Theorizing the possibility of instituting the commons ultimately means confronting what we call the “question of power.” We have already argued how we think it is illusory to imagine a piecemeal expansion of the commons “from below” that will gradually erode and collapse the foundations of capitalism.1 Accordingly, we have argued that it is indispensable to theorize the political construction of a new form of political power, given our absolute insistence on the inadequacies of merely “seizing power,” in the sense of taking over the state apparatus. The so-called “lesson of the Commune” for us is thus exactly the opposite of that drawn by Trotsky: adherence to the principle of communal autonomy is not a “great error” that merely hides one’s “cowardice in the face of revolutionary action,”2 but rather testifies to a great lucidity concerning the profoundly authoritarian and anti-democratic character of a unitary and centralized state. Communalism proves its great coherence by forcefully asserting its hostility to the “one and indivisible” Republic.”3
As we argue in our final political proposition, the only political principle that respects the autonomy of local governments is the federal principle. As Proudhon argues on this point:
Federation, from the Latin foedus, genitive foederis, which means pact, contract, treaty, agreement, alliance, and so on, is an agreement by which one or more heads of family, one or more towns, one or more groups of towns or states, assume reciprocal and equal commitments to perform one or more specific tasks, the responsibility of which rests exclusively with the officers of the federation.4
The essence of federalism is its commitment to reciprocity and equality of obligation, and the absolute exclusion of any form of structural subordination. Thus understood, the federal principle is directly opposed to the nation-state principle of sovereignty, whose essence is the recognition of a supreme power that transcends all others and which is absolved (ab-solutus) of any obligation toward them.5 The federal principle is the fulcrum upon which we must begin theorizing the necessary conditions for the political construction of the commons. Our discussion of federalism brings us back full circle to our etymological root munus, which, we might recall, denotes a relation of obligation built on reciprocity and mutualism.6 That said, we must also recognize that there are many different kinds of federalism. We will begin then by schematically distinguishing between a federation of people-states (peuples-États) at the international level, a federation that unites several quasi-autonomous states within a larger state (an “intra-state” federation), and the internal organization of an entity that is not a state strictly speaking.
Our discussion of federalism begins at the international scale, and Immanuel Kant’s “Toward a Perpetual Peace” (1795) is our point of departure. In this famous essay, Kant enumerates three definitive articles for achieving perpetual peace, and each article corresponds to a different level of “public law,” so to speak. Kant’s first article states, “The Civil Constitution of Every State Shall be Republican.”7 This article corresponds to what we might call the first level of public law, which is to say the level of civic rights within a state structure (jus civitas). Kant’s second article asserts, “The Right of Nations shall be based on a Federation of Free States.”8 This article corresponds to the level of the law that deals with the reciprocal relations between states (jus gentium). And Kant’s third article states, “Cosmopolitan Right shall be limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.”9 This article does not correspond to the level of international law exactly, but rather refers to what Kant calls “cosmopolitan right, in so far as individuals and states, coexisting in an external relationship of mutual influences, may be regarded as citizens of a universal state of mankind (jus cosmopoliticum).”10 For Kant, the federalism of a free state first of all presupposes a republican constitution, which is to say a constitution based on the separation of executive power from legislative power. This form of federation thus constitutes a “federalism of peoples”; this is not “the same thing as an international state,” which is to say a “world state.”11 Far from putting an end to the plurality of states within the international system, this version of federalism presupposes it, and Kant thereby precludes the possibility that this “peoples-state” plurality would function fundamentally differently from a federated state. Kant’s federation would therefore be a “pacific federation” (foedus pacificum) in which republican states work toward a complete cessation of all wars. Kant’s federation is not, then, based on “the positive idea of a world republic.”12 His federation of nations is therefore ultimately a means for states to protect themselves from war by renouncing the so-called “right to go to war.”13
Unfortunately, this type of purely defensive interstate federation is of little help when it comes to thinking about the coordination of the commons on a global level based on the principle of self-government. Kant’s sketch does not fundamentally challenge the principle of national sovereignty and accordingly precludes any internal federal structure with each state precisely because of his persistent attachment to the principle of sovereignty. It is also worth observing that Kant’s version of federalism produces a cosmopolitan law in which the foreigner is granted the “right of resort,” which should be distinguished from a “right of residence.” Recognition of the right of resort compels every state to admit any foreigner onto their soil – without necessarily making this foreigner a permanent resident – so long as the foreigner does not threaten the state’s existence. What Kant has in mind with this “right of resort” is in fact the necessary legal conditions for developing international trade. Kant rejects the “European argument about terra nullius in America and Africa that deprived indigenous populations of all their rights” and justified their colonization.14 This is the true content of Kant’s notion of the “right of world citizenship,” in the sense that it too has no positive content: its function is exclusively to promote trade between nations, according to the widely held belief in Kant’s age that sufficient trade is all that is required to pacify international relations.15 Kant then confirms that the “universal state of mankind” (the third order of public law) refers only to a “transcendental” reality in the moral order of duty.16 Kant’s argument is also based on a rather singular re-interpretation of the idea of “originary communal possession” of the soil, which we have already seen at work in Locke. Yet whereas Locke evoked this notion of original communalism to justify the passage from undivided co-possession to exclusive private appropriation without relying on the artifice of a convention, Kant actually succeeds in making “originary communal possession” itself the basis of the right to private property. Far from referring to any kind of actual historical point of origin, Kant argues that the legal impossibility of res nullius is in fact an “idea of reason”: nothing can be absolutely vacant since “all land belongs exclusively to the people (not collectively, but distributively),” and thus everyone must be considered equally entitled to appropriate a portion of land that has not yet been appropriated. In other words, the “common” of “originary communal possession” of the soil “is reduced to a license granted to all, which is to say to each individual, to declare for themselves a portion of the soil that has not yet been appropriated.”17 Kant’s version of federalism is thus a purely defensive interstate alliance designed to guarantee peace and trade. For Catherine Colliot-Thélène, the system’s defensive telos and its cosmopolitan insistence on the individual’s “right of resort” both “flow from the same principle, namely the freedom of possession.”18 And of course Kant’s articulation of the “common” as that which allows each individual to appropriate land for themselves has nothing whatsoever to do with the concept of the common, and the centrality of common use therein, that is at the center of our analysis.
