As we indicated at the beginning of the book, we are indebted to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri for first introducing the concept of the “common” – in the singular – to both critical political theory and activist discourse. The substitution of the singular “common” for the plural “commons” was a decisive theoretical achievement, and it accordingly warrants special recognition and careful study. Within the parameters of this new theoretical universe,1 we are no longer compelled to conceptualize capitalism’s present as a continual repetition of its origins. Indeed, as Hardt and Negri parenthetically admit in the Preface to Multitude, they were reticent to use the plural concept of the commons at all, precisely because the
term refers to pre-capitalist-shared spaces that were destroyed by the advent of private property … The more awkward [term] “the common” highlights the philosophical content of the term and emphasizes that this is not a return to the past but a new development.2
The common now designates the hidden dimension and the obscured condition of capitalism in its most modern form. The common is not what capitalism destroys but what it exploits, and to a certain extent the common is what capital produces:
Our communication, collaboration, and cooperation are not only based on the common, but they in turn produce the common in an expanding spiral relationship. This production of the common tends today to be central to every form of social production, no matter how locally circumscribed.3
More importantly, Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the commons, unlike the paradigm of the commons described in the previous chapter, does not ignore the capital–labor relation – though as we will see, Hardt and Negri’s understanding of contemporary capital–labor relations is not without its problems. For us, the common is the philosophical principle that makes it possible to conceive of a future beyond neoliberalism, and for Hardt and Negri the common is the only possible path toward a non-capitalist future. The common is also a category tasked with undermining any residual nostalgia for state socialism, particularly in terms of the state’s monopolization of a bureaucratized public service. In other words, the common is a category that transcends public and private. There is no doubt Hardt and Negri’s use of the concept of the common can be a little blurry around the edges and rather ill defined at times; nonetheless, their work represents a fundamental step in the right direction in terms of the common’s capacity for explaining the contemporary machinations of capitalism and the struggles striving to push us beyond the neoliberal present.
Hardt and Negri’s concept of the commons is, in many ways, the polar opposite of the “paradigm of the commons” we discussed in the previous chapter. Instead of the negative framework of “destruction,” Hardt and Negri theorize the commons from the perspective of “production”: the commons is less something we need to defend from attack, and more something we need to promote and institute. And while we should not underestimate some of the theoretical advances made by Hardt and Negri, one of the central claims we make in this chapter is that the theory of the commons Hardt and Negri produce in their trilogy – and especially in Commonweath, the third volume of the trilogy, which is entirely devoted to the concept – inadvertently revives an older socialist and anarchist doctrine. To put it bluntly, Hardt and Negri’s modern theory of the commons repeats the most striking aspects of the work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In their own way, as Lorenzo Coccoli observes, Hardt and Negri make theft a central mode of accumulation that is independent of capital itself (as did Proudhon).4 As Hardt and Negri put it, “scholars who critique neoliberalism often emphasize that capitalist accumulation is an increasingly predatory operation that functions through dispossession.”5 For Hardt and Negri, it is not so much the privatization or market subsumption of natural resources, urban spaces, or public services that constitutes capital’s principle means of appropriation, but rather its financial rents that act as capital’s principal lever for capturing the common products of immaterial labor. What is especially interesting or strange about Hardt and Negri’s revival of the Proudhonian doctrine of “theft” is, however, that it is formally expounded through constant references to Marx.
Theorizing the common today first requires a clear view of the two discourses that have traditionally divided socialism. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to illuminate contemporary debates on the common through an archaeological exposition of this bifurcated socialist discourse. The first of these socialist discourses describes the common as a socially immanent dynamic that Proudhon refers to as the “collective force,” and it is this immanent and spontaneous force that is subsequently stolen through the institution of property. The second socialist discourse is born from the work of Marx and argues that the common is not produced spontaneously at all, but is rather the direct product of capital – more specifically, it is a product of capital’s power of command over labor and its imperative to organize productive cooperation. Capital, in Marx’s view, produces the common out of its frenzied drive toward its own enrichment, through its organization of the collective force of the workers into the collective force of capital.
We refer here to the first of these discourses as the spontaneous social force of the common. This is undoubtedly Proudhon’s take on the commons, and its correlative is an analysis based on exploitation as “theft.” For Proudhon, that which individuals and societies produce spontaneously is subsequently subtracted for the benefit of private individuals or classes through various types of legal or political mechanisms, though the primary mechanisms of theft are private property and the state. For Proudhon, who follows and modifies the Saint-Simonian tradition, the common is nothing other than the spontaneous nature of the social itself. In this respect, Proudhon belongs to the same tradition as the classical political economists, especially Smith, who make labor the source of all wealth and who can accordingly only justify rent and profit as something that was extracted after the fact.
Marx’s very different conception of the common was in fact a direct response to this sociological and anthropological model. And while, at a passing glance, Marx seems to borrow much from Proudhon, closer examination discloses how different Marx’s analysis really is. While Marx undoubtedly views humans as fundamentally “social” creatures, he insists that the social character of humanity is not an eternal essence, but is historically developed and is therefore always manifest in historically different forms. In the capitalist mode of production – and here we should think especially of Marx’s analyses in Capital (vol. 1) of labor’s cooperation in the context of large-scale industry – it is capital itself that organizes the common and puts it to work producing the surpluses necessary for accumulation. For Marx, the concept of capital is the foundation of bourgeois society. Capital is that unique form of value that valorizes itself by producing more labor and hence more value. There is no economic activity, and thus no work for the workers, unless there is profit to be had for the capitalist. Capitalist appropriation does not therefore take place after the fact, but production itself is always already organized around the pursuit of private profit – indeed, through a typical ideological inversion characteristic of employers, the wage itself appears to be an illegitimate tax on the capitalist’s income (the famous “cost of labor”). For Marx, the productive cooperation implemented by capital is the objective foundation of communism, and thus the explanatory scheme Marx offers is the historical production of the common by capital.6 The historical gestation of the common within capital is the foundation of progressive Marxism, which sees the conditions of a superior type of society in germ form within the capitalist productive forces themselves.
Within the first of these socialist discourses, cooperation precedes labor’s submission to capital, and so the entire problem can be resolved by organizing new relations between workers that simply bypass the appropriative powers of property. And for Proudhon, these new relations are to be organized on a strictly professional basis. In the second socialist discourse, the solution to the problem resides in the expropriation of the property owners themselves: the appropriation of capital by individual workers leads to the creation of a great collective worker, and cooperation is thus no longer directed by capital but organized by the workers themselves. A clear understanding of this older socialist debate is essential for adequately dealing with the challenges of theorizing the common today. It is not a question of choosing one discourse over the other, but of properly identifying the way in which this great debate has re-emerged within contemporary discourses of the common, which in turn raises two crucial questions: to what extent is the “rentier” theory of contemporary capital, which speaks of capital’s ability to capture rents from the common, compatible with our understanding of the current organization of labor and the subjective mutations characteristic of neoliberalism? And secondly, to what extent does the doctrine of capital’s production of the common allow us to account for the transition to a post-capitalist world? We suspect these questions are not just theoretically important, but have strategic bearing as well.
The concept of the common that Hardt and Negri initially proposed in Empire and expanded on greatly in Multitude refers, in the first place, to the historically specific productive activity of “multitudes” within the context of late-twentieth-century globalization. By producing new interactions of all kinds, by creating multiple communicative networks and circulatory flows, globalization allows previously isolated individuals to produce the common: “insofar as the multitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses),” write Hardt and Negri, “the internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together.”7 Hardt and Negri see the “production of the common,” through social interaction, as the dynamic and ultimately subversive force within empire. It propels empire forward and constantly overflows it. This is what Negri refers to elsewhere as the “power of multitudes.” However, in the third volume of their trilogy, Commonwealth, the concept of the common becomes increasingly syncretic: it begins to encompass very heterogeneous objects and processes within the intellectual architecture of “alter-modernity,” while it simultaneously condenses and projects a philosophical position onto capital’s contemporary trajectory and its concomitant social struggles.
The common’s first definition relates to what Hardt and Negri call “the common wealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty – which in classic European political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together.”8 There is nothing especially original here. While Hardt and Negri rightly recall how many conceptions of the common have been influenced by this theological framework, which conceives of the common as a gift to all of humanity from God, it is unclear what benefit is derived from preserving this theological account of the “natural common,” especially since it takes us some distance from our contemporary concerns about theorizing an alternative to neoliberalism. The second “more significant” definition of the common Hardt and Negri offer refers to the “artificial common”9 – i.e., “those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.”10 According to this definition, the commons is not a gift of the divine, nor even a gift from nature, but rather it designates both the condition and result of human activity in all societies. In addition to its prior theological meaning, the common is now endowed with anthropological significance as well. Human activity in any form always presupposes common conditions and resources. We all adopt various social “habits” as a result of social interaction, and this activity produces, reproduces, and transforms these initial conditions and resources.11 The common, in this view, is both a set of conditions and the results of human activity – both “common resources” and “common products.” This generalized anthropology of the commons tends to reduce the “production of the common” to notions of “communication” associated with the study of linguistics, notions of “habits” as understood by the American pragmatists, and even the concept of “culture” as used in the social sciences in the most general sense.
