Common

Definition

Peter Linebaugh:

“Common has an extraordinary range of meaning in English, and several of its particular meanings are inseparable from a still active social history,” says the 20th century critic, Raymond Williams.3 The root word is “communis, Latin, derived alternatively, from com-, Latin – together and manis, Latin – under obligation, and from com- and unus, Latin – one.” It thus points to either “a specific group or to the generality of mankind.” (http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=98)

Source: Semantical-Historical Paths of Communism and Commons

Discussion

Michel Bauwens

More and more the concept of the common seems to become a third term, alongside the private and the collective.

The common consists of a series of inalienable rights that are hold by all individuals, rather than collective aspects governed by a separate sovereign body, and different from the individualized/privatized aspects of existence.

The difference is explained in our entry on Common Rights, from an article by Dan Sullivan.

It translates into new forms of Common Property that has it own rules and theory, applying to Common Goods and Common Pool Resources, sometimes governed by specialized Common Good Licenses such as the General Public License for software.

The concept of the common is therefore essential for building a society based on the Common Good, and is the key to understand Peer Production and how it socially reproduces itself through a process of Circulation of the Common.

Common proprerty forms for physical goods that can be governed through Commons-based approaches can take the form of Trusts.

Michael Hardt

Hardt positions the 'common' as explicitely countering the notion of property:

Q: Do you see any connection here with questions concerning the relationship between the common, on the one hand, and common property or common goods, on the other hand? You already mentioned that there is something in the way that the concept of the common is used, which often ends up situating it against various forms of property, but, on the other hand, there are clearly some tensions here, and maybe possibilities to think about how the concept of property could be rethought along similar lines in which you have dealt with concepts such as democracy and communism.

Micheal Hardt: If we move into the contemporary political framework of discussions on the common, there is clearly a great deal of ambiguity, and perhaps there should be a kind of clarifying work done about what is meant by the common. I think one division that is already implied in what you are saying is the division between the common and the public. In many discussions what I would call the public, by which I mean that controlled and regulated by the state, people call it the common, and for me it is very important to make a distinction between the public and the common. Public still functions as a form of property, and here what we mean by property is that it has the same primary characteristics as private property: that is, limited access, and a monopoly of decision-making. That seems to me the defining characteristic of property as a whole in these discussions, both on public and private property. So, that is one division I would say between the public and the common — an area of confusion or mixed discourses which I think it would be helpful to set straight.

It is a slightly different, but also overlapping distinction here that you are making between the common and what sometimes goes as common property or in other discussions as common goods. Here, too, it is helpful to distinguish the common from property, as such, and to avoid conceptual confusions. Also, sometimes attached to these distinctions are real political divisions. One useful scholarly point of reference for the question you just asked, is to think about the passage in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, in which he is trying to bracket off, and separate, his notion of communism from what he is calling crude communism. Crude communism in some ways is characterized by a passage from private property to making those same goods the property of the community, which he is ridiculing and mocking. His example of this transfer of property from private to some notion of communal property, or common property, is the passage of women as property of the bourgeois male, as private property of the husband, to some notion of community of women, in which women remain property, as they are in bourgeois marriage, but are now property of the entire community. It is a bizarre example, but nonetheless gives you an idea of Marx’s anxiety about this notion of common property, and the misunderstandings that could follow from that kind of conception. I maintain that we have to understand the common in contradistinction from any form of property. In other words, whereas property (public or private) designates limited access and a monopoly of decision-making, the common must create open access and collective, democratic decision-making.

Q: Could you maybe elaborate a bit more on how you see this relationship between the common and communism.

One of the ways I have understood the project that Toni and I have been working on in all three volumes of this series of our books is to re-think the basic components of the concept of communism. What do I mean by the basic components of the concept of communism? At least a critique of the state; a critique of property; and the proposition of a real democracy, an absolute democracy, a new democratic organization of society. These are at least some of the components of communism that we try in various ways throughout the books to re-think. So, I would say that the common, both as a philosophical concept, as we were talking before, and as a political terrain of struggle, is a way of exploring the critique of private property today. And I would have to add, once again, not only private property, but also public property.

So thinking about the common here is a challenge at least. It is not really an answer to the question; it is a way of formulating the question of the rule of property and the possibilities of social organization that lie outside the rule of property. So in that sense, I would say it is one of the components that one would have to not only articulate, but also work through and transform, in order today to be able to propose some meaning to the concept of communism. It is one among several fields of work that one would have to do to develop the concept of communism today.