Federalism does not only concern reciprocal external relations between states at the international level, but it also bears on the internal structure of the states themselves (“civic law”). Whereas Kant was our point of departure at the international level, our touchstone for intra-state federalism is Book IX of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. Chapters 1, 2, and 3, which are dedicated to a discussion of the “federal constitution” and the “federal republic,” are especially pertinent to our present concerns. Speaking of the federal republic, Montesquieu writes:
This form of government is an agreement by which many political bodies consent to become citizens of the larger state that they want to form. It is a society of societies that make a new one, which can be enlarged by new associations that unite with it.19
Montesquieu’s famous definition (“a society of societies”) broke with the previous correlation, as established by Pufendorf, between statism at the national level, on the one hand, and interstatism at the international level, on the other, which was a reinforcing homology rooted in the general principle of sovereignty. Montesquieu’s conception of a union between several republics is not at all the same as the relation between states that prevails at the international level: the states bound by their federal pact constitute a single unit at the international level, and the citizens of each republic are, at the same time, citizens of the larger republic that emerges from the federation of all the smaller republics. The federal republic thus combines the internal advantages of the republic with the advantages of monarchy “with regard to the exterior.”20
Unlike the hypothetical version of federalism advocated by Kant, Montesquieu’s conception of federalism has been repeatedly tried throughout history. Montesquieu himself mentions the Republic of the United Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Swiss Leagues, and he is especially interested in the ancient Republic of Lycia, which was comprised of twenty-three cities.21 Indeed, Montesquieu’s emphatic praise for the federal republic inspired many of the leaders of the American Revolution. Madison, for instance, adapted Montesquieu’s concept to arrive at his own notion of a “compound republic”;22 he also celebrated the “mixture” that characterizes the United States Republic, inasmuch as the latter “[partakes] both of the national and federal character.” In an article from 1788 in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton also draws on the same chapters from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, especially Montesquieu’s discussion of the Lycian Confederacy. Hamilton even suggested the twenty-three Greek poleis of the Lycian Confederacy prefigure the “states” of the American Union.23 Interestingly, the anti-federalists also invoked Montesquieu, and they did so precisely to critique Madison and Hamilton’s pro-federal arguments. In any case, the latter tend to describe federalism as a “technique for the vertical distribution of power” that effectively detaches the federal dynamic from any determinate social content. In other word, federalism, in the hands of the American Federalists, is little more than a “technical” solution to a “technical” problem.
The reality, however, is that this whole approach negates what is most essential in the federal principle. Strictly from the point of view of democracy (and all other things being equal), a crucial distinction emerges out of the American experiment in federalism between a “juridical federalism,” in which it is the Supreme Court that acts as the guarantor of the constitution through its legal interpretations, and a “referendum federalism,” in which the people are the ultimate guarantors of the constitution through their direct vote. This is why Hannah Arendt is clearly misguided in celebrating the American Revolution’s decision to opt for a “legal” rather than a “political” auctoritas. The fact that a panel of judges is charged with exercising, as Woodrow Wilson put it, “a kind of Constitutional Assembly in continuous session” does not speak in favor of American federalism but is rather a mark against it.24 Entrusting continual “constitutional control” to a “judicial branch of government” runs directly counter to the democratic conception of the separation of powers by granting the judiciary pre-eminence over the properly political organs of government. And the anti-democratic character of the court is exacerbated when the judges are appointed for life (in the dual sense that they are neither elected nor subject to recall). More generally, then, perhaps it is worth asking if the praise Arendt bestows upon the federal principle at work in the Paris Commune is not in total contradiction with her valorization, in this very same text, of the “most important” innovations of the Americans. In the last chapter of On Revolution, Arendt cites Odyssée Barrot, who argues that as a “social revolution” the Paris Commune must “continue” and “complete” the revolutionary period of 1793. Yet as a “political revolution,” Barrot argues that the Commune is a direct “reaction against” the 1793 phase of the revolution and a return to 1789.”25 Yet in the minds of many of the Communards, not only was there no contradiction between social and political revolution, but the federal principle they inherited from 1789 was the most appropriate political form for continuing to challenge the absolute right of property that the revolution initiated in 1793.26 Arendt’s interpretation of the French Revolution, however, goes in exactly the opposite direction: Arendt argues that the centrality of the “social question” was precisely the ferment from which the Terror was born, in the sense that the revolution’s attempt to free people from misery necessitated recourse to the most unrestrained means of violence.27 In this respect, we think Castoriadis offers a more accurate interpretation of the subject:
The economic and social question was not, in fact, taken into account by those who established the first colonies in New England. And Arendt welcomes this, as if this reticence was not precisely one of the factors that lea d to the subsequent evolution of American society she so deplores.28
