Imre Szeman
The world, it seems, is a disaster. The relentless drive for profits and unfettered consumerism are eating up the planet’s resources and poisoning it in the process. The rich are getting richer, and richer, and richer still. The poor and the precarious have, in turn, given up on even the fantasy of class mobility, knowing full well that the game is rigged. Global warming will violently impact human, animal, and plant communities over the remainder of this century, and indeed, centuries still to come. Nowhere are the true desires and capacities contained in the ideal of democracy to be found in actually existing politics. Nothing is going right, or, for that matter, ever has. We’re living in the remnants of a teenager’s house party, held when parents are away for the weekend. Even if it means we might get in trouble, we’re now expecting them to return to clean up the broken glass and adjust the angles of the crooked picture frames. Except they won’t be returning; there never were any parents in the first place.
Given the state we’re in, what is to be done? Critics and theorists of all stripes have proposed innumerable political prescriptions. If the present is a disaster, they say, then let’s live and work together differently. Let’s move beyond capitalism to a more just and equitable social and economic system. Let’s change our understanding of and relation to nature. Let’s figure out a truly democratic way of being in relation to one another. Out of the billions of individuals that make up the planet, let’s come together to craft new processes and practices, actively and collectively, that would allow us, finally, to inhabit a common. The evidence before our eyes today suggests not only that all this is far easier said than done, but also that we’ve likely been heading down the wrong path for far, far too long.
Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s Common: On Revolution in the Twenty-First Century proposes we take a new direction. “All the efforts since the nineteenth century that tried to renew both political thought and social theory in order to more effectively confront capitalism have failed to produce a fully coherent politics of the common,” they write. The fundamental aim of Common is nothing less than to succeed where all these others have failed. Through the extensive and multifaceted overview of the history of the communal ideal carried out in its pages, Common lays the foundations for a politics tailored to the challenges of this new century. This is possibly the best account of the communal idea that exists in a single book, beginning with the ideas of old standbys likes Plato and Aristotle, through to Proudhon and Marx, and up to such strange bedfellows as Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom and political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Even those who might at times take exception to their arguments will find this book to be an ideal place from which to start their own assessment of where we go from here to transform the common from idea into reality.
The labor of moving through the history of the common, testing out and checking in on varied articulations of it, isn’t intended by Dardot and Laval as an exercise in compiling a new recipe of the political out of the bits and pieces of old ideas and practices (a pinch of Proudhon, a dash of Marx). The critical exploration undertaken here is meant instead to grapple with the political and conceptual missteps that have hitherto impeded the development of the common. There are two key insights that emerge as central to Dardot and Laval’s understanding of how, moving forward, we should better conceive of the practices and processes shaping the common. The first and most critical point is the need to stop theorizing the common as a socio-political formation produced by capitalism. This is, of course, the contribution made to political thought by Marx, and affirmed (if in distinct ways) by the various Marxisms that have followed in his wake. The common (or, in the case of Marx, communism) has to pass through capitalism, it has been imagined, because of the way in which capitalism assembles those collective forces of labor that will eventually bring about its demise. Dardot and Laval are generous readers of Marx (and indeed of all the thinkers whose work and ideas they explore). However, they view any theory of political transformation that cedes political struggle to the motors of history as limited in the extreme. Common owes a debt to the groundbreaking work of Hardt and Negri, whom Dardot and Laval see as the first thinkers to directly take up the challenge of systematically re-imagining the common for the twenty-first century. Yet if they see Hardt and Negri’s theory of the common as problematic, it is because they see it as repeating a spontaneism endemic to the left thought: the view that history will generate those new modes of cooperation and socialization that will bring about the conditions necessary for a new common. “We freely admit that capital creates an objective antagonism between itself and its workers,” Dardot and Laval write. “Yet given the various forms capital has taken since the mid-nineteenth century, we’re less sure about the proposition that the capitalist institution of forced cooperation and mechanization will ultimately produce a fully socialized individual who has developed all his faculties as a result of an increase in free time.” The common has to be fought for in the present, by those living in the present, who want to bring about a different social order than the one in which they currently find themselves.