Q: This is obviously closely connected to one of the questions being debated in many of the discussions on the common, that is, what is the role that the state should play in relation to it. Now, would it be a total misrepresentation of your recent work to say that in Declaration there is a more explicit role for the state to be found as a strategic tool in the fight against the privatization of the common?

I do think that in our view it is a feasible route in certain circumstances today to maintain an antagonistic, but nonetheless strategic, relationship to the state. But it does depend on the circumstances, so that in Declaration, at that point you cite, we are primarily talking about the power of the social movements in Latin America, that in the last ten years have developed a kind of double relationship to the leftist governments. It seems to us wrong to say that those leftist governments represent us, and we should support them at all cost, but it also seems wrong to say that those leftist governments are really the same as the neoliberal forces we were fighting against previously, and we should therefore attack them in the same way we attacked the previous governments. What we describe, which is not so much our proposal as our recognition of what people are doing, is maintaining a dual relationship with such states. Not to be satisfied with them and constantly support them or to attack them as the enemy, but to maintain a dual combat: with them against the forces of neoliberalism and against them in the interests of the common." (http://www.commons.fi/even-when-you-dont-see-it-it%E2%80%99s-still-there-interview-michael-hardt)

Source: from an interview conducted by Taavi Sundell & Tero Toivanen

What's the Difference between the Common and the Commons?

Tero Toivanen:

"The common is used especially in present discussion by theorists of or writers influenced by autonomous marxism. Here the difference is related on what I would perhaps call as a distinction between social processes and resources. One way to see it is that the common is not so much “discovered”, as maybe the commons when seen as resources are, as it is “produced”. For example Hardt and Negri willingly emphasize the difference by relating commons to "shared places" that were enclosed by the time of primitive accumulation. Here the difference is perhaps more philosophical, but, as I see it, they also use it as a way to form new language for political theory and economy. So the common refers to the social processes that are based on the common, produced co-operatively and the result is common, that, then again, is used as common in further production. For Hardt and Negri this, of course, relates to the rise of immaterial production and their conception of biopolitical production: “Common is dynamic, involving both the product of labor and the means of future production. This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practises we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationship, and so forth” (In book Commonwealth).

On the other hand, we can ask what’s the “new” about this. As historian Peter Linebaugh has shown in his Magna Carta Manifesto, the word “commons” was used as a verb in the times before and during the primitive accumulation and the enclosure. Linebaugh writes at the conclusion of his book (p. 279): ”To speak of the commons as if it were a natural resource is misleading at best dangerous at worst – the commons is an activity and, if anything, it expresses relationships in society that are inseparable from relations to nature. It might be better to keep the word as a verb, an activity, rather than as a noun, a substantive. But this too is a trap. Capitalist and the World Bank would like us to employ commoning as a means to socialize poverty and hence to privatize wealth. The commoning of the past, our forebears’ previous labor, survives as a legacy in the form of _capital_ and this too must be reclaimed as part of our constitution.”

One perspective to look the issue is, of course, the distinction between the concepts of private, public and common. Here, following Linebaugh’s idea of constitution mentioned above, you can perhaps formulate an idea of three different constitutions of societies, or maybe “constituent processes” that all have been present at least since the dawn of capitalism. These three concepts refer to ways how the property, production and class relations are “arranged”. Private property defines the constitution for capitalism: the means of production are owned privately and used by wage labor to gain profit for the owners of the means of production. Public obviously refers to existing public resources regulated by state, but you can also see it grasping the history of “really existing socialism” where the means of production were held by state. I think the key idea here is that in “really existing socialism” the ownership form was confused with the ownership relation. The state ownership of the production is not to abolish the class relations or not even the capitalist ownership, since the producers still are separated, as is also the case with privately owned means of production, from their means of production. This is why, I think, it’s very much legitimate to call the existed soviet experiment as state-capitalism.

Thus, maybe then we can see the common referring to Marx’s idea of “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common”. (Let’s add here that the concept of common seems also to give a whole new and open, if you like, perspectives to read Marx’s texts). Then the question arises, how far are we to understand common as a property or property relation at all? Or can it be defined something as a concept beyond the idea of property, as Hardt seem to vision? Can the “world of common” be the world of use values beyond the very idea of property and the separation of the producer from the means of production?"