Hardt and Negri are, however, not entirely satisfied with these older and heterogeneous descriptions of the common, and so they develop a third definition of the common that is more original and more in line with the subject matter these two authors have long studied, namely the rise of “cognitive capitalism” and “immaterial labor.” On the one hand, capitalist production is compelled to exploit everything that belongs to the common – including all the contents of the two previous definitions – and, in general, to subject all of social life to its own ends. But, on the other hand, it also increasingly requires free access to the “immaterial” resources of the common that have expanded in the new form of “biopolitical” production.12 This is because “the hegemony of immaterial labor creates common relationships and common social forms in a way more pronounced than ever before.”13 If the common, in this sense, is increasingly the underlying condition upon which contemporary capitalism operates, and the common itself is based on immaterial labor, then the common is therefore the most promising development for the realization of the future communist society. In lockstep with the dominant Marxist tradition, cognitive capitalism itself is said to generate the conditions of its own transcendence:
The content of what is produced – including ideas, images, and affects – is easily reproduced and thus tends toward being common, strongly resisting all legal and economic efforts to privatize it or bring it under public control. The transition is already in process: contemporary capitalist production by addressing its own needs is opening up the possibility of and creating the bases for a social and economic order grounded in the common.14
Intensely cognitive forms of immaterial labor function as the universal and spontaneous driver of the commons. This is Hardt and Negri’s theory of the common.15 It is based on the hegemony of the network as a “common form that tends to define our ways of understanding the world and acting upon it,” and on the essence of knowledge as non-appropriable and uncontrollable, both of which intrinsically challenge the logic of value and its subsequent measure.
And finally, Hardt and Negri offer a fourth definition of the common, one which belongs to the register of social and political struggle and is defined as a collective act of the multitude. A new form of democratic social organization, in germ form, is latent in the struggles of today’s cooperative and immaterial workers, as well as in the struggles of the poor multitudes all over the world. The “common wealth” (two words) produced by workers is translated into a political form that inaugurates the “commonwealth” (one word). This new commonwealth is no longer the “republic of property” but the political institutionalization of the common.
While these four definitions of the common are undoubtedly part of an ambitious project to endow the concept with an expansive scope, Hardt and Negri often struggle to articulate between them. In fact, it seems to us that the unity of the concept is almost purely rhetorical, especially when Hardt and Negri speak of a “biopolitical reason” that tends to function as a kind of vitalist inspiration for making all different aspects of the concept coalesce.16 By collapsing theologico-juridical, anthropological, economic, and political dimensions into the same concept of the “common,” Hardt and Negri hardly help develop the clarity of the concept, much less elaborate a new politics based on the concept they are trying to construct. Suffice it to say that their definition includes everything given in nature, all universal aspects of social life, the products of immaterial labor in the historically dominant era of cognitive capitalism, and finally all that which most characterizes contemporary struggles. We think this expansive amalgam needs to be unpacked.
The fact is that the unity of the concept of the commons is not really based on the realities the concept tries to describe, but rather derives from a “communistic” reading of Spinoza that functions something like a universal key. Being is the affirmation and self-development of power: nature, social life, immaterial labor, and political struggles are all manifestations of this power and the modes through which this power is affirmed. It then suffices merely to say that power and production are identical, and that being and the common are synonymous, in order to justify a concept of the common as a transhistorical principle that has operated since the beginning of time, all the way up to the immanent emergence of the superior society we are currently witnessing.
One of the more problematic contradictions Hardt and Negri encounter emerges out of their attempt to create a positive concept of the common as production, but without abandoning the natural, social, and intellectual definitions of the term. Yet these disparate elements only find their unity through the operations of capital, and capital, we are told, captures the common wealth in all its immensity and diversity from the outside. In this sense, then, the common only seems to exist as a resource confiscated by capital so that the latter can achieve profitability. In short, then, Hardt and Negri remain beholden to a negative definition of the common as the object of “theft” and “capture.” Their communized Spinozism is combined with a neo-Proudhonism that can only conceive of exploitation as the “a posteriori illegitimate capture of the products of labor” – an assertion that could have easily come from Proudhon’s First Memoir on Property.17 This approach not only represents a profound regression in relation to Marx’s analysis of capitalism, but also a profound blindness to contemporary forms of worker exploitation, the transformations of social relations and subjectivities under neoliberalism,18 and the significance of struggles being waged today. What is ultimately most important, for Hardt and Negri, is not so much that they give voice to a revolt against the unbearable oppression of neoliberalism – the most negative aspects of which, especially in the workplace, are largely neglected – but that they openly testify to the “power of the multitudes” in accordance with the historical ontology upon which their analysis ultimately rests.
The institution of the commons is thus understood not as a determination of the second by the first but, inversely, as a determination of the first by the second. In other words, the common is thought to exist and develop independently of its institutional substrate, which is to say its status as “property,” under conditions of biopolitical production. Its future institutionalization is conceived as the long-awaited coincidence between its prescribed political form and the nature and dynamism of its productive activity, which supersedes the old and outdated politico-juridical forms that paralyzed its essential productivity and hampered the production of the common throughout the centuries. The institution of the common, for Hardt and Negri, is thus a classic case of “adequacy” and “correspondence,” in the sense that neither the institution of private property nor the public institutions that assert state control over the means of production are properly adapted to today’s biopolitical production. Unlike the scholastic model, then, the “legal-political superstructure” now descends into the base in order to, as it were, “rise above it.” Yet one cannot but wonder whether all of this does not ultimately promote a certain quietism: why the bothersome struggle to invent another world if cognitive capitalism necessarily produces its own transcendence as a result of its internal logic, and if “nature constitutes the wealth of the common that is the basis of human activity.”19
It may seem strange to place Hardt and Negri’s analysis alongside such an “outmoded” nineteenth-century thinker as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Does Hardt and Negri’s work not deal with the most recent transformations of our capitalist economies and societies? This unlikely pairing raises another question: can we reconcile the manner in which Hardt and Negri radicalize a certain Marxist optimism that tells us the objective conditions for the overcoming of capitalism have already been achieved, along with their profound (if unconscious) proximity to Proudhon? The answer to our question, and the underlying reason Hardt and Negri revive Proudhon’s critique, ultimately lies in their specific diagnosis of the relations between immaterial labor and capitalism. To put it in Marxian terms, Hardt and Negri’s thesis is based on the hypothesis of a certain regression of the direct control exercised by capital over workers, in the sense that capitalism will revert (in terms of one of its tendencies at least) from the “real subsumption of labor under capital” to conditions of “formal subsumption” and, eventually, from conditions of formal subsumption to the non-subsumption of labor under capital.20 Hardt and Negri are not unaware of this aspect of their thesis: “the return movement from real to formal subsumption corresponds, in certain respects, to the recent reappearance of many antiquated, parasitical forms of capitalist appropriation.”21 This is the crux of their entire analysis: labor has already emancipated itself from the command of capital because the latter is incapable of organizing the most creative and fertile forms of intellectual cooperation. And, unsurprisingly, the conclusion to this process nicely accords with Negri’s earlier work: communism already exists as the shrouded verso of contemporary capitalism itself.
