Michael Hardt is a great voice in political theory concerning ideas about the ‘common’. I want to discuss his ideas about the situation of the common in communism.
Hardt locates the ‘common’ as being established completely outside of capitalist private property and socialist public property. The common in communism is not to be located within the market and/or the state, which are the hegemonic forces in our daily lives. The common is to be found in the hypothesis of communism, i.e. a new communist hypothesis that is modern and based in the production of the present. The essential point to understand is that the ‘common’ is not a form of property. There are 2 basic types of the common: 1. the common refers to the earth and all of its resources (land, air, waters, minerals, etc), and 2. the direct results of human labour and creativity (ideas, languages, affects, etc.) (136). These two types of the common have been increasingly usurped under forms of private and public property in the past few centuries: under classic liberal capitalist accumulation and neo-liberal capital of the past 30 years.
The industrial era is over and is no longer dominant in capitalism, as it was in Marx’s day. What is now dominant is, according to Hardt, ‘immaterial and biopolitical production’. Industrial production is thoroughly based in the creation of material goods that are moveable through the aid of commodification and consumerism. Industrialization is still prevalent but not dominant. Whereas, immaterial production refers to the production of ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, etc. These designate occupations ranging from high end to low end workers found all over the capitalist spectrum (e.g. health care workers, flight attendants, educators, software programmers, fast-food workers, call-centre workers, designers, advertisers, and on and on) (134). These types of workers are not producing a material commodity, as such, because they are the living commodity that they are producing; a piece of their biological commodity is being marketed. What gets sold to the consumer is not exactly a material need rather it is a service or an intellectual form of property or some other non-material affect. What these workers are producing is the immaterial realization of their own commodity, i.e. labour-power, and they are selling their own exploitation; in some ways.
The common, as was established above, is being bought and sold through very new and mysterious forms (fetishistic forms). The privatization and sale of the traditional common is easy to spot: i.e. privatization of water, minerals, etc. but the sale of the second type of common is much more elusive than we think; for Hardt this is based on the notion of ‘rent’ and not a direct sale of material goods. Direct results of human intellectual labour are hard to privatize because these are based in something that is not exactly physical and material. A great example is found in the worlds of patents. What exactly gets patented? It is usually an idea of some sort, not a material good but the idea as to how to utilize that material good in a new or better fashion. There are also patents on all sorts of other immaterial things; the world of computer technology (software) is a great place to find these new areas of intellectual property. For Hardt, the solution is not that we should have a great pool of public property to protect all of this knowledge and/or natural resource. Rather, we should organize to protect ourselves from creating a system of ownership; from the hands of the market or the state, i.e. the eradication of property relations.
What is the answer to re-establishing the common? Organization is the simple solution, but of course we are referring to a communistic organization that is beyond the state and the marketplace. How else could we liberate the common with rational interest? Certainly the capitalist market and the state have selfish interests in regard to the common and it is apparent that these entities have failed in providing meaningful parameters as to the public usage of the common – their usage turns into commodification, exploitation, and property. So then an organization is essential (not a singular political party) that has the primary interest of liberation of the common from capital and the state; i.e. to eradicate the exploitation of the common and implement autonomy of the common.
This communist organization is not a part of the vulgar realities of state powers of the past century rather it is located in a more powerful location, i.e. the multitude.
Property is the antagonism of the common. To quote Marx: “private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it” (Marx, 345). Hardt adds that “we have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common” (Hardt, 139).
So then, where is the critique of political economy to be found in all this discussion of the common? To quote Hardt again “capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and (…) the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism…. the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task or organizing it” (144).
Autonomy of the common – this is the essence of the common in communism!
References:
Hardt, Michael. “The Common in Communism.” In The Idea of Communism, ed. Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas. New York: Verso, 2010. pp. 131-144
Marx, Karl. Early Writings. London: Penguin, 1975.
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