To escape from the unsustainable present in which we live, we cannot simply appeal to the creative spontaneity of society, as if it were sufficient, for example, to demand a universal basic income and then wait for the common to flourish through a thousand diverse activities or through the conjunction of a multitude of singularities. The common is a political construct – or better, the common is the institutionalization of the political at a moment when numerous dangers threaten humanity. To assert that the common is immediately political, as its etymology indicates, means that we are compelled to conceptualize the common as a new institutional power structure. The politics of the common is not “anarchist” in the sense of the simple negation of power or the contradictory refusal of all authority. Instead, the politics of the common demands, in the most systematic and profound manner possible, the widespread introduction of institutional self-government. We must be careful to distinguish this imperative from the many forms of self-management that arose during the twentieth century and which – if one wants to be true to the meaning of the term “management” – were limited to the function of organizing and which only concerned the administration of things. The common, as we understand it, is above all about the government of people, and the institutions and rules people create in order to coordinate their relations. The politics of the common is thus rooted in the political tradition of democracy, especially in the Greek experience. It is based on the Greek notion that there is no desirable human world except that which is explicitly and consciously founded on common action, a world where the source of laws and collective obligations is intimately linked to what the Greeks called justice and friendship. But, as Derrida argued, this concept of democracy will be even more prominent in the history of our incomplete or open democracies to come.1 For the egalitarian dynamic identified by de Tocqueville does not issue from some mysterious, subterranean, or providential power at work within history; it is not unilaterally shaped by capital and the market, nor did it emerge after the Enlightenment tore back the veil of darkness that obscured the world. Rather, this conception of democracy insists that common action, in spite of its momentary repression and derailment, engenders new institutions, new projects, new relations, and new practices, especially during moments of democratic convulsion and subversion. A deliberate politics of the common will therefore strive to create self-governing institutions that enable the freest expression of common action as possible, within the limits societies give themselves based on the rules of justice they consensually establish.
The politics of the common we must construct today is therefore incontestably reminiscent of certain aspects of nineteenth-century associationist socialism and twentieth-century council communism. But today’s politics of the common cannot be thought of in terms of artisanal or guild associationism or as a renewed version of the industrial workers’ councils. Rather, the politics of the common today must touch on all aspects of social life, not just political activities (in the circumscribed parliamentary sense of the term) and not just economic activities. The politics of the common always cuts transversally across institutional separations, and it embodies a democratic demand that is both generalized and coherent: the politics of the common is literally “everywhere,” in every single domain in which people interact and have the opportunity to participate in creating the rules that affect them, and in the governance of the institutions they create and in which they work and live. The politics of the common is not confined to small and isolated units of work and life, but cuts across the entirety of social space, from the local to the global (and passing through the national).
It is especially evident today that the global dimension, in particular, is in need of renewed political reflection. In the face of the ongoing ravages of cosmo-capitalism, there is an almost irresistible temptation to retreat behind the walls of the national state, to enclose ourselves in the nation-state’s rhetoric of citizenship, identity, religion, etc. If we only look after our own, everything will be better. But it is precisely seductive injunctions such as these that spell the end of democracy, whether we are aware of it or not. On the other hand, however, it would also be a mistake to seek salvation in the creation of a world state. No global Leviathan will ever wrest control over global capital and bring order to today’s economic chaos, nor prevent ecological disaster from befalling humanity. For if a global Leviathan were to arise (which is far from evident) it would almost certainly lead to more concentrated and intense forms of neoliberal governance.
We thus propose another direction here. A contemporary politics of the common must account for the profoundly global character of the struggles underway today, and conceive of all these struggles as so many interdependent expressions of the forces structuring our worlds of work and life, our imagination, and our intelligence. A new internationalism is already at work in the multiple alter-globalization organizations that coordinate actions, analyses, and slogans across global networks. Indeed, the very thematic of the “common,” which is global in both scope and content, testifies to this. The imperative to give institutional form to these diverse efforts at self-government is thereby also an invitation to re-connect with philosophical and political ideas that form the basis of the principle of federalism. And if Proudhon’s name is so often associated with the principle of federalism, it is undoubtedly because his articulation of this principle was arguably one of the most important advances of nineteenth-century socialist thought – indeed, Marx even seemed to have conceded as much when he eventually lent his support to the so-called “communal” constitution of the Parisian Communards in 1871. It goes without saying that this principle of federalism has nothing whatsoever to do with today’s caricature of European pseudo-federalism, which is nothing but the minimum necessary political form needed to sufficiently “organize” generalized competition between citizens and workers. This form of federalism is in complete contradiction with the federalism we are advocating here. Genuine federalism between commons, peoples, or activities is not possible except on the basis of cooperation, not competition. In other words, federalism properly understood implies the negation of capitalism’s very foundation.