In other words, it was precisely its neglect of the social question that led the United States to increasingly accept the unitary logic of the nation-state and, consequently, turn its back on the federal structure of elementary “small republics” for which Jefferson argued at the end of his life. The “social” thus takes its revenge in the worst forms: in this case, it resulted in an oligarchic constitution that methodologically separated the people from direct participation in public affairs by making politics “a profession and a career,” and by introducing all manner of advertising into politics “through which the relationship between representative and elector is transformed into that of seller and buyer.”29
In light of this institutional evolution, the issue we are confronted with is the extent to which federalism is able to endow the social with a form of institutional expression in order to prevent some of the more dangerous effects that arise whenever the social is unduly distanced from political institutions. Clearly, most existing forms of federalism do not correspond, in any direct way, to some specific social content or other (systems of social protection, for example). In this case, then, we will firstly want to distinguish between “interstate federalism” (Canada and Europe) and “intra-state” federalism (Switzerland, the United States, and Germany), in order to better differentiate an administratively decentralized unitary state, like the United States, from a “non-centered” federalism “with asymmetrical and multinational content” as can be seen in Canada, where the relationship between the federal government and various provincial governments is managed through a network of federal-provincial conferences.30 The Canadian example is especially useful for reflecting on how the European Union (EU) could re-organize its own institutions in the spirit of enhanced social citizenship and monetary federalism. Examined from the perspective of the connection (or lack thereof) between institutional form and social content, the experience of the EU is actually a perfect counter-example, or an example of what not to do. The EU of course prides itself on the fact that its constitution is the combined product of very diverse intellectual sources, from Kant’s reflections on perpetual peace to the market-based statism of German ordo-liberalism.31 In terms of its actual institutional structure, the EU is neither a supra-national state nor a union of several states (as in the model of a federal republic). Nor is it a defensive alliance based directly and solely on the rights of “nations”; nor is it a little of all these at once. The crises currently afflicting the EU are therefore profound and penetrate all the way down to its very foundations. This is why neither the return of national sovereignty nor the opposing attempt to add a political constitution “on top” of the existing institutional infrastructure will be sufficient to deal with the problems facing the EU.
Júrgen Habermas has recently proposed an institutional re-arrangement of the EU as a means of remedying the technocratic drift of what he calls “executive federalism.”32 But Habermas’s position, in our view, is based on an untenable reading of the Treaty of Lisbon. The fact is the treaty very nearly endows the EU with a form of “transnational democracy,” insofar as it enshrines the division of constituent power between the citizens of the union and the peoples of the various member states. For instance, in Article 1, paragraph 1, the Treaty of Lisbon speaks of the “will of citizens and states of Europe.” But what justifies this divisive “and”? Should we understand the citizens and the states as two distinctive political subjects? Of course, a citizen of the union is not qualitatively distinctive, legally speaking, from a citizen of a member state, simply because the treaty establishes an equivalence between a “citizen of the union” and a “citizen of a union member state”: it is by virtue of being a citizen of a member state, and for no other reason, that one becomes a citizen of the EU. What escapes Habermas’s attention – and is the reason why the technocratic drift of the EU’s executive federalism cannot be remedied within the existing institutional architecture – is rather the internal connection between three aspects of the EU that are normally dissociated: a) the “executive federalism” that privileges intergovernmental bodies (the European Council) at the expense of parliament; b) the manner in which economic competition is enshrined in the constitution, which encourages speculation and leads to state indebtedness; and c) the EU’s refusal to recognize social rights as fundamental rights.33 In other words, the technocratic drift deplored by Habermas does not stem from a superficial or superstructural “democratic deficit” that could be somehow remedied in isolation from the rest of the system, but is the perfectly predictable outcome of the social content that was the EU’s very purpose from the beginning. The primacy given to economic competition and the secondary importance of social rights is why the Commission and the Council of Ministers are the two institutional bodies charged with “promoting the general interest”: their independence and distance from the citizens and from parliament are designed to ensure that social interests will not intrude and distort the EU’s overriding principle of economic competition.
The real challenge we are facing, then, involves realizing the federal principle in such a way that it is directly linked to a substantive conception of democracy, one that does not exclude the very “social” sphere that has tended to be seen as foreign to the “public domain” of pure politics. We need a federalism that can generate two modes of politics for both the agora and the ecclesia, to borrow Castoriadis’s phrasing of the problem. Indeed, it is precisely this concern for ensuring the continuity between the “social” and the “political” that has led many contemporary theorists back to the work of sixteenth-century German jurist Johannes Althusius. For many, Althusius’s work is considered the crucible of an “original notion of federalism” that is starkly different from today’s modern version of “statist” federalism.
