Commonwealth is a fundamental contribution to the new horizons of political struggle in the 21st century because it attempts to answer the question most asked of social movements: what are we fighting for?Since at least the end of the Second World War, most western political thought has been deeply characterized by negative metaphysics. In a vain search for a pure essence of the individual, society, or being itself, many have tried to “strip away” the falsities of life, representation, or capitalist exploitation. Innumerable thinkers have attempted to reach some deep, metaphysical truth obscured by the veil of modern civilization. In the end, these negative tendencies can, in the best instances, answer the question “what are we fighting against?”. In the worst, they are simply reactionary. The greatest political challenge of the 21st century is understanding what we are struggling for and overcoming this antimodernist block.
Commonwealth attempts just that. Similar to the radical shift posed in the thought of Italian
operaismo in the 1960s and 1970s where the protagonism of workers’ struggles in the transformation of capital is stressed, here we find an ontology (rooted in Spinoza and Deleuze) that highlights the productive capacity of living labor in the production of subjectivity and the real creation of another modernity, “altermodernity”. This fundamental shift puts the struggle for liberation not
against a dominant capitalist exploitation but rather exposes capitalist exploitation’s parasitical nature of life as a marginal force. Once again, the
potentia of human beings is re-centered on the stage of political thought while capitalism is forced to attempt to capture value
ex post from socially produced wealth. Here, common production is the basis of the world and exploitation is what is struggling.
Liberation, then, is achieved not through subtraction from contemporary life and society but though
exceeding it. Producing, creating, relating, interacting, organizing, expressing: these are the keywords we find at the horizon of liberation, these are the constituent practices that can build stalwart social and political institutions of the common able to exclude capitalist exploitation. As the most recent wave of struggles demonstrate – crossing the globe from North Africa, across Europe and the Middle East, all the way to the heart of finance on Wall Street – we are no longer fighting against something but instead fighting for what is already ours: everything.
