We have argued in this book that the common is a political principle. This principle is not our invention, but has rather emerged out of ongoing challenges to the present order. The common marks out the front lines and zones of struggle where social transformation is currently underway. The political principle of the common thus reflects the aspirations of those hostile to capitalism and its machinations, and it fosters practices that help bring about the creation and governance of the commons.
The movements and struggles trying to realize the common, which we have seen emerge all over the world since the beginning of the twenty-first century, are the prototypes for new institutions: they are establishing new political form and content (or new means and ends) that largely bypass the party system and the dominant regime of representative parliamentary democracy. There is no question that this search for forms of self-governance is necessarily difficult and tentative. Yet the historical originality of these struggles against, for instance, the neoliberalization of the university, against the privatization of water, against oligarchic and state control of the Internet, against the appropriation of public spaces by the state or private authorities, etc., is undoubtedly due to their practical refusal to separate their democratic ideals from the institutional forms through which these struggles are fought out. In other words, the specific historical character of the politics of common is its drive to fight against capitalism while simultaneously turning its back on state communism. What is new in these democratic insurrections and social movements is not, as certain authors have suggested, the universal acceptance of “market democracy,” but rather the refusal to use tyrannical means to achieve emancipatory ends. These movements are young, and everything is still to be invented or re-invented, but such struggles and insurrections against political dictatorship and neoliberal capitalism will only have lasting historical significance if they are able to invent new institutions, as was the case at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. This will be the crucial issue for large-scale instituent praxis today.
The heterogeneous axes of struggle against the existing order today, in all their infinitely varied forms and their incredibly diverse range of actors, compel some reflection on what the implementation of the principle of the common might look like in the fields of law, power, economics, culture, education, or social welfare. The possibilities are endless for those willing to try. Examining the common as the effective principle of institutional transformation thus presupposes an exercise in political imagination, even an exercise in historical prognostication, though an exercise that is of course subject to all the usual limitations of this specialized genre. But, for the moment at least, the creation of the common is a free and open endeavor for those bold enough to take the lead. We make no assurances whatsoever that the eventual historical transformation will correspond to the course we have outlined here, to the problems we have raised, or to the possibilities we have envisioned. We do not subscribe to any “laws of history,” let alone any “revelations” of what the future ought to be. For us, it is more important to be adept at creating thoughtful and cautious forms of political experimentation and practice, at least so far as circumstances permit. That said, multiple examples can already be seen that illustrate the political propositions we offer below. Italy, for instance, is a country where quite a variety of such experiments have led to particularly interesting legal developments as well political initiatives in self-governance. The communal governance of water in Naples, or the construction of a common in the Teatro Valle (Valley Theater) in Rome immediately come to mind.1
It is precisely for this reason that we propose only a series of theoretical and practical propositions, propositions that take the form of brief overtures designed to invite reflection and, above all, intellectual and practical collaboration. In other words, these nine propositions do not constitute a fully worked-out “program.” It is perhaps worth remembering, here, that the term “proposition” comes from the Latin propositio, which refers to both an enunciation and the major premise of an argument, which is a dual meaning that is also found in the Greek protasis: in both cases, we are dealing with a statement or enunciation that invites a response, much like a question or provocation that needs to be established and verified. The following propositions on the politics of the common should therefore be interpreted in this sense: they are declarative statements whose function is to invite further enunciations and responses, and their logic is such that they can only be verified and developed through practical efforts to build the common. Yet however fragmentary these propositions may be, they are interconnected by the red thread that weaves our present historical conjuncture together. To pose the principle of the common is one thing, but to imagine an actual politics of the common is something else, and so the logic of our propositions proceeds as follows: we begin by affirming the necessity of a politics of the common, which is to say a politics that makes the common the fundamental principle of social transformation (Proposition 1). This is followed by the necessity of undermining contemporary property rights with a new concept of use rights (Proposition 2). We then argue that the principle of the common must also be the principle of labor’s emancipation (Proposition 3) and the governing structure of the worker-run industries (Proposition 4). We argue that associationism must prevail in the economic sphere in general (Proposition 5), and we affirm the necessity of re-building social democracy (Proposition 6), along with the importance of transforming public services into true institutions of the common (Proposition 7). And finally, we conclude with the need to make the common global (Proposition 8) on the basis of a federal model uniquely suited to the political principle of the common (Proposition 9).