The second insight that emerges from Dardot and Laval’s analysis concerns the limit of approaches that view the common negatively or defensively, whether knowingly or unknowingly. One of the tendencies for left politics today is to view the commons as something that once existed, but is now quickly being eaten up by an ever-expanding capitalism. The description of the common or commons as over time being absorbed by capitalism (as spelled out in the “tragedy of the commons”), with neoliberalism constituting the most ferocious attack yet on anything and everything common, has the misfortune of positioning the common (once again) in relation to capitalism. The common becomes imagined as what capitalism isn’t and does so on the terms first established by the latter. Dardot and Laval draw our attention to how this view of the common ultimately affirms the legitimacy of the state as it is currently exists, and also positions property (i.e., ownership, however construed) as central to the common, too. Though they find a great deal of merit in David Harvey’s description of neoliberalism as being engaged in a practice of “accumulation through dispossession”—dispossession of common or public property—Dardot and Laval argue that this view of capitalism misses “a more general accumulation through an expanded and deepened subordination of all elements of the population’s existence—consumption, transportation, leisure time, education, health, the use of space and time, social and cultural reproduction, and ultimately subjectivity itself.” Any politics of the common that views it as something lost that needs to be recovered (as in Peter Linebaugh’s account of the long process of the “enclosures of the common”) can only generate a defensive politics, one that positions the people as endlessly running after the capitalist state in the hopes of undoing its work or taming its more aggressive tendencies.
So just what is it that Dardot and Laval understand as the common? In many ways, Common constitutes a sequel to The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (2009; English translation 2013). In that book, Dardot and Laval provide an overview of the operations of “neoliberalism reason,” and end with a call for the necessity of the construction of an alternate form of reason—what they call the “reason of the common.” Common takes up this project, announcing in its opening pages, “The common (singular) is a political principle through which we are able to build the commons, maintain the commons, and sustain the commons. It is, as such, a political principle that defines a new system of struggles on a global scale.” It is essential to understand that for Dardot and Laval, the common needs to be understood as a verb, rather than a noun—as a practice or process of commoning. The common is not simply a situation of co-belonging (as might be the case if one participates in an off-grid community) or co-ownership (property divvied up in equal measure), which are evoked by the use of the plural term “the commons.” Rather, the common is activity, the collective process of fashioning a new political subjectivity; it is a task that has some clear aims (bringing about the end of property, for instance), but which in most ways is as interminable as history itself. Against political views that look to the state to defend the people, or to the unfolding eschatology of socio-historical form (à la Marx), Dardot and Laval insist on the active, affirmative character of collective practices and struggles that take up the challenge of generating new political forms. Throughout their investigation of the history of common, they reiterate this point with more and more certainty and clarity: the common is about coming together and creating, equally and collectively, a new world from the old.
One of the challenges for any theory proposing political change is that, inevitably, it becomes important to provide an account of how one gets from here to there—from neoliberalist reason to the common. If not via the social contradictions generated by history, or by the sudden, unexpected burgeoning into life of political energies thought to be dormant, then what? What might come as surprise to many readers is Part 2 of Common, in which Dardot and Laval offer a second archaeology to go along with the first on the common—an overview of property rights in Western history, as a way of mapping the dialectic of the law of property and the law of the common. “If the common isn’t directly immanent to the social itself—or even a ‘tendency’ of the social that we need only stimulate to bring into existence,” they write, “it’s because the common is first and foremost a matter of law, and therefore a determination of what must be.” Neither res communis in Roman Law nor Anglo-Saxon common law provide the resources for the constitution of a law of the common; in each case, the legal apparatus of the existing sovereign determines what might constitute the commons as opposed to private property, a distinction that can be (and is) changed as needed. Dardot and Laval argue that the common has to be organized around a radical challenge to and elimination of private property. Drawing on the insights of Marx’s defense of customary law (which he undertook as a journalist working at the Rheinische Zeitung early in his life), they outline a process they name “instituent praxis.” Nether a recognition of laws that already exist, nor a creation of laws from scratch, instituent praxis generates revolutionary social and political change on the basis of what exists. When it comes to social change, this is a process that circumvents the creaky old opposition between reform and revolution, and does so in a manner that is attentive to the principles of co-activity and of the unappropriability (of property) that will constitute the basis of a new politics. As with the insights about the political principles of the common, Dardot and Laval’s original investigation of the law in the constitution of new political communities takes us down paths we’ve yet to go down. Like the work of other critics in recent years, Common announces the need to conceptualize and develop durable structures to confront neoliberalism and to advance left politics. The law need not be imagined (as it often has been in French thought) as limiting, violent and dangerously determinate; indeed, only a law of the common can radically challenge and overturn the reign of the law of property.
However extensive the account offered here of the communal ideal and the law of the common, some might still feel that there are missing elements of this account of the conditions for twenty-first century politics. The common is produced through practices of co-creation and co-development that are the basis for genuine, expansive social and political transformation. The political principle of the common outlined here, Dardot and Laval take pains to emphasize, isn’t an invention, a matter merely of political theory, but “reflects the aspirations of those hostile to capitalism and its machinations.” Be that as it may, it has to be noted that even if hostility to capitalism today is widespread, found in those myriad anti-globalization and environmental groups from which they draw inspiration, only a minority of the planet’s inhabitants are engaged in active challenges to the political and economic status quo. The question that looms over these pages, and indeed, the pages of any theory of revolutionary transformation, is how we get from where we are now to a situation in which people everywhere are engaged in the work outlined in the provocative and useful political propositions with which Common ends. There are blockages and limits to the activity of the common that go beyond limits in how we have framed it conceptually or in relation to law—impediments that are at once social, political, and psychological.
