On The Common, Universality, and Communism - A Conversation Between Balibar and Negri

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On the Common, Universality, and Communism: A Conversation between

Étienne Balibar and Antonio Negri
Anna Curcio; Ceren Özselçuk
Online publication date: 25 August 2010
To cite this Article Curcio, Anna and Özselçuk, Ceren(2010) 'On the Common, Universality, and Communism: A
Conversation between Étienne Balibar and Antonio Negri', Rethinking Marxism, 22: 3, 312 — 328
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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)
On the Common, Universality, and

Communism: A Conversation between
Étienne Balibar and Antonio Negri
Introduction by Anna Curcio and

Ceren Özselçuk
Downloaded By: [TÜBTAK EKUAL] At: 07:45 14 October 2010
In this conversation Étienne Balibar and Toni Negri address the question of how to
understand and practice communism in our conjuncture*/specifically, in the context
of our contemporary global economic crisis. While taking this question as their entry
point, they articulate a series of important philosophical and political convergences
and divergences between their frameworks. These points of productive intersections
and tensions open to a plurality of readings of Marx and Marxism. At the same time,
the conversation maps a terrain that includes the question of social ontology and its
relation to the political and the ethical; the conceptual status of labor and
production and the place of anthropological differences within Marxism; and the
politics of equaliberty and its relation to the common and its new institutions.
Key Words: Communism, the Common, Equaliberty, Economic Crisis, Readings of

Marx
Introduction
by
Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk
When we contemplated this event, our desire was to facilitate a conversation

between two vibrant strains of work within the Marxian tradition. In naming these
strains Autonomist Marxism and Althusserian Marxism, our intention was not to treat
them as mutually exclusive or unified schools of thought. Similarly, we do not wish to
position Toni Negri and Étienne Balibar as representative, respectively, of each of
these extremely internally varied traditions. Balibar once said, ‘‘I am not a
representative of the ‘Althusserian School’*/for the simple reason that that school
never existed as such’’: that is, as a ‘‘unified doctrine.’’ We share his insight and
recognize the internal diversity as well as the cross-disseminations in the develop-
ment of each of these movements. For us, what make these traditions meaningful
today are the problematics and ideas that they helped to raise as well as the
unrealized possibilities of these problematics and ideas, which are materialized and
ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030312-17

– 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490356
COMMONS AND COMMUNES 313
multiplied as they are continuously put in relation to their own internal tensions as
well as the ever changing present.
Communism is the specific idea around which we want to structure this
conversation. Scholars drawing from Autonomist and Althusserian traditions have
for long complicated totalizing considerations on commune-ism and opened the way
to nonessentialist reflections on community that do not demand allegiance to a
common being or a historical necessity or both. Moreover, their reappraisal of
communism has so far taken a detour through a shared set of proper names: Marx’s
critique of political economy, Spinoza’s ontology, and a critique of Hegelian
historicism. Nevertheless, there are certain productive divergences in the manner
in which these traditions imagine commune-ism that are worth exploring. Our
intention is to explore both the shared ground and the productive divergences.
In Toni Negri’s recent writings with Michael Hardt (Hardt and Negri 2001, 2005,
2009), communism is thought from an ontology of the common. The common is both
the presupposition and the product of social cooperation. It is a potential of

expanding social cooperation which attends the paradigmatic transformation
of productive forces toward immaterial production and the prominence of new
forms of labor in contemporary capitalism such as affective labor, creative labor, and
the increasingly socialized production of knowledge and communication more
generally. The common refers to a form of socialization that breaks down the former
divisions between work and life, between production and reproduction, and between
material and immaterial.
In Étienne Balibar’s and some post-Althusserians’ recent writings, communism
and related concepts of social emancipation are thought in relation to a
paradoxical idea of universality, one that is simultaneously impossible to realize
and yet necessary for politics. Against the false universalisms of communitarianism
and commodity fetishism, this paradoxical universal both presumes and politicizes
the internal limits of any formation. Balibar’s name for this ‘‘ideal universal’’ is
equaliberty (égaliberté). By stating that equality and liberty are inseparable, the
principle of equaliberty questions the limit of any discourse and extends the
emancipatory potential of rights beyond their current exercise (see Balibar 1994,
2002).
We want to explore the theoretical and political implications of these two
approaches for how we understand and practice communism in our conjuncture
*/more specifically, in the context of the current global economic crisis. There
are two aspects of this crisis that we find particularly interesting for discussion. First,
the current crisis renders visible the extent to which the financial processes have
colonized the social body. Second, as the Empire begins to formulate a response to
this crisis, the shape it takes borrows heavily from Keynesian demand management,
invokes the New Deal as a point of reference, and yearns for a green (post)Fordism.
The two questions we formulate below, and with which we want to initiate the
conversation between Toni Negri and Étienne Balibar, take these two aspects of the
crisis as their points of entry.
314 BALIBAR AND NEGRI
Question 1
A particular argument proposed in Multitude and further developed in Common-

