Common

On Revolution in the 21st Century

Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval, Matthew MacLellan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350021211
• eBook ISBN: 9781474238625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Around the globe, contemporary protest movements are contesting the oligarchic appropriation of natural resources, public services, and shared networks of knowledge and communication. These struggles raise the same fundamental demand and rest on the same irreducible principle: the common. In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology. Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common's citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.

1

Archaeology of the Common

Identifying the political principle of the common amongst contemporary anti-capitalist struggles all over the world requires some prior explanation of what we mean by “common.” The extensive adjectival use of “common” in expressions like “the common good” or “common goods” (in terms of property) might suggest the word can, in fact, mean almost anything, and that anyone may lay claim to it. It would, in this case, be little more than what Auguste Blanqui referred to in his discussion of “democracy” as a “rubber word.”¹ Perhaps we are dealing, then, with an insignificant word, a null-concept, or a baseless and uninteresting term. The term is, in fact, often used as if it designated a kind of lowest common denominator, as if it were a middling term that unifies “men of good will” of all classes and perspectives. Unfortunately, neither good intentions nor sudden pangs of conscience will ever pose a serious political threat to capitalism. And if the common only referred to vague notions of a “good life” in “harmony with nature,” or to some shapeless notion of the “social bond,” there would be very little to say about it, and moral treatises about the evils of capitalism would more than suffice. For what else might we say about contemporary struggles if we are only dealing with movements of moral indignation that are merely seeking to introduce a little more attention and care for others in a world increasingly ravaged by the self-interest of dominant oligarchies? For who cannot recognize themselves, at least rhetorically, in the aspiration to create a more “common world,” to re-establish forms of “rational communication,” and more positively re-define what it means to “live together”? Such generalized aspirations are rich soil for everything from the most intransigent republicanisms to all those particular communitarianisms that call for a return to our roots, origins, traditions, and beliefs.

Our re-conceptualization of the common is intended to break with all the colloquialisms about the common that are rarely subject to serious reflection and can be somewhat amnesic, to say the least. But before we can begin to theorize a new “reason of the common,”² we need to do some archaeological work: for even the most recent of political struggles emerges out of a pre-established context and is inscribed in a specific history. And it is precisely a careful exploration of the long history of the common that will allow us to dispense with the many platitudes, confusions, and misinterpretations of the subject. The aim of this introductory chapter, then, is to identify the initial discourses from which the concept of the common emerged, in order both to determine what the common is not as well as begin to introduce the specific concept of the common we want to develop in this book.

Co-Activity as the Basis of Political Obligation

The etymological root of the word “common” provides us with an initial bearing and direction for research. Émile Benveniste indicates that the Latin term munus belongs, in the Indo-European languages, to a vast anthropological record of the gift, while at the same time designating a very specific social phenomenon: according to this root, the term designates a particular type of performance and counter-performance concerning honors and benefits associated with an office or a position of status. The term thus speaks to the inseparability an office, a function, a job, a task, or a charge, and that which is reciprocally given in the form of gifts and rewards. What we find in the term’s etymological meaning is thus the Janus-face of the debt and the gift, of obligation and recognition. The term is thus bound up with the fundamental social fact known as symbolic exchange, which – at least since the work of Marcel Mauss – ethnological and sociological literature has documented in almost every form of human society. The term designating reciprocity – mutuum – is likewise a derivative of munus, yet munus is not reducible to this formal requirement for reciprocity alone. Rather, its singularity resides in the collective and often political character of the remunerative duty (in the etymological sense of the verb remuneror, meaning to offer a gift or a reward in return). In other words, munus does not, first and foremost, refer to gifts and obligations exchanged between family members or between friends, but designates the various benefits and counter-benefits that concern the symbolic existence of the community as a whole. We find the significance of this root in the later Latin term for the public spectacle of the gladiators – gladiatorum munus – as well as in the term that expresses the political structure of a city (municipium) as constituted by citizens of a municipality (municipes). From this perspective, we can also see the manner in which the term immunitas refers primarily to an exemption from a duty or a tax, and may on occasion refer, in moral terms, to the conduct of one who selfishly wishes to escape his duties toward others. This root also demonstrates how the terms communis, commune, communia, and communio are all formed through the same articulation of cum and munus (cum-munus) that not only designates that which is pooled or “shared in common” (mis en commune) but also, and perhaps especially, designates those subjects who have “duties in common.” The common – or the Latin commune – therefore always implies a certain obligatory reciprocity related to the exercise of public responsibilities.³ The term “common” is particularly apt, then, for designating the political principle of co-obligation for all of those engaged in the same activity. It resounds the double meaning contained in munus – obligation and participation in a shared “task” or “activity” – and should be understood in a broader sense than the narrower concept of “function.” For us, then, common activity refers to the act in which people collectively engage in the same task and thereby produce, through their activity, the moral and legal norms that regulate their collective actions. In a strict sense, then, we define the political principle of the common in the following terms: “obligation only exists between those who participate in the same activity or the same task.” We consequently hold that such relations of obligation do not exist on the basis of mere belonging or membership that is independent of such co-activity.

