1See Michael Löwy, Écosocialisme, l’alternative radicale à la catastrophe écologique capitaliste (Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2011).
2Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015).
3See one of our previous books, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2017).
4Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York: Zed Books, 2002).
5UNDP, Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World, Human Development Report 2007/2008: http://hdr.undp.org/
6Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: Why People Will Be Killed in the Twenty-first Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Polity, 2012), 6.
7See John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology against Capitalism.” Monthly Review, vol. 53, no. 5 (October 2001).
8Ugo Mattei, “Rendre inaliénables les biens communs.” Le Monde diplomatique, December 2011. See Ugo Mattei, Beni comuni: Un manifesto (Rome: Laterza, 2011), viii–ix.
9We gladly defer here to Cornelius Castoriadis’s wise words following the discontinuation of Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1967: “revolutionary activity will again become possible only when a radical ideological reconstruction will become capable of meeting up with a real social movement.” See Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Suspension of Publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie,” in Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, Volume 3, 1961–1979, trans. David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 121.
10Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (New York: Verso, 2005), 379.
11First Communiqué of the Cordinadora de defensa del agua y la vida (Cochabamba, December 1999).
12Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004) and Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009).
13See Hervé Kempf, How the Rich are Destroying the Planet (Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008).
14This phrase comes from the manifesto Our Commons, Who, Why? See mustereklerimiz.org.
15Ferhat Taylan, “Taksim, une place vitale.” La Revue des Livres, no. 12, (July–August, 2013), 57.
16See Zeynep Gambetti, “The Gezi Resistance as Surplus Value” (July 5, 2013. www.jadaliyya.com). Gambetti, professor of political theory at Bosphorus University, shows how the “value” created by this movement is far in excess, in terms of meaning and praxis, of the individuals that participated in the event.
1Auguste Blanqui, “Lettre à Maillard, 6 juin 1852.” Maintenant il faut des armes, La Fabrique (Paris, 2006), 176. In 1852, after Louis Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état, Blanqui declared: “what then, I beg you, is a democrat? It is a vague, banal word, without precise meaning, a word made of rubber.” He then added: “What opinion would not accommodate itself under this sign? Everyone claims to be a democrat, especially aristocrats.”
2Translator’s note: Dardot and Laval conclude their prior book – The New Way of the World, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2013) – with the claim that only the creation of a new “reason of the commons” will be able to supplant today’s dominant neoliberal reason (ibid., 321). This book is their attempt to provide a detailed account of this new “reason.”
3Émile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society (Chicago: HAU Publishing, 2016), 69.
4Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 112 (1282b).
5Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 150 (1170b). It is significant that philia, in the sense of civic friendship, is conceived by Aristotle as the affective outcome of participation in the same activity, and not as an affective community realized by a strict hierarchy of functions (as in the case of the Platonic community where friendship is always “diluted”). See Aristotle, Politics, 42 (1262b).
6We offer a more detailed discussion of this topic at the beginning of Chapter 6.
7See Aristotle, Politics: “it is clear from what has been said that the better system is that under which property is privately owned but is put to common use” (ibid., 47 [1262b]), and, “on our view, property ought not to be owned in common, as some writers have maintained – though it ought to be used in common and as friends treat their belongings, but none of the citizens should go in need of subsistence” (ibid., 274 [1329b]).
8Ibid., 47 (1263b): “on such a scheme, too, moral goodness will ensure that the property of each is made to serve the use of all, in the spirit of the proverb which says ‘Friends’ goods are goods in common.’”
9See, for example, Riccardo Petrella, Le Bien commun. Éloge de la solidarité, Éditions (Lausanne: Page deux, 1997) and Pour une nouvelle narration du monde, (Montréal: Écosociété, 2007), 17. And for a different perspective, see François Flahaut, Où est passé le Bien commun? (Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2011).
10It should be noted that the category of “common goods” has been susceptible to specific modifications throughout the course of various struggles against neoliberalism. The Italian movement against the privatization of water, for instance, which added the category of “common goods” to its Civil Code thanks to the remarkable work of the Rodotà Commission (2007–2008) interpreted the common in a legally innovative way by integrating it into its definition of “participatory democracy” (see Part 3, “Political Proposition 7”). On the other hand, the economists working for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) developed a theory of “global public goods” that is a much clearer example of the logic of legal reification. See Part 3, “Political Proposition 8.”
11Cicero, On Duties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 111 (Book III, v. 30).
12Ibid., 109–110 (Book III, v. 27).
13Ibid., 111 (Book III, v. 31). See the commentary in Jean Gaudement, “Utilitas publica,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger, no. 29, 1951, reprinted in Christian Lazzeri and Dominique Reynié, Politiques de l’intérêt (Besançon: Presses universitaires franc-comtoises, 1998), 11.
14Ibid., 116 (Book III, v. 47).
15We will return to these two meanings of “public” in Chapter 6 and in Part 3, “Political Proposition 1.”
16In numerous other languages, including English and to a lesser degree French and Italian, the very substantial overlapping of these two notions continues to this day. See Elio Dovere, “Le discours juridique et moral de l’utilitas à Rome,” in Alain Caillé, Christian Lazzeri and Michel Senellart, Histoire raisonnée de la philosophie morale et politique (Paris: La Découverte, 2001), 108–115.
17Elio Dovere, “Le discours juridique et moral de l’utilitas à Rome,” 115. The same applies for the term jus publicum.
18Jean Gaudemet, “Utilitas publica,” 21.
19Augustine, The City of God, Book XIX, Ch. 21, vol. 25 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 232.
20Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from The Six Books of the Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1.
21Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 63.
The purpose of the institution of the state is, of course, the common good itself.
22See Yves Sassier, Structures du pouvoir, royauté et res publica (Rennes: PUR, 2004).
23Qtd. in Yves Sassier, “Bien commun et utilitas communis au XIIe siècle, un nouvel essor?” Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no. 32 (2010), 251.
24John Marenbon, The Philosophy of Peter Abelard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
25Yves Sassier, “Bien commun et utilitas communis,” 252.
26Aristotle’s Politics was translated into Latin in 1260.
27Mathew Kempshall (The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) shows that the common good, for the theologians, borrowed much from the Aristotelian notion of ordo, which refers, as demonstrated by Benveniste, to a Indo-European category that designates “order, arrangement, the close mutual adaptation of the parts of a whole to one another” (see Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, 387).
28Bénédicte Sère, “Aristote et le bien commun au Moyen Âge. Une histoire, une historiographie.” Revue française d’histoire des idées politiques, no. 32 (2010), 281.
29André Modde, “Le Bien commun dans la philosophie de saint Thomas.” Revue philosophique de Louvain, vol. 47, no. 14 (1949), 230.
30Ponitifical Council, “Justice and Peace,” “Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.” See online at www.vatican.va. Observe the difference with Aristotle: whereas for Aristotle the private use of property ought to be rendered common through legislation, it is the good, in Thomasism, that tells us whether private usage should be directed toward the common. We thus pass imperceptibly from common use to common good, which is not at all a neutral passage insofar as use is still governed within a purely private system.
31Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006), 221.
32Paul Veyne indicates in a note to his translation of L’Énéide (Paris: Albin Michel-Les Belles, 2012) that “the Trojans suggest that they require very little,” which, from his point of view, justifies the use of the qualification “ne … que” in French.
33Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Chose Communes (Paris: LGDJ, 2006), 1 (note. 4).
34Ibid., 3–4.
35Ibid., 16–17.
36As put by Yan Thomas (“Res, chose et patrimoine. Note sur le rapport sujet-objet en droit romain.” Archives de philosophie du droit, no. 25, 1980, 422), the word patrimonium “signifies the ‘legal status of the pater,’ while everything matrimonium designates the legal status of the mother’ (the -monium suffix indicates the juridical condition of the name of the agent to which it aggregates).” The term eventually lost all its statutory meaning and began to denote the evaluation of goods by money, or the “objectification of the wrold of commodities.”
37For the distinction between sanctum and sacer, see Émile Benveniste, Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, 460. Sanctum is that which is defended and protected against the violations of humans through the use of sanctions. It is in this sense that one may speak of leges sanctae. That which is sacred, and denoted through the word sacer, means “consecrated to the gods.”
38Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Chose Communes, 135 (footnote 163). We will return to the importance of this qualification in Chapter 6.
39Ibid., 17.
40Ibid., 18.
41Ibid., 135. The author refers to a text by Yan Thomas: “Imago naturae. Note sur l’institutionnalité de la nature à Rome,” in Théologie et droit dans la science politique de l’État moderne, Proceedings of the Round Table organized by l’École française de Rome with the assistance of CNRS, no. 147 (1991), 201 and 203.
42Ibid. The author refers to a text by Yan Thomas, cited above, 211.
43The passage “cunctis … patentem” from the Aeneid cited above takes on its full significance.
44Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Chose Communes, 134.
45Ibid., 136.
46Yan Thomas, “Res, chose et patrimoine,” 425–426
47Ibid., 416. We will return to this conceptualization of res in Chapter 6.
48Ibid., 417.
49Ibid., 425. “Res, pecunia, bona: these terms were developed during the turn of the third and second centuries B.C.E and were part of a language of goods situated on a completely different plane, and which corresponds to a mode of thought that is completely different from the traditional vocabulary. We are dealing here with abstract and universal terms totally divorced from their familial and social connotations. The ‘object’ is no longer inscribed within a statute, but it is viewed separately in a world of objects that now have their own values as determined through exchange and money.”
50Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 8.
51Ibid., 11.
52Ibid., 6–7.
53Qtd. in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, trans. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 72.
54Gilles Martin, De la responsabilité civile pour faits de pollution au droit à l’Environnement, (Nice: thèse soutenue, 1976), 115.
55Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 116.