In actual fact, the central doctrine articulated in Althusius’s Political Methodice Digesta (1603) is not the federal principle at all, but the doctrine of consociatio symbiotica. Pierre Mesnard translates this doctrine as “symbiotic community” in order to clearly designate Althusius’s conception of an organic union that “transforms members into symbiotes or “guests” (convives).34 The concept describes a true community of life (symbiosis) whose cohesive force is entirely affective and spiritual.35 Yet, despite the organic character of these communities, Althusius wants these communities to produce new communal forms of increasing complexity: from simple or private communities, followed by mixed or public communities, and ending with the highest communal form, the state. His method is based on the reproduction of an “exact genetic order” in which restricted communities lead to more integrated and complex forms. In this way, the simplest communal forms invariably give rise to more complex communities that incorporate the early, simpler forms into their subsequent permutations. The two predominant forms of simple or private communities are the family and the “college” or “brotherhood,” which is a voluntary civil group whose members are “companions.” The most extensive of such groups are what Althusius calls the different orders, the clergy, nobility, and the third estate. For Althusius, several of these private communities coalesce and create public communities or Universitates, whose members are called “citizens.” Pierre Mesnard emphasizes the specificity of the term “citizen” for Althusius: one only becomes a citizen, in the sense of symbiote, by first becoming a member of a college or brotherhood, such that the elements of the civic body are not essentially comprised of individuals but of constituent communities.36 For Althusius, there are two types of public communities – the municipality (a rural commune, village, parish, borough, urban commune, etc.) and the province – and the rules governing each are perfectly homologous. Above these public communities, and always proceeding through the movement of generative coalescence, is the final form: the state, or the “integral symbolic community.”37 This community is governed by a college of ephors and a supreme magistrate: the ephors are the supreme guardians of the constitution, and they represent the people and speak in their name; and the supreme magistrate is the administrator and agent invested with executive power. But this division of power must not obscure the superiority of the collective body over the supreme magistrate: the latter is only an agent or a féal, and it is always in the name of the integral community, its justice and its law, that the ephors and the magistrate are obliged to act. By virtue of the continuum connecting every community to those above it, the same organizational principle prevails at each level – namely a division of powers coupled with the superiority of the collective over its representatives: the superiority of the corporation over its president, the superiority of the municipality over its mayor, the superiority of the states (in the sense of the various orders) in each province over their respective leaders, etc.
What can we learn from Althusius’s conception of political organization, in which complex entities are derived from simpler ones? On the one hand, this model offers an interesting means by which the state is constituted from the bottom, and not from a power center of some kind. On the other hand, however, the entire doctrine is grounded in a rather questionable conception of the social. By conceiving of the social as an almost evolutionary system in which an integrative logic allows simpler social forms to yield more complex forms, this approach might more accurately be described as a corporatist doctrine rather than a federal doctrine.
We find it difficult to imagine how this form of “federalism” could act as a model for coordinating the multitudinous networks that make up today’s technologically immersed social movements.38 Nor do we see how this approach helps us theorize the articulation of different commons at all levels of social life. At bottom, the principle of common use is radically incompatible with the principle of corporatist organization (least the common become a political form that is restricted to certain communities).
In order to properly identify the type of federalism that is most appropriate for the practice of common use at all levels of social life, we need first to return to the most basic definition of the federal principle. In The Principle of Federation (1863), Proudhon contrasts the “federal contract,” in which the “political contract binding the citizen to the state [is] equal and reciprocal” to “the society of private property,” or what Proudhon calls “the replica in miniature of all absolute states.”39 Federalism, for Proudhon, is based on a double imperative: the first imperative is the reciprocity between each side of the contract (the contract must therefore be “synallagmatic” or “bilateral”); the second requirement insists on equivalence between that which is exchanged between each party (the contract must therefore be “communtative”). Under these conditions, the parties to the contract “reserve for themselves more rights, more liberty, more authority, more property than they abandon.”40 The “society of common property” therefore compels its adherents “to give up their independence, and to devote themselves totally to an organization.”41
Proudhon describes the difference between the federated municipality (commune) and a society in which all property is held in common in these terms:
The authority responsible for its execution can never overwhelm the constituent members; that is, the federal powers can never exceed in number and significance those of local or provincial authorities, just as the latter can never outweigh the rights and prerogatives of man and citizen. If it were otherwise, the community would be communistic.
Proudhon then outlines what he considers to be the “fundamental law” of the federal system as such:
In summary, the federal system is the contrary of hierarchy or administrative and governmental centralization which characterizes, to an equal extent, democratic empires, constitutional monarchies, and unitary republics. Its basic and essential law is this: in a federation, the powers of central authority are specialized and limited and diminish in number, in directness, and in what I may call intensity as the confederation grows by the adhesion of new states. In centralized governments, on the contrary, the powers of the supreme authority multiply, extend, and become more direct, bringing the business of provinces, towns, corporations, and individuals under the jurisdiction of the prince, as a direct function of territorial scale and size of the population.42
Proudhon’s “fundamental law” of federalism is therefore very different from that contemporary European construct known as the “principle of subsidiarity.” As Bruno Théret aptly remarks on this point:
The principle of subsidiarity can, in effect, be used to both extend and limit the prerogatives of the Union and the domain over which it intervenes. As a dynamic principle of decentralization that allows power to be staggered across different political levels of a unitary superstate according to the specific competencies of the varying levels, this principle is clearly part of a functionalist and centralist conception of political order.43
In fact, this principle, as formulated in Article 3b of the Treaty of Maastricht, is perfectly compatible with a centralized union that is founded on the principle of competition, since union intervention is only possible on the condition that certain member states fail to “sufficiently” meet the objectives of some proposed action.44 The principle is therefore very different from the federal principle according to which power decreases as one progressively moves up the institutional ladder.
