The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics 9781474446143, 9781474446167, 9781474446174

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The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics

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The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Politics Re-thinking social change

Alexandros Kioupkiolis

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Alexandros Kioupkiolis, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/12.5 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4614 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4616 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4617 4 (epub) The right of Alexandros Kioupkiolis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction, or The Long Run

1

1. Commoning the political, politicising the common Community and the political in Nancy, Esposito, Agamben, Laclau and Mouffe

10

2. From the commons to another politics of egalitarian autonomy Common-pool resources, digital and anti-capitalist commons, from Ostrom to Marxist autonomism

36

3. Common and communism: political theories for radical change From Hardt and Negri, and Dardot and Laval to Badiou and Žižek

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4. Taking on hegemony and the political

115

5. Reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons

143

6. Movements post-hegemony

185

7. Common democracy Political representation and government as commons

210

Notes References Index

236 238 252

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Acknowledgements

This volume brings together enlarged and revised versions of three papers that have already appeared in political theory journals and of a 2014 chapter in a collective volume. More specifically, Chapter 1 has been published under the title ‘Commoning the Political, Politicising the Common’, in Contemporary Political Theory, available at , October 2017. The section on Hardt and Negri in Chapter 3 rehearses parts of my chapter ‘A Hegemony of the Multitude: Muddling the Lines’, in A. Kioupkiolis and G. Katsambekis (eds) (2014), Radical Democracy and Collective Movements Today: The Biopolitics of the Multitude Versus the Hegemony of the People, Ashgate. Chapter 6 has been published as ‘Movements Post-Hegemony: How Contemporary Collective Action Transforms Hegemonic Politics’, Social Movement Studies, 17(1), January 2018. Finally, Chapter 7 reproduces most of the paper entitled ‘Common Democracy. Political Representation Beyond Representative Democracy’, Democratic Theory, 4(1), June 2017. Publishers have kindly consented to the inclusion of these essays in the present volume. All the rest are new, unpublished writings. In the final stage of preparation, from March 2017 onwards, work for the manuscript also benefited from European Research Council funding (ERC COG 2017–2020) for Heteropolitics: Refiguring the Common and the Political. This collective endeavour not only expands on the theoretical themes explored here. It also involves fieldwork on the ground of social movements and commoning activities that occur in three countries: Spain, Italy and Greece (for further details, see heteropolitics.net). Hopefully, this will make up the subject of a major future publication and, more ambitiously and importantly, a new chapter of history.

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acknowledgements

Finally, the last revisions of the manuscript were realised at Madison, Wisconsin, during an academic visit in March to May 2018 to Professor Erik Olin Wright’s ‘Real Utopia’ project. I am grateful to E. O. Wright for his warm hospitality and to the Greek Program of the Fulbright Foundation, which made this academic exchange possible by awarding me with a scholarship. This work owes a lot to my partner and the few close friends and relatives who have made my life not only viable but also meaningful and happy in the three years of its preparation. I am also indebted to my cat, Io, along with the two kittens she has brought to life. They have kept me affectionate company during the lonely hours of reading and writing, and have reconnected me more vividly with non-human life. But, first and foremost, this collection of essays is dedicated to the thousands of extraordinary people who have taken ‘common’ political action in recent times, reigniting the embers of real democracy. They are not only a primary source of theoretical insight, but also the main springboard to hope for the present and the future.

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Introduction, or The Long Run

Innovation in art is often characterized as a singular event – a bolt of lightning that strikes once and forever changes what follows. The Long Run provides an alternate view . . . it suggests that invention results from sustained critical thinking, persistent observation, and countless hours in the studio. (MoMA 2018)

Ours are times of the disastrous old persisting in its non-death. Times of the emergent new that remains evanescent, feeble and disperse. Times of monstrous symptoms, the resurgence of Nazi spectres, ravenous, uncheckable elites and far right-wing ‘mavericks’ followed by resentful crowds. Times when Gramsci again becomes the timely thinker of kairos, crisis and potential counter-strategies. But our times are also different, later, heralds of new possibilities. Set in motion by the Arab Spring, the 2011 cycle of massive contention marked a turning point in a historical phase of resistances against neoliberal domination, which had been inaugurated by the Zapatista rebellion and the Seattle kick-off of the alter-globalisation movement in the 1990s. This was the first active and substantial challenge to the ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) dogma. In 2011, the contestation of global neoliberal hegemony scaled up and morphed, turning more popular, majoritarian in aspiration and strongly affirmative of another, more democratic politics. This was no longer a politics of ‘summithopping’, minoritarian activism and rootless cosmopolitanism. It was a politics of broad sectors of the people coming out on the streets in their own countries, occupying central squares, reclaiming popular power on the local and the national scale, staunchly opposing neoliberal policies and demanding a different, more ‘real’ democracy. It was also a policies that enacted its democratic dreams by performing another democracy – open, collective, egalitarian, participatory, pluralist, even queer in parts. 1

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics But it was a politics that again failed to shatter entrenched neoliberal power, despite toppling authoritarian regimes in the Arab world. The misfire came on top of several other miscarriages since the 1990s, of different sizes and import, from the alter-globalisation movement and small-scale initiatives in community-building to the ‘pink tide’ of left-leaning governments in Latin America. As the second decade of the millennium nears its close, dramatic socio-economic inequalities, the expulsion of massive populations to the margins of social existence, ecological devastation, the hollowing-out of democracy, rising xenophobia and regressive nationalism punctuate the gloomy landscape of global history under the rule of neoliberal capital. For many, the response is resignation, accommodation and individual ‘coping’. For a few, whose number is shrinking, the system is working too well. For a certain ‘radical fringe’, the political solution will come via a regression into the past of Parties, Leaders or even Communist Terror (see, for example, Žižek 2010, 2015; Dean 2016; Gerbaudo 2017). At several moments, stretching sometimes over centuries, history seems to have come to a standstill, wiping out any possibility of thoroughgoing change. Think of the centuries-long Roman Empire or the Soviet Union in the 1960s. For those of us who care about freedom and life, the planet, the well-being of all, free creation and exploration, succumbing to a presumed fate in a dismal state of affairs is not the way. The striving for another, better world goes on, and it calls for vision, stamina, structure, reflection, effective tactics and strategies, broad-based collective agency. As in art, and more so, innovation in social history is not a windfall, nor an accident or an apocalypse. It cannot be simply imagined into existence or conjured out of nothing. It counts on existing antagonistic forces, endeavours, desires and experiences, sustained critical thinking, persistent observation, and countless hours of mundane, everyday work in the laboratory of history-making. Fortunately, we are not at zero point. The political legacy of the last round of struggles, from the 1990s onwards, is rich, replete with lessons and still alive with sustained energies on the ground or in the underground. We have learnt, among other things, that neither social movements alone nor governments and engagements with the political system suffice to elicit systemic transformation. The two sides will need to come together, but the confluence is rife with contradictions and risks that must be effectively tackled through new political strategies. Crucially, in recent years, resistances, creative initiatives, agitations, dreams, theories and discourse have crystallised around the idea of an alternative that both condenses the best of modern emancipatory traditions and has become an attractor for current activity and thought 2

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introduction oriented toward another, better world: the commons, or simply the common. To make this other world not only possible but also real we should build on actual alternative practices, quests and ideas, drawing insights, cues for strategies and live political energies from commoning activities at the grassroots. The commons not only constitute a quite widespread and feel-good buzzword of ‘alternativeness’ in our times. They already make up the collective frame of other politics and projects in countries such as Italy and Spain, where they inform new municipalist governments ‘of change’. They have emerged as the banner and the goal in social struggles against the privatisation of water and other infrastructures, in places like Cochabamba and Italy, or against the new enclosures of the Internet and digital codes. They are common-ist – egalitarian, anti-private, solidary and sharing – but also free, democratic and non-statist. We can avail ourselves today of a rich texture of commons-related activity: open source codes, community networks, makerspaces and cultural projects such as Wikipedia, democratically managed cooperatives, urban spaces run collectively by citizens and accessible to all, municipal proposals or processes for the participatory governance of collective resources, and so on (see, for example, Bollier and Helfrich 2014). The vision – or strategic objective – of a new society reordered around the commons has also been fleshed out eloquently in different variants (see, for example, Hardt and Negri 2009, 2012; Dardot and Laval 2014; Nancy 2000, 2010b; Bauwens and Kostakis 2014b). There are, moreover, plenty of tactical ideas in circulation, outlining practices and expedients through which the state-and-market system could be twisted, occupied and reconstructed to amplify the commons and to give way gradually to a commons-based society: ‘transvestment’ transferring resources from the capitalist market to the commons, an expansive network of mutually enhancing digital, labour and ecological commons, the basic income, a ‘Chamber of the Commons’, new pro-commons legislation, collaborative cities and many others (see, for example, DyerWitheford 2012; Bauwens and Kostakis 2014b). But what is still little considered and elaborated is a potent political strategy through which we could transition from global neoliberal command, fragmented social forces and dispersed commoning initiatives to another social configuration beyond state and capital by way of assembling a massive political front that can reshuffle the decks of power. A proper strategy of counter-hegemony would grapple with systemic power relations, transform the subjectivity – modes of thinking, desiring and acting – of large social strata, band together popular political coalitions across civil society and the political system, install alternative 3

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics institutions, alter the balance of forces and engage ingeniously with ruling institutions in order to open rifts or gradually transfigure them. To work out such a middle-range strategy of political change, we can extract valuable insights from actual civic initiatives and major thinkers of hegemony: Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. This is the nub of the political argument that drives the discussion in all chapters of this book. The commons skew the ways in which we think and practise politics towards collective self-government, common participation, equality, openness, diversity, sharing and care for the earth. But this ‘commoning’ of politics needs to be coupled with a parallel ‘politicising’ of the commons, plotting an adequate political strategy for expanding commons and for realigning power relations in favour of the commons. To the extent that the politics of hegemonic struggle in Gramsci’s and Laclau’s style could advance the cause of the commons, it should be actively taken up by social actors aiming at egalitarian transformation – but with a twist. Hegemony should be reinvented and refigured in the process so as to attune itself with the distinct, non-hierarchical, open and pluralist logic of the commons, subordinating any function of leadership and centralisation to the bottom-up, egalitarian self-organisation of common people. The common(s), a historical alternative that could refashion society, economy and politics; counter-hegemony, a political strategy to push forward this alternative; and the recasting of hegemony in the spirit of the commons: these are the leitmotivs that run through the entire volume, woven and rewoven in all chapters. Each chapter contains in miniature the entire argument but it zooms in on particular aspects. Other chapters delve into topics briefly touched upon in earlier ones in order to unpack them and to wrestle with the political predicaments they raise. The whole is a complex but single tapestry of questions, conceptions and arguments, which revolves around transformative politics in our times, drawing out common, interwoven themes from different angles, in different sizes and colours. A certain degree of repetition enables readers to peruse chapters separately and in various orders, as partly self-contained discussions. Political reflection starts out from the philosophical idea of the common and a new politics taking shape around it, in the post-Heideggerian thought of Jean-Luc Nancy (1991, 2000), Roberto Esposito (2010, 2013) and Giorgo Agamben (1993). The objective of this opening chapter is twofold. First, it is intended to foreground a sense of the common(s) and community that is poised against any communal substance, closure, homogeneity and exclusion, firmly embedding openness, alterity, 4

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introduction diversity, inclusiveness, conflict and insubstantial interaction in the common. Then, the argument uncovers the politics that is lacking in this speculative theorising, which does not come to grips with the antagonisms arising from differences in common, the ruling systems of power and the challenges involved in welding together a countervailing force for the growth of the common(s). The turn to hegemony in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s sense is meant to fill in this gap partly. A convergence between the two strands – the common and the political or hegemonic – turns out to be promising. But it is also riven with tensions (openness versus closure, horizontality versus centralisation/hierarchy, consensus versus force), which would require a reconstruction of hegemonic politics so as to put it in the service of the common. This is a theoretico-political labour whose rudiments are only sketched here, and it is carried forward in the next chapters, mainly from the fourth onwards. The governance of natural ‘common-pool resources’, such as fisheries and irrigation channels (Ostrom 1990), digital commons produced through an open and free collaboration among peers (Bauwens 2009; Bollier 2008; Benkler 2006) and the ‘anti-capitalist’ commons of labour, nature and digital technologies (Caffentzis 2013; Federici 2012; De Angelis 2007) are three distinct genres of the commons and strands of thought. They put flesh on the bones of an abstract idea of the common, illustrating how collective self-management can currently be practised on a footing of equality, openness, diversity and sustainability, which entails a rupture with the logics of the state and the capitalist market. Hence, Chapter 2 spells out what ‘commoning the political’ effectively means by shining a light on alternative modes of political organisation and interaction in diverse figures of the commons. The political silences, absences, limits or misconceptions besetting these views and the corresponding activities of the commons underscore the need for counterhegemonic alliances. M. Hardt and A. Negri (2009, 2012), and P. Dardot and C. Laval (2014) are two pairs of political thinkers who have championed the cause of ‘the common’ as a historical alternative and have undertaken to think through its politics. They put forth strategies that can advance it today and they theorise the common (rather than the ‘commons’) as a principle of radical social renewal. These theorists offer crucial inputs to the political arsenal of alternative commons, such as the value of deploying a net of counter-powers embracing both grassroots horizontalist commons and government mechanisms, and the operation of the common as a political principle of co-decision that should restructure all social fields. Still, they leave much to be desired in strategic terms, either because they misleadingly pit the common against hegemony in 5

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics general or because they fail to mind the gap between the formulation of principles and their actualisation in our condition. The fantasies of different types of communist nostalgics, from Badiou (2009) to Žižek (2010, 2015), are no remedy in this respect, since they hover uneasily between vague ideas and attachments to the worst authoritarian recipes of the past. This is the argument of Chapter 3. Hegemony, in the sense conferred on it by Gramsci (1971) and by Laclau and Mouffe (1985), is a political strategy that seeks to amass enough collective power and to reinstitute society in order precisely to bridge the gap between historical reality and particular demands, values and ideals. Hegemony is first broached in Chapter 4 through Gramsci’s lens, following an excursus on the meaning of the political, which elucidates this term for the purposes of the political argument of this volume. The political as social activity on the forms of society itself is an open, diverse and contested concept and praxis, able to encompass both hegemony and the common(s) as different instances of politics. From Gramsci’s standpoint, then, the common could become the principle of a new institution of society only if activities and advocates of the commons reach out to society at large and construct a comprehensive, popular movement – a historical bloc – challenging power relations in both civil society and the state. This bloc brings together a multiplicity of social resistances and political struggles. It carries out productive activities that cater to social needs, and it energetically diffuses a common political programme, new political values, critical ideas and passions, which configure a new collective–popular identity. This underpins the common bloc of forces, cementing its unity and fuelling its struggle. The whole endeavour towards forging a historical bloc is assumed and directed by a committed, cohesive political organisation. These are key political insights, although Gramsci’s favoured figure of the Party and its determinate class basis no longer are. The central Chapter 5 offers a window on to how Laclau and Mouffe (1985) revisioned hegemony with an eye on late modern conditions of contingency, diversity and social fragmentation. Now, both political antagonisms and the collective identities of antagonistic forces need to be articulated; they are no longer given by pre-existing class or other divisions. Moreover, both the sites and the political forms of organisation for hegemony are plural. Hegemony is essentially a political process whereby social actors move outside themselves to connect with other conflicts through ‘chains of equivalence’, tying together dispersed forces and vesting social practices and resistances with wider meanings. An effective hegemonic strategy implants ‘nodal points’ from which subordinated groups positively direct and refashion a broad range of social 6

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introduction spheres, combining an awareness of actual structural limits with a utopian vision for another society. In Laclau’s (2005a) later gloss on hegemony, a partial actor generates a ‘collective will’ by weaving ‘chains of equivalence’ among different social demands. ‘Empty signifiers’, such as ‘change’, ‘democracy’ and ‘commons’, catalyse the expansion of such equivalences. Representative claims, through which a hegemonic subject speaks in the name of the people and universal interests, and ‘uneven power’ or concerted force are also integral to a hegemonic contest that can overhaul the status quo. Hegemonic actors need also to motivate a radical affective investment in their discourse and politics by promising to fill a social lack and thereby to become a source of jouissance. These are fundamental political pillars that buttress the effort to band together a massive political alliance that can override the dominant forces of the state and the market on the way to reconstituting society around the commons. An agonistic twist on the commons, inspired by Mouffe’s political agonism, can rein in drives towards exclusionary unity and domination, and hence towards factional strife and fragmentation, which derive from a substantive identification of the commons with specific contents and institutions. Agonistic commons are a site of both collaboration and conflict among political actors, who may dissent over the appropriate contents, uses and development of the common good but they fight and create in concert by envisaging the commons as a common horizon of principles, values and practices that are, at the same time, a common field of diversity and internal battle for the common good. However, to make it possible for the politics of the commons and hegemony to join forces, Laclau and Mouffe’s essentialist conflation of the political with hegemony should be dismantled, along with several other ‘uncommon’ structures that Laclau inscribed in the core of hegemonic strategy: the vertical distribution of power, individual leadership, populist homogenisation, sovereign representation, and the antagonistic construction of the collective identities. Repurposing hegemonic politics for the commons is the aspiration of the last two chapters, which take their cues from political inventions on the ground of contemporary social movements. The hegemonic politics of popular unity, power struggles and engagement with state institutions could foster – rather than supress – the egalitarian, libertarian and pluralist politics of the commons only if it is properly reformed and subordinated to the commons. Chapter 6 looks into how recent collective mobilisations, including the 15M and the Greek squares movement in 2011, have paved the way towards such a post-hegemonic strategy. 7

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics Leadership, the concentration of forces, unity, representation and engagement with power structures in both civil society and the state – the core constituents of potent hegemony – are upheld in massive collective action, which can thereby rally together social forces with a popular appeal. At the same time, these elements are twisted and modified to further the common cause of plurality, equality, inclusion and nonhierarchical relations through patterns of ‘distributed’, collective and accountable leadership; unity resting upon the respect for difference, the collective formation of opinion, pragmatism; and collective representation through open participatory assemblies. The composition of vertical – hierarchical, institutional and centralised – logics with horizontal logics is tilted in favour of the latter, and power emanates from the bottom up. Such post-hegemonic inventions map out promising ways of radically renovating politics in a democratic direction, which can be further explored and enhanced to engender broader transformative effects. In Chapter 7, the political argument of the entire volume is brought to a (provisional) close by laying out a vision of ‘common democracy’. This could provide a political focus of post-hegemonic strategies by bringing the principles of the commons –openness, diversity, egalitarian participation and inclusion – to bear specifically on the domain of government itself. The vision is no mere figment of the theoretical imagination as it again draws its bearings from the 2011 popular assemblies in the squares of Spain, Greece, North America and so on. Common democracy opens up government to the people in its diversity and equality. It breaks with actual representative government, in which the people are typically excluded from crucial decision-making by political authorities. But common democracy also eschews the unlikely and exhausting ideal of a permanent self-presence of the people in its entirety in the government of all major institutions of the commons. The establishment of ‘common democracies’ is premised on a politics of antagonism that will seek both to build an independent institutionality and to ‘occupy’ representation in existing institutions, pushing for deep democratic transformations under actual conditions. This contemporary version of revolutionary ‘dual power’ should be driven from the bottom up through open, plural and inclusive participation, permanently unsettling divisions between representatives and represented. Libertarian ‘municipalism’ could be one of its names, and actual experiments in Italian and Spanish cities, such as Naples and Barcelona, could become its sites of emergence, among others. This is a book of contemporary political theory, and decidedly so. In monstrous times, suspended between past failures, present impasses and frail emergencies, we need to step back and take time to reflect on 8

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introduction what went wrong, what is feeding into the current crises, which possibilities are open to us and how we can actualise them. ‘Sustained critical thinking’ is, indeed, vital for historical invention. But this is also a volume of political theory, thinking through present-day politics in and with the actual polis, the citizens and their political activities today. In tune with its democratic values and aspirations, the present argument also seeks to enter into a constructive dialogue with critical and creative movements at the grassroots, drawing sustenance from them, fleshing out their political meaning and potentials, and pondering strategic ideas that could enhance them. The genre of political theory practised here is neither analytic nor prescriptive, primarily. It does not proceed from a presumed vantage point that would be situated above the tumult and the ‘poor understanding’ of the masses. My political theory is a process of politically motivated thought that unfolds through a critical interaction with citizens, and sees itself as an input into ongoing political debates and quests of several people in our world, even if it is pitched on a higher level of abstraction and immerses itself in philosophical and academic thought.

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Chapter One

Commoning the political, politicising the common Community and the political in Nancy, Esposito, Agamben, Laclau and Mouffe

In recent years, political thought has evinced a renewed interest in thinking and refiguring community, the commons or, more generically, the ‘common’ (see, for example, Esposito 2010, 2011, 2013; Dardot and Laval 2014; Gilbert 2014; Hardt and Negri 2012, 2009; Nancy 2000). What prompts such inquiries is arguably not a nostalgia for the ‘lost communities’ of the past, fuelled by resentment and insecurity in a globalised world. It is, rather, the quest for new modes of common action and understanding at a time when there are few collective resistances against steepening inequalities and the depletion of democracy, when ecological degradation is not effectively addressed through global coordination, when cultural diversity and migration flows fan the flames of racism and xenophobia (Dardot and Laval 2014: 11–16; Esposito 2013: 43). Responding to such circumstances, the existentialist philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have contemplated ways of tying social knots that overcome both fragmentation and the exclusions of closed communities. The foregoing thinkers envision collective convergences that bring together a plurality of singularities without enclosing them in organic totalities, predefined models and fixed boundaries – ethnic, cultural, ideological or any other (Nancy 1991, 2000; Agamben 1993; Esposito 2013). Such relations construct ‘inessential commonalities’, in which differences can act in concert and in solidarity without fusing together (Agamben 1993: 86–7). Promising as they may seem, these endeavours to reconfigure the ‘common’ have come in for a battery of criticisms, which castigate 10

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commoning the political, politicising the common them as politically irrelevant or impotent. Nancy, Esposito and Agamben remain stuck on the abstract level of a ‘fundamental ontology’ of being-together. They construe the ‘common’ as an ontology of coexistence detached from any actual politics. They do not face up to topical issues of democratic politics, such as the dominant forms of power and the specific modes of collective action that could redeem democracy in our times. Hence, these existentialist philosophers after Heidegger fail to reckon with the pivotal place of antagonism and power in politics, assuming a fundamental plurality with no deep divisions and no need for articulation (Marchart: 2012: 173–83; Elliott 2011; Wagner 2006; Norris 2012: 155; Dardot and Laval 2014: 14–15). This first chapter engages with post-Heideggerian thought on community and the common, driven by the belief that this harbours valuable insights and directions for democratic politics today. The aim is precisely to highlight and to enhance its political thrust for contemporary democracies. As a first step, the discussion seeks to show how Nancy, Esposito and Agamben ‘common the political’: that is, how they reconsider politics in light of a fundamental sense of coexistence that clears the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy. This analysis purports to furnish a first riposte to the charges of political irrelevance by spelling out the political implications of post-Heideggerian ontologies as these are unpacked in the work of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben itself. But, in a second stage, the chapter points out the political limits of this existentialist thought. The argument raises a series of pertinent objections, and responds to them by further politicising the post-Heideggerian vision of the common in ways that seek to amplify its political import and efficacy. This is a process of ‘politicising the common’, which comes after an initial commoning of the political and supplements it. Following in the footsteps of previous similar attempts (Schwarzmantel 2007; Armstrong 2009; Vyrgioti 2015), I set out to translate the ontologies of the common into more concrete political logics by relating them to actual political practices and by joining them to the political theory of hegemony and antagonism put forth by Laclau and Mouffe (1985; Mouffe, 2000, 2005; Laclau 2000a, 2005a). The latter elaborate a conception of the political that comes to grips with antagonistic conflicts and hegemonic systems of power with a view to forging more democratic relations. The conjunction of the ‘common’ with the antagonistic politics of hegemony is tension-ridden, to say the least, as they draw from radically different understandings of the ‘political’, pitting plurality and horizontal relations – the ‘common’ – against division and uneven 11

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics power –‘hegemony’. The argument affirms, however, that their combination can help to advance democracy and that, in order to do so, the clash between the two logics should be mitigated by way of two crucial moves, which are initiated here. First, the two contending approaches to the political should be situated at different sites of political action and, second, the ‘hegemonic’ framework should be tweaked so as to bring it more in line with horizontalist ‘common’ politics. This first chapter thus stages an overture to the guiding questions and argumentative themes that lie at the core of the volume. Contemporary thought and practice around the common(s) offer stimuli, inspiration and orientation for tackling the manifold historical crises of the present by crafting alternative, freer, more equal, open, creative, plural and sustainable worlds. How can we rethink and redo politics in their light? Hence, we make a first gesture of ‘commoning the political’. Yet, a lack of political thought and strategy glares in the midst of these figurations of the common(s). How can we enhance their political relevance and potency? Late modern political theory harbours intellectual resources that can help to fill in this gap by ‘politicising the common’. But political thought also requires to be refreshed and realigned so as to become more attuned to the spirit and the needs of the alternative common(s). Hence, there is a second moment of ‘commoning the political’. Moreover, taking its cues from Nancy, Esposito and Agamben, this introductory chapter will trace the lineaments of a critical idea of open and plural community in equal freedom. This will animate and inform the engagements of the volume with diverse instances of contemporary political thought in an attempt to reflect more rigorously on the strategies and the visions that can give rise to another politics of enhanced freedom and equality, in and through open pluralities.

Commoning the political (i) Jean-Luc Nancy embarked on a rethinking of community and the political in the historical circumstances of the 1980s, which he grasped in terms of ‘the retreat of the political’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1997). From the outset, then, Nancy’s philosophy of the community was stimulated by a concern with the political. The ‘retreat of the political’ implies the dissolution of politics and democracy into a play of economic and technical forces (Nancy 1991: xxxviii–xli, 40). It also entails the eclipse of political theology: that is, of totalitarian politics and political programmes that yearn to realise an essence of community (Nancy 2000: 37; Nancy 2010a: 41, 50; Nancy 1991: xxxviii–xxxix). These shifts lay bare our fundamental condition of ‘being-with’, stripping it of any transcendent 12

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commoning the political, politicising the common references and exposing it as pure space and numbers (Nancy 1992: 373). The retreat sparks, furthermore, a retracing: it raises anew the question of the political starting out from the question of relation as such, rather than from the categories of sovereignty, the subject, the state, metaphysical grounds or managerial criteria (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997: 112, 118–34). This questioning begins at the end of Marxism, and it looks beyond neoliberalism and the new political conformism (LacoueLabarthe and Nancy 1997: 145). Hence, Nancy’s retheorising of our existence in common was intended to revision the political in light of a new interpretation of the common. Nancy broaches community in terms of a basic ontology of existence, which is primarily a ‘being-in-common’ with others. The originary plurality of beings in the world is ‘at the foundation of Being’ (Nancy 2000: 12). Nancy’s search for a fundamental ontology takes its bearings from Heidegger’s philosophy and its claim that being-with – Mitsein – is essential to existence itself – Dasein. Nancy thus revisits the very meaning of politics through the prism of an originary condition of ‘being-manytogether’, which precedes and exceeds any particular ‘society’ and ‘individuals’ (Nancy 2000: xv, 25–6, 93, 41; Nancy 1992: 377). Nancy’s ontology is anti-essentialist insofar as it divests individuals and societies of any definite and permanent essence. Community is an interlacing, a mode of contiguity and contact between multiple singularities (Nancy 2000: 5–7; Nancy 1991: xxxvii–xxxviii). Singularities are ‘infraindividual. It is never the case that I have met Pierre or Marie per se, but I have met him or her in such and such a “form”, in such and such a “state”, in such and such a “mood”, and so on’ (Nancy 2000: 8). Community opens up a plural space where variable singularities are with others, ‘the with deprived of substance and connection, stripped of interiority, subjectivity, and personality’ (Nancy 2000: 36). Community is thus devoid of a proper substance of common Being – the people, the nation or generic humanity. It cannot be reduced to a unified totality, an Idea, a Subject or a Concept (Nancy 2000: 47, 54–5, 59–60, 146; Nancy 1991: xxxviii–xl). Community is just a relation among a plurality of singularities (Nancy 1991: 4, 6). Community happens, it is an act of association that sets up a space of coappearance and relations. It is a mélange, a dialogue of plural voices, encounters, reciprocal action responsive to diversity and subject to change, a praxis of sharing that is never complete, a network of singularities that expose themselves to each other and touch each other without melting together. What we share in community is thus essentially a lack of identity (‘finitude’), and the variable limits that render us singular and carve out a space between us. By contrast, the fusion of atoms in a collective is the 13

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics political project of totalitarianism, which brings on the death of community as a web of relations among singularities (Nancy 1991: 12, 35). It is evident that Nancy’s figuration of community gestures beyond mainstream ideas of organic community and modern society. An intimate, organic community (the first Christian communities, the Athenian polis and so on) would be woven out of tight and harmonious ties after the model of family and love. Society, on the other hand, is typically identified with ‘a simple association and division of forces and needs’ (Nancy 1991: 9, 76). Nancy’s ‘being-singular-plural’ breaks both with the nostalgia of a lost community (in Rousseau, Hegel and other modern philosophers) and with a scheme of ‘society’ whose emergence supposedly dissolved communitarian intimacy into an aggregation of separate atoms. Now, giving the lie to any facile charges of a-politicism, Nancy calls for the pursuit of another politics in view of this ontology of beingwith, moving beyond the two poles between which modern politics has oscillated: politics as police, the order of power, calculations and relations of force, and the politics of the common subject-substance (Nancy 1992: 389–90; Nancy 1991: xxxvii–xli, 40; Nancy 2000: 25). He does not ignore the political in the guise of power relations, class struggles or the formal abstraction of law, management, the rule of capital and technocratic administration (Nancy 2000: 47). Nor does he deduce directly a model of political organisation from his idea of plural coexistence. Nancy (1991: xxxvii) seeks rather to outline another vision of the political as ‘the place where community as such is brought into play’, tracing a horizon within which politics should be rethought and remade (Nancy 2000: 47–55). The community of plural singularities is not only an ontology. It is also ‘an ethos and a praxis’ (Nancy 2000: 65). Being-with sets thus limits to legitimate politics, demanding a politics that opens community to the ongoing sharing of multiplicity, the interweaving of singularities who resist completion and fixity (Nancy 1991: 80–1). Nancy does not flesh out the specific forms that a politics beyond sovereignty, technocracy and common essence could possibly assume. His aim is rather to lay out the knots of being-in-common that bind the political, providing a fundamental background and a norm through which other modes of politics, beyond power and identity, could be figured out in greater detail (Nancy 1991: xl, 80–1). From this vantage point, the ‘political’ pertains generally to a type of social interaction in which singularities consciously undergo the experience of non-organic community (Nancy 1991: 40). Thus understood, the political conveys primarily openness, plurality, variation, creativity, 14

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commoning the political, politicising the common freedom, equality, infinite justice and struggle. The political turns against atomisation and totality, homogenisation, fusion, sovereignty, the sacrifice to a Cause, the realisation of a fixed identity of soil, blood, community or self (Nancy 1997: 89–91, 103–7, 122). This is the nub of Nancy’s endeavour to ‘common the political’: that is, to reimagine politics in accord with his ontology of being-with a plurality of singularities. Let us unpack it. To begin with, Nancy’s favoured politics undertakes to tie social knots through a dialogue among plural voices, which persist in their irreducible plurality and escape any unitary truth or a final consensus (Nancy 1991: 76; Nancy 1997: 90–3). This politics incessantly weaves a network of links among singularities without conforming to a predefined model. Its sole end is the singular, each time, intertwining of singularities (Nancy 1997: 111–14). Accordingly, politics should not order the ends of the community; it should not be responsible for the identity and the destiny of the common (Nancy 2010a: 41). Politics should rather afford access to other, not properly political, spheres, which fashion meanings and forms of life in common, seeking indefinite ends-in-themselves: arts, language, thought, science, love. A non-totalising politics should only enable an indefinite multiplicity of creative activities in common, without subsuming their diversity under an all-encompassing figure or an overarching end: ‘politics subsumes none of these registers; it only gives them their space and possibility. . . . Democratic politics renounces giving itself a figure; it allows for a proliferation of figures’ (Nancy 2010a: 26). In Nancy’s view, then, politics is only the process that opens up or sustains the possibility of infinite ends and forms made in common. Democratic politics, however, engages in an ongoing reflection on the limits of politics and the other spheres (Nancy 2009: 83, 91–4; Nancy 2010a: 33). Furthermore, Nancy’s politics draws the ‘combined lesson of war, law, and “technological civilization” . . . sovereignty is nothing’ (Nancy 2000: 141). In the wake of this insight, the multiplicity of peoples may seek to avoid both the hegemony of a single people and the desire for a sovereign separation of everyone, opting instead for the political articulation of a world federation. In it, each people would act as a ‘singular intersection’ and would give up the modern claim to full sovereignty (Nancy 2000: 141). Nancy concedes that ‘all of this does not let itself be conceived of easily’. It is an inconceivable task to be assumed (Nancy 2000: 141). Finally, politics should seek to regulate power according to an ‘incommensurable justice’ of equal freedom (Nancy 2010a: 50–1; 1993: 71–2). This affirms the incomparable value of any singular being: ‘Each 15

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics one . . . is unique by virtue of a unicity or singularity that obligates infinitely. . . . But, at the same time, strict equality is the regime where these incommensurable(s) are shared (out)’ (Nancy 2010a: 24–5). The politics of justice respects the real equality of each unique singularity and the equal sharing of incommensurable freedom (Nancy 1997: 114; Nancy 1993: 71–2). Freedom, for Nancy, is primarily the creation of the new and it implies independence from every established framework. This is ‘the task of politics as the liberation of freedom, as the (re)opening of the space of its inaugural sharing’ (Nancy 1993: 79). Hence, freedom and justice call on politics to constitute itself as a space and a practice of contest that allow for the questioning of any given arrangement and any measure of justice. Justice must be done to the singular, and this exceeds any prevailing just measure (Nancy 1993: 75–7). Justice, moreover, is infinite because it cannot succeed in fully eliminating injustices in the world. Therefore, justice is always the need for justice and the protest against injustice (Nancy 2000: 188–9). On an endnote, Nancy has occasionally rehearsed the term ‘communism’. But this refers to nothing else but the ontology of being-with, which comes before politics and forces on politics two exigencies: to open the common space to the common itself and to provide for the needs of common life (Nancy 2010b: 148–51). Nancy states, moreover, that it is necessary to question the -ism of communism, which entails a certain ideologisation (Nancy 2010b: 149). Hence, Nancy’s ontology of the common and the ‘inoperative community’ turn out to be a questioning and reformulation of historical communism from the standpoint of a post-Heideggerian ontology of Mitsein (see also Nancy 1991: 43–81). Despite their divergences from Nancy, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben have advanced essentially cognate conceptualisations of community from a similar, post-Heideggerian point of departure. And, like Nancy, both Esposito and Agamben undertook to envision another politics in light of their idea of the commnity. Esposito’s intent is likewise political. The vacuum of ideas left behind by the collapse of communism, the erection of walls around closed communities, impoverished relations, the bodies of starving people and refugees urge us to reactivate our thought on community (Esposito 2013: 43–4, 78). Taking his bearings from Martin Heidegger and Georges Bataille, Esposito again grasps community as an originary opening to the others and an escape from the self (Esposito 2013: 25, 44). Community is a transcendental condition of our existence, which enjoins us to preserve it by opposing the collapse of community into its opposite: closure to otherness, identity and fusion (Esposito 2013: 14, 29, 36). As in Nancy, community is a pure relation that joins multiple subjects 16

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commoning the political, politicising the common without congealing into a subject or an entity and without tying bonds of belonging around language, soil and ethnicity (Esposito 2013: 29, 38, 48, 53; Esposito 2010: 15–16, 135–8). Community exposes everyone to an irreducible alterity. The common does not pertain thus to an authentic and proper self, but to the improper; what is general, anonymous, undetermined by any essence, race or sex (Esposito 2013: 29–30, 45–6). The aspiration to a community that embodies a unified totality governs the logic of totalitarianism, which leads to the death of community as a primary aperture and relation (Esposito 2013: 15, 17, 29–30). Esposito breaks new conceptual ground by associating community with an original ‘munus’ and immunisation. Esposito posits, in effect, a fundamental, conflictual conjunction of communitas and immunitas (Esposito 2013: 48–9; Esposito 2011: 5–6, 9). The Latin etymology of community derives the common from munus, which means obligation and gift (communitas: cum + munus). What binds us together is a reciprocal gift and a duty that obligates us to the others, inducing us to care for them in a non-invasive way that lets the others be in their alterity (Esposito 2013: 14, 18, 25–6, 48–9; Esposito 2010: 2–6, 97). Community thus destabilises the boundaries of the person, exposing them to contagion by others. This exposure engenders risks and fears, thereby stimulating counter-processes of immunisation. ‘Whereas communitas opens, exposes, and turns individuals inside out, freeing them to their exteriority, immunitas returns individuals to themselves, encloses them once again in their own skin’ (Esposito 2013: 49). Through immunity, individual or collective entities close in upon themselves and seek to relieve themselves of obligations towards others, conserving their ‘essence’ as owners of their selves (Esposito 2013: 38–43, 48–9; Esposito 2010: 13; Esposito 2011: 2–5, 44, 154–5). Immunisation in its diverse manifestations defines the historical moment we live (Esposito 2013: 58). The logic of immunity fuels political fundamentalism, nationalism, racism and fascism. Hence, according to Esposito, the challenge for politics today is to counteract this logic and to foster instead community and freedom. If community is ‘a way of being in common of singularities that are irreducible to one another, then freedom coincides with that irreducibility’ (Esposito 2013: 55–6). Against the dynamics of immunisation, we should embrace, then, a singular and plural logic in which differences are affirmed as the bond that holds the world together, living and enacting the global system of differences (Esposito 2013: 65, 71–4). Esposito’s ‘affirmative biopolitics’ would connect a diversity of impersonal singularities rather than individuals caught up in exclusionary identities. Singularities are internally multiple and impure, and they 17

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics liaise with external multiplicities. Impersonal singularity bursts through static barriers and identities, embodying a unique being that is both singular and plural (Esposito 2012: 145, 150–1). Finally, in his Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben again takes up the themes of the singular and the common in order to fathom the politics of improper singularity in a community-to-come. Singularities appear and act in common without holding on to any determinate identity or belonging (Agamben 1993: 86–7, 105). Pure singularities that communicate with each other but are shorn of any common property are ‘the exemplars of the coming community’ (Agamben 1993: 11). Such singularities are ‘whatever’. They appear and they act in particular manners. But their manners are indeterminate and variable, available to new possibilities (Agamben 1993: 2, 19, 29, 44, 57). If humans were to succeed in belonging to impropriety as such . . . a singularity without identity . . . only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects. (Agamben 1993: 65)

According to Agamben, this is the political task of our times: to select the features that will enable contemporary human beings to survive as singularities who are only the faces and the modes of being that they expose each time, and who communicate only this variable exteriority rather than any internal essence or abiding predicate (Agamben 1993: 65, 93–4). A community of singularities features an ‘inessential commonality, a solidarity that in no way concerns an essence’ (Agamben 1993: 19). It is what takes place among them, their communication, which does not unite them in an identity but scatters them in existence (Agamben 1993: 19). The common place of singularities is a space of ‘ease’, an empty place in which they can move freely and approximate each other at an opportune time (Agamben 1993: 25). The politics of whatever singularity is thus devoid of determinate content. It is a common appearance, action and pure co-belonging that refuse to vindicate any identity that can be represented in the State. Hence, the ‘novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but . . . an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organisation’ (Agamben 1993: 85). As distinct from Nancy and Esposito, Agamben envisages primarily a coming politics of singularity and community, rather than a fundamental condition of coexistence that is already there. But this discrepancy should not be overstated (as in Vyrgioti 2015). Both Nancy and Esposito also call for a politics to come: a politics of plural singularities 18

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commoning the political, politicising the common in common that resist the contemporary disfiguration of community and the power politics of modernity (see, for example, Nancy 2000: 47–65, 141; Esposito 2013: 65, 71–4; Esposito 2012: 145, 150–1).

Politicising the common (i) Despite its evocation of the political and its visionary discourse of another politics-to-come, the post-Heideggerian philosophy of community has been repeatedly taken to task for being politically irrelevant or even anti-political. I will make now the case that these criticisms raise valid objections. But post-Heideggerian thought can be repoliticised, or more fully politicised, in ways that reclaim its political value for the contemporary world. The work of repoliticisation or deeper politicisation will implicate several different gestures. First, certain aspects of the foregoing ontology of community will be revised so as to shore up its political pertinence. Then, the abstract musings of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben will be associated with contemporary political movements on the ground that illustrate their actual relevance. Last, they will be supplemented with a critical theory of antagonism, division and hegemony, drawn from the work of Laclau and Mouffe. This can help to construct collective subjects of struggle and change that could further in practice the politics of the common advocated by Nancy, Esposito and Agamben. A first battery of critiques turns on the very project of formulating a fundamental ontology, an account of being in general, in order to establish a broad framework for rethinking community and politics (Armstrong 2009: 63; Norris 2012: 144). Any such ontological inquiry is bound to raise serious doubts under the late modern pluralism of ‘comprehensive views’ and an increased scepticism over objective universal knowledge. A contemporary interpretation of being should recognise its partiality, its weak grounding, its contestability and its historicity (White 2000; Marchart 2007: 82–3; Dardot and Laval 2014: 281–2). Furthermore, advancing propositions about being-in-common that would hold true in any time and place seems to contradict head-on the anti-essentialist tenor of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben, who claim to dispense with permanent essences. Finally, an intellectual labour that operates primarily at the highest level of ‘ontological’ abstraction and does not immerse itself in particular contexts will, most likely, fail to reckon with specific constraints and possibilities. Hence the numerous charges against the postHeideggerian ontologies of community, which take them to task for their abstract philosophism, their failure to connect ontology with concrete politics of the common, and their inability to offer guidance to collective 19

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics praxis (Dardot and Laval 2014: 276–83; Marchart 2007: 80–1; Fynsk 1991: x–xi; Norris 2012: 155; Elliott 2011; Wagner 2006: 93–4). The problem of political irrelevance is only compounded by the very fact that Nancy and Esposito locate their construal of being-in-common on the plane of an originary and fundamental condition. By definition, this condition is given from the outset. It is not something to be produced or instituted. Hence, it is not the object of a politics (Fynsk 1991: x–xi). In their defence, Nancy and Esposito could remind us that, in their view, the fundamental situation of being-singular-plural can be, and has been, distorted by totalising politics or atomisation. They suggest, thus, that their ontology of being-in-common should orient politics as a limit and a condition to hold on to (Nancy 2000: 47–65, 141; Nancy 1991: 80–1; Nancy 2010a; Esposito 2013: 65, 71–4). Yet, even with this qualification, they can always foment political quietism insofar as they assert that plurality, openness and relations free of fixed identities are the ontological ground of our existence, rather than contingent objectives and precarious forms that should be politically shaped and strained after (Elliott 2011). Moreover, it is true that Nancy, Esposito and Agamben dwell on an abstract conception of ‘inessential commonality’ without explicating the particular schemes of political action and organisation that could enact it in practice (Marchart 2012: 178–81). Both Nancy and Esposito explicitly admit as much. Their lofty politics, which lives the world as a system of plural singularities beyond sovereignty, ‘does not let itself be conceived of easily’ (Nancy 2000: 141); ‘transforming this philosophical formula into actual practice, into a political logic, isn’t easy. And yet we have to find a way’ (Esposito 2013: 65; see also Esposito 2013: 78). Translating their ontology into a pragmatic politics remains, for them, ‘an unheard-of, inconceivable task’ that we must assume (Nancy 2000: 141). Agamben (1993: 87) sees some hints of a political realisation in the Tiananmen demonstrations, only to end on an aporetic note: ‘Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.’ A second family of critiques revolves around the recurrent injunction to distance politics from any collective project, end or work. This is particularly pronounced in the thought of Nancy (2010a: 26, 41; Nancy 1997: 111–16; Elliott 2011: 268; Wagner 2006: 93–4). He seems to install a ban on the political determination of collective ends and the realisation of political projects through collective action. Nancy (1997: 89) identifies such politics with totalitarianism and the sacrifice to a Cause. But it is not clear why a body politic that undertakes common projects cannot also make room for other ends and activities that would be 20

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commoning the political, politicising the common carried out by particular groups or individuals. Moreover, what is left for politics, beyond technocratic administration and management, if it should refrain from collective choices and works? Finally, the very kind of politics championed by Nancy – a politics that affords access to multiple spheres of common activity by regulating force according to ‘incommensurable justice’ – must set itself the aim to do so. This objective will need to be subdivided into a multiplicity of particular goals relative to the different spheres of co-activity. Accordingly, Nancy’s politics would still be a politics that adopts collective ends and implements common policies or ‘programmes’ of action in various fields of society. Lastly, a third source of discontent lies in the dismal failure of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben to grapple with ‘the political’ in the sense of power relations, divisions, antagonism and the making of collective subjects. Nancy (2000: 47) acknowledges that politics involves also power and struggle. Moreover, at the latest stage of his work, he endorses a notion of politics that regulates force (Nancy 2010a: 50–1). What is blatantly missing, however, is any in-depth engagement with the questions of power, hegemony, antagonism, institutions and the forging of links among differences in order to configure collective subjects (Marchart 2007: 81–2; Marchart 2012; Wagner 2006: 100–1). Accordingly, Nancy’s contemplation of the common and the political seems to be an instance of those pluralist philosophies castigated by Chantal Mouffe on the grounds that they ‘envisage a pluralism without antagonism . . . pluralism as a mere valorization of multiplicity, thereby eluding the constitutive role of conflict and antagonism’ (Mouffe 2013: 14–15). Wrestling with hegemonic structures of power, antagonisms, the making of political ties and alternative institutions is necessary in order to challenge and change the ruling regime of neoliberal power by rallying together broad political alliances out of dispersed differences. It is necessary in order to further precisely the kind of open pluralist and egalitarian community cherished by post-Heideggerian philosophers. Otherwise, we are indeed left in a political vacuum of ethical injunctions and abstract philosophising. All these objections are to the point but they should not result in a dismissal of Nancy’s, Esposito’s and Agamben’s notions of the common and the political. Openness to the others, plurality, sharing and solidarity beyond differences, variation, creativity, singularity and equality, infinite justice, resistance to homogenisation, totality and atomisation, opposition to closed identities of soil, blood, community or self: all these are cardinal values of a politics that aspires to equal freedom and justice in a globalised, diverse, fragmented and dramatically unequal world. The critiques should motivate, rather, efforts to politicise the 21

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics ontologies of being-singular-plural, turning them into political principles and orientations and bringing them closer to the rough ground of actual politics. A first move in this direction should set out to politicise ‘ontology’. Every politics is infused with a particular sense of being – of the way human actors, society and nature are (see White 2000). Ontological reflection thus contributes to clarity, self-understanding, critique and revision. But there is no place today for an ‘objective’ fundamental ontology that would lay claim to universal validity. Every account of how ‘things are’ is partial, in conflict with other views of the ‘real’ and inflected by political values and choices. Hence, any ontology of being-singular-plural should be reframed as political: an interpretation of social being that rests on reasonable arguments and evidence but does not grasp the whole. It is imbued with value choices and it remains subject to question. Moreover, solidarity beyond specific identities (national, ideological, racial and so on), and being-in-common beyond atomisation and homogenisation are not a fundamental fact of the world but partial moments and values to be actively promoted. Therefore, political ontology should be further transcribed into a political logic, a political orientation that guides collective action, rather than posing as an already existing reality and foundation. This transcription already points to a third gesture of politicisation. Political action, particularly when it strives to overhaul prevailing systems of social power, should not condemn itself to a subsidiary role, subservient to ends that are fixed in existing social fields. Hence, political praxis cannot forswear the determination of collective ends and projects. Nancy is right to spurn a totalising politics that intends to pre-empt the ends of all social activities, to programme social life in its entirety and to demand a sacrifice to ultimate Causes. But there is no reason why political activity that ventures into common enterprises could not forgo such totalising aspirations and also make room for initiatives that are not designed by the body politic. Democratic politics is about the collective and deliberate determination of common ends. But it needs not, and should not, be totalising. Nancy seems to posit a false alternative between totalitarian politics or politics that sets itself no ends. In any case, politics is effectively located in any field of action where collective choices are made – through struggle, relations of power or egalitarian decision-making in common. A fourth major step in the labour of politicisation should link the idea of community sketched out by Nancy, Esposito and Agamben with contemporary political activities that partly instantiate it. Such an empirical grounding can demonstrate the actual pertinence of the philosophy of 22

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commoning the political, politicising the common plural being in common. It also helps to work out a middle level of theorising, which is situated beyond abstract, general philosophising and the detailed description of particular cases. In effect, since the turn of the century, a vast literature on social movements has shown that a wide array of collective mobilisations bear the precise features that single out ‘inessential community’ in Nancy’s, Esposito’s and Agamben’s thought. A variety of organisations, resistances and collective initiatives that have surged forth over the last decades in Latin America, across Europe and in various other sites organise in open and horizontal associations that manage their affairs directly through consensus and decentralised decision-making. They knit loose network coalitions, but they are pluralist and they do not adhere to a master plan of social restructuring; nor do they struggle to implement a universal model of social transformation forcibly (see Day 2005: 25–45, 186–97; Dixon 2014). Such communities thus elude the logic of state politics, sovereign power, definite political programmes, fixed models, common substances and closed identities. More recently, the Indignados and Occupy insurgencies in 2011–12 likewise embodied communities of action rather than of a common ethnic, religious and so on substance. They celebrated plurality, openness and solidarity beyond particular identities, dismissing ideological closures, uniformity and political programmes (see, for example, Sitrin and Azzellini 2014; Taylor et al. 2011; Dhaliwal 2012; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011). They were ‘leaderless resistance movement[s] with people of many . . . political persuasions’ (Harcourt 2011) that stood up against material inequalities, debt, foreclosures and the economic system that engenders them in partnership with states. But the movements took issue with formal political representation, party partisanship, definite ideologies and the homogeneous unity of the people or the masses. They carried out, instead, new practices of self-governance through an egalitarian and consensual deliberation that is accessible to all and welcomes diversity. Moreover, they set up horizontal, decentralised networks that allow for collaboration without suppressing the freedom of singularities (see Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011; Tejerina and Perugorría 2012; Lorey 2014; Graeber 2014). The popular assemblies that were convened in public squares sought to institute spaces of free and plural community. Their processes of collective decision-making opened political power to common citizens, striking down informal and institutional barriers to participation (Dhaliwal 2012: 265–6). Moreover, the assemblies welcomed a wide range of differences (Dhaliwal 2012: 263–5; Nez 2012; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011: 43–54, 221). As a result, the squares became 23

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics ‘a magnetic furnace where strangers that once walked anywhere alone meet, mix’, performing Agamben’s community as a space of ease in which people can move freely and approximate each other as they wish (Dhaliwal 2012: 259; Agamben 1993: 25). In all these respects, the recent ‘square movements’ and other contemporary instances of collective action exemplify the idea of community set forth by Nancy, Esposito and Agamben: community as an open relation among a plurality of singularities, a happening, an act of association, a dialogue of plural voices, reciprocal action exposed to diversity and change, a practice of sharing that is never complete, a web of singular differences, a space of free convergence. A fifth and last politicising intervention should wed ‘the common’ to a political conception that thinks through two political predicaments that are left unaddressed by Nancy, Esposito and Agamben: antagonism in the sense of conflict between irreconcilable positions, and the hegemonic relations of force underlying the dominant order of society and any struggles for founding new political communities. The work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985; Laclau 1990, 2005a; Mouffe 2000, 2005, 2013) is particularly suited to this task. It is a major contribution to the contemporary rethinking of both hegemony and antagonism, which is intended to forward plural and egalitarian democracy. However, a conjunction of the plural, open and horizontal common with hegemonic politics could not be seamless and frictionless since they embody conflicting political logics and practices. Hegemony involves the drawing of political frontiers, exclusions and processes of concentration and convergence on common identities, which set bounds to plurality, openness, horizontality and sharing. The remainder of the chapter will carry on with this last step of ‘politicising the common’ by probing certain aspects of the crucial but tension-ridden task of tying together the plural common with hegemony.

Politicising the common (ii): Hegemony and the common From the standpoint of Laclau and Mouffe, ‘hegemony’ is necessary in order to transform contemporary societies in the direction of open and plural communities. A randomly dispersed multiplicity of movements, fights and alternative practices of the ‘common’ is unlikely to elicit broader social change. It is more likely to founder on incoherence, conflicts among heterogeneous courses of action, and the weakness of fragmented, isolated forces that are confronted with entrenched interests. To achieve a minimum of convergence among diverse struggles and 24

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commoning the political, politicising the common to amass enough force to challenge the status quo, we need to engage in the politics of hegemony. This articulates wider political communities through chains of equivalence, targets an enemy, draws frontiers between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and instils into different actors a modicum of collective identity (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 140–1, 178–84; Mouffe 1991: 70; Mouffe 2013: 73–4). Hegemony is, more specifically, the political practice that brings into being a new social order starting out from an antagonistic confrontation between rival social sectors. Diverse demands and groups can become equivalent by means of their common opposition to an enemy. They thus forge a ‘chain of equivalence’ that unites them beyond their particularities. This chain will coalesce into a collective subject if a particular force within it rises to become the general representative of all equivalent struggles and claims, functioning as a centre of cohesion. To this end, the identity of a particular actor must be partly divested of its particular contents so as to serve as a wider symbol that represents and holds together the entire community of differences (Laclau 2005a: 93; Laclau 2000a: 207–12). Hegemony is contingent upon an unequal distribution of power within the oppositional front, since a particular actor must accede to a position of leadership, and against the enemy who must be excluded and eventually overrun in order to instate a new hegemonic order (Laclau 2000a: 207–8). Hegemonic politics is also a politics of representation: a particular force champions common ends and projects in the name of an entire bloc of forces (Laclau 1996: 98–100). Laclau and Mouffe have entertained a particular idea of radical democratic community, drawing on a conception of the ‘political’ that is elided with hegemony and antagonism (Mouffe 2005: 8–9, 17; Mouffe 2000: 22, 130; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–45). Antagonism consists in an unbridgeable division between ‘us’ and ‘them, ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’, whereby the presence of the other negates my identity (Mouffe 2005: 15–18; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 111–14, 125–30). Antagonism is an always present possibility of social relations because plurality sparks radical disagreement in the realm of politics and justice. Hence, for Laclau and Mouffe, the ‘political’ refers to ‘a choice between conflicting alternatives’. And when they are taken amidst dissent, political decisions settle on one or the other alternative, according to the prevalent relations of force (Mouffe 2000; 130; Mouffe 2005: 105; Laclau 1991: 90). Every social order is thus ‘hegemonic’ in that it rests upon a particular balance of forces and a set of political exclusions (Mouffe 2005: 17–18; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–45). The hegemonic road to the plural common converges partly with the contemporary existentialist ways. For Laclau and Mouffe, what ties 25

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics together a radical and plural democratic community, which is hegemonically formed, is not a substantive idea of the common good, but a collective identification with the political principles of freedom and equality and a shared commitment to their expansion (Mouffe 1991: 76–82; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 176–86). Hence, as in the thought of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben, the common of radical democracy is plural and open. It eludes the dichotomy between modern society diluted into an aggregate of atoms and a premodern community organised around a specific notion of the good (Mouffe 1991: 75). In the radical democratic common of Laclau and Mouffe, the mutual recognition of certain ethico-political values respects individual liberty and allows for a diversity of more specific allegiances. The political community thus lacks a fully fixed identity or a final unity. It is amenable to ongoing re-enactment and it does not make up a unitary subject. The common consists, rather, in the precarious and provisional articulation of a multiplicity of spaces, social relations, movements, forms of identification and democratic practices that retain their partial autonomy (Mouffe 1991: 77, 79–80; Laclau 1991: 95–6; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 176–93). But this political framing of the plural common parts ways with the post-Heideggerians ideas as it addresses antagonism, power relations and the need to build the political community rather than presuppose it as an ontological condition. First, the commons of open plurality, freedom and equality are seen by Laclau and Mouffe as a political project that must be actively elaborated and striven for by a collective counter-hegemonic front. And the common ‘we’ of the democratic struggles that will take on this task is not already given. It must be strenuously composed amidst diversity and conflict by pursuing the politics of hegemony. This involves the banding together of differences, chains of equivalence, concentration of force and empty signifiers (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–45; Laclau 2000a: 207–11). Second, the common reckons with antagonisms and political contests both inwards and outwards. Outwards, it names an enemy of its political project – the status quo – that must be fought and defeated (Mouffe 2000: 20, 48; Mouffe 2005: 15–16; Laclau 1991: 91). Inwards, clashes over democratic values, programmes and tactics are acknowledged and handled politically by cultivating a conflictual consensus around the core commitments to freedom and equality. These principles are susceptible of contending interpretations. A radically plural democratic community enshrines institutional spaces for the public expression and contest of such antagonistic differences. It breeds solidarity among political rivals who acknowledge the legitimacy of the conflict among 26

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commoning the political, politicising the common contending positions and share an allegiance to freedom and equality (Mouffe 2000: 101–4). This politics of commonality through strife can nourish solidarity and can give fuller scope to equal liberties under circumstances of conflictual multiplicity, where disparate political preferences cannot come into effect at the same time. Rivals are likely to develop a mutual understanding as they come to appreciate the reasons and concerns on other sides by taking part in ongoing political interaction. Bonds of solidarity among political opponents may arise from their shared concern for a political community that guarantees fundamental rights for all, empowers them to stand up for their positions and enables them to prevail in the political contest in the future if they gather more political force (Tully 2008: 216, 311). Exclusion of differences and repression of freedoms can be reduced to a minimum when dissenters, minorities and oppressed social sectors are free to voice their demands in public, to advocate their cause, to negotiate compromises and to keep fighting for their positions. Equal liberties can deepen and amplify when those subject to unequal relations and injustice are able to participate in relatively fair processes of conflict and deliberation that allow them to challenge and overhaul the status quo. Hence, this ‘agonistic common’ can nurture bonds of mutual recognition and coalescence among different parties who remain rivals along certain dimensions, making more space for plural freedom under conditions of dissent and division (Tully 2008: 181–4, 214–15, 306–8). In an agonistic common that seeks to amplify open plurality and freedom, the political contest over political arrangements and social relations should remain infinitely ongoing. This is a fundamental condition both for preserving social relations from coagulation and for bolstering the equal freedom of singularities under regular constraints of time, asymmetrical relations of power and covert forms of domination. Such constraints impede political intercourse from achieving a fully inclusive and free consensus that would accommodate the desires and liberties of all (Mouffe 2005: 121–2; Mouffe 2000: 15–16, 32–4, 77, 47–8, 104–5; Tully 2008: 181–4, 214–15, 306–8). Finally, in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s thought, the common is receptive to difference, dissent and change. But it sets bounds to openness and diversity by delimiting friends from enemies, enforcing exclusions, harbouring uneven power relations and instituting political representation. A plural and radical democratic community represses or expels primarily the enemies of its principles and institutions, thereby foisting limits on the plurality it shelters. Within itself, as well, particular conceptions and forces will hegemonise at each moment the interpretation 27

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics of democratic principles and will determine the dominant patterns of social relations and institutions. Yet, their hegemony will be partial, temporary and subject to challenge. In a plural common that is agonistic and democratic, all practices, relations, arrangements and collective choices are seen as mutable products of history and politics, stained with traces of violence and exclusion. Hence, in a radical democratic community, they should lend themselves more readily to interrogation and transformation in order to combat persisting or newly emerging bonds of domination and to minimise expulsions and repression. By the same token, there would be ampler room for new identities and political horizons to rise up and to vindicate their rights. This way of constituting an agonistic plural common conduces to an endless opening and a perpetual extension of the range of differences that enjoy equal freedom, without fully eliminating exclusions and inequalities (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 190–3; Laclau 1991; Mouffe 1991; Mouffe 2005, 121–2; Mouffe 2000, 32–3, 77, 47–8, 104–5; Laclau 2005b: 258–61).