56Jean Domat, Les Lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel (Paris: Nicolas Gosselin, 1713). It should be noted that if Domat distinguishes things in common from things public (rivers, streams, shorelines, highways), he nonetheless submits everything to the same juridical regime – i.e., common things – by subtracting things held in common from the domain of sovereignty (Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 34).
57Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1925), 191.
58J.L.E. Ortolon, Explication historique des Instituts de l’empereur Justinien, livre 2, (Paris: Joubert Libraire-Éditeur, 1840), 30. Qtd. in Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 112.
59Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 116.
60Ibid., 131.
61See Chapter 4.
62Proudhon’s citation of Charles Comte reproduced above could easily pass as an example of the criterion of non-rivalry. A very similar sensibility is found in the words of the jurist Demolombe: “The creations of the intellect, of literature, science and art may, at the same time, profit each and all, entirely, completely, without the enjoyment of one preventing or diminishing the enjoyment of an other.” Qtd. in Mikhaïl Xifaras, La Propriété. Étude de philosophie du droit (Paris: PUF, 2004), 380.
63Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 191–228.
64Ibid., 213–214.
65Ibid., 225.
66Judith Revel, “Produire de la subjectivité, produire du commun : trois difficultés et un post-scriptum un peu long sur ce que le commun n’est pas.” From the seminar “Du public au commun,” December 5, 2010, 6.
67Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Alain Rey (ed.) (Paris: Le Robert, 1992), 455.
68Judith Revel, “Produire de la subjectivité, produire du commun,” 6.
69René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23. Translator’s note: Dardot and Laval do not of course reference the English translation of Descartes’s vulgus in their original text, but rather draw attention to its conventional translation into the French term commun.
70Ibid., 24.
71Descartes’s celebrated formula “common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world” must not of course be taken literally to mean all men are endowed with it in equal amounts.
72On this point, see Jacques Brunschwig, “En quel sens le sens commun est-il commun?”, in Corps et âme, Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey (ed.), (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 208. One example of Aristotle’s notion of “common sense” is movement: movement is not perceived by one sense in particular, but by different senses all at once, insofar as an object in motion has color, makes a sounds, etc.
73Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 173.
74Ibid., 175.
75Ibid.
76Lord Shaftsbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners Opinions and Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49.
77Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, 242. It is in this context that one should interpret the title of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), which laid out all the arguments for rebellion in the American colonies.
78Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 2004).
79Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 44.
80For more on this distinction, we refer you to Pierre Aubenque, Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1972), 210.
81G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline. Part 1: Science of Logic, trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 237.
82Ibid., 238.
83Rousseau, The Social Contract, 66.
84Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, 238.
85Hegel, Outlines of a Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 230.
86Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline, 249.
87Ibid., 250.
88Ibid.
89Ibid.
90Catherine Collioyt-Thélène, La Démocratie sans ‘demos’ (Paris: PUF, 2011), 138.
91Ibid., p. 137.
92For the distinction between these three senses in Kant see ibid., 133–132.
93Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 40.
94In The Making of the English Working Class (published in 1963), Thompson discusses the example of shop looting during a period of rising prices. He subsequently defines the moral economy of the poor in these terms: “consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community” (“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” The Past and Present Society, no. 50 [Feb, 1971], 79).
95Karl Marx, “Letter to Pavel Vassilyevich Annenkov, December 28th, 1946,” The Letters of Karl Marx (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1979), 45.
96This turn of phrase comes from Chapter 1 of Peter Linebaugh’s book Stop Thief! (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 13: “Human solidarity as expressed in the slogan ‘all for one and one for all’ is the foundation of commoning. In capitalist society, this principle is permitted in childhood games or in military combat.”
97Léon Duguit, Souveraineté et liberté: Leçons faites à l’Université de Columbia (Paris: Félix Alcan), 167–168.
1Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957).
2Domenico Losurdo’s rehabilitation of Stalin, which employs terms like “objective context” and “comparatism,” is indicative of how opposition to capitalism and neoliberalism has the potential to fuel supposedly demystifying “counter-histories” that are, in reality, narratives designed to trivialize the terrorism of bureaucratic communism. See Domenico Losurdo, Staline: Histoire et critique d’une légende noire (Brussels: Aden, 2011) and Fuir l’histoire? La révolution russe et la révolution chinoise aujourd’hui (Paris: Delga, 2007). And while Alain Badiou concedes that criticism of Stalin is and remains necessary, he follows this assertion by claiming that the only rigorous critique of Stalin comes from Mao: “the political critique of Stalin and his terrorist vision of the State needed to be undertaken in a rigorous way, from the perspective of revolutionary politics itself, and Mao had begun to do as much in a number of his writings.” Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010), 251. Later in the chapter, we will look more closely at Badiou’s thoughts on Mao and the part he played in the Cultural Revolution.
3Jean-Luc Nancy, “Communism, the Word.” The Idea of Communism, ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2010), 145.
4Nancy, “Communism, the Word,” 146.
5We should also reference here Sylvain Maréchal’s “Manifesto of Equals and the Fragment for a Project of Economic Decree,” in Philippe Buonarrotti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equality (London: H. Hetherington Publishing, 1836), 314.
6Buonarrotti, Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality, 317.
7See Philippe Riviale, L’Impatience du bonheur. Apologie de Gracchus Babeuf (Paris: Payot, 2001), 275.
8Buonarrotti, Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality, 315.
9Ibid.
10See Victor Serge, “Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution.” Critique, no. 1, vol. 28 (May 2009): 239–258.
11The denial of the gulags, for instance, was a lasting phenomenon. It took the publication of “camp literature,” such as the admirable The Kolyma Tales (New York: Penguin, 1995) for the reality of the camps to be recognized by the communist parties. See Jean-Jacques Marie, Le Goulag (Paris: PUF, 1999).
12According to Durkheim, “all communist theories formulated later derive from Platonic communism, of which they are hardly more than variations.” See Émile Durkheim, Socialism, trans. Charlotte Sattler (New York: Collier Books, 1958), 68.
13See Jacques Grandjonc, Communisme/Kommunismus, Communism. Origine et développement international de la terminologie communautaire prémarxiste des utopistes aux néo-babouvistes 1785–1842, vol. 2 (Trier: Karl-Marx-Haus, 2013), 332.
14Durkheim, Socialism, 73.
15Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 125 (417b).
16Ibid., 188 (463b).
17Ibid., 125 (416e). The term “syssitia” designates a common meal. It is revealing in this regard that Pierre Leroux sees a form of communism avant la lettre in the Spartan practice of communal meals.
18See Chapter 6.
19Aristotle, Politics, 41–43.
20See Gérard Raulet’s article “Communism” in Grand Dictionnaire de philosophie, Michel Blay (ed.) (Paris: Larousse, 2003). Engels’ examination of the communist sects and the German Peasants War contrastingly emphasizes this religion dimension. See Friedrich Engels, “On the Early History of Christianity in Marx and Engels,” in On Religion (New York: Dover Publications, 2008). This point is discussed at length in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), 622.
21Proudhon, who was to some extent anti-communist, emphasized in his strongly anti-clerical writings how much the Church exalted a certain form of communism, both in its history and in some of its institutional forms, while nonetheless remaining a largely feudal organization: “through a contradiction all its own and which results directly from its dogma, the Church, as it relates to both the organization of labor and property, is both communist and feudal. It is communist, because it considers the pure community, shorn of any distinction between yours and mine, as the ideal model of human association; this ideal, according to the Church, which would have been realized as an earthly Paradise with the hopes and grace of Jesus Christ, can still be realized through coenobitic institutions. Yet the Church is also feudal, by virtue of the original sin that destroyed the law of charity, and forever inscribed inequality amongst men. Now that this inequality becomes unchangeable and, on the other hand, because not everyone is able to become part of a religious community, the Church found that the most appropriate way to regulate this inequality was by giving it hierarchical form, which was then counterbalanced by the various religious communities and by charitable institutions.” Pierre Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, Vol. 1 (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 389.
22It is not a matter of indifference that Babeuf, who did not use the word “communist,” at least speaks, at times, of “communautists” to designate the followers of the “Community of Equals.” See Jacques Grandjonc, Communisme/Kommunismus, Communism, 310–304.
23In De l’Humanite (1840), Pierre Leroux argues that the Essenes are especially important in this respect. He sees them as Jesus’s predecessors because of their practice of equality and brotherhood without restriction, as opposed to the other “Jewish sects,” the Sadducees, which were very individualistic, in his view, and the Pharisees, who restricted their charitable activities within their own Church. See Pierre Leroux, De l’Humanite (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 160 and 460.
24Acts of the Apostles, 2. 42, 44–46.
25Ibid., 4.32–35.
26For more on the communal meal as a sacrificial rite, see Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of the Meal.” Societies, vol. 37 (1992): 211–216.
27The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 36.
28Ibid.
29Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2001), 216–217.
30Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2007), 175–185.
31Qtd. in Jacques Grandjonc, Communisme/Kommunismus, Communism, 52.
32Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 202–216.
33Ibid., 211.
34Ibid., 218 (note 11).
35Étienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, Part III.
36Buonarroti, History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equality, 318, 321.
37Claude Mazauric, “Introduction,” Babeuf. Écrits (Paris: Le Temps des Cerises, 2009), 77.
38Qtd. in Buonarroti, History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equality, 418.
39Ibid., 69.
40“The current progress and boundless power produced by steam and machinery assures equal abundance,” in the words of Étienne Cabet. See Voyage en Icarie, Preface, Part III.
41Translator’s note: The Icarian movement was founded by nineteenth-century French philosopher and utopian socialist Étienne Cabet. The Icarians established a series of egalitarian communes in Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and California. The last of the Icarian communes was voluntarily disbanded in 1896.
