These notes were transcribed at a'conference' organised by Officine Precarie in Pisa.

Anonymous comrade writes:

Public sphere, labour, multitude: strategies of resistance in Empire.

"Sfera pubblica, lavoro, moltitudine. Strategie di resistenza nell'Impero".

Con: Toni Negri, Paolo Virno. Coordina Marco Bascetta'

Toni Negri:

I am perplexed when I confront the issue of the common. Every time I start
to follow this theme -I don't know why- it flees in all directions because
it is so pregnant with modern and ancient ideological suggestions...In
fact, any attempt to distinguish it from the private, or the state, or the
public in the French sense, is almost impossible, at least for me, for how
my head works. Hence, I don't claim to provide a conclusive definition and I
have reservations with regard to definitions of strategy.

The common is something that escapes any Marxian positive definition of what
is produced. For me, and I am a Marxist and stay a Marxist, the common is
abstract labour: i.e. that ensemble of products and energies of work that
gets appropriated by capital and thus becomes common. Basically, it is the
result of the law of value. It is capitalism that creates the common. In
Marx there isn't a conception of the common that is a pre-capitalist common
(yes, there are the commons, but they are not productive). If we want to
reduce and bring the common within a modern conception we must accept this
definition of the common as abstract labour, accumulated, consolidated. But
abstract, accumulated, consolidated labour is never merely a quantity, an
economic quantity, but it is an ensemble of relations that are relations of
exploitation; or rather: hierarchical relations, schemes of division of
labour, organisation and social diffusion of functions of command,
reproductive hypotheses, consumption capacities etc.

Evidently, we have to start thinking this abstract, common, as something
that is the common of exploitation. The question on the common -and here I
start getting confused you see cause it is always the same word that gets
used- is how to take the common away from exploitation? So long as we speak
of the common we always speak of the common of exploitation. We all are
commonly exploited. The common as something that is unexploited has been
proposed a thousand times by all utopias, like for instance, regarding
global goods such as air, water etc. No. Air and water are not there
anymore, there are air and water that increasingly are exploited, absorbed,
colonised, made to produce, turned into profit and that only in this way
become common. The great capitalist expansion is that which goes to get
forests, appropriates air and biological transformations become produced by
the rainforest. This is globalisation: what makes common that rainforest
that for me would have never been common.

Then the problem becomes to liberate the common from exploitation? What does
this mean? First of all, we have to grant capital that it has, through
abstract labour, put us in this happy -so to speak, obviously- situation
where we are able to speak about the common. There is no common before
capital. There is no common before capitalist history imposed it. Then, I
must go and see how this common works, which largely corresponds to public
space, to the history of public space, because there is a modern production
of public space that is disciplinary production, i.e. a production of public
space organised by the capacity of expressing power on individuals, of
commonly putting individuals to work, of imposing a common measure on their
labour, a measure so common that all capital (Marx's and capitalism in
general) is based on an abstract temporal measure that constitutes the
common [comunanza] of labour. The postmodern production in our world
characterised by the investment of life by capital, becomes the mode of an
extension of control not only simply on individuals but also on populations.
When we talk of multitude, we do so in the face of this common colonisation
of life.

Why do we start talking of the multitude and we pose the problem of the
common, at this point, I think, still confusingly? There has been for
instance an experiment, of the tradition of classical operaismo, that was
that of attempting a subjectivation of abstract labour. Practically, one of
the fundamental elements of this dynamics of the common, of the common
exploitation of the common, had become the working class: the working class
was this attempt to subjectify a series of common structures within
capitalist abstraction, within capitalist relations of exploitation. We used
to call it the capitalist relation, the general relation that sees on the
one hand the capitalist's [padrone] subjectivity, of the enterpreneur, of
capital as such; whilst on the other hand the working class, that of which
one did not recognise the concrete specificity, but only looked at its
capacity of posing itself within a wage relation, i.e. a quantitative
relation, a capacity to divide this productive common. The wage was the
ability to take a portion of this common product. Evidently, all this
maintained that conception of the common, the working class had as its
fundamental goal that of 'managing' (gestire) that common. Socialism had
become represented as the management of this common according to the needs
of the working class, not very differently from how capital did it, which
proposed that this common was used for the reproduction of the system.

I can't understand the public/private distinction from within this scheme,
this situation, because I don't think that public or private can identify
alternatives at this point to that capitalist common that is the only one we
have. The concept of the multitude can only emerge when the key foundation
of this process (i.e. the exploitation of labour and its maximal
abstraction) becomes something else: when labour starts being regarded, by
the subjects that are at stake, involved in this process, in this continuous
exchange of exploitation, as something that can no longer enter the
relation, this relation of exploitation. When labour starts being regarded
as something that can no longer be directly exploited.

What is this labour that is no longer directly explited? Unexploited labour
is creative labour, immaterial, concrete labour that is expressed as such.
But you might say: exploitation is still there! Of course it is, but
explotiation is exploitation of the ensemble of this creation, it is
exploitation that has broken the common and no longer recognises the common
as a substance that is divided, produced by labour, by abstract labour, and
that is divided between capitalist and worker, and structures command and
exploitation. Today capital can no longer exploit the worker, it can only
exploit cooperation amongst workers, amongst labourers. Today capital has no
longer that internal function for which it became the soul of common labour,
that produced that abstraction within which progress was made. Today capital
is parasitical because it is no longer inside, it is outside of the creative
capacity of the multitude. That is why it makes war to perfect its control.
War is a fundamental and destructive element that represents its parasitical
nature. It is the element that wants to build the capitalist common, that
wants to rebuild the body of capital, the people, the global people, the
democratic people Bush tells us about, in this attempt to reinteriorise the
common; whereas labour as activity constitutes the multitude, a multitude of
singularities that is creative. As you can see, the common brings terrible
confusion, cause I cannot really define it.