If we look back even further than the Latin etymology, this conception of the common is also suggested somewhat in the ancient Greek – the political language par excellence – and more precisely the ancient Greek as fixed in the Aristotelian lexicon. The Latin origin of “common” resonates with the conception of the institution of the common (koinôn) and of the “putting or sharing in common” (koinônein) we find in Aristotle. According to the Aristotelian take on the concept, it is the citizens who collectively deliberate in order to determine what is appropriate for the city and what constitutes a just course of action.⁴ For Aristotle, “living together” is not simply a matter of “sharing the same pasture,” “as in the case of grazing animals,” nor is it merely a matter of pooling everything together. “Living together” is more fundamentally based on the “sharing of conversation and thought”: it is to produce, through deliberation and legislation, similar customs and rules of living for all those who pursue the same end.⁵ The institution of the common (koinôn) is the effect of a “pooling” (mise en commun) that presupposes a shared mode of existence. And for Aristotle, that which holds for a small community of friends pursuing a common purpose also holds, at a larger scale, for a city oriented toward the “sovereign good.” While it is not necessary to delve further into an analysis of the Aristotelian conception of the activity of “sharing in common” here, suffice it to say that Aristotle’s koinônein constitutes the fundamental matrix for our own conception of the common: it makes the practice of “sharing in common” the basic pre-condition for every common, in both its normative and affective dimensions.⁶ Yet the primary limitation of this Aristotelian perspective, which we cannot ignore, is its advocacy for the private ownership of property under the condition that what is privately owned is put to common use.⁷ For while the distinction between ownership and use is theoretically useful – as we will argue throughout the book – the reality is that the common use of private property always depends on the “virtue” of legislation and education,⁸ and thus such an arrangement seriously underestimates the real force of an institution like private property and its ability to compel certain kinds of conduct.

The concept of common activity we have drawn from Aristotle is absolutely irreducible to much of the recent discourse that makes use of the adjective “common.” Browsing through the contemporary political literature, one cannot but be struck by the mess of mixed traditions, superimposed meanings, and confused concepts. By and large, most authors adopt virtually the same syncretic concept of the common: one that is characterized by a politics that tries to bring about the “common good” through the production of “common goods” that are viewed as the “common heritage of all humanity.”⁹ An ancient theologico-political notion of the “common good” is thus re-articulated and re-deployed alongside an economico-juridical category of “common goods” and an often very essentialist conception of a common human nature, wherein the latter functions as the basis for an understanding of the “vital needs essential to humanity” or some notion of the “natural social co-existence of men.” Thus whomsoever today attempts to theorize new uses for the category of the common immediately runs up against this triple tradition that continues to shape, more or less consciously, our contemporary representations of the common. The first tradition, whose origin is essentially theological, conceives of the common as the highest end of our political and religious institutions: the superior norm of the “common good” (in the singular) ought to be the principle that guides the action and conduct of those who are burdened with both bodies and souls. The second tradition is juridical in character and manifests as an extension of a certain economic discourse concerned with the classification of “goods” (plural): this discourse tends to reserve the qualification “common” for a certain types of material “things” (chose). This tradition is especially active in the alter-globalization movement which, for example, advocates for the creation of various “global commons” such as the atmosphere, water, knowledge, etc.¹⁰ The third tradition is philosophical: it tends to identify the common with the universal (that which is common to all), and any aspects of the common that resist this universalist identification are jettisoned into the insignificant margins of the ordinary or the banal. We will now briefly examine each of these traditions in order to better show how this muddled agglomeration of ideas hinders the development of a truly political concept of the common.