42Hence the insoluble problems the Icarian community faced as a result of the insurmountable internal conflict between its egalitarian principle and the “organization of everyday life ruled by the Father of the community.” See Jacques Rancière, “Communists without Communism?” The Idea of Communism, 170.
43Durkheim has a tendency to underestimate the associationist aspect of modern socialism in favor of its more statist conception.
44The inventors of modern socialism are often explicit in signaling their opposition to the older model of communism. The Saint-Simonians, for instance, attacked anyone who reproached them for not distributing goods perfectly equally and for defending skill-based inequalities. See Doctrine de Saint-Simon, 1831 Edition (Paris: Au Bureau de l’Organisateur), 183 and Victor Considerant, Exposition abrégée du système phalanstérien de Fourier (Paris: Librairie sociétaire, 1845), 27–28.
45The opposition between “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” (Gesellschaft) is the fundamental explanatory principle of a “pure sociology” for Ferdinand Tönnies in Community and Society, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Whereas Gemeinschaft is viewed as a “living organism,” Gesellschaft is a “mechanical aggregate and artifact” (ibid., 19). By situating community in the primordial past, Tönnies holds to a view of communism as “primitive.” As for socialism, which “is already latent in the concept of Gesellschaft,” it presupposes the development of individualism within the context of an urban environment and attempts to manage markets and labor through the state mechanism (ibid., 260).
46Marx articulates this very well in The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1992), 126: “the working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.”
47Pierre Ansart, Marx et l’Anarchisme (Paris: PUF, 1969). 525–526.
48Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 114.
49Ibid., 14.
50Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), 70.
51For an analysis of this internal tension in Marx, see our Marx, Prénom : Karl (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
52Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 929.
53Ibid., 929.
54Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Content of Socialism I,” in Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 303.
55Ibid., 302.
56Ibid.
57Ibid., 303. While this assertion is insightful, it is not exactly accurate, insofar as capitalist transformation involves a kind of permanent revolution. Moreover, Castoriadis’s account neglects the distinctive institutional forms, rules, and values created by the workers’ movements.
58This confusion is manifest in a passage about the “association [assoziation] of workers” realized in the factories as a result of the division of labor and cooperation, and the “association [Verein] of free men” evoked in the first chapter of Capital. The same word (assoziation) also appears in the 1844 Manuscripts to designate both an objective tendency of capital and a future form of society. See Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 627–629.
59See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 121. What Badiou calls the “subjective component” of the Idea of Communism corresponds to the effect produced on the will by Kant’s postulate of practical reason.
60Alain Badiou proffers the analogy of Fermat’s theorem. See The Communist Hypothesis, 6.
61Ibid.
62Leon Trotsky, Communism and Terror (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 55.
63In State and Revolution and the April Theses, Lenin still speaks of an explicitly anti-statist form of power.
64Early on, Rosa Luxemburg criticized the Bolshevik policy of democratic suppression: “the tacit assumption underlying the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the dictatorship is this: that the socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice.” The Russian Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1962), 69.
65Serge, “Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,” 253.
66See Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of 1917 (London: Routledge, 1972).
67The logic that substitutes the Party for the working class is central to the challenge of the “workers opposition,” whose most famous representative is Alexandra Kollontaï. The movement was born in 1920 in opposition to the theory of a single industrial program defended by the leaders of the Bolshevik Party. In vain, the workers’ opposition tried to defend the idea of the “creativity of the working class” in the development of communism and to uphold the “autonomous activity of the masses” in place of bureaucratic administration in economic and social development.
68See Marc Ferro, Des soviets au communisme bureaucratique (Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 1980). Ferro is one of the only historians to write a detailed institutional history of the 1917 revolution.
69Ferro, Des soviets au communisme bureaucratique, 112.
70See Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Role of Bolshevik Ideology and the Birth of Bureaucracy,” in Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and Social Writings, vol. 3: 1961–1979. D.A. Curtis (ed.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and Claude Lefort, Éléments d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Paris: Droz, 1971).
71Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 168. Qtd. by Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Role of Bolshevik Ideology and the Birth of Bureaucracy.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, 99.
72Needless to say, the claim that such an interpretation stems from Hannah Arendt is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty and must be denounced. Arendt never ceased linking the phenomenon of totalitarianism to the question of conditions of action, which for Arendt always has the specific characteristic of placing humans in relation with others (inter-ests). And just as we should be cautious of this “liberal” reading of Arendt, it is equally important to reject, in the most forceful terms possible, the various conservative interpretations of Arendt (the work of Alain Finkielkraut being paradigmatic). For what unites these two interpretations is their failure to comment on, or their outright ignorance of, Arendt’s attachment to the tradition of the revolutionary councils and her ruthless criticism of the principle of the nation-state.
73Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Hungarian Source.” Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, 267. Castoriadis references Marx’s celebrated formula from Chapter 32 of Capital, vol. 1 (1977), which asserts that the working class is “trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production” (929).
74Yves Cohen, “Administration, politique et techniques. Réflexion sur la matérialité des pratiques administratives dans la Russie stalinienne (1922–1940).” Les Cahiers du monde russe, vol. 44, no. 2–3: 269–307, and Yves Cohen, Le Siècle des chefs. Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorité: 1890–1940 (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2013).
75For the relevant passages from Lenin and Trotsky mentioned by Castoriadis, see “The Role of Bolshevik Ideology and the Birth of Bureaucracy,” 99–104.
76Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 40.
77Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Hungarian Source.” Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, 252.
78Ibid., 260, 261.
79Ibid., 260.
80Ibid., 264.
81Ibid., 266.
82Ibid., 270, note 14: “Unbelievable as it might sound, Lenin and Trotsky considered the organization of work, the management of production etc., as a purely technical question that had nothing to do, according to them, with ‘the nature of the political power,’ which remained ‘proletarian’ – since it was exercised by the ‘Party of the proletariat.’ To this corresponded their enthusiasm for the capitalist ‘rationalization’ of production, Taylorist, piecework, etc.” For the primacy of the workers’ perspective on production, see ibid., 266.
83Jean François Billeter, Chine trois fois muette (Paris: Allia, 2010), 51.
84Jasper Becker, La Grande Famine de Mao (Paris: Dagorno, 1998).
85Billeter, Chine trois fois muette, 50. One might also consult the major study by Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). Jisheng does not merely describe Mao’s responsibility for the forced collectivization of the Chinese countryside, he also underscores the degree to which the Party functioned as a particularly efficient apparatus for hiding the actual effects of its policies. Those who dared to speak about what they saw were treated as “foreign elements within the working class,” “degenerate elements,” “right-wing opportunists,” and other kinds of “unwanted elements,” and they suffered repressive consequences (187).
86Billeter, Chine trois fois muette, 52–53.
87Hua Linshan, Les Années rouges (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987). For Jean François Billeter, Linshan’s book is “the best book published on the cultural revolution in any language whatsoever” (Billeter, Chine trois fois muette, 53).
88The questions were formulated in these terms: “Why is the Central Committee attacking us? What ideological errors have we committed? Is it not egregious for the preparatory group to be massacring the population? What is preventing us from fighting against them? What has happened to the principles of the Cultural Revolution? What does Chairman Mao think? And what, ultimately, is the Cultural Revolution?” (Linshan, Les Années rouges, 292).
89On this point, see Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 168.
90Billeter, Chine trois fois muette, 54.
91Hua Linshan, Les Années Rouges, 367.
92This is Alain Badiou’s interpretation: Mao is simultaneously the “supreme name of the party-state” and “the name that which, in the party, cannot be reduced to the state’s bureaucracy.” The Communist Hypothesis, 103,153. This is Badiou’s specious inference that the contradictory character of the Cultural Revolution actually comes from the “intrinsically contradictory” name of Mao himself, as if this name, in itself, accurately reflects the abrupt and convulsive course of the actual Revolution.
93Ibid, 113.
94Marx’s view of Plato’s Republic is also clear: “Plato’s Republic, in so far as the division of labour is treated in it as the formative principle of the state, is merely an Athenian idealization of the Egyptian caste system” (Capital, vol. 1, 489).
95Plato, Republic, 237 (501a–d). For more on this, as well as more on the general difficulty of articulating the three meanings of the notion of hypothesis, see Pierre Dardot’s lecture, “Communism is not a Hypothesis,” at the Paris VIII Conference, “Question Marx” (January, 2010): http://www.questionmarx.typepad.fr/.
96It is important to speak of the “form of the party” and not just the “party-form”: the latter expression gives the impression that the party is merely a neutral form in the sense of a “method” or a “means,” whereas the party, from the very beginning, has always commanded a certain content – specifically, the counter-state (in the sense of a substitute state) in formation.
97The bureaucratic capture of the common was never total. Societies continued to live and cultures continued to develop outside and often in conflict with official supervisory apparatuses. Neither the most brutal police violence, nor the forms of bureaucratic socialization used to create a “new man” were able to completely prevent the formation of public opinion, patterns of behavior, and an array of other practices designed to escape and resist the vertical logic of the state-party. See Alexandre Sumpf, De Lénine à Gagarine: Une histoire sociale de l’Union soviétique (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).
1Vandana Shiva, “Water Democracy.” Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia, eds. Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004), xi.
2We will return to this subject at greater length in Chapters 6 and 7.
3See Donald Nonini, The Global Idea of ‘The Commons’ (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
4For this distinction in Roman law, see Chapter 1.
5Olivier Hoedeman and Satoko Kishimoto (eds.), L’Eau, un bien public (Paris: Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer, 2010).
6This dimension of the common will be more thoroughly addressed in Chapter 4.
7See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces (Oakland: AK Press, 2010). The expression “revolution in the revolution” comes from the title of Régis Debray’s famous book Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (New York: Grove Press, 1967). The phrase refers to the “foco” strategy (guerilla warfare) that was supposed to supplant the strategy of the Leninist-type party. The book’s new 2003 edition suggests the commons is, in turn, replacing the foco strategy.