Commoning the political (ii) No doubt, antagonistic struggles, exclusions and the use of power are called for today in order to enlarge the social fields where diverse, open and egalitarian commons can gain ground against the overwhelming forces of neoliberal globalisation. It is also evident that irreconcilable conflicts and, hence, power struggles and repression are likely to arise in any communities of singular differences that are not held together by unifying principles and universal foundations. But Laclau’s and Mouffe’s hegemonic notion of the ‘political’ tends to reinforce, rather than subvert, tendencies towards exclusion, strife, vertical hierarchies and centralised power. This transpires from their very identification of the ‘political’ with antagonism, hegemony, coercion, exclusion and sovereignty, and the explicit dismissal of conceptions that construe the political as a space of freedom and deliberation (Mouffe 2005: 8–9, 17; Laclau 2005b: 258). More specifically, Mouffe (2000: 33; Mouffe 2005: 11–12) has asserted time and again that ‘a non-exclusive public space of rational argument where a non-coercive consensus could be attained’ is a ‘conceptual impossibility’. Moreover, her idea of an agonistic democratic association is fixated on the relation between political rivals. Opponents converge on the ethico-political values of freedom and equality but they are divided by their incompatible understandings of these values. And they vie for hegemony without any interest in compromise and agreement with their political opponents. Hence, the type of political bond 28

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commoning the political, politicising the common that receives close attention in Mouffe’s picture of an agonistic political community is the relation of contained, politicised strife and contest between political rivals. The ‘friend’s side’ of politics in the political interaction between friend and enemy, the ties of civic friendship, coalition and solidarity that make up ‘us’ who fight ‘them’, are scantly theorised in comparison. Even when she addresses the question of unity, which must be formed between various democratic demands and struggles in order to put together a collective will, she fastens primarily on the need to deal with an adversary (Mouffe 1991: 70–82; Mouffe 2013: 5–18, 74). In a nutshell, in her view, the fundamental question is not how to arrive at a consensus without exclusion. . . . This is impossible. . . . For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of the ‘adversary’. . . . Adversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation of the principles to become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position . . . what is at stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled rationally, one of them needing to be defeated. (Mouffe 2013: 6–7, 9)

A sea of distance thus seems to separate Mouffe’s agonistic commons from the logic of the common outlined by Nancy, Esposito and Agamben: the common is sharing, responsiveness to the others, solidarity amidst difference and connection beyond particular identities, bursting apart boundaries, exclusions, fixed demarcations, state sovereignty and top-down rule. Mouffe (2013: 78) discards the very idea of ‘a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty . . . without the need of law or the State’. Division, determinate collective identities, demarcation from Others and confrontation with them, the State and political representation in its institutions occupy the core of her radical and plural democracy (Mouffe 2013: 78–9, 84, 125). Hence Mouffe’s uneasiness with contemporary civic movements such as Occupy and the Indignados. Their aspiration to plurality and openness without bounds, their negation of state politics and institutional representation, their commitment to consensus, horizontality and decentralisation, their pursuit of the ‘common’ outside the state are denounced as an inadequate strategy for democratic reform, which is rooted in a flawed conception of the ‘political’ (Mouffe 2013: 109–27). In the work of Laclau and Mouffe, the communal link is drawn in the manner of hegemonic politics, which engineers collective identities and communities of struggle by welding ‘chains of equivalence’ (Laclau 2005a: 93; Laclau 2000a: 207–12). Hence, a certain degree 29

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics of centralisation of power, power inequalities among members of the community, political representation, top-down leadership, unity around a common collective identity, and a common sense and culture (Laclau 1991: 121) are held to be constitutive of any politically fabricated ‘common’ of plurality and equality. In Laclau’s hegemonic view, the community of social actors, spaces and mobilisations that yearn for a radical and plural democracy will be led by a particular force that soars above all others to become the representative of the whole: ‘the ability of a group to assume a function of universal representation presupposes that it is in a better position than other groups to assume this role, so that power is unevenly distributed between various organisms and social sectors’ (Laclau 2000b: 208; see also Laclau 2005a: 158–64). Inequality, concentration of power and vertical leadership are thus bound to persist within the plural common. Even individual leadership is accorded a prominent place (Laclau 2005a: 100). Political representation becomes likewise entrenched in the politics of post-Marxist hegemony. It is necessary not only for the symbolic representation of a counter-hegemonic front but also for the composition of a collective will out of fragmented, inchoate and marginalised social identities. Hence, in a contemporary plural common, political representatives assume an enhanced sovereign function, moulding social relations, collective identities and the common will (Laclau 1996: 98–100; Laclau 2005a: 158–61). Hegemony is bent on sovereign politics even more clearly in regard to the state. Rather than opt for an exodus from the state or seek to abolish it, the aim of a counter-hegemonic strategy today would be to engage with established institutions and to reconstruct the state along with its representative politics (Mouffe 2013: 75–84, 118–27). Commenting on the 2011 ‘anti-institutional’ mobilisations, Laclau (2014: 9) affirmed unambiguously that ‘the horizontal dimension of autonomy will be incapable, left to itself, of bringing about long-term historical change if it is not complemented by the vertical dimension of “hegemony” – that is, a radical transformation of the state’. Finally, hegemonic politics reinstates a measure of substantial unity that smothers plurality. In Laclau’s perspective, the unification of diversity is brought about mainly by means of ‘empty signifiers’, which seem to eschew any substantial common identity, nurturing plurality as a result. ‘Empty signifiers’ denote particular demands and symbols that are partly emptied of their particularity in order to act as a surface for the inscription of an infinite diversity of grievances and claims (Laclau 1996: 57–8; Laclau 2000a: 210). However, centralised leadership will occasion effects of unification that stifle dissent and plurality (see, for 30

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commoning the political, politicising the common example, Laclau 2000a: 207–8). Moreover, in certain turns of his argument, Laclau holds on explicitly to residues of a substantial, overarching identity: ‘For me, a radical democratic society . . . instils in its members a civic sense which is a central ingredient of their identity . . . a diffuse democratic culture is created, which gives the community its specific identity’ (Laclau 1996: 121). In effect, concentrated force, inequality, exclusions, sovereignty, representative government, hierarchies, vertical leadership and vestiges of a substantial unity become naturalised, hardwired into the very essence of politics and raised above the fray of political contestation itself. These features are inherent in hegemony, which is elided with the ‘essence of the political’ itself (Mouffe 2005: 8–9, 17; Mouffe 2000: 22, 130; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–5). Laclau’s and Mouffe’s theses on antagonism, hegemony and counterhegemony are situated, indeed, at a level of ‘ontological’ abstraction that occupies the deep ‘ground’ of the political itself. The ‘political’ is placed at a distance from the empirical variety of politics: that is, of particular modes of organisation, collective action and government. However, exactly on account of this ‘ontological difference’, Laclau’s and Mouffe’s idea of hegemonic politics admits of diverse translations into specific practices that might cut against closure, exclusion, homogenisation, inequality, concentration of power and sovereign, top-down rule. Laclau points in this direction when he counsels that, although power cannot be eliminated, ‘Any theory about power in a democratic society has to be a theory about the forms of power which are compatible with democracy’ (Laclau 1996: 115). However, these specific forms of democratic power are not thought through in their work. We are thus left with the ‘ontological’ propositions that can serve, and have served, to doubt and invalidate anti-hierarchical, plural self-organisation in both theory and practice (for an example of theoretical use, see Mouffe 2013: 75–84, 118–27. For an example of practical use or abuse, see the discussion of verticalism in Podemos in Kioupkiolis 2016). It thus seems that the hegemonic constitution of a plural democratic common clashes head-on with the inclusionary, wildly diverse, egalitarian, horizontal, consensual, decentralised, caring, solidary, non-sovereign, nonstatist and non-representative spirit that animates both post-Heideggerian thought and contemporary autonomous mobilisations such as the Indignados and Occupy. The two, accordingly, could not make common cause in order to help horizontal commons to come to grips with antagonism and power structures. Yet, both Laclau and Mouffe have pleaded for such a conjunction between the ‘logic of hegemony’ and the plural ‘logic of autonomy’, 31

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics even in most recent years: ‘Instead of opposing extra-parliamentary to parliamentary struggle, thereby eschewing the possibility of common action, the objective should be to jointly launch a counter-hegemonic offensive against neo-liberalism’ (Mouffe 2013: 127; see also 76–7, 126–7). For Laclau (2014: 9), the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street and the piqueteros in Argentina, among others, incarnate the ‘horizontal dimension of “autonomy”’, and ‘To advance both in the direction of autonomy and hegemony is the real challenge to those who aim for a democratic future.’ Their latest calls for a constructive confluence bespeak, however, an ignorance of the collisions between the two logics, which may turn out to be destructive. The recent history of the relations between ‘progressive governments’ and autonomous grassroots movements in Latin America bears witness to the ruinous tensions (see Dangl 2010; Zibechi 2010; Holloway 2010). As social energies and demands are increasingly channelled into state institutions, they are diverted from other activities. Social actors become incorporated in the state apparatus and its power games, while movements are drained of their stamina and autonomy. More broadly, in their intercourse with social movements, state authorities are most often the stronger partner on account of their organisational power, their monopoly of legitimate force, their sovereign claims to political decision-making and their institutional diffusion. Generally, the politics of top-down, centralised direction, with its organised mechanisms and its fewer inhibitions in the use of power, normally has the will and the force to sway more poorly resourced and loosely structured civic mobilisations, which are averse to power politics and authoritarianism. Laclau and Mouffe were alert to these frictions in their earlier, and seminal, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In it, they understand that a political logic aiming at unity, concentration of forces and closure may escalate into a totalising politics that suppresses plurality and rules in an authoritarian style. They contend, moreover, that there is a symmetrical danger with the logic of autonomy and difference. Taken to extremes, it may entail the absence of any common point of reference and any political bond, thus resulting in the loss of the political. Hence, democracy should recognise a multiplicity of social logics and the need to articulate them. But Laclau and Mouffe insisted, then, that this articulation should be ‘constantly re-created and renegotiated’, as no final balance could be definitely struck (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 188). Radical democracy should therefore undertake to ‘institutionalise’ this ‘moment of tension, of openness’ between the conflicting logics (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 190; see also 181–93). 32

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commoning the political, politicising the common In the thought of Laclau and Mouffe, however, the awareness of a conflictual bind between hegemony and autonomy has not given rise to any systematic endeavour to work through the tension with a view to reducing the risk of destruction, mainly of autonomous plural politics by hegemonic forces. Such labour is vital for any contemporary politics that seeks to weave together the two logics so as to plot an adequate strategy for the proliferation of open, diverse and self-organised commons. A first step towards moderating their conflict would dispense with essentialist ‘hegemonic’ definitions that confine ‘the political’ to antagonism, exclusions and power relations, ruling out consensus, maximum inclusion and an equal distribution of power. ‘The political’ as the active determination of social relations and collective ends manifests itself in various guises, which feature both strife and dialogue, both antagonism and attempts at a mutually acceptable agreement, both power struggles and solidarity, both preservation of the status quo and creative transformations. Furthermore, to avert the absorption of grassroots horizontal communities in the bureaucratic institutions of the state or the market, the synergy between horizontalism and verticalism should be disjunctive, thereby keeping alive the mutual agonistic contest and the independence of each political practice. A heightened awareness of the tensions that run between the different aspects of counter-hegemonic politics and a committed effort to keep them apart will be necessary in order to maintain the different qualities of political agency in its various directions. Moreover, the politics of hegemony and the politics of open and plural commons should be conducted with different strengths on different sides and levels of socio-political activity. The fixing of antagonistic frontiers, the formation of collective identities, the rallying together of forces, the exclusion of particular politics and social forms, the struggle to overpower the opponent should be undertaken primarily outwards – against the advocates and the beneficiaries of unjust, oppressive, exclusionary, homogenising and unequal relations. The drive to enact inclusionary, free, egalitarian and diverse commons should energise mostly the ties and interactions within the multiple movements that converge against common adversaries: the political forces that defend old or new enclosures, hierarchies and injustices. In other words, the politics of hegemony should be turned against its upholders with a view to minimising structures of domination, expulsion and closed identity across all social fields. Finally, a series of particular attitudes, ethics, arts and strategies can help to negotiate the tensions between the two logics successfully in favour of the open and plural common. The hegemonic leg of the pair 33

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics is typically more powerful and imperious. It is better resourced, better organised, relatively isolated from direct collective influence and, most often, power-mongering. Therefore, effective steps need to be taken in order to tilt the balance of force between vertical hegemony and the plural commons in favour of the latter. First, any higher-level concentration of power in representative institutions, spoke councils and so on should emanate from the bottom, and grassroots communities should be laid out in ways that promote openness, diversity and the decentralisation of decision-making. Second, any residues of hegemonic politics – of unification, leadership and representation – that are still condoned within horizontal communities on the grounds of political efficacy should be radically transfigured in ways that nourish egalitarianism, autonomy and a spacious diversity. Among others, a regular rotation in roles of responsibility and leadership can contribute to a wide sharing of knowledge and power, the acquisition of skills by large numbers of people and their empowerment. Moreover, full transparency, accountability and revocability of councilpersons and representatives empower the grassroots to retain control over leadership functions (Dixon 2014: 186–8, 190–6; della Porta and Rucht 2015: 222–131). Besides, in order to safeguard the plurality and the openness of the common, alternative arts of unification and community-building should be deployed in order to counter drives towards homogeneity and closure. Hence, diversity, inclusion and a shared opposition to forces that impose uniform models could become the very foundation of convergence and community. This has indeed been the case with recent democratic movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, which stood up in common against the ‘1 per cent’ but valorised the plurality of perspectives, intentions and desires that they encompassed (Harcourt 2011).

In conclusion Ours is a time of pervasive social diversity, tighter global interconnections, social fragmentation, disillusionment with democracy, growing oligarchic tendencies, steepening inequalities and rising xenophobia. It is urgent, therefore, to rethink the social bond, solidarity, community, collective action, politics and government. And this revisiting should be carried out in terms of an irreducible plurivocity and a political praxis that establishes an open network of links among singularities without conforming to prefabricated models or substantial closed identities. Hence the importance of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben on the ‘inessential’ commonality of community. 34

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commoning the political, politicising the common To put flesh on the bones of this idea of the common and to make it politically operative, contemporary philosophy needs to politicise its abstract ‘ontological’ discourse, while preserving its reflective edges and its broader remit. A key step in this direction is to regain contact with real politics on the ground – with emergent social movements, systems of power and antagonisms. In the last years, collective mobilisations such as the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street have assembled communities of action that are open, consensual and self-organised; they embrace diversity, they empower ordinary people on a footing of equality and they do battle with fixed hierarchies, top-down state politics and closed ideologies. In all these respects, they have staged specific enactments of the open, plural, free and ‘inessential’ common that Nancy, Esposito and Agamben envision. Hence, contemporary mobilisations indicate how an elusive theorising about ‘being-singular-plural’ and ‘the coming community’ could be transcribed into more specific political action and change. A second major gesture would be to join the philosophy of the plural common to political thought and practice that give due recognition to what the former philosophy leaves out of account: power structures, fundamental antagonisms, the construction of collective identities and the organisation of collective action. Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony and agonistic democracy contains valuable intellectual resources on this front. But their ideas, and any other ‘realistic’ take on power politics, should be substantially revised in order to minimise repression, exclusion and inequality in the new commons of democratic struggles. This can help to strike a productive balance between political efficacy and the actual cultivation of another ethos of the common. The following chapters will carry forward this attempt to common the political and to politicise the common by delving into other conceptions, practices and facets both of the common(s) and of the political.

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Chapter Two

From the commons to another politics of egalitarian autonomy Common-pool resources, digital and anti-capitalist commons, from Ostrom to Marxist autonomism

The proliferating research and discourse around the ‘commons’ in recent years can briskly refresh reflection on the common, the political and their mutual enhancement. On the one hand, it can help to give substance to the abstract post-Heideggerian musings on autonomous communities. On the other, it showcases effective schemes of collective self-organisation by exploring historical and actual instances of collective self-management around shared goods. This chapter will tease out at some length the implications of commons theories and practices for relaunching the politics of egalitarian autonomy in our times. It will thus carry forward the process of ‘commoning the political’. At the same time, it will uncover the ‘lack of the political’ that plagues various strands of contemporary work on the commons by bringing out their failure to think through the political in the guise of power relations, conflict, the making of collective subjects and communities of struggle. It will thereby further motivate the search for apposite ways to ‘politicise the common’. The ‘commons’, ‘common-pool resources’ (Ostrom 1990: 30, 90) or ‘commons-based peer production’ (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 395) encapsulates goods and resources that are collectively owned and/ or collectively produced. Access to them is provided on equal terms (which may range from totally open access to universal exclusion from consumption, with many possibilities in between). The common good is collectively administered in egalitarian and participatory ways by the very communities that manufacture it or own it. There are many different varieties of common goods, from natural common-pool resources (fishing grounds, irrigation canals and so on; 36

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy Ostrom 1990: 30) to common productive assets, such as workers’ cooperatives, and cultural or digital goods, such as open source software (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006; Dyer-Witheford 2012; Walljasper 2010: xix). Crucially, the category of the ‘commons’ captures shared resources that are governed, produced and distributed through collective participation in terms that eschew the logic of both private–corporate and state–public property (Ostrom 1990: 1–30, 90; Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 394–6; Dyer-Witheford 2012). Equally important, existing ‘commons’ are menaced by the predatory, privatising impulses of corporate forces and by the top-down, monopolistic authority of state powers (De Angelis 2005, 2010, 2012; Caffentzis 2013; Bollier 2008). Finally, it is now a common topos that the commons display a tripartite structure. ‘Most definitions present commons as a construct constituted of three main parts: (a) common resources, (b) institutions (i.e. commoning practices) and (c) the communities (called commoners) who are involved in the production and reproduction of commons’ (Dellenbaugh et al. 2015: 13; see also Bollier and Helfrich 2015: 3). The burgeoning body of research on the heterogeneous commons (natural, social, digital and so on) generates valuable insights into how self-organisation can actually be practised in common, nurturing values of reciprocity and fairness while yielding effective solutions to critical problems in the management of collective resources (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006; Ostrom 1990; Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010; De Angelis 2005). This extensive literature illuminates empirically tested modes of conflict resolution, collective governance and institution-building, which embody alternative ways of doing politics by furthering equal participation, inclusion and sustainability.

Elinor Ostrom and natural ‘common-pool’ resources: reclaiming the commons in theory and practice Elinor Ostrom’s innovative scholarship, published in her magnum opus Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990), was a major intervention in mainstream government studies and economics. It shook up prevalent assumptions and disseminated the concept of the commons across research communities and beyond. In this watershed of the contemporary literature on the commons, Ostrom takes issue with the two dominant approaches to the management of natural resources and to government, more broadly. Political orthodoxy misses and occludes the fact that ‘communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over 37

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics long periods of time’ (Ostrom 1990: 1). The aim of Ostrom’s commons studies has, from the outset, been to make conceptual and political space for the recognition of other ways of governing natural resources in common, emphasising the diversity of systems and institutions of governance (see Ostrom 1990: 2–21; Ostrom 2010). She intended to question the reduction of actual options to ‘policies of privatization and nationalization that were so widely adopted’ (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010: 39). Her entire work draws on case studies and institutional analysis in order to demonstrate that ‘collective action on the commons is possible and not merely a vestigial form’ (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010: 46). The styles of reasoning that warrant only state regulation or market privatisation and competition presume that individuals are rational ‘utility maximisers’ who separately look after their personal interests in the best way possible. Individuals will thus face a ‘collective action’ problem in the management of natural resources, and in other circumstances, when it is in their best interest to collaborate but independent, self-interested reasoning prevents them from doing so. This is the nub of the argument made by G. Hardin in his (in)famous article ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, published in Science in 1968. The ‘tragedy of the commons’ boils down to the fact that each user of the commons – the pasture in Hardin’s famous example – is rationally motivated to exploit the commons without limit, although the resource itself is finite. Individual users of the commons cause thus their overuse and destruction by simply attending to their own best interest (Ostrom 1990: 2). Ostrom (1990) contests this logic of (the failure of) collective action by countering that the commons are not actually a free-for-all, an unregulated open-access resource. Instead, they are collective goods that are jointly administered for mutual benefit. To mount her case, she conducted and perused multiple case studies in order to pin down specific empirical conditions for the flourishing of collective self-management. Ostrom digs into a particular kind of commons, which she designates as ‘common-pool resources’ (CPRs): a ‘natural or man-made resource system that is sufficiently large to make it costly (but not impossible) to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use’ (Ostrom 1990: 30). CPRs are like public goods in that it is difficult to exclude people from their use. But they are also akin to private goods because they are subtractable. One person’s use subtracts from the good available to others (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 8–9; Ostrom 2005: 22–6). She dwells, more specifically, on CPRs that are small-scale and located in a single country. They involve 50 to 15,000 persons who are heavily dependent on the CPRs and they contain renewable but scarce, depetable resources (Ostrom 1990: 26). The resource systems in question belong 38

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy to the ‘big five’: communal forests, animal husbandry in grazing areas, water management of groundwater basins, irrigation channels and inshore fisheries (Ostrom 1990: 26; Van Laerhoven and Ostrom 2007: 8). The CPR institutions that she investigates are located in several countries, from Japan and Switzerland to Spain and the USA. Their history exceeds 1,000 years, in some cases. And they have proven to be robust in the sense that they have survived severe natural phenomena and political and economic upheavals (Ostrom 1990: 58–88). The keynote questions that she grapples with are how a ‘community of citizens’ can self-organise to fend off the adverse effects of independent action in the appropriation of a CPR and how it can resolve issues of institutional supply, commitment and monitoring without reliance on the state or the market (Ostrom 1990: 29). Her main objective is to identify the conditions under which communal self-organisation is possible and likely to put in place enduring CPR institutions. All robust CPR systems that she takes up in Governing the Commons face uncertain and complex environments but the populations have remained more or less stable over time. They share a past, they expect to share a future and they can trust each other. The homogeneity, close ties, unity and boundedness of the relevant communities thus underpin the effective self-organisation of the commons in these cases (Ostrom 1990: 88–9, 166, 185; Ostrom 2008). The presence of local leadership, high levels of local knowledge about a resource and high dependence on it are also decisive. The size of an environmental system is another key variable. Very large resources are less susceptible to self-organised collective regulation. They make it harder to obtain adequate ecological knowledge about them and to define and monitor the boundaries of a CPR structure (Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010: 194, 239–40; Ostrom 2008; Ostrom and Basurto 2009: 50–1). The operational rules of different CPRs diverge widely according to varying environmental circumstances, cultural contexts and economic and political structures. Amidst this diversity and complexity, however, Ostrom identified a set of essential conditions (‘design principles’) that help to explain the emergence of self-governance institutions and their robustness over time (Ostrom 1990: 90–102; Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010: 100–1): 1. Clearly defined boundaries. Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself. 2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions. More specifically, rules-in-use should allocate benefits in proportion to contributions of required inputs. 39

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics 3. Collective-choice arrangements. Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules. Through such arrangements, CPR institutions can adapt their rules to changing local circumstances and learning over time, while these self-designed rules through collective participation are considered fair by participants. 4. Monitoring of CPR conditions and appropriator behaviour. Monitors are accountable to the users or are the users. 5. Graduated sanctions. Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness of the offence). 6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms for conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials. 7. Minimal recognition of rights to organise. The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities. 8. In large and complex CPRs, appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution and governance activities are organised in multiple layers of nested enterprises, from the local/small-scale upwards to regional and national levels. Large-scale institutions are also needed to govern interdependencies among smaller units. In sum, her answer to the ‘problem of collective action’ is that individuals catering to their interests will jointly self-organise to co-manage a certain natural resource if they participate in devising common rules, if they estimate that these rules will yield higher joint benefits and if monitoring protects them against ‘being suckered’ (Ostrom 1990: 90). A vast array of in-depth case studies thus attest to the possibility and the reality of other modes of organising society and governing ourselves. Grassroots communities have demonstrated their capacity to self-manage collectively on a basis of relative equality, freedom and reciprocity, independently of profit-driven markets and top-down state administration. They thereby illustrate the human artisanship in constituting and reconstituting the very contexts in which individuals make decisions, act and bear the consequences of their actions (Ostrom 1990: 185, 216).

Beyond the small-scale and the ‘natural’ However, it looks as if Ostrom’s findings and insights remain stuck on the small scale and particular kinds of non-urban natural environments. If this were the case, they would be irrelevant for the most part of ordinary politics on medium and large scales and urban contexts: that is, for 40

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy the most part of politics tout court. Her later inroads into the ‘commons of knowledge’, her institutional analysis and the concept of ‘polycentric governance’ could allay some, at least, of these misgivings. To begin with, in her late excursus on ‘knowledge as a commons’ (Ostrom and Hess 2011), Ostrom extends her analysis of the commons to take on board other types of common goods beyond small-scale common-pool natural resources. Commons is a general term that refers to a resource shared by a group of people. In a commons, the resource can be small and serve a tiny group (the family refrigerator), it can be community-level (sidewalks, playgrounds, libraries, and so on), or it can extend to international and global levels (deep seas, the atmosphere, the Internet, and scientific knowledge). The commons can be well bounded (a community park or library); transboundary (the Danube River, migrating wildlife, the Internet); or without clear boundaries (knowledge, the ozone layer). (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 4–5)

Knowledge commons feature diverse kinds of goods and regimes, which vary from public libraries and academic research results to free software and cultural, creative works (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 4–15). While most environmental CPRs, such as fisheries and forests, are ‘subtractive’ goods in which one’s person’s uses takes away from the amount of good(s) available to others, knowledge commons are typically non-subtractive or non-rivalrous. Actually, the more people use them, the greater the common good becomes through the diffusion and the growth of knowledge. Moreover, communities of the knowledge commons, such as Wikipedia, can be global, virtual and heterogeneous, unlike the closed, homogeneous, face-to-face and small-scale communities that administer ecosystems such as grazing grounds (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 5, 48–9). Yet, the commons of knowledge share to a large extent the political structures, the logics and the issues of the commons of nature. They call for political regulation and arrangements since the ‘Outcomes of the interactions of people and resources can be positive or negative’ (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 13; see also 43). Accordingly, the ‘new’ knowledge and digital commons confront us again with the essential political questions of equity (equal use of and contribution to), efficiency (optimal production, use and management) and sustainability for future generations (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 6). Moreover, like the ‘environmental’ commons, they tackle these political matters through the cooperative government of self-organised groups. They rely on collective action, on the continual design and evolution of appropriate rules, on trust and norms of reciprocity. The political challenges confronting the commons of knowledge have become more acute 41

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics lately in consequence of the recent waves of privatisation, commodification and withdrawal of knowledge that used to be, or could be, publicly available. Patenting, licensing (copyright) and new technologies that are capable of ‘capturing’ previously unowned resources – from academic knowledge to the electromagnetic spectrum – have curtailed public availability. Hence, in order to secure open accessibility and the robustness of digital resources, we need committed collective-action initiatives such as the free software movement (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 12, 52). In addition to the ‘nature’ of the common good, the question of scale has been raised time and again to cast doubt on the political import of Ostrom’s inquiries into the alternative politics of CPRs, which have been primarily centred on small-scale systems involving 50 to 15,000 persons (Ostrom 1990: 26). A wide chorus of contemporary researchers and analysts (Dowsley 2008; Carlsson and Sandström 2008; Ostrom and Andersson 2008; Harvey 2012) have objected that the non-hierarchical, direct communal self-government of vital ecosystems does not function effectively on higher and multiple scales. As a result, insights gained from the collective self-organisation of small-scale economies cannot translate into solutions for large-scale problems (Harvey 2012: 70) This critique seems to ignore or bypass the finer points of ‘polycentric governance’ through which Ostrom sought to wrestle with scale (Ostrom 2010; Ostrom and Andersson 2008). Polycentric governance displays a complex mix of multiple levels and diverse types of organisation that are drawn from the public, the private and the voluntary sector, with overlapping responsibilities and capacities. It is characterised by multiple governing authorities operating on different scales rather than by a central dominant unit (Ostrom 2008: 552). The polycentric approach grasps how the direct interactions between individuals who manage an ecosystem in a local setting are embedded in larger contexts of social, economic and political arrangements and ecological systems. A full account of ‘action situations’ on the micro-level thus requires a rigorous anatomy of their links with broader contextual variables. Local actors are ‘nested’ in larger political systems. Different actors at different levels – local, regional, national, global – interact and influence each other’s decision-making (Ostrom and Andersson 2008: 74). The polycentric view holds that in such complex, interconnected systems of multiple interactions at different scales both the active participation of local users in the management of resources and governments play a key part in solving CPR problems. Polycentric governance means that ‘national officials’ work with local and regional officials, non-governmental organisations and local communities to achieve the best outcome. 42

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy In her latest work, Ostrom found fault with simple-minded outlooks that favour full decentralisation in the governance of resource ecosystems. Decentralising policies may reinforce local elites and can harm collective interests (Ostrom and Andersson 2008: 73; Ostrom 2005: 220). From these real risks Ostrom distils a political morale against simple and full decentralisation. Polycentric governance regimes commend themselves because they contain back-up institutions on both higher and lower levels, which can offset the imperfections and injustices that are likely to arise at all levels. Polycentric governance can effectively take on the challenges of multiple scales, confronting even global collectiveaction problems, such as the reduction of greenhouse gases around the world (Ostrom 2008). Finally, to work out all the implications of Ostrom’s take on the commons for the politics of egalitarian self-institution and government, one needs to delve into her institutional account of the commons as complex, diverse and instituted systems (Ostrom 2005). The basic structure of collective action in the commons of ‘nature’ results from the interaction of three set of variables: the rules that order the relationships of actors; the attributes of the biophysical world, such as excludability and subtractability; and the attributes of the broader community in which a certain action arena is situated (Ostrom 2005: 15, 16, 23). The rules regulating behaviour and intercourse in various structured situations, from the family to markets and governments at all scales, is what Ostrom intends by ‘institutions’. These rules shape the context of choices available to individuals, the constraints and opportunities they face, and they are made by individuals themselves at a deeper or higher level of interaction (Ostrom 2005: 3, 9). A first political inference of her complex classification of institutional rules is, then, that social actors are capable of modifying the structure of the situations in which they find themselves by altering the very rules that constitute the structure, through reflection, conflict and reorganisation. Actors do not only make choices within given situations and according to their fixed opportunities and constraints. They also make choices about situations and the different sets of rules that may regulate them (Ostrom 2005: 33–4, 62–5). This capacity for conscious and reflective self-legislation underlies the capacity of individuals to selforganise collectively and govern themselves. Ostrom’s institutional theory of the commons (2005: 220–3, 236, 239) holds in store further political lessons in support of pluralism and ongoing experimentation. A major empirical finding of her research is the diversity of institutional arrangements that cope with commonpool management. Moreover, many action situations around collective 43

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics resources are non-linear, complex systems (Ostrom 2005: 239). Systemic non-linear complexity means that a multiplicity of factors act jointly to co-produce a certain social, ecological or eco-social whole, in ways that are not fully set in advance and can give rise to new, ‘emergent’ phenomena and situations. Complex systems set bounds to any attempt to gain full knowledge of their functioning and development, and they constrain any effort to control them fully and sovereignly manage them (Byrne and Callaghan 2014). As a result, our knowledge about institutions and politics is bound to remain incomplete. There are no unique ‘optimal solutions’ to political questions and collective-action problems. Any political decisions and institutional settlements should always be handled as partial, limited and provisional constructs that need to be monitored, evaluated and amended over time. Ostrom’s institutional analytic of the natural commons warns against dogmatism, perfectionism, the politics of ‘universal’ truths and global blueprints. It pleads for democratic openness, flexibility, pluralism, an awareness of permanent imperfection and uncertainty, reasonable scepticism and modesty, tolerance, dialogue, political processes that can reactivate collective creativity, ever-lasting political contest, collective reflection and revision through trial and error.

The lack of the political in Ostrom’s common-pool resources Despite its political thrust, Ostrom’s take on the commons is compromised by an exclusionary, homogeneous idea of the community and a feeble sense of hegemonic power relations and antagonisms. These limitations, together with the narrow scope of participatory government and her accommodating dispositions towards the state and the market, detract from the value of her idea of the commons for transformative politics today without, however, annulling it. To begin with, the communities in her CPRs are homogeneous, closely knit and internally unified. They are also circumscribed by clearly fixed boundaries, which are a ‘design principle’ of successful, enduring, ecological commons. The members of the relevant communities are attached to their land and to one another (Ostrom 1990: 88–9, 166, 185; Ostrom 2008). In our cosmos of culturally diverse societies, heterogeneous urban populations, increasing migration flows and refugee crises, this model of community not only is inapt for any political project aiming at egalitarian democracy. It is dangerous. It projects an imaginary ‘ideal’ of a closely knit, homogeneous community that feeds into xenophobia and 44

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy drives national and other communities to erect walls around them, as they become anxious to safeguard their identity by fending off foreign ‘others’ or by expelling ‘deviants’ that trouble the orthodox, uniform norms of the community. In our condition, communities that value equal freedom should remain open to others, plural and variable in the spirit of the post-Heideggerian community of plural singularities, which stands diametrically opposed to Ostrom’s bounded and unified communities. It is only at the margins of a late analysis that Ostrom bespoke a dim awareness of the vexing political issues of closure and exclusion from the commons. Hence, among the perils of highly decentralised systems, she also listed ‘inappropriate discrimination’ on the basis of ‘identity tags’, which are attached to ascribed characteristics and have little to do with the trustworthiness of persons. Such discrimination can be averted by larger governmental units that intervene within a polycentric configuration (Ostrom 2005: 282–3). Of course, these few and marginal points fall short of reimagining community beyond totalising homogeneity and rigid, exclusionary bounds. Another objection that denies the pertinence of Ostrom’s commons for radical democratic politics is that she refuses to make the commons into ‘a general principle for the reorganisation of society’ (Dardot and Laval 2014: 155). This is indeed the case (see Ostrom 2012; Ostrom and Andersson: 2008; Ostrom 2008). But it is a legitimate political choice that Ostrom defends by disputing the validity of panaceas and uniform blueprints in matters political. Moreover, her own unwillingness to generalise need not deter others from doing so by trying to realise the logic of the communal self-government of CPRs at multiple layers and in diverse social fields. What seems to bar such an attempt from within Ostrom’s own reasoning is her alleged ‘naturalism’ (see Dardot and Laval 2014: 155–65; Dellenbaugh et al. 2015). Her studies situate self-governing commons in particular kinds of resources and communities: small-size groups and CPRs. CPRs offer benefits from which it is difficult to exclude potential beneficiaries. At the same time, the use of a CPR system by a certain beneficiary diminishes the resource units available to other users (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 8–9; Ostrom 2005: 22–6). For different kinds of goods (private and public), as well as for larger societies, market competition and state administration seem more fitting in her view (see, for example, Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010: 221–2; Ostrom 2012: 70). Her thesis is that the natural attributes of different goods and resources, along with the size of the population, dictate particular patterns of social and political organisation. For her, this precludes in 45

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics principle a general expansion of the commons principle, confining it exclusively to CPRs and small, homogeneous communities (see Ostrom 2005: 22–6; Ostrom 2008). Any political project that purports to propagate the commons paradigm across multiple social fields, as an alternative to market and state logics, should escape naturalistic reductions of the commons to fixed types of goods and communities. Yet, in order to politicise the commons beyond narrow naturalisms, one need not go to the other extreme. We should not presume that political action is omnipotent while ecological, economic and technological variables are irrelevant. We can acknowledge, along with Ostrom, that material terms condition social selfinstitution and self-governance. But, against Ostrom in some turns of her argument, we can hold that these conditions do not fully pre-empt the range of institutional possibilities, prescribing, for example, state administration or market competition for certain goods and scales of social life. The grounds for this openness lie in Ostrom’s nodal political intuition. Social agents engage in the ‘artisanship of crafting rules’ in innovative ways and with unforeseen results (Ostrom 2005: 63–5, 133). Finally, the lack of an acute feel for political conflict, antagonism and power relations becomes evident in Ostrom’s political thought, specifically in her stance towards the markets and the state and, more broadly, in her dim recognition of hegemonic structures and the value of agonistic politics. Since at least the thirteenth century in England, the history of the commons is a history of relentless fights against socio-economic and state elites, external invasions and enclosures of the commons that were perpetrated by the state, old feudal lords and the rising bourgeois class. Since the 1970s, the gradual globalisation of neoliberal policies has propelled a new wave of enclosures: that is, the private appropriation of public and common goods, of land, water, energy resources, public infrastructure and services across the world (Linebaugh 2008; Sassen 2014; Harvey 2007, 2012). The ‘water war’ in Cochabamba, Bolivia (December 1999 to April 2000), a massive social uprising against the privatisation of the water supply infrastructure, was a milestone in the new aggressive plunder of the eco-commons and the social struggles in their defence. The turmoil of these older and new violent battles over the commons is conspicuously absent from Ostrom’s pacified narrative. An exception can be found only in her excursus in the contemporary commons of knowledge (Ostrom and Hess 2011: 10–12). Ostrom also fails to sense the contradictory logics that bring the commons into conflict with the modern state and the capitalist markets. State sovereignty is manifested in centralising trends and a top-down 46

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy administration that collide with the efforts of grassroots communities to exercise effective self-government on the local scale. Autonomous decision-making by particular communities within the territory of a state clashes inherently with the state’s monopolistic claims to rule as the ultimate locus of decision-making and the sovereign power over its entire territory. Even when central governments delegate authority to lower tiers of public administration or other social agencies in their territories, they can always claim back the powers they have delegated. And they hold on to a part, at least, of their centralised and hierarchical structures. Within a state-governed polity, any communal autonomy is a concession that remains always at the discretion of the central sovereign authority. A similar intrinsic tension upsets the relation between the ‘practical reason’ of the commons and the logic of the capitalist market. Successful instances of CPRs enact an equitable sharing of resources. They handle ecosystems for the mutual benefit of all members of a community and they care for the sustainability of environmental settings over time. By contrast, private enterprises in competitive capitalist markets are out, above all, for maximising profit. They are often compelled to do so just in order to survive under the pressures of competition. Concerns with equity, social welfare, democratic self-government on a basis of equality, the common good and the environment are either absent or ranked as lower priorities. The compulsive pursuit of maximum profit induced the massive recent wave of private enclosures in formerly unowned goods, which vary from seeds to cultural creations. Private corporations are bent on appropriating public assets, from land to water supplies, hospitals and universities, put on sale by states or local communities that are impelled by financial circumstances, power relations or neoliberal ideology. Private, profit-driven actors in capitalist markets are strongly motivated to appropriate public or common goods so as to turn them into new sources of profit when they can be put to such use. They are thus driven to attack the commons on several occasions. They increasingly do so under the present neoliberal hegemony, which intensifies pressures on public and common property (Sassen 2014; Harvey 2007, 2012; Wolin 2008; Dardot and Laval 2014). Her angle on the commons considerably conceals, then, the political as antagonism, struggle and power structures. Crucially, she fails to contend with the hegemonic formation of societies: the unequal hierarchies of command that connect the different types and scales of social activity and government, as well as the forces and structures dominating the systemic wholes in which diverse communities, relations and actors are positioned (Dardot and Laval 2014: 156). In the contemporary world of neoliberal dominance, such a sense of the political would force her to 47

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics reckon with the collisions between markets and commons and to deal with paramount political questions for the fate of the commons today: how is it possible to reorder the balance of power and to reign in market forces and central state governments so as to afford more space for an effective self-governance and economy of the commons? However, it should be recognised that ‘conflict resolution mechanisms’ figure prominently in her list of the ‘design principles’ for robust and enduring CPRs (Ostrom 1990: 90–102; Poteete, Janssen and Ostrom 2010: 100–1). She is also alert to the unequal distribution of opportunities and control in the various ‘action arenas’ of the commons, as well as to phenomena of domination by persons or local elites (see Ostrom 2005: 32–3). However, this understanding of antagonism and hegemonic power is rather narrow and shallow. It touches mainly on private conflicts that occur among ‘appropriators’ over their share of the common resource. Her inquiry does not pierce into several layers of social division along class, gender, racial, ideological and so on lines, as well as into entrenched exclusions and unequal hierarchies of power in wider social systems. Moreover, it shows little, if any, appreciation for the virtues of conflict in democratic politics. Next chapters will explain how the agonistic politics of strife through commonality can give fuller scope to equal liberties in circumstances of conflictual diversity. The freedom of citizens to take part regularly in political debates and renegotiations around prevalent norms and policies, in tandem with the right to keep fighting for one’s cause, foment an identification with the common political association that enshrines these liberties. Citizens can thus craft a political community among and across differences and frustrations by sustaining a kind of agonistic political commons around shared goods that are subject to recurrent question, conflict and revision (Tully 2008: 311–12). In brief, Ostrom has outlined and empirically documented another politics of egalitarian and sustainable self-government. But her politics of the commons should be broadened to take in a richer inventory of possibilities for the commons today. Her account should be also sharpened by building in an agonistic–hegemonic notion of the political and an astute perception of the conflictual tensions that perturb the relations between the commons, the market and the state.

The new networked commons Since the turn of the century, with the diffusion of new digital technologies and the Internet, a large body of thought and action has shifted attention from the ‘commons of nature’ to the commons of culture, 48

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy information and digital networks (Benkler 2006; Bollier 2008; Bauwens 2005, 2009, 2011). Technological advances have ushered in the formation of new modes of production and collaboration, which have spawned novel patterns of association and self-governance. These not only expand the commons of co-creation and social sharing outside their traditional bounds of fisheries, forests and grazing grounds. They also figure new schemes of community and collective self-governance, which overflow the boundaries of closely knit, stable and homogeneous communities of face-to-face interaction (Benkler 2006: 117–20; Bollier 2008: 2–4; Bauwens 2005). Digital networking has afforded new opportunities for making and exchanging information, knowledge and culture. Spanning diverse fields, from software development to online encyclopaedias, investigative journalism and social media platforms, the new information environment enables the emergence of decentralised, self-administered communities. These combine individual freedom and autonomous social collaboration, bearing the promise of more democratic participation, openness, freedom, diversity and co-production without the hierarchies of the state and the market (Benkler 2006: 2; Bollier 2008: 1–20, 117; Bauwens 2005). The Internet not only boosts and diffuses creativity in the production of culture and information. It also makes possible ‘egalitarian encounters among strangers and voluntary associations of citizens’ (Bollier 2008: 2). The new digital commons evince considerable affinities with the ‘traditional’ ecological commons brought to the fore by Ostrom. They make up a tripartite system that consists of a self-governing community of users and producers; a common good (from free software and music to encyclopaedias and social communication platforms); and equitable, self-legislated norms of access, use and collective self-management (Benkler 2006; Bollier 2008; Bauwens 2005, 2011; Ostrom and Hess 2011). They likewise nourish a culture of decentralised collaboration, cooperative non-market production and sharing. They thus foster an alternative to both the profit-driven, competitive and centralising logics of the market and the top-down, hierarchical command of the state. Moreover, they are similarly locked in a battlefield with the market and the state, which seek to appropriate and to ‘enclose’ them by means of patents, copyright and trademark law, trade regulations and privatisation (Bollier 2008: 2–15, 140–1; Benkler 2006: 2; Bauwens 2005, 2011). However, they radically depart from the historical commons of nature in ways that matter politically. The goods that they fabricate and maintain are not depletable and rivalrous (Bauwens 2005; Benkler 2006: 117). The ‘new commons’ comprise essentially non-rival cultural 49

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics goods. Their consumption by one person does not make them less available for consumption by others (Benkler 2006: 36). Second, their communities are internally heterogeneous, inclusive and potentially global rather than local, homogeneous and bounded. Their networks introduce new modes of sociality whereby cooperation on equal terms is coupled with enhanced individual autonomy and creativity (Bauwens 2005). Hence, the digital networks of communication and co-creation seem to incarnate and to advance the post-Heideggerian vision of a community of open, expansive and plural encounters without any fixed centre or identity (Armstrong 2009). Finally, ‘digital commoners’ argue that the networked information commons immensely expand the commons paradigm beyond its traditional, small-scale natural location in forests, land, irrigation channels and fishing grounds. They actually represent a new, emergent mode of peer-to-peer production that is displacing the industrial mode of production and promises to install decentralised non-market cooperation at the epicentre of contemporary economy, society and politics. They remake in their image a wild diversity of social fields, from music to business, law, education and science, remodelling them after the logic of the open, plural, creative and participatory commons (Benkler 2006: 2–3; Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006; Bollier 2008: 14–18; Bauwens 2005). In the following, we will probe whether the incubation of a new ‘mode of production’ within social activities and new technologies does indeed fuel a motor of change towards a commons-based society. In a nutshell, the case that will be made is that salient theories of digital commons, in the writings of Y. Benkler, D. Bollier and M. Bauwens, sketch more open and plural shapes of community compared to the ‘Bloomington School’ of ecological commons. Moreover, in contrast to Ostrom, digital commoners advocate a broader paradigm shift that is presumably capacitated today by network society and new technological developments. This opens up the horizon of a commons-based society, whereby the commons will not be confined to small-scale communities and local ecosystems but will occupy centre stage in economic, political and social life. Despite such breakthroughs and departures from the older, Ostrom school of commons studies, the theories of digital commons are, however, beset with similar deficiencies in their grasp of the political. Again, they do not fully confront the contradictions between the logics of the state, the market and the commons. Likewise, they fail to grapple adequately with the hegemonic power structures of contemporary social formations. As a result, they do not adequately fathom the conditions and the political practices through which a massive social movement of transformation – a 50

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy counter-hegemonic bloc – can be put together under our circumstances of social fragmentation, exclusion, precarisation and collective disempowerment. Political processes of collective dis-identification from hegemonic relations, movement-building, political struggles around, with and within the state, and intense conflicts with dominant political and economic elites, who profit from a vastly unequal market economy, are given scant consideration.

Commons-based peer production Yochai Benkler (2006; Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006) has been among the first and most vocal ‘prophets’ of a new socio-economic system of production that is allegedly gestating in digitally networked environments (Bollier 2008: 19). His mindset and style of reasoning are echoed in the earlier work of D. Bollier (2008) and M. Bauwens (2005, 2009), who have likewise championed the peer-to-peer and digital commons paradigm. In sum, this lays the groundwork for an alternative mode of collaboration, interaction and self-management among ‘strangers’, which unfolds on a global scale and is without precedent in human history. Its emergence has been made possible by the latest technologies of the Internet, the distributed digital networks in which individuals can collaborate directly without passing through obligatory nodes. The new, digital mode of production outputs information and other cultural goods through patterns of coordination that do not rely on market pricing, firm managers and managerial hierarchies (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 394–6; Bollier 2008: 1–20; Bauwens 2005). At the same time, digital commons fashion new forms of social relations and virtuous subjectivities (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006; Bollier 2008: 1–20; Bauwens 2005). Crucially, peer production inserts an essential component of nonmarket activity in the core of the contemporary economic engine, since information impacts on the production of an immense number of information-based goods, from tools to services and capacities. Peer production thus shows the limits of neoliberal markets and signals a real change in the course of the global economy. Peer production bolsters the most ‘widespread participation by equipotential participants’. Through peer-to-peer practices, ‘people voluntarily and cooperatively construct a commons according to the communist principle: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”’ (Bauwens 2005). Peer-to-peer projects, first, deliver use value rather than exchange value and profit for the market. They thus constitute a ‘third mode of production’, which differs both from market-/profit-driven and from public-/state-managed production. Second, they thrive on free cooperation 51

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics rather than on the coercion of the producers. They are self-directed by the community of peers rather than by state or market hierarchies. Hence, they enact a ‘third mode of governance’. And third, by dint of new regimes of common property, users on a global scale enjoy free access to the use value that is being manufactured. This is a ‘third form of property’ distinct from both private and state property (Bauwens 2005; Bauwens 2014: 20). The ramifications of the growing new sector of the ‘information economy’ cannot be overestimated: first, because information, knowledge, communication and meaning are a ‘dominant output’ in advanced economies. Second, peer-to-peer digital production has fed an ‘upward spiral of innovation’ from free software to the Web and social platforms for Web-based collaboration. New digital networks can boost creativity beyond software programs themselves by virally disseminating ideas and by allowing them to recombine widely in any field of activity (Bollier 2008: 2–3). Third, the new networked economy bears witness to the sustainability and efficiency of non-market production on a large scale, thereby affirming the possibility of alternative systems of production beyond the market and state communism (Benkler 2006: 3–7, 32; Bauwens 2005, 2009).

Bringing in the political Benkler (2006: 8–9), Bauwens (2005) and Bollier (2008: 5, 9, 20) have made the case that networked peer production is rife with implications for our political imagination today, stretching it far beyond the straitjackets of the market and the state. To begin with, the new commons of information and culture incarnate and promote other figures of community: nearly unbounded, freer, more diverse and egalitarian. Peer production is situated ‘in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavor’ (Bauwens 2005). No one owns the collective project and nobody can exclude others from its use or its co-production. Many free or open source software projects, such as the GNU/Linux operating system and the Apache Web server, offer ‘flagship’ examples. Leaders may be present in the communities that design free software but they possess no formal power of command. They cannot restrict discussion or assign tasks to others, nor can they prevent subgroups from branching off if they disagree with the direction of the project. The only role of hierarchy is to initiate and to sustain ‘autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor’ (Bauwens 2005). 52

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy Accordingly, commons-based peer production sponsors open communities of volunteers who collaboratively fabricate a common good of culture and information. In principle, any user can freely access the common good. The collective effort is anchored in a mix of voluntarism, good will, a sense of common purpose, intrinsic motivations, technology and some law, such as the GNU General Public Licence and the Creative Commons licences that govern most free software development (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 395–6; Bollier 2008: 28–33; Benkler 2011: 11–28; Bauwens 2005). Free software is only a prominent instance of the broader phenomenon of commons-based peer production, which is powered by new digital technologies and ranges from scientific collaborative projects to the creation of music, journalistic sites and Wikipedia. The latter tellingly illustrates the new communities of the digital commons that have sprung up at an advanced stage of Internet development, branded as ‘Web 2.0’. This designation highlights the liquid social dynamics that take place on open Web platforms, from wikis and blogs to social networks and other open, collaborative platforms, where people are free to share and to reuse work. ‘Web 2.0 amounts to a worldview that celebrates open participation as a way to create valuable collective resources’ (Bollier 2008: 133; emphasis added). Wikipedia itself is composed on a shared, open technological platform (the ‘wiki’), where thousands of users can autonomously write, peer-review and re-edit its articles. Wikipedia encourages an open discourse among participants about their contributions (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 398–9). Peer production brings together a wider diversity of autonomous individuals who self-identify with the tasks they want to assume in a collective enterprise according to their individual capacities and desires. It thus makes for enhanced personal autonomy and mobilises human creativity more efficiently than market or state mechanisms (Benkler 2006: 111). In conclusion, the communities of new digital commons tend to be open, fluid, voluntary, large and dispersed, connecting thousands of otherwise unrelated individuals. Their bounds are permeable. Hierarchies tend to be flatter and reversible. As opposed to what happens in local eco-commons, in the digital environment, communication and collaboration can reach across social and national boundaries, across geographical space and political divisions. Moreover, the type of affiliation that binds together participants in peer production is loose and fluid. It does not rely on long-term relations and strong commitment. Individual autonomy, fluid freedom and decentralisation considerably foster diversity among collaborators. They give an outlet to divergent individual 53

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics preferences and perspectives. They allow individuals to enter a variety of collaborative relations (Benkler 2006: 9, 100). The ground of the common is not any cultural, ethnic or local identity but a shared sense of purpose and an ongoing interaction and collaboration. As a result, the digital commons can effectively conjoin individual autonomy, singularity and creativity with diversity and collaboration (Benkler 2006: 20, 362–7; Bauwens 2005). Hence, their mode of intercourse embodies the interaction that occurs between singularity and plurality in a postHeideggerian community, which welds together a variety of free and equal actors who hold on to their singularity. A second political impact of the Internet lies in the democratising effects that it induces within the wider public sphere today. The Internet provides individuals with access to global publics. It sets up a freer, decentralised public sphere that supplies multiple outlets for the public expression and exchange of individual views, for critical and diversified information, for investigative journalism, for extensive debate among citizens and political organisation. Digital networks have also democratised creativity on a global scale as they make it very cheap and easy to share ideas and cultural creations, to collaborate and to organise (Bollier 2008: 3, 8, 71; Benkler 2006: 10–13, 16; Bauwens 2005). A third salient political aspect of commons-based peer production turns on the core values of democracy that it realises in itself, such as participatory government and free collaboration, equal freedom in the co-production of collective processes, autonomy and creativity, cultivating these powers and virtues of democratic political subjectivity (Bauwens 2005). Authority to act lies with individual actors themselves. There is no fixed authoritative centre – of a state bureaucracy or firm managers – dictating and coordinating action. Individuals thus gain the autonomy to seek out and to create information, communication and cultural goods without depending on commercial mass media and corporations. Peer projects themselves are self-governed by the community of peers rather than by state or market hierarchies. Hence, they constitute a ‘third mode of governance’ (Benkler 2006: 9; Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 401–2). Furthermore, the design of the integrative mechanism in peer-to-peer projects is such that participants can freely gather information about the contributions of other participants and about the aims and the operations of the entire project. This capacity for a free comprehensive view is called ‘holoptism’ and it contrasts with the ‘panoptism’ of hierarchical projects, in which total knowledge is reserved for the elites. Accordingly, in peerto-peer processes, transparency can be all-out and communication is more 54

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy ‘horizontal’, premised on the equal freedom of participants and not on top-down rigid hierarchies (Bauwens 2005). Moreover, the chief motives that animate peer production are values of good citizenship. Positive social relations, mutual recognition, companionship, the joy of sharing and creativity incentivise peer production more than market stimuli such as material need or profit (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 402–3; Benkler 2006: 91–9; Bauwens 2005; see also Benkler 2011).

The techno-politics of digital commons It is plain that Benkler (2006: 18), Bollier (2008: 12, 20) and Bauwens (2005, 2009, 2014) accord to technological developments a pivotal role in pushing society towards the commons. The irruption of new computer and digital network technologies has been the main engine of socio-political and economic transformation. It has destabilised the prevalent structure of markets, technologies and social practices, sparking a diffuse institutional battle over the physical, the technical and the logical (software and protocols) components of the networked environment (Benkler 2006: 468–9; see also Bollier 2008: 1–20; Bauwens 2005). The rise of the digital commons and peer-to-peer processes since the turn of the century is contingent on several conditions, which are mainly technological and legal, along with a general ‘cultural’ one. The first condition is a technological infrastructure, which operates through peer-to-peer processes and grants distributed access to ‘fixed capital’ (computers and networks). This infrastructure is fundamentally the Internet, a point-to-point network in which computer users can participate directly without passing through obligatory hubs. The second condition is Web 2.0 as a communications system that enables the ‘universal autonomous production, dissemination and “consumption” of written material’ (Bauwens 2005). The third is again technical: a software infrastructure for free global collaboration through tools, such as wikis and blogs, that are embedded in social network software and help global groups to generate and distribute use value without the mediation of for-profit enterprises. The Internet and peer-production processes have deliberately designed architectures that allow them to pool diverse individual efforts. At the basis of these architectures lies their ‘modularity’, their capacity to integrate many small and specific contributions. The fourth condition is a legal one, the licences that protect common use value from private appropriation and enclosure. The final term 55

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics is cultural: the ascent of cooperative individualism that flourishes in peer-to-peer collaboration and has come about through ‘the diffusion of mass intellectuality . . . and associated changes in ways of feeling and being (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology) and value constellations (axiology)’ (see Bauwens 2005; also Bollier 2008: 1–20; Benkler 2006: 100, 104–5). Yet neither Benkler nor Bollier or Bauwens is a naïve believer in technological determinism. Technologies are channelled and moulded by political objectives, social values, the historical context. What shapes the prevailing structures and modes of life in a certain period is the interaction between technological–economic ‘feasibility spaces’ and social responses to them in the guise of institutional regulations and social practices. Hence, digital technologies of networked computers can be put to different uses. There is no assurance that they will contribute to innovation, freedom and justice. This is a matter of the social choices we will make in the coming years (Benkler 2006: 17–18, 31–4). In terms of the politics of commons-based digital production, Benkler concedes that technological progress is not enough. ‘Incumbent’ forces of the information and the cultural industry, from Hollywood to the telecommunications giants, wage battles against the redistribution of power and money away from them. The fight is taking place, more specifically, over the ‘institutional ecology’ of the digital ecology and the extent to which its different layers and resources, from the physical devices and the network infrastructure to its cultural sources and its logical structures, will be in the grip of private proprietary frameworks or will be freely available as commons (Benkler 2006: 23–6, 380–5; Bollier 2008: 1–20, 23–93). An extensive literature on law and copyright testifies to a ‘second enclosure’ movement whereby private intellectual property regulations curtail the freedom to create and exchange information and cultural goods (Bollier 2008: 23–55). Private industries are striving to keep them under private control and to enforce pricing mechanisms (Benkler 2006: 23–6, 380–5, 393–456). In the opposite camp, the profusion of the digital commons has been a collective achievement. Commoners had to put in place an infrastructure of ‘software, legal rights, practical expertise, and social ethics’. They had to realise their distinct interests in controlling their creative work and in organising their communities (Bollier 2008: 7). Among other things, they came up with licences, such as Stallman’s GNU General Public Licence (1989), which resist the forces of privatisation. They deliberately institute against enclosures a commons of universally free access, use, reconstruction and public distribution for digital goods 56

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy (Bollier 2008: 28–30, 95). Later on, the invention of Creative Commons licences (Bollier 2008: 93–121) not only consolidated the freedom of the digital commons in various other fields, including art and science. Creative Commons licences have also become the symbol of a new commoners’ movement, which espouses an ethic of sharing, openness and free collaboration (Bollier 2008: 168–9). Finally, for Bauwens (2005), the growth of peer-to-peer production has spread new cultural practices and a nascent, socio-political movement that ‘echoes the means of organisation and aims of the alter-globalisation movement’. He envisions a new form of society, ‘based on the centrality of the commons, and within a reformed state and market’ (Bauwens 2005). Bauwens thus champions a deliberate project of social change that holds out an alternative to ‘neoliberal dominance’ and could act as a guide for ‘commonist’ politics today. The objective is to configure a commons-based political economy, which would pivot around peer-topeer. A peer-to-peer economy would coexist with, first, a gift economy; second, a reformed market, which gives up the growth imperative and does not externalise the costs of natural and social reproduction; and third, a reformed state that operates in terms of ‘multistakeholdership’, arbitrating between the commons, the market and the gift economy (Bauwens 2005).