wealth is that financialization crystallizes the way in which the value of (the present
and future) social cooperation and living labor is homogenized, subjected to
abstraction through money, and expropriated by capitalism. In this process of
financialization, we locate a particular subjective support. As a substitute for the
disappearing welfare state, the process of neoliberal financialization interpellates
individuals as managers of their consumption and retirement plans as well as
entrepreneurs of their own human capital. In the face of this subjective support of
financialization, how do we distinguish the affects, desires, and forms of cooperation
that produce the common from those that reproduce capitalistic cooperation? In this
sense, is there not a role for ethics (beyond an ontology of the common) in the
production of the common? Could we imagine communism as the name of such an
ethics? Furthermore, given the displacement of the welfare state by the process of
privatization and individuation, how does the idea of the common enable us to
rethink, or perhaps think beyond, the relationship between the state and the public?
Question 2
As the response to the current crisis borrows from the protocols of Keynesian demand
management, not only do discourses on equality begin to be articulated in the public
sphere (both by its conservative detractors and liberal proponents) but also calls for a
moderation of the unbridled pursuit of private property begin to be voiced (both by
conservative moralists and liberal humanists). It seems to us that these pronounce-
ments of equality and moderation support a particular regime of distribution and
stabilization that will not necessarily do away with the historically overdetermined
social hierarchizations and regimes of ‘‘internal exclusion’’ on the basis of race,
gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on. In this conjuncture, through what
political demands can we extend and intensify the emancipatory potential of
equaliberty? In what ways might these demands be continuous with, or depart
from, those social rights that constitute the public under the welfare-state form?
Could we imagine communism as a supplement of class struggle that pushes
equaliberty beyond the horizon of Keynesian pragmatics, entitlements, and morality
(i.e., beyond liberal capitalist democracy)?
Conversation between Toni Negri and Étienne Balibar
Toni Negri: I think that in order to get straight into the questions we have to draw
a distinction, in the concept of the multitude, between the singular subject regarded
as labor power*/living labor in social production*/and the subjected individual
identified in the political order of citizenship. At this stage of the crisis of
financialization and in the processes of struggle that emerge in such a situation,
although the distinction I draw does not exist in reality (the two are indistinguishable
in fact because they function in relation to one another), it permits us to confront the
questions posed by Michael Hardt and me (and we do not claim to represent the
current of operaismo as a whole) and by Étienne Balibar (who tries to distinguish
himself from the Althusserian tradition with right resolve).
Let us start with the second figure: the individual who is subject to the civic and
political order can be identified in a relation of equaliberty to the extent that she is
assumed as the material condition of a juridical and/or constitutional conjuncture

and as a ‘non-actual’*/unstable and unsatisfied*/tension. In my view, the paradox
underlying the definition of equaliberty as a universality that is impossible to realize
and yet necessary to democratic and progressive politics can be related to spheres
other than just those of equality and liberty; these are the political-economic spheres
of the capitalist order of society*/brutally defined as ‘wage’ related because income
is generally regarded as the condition of direct or indirect participation in capitalist
social relations. We are speaking of the figure of the citizen as historically integrated
in the biopolitical order of welfare.
If we take the nexus connecting the figure of the citizen to that of the worker, both
of whom are subjected to the measure of a ‘necessary wage’, to that historical
measure of the satisfaction of needs indispensable to producing and surviving, the
definition of this measure/quantity of needs leads us straight to the heart of
the problem. We need to ask how, starting from this determination, it is possible to
raise the question of maintaining, increasing, politically identifying, or changing that
mass of needs that only a given level of ‘necessary income’ is able to satisfy.
We know that the current transformation of labor power (living labor is increasingly
immaterial and cooperative) and its socialization (the valorization of labor can now
be captured only at the level of money and finance) changes the terms of this
question. The problem is taken away from the analysis of the length of the working
day and subjected to the laws of finance. Consequently, the economic struggle to
subvert the rules of the relative wage becomes a sociopolitical struggle to subvert
the rules that govern the financial distribution of income in the welfare state. Liberty
and equality have a cost. They are independent values with an always determinate
economic base. As labor becomes intellectual, liberty is indispensable to it; similarly,
as it becomes cooperative, equality qualifies it. Today, without liberty and/or
equality, there can be no productive labor.
In this respect, the problem of distinguishing between the ‘common’, the ethico-
political whole constituted by singularity and produced by the making-multitude, on
the one hand, and the ‘communism of capital’, the form of capital accumulation and
the symmetrical representation of new processes of social and cognitive production
of value, on the other, no longer exists. In this context, any action aimed at securing
a higher level of necessary income and any reference to financial capital have to do
with exchange value and exchange value only, with commodities and commodities
only. Identifying an alternative to the current character of the world of capital, the
so-called communism of capital, is no longer possible at the level of wages and
welfare in general. Therefore, to approach the question of finance from the
standpoint of a theory of equaliberty, or any reference to it in political economy,
can only amount to a proposal arising from within the issue of exchange value,
completely from the inside of the problem of the commodity.
However, if we open the question to the aforementioned point of view that faces
the effective nature of labor power*/the particular technical and political composi-
tion of labor power*/then we can start talking about the worker as participating
in the multitude.
Then we can insist on the new figure of the productive subject who has conquered
a relative autonomy both in the forms of cooperation she expresses and in the
complexity of cognitive, intellectual, relational, and affective materiality of the
labor power she puts to work. On this terrain there begins to emerge a specific excess
linked to the becoming common of labor and of human reproductive activity, a surplus
with respect to the difficulties of alienating the subjectivity inherent to autonomous
production or expropriating the objective excess of such a production.
At this point our reflection must go deeper. The presupposition is that capital is
always a relation between constant and variable, dead and living elements, and
that this relation is always dialectical from the standpoint of capital. Capital must
reduce this opposition to a unity by sucking dry its living power. Our question is
whether this capital relation can be broken and the elements that make up the
synthesis of capital can be divided. Every time there is a capitalist crisis, this
rupture and division becomes evident, but capital recomposes this process. Now,
can the new structure of living labor, the new technical composition of the labor
force and the making-multitude, can the new possible political composition
definitively keep the technico-political structure of capital open? Can it break the
capital relation?
We can begin to answer this question by looking at the issue of the nonhomogeneity
between becoming ‘common’ (the making-multitude of singularity) and ‘the com-
munism of capital’ (global domination in the figure of financial capital).
From the standpoint of the ‘communism of capital’, we can only see the chance of
moving within the realm of exchange value: the struggles for necessary income. The
rupture that can be determined in this realm follows these struggles, but the nature
of value stays the same: it is always exchange value. When income or welfare is the
object of our demands, commodities and currency can be redistributed without
affecting their nature. This struggle is fully inserted in the dynamics of the exchange
of value: that is to say, of exchange value.
The only point where the determined rupture is ontologically relevant is when it
relates to new figures of labor power, as outlined above, and insists on the labor
power that produces excess at the productive level of the relations, affects,
language, and communication that exalt the new cooperative nature of labor. What
emerges from this is the common, and here the rupture is pushed toward the
conversion of values (from exchange value) and the seizure of a mode of production
oriented toward the production of man for man also at the level of welfare: the social
wage and citizen income are no longer a quantity but the image of a new progressive
breaking point of the capital relation and the power (potentia) of the autonomy of
labor. I think that there are analogies with the process of equaliberty here, but the
problem is to take hold of a figure of the production of man for man and of a radical
change in the structure of production.
Étienne Balibar: I will return to the issue of equaliberty. I am always a little