On the other hand, if I started talking about the common as basis, I could
even do it. Undoubtedly it is almost impossible to define creative labour
today without starting from the common, and the active common of labour,
i.e. the common that is construed by the cooperation of creative
singluarities. It is almost impossible to do it, it is obvious that today
all institutional economists keep saying: it is external economies,
economies of transactions, all this accumulation of intelligence, cultural
exchange that constitute the basis of production of value. But this basis of
the production of value is not there unless it goes through the capacity of
singularities to make it live each time as provision of living labour.

The analysis of cooperation is something that confirms what I said before.
Cooperation itself is part of that creativity of singular labour. It is no
longer something that is imposed from outside. We are no longer in that
phase of capitalist accumulation that also has a function of construction of
the workers' labour capacity to be put into production. Singularities of and
in the multitude have assumed cooperation as quality of their labour.
Cooperation -and the common- as activity, is anterior to capitalist
accumulation. Hence we have a common that is a foundation of the economy,
only in so far as it is seeen as this element of cohesion of the production
of singularity within the multitude. Examples of this could be networks and
all the consequences of a definition of the common as the phenomenology of
the web. Strategies: ..

Paolo Virno

Marx mentions the common twice: in the Early Writings: as esistenza generica
[tr.: perhaps italian translation of common species-being], where generic
means at the level, up to the standards of the human species. In the
Grundrisse, in the section on the general intellect, he matures his former
notion into that of the social individual. Social individual sounds like an
oxymoron, but must be seen as the presupposed common that makes also
singularities possible. If the multitude is the ensemble of individuated
singularities, it can only be conceived if they have behind them a common.

About generic existence: one might say that there is something common,
independently of history, evoking human nature. I agree with Toni that you
can't evoke an originary scenario to determine the notion of the common, but
one must consider the game between the 'since always' [da sempre] and the
right now [proprio ora]. The right now of capitalism, of postfordist
capitalism that has as baricentre the exploitation of many human faculties
as such, a historic product, as a right now, it configures something that
has always been. The contingency of capitalism is the organising of an image
and a mode of using the capacities of generic existence, of configuring it
somehow. I think too that all is played at the level of cooperation. I agree
with Toni. The category of cooperation comes before, and is the condition
that makes possible a definition of the productive individual input, it is
not their sum, but something that overdetermines them as well as being their
basic terrain. It is not the general average. Cooperation moves at a level
that is no longer inter-individual but trans-individual. Let me explain.

This term has been used by Kojeve, Simondon, Balibar, but this doesn't
matter, it's been used many times but I use it in my own way anyway. The
inter-individual is a self conscious subject that interacts (as with
inter-national). The trans-individual identifies an intermediary zone,
between different I s, that is on this side [aldiqua] of any fixation of the
individual. A zone between the I and the not-I. It is not referrable to any
precisable individual. It precedes the definition of individuals.
Trans-individual cooperation with respect of inter-individual cooperation,
is nothing but linguistic praxis. Linguistic praxis exists in the between
individuals, before and independently of their fixation, it is the
presupposition whereby we then distinguish social and personal, interior and
exterior, whilst before this there is this sphere of nobody's and
everybody's. Postfordist productive cooperation has this trans-individual
character and it is this dimension that introduces us to a reflection on the
common, and on the generic existence of the social individual today.

It is very difficult for me to separate the notion of the common from the
notion of the public at least if we intend public in this radical
trans-individual mode. Essentially common was always considered the life of
the mind. Pure thought, knowledge, is something that is difficult to ascribe
to one or the other, it is an experience of the spieces as such. What is the
characteristic of the life of the mind as common life? Historically, in
order to use this common element that is the life of the mind, you had to
get away from life with others, the thinker used to get away from the
square, from public life, from politics. The difference produced by
trans-individual cooperation and the experience of capitalism is that the
life of the mind has become exterior and manifest [appariscente]. This
self-publicising of the life of the mind, the fact that the mind goes public
in the square, in Porto Alegre, in social forums, in production-even if in
reversed and terrible ways- entails that the life of the mind no longer
requires a self isolating gesture: it is the common, an immanent form of the

common. The life of the mind is one and the same as what in the classical
world was the care for common affairs.

This is a condition for thinking non-state politics. Last consideration: we
should look with enthusiasm to the drastic impoverishment, in culture and in
each of us, of inner life: the inner life, the misery of conscience, the
misery of the self-centred I, the rigid barrier between the so called
external and the even more mythological internal is at the philosophical
level the womb of transcendental illusions where the living subject never
draws on [attinge] his mode of being, never reaches himself, always has
presuppositions that he can't dispose of. We should celebrate today this
misery of inner life, in the sense that all that counts in human relations,
as cooperation shows, is totally outside of the I, has immediately this
completely exterior quality to it. What is common can never be interior,
otherwise one ends up opposing to commodity fetishism a precapitalist
situation whereby human relations were not mediated by relations between
things, but there were relations of subordination of corporal and religious
character.

We need to think of a situation where human relations manifest themselves as
exterior things. We need to think about the things of relations, that is
something other than their transformation into relations between things.
What is common is exterior, what is common the I outside of the I, it is
trans-individual, the right-now (of capitalism and of expropriation of
capitalism) of what has always been.

transcription & translation by Arianna Bove