Missing out on the political To glimpse the lack of the political in the digital commons literature, it is worth plunging into the details of Benkler’s and Bollier’s picture of the political field where the battle of the commons is fought out. This ‘political arena’ hosts a battle over ‘the making of copyrights, patents and similar exclusive rights’ (Benkler 2006: 456). It pits mainly rent-seeking private industries, such as Microsoft and Walt Disney, lobbyists, governments and courts, against individuals and groups who develop or use open source material. The ‘social movements’ engaged in this fight are composed of the conscious, public advocates of free software, open archives and file-sharing. More generally, they involve groups and individuals who self-consciously adopt and cultivate ‘commonsbased practices as a modality of information production and exchange’ (Benkler 2006: 470; see also Bollier 2008: 3). The main instruments of the struggle are, on the anti-commons side, the expansion and enforcement of copyright law and patents, lobbying, litigation, state regulation and the manipulation of technical standards and software. On the commons side, political means range from public advocacy and the 57

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics introduction of commons-supporting licences and copyrights (Creative Commons and so on) to the production itself of open source material and peer-to-peer networks, the disregard for exclusive property rights through file sharing and so on (Benkler 2006: 420–70). Bollier’s ‘larger story’ about how digital commons have democratised creativity and challenged centralised institutions boils down to a story of ‘commoners besieged by oppressive copyright laws, empowered by digital technologies, and possessed of a vision for a more open, democratic society’ (Bollier 2008: 3). Its main heroes are people such as Richard Stallman, a pioneer of free software development, and Lawrence Lessig, who has waged legal battles against excessive copyright protection and has led the invention of Creative Commons licences (Bollier 2008: 3, 11–13). The battlefields and the weapons of struggle for the digital commons are ‘software, legal rights, practical expertise, and social ethics’, the arduous construction of a ‘legal and technical infrastructure of freedom’ (Bollier 2008: 7, 95; emphasis added). The millennial explosion of the new commons has been instigated, indeed, by ‘a social movement’ that draws sustenance from the multiple initiatives of ‘visionary leaders’ and activates ‘countless individuals . . . a global family of hackers, lawyers, bloggers, artists, and other supporters of free culture’ (Bollier 2008: 8; see also 21–2, 65, 68). This movement is informed by a loosely shared vision and ethic but it is shorn of political ideologies. It is rather pragmatic and improvisational, taking action through ‘cool software, effective legal interventions, and activist innovations’ (Bollier 2008: 201). Digital commoners are concerned with legislation and conventional or ‘single-issue politics’. But they are mainly bent on crafting their own peer-to-peer platforms of free collaboration, creativity and sharing, thus sculpting a parallel social order within the dominant political economy (Bollier 2008: 9, 201). Has this movement coalesced to coordinate its dispersed initiatives in ways that can induce a wider social shift towards the commons? Can it act in concert to accomplish common goals and to withstand or to exert pressure on other social forces in the state, the market and international power relations? For all his hype about transnational cultural movements, digital republics and a ‘second superpower’ (Bollier 2008: 8), Bollier admits in the end that the international commoners’ coalition is still a ‘fledgling enterprise’ and a cacophony of separate initiatives (2008: 201). In the closing remarks of Benkler’s long tract–manifesto, we are told that ‘Perhaps these changes will be the foundation of a true transformation toward more liberal and egalitarian societies’ (Benkler 2006: 473). In the end, the main catalyst of social change is located in new technologies 58

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy and economic structures. The politics of the new commons largely reduces to legal, technological and ‘practical’ fights among private business, states and the practitioners of the digital commons. Technology and the economy, assisted by law and the initiatives of civil society, are the chief engines of change towards a commons-based society. Bollier, Benkler and Bauwens thus converge on a techno-legal and economic fix when they anticipate transitions in the direction of the commons. Despite allusions to ‘commonist’ movements, we are left completely in the dark as to how these will gather a critical mass, how they will overhaul the ‘neoliberal dominance’ and how they will reform the state and the market (Bauwens 2005; see also Bauwens 2014: 28). Instead, we are served a list of techno-economic conditions that will promote peer-to-peer production (Bauwens 2005). The ‘vital condition’ for a historical transition towards a commons-based society is not political but the existence of commons-based peer production, as proto-practices for a full mode of production. . . . These proto-practices have to evolve within the older system, first as emergent practices, then on a parity level, before they can become dominant themselves. (Bauwens 2011; emphasis added)

In the technocratic outlook that has prevailed from the beginning of the millennium in the digital commons literature, technology, economic practices, the law and vague references to ‘social movements’ are the main entries. Change society by designing a new model that makes the existing model obsolete, not by fighting ‘the system’. This is the guiding idea (Bollier 2008: 294). Historical transformation would be mostly incremental and immanent, arising from within actual social relations and productivity (Bollier 2008: 305–10): ‘Superior working models – running code and a healthy commons – will trump polemics and exhortation. Ideological activists and political professionals are likely to scoff at this scenario’ (Bollier 2008: 305). Society will not be reordered, then, by taking political power but through a long process of technologically induced development that advances new social logics of production (Bauwens 2009). If one removes the revolutionary flame, the idea of an immanent transformation that stems from technological and economic evolution is, actually, a very classic Marxian one. Here is the Marx who postulates in the famous 1859 ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’: At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. . . . The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics whole immense superstructure . . . No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. (Marx 1859)

A techno-economic theory of big change is likely to display little concern for the tasks of organising broad-based socio-political movements in robust blocs and schemes of action that could really contest the power of vested private interests and state elites. Revealingly, Bollier (2008: 8) talks of an ‘emergent second superpower’ that springs from the convergence of people who espouse common values and fashion new public identities in online networks. He does not pause to consider, however, the paramount political question: whether the organisational forms of the ‘movement’ are fitting and can face off the other ‘superpowers’ of states and large corporations (see also Bollier 2008: 199–225). Unfortunately, this ‘second superpower’ is scarcely visible in our actual world of proliferating ‘surplus populations’ and exclusions (Sassen 2014). No more do we find an explanation of how collective influence could be effectively exerted on entrenched power beyond the limited capacities of lobbying, litigation and legal proposals or public appeals to the good will of public officers. Indeed, the impotence of law in reshuffling the established order of power has been realised by ‘digital commoners’ themselves. ‘The more I’m in this battle, the less I believe that constitutional law on its own could solve the problem’ (Lessig cited in Bollier 2008: 87; for the limits of technology see Benkler 2006: 17–18, 31–4). The tactic of public appeals through open letters, speeches etc., which speaks to the good will of incumbents, has not fared any better. The revolving doors between business interests and political elites have also blatantly refuted, time and again, the naïve trust in the benevolence of present-day governments, which would be persuaded by rational arguments to assist commoners in founding a ‘digital republic’ (Bollier 2008: 93; Benkler 2006: 382). In recent years, an awareness that the techno-economic and legal path runs up against overpowering obstacles has been significantly growing among the peer commons school (see, for example, Bauwens and Kostakis 2014a; Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis 2018). Hence, they place an increasing emphasis on the ‘partner state’, on social and political movements and on assembling commons counter-power by crafting parallel institutions, such as the ‘Chambers of Commons’ (Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis 2018: Ch. 5). 60

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy Still, the techno-economic and legal steps are always accorded pride of place in both analysis and practice, and the political comes second: ‘political and social revolutions occur as a result of structural changes, not as a prior condition to it’ (Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis 2018: Ch. 4; see also Ch. 5). They acknowledge that this approach to social renewal ‘is based solely on the structural changes that take place within the political economy. An integrated strategy needs to also take particular notice of the relevant cultural and subjective changes that vary in every different context’ (Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis 2018: Ch. 5). In effect, an ‘integrated strategy’ that takes on board political dynamics would need to deploy a fully-fledged politics of hegemony, which precisely diffuses cultural and subjective transformations but also is bent on organising socio-political struggle and on welding together wide, transversal alliances. Work on the regulatory and institutional framework that could push forward the commons is not enough if we lack the agents and the political practices that could reconstruct state structures and economic policies in order to put in place such a framework in the face of bureaucratic resistances and elite opposition. In the peer commons current, one now also discerns a heightened conscience of the fact that political power struggles would be required in order to turn the actual ‘market state’ into a ‘partner state’ that tends to common interests and is internally ‘commonified’ (Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis 2018: Ch. 4). Majoritarian social movements of a global reach and new, parallel institutions of the commons should be enlisted and bolstered in this enterprise. But how could we overcome social fragmentation and widespread disaffection in order to band together such movements at a time when economic and political crises push the majority of citizens towards xenophobic and conservative politics across the world? Who and how would bring them round to a ‘common’ political perspective, construct a historic bloc for the commons and orchestrate a political transition towards a true ‘partner state’? It is this paramount political question that is still left unaddressed and cries out for proper political reflection on the level of strategy, agency and organisation. A political critique of the more technocratic imaginary of the commons should not catapult us into a diametrically opposite error. Indeed, material social practices can help to educate people in alternative values. They can also stage an appealing prefigurative example that serves to win over larger swathes of the population. Moreover, they could manufacture an infrastructure that reduces dependence on the power of dominant structures and elites, yielding the base for an effective counter-hegemonic bloc. Yet ‘the political’ needs to be alive and kicking throughout, even within the techno-economic advances. If, for instance, 61

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics ‘open communities of peer producers are largely oriented towards the start-up model and are subsumed to profit maximization’ (Bauwens and Kostakis 2014b: 358), how are they going to rally around the cause of an autonomous peer production of the commons without a political articulation of a commons vision and a deliberate collective agency around it? A political perspective should not simply turn this scheme upside down by positing a voluntarist primacy of the political as the paramount factor of historical change. More plausibly, it should reassert the required activation of the political and the need to combine progress in the modes of production with concerted cultural and political activity in order to push forward a systemic reform (see Rigi 2014: 403).

In love with the market: the lightning of post-politics amidst the digital commons The ambivalent liaisons of the digital commons stream with profitoriented businesses and markets shed light on its tendency to suppress the political in the guise of radical contestation. In this and other respects, Benkler, Bollier and Bauwens partake of the ‘post-political vision’ fleshed out by Mouffe (2005, 2013). Post-politics turns on the notion that democratisation can proceed without targeting an adversary. Allegedly, in post-traditional societies, collective identities are no longer constructed in terms of we/they on account of a diffuse individualism. Conflicts can be pacified through dialogue and by breeding relations of mutual tolerance among individuals with different interests and perspectives. Moreover, the post-political view typically glosses over power relations and how they structure contemporary societies (Mouffe 2005: 48–51). The politics of ‘consensus at the centre’ is plainly a symptom of ‘the unchallenged hegemony of neoliberalism’ (Mouffe 2013: 19). Now, despite its castigation of rent-seeking behaviours and enclosures, the digital commons literature tends to skim over the potentially forceful tensions that run between the logics of private business and the logics of the commons. Benkler (2011: 28) is eloquent. Self-interest and cooperation aren’t mutually exclusive; quite the contrary. Valuing independence, autonomy, capitalism, and individualism do [sic] not automatically make us egocentric. . . . Cooperation and profit can coexist. Embracing this duality, learning how to remake our society around it and harness it for individual, corporate, and societal goals, is not only possible, it is imperative.

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy In effect, Benkler and Bollier trumpet the idea that wealthy corporations can reorient their business models, make profit through the use of open source software and become political allies or even business partners of the digital commoners (Benkler 2006: 471; Benkler 2011: 25–8; Bollier 2008: 15–16, 20, 229; Bauwens 2011). Bollier (2008: 237) mentions in passing that IBM turned to free software because it could leverage people’s programming talents for a fraction of the cost it would incur by paying programmers for the full development of its software or by buying copyrighted software. There is no need to worry because ‘Power is too dispersed for the predators to survive too long, and besides, the commoners are too empowered’ (Bollier 2008: 242). The picture is more complicated in Bauwens’s work, which has attended, from early on, to the contrasts between capitalist markets and the digital commons (2005). Yet Bauwens (2011) endorses, too, the actual synergies between for-profit corporations and peer communities. In response to the vehemently anti-capitalist idea of the commons propagated by Massimo de Angelis, Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis, among others, he charts a fuzzy, real-life area of ‘hybrid commons’, which bear both non-capitalist and capitalist elements (Bauwens 2011). For instance, private corporations coalesce around the commons of free software, extracting profit from market services and products related to the code. But they do not ‘enclose’ the free software and they sustain the community of developers by hiring them for making derivative goods and for expanding the open code. In this context, there is a relation of mutual dependence and benefit between the capitalist markets and the digital commons. This ‘bargain’ serves both the reproduction of capitalism and the proliferation of the new commons. So, for Bauwens (2011), the question of the capitalist commons cannot be settled in advance, in the ideological and political nebula of anticapitalism, ‘blinded by any perceived absolute “enemy”’. What is called for, instead, is a pragmatic mindset that flexibly weighs the variable interests of the commoners in different settings, and estimates the degree to which they benefit in the short and the medium term. Hence, we should condone the intertwinement of ‘netarchical’ capitalist entities and the commons in hybrid constellations insofar as these entanglements contribute to the growth of concrete commons. It is this growth that is ‘absolutely vital for the transition’. Any political and social transition will occur only on the back of flourishing digital commons (Bauwens 2011). In other words, amidst conflicts and contradictions in a messy, complex world, the priority now is the material development of digital commons, not the dissemination of a political and social vision. This 63

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics is a direct implication of the status that is conferred on the technological infrastructure, which is held to be the ground and the motor of historical innovation, in standard Marxist fashion. And its effect is to play down not only the force of the antagonisms between the logics of capitalist markets and the commons, but also the importance of sculpting and diffusing a new socio-political imaginary, in light of which the antagonisms would rise to prominence. Without communicating an alternative political consciousness and dream, the prevalent logics of the market – competition and private utility maximisation – are bound to maintain their grip on the mind and the will of contemporary commoners. This would impede the rise of a firm majoritarian orientation towards a commons-based society, in which managerial hierarchies and profit motivations will be subordinate or minimal. Hence the political urgency of coining an alternative political discourse and an oppositional imagination that will move commoners to dis-identify with the competitive and profit-oriented subjectivity and will drive them to identify more closely with the collaborative and social ethos of the commons. Indeed, on the face of it, it seems unlikely that individual programmers who have been active in the ‘concrete commons’ of open source software and who also earn their livelihood by working for private corporations, such as IBM, will feel an incentive also to work for the transition to another society configured around the commons. They make a living as professionals employed by private business or they may run their own private business. They freely express their creativity and they fulfil themselves by partaking in the evolution of open source in their free time. Why on earth would they feel motivated to change their situation as ‘hybrid’ commoners? Why would they care about a ‘commonist’ society and what would spur them on to strive for it? When a person aspires to a new social order around the commons, he could downplay the need to elaborate a socio-political project to inspire digital commoners if he trusts them to ‘revolt against the limitations imposed on this hyperproductive modality, by outmoded, repressive and life-undermining modalities of capital’ (Bauwens 2011). In other words, if he presumes, first, that the interest of digital producers in further increasing productivity ‘against the limitations’ of ‘outmoded’ capital will itself impel them in the end to rebel against the capitalist fencing of the commons; and second, that capital only foists constraints on the rising ‘hyperproductivity’ of digital technologies and does not, or cannot, sustain and amplify it. It is worth noting that the latest writings of Bauwens, his P2P Foundation and his collaborators exude a deepened conscience of the value of political mediations (see, for example, Bauwens and Kostakis 2014a; 64

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis 2018). However, this has not yet led to a rigorous confrontation with matters of political organisation, discourse and struggle. To illustrate, in their 2014 essay, ‘From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons’, Bauwens and Kostakis come around to seeing that the free software and culture movements lack the political philosophy that would set them on the course of a commonsbased social order, and they are often oriented towards the start-up business model (Bauwens and Kostakis 2014a: 357–8). Then, it is claimed that the main predicament is to engineer an autonomous circulation of the commons, where the use value they engender would further reinforce them. The solution is to be found in a new type of licence for the information commons, which would force private business to pay a fee for the use of the commons, thereby directing a stream of income towards the commons and funding their independent sustainability. The flourishing of a counter-economy through the Peer Production Licence and a new mode of open cooperativism would lay the groundwork for a counter-hegemony (Bauwens and Kostakis 2014a: 357–60).

Anti-capitalist commons A third ‘paradigm’ of the commons has taken shape in the labours of a cohort of authors with strong Marxist leanings and the will to revive a ‘commonist’ alternative that breaks with the history of state socialism. This collective comprises George Caffentzis (2010, 2013), the founder of the Midnight Notes Collective (see Caffentzis 2013); Silvia Federici (2004, 2010, 2012), a feminist theorist and activist; Massimo De Angelis (2005, 2010, 2012), the editor of the Web journal, ‘The Commoner’ (http://www.commoner.org.uk/); Peter Linebaugh (2008, 2014), the historian of the Commons and author of The Magna Carta Manifesto; and Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999, 2012, 2015), who has been navigating an autonomist Marxist course in the politics of the ‘digital age’, tapping into Caffentzis and De Angelis, among others. Although Hardt and Negri (2001, 2004, 2009, 2012) could be listed among their ranks, given their revolutionary objectives and their common background of Marxist ‘operaismo’ or ‘Italian autonomy’ from the 1970s, they will be taken up in the next chapter, which will debate political projects for the commons. They have put forth a wide-ranging and more thorough political conception of the commons, while they also part ways in their critical diagnosis of the present. What sets the anti-capitalist commoners apart from Ostrom’s Bloomington School and the digital commons is the fact that they are animated by a heightened perception of the clash between the commons and capital, 65

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics and they stand for a radically anti-capitalist politics. The commons are held to be locked in an endless conflict with capitalism since its rise at the end of the Middle Ages, as capitalism is relentlessly driven to dispossess and appropriate the commons. ‘Primitive accumulation’ is deemed a historical constant of capitalist production (De Angelis 2007: 14). The commons have also been subject to an ideological and political appropriation by contemporary capitalism, in an attempt of the system to save itself from its own anti-social folly (Caffentzis 2010; Federici 2010). Hence, this body of thought can contribute not only to reimagining political action in light of the egalitarian and participatory commons, but also to deeply ‘politicising the commons’ by nurturing an enhanced conscience of the political predicaments and the battles of the commons in our times. Anti-capitalist Marxist commoners are awake to the political in its power-laden and antagonistic facets, particularly in the battles between capital, the commons and the global poor. As distinct from Hardt and Negri, they are also alert to the need to bring actively into being what is absent – a collective subject of historical progress towards the commons (Dyer-Witheford 2012, 2015; De Angelis 2010, 2012). Moreover, they have considerably broadened the scope of commons analysis by also factoring in a historical (Linebaugh and Federici) and a feminist (Federici 2004, 2010, 2012) perspective. Despite all this, the anti-capitalist/Marxist script of the commons is beset with several deficiencies akin to those we have detected in the digital commons paradigm. Socio-economic processes and struggles are placed apart from political ones (De Angelis 2012: 4, 10). For all its political concerns and ideas, it has not worked out a robust scheme of counter-hegemony suited to our times and the commons.

The clash with capital In the ‘autonomist Marxist/anti-capitalist’ theory of the commons, class struggles are constitutive of social relations and they account for the vicissitudes of capitalism. ‘Class’ is not confined to industrial workers but encompasses peasants, housewives, unwaged workers and so on. ‘Autonomist Marxism champions the autonomy of workers, their capacity to resist and find alternatives to capital. To that end, it has always focused on struggle, and working-class capacity’ (Dyer-Witheford 2015: 188). The co-evolution of the capitalist system and working-class struggles is what marks off the worldview of ‘autonomist Marxism’, according to De Angelis (2012: 5–6; De Angelis 2010: 954–5). He contrasts this strand of thought with Marxist currents that locate the engine of social evolution in the independent development of the forces of production. 66

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy For autonomist Marxism, the relation between working-class struggles and the formation of capitalism follows the alternating phases of class recomposition, when the working class becomes united in a collective movement, and class decomposition, when this unity dissolves under the repressive force and the restructuring strategies of capital. The co-evolution of class struggle and capitalist development could be endless. There is no predetermined end (De Angelis 2012: 6). Moreover, autonomist Marxism dismisses Foucault’s talk of a dispersion of resistances across various social fields. The ‘embroilment’ of social resistances has a clear class frontline (De Angelis 2010: 955). Capital and the state under capitalism clash head-on with the commons of labour and nature as they are bent on expropriating, enclosing and privatising them. This holds true not only in a primordial phase of ‘primitive accumulation’, which inaugurated capitalism, but also throughout the history of this mode of production (De Angelis 2010: 955). Since the 1970s, we have indeed witnessed an intensified wave of ‘new enclosures’ in the global South, which has travelled across the world under the globalising impulse of neoliberalism. The ‘structural adjustment’ programmes have set out to expropriate people in Africa, Asia and the Americas from their common lands and natural resources, initiating the onset of new privatisations of ecosystems and public infrastructure. However, this drive has also sparked a global upsurge of local mobilisations against the privatisation of resources that communities come to reclaim as common property, from the Bolivian ‘water wars’ (2000) to groups in the Niger Delta that demand the communal ownership of petroleum (Federici 2012: 75–85, 96–104; Federici 2004: 15–17, 214; De Angelis 2007: 1–5). Under the twin circumstances of the neoliberal hegemony and the collapse of the currently existing socialism in the 1990s, the commons have acquired political salience for anti-capitalists. They demonstrate that non-capitalist modes of organising material (re)production are alive and struggling throughout the world. Precapitalist commons of nature and collaboration persist for the billions of people who still live off them. Moreover, new ‘post-capitalist’ commons are surging forth in ecological energy spaces and information technologies. Hence, we need not be disheartened by the demise of state socialism, nor should we wait for a mythical new beginning of history after the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Various forms of the ‘free association of producers’ are already present, and we should put all our efforts into extending them into an anti-capitalist world (Caffentzis 2010: 24). The commons tackle the crises of both socialism/communism and neoliberal capitalism. Social reproduction, freedom, equality and justice 67

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics for the vast majority in the world can be achieved today by overcoming capitalism and its state. To this end, we need to conduct ‘constituent’ anti-capitalist struggles that generate independent life-sustaining commons for the many, enabling their reproduction here and now and buttressing their political and other fights against capital. A large part of capital’s power lies in its ability to terrorise people with the idea that they are unable to organise the production and reproduction of their livelihoods outside the circuits of the market (Caffentzis 2010: 25). As De Angelis (2010: 955) has put it, we are called upon to further ‘commoning’ across existing worlds beyond capital in order to sustain, reproduce and extend the organisational reach of other-than capital forms of (re)production in common of livelihoods and at the same time keep at bay and push back the capitalist form of production in common. Here is the problematic of the ‘frontline’: a way to reproduce livelihoods in common versus another way to reproduce livelihoods in commons. . . .

One can already catch sight of the lack of the political in the anticapitalist commons school: the social reproduction of ‘livelihoods in common’ is given centre stage, to the detriment of political processes, discourse and organisation. Moreover, the primacy of class struggle over other modes of social or political contest is simply postulated. Likewise, the pre-eminence of an anti-capitalist orientation that would strain to eradicate, rather than check or supplement, the market and the state is taken for granted. This may be so from within an avowed and committed anti-capitalist position but it is hardly a political ‘given’ for vast majorities of people across the world. Unless one is happy to preach to the choir, political action on the discursive, the communicative, the organisational and the material fronts of everyday lives will be required to win over wider sectors of the population to an anti-capitalist vision of the commons. To turn struggles ‘inside’ the system into struggles ‘outside’ it is not enough to lay down the traits of the anti-capitalist fight for the commons: subversion of class hierarchies and exclusions, respect for diversity and promotion of class unity around global issues, construction of decommodified relations and direct participatory self-governance, more holistic attitudes towards the planet and so on (see Midnight Notes Collective 2009: 14–15). How can these values and practices escape the narrow confines of small communities and activist minorities? Who is going to do the work of successfully propagating them through example, persuasion, struggle and collective organisation? How will this work be 68

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy done? This question comes into sharp relief if one owns up to the fragmentation, the disempowerment and the attachment to hegemonic values that are widespread across both the ‘working class’ and the ‘middle class’, as De Angelis (2010) and Dyer-Witheford (2015) themselves have amply explained.

Ill at ease with the political The writings of Massimo De Angelis (2007, 2010, 2012) speak volumes about the anti-political animus of the ‘autonomist Marxist’ view of the commons. In effect, this author opposes the ‘social’ to the ‘political’ and, by extension, the ‘commons’ to the ‘political’, since he identifies the social with the common. De Angelis’s points of departure are the multiple – economic, social and ecological – crises that perturb the contemporary world of capital and raise with pressing urgency the question of a solution. From an anti-capitalist angle, De Angelis’s core political question is how social movements and struggles can swing the world against and beyond capital to institute ‘an association of free individuals’ (De Angelis 2012: 6; De Angelis 2010: 956). He begins to trace the lineaments of an answer by warning, precisely, against the ‘fallacy of the political’ (De Angelis 2012: 4, 6). Social relations and systems of social reproduction cannot be transfigured through a political recomposition that would spring from social movements. Political recomposition mobilises structures of political representation, which – by taking state power, for example – set out to fashion new social relations. This political direction of social transformation is impossible for De Angelis, in the face of the systemic forces of capital that strive to pre-empt it, and given the adaptive nature of the capitalist system, which knows how to co-opt (De Angelis 2012: 4). In consequence, we have to set apart social revolution (the commons) from political revolution (social movements) and then to rearticulate them by according a firm priority to social revolution (De Angelis 2012: 10). The commons are identified with the social because their ‘first goal’ is ‘that of addressing directly the various needs of different communities by mobilising natural and creative resources’ (De Angelis 2012: 4). On the other hand, De Angelis discards a fully apolitical attitude towards the commons, like the position apparently entertained by Ostrom, which disregards the necessity of organising against the external social forces (of capital) in order to shore up the commons. As a result, his own first tentative answer to the meta-question of historical transition is that 69

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics our world can be changed by developing a new mode of production (social revolution through the commons) while keeping at bay the old one and reclaiming resources from it (political revolution, through movements). (De Angelis 2012: 4)

Political recomposition features a cycle of struggles that put in place new structures of political representation and win ‘victories’ against capital and the forces of the establishment (De Angelis 2012: 4–9). These victories can build up momentum for change but they are incapable of bringing about a radical deconstruction of social systems like capital. They can only ‘perturbate’ them (sic). Capital adjusts to the shifts and the concessions it has made, so as to gain time to develop and strike back. The history of the rise and the fall of the welfare state after World War II bears witness to the adaptability and the co-opting powers of capital, on the one hand, and to the limits of political revolution, on the other (De Angelis 2012: 6–8). The ‘fallacy of the political’ summons up a conception of social revolution that De Angelis aligns with Marx’s and juxtaposes to Lenin’s. De Angelis does not envisage epochal change as a result of the seizure of power by political elites, through elections or insurrection. He envisions a long-term process that issues in ‘the actual production of another form of power, which therefore corresponds to . . . a change in the “economic structure of society”’ (De Angelis 2012: 9). His conception disowns the classical political strategies of reform and revolution, which divorce the organisational means – the party, the gulag etc.and so on – from the aspirational ends – communism as free association; they subordinate the ‘masses’ to the leadership of a hierarchical party and they subscribe to a stagist idea of historical evolution (De Angelis 2007: 5–6). Despite its anarchist leanings, De Angelis’s take on social revolution also espouses ‘socialism’ in the sense of the struggle within, against and beyond the state (De Angelis 2007: 245). Interestingly, De Angelis does not deny that there is a political aspect to ‘social revolution’, and he endorses the feminist slogan ‘the private [sic] is political’ (De Angelis 2012: 9). But it is illuminating to see where he locates this political dimension: Social revolution is political in the sense that it acts as a crucial perturbation of established political systems that seek to discipline, order, and channel or draw resources from socioeconomic systems. (De Angelis 2012: 9)

Hence, social revolutions can be political only in the sense that they can upset the political system. But the political is situated outside the social. In the vein of classic vulgar materialism, the social and the political are 70

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy two clearly separate realms, which may interact with each other but they do so as two different poles external to each other. The political belongs to the ‘superstructure’. It is erected upon the social foundation, which is reduced to the economic. The economy is the ground of the political. That is why, according to De Angelis (2012: 11), we should heed Marx’s counsel that radical transformation past capitalism is unfeasible unless the necessary socio-material bases are in place. This is the reason why the ‘various movements in the last few decades . . . all depended on some form of commons, that is, of social systems at different scales of action, within which resources are shared’ (De Angelis 2012: 10). The political comes after, and it has a limited capacity for transformative agency if the required social ground is lacking (De Angelis 2012: 4–8). The ‘centre of gravity’ for a commons-based society moves towards ‘extending the realm of the non-commodified field of reproduction’ (De Angelis 2012: 19). What is eclipsed from view here is the political within the social: that is, the power relations, antagonisms and contestation that suffuse social relations, as well as the political process of constructing social relations (see Lefort 1986; Laclau and Mouffe 1985). In effect, when the political is lodged in a site fully external to the social, the binary society versus politics replicates the binary nature versus politics. Society tends to be seen then in the naturalistic terms of a spontaneous and immanent development, which is stripped in itself of the artifice, the activism and the contest of the political. By depoliticising the social and by eliding the social with commons (De Angelis 2012: 10), this stream of autonomist Marxism removes their political edge twice from the commons. First, it obscures the power asymmetries and the conflicts besetting the fields of the commons. It fails to reckon, therefore, that we should organise them politically in order to channel actual commons towards particular courses of history-making. Second, it puts forward an overstretched definition that equates the commons with society at large – social systems, sociomaterial conditions of production and reproduction, even the family (De Angelis 2012: 10–11; De Angelis 2007: 243). There are capitalist, patriarchal and reactionary commons; almost all things social are commons (De Angelis 2012: 11–12). As a result, the commons are shorn of any distinctiveness as alternative social arrangements and as a specific political choice and orientation. However, De Angelis’s construal of the commons, which explicitly relegates politics to a subordinate position, cries out itself for a strategy of political hegemony. In this autonomist Marxist strand, the commons stand out as an alternative social formation in the interstices of the 71

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics dominant capitalist system. Their growth sets them inevitably on a collision course with ruling powers. Yet, there is no independent, already constituted social force that could propel the commons and push for their expansion. The awareness of this lack and of the corollary need to manufacture what is absent – a collective subject for a counter-hegemony of the commons – is a crucial difference that separates Caffentzis, Federici and De Angelis, on the one hand, from Hardt and Negri, on the other. As against the latter, De Angelis insists that there is no ready-made, positive ‘multitude’ that is effectively building communism so that we could just push through Empire to see that we live in communism (De Angelis 2007: 3–4). A counter-hegemonic force could materialise out of the working class and the middle class. However, both classes are divided, fragmented and caught up in dominant practices and fantasies. The middle class, in particular, remains captive to the illusion that ‘betterment’ can be achieved by means of individual action and effort (De Angelis 2012: 13–15; De Angelis 2010: 956–68). Yet, the capitalist market will not collapse on its own without an intervention from the outside (De Angelis 2010: 966, 968). Accordingly, it is imperative to call into being what is lacking: a collective subject of counter-hegemonic commoning that will ‘explode’ the middle class and will bring together actors across wage hierarchies, national borders and frontline struggles. This ‘explosion’ will tap into the current contradictions and fugitive energies of the middle class in order to bridge actual divisions and to tie together a new political subject for a counter-hegemonic project around commons (De Angelis 2010: 971). The success of the alternative commons in their clash with the ruling system will turn on their ability to activate multiple social powers – the ground zero of hegemonic politics (De Angelis 2012: 13–15)! This explosion of alternatives till the point of hegemony is not possible if these latent alternatives do not overcome existing divisions within the social body, within the working class corresponding to the middle-class hegemonic sense of what constitute [sic] ‘betterment’, and therefore constituting ‘social order’ along a wage hierarchy. . . . A world in which these divisions are overcome is part of the puzzling equation that needs to be solved in order to address our ‘how do we change the world’ meta-question. (De Angelis 2012: 15; emphasis added)

And yet we are served notice that a collective subject possesses no autonomy at all from the social system underlying it (De Angelis 2012: 14). It can rise and amass powers only as a manifestation of the powers of the social system itself and to the extent that it is necessary for the reproduction of the 72

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy system (De Angelis 2012: 14; De Angelis 2007: 238). But if the system of the commons itself is ambiguous, limited by capital and in battle with it, if the current crisis itself cannot automatically push forward the struggle, and if no existing collective subject effectively advances it, how can the diverse alternative commons grow and flourish? And how is it possible to rally together the divided social forces that could labour and fight for the commons, if ideology and discourse cannot furnish the ground for hegemonic unity, which must be rooted only in real, concrete commons and immediate material interests (De Angelis 2012: 15; De Angelis 2010: 958; De Angelis 2007: 238–9)? We have reached a cul-de-sac, in which the urgency of hegemonic politics is acutely felt, yet we are barred from thinking in such terms. De Angelis cannot help us to think through the riddles of building a political subject today as he posits the primacy of the ‘social system’ and the total dependence of the subject on this system (De Angelis 2012: 14). In line with these assumptions, he fails to flesh out any theory for the making of counter-hegemonic agencies and projects. Honestly enough, he concedes this failure and the political impotence to which it condemns us: The explosion of the middle class . . . rearranges social relations . . . and the borders of the wage hierarchy policed by the army of prejudice, patriarchy and racism. How this explosion will be brought about, I do not know. (De Angelis 2010: 971, emphasis added)

Taking stock of the commons: the double play By mapping out the commons in their theoretical and practical diversity we tracked a double movement. The commons renew contemporary political thought and praxis, stretching their horizons in multiple ways. They constitute shared resources that are governed, produced and distributed through collective participation in terms that escape the logic of private–corporate and state–public property. The commons of nature and culture attest to the possibility of other ways of doing politics and acting politically. They disclose modalities of political action and structure that foster collective participation, effective equality, social justice, reciprocity, openness, diversity, grassroots self-institution, the selforganisation of citizens and ecological sustainability. They show that institutional arrangements are complex, non-linear and diverse systems that admit of no single ‘optimal’ solution. Moreover, the new commons of culture, anchored in digital technologies and networks, instantiate new figures of community and selfgovernance that burst through the closed, stable and homogeneous 73

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics communities of face-to-face interaction. Networked communities tend to be heterogeneous, open and potentially global. Illustrating the postHeideggerian idea of community, the digital commons rest on a shared sense of purpose and on sustained collaboration rather than on any cultural, ethnic or ideological identity. They can join together individual freedom and autonomous social collaboration, enabling more democratic participation, openness, freedom, diversity and co-production without the hierarchies of the state and the market. In effect, commonsbased peer production initiates a new ‘socio-technological paradigm’ and catalyses a broader radical transformation of culture by diffusing the values and the practices of the commons – sharing, free collaboration for mutual benefit, egalitarian self-organisation, openness. This movement paves the way towards a commons-based society. The contemporary digital commons also point to a certain scheme of social change. New technologies and material practices can fabricate a new material infrastructure that will gestate a new mode of production, governance and distribution, while reducing dependence on dominant structures and elites. As a result, the digital commons can furnish the base for an effective counter-hegemonic bloc. Moreover, their actual social practices of collaborative production, sharing, autonomy and diversity can help to inculcate alternative values into people. They can also enact a prefigurative example that helps to attract larger sectors of society to the cause of the commons. Finally, anti-capitalist Marxist commoners (Caffentzis, Federici and De Angelis, among others) are intensely conscious of the political in its powerful and antagonistic dimensions, particularly in the social struggles between capital, the commons and the global poor. They also call attention to the need to create actively what is lacking – a collective subject of historical shift towards the commons. Moreover, they foreground a key political insight. By commoning the means of the reproduction of life, we provide a breeding ground for cultivating collective interests, social ties and spaces partly independent of capital and the state, and we secure conditions of sustenance that limit the hold of global markets on our lives. On the other hand, commons theories and practices are fraught with political failures and gaps that take away from their value for transformative action today. The commons of nature often embody an exclusionary, homogeneous concept of the community. Their account in Ostrom’s work is marred, moreover, by a weak understanding of hegemonic power relations, political antagonisms and the virtues of conflict. In Ostrom’s political perspective, civic participation in the institutions of governance is narrowly circumscribed, while the tensions between the logics of the commons, the state and the market are nearly hidden from view. 74

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from the commons to egalitarian autonomy For their part, the commons of digital culture and networks have so far sponsored a technocratic plan of socio-economic transformation, in which the expansion of a new mode of networked production, legal reforms and ‘social entrepreneurship’ are the prime motors of epochal change. The vexing politics of collective dis-identification from hegemonic values and relations, the building of popular movements, political battles around, with and within the state, and the need to confront dominant elites are not probed in depth. The theorists of the new commons do not effectively think through the conditions that would enable a broad-based social alliance for change to come together and to rise up against the neoliberal hegemony, overcoming widespread social fragmentation, exclusion, precarisation and disempowerment. The focus is, instead, on new technologies and practices of economic production. Likewise, the anti-capitalist ‘autonomist’ theory of the commons has failed to work out an efficacious figure of counter-hegemony for our times. Behind this failure lies the primacy assigned to the social reproduction of livelihoods in common over political activities, discourse and organisation. Social revolution (the commons) is uncoupled from political revolution (social movements) and then reconnected with it in order of priority. As a result, political concerns recede to the background. The task today facing a commons-centric strategy for social renewal is not simply to invert the priority of the political over the social that we find in Leninist revolutionism or in social-democratic reformism. Social relations cannot be emancipated from the top. However, under the present circumstances of neoliberal hegemony, massive impotence and fragmented societies, social structures are unlikely to alter and to privilege the commons without deliberate collective coordination. In both contemporary theory and practice, the commons do attest to the real possibility of another, autonomous politics beyond TINA, beyond the hegemonic mould of the present state and the market with their oligarchic authoritarianism and excessive disparities. The commons also exemplify specific ways of performing politics that serve egalitarian collective self-governance, social justice, openness, diversity and sustainability. But they lack the critical mass, the force and the confluence needed to elicit wide-ranging social reconstruction. For the cause of common freedom in our times, the challenge ahead is, then, to rethink and relaunch the politics of counter-hegemony in order to put together a broad alliance of social forces for the commons, in terms favourable to the commons.

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Chapter Three

Common and communism: political theories for radical change From Hardt and Negri, and Dardot and Laval to Badiou and Žižek

The last decade or so has certainly seen a restart of political reflection on the common(s) or the idea of communism in an attempt to blaze political paths beyond neoliberal hegemony. These theoretico-political ventures are stirred by an acute critique of the global system of neoliberal dominance, and they are on the lookout for powerful counter-strategies that can reorder the balance of forces for the common good. Moreover, they often sketch out figures of post-capitalist societies embodying egalitarian and emancipatory principles. Many of these theorists (including Hardt and Negri, and Dardot and Laval) marshal their arguments and speculations under the banner of the commons or the common. They disown the signifier ‘communism’ on account of its hard-to-break association with a bloody historical record of state dictatorship and inefficient command economies. The common(s) signal a transformative project that reaffirms the values of collective ownership and self-management not only in the state but also in the material basis of production (Negri 2007: 70). Yet, they are free of the burdens of twentieth-century history. They are poised against state centralism and authoritarianism, instead favouring bottom-up self-organisation, plurality and openness. As Dyer-Witheford (2007: 2) has put it: ‘Commons’ is a word that sums up many of the aspirations of the movement of movements. It is a popular term perhaps because it provides a way of talking about collective ownership without invoking a bad history – that is, without immediately conjuring up, and then explaining (away) ‘communism’, conventionally understood as a centralised command economy plus a repressive state.

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political theories for radical change Other thinkers, most famously Badiou (2009, 2010) and Žižek (2008, 2010; see also Bosteels 2011; Dean 2012), disagree. They are aware of the new social movements for the commons. But they go against the grain by reclaiming not only the name but also core components of the historical legacy of communism, from the communist party and the state (see Žižek 2008, 2010, 2013; Dean 2012, 2016) to the militant commitment to the common Cause (Badiou 2009, 2010). This chapter digs into these diverse political reflections on the postSoviet appearances of the common(s) and communism in order to extract insights and critical compasses for commons strategies. At the same time, it shines light on the limits and the holes in political thinking on this front. If the pro-common(s) or commonist theorists again fail to face up adequately to the challenges of antagonistic difference, mass movement building and counter-hegemonic politics for the commons, revamped communists fare no better. And some of them, short on imagination and a sense of history, fall back on defunct ‘truths’ about the state, the party and the communist Idea. So, the need to revisit the logics of hegemony becomes urgent if the aim is to summon into existence a massive collective agency for the commons that will alter the status quo and will embark on wide-ranging transformation. As argued in the previous chapters and reiterated in the present, hegemony and the common(s) get entwined in the processes of reinventing society in the spirit of the commons. Still, a pertinent hegemonic politics for the commons should have imbibed the lessons from the critical inputs, the generative potentials and the failures of the state of the art in twenty-first-century political thought on the common(s).

The multitude as a chimera of biopolitics Those acquainted with the renowned trilogy of Hardt and Negri, Empire (2001), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), up to their manifesto-like Declaration (2012), might scoff at the claim that contemporary theory has failed to figure out any systematic idea of the collective subject that could lead the way to an ‘absolute democracy’ of the commonwealth. Hardt and Negri (2004, 2009, 2012) have made the case that the collective subject of democratic struggle against the neoliberal empire is already there, even if it is still submerged and subdued. This subject is the ‘multitude’, which encompasses not only the various agents of the alter-globalisation movement at the turn of the century but equally the latest Arab Spring, Indignant and Occupy movements. The multitude is grounded in the common and gives rise to the common. The multitude’s 77

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics investment in the common orients its desire and its action towards a democracy of the common across the globe (Negri 2007: 67). The ‘common’ is ‘the central concept of the organisation of society’ and a political strategy, the ‘constitutionality of the common’, which would extend collective self-management and commoning to much broader fields of the social (Hardt and Negri 2012: 71, 92). Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude acquires particular salience in the present quest for a mode of collective action that can assemble a community of struggle while also ingraining plurality, equality, autonomy, openness, horizontality and decentralisation in this collective subject. As in the philosophy of Nancy, Esposito and Agamben, the common of the multitude is not centred on a fixed and homogeneous identity. It introduces a scheme of unity without fusion and closure, of coordination without centralisation and top-down hierarchies, of communication without unanimity and stifling consensus. It bears the promise of bodying forth a democracy of the common without hegemony, with all its repressive and exclusionary downsides. Can it live up to this promise? To begin with, the multitude names a new mode of social production, a collective subject and a political logic that have sprung from post-Fordist forms of ‘immaterial labour’ or ‘biopolitical production’ (Hardt and Negri 2001: 287–94; Hardt and Negri 2004: 66, 109, 114–15, 198, 219). Expansive webs of communication, the diffusion of information and knowledge, the spreading out of social relations through new technologies, the growing similarities of social and economic environments knit closer ties among all those who work under the rule of capital. Through extensive cooperation, immaterial labour brings forth new common knowledge, communication and social relationships (Hardt and Negri 2004: xv, 114–15, 125–9). The multitude thus stages the common in its duality, the webs of cooperation and communication in which the transformations of labour are already embedded and the new common ideas, affects and relationships that are being crafted. The immaterial labour of the common has transfigured in its image the contemporary scene of labour and production (Hardt and Negri 2004: 115). And, most tellingly, its network structure has pervaded social life as a way to arrange and understand everything, from imperial armies to migration patterns and neural functions (Hardt and Negri 2004: 65, 108–15, 142). Crucially, for the making of new progressive alliances, the new subjectivities that are being shaped in immaterial production and the new patterns of sociality that stretch across the various spheres of life are 78

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political theories for radical change strongly egalitarian and libertarian at the same time. This is because the multitude incarnates a distinctive template of social and political organisation, which governs not only biopolitical labour but also contemporary resistance to imperial biopower from the Zapatistas to Seattle onwards: the distributed network. It is the network structure of the multitude that enables it to attain an alternative form of composition, beyond the hegemonic model of unity and in favour of the common (see Hardt and Negri 2004: xiii–xv, 57, 82–8, 142, 222, 288, 336–40). In this figure of political agency and association there is no principal actor who soars vertically above other differences and partly subsumes singularities under a particular identity in the hierarchical style of Gramsci and Laclau’s hegemony.1 The common does not emerge from the subordination of differences to an overarching particularity; it lies in the interaction and the collaboration among the singular constituents themselves. Participation and collective decision-making take the place of less than fully accountable representatives and leaders. The swarm intelligence of the multitude can coordinate action through the autonomous input of its singularities, which can thus manage their community without the centralised leadership of hegemony. Hardt and Negri (2004: 337–40) point to open-source programming to illustrate an effective decentralised procedure of biopolitical labour that can bring a myriad of independent actors to reach a collective outcome without a priori exclusions and hierarchies. Each one freely contributes proposals and amendments to a common pool, which develops continually and yields a tangible result that works for all. There is no centralised command structure but an irreducible plurality of collaborating nodes. Seattle and later militant actions in summit conferences, social forums and Internet communities have also exemplified the horizontal workings of network mobilisation (Hardt and Negri 2004: 86–7, 208–11, 217–18, 340). The ‘distributed network’ instantiates a social formation that is organised and yet is not structured in the manner of hegemonic formations, on the basis of exclusions, antagonism and centralised leadership. Connections unfold horizontally and possess no centre and no definite boundaries. All nodes can communicate directly with each other, while new nodes can join in indefinitely. All differences retain their singularity, yet they share similar conditions and they are nested in the same webs of communication. Commonality lies mainly in the dynamic collaboration and interaction of differences (Hardt and Negri 2004: xiv–xv). This is what sets the multitude apart from prevalent modern notions of the subject of emancipation: it is made up of a multiplicity of singular differences that cannot be submerged under the single identity of the 79

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics people or the uniformity of the masses (Hardt and Negri 2004: xiv–xv, 106–7). The polyphonic and carnivalesque swarm of the multitude not only is an egalitarian multiplicity in common that engages in militant resistance against imperial power. It also prefigures the advent of an ‘absolute democracy’ that empowers the free expression of differences and their equal connection, beyond exclusion, domination and enclosure in antagonistic relations (Hardt and Negri 2004: xi, 241). Hardt and Negri’s multitude has attracted the fire of several critics, who have taken issue both with the empirical implausibility of this narrative overall, and with its incapacity to orient strategic thought and action. De Angelis (2007: 3–10) and Caffentzis (2013: 66–81), among others, have dismissed the idea of an already organised ‘multitude’. They dispute the importance of the shift towards ‘immaterial labour’ across the world. They also question the new ‘vanguardism’ that elevates immaterial labourers to the pioneers of historical innovation (De Angelis 2007: 4). They argue that the political force of change for the commons remains yet to be properly constituted as the labouring strata of the population are still deeply caught up in capital’s regimes of domination and exploitation. Hence, Hardt and Negri’s narrative unleashes pacifying, depoliticising effects. It suggests that no big efforts will be required to self-organise, to modify ideas, relations and practices, and to combat the rule of neoliberal capital (De Angelis 2007: 3–4, 9–10; Caffentzis 2013: 81). For Rancière (2010), the multitude in question resurrects an obsolete Marxist teleology of productive forces that drive the evolution of the social ‘system’. This multitude implies the immanent, spontaneous workings of a deep communal substance (the many as a natural community). Taking its lead from Rancière, Laclau’s critique (2001; Laclau 2005a: 239–44) is particularly poignant. It speaks to the heart of the matter here: whether the multitude can effectively dispense with the politics of hegemony in the making of a massive bloc for the commons. Laclau objects, first, that the account of the multitude lacks any theory of political articulation that would orchestrate the creation of a ‘collective will’ out of particular struggles. The unity of the multitude is apparently the result of a spontaneous aggregation of different actions and struggles. But in history and politics nothing guarantees that the objectives of particular mobilisations will not clash with each other and will converge in an effective force of change. Communities are not a gift of nature. They are the offshoot of political construction out of a primary diversity and division. Second, Hardt and Negri’s multitude presumes a ‘natural will to resist’ oppression, whereas such a will needs to be actively edified and 80

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political theories for radical change directed against particular targets. The upshot is that the multitude is a non-entity and its theory is unable to guide collective action and political organisation. For Laclau (2001: 6), the post-Marxist theorist of hegemony, any ‘multitude’ and all political subjects of change must be configured ‘through political action – which presupposes antagonism and hegemony’.

Politicising the multitude: building collective agency for the common? After the revisions carried out by Hardt and Negri in their Multitude (2004), Commonwealth (2009) and Declaration (2012), the charges of spontaneism, teleology and non-political nature do not hold much water. Hardt and Negri (2004: 159, 220, 226, 354–5; Hardt and Negri 2009: 165, 169) have increasingly stressed that historical trends do not suffice. The multitude is yet to crystallise as the political subject of a new, ‘absolute’ democracy. The common social flesh that arises from biopolitical productivity has not yet congealed into a concrete body. The democracy of the multitude is thus a project that demands concerted political efforts. Capitalist crisis will not automatically trigger the collapse of the capitalist empire. Their 2012 Declaration is devoted to thinking historical transition, political strategy and the forging of counter-hegemony alliances. This short treatise seeks precisely to provide what was missing: a present-day theory for the political construction of collective subjects and constituent powers that would institute a democracy of the multitude, taking its bearings from the democratic struggles of 2011. Yet, in both this manifesto and their earlier extended volume on the commons, Commonwealth (2009), Hardt and Negri posit a stark and, ultimately, untenable divide between the politics of the common and hegemony. If hegemonic logics are still present or even called for in the politics of the common, then the task would be to consider ways in which we can minimise asymmetries of power and the repression of differences. This endeavour cannot get started, if it is not actually blocked, when hegemony and the common are represented as clear-cut opposites, between which there is no actual or desirable combination. According to Hardt and Negri’s (2012: 45–6) reading of the 2011 cycle of contention, this introduced constituent processes that can cultivate the types of subjectivity that will be adequate to a free and equal democracy. The democratic insurgencies mobilised agents and practices that turned their backs on centralised leadership, closed ideologies and representation by political parties, trying to win back effective self-government. 81

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics They were organised horizontally through networks that subvert hierarchies. They convened assemblies of direct collective decision-making, which engendered new social truths and affects. Collective deliberation could attend to minorities and embrace singular differences. It did so by enacting plural procedures open to conflicts and by making decisions that blended divergent views in contingent ways. Provisional majorities were not uniform and univocal bodies but a ‘concatenation of differences’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 64). Following the lead of such innovations, the legislative, the executive and the judiciary could be refashioned along federalist lines, which would enact common self-governance by weaving together an extensive variety of interacting forces and assemblies. These agencies would multiply horizontally across social fields and they would deliberate with each other without being subsumed under any overarching, centralised authority (Hardt and Negri 2012: 89–90). The Indignados and Occupy movements contested, moreover, the rule of both private and public property, raising the prospect of collective free access to resources that are held in common and are managed in concert. These mobilisations conducted, moreover, sedentary slow-time politics, rooted in local conditions. But they also communicated with each other across national borders and they spoke to global concerns (Hardt and Negri 2012: 5–7, 39–40, 63–4). Accordingly, for Hardt and Negri, democratic transformation is not the automatic function of an already operative multitudinous force. It is an arduous political endeavour to compose collective subjects and constituent powers. Biopolitical production and the new democratic mobilisations have prepared the ground and they have drafted some guidelines. But they have not delivered any definite, fully-fledged solutions (Hardt and Negri 2012: 101–4). The multitude is put forward as a political project for an autonomous, egalitarian and common democracy, whose rudiments are furnished by the new modalities of biopolitical labour and collective action. Laclau’s dilemma – hegemonic politics or immanent, teleological multitudes – is revealed to be a false one, occluding the possibility of alternative, non-hegemonic patterns of political organisation: ‘Spontaneity and hegemony are not the only alternatives. The multitude can develop the power to organise itself through the conflictual and cooperative interactions of singularities in the common’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 175). Yet, Hardt and Negri (2004: 88, 94–5, 114–15, 219–22; Hardt and Negri 2009: 165–6) hold on to some ontological and historical– materialist assurances that still depoliticise the multitude. They portray the multitude as the magic key to radical democratic innovation today, 82

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political theories for radical change pre-empting political controversy over the pertinence of different paths to common freedom. In the political anthropology of the Commonwealth (2009), the ontological ‘guarantees’ are drawn from an anthropological ‘power of love’. Hardt and Negri (2009: 192–9) see love and the common as primary forces. ‘Evil’, the distortion and obstruction of the loving, plural power of the common through racism, fascism and other hierarchical and identitarian institutions, is held to be derivative – a corruption of the primary forces with no original and independent existence. The power of love is manifested in schemes of organisation that are always open, horizontal and multitudinous. Thanks to its primary power, every time it is barred and corrupted in vertical relations, love manages to break through these limits and to reopen itself to the free participation of all singularities (Hardt and Negri 2009: 198). The historical–material warrants are adduced in their depiction of biopolitical labour. This is supposed to demonstrate that contemporary webs of production operate through the non-hierarchical cooperation of a diversity of productive singularities, which are coordinated like ‘an orchestra . . . without a conductor, [that] would fall silent if anyone were to step onto the podium’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 173). They go on to argue (Hardt and Negri 2009: 175–6) that if this non-sovereign, non-hegemonic model of collective self-organisation can be established in the daily creation of the common, the political capacity of the multitude is no longer an issue. In accord with this construal of the biopolitical multitude as a fundamental and self-standing essence, a clear-cut dichotomy is drawn between the multitude and hegemony. ‘The needs of biopolitical production . . . directly conflict with political representation and hegemony’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 169, 305). ‘Note that the plural operation of politics . . . is not a form of populism . . . subsumed within a hegemonic power’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 83). However, the purity of this dualism does not stand up to scrutiny. In contemporary struggles for greater egalitarian freedom, the politics of hegemony (concentration of force, representation, partial unification) is not, and should not be, disentangled from the politics of the multitudinous common.

Hegemony and agonism in the multitude and the common Hardt and Negri’s ontological and historical–material guarantees are hollow. Vertical hierarchies and uneven power relations are possibilities intrinsic to horizontal democratic publics and should be acknowledged 83

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics as such, if these publics are to carry forward the fight against various structures of domination. Hardt and Negri (2009: 357–8) concede that singularities often collide with one another. Yet, they insist (Hardt and Negri 2009: 196, 175, 359) that horizontally configured multiplicities can combine full freedom and equality, ‘the consensus of singularities and the autonomy of each’, without constituting any unified and sovereign power. This is wishful thinking. If differences are liable to clash, processes of collective unification and the exercise of sovereign power over dissidents will become necessary when binding collective decisions are in order and antagonisms are not resolved in a manner that commands the free assent of all. If the ‘commons’ of nature and material infrastructures, for instance, are to be shared and equally managed by all those concerned, it is likely that not all desirable uses will be empirically feasible at the same time. Collective choices will have to be made among competing alternatives. To draw an example from Hardt and Negri’s own Declaration (2012: 70), ‘Where there is not enough water to satisfy both urban needs and agricultural demands, for example, distribution must be decided democratically by an informed population.’ Inspired by the democratic ‘occupations’ of 2011, they contemplate ways to pluralise the will of the majority internally so as to take on board many differences, through a practice of ‘agglutination’ that weaves together different views and desires in contingent manners (Hardt and Negri 2012: 64). But what could warrant the certainty that all dilemmas in public choices can be overcome, attaining universal agreement? Such warrants are hard to find in a world that is fundamentally open and rife with unpredictable possibilities. The likelihood of irresolvable divisions seems intrinsic to a universe of heterogeneous singularities that are capable of creative self-differentiation and are not bound together by a universal identity or invariant laws of human nature, reason and history. This is precisely the world inhabited by the horizontal multiplicities of Hardt and Negri (2009: 358, 378–9). And this affords them no security against the exclusion of certain options and the suppression of minoritarian preferences when the free convergence of different wills is not forthcoming. In an indeterminate and plural cosmos, we could not rule out the possibility of social conflicts that confront us with a choice between political stalemate, endless strife or the coercive imposition of certain preferences, preferably majoritarian. Hence, we could not preclude the reassertion of hegemonic, sovereign rule. And this reassertion is inherent in the openness of a world that can be antagonistically divided because it is not unified a priori by universal laws. 84

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political theories for radical change The historical–materialist argument fares no better in demonstrating the real possibility of full horizontality in biopolitical labour. Empirical research has uncovered the operation of ‘power laws’ in the distributed networks of biopolitical production. Although each node of the network can connect to any other, and nodes can infinitely extend and multiply, a small number of highly connected nodes tend to emerge and to function as key hubs in the webs of communication (Hands 2011: 110–12, 122–3). Even open source communities, Hardt and Negri’s (2009: 173) favourite example of commons that operate as ‘an orchestra . . . without a conductor’, bear witness to the contrary: the active presence of a well-defined core of main programmers who direct the design of open software through its various stages (Leadbeater 2009; Valverde and Solé 2007). In effect, various strains of Laclau’s hegemonic politics persist within the very politics of autonomous multiplicities, underpinning their operations. The 2011–12 Occupy movement can illustrate the point. Despite its explicit opposition to delegation, hierarchical organisation, party partisanship and ideological unity, building blocks of Laclauian hegemony – representation, antagonism, uneven power and ‘chains of equivalence’ – stood out in its political discourse and action. The central slogan of the movement to Occupy Wall Street – ‘We are the 99 per cent’ – bears the most obvious and blatant testimony. This slogan makes a claim to representation; it constructs a collective identity and it stages a radical antagonism with a collective enemy – the elites of the top 1 per cent (Dean 2012: 200–1, 224–32). A particularity, the activists who effectively participated in the various Occupy actions, stepped forward as the representative of a near universality, the 99 per cent of the people, in the context of an antagonism with a common rival. Finally, although occupations were loosely linked in an open network, central hubs, such the Zuccotti Park in New York, played a leading part in the direction of the movement (see Egberts 2012; Dean 2012). The first conclusion is that hegemony in the guise of unequal power, representation, unification and centralised control is an ever-present possibility of the multitude and the commons. Accordingly, openness, horizontality and real political equality should be upheld as endless strivings that call for ongoing vigilance and a fight against subsisting bonds of hierarchy and closure. When the inherent possibility of hegemonic relations and antagonistic divisions is recognised, we are driven to search for and to perform political practices through which asymmetries of power can be contested and dissolved or minimised, and intense conflicts can be mitigated in the service of the commons. Agonism thus becomes a pivot of egalitarian commons. 85

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics Agonistic politics (Connolly 1995, 2005; Mouffe 2000, 2005; Tully 2008) opens up existing arrangements to ongoing contestation and change, exposing communal boundaries and censures to question. All laws, practices and social relations come to be seen as mutable sediments of history and politics, which are stained with traces of violence and exclusion. As a result, socio-political arrangements can lend themselves more readily to interrogation and change, making it easier to combat and dismantle bonds of subjection, inequality and exclusion. By the same token, there is more room for new identities and political horizons to break forth and to vindicate their rights. The agonistic way of constituting social relations can thus energise a perpetual extension of the range of differences that enjoy equal liberties. But a virtuous introduction of agonistic politics into the common(s), which can help to bolster their values of equal freedom, diversity and openness, is not motivated and can even be forestalled when one implausibly presumes, as Hardt and Negri do, that it is always feasible in common assemblies to ‘agglutinate’ differences and to overcome deep divisions. The second implication is that contemporary movements and plural alliances should actively undertake hegemonic forms of political intervention so as to gain the power to remake the world in tune with their variable ideas of the commons, removing the ruling forces of today. However, in their re-enactments of sovereign hegemony, such common multiplicities should radically question, twist, distort and reconfigure its prevailing structures if they are out for greater freedom, equality, openness and diversity in collective self-governance. Indeed, the very proponents of non-hegemonic multitudinous politics, Hardt and Negri, grant, in their Declaration (2012), the pertinence of hegemonic logics for an effective self-organisation of the multitude.2 Drawing the outlines of a constituent process that can advance the common freedom of the many, they reasonably ask (Hardt and Negri 2012: 56): ‘What good is a beautiful constituent process when people are suffering now? What if, by the time we create a perfect democratic society, the earth is already degraded beyond repair?’ Constituent powers must be equipped with a set of democratic ‘counter-powers’ that will take immediate action in order to prevent further environmental degradation and to meet basic human necessities (food, shelter, health and so on). To this end, counter-powers will deploy legal means and ‘weapons of coercion’, so as to ‘force the corporations and the nation-states to open access to the common’ and to halt natural and social destruction (Hardt and Negri 2012: 59). Hardt and Negri (2012: 101–3) underscore, moreover, that the rich will not give away their property and the powerful will not let the reins of power 86

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political theories for radical change fall of their own free will. To overthrow the ruling powers we will need collective force. We should prepare, therefore, for an event that will ‘completely reshuffle the decks of political powers and possibility’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 102). What is required, then, is a new balance of power that can be attained through the forceful assertion of the multitudes in an event of rupture. This realignment of the balance of power lies at the core of any hegemonic démarche on its most classic, Gramscian conception (Gramsci 1971: 57–8, 109, 172, 404). Contradicting the sharp divide between hegemony and multitudinous autonomy that he stipulated in the works co-authored with Michael Hardt (Hardt and Negri 2009: 169, 305; Hardt and Negri 2012: 83), Negri has explicitly affirmed the need for a ‘hegemony of one pole . . . the common of the multitude . . . that has been subordinated over another which has been dominant until now’ (Curcio and Özselçuk 2010: 322). Hardt and Negri now endorse further components of hegemony. They argue that a democratic society grounded in the open sharing and self-management of the ‘commons’ will have to knit together coalitions between the defenders of such a project and a variety of groups who are struggling – workers, unemployed, the poor, students . . . (Hardt and Negri 2012: 106–7). Furthermore, such blocs of forces should converge in alliances in which autonomous singularities interact with each other, transform themselves through their exchanges, and recognise themselves as ‘part of a common project’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 107). That is, the logic of difference should be supplemented with a logic of equivalence that figures a common identity, in Laclau’s terms, and breeds a community of passion and understanding, in Gramsci’s account (1971: 333, 418). Finally, Hardt and Negri (2012: 82–3) trace out a certain dialectic between movements and recent ‘progressive governments’ in Latin America and they showcase it as an exemplary instance of the ‘institutionality of the common’. Democratic decision-making unfolds here in plural processes of transparent and flexible governance, which ally effective counter-powers with autonomous, long-term political developments and the ethico-political elaboration of a new democratic constitution. In an apparatus of open, plural and egalitarian self-government, radical movements hold on to their organisational and ideological autonomy. They entertain cooperative and antagonistic relations with governments that programmatically sponsor the same project. They wage common battles against various hierarchies. But they turn against their allies in state administration and ruling parties when the latter regress into old practices of domination. 87

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics This rapport between movements and parties–governments enacts a type of disjunctive conjunction, which may indeed mark a radical rupture with the hegemonic, socialist or populist subsumption of social movements under a centralised party with ideological homogeneity (Hardt and Negri 2012: 81, 83). However, it may actually embody a reformed strategy of hegemony. Even though this agonistic interaction dilutes sovereign power into a complex plurality of deliberative moments and consensual law-making initiatives, Hardt and Negri (2012: 82) claim that it preserves ‘a deep political coherence of the governmental process’, which results in a consistent ‘institutionality of the common’. If this is so, the government must partly represent in the state the interests and the political orientations of the social movements. In other words, representation remains intrinsic to this modality of political rule, which seeks, furthermore, to exert the hegemonic power of an allied bloc over other social forces, conducting a common fight ‘against national oligarchies, international corporations, or racist elites’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 81–2). Laclau’s ‘uneven power’, ‘logic of equivalence’ and ‘representation’ are alive and kicking amidst the constituent politics of the common. On the other hand, a contemporary hegemony of self-organised multiplicities for the commons should break many inegalitarian and oppressive bonds of hegemony in Gramsci’s and Laclau’s mould, subverting hegemonic politics from within and without. In tune with recent civic insurgencies, such as the Indignados and Occupy, collective action today can initiate a process of commoning hegemony: that is, of opening it up to ordinary people on a footing of equality, by devising ways in which leadership, unity-cohesion, force and representation – the linchpin of hegemony – become collective, plural, networked, decentralised, open and equal in the radical democratic spirit of the ‘multitude’. There should be a permanent movement in favour of broadening access and equalising power in collective self-governance. Participatory democracy for all, the struggle against sovereign leaders and the promotion of active engagement in collective self-governance should be ranked higher in the order of priorities. All these shifts and inflections outline a progressive recalibration of hegemony in the light of present-day democratic mobilisations. This reconstitution will be undertaken in some depth in the next chapters.