uncomfortable with explaining or defending my own ideas but, after all, this is
something probably an intellectual, or a public intellectual, has to do. So, I will try
to do it and answer Toni’s criticism, which I perfectly understand. But right now,
in reaction to Toni’s positions, let me say three things.
First of all, starting again from the question about the crisis and financialization:
I truly believe that the current crisis, if it is really what it seems to be*/that is, a deep
crisis, a global crisis, a crisis not only of certain, say, economic mechanisms, but as
President Lula of Brazil wrote a few days ago [March 2009] in an op-ed that I believe
was published more or less everywhere in the world, a crisis of civilization including
the kind of world order in which we live*/this will force us to more or less completely
rethink, revise, redimension the political and theoretical categories with which we
have been working in the last period. It was always like that in similar historical
conjunctures. This was particularly the case several times during the dramatic history
of Marxism as a theoretical and political project. And each time, to put it in the words
of Althusser, it meant that you did not only have to think about the conjuncture by
applying or trying to implement as intelligently as possible already existing
categories, but you had to start again thinking within and under the conjuncture,
under the constraints of the conjuncture. In particular, we will have to determine
which are the strategic dimensions of this crisis. Of course, each of us has guesses and
hypotheses about that, but, in fact, we do not know. And therefore, everything we
can say today about alternatives, even alternative languages, be it based on the
ontology of the common and the political philosophy of the multitude as global
revolutionary subject, or on a certain conception of nonexclusionary citizenship and
‘‘democratizing democracy’’ that I try to attach to the category of ‘equaliberty’, will
probably have to be completely reexamined.
Now, second and third, to return to Toni’s ideas and positions which he once again has
very forcefully expressed: There are at least two great ideas that, from my point of view,
not only are positive contributions, but are crucial elements of our attempt at thinking
alternatives in the late capitalist moment in which we live. I do not go into details, but I
want to name them. The first of them is his idea of ‘‘constituent power.’’ I think that in
fact on this point perhaps we have slightly different terminologies, but, in reality,
tracing back to a historical legacy, a revolutionary tradition that we broadly share, what
I try to say in terms of ‘‘equaliberty’’ and what Toni tries to say in terms of ‘‘constituent
power’’ are fundamentally convergent. And it has to do, of course, with the idea that
only struggles, as Toni just repeated, a conflictual nature of social relations*/and I
absolutely agree with the idea that capital, indeed, is a relation*/can account for the
transformation of institutions, be they economic or political, civic, and, therefore,
represent the motor of historical changes. And the important point is, of course, not
only this primacy of the insurrectional or the constituent over the constituted, which
does not deny the necessity of institutions and constituted power. But it is also the fact
that the materiality of the struggle is always to emerge again in the very places where a
certain established, official discourse, the discourse of the state and the dominant
class, the hegemonic discourse will deny its presence and do its best to convince us that
in fact it does not exist*/either because it was eliminated or because it is bound to
remain marginal. And the range, the breadth, of such spaces in history, culture, society
where the constituent power, the insurrection as the driving force of history emerges
and reemerges, is truly fascinating. And I see no difficulty, at least in the first moment,
to put that under the umbrella ‘multitude’ if there remains a question mark: if the
multitude is not taken for an existing subject, but rather, I would say, a regulatory idea
of a possible convergence of these insurrectional elements.
The second element that I find central in Toni’s reflection concerns his thinking on
labor and productive power. My great divergence, to put it in quick terms, is that
I have long abandoned the ontological prerequisite of Toni, which is the absolute
primacy, not to say the uniqueness, of productive force as an anthropological
foundation for politics and historical change. So I see a number of other dimensions of
culture and society which cannot be reduced to an analysis in terms of productive
force and which we need if we want to understand something about the struggles of
the societies in which we live. But I agree with Toni, and this is something that he
really pushed to the fore on the background of a number of inquiries which combined
psychology, sociology, labor relations, and in the end, of course, political theory, that
the concept of labor with which Marx himself had been working was much too narrow
and, from that point of view, did not account for the reality of the development of
labor relations in past capitalism, and certainly not in contemporary capitalism. By
insisting again on something that was present only marginally in Marx, on the
importance of the dialectic of material and intellectual labor, the role it plays in the
permanent contradiction between the individualistic and the cooperative aspect of
labor, and above all, by reminding us that labor is not only intellectual, or manual, but
also has an affective dimension and, for that reason, is intrinsically connected to all
the social passions, which build or destroy the common, Toni really has revolutionized
a certain narrow, perhaps utilitarian, view of labor that Marx had retained. Now
I think these two things are absolutely inevitable and in everything I could say myself
I would try not to forget or to deny that.
Finally, just one quick remark: my problem is with Toni’s ontological understanding
of all these problems. He’s even pushed the ontological dimension or one-sidedness
around the definition of men as productive animals to a greater length, which allows
him to resume the neat narrative that sees communism at the end, as the telos of the
progressive socialization of labor. He’s pushed that to another extreme, which, from
my point of view, is completely metaphysical. And from that point of view, of course,
what I miss*/he won’t be surprised, this is the old Althusserian tune*/is politics.
There cannot be politics where everything is always already determined in advance by
an ontological framework. You cannot have the uncertainties of politics. You cannot
have the unexpected character of the political conflicts or crises that are rooted
either in the economic phenomena or in the ideological dimensions of contemporary
politics. Where is religion, where is nationalism, where are all the ideological
discourses and practices that will heavily weigh on any and every turn in the historical
moment in which we are living and that make it absolutely irreducible, from my point
of view, to a simple alternative between the more or else irresistible rise and
emergence of the common as the futuristic dimension of labor, on the one side, and
the ‘‘communism of capital,’’ on the other? A beautiful oxymoronic formula that
I salute, but which says nothing about the conjuncture.
Negri: First, I do not believe that historical materialism is a constrictive ontology, a