The Common: Between Statism and Theology

The resurgence of the theologico-political notion of the “common good” raises a number of important questions that are not generally addressed in most contemporary political literature. Who, for example, is in a position to define what counts as the “common good,” and who precisely controls the means by which a given mode of politics can be said to conform to this notion of the “common good”? The fact is that this theological notion of the “common good” is burdened with a number of fundamentally anti-democratic postulates in terms of endowing the state, the “wise,” “ethical experts,” or the Church with the power to determine the definition of the common.

This theological notion of the “common good” has, of course, a very long history that we are unable to exhaustively trace here. It should suffice for our purposes, however, to unearth several notable aspects of the concept’s history in order to highlight certain difficulties inherent in its contemporary resurgence. The expressions the “common good,” the “common benefit,” and the “common utility” are all derived from Latin, but the corresponding Latin roots of these terms are themselves derived from Greek philosophy, and specifically from the manner in which Greek philosophy conceives the relationship between the just and the advantageous. They are derivations of the Greek term used by Aristotle to signify the “common benefit” or “common advantage”: koinê sumpheron. It was, however, principally through the intermediary of Cicero that the expression utilitas communis – a translation of Aristotle’s koinê sumpheron – passed into the political and ethical discourse of the West (though the term was further modified as it was subsequently transmitted by the Fathers of the Church, especially Augustine). For Cicero, the term is meant to emphasize the civic duty expected of magistrates in the exercise of their respective offices. All those who hold an office are forbidden from serving their own interests at the expense of the common benefit (utilitas communis) considered coterminous with human society, insofar as this utilitas communis is both the framework for the reciprocal obligations that are a natural or universal aspect of human society as such and, at the same time, works toward some concept of specifically “public” utility (utilitas rei publicae), from a republican perspective. To betray the common utility for one’s own selfish interest, as tyrants are won...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction The Common: A Political Principle
• 1 Archaeology of the Common
• Part I The Emergence of the Common
• 2 The Communist Burden; or Communism Against the Common
• 3 The Great Appropriation and the Return of the “Commons”
• 4 Critique of the Political Economy of the Commons
• 5 Common, Rent, and Capital
• Part II Law and Institution of the Common
• 6 The Law of Property and the Unappropriable
• 7 Law of the Common and “Common Law”
• 8 The “Customary Law of Poverty”
• 9 The Workers’ Common: Between Custom and Institution
• 10 Instituent Praxis
• Part III Nine Political Propositions
• Political Proposition 1 We Must Construct a Politics of the Common
• Political Proposition 2 Use Rights Must Challenge Property
• Political Proposition 3 The Common is the Principle of Labor’s Emancipation
• Political Proposition 4 We Must Institute Common Work
• Political Proposition 5 Economic Associationism is the Pathway to the Society of the Common
• Political Proposition 6 The Common Must Be the Basis of Social Democracy
• Political Proposition 7 Public Services Must Become Institutions of the Common
• Political Proposition 8 The Commons Must be Global
• Political Proposition 9 We Must Institute a Federation of Commons
• Post-Script on Revolution in the Twenty-First Century
• Notes
• Copyright