In imagining the coming into being of the common, one might have thus expected to find here an account of what can only be called ideology. Perry Anderson famously castigates Western Marxism for its turn from economics and politics to philosophy, which brought with it a constituent pessimism about political change that it has found hard to shake. Yet even Anderson understands (at least at times) the reasons for this turn: the necessity of mapping cultural and social forms and structures “in relationship to the maintenance or subversion of the social order” (78). From Louis Althusser’s analysis of the work of the Ideological State Apparatuses that make subjects “go” all on their own (without the state or the police standing over their shoulder), to Herbert Marcuse’s investigation of the dynamics of affirmative culture, to Lauren Berlant’s articulation of the “cruel optimism” with which the majority of us manage the disappointments of living in capitalism, the work of a great deal of left thought over the past century has been to understand why political change has, at least in some parts of the world, ground to a halt. Capital has indeed taken various forms since the mid-nineteenth century; free time hasn’t produced a fully socialized individual because free time—indeed, even sleep time, as Jonathan Crary has argued—has become an ever more important part of the operations of capital. No wonder the tendency is for a defensive reaction to capitalism! And if there continues to be faith in the fact that capitalism might bring about its own demise, it is in part because the operations of ideology have meant that the subjects of capital don’t always seem very interested in or capable of doing it themselves.
Dardot and Laval don’t express any fears about how the subjects of capitalism might become the subjects of the common. They don’t imagine the need for the right kind of subjects, ones no longer beholden to the structures and practices of the ideologies that support capitalism (which might require the intervention of something like a political party to bring about). The subjects of the common, it seems, are produced through the very activity of the making of the common, but how these subjects begin their transformation in the first place is somewhat of a mystery. Dardot and Laval do what they can to move past these limits by placing their faith in the inhabitants of the planet to, in common, generate the principles and prospects of a collective planetary life. For them, the operations of ideology may be real enough (however much some of the left might want to wipe their hands of it, or of related concepts like hegemony); however, the idea that one needs to get things right in how one views capitalism before one can act on it, can only impede the project of the common, setting things aside indefinitely and tragically.
Fears about the confusions and misdirections introduced by ideology, as have been expressed recently in relation to the rise of violent populisms across the globe (e.g., Modi in India, Orbán in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey), might lead one to be cautious about any politics that appears to orient itself toward “the people.” But this kind of worry can come perilously close to the view that there must be a “correct” mode of the political, judged as correct by political experts (including “experts” on the left) who somehow stand outside of ideology, and so can measure the right way to behave politically. The reign of experts who (as Jacques Rancière has pointed out) hate real democracy and substitute for it “appropriate” modes of technocratic governance has ensured that there is in fact less and less opportunity for democratic decision-making within official politics. And when people do get to participate, it is on terms dictated by experts, via “yes” and “no” votes that contain and limit genuine political expression. Dardot and Laval believe that the self-government of the common is accessible to everyone, everywhere, and now. We shouldn’t look for the capacities of “the people” in faux games of democracy, like the vote over the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, but in challenges to the status quo that emerge when publics are actually allowed to openly voice their opinions. In an online poll, publics named a British Antarctic Survey vessel Boaty McBoatface—a humorous challenge to military protocol and self-import, as well as to the pretense of democracy extended by the poll itself. Such a decision might be a better index of political will (however comic or irreverent), of the capacities that exist today for the co-activity of the common, than the outcomes of elections that have recently granted power to dangerous, autocratic, and racist leaders around the world. Change is possible and waiting to happen. (Note: the ship was renamed RRS Sir David Attenborough by the British government—the people were not allowed to speak).
The world is a disaster. Yet there are more and more people around the world engaged in a process of collectively re-shaping the world into something other than a disaster. The activity of creating the common today, however dispersed and small it might sometimes appear to be, is producing subjects who no longer have any faith in existing social and political systems. The tents of the Occupy movement might have been taken down around the world, but the remnants of the politics articulated at each site continue to animate how many understand just what needs to be done. Through the rigorous analysis and argument they offer on behalf of a new idea of the common, and the energy of political principles they provide us, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s Common promises to contribute substantially to the process and practice of generating a new world, lived in common, and operating by laws that no longer celebrate property above all else. A new global society is coming.
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