operate on all kinds of production from soybeans to computers and through the manipulation of currency and interest rates.

Following the form of Kant’s argument, then, our transcendental critique must show how capital and law intertwined together—what we call the republic of property—determine and dictate the conditions of possibility of social life in all its facets and phases. But ours is obviously an unfaithful, tendentious appropriation of Kant, which cuts diagonally across his work. We appropriate his critical perspective by recognizing that the formal structure of his epistemological schema corresponds to that of the power of property and law, but then, rather than affirming the transcendental realm, we seek to challenge it. Kant has no interest in overthrowing the rule of capital or its constitutional state. In fact Alfred Sohn-Rethel goes so far as to claim that Kant, particularly in the Critique of Pure Reason, strives “to prove the perfect normalcy of bourgeois society,” making its structures of power and property appear natural and necessary.⁶

But our quarrel here is not really with Kant. We merely want to use the tools he provides us to confront today’s dominant powers. And we should highlight, finally, how the practical consequences of this transcendental critique of the republic of property overcome the powerlessness and bitter resignation that characterize the “transcendent” analyses of sovereignty and fascism. Our critique of capital, the republican constitution, and their intersection as transcendental forms of power does not imply either absolute rejection or, of course, acceptance and acquiescence. Instead our critique is an active process of resistance and transformation, setting free on a new footing the elements that point toward a democratic future, releasing, most significantly, the living labor that is closed within capital and the multitude that is corralled within its republic. Such a critique thus aims at not a return to the past or creation of a future ex nihilo but rather a process of metamorphosis, creating a new society within the shell of the old.

Republican Rights of Property

The term “republicanism” has been used in the history of modern political thought to name a variety of different, competing, often conflicting political tendencies. Thomas Jefferson, late in his life, reflecting on the early years of the American Revolution, remarks, “We imagined everything republican which was not monarchy.”⁷ There was certainly an equal if not greater range of political positions designated by the term in the English and French revolutionary periods. But one specific definition of modern republicanism eventually won out over the others: a republicanism based on the rule of property and the inviolability of the rights of private property, which excludes or subordinates those without property. The propertyless are merely, according to Abbé Sieyès, “an immense crowd of bi-ped instruments, possessing only their miserably paid hands and an absorbed soul.”⁸ There is no necessary or intrinsic link between the concept of republic and the rule of property, and indeed one could try to restore alternative or create new notions of republic that are not based on property. Our point is simply that the republic of property emerged historically as the dominant concept.⁹

The course of the three great bourgeois revolutions—the English, the American, and the French—demonstrates the emergence and consolidation of the republic of property. In each case the establishment of the constitutional order and the rule of law served to defend and legitimate private property. Later in this chapter we explore how the radically democratic processes of the English Revolution were blocked by the question of property: a “people of property” faced off against “a multitude of the poor.” Here, instead, we focus briefly on the role of property in the U.S. and French revolutions.

Just a decade after the Declaration of Independence affirms the constituent power of the American Revolution and projects a mechanism of self-government expressed through new, dynamic, and open political forms, the Federalist and the debates surrounding the drafting of the Constitution limit and contradict many of these original elements. The dominant lines in the constitutional debates aim to reintroduce and consolidate the sovereign structure of the state and absorb the constituent drive of the republic within the dynamic among constitutional powers. Whereas in the Declaration constituent power is defined as fundamental, in the Constitution it is understood as something like a national patrimony that is the property and responsibility of the government, an element of constitutional sovereignty.

Constituent power is not stripped from constituted public law but, rather, blocked (and expelled from the practices of citizenship) by the relations of force that the Constitution is built on, most important the right to property. Behind every formal constitution, legal theorists explain, lies a “material” one, where by material constitution is understood the relations of force that ground, within a particular framework, the written constitution and define the orientations and limits that legislation, legal interpretation, and executive decision must respect.¹⁰ The right to property, including originally the rights of slaveholders, is the essential index of this material constitution, which bathes in its light all other constitutional rights and liberties of U.S. citizens. “The Constitution,” writes Charles Beard in his classic analysis, “was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.”¹¹ Many scholars have contested Beard’s claim that the founders in drafting the Constitution were protecting their own individual economic interests and wealth, but what remains unchallenged and entirely convincing in his analysis is that the participants in the debate saw the Constitution as founded on economic interests and the rights of property. “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God,” writes John Ada...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: The Becoming-Prince of the Multitude
• PART 1 Republic (and the Multitude of the Poor)
• PART 2 Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity)
• PART 3 Capital (and the Struggles over Common Wealth)
• INTERMEZZO: A FORCE TO COMBAT EVIL
• PART 4 Empire Returns
• PART 5 Beyond Capital?
• PART 6 Revolution
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index