Commonwealth is an important book. It’s important because, despite the end of the expansive cycle of globalization of the ‘90s, it updates and improves the analyses of Empire and Multitude, radicalizing the theoretical and political results of these first two works on the horizon of the crisis. As far as I am concerned, there are three decisive elements in Commonwealth. The first is the idea, developed in the UniNomade research network, of the becoming rent of profit. Contemporary turbocapitalism, the capitalism of international finance, is a purely parasitic one. Confined to the margins of social cooperation by the struggles that came before the logic of the globalization of capital – a globalization that should be understood as the response to the mass exodus from the factory regime in the West and, in the rest of the world, as an attempt to connect productive relations to controlled valorization, irreducible to the one of Fordist management – capital became finance, a machine of general indebtedness, a vampiric capture of living labor’s biopolitical production. This passage should be understood as a decisive passage for contemporary capitalism. It marks a territory, a battlefield where two forces face off, one against the other: a productive potency that is pure immanence of cooperation (networks, sharing circuits, the entrepreneurship of the precarious general intellect) and a capturing device that tries to break, trap and de-potentialize the autonomy of that potency. Here we find the second relevant element in Commonwealth. It concerns the transformations of the institutional structures that accompany this passage. The scenario designed by the progressive evanescence of the nation-state, in the framework of globalization, is also the scenario of the erosion of the category of sovereignty and its legal correlates. This also marks a decisive shift. The processes of revolutionary subjectivation of our present have a connotation of exodus and have, for sometime already, given up the idea of taking power. Michel Foucault learned this, as a Kantian “characterizing sign”, from the anti-systemic movements in the second half of the ‘70s. Irreducible to the one of control, on the level of the organization of labor, because cooperative production overflows from the factory walls, invading the entire metropolitan space and, on a political level, because this class composition is structurally unrepresentable. The multitude abandons the territory fenced off by the incumbent Sovereign: it doesn’t close its potency in the fortress of a counter-power, but gives its autonomy an immediately constituent project. This project is the definition of a free institutionality that exceeds the classic distinction between public and private and that marks the definitive end of the 20th century. Commonwealth’s prospective is neither anarchical nor socialist. It doesn’t reason in terms of individual or “private” liberty, nor in terms of “public” institutions to be defended from the neoliberal assault, because the genealogy of the “public”, as the socialist 20th century has shown, coincides with an expropriation at least as radical as capitalist expropriation. It is not by chance that the power devices, at least starting with the debate on the crisis of democracy induced by the excess of claims that struck representative institutions in the ‘60s and ‘70s, progressively governmentalized themselves; that is to say they assumed the form of a multilevel governance. This means, once again, co-opting institutional dialogue, after having opportunely filtered the organizations and claims of civil society; of breaking down, with the objectives of control and government in mind, the confines between state and civil society, between public and private. This transformation, which is currently in crisis because the multitude and its movements are structurally ungovernable, is irreversible. The common is defined by the institutionalization of living labor’s autonomy in free and democratic relations in an absolute democracy because it immediately corresponds to the immanence of the trajectories of political subjectivation of needs and desires in that node of singularity that we have called “multitude”. An autonomy that isn’t afraid of constituting itself while facing those who govern with the pretext of inciting it and controlling it through its own resistance. That this idea isn’t a utopia is demonstrated by the interesting experiments of “governance” from the grassroots of South America (Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil) or on the Indian subcontinent. Interesting works have been writing by Alvaro de Linera and Ranabir Samaddar on these questions. The third decisive element in Commonwealth, in my opinion, is the idea of the metropolis. With it, Negri and Hardt intend a space of production and circulation of value that wholly redesigns traditional political cartography. Saskia Sassen, in her work on the deconstruction and restructuring of political spatiality talks about the “unbuilding” of an assemblage of territory, authority and rights historically realized by the nation-state. She also speaks of the way that, as space contested between territorialization of exploitation and ruptures created by struggles, a new map of global politics is constituted. Commonwealth puts this retracing of spatial categories – starting with the processes of subjectivation that determine it from below – into focus. This means analyzing and organizing the transnational spaces of the circulation of value and social struggles. They call “metropolis” not the big cities, according to a plan that would end up reproducing a hierarchy between urban and rural spaces, between center and periphery, but inside a field of relations between control and insurgence that “has no outside”, a striated space where the battle between a technical composition of capital that exploits networks and financial concentrations of wealth and a political composition of a mestizo, precarious, cognitive class that makes subjective use of mobility, of flight, of speed and of nomadism. The excedence of contemporary living labor, its irreducibility to value measurement, impedes its territorialization within national spaces, within factory walls, and within traditional welfare systems where the 19th century Fordist compromise was consummated. The metropolis is the transnational scenario of the right to precarious flight. The place of making-multitudes and organizing the common.

translated by Jason Francis McGimsey

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