8See James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.” Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 66, no. 1 and 2 (2003). Also see James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
9See David Bollier, Silent Theft: the Private Plunder of our Common Wealth (New York: Routledge, 2003).
10See Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century: The Coming Age of Genetic Commerce (New York: Penguin, 1998).
11See Gilles Van Kote, “La course aux terres ne profite pas aux pays du Sud.” Le Monde, April 27, 2012. Also see the remarkable documentary by Alexis Marant, Planète à vendre (France: Arte, 2012): http://planete-a-vendre.arte.tv. And in English, Planet for Sale: https://www.farmlandgrab.org/
12See the project “Land Matrix,” which identifies financial transactions associated with “land grabbing”: http://landmatrix.org.
13See Riccardo Petrella (ed.), Eau: Res publica ou marchandise? (Paris: La Dispute, 2003).
14Marc Laimé, “La marchandisation de l’eau s’accélère.” Le Monde diplomatique, March 2008.
15See Oscar Olivera, “Privatization.” Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia, eds. Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004). Also see Pierre Sauvêtre; Crises de gouvernementalité et généalogie de l’État aux XXe et XXIe siècles, 921.
16Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
17We will return to this assertion in greater length in Chapter 7.
18David Bollier, “Growth of the Commons Paradigm.” Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, eds. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
19David Bollier, “Growth of the commons paradigm,” 29.
20We will return to this work in greater detail in Chapter 4 of this book.
21David Bollier, Silent Theft: the Plunder of our Common Wealth (New York: Routledge, 2002).
22David Bollier, “Les communs. ADN d’un renouveau de la culture politique.” Libres Savoirs: Les biens communs de la connaissance (Paris: C&F éditions, 2011), 306.
23Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
24Naomi Klein, “Reclaiming the Commons.” New Left Review, no. 9 (May–June 2001): 81–89.
25Klein, “Reclaiming the Commons,” 82.
26Ibid.
27David Bollier, “Les communs. ADN d’un renouveau de la culture politique,” 307.
28Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
29Philippe Aigrain, “Pour une coalition des biens communs.” Libération, Aug 55, 2003. Access online at http://paigrain.debatpublic.net.
30Pierre Bourdieu admired the same link between the local and the global in the activism of José Bové when he was the head of Peasant Confederation.
31Amongst the partisans of the commons, not every position is this radical. David Bollier, for example, argues that the defense of the commons does not entail a questioning of the market as such, but rather aims at “equilibrium” between communal resources and the forces of capitalism. See David Bollier, Silent Theft, 3.
32See Oscar Olivera, “Privatization.” Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia, eds. Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004). We will return with greater precision to the political dimension of the commons’ management in the following chapter.
33See Jérôme Baschet, La Rébellion zapatiste: Insurrection indienne et résistance planétaire (Paris: Flammarion, 2005).
34Franck Poupeau, “La Bolivie et le paradoxe des ‘communs.’ Sept thèses commentées sur le processus de transformation politique actuel,” at the seminar “Du public au commun,” December 15, 2010.
35See “Reclaim the Commons”: http://bienscommuns.org/
36See online at: http://www.aefjn.org/
37See Chapter 1.
38For a re-construction of the main lines of this argument, see Chapter 6.
39Milton and Rose Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
40We will return to this argument in Chapter 4.
41See Joseph Schumpter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper-Perennial, 2008), especially Part II, titled “Can Capitalism Survive?”
42See Blandine Laperche (ed.), Propriété industrielle et innovation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001).
43Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), vii.
44Ibid., 1–2.
45Ibid., 2.
46Ibid., 3.
47Douglass C. North, “Institutions.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 5, no. 1 (Winter, 1991), 97. We will return later, in Chapter 10, to the decisive question of institutions.
48North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World, 132, 146.
49Ibid., 152.
50Ibid., vii.
51Ibid., 155.
52See Dimitri Uzunidis (ed.), L’Innovation et l’Économie contemporaine: Espaces cognitifs et territoriaux (Paris: De Boeck, 2004).
53See Amy Kapzincski and Gaëlle Kirkorian, Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
54See Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay and Hervé Le Crosnier synthesis, Propriété intellectuelle: Géopolitique et mondialisation (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2013), 13–14. Richard Stallman offers an uncompromising criticism of the amalgamations introduced by the notion of intellectual property: “If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, or copyrights, or trademarks, or various other different laws, the first step is to forget the idea of lumping them together, and treat them as separate topics. The second step is to reject the narrow perspective and simplistic picture the term ‘intellectual property’ suggests. Consider each of these issues separately, in its fullness, and you have a chance of considering them well.” Richard M. Stallman, “Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It is a Seductive Mirage”: https://www.gnu.org/
55Interview with Maurice Cassier, Nouveaux Regards, no. 15 (Fall 2001).
56Mikhaïl Xifaras, “Copyright and the Theory of Property.” Eurozine, Sept. 16, 2010: http://www.eurozine.com/
57Interview with Maurice Cassier, Nouveaux Regards.
58French Collective Against Biopiracy, “Biopiracy,” Libres Savoirs, 143.
59See Vandana Shiva, “Monsanto and the Seeds of Suicide.” The Asian Age, March 27, 2013.
60Many contemporary historians have expanded on these classic expositions. Notable examples include E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975), Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Pelican Books, 1975), and Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New York: Verso, 2002). Also see Michael Perleman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
61Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 19.
62Ibid.
63Ibid.
64Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Times (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 37.
65Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 874.
66Ibid., 874.
67Ibid., 885.
68Ibid., 889.
69Ibid., 875 (our emphasis).
70Ibid., 899.
71Ibid., 875.
72Ibid., 927.
73For a more detailed analysis of this sequence, see Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 641–647.
74By “improvement” Locke referred to the increases in the yields from otherwise closed-off lands, which in his view justified private appropriation.
75David Harvey is one of the more recent authors to sing the praises of primitive accumulation in this Marxian manner. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Jean Jaurès was also very critical of customs-governed traditional commons. See Chapter 8.
76See Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 648.
77See, for example, Pierre Jalée, The Pillage of the Third World (New York: Monthly Press Review, 1968), André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), and Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale. A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
78Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London: Routledge, 2009). Also see the renewal of Luxemburg’s analyses by Hannah Arendt: “Part Two: Imperialism,” in The Origins of Totalitariansim (New York: Harcourt, 1976).
79Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 335.
80Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 367.
81Louis Althusser, “Preface to Capital Volume One,” Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 56.
82David Harvey, “The Future of the Commons.” Radical History Review, no. 109 (Winter 2011): 101–107.
83David Harvey, The New Imperialism, 158.
84Ibid., 148.
85David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2010), 54.
86Harvey, The New Imperialism, 149.
87David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 249, and The New Imperialism, 178–179.
88Harvey, The New Imperialism, 189.
89John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (London: Pluto Press, 2010).
90Massimo De Angelis, “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: the Continuous Character of Capital’s ‘Enclosures.’” The Commoner, no. 2 (September 2001): 1–22.
91See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3, trans. Emile Burns (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969). Also see, on this point, Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 548.
92This is what Marx called, drawing on his Hegelian background, “its own presuppositions.” On this point, see Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 548.
93See Robert Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale. Une chronique du salariat (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 268 and Donald Nonini, The Global Idea of ‘The Commons,’ 6.
94See Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008).
1The prize is actually called the Economic Prize of the Bank of Sweden “in memory of Alfred Nobel.” Elinor Ostrom’s work was developed within the framework of an interdisciplinary research group she founded with her husband, Vincent Ostrom, in 1973 at the University of Indiana, called the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. For a historical overview of the group’s work on the commons, see Charlotte Hess, “Is There Anything New Under the Sun? A Discussion and Survey of Studies on New Commons and the Internet,” a paper presented at the Eighth Conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Bloomington, Indiana, May 31–June 4, 2000: http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/
2This is why Ostrom settles on such a minimalist definition of the commons as “a resource shared by a group of people.” See Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (eds.), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: from Theory to Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 3.
3André Gorz, “The Exit from Capitalism has Already Begun,” in Ecologica, trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull Books, 2010), 36, 38.
4The economic distinctions on this topic can be traced back to Roman civil law and its division of goods according to their nature (see our analysis in the “Reification of the Commons” in Chapter 1).
5For exegesis of this doctrine, see Luc Weber, L’État acteur économique (Paris: Economica, 1997).
6See Richard Musgrave, The Theory of Public Finance: a Study in Public Economy (Columbus: McGraw- Hill, 1959) and Paul Samuelson’s canonical Economics (Columbus: McGraw-Hill, 2009).
7Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
8For instance, there are individualistic consumable goods – like education – that may be provided by the state or the market, just as a lighthouse can be public or private. Similarly, roads can be free of charge but users may also pay tolls.
9See Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions of Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
10Garrett Hardin, Science, no. 13 (December 1968): http://www.sciencemag.org.
11Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, Code de la nature (Paris: La Ville brûle, 2011), 44.
12Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 2nd ed. (London: J. Johnson, 1803), 531.
13See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1946), 15. For Whitehead, the Greek conception of nature – “a drama in which each thing played its part” (11) – tends toward its proper end just as tragic art pushes destinies toward their completion, and this is the foundation of modern science: “their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic incident to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science” (15).
14Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1244.
15For further clarification on this point, see Matthew MacLellan, “The Tragedy of Limitless Growth: Re-Interpreting the Tragedy of the Commons for a Century of Climate Change.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 7 (2015), 41–58: http://environmentalhumanities.org/
16Julien Bouissou, “Agriculture, surexploitation des nappes. L’Inde est menacée par une pénurie d’eau.” Le Monde, August 10, 2013.
17See Chapter 1, “The Reification of the Commons.”