The common as political principle and proposition In their Commun: Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle, Dardot and Laval (2014) situate themselves after Hardt and Negri’s breakthrough, which brought into play the category of the ‘common’ in the singular. In broaching the commons politically, Dardot and Laval likewise endorse 88

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political theories for radical change the singular ‘common’. This helps to signal that what is at stake in actual activities around the commons is not a return to the precapitalist commons but a new phenomenon and a new, positive principle that enables us to project an alternative future beyond neoliberalism, negation and resistance. Like Hardt and Negri, moreover, Dardot and Laval position the struggles for the commons in the critical context of neoliberal hegemony, and they bring to the fore the power relations between the commons and capital (Dardot and Laval 2014: 56, 189–90). However, while Hardt and Negri used to imagine that ‘communism’ and its multitude are around the corner, Dardot and Laval embark from the outset on a protracted endeavour to articulate a new, devotedly political theory of the common, which is informed by critical engagements with the diverse currents of the commons (Dardot and Laval 2014: 57). They are sharply aware of the need to put together a collective agency for the commons, since resisting forces are fragmented, divided and effectively subsumed under neoliberal capital. Hence, they invite us to think and to act politically for an alternative political project of the commons. They enjoin us to work for the (re)configuration of subjectivity, to bring the disparate commons into some platform of convergence, to imbue the commons with a shared political meaning, to ponder strategies of change, to flesh out more fully the idea of an alternative political formation that will push for the commons on a global level, to formulate political principles that can orient action in concert. They wrestle with these foremost political issues by taking their bearings from Marx, Foucault and Castoriadis, among others. Nevertheless, their ambitious theoretico-political venture does not amply contribute to strategic thinking over the appropriate modes of confrontation, organisation and reconstruction towards a commonscentric society. Their political reflection remains largely on the plane of prescription. They promulgate principles of political action and ideal schemes of political association for a future democracy of the common. Between these ideal patterns and principles, on the one hand, and real activities of struggle and community-building on the ground, there remains a yawning political gap. This still needs to be bridged by political tactics and strategies that can bring the proclaimed ideals to bear on historical reality. Their political intent is to chart an alternative order to the rule of both the bureaucratic state and the neoliberal globalised market. They put forward the common as such an alternative. And they construe it essentially as collective instituting praxis, co-activity, co-decision and co-obligation, a political principle that should reconstitute all social relations (Dardot and Laval 2014: 20, 48–9, 155, 234). The common is not a good. It is 89

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics primarily collective activity that engenders common goods and a new collective subject that does not exist before this activity. It is the political principle on the basis of which we must construct the commons and relate to them in order to preserve them, to extend them and to make them live. It is on these grounds the political principle which defines a new regime of struggles on the global scale. (Dardot and Laval 2014: 49)

In grasping the common as a historical alternative, they deploy a particular methodology. First, they situate their inquiry in the present setting of neoliberalism: the manifold crises, the ruin of collective ideals, the ‘decollectivisation of action’, the demise of organised labour and the failure to bring together the forces of the ‘dispossessed’. These are all historical effects unleashed by neoliberal competition, individualism, consumerism and precarity. Second, political principles and strategies are derived from recent social and cultural struggles against the capitalist order and the entrepreneurial state. The ‘common’ is a formula of both concrete local fights and broader political antagonisms in the last two decades. But the common is not only defensive resistance. It also delineates a new way of challenging capitalism and of positively envisaging its overturning in new practices, social ties and institutions. This new way turns its back on statist communism. The common has thus risen as the signifier of both resistance and new creation. And their work distils the political significance of contemporary movements against neoliberalism, from the 2011 square movements to the ‘Commune of Taksim’ in 2013 (Dardot and Laval 2014: 16, 19–20, 95, 130, 136). Dardot and Laval’s ‘new conception’ and ‘politics of the common’ are placed on the terrain of law and institution. They take their cues from the foregoing movements, from political philosophy, the socialist tradition and the various institutional and legal inventions that have defied the ‘bourgeois order’ with its proprietary logic (Dardot and Laval 2014: 20). The ‘new conception’ performs, among others, five poignant gestures that intensely politicise the common and should inspire any political strategy for social restructuring towards the commons. The first gesture draws attention to power in constitutive and hegemonic terms. It throws into relief the power relations and hierarchies that pervade the commons both internally and externally, within the broader power formations in which they are nested. Dardot and Laval (2014: 156) place an accent on the hierarchical relations that may connect different modes of production and social relations to social systems as a whole and, more specifically, to the constraints of the global capitalist economy. Following the lead of Foucault (see Dardot and Laval 90

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political theories for radical change 2010), they see power not only as a negative, external force of repression, but also as productive of social relations to which individuals are subject from the outset. In accord with this logic and in contrast to Hardt and Negri, neoliberal capitalism is not held to be parasitic and external to the common. It is not merely a force that encloses and exploits the commons, which would be self-created by a multitude that could emancipate itself simply by shattering the repressive shell of capitalism. Neoliberal capital is a force that organises production directly, deeply and in an all-encompassing manner. Capital invents new modes of exploitation and domination in contemporary enterprises, and it seeks to readjust all social fields in line with its competitive ethos (Dardot and Laval 2014: 131–5, 226–7). The political conclusion follows suit. The commons do not spring ‘naturally’ from social life and cooperation. They must be actively striven for, fabricated and instituted. The same goes for the collective subject of change, which could not come into being without a drastic reformation of dominant logics, sentiments and values among the vast majority. Such a re-education of spirits and habits can occur only through a self-transformative involvement in new commons (Dardot and Laval 2014: 226–7, 397). Therefore, we should ‘conceive of another theoretical model of the common, which takes more into account the historical creativity of people and which is more “operative” on the strategic plane . . . it is time we think systematically of the institution of the common’ (Dardot and Laval 2014: 227). They turn, thus, to Cornelius Castoriadis’s instituting power. This is to be distinguished from Hardt and Negri’s constituent power, which pertains properly to the revolutionary moments in which a new polity is founded. According to Castoriadis, the instituting power is an originary faculty of the ‘social imaginary’ that conjures new forms or rules of living, new modes of connection, thinking, production and reproduction, both at times of revolution and in more ordinary circumstances. The aim would be to craft a deliberately and freely self-instituting society of the commons through a conscious collective praxis of instituting, which would be reflective, ongoing and conditioned. This instituting praxis devises the new on the basis of inherited historical conditions that it only partly transcends (Dardot and Laval 2014: 420–51). Grasping the common – or commoning – as an instituting activity that innovates and alters given circumstances is the second politicising motion of the new conceptual figure. Instituting praxis is a central instance of the political itself (Lefort 1986). From this vantage point, current political struggles and practices of the commons are seen as sources of law-making and institution of the commons through which 91

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics individuals could escape from the hold of capital (Dardot and Laval 2014: 227). The third gesture is an astute perception of the articulatory function of the commons. This hinge function turns on the capacity of the commons to assemble diverse practices, groups and social forces by uniting them against the same enemy that menaces them – corporate and state forces of enclosure – and towards the same end – collective property and management for the common good. The labour of knitting together social differences in a collective front or arrangement is the labour of politics par excellence (see Plato (1992) Politicus). It has occupied centre stage in the theory of hegemony set forth by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, to which Dardot and Laval (2014: 107) allude in passing. In Laclau and Mouffe’s lexicon, the ‘commons’ are an ‘empty signifier’: that is, a general term that can be variously signified but which acts as a rallying point that holds together a ‘chain of equivalence’. The ‘empty signifier’ renders different social groups, practices and relations equivalent vis-à-vis a common opponent, and it places them under the same umbrella (the promising alternative to which we aspire; see Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 188–90; Laclau 1996: 36–46). These discursive and practical processes that weld a counter-hegemonic coalition remain, however, under-theorised in Dardot and Laval’s treatise (2014: 106–7). The fourth key moment of politicisation makes of the common a way of reshaping dominant structures of government and political organisation. This way renders the political common, or it commons the political, by prying decision-making open to ordinary people and by extending egalitarian decision-making to all fields of society. Common politics is not reserved to a minority of professionals or specialists. Common politics is an affair of just everyone who desires to take part in public deliberation (Dardot and Laval 2014: 579). The ‘common of democracy’ came on stage for a brief moment, among others, in the Hungarian anti-Soviet uprising in 1956. Workers’ councils set out to deprofessionalise politics by involving ordinary citizens in government. The councils thus broke down the divides that held the political realm apart from other social spaces and, most notably, from the economy. The workers’ councils briefly realised equal decisionmaking by all workers in their workplace. They fulfilled what can be recognised as the principle of the common in its most pure form: only the co-participation in a decision produces a co-obligation in the execution of the decision (Dardot and Laval 2014: 86–7). Commoning the political ramifies into further political implications. First, it would have us forswear the traditional party form and its 92

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political theories for radical change bureaucratic logic, which grants to the higher ranks a monopoly over political knowledge, decision-making and representation (Dardot and Laval 2014: 79–85). Second, common politics sets its face against conventional representation and delegation, which separate representatives and represented, elevating representatives to a position of leadership. Furthermore, it aligns political means with ends, practising egalitarian and participatory models of organisation in pursuit of egalitarian and participatory common ends (Dardot and Laval 2014: 455). Finally, commoning politics means spreading the politics of the common beyond government and the political system into society, economy and culture. It politicises these fields in the manner of a democracy of the common, decentring political discourse and action away from an exclusive focus on state power. According to this idea of common politics, taking state power – the Leninist dream – could not set society on the course of the common, as the free self-institution and self-government of all core social institutions by all citizens cannot be dictated from above. Self-institution and self-government lie in the autonomous self-activity of people themselves in the different spheres of their life (Dardot and Laval 2014: 398). On the other hand, collective self-management in the economy and elsewhere can usher in a new society of the common only if the common also becomes political itself. This implies, first, that the various commoning activities should be infused with a political consciousness by way of endorsing a transformative project. Second, it implies that the commons come to constitute themselves as a terrain of conflict with the ruling logics of hierarchy and competition. And, finally, it implies that the commons join a more encompassing process of radical political shift, which could generalise the political forms of common organisation, co-decision and co-obligation (Dardot and Laval 2014: 402). The fifth and final gesture of politicising the common is an exercise in historical projection, which imagines how the common could actually operate as a principle of a new social institution. This exercise is accomplished by formulating a series of propositions that are brought to bear on historical actuality. The propositions could be further spelt out and confirmed only in practice (Dardot and Laval 2014: 456–7). 1. The common demands a politics to be constructed. Social spontaneity alone could not introduce egalitarian self-government in all social spheres and on every scale, from the local to the global (Dardot and Laval 2014: 459–66). 2. We should pit the right of use against property. The common entails the inappropriability of things and the common right of use. 93

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics 3. The common is the principle of the emancipation of labour. It calls on us to democratise the economy (Dardot and Laval 2014: 482–9). 4. Hence, we have to institute the ‘common enterprise’ in the economy and in any arena of social activity (Dardot and Laval 2014: 490–6). 5. Collective associations in the economy should pave the way for a society of the common. But to avoid their all too frequent co-optation by market logics, the struggle for another economy should be total and political (Dardot and Laval 2014: 497–505). 6. The common should found social democracy in the sense of collective democratic control over the institutions of solidarity and reciprocity (Dardot and Laval 2014: 506–13). 7. Public services should be transformed into institutions of participatory self-management (Dardot and Laval 2014: 514–26). 8. We must promote global commons for global goods (from the oceans to peace and the atmosphere) (Dardot and Laval 2014: 526–45). 9. We must set up a federation of the commons, a non-statist, decentralised federation of self-governing local communities (Dardot and Laval 2014: 546–68). Dardot and Laval’s proposals sharpen our understanding of the political implications of the common(s) for collective action and a new society. They should be taken on board in any rigorous attempt to strategise for the commons today and to bolster social initiatives in this direction. Yet, Dardot and Laval’s politics of the common still reads largely as a wish list and a proclamation of principles and end goals of political action. All these do indeed serve to draw out the politics of egalitarian, alternative commons and to nudge collective action in positive directions. But what receives scant response in their work is the obvious and urgent question: how do we get there? How could we put all these propositions into practice, starting out from the disabling circumstances that Dardot and Laval astutely lay out? On this front, neither Foucault, who dwells on local micro-resistances and experiments (see Kioupkiolis 2012), nor Castoriadis, who advocates revolution as the deliberate reinstitution of society by itself, can be of much help. Taking on the ‘question of revolution’ today, Dardot and Laval have recourse to Castoriadis. For them, revolution is ‘the moment where the instituting praxis becomes institution of society by itself or “selfinstitution” by the “collective and autonomous activity” of society itself’ (Dardot and Laval 2014: 575, 577). How do we reach this moment, setting out from our current condition? And how could Castoriadis’s notion of collective, autonomous and explicit self-institution, abstract as it is, aid us in getting started on this historical transition? How can 94

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political theories for radical change it help, more specifically, to fulfil what Dardot and Laval (2014: 578) consider a key condition for vesting dispersed activities with a common sense and orientation – the emergence of lines of force that would be strong enough to knit ties among the various actors of common practices? Castoriadis’s typical response to such questions was a general appeal to the creativity of the people: ‘The public, the people, the peoples will find the way in which to create forms which we cannot even imagine today, which would solve problems that seem insurmountable to us’ (Castoriadis 1990: 131).

Communism At a critical juncture, when neoliberal capital has become all the more ravenous, and elites intensely mobilise their state apparatuses to scale up private accumulation by dispossession and to repress social struggles, alternative civic practices and movements are increasingly judged by their capacity to fight back. In the wake of the 2008 financial crises and the ever more predatory neoliberalism, several radical voices have taken non-statist alter-politics to task for its narrowness, its ephemerality and its impotence. Given the concentration of financial power in the hands of capitalist elites, given also that states remain a central locus of political power, collective action that lacks formal organisation, efficient leadership and focused strategies, and which does not come to grips with state institutions seems unable to generate drastic and lasting reform (see Juris and Khasnabish 2013: 379, 385–6). Several such critics have thus advocated a revival of the forceful politics of communism in some, at least, of its historical manifestations (see Badiou 2009, 2010; Žižek 2008, 2010, 2013; Bosteels 2011; Dean 2012, 2016). We will take up here two prominent figures of the communist nostalgia, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. We leave aside those, such as Negri (see, for example, Negri 2010) and Nancy (see, for example, Nancy 2010b), who have made a rare use of the communist word that bears little affinity with its historical legacy. A third contemporary cohort of communist theorists, represented eloquently by Bruno Bosteels (2011) and Jodi Dean (2012, 2016), effectively moves within the same orbit of Badiou’s and Žižek’s communist Idea(s). They qualifiedly reaffirm the Badiouian and Žižekian ‘ahistorical kernel’ of communist politics (Bosteels 2011: 278–83). They see the actuality of communism in real movements that negate the present order of things (Bosteels 2011: 225–68), such as Morales’s and Linera’s socialist government in Bolivia. They reassert, finally, the classic role of the state and the party for a potent revolutionary politics of the working people (Dean 2012: 12, 174–5, 183, 242–4; Dean 2016). But they either 95

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics fail to tease out any new principles of ‘communist politics’ from the actual movements they invoke (see, for example, Bosteels 2011: 278–83) or they castigate them as ineffective (Dean 2012: 12–13, 56, 174–5, 208–11). Although, historically, communism has stood for several values, such as common ownership, egalitarianism and collective self-government, which throb at the heart of the commons, its retrieval as a whole should be treated as a non-starter from an alternative commons perspective. At the core of the same tradition also figure prominently the state and the party, top-down direction and centralism, totalitarian control, ideological unification, brutal authoritarianism culminating in massive violence and murder, and an idolatry of leaders. All these political logics are not simply at odds with the egalitarianism, pluralism, openness and horizontalism that infuse the alter-politics of the commons at its best. They spell the death of these alternative commons. The same lethal legacies have indelibly stained the signifier ‘communism’ in the former communist countries, in political systems with communist parties, and in cultures that have been subject to virulent anti-communist propaganda, such as the USA. Accordingly, the signifier is not up for grabs for resignification. Its adoption does not make any sense in a bid for a counter-hegemonic politics that could win over large swathes of the people. This is the gist of the negative case that will be made in the following sections.

The idea of communism: Badiou Alain Badiou is one of the foremost intellectuals who has proclaimed in recent years that ‘we can give new life to the Idea of communism, in individual consciousnesses. We can usher in the third era of this Idea’s existence. We can, so we must’ (Badiou 2010: 14). According to his diagnosis, in our times of cynical capitalism and outrageous inequalities, it is the eclipse of this Idea, the forgetting of the word ‘communism’ or its equation with criminal enterprises, that have confounded the popular masses. Dispossessed of this Idea, vast sectors of the working class are now prey to passivity, despair and nihilism, while the majority of intellectuals are servile, and revolutionaries remain divided and weakly organised. The Idea of communism is located today by Badiou primarily at the level of political subjectivity. What is at stake nowadays is not the historical– political victory of the communist Idea, but its vigorous existence in political consciousness. This subjective existence can help to remedy our condition of disorientation and division by stimulating collective action (Badiou 2010: 13–14). This Idea carries heavy and time-worn historical baggage. It is the perennial Idea of emancipation. It has gone through two main phases of 96

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political theories for radical change intense presence in modernity, which have come to an end today, setting the stage for a third stage (Badiou 2010: 2, 12, 13–14; Badiou 2013a: 16–23). The modern history of communism originates in the ‘second sequence’ of the French Revolution, in which the ‘compromise’ between the three principles of equality, liberty and property was shaken up by Babeuf and utopian communism. In the ‘communist sequence’, equality is given pride of place and it sets the norm. So, the communist Idea, dating back to Plato at least, resurfaces in modernity in the nineteenth century. Its first stage is Marx’s vision of communism as an outcome of class struggle that would resolve itself, abolishing private property and securing the triumph of equality. The Paris Commune was a litmus test for the first, insurrectional phase of communist movement politics (Badiou 2013a: 16–17). Its failure thus led to the second phase of the Idea of communism, which fastened on organisation, the party and the state. Particular modes of political organisation would ensure the victory of the popular insurrection. The Party–State comes to represent the proletariat, in a process that projects the One of a single social body. Stalin becomes the name of this process, which is far from Marx’s own ideas. The second phase comes to a close with Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mao relaunched the movement against the Party–State, but the result was chaotic because Maoism lacked any other organisational idea. The subordination of liberty and property to an egalitarian rule, dictatorship and violence against the enemies were hallmarks of the second period of the communist Idea, which has gone by. The demise of the Cultural Revolution sealed the ultimate failure of the Party–State and its terror. Hence, we need to go beyond representation by the Party–State. The havoc of the Cultural Revolution also shows the impasse of having exclusive recourse to the spontaneous movement of the masses (Badiou 2013a: 18–21; Badiou 2009: 146–53). Hence, Badiou’s politico-theoretical wager is that, by resurrecting the Idea of communism on the level of consciousness and practical experiment, we can properly respond to the predicament of our times and we can inaugurate a new era of emancipatory politics. Otherwise, we are left with the dominant consensus (Badiou 2013a: 22). ‘It is, in any case, more efficient and far more promising, if one wants to prepare for the political events that will not fail to occur, to remain faithful to the word “communism”’ (Badiou 2013a: 23). Communism still signals the most radical rupture with traditional ideas, an association where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. Communism today implies a total overhauling of ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’. It gestures towards a polyvalent society with variable trajectories, non-hierarchical forms of organisation and 97

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics an egalitarian society that tears down walls and divides (Badiou 2009: 51–2, 82). Thus construed, the Idea of communism is, in effect, the one that shone through the Paris Commune of 1871, before the onset of statist communism: communism as a proletarian self-emancipation that shatters the frame of the bourgeois state and the Party (Badiou 2009: 153, 170–5). Hence, Badiou contemplates the Idea of communism in a way that bears very little in common with the communist politics of the twentieth century. one of the contents of the communist Idea today . . . is that the withering away of the State, while undoubtedly a principle that must be apparent in any political action . . . is also an infinite task . . . the word’s function can no longer be that of an adjective, as in ‘communist party’, or ‘communist regimes’. The party-form, like that of the socialist State, is no longer suitable for providing real support for the Idea. (Badiou 2010: 13)

We must start again from scratch, deeply averse to the Terror of the party– state (Badiou 2013b: 7). New political forms without a party will instantiate the Idea of communism. Contemporary types of political organisation and action among the poor try out new possibilities, and further ones remain to be invented. This other politics of communist emancipation will be carried out at a distance from the power of the state and existing parties. It will be constructed and enlarged point by point, feeding off particular practices and achievements (Badiou 2009: 81). Yet, the problem of devising effective schemes of political organisation remains urgent and unresolved (Badiou 2010: 13–14; Badiou 2009: 53, 55). In addition to the patient labour of political struggle, experiment and organisation, a second core operation is ideological. The main thrust of an actual commitment to the Idea or the hypothesis of communism is that, on the plane of intellectual representations, one hangs on to the belief that the world as it is, under the rule of capital and parliamentary politics, is not necessary. This belief allows us to envisage other possibilities in the current situation (Badiou 2009: 54). ‘Nothing is more important than to regain the passion of ideas, and to oppose to the world as it is a general hypothesis, the anticipated certainty of a completely other course of things’ (Badiou 2009: 81). Contra Badiou’s theoretico-political wager, we maintain that the Idea of communism is highly unlikely to fulfil the function of subjective cement, political guide and agent of collective articulation. The historical materiality of the signifier, which is disavowed by Badiou, and a theoretical vagueness that offers little to present-day quests for 98

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political theories for radical change another politics, along with Badiou’s residual attachment to the communist militancy of the past, obstruct the Idea of communism from playing such a role. On Badiou’s conception, the Idea is the ‘subjectivation of an interplay between the singularity of a truth procedure and a representation of History’ (Badiou 2010: 3). Badiou designates as ‘truth’ a real and sustained practice of fidelity to an ‘event’. This fidelity gives rise to a new multiplicity in a certain situation and it transforms the logic of the situation according to the novel truth under construction. Truth is the process of transfiguring a certain socio-historical situation in line with the statement of an event. An event occurs when something happens in a particular time and place, which discloses ‘a new, previously unknown possibility’ (Badiou 2012a: 60) in a certain socio-historical context, a possibility ‘that cannot be reduced to . . . what there is’ (Badiou 2001: 41). The event is episodic. It vanishes, but it leaves behind the trace of a statement that declares that something has been decided as true. For instance, in the event of an immigrants’ protest, the ‘true’ statement may be that immigrant workers are entitled to equal citizenship (Badiou and Žižek 2009: 37). A subject is an agent who decides to recognise that an event has taken place, and who draws the consequences of the eventual statement for the existing situation by inventing a new way of being (Badiou 2001: 41–2). A collective Subject in politics is an organisation consisting of individual multiples who figure out a political truth (Badiou 2010: 7). The Idea instils in individuals the sense that they participate in a political truth process and that, through this participation, they belong to the movement of History. Inspired by the Idea of communism, individuals imagined in the past that they were agents of a historical orientation of all humanity. History exists only symbolically. The alleged totality of human history cannot be actually located in any existing world (Badiou 2010: 3–5). The Idea is thus an ideological operation whereby a political real activity is imaginarily projected on to the symbolic fiction of History (Badiou 2010: 11). Its role is ‘to support the individual’s incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure . . . to go beyond the Statist constraints of mere survival by becoming a part of the body-of-truth’ (Badiou 2010: 11). The Idea thus motivates individual action by fuelling ties of identification and by conjuring up a broader meaning and orientation. A banal discussion among four workers may, then, be enlarged to the dimensions of communism. Thereby, it can be both what it is and a moment in the local construction of the True (Badiou 2010: 11–12). 99

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics The Idea of communism performs a further function. It allows us to anticipate the surprise of the event, the rise of new, unforeseen possibilities. ‘An Idea is always the assertion that a new truth is historically possible’, that the subtraction from the power of the State and the forcing of the impossible into the possible is an infinite process (Badiou 2010: 12–13). Hence the complexity of the Idea of communism. We cannot decide conclusively whether it is merely a Kantian regulative Idea, which cannot be realised but can suggest reasonable ends, or it sets a specific agenda, or it names a utopia. The Idea presupposes real sequences of emancipatory politics. But it also encapsulates a range of historical facts that symbolise something beyond them – the becoming ‘in truth’ of just political ideas in history. The Idea anchors in facts what is elusive in the becoming of a political truth. Yet it is not reducible to practice or any given state of affairs, as the Idea involves symbolisation and imaginary projection(s) (Badiou 2010: 8–9). The Idea is thus endowed with a fleeting, imaginary–symbolic and complex status. It is bound up with actual sequences of emancipatory politics but it also exceeds them. This is a first cardinal feature of the Idea of communism. A second defining mark is the ‘subtraction’ from the state. The Idea is predicated on individual participation in a political truth process and, hence, it implies fidelity to an event. The event, as the disclosure of new possibilities beyond the current state of affairs, can happen ‘only to the extent that it is subtracted from the power of the State’ (Badiou 2010: 7). Badiou identifies the State with the set of constraints that limit possibilities in a given situation. The Idea of communism can represent a certain emancipatory politics only as subtracted from the power of the State (Badiou 2010: 9). Correlatively, a third trait of the communist Idea is that it does not encourage the destruction of an enemy, ‘but the positive resolution of contradictions among the people – the political construction of a new collective configuration’ (Badiou 2013b: 6). The constitution of a new collective order under the sign of the Idea is a long-term process that could force a change of the field. But it would do so without insurrectional urgency or unconstrained violence. Badiou subscribes to a classic notion of the political in terms of articulation – the art of weaving. Accordingly, for him, the main challenge for communist politics is how to piece together a unified political camp that will preserve one’s forces. The resolution of contradictions among the people requires discussion of the problems that arise at the border between the Idea and a specific situation. It calls for an immanent activity that seeks solutions and harbours its own temporality of emancipation, a certain collective slowness in handling the contradictions. Terror by means of state coercion is not a solution to this problem, 100

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political theories for radical change but the suppression of the problem by way of a brutal forcing of the situation (Badiou 2013b: 9–10). A fourth aspect entails that ‘Khrushchev’s condemnation of “the cult of personality” was misguided, and that, under the pretence of democracy, it heralded “the decline of the Idea of communism”’ (Badiou 2010: 10). Proper names are vital for the workings of the Idea. Although emancipatory politics is the action of anonymous masses, it is singled out by proper names, which represent it ‘much more forcefully than is the case for other kinds of politics’ (Badiou 2010: 10). The reason is that proper names symbolise the ephemeral sequence of emancipatory struggles and the elusive formalism of bodies of truth. The anonymous action of multitudes, which is unrepresentable as such, gains a representation and a foothold in actual historical existence through the proper name of a ‘glorious’ person. This serves to ‘prove’ to individuals that they can ‘force’ their finitude. Hence, Lenin, Mao and Che Guevara are constituent moments of the Idea of communism in its various sequences. The function of the proper name for the Idea, in particular for the Idea of communism, cannot be eliminated. The Idea needs the finitude of the One of a proper name in order to refer to the infinity of the people and the action of innumerable masses (Badiou 2010: 10–11). Beginning from the beginning, the very intent to resurrect the Idea of communism smacks of an apolitical, speculative idealism. It rides roughshod over the historicity of the signifier of communism precisely at a time when this signifier has scant popular resonance and remains heavily laden with deep dark memories. Speculative idealism bespeaks a belief in the value of intellectual ideas and philosophy as such, completely disconnected from historical actuality. This is indeed one of the most common charges pressed against Badiou’s communism (Bosteels 2011: 16–17, 30–3): Although Badiou submits that the Idea needs points of anchorage in specific time- and space-bound sequences of political action, a total disconnect of the Idea from historical actuality is proclaimed as an imperative. Communist-type politics is . . . an activity under the sign of a shared Idea, not an activity determined by external constraints such as the economy or the legal formalism of the state. . . . We will find for the Idea what it lacked. . . . the absolute independence of both its places and its time (Badiou 2013b: 9, 11)

How could such a posture help collective action and intelligence to wrestle with the structures of power in which we are situated, including the state and capital? How could actual resistances and alternative politics tear themselves away from the omnipresent power of the state(s)? How 101

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics could Badiou’s injunction to act at a distance from the state enable us to engage with the state apparatuses that control our lives and resources? Is this Idea of ‘politics’ recommending anchoritism and the purism of beautiful souls, which refuse to soil their hands by taking part in real struggles within actual historical circumstances? It seems that this is just a nonstarter for an egalitarian politics that would seek to confront reality. In more banal terms, Badiou’s Idea of communism is of little relevance to concrete radical thought and action on the simple grounds that it largely boils down to general ideas and principles along with vague references to local experiments. He intimates that ‘to give a new lease of life to the communist hypothesis . . . we need to combine intellectual constructs, which are always universal, with experiments of fragments of truths, which are local and singular, but can be globally transmitted’ (Badiou 2010: 14). This is common sense in contemporary democratic movements (see, for example, Day 2005; Dixon 2014). Even if we fill out the content of ‘intellectual constructs’ with Badiou’s tenets of communism – the break with ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’, a politics invented by the ‘real of the people’, an egalitarian and diverse society that strikes down walls and divides, and non-hierarchical organisation – this is again the shared wisdom of present-day egalitarian activism (see Dixon 2014; Graeber 2014; Day 2005; Juris and Khasnabish 2013). One stands to learn much more about the possibilities and strategies of emancipatory politics today by exploring the situated thinking of more empirical inquiries into contemporary movements (as illustrated in the foregoing work of Dixon 2014; Graeber 2014; Day 2005 and so on). Badiou’s idealist detachment for socio-political reality and the needs of massive mobilisation comes into relief in his very stance towards the name – the signifier – of communism. In several places, he urges militants of equality to remain faithful to the very word of communism (see, for example, Badiou 2013a: 23; also Badiou 2009: 51–2, 82). He himself demonstrates his abiding fidelity to the word. ‘Communism’, rather than ‘commons’, ‘common’ or even ‘commonism’, is the term he typically employs to designate the idea of radical egalitarian politics in our time. Elsewhere, he displays a more offhand attitude to the name: ‘The Idea of communism (regardless of what name it might otherwise be given, which hardly matters) . . .’ (Badiou 2010: 11). Yet, both stances bespeak an indifference to the political efficacy of discourse and to the actual context in which massive politics could unfold. In this, communism could hardly furnish a political trigger and glue for popular alliances. At best, communism is a name for resigned and co-opted or irrelevant party politics (in the West), or for a system consigned to the dustbin of history. Most often, it calls to mind terror, 102

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political theories for radical change despotism, repression of plurality and economic failure. Badiou knows as much: ‘There’s not a single person who says they’re communist anymore, except possibly me and some friends of mine’ (Badiou and Engelman 2015: 51). It seems, then, that, for Badiou, political discourse and its capacity for hegemonic address do not really matter when it comes to the name of communism. Such an attitude is not only politically naïve. It is inconsistent with Badiou’s own thesis that ‘it is necessary to think and endorse the vital importance of proper names in all revolutionary politics’ (Badiou 2010: 9), when the name at issue is the name of the revolutionary leader. Since Badiou reckons with the political force of the signifier in this setting, his clinging to the signifier ‘communism’ is not a consequence of underrating political discourse or of misrecognising the discursive valence of the communist word in our world. His attachment seems, rather, to be rooted in a quasi-religious – rather than political – faith in resurrection, in an overriding nostalgia and a vestigial passion for the word itself and what it stands for historically: ‘I am well aware that Stalinism killed off communism, but I think it can come back to life’ (Badiou and Engelman 2015: 101). Second, when Badiou’s Idea acquires some specificity, beyond general principles and nebulous hints at local experiments, the spectre of the communist past with its ugliest moments rises again to the surface. The attempt to restore the cult of personality speaks volumes. Moreover, as in the ‘best’ Marxist–Leninist tradition, Badiou’s communism is a matter of truth and of faith. The communist Idea is premised on fragments of the ‘political real’, which is identified with a ‘truth procedure’: that is, with an ongoing organisation of the consequences of an event and its statement in a certain situation (Badiou 2010: 5–7). The collective subject of the communist Idea ‘shares in the creation of a political truth’ (Badiou 2010: 7). Even if Badiou warns against the absolutisation and the totalisation of truth (Badiou 2001: 72–3, 80–5), fanaticism, dogmatism, self-authorisation in the name of truth, a politics of heroism and self-sacrifice follow suit from the association of communism and its politics with truth. Badiou himself avers as much. A politics is a hazardous, militant and always partially undivided fidelity to eventual singularity under a solely self-authorizing prescription. The universality of political truth results from such a fidelity. (Badiou 2005: 23)

True, for Badiou, the process of truth-construction, which works out the implications of the event, is open. It is not governed by particular laws or authoritative formulas and knowledge about history, science and so on. 103

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics The truth-procedure consists in successive choices to include or not to include certain elements in the subset of truth (Badiou 2008: 123–5). Yet the signifier ‘truth’ has its own history and potency – otherwise why use it in relation to politics? It can fire militant faith in the particular principles that have been declared true in the event and in the processes this has initiated. Adhesion to a truth that ‘will eternalize the present of the present’ (Badiou 2006: 525) and that commands ‘a militant and always partially undivided fidelity to evental singularity under a solely self-authorizing prescription’ undercuts critical reflection on the principles of the event and the specific politics of truth that it has set in motion. Badiou himself declares that There is no authority before which the result of a truth process could be brought to trial. A truth never appertains to Critique. It is supported only by itself and is the correlate of a new type of subject . . . entirely defined as militant of the truth in question. (Badiou 2003: 109) [S]peaking about the truth without speaking about the absolute is meaningless. If truths are relative, they are actually indistinguishable from opinions. (Badiou and Engelman 2015: 13)

Accordingly, in Badiou’s politics of truth, the ‘essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions’ (Badiou 2005: 24). Moreover, ‘in the idea of justice, equality is far more important than liberty, and universality far more important than particularity, identity or individuality’ (Badiou 2012b: 29). Individuality, particularity, liberty and opinions, then, can be suppressed in the name of justice. ‘Philosophy opposes the unity and universality of truth to the plurality and relativity of opinions’ (Badiou 2012b: 28). Debates and deliberation will be required in order to extract the implications of the event. ‘But not exclusively. More important still are the declarations, interventions and organisations’ (Badiou 2005: 24; see also 13–25; Hallward 2003: 267–8, 286–9). It is not hard to imagine the kind of politics that a militant fidelity to a self-authorising prescription can spark in collective subjects, and what happens when different militant truths clash with each other. The history of communist politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries abounds with illuminating examples.

Lenin as a fetish: Žižek Žižek follows the lead of Badiou in his sanctification of the ‘eternal’ Idea of communism, but with a twist. He wishes for the resuscitation not only of an abstract communist egalitarianism but of the precise ‘fundamental 104

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political theories for radical change concepts’ of this Idea, which have been at work from Plato to Mao through Lenin: ‘strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people’ (Žižek 2010: 217). Badiou (2006: 36) pinned down four ‘determinations’ of an eternal Idea that drives the radical will to emancipate humanity in its totality. Voluntarism opposes socio-economic necessity. Equality contests the entrenched hierarchies of power or wealth. Trust in the people rejects the fear of the masses. And authority or terror intervenes in the ‘spontaneous’ and ‘natural’ play of social interactions and competition. But Badiou explicitly consigns these determinations of the communist ‘Idea’ to historical sequences of egalitarian revolutionary politics that extend from the Jacobins to Mao (Badiou 2006: 30–6; Badiou 2010: 2, 12, 13–14; Badiou 2013a: 16–23). These four specific features do not constitute transhistorical invariants of an ‘eternal’ Idea that radical egalitarian politics should revive today. On the contrary, Badiou urges a rethinking and re-enactment of communism after the end of its statist and terrorist stages, in political activity that is ‘subtracted’ from the state and Terror (Badiou 2010: 13; Badiou 2013b: 7). Žižek, in effect, turns Badiou upside down by reclaiming a communist past of statist and authoritarian politics, the Jacobin–Leninist ‘paradigm of centralised dictatorial power’ (Žižek 2010: 217), to which Badiou is pronouncedly averse. Perhaps, the time has come to . . . admit that a dose of this ‘Jacobin–Leninist’ paradigm is precisely what the left needs today. . . .If you do not have an idea of what you want to replace the State with, you have no right to subtract/ withdraw from the State. (Žižek 2010: 217, 219)

Hence, the problem with Žižek’s communist nostalgia is not simply that the loaded signifier is hardly apt for the central political task of egalitarian politics today, according to Žižek himself: the coming together of the three divided segments of the ‘proletariat’ – the intellectual workers, the ‘redneck’ workers inclined towards populist politics, and the social outcasts (Žižek 2010: 226). Try talking to the ‘populist’ working class about communism and centralised state power in support of the immigrants and the social outcasts. . . . Try preaching about Leninism, the Leader and centralised Party discipline to the contemporary ‘liberal’ cognitariat, the highly educated, networked and impoverished middleclass youth. . . . The problem is not only, either, that behind Žižek’s pseudo-radicalism one bumps into the same vacuity of political thought and strategy as in the abstract appeal to general principles, movements and new beginnings. The problem is, fundamentally, that the conservative cleaving 105

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics to the Jacobin–Leninist past, which would be victorious and forceful, both masks an absence of political reflection on the present and thwarts such a reflection. It does so by striving to restore the revolutionary aura of historical communism – let’s turn back to the truly radical ways of Jacobinism–Leninism – while it misses or diminishes contemporary egalitarian mobilisations by looking down on them as mere protests or collective outbursts without efficacy and positive direction. Žižek tries to resituate the communist Idea in a context of real antagonisms around the commons, which give the Idea a practical urgency. The first three antagonisms pivot around the commons of external nature (the menace of ecological disaster), the commons of internal nature (our biogenetic inheritance, which can be tampered with by new techno-scientific developments) and the commons of culture (the inappropriateness of private property for intellectual creation, the privatisation of public infrastructure and so on). The fourth antagonism turns on the new and old divisions between the socially excluded and the included. The first three raise the spectre of a new proletarianisation of social majorities who run the risk of losing everything, their means of communication and subsistence, their non-manipulated genetic base and their environment. However, it is the ‘supplement’ of the fourth one, the inclusion of the ‘plebs’ and the identification of political actors with the excluded and the poor, that can give social struggles a communist slant. The other antagonisms could be resolved by authoritarian state policies that erect walls to keep the excluded at a safe distance (Žižek 2010: 212–214; Žižek 2009: 91–99). It is this reference to the ‘commons’ which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism: it enables us to see the progressing ‘enclosure’ of the commons as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance. (Žižek 2010: 212)

In an almost perverse way, Žižek here appropriates the more faddish and ‘lightweight’ discourse of the commons to lend credit to his fantasy of communist revival. While borrowing some conceptual distinctions from the literature on the commons, he does not attend to the distinctive political logics of the commons, which outline alternatives to both the market and the state. On the contrary, he twists and turns them in the service of a Jacobin–Leninist ‘dictatorial’ power of the state. He claims that holding fast to the communist Idea is not ‘an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost Cause’ (Žižek 2010: 212). Our aim should not be to build upon the foundations of the revolutionary communism of the twentieth century. We should, rather, descend back 106

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political theories for radical change to the starting point, ‘begin from the beginning’ and follow a different path (Žižek 2010: 210). But Žižek fails even to envision any different paths by taking a cue from actual movements and alternative politics. Instead, he champions a communist conservatism of the worst kind. Žižek’s professed position is that the communist ‘invariants’ of ‘strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people’, along with the ‘“Jacobin–Leninist” paradigm of centralised dictatorial power’, are ‘precisely what the left needs today: today, more than ever. . . . This matrix is not “superseded” by any new postmodern or postindustrial or post-whatever-you-want dynamics’ (Žižek 2010: 217, 219; see also Žižek 2009: 125; Žižek 2008: 460–1). Moreover, he contends that the failure of statist and centralised communism ‘is above all the failure of anti-statist politics, of the endeavour . . . to replace statal forms of organisation with “direct” non-representative forms of self-organisation’ (Žižek 2010: 219). Conciliar democracy was anchored in the belief that we can accede to a self-transparent organisation of society in which there is no political ‘alienation’ of society from itself through the rise of an autonomised state apparatus. The end of ‘really-existing socialism’ also signalled the demise of this idea and the ‘postmodern’ resignation to the ‘fact’ that social complexity and diversity rule out a totally self-transparent society. Hence, all forms of contemporary ‘direct democracy’ in digital communities or in the global favelas have to rely on a state apparatus that sustains the space in which they act (Žižek 2008: 376–377). Collective self-organisation in social movements is also inept when ‘one has to act, to impose a new order – at this point, something like a party is needed’. But even the party does not suffice. A gap remains between the people and their organised forms of political agency. This must be overcome, but how? Not by the proximity of the people and these organised forms; something more is needed, and the paradox is that this ‘more’ is a Leader, the unity of the party and people. . . . The problem with the Stalinist leader [was that] he was not sufficiently a Master. (Žižek 2013: 191)

This is the ‘moment of truth’ in totalitarianism. The people need their political Master to formulate their interests for them, as they are apparently unable to do it for themselves. ‘Even in a radical protest movement, people do not know what they want, they demand a new Master to tell them this’ (Žižek 2013: 189). Moreover, ‘a leader is necessary to trigger the enthusiasm for a Cause’ (Žižek 2008: 378). That is why we should forsake the ‘ideology’ of ‘anarchic horizontalism’, which despises 107

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics hierarchies. We should reaffirm, rather, the idea of a vanguard that instigates and leads a progressive movement. The ‘vows’ of anti-hierarchical horizontalism, equal participation and consensus are just an expression of liberal political correctness (Žižek 2015: 185, 188–91). Finally, the ‘essence’ of communist politics lies in the primacy that communism accords to economic exploitation over domination (Žižek 2013: 194–5). Hence, domination could be justified in the name of eliminating capitalist exploitation. The ‘terrorist’ element of the communist Idea consists precisely in ‘the brutal imposition of a new order’ that will dictate ‘the ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed . . . measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal “freedoms”’ (Žižek 2008: 419, 421). We ‘should absolutely reject’ the liberal and postmodern ‘mantra’ of weak belief and commitment, which reins in religious and political doctrines when they induce the violation of minimal moral norms and they inflict mass murder (Žižek 2015: 206). It turns out, therefore, that, rather than ‘beginning from the beginning’, Žižek dreams of the worst nightmares of authoritarian communism – the State, the Party, the Leader/Master, terror and political voluntarism – which, time and again, have spelled the ruin of both equality and freedom in the twentieth century. Calls for radical change and innovation in communist politics remain hollow. Žižek submits that the ‘true task’ for communists today is not to withdraw from state politics but to transform the state and to make it work in a ‘non-statal’ way. Therein lies the essence of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Žižek 2010: 219–220). But the main thing that we learn about this ‘non-statal way’ is that the state should lean on new modes of popular participation (Žižek 2010: 220). If direct forms of collective self-organisation have failed ‘above all and primarily’ (Žižek 2010: 219), then how would these new modes of participation operate? Could they not just consist in (forced) membership in the Party, as in the old good Soviet days? Žižek‘s earlier fascination with the politics of leftist governments in Latin America, notably those of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, sheds light on what he imagines as the ‘non-statal’ exercise of state power. In the first years of his rule, Chávez turned to the excluded favela dwellers as his socio-political base. He interpellated them in support of his government and he sponsored their collective self-organisation in grassroots communal committees. By so doing, he did not simply include the excluded in a pre-existing liberal framework. He restructured the entire political space and the available forms of popular participation. In this way, Chávez highlighted the difference between ‘bourgeois democracy’ and ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Žižek 2009: 102; Žižek 2008: 427). 108

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political theories for radical change A ‘non-statal’ use of state power feeds on the direct mobilisation of grassroots supporters, the circumvention of the party–state representative nexus and the reliance on the collective will of the people (Žižek 2009: 155). Hence, the more general motto underlying Žižek’s praise for such leftist governments reads ‘“no movements without governing”, without a state power sustaining the space for movements’ (Žižek 2008: 377). His celebration of the radical emancipatory potential carried by Chávez’s power grab and his thesis that state power is the necessary ground of grassroots self-organisation is naturally matched with a lament for today’s anti-statist left – from Critchley to Hardt and Negri, and Badiou. Their injunction to build struggles and a new world at a distance from the state are denounced as symptoms of defeat and failure in the face of the full hegemony of global capitalism and the (neo)liberal state (Žižek 2008: 337–80). Indeed, both the state and a proper leadership can facilitate popular self-organisation and the progress of socio-political equality but only insofar as they act so as to empower society, to enlarge the scope for collective self-activity continuously, and to make themselves gradually redundant by functioning as ‘vanishing mediators’. The exercise of power from outside or from above is, in principle, at odds with egalitarian selfgovernment, and it prevents societies from honing their own capacity for self-organisation. Accordingly, inherent tensions trouble the relations between state support, powerful ‘progressive’ leadership and egalitarian social emancipation. These tensions need to be tackled in depth. They call for politically creative ways to negotiate them: for example, by entertaining the ‘disjunctive conjunction’ between movements and parties– governments that has been proposed by Hardt and Negri, among others. The strains in question became glaringly apparent in Žižek’s once favourite example – Chavismo. The concentration of power in the person of the leader and Chávez’s authoritative direction of the forces assembled around him undermined social self-organisation and an egalitarian empowerment of the people. The clash between top-down rule, personalism, centralism and autonomous grassroots mobilisation has, indeed, been deemed the contradiction of Chavista populism (López Maya 2015: 386–97; Philip and Panizza 2011: 96–7; Azzellini 2015). The project of instating ‘Consejos Comunales’, the vanguard of Chávez’s ‘state-sponsored participatory democracy’, illustrates the tensions in an exemplary fashion. A grassroots initiative to radicalise democracy was taken over and sponsored by Chávez’s leadership and the state. They officially funded ‘participatory democracy’ and set out to institutionalise it (Azzellini 2015: 133–298; Ciccariello-Maher 2013: 243–9). State sponsorship and incorporation did not completely stifle 109

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics social spontaneity and grassroots autonomy. However, bureaucrats, the local administration and other actors in the Chavista political apparatus have frequently interfered with Communal Councils in an attempt to block their plans, to control them, and to resist the expansion of direct democratic self-governance (Azzellini 2015: 186–99; Robertson 2014). In the communities themselves, the tight entanglement with the state has also nourished clientelist relationships and a growing dependence on the state and the leader, undercutting the growth of self-reliance (see Stavrakakis, Kioupkiolis et al. 2016). Žižek came to acknowledge the ultimate unravelling of Venezuela’s ‘Bolivarian revolution’ into ‘a caudillo-run populism’ (Žižek 2012: 127). He never paused to mull over the causes of this umpteenth fiasco of an alleged process of popular emancipation that gravitates around the leader, the state and the party. His deeply ingrained communist statism and a failure to rethink the politics of freedom and equality creatively may account for this silence. Finally, as for the profile of the new leaders and the new ‘organs of control and repression’ that should be deployed in order to ‘change the system’, these are ‘the truly difficult questions’ to which an answer must be sought. But Žižek says precious little on this score (Žižek 2013: 198). On top of his reticence about what renewing communism would actually mean, Žižek enjoins us not to look for any tentative answers and political inventions in recent social activism and revolts. There is nothing of substance to glean from them. The uprisings in the 2011 Arab Spring ‘express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a minimal positive program of socio-political change’ (Žižek 2013: 187; see also Žižek 2012: 71–5, 78). Likewise, the Occupy movements were a mere beginning, ‘a formal gesture of rejection’ that just carves out a space for generative new contents (Žižek 2013: 203; Žižek 2012: 77–8, 83). As long as they remain bent on organising the occupied spaces and their democratic assemblies, they risk ‘falling in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the “occupied” places’ (Žižek 2013: 197). The real problem is how to redesign the system, what social structures will supplant capitalism and what kind of new leaders and organs of repression will be in order (Žižek 2013: 197–8). Even the signal political creations of ‘occupied squares’ – the open assemblies where there is no central authority and everyone is allotted the same time to speak – do not ‘move beyond the form of a mere protest’. To do this and to impose a reorganisation of society, ‘one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and realise them with all necessary harshness. . . . A new tetrad emerges here, the tetrad of people–movement–party–leader’ (Žižek 2013: 189; see also Žižek 2012: 81–2, 88). 110

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political theories for radical change The movements’ quest for assembly-based democracies and horizontalism is entirely misplaced. ‘Reacting to the Paris protests of 1968, Lacan famously said: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new Master. You will get one.” It seems that his remark has found its target (not only) in the indignados’ (Žižek 2012: 79). The idea of ‘commoners’ that society could be transfigured into a network of self-governing associations is a utopia which obfuscates a triple impossibility: there are numerous cases in which representing others is a necessity; . . . when we effectively get a mass mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of people self-organising themselves horizontally . . . they remain a minority; . . . permanent political engagement has a limited time-span. (Žižek 2015: 126–7)

The positions of contemporary radical egalitarians, who spurn Masters in favour of dynamic lateral links and molecular self-organisations, raise the main ‘epistemological obstacle’ to the rebirth of leftist politics (Žižek 2015: 161). ‘Is there a name for this reinvented democracy beyond the multi-party representational system? There is indeed: the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Žižek 2012: 88). So, let’s revive the old communist wisdom instead of putting on carnivals and ‘mere’ leaderless protests. Žižek grants that ‘Communism today is not the name of a solution, but the name of a problem’ (Žižek 2015: 214). That is surely so. It is the problem of a history that still works to discredit the very idea of a pro-commons alternative to the present order of things. It is also the problem of conservative sectors of the left who appear to be on the lookout for such an alternative but, haunted by the spectres of the past, fail to think beyond the strictures of the darkest legacies of communist politics in the twentieth century. They thus fail to help us forge a counterhegemonic alliance for the commons of our times. What is worse, they strive to hold us back and keep us captive in their fantasies.

Mapping the gaps and the impasses of current radicalism and projecting ahead In recent years, a burgeoning body of political thought on the common(s) and communism has sought, in effect, to take on strategic considerations and to fill in the political gaps in common(s) theory and practice. It has thus set forth projects of comprehensive transformation in the direction of the commons: collective ownership and self-government, grassroots democracy, strong egalitarianism and ecological sustainability. Such political reflection has walked along two main paths. A first 111

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics chorus of theorists, including Hardt and Negri, and Dardot and Laval, have raised the banner of the commons. They have immersed themselves in present-day theories and practices of the commons in order to extract new principles of political action and up-to-date strategies for socio-political renewal in the service of the commons. By so doing, they have supplied intellectual weapons to an arsenal of practical ideas that promise to advance the common(s) cause. Hardt and Negri have recast the ‘commonwealth’ of the multitude in terms of a political process and a vision of radical democratic society that enacts the open sharing and government of the ‘commons’. To this end, advocates and diverse social groups in the struggle – workers, unemployed, poor, students, people opposing racial and gender hierarchies – must rally together in massive fronts of struggling and alternative institution-building. Hardt and Negri have fathomed the rise of such networks of horizontal multitudes in recent social mobilisations across the world and in Latin American ‘progressive governments’. Plural practices of transparent and flexible direct self-governance point the way forward by allying effective counter-powers with autonomous, long-term political developments and the making of new democratic constitutions. In these processes, radical movements enter into relations of disjunctive conjunction with governments and state authorities. They compose an expansive bloc of forces who push back neoliberal hegemony in common and promote alternative commons. But grassroots activity upholds its autonomy from parties, governments and institutions, working together with them or apart from them or even against them, according to the circumstances, so as to realise a consistent ‘institutionality of the common’, an egalitarian sharing and collective self-management across all social fields. Dardot and Laval delve into contemporary democratic activism to figure out an alternative political principle of the common, which consists in collective instituting praxis, co-decision and co-obligation. This political principle should reconstitute all social relations. They draw attention to macro- and micro-power systems in the context of neoliberal capitalist hegemony. They politicise commoning activities by calling for a drastic reformation of dominant logics and feelings through a massive self-transformative engagement in new commons. Political fights and civic initiatives around the commons should become sources of law-making and institution of the commons, through which individuals could liberate themselves from the rule of capital. The commons are endowed, furthermore, with a crucial political function – an articulatory role that works to knit together diverse activities, communities, aspirations and forces in a common platform and against a common 112

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political theories for radical change enemy. Finally, they foreground a core idea of common politics, a process of commoning the political, whereby political powers and institutions welcome the effective participation of lay people. Commoning the political breaks with conventional representation, state politics and the traditional party form, in which the higher echelons monopolise knowledge, power and decision-making. The free self-legislation and self-government of all central institutions by all citizens thrive on the autonomous self-activity of people themselves. Yet, despite their insights and breakthroughs in strategic theorising, these more politicised conceptions of the commons leave much to be desired in political terms. Hardt and Negri still divorce the ‘institutionality of the common’ from the politics of hegemony. They thereby obscure the centrality of three political moments – the reordering of the balance of forces in society, unification/articulation of differences, and political representation. They thus fail to advance, if they do not impede, the required rethinking and realigning of hegemonic logics in a spirit akin to egalitarian and plural commons. For their part, Dardot and Laval do not speak to the question of how we will effect the transition from the ideal to the real, from the political principles and alternative vision of the commons to their socio-historical enactment by connecting with social forces on the ground and by grappling with entrenched power relations and dispersed subjectivities. Hardt and Negri, and Dardot and Laval represent a certain politicotheoretical trend in our times. This envisions the reinvention of society in the image of the commons, drawing inspiration from commons initiatives in order to put forward an alternative pro-commons politics. The remaining lacunae in their political thought thus partly reflect the weaknesses of contemporary civic activities themselves with respect to collective convergence, the elaboration of political strategies, power relationships with the state, the market and organised elites. Another contemporary cohort of political theorists, featuring Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Bruno Bosteels and Jodi Dean, among others, hang on to the Master Signifier of Communism and they give off, to varying degrees, a nostalgia for the communist politics of the past. This group divides into at least two factions. The first one is anti-statist and calls upon actual social movements, progressive initiatives and experiments contesting the rule of capital. However, they remain mostly stuck to a communist Idealism that possesses little anchorage in grassroots politics and meagre strategic or other ‘substance’ that would be derived from a critical interaction with alternative movements themselves. Their ‘communist’ politics boils down largely to vague evocations of a new, yet unspecified incarnation of the communist Idea, a militant posture, 113

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics and lingering attachments to the ‘glorious’ revolutionary communism of the past, such as the cult of the Leader. The second ‘communist’ faction dreams of a resurrection of Jacobin– Leninist revolutionary politics, with strong doses of voluntarism, terror and the classic adulations of the Party, the State and the Leader. They edge away from the emptiness of much communist talk today only to fall back on the standard, and failed, recipes of the communist past. These nostalgics of Leninist power politics do not simply refuse to follow in Marx’s footsteps in sounding out political reflection and creativity in actual grassroots praxis so as to plot a pertinent strategy for collective emancipation. They pull the rug out from under this endeavour and they seek to hold us hostage to the zombies of communist history by denigrating present-day democratic activism. The main political proposition of this book, which the next chapters will unpack, is that a renovation of Gramsci’s and Laclau’s hegemony, which will inflect it towards open pluralism, radical egalitarianism and the collective building of power from below, can help to fill in the gaps of the political in the theory and the transformative praxis of alternative commons today. Such a reactivation of hegemony for a common(s) democracy could not proceed in the Leninist style of intellectuals injecting a revolutionary consciousness from without. It can bear fruit for the commons by operating in the manner proposed by the first chorus of pro-commons thinkers: by entering into an ongoing dialogue, interaction, reciprocal reflection and mutual learning from actual democratic insurgencies, collective commoning and egalitarian initiatives of citizens.

