Abstract
One of the main points of contention in the current debates surrounding Marxism has been the problem of finding a concrete substrate, which would orient the recuperation of the communist political strategy. Are there impasses in our contemporary society which justify the use of such a polemical notion as communism? Most authors currently involved with this debate agree that it is the problem of the “commons" under capitalism, which calls for a new theory and practice of communism. Where they disagree is on what the “commons” are and on how they exist within capitalism itself. The present contribution seeks to intervene on this debate and spell out the categorial recomposition of some fundamental aspects of Marxist critique of political economy implicitly at stake in Slavoj Žižek’s theorization of the “antagonisms of the common”. Taking up the insight of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt concerning the new centrality of the enclosure of the commons in contemporary capitalism, Žižek has developed an alternative—more sober—view of the structural subsumption of these common spaces to the dynamics of Capital, where the very communal dimension of these domains only appear as common after they have been privatized. To extract the consequences of this assertion, we will first reconstruct the Marxist theory of enclosures in a comparative reading of the first volume of Capital and Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation. This will lead us to a broader discussion of the contemporary transformations in capitalism, with a focus on the crisis of value as primarily sustained by absolute surplus-value extraction. With an understanding of the idea of the commons and a historical background of our current predicament, we will be in position to follow Antonio Negri’s reading of how the enclosure of the commons leads to a new communist strategy and also to criticize it, using Slavoj Zizek’s alternative understanding of our contemporary social antagonisms. Following through Zizek's reading of the logic of enclosures, we come to the conclusion that, first, unemployment has the structure of an enclosure, one which is responsible for the very form of the work commodity—as it was already suggested by Fredric Jameson and others—and, second, that, from a certain philosophical perspective shared by thinkers such as Zizek and Badiou, this realization can lead us to an innovative recuperation of the Marxist theory of “generic being”, proposed by Marx in his Manuscripts of 1844.
Highlights
One of the main points of contention in the current debates surrounding Marxism has been the problem of finding a concrete substrate, which would orient the recuperation of the communist political strategy
Alain Badiou introduced a great deal of clarity into the debate over how to critically assess the history of radical emancipatory politics in the XXth century by distinguishing three different dimensions of egalitarian political projects (Badiou, 2010): the communist hypothesis—a general and unlocalized commitment to the principle of equality—the idea of communism—different and situated formulations of this principle, articulated under concrete historical constraints—and the communist experiments—political sequences which put these different "incarnations" of the communist idea to the test, producing lasting examples and challenges for those who might seek to reformulate the hypothesis under new historical conditions later on
It was by considering the brute social reality of early capitalism that these political thinkers defended that another sort of communal life was possible, unlike both the communities organized under decaying feudal rule and the emerging "civilized" world of the bourgeois cities
Summary
Alain Badiou introduced a great deal of clarity into the debate over how to critically assess the history of radical emancipatory politics in the XXth century by distinguishing three different dimensions of egalitarian political projects (Badiou, 2010): the communist hypothesis—a general and unlocalized commitment to the principle of equality—the idea of communism—different and situated formulations of this principle, articulated under concrete historical constraints—and the communist experiments—political sequences which put these different "incarnations" of the communist idea to the test, producing lasting examples and challenges for those who might seek to reformulate the hypothesis under new historical conditions later on. There seems to be an uncanny element of repetition here, as the idea of communism espoused by utopian socialists took the very thing that had been lost through that initial wave of primitive accumulation—communal properties—as the standpoint of their positive view of an alternative society—communal collective life—while the new idea of communism espoused by the defenders of the multitude take the very thing that is being currently privatized—cultural creation of knowledge—as the basis for their strategic view of a "communism of the commons" Just as it was the process of dispossession of land and labour which gave the defenders of the commune the idea that sharing— the lost—land and labour could counteract the capitalist tendency towards social mediation through commodity exchange, the view that culture can produce an immediate form of social link, binding citizens together as producers and consumers of collective forms of life (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 103–115), can only emerge as a possible social common ground after the commons of culture have been privatized.
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