To get a better appreciation of Proudhon’s position on federalism, we must emphasize the continuity between his earlier critique of the very idea of “government” (1840) and his advocacy, twenty years later (1862), for federal relations between states. For the later Proudhon, federally related states at the international level are not, as they were in Kant, simultaneously unitary states in terms of the internal constitution, but are themselves comprised of federated municipalities. For Proudhon, the federal principle is not only concerned with relations between nations, then, but is also intended to ensure contiguity of power between the municipalities and the provinces, between the provinces and the state, and between the state and other international states.45 To put it in Kantian terms, we could say the federal principle concerns both “civil right” (the first level of public law”) and “international right” (second level of public law), though it is doubtful if this distinction has any meaning so long as one presupposes a centralized state. What is certain is that Kant’s demand for a “republican constitution” (the first Kantian requirement for perpetual peace) must be replaced with the demand for a “federated constitution” within each state. What is more, this same internal federal principle must also operate at the international level in relations between states in order to forestall the creation of a world superstate, since the very idea of a superstate itself betrays the federal principle in which local forms of federalism are projected onto increasingly higher levels. And, of course, the more one rises from one level to another, the more power must be restricted and specialized in such a way that the lower levels retain maximum prerogative and power of initiative, which necessarily excludes the integration of various states into a world state. On the other hand, one could well imagine “conferences” (something like the federal-provincial conferences in Canada) between the states at a regional or continental level, which would then provide the platform for coordination at the global level. What we are describing here, then, is a radical form of non-state federalism, rather than an “interstate” federalism as we described above: the state does not disappear, strictly speaking, but is simply one stage in a larger institutional continuum that extends both below and above the state level as such. And while the “state” level may just happen to correspond to the historical and social content of a given “people” or “nation,” this correspondence is of no particular importance, let alone privilege; a non-state federalism is, in this sense, also a non-centered federalism.
It was precisely this interpretation of the federal principle that the Paris Commune turned to in 1871. The proclamation adopted at its second meeting explicitly describes the prospect of a “federal constitution for the communes of France.”46 It is hardly surprising, then, that Marx felt compelled to revise his former position in order to recognize the originality of the 1871 communal constitution. In his earlier address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in March 1850, Marx and Engels vigorously opposed the democrats who favored a federal republic:
The workers, in opposition to this plan, must not only strive for a single and indivisible German republic, but also within this republic for the most determined centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be misguided by the democratic talk of freedom for the communities, of self-government, etc.47
“Nor,” as Marx asserts even more emphatically, “can this so-called free system of local government be allowed to perpetuate, side by side with the state civil law,” at which point Marx speaks, in a very complimentary manner, of the centralization in France during 1793. Indeed, in a note added to an 1885 edition of Marx’s address, almost fifteen years after the Commune, Engels argues that Marx has not given up on the idea of national political centralization as the primary political objective of the proletariat. Engels is here entirely preoccupied with dispelling any “misunderstanding” about the meaning of Marx’s 1850 critique of communalism, and so he contrasts the virtues of the provincial or local self-government in France during the revolution (which he sees as similar to the United States) with the “narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland.”48 This facile opposition between the grandeur of American federalism and the narrow-mindedness of Swiss federalism is not so much designed to play one form of federalism against another as it to retrospectively justify the struggle against the “South German federal republicans” who, in 1849, wanted to model Germany after the Swiss system. The main function of this otherwise self-serving critique is to restrict communal self-government to very narrow conditions: provincial and local autonomy is admissible, for Marx, only if it is inscribed within a framework defined by national political centralization. In other words, Marx does not view local or provincial autonomy as a lever for higher forms of non-unitary and non-centralized political construction, and so any local autonomy is largely emptied of its substance. And thus we once again encounter the same Marxian limit: the proletariat’s first objective is the conquest of state power. The proletariat must centralize its own power, and for this it needs a unitary and centralized state apparatus.
