Communism already exists. Communism does not yet exist.

This is also preliminary. A few thoughts for now to be developed later.

I’ll begin on an affirmative note. I appreciate the emphasis on the common as the terrain of struggle.

I was curious to see how the book has been received and found a review in the Wall Street Journal. It ends: “COMMONWEALTH is a dark, evil book, and it is troubling that it appears under the prestigious imprimatur of Harvard University Press. Countless millions were slaughtered by adherents of Karl Marx in the 20th century. God help us if the scourge returns in the 21st.” It is telling that confronted with this dark, evil book, the reviewer is especially concerned with “the prestigious imprimatur” that grants it legitimacy. In other words, if the book were merely common it would be of little concern, but the fact that it is granted prestige offends the guardians of culture whose livelihoods are structured around partitions in the common.

Like a number of pieces in mainstream papers and magazines since the economic crisis, the WSJ review begins by incredulously announcing that Marx is “back in fashion” much the way that we are told that Ayn Rand is once again having her day. If Marx is being read and written about more frequently post-bailout that is probably a good thing, but I don’t know what that has to do with fashion. Of course Marxism, as the critique of capitalism, never went away, but more interestingly what seems to be gaining traction yet again is the use of the word “communism” to refer not to something that has failed but a promise of a better way of life. (It is more interesting because more naive.) In other words, COMMONWEALTH can be seen as a contribution to what Badiou calls “the communist hypothesis.” For Badiou, this first takes a minimal, negative form—namely, that the logic of the division of labor, class division, exploitation, private property, etc. is not inevitable. As a hypothesis or idea of generic equality, it contains no program or recipe for politics. It merely marks a precondition or axiom of political thought.

H & N’s book is of course called COMMONWEALTH not “Communism.” There is an emphasis then on longue durée as well as an avoidance of the connotations that accrue around “Communism” as ideology, party, nation-state…; the “-ism” perhaps implying within the name itself the “corruptions” that attend a robust notion of the multitude organized around the common. The “poor” in place of the proletariat serves a similar function. It is an ordinary word with a long political history but also vague enough as to be flexible, heterogeneous and inclusive.

The posts by Wesamtgunstkerk and Trew Leveller both raise the question of how the figure of the multitude is or becomes political and this seems to be both the focus of the book and the question it never answers. The multitude designates a non-liberal form of pluralism, a democratic figure not defined by hegemony or consensus but the common as a constellation of singularities. But if the multitude always already exists not as a static entity but in a process of becoming, its political organization or its becoming-revolutionary obviously remains a potentiality that’s not-yet-actualized. Otherwise, no need for the book itself or that “training” that they tell us is necessary (a term MRK rightly flags that, at the very least, begs more explanation). This is a recurrent problem in Western Marxism usually framed in explicitly dialectical terms. To use the old familiar language, the multitude has to go from in-itself to for-itself, it has to become self-conscious. Granted the “self” or body of the multitude as revolutionary figure is not a unity and the desired consciousness is not a matter of knowledge but of event, but this process still remains to be thought—this passage, or crossing of threshold, which seems to necessitate an awareness or consciousness of the common as distilled from its corrupt forms. Of course, it cannot merely be thought, it must be produced or created, but it’s hard to escape the feeling in COMMONWEALTH that this production of the new proceeds from some moment of awareness, some inversion of perspective in which the poor, the monstrous and the excessive is grasped as productive, beautiful and common. But this inversion cannot be merely a reversal, it cannot take a form that power recognizes. It must be a genuine alternative. There is then a hesitation or oscillation: Resistance is immanent to power (i.e. there is no outside) and yet we must negotiate an alternative that escapes the double-bind of binary oppositions (we must get outside). Again this logic of the immanent break is very familiar to the history of dialectical thought in Western Marxism despite H & N’s insistence that they are somehow free of this logic. (I don’t mean this as a criticism except of their tendency to dismiss dialectical thought. I have never understood the implication that all dialectical thought is somehow in league with transcendence and party politics.) The logic of immanence demands that Revolution is simply subtraction and the term they use for subtracting the common is exodus, but again a new organization of the multitude has to come into being before this exodus will find its moment.

This leads me to what I find least compelling in Hardt and Negri’s project. To pick up on the thread raised by MRK, what I am most dubious of is the folding together of politics, ethics and ontology. As Wesamtgunstkerk suggests, politics itself may get lost here as it hovers ambiguously between this shift of perspective or recognition and the real revolutionary movement of bodies that is not thinkable as such but still to come in some future event (whatever the emphasis on the immanent power of the multitude in its current manifestation). And while I too have some solidarity for the vision of Spinozan love described so nicely by Trew Leveller, I am rather hesitant to embrace a politics grasped in terms of sickness and health in which exploitation and oppression are identified as merely blockages or corruptions of love. Generic equality is not a question of love nor can it be made into a program. It is a hypothesis that can be actualized in specific instances that rupture regimes of sense or divisions of bodies but do nothing to confirm the latent potentiality of Being.