determinism, or a teleology. I think that in historical materialism and its ontological
condition we must include chance, the clinamen, alternative productions of
subjectivity, the aleatory connections of modes and so forth: Spinozist ontology
integrates and qualifies the horizon of materialism.
Second, my impression is that when we talk about labor, as we started doing in
Empire with Michael and many other comrades, the political dimension is exalted
rather than reduced. Insofar as labor becomes biopolitical, liberty and equality are
internal to human productive activity, be it economic or political.
Third, the political is not just a superstructure of social cooperation. Therefore it is
innovated by values that differ from market values and exceed and go beyond their
order and measure.
To open wide the question of politics, I want to return to the problem of the crisis
of sovereignty and government in particular. Inside this crisis of sovereignty and
government it becomes possible to express ‘‘constituent power.’’ This requires that
we confront the problems of capitalist civility (whether liberal or socialist) and global
organization with proposals, as Michael and I have been doing for over a decade now.
If what has been said so far has any meaning, when we speak of the common as a new
use value that opposes the capitalist rule of profit and command, we come to
understand the current political crisis as one that is eminently political in a strict
sense, as a crisis of government and sovereignty, of modern politics par excellence.
I would rather avoid going back to the crisis of sovereignty and its transformation in
the imperial age here; I have already amply discussed it elsewhere, but with regard to
the crisis of government and its modern figure, it is clear that state administration
has radically changed. It is less the design of a unitary and articulated decision that
descends from the law and more a dynamic, pluralist, and disarticulated system of
decisions, contracts, and conventions established among multiple subjects. Govern-
ance is coming to substitute for government. From the perspective of political
science strictly speaking, we ascertain the same alternative that we found in political
economy: the critique of political economy and the critique of political science are
juxtaposed. If we consider the problem from the point of view of juridical right
(which always presents itself as a formal science and as the coherent prise de
conscience of a singular ordainment), we face the same difficulties: not only does
government detach itself from the juridical qualifications of sovereignty, but
governance and administration assume a distance from constitutional and/or
administrative right, too. To clarify, these transformations occur because there are
surpluses that resist or are placed in alternation with the juridical or administrative
order everywhere. Government is always subjected to this play. You might have won
the elections with a large majority over your adversary, but you will be equally
subjected to the alternatives of governance. Examples of this are numerous and could
include the experiences of constitutive government today (as demonstrated by
Obama). At this point the problem becomes that of understanding whether this
surplus and alternative designs can be brought back to new forms of subsumption
within the renewed structures of sovereignty and capitalist government, or whether
these contradictions could be the basis on which to configure a space for constituent
power. Like Mao we are saying: one divides into two. Obviously the reference to Mao
is entirely ironic, but still effective if we think of the little irony with which the idea
of the political-theological One was proposed, from Jean Bodin to Carl Schmitt,
throughout modernity, and is still being suggested.
This is only a hypothesis. For the time being, we need to understand whether
capitalist command will manage to reconstruct its internal equilibrium within the new
conditions of development and crisis, and whether the subjects that seek a new
common prospect and new figures of liberty and equality will manage to build
institutions able to oppose the structures of government of capital over the common.
It is possible to clearly discern and identify a sort of institutional dualism with a
degree of precision in governance as well as other spaces that were opened by the
weakening of practices of sovereignty at the level of empire. We probably have to
sharpen this dualism and accumulate surplus only on one side of this relation of crisis:
that of the demands of the common.
Balibar: I want to start with an epistemological reflection on the uses of the very
category ‘common’. And I feel the need to try to articulate what Anna and Ceren very
generously pointed to as my signature intervention in these debates with the central
concern about common and communism. The first thing*/and I do not think Toni and
I would disagree on that, or we all agree on that in a sense, witness precisely his
provocative use of the formula ‘communism of capital’*/is that we have to take into
account the fact that the ‘common’ is a category that covers what I tend to call in
French ‘equivocity’ or equivocal meanings: that is, not only a variety of meanings and
applications but a permanent tension between opposite meanings.
And I see at least three directions in which any reflection on the common could go,
which I think are never completely reducible to one another. One has to do with the
issue of ‘universality’ and ‘the universal’. I argued in the past that the notion of the
universal itself was an intrinsically divided and conflictual one, with extensive and
intensive aspects, and, above all, especially in the West, torn between philosophical
and political traditions, centered on the idea of universalizable rights of the
individual person, certainly also linked to a certain homogeneity of the market or a
certain system of equivalences dominating the market, on the one hand, and claims,
attempts at rethinking the universal in a more differentiated and, for that reason,
dialectical, manner, on the other hand. That is the whole problem of the universal of
singularities, which are ultimately rooted in certain deep and enigmatic anthro-
pological differences: sexes, races, and cultures, the oppositions of health and
disease, the whole issue of normality and abnormality, however it becomes defined.
So, to summarize, I see here an essential dimension in which any reflection on the
common has to go, which is roughly speaking the attempt at rethinking the universal
as such in terms of anthropological differences.
For the universal in that sense, which remains essentially a regulative idea, or a
permanent aporia, there is very little chance of coinciding immediately with either
the project of building a state or a system of public institutions, or the problem of
promoting a communitarian dimension of social relations, which takes the many
forms that we know: national, religious, and also revolutionary. These two problems
concern the public, the citizen, whether identified with the state or critical with
respect to a statist dimension*/which has its importance. There would be no rights if
there had been no states in our societies, and the communitarian dimension. Again,
I hardly see how humans could live outside communities, but the problem is that the
communities are mutually incompatible so none of these dimensions is reducible.
Communism is the third and most enigmatic direction in which I see a reflection of
the common to go. Communism is a notion or a name that I would not disown or
abandon myself, if only at the ethical level that you were mentioning, but, more
profoundly perhaps, also at the logical level. The problem with communism, however,
is that it is being not only devaluated and scorned, but profoundly shaken and
internally destroyed by the history of the twentieth century so that any discourse of
communism today not only has to be formulated in terms of an alternative to
exploitation and various forms of oppression*/and, in the end, to capitalism*/but it
must be formulated in terms of an alternative to the alternative as it was historically
realized. If it does not understand the reasons why the communist project based on
Marxian concepts, however distorted, ended in its absolute opposite, it will produce
nothing, or once again it will lead to the worse. That was not because Lenin and Stalin
were bad guys or because Mao was a tricky ruler who fooled the people. The problem
is: why did masses, ‘‘multitudes,’’ understand communism like that and, therefore,
find themselves caught in the incapacity to reorient what they thought was an
emancipatory movement and proved to be a road to hell? So any communism today
has to be alternative to the alternative as well. And it is from that point of view of
course that we all try to rethink communism: Toni does it in his way, by returning to
a Christian inspiration (more precisely Franciscan; this is one great ‘communism’ in
history, the communism of poverty, love, and fraternity); and I do it by returning to
a radical bourgeois or civic form of pre-Marxist communism, the communism of
‘equaliberty’. It is not the communism of the market, of course. It is the communism
of the Levellers, of Blanqui and Babeuf. This is a political idea of communism which
preceded its Marxian fusion with socialism. This is what we are all doing, in the hope
of addressing in a critical manner the equivocities of the notion of the common in our
contemporary world. I repeat the three dimensions any reflection on the common has
to attend: (1) the issue of universality to come, (2) the issue of a public sphere beyond
the state, but not necessarily beyond citizenship or rights, and (3) the issue of how to
deal with communities and their mutual incompatibilities.
Negri: The three proposals Étienne presented to sum up the discussion correctly
address the questions we must concentrate on.
(1) We have to refer the search for a universal quality back to the concrete process
of the construction of the universal and to the Spinozist perspective of a constitution
of ‘common notions’. The epistemological and ontological questions need to be kept