18Private ownership also reduces bargaining costs by limiting negotiations to a small number of persons who settle neighborhood problems face to face, whereas every member is forced to negotiate with every other member in instances of common ownership – this is indeed a curious way of envisioning collective deliberation. See Harold Demsetz, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights.” The American Economic Review, vol. 57, no. 2 (May 1967), 357.
19Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (eds.), Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, 5, and Yochai Benkler, “The Political Economy of the Common.” Upgrade, vol. 4, no. 3 (June 2003): 6–10: www.upgrade-cepis.org.
20The translation of the “commons” into “biens communs” in French, or into the Italian “beni comuni,” effaces Ostrom’s groundbreaking work.
21David Bollier, “Growth of the Commons Paradigm.” Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, ed. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 29.
22Elinor Ostrom, Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1992), 19.
23Ibid., 20, 19. According to Ostrom, two mistakes must be avoided: one must not confuse practical rules with formal rules, and one must not believe there can be no other institutions except those created by the state.
24Benjamin Coriat, “Des communs ‘fonciers’ aux communs informationnels. Traits communs et différences.” International Seminar on “Propriété et Communs, les nouveaux enjeux de l’accès et de l’innovation partagés, Paris, April 25 and 26, 2013. Also see, from the same seminar, Olivier Weinstein, “Comment comprendre les ‘communs.’ Elinor Ostrom, la propriété et la nouvelle économie institutionnelle.”
25Translator’s note: Dardot and Laval use the phrase “‘guichets’ de l’État” here to denote the phenomenon of passive consumer citizenship. See Jean Marc-Weller, L’Etat au guichet (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1999).
26Ostrom, Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems, 24.
27As North puts it, “institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.” See Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.
28Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 35.
29Ibid.
30When North, following Ronald Heiner, argues that institutions are rational because they diminish the inherent uncertainty of human interactions, he believes he has discovered a profound truth. He forgets that classical authors like Hume already addressed this question.
31See Jean Pierre Chanteau and Agnès Chanteau, “L’institutionnalisme méthodologique d’Elinor Ostrom au-delà des communs. Quelques enjeux et controverses.” Revue de la rægulation, no. 14, (Fall 2013).
32Ostrom, Crafting Institutions For Self-Governing Irrigation Systems, 41.
33Ibid.
34Establishing rules is conceived as an investment in social capital capable of generating revenue. See Elinor Ostrom, “Constituting Social Capital and Collective Action,” in Robert O. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom (eds.), Local Commons and Global Interdependence (London: Sage, 1995), 125.
35Ostrom, Crafting Institutions for Self-Governing Irrigation Systems, 14.
36Olivier Weinstein, “Comment comprendre les ‘communs,’” 15.
37Significant, in this regard, is Mark Pennington’s collaborative rehabilitation of Ostrom in a pamphlet released by the Institute of Economic Affairs. See Mark Pennington, “Elinor Ostrom, Common-Pool Resources and the Classical Liberal Tradition,” in Elinor Ostrom, The Future of the Commons. Beyond Market Failure and Government Regulation (London: IEA, 2012).
38Olivier Weinstain, “Comment comprendre les ‘communs,’” 32.
39J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Robert Boyer (eds.), Contemporary Capitalism: the Embeddedness of Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2. These authors stress how “institutions are embedded in a culture in which their logics are symbolically grounded, organizationally structured, technically and materially constrained, and politically defended” (2).
40Olivier Weinstain, “Comment comprendre les ‘communs,’” 31.
41Robert Boyer, Regulation Theory: State of the Art, trans. Carolyn Shread (London: Routledge, 1995), 2.
42This typology can be found as early as 1977 in Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom, “Public Goods and Public Choices,” in E.S. Savas, Alternatives for Delivering Public Services (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977).
43Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: a Longer View (New York: Verso, 2002).
44Ibid., 244.
45Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 81.
46The term “new commons” covers a much greater terrain than the commons of knowledge alone, as will be the focus of discussion for the rest of the chapter.
47Hess and Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, 7.
48Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 183.
49David Harvey, “The Future of the Commons.” Radical History Review, vol. 2011, no. 109 (2011), 102.
50Hess and Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Common, 4.
51Ibid.
52Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac MacPherson, August 13, 1813. Qtd. in Peter Levine, “Collective Action, Civic Engagement, and the Knowledge Commons.” Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, ed. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (2007), 250, and Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 182. Also see commentary on this letter by James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
53Nancy Kranich, “Countering Enclosures: Reclaiming the Knowledge Commons.” Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, ed. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
54Coriat, “Des communs ‘fonciers’ aux communs informationnels. Traits communs et différences,” 18.
55Coriat, “Des communs ‘fonciers’ aux communs informationnels. Traits communs et différences,” 10.
56Michael Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anti-commons in Biomedical Research.” Science, vol. 280 (May 1998): 698–701. Also see Michael Heller, “The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons: Property in the Transition from Marx to the Markets.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 111, no. 3 (January 1998): 621–688 (see online at www.unc.edu).
57Hess and Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, 15.
58See Pierre-André Mangolte, “Le logiciel libre comme commun créateur de richessess.” Presentation at the International Seminar, “Propriété et Communs: les nouveaux enjeux de l’accès et de l’innovation partagés,” Paris, April 25–26, 2013.
59Robert Braden (Network Working Group) “Who’s Who in the Internet,” Request for Comments 1251, 3. See online: https://tools.ietf.org/
60Robert K. Merton, “The Normative Structure of Science” [1942], in The Sociology of Science (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1973), 267–278.
61Hervé Le Crosnier, “Leçons d’émancipation. L’exemple du mouvement des logiciels libres,” Libres Savoirs, 180.
62See Richard Stallman, “The GNU Project”: www.gnu.org. On the history of the free software movement, see Sébastien Broca, L’Utopie du logiciel libre. La construction de projets de transformation sociale en lien avec le mouvement du free software (Dissertation, Université Paris-I, January 2012).
63According to Robert Stallman, new Xerox computers and printers introduced to his laboratory came with a new operating system that required non-disclosure agreements, which “meant that the first step in using a computer was to promise not to help your neighbor.” A community based on cooperation was completely forbidden. The rule imposed by those who held the monopoly on proprietary software was: “if you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate. If you want any changes, beg us to make them” (The GNU Project: www.gnu.org).
64Phillipe Aigrain, Cause commune. L’information entre bien commun et propriété (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 109.
65After resigning his position at MIT, Stallman developed a computer operating system called UNIX, through his GNU project, that was compatible with the systems used in universities.
66See Mélanie Clemente-Fontaine’s study, “Sur la valeur juridique de la Licence publique générale de GNU.” Multitudes, no. 5 (2001).
67See Mikhaïl Xifaras, “Le copyleft et la théorie de la propriété.” Multitudes, no 41 (2010).
68For Mikhaïl Xifaras, copyleft is not, however, a global alternative to property: it is less a subversion of property than a neutralization of the deleterious political and moral effects of its exclusiveness.
69Mangolte, “Le logiciel libre comme commun créateur de richesses,” 4.
70Chris Anderson, Makers: the New Industrial Revolution (New York: Signal, 2012).
71Ibid., 5.
72Eric S. Raymond carefully distinguishes between the “hacker” (which originally denoted a worker who manufactures furniture with an axe), who is a programming enthusiast, and the “cracker,” who is an informational pirate. See Eric S. Raymond, The New Hacker’s Dictionary (Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1996), 130. Raymond also describes the cracker as a “dark-side hacker” (142), which is of course a reference to George Lucas’s character Darth Vader (“the dark side of the Force”).
73The culture of developers is actually more diverse than the hacking theorists often admit. There is a division between those who favor “free” software and those who favor “open” software; while this may seem esoteric from the outside, this division designates two very different attitudes, with the first being much more focused on the establishment of value structures within the digital environment.
74Raymond, The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 234.
75Flichy, “Comment Internet est devenu un marcheé,” 472.
76Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age (New York: Random House, 2001).
77See Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1994), and more recently Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
78Séverine Dussolier, “Open Source and Copyleft: Authorship Reconsidered?” Columbia Journal of Law and Arts, no. 26 (2002–2003).
79For a critical analysis of this type of sociologically unfounded extrapolation see Sébastien Broca, “Du logiciel libre aux théories de l’intelligence collective.” Tic & société, vol. 2, no. 2 (2008).
80Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: the Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 17.
81Richard Stallman, “On Hacking”: “it is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have ‘hack value.’” See https://stallman.org/
82Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of Information, 89.
83The hacker movement already plays a very active role in civic and political organizations devoted to the protection of freedoms in a number of countries. This was the case in Tunisia, which pitted militant hackers against the secretive government and which led to an “open gov” initiative. See Élodie Auffray, “Stallman et le ‘libre’ champions de Tunis.” Libération, May 6, 2012.
84Eric S. Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”: www.unterstein.net. For more on this point, see Pierre-André Mangolte, “Le logiciel libre comme commun créateur de richesses,” 10–13.
85For a synthesis of the scholarly literature on cooperative practices, see Broca, L’Utopie du logiciel libre, 131.
86Lessig, The Future of Ideas, 23.
87Ibid., 11.
88Yann Moulier-Boutang, “Droit de propriété, terra nullius et capitalisme cognitif.” Multitudes, no. 41 (2010).
89Broca, L’Utopie du logiciel libre, 145.
90Lessig, The Future of Ideas, 35.
91Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, 40.
92Lawrence Lessig, Code and other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
93See Lawrence Lessig, “Code is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace”: http://harvardmagazine.com/
94See Valérie Schafer and Hervé Le Crosnier, La Neutralité du net. Un enjeu de communication (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2011).
95Eben Moglen, “The dotCommunist Manifesto”: http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/
96Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 339.
97Broca, L’Utopie du logiciel libre, 97.
98See, for example, Maurizio Lazzarato, Les Révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2004), 115.