Let us recall that, for Marx, capital first subsumed “free labor” – which is to say, labor separated from the conditions of production – but left the pre-existing traditional labor process unchanged. In other words, capital took control of the pre-existing trades, skills, and tools and integrated them into its reproductive cycle without re-organizing, re-defining, or re-shaping them (as it will at a later stage of its development). By continually reproducing the conditions of its own expansion, capital is forced to ceaselessly revolutionize its relations with its subsumed workers. It increasingly subjects workers to its logic of accumulation and transforms them, purely and simply, into nothing more than “ingredients” or “variables” in its operations. It imposes new gestures, rhythms, movements, behaviors, etc. onto the workers. The living labor of the worker is no longer incorporated into the process of self-valorization of capital as the work of a more or less qualified individual, but as an element of “socialized labor” or “common labor” (vergesellschafteter or gemeinsamer). This socialized labor is adapted to the mechanized system through the “appliance of chemical and other natural agencies, shortening of time and space by means of communication and transport, and every other contrivance by which science presses natural agencies into the service of labour.”22 Hardt and Negri’s central thesis, along with the other theorists of cognitive capitalism, is that cooperation is no longer an effect of the direct domination of capital over living labor, but, on the contrary, is an external social or communal process, in the sense that it develops within society, outside of the process of production: “cognitive and affective labor generally produce cooperation autonomously from capitalist command, even in some of the most constrained and exploited circumstances, such as call centers or food services.”23
The idea, today, that value is ultimately created outside and prior to the capitalist organization of labor is a return to the notion of a spontaneous collective force that is subject to a process of subtraction from the outside of an essentially rentier type. This thesis proceeds from the contemporary observation that the productive process increasingly mobilizes knowledge. The whole notion thus builds upon Marx’s famous passage from the Grundrisse, though it inflects Marx’s commentary in a very singular fashion (if not inverting its meaning altogether).24 Industrial capitalism is becoming “cognitive”: value is no longer created from fixed capital but derives from the shared knowledge possessed and embodied in the workers themselves. This is also why it is not only labor that is transformed, but the objects of labor as well. Production has become “biopolitical” in the sense that the production of immaterial goods (knowledge, images, affects, etc.) is also the production of human subjectivity as such. Yann Moulier-Boutang defines this new mode of capitalism as follows:
The cognitive capitalist mode of production, if one wants to provide a concrete description of it that is sufficiently general to cover all its varieties (the production of material goods, services, signs and symbols) is based on intellectual cooperation networked by means of computers.25
“Rent” becomes the central mechanism of accumulation when capitalism enters its “cognitive” phase, but not because so-called bad financial capital leeches off so-called good productive capital, but because cognitive capitalism can only accumulate by imposing enclosures around knowledge and extracting revenue in a parasitic fashion.26 This “becoming rent” of capitalism follows from the fact that workplace cooperation is no longer organized by capital. Instead, capital only functions by capturing and distributing incomes because “intellectual cooperation” is now the direct, determining factor in contemporary production: “in fact, rather than providing cooperation, we could even say that capital expropriates cooperation as a central element of exploiting biopolitical labor-power.”27 In short, the core proposition here is the idea that the “locus of surplus-value” is the common: “exploitation is the private appropriation of part or all of the value that has been produced as common.”28 The hegemony of immaterial labor in the creation of value, the expropriation of the common, and the predominance of rentier-style appropriation by finance capital are intertwined phenomenon. By detaching itself from the production process, capital takes on the more liquid and volatile form of financial capitalism. Confronted with an autonomous intellectual and productive common, capital is now nothing more than a rentier and parasitic power that preys on the actual sphere of production from the outside. This analysis remains faithful to Marx, who explained how capitalist rent “no longer appears here as the normal form of surplus-value.”29 Carlo Vercellone, one of the premier theorists of cognitive capitalism, puts it this way: “in sum, rents functions as a claim or right of ownership over material and immaterial resources that enables the extraction of value from a position of exteriority in relation to production.”30 If capitalist profit is no longer derived from the extraction of surplus value produced through the organization of cooperation, this is due to the new centrality of knowledge in the productive process, combined with the fact that knowledge is embodied in individuals (not in fixed capital). In other words, knowledge is on the side of “living labor,” and it can no longer be encoded or controlled by capital.
According to this view, capital is in the process of abdicating its command over production and instead creates artificial conditions of scarcity by erecting “new enclosures.” These enclosures slow down or block the production and circulation of knowledge in order to collect rent. A contradiction thus arises between a rentier-style capitalism that exploits cognitive cooperation and the “collective worker of the general intellect,” and a knowledge society that develops outside these relations of exploitation (i.e., outside the factories and offices) through the support of welfare-state institutions.31 In any case, knowledge is not ultimately generated in those sites in which labor is directly exploited. This is, unfortunately, a subject about which Hardt and Negri have very little to say, aside from merely emphasizing how “the core phenomenon is no longer the accumulation of fixed capital by the capacity of learning and creativity within the workforce.” Almost nothing is said about all the studies dedicated to ongoing changes in the labor force and the highly ambiguous nature of the “autonomy” employees have achieved today.32
For these theorists, cognitive labor “is at the center of capitalist valorization and thus it possesses the power to break with the mechanisms of capitalist production.”33 Everything now transpires as if the hegemony of knowledge within the productive process has already given birth to a common that, by virtue of its progressive expansion, is destined to explode the capitalist integument confining it. There are several ways in which this argument is postulated. One of these ways emphasizes the fact that labor is no longer managed by outdated Taylorist methods, but through negotiation on the market – either through negotiations that involve the parent businesses and subcontractors or through relations between businesses and independent workers: “the Talyorist logic that proscribes specific tasks thus gives way to a results-oriented cognitive logic,”34 and this logic involves an indirect relation of monetary command, whereby discipline is supplied by the market. Ronald Coase’s theory, which tells us that the primary reason why firms are created is to reduce transaction costs, would therefore be at least partly overcome.35 This new organization of work also grants greater autonomy to increasingly creative and independent employees: “the principal source of value now resides in the creativity, the polyvalence, and the innovative force of employees, not in fixed capital and not in the routinized execution of work.”36 As Negri and Vercellone put it:
The rise of the cognitive dimension of labor correspond to the emergence of a new hegemony of knowledge mobilized by labor in relation to the knowledge embodied in fixed capital and in the managerial organization of firms. Moreover, living labor increasingly supplants many of the functions formerly fulfilled by fixed capital. Knowledge is thus more and more collectively shared, and this disrupts both the internal organization of firms and their relations with the outside world.37
The “knowledge economy,” which is the terminological inverse of “cognitive capital,” is based on a free and diffuse intellectuality that directly produces the common and which is exploited by capital as if it were “a gift from nature.” The reality, however, is that the knowledge economy is the product of welfare-state institutions that ensure the ongoing collective reproduction of society as a whole – i.e., healthcare, education, public and university research, etc.38 – through the establishment of deferred and socialized wages. Indeed, one of the effects of welfare-state planning is precisely the removal of knowledge, in terms of its creation and dissemination, from the exclusive domination of capital. Because knowledge has become independent of the fixed capital controlled by the bourgeoisie, labor and capital have thus become independent of one another, and capital’s revenues are not so much profit as rent obtained from “privatizing the common” – i.e., by establishing multiple forms of property rights. This process explains the precipitous rise of patents over the past few decades, but also the precipitous rise in shareholder earnings as well as the proliferation of “access rights” for services and means of communication. We can see, then, how the category of “enclosures” plays an increasingly essential role in this analogical reasoning. As Carlo Vercellone asserts, if rent is what is accrued to an owner through the expropriation of the common, we are therefore entitled to insist on the fact that “the original land enclosures and these ‘new enclosures’ of knowledge and life belong to a single logic.”39
It is indisputable that this thesis is based on a number of important transformations to labor processes and consumer access to goods and services. The problem, however, is that its account of these transformations is incomplete. The principle failures of this approach to cognitive capitalism are its tendencies to seriously underestimate the ongoing management and exploitation of labor through new forms of neoliberal governmentality in the private sector, and to confuse worker autonomy with new forms of power through which capital shapes cognitive labor and its corresponding subjectivities. It is not that these theorists ignore what they call the “prescription of subjectivity” by capital, but that they fail to see them for what they really are – namely, new forms in which capital subsumes labor by re-orienting its conduct in a flexible and indirect way. In other words, they fail to see how their thesis on the autonomy of immaterial labor completely contradicts their concomitant account of the transformations of labor under neoliberal capitalism:
The new prescription of subjectivity – which includes attempts to internalize firm objectives in workers, the shift to results-oriented workplace, the rise of project-based management, pressures related to customers service, as well as the pure and simple constraint posed by a rise of work precarity are all mechanisms adopted by capital to deal with an “unprecedented” situation, namely, the importance of mobilizing the knowledge and subjective involvement of employees who are the bearers of collective knowledge.
And Negri and Vercellone argue further:
The various forms of precarity now built into the wage relationship are, above all, instruments capital uses to try to enlist (and freely profit from) the total involvement/subordination of workers, without recognizing or paying a wage that corresponds to labor time that is not integrated into (and hence not measurable by) the official work contract.40
Their error is not, therefore, a function of their ignorance of new forms of neoliberal labor, but it lies in their insistence on viewing them as “external to production,” instead of mechanisms by which capital subsumes intellectual labor in a manner that is perfectly immanent to contemporary forms of capital valorization.
It is precisely because capital increasingly needs to extract value from intellectual sources that it deploys “psychological” techniques of control that offload all the burden and the responsibility for economic objectives onto the employee. Labor, especially intellectual labor, is not “free”: on the contrary, it is increasingly constrained by market pressures and disciplinary controls that continually measure its performance through various forms of evaluation. Firms do not passively wait for their cognitive rents to simply fall into their laps; rather, they try to codify and exploit everyday know-how by re-shaping knowledge and language, and all while organizing and directing the “cooperation competition” of their employees to elicit maximum productivity.