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Chapter Four

Taking on hegemony and the political

Hegemony, laid out along the lines of Antonio Gramsci, first, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe from the 1980s onwards, can help partly to fill the ‘vacuum’ of the political in present-day commons. It can speak, that is, to the vexing issues of political organisation, the rallying of a massive collective agency and a potent political strategy of large-scale transformation, which receive scant consideration in the theories and practices of existing commons, impeding their expansion into a broader alternative paradigm. The political thesis that pulses at the heart of the book – that an effective alter-politics of the common(s) should join ranks with the politics of hegemony – encounters an obvious interference that has been acknowledged from the very beginning (in Chapter 1). On the face of it, the ‘common’ politics of openness, diversity, inclusiveness and horizontal, non-hierarchical self-government clashes head-on with the politics of concentrated force, antagonistic exclusion, state sovereignty, representation, hierarchies and vertical leadership, which is sponsored by Laclau and Mouffe under the heading of ‘hegemony’. What is more, Laclau and Mouffe reduce the ‘essence of the political’ to hegemony, closing off in principle the prospect of another politics inclined towards horizontal, non-hierarchical governance, the dispersion of power, consensus through deliberation and non-exclusionary openness (Mouffe 2005: 8–9, 17; Laclau 2005b: 258; Laclau 2000a: 45–59). Discarding this ‘essentialisation’ of hegemony, which writes off alternative visions of politics, is a minimal, initial gesture that enables us to negotiate the conflict between the politics of the common(s) and hegemonic politics. This inaugural move needs to be pushed further through a substantial recasting of hegemony, which would not simply make for a fruitful confluence of the two political logics but would place hegemony in the custody of the common(s). In order to make room, first, for an open variety of different politics, the present chapter will pause to reflect on the meaning of the political itself. After theorising 115

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics the political, the argument will move on to revisit hegemony in the thought of Gramsci. Overall, the present chapter and the next one venture into a secondorder ‘commoning of the political’. The initial attempts to envisage politics in light of the commons of egalitarian self-governance, beyond the state and the capitalist market, have been coupled in preceding chapters with an endeavour to ‘politicise the common’, by grappling with gaps and flaws in the ways in which the various commoners broach issues of political subjectivity, power relations and conflict. The guiding hunch is that a ‘politicisation of the common’ that comes to grips with these defects can make headway through a ‘hegemonic’ realignment of the common(s). However, such a proposal cannot bear fruit without renewing the politics of hegemony itself so as to attune it to the political culture of the common(s). It is this process of repurposing hegemonic politics for the commons that implies a second-order commoning of the political and will carry on in all subsequent chapters, from the present one onwards.

Broaching the political The argument has taken the commons to task for their lack of political strategy and understanding. It has done so from the standpoint of Laclau and Mouffe, who wed the political to hegemony, conflict and power relations. On the other hand, previous chapters have exalted an alternative politics of the commons, which is horizontalist, antihierarchical, pluralist and open, and seeks out free collective agreement. Such an ambivalent position on the political may appear to founder on inconsistency and confusion. To complicate things further, Laclau and Mouffe’s gloss on the political has been castigated here for its essentialism, which postulates an abiding, universal ‘nature’ of politics. How is it possible to think and practise politics in a meaningful way without assuming a fixed definition of what is political? How could we think and perform politics in ways that allow it to take on an indefinite diversity of forms, accommodating hegemony and more commons-oriented modes of political action? Over the last two decades, critical reflection on the political has been refreshed and diversified (McNay 2014; Freeden 2013; Mouffe 2013, 2005; Newman 2011; Honig 2009; Tully 2008; Ingram 2002; Rancière 1995). But much of this thinking has been carried out in ontological terms, which pretend to seize the ‘essence’ of the political or a fundamental ‘ontological’ level of the political that constitutes human societies (see, for example, Laclau 2005b; Mouffe 2005; see also Marchart 2007; 116

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taking on hegemony and the political Connolly 1995). Alternatively, the political may be fathomed through a broader inquiry into ‘how things are’, how human existence and social ties are arranged, as in the post-Heideggerian existentialism of beingin-common (Nancy 1991, 2000; Esposito 2013; Agamben 1993; see also Hardt and Negri 2004; Tonder and Thomassen 2005; Mihai et al. 2017). More broadly, it seems that any inquiry into what politics or the political ‘is’ in general is bound to get trapped in an essentialism of definite and universal essences, in search of the universal or abiding nature of the political. Lois McNay (2014: 1) has made the case that political theory of all stripes has devoted itself, since the 1990s, to uncovering the ‘quintessential principles’ that regulate all political life in order to propagate ideals and principles of democracy on this foundation. This quest issues in a formulaic, rarefied and socially ‘weightless’ notion of the political, which passes over actual circumstances of entrenched inequality, dispossession and internalised disempowerment that prevent political action. McNay (2014: 17) argues that the obsession with the ‘ontology’ or the ‘essence’ of the political misguides political theory, leading it astray and away from lived social realities. She pleads, thus, for a political thinking that immerses itself in the material circumstances of oppression and deprivation, and that looks closely into everyday patterns of political agency and new modes of popular protest rather than conceptualise ‘the political’ in the abstract (McNay 2014: 21–4). Yet, elucidating the political in critical ways remains a crucial task for political thought, analysis and agency. In the most elementary sense, without any inkling about the qualities of the political – what counts as political activity or political relation, the bounds of political institutions and so on – political science and philosophy could not get started on their studies. In the context of the present argument, it would be implausible to speak of political lacunae and failures in the different strands of the commons without calling upon a plausible idea of the political. Needless to say, however, political discussion and practice are almost never completely in the dark over the meaning of the political. Implicit, common-sense or specialist intuitions set going and govern political discourse and action, particularly in social settings that are home to explicit vocabularies and distinct institutions of politics. Hence, to shun a critical review of the concept of the political is, almost inevitably, to remain captive to predefined horizons of thought about what is possible and plausible in things political, ‘For to adopt without revision the concepts prevailing in a polity is to accept terms of discourse loaded in favour of established practices’ (Connolly 1993: 2). By contrast, when the aim is to twist, to problematise and to pluralise prevalent assumptions and practices so as 117

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics to make them amenable to new possibilities of doing politics in the style of the commons, then a rethink of the political is rather apt and timely. The incisive criticisms of essentialism, universalist pretension and social ‘lightness’ set the terms for the ways in which such a conceptual labour should proceed. The will to fix the meaning of the political in a singular and exclusionary mould, the desire to stipulate an exclusive and universal definition of what is political, run counter to the plurality, the messiness and the strife that mark out many situations and activities that are experienced as political in the common sense and in ‘ontological’ political theory itself. W. B. Gallie (1955) and William E. Connolly (1993: 10) sought to explain why central political concepts, including ‘politics’ itself, are inherently susceptible to endless dispute over their meaning and range of application. When a concept is ‘appraisive’, denoting a valued activity; when it is internally complex, referring to a cluster of different dimensions; and when its rules of application are relatively open and an object of disagreement themselves, then the concept is ‘essentially contested’. It is obvious that ‘politics’ qualifies as such (Connolly 1993: 12–15). Politics implicates many different dimensions, including collective decision-making, legally binding authority, interests, conflict, negotiation, public administration, government and power, which are themselves internally complex and fuzzy. And people will dissent over whether sexuality, mathematics and religion are, or should be, political issues subject to public decision-making. Hence, a reasonable construal of the political should, first, remain alert to its historical limitations and its contestable validity, rather than make any pretence to universal truth. Second, it should be informed by a historicised hermeneutics that puts forth context-bound interpretations, taking its cues from contingent, contextual ideas about politics, while testing their bounds and creatively recalibrating them. Third, one should reckon with the diversity and the contentiousness of political positions and acts, while also acknowledging the openness of political action to the radically new. Finally, a pluralist and self-reflective conception of the political should closely attend to actual social conditions, and it should dialogically interact with the arena of mainstream politics as well as with grassroots civic activity and critical thinking. In a nutshell, a qualified, contextualised, plural and open notion of the political should remain alive to a tradition of political thought that was championed by Hans J. Morgenthau in 1933: ‘The concept of the political does not have a fixed content which can be determined once and for all’ (Morgenthau (2012) [1933]: 101). ‘The political nature of these matters thus depends on circumstances of time and place and does not result from a ground of principle’ (Morgenthau (2012) [1933]: 99). 118

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taking on hegemony and the political

On the concept of the political With these qualifications in mind, we can get hold of a solid, yet open and contingent idea of the political by scrutinising diverse conceptions of the political in Western (late) modernity, from the early twentieth century to date. These can be mapped along two main axes of differentiation. The first axis gravitates around the state, and it contrasts state-centred notions to views that tend to loosen the tight grip of the state on the political. The second axis turns on the antithesis conflict/struggle/division versus collaboration/consensus/integration. This mapping is not exhaustive but it ranges over a wide spectrum of vernacular and ‘professional’ ideas of the political. By probing both axes, one can gain critical purchase on much contemporary and earlier political thought. Thereby, we can also trace out common threads that run through many divergent senses of the political, and we can subsume both antagonism and common action within a pluralised matrix of the political. To start off from the first axis and the most conventional meaning of the political, this identifies politics with the art of government and, primarily in modernity, with the government of a nation-state. Heywood (2013: 3) succinctly renders the ruling doxa: politics can be understood to refer to the affairs of the polis. . . . The modern form of this definition is therefore ‘what concerns the state’. . . . This view of politics is clearly evident in the everyday use of the term: people are said to be ‘in politics’ when they hold public office, or to be ‘entering politics’ when they seek to do so. It is also a definition that academic political science has helped to perpetuate.

Hence, politics has been consigned to the machinery of national government and the apparatus of the state: the cabinet, the parliament, political parties, public administration and so on (Heywood 2013: 3–5; Freeden 2013: 44–9; Stoker 2006: 4; Schmitt 2007: 19–25; Duverger 1964: 15–23). With few exceptions, such as the thesis of Carl Schmitt, the fixation on government, the state and the political system has set the predominant tenor in Western political science until, at least, the 1960s, which marked a turning point in post-war political scholarship (Freeden 2013: 39, 44, 45–9; Duverger 1964: 15–17). However, contemporary textbooks of political science attest to the persistence of the standard wisdom. To illustrate, in their Theory and Methods in Political Science, Marsh and Stoker (2010: 8) stipulate that ‘Politics is much broader than what governments do but there is something especially significant about political processes that are or could be considered to be part of the public domain’ (cf. Goodin and Klingemann 1998: 7). 119

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics At the same time, all through the twentieth century up until our own time, one can witness a parallel ‘decentring’ of the political away from its focus on the state, the national government and the formal political system. Such displacements have occurred within political theory and political science themselves. Carl Schmitt’s essay on The Concept of the Political (1932) is an (in)famous landmark but decentring tendencies have intensified and proliferated in later decades (see Morgenthau (2012) [1933]; Arendt (1998) [1958]; Dahl (1972) [1965]; Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Lefort 1986; Rancière 1995, 2010; Connolly 1995, 2005; Ingram 2002; Day 2005; Tully 2008; Honig 2009; Hardt and Negri 2004, 2009, 2012; Freeden 2013; Heywood 2013). These gestures have been accompanied and bolstered by cognate movements in a broad array of other fields of inquiry, from anthropology (e.g. Clastres 1987; Scott 1990; Gledhill 2000; Papataxiarchis 2014), sociology (e.g. Giddens 1991; Beck 1992) and feminism (e.g. Butler 1988, 1990; Gibson-Graham 2006) to political ecology (e.g. Bookchin 1982; Bennett 2010), social movement studies (e.g. Zibechi 2010; Castells 2011; della Porta and Rucht 2015), anarchism (e.g. Ward 1982; May 1994; Newman 2011) and ‘post-structuralist’ French philosophy (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Foucault 1980; 2007). Carl Schmitt (2007 [1932]) perhaps inaugurated the veering away from the state in the twentieth-century political thought of the West, by noting that the equation politics=state ‘becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other’ (Schmitt 2007: 2). As is well known, for Schmitt the political is not located in state administration: ‘The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy . . . which denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation’ (Schmitt 2007: 26). Thus understood, the political may crop up in any social field beyond the state. Any social relations, or religious, moral, economic, cultural ones and so on, can become political if a conflict erupts in their midst that is intense enough to divide the members of the relation into friend and enemy (Schmitt 2007: 37–8). From a different angle, Claude Lefort (1986: 276–8, 310–11, 322–3) set out to contest the foundations of the modern statist capture of the political, the ‘theologico-political’ machine, which sanctifies the politics of unification around a sovereign One. By contrast, Lefort traced the political in the ‘generative principles’ of different forms of society, in the particular modes of instituting and figuring society. The political ‘mise en forme’ of human coexistence is at the same time a signification [‘mise en sens’] and a representation or staging [‘mise en scène’] of social relations (Lefort 1986: 280–2). 120

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taking on hegemony and the political In more recent times, several radical and liberal streams of political theory managed to escape more fully from the grip of the sovereign state politology and to hold out the possibility of political thinking and agency at any time and on any plane of social life. Jacques Rancière (1995, 2001, 2010) and Michael Freeden (2013) are two cases in point (see also Tully 2008; Honig 2009; Connolly 1995). For Rancière, politics is an act of dissensus that unsettles established identities, institutions and relations. He strongly objects, therefore, to the reduction of the political to the state, which re-enacts a specific way of living, led by a pre-existing subject (Rancière 2001: 1.2–1.4). Michael Freeden (2013: 6–9, 18–20) has taken issue precisely with the residual ‘sovereignism’ of contemporary philosophies of the political, which confine it to a singular property, such as conflict or public reason, authorising some of the available significations of politics to the exclusion of others and thus constraining politics against itself. The selective specificity and stipulative narrowness of this political theory fail to do justice to all the myriad ways of real-world thinking about politics. Politics is rife with diverse meanings and political life itself is complex and variable over time. Politics is not a ‘single grand thing.’ Any account of the political that accords with politics as we know it should only assemble its diverse ‘micro-components’ that recur in specific contexts of discourse and action, without laying claim to universal validity or an exhaustive description of the political. These ‘microcomponents’ can be found anywhere; they are not necessarily lodged in the state or in the ‘grand’ politics of instituting society. Freeden (2013: 34) suggests, then, that we, in our societies, tend to assign the term ‘politics’ and ‘political’ to the following features of social conduct: ultimate decision-making, which involves parcelling out and regulating domains and boundaries of competence among social spheres; the distribution of material and symbolic goods; the mobilisation or withdrawal of public support; the organisation of social complexities, which generates stability or conflict; policy-making and the selection of collective options; and wielding power (which cuts across all the above dimensions). Outside political theory, but often in intimate contact with it, secondwave feminism, anthropology and post-structuralist French thought (most notably, Deleuze, Foucault and, later on, Derrida) partook in the radical ‘decentring’ of the political by steering it away not only from the state itself as sovereign locus of power but also from the political logic of the state: the grand politics of the macro-scale, the social system as a whole, the overall institution of society and an ultimate, unitary instance of decision- making. 121

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics In exemplary fashion, the famous feminist motto ‘the personal is political’ intended to convey an idea that was scandalous in the 1960s: that there are ‘political dimensions to private life, that power relations shaped life in marriage, in the kitchen, the bedroom, the nursery, and at work’ (Rosen in Lee 2007: 163). The political is deployed thus ‘in the broad sense of the word as having to do with power relationships, not the narrow sense of electoral politics’ (Hanisch 2006: 1). ‘The personal is political’ means, also, that pervasive cultural norms and social and economic structures are enacted and reproduced through individual action (Butler 1988: 522). The feminist movement worked out schemes of political thought and action in line with this politicisation of the everyday. It favoured modes of civic engagement that involved ‘average’ women in their everyday lives. The emblematic practice of ‘consciousness-raising’ that has been nurtured in feminist groups purported to empower women politically in their personal relations and life worlds. This process of critical groupthinking embodies a dynamic way of politicising the personal and a singular modality of politics in the ‘everyday’. By way of sharing personal experiences and through collective discussion around shared feelings and concerns, it stimulated reflection on the political facets of personal life. Consciousness-raising thus enhanced awareness of everyday oppression. It boosted the self-esteem of women as persons who should affirm themselves, who can become reflective agents and who bring their distinct contribution to politics by cherishing, for example, values of sensitivity and care for the others. It also investigated ways of initiating change in patriarchal norms and subjectivities, in the present tense and from below. Hence, feminist politics intimated the idea that individual acts can be political in the mundane reality of gender relations inasmuch as they recycle cultural conventions of subordination or they undertake to displace and upset them (Hanisch 2006; Butler 1988: 523–4; Lee 2007: 165–6). These heteroclite understandings of the political lend credit to the notion that multiple political forms and practices gestate and operate beyond, outside and underneath state politics and official government. This tack discredits monistic, exclusionary and essentialist codings of the political that claim to pin down its ‘nature’ in a specific quality or structure, whether this is state government, hegemony and sovereignty, or the friend/enemy relation, disruption and micro-political creativity. Through a complex and nuanced gaze on the political outside or beneath the state, the radars of political thought can capture, appreciate and bring to the fore less conventional or visible modes of political agency and organisation. And 122

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taking on hegemony and the political they can stimulate the political imagination to envision other ways of doing politics in common beyond the state, the standard, the dominant and the formulaic. Does such a pluralisation of the political risk dissolving it into everything and, thus, into nothing specific? Not necessarily, and not in the present context of reference. A common thread can indeed be found running across all the different senses of the political we have brought into play, from the most typical politics of the nation-state and Schmitt’s friend/enemy division to Rancière’s dissensus or the ‘personal politics’ of second-wave feminism. In all these instances, ‘the political’ bears on social activity that deliberately intervenes in existing social relations, structures and embedded subjectivities in order to shape them intentionally by challenging them, transfiguring them, displacing them, managing them or defending them against challenges. Politics is both deliberate and social, even when political decision and activity are steered by an individual sovereign – the monarch, the tribal chief or the president. Offices that tend to monopolise the political are social institutions, and their effective operation rests on a measure of collective acceptance and mobilisation beyond individual holders of power themselves. From this broader angle on the political, political activity can run both in the formal political system and underneath, outside, against and beyond it. The political, of course, harbours revolutions and hegemonic acts of instituting entire social formations or particular social relations. But in the sense of deliberate collective action on social structures and subjectivities, it also encompasses the ‘management of collective affairs’ by governments, as well as ordinary, face-to-face social interactions and attempts at ‘coping’ with everyday problems. ‘The political’ can thus be positioned on any micro-, meso- or macro-scale of social life, in more or less institutionalised and visible social spaces and interactions in any social field. From this perspective, ‘low’ politics and ‘micro’-political actions in informal exchanges, performances and differences of everyday life are registered as political. But their impact on broader social practices and relations is not decided ex ante, and it remains up for debate whether micro-politics affects only certain interactions and structures, or can combine with other micro-political energies to set the stage for largescale social antagonisms and systemic ‘macro’-events. This rendition of the political as deliberate collective action on society does not postulate a universal essence nor is it intended to force a conceptual straitjacket. It fastens, rather, on a fine quality that allows for an indefinite diversification of specific senses of the political. And it marks the trace of a contingent commonality, or a ‘family resemblance’, 123

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics that permeates many different ideas of the political, both orthodox and critical, that have been entertained in earlier and late modernity. In this contingent, diffuse and open common ground lies the pedigree and the virtue of the concept of the political outlined here. How can this conceptual matrix handle the apparent dichotomy between politics as antagonism, disruption and power struggle or politics as action in concert, convergence and consensus-seeking? In effect, according to Maurice Duverger’s eloquent formulation, this opposition is ancient and overriding: Ever since men have reflected on politics, they have oscillated between two diametrically opposite interpretations. For some, politics is essentially a struggle, a combat, the power that permits the individuals and the groups that possess it to secure their domination over society, and to benefit from it. For the others, politics is an attempt to attain the rule of order and justice, the power that assures the general interest and the common good . . . a means of realising the integration of all individuals in the community. . . . The image of Janus, the two-faced god . . . expresses the most profound political reality. (Duverger 1964: 20, 22; my translation)

The political in the sense of social activity that seeks to format social relations, structures and subjectivities can display both faces of Janus. Both conflict and collective agreement are specific modes of deliberate intervention in social reality that try to configure it – by challenging opponents and institutions or by freely converging on a collective decision. In effect, within this template of thought on the political, we can more securely situate the political in relation to two extremes of antagonism and consensus: warlike enmity and eternal peace. We can, thus, dispute both Schmitt’s polemical idea of the political, which is dominated by ‘the real possibility of physical killing’ (Schmitt 2007: 33–4), and any fantasy of a final, fully inclusive consensus. The political features contest, strife, antagonism and struggle but in ways that hold deadly combat at bay. The physical elimination of the enemy in a situation of real war puts an end to the very relation one entertains with the enemy and, hence, to any kind of political interaction with them. Politics must therefore keep itself at a distance from warfare in order to safeguard the very possibility of a political engagement with others. And politics historically signals a step away from barbarity and bloody violence, a step towards civilisation or civility, in Rawls’s terms (Rawls 1996: liii, 49–54, 217). The civil character of politics is earmarked in the very etymology of the word in Greek, which derives from polis and thus shares the same root with politismos: that is, civilisation and culture in Greek. In Romance languages, the words 124

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taking on hegemony and the political citizen and citizenship likewise derive from the Latin civitas (city), which is the stem of civility and civilisation. To qualify as political, fight and strife need to be civil and to keep up the relation of citizenship within the city rather than lapse towards a lethal confrontation that kills the opponent and dissolves the political bond among adversaries. On the other hand, politics would equally fade away in a condition of full and permanent peace. Politics would indeed vanish, as Mouffe asserts, under a final consensus on the ‘basic structure’ of society, which would allow government to shrink to a neutral ‘management’ of social affairs that is free of both domination and conflict. An enduring social harmony of this sort eliminates the need for political decisions among alternative ends and means. It is thus not upset by political debates over contending choices. Both limit situations of bloody war and perfect social harmony also tend to wipe out plurality in the public sphere, the plurality that gives rise to political interaction, contest and deliberation. Under an enduring and extensive accord, the many fuse into One over a substantial range of economic, social, ethical, cultural and so on issues. The scope for argument and decision among alternatives narrows accordingly. In the event of warfare, plurality is undercut both outwards, in the relationship with the rivals that are targeted for extermination, and inwards. Armies are usually more effective when they are unified into a coherent war machine. And the space of political debate among warriors tends to shrink to null, especially at most critical moments. This location of the political in a continuum between the two extremes of war and peace not only carves out ample political space for both antagonism and the quest for consensus in variable positions, before reaching the endpoints where the political dissolves. It also sharpens the critical edges of the political, pleading against barbaric, unfettered violence and a single-minded pacifism or consensual moralism. Moreover, within this horizon of thought, the two faces of the political – fight, power/hegemony and agreement or common freedom – are not simply set side by side in a happy, but bland and naïve marriage. Their conjunction turns agonistic insofar as the tensions pervading them are fully acknowledged and can play themselves out. But the possibility of their conjugation is also sustained and affirmed, since both struggle and consensus are de-absolutised. They are kept at a civil distance from total war or peace. And they are subsumed under an enlarged notion of the political, which does not embrace either struggle or consensus in an exclusive manner. This relativisation of the two valences of the political makes not only for context-sensitive political choice among them, but also for their productive coalescence on two sides of the same political 125

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics activity (see Chapters 6 and 7 for examples of such a convergence in contemporary movements). But why should we bring together the horizontalist, grassroots politics of the commons with the political strategy of hegemony? How could this strategy remedy the ‘lack of the political’ in the commons? And in which respects should we recalibrate Gramsci’s and Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony to facilitate its confluence with the commons and to make it serve the flourishing of the commons?

Introducing hegemony The ‘H-word’ (Anderson 2017) has a complicated history, which has put it to a variety of uses. Gramsci (1971) and Laclau and Mouffe (1985) construed it not only as a structure of rule but also as a way of aggregating a collective political subject, which can realign the balance of forces in contemporary societies and elicit social recomposition on a massive scale. It is in this respect that their insights into hegemonic strategy are worth considering in the search for powerful ways of scaling up the alternative politics of the commons (see also Dixon 2014 and Smucker 2017 for a similar argument addressed to ‘radicals’ and social movements today). In antiquity, ‘hegemony’, meaning ‘leadership’ in Greek, used to denote a military league of city-states in which members are equal in principle but raise one among their number to direct them for a certain purpose. Back then, leadership was already premised on the free consent of the led (Anderson 2017: 1–3). The Greek word was taken up by the Russian revolutionary ‘social democrats’, at the turn of the twentieth century, in order to signify the political unity of all oppressed sectors of the Russian society, who contested the Tsarist regime in an alliance guided by the working class. The proletariat should actually conduct an all-sided political battle that would tend to the interests of the entire people and would found a republic in Russia. The Russian working class should thus accomplish a historical task that had been taken on by the liberal bourgeoisie in other countries (Anderson 2017: 13–18). It was Gramsci (1971) who turned hegemony into the centrepiece of a systematic theory. He generalised the meaning of hegemony to take in any stable form of rule that rests on the blending of force and consent – the consent of the subordinate social sectors to the ruling sector. But Gramsci also coined a rich armoury of concepts, such as ‘war of position’, intellectual and moral leadership and national–popular will. He thereby set out a fully-fledged political strategy, through which a revolutionary class would assemble a massive collective actor out of 126

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taking on hegemony and the political a variety of subordinate classes and would wage an extensive political battle in society and the state in order to occasion radical, progressive transformation. Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 4, 65–71) took their lead from Gramsci to relaunch hegemony as a strategy for radical democratic politics in the late twentieth century. Now, however, the objective is no longer the leadership of the industrial proletariat, which would weld together subordinate social classes in order to carry out a socialist revolution. The class structure of late modern capitalist societies has not spawned any massive, preconstituted collective agents. Enhanced complexity, social fragmentation, individualism and the dispersion of resistances reign supreme. More than ever, these historical circumstances cry out for the active hegemonic construction of collective organisations and broad-based political alliances out of a proliferation of differences, a multiplicity of social movements and various antagonisms, which no longer cohere around class struggle and economic demands (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 1–5, 149–94). Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 93–148) furthered the thinking of hegemony as a general political logic. This logic is no longer attached to a particular class base, and it can unleash its effects in full, freed from a Marxist economism that would trace the operations of hegemonic politics back to economic determinations ‘in the final analysis’. Hegemony can thus become an instrument for the politics of new social movements, of feminism, ecology, anti-war and so on. Egalitarian movements could rally around a project of radical democracy, which values pluralism, autonomy and individual liberties along with equality, deeper democracy and socialism (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 149–94). In this guise, hegemonic assemblages of movements and fights against the neoliberal status quo acquire a heightened relevance for the politics of the commons at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is so, of course, when the commons are embraced as a project of radical democratic change that will prevail over neoliberal capitalism and top-down elitist politics. However, Laclau and Mouffe vest late modern hegemony with a bundle of substantive contents and forms, from individual leadership and state politics to vertical organisation, concentration and political representation, which are out of synch with the horizontalist, egalitarian spirit, the decentralised network structure and the bottom-up power of contemporary commons. Hence, the politics of hegemony would be up for grabs for the commons only if it were partly unsettled and released from the burdens of its statist and party-political past so that it could align itself with the distinct political culture of the commons. 127

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics This work of delivering hegemony from its residual fixations in the political thought of Laclau and Mouffe is initiated in Chapter 5 and further pursued in the next two, in an attempt to reimagine the politics of hegemony in the spirit of the democratic movements and the alternative commons of our times. The focus is on those facets of the political logic of hegemony that can be reclaimed for a sprawling and transformative politics of the common. The present chapter will kick-start the process of ‘unsettling’ hegemony by pinning down substantive elements of hegemonic politics in Gramsci and, later, in Laclau’s and Mouffe’s template, which should be ditched so that hegemony can properly shore up the commons rather than erode their political soul. Echoing the construal of the political in the previous section, hegemony is held to be just one political logic of action among others, and a logic that is not one logic itself. Hegemony does not occupy the entire space or the centre of the political, as Laclau and Mouffe would have it (Mouffe 2005: 8–9, 17; Laclau 2005b: 258; Laclau 2000a: 45–59). Consequently, it can be conjugated with other modalities of political action, organisation and structure. And there are different possible figurations of hegemony, from Gramsci to Laclau and beyond (see also Anderson 2017 for various interpretations of hegemony; see Arditi 2007 and Emerson 2013 for similar, partial moves that ‘unsettle’ Laclau’s hegemony).

Gramsci’s breakthrough In an era of social media, viral videos and mass higher education, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony feels startlingly prescient. Indeed, he ever more appears not merely a Marxist thinker for our times, but perhaps the thinker. (Eaton 2018)

Gramsci (1971: 12–13) raised the notion of hegemony to a general analytic category that can give us a grip on the prevailing power structures in modern societies (Anderson 2017: 19; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 65–9). But the main political intent of his theory of hegemony was to capture the historical ‘transformation of the subordinate group into a dominant one’ (Gramsci 1971: 160). It was to shine light on the proper political process through which intellectual and moral reform is organised and a ‘national–popular collective will’ develops ‘towards the realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilization’ (Gramsci 1971: 133). As a political function, ‘hegemony’ consists in leadership by a ruling group, which is exercised throughout the state and society – and, more specifically, civil society – which is home to all ‘private’ organisations outside the state itself. Hegemony enlists the ‘spontaneous’ 128

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taking on hegemony and the political consent that the great masses of society extend to ‘the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige . . . which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production’ (Gramsci 1971: 12). By contrast, the state, or ‘political society’ in a narrower sense, exerts a direct domination through its coercive apparatus, which ‘legally’ enforces discipline when subordinate groups withdraw their spontaneous consent, most often in moments of crisis (Gramsci 1971: 12–13). However, in its ‘integral’ meaning, the state contains both ‘dictatorship’ through legitimate violence and hegemony in civil society. The state thus comprises the whole complex of theoretical and practical activities through which the ruling class wins over the active consent of subordinate classes, maintaining and justifying its dominance (Gramsci 1971: 239, 244, 263; see also Filippini 2017: 46–7). Hence, the ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony in a parliamentary regime is characterised by a mix of force and consent in a reciprocal balance. Force must appear to be grounded in the consent of the majority, which is expressed in elections, organs of public opinion and so on (Gramsci 1971: 80). Gramsci’s elaboration of hegemony has a twofold political bearing on contemporary commons. First, he offers a window into how a certain group or movement can connect organically with other existing social sectors and circumstances, alter itself, gather a broad-based collective will and achieve a new majoritarian coalition of forces in society and the political system, which can erect a new social order. Crucially, he wrestles with this paramount issue of political coordination and organisation under conditions of social differentiation and the pervasive grip of a dominant worldview, which closely parallel ours. Second, his take on political mobilisation is socio-centric. It starts out from existing economic conditions, civil society and common sense, and works through them in order to amass political power and reorder society. But in order to distil from Gramsci political ideas that can foster a transformative alliance for the commons, one should unhinge his reflections on political action not only from their remainders of economism and class determinism, as Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 69) have argued, but also from a particular historical figure of the ‘modern prince’, which, for Gramsci (1971: 253), is the political party with its centralised command structure. One of Gramsci’s fundamental insights that is highly pertinent for an expansive politics of the commons is that concrete and many-sided political action holds the key to installing a new social formation. This political action should also take on the state but it should be firmly 129

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics rooted in civil society and begin from there. In this respect, Gramsci displays close affinities with the socio-centric approach to social change that informs most literature on the commons (see Chapters 2 and 3), but with a twist whose significance cannot be overstated. In addition to crafting new economic practices and technologies, a properly political agency is in order, which will refashion common sense and will nudge social activity towards a broader direction of radical change by means of a devoted political actor–organiser. The theory of hegemony, both as a concept of power relations and as a political praxis of historical change, was put forward by Gramsci in response to the particular socio-political context of Western societies in the twentieth century, which departed significantly from the circumstances of both the French–Jacobin and the Russian Revolutions. In the former, ‘permanent revolution’ from 1789 onwards was suited for a rudimentary state apparatus and a meagre and fluid civil society, which was devoid of major trade unions and mass political parties. After 1870, however, the configuration of both the state and civil society has become thicker, all-encompassing and more complicated (Gramsci 1971: 242). Yet, in Russia and the ‘East’, the state practically held a monopoly of power till the early twentieth century, while civil society remained elementary and unstable. At that time, ‘in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society. . . . The State was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks’ (Gramsci 1971: 238). This is why, for Gramsci, the historical formula of revolution must extend to ‘civil hegemony’, which strives to have an impact on social relations and to modify the balance of forces in a multitude of social fields before conquering state power. A historical situation in which social differences split simply into two antagonistic camps is unlike the conditions of dense and multilayered social structures, in which the morality and the worldview of hegemonic groups have deeply impregnated the values and the common sense of subordinate social strata. This is also the state of affairs in which we find ourselves today. Neoliberal values and policies are still globally regnant to varying degrees. Societies are highly complex and universally interconnected. Populations adversely subject to neoliberal hegemony are fragmented, dispersed, atomised, captive to fear, precarity and the sway of neoliberal values and notions. Hence, no majoritarian force has effectively constituted itself into a challenger of the status quo. Exactly because such a historical condition closely parallels the circumstances of Western societies under which Gramsci thought through his politics of hegemony, his political theory can deeply resonate with the radical democratic politics of the commons in our times. ‘The 130

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taking on hegemony and the political Gramscian theory of hegemony . . . accepts social complexity as the very condition of political struggle and . . . sets the basis for a democratic practice of politics, compatible with a plurality of historical subjects’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 71). According to Gramsci, then, in socio-historical contexts of increased differentiation under a given hegemonic structure, a bloc of social forces can topple the status quo and implement a process of radical innovation only by first becoming the moral and intellectual leader of kindred and allied groups, before gaining governmental and coercive power. Social ‘leadership’ is accorded priority over state power in the politics of hegemony, which establishes a social formation by combining force with generalised consent. Hegemony thus represents a salient form of politics in that sense of the political that oscillates between the extremes of war and peace. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 70) have put it, Gramsci initiates in communist militancy a ‘transition to a non-military conception of politics’. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it specifically becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well. (Gramsci 1971: 57)

More specifically, a certain social group can gain the upper hand and start reordering society in accord with its worldview only when it transcends the ‘corporate limits of the purely economic class’ (Gramsci 1971: 181). A group aspiring to hegemony generalises its interests so as to embrace further subaltern groups, to band together a massive force and to manufacture a collective will that tends ‘to become universal and total’ (Gramsci 1971: 129). This is the starting point of the hegemonic struggle and the ‘most purely political phase’ (Gramsci 1971: 181). At this moment, the ideology of the aspiring hegemon must diffuse itself throughout society and must concoct a unity not only of economic and political objectives, but also of morality and ideas, ‘posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups’ (Gramsci 1971: 182). As opposed to ‘domination’ and ‘dictatorship’, hegemony instantiates a form of leadership whereby certain ‘nuclei . . . concord their interests and aspirations with the interests and aspirations of other groups’ (Gramsci 1971: 104–5, see also 106). The new collective will that a hegemonic actor should fashion should not be an artificial collage of distinct objectives and values around the 131

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics particular interests of the leader. It should, rather, be a true, active creation, which reforms and ties together different social interests beyond any narrow corporate perspective (Gramsci 1971: 130, 189; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 66–7). This collective will acts as ‘the motor force of a universal expansion, of a development of all “national” energies’ (Gramsci 1971: 182). The bourgeois class has been paradigmatic in this respect. It has posed itself as a perpetually moving organism that can assimilate the entire society and can raise other social classes to its own material and cultural level (Gramsci 1971: 260). Hence, for Gramsci, the propagation of intellectual and moral reform, of new ideas and values, lays the groundwork for the composition of a national–popular, or majoritarian, collective will, which can bring into being a new modern civilisation, a novel social order. Amidst conditions of heightened social differentiation, multiple entrenched powers and resistances, structural renewal can be induced when a certain political forum surges forth and functions as a decisive centre that brings together dispersed social actors, cementing a sizeable alliance of social movements and individuals against the ruling regime. It achieves this convergence of different groups by framing their grievances and aspirations into a coherent alternative discourse, vision, ethic and programme: that is, by figuring an effective collective identity and by coordinating their activity. Pursuing intellectual and moral innovation and shaping the collective will are two main tasks of an aspiring hegemonic agency in Gramsci’s politics. These operations need to be backed up by a programme of economic improvements in the material position of allied social groups. The economic programme is, in effect, the concrete form in which the moral and intellectual reform casts itself. Gramsci’s hegemony is ethico-political but it must also be economic, anchored in the decisive role of the hegemonic contestant in key economic activities (Gramsci 1971: 161). However, he overtly proclaims that the ‘two basic points – the formation of a national–popular collective will . . . and intellectual and moral reform – should structure the entire work’ of the modern Prince (Gramsci 1971: 133). Politics is born on the organic ground of economic life and lives off an economic plan, but it must exceed the terrain of the economy. Its proper task is permanent action and the building of political organisations. Politics must bring into play passions and aspirations that transcend any narrow calculus of profit (Gramsci 1971: 139–40) and engineer a ‘national–popular collective will towards the realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilization’ (Gramsci 1971: 133). The concept of hegemony and its cognate theory of the political party are 132

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taking on hegemony and the political put forward in explicit opposition to economism and in clear recognition of the material force of popular beliefs (Gramsci 1971: 165): hence Gramsci’s concern with the politics of ideology, which supplies a trigger and a glue for counter-hegemonic contestation. Ideology is employed by him in the sense of a worldview that infuses manifold social and individual activities, from art to material production. This world-picture can become the theoretical premise and the motor of a collective practical activity and will, knitting together an entire social bloc (Gramsci 1971: 328). The dominant worldview or ideology that is inherited from the past and fills out the theoretical consciousness of the ‘masses’ ‘is not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of will, with varying efficacy’ (Gramsci 1971: 333). Disseminating an alternative philosophy of the world is, then, for Gramsci, a linchpin of the political enterprise that strives to put up an extensive alliance of social forces against the powers that be. A ‘political ideology’ that inspires a ‘concrete phantasy’ ‘acts on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organise its collective will’ (Gramsci 1971: 126). To achieve this feat, political actors should not conjure up inventions or truths of their own. They should, rather, grapple creatively with common sense, with practical values and conceptions that are widely spread among the many (Gramsci 1971: 324–5, 346). An ‘organic relation’ and interaction with society at large is the hinge of Gramsci’s hegemonic politics, which purports to bring about a new majoritarian alignment that can overturn the establishment. In their economic and other practical activities, lay people carry an understanding of their practice and certain ideas about the world, which are often a response to specific problems posed by reality and are shared across particular groups. Conceptions of the world are socially differentiated, composite, ambiguous and contradictory. They harbour both historical prejudices and intuitions of a future ‘universal philosophy of humanity’. The challenge for a progressive politics that takes on the established hegemony is critically to finesse certain popular notions and everyday feelings that resonate deeply and widely, to piece them together into a systematic and innovative view that can connect a multiplicity of differences, and to engender thereby a decisive common will, fleshing out the ethics and the politics of a critical popular sense. Common sense becomes a primary battleground for the hegemonic contest (Gramsci 1971: 324, 334–5; Chodor 2014: 492–3; Johnson 2007: 99–101). In Gramsci’s terms, a ‘philosophy of praxis’ must critique common sense, selecting among its components and throwing off its regressive elements. Yet, this critical revisiting is a re-elaboration of common 133

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics sense, which inflects, modifies and sharpens existing modes of thought, passions and practices in order to advance a higher vision of life that appeals to the many (Gramsci 1971: 324, 330–3, 346, 418). the philosophy of praxis can only be conceived in a polemical form and in the form of a perpetual struggle. None the less the starting point must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude and which has to be made ideologically coherent. (Gramsci 1971: 421)

Herein primarily lies the function of the hopeful hegemon, the political agency that sets up an emancipatory collective front. In order to bring to life such a massive front, the political task is not to foist one’s own doctrines on the masses, but to shift the constellation of popular ideas in a radical direction, to draw them together into a systemic whole, to work out the corresponding ethics and politics, and to disseminate these progressive revisions or displacements of common beliefs (Gramsci 1971: 334–5, 339–41). Popular alliances are convened by means of forming collective identities, clusters of widely diffused values, worldviews and concrete ends of action. Among many others, the case of the Spanish political party Podemos and its meteoric rise in 2014, immediately after its creation, illustrates how a political actor can tap into common sense, readjust it in a critical sense and weld together a popular front (see Kioupkiolis 2016). Echoing the 15-M movement and its new, distinctive discourse, Podemos articulated a diagnosis for the present crisis and advocated policy alternatives by speaking a plain language to which people can easily relate. It employed terms that were not those of conventional leftist terminology but were spread across large social strata and appeal to electoral majorities hit by austerity policies. In line with contemporary social movements, Podemos refused to define itself on the basis of a particular ideology. Its activists presented themselves as ‘ordinary people like you’, ‘who understand the needs of ordinary citizens and are open to taking their lead from them through a participatory process’ (Fominaya 2014). This was an attempt to gain hegemony not by trumpeting dogmatic truths in an authoritative fashion, but in a deliberative and collaborative manner, by working in and through the already existing community of feelings and ideas held by ordinary people who are disaffected with the status quo (Iglesias 2014; Errejón Galván 2014). In pitting ‘la gente’ against the ‘casta’, in defending public goods, in demanding accountability and people’s power in democratic governance, in blaming political and financial elites for the crisis and corruption, the endeavour of Podemos’s discourse has been to draw on recent mutations in political culture and 134

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taking on hegemony and the political to rearticulate common conscience in ways that both engage majorities and further democratic change, navigating a course beyond reactionary conservatism and extreme radicalism (Errejón Galván 2014; Fominaya 2014). As Pablo Iglesias has put it, ‘The key is to succeed in making “common sense” go in a direction of change’ (Iglesias 2014). Collective identities can attract large swathes of the population and gradually attain a mass adhesion only when the political catalysts maintain an ‘organic’ connection with their social milieu, through a ‘continual adaptation of the organisation to the real movement . . . a continuous insertion of elements thrown up from the depths of the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus’ (Gramsci 1971: 189). ‘Organicity’ requires that hegemonic actors are always in touch with the national–popular ‘masses’. They should give voice to massive social demands and formulate ‘collective doctrines’, in the manner of a collective thinker who critically expresses and refines elements of the common sense of their times (Gramsci 1971: 340–1, 346; Johnson 2007: 99–101). [The] organic coalescence [of mass parties] with the intimate . . . life of the masses themselves . . . is acquired by the collective organism through ‘active and conscious co-participation’, through . . . the experience of immediate particulars. (Gramsci 1971: 429)

In sum, for Gramsci, a hegemonic politics that sets out to alter the status quo radically is contingent on a massive aggregation of different groups and individuals. This demands the making of a collective identity, a ‘moral’ and ‘intellectual’ unity in a common will and a shared political project. The entire process is spearheaded, sponsored and directed by a committed political agency, which must liaise organically with society at large in order to generate the required unity and historical innovation. However, in Gramsci’s politics, hegemony as the bonding of social differences into a collective front does not consist only in the formulation of a discourse that ties together popular notions and demands. In addition to the economic programme and practices that we mentioned above, counter-hegemonic politics also turns on two further key operations: political organisation and strategies of struggle. For Gramsci, the primary function of political organisation is assumed by the political party, ‘the modern prince’ (Gramsci 1971: 129), while the two key strategies are war of position and war of manœuvre. As Filippini (2017: 100) puts it, ‘Gramsci identified one element he believed to be key to allowing an antagonistic subject to develop and impose itself in a crisis. The element in question is organisation, the most 135

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics important weapon an antagonistic force may deploy. . . .’ Yet, Gramsci’s specific model of organisation – the party – is no model for a politics of the commons due to its hierarchical, top-down, centralising discipline under a group of army ‘generals’ (Gramsci 1971: 152–3). Gramsci himself, as he comments on Machiavelli, is ‘a man wholly of his period; his political science represents the philosophy of the time’ (Gramsci 1971: 140). Gramsci’s party is tripartite. It is composed of a massive grassroots base, an intermediary level of rank and file, and the party ‘generals’, who are vested with ‘great cohesive, centralising and disciplinary powers; also . . . with the power of innovation (innovation, be it understood, in a certain direction . . . )’ (Gramsci 1971: 152). This militaristic structure should be forsaken by political alliances for the commons: first, because a centralising, top-down leadership could hardly cultivate an egalitarian emancipation of the many, as it reproduces subject positions of subordination and guidance from the top, failing to educate people in self-government and self-direction on a footing of equality. Leaders themselves, on account of selfish motives or their habits and experience in political leadership, tend to perpetuate their position rather than gradually vanish to make room for the autonomous people. Second, the ‘multitude’ today is well educated and creative. The many need no leaders to guide them in light of their ‘scientific’ analysis of politics, society, the march of history and the intricacies of political strategy. At the same time, it is still true that a high level of massive and intensive political mobilisation, in the style of an ongoing squares movement always self-present in public spaces, cannot be permanently sustained. A cohesive platform of political organisation is still required, then, so as to hold disparate forces together around a common project, to plot a concrete political direction and to maintain a form of collective agency at a time of receding mass activity. Gramsci’s hierarchical party is a non-starter for the egalitarian politics of the commons. But his still valid point about the party is precisely that a ‘mass element, composed of ordinary, average men’, can constitute a potent collective agent on the condition that there is also a cohesive element, which . . . renders effective and powerful a complex of forces which left to themselves would count for little or nothing. . . . In the absence of this cohesive force, they would scatter into an impotent diaspora and vanish into nothing. (Gramsci 1971: 152)

This hub of coordination acts upon the social forces that it brings together, promoting, consolidating and universalising their political engagements (Gramsci 1971: 227). The political party, for Gramsci, acts 136

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taking on hegemony and the political primarily as a group of ‘intellectuals’ who organise, set out a political orientation and enunciate a political discourse with universal address. Beyond the party itself, ‘What matters is the function, which is directive and organisational, i.e. educative, i.e. intellectual’ (Gramsci 1971: 16). This function of political articulation, sustained activity, collective deliberation, political programme and action in concert remains decisive. Therefore, new patterns of political convergence and direction need to be devised in order to fulfil it in an efficient manner. Any schema of political agency today should nurture another principal component of Gramsci’s hegemon: ‘organic leadership’ (Gramsci 1971: 335) and the ‘organic’ bonding with ordinary people and social movements. The coordinating platform should keep close contact with broader society, ‘not only physically but also morally and intellectually’ (Gramsci 1971: 153, see also 189). It is only through dedicated efforts to steep itself in lived social experience and to remain intimately in touch with social majorities that a political assemblage could carry forward the politics of the common, of common concerns, shared aspirations, and collective participation of the many (see Chodor 2014: 493). At the same time, this ‘organic’ tie, which grounds political initiative in actual social desires, needs and powers, need not entail a conservative bias that would skew political action towards hegemonic worldviews and the status quo. ‘Common sense’ is ambiguous, complex and contradictory. Social reality itself is a relation of forces in perpetual motion. Emancipatory political action should put a radical twist on common sense and should intervene innovatively in reality, applying its collective will to reach a new equilibrium that transcends the current state of affairs by relating to some of its most progressive forces (Gramsci 1971: 172, 189). A cornerstone of Gramsci’s organic leadership/hegemony is the strategy of ‘war of position’ that he advocates. In his picture of social complexity, the coercive and governmental apparatus of the state constitutes only one site of power among others. It is entwined with a far-reaching system of other loci of power in ‘civil society’, a diverse array of institutions, associations and private initiatives and groups in education, culture, the economy (trade unions), religion, sports and so on. All these may operate as centres of collective force, diffusing hegemonic ideas and values, orienting political action and preserving the status quo or putting up resistance against it. In circumstances of social complexity and differentiation, a new socio-political alliance can eventually prevail in its bid against the establishment only if it undertakes a protracted and inventive struggle, which wins such positions of power in society. A counter-hegemonic ‘war of position’ besieges existing institutions and associations, or it pioneers its own forms and centres of social activity 137

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics in order to gather together social forces, to lead social resistances and to spread its values and ideas across different social sectors (Gramsci 1971: 236–43, 258–61). For Gramsci, the war of position has become more decisive than the ‘war of manœuvre’, whereby a contending force frontally assails the bastions of its opponent (Gramsci 1971: 108–9, 120, 236–7, 243). The war of manœuvre is more apposite when power is concentrated in particular locations, in the state or elsewhere, and the challenger can carry the day by seizing this fortress. But the war of manœuvre has limited efficacy when the state is only an outer ditch in an entire net of bastions and fortresses, which are dispersed across society (Gramsci 1971: 238). The school, political groups and trade-union associations can be home to ‘private’ initiatives of the ruling class or its adversaries, educating individuals and groups so that they consent to one or the other type of cultural hegemony and they rally in favour of one or another mode of socio-political hegemony (Gramsci 1971: 258–9). The war of position engages with civil society on this level, in a long-term process of gradual, ‘molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes’ (Gramsci 1971: 108; see also Filippini 2017: 40–1). The seizure of state power in the narrow sense only concludes the politics of Gramscian hegemony, which draws sustenance from a much broader, protracted, agonistic and creative involvement with social relations in their multiplicity (Gramsci 1971: 57, 108). As in most contemporary schemes of commons-based change, hegemonic politics starts out from the social ground and remains deeply vested in it, devising new social institutions, new modes of production, new social bonds and networks, or labouring to refashion existing ones. But, in contrast to various commons alternatives, ongoing social innovation, social resistances and battles are properly politicised. First, they are coordinated through a coherent political alignment that is intent on becoming majoritarian; second, they are inscribed in a conscious political project of paradigm shift; and third, they are coupled with sustained efforts to influence, take over and reshape state institutions. This organised political intervention is driven by a sharp awareness of the persisting accumulation of force in the state. But Gramsci’s hegemonic politics is also intensely conscious of the much broader remit of power relations, both within and across social formations. And Gramscian hegemony subordinates the use of state, top-down direction and coercion to a wide-ranging transformative process that actively wins the consent of popular majorities. A strategic vision along such lines can boost alternative commons and can forward another politics of 138

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taking on hegemony and the political the common as it seeks to generate common power from below, within the realm of the social, while it is guided by an acute perception of dominant power (im)balances across multiple layers.

Taking stock All in all, ‘the political’, couched in terms of social practice that, first, deliberately acts on social relations and structures so as to question, alter or conserve them; and second, takes place in between the endpoints of all-out war and peace, can offer a capacitating and capacious idea. This take on the political affords an appropriate prism for scanning distinctly political qualities and phenomena so as to debate them, appraise them or imagine them otherwise. But it can also uphold the marked openness and plurality of the political, the variable, unpredictable particular figures that it can assume, its amenability to change and its variable appearances in multiple sites and guises, from the formal political system to the informal micro-politics of daily interactions and the making of subjectivities. Through these conceptual lenses, we can make sense of and value political activities outside the box and the official stages without losing sight of the concentration of political power in the state(s) and international agencies. And we do not fix in advance the relative weight of government apparatuses or molecular infrapolitics in the everyday. Political innovation and generative potentials can thereby be traced out not only in big ‘acts of hegemonic institution’, but also in small-scale ordinary exchanges and processes, while their broader ramifications remain up for debate. Finally, contention, power, action in concert and agreement are all embraced as different facets of the political within the bounds of civility and plurality. As a result, a heightened awareness of power relations, the will to combat inequalities and the freedom to dissent from prevalent norms can go along with a preference for free collective consensus and a disposition to minimise exclusion and repression. Cast in these terms, the political opens up to the common by turning out to be a widespread, everyday common practice occurring on multiple scales of time and space. This approach commons the political by blurring rigid dichotomies between formal/informal, micro/macro, hegemonic institution/ordinary management, and consensus/dissensus. The proper locus of the political is not determined in advance. Therefore, attention can turn to any site and can assess its political clout with an open mind. Lay activities of daily resistance, dispute, negotiation, creative initiative and defence of the status quo in local micro-contexts are brought within the ambit of the political and they are appraised 139

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics as such. At the same time, states, formal institutions and international power centres remain nodal points of political action and struggle, which should be reconfigured to yield to the equal power of common people. Likewise, the value of disparate forms of political practice remains subject to context-sensitive judgement. Innovative changes on the plane of subjectivities and face-to-face intercourse, systemic ruptures, largescale collective organisation and processes of social preservation can all be taken on board and scrutinised with regard to their political efficacy for common freedom. Such an enlarged perspective on the political clears the way for a counter-hegemonic politics of the commons. It is plural, sensitive and flexible enough to encompass novel political experiments on any level, practices of egalitarian self-government and counter-hegemonic massive alliances against the prevailing neoliberal order. Endowed with such an ampler and complex meaning, the political enables us to reappropriate hegemony for the commons without authorising hegemony to occupy the totality or the commanding centre of politics that matters. With these qualifications in hand, a Gramscian political argument for the commons of our times can be put forth along the following lines. The principle of the common could rearrange prevalent institutions and structures only if social creativity on the ground – new communities of the commons, new, open and collective technologies of production and so on – is embedded in a larger political movement contesting hegemony: in a historical bloc (Gramsci 1971: 137, 168, 366, 376–7). A fully-fledged hegemonic politics of revolutionary change à la Gramsci is anchored in a wide-ranging bloc that knits together a multiplicity of social resistances and political struggles; economic projects and productive activities that tend to social needs; and the making of a new collective identity, a common political programme, values and critical ideas. All these elements are organised through the cohesive force of a committed political actor. Organic bonds with large social sectors in their everyday life, popular outreach and an ongoing ‘war of position’ in civil society and the state make up a hegemonic strategy that bridges micro- and macro-politics. Political activity dwells on the micro-level of everyday social activities and groups, grappling directly with social relations and subjectivities so that they morph into a new collective identity, culture and political orientation. At the same time, a common political platform connects the multiplicity of micro-political processes, draws up a coherent and comprehensive political plan geared to an entire social formation, and wrestles with macro-structures and institutions of the state, the economy, culture and so on. 140

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taking on hegemony and the political No doubt, to harness a Gramscian strategy of hegemony for commonsoriented reform, core elements of Gramsci’s thought should be problematised and cast aside, beginning with his Party and moving on to his class politics. Gramsci grounded hegemonic politics in the economic basis, the forces and relations of production, which gave rise to two main social classes that could vie for hegemony in modern societies: the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’ and the ‘modern proletariat’ (Gramsci 1971: 116, 157, 161, 180–1; see also Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 69). Class inequalities have skyrocketed in our epoch of neoliberal hegemony. Global wealth is amassed world-wide in the hands of few superrich people. Middle classes are being increasingly impoverished in many Western countries. And the global expelled population – the poor, workers, unemployed, precarious, dwellers of shanty towns – who live at or below subsistence level is in the billions. Still, the ‘working class’ does not compose today a unified, massive category that can furnish the ground for majoritiarian political identities and mobilisation (see Crouch 2004; Dyer-Witherford 2015; Standing 2016). Social differentiation and fragmentation, the pervasiveness of (neo)liberal individualist values, the decline of industrial labour in developed countries, the growth of precarious labour and the service sector are some of the factors that underlie the actual failure of working people across the globe to become politically interpellated as ‘working-class’, to bond together and to hit back as ‘workers’ in a single country or internationally. Moreover, Gramsci’s assumption that the political conceptions or ‘ideologies’ that supply the glue of a historical bloc are determined, since they are organically rooted in certain modes of production, is a moot residue of economism and Marxist determinism (see Gramsci 1971: 341, 366–7, 376–7). Technologies and evolving patterns of production could be inflected in different directions: neoliberal, social-democratic, ‘commonist’ or something else (see Wright, Levine and Sober 1992; Bauwens and Kostakis 2014; Dyer-Witherford 2015). Finally, the politics of democratic commons needs to come up with new patterns of powerful political organisation that break with the centralised, hierarchical and homogenising party: figures that are in tune with the horizontalist, pluralist and egalitarian animus of the commons. It is worth noting, however, that although he consecrates the party as the hegemon of a historical transition in the twentieth century, Gramsci does not eternalise the state by ingraining it into any hegemonic formation. On the contrary, he remains faithful to the Marxist doxa of an eventual eradication of the coercive apparatus. ‘It is possible to imagine the coercive element of the State withering away by degrees, as ever-more conspicuous elements of the regulated society (or ethical State or civil 141

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics society) make their appearance’ (Gramsci 1971: 263; see also Emerson 2013: 432). Gramsci’s hegemonic politics sets out to conquer state power at the end of a protracted process that wages a war of position in civil society. But Gramscian hegemony also holds out the prospect of eliminating the coercive mechanism of the state. This contrasts sharply with Laclau and Mouffe’s position, which commits hegemonic politics to the state and writes off the possibility of doing away with state coercion (see Mouffe 2013: 75, 78; Laclau 2014: 6, 196). But this is moving too fast.

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Chapter Five

Reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons

A line of force that runs through the political argument in this chapter is that an antagonistic politics of the commons today should retrieve Laclau and Mouffe’s framing of hegemony in its seminal form, which was set forth in their ground-breaking Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). The populist and ‘agonistic’ inflection of their thought (Laclau 2005a; Mouffe 2005, 2008, 2013) has obscured the vividly pluralist and pro-autonomy tenor of their original recasting of hegemony, which was intended to serve the cause of a libertarian-andegalitarian democracy and grassroots movements (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 1–3, 176–93). In their 1985 manifesto of post-Marxist theory, the ‘open, unsutured character of the social’, ‘plurality and indeterminacy’ provide for them the ‘fundamental bases from which a new political imaginary can be constructed, radically libertarian and infinitely more ambitious in its objectives than that of the classic left’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 192, 152). The ‘necessity’ of state sovereignty, top-down representation, coercion, individual leadership, concentration and unification are almost out of sight in their initial relaunch of hegemonic strategy after Gramsci. By contrast, plurality, openness, the dispersion of power, the autonomy of social movements, the diversity of political spaces and antagonisms occupy the forefront, both as contemporary conditions and as values reverberating in a radical democratic hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 137–40, 178–85, 190; see also Laclau 1990: xiv–xv). Hence, their earlier reclamation of Gramscian hegemony is more in line with the politics of alternative commons. Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of the political was likewise more polyvalent, flexible and congruent with commoning practices than their later statements, which level down the political to vertical power, sovereignty and antagonism. Back 143

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics in 1985, they concurred in ‘exploding . . . the uniqueness of the meaning of the political’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 179): politics as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations cannot be located at a determinate level of the social, as the problem of the political is the problem of the institution of the social, that is, of the definition and articulation of social relations in a field criss-crossed with antagonisms. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 153)

Their renewal of hegemonic politics in 1985 can thus speak directly and powerfully to the political predicament of transformative commons in our times, which is poorly tackled in existing commons literature and activities: how to band together a popular will for antagonistic commons and how to effect an expansive convergence of social forces that will dismantle the neoliberal regimes, will take on entrenched power relations across all social fields, and will found a new, egalitarian, participatory, plural and sustainable order. Overall, their political thought pivots around the ‘creation, reproduction and transformation’ of social structures, systems and relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 153; Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000: 6). But, more specifically, the ‘first of political problems’ with which Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 132) wrestle in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is precisely ‘the constitution of the very identities which will have to confront one another antagonistically’, in circumstances in which social fragmentation and the proliferation of identities have dissolved the automatic unity of social antagonisms around any single popular pole. Laclau and Mouffe face this paramount political challenge in a way that ingrains plurality, openness, equality, autonomy, contestation and new social movements in a vision of radical democracy. This seminal breakthrough put in place the intellectual scaffolding for a post-Marxist tack to hegemonic struggle. The ‘post-’ indicates, first, the negation of Marxist economic determinism and classism. Crucially for the commons, it also points to a vocal rejection of state socialism, the ‘classical’ roads to socialism under the direction of a centralised party, and the Jacobin imaginary itself (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 1–2). Jacobinism postulates a single, foundational moment of historical rupture – Revolution with a capital ‘r’, a unique place where political struggle and power are to be concentrated, and a unitary collective will (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 2, 152). In all these respects, Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism has paved the way for another hegemonic strategy that can foster a pluralist, decentred and anti-hierarchical politics for the commons, a strategy that the next chapter will flesh out in partial opposition to Laclau’s later political thought. 144

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons These earlier lineaments of an alternative hegemony for the commons remain rather thin and abstract. They should thus be filled out with some later elaborations of Laclau and Mouffe, among others. However, their political thought after 1985 also makes regressive moves towards statism, closure and vertical structures. It calls, therefore, for a critical revision that will deliver post-Marxist hegemony from such accretions, aligning it again with egalitarian politics, horizontalism and the commons. The endeavour of critical adjustment will be initiated in the present chapter but a more substantial amendment of the hegemonic strategy will be undertaken in the following chapters in the light of contemporary movements.

