Preface

From the 'Public' to the 'Common'

Is democracy, as it is interpreted and experienced today in the West, a guarantee of freedom for citizens? The general and generic answer is, more or less, yes. But, as soon as you try to define this 'freedom' and ask yourself what are the effects of its hegemony in the charters of democratic regimes in the West, that consensus vanishes and you get instead confusion and differences of position. This is because that freedom, as embodied in Western democracy, is the freedom of the individual, of the desire to appropriate that defines the individual more than anything else does, of the contract that the individual produces in order to build the collective moment that is necessary for the development of social life. (I use here the term 'collective' rather than 'public' because the latter retains a juridical origin that makes it ill-suited and hardly does justice to the fulness of its usage in social life.)

In the face of growing scepticism, one wonders in fact whether this constitutive process of the collective as a product of individualism responds adequately to the current situation in which citizens live and produce - whether it is capable of bringing about the transformation of individual freedom into the collective freedom that citizens need, in short, whether it can build a civil society free of even greater difficulties and obstacles. As I restate and clarify my position on whether western democracy, in taking individual freedom as its watchword, can be an effective guarantee of a good life for society, my answer has to be in the negative. There is no connection of individual freedoms on a collective terrain, as long as appropriative individuals, together with their contractual prostheses, are held at the centre of society's constitutive process. The appropriative individual, private property, contractual mechanisms and private law are not machines that form a free society; rather they are machines that imprison the desire for sociability and the need to live a good life together - a life that is collectively ordered, a true democracy.

This awareness of society's civil rights crisis and obstacles in the search for freedom itself is ceaselessly renewed in the experience of productive life, which constitutes the backbone of modern society. During the last century of capitalist development, production became increasingly socialized, to the point of crossing a threshold: beyond this point it is no longer the result of a socially invasive process, of alienation and consumption, but has become the collective basis and common foundation of every new order of reproduction in society. We have called this new condition 'postmodernity' - this society where production is completely socialized. The continuous interchange between the private and the collective has reached a point of tendential hegemony of the latter over the former and can be seen in the forms of life that have consolidated in the twenty-first century. And these new forms of life, themselves contradictory, demand to be questioned.

The postmodern order can be described as a heavy (and sometimes horrible) domination exercised by the few over the very many who work, produce and create the wealth of living socially. The transition from modernity to postmodernity, from the industrial mode to the informatics-led and immaterial mode of production, often takes place by preserving the continuity of the old domination. This is due to the inertia of the past or to the ebb and blockage of the new movements of transformation. While life and production have changed, and while the sense of the collective and a thriving socialization have come to a standstill, command remains the same. Representative democracy - which had a hard time portraying values of freedom and participation (and all too often did so deceptively) - is definitively on the decline. The collective has to find means of political expression. This is the only way to save democracy - through self-renewal. But how is that to happen?

In the interregnum in which we were living, it did not take much for a positive 'key' to be introduced in the debate - an element to help us traverse these times and win some space in the conflicts that run through it. (Nothing much was to be expected from those who, like the Marxists who criticized operaismo, had come up with proposals for reading the great transition from modernity to postmodernity.) A theoretical key that arose from a reflection on the transformations in the production of life and from perceptions of the advanced degree of its socialization.

We were sunk in a state of confusion and indistinction. The complete socialization of the form of life gave the sensation of being in a common dark condition. But in order to live one had to turn on a light and shake and question that dead assemblage of lives. We had suffered a becoming common that now confused us. Life rose up and wanted to regain meaning. That 'becoming common' had to be analysed; and immediately it appeared to have two senses. On the one hand, it was a common like a collective of production and consumption in which the domination of capital had been completely realized and that presented itself now in totalitarian form. On the other hand, it was a common that, in addition to the recognition of capitalist socialization, appeared as a capacity of the cooperation of workers and citizens to be effective and as their political power. The maturation of this opposition was the sign of the limits of capitalism in our time; the common showed itself as the active force that recomposed production, society and life into a new experience of freedom.

It may be objected that, at least since the birth of socialism, this trend towards the growing socialization of production has been taken to be a prerequisite of progress towards the common. And the objection is correct. But there are writers, still today, who do not make the distinction but rather emphasize the continuity of eras and see the common as an ideal to be realized across them - one and the same, from the birth of the first workers' leagues to the self-revelation of the worker as a communist in the more advanced informatics networks. This is not true. When we speak of 'the common' today, we do not speak about a utopia to be realized, or an ethical-political principle, or a metaphysical truth that could unite humanity in a project to come. Rather we speak of a being-together, already powerfully realized in daily life, and thus of a real condition (presupposition, foundation) in every form of contemporary life: the common has become the ontological structure of living.

The subject of production, like that of the polis, is collective. As such it is organized as labour power and commanded by the order of exploitation. But in this condition, as a subjectivity hitherto objectified, it can - by rebelling, recognizing and assuming the power that constitutes it - break the relationship that binds it to the capitalist order and open up to the order of the common.

The function that keeps these two conditions apart and opposed to each other is private property. The juridical order of property is what constitutes the line of fortification of modern individualism against the postmodern common. And this is an efficacious operation. In this way the common is born in the cage of private property, and when it comes out it is once again caged, put in new chains and in new containers. This is where socialist reformism has done all its misdeeds. But one cannot expect that the power of the common will not explode sooner or later, demolishing all the miserable constraints that hold it back, and that the common will not appear, subjectivated and rearticulated, in institutions that will strengthen, along with freedom, the equality and ability of every citizen to participate in the making of the city.

This book brings together a number of articles, previously not translated into English, in which I continue and deepen at the political level the theoretical work that I conducted with Michael Hardt from 2008 on, in the volume Commonwealth (published in 2009), precisely on the subject of the common. As will be seen, my concern in these writings is to ground the concept of the common in a materialist fashion. Only one essay published here, the first, precedes the others: it was written in 1975. But it is useful both because it links the discussion of the common to the Marxist critique of the concept of state (on this account it was part of the political materials produced in the struggles of Italy's long red decade) and because it brings out with clarity, from the beginning, the materiality of the concept of common - which is thus set outside any modernist assimilation to the concept of public. I would therefore say that the pieces in this collection were written against the new metaphysics of the common, against its idealization. We do not know the common as an ideality, except in the hybrid form it takes in financialization - the ultimate expression of the alienated common, the common of money. Or in law. Or - and here we go back to basics - in private property. Each of these aspects of the odyssey of the common is taken into consideration here, as are the steps in a rediscovery of its new materiality: the common as a mode of production - that is, within or against the production of the common: the common as a starting reality from which a new communist project becomes possible.

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