The analogical reasoning behind this work on cognitive capitalism thus fails on two points. The first error resides in the belief that diffuse intellectuality exists outside the control of firms and is produced outside the sphere of capital’s influence and action. Quite the contrary: that our educational systems are increasingly subject to the narrow logic of the market has never been so obvious,41 to say nothing of the powerful apparatus of distraction and mass leisure geared toward producing neoliberal subjects. While it is true that capitalist production may increasingly depend on knowledge, capital has also successfully transformed knowledge into information that can be reduced to commodifiable units and then fully incorporated into the process of capital valorization. “Knowledge” is “human capital,” one of the most essential dimensions of capitalist subjectivity. And this process is not confined to knowledge; language has also undergone a similar mutation (which is obvious to anyone familiar with the abundant “operational” literature in the fields of management, marketing, and finance).
Their second and related error lies in the idea that capital no longer has an active and structuring role in the organization of cognitive labor and the development of knowledge. The opposite, in fact, is the case. The theorists of cognitive capital confuse the new modalities by which intellectual labor is subsumed by capital with an increase in labor “autonomy,” as if capital had become entirely financial, and as if the principle function of management consisted in “exercising essentially financial and speculative functions” while “the actual organization of production has increasingly devolved to employees.”42 In sharp contrast to this diagnosis, the sociology of labor has shown over the past few decades that it is rather the scope, intensity, and means of hierarchical control that has changed. Corporate management increasingly tries to produce a more “internalized” mode of subordination, one based on “motivation” and commitment to corporate objectives. We could even refer to this as a more advanced stage of subjective subsumption of labor under capital than the mode of “real subsumption” analyzed by Marx. If “formal subsumption” corresponds to the extraction of absolute surplus value through the extension of the working day, the extraction of surplus value under conditions of “real subsumption” is made possible by increasing productivity. Accordingly, the subjective subsumption of labor under capital extracts surplus value by imposing a particular mode of “ultra-subjectification” onto labor, the principle of which is the limitlessness of capital and an almost innate submission to the imperative to continually produce and consume “surpluses” (some of the more immediate consequences of which include the repeal of labor laws, especially when it comes to legal limits concerning work time).
As El Mouhoub and Dominique Plihon have shown,43 the Taylorist division of labor is far from disappearing from even the most “cognitive” businesses or production systems. The intellectual work of conceptualizing and developing products and services – work in the fields of design, marketing, management, and manufacturing – have almost nothing in common with the idealized and narcissistic image of the “worker-artist-inventor” who is not dependent on fixed capital. As for the fields of academic research, publishing, and teaching, it is hard to see what might compel one to believe today that “the production process is increasingly devolving to employees.” What we are witnessing instead is the increasing dominance of quantitative evaluation methods, as well as increasing reliance on management procedures designed to impose bureaucratic proscriptions concerning the objectives of research activities. In contrast to the principle thesis conveyed by the theorists of immaterial labor, the wage relation has not been relaxed because knowledge is now embodied in workers (as opposed to fixed capital); on the contrary, the wage relation has hardened and constricted as capital introduces a whole raft of mechanisms designed to target worker subjectivity itself. Capital is doing everything it possibly can to prevent the emergence of anything like the “collective worker” of the general intellect. The techniques capital has deployed are designed to govern subjects like individual capitals who must enter into hybridized cooperative-competitive relations (as is touted in contemporary management literature) in order to produce maximum economic performance. These are not neutral techniques, nor are they post hoc devices implemented after the theft of what is created in the pure productivity of the common. These techniques actively proceed from the underlying self-valorizing logic of capital.
When reading these theorists, one gets the sense that this conception of the common as the immanent product of immaterial labor is a new idea, especially insofar as the whole idea orbits around today’s most advanced technologies and its associated activities. The reality, however, is that the thesis on cognitive capitalism is in fact a strange combination of two rival conceptions of history’s dynamic, namely those provided by Proudhon and Marx. The former’s conception of history has all but fallen into oblivion, despite some recent research and some notable publications on the subject, while the undeniable magnitude of the latter’s theoretical and political posterity goes without saying. A thorough exposition of the contemporary relation between capital and the common thus demands we re-visit the theoretical dispute between these two influential theorists of the common.
As we mentioned in the chapter’s introduction, the Proudhonian model subscribes to a notion of the common as a spontaneous social force, while Marx views the common as the historical product of capital. Proudhon’s approach is based on the analytic of exploitation that is also a principle of social re-organization. Proudhon calls it the “collective force” in order to distinguish it from the power of individuals. The collective force is the fundamental source of aubaine – “increase” or “surplus” – a term Proudhon uses to designate the exploitation of the collective work made possible by the institution of property. The principle of this collective force, which he proffers as his great discovery, is also the basis for one of the great critiques of communism – or at least a certain paradigm of communism as the community of goods. Proudhon’s intent was to open up a third path between the “regime of property” and the “communitarian regime” (which was the term he gave to the communism of his day).44 In La Solution du problème social (The Solution of the Social Problem), Proudhon unambiguously summarized his project: “between property and community, I will build a world.”45 For Proudhon, both property and the community – i.e., capitalism and communism – exploit the collective force. Proudhon thus argues that individualism and collectivism are equally deficient when it comes to understanding the nature of society’s intelligence. Both the absolutism of the state and the absolutism of the individual – i.e., communist and individualist solutions respectively – lead to the destruction of social life. Unity – whether of the communist state or of the individual in the framework of the individual property owner – always overpowers the plurality of individuals in a society and dampens the plural composition of individuals themselves: “man is man only through society, which is supported, for its part, by the balance and harmony of the powers which compose it.”46 What, then, is the basis of society? For Proudhon, it is an immanent force that proceeds from the plurality of social beings who are themselves plural, and the establishment of their collective power, which is always greater than the sum of its parts.
Proudhonian sociology is thus based on a primordial discovery: the irreducible “collective force” that arises out of the sum of all individual forces. Proudhon’s sociology was especially influenced by the economists in this respect, chief amongst them Adam Smith and his famous analysis of the manufacture of pins,47 which is especially manifest in Proudhon’s Smithian analysis of the division of labor: “therein lies the whole problem of social transformation.”48 Yet for Proudhon, Smith was mistaken in making the division of labor his first and defining principle. Smith failed to see, argued Proudhon, that the “association of several men who pool their industry in common” is the principle of increased productivity. This collective force, born out of the “association of forces” not only concerns “workers who are presently employed,” which is to say those who produce collectively at the same time, but “also every successive operation undertaken with a common goal and for an identical object.”49 The association from which this collective force is derived is “the indissoluble chain that unites the workers: all contribute to a singular goal, social wealth.”50 It is precisely this wealth that is stolen from the workers by those who own property, and it is this wealth that the new order must return to the workers.
In his First Memoir on Property of 1840, Proudhon argued the following:
“The capitalist,” they say, has paid the labourers their “daily wages”; more precisely, it should be said that the capitalist has paid as many times “one day’s wage” as he has employed labourers each day, which is not at all the same thing. For he has paid nothing for that immense power which results from the union and harmony of labourers and the convergence and simultaneity of their efforts. Two hundred grenadiers stood the obelisk of Luxor on its base in a few hours; do you suppose one man could have accomplished the same task in two hundred days? Yet according to the calculation of the capitalist, the amount of wages paid would have been the same. Well, a desert to prepare for cultivation, a house to build, a factory to run – they are all obelisks to erect, mountains to move. The smallest fortune, the slightest establishment, the beginning of the lowest industry all demand the combination of so many different kinds of labour and skill that one man could not possible execute them all.51
This collective force arises from the “interdependence” of many individuals of differing talents and roles, all organized according to a plurality of possible arrangements. If Adam Smith, and others before him, illuminated the productivity of the division of labor and the coordination of tasks, Proudhon uses the example of the Obelisk of Luxor to emphasize how the collective force can also productively work when the shared capacities of many individuals are simultaneously applied to the same object or task. The collective force undoubtedly depends on the sheer number of arms and brains at its disposal, but it chiefly arises from the relations established between individual forces, the diversity of its associated functions, and the harmony established between individual relations. There are, accordingly, many ways in which this collective principle can be economically established. In La Capacité politique des classes ouvrières (The Political Capacity of the Working Classes) Proudhon demarcates, within the “economic forces” in general, the division of labor, machinery, competition, workers’ associations, credit, and the union of simultaneous forces, all of which constitute but one mode of economic organization: “what I refer to as the economic forces are specific modes of activity, the effect of which is to multiply the power of hard labor beyond what it would be capable of if economic activity were left entirely to individual freedom.”52 It is in this sense that we can clearly see how Proudhon’s condemnation of property is due to the manner in which he views property as the legal instrument by which the fruits of common labor are privately appropriated. Property and the collective force are antagonistic, at least up to a certain point, since there are artists and peasant proprietors who do not steal the output of the collective force but, on the contrary, augment the collective force through mutual exchange and competition. For Proudhon, then, not all property is theft: only that property that makes it possible to receive an income without work is theft, because it is a right not to one’s own labor – in concordance with Locke’s principle – but to the labor of someone else.
