The French Commonwealth

The excellent website La Vie des Idées has just posted a review of Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth written by Stéphane Haber. The review is positive, but brief and aware of the difficulty of reviewing such a book briefly. It makes none the less some interesting points that I want to summarize here yet more briefly.

First, Haber notes the strong engagement with, or return to, what might be called the technical vocabulary of Marxism. Hardt and Negri find themselves in a moment somewhat different from that of Empire or Multitude, in which, “apparemment, il ne faut plus craindre le reproche traditionnel d’économicisme.” Their critique of capitalism is a communist critique. Haber’s summation of Hardt and Negri’s basic economic diagnosis of the contemporary world gets, I think, only half the picture. It is rightly pointed out that, somewhat problematically, Hardt and Negri put ‘immaterial production’ at the center of the contemporary economy. It seems to me that their analysis of the turn to rent, as opposed to surplus value, as a source of capitalist profit, is also of enormous importance. For them, the contemporary world is typified by capital’s tendency to capture the product of the common—the new enclosure. This is important not least because it suggests that we are, perhaps, on the way to (rather than in the midst of) a revolution in the mode of production.

Haber’s comments are organized into three fundamental thematics: production, the critique of capitalism, and the philosophy of poverty.

The essential objection in the realm of production is that, it seems, it tends to include potentially everything. What Haber calls Spinozist, and what I myself would call a Bergsonian, monism includes everything. This seems to bother Haber—I can’t say that it bothers me:

Le schème du travail, relayant le monisme spinoziste, permet ainsi de couper court aux tergiversations : le monde (y compris dans celles de ses composantes que nous sommes tentés de qualifier de « naturelles »), tout comme nous-mêmes, sommes toujours déjà pris dans le cercle de la production inventive et collective dont « nature » et « société » ne forment que des moments isolés par abstraction. Tout cela ne manque pas d’allure, philosophiquement parlant. Mais la question reste posée de savoir si un écologisme quelque peu articulé (ne serait-ce que sous la forme d’une préoccupation minimale pour le « développement durable »), en tant qu’inévitablement orienté en direction de la préservation d’un environnement existant, peut trouver son compte dans une telle élaboration. Il lui faudra bien, ouvertement ou en catimini, une ontologie qui ménage une place à ce qui vient avant le travail humain. Voilà qui symbolise sans doute la difficulté du parti-pris néoproductiviste, si immatérialisé soit-il.

If I understand Haber correctly—and things are compressed here, I am writing on the fly, so perhaps I do not—then it seems to me that he misses the whole force of refusing to partition ‘the natural’ from ‘the human.’ Radical ecology is not the recognition that we must protect mother nature, but rather the recognition that there is no mother nature, that we must regulate ourselves for ourselves—in fact, radical ecology is clearly a critique of capital or, better put, a critique of capital is radical ecology. The point is that nothing comes before human labor—this is precisely why it is so important to understand the limits internal to this labor and its social formations. David Harvey makes a similar point about the inclusion of ecology within the critique of capital in the new preface to his big book. This brings us to Haber’s next point.

Hardt and Negri conduct a rigorously immanent critique of capitalism. Haber finds it unusual: “Ce qu’il y a sans doute de plus étonnant dans leur livre, c’est le sérieux avec lequel Hardt et Negri prennent au pied de la lettre le mot d’ordre de la « critique immanente ».” So immanent is the critique, in fact, that it turns out not to be sufficiently critical for Haber of life as it is lived ‘under capitalism.’ What is wanted and not supplied is a treatment of alienation (as we would find in the Frankfurt school, or on the contemporary French left in so many places—the comité invisible, say).

Ainsi, le passage au communisme suppose non pas la réinvention de régulations (dans le style d’ATTAC) ou la promotion d’institutions économiques nouvelles (une position actuellement défendue par la social-démocratie associationniste), mais la libération des forces productives existantes qui, d’elles-mêmes, s’assumant elles-mêmes, se soustrayant au pseudo-soutien que leur offre le capital tel qu’il existe aujourd’hui (en fait une force de contrainte et de parasitage) sont censées pouvoir favoriser l’avènement de la société désirable.

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Hardt et Negri critiquent non pas l’autonomie aliénante du capitalisme comme « système » (inhumain, anonyme, poussé à l’autoreproduction élargie constante, délié de la volonté et de l’intelligence etc.), mais cet aspect bien particulier du capitalisme qu’est la privatisation, c’est-à-dire en fait la sous-utilisation, des richesses produites en commun, un « vol » qui est d’ailleurs aussi censé expliquer la misère des exclus.

Haber is put off by this lack. It seems to me to be one of the signal virtues of the book. Capitalism is productive, and not only of misery (which Hardt and Negri hardly ignore), but also of possibility and innovation (although that word has been co-opted by CAppleitism). Haber recognizes that this perspective connects Hardt and Negri to the Proudhonian tradition—this is a tradition that seems to me, in parts, salvageable.

Lastly, Haber recognizes that Commonwealth takes the human suffering inflicted by capital as its starting point. How is this done, how might it be done? After discussing several possibilities, Haber describes the one in which Hardt and Negri can be located:

Un intersubjectivisme participationniste. Ici, les conditions de vie décentes, non-misérables, sont considérées comme faisant partie des supports empiriques d’une délibération digne de ce nom. Présupposé dans ces approches, l’argument trivial selon lequel on n’est pas prêt à bien délibérer lorsque l’on est dans le besoin suffit à la fois à emporter la conviction et à orienter la discussion. L’idéal d’une participation démocratique inclusive et authentique y forme donc le point de vue à partir duquel les situations socioéconomiques concrètes se trouvent évaluées. Dans le champ contemporain, Habermas a fourni une légitimation influente de ce genre d’approches d’aspect plus républicaniste.

Republican is right. One might also describe this, nodding to Petit: ‘freedom as (collective?) non-domination.’ But, for Haber, problems arise because the authors of Commonwealth link this collective participation not necessarily to fundamental bare-life issues such as drinking water or rule of law, but rather to participation in bio-political production. This is indeed difficult. It seems to me here that, on the one hand, Hardt and Negri are being faithful to a certain relativism in Marx, one that might be shorthanded as ‘time socially necessary.’ On the other hand, it is unjust to first admit that the authors begin with the problem of human misery, and then object when they subtract misery as such from the solution to the problem. This may be related to Haber’s relative discounting of the shift from a regime in which profit is based on the extraction of surplus value to one in which it rests on rent. It is not, it seems to me, empirically unrealistic to say—with many ‘official economists’—that poverty is the result of not-enough globalization. This ‘not-enough’ is required by capital. Remove it, and you allow the fruits of production to be distributed in a more egalitarian way.

Haber’s review, I think, hits many of the right points. Its incompleteness should be ascribed to its length rather than anything else. The final word of the review is positive and, it seems to me, rightly points out that the most appealing aspect of Hardt and Negri’s work is the attempt to grapple with the empirical reality of new economic formations in a critical and even revolutionary philosophical mode. The clear (although unnamed) foil here is Badiou. I’ll reproduce the last lines:

Les difficultés de la position défendue par Hardt et Negri forment la contrepartie de leur façon nette et décidée de répondre à cette exigence, et c’est pour cela que, sûrement, elle jouera à juste titre un rôle important dans la discussion contemporaine. Ne serait-ce que parce que, en ce qu’elle a de plus intéressante pour nous, l’impulsion marxienne a plus de chance de survivre dans une tentative sincère pour concevoir les transformations du travail et de l’exploitation que dans une quelconque spéculation déliée sur l’essence du Communisme comme Exigence pure.