Inflecting hegemony towards radical democracy In 1985, Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 65–71, 93–93) recover Gramscian hegemony for an up-to-date leftist politics. This could link together a multiplicity of democratic struggles, accumulating support for a political project that would radicalise liberal democracy and the politics of the left in the direction of anti-authoritarianism, deeper freedom and equality. To reset the politics of hegemony along these lines, they engage in a critical genealogy of Marxist determinism and hegemony; adduce a critical diagnosis of the present; offer a distinct interpretation of freedom, equality and democracy; and outline more specific political ends and practices for democratic change. To renovate hegemony, they put a lot of effort, first, into fleshing out another ontology of society and politics as discourse. Through discourse, Laclau and Mouffe seek to eliminate the Marxist economism and classism that also beset Gramsci’s analysis, in which only a fundamental class, preconstituted in the economic base, can carry out a hegemonic restructuring of society (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 138). Their starting point, firmly anchored in the present, is ampler social complexity, diversity and fragmentation ‘as the very condition of political struggle and . . . the basis for a democratic practice of politics, compatible with a plurality of historical subjects’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 69). This departs from Gramsci’s presumption that a majoritarian popular identity arises within a pregiven dichotomous political space, which is split along predetermined class lines: the proliferation of these political spaces, and the complexity and difficulty of their articulation, are a central characteristic of advanced capitalist social formations. . . . We will therefore speak of democratic struggles where these imply a plurality of political spaces, and of popular struggles where certain

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics discourses tendentially construct the division of a single space in two opposed fields. But it is clear that the fundamental concept is that of ‘democratic struggle’. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 139)

To release hegemony from economism and determinism, more broadly, Laclau and Mouffe make two key moves. They lay out a conception of society as a terrain of contingency or indeterminacy, and they substitute the notion of discursive formation for the base/superstructure model. The field of hegemonic interventions expands in proportion to the space of contingent articulations of socio-political relations and identities (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 3). Articulation, discourse, plurality and antagonism become the linchpins of a refurbished theoretical edifice that opens up an enlarged perspective on the politics of hegemony. Despite its abstract or even abstruse character, this theory of politics and society is particularly relevant for an alternative politics of the common(s) in our times and can energise strategic thought. This is so because Laclau and Mouffe pondered a strategy of counter-hegemony in our context of plurality, complexity, social fragmentation, diverse antagonisms against the establishment, and social contingency. First and foremost, the emphasis on contingency, which runs counter to the logics of historical, economic, technological and so on determinism, stimulates political reflection. It opposes the TINA dogma by highlighting the openness of history to unforeseen change. And it enjoins us to dispense with any historical assurances, such as technological innovation as the trigger of social transformation. The assumption of contingency invites us, consequently, to consider seriously how to kickstart and organise political action so as to bring about the wished-for transformation. Finally, the idea of contingency bolsters the alter-politics of the commons as it underpins the possibility of autonomous self-organisation against any predetermination of action, underwriting plurality and creativity against any preconceived universal models. For Laclau and Mouffe, then, all social orders, relations and identities or structural positions are contingent in the sense that they are precarious, mutable, non-necessary, incomplete and politically negotiable. They could have been otherwise and they remain amenable to open-ended change. Society is not a totality ruled by necessary laws (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 96, 104). There is ‘no single underlying principle fixing – and hence constituting – the whole field of differences . . . necessity exists as a partial limitation of the field of contingency’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 111). Any contingent social formation is the upshot of an activity of articulation, which formats social relations by working on dispersed social 146

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons elements in a primary sense, without being governed by other necessary processes or laws (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 96, 109): we will call articulation any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice. The structured totality resulting from the articulatory practice, we will call discourse. The differential positions, insofar as they appear articulated within a discourse, we will call moments. By contrast, we will call element any difference that is not discursively articulated. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 105)

Articulation is the decisive and open-ended praxis that composes and recomposes social relations, identities and positions by piecing together diverse social elements. These ‘elements’ include language, institutions, techniques, modes of production, objects, subjects within institutions and so on (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 107). The resulting social formation, which consists of a regular set of relations and differential positions, is called discourse to underscore that all social links, practices, objects and subjects are meaningful (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 106; Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000: 2–4). But discourses are also material, embodied practices and institutions: ‘The linguistic and non-linguistic elements are not merely juxtaposed, but constitute a differential and structured system of positions – that is, a discourse’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 108). Discourse is fundamentally a complex of different elements, in which the relations between the elements figure their identities, their positions and their meaning (see also Laclau 2005a: 68). ‘Discourse’ does away with the determinist base/superstructure division, in which the ‘superstructure’ of ideas, law and politics is determined ‘in the last instance’ by the material base of production (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 109; see also Laclau and Mouffe 1987: 97–132). Any discursive totality of relations is pierced by contingency. It is only partially and precariously fixed. No specific identity or relation within a particular discourse can become completely and finally settled. It remains exposed to ‘a discursive exterior that deforms and prevents it from becoming fully sutured. Both the identities and the relations lose their necessary character’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 111). In an indeterminate and plural reality, any social system could be otherwise because it is located in a wider field of differences, antagonisms and polysemy – the ‘field of discursivity’ – which subvert its particular construction of objects and subjects (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 111). Articulation, then, names an attempt to implement a partial fixation, to cut out instituted and intelligible forms of society from a flow of differences that could not be fully mastered and arrested. The articulatory practice installs 147

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics centres of meaning, power and institution, ‘nodal points which partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 113). Hegemony consists primarily in this process of articulation that is carried out in a contingent terrain. It seeks to put together an organised system out of disaggregated elements by instituting nodal points (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–5). In addition to contingent articulation, two further terms mark out the terrain of hegemonic politics proper: antagonism and the instability of the frontiers separating the antagonistic camps. The hegemonic struggle to impose one’s forms on social complexity pits contending operations of articulation. Moreover, the frontiers dividing the rival communities must be relatively fluid and under construction. Otherwise, the identity of the antagonistic forces would be immediately given, and there would no floating elements to construe and to arrange in different ways (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 114, 136). Antagonism is vested with a constitutive status in Laclau and Mouffe. It does not simply entail a relation of physical opposition or logical contradiction between two forces. It does not denote an objective relation between fully constituted conceptual or real objects that oppose or contradict each other. Antagonism implies, rather, the impossibility of constituting relations and identities, the failure of structures and beings, the negation of my being by the other and of the other’s being by me. In the case of antagonism, ‘the presence of the “Other” prevents me from being totally myself . . . it is because a peasant cannot be a peasant that an antagonism exists with the landowner expelling him from his land’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 125). Antagonism is thus constitutive in two senses. First, it is a final or primary ‘ground’. It is not subsumed under any broader system in which the antagonistic forces would simply occupy two different positions and would be governed by underlying positive factors (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 126). Negativity is radical, and the outcome of the struggle is not settled in advance. Second, antagonism draws the limits of a certain social order by negating that order. It defines the boundaries of a certain social formation as something that undermines this formation and impedes it from being a full presence: ‘Every “society” constitutes its own forms of rationality and intelligibility by dividing itself; that is, by expelling outside itself any surplus of meaning subverting it’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 137). Antagonistic limits configure a hegemonic formation into a totality by demarcating all its different elements as a whole from that which is beyond them, from that which they are not. Accordingly, antagonism and its negativity, the negation 148

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons of being, are primary and founding conditions of the social, in Laclau and Mouffe’s ontology (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 144). The essentials of Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemonic politics contain, moreover, the following: an analysis of more specific logics of political articulation; a theorisation of the agent of hegemony; an affirmation of positive, utopian projection; and the decentring of hegemony. Equivalence and difference are the two key logics that organise political spaces in Laclau and Mouffe’s analysis. Through the first, different objects and subjects become equivalent to each other insofar as they all stand opposed to the same negative pole (or ‘enemy’) in an antagonistic relation. In millenarian movements, for instance, all different elements of urban culture turn into equivalent incarnations of the evil that must be annihilated, while all elements of peasant culture become equivalent expressions of a collective opposition to cities. On both sides of the confrontation, the differences within each pole tend to be annulled and to become equivalent representatives of the antagonistic force. The logic of equivalence, which undercuts positive differences by splitting the political space into two, is the primary logic of antagonism and, hence, of hegemonic struggle (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 127–30). The logic of difference, by contrast, seeks to absorb demands and protests into an existing social system by handling them as different issues that can be separately managed. Difference thereby prevents the formation of equivalences between diverse social grievances or it dissolves actual divisions. This has been the political logic of the Welfare State (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 130). In sum, the logic of equivalence is the logic of the simplification of political space, while the logic of difference is a logic of its expansion and increasing complexity. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 130)

Both logics can play out in diverse social fields. This raises the main challenge for radical democratic politics in our times: how to bind together extensive and unified chains of equivalence among dispersed democratic struggles, grievances and movements, such as feminism, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, political ecology and so on. The multiplication of points of rupture along various lines, the precariousness of social identities, the instability and complex interdependences of social positions inhibit the emergence of central confrontations and extended chains of equivalence. According to their 1985 diagnosis, the conditions of political antagonism in advanced capitalism are very distant from the nineteenth-century politics of clear, stable and pre-existing division (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 131–4, 151, 170–1). There is ‘no 149

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics politics without hegemony’ because the partition of the social into two antagonistic camps is no longer a datum prior to hegemonic constructions. From the nineteenth century onwards, political spaces, the identity of forces that confront each other, and their dividing lines are fragile, ambiguous and subject to ongoing shifts (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 151, 170). From the turn of the twenty-first century to date, neoliberal capitalism seems to regress towards earlier conditions of steep inequalities and social cleavages (Crouch 2004; Streeck and Schäfer 2013; Sassen 2014; Picketty 2017), setting the stage for a resurfacing of populist oppositions, which confront the ‘1 per cent’ with the ’99 per cent’. However, diffuse individualism, neoliberal hegemony, social exclusion and fragmentation still stand in the way of building solid popular alliances with egalitarian democratic aspirations. As a result, the need for hegemonic interventions and strategies becomes more urgent than ever. How and who can come forward as a collective subject of hegemonic contestation? Contra Marxism, for Laclau and Mouffe, hegemonic subjects are not always fundamental social classes, whose unity coheres around specific class interests rooted in their position in production. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the category of the ‘subject’ pertains to ‘subject positions’: that is, to specific positions within diverse discursive formations, which condition the subject’s political experience and engagement (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 115, 118, 134). Disowning the Subject as a universal and foundational agent conduces to the idea of a dispersion of subject positions across a multiplicity of social relations and punctual fights in diverse fields. However, this dispersion does not issue necessarily in a total disaggregation. Antagonisms and subjects may be closely interlinked and capable of coalescing in a common front. To illustrate, there are multiple subject positions of ‘oppressed women’, which are spread across many social practices on the level of legislation, the family, cultural stereotypes, work and so on. Yet, there is also a considerable degree of ‘overdetermination’ – that is, of interaction and mutual reinforcement – among all of them, which tends to engender a systematic sexual division and to subordinate the feminine to the masculine. Such elements of commonality lay the ground for political convergence and action in concert. The open character of every discourse allows for the transformation of subject positions, their coming out of themselves and together in broader collective actors (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 115, 117–18). Hegemonic forces, the subjects of articulatory practices, are partly exterior to what they articulate. But their exteriority is not that of a fully sovereign, independent Subject. Hegemonic actors are themselves 150

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons situated within certain discursive formations. Yet, they strive to frame and combine external floating elements – objects and subjects – that are located outside their own formations and bear no fully fixed position or meaning (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–5). Hegemony, then, is a particular type of political relation and activity whereby social actors, such as a trade union or a religious organisation, move outside their particular struggles, identities and roles in order to link themselves to other conflicts and actors through chains of equivalence. They take on broader organisational functions in a community, establish alliances and assign wider meanings to social practices or resistances. ‘In this sense, we could say that hegemony is basically metonymical: its effects always emerge from a surplus of meaning which results from an operation of displacement’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 141). In this earlier rethink of hegemonic strategy, positive collective identities, projects and utopian projections offset negativity, antagonism and the ‘empty signifiers’ of Laclau’s later lexicon. A counterhegemonic alliance cannot come about through a chain of equivalence that is based solely on the common antagonism of groups with the same enemy. A hegemonic equivalence also forges a new ‘common sense’, which alters the identities of the assembled forces so that their demands can accord with and support each other. An ‘equivalence is always hegemonic insofar as it does not simply establish an “alliance” between given interests, but modifies the very identity of the forces engaging in that alliance’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 184). Moreover, beyond ‘enclave politics’, specific demands and negative protests against the status quo, a winning hegemonic strategy sets up nodal points from which a process of different, positive reconstruction of social structures can be initiated and carried forward. It is the capacity for positive direction and renovation across a broad range of social spheres that underpins an effective alter-politics of social change. Every hegemonic contest starts from negativity, the negation of a given social order. But it can consolidate itself only insofar as it manages to reconstitute ‘the positivity of the social’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 189). Furthermore, a hegemonic strategy for the ‘construction of a new order’ must negotiate a delicate balance between the realistic reckoning with existing structural limits to transformative processes – on the level of the state, the economy and so on – and a utopian aspiration to transcend the current state of affairs fully. The hegemonic practices of a radical democratic politics must steer away from both extremes of a managerial pragmatism without project and the totalitarian fiction of the Ideal City with complete harmony and happiness. However, without ‘utopia’, a set of symbolic meanings and ideas that envision another 151

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics social order beyond our present ability to threaten the status quo, ‘there is no possibility at all of the constitution of a radical imaginary’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 190). Finally, in the 1985 script, hegemony is externally and internally decentred. This stands in marked contrast to the later stipulations of Laclau and Mouffe, which overstretch the scope of hegemony to make it coincide with the political as such (see, for example, Mouffe 2005: 8–9, 17; Laclau 2005b: 258; Laclau 2000a: 45–59). Back then, hegemony is simply one political type of relation, ‘a form, if one so wishes, of politics’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 139), which operates alongside other political logics, such as ‘autonomy’, and is not equated with the essence of the social or the political. ‘[W]e reject the ontological plane, which would inscribe hegemony as centre of the social and hence as its essence’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 139). Laclau and Mouffe insist, moreover, that a variety of contingent political logics shape the contours of society. ‘If society is not sutured by any single unitary and positive logic, our understanding of it cannot provide that logic’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 143). The internal decentring of hegemony is equally crucial, as it stalls the hegemonic drive towards homogenisation, the accumulation of force in a single centre – a party, a group of leaders and so on – and the ensuing vertical hierarchies, the direction of collective action from a leadership on the top. Only such a decentred hegemony can attune itself with a horizontalist, egalitarian and pluralist politics of the common(s). First of all, for Laclau and Mouffe in 1985, it is not possible to maintain the idea of a single ‘nodal point’ in a social order. In any social formation, there can be various hegemonic nodal points, although some of them may be highly overdetermined and decisive for a wide array of social relations (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 139). More importantly, in their view, a radical democratic politics must affirm plurality and autonomy within a wider hegemonic intervention: ‘autonomy linked to the pluralism required by the expansion of the new social movements . . . is not opposed to hegemony, but is an internal moment of a wider hegemonic operation’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 140–1). The conjunction of hegemony and autonomy, equivalence-identity and difference, equality and liberty, is actually the linchpin and the main predicament of their project of ‘radical and plural democracy’, which strives to deepen both freedom and equality across all fields of the social (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 140–1, 167, 178–88). The autonomy of particular spheres, spaces and communities is an outcome of articulatory practices rather than a datum or a structural effect of necessary processes. If the autonomy of social movements and 152

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons communities is contingent on socio-political conditions, then it can be upheld and enlarged through a broader hegemonic intervention. This can tie together social movements and struggles, such as anti-capitalism, anti-sexism and anti-racism, in an alliance that reinforces them, or it can connect autonomous communities in a network of mutual support and collective defence of their liberties (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 140–1). On the other hand, an alternative hegemonic politics that proceeds, more specifically, in the direction of ‘radical and plural democracy’ seeks to enhance the real autonomy of groups and identities on a footing of equality and dismisses any hierarchy among the plurality of identities, struggles, communities and spheres: the project for a radical and plural democracy, in a primary sense, is nothing other than the struggle for a maximum autonomization of spheres on the basis of the generalization of the equivalential–egalitarian logic. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 167)

The plurality and the opening that lie at the core of a radical democracy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 178) are deeply at odds with centralised power and homogenisation. Radical democracy stands for the autonomy of different fields of struggle and a multiplication of political spaces ‘which is incompatible with the concentration of power and knowledge that classic Jacobinism and its different social variants imply’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 178). On the same grounds, the ‘classic’ idea of Revolution, whereby a revolutionary act refounds society by instituting a centre of power, is renounced. Radical change should be induced, rather, through a plural and ongoing process, which may also involve an ‘overdetermination of a set of struggles in a point of political rupture’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 177–8). A process-based and pluralistic path to counter-hegemonic reconstruction is very akin to the contemporary theories and practices of the commons, which envision historical transition in similar terms of long-term transformation and diverse activities of collective renewal – social, political, technological and economic. Moreover, in Laclau and Mouffe’s template, both the sites and the means of hegemonic struggle become plural and open. The social surfaces in which democratic antagonisms may burst forth and domination can be fought are diverse. They are located both in the state and in civil society, and they are not determined a priori. New social spaces can be politicised and turned into sites of strife and transformation. Counterhegemonic politics can take place on any level and in any field of the social. Likewise, the political vehicles of change are plural and should be politically chosen according to variable circumstances. In some cases, for instance, the state can function as an apparatus of bureaucratic 153

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics oppression that should be torn apart, whereas in other contexts state institutions could be mobilised against various structures of oppression in civil society (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 179–81, 192). ‘The important point is that inasmuch as the field of “society in general” has disappeared . . . , there has also disappeared the possibility of establishing a general theory of politics’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 180), which would fix in advance the value of particular sites and means of hegemonic struggle, pre-empting context-specific judgement and decision. By ditching any absolute political categories of the type ‘the Party’, ‘the Class’, ‘the Revolution’, Laclau and Mouffe’s rethinking of hegemony affords ample room for experiment, diversification, sensitivity to context, and the questioning of power effects in any political form (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 179–81, 190). The forms of democracy should be also pluralised to gear themselves to diverse social spaces and levels. And, more generally, a hegemonic project of radical democracy should embrace the irreducible plurality of the social, setting out to institutionalise the ‘moment of tension, of openness, which gives the social its essentially incomplete and precarious character’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 190). This ‘nodal point’ of radical democracy sits at the heart of any politics of plural freedom in common. Politically instated openness means that institutions authorise a continuing contestation of novel or subsisting modes of inequality; they resist any attempt to implement a final closure or fixation of social forms; they enshrine the freedom of citizens to question, debate and remake their institutions; and they enable new differences to find public space for their existence and flourishing. Of course, in the hegemonic logic of Laclau and Mouffe, pluralism, liberty, equality, openness and the ensuing decentring of the political are qualified. They should not unravel in a total dispersion and fragmentation. Their expansion hinges on the convergence of democratic fights through chains of equivalence and ‘nodal points’ of unity, which inevitably limit diversity and autonomy. But this is not a zero-sum game. The combination of the political logics of hegemony/equivalence and autonomy/difference is not, therefore, impossible. On the contrary, it is a prime object of political creativity, compromise and challenge, which should remain, in principle, ongoing, so that the constraints foisted on autonomy and difference could be always countered and undone (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 184–9). Between the logic of complete identity and that of pure difference, the experience of democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics along with the necessity of their articulation. But this articulation should be constantly re-created and renegotiated. (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 188)

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons It must be noted, finally, that the coming together of forces around ‘nodal points’ need not produce effects of domination and vertical, topdown leadership. In Laclau and Mouffe’s reimagining of hegemony in 1985, such foci of political activity and coalescence are multiple, preventing the concentration of power in one sovereign point (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 178, 188, 192). Moreover, they may consist primarily in privileged sites of political confrontation and creation, common points of reference and collective identities, rather than in parties or individual Leaders (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112–13, 139, 182–3, 188–90, 192). This profoundly anti-determinist, flexible, pluralistic and decentred version of hegemonic struggle that is aligned with autonomous social movements offers a fecund matrix of thought for organising, allying and amplifying commons-oriented activities in our times. Equipped with more specific tactics and strategies that have been devised by contemporary mobilisations themselves, it can address the needs of political composition and strategising for the commons. In their later work, Laclau and Mouffe have introduced important supplements to the ‘thin’ model of hegemonic politics they sketch out in their 1985 landmark. But they have also walked increasingly in directions that undercut the pluralist, libertarian and anti-authoritarian spirit vibrating in their earlier intervention. Hegemony is identified with the (originally repudiated) essence of the political, while centralised power, state sovereignty and exclusionary antagonisms are reinstated as an unsurpassable horizon of the political. The ‘imperialism’ of hegemony, which comes to saturate the space of the political, and the attendant tendencies had actually been inaugurated in their 1985 book. But they remained largely subdued and overshadowed by the accent on openness, diversity, autonomy and decentring. Already there, Laclau and Mouffe claimed that, since the nineteenth century, we have been witnessing ‘the process of generalization of the hegemonic form of politics’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 151), which comes ‘to constitute a fundamental tool for political analysis on the left’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 193). Autonomy itself is not a distinct political logic but an internal moment of the wider category, which is hegemony (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 141). Furthermore, an essentialist, quasi-transcendental tone, which posits necessary structures and features of political action, breaks through at certain turns of their initial argument, particularly in relation to the limits of a social formation and the way in which this formation can constitute itself. Antagonism is said to furnish the necessary condition for the demarcation and, hence, the formation of a social totality (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 143–4). If antagonism is not simply a 155

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics symbolic negation of rival values and principles, but entails an active opposition to a real antagonistic force, Laclau and Mouffe’s thesis entrenches Schmittian politics, the friend/enemy division and antagonistic conflict as intrinsic to any collective identity and community. And it does so from an untenable standpoint, which can capture eternal necessities of society and politics outside specific spatio-temporal contexts. These retrogressive steps towards closure, concentration and essentialism intensified in their later work. Hence the need for a meticulous labour of critique that will separate out what is worth taking on board for a hegemonic strategy of the commons and what should be set aside and challenged. The following section will embark on this critical enterprise, while distilling from Laclau and Mouffe’s thought a more fully-fledged logic of hegemonic politics that can lend itself to creative use by commons-based practices.

Revisiting Laclau’s hegemony after HEGEMONY AND SOCIALIST STRATEGY Laclau’s later idea of hegemony crystallises at the turn of the century. Hegemony is now ‘the very terrain in which a political relation is actually constituted’ (Laclau 2000a: 44). It designates the political process par excellence through which social relations are instituted, communities and collective identities are constructed, and social orders are established through the contingent interventions of social actors and the antagonistic collision between rival camps and possibilities (Laclau 2000a: 45–59). Accordingly, the political is reduced to hegemony in a fundamental sense. This is the ‘imperialism’ of hegemony, which bespeaks a relapse into essentialism: ‘Hegemony thus defines the essence of the political’ (Laclau 2005b: 258). Moreover, the political is endowed with ‘the status of an ontology of the social’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2001: xiv), whose formulation becomes one of the main objectives of Laclau and Mouffe’s later work (2001: x). Hegemony consists now of four core components: first, a dialectic between particularity and universality, whereby universality is partly incarnated in some particularity; second, uneven power; third, ‘empty signifiers’ through which particulars can take up the representation of universals; and four, the generalisation of relations of representation as the condition for the constitution of social orders (Laclau 2000a: 53–9; Laclau 2000b: 207; Laclau 2000c: 302–6). To these four pillars of hegemonic politics in Laclau’s later scenario we should add the populist turn: that is, his elision of hegemony and 156

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons the political with ‘populist reason’, and his stronger stress on rhetoric and psychoanalysis. The form of hegemonic actions turns on rhetoric operations: metaphor (equivalence), metonymy (combination of differences) and catachresis (figural terms that cannot be substituted by literal ones; see Laclau 2014: 53–125). The force of hegemony feeds on radical affective investments in a hegemonic discourse that promises to fill a social lack, thus becoming a source of jouissance. The libidinal identification with a hegemonic formation is crucial for cementing social ties (Laclau 2004: 299–304, 326; Laclau 2005a: 115). Whereas the populist twist has a decisive bearing on the verticalism and centralisation of Laclauian hegemony, rhetoric and libidinal investment do not affect its substance and its vicissitudes (see also Thomassen 2016; Glynos and Stavrakakis 2004). The following survey of the four axes of hegemony à la Laclau will show how the shifts towards concentration and top-down power are triggered mainly by Laclau’s take on representation, power and populist hegemony. 1. In political antagonisms, a collective will can take shape and successfully assail the ruling regime when the aims of a particular social sector, or a constellation of particular sectors, come to present themselves as the aims of the entire community or the ‘people’ itself. In this process, a particular force emerges and operates as the agent of universal needs and ends. In other words, a particularity assumes the function of universality. This lies at the root of hegemonic relations (Laclau 2000a: 54–6; Laclau 2000b: 210; Laclau 2005a: 226): there is hegemony only if the dichotomy universality/particularity is superseded; universality exists only incarnated in – and subverting – some particularity but, conversely, no particularity can become political without becoming the locus of universalizing effects. (Laclau 2000a: 56)

Key to this dialectic is the drawing of chains of equivalence among diverse demands, conflicts and groups. Their equivalence is grounded in their common opposition to the same enemy, who appears to be the obstacle that prevents society from attaining happiness and fulfilment. The contents that enter into relations of equivalence are internally split. They are particular, but they are also equivalent and universal insofar as they represent general social grievances and aspirations. The antagonistic equivalence of a plurality of groups and demands yields a pragmatic and contingent version of the ‘general will’. And a certain demand or ‘subject position’ becomes political precisely when it experiences its own particularity as a moment in a chain of equivalences that transcends the particular and generalises it: hence Laclau’s quarrel with the 157

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics category of ‘class struggle’. It is only when a social struggle exceeds its particular sector and its sectorial concerns that it can assemble a strong collective will (Laclau 2000a: 54–6; Laclau 2000b: 210). The ‘universality’ at stake is not that of an underlying essence, a common substance or an a priori principle. It is the common identity of a collective subject that tends to reach out beyond itself, through a chain of equivalences that is indefinitely open to other groups and demands. The universal – the community/the common good/the social order – thus becomes an empty place that can be partially filled in different ways by rival forces. Society and ‘the common’ lack a permanent form and a priori fixed contents. Particular groups contend with each other to shape social relations in their preferred ways, which remain transient and subject to contest (Laclau 1996: 55–60). For the dialectic of the particular and the universal to unleash counter-hegemonic effects, the presence of equivalences is not enough. A concrete fight or a specific demand could seem equivalent to others in their common stand against an enemy, but these equivalences may not actually add up to a collective actor. To rehearse Laclau’s example, under the extreme oppression of the late Tsarist regime, a workers’ strike for higher wages would be seen from the start as a wider anti-system activity that is equivalent to anti-system conflicts in other sectors. However, without the emergence of the body of a certain particularity that truly acts as the universal representative, the equivalence of meanings would not have coalesced in a collective will (Laclau 2000c: 302–3; Laclau 2000b: 207–8). This particular body is the hegemonic subject. In his later theorising, Laclau distinguishes the agent of hegemony from ‘subject positions’ lodged in a closed structure. The force that carries out a contingent articulation must be external to the elements it weaves together. This externality derives from the radical undecidability or ‘original lack’ of the structure, from the fact that social structures are not fully determined and determining as they are riven with dislocations, disorder and relative openness. Consequently, they are available to different (re)constructions through wilful acts of decision that are taken by hegemonic subjects. The hegemonic act is not the performance of a pregiven rule or rationality. Rather, it is a radical construction. The structure may condition actions by offering certain possibilities. And some discursive forms need to be already at hand and ‘credible’ – that is, in accord with the basic principles that organise a certain society – in order to resonate more broadly, enabling actors to garner collective power and introduce new social orders. But the structure does not fully preordain actions. It allows for a choice among different alternatives, and hegemonic agents communicate new discourses. The 158

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons more dislocated a social structure is, the wider the scope it affords for free decision and new creation (Laclau 1990: 29–30, 65–6; Laclau 1996: 92–3; Howarth 2000: 109–11, 121–2). 2. The articulation of a ‘general will’ is thus premised, for Laclau, on the presence of a particular group that stands for the general representative. This actor must be in a better position to do so than other groups ‘so that power is unevenly distributed between various organisms and social sectors’ (Laclau 2000b: 208). The asymmetrical distribution of power between the sectors that make up the ‘people’ against the establishment, and the accumulation of power at the top, are essential premises of a counter-hegemonic agency in Laclau’s terms. This means, in effect, that a particular political actor must be able to soar above the other allied forces and to exercise over them vertical, top-down leadership. Laclau has nicely illustrated this vertical scheme of leadership, which he inscribes into the core of hegemonic politics. He has drawn a pyramidal figure that places the ‘general equivalent’ alone at the helm, over all different parties of the counter-hegemonic operation (Laclau 2000c: 303). The other facet of power that is equally a necessary condition of emancipation is the ‘radical exclusion’ of the antagonistic force, of a social sector that is perceived as the cause of general oppression or a general crime against society (Laclau 2000b: 206–7; Laclau 2000c: 302–3; Laclau 2000a: 54–5). The antagonistic pole must be expelled and eventually overwhelmed if a new hegemonic order is to be installed. 3. A hinge of the hegemonic intervention that enables particular agencies to take on the function of universality is the circulation of tendentially ‘empty signifiers’ (Laclau 2000a: 57; Laclau 1996: 36–46). This is ‘the very condition of politics and political change’ (Laclau 2000b: 185). Empty signifiers are the earlier ‘nodal points’ of a hegemonic discourse (Laclau 1996: 43). They are names and symbols – such as ‘justice’, ‘solidarity’, ‘change’, ‘democracy’, ‘peace’ and so on – that are not necessarily attached to precise contents and specific social actors. A hegemonic actor who speaks in their name can thus appear to transcend her particular position and can win over broader swathes of the population. Several others may come to identify with the ‘empty signifier’ of a common struggle by projecting their own particular meanings – demands, grievances and aspirations – on to it. Hence, to rise to the top of a collective force, the name or the aims of a particular member of the equivalential chain must be partly emptied of their distinct content so as to become a wider symbol that represents and holds together the entire community of the different parties, pursuits and movements (Laclau 2005a: 93, 96; Laclau 2000b: 210–11). 159

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics Empty signifiers name just the positive reverse of a situation of social disorder, crisis, oppression or discontent. ‘Justice’, for instance, can be brandished against a grave unfairness that afflicts various social strata. Empty signifiers earmark a lack or the ‘absent fullness’ of society. Their contingent links with more specific contents are the outcome of a hegemonic contest (Laclau 2000b: 184; Laclau 1996: 44–5). The empty signifier can aggregate differences in an equivalential chain precisely by referring to the ‘absent fullness’ of community: that is, to what is lacking for the various parties that press particular demands, thus providing the ‘general equivalent’ (Laclau 2000c: 305; Laclau 2000a: 96). The empty signifier is the anchoring point of collective wills in the social imaginary, and it is the main factor that, through its emptiness, can universalise a political discourse by making it the surface for the inscription of an expanding plurality of social demands. Front Populaire, for instance, in the France of 1930s, designated a particular alliance of forces but it was also ‘empty’ enough – that is, detached from its specific contents – to be able to associate itself with a wider variety of social aspirations (Laclau 2000b: 210). 4. A direct corollary of all the above is that representation sits at the centre of hegemonic action: ‘the terrain in which [hegemony] expands is that of the generalization of the relations of representation as the condition of the constitution of a social order’ (Laclau 2000a: 57). In the most elementary sense, relations of representation play out at the heart of the process whereby a partial social force – for example, a social-democratic party – comes to speak and to act in the name of a totality, the nation or society at large, posing as the agent of general interests beyond its particular identity (Laclau 2000b: 207–12; Laclau 1996: 43, 54–7; Laclau 2005a: 226): ‘If a particular sector has to incarnate the universal aims of the community, representation is essentially inherent to the hegemonic link (Laclau 2000b: 211). Laclau, however, holds representation to be ‘essential’ in a more specific sense, that of political actors representing their constituencies in public institutions of power. Representatives of this kind are, arguably, required in order to generalise the partial preferences of their particular constituency and to harmonise them with the interests of other constituencies and society at large, through political interaction with other representatives. In the act of doing so, political representatives redefine the collective will and the identity of those they appear to represent (Laclau 2000b: 212; Laclau 1996: 98–100): representation is always a double movement from represented to representative and from representative to represented. . . . The task of a representative in Parliament, for instance, does not simply consist in transmitting the wishes

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons of those he represents; he will have to elaborate a new discourse which convinces the other Members. . . . In this way he inscribes those interests within a more universal discourse. (Laclau 2000b: 212)

In short, according to Laclau, not simply ‘symbolic’ or discursive representation by a collective actor who speaks in the name of a universal cause, but effective or sovereign representation is a necessary prop of hegemonic politics. In the sovereign version of representation, political actors make decisions for those they claim to represent, and they mould the will and the identity of the represented as leaders and decision-makers. For Laclau, this modality of authoritative ‘representation’ becomes all the more indispensable under conditions of globalisation and increasing social fragmentation. Now, the representative constitutes collective identities and social order in a primary sense. First, s/he acts as a catalyst that bands together a collective will out of dispersed differences and divided or marginalised social sectors. The representative supplies a point of identification for the disconnected differences, and s/he effectively constructs their collective will and identity through the very process of representation. Second, in contemporary societies, there is a proliferation of points from which decisions are taken on the regional, national and supranational level (Laclau 2005a: 158–61; Laclau 2000b: 212; Laclau 1996: 98–100). Consequently, the ‘role of the “representatives” will be ever more central and constitutive’ (Laclau 1996: 100). Taken to its extremes, the reliance of heterogeneous differences on a general representative leads to identification with the ultimate form of singularity: ‘the name of the leader’ as the ground of unity. The ‘symbolic unification of the group around an individuality – and here I agree with Freud – is inherent to the formation of a “people”’ (Laclau 2005a: 100). No doubt, Laclau drives a wedge between this symbolic unification around an individual leader and ‘actual ruling’. The case of Nelson Mandela illustrates how the symbolic role of the leader can still make room for a considerable degree of pluralism within his movement (Laclau 2005a: 100). But is this distinction really tenable from the standpoint of both discourse theory and political practice? Is the symbol devoid of material efficacy? Does the symbolic elevation of the leader not authorise him to exercise ‘actual ruling’ over his followers, guiding them in a singular direction of his own choosing? How can the identification of the ‘masses’ with the individual person of the leader, and the ensuing adoration of the leader and dependence on him, empower people to act autonomously so as to chart their own course of political action from the bottom up? The vertical and homogenising drives of Laclau’s later model of hegemony have been exacerbated by the ‘populist turn’ of his thought from 2005 onwards (see Laclau 2005a). This signals an increasing 161

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics tendency to conflate the political not only with hegemony but with ‘populist reason’ itself: if heterogeneity is constitutive of the social bond, we are always going to have a political dimension by which society – and the ‘people’ – are constantly reinvented. Does this mean that the political becomes synonymous with populism? Yes, in the sense in which I conceive this last notion. . . . There is no political intervention which is not populistic in some sense. (Laclau 2005a: 154; see also 18, 67, 225, 229–32; Laclau 2005b: 259–60)

Hence, the logic of populist politics marks the logic of politics tout court. And, for Laclau, populist reason is fundamentally a political discourse that draws battle lines dividing the social into two camps: the ‘people’, a partiality that represents itself as the totality, and the ‘establishment’ or the elites (Laclau 2005a: 18, 81, 154). Populist reason primarily spawns a logic of the ‘simplification of the political space (all singularities tend to group themselves around one or the poles of the dichotomy)’ (Laclau 2005a: 18). The more ‘rupturist’ and anti-establishment a certain politics is, the more populist it will be, extending to the maximum the chain of equivalences that split society into two and assemble a ‘global’ political subject out of a multiplicity of social demands. The central historical actor will always be a people of sorts (Laclau 2005a: 81, 117, 154, 225, 239). Populist politics thus homogenises the socio-political space by splitting it into a global popular camp, on the one side, and the evil establishment, the elites and so on, on the other. The exaltation of ‘popular struggles’ stands in marked contrast to the primacy that Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 139) accorded earlier to the decentred and pluralist ‘democratic struggles’, which feature a diversity of political spaces and movements. In 2005, Laclau contended that the historical conditions of ‘globalised capitalism’ have multiplied social dislocations, proliferated new antagonisms and enhanced heterogeneity. Therefore, the definition of the enemy and of specific political objectives has become much more vexing. Under such circumstances, the major political challenge is to set up equivalences between a multiplicity of heterogeneous demands against a hard-to-determine global target. As a result, populist reason and popular identities are now on the rise and in high demand (Laclau 2005a: 229–31). Although the details of Laclau’s historical diagnosis need to be filled out to sustain his argument, a compelling case has been made, indeed, for the diffusion of a ‘populist Zeitgeist’ at the turn of the century (see Mudde 2004; Kaltwasser and Taggert 2017). But the issue remains. Populist politics often cuts against pluralism, openness and horizontal 162

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons democracy. This is definitely the case in Laclau’s own conception of populism, which simplifies the political space by means of a global dichotomy, while it centres collective agency around a single leader. Can we think and practise popular antagonistic politics in ways that also foment pluralism, collective leadership, grassroots autonomy and openness to difference? If we can, these ways are not to be found in the populist reason of the later Laclau. In a general sense, all the four keystones of Laclau’s later edifice of hegemony are, indeed, integral to a mass-based political front that could overhaul the dominant state of politics and the market, and could lay the foundations for a commons-centric society. The relative generalisation of a partial force through ‘chains of equivalence’ is inherent in the making of a collective will that can gather massive support. ‘Empty signifiers’ contribute to the extension of equivalences around a collective actor. A certain concentration of forces that can topple the status quo will be also needed, unless one expects privileged minorities to give up their privileges and positions of power of their own free will. Finally, an expansive, majoritarian counter-power makes typically representative claims, through which a particular force speaks in the name of general interests and identities. In Chapters 1 and 3 we have already seen how all four strands of hegemonic politics have indeed framed the antagonistic politics of recent collective action that aspired to become majoritarian and to pull apart the regime of neoliberal capital. In a standard ‘hegemonic’ fashion, Occupy drew a chain of equivalence among different demands, resistances and activities. The equivalential chains were woven around signifiers –‘Occupy’ and ‘99 per cent’ – that were partly divested of their particular meaning to embrace a diversity of demands, pursuits and significations, alluding to an ‘absent fullness’ of economic justice and democracy. Through them, a particularity – the activists who actually participated in the various Occupy actions – claimed to represent a near-universality, the 99 per cent of the people, in the context of an antagonism with a common rival, the 1 per cent. Finally, although occupations were loosely linked in an open network that spread through ‘memes’, a degree of uneven concentration of power could be detected in the central hubs that played a leading part in the movement (Zuccotti Park in the USA, Puerta de Sol in Spain, and Syntagma Square and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece, and so on), while various ‘working groups’ and committed activists often exerted greater influence (Dean 2012; Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012; Smucker 2017). On the contrary, five layers of Laclau’s hegemony that he appended to the main dimensions – vertical distribution of power within the hegemonic alliance, individual leadership, populist homogenisation, 163

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics sovereign representation and antagonistic formation of the collective – should be contested by alternative forms of hegemonic agency that aim at a fuller democracy. The gathering of forces is intrinsic to any collective bloc of counter-hegemony. But the distribution of power among its constituents could tend towards horizontality rather than towards vertical direction from one particular group or person at the helm. In one of its primary meanings, leadership is synonymous with political initiative that opens the way. But such leadership could be collective and distributed rather than concentrated in the hands of a single individual or even a set of individuals. ‘Nodal points’ or centres of unity and coordination could be discursive and collective rather than identified with particular groups or individuals. A measure of unity is called for in any powerful collective mobilisation, but this could tap into diversity and pluralism both inside and outside itself, unsettling any simple dichotomisation. Furthermore, decision-making and the construction of collective wills could also be an open, participatory and collective praxis rather than an affair of individual representatives. Finally, political frontiers and the targeting of an enemy are part and parcel of any transformative politics that requires the removal of the dominant regime. But it does not follow that antagonism must be the central category in the formation of a collective identity and action, relegating consensus and inclusion to a secondary possibility and foreclosing ‘a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument’, as Laclau and Mouffe postulate (see Laclau and Mouffe 2000: xvii; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 143–4). Both dissensus and dialogical consensus could be entertained and prioritised on different levels of political initiative. Again, the Occupy movement, the Spanish Indignados and the Greek Aganaktismenoi in 2011 can shine light on these alternative possibilities in action. The foregoing mobilisations rose up against the global rule of neoliberal capital and non-responsive political elites. They took issue with formal representation, party partisanship, ideological closures, centralised leadership, and the homogeneous unity of the people or the masses. But they also enacted collective practices of egalitarian, consensual deliberation that were available to all, allowing for extensive diversity and knitting networks that enable collaboration without suppressing the freedom of singularities (Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011; Hardt and Negri 2012; Castañeda 2012; Dhaliwal 2012; Sitrin and Azzelini 2014). The next chapter will expand on the specific ways in which such collective politics can transfigure Laclau’s hegemony by disrupting the vertical and centralising inclinations of Laclau’s later theory while holding on to core components of hegemonic politics – the dialectic of universality/particularity through equivalences, the accumulation of 164

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons forces, empty signifiers, collective representation – which are vital for an effective counter-power of the commons. A recalibration of hegemony along these lines departs in a further way from Laclau’s later thinking, which is absorbed in social–political ontology and the formalism of ‘empty signifiers’ to the detriment of creative praxis and ‘ontical’ inquiry into specific political practices, pursuits and institutions (see Howarth 2000: 117). Laclau’s fixation on collective identities has steered attention away from how people act, from the praxis dimension of (counter-)hegemonic politics, which involves grassroots self-organisation, creative experiment with different modes of action in concert, institutional innovation, and plural democratic enactments that assign a concrete form to collective subjectivities (Frank 2017: 629–43). As Lois McNay (2014) has argued, it is this single focus on ‘general ontology’ that results in a formulaic, restrictive and ‘weightless’ notion of the political. Essentialism, the attribution of a universal and abiding essence to the political (in terms of hegemony, coercion and antagonism), is a corollary of this attachment to ontology at the expense of contextual detail and creative praxis. Ontological formalism and abstraction have only been aggravated by the primacy that Laclau has imputed to ‘empty signifiers’ rather than to positive, utopian construction, which was deemed intrinsic to hegemonic interventions back in 1985 (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 190). Hence, in addition to removing the five biases of Laclauian hegemony, an alternative hegemonic politics should also eliminate the essentialist twist, as we have argued at the very beginning, by regarding hegemony as just one possible political logic among others. This alternative politics should, moreover, offset the ontological focus by interacting more closely with ongoing political praxis. It is the immersion of political reflection into activity and experiment on the ground that can inspire and regenerate political thought, enabling it to visualise different practices of political representation and leadership, among others, and preventing its entrapment in fixed frames of the political.

Antagonism, agonism and hegemony in Mouffe’s post-1985 thought: deflating antagonism The ontological tenor has, arguably, been even more vocal in Mouffe’s work after Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In her ontological pronouncements, Mouffe has encumbered hegemonic politics with even more disputable biases – the belief in the state, sovereignty, coercion and violence as inevitable aspects of the political and hegemony. On the other hand, the distinctly ‘agonistic’ spin that she has put on radical 165

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics democracy and hegemonic contest can further equal freedom, openness and pluralism. Agonism is thus worth entertaining in another hegemony of the commons. In the following, the implications of the political ontology of antagonism will be drawn out more fully, and the foundations of this ontology will be deconstructed to enable an agonistic take on the political that is more open, pluralist and congenial to the commons. Mouffe (2005: 8–9) posits a divide between an ‘ontic’ level of politics, which bears on the ‘manifold practices of conventional politics’ through which an order is maintained amidst conflict, and an ontological dimension of the political, which concerns the way in which society is instituted. More specifically, ‘by “the political” I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies’ (Mouffe 2005: 9). Next to antagonism, ‘hegemony is the key notion for addressing the question of the political’ (Mouffe 2005: 17). She grants that there is dissent over the meaning of the ‘political’, noting that certain thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, grasp the political as a space of freedom and collective deliberation. But she resolves to discard these views by endorsing another perspective, which sees the political as a space ‘of power, conflict and antagonism’ (Mouffe 2005: 9; see also Mouffe 2000: 101). Mouffe’s post-Marxist ontology explicitly forswears a Marxist idea that fantasised ‘a reconciled society beyond law, power and sovereignty . . . without the need of law or the State’ in a future communist utopia (Mouffe 2013: 78; see also 83–4). In her ‘radical’ hegemonic project, ‘What is at stake is not any “withering away” of the state’ (Mouffe 2013: 75). The moment of decision, which demarcates the field of the political, entails ‘an element of force and violence that can never be eliminated’ (Mouffe 2000: 130; see also 132). As a result, Mouffe’s master thesis is that ‘a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument where a non-coercive consensus could be attained . . . is a conceptual impossibility’ (Mouffe 2000: 33; emphasis in the original). Through an ontological stipulation, which claims to apprehend its ‘nature’, Mouffe elides the political with antagonism, sovereignty, the state and coercive power, ruling out in principle a politics of consensus and deliberation (Mouffe 2000: 17–34, 45–9, 83–94; Mouffe 2013: 83–4). Mouffe’s lop-sided definition of the political thus narrows unwarrantedly the field of political possibilities. She closes off a politics of friendship, free collective agreement and collaboration, a politics beyond asymmetrical power relations, the state and sovereignty. Even in her ‘ideal’ agonistic politics, in which adversaries are not enemies ready to exterminate each other but legitimate rivals who share an ethico-political allegiance to democratic principles, disagreement cannot be resolved through deliberation 166

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons and rational discussion. It is settled through a power struggle in which one political party prevails over its opponents and wields a hegemony that is always partly coercive (Mouffe 2000: 33, 102; Mouffe 2005: 21). Both her exclusionary idea of the political and the ensuing limits that she foists on political possibilities are untenable. First, her arguments cannot carry the weight she places on them. More broadly, her ontological and epistemological presumptions, turning on the contingency of being and the lack of objective certainty, do not license the essentialism and the dogmatism that vitiate Mouffe’s political thought. One can trace in her thought two intertwined lines of reasoning that try to lend plausibility to her assertion that ‘a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument where a non-coercive consensus could be attained . . . is a conceptual impossibility’ (Mouffe 2000: 33). The first, which draws explicitly on Carl Schmitt, is that the we/they distinction informs all political identities. Only such a division, which separates ‘us’ from ‘them’ and thereby demarcates a community, can give rise to a specific ‘people’, a democratic political community (Mouffe 2000: 43). If all political identities imply a we/they division, they can always become the site of an antagonism. This means that the possibility of emergence of antagonism can never be eliminated. It is therefore an illusion to believe in the advent of a society from which antagonism would have been eradicated . . . the political belongs to our ontological condition. (Mouffe 2005: 16)

The interplay of exclusion/inclusion, which delimits the ‘people’, blocks out the politics of free collective deliberation and agreement. ‘Indeed, the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all on matters of common concern goes again the democratic requisite of drawing a frontier between “us” and “them”’ (Mouffe 2000: 48). Hence, any consensus always rests on exclusions, and it expresses a particular type of hegemony, a specific configuration of power relations, which decide who is expelled from the political community and who belongs to it (Mouffe 2000: 49). Mouffe has cast the same argument in a post-structuralist vocabulary. Any collective identity is predicated on the ongoing presence of a difference, which it both excludes as the other, and includes as the outside that defines the identity, the ‘constitutive outside’. Consequently, alterity cannot be entirely diluted into oneness and harmony (Mouffe 2000: 13, 21, 33; Mouffe 2005: 14–15). And power governs the relation between us/the inside and them/the outside, thereby underlying both the relations and the identity of a social formation (Mouffe 2000: 21). Hence, any political order is based on a certain pattern of power relations; this is the crux of hegemony (Mouffe 2000: 99). 167

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics Mouffe’s second strand of reasoning revolves around political decision. Taking her cues from Wittgenstein, Cavell and Derrida, she submits that bringing a deliberation to a close is always the effect of a decision that cannot masquerade as a mere application of procedures. Political decisions erase certain voices or alternatives, thus annulling the possibility of ‘a complete reabsorption of alterity into ‘oneness and harmony’ (Mouffe 2000: 76). Hence, the conversation for justice and democracy should remain open forever. We should give up any reference to a consensus that should not be shaken up because it would instantiate justice and rationality (Mouffe 2000: 76–7). By insisting that every deliberation that reaches a decision suppresses other possibilities, agonistic pluralism ‘reveals the impossibility of establishing a consensus without exclusion’ (Mouffe 2000: 105). Neither line of thought could reasonably warrant Mouffe’s monistic rendition of the political as ontologically antagonism, coercion, force, exclusion and power relations. Most plainly, the claim that antagonism is an ever-present possibility implies that the realisation of antagonism is not a necessity in every instance, and non-antagonistic political relations between we and they are also possible. The always present potentiality of antagonism indeed disallows ‘a final resolution of conflicts’ (Mouffe 2000: 32, emphasis added; see also 93, 102). But it does not preclude the likelihood of non-exclusive rational deliberation and a non-coercive consensus in general, as Mouffe (2000: 33) has it. Both free agreement and irresolvable difference remain real possibilities at particular moments. Second, all decision-making among alternative options will force one or more options out of existence, for the time being at least. But from this trite truth it does not invariably follow that any collective agreement and decision will coerce some members of a political entity. The effect of coercion is conditional on whether the dismissed alternatives were actually favoured by some people, whose choices lost out in the contest as a result of power relations. If an entire assembly freely agrees to opt for one alternative rather than another, an exclusion ensues, but who is coerced and how? Likewise, even if we grant that the we/ they difference is indispensable for the being of political identities and communities, this does not mean that the proscription or coercion of some other agents is necessary, as well. ‘They’, against which we define ourselves, need not be another political grouping that is repressed or banned from our political community. ‘They’ can be primarily a rival political view that we oppose. In effect, through such opposition, we may even strive for maximum inclusion and equal freedom in the case when ‘they’ are all kinds of authoritarian, inegalitarian and discriminatory political attitudes. 168

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons Mouffe’s positions on the political can be further called into question from within the core of her ontological and epistemological premises, as well as from within her very politics of agonistic pluralism. First and foremost, she decidedly ascribes a fixed and singular essence to the political: the dimension of antagonism, power, coercion, exclusion and hegemony (Mouffe 2005: 9, 17; Mouffe 2000: 101). But such a posture runs counter to her professed anti-essentialism (Mouffe 2000: 17, 20; Mouffe 2013: 4). It cannot be upheld within her own matrix of thought, which presumes that any social order of things is contingent, ‘the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. . . . Things could always be otherwise’ (Mouffe 2005: 18; see also Mouffe 2013: 2). Therefore, it is blatantly inconsistent to stipulate that politics is always antagonism and hegemony in a primary, foundational sense (Mouffe 2000: 33; for a broader critique of essentialism in post-structuralist thought, see Robinson 2005). Similarly, there is no place for universal pronouncements about what is politically possible in an epistemology that is alive to ‘the lack of a final ground’, the ‘dimension of undecidability which pervades any order’ (Mouffe 2005: 17), and holds that ‘democracy does not require a theory of truth and notions like unconditionality and universal validity’ (Mouffe 2000: 65; see also 60–79). In the final analysis, if ‘bringing a conversation to a close is always a personal choice, a decision’ (Mouffe 2000: 75), which is not grounded in objective reason (Mouffe 2000: 75–7), then other parties in the debate over the political are simply entitled to decide otherwise, in favour of a different understanding. Furthermore, by collapsing ‘the political’ into antagonism, violence and hegemony, Mouffe seems to yearn for a depoliticisation of thought on the political, in her own terms of agonistic politics. Rather than keep up a democratic agon over the meaning of the political among different interpretations, which would address each other as legitimate opponents, she strikes them out of existence by decisional fiat, although she registers their presence and their democratic allegiances (see Mouffe 2005: 9; Mouffe 2000: 45–51, 85–95; Mouffe 2013: 109–15). Mouffe’s propositions about the political are not politically moot. Their critical revisiting is not an idle pursuit, unless one holds that a wall separates contemporary political theory from everyday political thought and action, and that political theory has hardly any bearing on present-day political thought and practice. This is not the viewpoint of the present book, which situates political theory in circuits of ongoing interaction with political thinking and activity ‘on the ground’. By narrowing political controversy around the meaning and the manifestations of the political itself, then, Mouffe’s political theory 169

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics skews practical priorities in a particular direction. Among others, it seeks to bar debate over the value of consensus-seeking and the politics of sovereign decision and the state. No doubt, when consensus becomes the be-all and end-all of collective deliberation, it will stifle dissent. Besides, the appearances of social consensus could mask systematic violences and injustices that currently go uncontested (Connolly 1995: 102). On the other hand, a manifest absence of consent often signals the presence of dramatic injustices and inequalities. It is likely to indicate that governments or elites run brutally roughshod over the will of citizens or that assertive majorities trample minority rights. Furthermore, consensus-oriented procedures can tend to equal freedom insofar as they seek to fashion arrangements that are sufficiently attuned to the preferences of all (see, among others, the essays by Habermas, Cohen and Rawls in Bohman and Rehg 1997). Therefore, the political choice between consent or dissent, inclusion or opposition, should remain available to political judgement and decision according to varying circumstances. This choice can become subtly refined and complicated when, for example, radical democratic assemblies combine a politics of dissensus outwards with a politics of consensus and maximum inclusion inwards. The Indignados and Occupy, among others, stood up against neoliberal hegemony while, at the same time, in the popular assemblies they convened, they conducted forms of egalitarian and consensual deliberation that was accessible to all, welcoming diversity and permitting inclusive collaboration (see Tejerina and Perugorría 2012; Lorey 2014; Graeber 2014). By postulating the primacy of conflict and the impossibility of a noncoercive consensus, Mouffe’s reductive sense of the political pre-empts all such political judgements and the plural games that can be played with consent and dissent. Her conceptual radars are thus bound to miss or misjudge heterodox forms of politics, such as those practised by open, plural and egalitarian assemblies. To illustrate, Mouffe has voiced her serious qualms about the Indignados and Occupiers’ ‘horizontal’ politics for the common, which was bent on non-hierarchical, consensus-based participatory democracy. She comments that these mobilisations lacked a real political strategy and that the most ‘important development’ occurred after them, when trade unions and leftist parties took over. She asserts that horizontalist practices have a limited capacity for promoting a more equal society, while their insistence on reaching a consensus among heterogeneous views has resulted in the absence of systematic focus (Mouffe 2013: 110–19). The valorisation of diversity, consensus, non-hierarchical relations and anti-statism bespeaks, moreover, 170

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons a convergence with the liberal mindset, which prevents them from ‘apprehending the nature of the political’ (Mouffe 2013: 117). The denunciation of representative democracy by sectors of the Occupiers and the Indignados is said to express ‘a yearning for a society reconciled with itself through direct democracy’ (Mouffe 2013: 111). All these dismissive judgements are made in an offhand manner, without diving into the alternative practices themselves and the political arguments of their advocates. Horizontalist politics, which do battle with hierarchies of power and sovereign representation, are faulted for being incapable of advancing a more equal society in the present, as if the vertical politics of hierarchical parties and organisations around the state had achieved this feat. Mouffe does not pause to consider whether the ‘leftist parties’, who took up where the movements left off, actually had a coherent political strategy that enabled them to fulfil their radical promises. The fiasco of the Greek SYRIZA in government from 2015 onwards – a party that Mouffe (2013: 111) has evoked approvingly speaks volumes for the contrary, and for the extent to which Mouffe’s political judgements are a priori, predicated on the presumed ‘nature of the political’. Her contention that those who spurn liberal representative democracy crave ipso facto for a society reconciled with itself also intimates the absence of political imagination in Mouffe’s theory of politics, which remains captive to the dogmas of the past and dismisses without further ado what does not fit into its mould.