Proudhon extends this fundamental principle of production to all social life, and to all political activity. Economic analysis provides the key to understanding society, insofar as it shows how the combination of individual forces that produce a result greater than the sum of its parts is the secret of all human activity as such. For Proudhon, it is the social bond itself that is the source of all wealth: it is the principle of economic productivity and the principle of intellectual and spiritual fecundity. As Pierre Ansart observes, “Proudhon replaces the centrality of technological or material force with the social relation as the basis of the collective force.”53 The collective force is social being itself. Social being is the heart of his ontology, and the focus of his sociology. Every form of social relation is a force multiplier of all the individual forces it encompasses. Proudhon posits an active and creative power of the group as such, which derives from the fact all activity and all production is co-activity and co-production (the workshop being but one particular example). As soon as individuals group their isolated forces together, they constitute a collective force: “the end result of these agglomerated forces, which must not be confused with their sum, constitutes the force of power of the group.”54
While the collective force is indeed immanent to the social bond, social relations are nonetheless differentiated: there are simultaneous or successive relations of cooperation in production on the one hand, and relations between differentiated independent producers, on the other. The workshop functions according to a simultaneous cooperative force, while society as a whole is structured through a division of specialized labor. In both cases, a certain combination of work generates a productive effect that translates into a surplus of wealth over and above a simple addition of individual forces. For Proudhon, then, the productivity of the collective force is based on the simultaneous pooling of all forces. Everyone, working together, is able to achieve a goal that could not be accomplished by a succession of individual efforts. This notion of a compositional effect – the “cooperation of forces” – is very similar to the division of labor in the workshop (which is also an effect of the organization of labor, albeit of a different kind) insofar as it is dedicated to ensuring the coherence of a series of successive operations to be carried out. And lastly, Proudhon extends this analysis of the social division of labor, based on specialized functions and the various exchanges that result from the division of labor, to the larger scale of society itself. For Proudhon, the whole of society should be viewed as a space in which individuals cooperate on the basis of commutation or reciprocity. And everything that facilitates these types of exchanges amplifies the collective force.
This collective power is not the outcome of choice, nor is it the expression of the rationality of the self-interested individual, nor still is it the result of an external power. The collective force is not produced by the individual or the state: it is society itself that possesses its own dynamism and thereby generates these productive effects. Proudhon rejects the individual nominalism that denies the reality of the social as much as he rejects the realism that reifies the individual at the expense of the social (which is then viewed as an entirely separate entity). Society consists of relations that can neither be reduced to their elements nor constituted as an entity that is detached from its elements.
The sui generis reality of the collective force is not only economic, it is also social. And it is all of these things in a double sense: society is both produced and productive as a result of the activity of labor: “labor is the bonding force of society.” It shapes society and determines its movement. It is the collective worker who shapes society. But it is also the social composition of activities and functions that concretely produces “social wealth.” This is not only due to the fact that it is always a group of workers who carry out all productive labor, nor because production presupposes a division of labor, but above all because all work, even if it is seemingly individual work, is in reality social or collective. Viewed in this light, Proudhon even goes so far as to question whether there can really be said to be, from this perspective, a purely individual force at all – a claim that would fundamentally negate our spontaneous perception of society as a composite of individual and collective forces: “as soon as man works, he embodies society … in the working society … there are no workers, only one worker, unique, and infinitely diversified.”55
To be in society is to be a “collective man.” All individuals are always already plural, always already involved in community activity, and always indebted before being creative. Our so-called individual force is already part of the collective force because everyone is a combination of multiple components drawn from our education and our continuous socialization: is individuality itself not merely the superficial effect of an underlying multiplicity of sources and factors? For Proudhon, we are singularly deceived whenever we believe the individual to be an atom, believe the individual is the source of wealth, or believe all the merit and talents of some atomistic individual are rightly its own:
Just as the creation of every instrument of production is the result of collective force, so also the talent and knowledge of a man are the product of universal intelligence and general knowledge slowly accumulated by a number of masters and with the aid of many inferior industries.56
While it may seem as if this Proudhonian notion of “human capital” bears a family resemblance to neoliberal theories (which are based on an homonymic concept), Proudhon’s approach is in fact diametrically opposed to the neoliberal position insofar as he insists that capital cannot be viewed as a form of personal property that gives one the right to a corresponding income (and in this sense Proudhon’s approach is closer to what Marx calls the “general intellect” in the Grundrisse):
Talent is a creation of society rather than a gift of nature; it is an accumulated capital of which the recipient is only the guardian. Without society, without the education and powerful assistance which it gives, the finest nature would be inferior to the most ordinary capacities even in the areas where it ought to shine.57
This perspective lies at the heart of Proudhon’s disagreement with the “capacitive” and inegalitarian theorists like the Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists.
True social science begins with the discovery that the collective force is stolen by both the proprietary class and an alienating state.58 Instead of allowing those engaged in direct cooperation and exchange to determine economic arrangements, external powers have monopolized the surplus of social wealth (whether produced through exchange or cooperation) for their own benefit. The totality of the collective force, and the fruits of its production and exchange, is alienated by private property and the state. Proudhon’s first analyses were focused on the exploitation of labor by private property, and then he later extended this analysis to state alienation. The exploitation of man by man, and the exploitation of the government of man by man, manifests the same logic of usurpation and theft. In his famous 1840 text What is Property?, Proudhon tries to show how the collective force is the source and target of exploitation, and he directly points the finger at the property-owning class: “for when you have paid all the individual forces, you have still not paid the collective force. Consequently, there always remains a right of collective property which you have not acquired and which you enjoy unjustly.”59 It is the collective force that is the real substance of profit or the aubaine, as Proudhon calls it. The capitalist appropriates the collective force at no cost and, accordingly, Proudhon’s theory of exploitation is actually very simple: the individual wage corresponds to maintenance of the worker, the satisfaction of its elementary needs, while accrued profit is the expropriation of the fruits of the collective force. Capital, writes Proudhon, is therefore “accumulated, concretized, solidified labor,”60 and its capture is facilitated by private property. As Proudhon further explains:
The collective strength of a hundred workers is incomparably greater than that of a worker raised a hundred-fold, and so this force is not properly paid by the wages of a hundred workers; consequently, there has been an error in accounting between the workers and the masters.61
And for Proudhon, the state’s political alienation of society follows the very same logic. Economic exploitation and political exploitation operate according to the same mechanism, namely the alienation of the collective force. This is what accounts for the great unity and coherence of Proudhon’s remarks. Historical reality, as Proudhon argues, is the appropriation of the output of social power by the state.62 The power of society is monopolized by an individual or a class that seizes the collective force of a people who are then rendered incapable of governing themselves. The state is an imposter. Its power, while real, comes from the totality of forces that comprise society.
But why, then, do people tend to both submit to the state and respect private property? For Proudhon, this is not an aberration or a normative departure. Rather, he argues that there is a logic in enslavement, and a truth in our consent to our exploitation. Our acceptance of external power over us is due to the perception that the establishment of each is integrated into the collective force, which is then embodied and represented by these forms of social power. We are nothing without others: since we must integrate ourselves into the whole in order to produce this collective force, we must also submit to the authority that embodies this collective force, whether this is the authority of the property class or the state. As Proudhon puts it:
Workers and citizens do not really submit to an exploiter or to a tyrant: they do not submit because of seduction or terror. It is rather the representative of the social power to which they submit. While this is a power that is ill-defined in their thoughts, it is nonetheless a power they feel they cannot live without. It is a power, whatever its principle may be, that shows them its seal, and they tremble to break it through their insurrection.63
To attack capitalist property would thus be to attack the productive force itself, and to attack the state would be to attack society itself. In both cases it would be to attack social power – i.e., the power of association, whether in its commutative or cooperative forms. In short, it would be to attack their own social being.
