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n Commonwealth

Antonio Negri

Translat ion by A rianna Bove. Gothenbu rg Conference onWhat is theCommon? Octob er 2009.

Before Commonwealth , we published Empire and Multitude .

Whilst Empire was a book that could be immediately understood fromthe point of viewof the spatiality of power, Multitude presented someproblems. In particular, the question of how the multitude could organiseitself.

So the first issuewe confront in Commonwealth is the becoming Prince , inMachiavellian terms, of the multitude. I am not following the thread of thebook here. I am just trying to outline the problems we set out to confront inthe book.

We thought that the possibility of giving a structure, or a spine, a backboneto the multitude resided in the concept of the common.

So, what is this concept of the common?

First of all, let me say a small footnote on its naturalistic dimensions. We allknow that the common is water, air, soil, the sea, land, etc. but we areinterested in the human-made common, because the naturalist commonhas long been reabsorbed in the productive structures of capitalism.

So the problem we confront in the book is the definition of the commoninside the multitude.

The notion of the common and the notion of multitude tend to bejuxtaposed and confounded. They are interchangeable notions, the

constitution of the common and the multitude. That is to say, the commondoes not precede or follow the multitude: the making of the multitude is thecommon.

All of this obviously occurs within capitalism and capitalism is always asocial relation, one between those who command and those who obey,between fixed and variable capital.

So we need to build the concept of the common inside the relation ofcapital. Here capital is presented as struggle, as a common that is there,
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but that was historically appropriated by capital and continuously subjected,in the process of its making, to capital.

But today the common is the name of capitalism: capitalism today iscapitalism of the common. People who insist on private propertytoday areactually talking about the private property of capital, which is the commonof capital against the property-less.

Here we find the great bifurcation of our times, which is the new technicalcomposition of labourpower,inside and outsidethe common butexpropriated of its capacity and possibility of enjoying it.

The generalcontext of the development of this bifurcation is biopolitical,and in the book Commonwealth we dedicate a chapter to explaining how

this bifurcation is one of the concept of capital itself, where one divides intotwo: on the one hand, the communism of capital, on the other hand, theprecarisation of this new labour power.

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At this point, we need to talk about the issue of financeand rent. Finance isthe main instrument of capitalist accumulation: in this bifurcation capitalistaccumulation takes on the form of finance. We must stop talking about aseparation between finance and real production, and understand that

financialisation is not an unproductive and parasitical deviation of growingquota of surplus value, but rather the very form of capitalist accumulation,symmetrical to the new processes of biopolitical production.

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So how do we get out of the crisis? We can only do it through a socialrevolution that confers to the multitude or the subjects who construct themultitude new rightsof social property over what are common goods.

Clearly, this is only possible if we fundamentally oppose private property asconceived as the power of capital.

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But if we wish to return to the notion of multitude and its biopoliticaldimension, we'd better do it historically.

Right from the start, the multitude is opposed to the republic, because therepublic is the republic of property (see for instance the debate on the

English revolution). So the republic is the republic of property to which we


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must start opposing the multitude as a becoming common and themultitude of the poor.

Today the poor constitute the multitude, because there has been a changein the relationship between production and wealth. Mind you, the poor arenot the excluded, they are the foundation of wealth, because wealth ismade of social relations and the poor embody the exodus from capitalistrelations of private property wealth lies in this dispossession.

Critiques

Some critiques are about the centrality of working class labour in thedefinition of the multitude.

We know that the relation between working class and other sections of theproletariat, like the poor, or those who fight racism, colonialism and allforms of domination can be considered in the concept of the multitude.

Here we need to introduce an intersectional perspective, we must find themechanisms that do not solve the problems but allow us to build a commonforce. This intersectionism is not a flat network of inter-crossing webs; it isthe Spinozian notion of the creation of surplus in the encounter ofsingularities, anything but flat. So the multitude as a concept is a dispositifof organisation of singularities (see Iran for example).

Other critiques state that on this multiplicity we need to refer to theuniversal rather than the common, and this universal is equal-liberty. Thisequal-liberty is a universality that is a synthesis of heterogeneous and atraversing of differences.

Others think that the multitude can only be recomposed through asynthesis where the universality and hegemony of concepts are played out.This is a rather Leninist conception of a vanguard group acting to fosterand shape this process.

Our response is that we look for a unity that comes through the materialityof relations, from ontology. Their problem is that they cannot refer toontology and thus they cannot renew historical materialism.

Other criticisms are that the moment of the revolution and communism issomething that cannot be summarised in a continuity of causes but mustfind a radical innovation in the event. This is acceptable in some respects,but we also insist on historical materialism and the fact that someone hasto do these things, on the continuity of things and the accumulation ofevents. These processes are not necessarily bureaucratic, where all


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multiplicity is already an institution, so the polemic is correct but one has tosee the accumulation of elements of refusal.

Here the relation between refusal and constitution is one of accumulationand cannot be otherwise.

Constituent power emerges out of refusal like love, as a pulsation that ispositive. It is the refusal of poverty and misery that becomes the potenza ofpoverty, and the Platonic need is subverted. The Platonic idea aboutpoverty is that poverty leads us from need to wealth.

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