Given the power capitalism has acquired over the past three or four decades, and the relative weakness of its opponents, it is tempting to imagine a kind of encirclement of capitalism from the outside, or to hope for its collapse from within. In the meantime, we make do with calls for improved public services, we put our faith in a cooperative “third sector,” and we encourage the creation of isolated communities of life and work that might somehow escape the reach of the dominant order. Or we await the inevitable mass disengagement of workers who are exhausted by endless competition, a kind of generalized “dropping out”2 that empties capitalism from within and deprives its engine of fuel, either by the mass exodus of intelligence (“brain drain”) or sheer physical exhaustion. And all the while we quietly meditate on the ineluctable end of the capitalist system which, like the fall of the Roman Empire, will eventually lead to a new phase of history. The diversity of our denialism only testifies to the confusion that has resulted from the loss of our usual beacons of progressive thought. All these narratives, in one way or another, turn us away from the struggle rooted at the center of the economic system and allow us to circumvent the central feature of capitalism: private enterprise. Yet it is here that the submission of labor to capital is still most evident. It is the central node that yields vast inequalities and hierarchies, and it deeply shapes the ways in which we live and think. Any project that truly wants to transform capitalism must, therefore, squarely face the fundamental question of property. For us, the institutionalization of the common at the scale of society is simply not possible unless property rights, the absolute dominium of the proprietor over the earth, is subordinated to common use rights, which necessarily means property loses its absolute character. While we question some of their political strategies and conclusions, the first socialists were undoubtedly correct in basing their struggle on the problem of private property. They, at least, did not shy away from the central difficulty posed by the law of property, and they dared to imagine a fundamentally different kind of society.
It is therefore necessary to start thinking more transversally about the practices and institutions through which the most diverse resistant activities might converge toward the creation of the common. For the possibility of the convergence of the private, public, and associative spheres resides precisely in the fact that these activities lose their meaning if they are not contributions to the common, if they are not parts of the larger communal activity that produces society. If, as Maurice Godelier argued, “human beings, in contrast to other social animals, do not just live in society, they produce society in order to live,”3 then the challenge we confront is the imperative to merely give democratic form to the already communal production of society. In other words, it is a matter of politically instituting society by creating, in all sectors of social life, self-governing institutions whose goal and whose operational rationale is the production of the common. Neither the dissolution of politics into the economy nor the bureaucratic and tyrannical statisization of the economy will suffice. Only the democratic institutionalization of the economic can produce the common. This was the basic political goal of socialism, which Jaurès inscribes in the long history of democracy going back all the way to the Greeks:
The highest end to which men can aspire is to pass from a state of brutal competition to a state of cooperation, in which the masses escape economic passivity and embrace economic initiative and responsibility, and all the energies currently expended in sterile and savage struggle are coordinated toward a great common end. Less preoccupied with domination and the desire to defend themselves, and more sure of themselves and others, humans thus gain more leisure and more freedom to develop their physical and moral being; and it will truly be the first appearance of a civilization of free men – as if the brilliant and charming flower of ancient Greeks had not bloomed against a background of slavery but had given rise to a universal humanity.4
It is this political ambition we must re-kindle today.
To this end, it is crucial to first understand, as precisely as possible, the relationship between the political and this thing we call the “social.” For this relation bears on both the extension and the direction of the politics of the common. By extension, we mean that the politics of the common cannot be limited to the “political sphere” or the state apparatus, in the sense of political science or political sociology. Rather, the politics of the common concerns everything we designate with the term “social.” And by direction – recalling that the Latin term directus is at the root of the French term droit (law, right) – we mean the manner in which the politics of the common aims at the re-organization of the social by substituting use rights for the principle of property as the juridical lever of social and political transformation.
It is well known how Hannah Arendt identified the “rise of the social” – which is to say the emergence of the society “from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere.”5 For Arendt, this was a considerable change that “not only blurred the old borderline between private and political,”6 but transformed the meanings of these terms to the point that they became almost unrecognizable. Indeed, according to the “modern concept of government … the only thing people have in common is their private interests,”7 and so it is the very distinction between the public domain and the private domain that is completely erased by “submersion of both in the sphere of the social.”8 The two constituent phenomena of the public – (a) “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody” and (b) “the world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us”9 – are ultimately relegated to what was formerly the private domain, which for Arendt threatens the very existence of the “common world.” In the face of this loss of the common, this “loss of world,”10 Arendt favors the Greek relegation of the private to the “idiotic” – literally that which is “one’s own” (idiôn)11 – and the concomitant valorization of the public domain as the “proper place for human excellence.”12 But is Arendt’s portrayal of this separation accurate? Is the social nothing more than a public that has been invaded and annexed by the private realm?