Usurpation or theft by political authority is based on the idea that if social power is the product of relations between groups of workers and members of the society, then these relations must be regulated and balanced by the law.64 This is the indispensable role of the judiciary – it legitimates the usurpation of power. It is thanks to the legal apparatus’ ability to regulate exchange and cooperation that states and capitalists are maintained. Justice – a core concept in Proudhon’s reasoning – is the regulation, or more exactly the self-regulation, of social relations without which there would be neither common activity nor social productivity. Yet justice has been monopolized by castes of lawyers, in the pay of property owners, so that they may legally “justify” their unjust appropriation. The law produced by the sovereign legislator is therefore never true justice. Real justice can only arise from all those concrete and varied ways in which equilibrium between parties is regulated – i.e., by the contractual management of their relations in order to ensure the equity of exchanges according to the “true value” of goods and services. In other words, justice is immanent to economic and social activity, and economic and social law is nothing other than the shaping of these relations between individuals themselves. By purporting to endow these rights with the “force of law,” the legislator has been able to pass itself off as a transcendent entity over and above these individuals. This is the basis of Proudhon’s double refusal of individualism and communism.
These views led Proudhon to produce a systematic critique of communism, which Marx repeats almost word for word in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Communists believe state property is a vehicle for overcoming the economic exploitation rooted in capitalist private property. Yet, for Proudhon, even if community ownership expropriates capitalist private property, it does not fundamentally change the relationship between workers and their products. Rather than seeing a solution in the regulated association of multiple and diverse forces, the communists opt for the communal ownership of capital as the singular source of wealth, which Proudhon views as symmetrical to the “individual hypothesis,” adopted by the liberals, whereby all wealth is derived from the isolated individual. But as Proudhon showed (before Marx), property still prevails over free activity in this type of communism. As Proudhon once exclaimed, “communism is still property!” And as he wrote elsewhere, “it is very curious that systematic communism, the deliberate negation of property, is conceived under the direct influence of the prejudice of property, and it is property that is to be found at the root of all communistic theories.”65 Indeed, Proudhon believed alienation would become even more intense under communism, since the community not only owns the means of production and its products, but it owns individuals as well. The community is thus the apex of property, since everything belongs to the community qua moral person.
The socialists and the communists remain committed to the program of community property because they have fallen prey to the illusion that capital and the state are the only sources of wealth. In his System of Economic Contradictions, Proudhon attacks the socialists for wanting to seize capital and the levers of state power without realizing that these forms are merely derivative organs of more primordial forces:
Capital and power, secondary organs in society, are always the gods whom socialism adores: if capital and power did not exist, it would invent them. Through its anxieties about power and capital, socialism has completely overlooked the meaning of its protests.66
The communists and the socialists are thereby trapped within a false symmetrical opposition: they advocate communal property over individual property, yet the former is merely the property of those who control the community. What they call “emancipation” is actually absolute political oppression and a new form of exploitation. The communists hypostatize the collective force by making it the prerogative of the state, as if the state itself was the origin of the collective force. It is because they think power and force come from the center and the top, and not from the activity of individuals, that they assent to this exploitative logic. In the final analysis, however, there is only one kind of state organization for Proudhon, and that is the state as a generalized police force, a reactionary state, and a state of pure constraint. For Proudhon, then, we must take a very different path, one based on economic law, industrial democracy, and communistic federalism. It is this path that has been all but abandoned, if not in practice than at least in theory, and it is a path that must be reopened.67
To his great merit, Proudhon foresaw the intimate connection between the collective force and the law and, as we will see later, he anticipated the crucial relation between the common and institutional activity. But, nonetheless, he still viewed the law as outside and prior to the collective force. The law is merely the acknowledgment of a social bond that precedes it. The collective force is spontaneous and free, and its products are stolen by private property and the state, such that both private and public property performs an essentially rentier function. Property (private or public) does not organize the collective force, and it creates nothing itself. It is fundamentally negative. Property denies the spontaneous nature of the social. The Marxian analysis, on the contrary, completely opposes the view that all profits are essentially rent, or that rent ought to be the dominant paradigm through which all forms of social exploitation should be thought.68 It was undoubtedly this fundamental divergence that was at the root of Marx’s hostility to Proudhonian thought in the second half of the 1840s. That said, we sometimes forget how much Marx borrowed from Proudhon, especially from his concept of the collective force, and at times he even seems to adopt some of its central features.
As early as 1842, Marx read and eloquently commented on What is Property? A year later, in The Holy Family (1843), Marx wrote, “Proudhon’s treatise Qu’est ce que la propriété? is as important for modern political economy as Sieyès work Qu’ est-ce que le tiers état? for modern politics,” and he even went so far as to call Proudhon’s book “a scientific manifesto for the French proletariat,” which is no small compliment.69 It is well known that the two men participated in lengthy exchanges in Paris in 1844, and while Marx later recalled how he sought in vain to explain Hegel to Proudhon, he is less forthright about how much his nascent thought was indelibly marked by what Proudhon taught him. Indeed, there was a time when the two marched lockstep toward a common end, and Marx even acknowledged his debt to Proudhon, in The Holy Family, concerning the idea about the negation of property through the revolutionary action of the proletariat. And while Marx may distort things somewhat on this point, it is nonetheless the case that it was in Proudhon’s First Memoir on Property that we find the idea that the workers must necessarily destroy property: “all human labour being the result of collective force, all property thereby becomes collective and undivided; in more precise terms, labour destroys property.”70 This inevitable conclusion is not fundamentally different from Marx’s famous phrase mentioned above, according to which “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation.”71 Now is not the time, however, to dive deeper into the quarrel between these two men, nor to detail the battles led by Marx against the Proudhonians within the First International.72 Instead, we want to look a little closer at the uses Marx made of the Proudhonian concept of the collective force, especially as regards worker cooperation.
In contrast to the maxims of bourgeois political economy, capital is not a form of private property that magically generates profit, but is rather the product of cooperation amongst producers. As Marx and Engels asserted as early as their 1848 Manifesto, “capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many men, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is, therefore, not a personal power, it is a social power.”73 While this notion of “social power” is reminiscent of Proudhon, it is far from a spontaneous form. Social power, in Marx’s view, must be precisely shaped by capital in order to be integrated into the production process. Chapter 13 of Capital (vol. 1), titled “Cooperation,” provides a very clear exposition of Marx’s view on the matter. Borrowing from Proudhon, Marx argues that the collective force of cooperating individuals is always greater than the sum of its individual workers. Indeed, Marx argues that it is a trait unique to the species, insofar as man is a “social animal.” Even before the advent of large-scale industry (characterized by the planned and rationalized organization of cooperative work), the simple union of several workers within the same factory led to a “spirit of cooperation” that increased productivity. But it is only once capital succeeds in systematizing the cooperation of the “global worker” (travailleur global), who then becomes an appendage of the machine, that the species fully arrives at “the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one.”74 In other words, capital makes it possible for the human species to take a giant leap forward by enabling “the social productive power of labour” to achieve a degree of power unrivaled in all human history: “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.”75
The social nature of man thus finds its most historically advanced instantiation (as of yet) in capitalist cooperation. The “global worker” is the “social animal” whose socialization is now systematized and planned by capital. Capital, in other words, embraces the social nature of the species and pushes it to its fullest extent. Through concentration, capital “socializes” the growing mass of proletarians:
[The] concentration of large masses of the means of production in the hands of individual capitalists is a material condition for the co-operation of wage-labourers, and the extent of cooperation, or the scale of production, depends on the extent of this concentration.76
But this cooperation demands direction, command, and modes of supervision. These are the tasks that constitute the specific function of capital once work becomes cooperative. This task is not only technical, but is also a response to the structural antagonism between “the exploiter and the raw material of his exploitation.”77 If it is capital that constitutes and organizes cooperation, it does so – as Proudhon had already shown – in order to profit from the fruits of this collective force without having to pay for it in full: “[the capitalist] pays [the worker] the value of 100 independent labour-powers, but he does not pay for the combined labour-power of the 100.”78 When the capitalist compels worker cooperation, it is no longer one hundred individual labor powers with which the capitalist deals, but labor power that has “ceased to belong to themselves” and is “incorporated into capital,”79 such that the collective force organized by capital always appears to the workers as the effect of the authority of the capitalist, as the heteronomous power of capital. The productive force of social labor appears to be “a power which capital possesses by its nature – a productive power inherent in capital.”80
The workers thus become mere variables in the larger production process. They are elements of a capital that unwittingly self-develops by subsuming the force of living labor within itself:
As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital. Hence the productive power developed by the worker socially is the productive power of capital. The socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions.81
The division of labor in manufacturing, and the machinery that corresponds to large-scale industry, only deepens the incorporation of the worker into capital. As cooperation develops, the worker enjoys less and less independence from capital. The worker’s individual labor power counts for nothing; he is absorbed into capital as a “global worker.”