Against Marx’s political idealization of 1793, Proudhon’s De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865) interpreted the year 1793 as but one moment in the long and varied evolution of French political unity, which was a process of successive annexation that both pre-dated and extended well beyond the 1789 revolution: “the reformers of 1789 continued the monarchical project of constructing a unity doctrine of the state with the total acclaim of all the people up until the present day.”49 Various French départements or municipalities resisted this gradual centralization of power, but their efforts were ultimately undermined by the Constitutions of Year II and Year III, which made municipal administrations mere subdivisions of the central national administration. The centralization of power was further entrenched by the creation of administrative prefects in 1800. This evolutionary centralization was completed with the law of May 5, 1855, which allowed the emperor or the prefects to appoint mayors and deputies: “as a result of the law of May 5 1855, municipalities became what the logic of unity – from 1789, 1793 and 1795 – decided they would be, namely a powerless branch of central authority.”50 While Proudhon commiserates the death of the “old spirit of the municipalities,” he remains nonetheless convinced that “the moment is approaching when, after a final crisis, a call will be made on the basis of principles and a movement in the opposite direction will begin.”51
We now want to examine whether the federal principle might organize not only relations between local municipalities and the federal authority, or between the states and the federal authority – i.e., political relations stricto sensu – but also the relations between the various commons in the socio-economic sphere. And, more broadly, we need to examine whether the federal principle is able to organize not only the internal institutions of these spheres, but also their reciprocal interrelations. To this end, it is especially important to have a firm grasp of the content of the federal principle itself.
In the bourgeois world, according to Proudhon, two principles function as the “two pillars of society and the state”: the principle of “political centralization” and the principle of “economic competition” – which he also refers to as “commercial and industrial anarchy” – and this “necessarily leads to the feudalization of society by capital” and thus functions as a counter-weight to the first principle or pillar.52 For Proudhon, however, our aim should not be to oppose these two principles with two countervailing principles, but to oppose them with one and the same principle, namely “mutualism” (mutualité), a term that implies both municipal autonomy and economic solidarity. Why? “The French word mutual, mutualité, mutuation, and its synonym réciproque, réciprocité, comes from the Latin mutuum and signifies today as “loan” (prêt) or, in a broader sense, “exchange.” If it is assumed that a borrower who consumes a loan makes an equivalent loan to someone else in one form or another, and that a lender in turn becomes a borrower at some subsequent point, then a situation of “mutual benefit” or “exchange” necessarily arises. But what is crucial to understand, for Proudhon, is “how we are able to substitute justice for authority, community, and charity through these values of mutualism, reciprocity, and exchange, and how we are then in a position, in politics and the political economy, to build a system of relations that will do nothing less than fundamentally transform the social order.”53
One may object at this point that the principle of mutualism only concerns the commercial sphere, or the socio-economic sphere, and that it is connected to the federal principle we have been discussing above only with great difficulty. For Proudhon, however, federalism itself is nothing more than the extension of mutualism into the political sphere: “thus, transported into the political sphere, what we have been hitherto calling mutualism or guarantism is now called federalism. In this simple synonym, the whole political and economic revolution opens up in front of us.”54 What we have here then is a simultaneous distinction drawn between the economic and political spheres and the identification of a principle linking the spheres together. It was the awareness of this identity that led Proudhon to advocate the establishment of “workers’ corporations” that were subject to neither the state nor capital, and it was for the same reason that the Paris Commune favored the creation of cooperative workshops rather than the development of large-scale industry: the extreme centralization of the latter was seen as largely incompatible with self-government in the sphere of production. It is in this sense, then, that we are able to conceptualize the federal principle as two-fold: it orients both the federation of productive units and the federation of municipal units. Federalism, then, as we have described above,55 must become the basis of two forms of democracy: the political democracy of municipalities and the industrial democracy of the workers’ enterprises. And this is precisely why the distinction between the two forms of federalism – political and economic – is perhaps better viewed as merely the extension of the principle of productive or economic mutualism throughout society as a whole.
This idea of a double federalism connecting the political and socio-economic spheres seems very promising to us. A question, however, remains as to whether the principle of mutualism is best suited to realizing this articulation. As Proudhon himself indicated, the mutuum of “mututalism” refers, above all, to the necessity of reciprocity between lender and borrower, the “exchange of good offices and products.” But is a commercial relation the best model to be applied to all manner of social relations? Might the social not be impoverished if it is governed as nothing more than a contractual system linking independent individuals or units? This tendency to theorize the social in contractual terms – for example, Proudhon’s proposition to substitute “contracts” for “laws” – is one of the more problematic characteristics of Proudhon’s concept of federalism. But as we have pointed out in the beginning of the book,56 if mutuum is indeed a derivative of munus, it is difficult to reduce the term to strictly economic forms of reciprocity insofar as its genealogical root denotes the holding and exercising of public office. We must therefore re-affirm the primacy of munus over mutuum and, consequently, make the principle of co-obligation (which links co-participants of the same activity) the central internal organizing principle of the two spheres, as well as the principle of their reciprocal articulation. For we must, at all costs, avoid organizing the federalism of the political sphere on the basis of the relations of exchange (mutuum) prevailing in the economic sphere: to orient the political sphere on the basis of the economic would be to repeat some of the same Marxist errors described in previous chapters, and we should be cautious about making the same mistakes with Proudhon. Proudhon rejects the notion of a centralized state that “corresponds” to the centralization of large-scale industry, and so he instead proffers the notion that the mutualism of the political sphere should be an extension of the mutualism organizing the economic sphere. Thus, in both cases – Marx and Proudhon – the political sphere is organized on the basis of the economic sphere, and this can only result in a compromised political sphere. The concluding logic of this strategy is the all-too-familiar dissolution of the state or of politics into the economy, an idea that haunted the early Proudhon, and an idea that Marx turned into the ultimate truth of history as such.