tightly together. (Here I am also referring to the aporia*/that was ‘actually’ not an
aporia*/proposed by Derrida in his Specters of Marx.)
(2) With respect to Étienne’s proposal, I insist that it is important to avoid excluding
the principles of right and citizenship by relegating them to a sphere that, however
common, lies beyond the state; they have to be strictly linked to the new rights of
living labor. If we fail to perform this conjunction, I am afraid that the new rights of
citizenship and equaliberty will cease to exist.
(3) Central to this problem are the making-multitude and building of the common,
not only in the dialectical terms of mediation but also in constituent and ethico-
political terms. Étienne highlights a very difficult problem indeed. It is no less than
the problem of social conflict and its solution, one that needs to be seen in a
continuous perspective up to the ever present hypothesis of civil war. Perhaps, as we
have argued, a realist definition of governance and its internal articulation can help
us to move forward. But I do not believe that the ideas or Utopias of pre-Marxist
socialism and/or communism help us solve this problem any more easily than the
events of the confrontation with the movements inspired by revolutionary Marxism.
Even when democratic radicalism, in a felicitous synthesis with Marxism, is assumed
as the ground on which to build institutions of the common, resistance to exploitation
and the exercise of violence in the construction of liberty and equality could still be
necessary. As Rosa Luxemburg said, irenism and the construction of a democracy of
the oppressed are not always in agreement.
To conclude, the current economic crisis indicates that the overcoming of capitalist
domination might be easier than we ever hoped. So the equilibrium of governance
might be broken or subverted and the ‘common of the multitude’ might have the upper
hand over the ‘communism of capital’. This situation would not be tragic; it would
simply be a democratic solution to the crisis*/even though we are sure that 99 percent
of political scientists and academics who deal with this matter would scream about the
danger of a dictatorship and the threat of socialism (i.e., Stalinism). But it would not be
a dictatorship: it would simply be the hegemony of one pole that has been subordinated
over another which has been dominant until now. Obviously, nobody holds a monopoly
over the rule or the balance of governance, and yet it is up to everyone to
democratically safeguard the rule. Given that political science has extensively
discussed capitalist government, I propose to develop, in line with Étienne’s third
theme, a discussion of the issue of new institutions of the common. It would suffice, for
instance, to start from a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where Hegel develops
the institutions of the objective, bourgeois, and public spirit in three great chapters on
family, civil society, and the state. From the standpoint of the common, I propose to
open a critical debate on the future of the family and its possible destruction as an
instrument of identity in the spheres of education, reproduction, and inheritance (what
a monstrosity!) while facing the economic situation, and to outline more adequate and
happier forms of conjugal and filial relationships. Instead of markets and enterprise,
I propose to discuss social production and its democratic organization; instead of
guilds, unions and the ‘general classes’, I want to talk about the de-structuring of
communication networks and welfare; and finally, in place of possessive individualism,
banks, and financial communism, let us think about new forms of production of man by
man. All this needs to be done until we build and imagine the exercise of constituent
proposals of a new form of right that is no longer public or private, but common. Well,
this seems to me a great work project to be discussed and developed by many.
Balibar: So many things in what Toni has said would deserve elaborated responses!
I will try and imitate his careful enunciation of points of convergence and divergence,
each of them being just elements for a continuation of the discussion. This is in fact
a form of ‘common’ intellectual work. There are five questions (mainly) on which
I would like to continue and from which I would like us to reexamine our tacit
assumptions in the reading of Marx, or in the interpretation of contemporary events.
(1) First there is the dialectical thesis, which Toni resumes (ironically) from Mao:
‘‘One divides into Two.’’ Without such a thesis, there is no possibility of immanent
critique, no politics that radicalizes the contradictions produced by history and reacts
upon them, no liberation of the forces generated by collective experience, and so on.
We agree on that general principle and, in a sense, this is not surprising, given the
Marxian background on which we both work. But clearly there are different ways of
understanding it. One of them was rooted in the juridico-political notion of
‘sovereignty’ (or its reversal in the problematic of the class struggle as civil war,
the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.); it culminated in the idea of ‘double power’
characterizing a more or less interminable ‘phase of transition’. We no longer think
in these terms (and I have to admit that it took me long to understand why it was
inseparable from the catastrophic outcome of the past ‘communist revolutions’).
Another way, probably not so simple itself, is the idea of ‘bifurcation’. I developed it
some years ago on the basis of a fresh reading of Marx’s analysis of ‘reproduction’ and
it seems to me that it is not without affinities with what Toni and Michael Hardt