Marx’s analysis thereby revealed what Proudhon failed to see: cooperation is anything but spontaneous. It is produced by capital, and the scale of cooperation always depends on the amount of capital deployed by the capitalist (even for the simplest forms of cooperation). It follows, then, that exploitation cannot be analyzed as the mere theft of something that previously existed or that which was produced outside the capital–labor relation in the form of an autonomous collective force, because the collective force is, in fact, organized by capital according to its needs and its further development. It is capital that gives rise to systematic cooperation, and it is capital that produces forms of organized labor that make it possible to increase the rate of exploitation through a combination of cooperation and mechanization. In short, what Marx calls the “theft of the labour of others” is much more than simple theft: it presupposes the submission and incorporation of the victim into the system of organized labor.
Marx thus “assimilated” and transformed Proudhon’s analyses of the collective force and integrated these analyses into his own conception of capitalism’s singular dynamic. But it is not only in Marx’s economic writing that Proudhonian ideas can be found: the same assimilation-transformation of Proudhon is also manifest in Marx’s commentary on French political history. Marx, in a sense, “digests” Proudhon in order to articulate the specific historical dynamics through which the Paris Commune is interpreted as the antithesis of the French Empire. For instance, Marx’s description of the French bureaucracy as a “parasitic” state (as opposed to the active society) is very Proudhonian.82 For Marx, the centralization of the state serves exactly the same function as the economic concentration of capital. In the course of successive revolutions, the state increasingly represses society as it becomes more and more centralized, isolated, and external in relation to the larger society, to the point that the conscientious revolution (la consciencieuse révolution), by perfecting and concentrating executive power, “sets it up against itself as the sole target, in order to concentrate all its forces of destruction against it.”83 And nineteen years later, in his address to the First International titled The Civil War in France, Marx recognizes the “Communal Constitution” as the original and inaugural feature of the Paris Commune, though he completely dissociates the Constitution from its Proudhonian roots. In any case, communism, for Marx, can only arise from a specific historical dynamic that creates the necessary conditions for communism’s emergence. The economic common and the political common, the free association of the producers and the political federalism of the communes, can only be realized upon the conflicted terrain created by capital and the state themselves. Capital and the state contribute to producing, right in front of themselves, the collective forces that will be their eventual destruction.
We have written elsewhere about the problems inhering in the dialectical theory Marx opposes to Proudhon’s approach. Are we really to believe that the development of large-scale, mechanized, automated industry will give rise to a unified and polyvalent individual capable of fully developing all his faculties? And can we really believe that the constricted and domineering socialization of the workers by capital necessarily leads to a free association of individuals? We freely admit that capital creates an objective antagonism between itself and its workers, and we will also admit that workers’ struggles to limit their exploitation express a nascent desire to re-appropriate the fruits of their labor (as is clearly demonstrable through an analysis of the history of workers’ struggles). Yet given the various forms capital has taken since the mid-nineteenth century, we are less sure about the proposition that the capitalist institution of forced cooperation and mechanization will ultimately produce a fully socialized individual who has developed all his faculties as a result of an increase in free time.
If the common, in the form of social labor, finds its most developed form in the “technological application of science”84 to production, as Marx explains in the Grundrisse and in Chapter VI of Capital (vol. 1), then we are dealing with a form of historical necessity that will invariably lead to the “expropriation of the expropriators.” This is the logic of Marx’s famous “Fragment on Machines,” from the Grundrisse, that has been so central to the theorists of Italian operaismo (“workerism”). In this influential passage, Marx describes capital’s tendency toward a progressive reduction of social or communal work, and a concomitant shift away from cooperative production in favor of mere supervision and regulation of an “automatic system of machinery” in which workers are but cogs endowed with intellect.85 This tendency allows the workers to largely liberate themselves from manual labor, wherein they are subsequently able to completely devote themselves to their own development and fulfillment. Given its importance for many contemporary theories of the common, this passage warrants close and careful examination. For this famous “Fragment on Machines” is not merely a rough draft of the more precise analysis found in Capital, but rather constitutes a singular theoretical moment in itself within Marx’s work.86 In these writings, Marx dares a rather precise prognostication on the basis of certain tendencies already at work in capital’s present: specifically, in this case, capital’s tendency to assimilate scientific advances toward its own ends and the contradictory effect of this assimilation in terms of capital’s control over its workers. At the outset, we should observe how Marx’s prognostication is completely at odds with Hardt and Negri’s thesis concerning knowledge and autonomy: as Marx clearly indicates, scientific knowledge does not reside in the worker, but rather it is “concentrated” in fixed capital, such that capital increasingly relies on a combination of the forces of production to the detriment of direct labor power. Living labor thus loses all its independence: “the worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite.”87 Intellectuality, in other words, is completely monopolized by capital.
Once science is objectified in the mechanisms of the productive apparatus, it makes the total domination of capital over labor possible:
The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.88
Reading this passage, one might think Marx was actually describing the effects of industrial Taylorism. The reality for Marx, in any case, is that this “automatic system of machinery” is merely the continuation of the tendency, already at work in manufacturing, that leads to an increasingly radical division between the worker and the means of production. This tendency then leads to the domination and transformation of the worker through a simple combination of natural forces: “[it is,] hence, the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character [and] direct labor is reduced to a mere moment of this process.”89 Of course, as Marx rightly asserts, it is in no way science itself that is responsible for technological progress; rather, the entire productive apparatus is the result of the logic by which capital develops techniques and mechanisms precisely designed to extract surplus value. In accordance with the ideas of Adam Smith and Charles Babbage, Marx articulates technological production as a phenomenon that decomposes and re-composes direct labor in the manufacturing process, and then again, but now in a more systemic fashion, in large-scale industry. The division of labor and cooperation in capitalistic form is what makes machinery possible, through a combination of natural, scientific forces and the planned coordination amongst machinery. Capitalism, as Marx explains in almost inexorable terms, transforms “the production process from the simple labour process into a scientific process, which subjugates the forces of nature and compels them to work in the service of human needs.”90 This reduces direct labor power to a state of near powerlessness “in the face of the communality [Gemeinsamkeit] represented by and concentrated in capital.” Labor is no longer productive save “[those] common labours which subordinate the forces of nature to themselves.”91 As a result of capital’s frenzied drive to accumulate, cooperation, once restrained by the capital’s command, is transformed into a combination of natural forces subject to applied science and its mechanized objectification. Centralized cooperative labor is painfully supplanted by scientific activity, and the common is thereby “concentrated” in fixed capital. In the final analysis, the automatic system of machines is nothing but the “capitalist common” in its most advanced form.
But where does the knowledge objectified in fixed capital come from? Marx’s answer on this matter is ambiguous, insofar as his response takes on certain Proudhonian features. And it is undoubtedly the case, in our view, that it is precisely these Proudhonian features that lie at the root of Negri’s interpretation of Marx’s 1857–1858 writings. Capital appropriates the social development of the general intellect “free of charge,” as Marx puts it,92 and this then amounts to the theft of that which is derived from generalized social progress that capital neither produces nor organizes. Yet Marx understands very well that if science – much like value – is one of capital’s historical “pre-conditions,” it also becomes, as a condition of its subsequent development, one of capital’s “results.” Far from remaining unmoored or free floating within society, science is transformed into a sphere of professional activity that is increasingly subject to specific economic imperatives and is increasingly rationalized and “objectified” in fixed capital: “invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it.”93 While we might reproach Marx for being somewhat positivistic here, it is worth noting that “science,” for Marx, is an index of advanced social development and one of capitalism’s most important creations. Marx explicitly tells us how machinery really only develops once “all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital.”94
The fact is that it is only after the development of the general intellect, or rather general intellectuality – a phenomenon born from social life and which in turn nourishes social existence – that knowledge truly supplants the exploitation of labor as the source of wealth. The total domination of living labor is thereby dialectally transformed into the condition of labor’s emancipation. Let us not forget that capital is a “moving contradiction” that “works toward its own dissolution as the form dominating production.”95 If capital employs machinery to produce ever more labor power, it unwittingly produces, despite itself, the foundation of a completely different system of wealth, one that is not based on the quantity of labor stolen from workers, but on the development of science and technology to continuously create more disposable time. This contradiction pits capital’s tendency to continually increase labor productivity for the benefit of the capitalist against its concomitant tendency to produce free time for the benefit of the worker, and for the society as a whole. In a very illuminating passage, Marx writes:
What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value [is] directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposal time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s labour time for their own development.96
The development of the social individual, which is enabled by the augmentation of disposable time as a result of this new foundation of wealth, is not a unilateral tendency for Marx, even if he describes it as ineluctable: production, for Marx, increasingly issues from the “the combination of social activity [which] appears, rather, as the producer.”97 Society – which is to say “individuals in mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew” – now appears as the true subject of production (its “producer”), and it now appears as if capital was only a necessary moment in this larger process. Society thus takes the form of the “social individual,” “the human being in the process of becoming [and] in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society.”98 Only at the conclusion of this process does the “general intellect” become the real wealth of individuals (not capital) and the basis of the “real life process.”99 Emancipation is thus ultimately grounded in the movement of capital:
In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual, which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears as a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself.100
This process irrevocably leads to the polarization between the “surplus labour of the mass” – which is the “condition for the development of general wealth” and the “non-labour of a few” – and the “development of the general powers of the human brain.”101 It is through this polarizing process that another logic, or another future, becomes possible, one based on the “free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour time to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific, etc., development of the individuals in the time set free, and with means created, for them all.”102 In other words, the reduction of necessary labor proportionally extends non-labor to the whole society as such, which can now devote itself to the pursuit of true wealth – i.e., “the developed productive power of all individuals.”103
Marx’s anticipatory vision of the future in the Grundrisse is by no means original within the socialist tradition. One need only think, for example, of the conferences organized by William Morris. For Morris also developed a vision of a socialist future, in which the creative and aesthetic qualities of individuals are able to flourish because machines have freed workers from the most immiserating labor.104 Marx’s vision of the future, however, involves an account of capitalism’s development that is rather astonishing and, we must admit, not very historically credible. Marx exaggerates capital’s tendency to develop the productive forces – which appear to him to be “the material conditions [that will] blow this foundation sky-high”105 – to the point that he fails to consider how an increase in productive power might also modify the composition of subjective consumption and needs. In a word, Marx underestimates the capacity of capital to continue to subject the “real life process” to its own imperatives.