It is highly doubtful whether the Greeks conceived of these divisions in such a clear-cut manner – or, rather, it is doubtful if their understanding of their own societies was based on the principle of this separation. We are greatly indebted in this respect to Cornelius Castoriadis, who showed, contra Arendt, that the full deployment and articulation of Greek democracy was based on a partition of human activity into three, not two, spheres. In the first place, the strictly private or domestic sphere, or the oikos; secondly, a mixed “public/private sphere,” the agora, the place where citizens met with each other outside the political realm”; and thirdly, the “public/public sphere,” or the ecclesia, the place “where they debated and deliberated public affairs.”13 What is essential for our purposes is Castoriadis’s distinction between the agora and the ecclesia. Of course the agora is public in the sense that “one engages in discussion with others,” but this public space is also private in the sense that “no political decisions (legislative, governmental, or judicial) are arrived at here.” While in the ecclesia, on the other hand, “which includes both the ‘assembly of the people’ as well as the ‘government’ and the courts, I am squarely in public space (public/public): I deliberate with others in order to arrive at political decisions, and these decisions are sanctioned by the public authority of the collective.”14 It is thus understood that the public dimension of the social does not refer to the common in the sense of “common affairs,” but to the publicity of exchanges, almost as if this second sphere (agora) only refers to the first of the two meanings of the public as described by Arendt – i.e., that of “publicity” but not that of the “common world.” This is why Castoriadis writes the following in the context of the public/private sphere and the public/public sphere: “the last two aspects of the public are often confused in current discussions, particularly since Hannah Arendt listed each under the concept of “public space.”15 In a passage concerning “experts and citizen,” Castoriadis makes this even more explicit by revealing a paralogism in Arendt’s analysis:
While Arendt is correct that the political sphere excludes matters related to our biological interest, her reasoning falters when it comes to her concomitant exclusion of the social and the economic from the political sphere. Her rationale simply ignores that fact that from the moment a division of interests becomes sufficiently important in a society – which is practically always the case whenever a society transcends its archaic stage – it is perfectly utopian to imagine a political sphere operating this way, whatever the situation of the social and economic spheres.16
But beyond Castoriadis’s critique of Arendt, it is worth asking in what sense this public/private sphere merits the label “public.” Should we be satisfied with the thesis that the agora is considered public because it is a place of exchange and thus a place where citizens discuss with each other? By Castoriadis’s own admission, the agora is very complex space. In the most literal sense, the term means the “market,” but insofar as the term also designates the second of Castoriadis’s three spheres, it then takes on a more general meaning. Specifically, it designates “the sphere where individuals meet and associate, not on the basis of explicitly non-political matters, but rather where they engage in multiple other activities and exchanges … And of course these activities include ‘economic’ exchanges, i.e., production and the market, and discussions in the agora often concerned economic organization.”17 But, as we have already discussed in the context of the Hungarian Revolution,18 self-governance must not stop at the doors of the shop floor and other spaces of production. Quite to the contrary, this principle must prevail everywhere: “here, as in properly political space, the same underlying principle must prevail: no execution of decisions without participation in the decision-making process.”19 We must recognize this principle to be none other than the principle of co-obligation based on co-decision and co-activity, which is the essence of the political principle of the common. And it is precisely in this respect that the second sphere must also be viewed as a “public” and not merely a place of “publicity,” in the sense of mere discussion.
It would, however, be a mistake to conclude here that there should be no division or distinction at all between the political and economic spheres properly speaking, insofar as co-decisions involving one or many units of production should be distinguished from decisions involving a municipality (or commune) or a people a fortiori. In other words, the injunction to ensure that the principle of the common operates across all social spheres does not thereby abolish the distinction between these various spheres (social-economic, or public/private, and politics properly speaking). Rather, the principle’s function is to organize the economic sphere in a manner that makes public deliberation possible, such that the former is not controlled by the interests of a specific socio-professional class. But, of course, this can only happen if the economic sphere is completely re-organized as a self-governing commons (including cooperatives, urban spaces, forest and water management, etc.). This is not to say that each unit should be entirely independent from all the others, as if they were separate, isolated productive units, for this would merely reproduce the atomization that is characteristic of private ownership, but at a more collective level. It is rather necessary to ensure that the self-governance of the economic commons accounts for all the “externalities” of its activities and, obviously, for the needs it is required to satisfy, all of which presupposes that the governmental organs of each unit are not merely open to users and citizens, but that the units are actually governed by the collective co-producers of the service or good themselves.20
In other words, the primacy of the common in both spheres – the political and the economic – which ensures that the social-economic domain is itself a training ground for quotidian co-decision-making, is what ultimately makes their reciprocal re-articulation possible. For the articulation between the spheres is especially important when we move on to more directly address the institutional forms of the commons themselves. The challenge here is to make sure self-governance in the “social-economic” sphere does not hinder the exercise of this same self-government in the “public/public” sphere.