describe as the opposition between the production of the ‘common’ and the
‘communism of capital’. But indeed this mimetic rivalry should be further discussed.
(2) This leads quite naturally to another point in Toni’s theorization that is quite
fascinating for any Marxist: his description of the ‘excedent’ or ‘surplus’ produced by
the social labor process, which is not quantitative but qualitative, and nevertheless
quantitatively appropriated by the financial capital. As we know, this idea derives
from Marx’s description of the effects of cooperation after the industrial revolution,
but it substitutes financial capital for productive capital as ‘subject’ of the
appropriation. On the one hand, this allows Toni to conflate the idea of the excedent
with another Marxian concept*/namely, the idea that the production process not only
‘produces’ commodities but also ‘reproduces’ the social relationships of production.
Taken together, they lead to the idea that in the current developments of capitalism,
the ‘relations’ that are reproduced in the labor process are, in fact, no longer
capitalist but already ‘communist’, or they recreate ‘commons’. On the other hand,
this leads to the idea that, now that its cycles and trends directly command the labor
process, the function of financial capital is not one of organization of this process,
but only one of plundering its results and political constraint over its agents. A similar
idea was brilliantly developed by Michael Hardt in his contribution to this issue in
terms of the accumulation of financial capital being today more akin to rent than to
profit, therefore external to the collective ‘living labor’. I see this as a deep
ambiguity in their use of the concept of ‘life’, which they use to bridge the distance
between a Marxian notion of living labor and a Foucaultian notion of biopolitics. Life
is simultaneously taken as an ontological category that designates the immanence of
the whole process of production (within which the political moment is organically
included) and an ethical category that authorizes a dualistic antithesis between the
‘living’ and the ‘dead’ (or the artificial, the repressive, the intervention of power,
etc.). I really don’t think that one can blur the ideological tensions of the notion of
‘life’ like this.
(3) I have no difficulty with the idea that there is a directly political element in the
organization of production, which is also an element of struggle and violence. On the
contrary, as I said before, I take it to be one of the most precious and indisputable
legacies of the operaista tradition. Therefore, I also have no objection to the idea
that there is no ‘distance’ between the labor process and the political interventions
of the state, but a direct interaction (again this is something that can be traced back
to Marx in passages that depart from the architectural metaphor of base and
superstructure or the legacy of the Hegelian distinction between civil society and
state). The importance of this idea is enhanced when, like Toni, one insists on the fact
that the production process is no longer enclosed in the space of the ‘factory’ or the
‘workplace’. Something like a new era of ‘putting out’ is taking place, which also
involves a considerable broadening of the category of (living) labor. But when I say,
‘‘I don’t see the politics in Negri,’’ I have another aspect in mind. To me, Toni’s
philosophy represents an extreme form (spectacular for that reason) of the reduction
of ‘society’ to a productive organism, and the understanding of every anthropological
relation (and difference) as a function of human labor (which also involves, of course,
that ‘living labor’ becomes a very complex reality*/in fact, a totalization of the
human). As a consequence, Toni’s attitude with respect to the old problematic of
socialism versus communism is very strange: he criticizes harshly, and rightly in my
view, the idea of a ‘socialist transition’ toward communism (‘‘Goodbye, Mister
Socialism!’’), but he pushes to the extreme the idea that communism, or the
emergence of the common, results from the ‘socialization of the productive forces’
whose ‘final’ stage is reached through the primacy of immaterial over material labor
and the reintegration of the affective dimension into the productive activity. I
strongly object to this, and it is the basis of my remarks on his implicit teleology. It
seems to me both empirically wrong and theoretically ruinous to suppose that all
anthropological differences (sex/gender, normal/pathological, cultural/racial, etc.)
are reducible to differences within ‘labor’ (or, in more ethical terms, ‘production of
man by man’). Although I admit that they constantly interfere in practice, I think that
the anthropological differences remain heterogeneous; there is an essential plurality
of agencies here or, in Althusserian jargon, overdetermination: not so much the
overdetermination of base and superstructure, but the overdetermination of social
relations themselves. For that reason, I refer ‘politics’ not only to the element of
conflict, but to the diversity of struggles, emancipatory values, collective agencies of
which the ‘social producer’, however important, is only one. This is also one of the
reasons why I believe that contemporary radicals (including Toni himself, in fact)
‘return’ to pre-Marxist models of communism: it is also a way of disentangling the
question of the common from the onto-teleological absolutism of labor (and, indeed,
I do not agree that ‘equaliberty’ is an expression of the logic of exchange value; this
was Marx’s reductionist understanding of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition from

