The first volume of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's trilogy was a theoretical event and at the same time the discursive machine of the anti-globalization movement.The concatenation of
Empire with the developing movement of the criticism of globalization was not at all a simple linear connection.
Empire wasn't a blueprint for the struggles on the turn of the century, a theoretical model to be followed by new social movements of the revolutionary multitude. And reversely, the book was not simply an early interpretation and a historical classification of this ambivalent social and political figure. On the contrary, both the discursive machine around
Empire and the social machine that since the late 90s was being formed in the protests against IMF, World Bank and G7, incessantly generated effects of overlapping, intersection and exchange.
Ten years later Hardt and Negri ignite this machine once again with a new, heavyweight notion: yet, the common definitely has a stronger genealogy, both from the point of view of politics and the philosophy of history, than the two first notions that gave titles to
Empire and
Multitude. Its genealogical lines are rooted both in the community-discourses on the right and, first and foremost, in the various debates on the left around the
communitas, communes and communism. The strategy not to remove these strands, but to introduce them into the postmarxist and poststructuralist positions of the authors and to transgress them, makes up one of the strengths of
Commonwealth.
As the authors write in the Preface, the common is on the one hand „the common wealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature's bounty – which in classical European political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole“ ((M. Hardt, A. Negri,
Commonwealth, Cambridge MA 2009, p. VII.)) . On the other, and this is the aspect stressed by Hardt and Negri, the common encompasses „those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledge, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth.“ ((Ibidem, p. VIII.)) . This second perspective sees the common as the practices of interaction, care and aid, of living together in a common world. Hence we should understand the common as those practices that do not comprehend humanity as separated from nature, either according to the logic of exploitation or protection.
On these two levels
Commonwealth can be interpreted as an ending to the trilogy that correlates with the fading of the anti-globalization movement: a further start-up to actualize post-operaist theory and to enrich it with new theoretical currents (in this case mostly queer, feminist and postcolonial concepts). Yet, the talk about the end of the anti-globalization movement is taken in by all too simple ideas of cycles of struggles and submerges the various changes, passages and trajectories of the different social movements (probably already since 1968, doubtlessly since the 90s).
On the contrary, taking into account the continuities of such movements as those of the Zapatistas, of anti-globalization, social fora, precarious workers and student occupations, the discourse about the end is nothing more than a pathetic phantasy of rupture. From this perspective
Commonwealth not only constitutes an end of a trilogy, but also marks the beginning of a new boom of social struggles connected to all those movements.
In the course of the whole book one can discern a third aspect of the common, apart from the two prevalent meanings introduced in the preface, one that picks the issue of the concatenation between the singular streams of a multiplicity as a central theme: the common as a self-organization of the social relations. Self-organization should not be understood here in any way as a simple empirical fact or a naturlike automatism, but as the political project of the instituting the common. This instituent practice of producing the common implies, on the one hand, that the common cannot be perceived as a being-common, but as a becoming- common, as a production of the common. And it implies also, that the common and the singularities are co-emergent, not only compatible, but constituting each other.
It is this kind of constituent and instituent practices of the common that is at stake in the occupy movements of the year 2011. In all their differences the occupations from Tunis to Tel Aviv, from Cairo to Oakland, from the Greek insurgencies to the Spanish M-15-movement, from occupy wallstreet to occupy moscow show similarities that find their focal point in the common experiments with the precarious modes of life, with orgic forms of organization and reappropriation of space and time, in the sense of the production of new machines of the common.