Finally, there is one more point that merits further discussion: namely, Marx’s conception of science, knowledge, and/or the intellect. On the one hand, one has to admit Marx’s talent for anticipatory analysis when he emphasizes, more than a century ahead of the development of genetically modified seeds, how agriculture “becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism.”106 However, by overemphasizing the liberating potential of knowledge, Marx reciprocally underestimates capital’s ability to subsume intellectual activity and its products. Knowledge seems to be embodied in fixed capital, but without substantially affecting the individual – other than through the potentially liberating character that it exerts on necessary labor time and its ability to contribute to the “combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.”107 Now, if there is a lesson to be learned from the movement of capital, it is that the progress of knowledge in the fields of management, organization, commerce, or communication – which has been considerable as a result of capital’s intensive interest in these fields – are not at all “sciences” that capital has captured by extracting them from a rich social milieu in order to extend the independence of wealth vis-à-vis labor time. In other words, this whole normative and descriptive dimension of knowledge about man and society seems to have largely escaped Marx.
We have already seen, in numerous instances, how much Marx believed in the “historically necessary” conversion of capital’s forced socialization into voluntary free association, and how the cooperation coerced by capital is converted into free cooperation.108 But this belief runs counter to all the historical work documenting the ways in which a class constitutes itself through the conscious creations of institutions and the subsequent struggles it leads. While Marx insightfully analyzed capital’s development of a common as a result of the former’s gradual detachment from living labor, he did not, however, undertake a comparable analysis of the progressive autonomy of the workers’ movement, of the class constitution of the workers, or the formation of a proper workers’ common that is independent from the development of capital. On this point, at least, Proudhon deserves to be recognized as the more prescient of the two. More astutely than Marx (and before him too), Proudhon theorized the workers’ struggle for autonomy in institutional terms.109 While Marx’s inadequacy was partly remedied by the lessons he drew from the Paris Commune, he nonetheless continued to emphasize the fetishistic development of a vanguard party amongst most of his followers.
What we get in Marx is precisely the idea that the conditions produced by capitalism make worker organization possible and, concomitantly, they produce the conditions for their unification, solidarity, and eventually their struggle against exploitation. Increasingly sophisticated forms of subjection, which are more concerned with increasing productivity than with lengthening the working day, are simultaneously linked to new forms of cooperation that generate a “collective worker.” This collective worker is accordingly able to organize itself on its own foundation, develop organizational independence, and, by increasingly engaging in resolute struggle against capital, constitute itself as a new historical subject. By integrating workers into its great mechanisms for extracting surplus value, capitalism simultaneously creates a new terrain upon which the class struggle will be fought and ushers in a new antagonistic subjectivity. While Marx never wavered from his narrative of historical finality based on an implacable structural necessity, he was admittedly one of the theorists who, at times, most precisely analyzed the concrete conditions of the worker struggles unfolding on the new terrain he theorized. It is this latter dimension of Marx’s work that we are most interested in expanding upon throughout the rest of this book. Rather than continue to theorize the objective creation of the common by capital in one way or another, we want to look at the creation of a different kind of common, a common the workers’ movement gives itself by creating its own institutions independent of the strict laws governing the reproduction of capital.
This analysis of the theoretical divergence between Proudhon and Marx allows us to establish a fundamental axiom for theorizing the common anew. This confrontation between Proudhon and Marx helps us grasp several contemporary illusions about the genesis of the common. While Hardt and Negri’s recent theory is clearly both original and ambitious, their work looks a little different once it is seen as a revived version of an older discourse on the spontaneous production of the common. And while Hardt and Negri describe Marx, rather than Proudhon, as the more important source of inspiration for their work, this intellectual lineage can only be sustained by extracting both theorists from their proper context and rather drastically re-interpreting Marx’s remarks on knowledge and science. By turning Marx into a visionary who anticipated the supposed autonomy of knowledge under conditions of immaterial labor, Hardt and Negri actually attribute Proudhon’s ideas to Marx – for example, the very Proudhonian assertion that “production thus relies … on workers who immediately cooperate together prior to the discipline and control of the capitalist.”110 And if Hardt and Negri really are the true heirs of Proudhon, it is because of the scant attention they pay to the actual organization of intellectual labor, and their refusal to consider the forms of submission to which intellectual labor is rigorously subjected. At base, this oversight grows out of their naturalistic conception of the common, according to which knowledge is naturally unappropriable because it is naturally non-exclusive. In other words, by adopting the view that goods are “naturally” common, Hardt and Negri are able to claim cognitive capitalism is doomed by a boundless expansion of knowledge: “when I share an idea or image with you, my capacity to think with it is not lessened; on the contrary, our exchange of ideas and images increases my capacities.”111 Formulations such as these are precisely what we find in the typology of goods characteristic of the new institutional economy of the commons.
But, on the other hand, Hardt and Negri never abandon their Marxian historical optimism. We might even say, on this point, that they are perfectly orthodox Marxists. What we find in their work is thus a strange and rather obscure logic: while capital may be essentially parasitic, it is nevertheless “creative” in terms of the conditions necessary for communism. In an attempt to overcome Marx’s false equivalence between the passage from feudalism to capitalism and the passage from capitalism and communism, Hardt and Negri write, “we can already recognize – in the autonomy of biopolitical production, the centrality of the common, and their growing separation from capitalist exploitation and command – the makings of a new society within the shell of the old.”112
The reality is that “biopolitical production” does not inherently expropriate a fundamentally creative common – as if cooperation in cognitive or affective work were inscribed into new forms of production that have become autonomous in relation to a purely parasitic mode of capitalism. Capital’s organization of production, of knowledge, and of life has in fact never been so direct, so detailed, and so totalizing.113 What we are encountering instead is a real subsumption of intellectual labor that replaces outdated, artisanal, irregular, and discontinued means of expropriating our cultural inheritance and intellectual work.
By affirming an overly simple and factually erroneous theory about the intrinsic and irreversible autonomy of intellectual labor, Hardt and Negri eschew more fundamental questions concerning the concrete forms through which the common is produced and reproduced today.114 A careful consideration of this question necessarily requires a more detailed interrogation of the new conditions of struggle that workers and citizens face today. It also, and perhaps more importantly, demands an examination of the types of practices workers and citizens are implementing and the types of institutions they are creating to escape, as much as possible, from capital’s grip on their activities and their existence. This is work that needs to be done, and it demands a perspective that pushes beyond the dispute between Marx and Proudhon, and which refuses any of the more or less confused hybridizations of these two models. It requires a perspective that is not limited to the sociological or economic discourse that theorizes the common as “naturally” emerging from either social life itself or from the accumulation of capital. We must conceive of a different theoretical model of the commons, one that better accounts for our historical creativity and is accordingly more “operational” when it comes to political strategy. This new theoretical model must be based on collective practices and political struggles. It must put these practices at the center of its analysis, and not as negative acts of “resistance” to domination, or “protests” against the neoliberal order, but as the positive basis for new institutions and new laws. For us, it is time to systematically theorize the institution of the common in these terms.