which he wanted to distantiate himself).
(4) This would lead us to another interesting confrontation on the issue of
institution and its relationship to what I called the model of bifurcation. I welcome
the idea that, not only should communists make ‘propositions’, appear as a ‘creative’
force (not only a ‘reactive’ or even a ‘resisting’ force), but these propositions should
concern alternative institutions. Perhaps this insistence on institutions, and the
disjunction of the institutional dimensions of politics from an ‘artificialist’ view, is
something that comes from Hume, through the intermediary of Deleuze. But it also
has a Spinozist and Rousseauist dimension. Marxism, traditionally, has been almost
unable to cope with the dilemmas of the institution (for example, participation versus
representation), even when these played a key role in its own political experiences
(the ‘party’, the ‘social movement’, the ‘councils’, etc.). All this clearly relates to
the reunification of the issues of communism and democracy that we both advocate
(with several others: Rancière, for example). Then comes the institutional problem of
governance and its tendency to substitute ‘sovereign power’ in the construction of
the political space of capitalism; therefore, also the interpretation of the changes
produced by globalization, and the virtual bifurcation of a neoliberal governance and
a governance of the multitude (which essentially for Toni would be its self-
organization or its self-institution: are we really far here from somebody like
Castoriadis?). We certainly must have a thorough discussion on governance and
‘governmentality’. I agree that the figures of the political are currently changing,
that the role of the nation-state, as it was maximized by the Keynesian welfare state,
is challenged by other structures based on networks rather than territory. But I am
amazed at the idea proposed by Toni that financial and transnational governance
should be, if not exactly less violent than imperialist state power, at least a more
favorable condition for the institution of communism, as the financial crisis would
demonstrate. Again the metaphysics of the virtual autonomy of the multitude
preempts concrete analysis. Not only does it seem to me that the introduction of
these forms of governance, and the corresponding technocratic discourse, now all-
pervading, has not purely and simply eliminated the political centrality of the state
and its ‘territorializing function’ (the crisis also demonstrates that), but I believe that
neoliberal governance develops forms of ‘real subsumption’ of individuality under
capitalist relations, which also have psychological dimensions, or generate ‘voluntary
servitude’. So, I don’t really believe that a communist politics has become easier or
more spontaneous than it ever was. Hopefully it is not, in fact, the opposite: a
communist politics has become more difficult. In any case, this is a violent internal
contradiction to cope with, if the discourse of the ‘common’ is not to appear wishful
thinking.
(5) My question finally*/the one I would hope we would keep thinking about when
speaking of democratic forces or anticapitalist movements in this ‘globalized’
world*/would be the following: not ‘‘what is communism?’’ (how is it defined? how
is it ontologically grounded? what are its material or immaterial bases?), but rather,
‘‘who are the communists?’’ (therefore also where are they? what are they doing?).
I cannot but remind you that the final section of the Communist Manifesto is devoted
not to a definition of communism but to a ‘pragmatic’ answer to this interrogation:
who are the communists*/that is, what distinguishes them from ‘‘other parties of
opposition,’’ and what do they support or stand for? This is in many respects the most
political moment in Marx’s way of writing about communism, even if it does not
exhaust the theoretical questions. It also suggests that ‘the common’ is essentially
the result of a political practice, located in a specific historical conjuncture, or in
a ‘difference of times’, especially through Marx’s insistence on the fact that the
‘communist party’ does not so much propose its own agenda as reveal the possible
unity of all the ‘movements’ against the dominant order. It seems to me that this
attitude is well worth imitating in our current discussions of a communist revival
beyond the ‘catastrophe’ of ‘really existing socialism’. Of course the communists,
defined in practical terms, are not necessarily where the name Communism is
invoked. We can also try to reflect on how we would reformulate what Marx
designated as the two crucial dimensions of this politics: the critique of property, and
the internationalist attitude. For Marx, their unity was grounded in the situation of
the proletariat, but this has become very problematic for us and much too narrow in
terms of defining the forms of exploitation and oppression against which to revolt.
Beyond the critique of property, there exists a problem of inventing the modalities of
‘sharing’ the means of existence and distributing the subjective dimensions of life
between the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ poles of personality, both necessary
(this is in particular where I believe that ‘equaliberty’ remains an important idea).
And beyond internationalism, a reiteration of the old cosmopolitan ideal that did not
tackle the roots of nationalism, tribalism, racism, religious antagonism (because Marx
thought that these ‘ideologies’ no longer mattered to the proletarians), there exists
a problem of creating a new cosmopolitanism that, in particular, transforms the clash
of cultures into a mutual capacity of translation. I am tempted to say that the
‘communists’, however they call themselves, are those who practically contribute to
these goals, which perhaps are not entirely isolated.
Negri: I would like to conclude without concluding, just to put forward some brief
comments on Balibar’s conclusions.
(1) OK, Balibar’s interpretation is right: Mao’s thesis, ‘‘one divides into two,’’ is not
dialectical; it is a bifurcation. The path, not just the path we walk on, but the
direction objectively bifurcates. Given the situation determined by the accumulation
of surpluses of immaterial, cognitive and affective labor, capital finds it harder and
harder to operate a fixed synthesis between its command and the autonomous
development of labor power.
(2) OK, Balibar’s position on this point seems correct, but rather than a contra-