Mouffe’s hegemonic interventions and agonism for the commons However, from the vantage point of another, horizontalist politics for the commons, Mouffe’s post-1985 thinking holds in store valuable insights for a counter-hegemonic offensive. The first ones are essentially reiterations of Gramscian thought in the present. Taking a stand on the debate over the appropriate practices of radical politics against neoliberalism, she affirms that a hegemonic strategy also calls for, first, an engagement with institutions, including state institutions, and an assault on the various nodal points that secure the hegemony of postFordist capitalism; second, a moment of re-articulation that should join the dis-articulation of the current regime of power; and third, hegemonic confrontation in a multiplicity of fields, not only in the political system, but also in ‘civil society’ where the ‘common sense’ takes shape (Mouffe 2013: 71–5, 89). Wrestling with established institutions and centres of power, rather than withdrawing from them, is key to a broader transformative process 171

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics in societies in which state and market institutions are powerful enough to block any substantial change and they control a critical mass of social resources and infrastructure, from education to health, digital networks, water and energy supplies. In all these fields, it is almost impossible to generate alternative resources and institutions, and it is nonsensical or even catastrophic to leave the wealth of available infrastructure and resources in the hands of the state and the capitalist market. In Mouffe’s and Mark Fisher’s words, in order to challenge neo-liberalism, it is necessary to engage with its key institutions. It is not enough to organise new forms of existence of the common, outside the dominant capitalist structures, as if the latter would progressively ebb away without any confrontation. (Mouffe 2013: 115–16) Occupy . . . wants to anticipate future forms of (post-hierarchical) political organisation. The question, then, is how – in the lack of the organs of the State of the mass media – are these forms of political organisation to propagate? (Fisher quoted in Mouffe 2013: 116)

Of course, ‘engagement’ with dominant institutions could take on several forms, geared to different contexts and political judgements. From the perspective of the commons, such involvement should strive to draw sustenance from collective power from below and to avoid reasserting the bureaucratic, top-down rule of the state or the profiteering logic of the market. The ‘municipalist’ movement in contemporary Spain and Italy navigates its course along such lines, even if this remains a field of exploration, creativity, trial and error. If ‘dis-articulation’ is the crisis of a hegemonic order, re-articulation means banding together a new common will out of diverse demands and grievances in order to erect a new social order. Without a new socio-political creation, structural dislocations themselves could only wreak havoc and pave the way for reactionary forces to fill the vacuum. Moreover, the collapse of the status quo does not suffice to summon into being a new society of freedom and equality. Diverse struggles and aspirations may clash with each other, causing a mutual subversion. Moreover, the ‘control of the soul’, its habits of thought and its desires, underpins any enduring system of power. Without a counter-hegemonic battle to redirect desire and to cultivate new modes of thinking, it is hardly possible to detach a critical mass of people from the dominant regime and to commit it to a different socio-cultural order. That is why it is crucial to create new types of social bonding and to educate a new ‘common sense’ in quotidian life and interactions. Hence the central function of re-articulation, which consists in a protracted process to craft 172

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons new social relations, practices and identities (Mouffe 2013: 74). Cultural and artistic practices, but also the various commoning activities in digital products, infrastructures, care and reproduction, provide the terrain for these operations of subjective transformation, which are arduous but decisive. Contemporary commoning initiatives fulfil this political role in action. But an enhanced awareness of how valuable these transformative processes are can reinforce them and push thus forward the counterhegemonic struggle for the commons. Finally, the agonistic twist that Mouffe has put on the politics of hegemony is her distinct contribution to renewing hegemony (see mainly Mouffe 2000, 2005, 2013). This agonism can further the values of the commons, including pluralism, openness and equal freedom, if suitably readjusted to allow for combinations with other, less contentious, ethics and politics. After 1985, Chantal Mouffe set out to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political in what is, perhaps, the most notable endeavour to re-elaborate the friend/enemy politics for democratic purposes. The cardinal insight of Schmitt, which supplies Mouffe’s starting point, is that political identities consist in a type of we/they relation. To construct an identity, we must differentiate it from others. The formation of a political actor, of a certain ‘we’, can take place by marking it out from a ‘they’ (Mouffe 2005: 15). While she is in accord with Schmitt so far, she departs from him by claiming that the we/they relation need not be an antagonistic fight of friend/enemy. It can always become antagonistic under certain conditions, when the identity of the other is perceived as threatening my collective identity and existence. According to Mouffe (2005: 19), we cannot fully transcend the we/they relation, but we can, indeed, deal with it in ways that ‘domesticate’ or civilise antagonism, fending off lethal enmity. Democratic agonism in Mouffe’s style enshrines the political contest of opposing hegemonic projects that vest freedom and equality with different meanings. A democratic political association rests on a common symbolic space, the principles of freedom and equality, which are shared among political adversaries. A consensus on these values (among democrats) goes along with a perpetual confrontation among their divergent translations into liberal, social-democratic, radical democratic and other programmes (Mouffe 2000: 101–4; Mouffe 2005: 20–1). Such conflicts do not admit of a rational solution and reconciliation. Yet political rivals see their democratic opponents not as enemies to be destroyed but as legitimate political associates who are entitled to vie for hegemony: that is, for the (conditional and precarious) decontestation of democratic values through specific institutions and policies. 173

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics Agonistic contention can bolster a democracy of the commons along several lines. To begin with, it can help to defuse violent antagonism through institutions and practices in which potential conflicts can manifest themselves in agonistic ways. When legitimate political channels give vent to dissent, violent clashes are less likely to erupt and political conflicts can be regulated through democratic procedures (Mouffe 2005: 20–1). Most crucially, the agonistic politics of strife through commonality can give fuller scope to equal liberties in circumstances of conflictual multiplicity. Rival political projects cannot come into effect at the same time. But, in an agonistic democracy, they can enjoy the freedom to champion their cause, to voice their disagreement and to carry on with their struggle. This disrupts and pluralises hegemony as the predominance of a single set of institutions, policies, values and relations. If, among available alternatives, only one cluster of institutions and interpretations of equal freedom can be realised in a certain sociotemporal context, placing their hegemony under an agonistic constitution can considerably qualify and undercut their exclusive domination. The hegemonic parties will be bound to leave space for contending alternatives, which can continuously challenge the hegemonic options and replace them over time, following the political processes of hegemonic contest. Hence, agonistic plurality comes to disturb radically any hegemonic drive towards monism, the imposition of homogeneity, the repression of adversarial differences, and exclusive rule. This is a long way from populist simplifications. Mouffe’s agonistic democracy would restrain or ban some undemocratic, inegalitarian and non-pluralist political actors. But it would avow its exclusions and would deal with its bounds in political terms, sanctioning a regular review of its repressions and proscriptions. Agonistic democracy refuses to ‘neutralise’ its exclusions and to insulate its arrangements from critique by deducing them from a higher authority of reason, morality and so on (Mouffe 2000: 22, 32–4, 47–9, 77, 104–5; Mouffe 2005: 17–18, 21, 121–2). Agonistic democracy thus intensifies the contestability of its institutions by attaching to them a stigma of ineliminable imperfection in realising equal liberties, by acknowledging that they are grounded in political decisions, and by opening up relations of power to regular, legitimate contest and transformation. The agonistic perspective calls attention to the relations of power, inequality and exclusion that underlie any regime. Instead of trying to erase the traces of power and exclusion under pretences of neutrality and objectivity, agonistic democracy brings them to the fore and institutes their ongoing contestation (Mouffe 2000: 20, 32–4). 174

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons Hence, the virtues of agonistic politics stem from the ways in which its institutions, ethics and practices can facilitate the interrogation and the profound change of prevailing socio-political arrangements. This ampler political possibility to question and alter dominant formations shores up the political freedom of citizens to act with regard to their social relations and structures. By the same token, agonistic democracy enhances equal freedom in two ways: by making it easier to protest and transform relations of inequality, oppression and injustice; and by making more room for new identities and political horizons to break forth and to vindicate their rights. Accordingly, democratic agonism in Mouffe’s guise can promote real equality and freedom, and it can fuel a perpetual pluralisation, an extension of the range of differences that effectively enjoy equal liberties. All these qualities of political agonism commend it for another democracy of the commons, which would be egalitarian, pluralist, horizontal and open. Most importantly, instilling agonistic politics in the commons can curb tendencies towards exclusionary unity and domination that feed on a substantive idea of the common. The latter perceives the common good and its collective management in terms that identify the common with a unique content and institutional embodiment. By contrast, an agonistic outlook on the common grasps it as a space of both collaboration and contention among the members of a community, who work in concert but may dissent over the appropriate contents, uses, management and development of the common good. More broadly, in an agonistic view, the alternative politics of the common(s) champions the common use of social goods on a basis of collective self-management, equality, diversity, openness and ecological sustainability. But the precise meanings and institutions of such politics, as well as the ways in which it can scale up under present circumstances, the appropriate strategies towards the state and the capitalist market and so on, should delineate a common horizon that encompasses contending interpretations and enactments. The common endeavour should persist amidst difference and rivalry, tapping into an agonistic sense of the common as a space of collaboration through conflict and despite it. The value of such an agonistic politics of the commons is not only that it would help to counter domination in the communities of the commons. It is also that it can serve to hold in check ruinous conflict and fragmentation in militant collectives that strain after the growth of the commons, but they vie for the prevalence of a single, ‘true’ idea of the common or the single, ‘best’ road to commoning. The main political challenge for a large-scale alliance for the commons is precisely to persevere in the common fight and creation despite internal discord, 175

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics by acknowledging the validity of dissent and by enabling an ongoing debate over strategies. To this end, internal division and strife should also be seen as a common good – the common good of plurality, freedom and enduring contestation that can help collective action to make inroads and to spark new inventions. The common should be envisaged, then, as a common horizon of principles, practices and aspirations that are, at the same time, a common field of diversity and internal struggle for the common good. Agonistic commons can thus uphold freedom, conflict and plurality within a community of commons, containing division and fragmentation among divergent approaches and politics. This possibility relies on a different figure of the community and the collective identity, which is rooted primarily not in a thick identity of ideas and positions but in common political practice, the participation in lasting debates and negotiations over the common, through which we acquire our common identities and our sense of co-belonging to a political alliance or a democratic association of the commons (see Tully 2008: 164). Even if they do not realise their preferences at a particular moment, dissenters will adhere to the constitution of the commons and they are likely to cultivate mutual understanding and trust with others as long as they are able to participate in open and fair practices of contest and deliberation, which avoid recourse to raw force. They could do so, first, because dissenters may come to appreciate the reasons and concerns on other sides. Second, they may become attached to a community that empowers them to stand up for their rights. And third, they know that they may carry the day in the future as long as any political outcome is provisional. If any hegemonic settlement of the common – the contents of the common good, the institutions of its management, political strategies towards the state and the market – lends itself to challenge, political minorities may be able to overturn the dominant consensus if they amass more political force, if they build up larger alliances and if they are more convincing in the political debate (Tully 2008: 216, 316). Disagreement can be dealt with more effectively, reducing conflict and sentiments of injustice, if any agreement remains subject to review, thereby entitling dissenters to keep up the political fight to revise existing settlements (Tully 2008: 181–4, 214–15, 306–8). Hence, Mouffe’s agonistic stand on the political commends itself on many grounds for an alter-politics of the commons. On the other hand, her narrow-minded reduction of the political to antagonism and agonism should be renounced. Agonism alone cannot foster radical democracy and the commons. In Mouffe’s paradigm of agonistic democracy, the parties in dispute recognise each other as legitimate adversaries 176

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons who are bound by the same fundamental principles. But their disagreement is deep and irresolvable. Moreover, the overriding objective of each party is to win the game of power and to entrench the hegemony of one’s own political project, confining rivals to political opposition and minimising their say in decision-making (see Mouffe 2005: 20–1; Mouffe 2008: 5–6). Adversaries lack any political or ethical disposition to care for their opponents’ concerns (White 2003: 211–13). What could counterweigh the will to all-out domination within the bounds of a constitutional regime? What might motivate a ruling force to respond to the claims of its opponents? On what grounds would the hegemon seek to accommodate newly arising differences? It is also worth contemplating how Mouffe’s agonistic ethos consolidates predominant political attitudes of power-mongering, masculine competition, self-assertion and aggression. Another politics of the commons should thus nourish a richer and more nuanced political ethos that complicates and offsets agonism with different political attitudes, such as a responsiveness to the other part – audi alteram partem – and a willingness to learn from others, solidarity and care beyond differences, even a qualified disposition for consensus. An enlarged agonism is compatible with the politics of reasonable deliberation and the search for agreement in the interests of equal freedom. Not only is it possible to alternate between the politics of reasonable consensus and power struggles in accord with variable circumstances, needs and political judgements. Collective action can also bring together the two faces of politics – consensus and dissent – in an uneasy alliance, which attends to the consensual freedom of differences within a certain collectivity while conducting battles outside and striving to reorder the balance of forces in society more broadly. This is precisely the kind of politics that has been undertaken by a wide range of contemporary democratic mobilisations since the turn of the century, from the Zapatista uprising and the global justice movement to the global democratic insurgencies of 2011, which spread from the Arab Spring to Occupy in North America, through the Spanish Indignados and the Greek Aganaktismenoi. These collective movements revolted against the global rule of capital and political elites, in ways that were militant and even turned violent at certain moments. But in their midst they were practitioners of consensual deliberation through the exchange of reasons, nurturing diversity and reciprocity among differences (Hardt and Negri 2012; Castañeda 2012; Dhaliwal 2012; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011; Arditi 2007; Beasley-Murray 2010; Holloway 2005; Day 2005; Maeckelbergh 2009). It is on this side of a counter-hegemonic struggle that, indeed, even Rawlsian ideas of 177

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics public reason can find their place alongside or within agonistic politics, motivating the pursuit of collective freedom through reciprocity, civility and the formulation of political reasons that others could reasonably accept as free and equal.

Common hegemony and beyond Laclau and Mouffe’s relaunch of hegemonic politics in 1985 grapples head-on with the central political predicament of transformative commons today: how to stitch together a popular will for antagonistic commons and to catalyse an expansive convergence of social forces that will overturn the dominance of neoliberal capital and will extend equal freedom around the commons, under circumstances of social fragmentation and complexity that do not cohere around any simple and given antagonism. In accord with the spirit of alternative commons, their refiguring of hegemony is anchored in the ‘open, unsutured character of the social’, ‘plurality and indeterminacy’, the dispersion of power, the autonomy of social movements, the diversity of political spaces and antagonisms (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 192, 152). They rid hegemony of Marxist determinism, the determining force of the economic base and class. Their accent on social contingency brings to the fore the always present possibility of historical turnaround against TINA. Doing away with any historical assurances, such as technological innovation and networks as the trigger of social transformation, they prompt us to think politically and to ponder seriously how to organise political action so as to attain the wished-for transformations. Contingency underwrites the alternative politics of the commons. It holds out the possibility of autonomous self-organisation against any predetermination of action, and it holds up pluralism and openness to the new against any preconceived models. Articulation, discourse, plurality and antagonism become the contingent grounds of a post-Marxist practice of hegemony. Hegemony is primarily a process of articulation that operates in a contingent terrain and strives to piece together an organised system of relations out of disaggregated elements and differences by way of instituting nodal points (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–5). Hegemonic composition, the struggle to impose one’s forms on social complexity, is accomplished through a confrontation between contending articulatory operations, while the frontiers dividing the rival communities are relatively fluid and subject to redrawing (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 114, 136). Equivalence and difference are the two salient logics of political–hegemonic articulation. Equivalence tends to simplify the political space by splitting it into two. 178

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons By contrast, the logic of difference tends to multiply the number of positions that can enter into a relation of combination with each other (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 127–30). Hegemony consists, then, in a particular type of political relation and activity whereby a social force moves outside itself to connect itself with other conflicts through chains of equivalence. Social actors aspiring to hegemony go beyond their narrow identities and assume broader organisational functions in a community, putting together coalitions and imputing wider meanings to social practices or resistances (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 134–5, 141). A hegemonic equivalence infuses the assembled forces with a new ‘common sense’, modifying their identities so that their aims can become aligned with each other. Furthermore, beyond specific demands or negative protests, a winning hegemonic strategy installs nodal points from which a process of different, positive reconstruction of social relations can be set in motion. An effective alter-politics of social transformation draws on the capacity of subordinated groups for positive direction and renovation of a broad scope of social spheres. A hegemonic strategy for the ‘construction of a new order’ must finally conjoin an understanding of existing structural limitations – on the level of the state, the economy and so on – with a utopian vision for another social order (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 184, 189, 190). Finally, in the 1985 script, hegemony is decentred. It is simply one type of political relations, which functions alongside other political logics, including ‘autonomy’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 139, 142–3). Hegemonic politics is also internally decentred, countering vertical hierarchies and the concentration of power. The hubs of political activity and convergence are multiple, preventing the accumulation of power in one sovereign centre of decision (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 178, 188, 192). Moreover, these diverse and relative centres may reside primarily in privileged sites of political confrontation and construction, common points of reference and collective identities rather than parties or individual Leaders (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 112–13, 139, 182–3, 188–90, 192). The decentring of hegemony enables its confluence with the horizontalist, egalitarian and pluralist politics of the common(s). The conjunction of hegemony and autonomy, equivalence-identity and difference, equality and liberty, is a political focus of a ‘radical and plural democracy’ that furthers both freedom and equality across all fields of the social (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 140–1, 167, 178–88). An alternative hegemonic politics for ‘radical and plural democracy’ shores up the effective autonomy of groups and identities on the basis of their equality; it dismisses hierarchies and resists any Jacobinic 179

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics concentration of power and knowledge (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 178). It works for radical change through a plural and ongoing process, which may also include an ‘overdetermination of a set of struggles in a point of political rupture’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 177–8). This process-based and pluralistic scheme of counter-hegemonic action is very akin to the contemporary theories and practices of the commons, which envision historical transition in terms of long-term transformation and a diversity of socio-political and techno-economic activities of new commoning. The fields and the vehicles of counter-hegemonic struggle are plural and open. Sites of antagonism can be located on any level and field of society, both in the state and in civil society, and they are not determined a priori. Likewise, the political vectors of organisation and social transformation are plural and they should be politically decided. In some cases, for instance, the state can be an oppressive apparatus that should be dismantled, whereas in other contexts some state institutions could be enlisted against structures of oppression (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 179–81, 192). Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony disowns absolute political categories of the type ‘the Party’, ‘the Class’, ‘the Revolution’, levelling the field for ample experiment, diversification, sensitivity to context, and the questioning of power effects in any political form (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 179–81, 190). The initial, thin skeleton of a pluralist and decentred hegemony that could carry forward alternative commons was filled out in Laclau and Mouffe’s later thought in both constructive and regressive ways, which a pro-commons hegemonic politics should discard. To begin with the positive extensions, in Laclau’s post-1985 work, hegemony now lies in four core operations: first, a dialectic between particularity and universality; second, uneven power, a convergence of forces that can overwhelm the antagonistic pole; third, ‘empty signifiers’ through which particulars can assume the representation of universals; and fourth, the generalisation of relations of representation (Laclau 2000a: 53–9; Laclau 2000b: 207; Laclau 2000c: 302–6). At the crux of the hegemonic process lies the weaving of chains of equivalence among diverse demands, antagonisms and groups, based on their opposition to a common enemy. The antagonistic equivalence of a plurality of groups and demands generates a pragmatic, contingent version of a ‘general will’. And a certain demand or ‘subject position’ becomes political precisely insofar as it experiences its own particularity as a link in a chain of equivalences that transcends the particular (Laclau 2000a: 54–6; Laclau 2000b: 210; Laclau 2000c: 302–6). In a general sense, all the four planks of Laclau’s later model of hegemony are integral to a massive political front that could overhaul the 180

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons dominant forms of the state and the market in order to bring into being a commons-based society. The relative generalisation of a partial actor through ‘chains of equivalence’ is required in order to aggregate a collective will that can recruit massive support. ‘Empty signifiers’, such as ‘change’, ‘democracy’ and ‘commons’, can extend equivalences around a collective actor. A certain concentration of forces will be also needed, unless one expects privileged minorities to forfeit their privileges and positions of power out of their free will. Finally, a majoritarian counterpower will make representative claims, speaking in the name of the entire people and universal interests. A hegemonic subject will thus engage in rhetoric operations, but its force will turn on its capacity to trigger a radical affective investment in its discourse and politics by promising to fill a social lack and thus to become a source of jouissance (Laclau 2004: 299–304, 326; Laclau 2005a: 115; Laclau 2014: 53–125). Mouffe’s political theory after 1985 can also serve a counter-hegemonic politics for the commons. A powerful counter-hegemonic strategy should, first, come to grips with existing institutions, including state institutions, and assail the various nodal points that buttress the hegemony of postFordist capitalism. Second, it should undertake a practice of re-articulation in tandem with the dis-articulation of the current regime. And, third, it should conduct struggles in multiple social fields, not only of the political system, but also of ‘civil society’ where the ‘common sense’ is constructed (Mouffe 2013: 71–5, 89). Mouffe’s original input lies, however, in the agonistic inflection of hegemony that checks hegemonic drives towards complete dominance and uniformity. In an agonistic democracy, the effective presence of a plurality of contending alternatives can continuously disturb and limit the hegemonic system of discourses and institutions. Crucially, introducing agonistic politics in the commons can reign in drives towards exclusionary unity and domination that stem from a substantive conception of the commons in terms of unique contents and institutions. In contrast, agonistic commons are a space of both collaboration and conflict among the members of a community, who act in concert, although they may dissent over the appropriate contents, uses and development of the common good. An agonistic practice of the commons can contain ruinous conflict and fragmentation in militant groups committed to the commons. To keep in place a forceful broad alliance for the commons, we must persist in the common fight and creation despite internal disagreement. The common should be envisaged, then, as a common horizon of principles, values and practices that are, at the same time, a common field of diversity, endless debate and internal battle for the common good. 181

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics However, Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemonic intervention could be reclaimed for a political strategy of alter-commons only if it were released from certain biases that clash head-on with the horizontalist, pluralist, open and autonomous logic of the commons. The first such bias is their increasing essentialism from 1985 onwards: their growing tendency to postulate an ‘ontology’ of the political that conflates it with hegemony in a restrictive sense and eternalises violence, division, unequal power and state sovereignty. To defuse this essentialist spin of post-Marxist hegemony, the latter is repositioned as just one political logic and practice alongside others. Hegemony takes its place within a broader concept of the political that is duly contextualised, contestable and pluralist, grasping politics as deliberate action on social relations and structures that challenges, refashions or preserves them. To counter essentialism and abstract formulas, political reflection should steep itself into political praxis on the ground that can inspire different practices of political representation and leadership, among others, beyond any preconceived notions. This is precisely how I will propose to extend and transfigure Laclau and Mouffe’s hegemony for the purposes of the commons in the next chapter. Along with essentialism, a commons-oriented political thought should also cast off the five contested elements of Laclau’s hegemony, which skew it towards centralisation and top-down direction, and should break with Mouffe’s one-sided account of the political, which reifies unequal power, antagonism and the sovereign state. As noted above, Laclau attached to the main components of hegemony five further layers: the vertical distribution of power within the hegemonic alliance; individual leadership; populist homogenisation; sovereign representation; and the antagonistic formation of the collective identity. Pace Laclau, the distribution of power among the constituents of a radical democratic front could tend towards horizontality rather than towards vertical direction from one particular group at the helm. Unity could be enacted in ways that nurture diversity and pluralism both inside and outside itself. Decision-making and the construction of a collective will could be a participatory and collective process rather than an affair of individual representatives. Lastly, any politics that aims at overcoming the established order needs to define an enemy and to draw political frontiers. But this does not imply that antagonism must occupy the centre of collective identity and action, foreclosing ‘a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument’ (see Laclau and Mouffe 2000: xvii; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 143–4). As Laclau and Mouffe (1985: 189) have argued in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, utopian imagination, creativity and the positive 182

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reclaiming post-Marxist hegemony for the commons reconstruction of social order are pivotal to an effective counter-hegemonic strategy, beyond the negative moment of antagonism and protest. Moreover, both dissensus and dialogical consensus could be practised and privileged on different sides of the political initiative, according to what best serves the cause of equal freedom. To turn post-Marxist hegemony into a powerful instrument of transformative politics for the commons, a further, decisive inflection is in order. The cardinal proposal of the present book, the qualified combination of the politics of hegemony (aggregation of forces, collective convergence and so on) with the politics of alternative commons (horizontal self-organisation, openness, diversity), was actually anticipated in part by Laclau and Mouffe themselves, who pleaded for the hegemonic articulation of a plurality of democratic movements, struggles and spaces in ways that uphold their autonomy and diversity. The synthesis of hegemony and autonomy, equivalence-identity and difference, equality and liberty is indeed the chief objective of their ‘radical and plural democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 140–1, 167, 178–88). What is more, Laclau and Mouffe have reaffirmed the political potency of this conjugation in their excursus into more recent democratic mobilisations such as the Indignados and Occupy. Laclau concludes the introduction to his last book, The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, with the following thesis: the horizontal dimension of autonomy will be incapable, left to itself, of bringing about long-term historical change if it is not complemented by the vertical dimension of ‘hegemony’ – that is, a radical transformation of the state. Autonomy left to itself leads, sooner or later, to the exhaustion and dispersion of the movements of protest. But hegemony not accompanied by mass action at the level of civil society leads to a bureaucratism that will be easily colonised by the corporative power of the forces of the status quo. To advance both in the directions of autonomy and hegemony is the real challenge to those who aim for a democratic future. (Laclau 2014: 9)

Mouffe concurs: the variety of extra-parliamentary struggles and the multiple forms of activism outside traditional institutions are valuable for enriching democracy. Not only can they raise important questions and bring to the fore issues that are neglected, they can also lead to the emergence of new subjectivities and provide a terrain for the cultivation of different social relations. . . . What I contend, however, is that these practices cannot provide a substitute for representative institutions and that it is necessary to establish a synergy between different forms of intervention. . . . If the protest movements refuse to establish alliances with traditional channels . . . their radical potential will be drastically weakened. (Mouffe 2013: 126–7)

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics What is glossed over in these formulations, however, is the tension running between horizontalist (autonomous, non-hierarchical, noninstitutionalised) politics and vertical (hierarchical, institutional, centralised) politics. Laclau and Mouffe’s position is thus reminiscent of Žižek’s motto: ‘“no movements without governing”, without a state power sustaining the space for movements’ (Žižek 2008: 377). As argued in Chapter 3, the political naïveté of this view disregards how vertical power conflicts inherently with horizontal self-organisation. The exercise of power from above is, in principle, at loggerheads with egalitarian collective self-government, and it impedes societies from building their own capacity for self-direction. This contradiction erupted forcefully in the case of Chavismo. The clash between topdown rule, personal leadership, centralism and autonomous grassroots mobilisation has been highlighted as the constitutive contradiction of Chavista populism (López Maya 2015: 386–97; Philip and Panizza 2011: 96–7; Azzellini 2015). More broadly, the composition of horizontalism with verticalism is typically a risky enterprise. The balance between the two is hard to strike, at the expense of grassroots, egalitarian self-organisation and alternative institutions. The reason is that most horizontalist activities and groups are weaker and less organised than concerted forces in the state or other centres of power, which can easily overwhelm or co-opt them (Dangl 2010; Zibechi 2010). Moreover, in every political process that combines grassroots participation with hierarchical representatives and centres of decision-making from above, when conflicts break out between the two directions of decision, the top-down and the bottomup, the chief nodes of power and ‘vertical’ leaders can deploy their organised force or their unabashed power politics. Thereby, they can easily win the game of power when they confront a cacophonous and poorly coordinated multitude. This well-known drama has been vividly replayed in the recent evolution of the Spanish party Podemos, if we need to rehearse historical lessons (García 2015; Lloriente 2014). To prevent the suffocation of the horizontalist politics of the commons in their potential convergence with massive counter-hegemonic fronts, the tensions should be considered in depth and skilfully negotiated so that the balance is tilted in favour of horizontalism, autonomy and plurality. Achieving such an imbalance in support of the commons calls for new political practices, priorities and articulations that move beyond the ‘hegemony of hegemony’. The next chapter will thus dig into actual creative movements beyond hegemony in order to sketch the rudiments of another hegemony for the commons.

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Chapter Six

Movements post-hegemony

‘Post-hegemony’ has become a cri de guerre among theorists who take issue with the modern politics of hierarchical organisation, representation, unification, the state and ideology: the politics of ‘hegemony’ (see, for example, Beasley-Murray 2010; Arditi 2007; Day 2005). Under the rubric of ‘post-hegemony’, they intend to foreground historical changes and emergent possibilities that harbour prospects of egalitarian, plural and anti-authoritarian politics beyond the vertical hierarchies and the closures of conventional modern power. The term purported, initially, to fathom transformations both in the dominant regimes of power and in various democratic resistances at the turn of the century (Lash 2007; Beasley-Murray 2010; Arditi 2007). These seemed to spell the end of systems of domination and organisation that could be captured through the lenses of Gramsci’s (1971) and Laclau’s (2005a) theory of hegemony: a theory about collective identities, the interplay of force and consent, representation and discourse (or ideology), and the need to mesh with both civil society and state institutions in order to bring about historical change. The crux of the ‘post-hegemonic’ arguments is that, today, both the global nexuses of power and the democratic mobilisations against them escape arrest in these terms. They are networked, dispersed and immanent. They are immersed into bodies and they work through habits and affects, beyond discourse and representation (Lash 2007: 55–6, 60; Beasley-Murray 2010: x, 7; Arditi 2007: 212–24). The label ‘post-hegemony’ can be justifiably applied to a wider spectrum of contemporary thinkers and scholars who do not place themselves under this heading but assail the same dominant forms of power and track the emergence of new structures in global networks and social initiatives (see, for example, Hardt and Negri 2004, 2009; Day 2005; Newman 2011; Holloway 2005; Nunes 2014; Maeckelbergh 2009). The present chapter will dive into the debate over hegemony and post-hegemony as it bears specifically on social movements and a 185

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics nascent radical–democratic culture. ‘Post-hegemonic’ narratives hold that collective democratic agency today is horizontal – that is, nonhierarchical, networked and plural – and conducts prefigurative politics that enact, here and now, the values of a radical democracy to come. These schemes of political action are said to have superseded older, hierarchical types of agency in political parties, governments and movements. Critical responses to the ‘post-hegemonic’ thesis counter that contemporary democratic resistances do not attain, in effect, a full rupture with hegemony or they should not attain it, lest they condemn themselves to insularity and inefficiency (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012; Stavrakakis 2014). The main aim here will be to spot the creative displacements of counter-hegemonic politics that have been performed by recent collective actions in order to bring out how they actually transfigure the strategy of hegemony, striking an imbalance between vertical homogenising structures and horizontal autonomy in favour of the commons. Through these displacements and innovations, democratic movements of our times not only supplement and enrich Laclau and Mouffe’s abstract template of counter-hegemonic strategy, working out specific practices of social contestation and reform for the commons. They also constructively unsettle and modify hegemonic politics, devising another political strategy of social renewal that can carry forward alternative commons. They engineer, namely, a hybridisation of horizontalism and verticalism, autonomy and hegemony, in which the former can gain the upper hand within a complex strategic assemblage that can become powerful enough to take on the status quo. The theorists of post-hegemony help to shed light on these motions beyond post-Marxist hegemony. But they also spread confusion by misconstruing these shifts as a full negation or transcendence of hegemony rather than a critical renovation and alteration of hegemonic strategy. The following argument thus seeks to dispel this confusion and to recast the post-hegemonic thesis. The gist of my case is that a drive beyond hegemonic politics, which, indeed, has energised collective action and movement cultures over the last two decades, renews and recalibrates the strategies of hegemonic struggle rather than dismissing them in full. Main axes of hegemonic politics, such as representation, concentration of power and unification, are endemic to various instances of anti-hierarchical self-organisation in our times. But recent modes and practices of collective agency also point beyond hegemony, not in the sense that they are completely cleansed from its defining logics but in that they reform its political logics in distinct ways, folding pluralisation and non-hierarchical interaction into representation, leadership and unity. 186

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movements post-hegemony ‘Horizontal’ networks and mobilisations are shot through with forces and patterns of representation, leadership and cohesion. But, in their midst, conventional hegemonic forms yield to collective participation and egalitarian interaction. Moreover, openness and pluralisation themselves become the ground of cohesion. Finally, despite the blending of horizontality and verticality, of grassroots autonomy and hegemony, the first pole of this binary prevails in diverse new democratic movements. This ‘bias’ sets them apart from most modern schemes of collective organisation in parties, trade unions, state institutions and others. Paradoxically, then, we can witness a relative hegemony of non-hegemonic politics that countervails the logic of hegemony proper. The present chapter will unroll, first, an up-to-date map of the different positions in the controversy over post-hegemony. It will seek to demonstrate, then, that diverse moments of contemporary activism are indeed post-hegemonic, not in the sense posited by most post-hegemonic narratives till now, but in the sense of the ‘post-’ which connotes an impure, ongoing development: a time and a space in between. The second half of the chapter is thus devoted to rearticulating the idea of post-hegemony in order to outline a strategy of social transformation in tune with alternative commons. The final sections will lay out how recent democratic mobilisations and initiatives reconfigure hegemonic politics by inventing new styles of unification, leadership and representation. These exceed the imagination of Gramsci and Laclau, reflecting the plural, open and horizontal spirit of the commons. Hence, through their political creations, egalitarian movements of our times plot a new political strategy that can buttress another hegemony of the commons.

Post-hegemony (1): inaugurating the debate ‘Post-hegemony’ is meant to describe a new modality of power at a time when the era of hegemony is ‘beginning to draw to a close’ (Lash 2007: 55). The theory of hegemony has been authored mainly by Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau and Stuart Hall (Lash 2007: 56). Laclau’s conceptual labours used to provide the key reference, in cultural studies at least (Beasley-Murray 2010: 40). ‘Hegemony’ designates a regime of power that dominates by combining coercion and consent. It relies on discourse rather than ‘facts’, and it is exercised ‘extensively’ over its subjects rather than ‘intensively’ from within social relations (Lash 2007: 55–6). Lash (2007: 60) also drew a link between post-hegemonic politics and the self-constitution of ‘multitudes’, who cooperate in political action and contemporary labour. But it was the work of Jon Beasley-Murray (2010) and Benjamin Arditi (2007) that popularised ‘post-hegemony’ as the name 187

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics of a new figure of resistance and collective agency in our times. Others, including Hardt and Negri, and Richard Day, theorised the overcoming of hegemonic logics in the ‘multitude’ and new anarchist currents, although they did not adopt the terminology of post-hegemony itself. In all these bodies of thought, various schemes of egalitarian activism and social experiment are contrasted to a ‘hegemonic’ model of politics. As we have seen, in Gramsci’s thought, hegemony is a political practice that seeks to aggregate a majoritarian national–popular will and to ‘become state’. This objective is pursued crucially through a gradual ‘war of position’ in civil society (Gramsci 1971: 181–2, 239, 418). However, the main antithesis against which contemporary post-hegemony defines itself is Laclau’s revisiting of Gramsci (Arditi 2007: 207–10; BeasleyMurray 2010: 40; Hardt and Negri 2009: 175, 305; Day 2005: 8–13). To recap, in Laclau’s theory, hegemony articulates a contingent plurality of autonomous struggles around a ‘chain of equivalence’, welding together a common political front. It is the political process whereby a new social formation comes into being through an antagonistic fight between the dominant regime and an oppositional coalition of forces, or between rival political projects (Laclau 2000b: 207). Hegemony is premised on ‘chains of equivalence’, an antagonistic division, representation and the uneven distribution of power. Hegemonic practices mobilise a particularity that takes up universal tasks in the name of an entire bloc of forces (Laclau 1996: 98–100). Within the community of struggle, a particular agent leads the counter-hegemonic bloc, whose enemy (‘the regime’) must be excluded and eventually overruled if a new hegemonic formation is to be established (Laclau 2000b: 207–8). In sharp contrast to this model of transformative praxis, ‘[h]abit, affect, and the multitude are the three components of a theory of posthegemony’ (Beasley-Murray 2010: x). The ‘multitude’, a term borrowed from Spinoza via Hardt and Negri, features a heterogeneous collection of bodies, resistances and agencies. This collectivity self-organises, cultivates new habits and alters the course of history. The immanent processes of the multitude ‘incarnate a logic from below that requires neither representation nor direction from above’ (Beasley-Murray 2010: x). In its late modern appearances, such as the Zapatista insurrection in Mexico and the Argentinian pickets and neighbourhood assemblies in 2000–1, the motley crew of the multitude ‘resisted authority, representation, or leadership’ (Beasley-Murray 2010: 7), acting on principles that ‘break decisively with hegemony’ (BeasleyMurray 2010: 234, emphasis added). In Beasley-Murray’s conceptualisation of ‘posthegemony’, the constituent power of disparate struggles for liberation today effects a radically 188

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movements post-hegemony rupture with Laclau’s hegemony and its privileged agent (the ‘people’) as it withstands and eschews its fundamental structures: representation, leadership that concentrates ‘uneven power’, unification through chains of equivalence and exclusionary collective identities. Moreover, the multitude’s power comes before the state and it overflows the bounds of both the state and civil society (Beasley 2010: 234–5, 275, 284–6). Beasley-Murray does not simply posit a stark divide between the politics of hegemony and post-hegemony. He advances also the sweeping claim that ‘There is no hegemony and never has been. We live in cynical, posthegemonic times’ (Beasley-Murray 2010: ix). Chapter 3 has shown how the same absolute dichotomy between the (post-hegemonic) multitude and the politics of hegemony is asserted by Hardt and Negri. Their ‘multitude’ names a new mode of social production, a collective subject and a political logic that have arisen from postFordist ‘biopolitical’ labour, which produces new common knowledge, communication and social relationships (Hardt and Negri 2004: 66, 109, 114–15, 198, 219). The multitude embodies a distinctive type of collective organisation, which marks not only biopolitical labour but also contemporary resistances to imperial biopower from the Zapatistas onwards: the distributed network. In it, no principal agent stands vertically above other differences and represents the whole in the hierarchical manner of Gramsci and Laclau’s hegemony. Participation and collective decision-making take the place of unaccountable representatives and leaders (Hardt and Negri 2004: 337–40). The ‘multitude’ also encompasses the ‘internal organisation of the latest Arab Spring, Indignant and Occupy movements’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 5). All these knit together ‘distributed networks’ in which connections expand horizontally, without definite boundaries and without any single centre of command. In the 2011 insurrections, the multitude set in motion new constituent powers that aspired to emancipate the selfgovernment of the many from top-down leadership, closed ideologies and representation by political parties. They introduced, instead, plural processes that ‘agglutinated’ divergent views in contingent ways (Hardt and Negri 2012: 44–5, 64). Hence, ‘the multitude is formed through articulations on the plane of immanence without hegemony’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 169). Another strand of post-hegemonic theorising affirms the rise of politics outside hegemony without assuming, however, that we have entered a new era in which hegemonic politics is completely defunct. Taking his cues from Laclau, Benjamin Arditi (2007: 211, 216) locates the essence of hegemony in the practice that pieces together an alliance between differences by drawing chains of equivalence that generate a ‘superordinate’ 189

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics category of unity. Arditi (2007: 211–12) mounts the case, then, that there is indeed a politics ‘outside the hegemonic form’. This surfaces on the level of the state and electoral contests, but most notably in diverse late modern protests (as in the Argentinian crisis of 2001), in the post-Fordist ‘multitude’, in autonomous zones and self-managed communities that defy institutional representation, or in the ‘viral’ politics of networked communication and hacktivism (Arditi 2007: 212–24). Here, differences come together without any ‘supernumerary’ One, without a central plan, a command structure or an agency that builds chains of equivalence (Arditi 2007: 216–23). Arditi, however, parts ways with Beasley-Murray and Hardt and Negri as he jettisons a Manichean choice between hegemony and its outside. ‘It would be myopic . . . to propose that either there is hegemony or exodus. . . . The enactment of defection in any of the variants described . . . is not antithetical to resistances that enter into relations of equivalence . . .’ (Arditi 2007: 221). Hegemony and post-hegemony, then, constitute a clear binary, in which the two poles are independent from and uncontaminated by each other. However, pace Beasley-Murray and Hardt and Negri, they do not stage an antagonistic alternative; they can coexist or combine in the same time and place. The era of hegemony is not definitely past (Arditi 2007: 221–4). Richard Day seems to subscribe to the same doctrine, although he was one of the first to proclaim the ‘death’ of Gramsci and the logic of hegemony (Day 2005). This dying logic is proper to ‘the politics of representation, recognition, and integration’ (Day 2005: 18). Hegemony is animated by the desire to implement a universal model of social transformation, and it is ready to enforce this model upon dissenters (Day 2005: 14, 45, 65). The hallmark of the ‘hegemony of hegemony’, which pervades both Marxism and liberalism, is the ‘belief that state domination is necessary to achieve “freedom”’(Day 2005: 14). Day notes, by contrast, a heterogeneous mix of tactics, organisations and initiatives that have surged forth over the last decades, such as the landless peasants’ movement in Brazil (MST), indigenous communities in Latin America and social centres across Europe. These craft new shapes of communal life and political interaction that display an affinity ‘for non-hierarchical, non-coercive relationships based on mutual aid and shared ethical commitments’ (Day 2005: 9). They ‘set out to block, resist and render redundant both corporate and state power’ by manufacturing minoritarian alternative spheres (Day 2005: 45). They seek to dismantle relations of domination, top-down direction and coercive governance, constructing open and horizontal associations that manage their affairs directly through consensus, decentralised decision-making 190

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movements post-hegemony and collective deliberation (Day 2005: 25–45, 186–97). They weave together loose network coalitions, but they do not adhere to a master plan of social restructuring nor do they struggle to generalise their values and schemes forcibly (Day 2005: 156–7, 172). Despite appearances, however, (provocatively conveyed by the very title of his book), Day does not advocate a ‘total rejection of reformist or revolutionary programs in all cases’ (Day 2005: 215). These strategies remain relevant for as long as the state and corporate structures of power weigh heavily on our daily lives. To rule them out would be both politically imprudent and a paradoxical re-enactment of the ‘hegemony of hegemony’, if the politics of ‘affinity for affinity’ were to ‘hegemonise the whole field’ of emancipatory action today (Day 2005: 215). Accordingly, within the post-hegemonic camp, Day takes sides with Arditi against BeasleyMurray and Hardt and Negri. There are actual and promising instances of politics ‘outside’ hegemony but they can be contemporaneous with it. Day, moreover, takes a hesitant further step as he starts to blur the clarity of the binary. He oscillates as to whether ‘non-hegemonic’ politics can be completely pure of any hegemonic residues within them. On the one hand, he does contend that ‘it is both possible and desirable for human beings to live without state intervention (political principle/ hegemony)’ (Day 2005: 213). And the newest autonomous movements carry out actual ‘non-statist experiments’ (Day 2005: 216). On the other, he alludes approvingly to Foucault’s ‘disavowal of the possibility of living a life entirely without relations of power as domination’ (Day 2005: 137), and he submits that ‘while we might rid ourselves of particular states, we can never rid ourselves of the state form’ (Day 2005: 140, emphasis added).

Against post-hegemony Critical ripostes to the post-hegemonic thesis do not deny that novel or alternative schemes of multitudinous politics have appeared at the turn of the century. They argue, rather, that hegemony and post-hegemony are not two self-standing, internally pure and fully independent poles. Negations of post-hegemony seek to destabilise the stark dichotomy in three different ways. First, it is claimed that in order to engender transformative effects it is not only possible but also necessary to ally horizontal, spontaneous and ‘non-representational’ action with vertical, centralised and representative politics. Second, the case is made that key components of allegedly ‘post-hegemonic’ politics were already part and parcel of Gramsci’s own tack to hegemony. Finally – and this is the most radical challenge – critics have pointed out that vertical logics of representation, 191

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics leadership, centralisation and unification persist within the horizontal multitudes, belying any notion of pure, autonomous counter-strategy. Speaking for the first approach, Stavrakakis (2014: 214) submits that ‘a multitude of autonomous struggles have historically become effective only when articulated within a common counter-hegemonic horizon of representation’. The examples of the Greek Aganaktismenoi in 2011 and the Argentinian piqueteros in 2001 illustrate how spontaneous grassroots protests can elicit real socio-political change only when they morph into a ‘people’ that is represented in political institutions by an organised collective actor – such as SYRIZA in Greece and the Kirchners’ presidency in Argentina. Multitudinous horizontalism and hegemonic verticalism are, then, two complementary moments in a single dialectic of progressive, democratic reform. When their ‘co-implication’ and ‘interpenetration’ fail to obtain, democratic struggles stand few chances of success (Stavrakakis 2014: 120–1). The second line of critique partly reiterates the foregoing argument. Without a Gramscian emphasis on cohesion and engagement with the state, the ‘spontaneous’ multitude will remain fragmented and impotent (Chodor 2014: 490, 496–7). What is added now is the suggestion that Gramsci’s counter-hegemony anticipated post-hegemony in various respects. Like post-hegemonic diagnoses, Gramsci’s analysis was alive to non-conscious, non-discursive dimensions of power. Crucially, his ‘counter-hegemony’ valued plurality within the counter-hegemonic bloc and it sought to band together a collective will through equal interaction and the mutual transformation of all involved parties rather than through the imposition of one actor upon the others (Chodor 2014: 493, 497–500; Johnson 2007: 97, 100). The third objection is arguably the most provocative. It uncovers important ‘residues’ of hegemony within multitudinous networks and actions. These residues include representation, vertical, hierarchical relations and hubs of concentrated force. Prentoulis and Thomassen, for instance, in their incisive discussion of political representation in the ‘square’ movements of 2011, conclude that there is a mutual contamination between horizontality and verticality because the very realisation of equality is only possible through some representational space, and such a space unavoidably involves some inequality and hierarchy. There is no horizontality without verticality, and no equality without inequality. (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012: 16)

Prentoulis and Thomassen (2012: 11) make the case that even those currents in the Spanish Indignados and the Greek Aganaktismenoi that most stridently dismissed political representation admitted delegates 192

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movements post-hegemony from smaller assemblies or assigned organisational and coordinating functions to certain groups and persons. Although General Assemblies proclaimed that they represented nobody beyond their actual members, ‘the movements use spokespersons, even if their status is checked in different ways’ (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012: 12). Second, autonomy and horizontal relations are not immediate and spontaneous. They are instituted through the disputed rules laid down by assemblies. The rules enforce turn-taking, the use of sign language, the function of moderators and so on, with a view to cutting out a space of egalitarian inclusion and participation (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012: 12–13, 15). With their specific ways of counting, the Spanish and the Greek protesters would ‘be able to represent themselves as equals – but the new “order” will also be a police order . . . according to a new set of norms about who belongs to the community of equals’ (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012: 17). Furthermore, in the relations between various local assemblies in Spain and Greece, central assemblies occupied a nodal position in the network, giving rise to hierarchies among the assemblies (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012: 13). Another instance of autonomous democratic mobilisations in 2011–12, the Occupy movement, illustrates the endurance of hegemonic trends – representation and unification around common identities – amidst horizontal practices and aspirations of pluralist direct democracy. As Jodi Dean (2012: 229) has indicated, ‘Occupy Wall Street is not actually the movement of the 99 percent of the population of the United States. . . . It is a movement mobilising itself around an occupied Wall Street in the name of the 99 percent.’ In other words, it placed a representative claim at the core of its activism. The different Occupy assemblies and networks came together in a platform of confluence and collective identity in which the many are simply many ‘without converging into a One’ (Arditi 2007: 213). They hosted a multiplicity of subjectivities bearing diverse ideas and demands, and different groups championing particular causes (Harcourt 2011; Klein and Marom 2012). Yet they were all identified with the Occupy name and the 99 per cent versus 1 per cent frame of meaning, which imparted a common understanding of the enemy – ‘the system that places profits before people and the earth’ – and they coalesced around the shared collection of aims and practices designated by the signifier Occupy Wall Street (Marom in Klein and Marom 2012). Hence, in the manner of Laclau’s hegemonic politics, Occupy established a chain of equivalence among different demands and struggles by investing them with a supplementary meaning common to all. The equivalential chains cohered around signifiers – ‘Occupy’ and ‘99 per cent’ – which were 193

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics partly stripped of their original meaning to refer to a plurality of demands, practices and ideas, alluding to an ‘absent fullness’ of economic justice and democracy. Through these ‘empty’ signifiers, a particularity, the activists who actually participated in the various Occupy actions, stepped forward as the representative of a near universality, the 99 per cent of the people, in the context of an antagonism with a common rival, the 1 per cent (see (Dean 2012: 207–50).

Post-hegemony (2): redefining the debate Is it possible to sustain the post-hegemonic thesis in the face of such empirical and theoretical refutation? The argument that will be unpacked in the following replies ‘Yes’. But this affirmative response starts out from a reconsideration of the post-hegemonic claims, beginning with the very definition of the term. In the different variants of post-hegemony (1), ‘post-’ signifies a total break with hegemonic logics. Whether the contention is that hegemony is now dead and we have entered a new era, or that it survives along with other modes of politics, the collective assumption of Beasley-Murray, Arditi, Hardt and Negri and, more hesitatingly, Day is that hegemony and post-hegemony represent two options that are separate and autonomous. Critics have objected to this proposition by highlighting the intertwinement of the supposedly opposite logics. But such ripostes could not defeat a different take on post-hegemony that construes the prefix ‘post-’ in accord with its standard uses in social and political theory. François Lyotard (1984: 79) deciphered the postmodern as ‘a part of the modern. . . . Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state.’ The postmodern reinforces trends and dynamics of the modern without fully overcoming it (Lyotard 1984: 37–41, 79–82). According to Colin Crouch (2004: 20), the ‘post-’ in ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-modern’ and his own ‘post-democracy’ implies ‘that something has come into existence to reduce the importance of X by going beyond it in some sense. . . . However, X will still have left its mark; there will be strong traces of it still around.’ More recently, in his inquiry into ‘post-representation’, Simon Tormey (2015: 9) intimates that the prefix is ‘indicating not the redundancy of the object in question, so much as its querying . . . an incipient problematization that evinces dissatisfaction but without presupposing the acceptance of a clear break or alternative’. Reading the ‘post-’ in post-hegemony in this way reverses our perspective in the relevant debate. It turns out that those advocates who announce a complete supersession of hegemony or a clear-cut alternative 194

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movements post-hegemony to it deviate from the conventional usage of the prefix in contemporary theory. By contrast, those who oppose the post-hegemonic thesis by fastening on the ‘interpenetration’ of horizontal and vertical logics in late modern struggles in effect confirm this thesis but they recast it in line with the common sense of the ‘post-’. The critics acknowledge that there are indeed incipient moves beyond hegemonic politics but these tendencies do not amount to a total rupture or a fully-fledged alternative. In other words, the critics avow that there are movements post-hegemony in the precise sense of the ‘post-’ we outlined above. This is the argument that the rest of this chapter will unravel in order to draw out a proper post-hegemonic strategy for commons-oriented change. No doubt, on various occasions, horizontal and plural selforganisation replicates hierarchical and representative relations in its ranks. Moreover, in order to attain enduring transformative results, synergies between hegemonic politics and horizontal, spontaneous and ‘non-representational’ action are not only possible but also necessary. These synergies should be embraced by contemporary movements that aim at the formation of autonomous and equal associations that produce and share goods in common. On the reasonable assumption that entrenched interests, plutocrats and established oligarchies will not voluntarily forsake their power, their property and their privileges, it will be necessary, first, to carry out a divisive, hegemonic struggle so as to reorder the existing composition of forces and to substitute for it a different power structure that will strain to minimise domination, hierarchies and exclusions. Second, even if one envisions freer, plural and egalitarian worlds, and the fights to realise them, in terms of multiple interlocking and conflicting assemblages, rather than as a global system or a united revolutionary front, a variable degree of hegemonic unity-cohesion will be still needed to avoid mutually destructive collisions and incompatibilities. This composition would be redundant only if social and individual differences cohered spontaneously, and ruinous conflicts could be magically averted without much effort. Third, relations of representation and the dialectics of particularity/universal, whereby a particular force takes on universal tasks and speaks in the name of the whole, will be re-enacted in any association in which the will of the many does not coincide with the will of all. Such a congruence is not logically inconceivable. But it is empirically unlikely in societies of free, diverse and self-differentiating singularities where no universal reason, nature or homogeneous tradition guarantees the collective convergence of different understandings, values and pursuits in political interactions. 195

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics However, in thinking and pursuing collective action to shift society towards the commons we should not simply rehearse hegemonic politics in line with Gramsci’s or Laclau’s script. The ‘post-hegemonic’ supplement sparks displacements and innovations in relation to political logics and practices that tend primarily towards concentration, hierarchy, uniformity and totalisation. The alter-globalisation protests at the turn of the century and the Indignados and Occupy insurgencies in 2011–12, among others, sponsored open collective decision-making. They favoured plurality against fixed ideologies or closed, homogeneous identities. They experimented with egalitarian institutions and social spaces (see, for example, Sitrin and Azzellini 2014; Dhaliwal 2012; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011). In all these respects, they ventured to transcend the politics of elite rule, government by representatives in state institutions and enclosure in an overarching common identity or a determinate ideology. To this point, Gramscians and Laclauians could again respond by showing how the conjunction of centralised, unifying organisation with horizontal multiplicities is anticipated in their models of transformative agency. Gramsci’s counter-hegemony builds on the reciprocal interaction and transformation of a diversity of actors, which issue in an ‘equal and common’ conception of the world (Chodor 2014: 497–8; Johnson 2007: 100). Likewise, the radical democratic project that Laclau and Mouffe advocated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy exalts a conflictual pluralism that questions the predominance of any single political logic, and commends a creative amalgamation of the conflicting dynamics of ‘hegemony’ and ‘autonomy’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 181, 185, 190). To show, thus, that the autonomous activity of contemporary multitudes pushes up against the bounds of hegemony, we will build a case to the effect that, first, anti-hierarchical movements substantially refashion the most typical structures and habits of hegemony among their ranks; and second, when they combine with centralising, representative politics outside their ranks, this coalescence does not, and should not, assume the form of a happy marriage or a balanced coexistence, even if this is conflict-ridden and mutually limiting as Laclau (and Mouffe) would have it. When the objective is the growth of an alternative paradigm of the commons, which self-organise on terms of openness, diversity, creativity and equal freedom, the balance in the fuzzy, hybrid politics of contemporary movements should be forcefully tipped towards bottom-up, plural and collective participation in an anti-hierarchical vein. Following the lead of democratic mobilisations and egalitarian initiatives in our times, we should reimagine and reshape the strategies of hegemonic politics in 196

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movements post-hegemony formats that would, indeed, be post-hegemonic insofar as they would contest and subdue hierarchies, centralisation and homogeneity. The purpose of the following sections is precisely to set out a post-hegemonic strategy of social struggle and transformation for the common, thinking with and through recent ‘horizontalist’ movements.

Post-hegemony (2): another political strategy refiguring hegemonic structures Leadership, representation, unification and concentration of forces are keynotes of the dominant, hierarchical style of political organisation that resurface in late modern activism. But they are actively questioned and reformed in order to advance horizontalism over and against any residual verticality. 1. Leadership is synonymous with hegemony. Historically, it calls to mind various figures of asymmetrical influence, such as the top-down direction of the ‘masses’ by individual leaders, authoritarianism and paternalism. The persistence of leadership in allegedly non-hierarchical groupings has been noticed since the 1970s (Freeman 1972: 151–64). However, contemporary anti-authoritarian activism has embarked on an ongoing search for ‘another leadership’. This involves an endeavour to grapple reflectively with power and command, to mitigate their authoritarian implications as far as possible, and to experiment with diverse schemes of collective ‘leadership from below’ (Dixon 2014: 175–98; Rucht 2015: 66–7). It is now more widely acknowledged that inequalities of power cannot just be wished away by calling a movement ‘leaderless’. In various nominally non-hierarchical organisations, particular individuals or groups exert greater influence in collective decision-making on the grounds of the time and the devotion they invest, the experience they accumulate, their expert knowledge, their social capital and other unevenly shared skills and capacities (in persuasion, planning, communication and so on). Leaders initiate new practices, they mediate conflicts, they put forward plans and common visions, they motivate and integrate groups, they link up with other organisations and, in general, they fulfil tasks that afford them increased power in the direction of collective action. Leadership is likewise detected in the networks that have recently become a privileged platform for organising democratic collective action and are often cast as ‘horizontal’ (Dixon 2014: 175–9; della Porta and Rucht 2015: 222–9; Nunes 2014: 7–13). Denying the existence of such leadership covers over potential hierarchies, hinders accountability and prevents collective control over leaders. 197

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics Contemporary collective action has confronted issues of asymmetrical power, first, by recognising its presence and, second, by seeking to institute forms of explicit leadership that do not engender domination and contribute to the collective sharing of skills, knowledge and responsibility. Developing ‘another leadership’ essentially entails a ‘growing attempt to be clear, conscious, and collective about leadership’ (Dixon 2014: 186; see also della Porta and Rucht 2015: 223–9). To begin with, clarity and reflectiveness about leadership are nourished by the acknowledgement that unequal influence is hard to eliminate in communities of action due to the uneven distribution of capacities and the valuable functions that leadership roles can fulfil by enabling collective processes. Leadership roles are not merely an unfortunate fact. They can also be valuable functions in certain capacities, such as the facilitation of collective process, the coordination of action and decision-making, the education of people with underdeveloped skills and limited knowledge, and the maintenance of healthy relations within groups (Dixon 2014: 187; della Porta and Rucht 2015: 223, 229). Second, in order to enhance internal democracy and to increase collective control over leadership functions, anti-authoritarian organisations lay down rules, roles and processes through which they seek to promote collective and consensual decision-making and to reduce actual asymmetries of power. Hence, they moderate discussions, they limit the time of speaking, they enable the transformation of preferences, they respect differences and they refrain from overruling minorities. Such ‘internal democracy’ feeds on a practical culture and a spirit that shore up symmetrical communication, transparency, consensus, and the respect of minorities and differences (della Porta and Rucht 2015: 225). Third, democratic activism sets out to cultivate another ethos of leadership in accord with the Zapatista formula, ‘leading we obey’ (mandar obedeciendo). This commends ampler transparency for the actions and the decisions of leaders, constant accountability to their communities, humility and ‘reluctance’ in the exercise of leadership (Dixon 2014: 186–8; della Porta and Rucht 2015: 223). Fourth, contemporary democratic groups often opt for ‘differentiated leadership’, which is geared to different intellectual qualities, capacities and interests. They explicitly delegate definite tasks to particular people, then, which come with special obligations (Rucht 2015: 66–7; della Porta and Rucht 2015: 222–31) Crucially, however, grassroots democratic collectives tend to rotate those tasks that need to be allocated, such as public speaking duties or facilitating and coordinating roles, in order to transform them into power- and knowledge-sharing experiences. To this end, they encourage the sharing of skills by means of 198

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movements post-hegemony training and alternation in the performance of tasks. They create spaces in which people exchange knowledge about politics and society, developing analytic frames of understanding. They foster ‘empowerment’ by involving people in activities of increasing difficulty, through which new and ordinary group members boost their sense of capacity and they acquire skills so as to realise ‘that they have the power and the ability to affect change’ (Dixon 2014: 190–6; see also della Porta and Rucht 2015: 231). ‘Distributed leadership’ is likewise operative in the ‘network-systems’ of various mobilisations today (Nunes 2014: 33–40). In these networks, particular ‘hubs’ of actors and groups tend to occupy central positions. They are connected with more nodes and they produce a widely felt impact. Yet, leaders ‘are several, of different kinds, at different scales and on different layers, at any given time; and in principle anyone can occupy this position’ (Nunes 2014: 33). Distributed leadership can come from anyone and from anywhere. Hubs can increase or decrease, and new nodes can appear and ‘lead’. Hence, contemporary network-movements are not fully flat. But they can be more egalitarian and democratic when they distribute power more evenly and they remain open to new initiatives and hubs (Nunes 2014: 35, 39). In consequence, present-day horizontalism is not a finally achieved condition in which hierarchies have been fully eradicated. It constitutes, rather, a horizon and a regulative principle for which egalitarian movements endlessly strive through critical reflection, political processes and experiments that combat domination and work to curtail to the minimum or, at least, to control any concentration of power in their midst. This internal struggle against inequality is sustained through spaces of ongoing reflection in which questions of domination and influence are openly debated and unwarranted authority gets effectively challenged (Dixon 2014: 72; della Porta and Rucht 2015: 225, 231). This features an ‘agonistic horizontalism’ that contrasts with Gramscian and Laclauian logics of organisation that entrench centralisation, top-down direction and asymmetrical power as essential structures (see, for example, Laclau 1996: 54–7, 98–100; Gramsci 1971: 152–3, 181–2). 2. Representation lies at the core of hegemony in both Gramsci’s politics, which elevates the Party to the modern Hegemon, and Laclau’s scheme, in which ‘particularities . . . , without ceasing to be particularities, assume a function of universal representation. This is what is at the root of hegemonic relations’ (Laclau 2000a: 56). Hegemonic representation rests on the exercise of unequal power over others (Laclau 2000b: 208). What is more, in the present circumstances of ampler social heterogeneity, dispersion and 199

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics globalisation, the need to configure a ‘collective will’ is more intense than ever. Accordingly, for Laclau (1996: 99–100), ‘the constitutive role of representation in the formation of the will . . . now becomes fully visible . . . the role of the “representatives” will be ever more central and constitutive’. This embrace of political representation clashes head-on with the disaffection with representative politics that is widespread among late modern citizens and activists (Tormey 2015; Sitrin and Azzellini 2014; Tornquist, Webster and Stoke 2009). Hence, the 2011 democratic uprisings, from the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados, the Greek Aganaktismenoi to the Occupy Wall Street, spurned political representation, along with party partisanship, standing hierarchies, fixed ideologies and professional politicians. Instead, they initiated processes of consensual self-governance that were accessible to ordinary people. In this way, they publicly staged alternatives to conventional representative democracy (Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011; Tejerina and Perugorría 2012; Graeber 2014). Nevertheless, the evocation of ‘real’ or ‘direct’ democracy in such civic initiatives does not mean that they effectively dispensed with any notion of political representation. Indeed, mobilised actors made representative claims in their appeals to non-present citizens, as illustrated by the slogan of Occupy Wall Street: ‘We are the 99 per cent.’ To repeat Jodi Dean’s (2012: 229) apt remark, ‘Occupy Wall Street is not actually the movement of the 99 percent of the population of the United States. . . . It is a movement mobilising itself around an occupied Wall Street in the name of the 99 percent.’ Likewise, the crowds that assembled in Athens’ Syntagma Square in May to August 2011 came forward as representatives of the people in general, thus making present what was physically absent as a whole (Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011). However, the forms and principles of political representation that are at play in such civic practices depart radically from institutional representation in liberal democracies. If representation ‘means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact’, according to Hanna Pitkin’s (1972: 8–9) seminal analysis, the Indignant and Occupy assemblies indeed raised representative claims and introduced procedures of representative governance. At the same time, they challenged the sovereign modalities of political representation in liberal democracies. What defines the latter is the establishment of a ‘permanent and institutionalised power base’ (Alford 1985: 305), which separates political representatives from the represented and releases them from the immediate pressures of their constituencies (Alford 1985: 305; Brennan and Hamlin 1999). This power base, which comprises the parliament and the entire governmental apparatus of the modern state, entrenches standing divisions and 200