99We discuss this conception of the common in more detail in the following chapter.
100André Gorz, The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and Capital, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Seagull Books, 2010), 14.
101John Hagel III and Arthur Armstrong, Net Gain: Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1997), and John Hagel and Marc Singer, Net Worth: Shaping Markets When Customers Make the Rules (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 1999).
102Oliver Zara, Le management de l’intelligence collective: Vers une nouvelle gouvernance (Paris: M21 éditions, 20080:
103Zara, Le management de l’intelligence collective, 26.
104Zara, Le management de l’intelligence collective, 29 and 30.
105Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2005).
106Thomas Coutrot, L’Entreprise néolibérale, nouvelle utopie capitaliste? (Paris: La Découverte, 1998). These “new” managerial techniques should obviously be viewed as “trends” rather than completely normative.
107Zara, Le management de l’intelligence collective, 229 (our emphasis).
108Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” Wired, no. 14 (June 2006): https://www.wired.com/
109And speed is of the essence: “those who aspire to play the role of community organizer or owner will need to move quickly and aggressively to increase the likelihood of becoming the first to aggregate a critical mass of members in a target area” (Hagel and Armstrong, Net Gain, 75).
110Ibid., 59.
111Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
112Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything New York: Portfolio Books, 2006), 1.
113Ibid., 3.
114Ibid., 12.
115Yann Moulier-Boutang, “Droit de propriété, terra nullius et capitalisme cognitive,” 167. For more discussion of this point, see the following chapter.
116Though of course these forms of exploitation are superimposed and articulated. Even the most modern firms are still imposing drudgery on new generations of aspiring employees – the contemporary practice of “internships” is one obvious example.
117Tapscott and Williams, Wikinomics, 3.
118Ibid., 15.
119For more on this point, see Antonella Corsani, “Éléments d’une rupture. L’hypothèse du capitalisme cognitif,” in Christian Azais, Antonella Corsani and Patrick Dieuaide (eds.), Vers un capitalisme cognitif. Entre mutations du travail et territoires (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 183–184. Also see Enzo Rullani, “Le capitalisme cognitif : du déjà vu?” Multitudes, no. 2 (2000).
120Richard Stallman aptly summed up this prudent position as follows: “computers and the web make it much easier to work collaboratively and continuing to improve publications. I think that this will become even more true in the future, as people develop better ways to do it. The proprietary mindset might as well be precisely calculated to deprive us of this benefit of the Internet.” “The Hacker Community and Ethics: An Interview with Richard M. Stallman”: https://www.gnu.org/
121Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 15.
122Benkler refers to Langdon Winner’s work on technology in “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 19–39. According to Winner, some technologies lend themselves to a range of political uses, while others are more inflexible and their consequences for social organization are therefore determined ab initio. For Benkler, it seems that the older broadcast media were of the second kind, but when it comes to the Internet, things are less clear. This is what sets Benkler apart from the supporters of informational communism, for whom Internet technology is fundamentally and irrevocably democratic.
123Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 17.
124Ibid., 22.
125Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 3.
1It is a universe Pierre Sauvêtre aptly calls “the historical ontology of the common.” See Pierre Sauvêtre, Crises de gouvernementalité et généalogie de l’État aux XXe et XXIe siècles, 1015.
2Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xv.
3Ibid.
4As Coccoli shows, the theme of “theft” is widespread today, even in Marxist literature, and it often trumps Marx’s central idea that it is capitalism itself that initiates cooperation in order to exploit its benefits. It is all the more curious that this Marxian notion is more prominent in management literature, almost all of which recognizes the importance of this collective aspect of capitalism when it comes to the exploitation of “human resources.” See Lorenzo Coccoli, “Property is (still) Theft! From the Marx-Proudhon Debate to the Global Plunder of the Commons.” Comparative Law Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013): http://www.comparativelawreview.com.
5Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2009), 137.
6As we saw in Chapter 2, this scheme is at the heart of the second discourse of communism.
7Hardt and Negri, Multitude, xv.
8Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, viii.
9Ibid., 250.
10Ibid., viii.
11For more on the “Production of the Common,” see Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 196.
12The concept of “biopolitics” is borrowed from Michel Foucault but is given a completely different meaning. It no longer designates a politics of normalization, but rather the production of “life,” society, collective intelligence, and autonomous subjectivity. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, 22–41.
13Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 113.
14Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, x.
15This reference is to Hardt and Negri’s analysis of the hegemony of immaterial labor in the context of “biopolitical production.” See Commonwealth, 132–149. For a critical analysis of this aspect of their work, see Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval and El Mouhoub, Sauver Marx? Empire, multitude, travail immatériel (Paris: La Découverte, 2007).
16Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 167–128.
17For an earlier discussion of ours on the topic of this Proudhonism, see Sauver Marx?, 56.
18For more on all these points see Stéphane Haber, Penser le néocapitalisme. Vie, capital et aliénation (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, 2013): 163–180.
19Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 249.
20See the special edition of Multitudes, “Capitalisme cognitif: la démocratie contre la rente,” no. 32 (2008) and especially the article by Antonio Negri and Carlo Vercellone, “Le rapport capital/travail dans le capitalisme cognitif.”
21Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 230.
22Karl Marx, “Value, Price and Profit.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collective Works, vol. 20, 1864–1868 (New York: International Publishers, 1985), 125.
23Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 140.
24See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons from the Grundrisse (London: Pluto Press, 1991). Also see “The Common in Capital and the Common Worker” in this chapter.
25Yann Moulier-Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery (London: Polity Press, 2011), 77.
26See Carlo Vercellone, “La nouvelle articulation salaire, profit, rente dans le capitalisme cognitif.” European Journal of Economic and Social Systems, vol. 20 (2007): 45–64. Also see Carlo Vercellone, “Il ritorno del rentier.” Posse (Nov. 2004): 97–114. And see Bernard Paulré, “Finance et accumulation dans le capitalisme postindustrial.” Multitudes, no. 32 (2008): 77–89.
27Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 140.
28Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 150.
29Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 939.
30As Vercellone continues: “the source of the ‘wealth of nations’ is increasingly based on a productive cooperation that develops outside the confines of businesses.” See Carlo Vercellone, “La nouvelle articulation salaire, profit, rente dans le capitalisme cognitif,” 58.
31See Antonio Negri and Carlo Vercellone, “Le rapport capital/travail dans le capitalisme cognitif,”
32Ibid., 43.
33Ibid., 44.
34Vercellone, “La nouvelle articulation salaire, profit, rente dans le capitalisme cognitif,” 57.
35In a classic article, “The Nature of the Firm” (1937), Ronald Coase explains the existence of firms through the fact that firms make it possible to obtain “in-house” goods and services at a lower cost than they would be obtained “externally” on the market. See Ronald Coase, “The Nature of the Firm.” Economica, vol. 4, no. 16 (Nov. 1937): 386–405.
36Vercellone, “La nouvelle articulation salaire, profit, rente dans le capitalisme cognitif,” 57.
37Negri and Vercellone, “Le rapport capital/travail dans le capitalisme cognitif,” 42.
38Ibid., 42.
39Vercellone, “La nouvelle articulation salaire, profit, rente dans le capitalisme cognitif,” 59.
40Negri and Vercellone, “Le rapport capital/travail dans le capitalisme cognitif,” 45–46.
41See Christian Laval, Francois Vergne, Pierre Clément and Guy Dreux, La Nouvelle École capitaliste (Paris: Découverte, 2011).
42Negri and Vercellone, “Le rapport capital/travail dans le capitalisme cognitif,” 47.
43El Mouhoub and Dominique Plihon, Le savoir et la finance: Liaisons dangereuses au cœur du capitalisme contemporain (Paris: La Découverte, 2009).
44See Chapter 2.
45Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Solution du problème social (Paris: Lacroix, 1868), 131.
46Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?, trans. Donald R. Kelly and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 181.
47Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la création de l’Ordre dans l’humanité, in Œuvres complètes, vol. V (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1926), 299.
48Ibid., 300.
49Ibid., 318.
50Ibid.
51Proudhon, What is Property?, 91.
52Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, La Capacité politique des classes ouvrières, in Œuvres complétes, vol. 3 (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1923), 185. For more on Proudhon’s notion of the “economic forces,” see Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. 7 (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1927), 217.
53Pierre Ansart, Marx et l’Anarchisme, 157.
54Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, 693.
55Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Carnets, March 11, 1846, vol. 2 (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1960–1974), 3.
56Proudhon, What is Property?, 111.
57Ibid., 151.
58See Pierre Ansart’s commentary in Marx et l’Anarchisme, 152.
59Proudhon, What is Property?, 93 (our emphasis).
60Proudhon, De la création de l’ordre dans l’humanité, 312.
61Ibid., 302.
62Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église, 706.
63Ibid., 708.
64For further discussion of the Proudhonian concept of law, see Chapter 9.
65Proudhon, What is Property?, 196.
66Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, System of Economic Contradictions or, the Philosophy of Misery, trans. Benj. R. Tucker (Boston: Benj. R. Tucker, 1888), 317.
67See Chapter 9 and Part 3, “Political Proposition 9.”
68For more on all these points, see Lorenzo Coccoli, “Property is (still) Theft!,” Comparative Law Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (2013).
69Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, trans. Richard Dixon and Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), 41, 53.
70Proudhon, What is Property?, 215.
71Marx, Capital, vol.1, 929.
72We know the circumstances of their final quarrel. In May 1845, Marx suggested Proudhon become the French correspondent of a communist information network. Proudhon refused, and this precipitated the rupture between the two. In 1847, Marx wrote a violently anti-Proudhonian text, The Poverty of Philosophy, which was a response to Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty (1846). This was the beginning of a series of hostile remarks concerning Proudhon and a political battle that extended to the struggles against Bakunin and his supporters within the International. After calling him the “Socialist of Empire,” Marx nevertheless acknowledged Proudhon’s great courage in his obituary, especially when the latter faced a furiously hostile National Assembly on July 31, 1848.
73Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 485.
74Max, Capital, vol. 1, 443.
75Ibid., 447.
76Ibid., 448.
77Ibid., 449.
78Ibid., 451.
79Ibid.
80Ibid.
81Ibid.
82There are in fact many passages in Marx’s political writing that strikingly resemble Proudhon’s work. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for instance, Marx describes the French centralized state as an “appalling parasitic growth, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores.” And he later discusses state centralization in the following manner: “every common interest was straightaway severed from society, counter-posed to it as a higher, general interest, snatched from the self-activity of society’s members and made an object of governmental inquiry.” See “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 607. And for further commentary, see Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 273.
83Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 606. This is the passage in which Marx cites Shakespeare’s famous phrase “well grubbed, old mole!”
84Marx, Grundrisse, 699.
85Ibid., 692.
86In his seminar dedicated to the Grundrisse (and published in Marx Beyond Marx [1991]), Antonio Negri emphasized the exceptional nature of Marx’s 1857–1858 writings. While we do not necessarily ascribe to Negri’s view that Marx was able to invert his theoretical objectivism by assigning revolutionary subjectivity (both theoretically and practically) to the proletariat, we agree with Negri that the Grundrisse contains numerous original passages that are of great importance when it comes to understanding Marx’s thought.
87Marx, Grundrisse, 693.
88Ibid.
89Ibid., 699.
90Ibid., 700.
91Ibid.
92Ibid., 694–695.
93Ibid., 704.
94Ibid.
95Ibid., 700.
96Ibid., 708.
97Ibid., 709.
98Ibid., 712.
99Ibid., 706.
100Ibid., 705.
101Ibid.
102Ibid., 706.
103Ibid., 708.
104See William Morris, How We Live, and How We Might Live (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publishing, 2015).
105Marx, Grundrisse, 662.
106Ibid., 705.
107Ibid.
108See Chapter 2, “Communism as ‘Association of Producers.’”
109See Chapter 9, “The ‘Social Constitution.’”
110Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (New York: Argo, 2012), 13.
111Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 283–284.
112Ibid., 301. See Patrick Rozenblatt, “Vers de nouvelles formes de coopération dans le travail.” Futur antérieur (Sept. 1994).
113Hardt and Negri sometimes play with words when they equate the extractive logic of the rentier in the context of intellectual cooperation to conditions of real subsumption of capital and society under capital in which there is no longer anything “organic.”
114In Hardt and Negri’s words, “the distributed network structure provides the model for an absolutely democratic organization that corresponds to the dominant forms of economic and social production and is also the most powerful weapon against the ruling power structure” (Multitude, 88).
1Qtd. in Ostrom, Governing the Commons, 2. See Aristotle, Politics, 42 (1261b).
2Ibid., 46 (1262b).
3Ibid.
4Aristotle, Politics and the Constitution of Athens, trans. Steven Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36 (1263a). Translator’s note: for this passage, I have cited the Cambridge translation of Aristotle’s Politics, by Steven Everson, because it more directly translates Aristotle’s koinônein into the English “common,” and is therefore better suited to Dardot and Laval’s purposes in this specific context.
5See Chapter 2.
6Aristotle, Politics, 36 (1263a).
7Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999), 150 (1170b).
8Pierre Aubenque, Problèmes aristotéliciens. Philosophie pratique (Paris: Vrin, 2011), 209.
9For more on this, see Chapter 10.
10Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 194–195.
11Aristotle specifies, however, that the term politikè also applies to the “legislative,” which should suffice to exclude this second space from being declared “pre-political” and ejected from the political as such: politikè is thus the generic name that encompasses both species and the specific name for the second species.
12Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 92 (1141b, 29).
13Arendt, The Human Condition, 195.
14Pierre Aubenque, Problèmes aristotéliciens, 81.
15Ibid., 83.
16See Chapter 1.
17Aristotle, Politics, 112 (1282b). The Greeks distinguished amongst goods in terms of the useful or the suitable (agathon) and the good in the sense of acquisition and possession (ktêsis): the common advantage, which is not the same as the politico-philosophical notion of the general interest, constitutes a good in the first sense of the term but not the second (since it cannot be an object of possession).
18We should point out, here, that deliberative power, for Aristotle, is the power exercised by the Assembly.
19Pierre Aubenque, Problèmes aristotéliciens, 171.
20Ibid.
21Aristotle Politics, 12.
22Pierre Aubenque, Problèmes aristotéliciens, 172. We must therefore not give taxis the sense of an order made by the political community and its instantiation, but the active sense of an ordering that constitutes the political community, a meaning that refers directly to the activity of sharing or pooling in common.
23The evocation of “nature” here by Aristotle does not at all cancel out the necessity of intentionally instituting the political community. In this sense, his naturalism is the opposite of the naturalization of the common as discussed in Part 1.
24As Hegel observes in his work on natural right, the Greeks used the verb politeuein to signify active participation in public affairs. It would be inaccurate to translate this verb as politics in the sense of the specialized activity of a minority of professionals within a pre-established constitutional order. Politeuein, rather, refers to the collective activity of all citizens in matters of public affairs, which implies something closer to sharing in common or koinônein.
25This phrase is borrowed from Alain Testart’s article “Propriété et non-propriété de la terre.” Études rurales, no. 165–166 (January–June 2003), 1.
26Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 171.
27Ibid., 929. For further interpretation of this passage, see Dardot and Laval, Marx, Prénom : Karl, 641.
28In 1855, Marx read Barthold Georg Niebuhr’s History of Rome, which included a section titled “The Possessions in the Ager Publicus” that explains the origin and nature of the ager publicus. See Paul Sereni, Marx, la personne et la chose (Paris: Harmattan, 2007), 152–154.
29This is the definition provided in Ager Publicus (vol. 4, 133) of the monumental Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines by Daremberg and Saglio (Paris: Hachette, 1887–1919), which cites Niebuhr in Footnote 16 concerning deditio, or the process through which foreign annexed territory could be rendered ager publicus (the other method being the use of force after the destruction of a city).
30Paul Sereni, Marx, la personne et la chose, 144. In an 1841 letter to Blanqui on the subject of property, Proudhon discusses the example of the Roman Republic to justify his conception of “possession” as a form of appropriation that excludes an absolute right and an unlimited sovereignty over things. Ibid, 147–148.
31Marx, Grundrisse, 476.
32Ibid., 483.
33Ibid.
34Ibid., 484.
35Paul Sereni, Marx, la personne et la chose, 159.
36Marx, Grundrisse, 485.
37Alain Testart, Avant l’histoire: L’évolution des sociétés de Lascaux à Carnac (Paris: Gallimard, 2012).
38Ibid., 408. Testart cites the words of an Inuit anthropologist on this subject: “in principle, the situation is this: personal possession is conditioned by the actual use of property.”
39Ibid.
40Ibid., 410.
41Ibid., 417.
42Ibid., 431
43Ibid., 430, note 3. As Tacitus writes, “the great extent of the land makes the division easy. They plough different fields every year and there is still spare land available.” See Tacitus, Agricola and Germania, trans. A.R. Birley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 50. Testart states (in the same note) that Tacitus opposes ager (the earth in general) from arvum (the earth that is plowed and seeded).
44Ibid., 431.
45Ibid., 451–457.
46Engels only uses the term once. He does not define the term precisely, nor does he reserve it for the Germans alone (ibid., 483, note 2).
47Ibid., 482.
48Ibid., 485.
49Ibid., 488.
50Ibid., 488–489.
51Ibid., 511.
52Alain Testart, “Propriété et non-propriété de la terre,” 16–17.
53Ibid., 3.
54Ibid., 7.
55Ibid., 14–15.
56Ibid., 23–35. For more on the concept of terra nullius, see Chapter 1.
57Ibid., 16.
58Ibid.
59See Chapter 2.
60Thomas Aquinas, “Second Part of the Second Part, Question 66: On Theft and Robbery,” in Summa Theologica (translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province): http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1225-1274,_Thomas_Aquinas,_Summa_Theologiae_%5B1%5D,_EN.pdf.
61Leo XIII, Rerum novarum. “On the Condition of the Workers,” May 15, 1891. The target of the encyclical is socialism, as can be seen in the following passage: “It is clear that the main tenet of socialism, the community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.” In this document, the Catholic Church unconditionally rallied in support of the ideological principles of capitalism. See: http://w2.vatican.va/
62Aquinas, “Second Part of the Second Part, Question 66: On Theft and Robbery,” in Summa Theologica: http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1225–1274,_Thomas_Aquinas,_Summa_Theologiae_%5B1%5D,_EN.pdf.
63Leo XIII, Rerum novarum: http://w2.vatican.va/
64Leo XIII, Rerum novarum: http://w2.vatican.va/
65John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 287 (§27).
66For more on this point see Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, 129.
67Locke, Two Treatises on Government, 298–299 (§44): “From all which it is evident, that though the things of Nature are given in common, yet Man (by being Master of himself, and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) had still in himself the great Foundation of Property; and that which made up the great part of what he applyed to the Support or Comfort of his being, when Invention and Arts had improved the conveniences of Life, we perfectly his own, and did not belong in common to others.”
68Léon Walras, Études d’économie sociale. Théorie de la répartition de la richesse sociale (Paris: F. Pinchon, 1896), 214–215.
69Adolphe Thiers, De la propriété (Paris: Paulin, Lheureux et Cie, 1848), 39.
70Ibid., 22.
71Ibid., 36.
72Ibid., 28.
73Ibid., 25.
74Ibid., 95.
75Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 302 (§ 51): “Right and conveniency went together.”