diction we should see it as a condition. Life is the ontological substratum where each
human event unfolds. Life is the immanence of every behavior, but also the place
where every value emerges. To live is good; it is the ethical goal. The enemy presents
itself as, and consists of, anything that deprives life of its potency and returns it to
death. Life is good, evil is non-life. I think that there is something of Spinoza in this
affirmation.
(3) As above. Society is certainly a productive synergy and becomes so more
intensively as the capitalist artifice and manipulation of life controls, models, and
blocks productive powers. But this capitalist invasion of life is nonetheless a productive
relation, that is, an antagonistic relation. The capitalist invasion of life augments, and
does not eliminate, the antagonism of social relations. Here, it would be easy to object
that when there is no manifest political opposition, this antagonism cannot be seen. But
I see it as a possibility, a tendency and the accumulation of forces that forewarn of a
resolutory event. It is worth pointing out that in this widening of the scope of capitalist
domination and around the primitive and originary labor power resistance to capitalist
exploitation, other human activities (against colonial power, gender domination, etc.),
behaviors that arise as antagonistic figures, posit themselves in the position (and
eventually as the option) to resist. If equaliberty could in praxis develop as a tendency
to recompose resisting subjectivities, this would be good news.
(4) Subjects organize themselves as institutions along the line of exodus that
prolongs the bifurcation. In the biopolitical realm, subjects always appear as
institutions (production of subjectivity, accumulation of subjectivity, multitude of
singularities); if they didn’t, they would be mere shadows (like fetishes inside
capitalist domination, as Derrida taught us). In the biopolitical realm, subjects are
never individuals; they are always ensembles of resistance. Here lies the difficulty of
seeing the constitution of subjects as a transindividual process. This constitution is
certainly determined by a horizontal relationship between ‘individualities’ (subjects,
singularities, etc.), but it is also overdetermined by the surplus of this encounter. And
to add a last remark: we are not from the Frankfurt School; we do not experience real
subsumption as a destiny. Rather than linear, real subsumption is always fragmented
and discontinuous. We see it as a contradictory process where the relation between
action and reaction, and resistance and oppression, is never given once and for all; it
is always open. Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx, and the operaists have always refused
teleology (especially catastrophism). For us, resistance is the key to all development.
(5) We seem to be more or less in agreement on this too, but my problem as a
communist is not only seizing power, but also what to do with it once it’s seized (and
the whole history of class struggle, both before and after the seizure of power, is
clearly a process of transition from this standpoint). So, what to do with power? Our
discussion on communism starts here. In addition, I am convinced that we need to
solve two fundamental problems: property and internationalism. And on these points
we must face some difficulties: how to build the common and institute it within
democratic structures, how to overcome public as well as private law and invent new
figures of the constitution and the expression of the common. The same applies to the
shift ‘beyond internationalism and toward a cosmopolitical common’, so to speak.
This poses the problems of peace and freedom of commerce, of the defense of the
environment and the conquest of space, of the fight against misery and death, and so
on. The need for a world association of states that goes much deeper than the
internationalism of the past two centuries is already asserted in the current
constitutions of the ‘communism of capital’. The questions inherent to ‘being
communists’ today are those of how to govern the exodus from capitalism, push the
bifurcation outside the two, in multiplicity, to conquer a form of life where the
common can develop and constitute itself as a web of singular rights. These questions
constitute communist militancy not simply as problems, but as the fields, tensions,
and desires of political experience.
Acknowledgments
This conversation, in which Toni Negri participated through videoconference, was
the opening address at ‘‘The Common and Forms of the Commune: Alternative Social
Imaginaries,’’ a symposium held at Duke University, 9/10 April 2009. Through a series
of subsequent exchanges, the authors have revised and expanded on the original
transcript, the result of which is the text that appears in this issue. Arianna Bove
translated Toni Negri’s section of the conversation from Italian.
References
Balibar, É. 1994. Masses, classes, ideas: Studies on politics and philosophy before and
after Marx. Trans. J. Swenson. New York: Routledge.
*/**/ /. 2002. Politics and the other scene. New York: Verso.
Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
*/**/ /. 2005. Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin.
*/**/ /. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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On the Common, Universality, and Communism: A Conversation between

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On the Common, Universality, and

Introduction by Anna Curcio and

Key Words: Communism, the Common, Equaliberty, Economic Crisis, Readings of

When we contemplated this event, our desire was to facilitate a conversation

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030312-17

the presupposition and the product of social cooperation. It is a potential of

A particular argument proposed in Multitude and further developed in Common-

Conversation between Toni Negri and Étienne Balibar

assumed as the material condition of a juridical and/or constitutional conjuncture

Étienne Balibar: I will return to the issue of equaliberty. I am always a little

Negri: First, I do not believe that historical materialism is a constrictive ontology, a

of ‘common notions’. The epistemological and ontological questions need to be kept

was Marx’s reductionist understanding of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition from

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