We must, instead, insist on the irreducible diversity of these two types of federalism while holding to the necessity of their democratic coordination: unlike the logic of mutuum, the common is not an economic principle that can “become” political by merely extending it to the political sphere. Nor can this economic logic serve as an ahistorical principle of moral justice. Rather, it is first and foremost a political principle that strives to govern the socio-economic sphere in the same manner as it governs the political sphere. The remaining question, then, is how to institutionalize the irreducible difference between the two spheres without hindering their interconnection.
In spite of her attachment to the absolute separation between these two spheres, Hannah Arendt indirectly furnishes us with a promising means of answering this pressing question in an interview from 1970 titled “Thoughts on Politics and Revolution.” In her discussion of “a different state concept” that breaks with the principle of sovereignty (particularly in terms of the latter’s “claim to unchecked and unlimited power in foreign affairs”), Arendt suggests, “the mere rudiments I see for a new state concept can be found in the federal system, whose advantage is that power moves neither from above nor from below, but is horizontally directed so that the federated units mutually check and control their powers.”57 Arendt then evokes the emergence of the council system as a new form of government, and she is careful to point out that history provides us with examples of such councils of all different types: “neighborhood councils, professional councils, councils within factories, apartment houses, and so on,”58 all of which are participatory bodies concerned with public affairs. Arendt’s evocation of the council system is especially interesting because it departs from the otherwise purely territorial or geographic division of the public sphere characteristic of almost all proposals aimed at reforming governmental systems. We might recall, in this regard, Jefferson’s famous proposition near the end of his life: “the subdivision of the countries into wards.”59 There is no doubt Jefferson’s “administrative subdivision” was designed to combat the danger of corruption emanating from the increasing expansion of the private sphere: to the extent that counties are organizational forms that are still too vast to allow every citizen the possibility of effectively participating in public affairs, the smaller “elementary republics,” or wards, would devolve public space and place political power more directly in the hands of the ordinary citizen. Yet no matter how this “graduation of authority” may proceed (district, county, state, union), this strategy never departs from the notion that political organization is fundamentally territorial and geographic in nature. But Arendt’s extreme diversification of the various types of councils induces a radical pluralism of the public sphere, particularly in terms of the councils formed on a socio-professional (rather than territorial) basis. But given the fact that these new councils must persist beyond the immediacy of the revolutionary effervescence from which they arise (at least historically speaking), it is difficult to see how councils so constituted would not introduce conflicting socio-economic interests into the public sphere itself. The radical pluralism Arendt envisages thus favors a substantial enlargement of the public sphere, whereby an essential dimension of the social now becomes part of the public sphere itself: namely a diversity of social and economic interests that are otherwise always in danger of breaking out into open conflict. And in the final lines of her interview, Arendt pushes her ideas on federalism even further:
A council-state of this sort, to which the principle of sovereignty would be wholly alien, would be admirably suited to federations of the most various kinds, especially because in it power would be constituted horizontally and not vertically.60
This radical pluralization of federalism advanced by Arendt is largely irreconcilable with the schema proposed by Jefferson, according to which there is only one type of federation, namely one established along a vertical plane oriented according to a logic of “graduated authority.” The very different horizontalism of which Arendt speaks, however, opens up the possibility of not only relating the lower levels of a federated structure with the higher levels, but it also suggests a means of relating various lower levels with each other, horizontally, without passing through the upper echelons of the institutional pyramid – districts with other districts, counties with other counties, etc. – and all independent of those in control of the upper levels. Arendt’s conception of the council system also extends beyond the political sphere and includes socio-economic or professional councils. Arendt’s council system is thus structured by means of a double horizontality or a transversal horizontality: there are federal relations between councils established on a socio-professional basis, but also federal relations between those economic councils and councils established on a strictly territorial basis. And, insofar as this double relation must also be reversible or reciprocal, there are also federal relations between various territorial councils, as well as between the territorial councils and the socio-economic or professional councils.
If we push the institutional logic of a double federal horizontalism as far as possible, what we arrive at is a complex institutional system articulated on the basis of a double federation: on the one hand, there is a federation of commons constituted on a strictly professional basis and, at the same time, a federation of commons established on a strictly territorial basis. Put differently, we have a socio-economic federation and a political federation. And these two types of commons are concatenated by a transversal horizontalism of the following type: first, the socio-economic commons (commons of production, consumption, seed banks, etc.) are independent of the logic of territoriality; in other words, they are solely constituted in order to take charge of the socio-economic resources or goods around which they were initially formed. Thus, for instance, a common river or a common forest may be granted its own institutional structure and rules. The river or forest may intersect many administrative territories, but it will not submit its institutional norms or rules to these administrative regions. Second, the political commons, on the other hand, are constituted according to a territorial logic: their integrative rules ensure, at the geographic level, the coordination of the various commons that fall within them. Whatever the extent of the territory, these rules are codified as a form of “political constitution.” The basic unit of the political commons is the municipality – i.e., the elementary form of local self-government – which revives the older meaning of the Roman municipium. Its basic political constitution is therefore a communal constitution. And regardless of the territorial echelon within the institutional pyramid, the entire political constitution is based on the recognition of the individual’s fundamental rights. Each political common must vigilantly protect these rights. Henceforth, then, the development of these constitutional rules means the political commons are bodies that are designed to be responsive to any individual, in any community, who believes their subjective rights are threatened or challenged. And, in our view, this double system of a federal commons must be global in scale.