76See Christian Laval, Les artifices du capitalism (Paris: PUF, 2003) and Stephen G. Engelmann, Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic Rationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
77Léon Walras, Études d’économie sociale, 237.
78Robert-Joseph Pothier, Traité du droit de domaine de propriété, t. 1, Debures père, no. 21 (1777): 23–24, qtd. in Marie-Alice Chardeaux, Les Choses communes, 120 (note 81).
79Xifaras, La Propriété, 378.
80Ibid. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon also avails himself of this argument in his criticism of Charles Comte in What is Property?, 72: “thus the earth, like water, air, and light, is an object of prime necessity which each may use freely, as long as the rights of others are not infringed. Why, then, has the earth been appropriated? Monsieur Ch. Comte’s reply is a curious one. Say pretends that it is because it is not transient; Monsieur Ch. Comte assures us that it is because it is not infinite. The land is limited; therefore, according to Monsieur Ch. Comte, it is something that should be appropriated. It would seem, on the contrary, that he ought to say that it should not be appropriated.”
81Xifaras, La Propriété, 379.
82Ibid., 381–382.
83Ibid.
84See Chapter 1.
85Qtd. in Mikhaïl Xifaras, La Propriété, 385 (our emphasis).
86See Marx, Grundrisse, 245 (Marx references the Institutes of Justinian).
87Ibid., 246.
88On this topic, we’re relying on the thesis of Paolo Napoli in his lecture during the April 6, 2011 session of the seminar titled “Du public au commun,” which dealt with various conflicts concerning different uses of the law. The term “pandectism” comes from the “Pandectists,” which etymologically derives from the Greek pandectai, or “that which contains everything.” For more on the “Pandectists,” see footnote 91 below.
89Reinhard Zimmerman, “Roman Law and the Harmonization of Private Law in Europe.” Toward a European Civil Code, ed. Arthur Hartkamp et al. (Leiden: Kluwer Law International, 2004), 29.
90Harold Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 4.
91These two texts are referred to as The Pandects and The Institutes. The Pandects are better known as The Digest, since the Latin title under which they were promulgated in December 533 was Digesta, sive Pandecta Juris. Widely used in the Byzantine Empire but little known in the West, this summary of Roman law was re-discovered in Italy in the middle of the eleventh century and became the point of departure for legal scholarship in European universities.
92Berman, Law and Revolution II, 126.
93Ibid.
94This phrase comes from Paolo Napoli, “L’histoire du droit et le commun,” 2.
95Ibid., 6.
96Berman, Law and Revolution, 116. In note 52, Berman refers to Hans Mullejans’s work, Publicus und Privatus im römischen Recht und imalteren kanonischen Recht unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Unterscheidung Iuspublicum und Ius privatum (Munich, 1961), and talks about how “Mullejans concludes from his careful study of the sources that the Roman lawyers and the early ecclesiastical lawyers ‘made no clear distinction’ between a “ius publicum, that is, a law pertinent to the affairs of the state or of the ecclesiastical domain” and “a ius privatum, that is a law governing the private affairs of persons.”
97Ibid., 120.
98Ibid., 126.
99See Kant’s tripartite division two centuries later in his Doctrine of Right.
100See Chapter 1.
101Yan Thomas, “La valeur des choses. Le droit romain hors la religion.” Annales: Histoire, Sciences sociales, vol. 6 (2002): 1431–1462.
102Ibid., 1444. For more on this, see Chapter 1.
103Paolo Napoli, “L’histoire du droit et le commun,” 6 (our emphasis).
104Yan Thomas, “La valeur des choses,” 1432.
105Ibid., 1433.
106Ibid., 1435 (our emphasis).
107Ibid.
108Ibid., 1436.
109Ibid., 1444. Thomas discusses an example of a sacred building destroyed by an earthquake: the consecrated site did not become profane and it “continued to resist the grip of private sale.”
110Ibid., 1445.
111Ibid., 1448. In legal history, the qualification res nullius “is traditionally related to abundance. If it belongs to no one, and if everyone can use it as they please, without constraint, it is primarily because no one is afraid of depleting it. It is profuse. The herring, for Grotius, writing in the seventeenth century, was thus symbolic of it.” See Marine Rémond-Gouilloud, “Ressources naturelles et choses sans maitre.” L’Homme, la Nature et le Droit, ed. Christian Bourgois (Paris, 1988), 222. The emergence of a shortage can thus bring a thing out of the sphere of res nullius and make it enter that of res communis, which demonstrates how the point at which a thing belongs to one category or another is always decided historically, and never on the basis of a supposed “essence.”
112Yan Thomas, “La valeur des choses,” 1448.
113Ibid. This point can also be found in Henri Allart’s De l’occupation en droit romain, des brevets d’invention en droit français (Paris: Moquet, 1877) in the context of a legal development devoted to things without master but which are susceptible to acquisition by “occupation”: “it is important not to confuse terms here: we have seen that things divini juris – sacrae, religiosae, sanctae – are called res nullius in the sense that they do no and cannot belong to anyone, insofar as their very nature is irreconcilable with the very idea of private appropriation. The res nullius we’re describing do not yet belong to anyone, but nevertheless can be appropriated” (our emphasis).
114Ibid.
115Ibid., 1449. Also see Chapter 1 for more on this point.
116Ibid., 1461.
117Ibid., 1462. This meant, for instance, that someone who built his house in the middle of a sacred place was compelled to restore the place to the god.
118Paolo Napoli, “L’histoire du droit et le commun,” 7.
119Ibid.
120Ibid., 6.
121Ibid., 8.
122Rousseau is always eager to remind his readers about the etymology of the term ministre, which in French is linked to serviteur.
123Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer, II 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), xi.
124Ibid., 1. By the expression “economic theology,” Agamben tries to indicate that the God of the Trinity (especially in the person of the Son) takes over the management of the world in an immanent way, while the term “economic” is meant etymologically (oikos) and designates the management of domestic space.
125The concluding lines of the book are rather eloquent in this respect: “modernity, by removing God from the world, has not only failed to leave theology behind, but in some ways has done nothing other than to lead the project of the providential oikonomia to completion” (287).
126Ibid., 285.
127Ibid., 277.
128This expression comes from the conclusion of Pierre Dardot’s presentation at the first session of the seminar titled “Du public au commun” on November 30, 2010 (“Le passage du public au commun,” 9). Equality is for us the product of participation in that which makes the koinônein.
129According to Paolo Napoli’s forceful expression, “L’histoire du droit et le commun,” 9.
130Ibid., 9. Napoli refers to the demand from the First Epistle of Timothy to “keep the deposit,” which he argues should be understood in the sense of “watching over the common heritage of faith and to give an account of it at any time.”
131Ibid.
132Ibid.
133Ibid. On this subject, Napoli discusses how the jurists of the twelfth century attributed the ownership of ecclesiastical property to places rather than persons. Thus, the property of the monastery, after the deaths of all its members, belonged to the walls of monastery itself. He also discusses how this legal fiction was taken up by the Italian Court of Cassation in 1953 when it maintained that the walls of the houses of a village remained the owners of the common lands that ensured the subsistence of the inhabitants and which therefore remained depopulated for some time.
134Marx makes a formal distinction between the two meanings of Aneignung, especially in terms of differentiating between “real appropriation” in the labor process and the juridical form of property.
135Pierre Legendre, De la Société comme Texte. Linéaments d’une anthropologie dogmatique (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
136Pierre Legendre, Sur la question dogmatique en Occident (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 106.
137For more on this ontology, see Chapter 5.
138Jean-Luc Nancy, La Communauté affrontée (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 34.
139Nancy, “Communism, the Word,” 149. Translator’s note: Dardot and Laval add the following sentence, which was taken from Nancy’s preparatory notes from his lecture at the “The Idea of Communism” conference in London, March 2009: “… where politics had before been precisely thought of as the assumption of the common, of a being that was supposedly common.”
140See Pierre Sauvetre, Crises de gouvernementalité et généalogie de l’État aux XXe et XXIe siècles, 183.
141Nancy, “Communism, the Word,” 147.
142Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 155.
143Pierre Sauvetre, Crises de gouvernementalité et généalogie de l’État aux XXe et XXIe siècles, 190.
144Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 34.
145Nancy, “Communism, the Word,” 151.
146Ibid.
147Ibid., 148.
148Robert Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, trans. Rhiannon Noel Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 45. Esposito also draws on § 26 from Heidegger’s Being and Time.
149Ibid., 45.
150According to the meanings of munus that are privileged by Esposito in his book Communitas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
151Esposito, Terms of the Political, 15, 18.
152Ibid., 18.
153Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.
154Ibid., 55.
155Ibid., 57–58.
156Esposito, Terms of the Political, 91, 96.
157Jean-Luc Nancy, The Truth of Democracy, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 25.
158Esposito, Terms of the Political, 130.
159Ibid., 110.
160Ibid., 15.
161Ibid., 121. This difficulty is aptly described by Frédéric Neyrat in the preface to the French edition.
162See Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval, and El Mouhoub Mouhoud, Sauver Marx?, 253.
163Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 203.
164Michel Foucault, “What is Revolution,” trans. Lysa Hochroth, in The Politics of Truth (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 95.
165Hannah Arendt highly praised the Americans’ decision to entrust the US Supreme Court with authority over the US Constitution. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006), 171–207. It is here, however, that we reach the limits of her political intervention, despite her very justified criticisms of the natural community as guaranteeing a “common world.” As the site of judiciary power, the Supreme Court enjoys a monopoly in terms of the enunciation of the law, which is completely antithetical to the co-production of law in and through common use. In general, we think this entire political paradigm must be questioned (for a critique of this paradigm, see Chapter 10).
166Translator’s note: in the original French, Dardot and Laval prefer the term homme du commun (man of common) over homme commun (common man), insofar as the latter sounds more like a sociological or statistical average.