What type of citizenship might correspond to this form of global federation? In the first instance, we must immediately exclude any form of “global citizenship” that merely projects the nation-state model onto the global level: the global federation of the commons is in no way a form of world state, and therefore the mode of citizenship that corresponds to it must be plural and decentralized, like the very public spaces in which citizens live. Of course, achieving the objective we are aiming at here undoubtedly means working actively, in the present, to build new forms of citizenship that transcend national borders. But we must not downplay the difficulty of this task by merely evoking the joint crises of nationality and sovereignty. There is no question we are in the midst of a “denationalization of citizenship.” But we must not deceive ourselves about the nature of this process. As Catherine Colliot-Thélène writes, “it is the mobility of capital, much more than the mobility of populations, that is undermining national citizenship.”61 Accordingly, there is no “transnational community”62 that will spontaneously emerge from this dilution of national citizenship, and so it is up to us construct form a transnational citizenship in the absence of any spontaneous appearance of a transnational community.
Given today’s great ecological peril, it is very tempting to revive the old cosmopolitan chestnut of “global citizenship”: we should all be citizens of one and the same world, such that our common belonging alone is sufficient to make us act as responsible global citizens. But can the world really be a single polis? From what point of view would we be justified in calling ourselves citizens of the world, and what would be the meaning of this notion of citizenship? We have of course already broached the subject of global citizenship. Kant, for instance, understands the latter as a kind of superstate citizenship that is distinct from “state citizenship” as well as from “infrastate citizenship,” i.e., “city citizenship.”63 It is indisputable, in our view, that contemporary state citizenship should not be considered the “norm” of citizenship in general. But, at the same time, there is no denying that the notion of citizenship loses much of its substance once it is diluted on the global scale. As we have seen in Kant, the right of global citizenship is transformed into a “right of resort” that is merely meant to facilitate commercial trade. In other words, this is not a right of residence or anything else we might consider comparable to citizenship. Under these conditions, it is difficult to see how this kind of “global citizenship” could retain any political content. Superstate citizenship thus seems threatened by a constitutive apoliticism, if it is not dissolved outright into a purely technical legalism.
The Stoics, at least, tried to ground the world polis on the basis of our common constitution as rational beings (gods and men): to be concerned with the common good (koinônikon) was, for them, to put oneself in the service of the whole, and for them one’s polis was only a small part of this whole. For the Stoics, the universal city is what counts. To be a human being is that which makes one a citizen of the world.64 The difficulty here again, however, is that whatever citizenship gains in extension it tends to lose in quality, such that notions of global citizenship tend invariably to merge, purely and simply, with the mere quality of being human, or with humanity in general (to turn the Stoic formula around). Cosmopolitanism is thus reduced to an apolitical form of citizenship – and is apolitical citizenship not a fundamental contradiction in terms? We cannot escape this difficulty by invoking vague notions of belonging to the “earth” as “a city of men and all living beings.”65 These concepts all subscribe to a notion of global cosmopolitan citizenship that, if not apolitical, is “metapolitical” and, correspondingly, tries to link the rights of global citizenship to the rights of “humanity” as such.66 What we need to come up with is a form of citizenship that is capable of escaping from the closed alternative between an apolitical global citizenship, be it either infrapolitical or metapolitical, and some extension or other of contemporary state or national forms of political citizenship. What we need to construct, then, is a form of non-state and non-national political citizenship that also avoids all the one-dimensional forms of “legal,” “commercial,” or even “cultural” citizenship. For us, this creative activity of constructing a new form of citizenship can only arise through instituent praxis (for example, by encouraging the creation of citizen collectives comprised of many nationalities around a common issue, such as an ecological issue).
In addition to extra-national political experiments, we are also drawn to the notion of citizenship that James Holston has beautifully called insurgent citizenship. For Holston, the term refers to forms of citizenship practiced by citizens who belong to disadvantaged populations living in the peripheral neighborhoods of large Brazilian metropoles: through their struggle these underprivileged groups managed to win new rights that were hitherto reserved for privileged minorities, especially in terms of public services like health and education.67 Holston’s examples show us how non-state forms of citizenship can take many diverse forms, from the local to the transnational. These heterogeneous forms of citizenship challenge the neat, cumulative logic of citizenship envisioned by Thomas Marshall above (wherein civil rights lead to political rights, and political rights lead to social rights). Transnational citizenship must be decoupled from mere belonging and the rights that are granted on the basis of mere belonging; it must be thought of in terms of practices rather than formal rights granted from above. As Catherine Colliot-Thélène puts it, “citizenship is always a matter of rights, and rights are only ever actualized in practices: in their use, in their defense when they are threatened, and in the struggle to obtain new rights.”68
But are the practices that produce this type of citizenship sufficient to bring about the creation of the global federation of the commons we need today? We will let Hannah Arendt answer this question for us: “but if you ask me now what prospect it has of being realized, then I must say to you: very slight, if at all. And yet perhaps, after all – in the wake of the next revolution.”69