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movements post-hegemony hierarchies between citizens and their representatives in the political system. As a consequence, representatives come to exercise sovereign power over the represented. The democratic ‘square movements’ of 2011 took aim precisely at this institutionalised separation and the sovereign rule of representatives. They ventured, instead, to open up the political representation of the people to ordinary citizens by striking down barriers to participation in collective deliberation. The very choice of public squares and streets to hold popular assemblies, in its contrast to decision-making behind closed doors, highlights the will to publicity, transparency and free accessibility of political power to all (Nez 2012: 131). Inclusionary openness to the diverse multitude was furthered by the rejection of ideological closures and fixed programmes. The assemblies thus made a non-partisan call-out to all citizens (Stavrides 2012), uttering a spacious discourse that was hospitable to a wide range of differences. Occupied squares were reconstructed as ‘spaces to do politics without politicians . . . spaces without money, leaders and merchants’ available to ordinary citizens, the poor, non-experts and marginalised people (Dhaliwal 2012: 263). The procedures of collective deliberation that they followed made evident this drive to openness and asserted the rule of everyone against the power of elites. In order to preclude the exercise of sovereign authority by any individual officer or closed body of decision-makers, the Indignant and Occupy assemblies in 2011–12 enforced binding mandates and alternation in the functions of spokespersons, discussion moderators and special working-groups. They also set strict time limits for speakers, and they used rotation and lot to allocate the opportunity to speak in public. These flexible, collective and egalitarian practices of decisionmaking sought to ward off domination and precluded the sovereign authority of any individual office or closed body of decision-makers (Nez 2012: 132–4; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011: 52–66, 113, 333; Lorey 2014: 50–5). Consequently, the anti-representative rhetoric of the 2011 democratic mobilisations targeted long-established institutions and logics of representative governance. But insofar as they pretended to represent the ‘people’ or the ‘99 per cent’, they indeed made a representative claim. This, however, was premised on radically different processes of representative decision-making, which entail a rupture with hegemonic, vertical and centralised representation. What the 2011 movements strained after in their own practices of coordination and self-direction was to prevent the usurpation of collective power by particular ‘representatives’ and to empower anyone to participate. The occupied squares thus installed 201

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics open platforms of self-governance that anyone could easily join according to their resource availability and interest. Such patterns of collective self-rule were designed to augment massive participation and to be accountable to the many, sketching the rudiments of an open, collective and egalitarian mode of governance that would be more fully representative of the many as many. This new form of collective self-rule, based on a praxis that commons political representation and government, in effect prefigures a democracy of the commons or a ‘common democracy’: the political regime of the commons. The last chapter will draw again on the political experiments and inventions of the 2011 democratic insurgencies in order to flesh out the idea of common democracy and to sketch, thereby, the rudiments of a political vision or objective that guides the strategies of post-hegemony. 3. Unity, the construction of a collective identity, and the concentration of force in order to ‘become state’ form the backbone of hegemonic politics (Laclau 2000b: 207–12, 301–3; Gramsci 1971: 152–3, 181–2, 418). By contrast, in the multi-coloured tapestry of contemporary activism, from the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations in Turkey to viral mobilisations through the Internet, such concentration and collective identity are either absent or weak and marginal. Instead, diversity, decentralisation, dispersion, spontaneity, prefiguration (the creation of alternative spaces and institutions), evanescence, ‘dis-organisation’ and distance from the state have gained prominence in civic action (Arditi 2007; Tormey 2015; Fominaya 2015). Sporadic and ‘disorganised’ upsurges of collective politicisation can tackle specific issues, press for reforms in the political system and catalyse long-term transformations. In recent years, however, egalitarian movements have also engaged in broader coalition-building, addressing society at large, forging collective identities and seeking to amass enough power to reshuffle the prevailing balance of forces. The Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish and the Greek Indignant, along with a multiplicity of anti-authoritarian groups in the USA and elsewhere, are again a case in point. These instances of grassroots political activity have converged around common ends, practices and signifiers (such as ‘the 99 per cent’ and ‘the people’). They centralised the coordination of action in certain ‘hubs’ (such as the Puerta del Sol in Madrid or Zuccotti Park in New York). They tried to reach out to broader sectors of the population affected by neoliberal governance. They sought to bring together a variety of actors. They voiced aspirations to deep socio-political change 202

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movements post-hegemony (such as ‘real democracy’, ‘global justice’). And they took on dominant structures of power with vast collections of human bodies and networked actions (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012; Dean 2012: 207–50; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011: 274–340; Fominaya 2015). Accordingly, they have replicated signal traits of hegemony in tandem with their non-hegemonic horizontalism – the opposition to fixed hierarchies and the exercise of power from the top down. Allying ‘common’ horizontalism with hegemonic politics can add up to an effective political strategy for commons-oriented change. When the aim is to induce radical and broad-ranging transformation, a partial confluence of ends and practices among different agents, the formation of wider social coalitions, dense organising and a powerful gathering of forces to overturn an entrenched distribution of power are, arguably, necessary moments in the build-up of struggle and change that seeks to move in a specific direction, such as greater freedom and equality. The production of coherent systemic effects by uncoordinated protests and dispersed initiatives is just a matter of good fortune. Moreover, without deliberate coordination, the activities of an ‘unbound multiplicity’ are likely to stumble over fatal contradictions between heterogeneous objectives and tactics that cancel each other out – unless an automatic mechanism works its magic to eliminate potential antagonisms among unlimited differences. Finally, plutocrats and political elites are unlikely to give up their privileges through peaceful dialogue and elections. Short of a catastrophic crisis, deep readjustments in structural asymmetries of power come about through social struggle. And, in most cases, the majority of the people have nothing to oppose to the organised power of accumulated wealth, institutions, networks and guns but the united force of their numbers. The simple combination of unity and concentration with autonomous multiplicity would not, however, suffice to qualify a certain type of politics as post-hegemonic. As suggested above, Gramsci’s counter-hegemony and Laclau’s radical populism likewise appear to endorse a certain composition of horizontality/autonomy with verticality/hegemony. Yet, contemporary hybrid instances of horizontalism point effectively beyond hegemony insofar as they turn the scales in favour of plurality, egalitarianism and decentralisation. In that sense, they diverge significantly from the most balanced and diversified variants of hegemony. This is the nub of the post-hegemonic argument that seeks to capture a suitable and forceful political practice for the commons. The remainder of this chapter will illuminate more specifically the ways in which actual examples of civic activism that mix horizontality with verticality are skewed towards diversity, openness and non-hierarchical coordination, sculpting new patterns of unification and community beyond the hegemonic mould. 203

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics

Post-hegemony (2): turning the scales To begin with, diversity and openness themselves became the principle of unity in horizontalist mobilisations such as the Global Justice Movement at the turn of the century. The motto ‘One No, Many Yeses’ succinctly voices the value placed on open plurality as the very foundation of cohesion. This motto pits a variety of forces, ideas and models of organisation against a common enemy (global capitalism), and projects a world in which many worlds can fit (Kingsnorth 2012; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014). Likewise, Occupy Wall Street identified itself as a ‘resistance movement with people of many . . . political persuasions’ (Harcourt 2011). ‘We are trying to build a movement where individuals and groups have the autonomy to do what they need to do and pick the battles they need to pick’ (Marom in Klein and Marom 2012). In the spirit of hegemony, the foregoing struggles indeed sought to overcome sheer dispersion and ‘spontaneity’ by putting together broad coalitions that aimed at large-scale transformation (Dixon 2014: 4–5, 118–19, 140, 221; Dean 2012: 207–50; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011: 274–340). But their mode of coordination was inflected by a strong commitment to diversity that counters tendencies towards homogeneity and closure. Open pluralism has been persistently pursued through a multiplicity of norms, ethical practices and organisational choices. The making of open spaces of convergence for collective deliberation and coordination is a catalyst for flourishing diversity (Juris 2005; Nez 2012: 131–4). Again, the Indignados and Occupy in 2011 adduce telling examples. Their popular assemblies in squares and streets intended to put up ‘a really big tent’ where individuals and groups can operate autonomously ‘while being in solidarity with something much broader and far-reaching . . . [which] connects all those struggles’ (Klein and Marom 2012). Moreover, the assemblies forswore ideologies and strict programmatic definitions in order to appeal to all citizens in their diversity (Harcourt 2011; Dhaliwal 2012: 265). Openness and plurality in communities of action are further nurtured by a certain political culture that is deliberately promoted in antihierarchical organisations and spaces of activism in our times. This culture foments tolerance, critical respect for differences, civility, generosity, a relaxed atmosphere of debate, and an affective politics. It nourishes relations of care and love among diverse people who struggle in common despite their differences (Dixon 2014: 90, 228–9; della Porta and Rucht 2015: 206, 211). 204

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movements post-hegemony The network form that is widely diffused among democratic militancy today is also conducive to diversity, openness and decentralisation. Hardt and Negri (2004) have made much of the ‘distributed network’, the body of the contemporary ‘multitude’, which emerges both in ‘biopolitical labour’ and in various instances of resistance to imperial power in the last fifteen years, from the 1999 Seattle protests onwards. Such networks consist of different units that link up with one another as nodes in a complex web. Connections expand horizontally, lacking any single commanding centre and fixed boundaries. The different nodes can communicate directly with each other, bypassing central ones, while new nodes can be added without a priori limits. Distributed networks enable a loose coordination among different groups and individuals. Participants need not subordinate their distinct identities to an overarching collective identity or a hegemonic agent, yet they are nested in the same web of communication and they can act in common. Flexible networks can coordinate action through the autonomous input of an open multiplicity, which can thus collaborate without central leadership, representation and uniform group identities (Hardt and Negri 2004: xiii–xv, 57, 83, 142, 208–11, 217–18, 336–40). Pace Hardt and Negri (2004: xii–xv, 288, 336–40), most actual network formations are not fully horizontal. Usually, in extended networks, a number of highly connected ‘hubs’ is surrounded by long chains of other nodes with decreasing connections and impact. However, distributed network-systems are not ruled by solid hierarchies or a single leadership. They are subject to an ongoing internal differentiation, and they make room for several, alternating leaders ‘at different scales and on different layers, at any given time; and in principle anyone can occupy this position’ (Nunes 2014: 33; see also 31–3). Dynamic network-systems display flexible, varying mixes of dispersion and unification in different ways, such as swarming, diverse parallel tactics, even new types of political parties. Moreover, as hubs can grow and diminish and new hubs can appear, centralisation remains relative, distributed, contestable and mutable. Present-day organisations such as the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca in Spain and the Movimento Passe Livre in Brazil, illustrate how a more coherent organising core can tie up with a loose group of diverse agents who participate in different degrees, making up an open ‘network-system’ that favours plurality and resists strong centralisation and fixed hierarchies (Nunes 2014: 29, 31–3, 39, 43; Tormey 2015: 110–15). Finally, in horizontalist schemes of collective confluence, pragmatism underpins forms of convergence and common identity that shelter diversity and openness. A heterogeneous assemblage of agents and 205

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics practices can more easily cohere around strategic wagers and practical objectives rather than around group identities and definite political programmes or ideologies. Collective action can thereby avoid both the fragmentation of ‘identity politics’ and the conflicts that tend to erupt among closed identities that assert themselves. Moreover, sustained interaction that is out for shared objectives can glue together a community of practice and, thus, a practical identification that does not rest on common dogma or a collective tradition. Such communities of action can help to reduce exclusions and offset pressures towards homogeneity (Hardt and Negri 2004: 86–7, 337–40; Nunes 2014: 42–4; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014: 239–40). The experiences of World Social Forums and Latin American radicalism over the last two decades recommend a more specific spirit of pragmatism that can inform ‘depolarised pluralities’. Constructive pragmatism treats big and divisive issues, such as the relation between the state and grassroots movements, as open questions that should be tackled contextually, variously and practically rather than uniformly and abstractly. Relevant actions and organisational forms should be equally complex, plural and flexible enough to accommodate variation according to context and divergent judgements. They are therefore not ‘susceptible to being reduced to a general principle or recipe’ (de Sousa Santos 2008: 266). Recent history shows, for example, that confrontation or collaboration with the state or maximum distance from it can variably represent the best option in different situations (de Sousa Santos 2008: 266–7; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014: 81). Acceptance of empirical ‘messiness’ and hybridity, a flexible approach oriented to concrete problem-solving, an open mind and a reluctance to take universal, dogmatic positions compose a pragmatic outlook that can ‘depolarise’ strategic choices, edifying broad pluralist assemblages in the interests of the many. In a world that is faced with planetary hazards and global injustices, but is wildly diverse, fragmented and complex, it is urgent to form publics around key challenges and salient issues, without prejudice towards what counts as legitimate space, cause and practice (Amin and Thrift 2013: 150–3). Respect for differences, a feel for complexity and an embrace of impurity allow us to work through the plethora of political sites, actors and interests so as to knit together large communities of action and to serve the interests of the many. This conscience and the ethos it stimulates seem to be spreading today among the ranks of various ‘horizontal’ activists in Spain and elsewhere. An emerging political subjectivity has come to acquire a taste for pragmatic hybrid politics, which deploys a heteroclite mix of tools, including 206

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movements post-hegemony participation in formal representative politics in order to break sovereign institutions open to an unruly multitude outside them. Hence the rise of new citizens’ parties, civic initiatives and municipal ‘confluences’ such as Podemos, PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca/Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) and Barcelona en Comú (Tormey 2015: 110–19, 149). An affirmation of contamination, heterogeneity and complexity radically counters the trends towards dogmatic closure and homogeneous unification, even unification around horizontal practices as a singular strategy. The crux, however, is that if hybrid movements want to fend off the ‘hegemony of hegemony’ – that is, the predominance of top-down hierarchies foisting uniformity – the balance must remain firmly tipped towards grassroots self-direction and the making of egalitarian alternative institutions. This is because most horizontalist initiatives and mobilisations today remain weak, tentative and dispersed, while they are confronted with entrenched state institutions and corporate or other systemic centres of power that can easily overwhelm or co-opt them (Dangl 2010; Zibechi 2010). Moreover, in every collective formation that melds grassroots participation with hierarchical structures, tensions are likely to break out between the two directions of decisionmaking, the top-down and the bottom-up. In such conflicts, central nodes of power and ‘verticalist’ leaders can mobilise their organised force or their unabashed power politics. Thereby, they can easily win the game of power when they are confronted with a cacophonous and poorly coordinated multiplicity. The recent history of the Spanish party Podemos has repeated well-known lessons in this regard (García 2015; Lloriente 2014). The importance of a resolute tilt towards horizontalism within impure egalitarian movements has been clearly grasped, in effect, by certain currents of contemporary theory and practice. In North and South America, for instance, activist groups committed to direct participation and alternative institutions now connect with the logic of hegemony as they seek to build up ample movements for systemic change. At the same time, however, they embed broader social visions into everyday fights, and craft practices that cater to everyday needs but also sustain and cultivate egalitarian values (Dixon 2014: 116–54, 220–9; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014: 130, 156–7, 179). These are rough outlines of political strategies whereby the politics of hegemony will be grounded in prefiguration and in grassroots power, which will direct the whole process of transformation from below. Such strategies of ‘another politics’ mix horizontalism and verticalism with a clear accent on the former, combining heterogeneous spatialities and 207

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics temporalities. They are anchored in the here and now: this world, its urgent needs and its ordinary people. Yet they are also oriented towards new worlds of freedom and equality, which pertain to the long term and invite arduous processes of reflection, struggle and invention.

Conclusion Hegemony and post-hegemony stand out as two critical categories of political thought that illuminate aspects of late modern political agency without, of course, capturing them all. Single-issue protests, spontaneous uprisings, everyday public administration and political wrangling in parliaments are just a few examples that usually fall outside this conceptual binary, even if they can be variously related to it. The categories of hegemony and post-hegemony remain pertinent, however, to wider systems of power or broad-ranging social change. In this context, the controversy around post-hegemony touches on critical issues of collective mobilisation and transformative politics today. Most advocates of post-hegemony assert that it instantiates collective action and organisation that are situated outside the politics of centralisation, unification, representation and top-down leadership. But hegemonic logics can still be traced in purportedly ‘horizontal’, open, participatory and plural movements. Moreover, spontaneous and dispersed actions should arguably be conjoined with more centralised and representative structures if their aim is to elicit extensive and enduring transformation. The prefix ‘post-’ signals messiness, interdependence and a process of transition and emergence that is far from being accomplished. The case has thus been made that, in the last two decades, various posthegemonic movements have indeed arisen among political actors who yearn for new social systems with greater freedom and equality. These actors do not simply mix up open, egalitarian participation with hierarchical, unifying organisation. Contemporary democratic mobilisations, including the latest 2011 cycle of creative resistances, gesture beyond the vertical politics of hegemony insofar as they are inclined in favour of openness, egalitarianism and diversity in their impure constellations of collective action. They have devised forms of representation, leadership, unity, collective identity and concentration of forces that seek to advance the values of horizontality and plurality to the maximum extent possible. They embody, moreover, an ethos of ongoing self-reflection, anti-dogmatic pragmatism, respect for differences and a heart-felt commitment to principles along with the recognition that perfection is impossible. 208

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movements post-hegemony It remains to be seen if such inchoate tendencies will crystallise into something more solid, massive, enduring and effective that can generate systemic change in the service of alternative democratic commons. In the light of historical knowledge, we can plausibly argue, however, that the hegemonic politics of popular alliances, unity, power struggles and engagement with state institutions could promote – rather than stifle – the antiauthoritarian, egalitarian and pluralist politics of the commons only if it is adequately transformed and subordinated to the commons. This is the post-hegemonic strategy and the way forward that the newest social movements have charted for us.

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Chapter Seven

Common democracy Political representation and government as commons

The vexing paradox of a deep malaise in liberal democracy at the time of its globalisation has been a leitmotiv of much political thinking since the late 1990s (see, for example, Mouffe 2000; Crouch 2004; Stoker 2006). Representation, ‘the foundational idea of modern politics’ (Viera and Runciman 2008: 60), has occupied centre stage in debates over the malfunctions of established democratic regimes and the wide popular disenchantment with them, both of which have been only exacerbated by the rise of corporate power through neoliberal globalisation and the more recent financial crises in various countries (Crouch 2004). The democratic protests of 2011, from the Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignados to the Occupy movements, marked a point of culmination in this contestation of democratic representation, and they tried out new forms of collective participation (Prentoulis and Thomassen 2012; Hardt and Negri 2012). Contemporary political theory has ventured into a rethinking of representation in order to reappraise its political value and its actual workings (see, for example, Urbinati 2006; Manin 1997; Vieira and Runciman 2008; Tornquist, Webster and Stoke 2009; Micheletti and McFarland 2012). In this burgeoning body of critical reflection, a dividing line can be drawn between arguments that hold on to representative politics as a democratic institution, and strands of reasoning that tend to discard it, celebrating the prospects of a democracy ‘beyond representation’ (Robinson and Tormey 2007; Tormey 2015). Ernesto Laclau (2005a: 61), among many others, has thus affirmed that ‘the construction of a “people” would be impossible without the operation of mechanisms of representation’. On the other side of the divide, Hardt and Negri (2004: 244) have countered that ‘democracy and representation stand at odds with one another’. Their rhetoric resonates 210

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common democracy with the broader ‘post-hegemonic’ turn in contemporary theory, which takes issue with Gramscian hegemony (political leadership, ideology, representation) as undermining collective freedom today (Day 2005; Newman 2011; Beasley-Murray 2010). This closing chapter delves into the controversy over representative government as it is carried out in a particular quarter of contemporary political thought with post-Marxist and post-structuralist leanings, in order to chart a path beyond the two contrasting theses. The main intent is to set forth a conception of a ‘common democracy’ or a democracy of the commons and for the commons: a political regime that institutes the political logic of the commons – openness, plurality, equality, horizontality – and makes government itself a common good, shared and managed by all members of a community in the interest of all. The vision of a ‘common democracy’, prefigured in various civic initiatives and insurgencies of our times, is a central plank of transformative strategies for commons-oriented change. It projects a political ideal that can orient social struggles and processes of new institution; it shines light on the political dimension of the commons, the procedures and the practices of the collective self-management of shared goods; and it indicates the proper vehicles of political organisation for the spread of the commons through fight and invention. This political vision is neither a figment of the political imagination nor a prescription of normative philosophy. It is immanent in historical instances of participatory democracy and, most crucially, in actual commons and pro-commons mobilisations. Hence, by tracing out the enacted ‘utopias’ of a common democracy, the overarching argument of this book, which bears on historical change and political strategies to further the commons, will end on a high point. In political terms, this conclusion marks more of a beginning – the starting point of historical ferment, initiatives and incipient movements towards a commons-based society – rather than the end of the debate and historical processes. The polemic over representation within post-structuralist thought can give critical leverage on these questions as it probes political representation in some depth and, crucially, it brings out the most recent challenges to representative politics and contemporary ideas of a democracy beyond representation. At a time when representative democracies are in deep crisis across the globe and several social movements have cried out to their political establishment ‘You don’t represent us’, reconsidering political representation, and the possibility of other democratic institutions, without representation or with different forms of representation, becomes more urgent than ever. The debate reveals, at the same 211

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics time, the limits of any discussion that is conducted in starkly polarised terms, and it thus motivates the search for different modes of representative democratic politics that could shore up and deepen democracy in our times. The discussion starts off with an overview of the conflicting approaches in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Michael Hardt with Antonio Negri, so as to outline the dominant positions in this particular dispute and to uncover their respective limits and problems. The thrust of the argument is that overcoming the dominant forms of representation in representative democracies is conceivable and desirable from the standpoint of the commons, whereas an elimination of political representation is neither. The chapter moves on to peruse alternative scenarios of democratic representation in ancient participatory democracy, the contemporary governance of the ‘digital commons’ (in the case of Wikipedia) and recent democratic mobilisations (the Indignant and Occupy movements in 2011). The foray into the three cases seeks to tease out a different, ‘nonhegemonic’ logic of political representation and collective government that can offer a compass for political projects to make democracy a common affair of all citizens. The examples taken up here are used to flesh out an alternative logic of political government, which they incarnate only partly and in embryo. Moreover, as their context differs from late modern polities and their structures of governance, these examples can yield only hints and sources of inspiration. The alternative idea of collective government that they body forth has not been adequately realised in any modern political regime on a large scale. However, recent developments in European municipal politics, such as the citizens’ platform, Barcelona en Comú, which now governs the city of Barcelona, constitute attempts to enact it more extensively (Zechner 2015). By digging into three telling examples, the chapter seeks mainly to sketch out a theoretical framework for an alternative mode of government, which remains largely unfulfilled and little explored in contemporary theory, but re-emerges variously today in civic initiatives, protests, movements, municipal politics and digital communities. This logic of collective government puts forth an alternative to both ‘hegemonic representation’ – that is, the rule of elected oligarchies – and the mirage of popular full presence in democratic self-governance. The crux of the argument is that various aspects of representation are necessary or appropriate for participatory democracies but hegemonic representation is not. The hallmark of participatory democracies is not that the body of citizens is permanently and fully present as a unified sovereign in collective self-legislation and administration, but 212

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common democracy that political governance becomes a common affair: a public process of decision-making that is accessible to all members of a community on a footing of equality. Such a democratic regime is antagonistic to representative democracies where the assembled demos is excluded from any effective participation in the everyday exercise of major political power, which is entrusted to experts, bureaucracies and elected (or not) elites. But it also contrasts with direct democracy in a wholly post-representative polity where the collective sovereign would be fully present to itself, total and undivided. A counter-hegemonic democracy that would be egalitarian, participatory and effectively representative would be intent on making political power common, an equally shared good available to any and all. This common mode of democratic governance has not been adequately accomplished in any modern polity on a large scale over time, but it maps out a path worth walking for those committed to another society of the commons.

Introducing representation According to Hanna F. Pitkin’s (1972: 8–9) seminal analysis, ‘representation, taken generally, means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact’. Political representatives stand for the subjects they represent in a variety of ways, which may range from purely symbolic, when, for example, a party leader becomes a point of identification for his or her party, to more active and politically consequential, when representatives speak and act on behalf of their constituents, making decisions for them (Pitkin 1972: 38–111). A guiding thread of the present argument is that representation in the sense of ‘making present’ something that is ‘not present literally or in fact’ remains operative in participatory or direct democracies. What effectively marks off representative democracies is not merely the more extensive political role conferred on representatives but the establishment of a ‘permanent and institutionalised power base’ (Alford 1985: 305) that underpins the separation of political representatives from the represented and releases the former from the immediate pressures of their constituencies by vesting them with securely tenured office (Alford 1985; Brennan and Hamlin 1999; Manin 1997: 9). This institutional base, which comprises the parliament and the entire governmental machine of modern democratic states, gives rise to a ‘standing division’ between citizens and the government that substantially augments the sovereign power of representatives over the represented. This type of representation can be designated as ‘sovereign’ or ‘hegemonic’ insofar 213

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics as governments are authorised by the people but act as sovereign rulers during their term in office.

Contesting hegemonic representation Ernesto Laclau’s thought assigns to representation a constitutive function in a ‘hegemonic’ matrix of the political. Grappling with his argument can help to spell out and to query one of the two theses in the current post-structuralist/post-Marxist debate around representation. His defence of representative rule draws part of its rhetorical force from an elision between ‘hegemonic representation’ and other, pertinent facets of representation. As previous chapters have explained, by recasting Gramsci’s hegemony in Derridian and Lacanian terms, Laclau’s work decodes politics in terms of a constituent process that constructs social relations in a way that is grounded in power asymmetries, equivalences and logics of representation (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 93–194). Social orders are contingent formations that can be figured and refigured in different ways. Social orders are hegemonic in that unequal social power decides the prevailing contours of society. When ruling regimes are unsettled by social antagonisms, crises and dislocations, new orderings of society can take their place if the different groups and demands that confront the current regime coalesce into a ‘chain of equivalence’ articulated around shared demands and symbols. The antagonistic bloc will manage to defeat the hegemonic regime and to consolidate itself, instating its own idea of society, if there is sufficient concentration of force within the bloc to enable it to organise efficiently and to overthrow the establishment (Laclau 2000a, 2000b). We have noted how Laclau’s gloss on the ‘political’ lodges representation at the centre of a hegemonic social formation: ‘representation is essentially inherent to the hegemonic link’ (Laclau 2000b: 211). The gist of Laclau’s argument lies in the dialectic between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’. For Laclau, the universal as such is empty. There is no universal human essence, rationality or set of laws that determines the structure of human societies, and no substantial common identity underlies all different groups and identities in modern societies (Laclau 2000a, 2000b; Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 93–194). Hence, the unity of a collective front that will vie for hegemony is woven around ‘empty signifiers’ that represent a chain of equivalent demands and, by the same token, weld a community out of differences. The symbol of the unity (words, images, names of leaders and so on) is a particularity that is somewhat emptied of its particular meaning in order to provide a 214

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common democracy surface of inscription for many different demands and aspirations. This particularity becomes the representative of the ‘universal’: that is, of the community of struggle, and of society as a whole when the chain of equivalences expands to embrace broader social sectors in order to win the struggle for power and to install new social arrangements. Social fragmentation and the dissolution of social bonds cannot be overcome without any reference to universal demands, aims and identities that knit partial and contingent communities. But if there is no objective universality (principle, human essence, needs and so on), a particular demand or project will need to portray itself as the incarnation of that elusive universal: that is, of wider social needs and aspirations. In the politics of hegemony, a particularity comes to re-present a universality in Hanna Pitkin’s sense: this particular thing will make present something (the universal) that is literally absent and is bound to remain so: ‘[P]articularities which, without ceasing to be particularities, assume a function of universal representation. This is what is at the root of hegemonic relations’ (Laclau 2000a: 56). Assuming the contingency of society and history, Laclau’s rendition of representation through the dialectic between the universal and the particular seems reasonable and insightful. But this account goes awry when it conflates the necessity of ‘universal representation’ by particular ‘empty signifiers’ with the distinct claim that the representative function must be taken on by a particular social group that wields asymmetrical power over others: ‘the ability of a group to assume a function of universal representation presupposes that it is in a better position than other groups to assume this role, so that power is unevenly distributed between various organisms and social sectors’ (Laclau 2000b: 208; see also Laclau 2005a: 158–64). Hence, ‘[u]nevenness of power is constitutive’ (Laclau 2000b: 207; see also Laclau 1996: 144). It is obvious that the counter-hegemonic political front will need to win the game of power against the ruling forces and, therefore, it will need to amass more power than the latter. But why are the same asymmetry and concentration of force also inevitable within the counter-hegemonic bloc? Could the interaction among the social sectors and groups that make up this bloc not unfold in horizontal, egalitarian ways that prevent the rise of vertical leadership among them? Laclau makes a plausible case for the necessity of representation at a discursive level, whereby particular signifiers stand for essentially indeterminate universal values. But he elides this discursive representation with hegemonic political representation, whereby the making of collective formations around ‘empty signifiers’ is directed by leading forces that rule over other members of the community. Yet he puts forward 215

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics no argument to refute the possibility or the desirability of a discursive construction of collective identities and relations that is carried out on equal terms among their subjects. Laclau (1996: 98) has also advanced a more specific line of reasoning in defence of political representation. He figures it to be a link between representatives and represented, which is drawn when the identity of the represented is constituted in place A and decisions affecting it are taken in place B. In this exchange, the representative will come to define the interests of the represented because his or her role cannot be reduced to the transmission of a preconstituted interest. The terrain where representation takes place and decisions are made involves negotiations with other forces and considerations, in a context that exceeds the original perspective of the represented: ‘So, the representative inscribes an interest in a complex reality different from that in which the interest was originally formulated and, in doing so, he or she constructs and transforms that interest’ (Laclau 1996: 98). Hence, in political representation, there is a ‘lack in the identity’ of the represented. This is filled by the representative, who thus plays a decisive part in edifying the will of the represented, enlarging and transforming it. In Laclau’s view, this is always the case (Laclau 1996: 98; see also Laclau 2005a: 158–61). Under conditions of growing diversity and fragmentation in late modernity, social agents bear multiple, loose and shifting identities. In an ever larger variety of issues, the ‘collective will’ of citizens is something to be figured out or authored anew rather than a pregiven objective reality to be discovered (Laclau 1996: 99). Accordingly, for Laclau (1996: 99–100), ‘the need to “fill in the gaps” . . . becomes a primary terrain. The constitutive role of representation in the formation of the will . . . now becomes fully visible . . . the role of the “representatives” will be ever more central and constitutive.’ This is ‘hegemonic representation’ at its purest. The representative intervenes as a sovereign ruler who does not simply make policies for her subjects, but she defines their very social relations, identities, interests and will. In the spectrum between the representative as an accountable, instructed delegate and the representative as an independent, authorised Hobbesian sovereign (Pitkin 1972: 14–20, 55–9), we are getting ever closer to the second extreme. There is no denying that late modern circumstances upset any pregiven communal substance, and continuously raise new challenges that call for the making of collective identities and wills where there were none. The open-ended, creative and antagonistic formation of the collective will also lies at the core of an empowered participatory democracy (see Bohman and Rehg 1997; 216

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common democracy Castoriadis 1997; Barber 2004). What is in dispute is whether hegemonic representatives – that is, political leaders – are a conditio sine qua non for collective will formation. One wonders why democratic citizens themselves could not actively reformulate or negotiate their interests and relations, and why they need political rulers to perform this function in their stead. No doubt, it is arguably impractical for all citizens to take part in collective deliberation in all the diverse contexts that demand political decisions in complex societies. But there is no reason why democratic politics should not amplify the interactions between representatives and represented, and should not multiply opportunities for an effective political agency of citizens. New communicative technologies can facilitate an enhanced civic engagement, and collective imagination may fashion new participatory institutions adjusted to contemporary contexts. One would argue, indeed, that civic empowerment along such lines is precisely what democratic societies should aim at if they want to redeem the egalitarian promises of democracy as the self-government of the people. Laclau’s reasoning just eclipses this possibility and the democratic demand for collective participation without marshalling any arguments against them. He seems just to presume that political representation can take on only its conventional mantle, which confines sovereign decision-making and creative political agency to representatives. His idea of representation thus recycles an elitist prejudice that is common to both Leninist and liberal hegemonic politics. The plebs is an ‘amorphous mass’ that needs to be educated, moulded and directed by enlightened leaders. Let us take . . . the case of marginal sectors with a weak degree of integration into the stable framework of a community. In this case we would be dealing not with a will to be represented but, rather, with the constitution of that will through the very process of representation. The task of the representative is, however, democratic, because without his intervention there would be no incorporation of those marginal sectors into the public sphere. (Laclau 2005a: 159)

Unless led by political representatives, then, the marginalised, weak and fragmented people could not craft a collective identity for themselves and could not struggle for their rightful inclusion in the community (Laclau 1996: 99). Under the influence of Laclau’s thought and post-structuralist political theory more broadly, recent analyses of the 2011 democratic protests have taken pains to counter the pretension of these mobilisations to move 217

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics beyond representation. Collective movements such as the Spanish Indignados, the Greek Aganaktismenoi and Occupy Wall Street, have directed their political shafts against political representation, assailing actually existing democracies on the grounds of being elitist, in the service of big money and unresponsive to popular demands. Moreover, taking the step from negation to affirmative creation, they introduced decision-making practices of a ‘real’ or ‘direct’ democracy. These post- or anti-representative aspirations have been contested by several theorists in variable terms, which often rely, however, on the same two moot points in Laclau’s reasoning: the conflation of symbolic or discursive representation with political representation tout court, and the failure to attend critically to what singles out political representation in liberal regimes – the institutionalised autonomy of the representatives from the represented, which elevates the former to leaders and sovereign rulers.1 In both theory and practice, the Indignados and Aganaktismenoi stood up against hegemonic representation that vests elected representatives with sovereign authority, erecting oligopolies of power and nested hierarchies. There is a substantial political difference to be marked between instructed delegates and representatives authorised to make binding decisions by themselves, or between coordinators who take turns and are subject to recall by general assemblies, and contemporary governments with tenured office. These distinctions are clouded over when the practices of representation pursued by actual democratic movements are all subsumed under the same tent of vertical, hierarchical representation.

Absolute democracy beyond representation? On the other side of the debate, Hardt and Negri (2004: 240–1, 247, 255) retrieve a certain promise of absolute democracy that is embedded from the outset in modern democracy – the ‘rule of everyone by everyone’ – and envision its fulfilment beyond all ruling conventions of representation. The case that they mount dovetails with the critique of modern representation adumbrated in the foregoing. But its critical scrutiny can take forward the present argument by pointing to the need ‘to invent different forms of representation’, which Hardt and Negri (2004: 255) also assert, instead of moving beyond representation in general, as they frequently suggest. Under conditions of conflictual pluralism and extended democratic self-management, such an overcoming of representation is hardly imaginable. Hardt and Negri (2004: 241, 245–5) argue that representation is an alienation of the sovereignty of all and, thus, in conflict with democracy on 218

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common democracy a fundamental level. Representation brings about a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ that connects the multitude with the government and, at the same time, separates it from government. The moment of separation is present in different degrees in all socialist and liberal variants of political representation (fully autonomous, relatively autonomous and instructed) whereby sovereignty is partly transferred to the representatives. Consequently, they all fail to redeem the promise of full democracy, ‘the rule of everyone by everyone’ (Hardt and Negri 2004: 247). Political representation is bound up with modern sovereignty, which exercises unequal state power over citizens in a manner that unifies differences (Hardt and Negri 2004: 242–3, 247). The institutionalised disconnect of representatives from the represented in the management of collective affairs perpetuates the state as a sovereign power separate from society. Accordingly, asymmetrical power and the ensuing negation of democracy are built into the very logic of political representation in the state. Additionally, political scientists and sociologies have demonstrated in empirical studies how ‘representation becomes bureaucratic . . . and thus the claims of representation to social universality become completely illusory, leaving political rule in the hands of elites’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 247). Representation, furthermore, is intrinsic to the modern politics of hegemony. First, representation serves to translate the diversity of actual subjectivities into the unity of a people ‘through identification with a leader, a governing group, or in some cases a central idea’ (Hardt and Negri 2009: 305). Second, it performs the disjunctive synthesis between represented and representative rulers, which lays the basis for hegemony and, thus, for hierarchies and control exerted over the multitude. In both instances, representation lays down an aristocratic form of government by subduing the people to leaders, and it stifles diversity (Hardt and Negri 2009: 305). To this fake or impoverished democracy through representation Hardt and Negri oppose the vision of an absolute democracy beyond representation. But this does not amount to a cogent alternative, as it is informed by an implausible Rousseauian idea of democracy. Hardt and Negri’s democracy without representation is laid out in detail in their Declaration, where they seek to extract the new political principles declared by the 2011 democratic uprisings. The refusal of political representation by governments and leaders is located firmly at the heart of these mobilisations, which initiated a ‘constituent process’ for another democracy of the multitude and issued the death certificate of modern representative regimes (Hardt and Negri 2012: 2–3, 5, 7, 25–30, 43–7, 68). 219

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics The deliberative assemblies convened by the 2011 democratic protests indicate how a collective, egalitarian self-management could operate today through plural processes that are hospitable to conflicts and diversity, conducting politics according to ‘the will of all’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 64). Assemblies, federated in a horizontal network, lay down their own rules of decision-making. But they further the common goal of the equal inclusion of all in deliberation and law-making, free of leaders and centralised structures (Hardt and Negri 2012: 90, 107–8). The new democratic regimes that these movements foreshadow would instantiate a collective governance of the ‘common’. The common refers here to nature and products of social labour, such as codes, networks and information, which are organised as shared resources, and are administered and distributed in egalitarian ways that eschew the terms of both private and state–public property (Hardt and Negri 2012: 6, 69–80, 95). Common goods are to be managed ‘through the direct participation of citizens’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 71). The community of all citizens not only should enjoy equal access to these goods on sustainable terms, but also it should control and administer them via practices of direct participation (Hardt and Negri 2012: 71–2, 103, 105). The ‘common’ constructed along these lines should guide the reconstruction of social goods across a variety of domains, becoming ‘the central concept of the organisation of society’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 71). Through the assembly form, the ‘constitutionality of the common’ would extend collective self-management to much larger fields of society, building on the new circuits of communication that are woven by the contemporary ‘biopolitical’ production of ideas, affects and relations, and seeking to include all in decision-making (Hardt and Negri 2012: 92). Despite their protests against Rousseau’s ‘general will’, it is evident, however, that his spectre haunts Hardt and Negri’s ‘democracy of the common’, its negation of representation and its frailties.2 The full and direct presence of the demos in the self-legislation of society ‘across the entire social terrain’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 92) is to take the place of sovereign, alienated representatives. And, although the multitude is distinguished from the homogeneous people, composed as it is of diverse singularities that may clash with each other, these singularities can communicate through their differences, ‘agglutinate’ them in contingent ways, work out a common project and ‘develop a coherent perspective’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 107; see also 65, 105–7). A supersession of representative democracy could not be plausibly envisaged in such terms. The multitude’s full presence means that the community of citizens in its entirety would constantly partake in collective self-management across multiple social fields and it would be able 220

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common democracy partly to reconcile its differences. But on practical grounds, such as the concerns of everyday life, and for political reasons, such as the right to abstain from politics, a variable fraction of the citizenry will normally attend regular assemblies and other fora of social self-governance. Hence, a part of the whole will usually be present in the institutions of direct, popular self-rule and will make decisions for a whole that is absent as such. In other words, a layer of sovereign political representation will remain in place in most conceivable instances of an assemblybased democracy of the common. Moreover, under conditions of historical contingency and in the absence of a preconstituted universal reason or any other guarantor of general agreement, a partial consensus among dissenting views and desires cannot always be anticipated with certainty. This is even more the case if the singularities in the multitude are as diverse and self-changing as Hardt and Negri (2009: 331–40, 350) make them out to be. When antagonistic divisions split the body politic, a part – preferably, the majority – will again take decisions for the whole, thus acting as a sovereign political representative of the entire community, even in the exceptional circumstances when all its members are present at the moment of deliberation and decision-making. It looks as if political representation is hardly an eradicable structure of politics. The oligarchic grip on power in representative democracies thus could not be broken, if the sole alternative is an unlikely politics of the full presence of society to itself – the constant involvement of all members of society in its self-governance, making decisions that regularly attain a general consensus. To burst through the oligarchic bounds of representative democracy, then, we would need to think beyond the strictures of both Rousseauian self-presence and actually existing representation. A further impediment that stands in the way of an immediate leap into an ‘absolute democracy’ without representation is the state and its extensive and deep-rooted entanglement with modern societies. It is not simply that the concentration of police and military force in its hands is overwhelming and could not be easily defeated or circumvented by antagonistic social movements. It is also that contemporary states provide a wide array of vital social services and functions, in health, education, security, law-making and enforcement, income redistribution, infrastructures and so on, for which the only alternative providers are actually markets and private corporations – not any participatory democratic institutions. Hardt and Negri are aware of this state of affairs. Hence, they plead for a certain, Latin American synergy between ‘progressive governments’ 221

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics and grassroots egalitarian movements. This adduces a ‘constitutional example’ that can clear the path towards more democratic participation and a ‘new constituent process of the common’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 83). The progressive governments in charge of state apparatuses wage battles against poverty, racism and exploitative corporations together with autonomously organised communities, landless peasants, unemployed workers and so on. But these social movements remain external to the governments, holding them in check and putting pressure on the state administration ‘to dilute sovereign power to become instead an open laboratory of consensual interventions and plural creations of legislative norms’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 82). Governance is thus dispersed across various sites, which may conflict with each other, maintaining ‘nonetheless a deep political coherence of the governmental process’ (Hardt and Negri 2012: 82). If this is so, the governments in this ‘constitutional example’ are indeed representatives in Pitkin’s sense: they are both separated from and connected with their constituents, serving their common interest. Arguably, then, democratic representation would be still required to open the way to a democracy of the common.

The people are fully present in the event? Contemporary thought has taken another stab at conceiving a real and emancipatory presentation of the people beyond state representation. This is an audacious endeavour that confronts head-on some of the foregoing challenges and it is worth considering, although it is not possible to do full justice to the intricate theory that undergirds it. Reflecting on the 2011 popular uprising in Egypt against Mubarak’s dictatorship, Alain Badiou (2012a: 56–61) contended that, in the case of such an event, whereby previously inexistent people rose to prominence, the Egyptian people were present in person, although the insurgents admittedly constituted a fraction of the entire Egyptian population. The power of their uprising and their proclamation ‘that Egypt was the people who were there’ were such that ‘the whole world concurs’ (Badiou 2012a: 57). This assertion is enfolded in a wider argument that extols the ‘popular dictatorship’ and the ‘movement democracy’ of massive minorities who revolt against oppressive states and practise ideas of egalitarian justice (Badiou 2012a: 54–99). The power of such militant popular minorities draws from the ‘intensification’ of their subjective energies – their passion, enthusiasm and commitment to the cause – and from the ‘localisation’ of their presence in compact sites of struggle – squares, streets, factories, universities and so on (Badiou 2012a: 58–9). Carried by this 222

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common democracy powerful intensification and localisation, ‘the movement, which is always utterly minoritarian, is so certain of representing the country’s people in their entirety that no one can publicly deny that it does in fact represent them. Not even its enemies’ (Badiou 2012a: 58–9). This debatable empirical thesis is buttressed by two further contentions. First, the mobilised minority expresses the ‘general will’ because it manifests the rise of a ‘political truth’ that discloses a new possibility for politics and social relations. Construed as a process of generating political novelties and sequences, a political truth bears universal validity and possesses the ‘authority of reason’, a ‘dictatorial element that enthuses everyone . . . whose absolute law cannot be defeated by any opinion’ (Badiou 2012a: 60–1; see also 77, 85–8). The localised rally of the protesting people is thus a ‘real presentation’ – rather than representation – ‘of the generic power of the multiple’ because they have constructed a site that effectively presents the human capacity for justice, equality and universality. Their cause is endowed with ‘the universal value of the . . . what concerns, what enthuses, humanity in general’ dissolving separate identities and divisive criteria (Badiou 2012a: 87, 93–4). Any political truth is generic and universal, and eradicates ‘separating words’ that are established by states (Badiou 2012a: 77). Second, the amassed minority that occupies the site of an event of truth is a ‘massive minority’, ‘a sample of the generic being of a people’ (Badiou 2012a: 91). It encapsulates all varieties of persons that compose a people and it overcomes all significant contradictions between them, ‘between intellectuals and manual workers, men and women, poor and rich’ (Badiou 2012a: 111–12). Accordingly, this other enterprise to uphold theoretically the possibility of a real presentation of the political community dismisses Hardt and Negri’s first idea, the actual full presence of popular majorities in self-governing assemblies, and trades essentially on their second premise, pushing it to its extremes and uncovering its hidden presuppositions: the actuality of a universal consensus grounded in universal truths, and the existence of ‘generic multiplicities’ without divisive contradictions. Such a supersession of political representation thus hinges on two assumptions that are politically and theoretically contentious, to say the least: the metaphysical belief in universal truths and the potential dilution of antagonistic divisions among differences – the possibility to eliminate the contest of differences in certain key instances and sites. Historical reality bears witness to the unlikelihood of the latter assumption. Badiou himself admits as much when he talks of May 1968. However intensified, localised and articulated around emancipatory truths, this minoritorian insurgency was not accepted by everyone as representing them: hence the result of 1968 elections organised by De Gaulle 223

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics (Badiou 2012a: 58). The violent clash between the Muslim Brotherhood and their popular opponents in Egypt’s revolution also belies a conception of Egyptian insurgent multiplicities as generic, non-separated, at one with the people as a whole. Far from being easily resolved in militant ‘generic’ multiplicities that fight for universal justice, ‘contradictions within the people’ (Badiou 2012a: 66) remain in effect a vexing political issue for any democratic mass mobilisation today. Badiou is, again, painfully aware of this: ‘inventing a revolutionary political discipline’ that will sustain ‘the dictatorship of the True born with the historical riot’ and will not follow the authoritarian model of the army ‘is an enormous problem for today’ (Badiou 2012a: 66). If this is so, allowing for ‘political truths’ that authorise an insurgent multitude to legitimise itself in the name of truth, to pose as a real presentation of the people in general and to impose on everyone ‘the dictatorship of its decisions’ (Badiou 2012a: 60), indeed seems to be a recipe for an authoritarianism of militant massive minorities.

Making representative governance common Actuality and history hold in store examples of collective self-rule that chart political avenues beyond both hegemonic representation – the rule of elected oligarchies – and the perilous mirage of popular full presence. Principles and practices of a counter-hegemonic democracy, which would be egalitarian, participatory and effectively representative at the same time, can be traced out in ancient instances of limited direct democracy, in contemporary digital ‘commons’ and in radical democratic mobilisations. Despite their discrepancies, these figures can all be said to make political power common, an equally shared good accessible to all and sustainable over time. The ‘common’ denotes here the common baseline of the different definitions of the ‘commons’ or ‘common-pool resources’ (Ostrom 1990: 30, 90) or ‘commons-based peer production’ (Benkler and Nissenbaum 2006: 395) or the ‘common’ (Dyer-Witheford 2012: 2), among others. It encompasses goods and resources that are collectively owned and/or collectively produced. Access to them is provided on equal terms (which may range from totally open access to universal exclusion from consumption, with many possibilities in between), and the common goods are collectively administered in egalitarian, participatory ways by the communities that produce or own them. What is crucial for our theme of ‘common democracy’ and ‘common representation’ is that the ‘common’ pertains to shared resources that are managed, produced and distributed through collective and equal participation that breaks with the logic of both private and state–public property (Ostrom 1990: 1–30, 90; Benkler 224

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common democracy and Nissenbaum 2006: 394–6; Dyer-Witheford 2012; Hardt and Negri 2012: 6, 69–80, 95). The following examples illustrate a different notion of political representation that incarnates a process of ‘commoning’ representation and representative government. This process is subject to numerous practical constraints in each case and could not be immediately applied to all the various scales of contemporary democratic politics. But the examples shed light on an alternative logic of democratic representation that can orient efforts to practise ‘common representation’ more extensively through adaptations, tests and experiments. As against representative democracy, ‘common’ representative democracies smash any standing division between the rulers and the ruled, enabling anyone who so wishes to involve themselves in political deliberation, law-making, administration and law enforcement over collective affairs. Anyone can take legislative and policy-drafting initiatives in deliberative fora. Anyone can take up posts in the apparatuses of administration and the courts. Collective self-governance becomes, in principle, an affair of common citizens, of anyone. As distinct from Rousseauian democracy, however, sovereign power is not exercised by the assembled demos in its unified totality. Divisions within the people and between governors and governed remain in place, and the demos is never wholly present at once in any single political institution. Only an alternating fraction of the community participates normally in the various sites of self-management, as they freely choose. Political representation is not eliminated. But institutional devices such as lot, rotation in office, limited tenure, increased accountability and the casual alternation of participants in collective assemblies inhibit the consolidation of lasting divides between rulers and ruled, expert governors and lay people. It is precisely these effects of making political representation common, accessible to all and resistant to oligopolies that are often occluded by accounts of recent democratic insurgencies that simply affirm that political representation remains alive and kicking in their midst. A classic of direct democracy is indeed paradigmatic in this respect, despite the cultural homogeneity on which it fed and the exclusion of women, slaves and alien residents from the body politic, which deeply matters for us today. In ancient Athenian democracy (the fifth to the fourth century b.c.), decisive political power lay in the Assembly and the people’s courts. In these central democratic sites, the keynote speaker was ὁ βουλόμενος, anyone who wishes: ‘in democracies, anyone who wishes may speak, whenever he wishes’ (Aischines in Manin 1997: 16). The first comer among enfranchised Athenian men was 225

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics equally able to submit a proposal to the Assembly and to address his fellow-citizens. The main premise of direct democracy in Athens was not full popular presence. Not all citizens actually attended the general Assembly – only one-fifth of the total normally did so; nor did they all staff the people’s courts each year, for which 6,000 judges were drawn by lot from a pool of volunteers (Manin 1997: 18, 30). The cardinal principle was that political initiative and participation in the judiciary or the magistracies was a common right of any random citizen (Manin 1997: 12, 16, 30, 38). Everyone enjoyed an equal right or an equal chance to exercise decisive political functions whenever he wished, yet not all did at the same time. Iσηγορία, the equal right to take the floor in the sovereign Assembly, and the typical use of the lot in filling most public offices in the magistracies and the courts attest to the same idea: government is to be a collective good equally available to anybody, without pursuing and attaining the presence of all in its functions. ‘The Assembly was identified with the people not because all citizens attended, but because all of them could attend, and because its membership was constantly changing’ (Manin 1997: 31). Hence, various divisions between rulers and ruled persisted, and the demos was re-presented in political power by an alternating number of its citizens. But sovereign decision-making could not become the monopoly or oligopoly of anyone. Hierarchies and divisions of power were always provisional, fluid and reversed in regular terms. This effect was systematically sought after through a panoply of political technologies: the extensive use of lot to fill political posts; strictly limited terms in office; the legally enforced rotation of citizens in executive posts; the right to demand the suspension of magistrates at any time, which made tenure in all offices insecure; the simplification of all administrative jobs and judicial functions; the actual alternation of citizens attending the Assembly; and the frequently exercised right of any citizen to bring an action for illegality (γραφή παρανόμων) against any proposal submitted to the Assembly, even against laws passed by the Assembly, and to have them repealed by the people’s courts on the grounds that they were detrimental to the public interest (Manin 1997: 8–41; Alford 1985: 305–8). This elaborate political architecture was designed to render collective self-government really common by banning the rule of experts, professional politicians or any other standing elite (Manin 1997: 32–3; Rancière 1995: 19–40), and by ‘guaranteeing anyone who so desired – the “first comer” – the chance to play a prominent part in politics’ through ἰσηγορία and the lot (Manin 1997: 38). The rule of anyone carries, indeed, the risk 226

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common democracy of new oligarchies or populist dictatorships. In direct democracies which lack any constitutional checks and balances, militant minorities, activists and popular leaders may come to dominate sovereign assemblies. But Athenian democracy, through institutions such as the γραφή παρανόμων and the political power of people’s courts, had engineered effective checks and counterweights. These were still open to any citizen, though, rather than reserved for elites and closed bodies, thus securing the real commonness of collective self-rule. The Athenian democracy was common, then, in the precise sense that it afforded to all ordinary citizens the equal possibility to accede to political power, and it was bent on abolishing any permanent separation between the governors and the governed, recurrently unsettling the subsisting divisions of power by mixing, fusing and reshuffling the composition of citizens who assumed sovereign functions in the various bodies of government. Shifting forward once more, it is illuminating to see analogous principles at play in the self-governance of contemporary ‘commons’: that is, of natural and cultural goods manufactured and maintained by communities, which manage them collectively and share them in association (Dyer-Witheford 2012). Certain categories of these common-pool resources, such as the ‘digital commons’ of open source peer production, display structures of self-management akin to those governing Athenian democracy. Wikipedia, the free, Internet-based and collectively authored encyclopaedia, is a highly cited case in point. It is a public good freely accessible to anyone and collectively fabricated through the autonomous inputs of a multiplicity of volunteers without top-down command. It is also collectively self-managed by the community of its producers and users in ways that augment the power of anyone to participate in policy-making and enforcement according to their interests and abilities. Wikipedia’s core innovation rests on wikis, a technology that makes websites editable by anyone. The knowledge content of the encyclopaedic articles is thus provided and edited by any interested member from the potentially global community of Internet users. The common good, the online encyclopaedia, is freely created and consumed by an indefinite multiplicity of individuals through their cumulative, decentralised and interacting contributions to each article. There is no hierarchical direction of the production process (Konieczny 2010). The communicational architecture of the wikis thus underpins an ongoing collaboration among an open social network, enabling the participation of an anonymous, shifting and infinitely extensible multitude in the evolving production of a collective resource. The terms of their involvement are exactly those of ‘ὁ βουλόμενος’ and ‘ἰσηγορία’: ‘the design of the 227

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics wiki technology . . . provides equal and adequate speaking opportunity to anyone who wishes to be part of the community discussion’ (Black et al. 2011: 606). This holds equally true for the governance of the ‘digital commons’. The policy pages are equally editable by any registered user of Wikipedia, and publication policies come to reflect a mutable consensus among editors and the slow evolution of conventions (Konieczny 2010: 267–8). Wikis here support an open platform of decentralised, horizontal and fluid collective self-governance, which is available to any self-chosen party, achieving a ‘high level of empowerment of individual Wikipedia editors with regard to policy making’ (Konieczny 2009: 190). A variety of mechanisms, moreover, obstruct the rise of cabals and oligarchic rule amid a seeming chaos whereby ‘anyone can edit’ the content and the rules of the communal good. Wiki pages enhance transparency and collective monitoring since they operate as persistent public records and they allow the tracking of changes in content management. Articles and policy pages are then subject to constant control and review by any editor and they are watched over by administrators, who are, again, self-selected candidates elected by Wikipedia users. Administrators and experienced editors are formal and informal leaders who are thinly and reversibly separated from the community. Their rulings can be challenged, any editor can accede to these positions, and leaders rub shoulders with the rank and file on an everyday basis as they regularly collaborate in the production of the common good – the publication of articles. Furthermore, Wikipedia’s open-content licence authorises anyone to copy the database and to start up a competing project, cancelling out any efforts to gain an authoritarian hold on the community (Konieczny 2009: 165, 178–87; Konieczny 2010: 275–8; Viégas, Wattenberg and McKeon 2007; Beschastnikh, Kriplean and MacDonald 2008). Once again, collective self-management does not amount to a simultaneous presence of all in the institutions of e-governance. A real re-presentation of the collectivity comes about by offering to anyone equal access to power (policy- and law-making, monitoring and rule enforcement) while diffusing the processes of surveillance, rule enforcement and correction to thwart the concentration of power. Pursuing the common means also pursuing a sort of ‘holistic fusion’: participants in these projects seek a feeling of unity between their identities as consumers and producers . . . their status as experts and amateurs . . . as leaders and followers, between their activities of work and play, and between themselves and their fellow participants in the project. (O’Neil 2011: 6)

228

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common democracy As distinct from Athenian democracy, the self-management of digital commons today has the potential to burst beyond the socio-political confines of patriarchal regimes by setting up virtual platforms of participation available to any and all, irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity and other exclusionary identities. Moreover, new communicational technologies can lift constraints of time and space, fusing collective labour and self-regulation, and making democratic decision-making an ordinary aspect of everyday life (O’Neil 2011: 5). In short, ‘common’ here implies that government becomes equally an affair of any average individual and it is integrated into everyday life. The common thus upsets fixed identities and divisions, generating a fluid, ongoing process that draws on the wisdom of the crowd. The many appeals and democratic virtues of this modality of representative governance have prompted enthusiastic plans to translate it into systems of ‘wiki’ or ‘open’ government (Noveck 2009; Lathrop and Ruma 2010) directly applicable to contemporary states. However, several obstacles impede an immediate translation of wiki government into political institutions for offline democracies: the spatially bounded nature of offline political associations; the many vital, scarce and degradable resources that they have to manage (resources that are substantially different from universally usable, inexhaustible and lessthan-indispensable digital goods); the uneven distribution of digital literacy; unequal access to e-sources; and several others. This is not to say that wiki technologies could not be enlisted for the purposes of open government, but they could do so only when embedded in a wider socio-political frame and as a moment of broader socio-political mutations. Herein lies part of the thrust of the 2011 democratic uprisings, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movements, through the Spanish and Greek Indignant. These were ‘leaderless resistance movement[s] with people of many . . . political persuasions’ (Harcourt 2011) that rose up against material inequalities, debt, foreclosures and the economic system that orchestrates them in complicity with a corrupt representative government that no longer stands for the people. But the movements refused to make demands on the state and they dismissed political representation, party partisanship, fixed ideologies, centralised leadership, the power of money and politicians, and the homogeneous unity of the people or the masses. They devised practices of self-governance that would break hegemonic politics asunder by organising autonomously in public spaces. They designed processes of egalitarian, consensual deliberation that are open to all, fomenting diversity and knitting horizontal, decentralised networks that propel collaboration without suppressing 229

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics the freedom of singularities. Hence, they publicly prefigured in practice the vision of another, more equal and democratic world (Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011; Castañeda 2012; Harcourt 2011; Tejerina and Perugorría 2012; Lorey 2014; Graeber 2014) From our vantage point, they can be seen as a massive endeavour to act out a political logic of the common in central public sites. The popular assemblies held in public squares sought to open political power to all ordinary citizens, contesting the rule of money and professional political classes. Opposition to representative politics and the dominance of the markets went hand in hand with an endeavour to involve ‘normal and common people’ (Dhaliwal 2012: 265), pulling down informal and institutional barriers to participation in the exercise of sovereign power and striving to increase ‘community control’ over the entire social system (Dhaliwal 2012: 266). The idea of democracy embodied by the 2011 democratic movements can be construed as ‘presentist’ in the sense that it enabled citizens to be actually present in assemblies of democratic self-government, turning democracy into a ‘present becoming’ (see Lorey 2014: 59–60). But ‘presentism’ and the evocation of ‘real’ or ‘direct’ democracy did not mean that these gestures of democratic self-organisation rose beyond any sense of representation. Mobilised participants appealed to other, nonpresent citizens in an attempt to recruit them, and they staked representative claims in their appeals: ‘We are the 99 per cent’ . . . ‘We are like you: people who get up in the morning to study, to work, or to look for work’ (Dhaliwal 2012: 265). The multitudes populating the deliberative assemblies in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol or in Athens’ Syntagma Square thus claimed to re-present the people in general, making physically present what was actually absent as a whole. Yet, a sea of difference sets this scheme of political representation apart from institutionalised representation in liberal democracies. What is more, the difference is not accidental, but deliberately striven for by the ‘outraged’ democratic mobilisations in 2011. From this perspective, they undertook a process of ‘commoning’ political representation in collective self-rule. The very choice of public squares and streets to hold popular assemblies, in its sharp contrast to decision-making behind closed doors, patently signals the will to publicity, transparency and free accessibility of political power to any and all (Nez 2012: 131). Political rule is thereby positioned in open platforms that invite the participation of lay people and transform governance into a shared-pool resource. Inclusive openness to the multitude in its diversity throve, furthermore,

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common democracy on the rejection of ideological closures and programmatic definitions. The assemblies articulated a spacious discourse hospitable to a wide range of differences (Dhaliwal 2012: 265; see also Stavrides 2012). Occupied squares were redesigned as ‘spaces to do politics without politicians . . . spaces without money, leaders and merchants’ (Dhaliwal 2012: 263) available to ordinary citizens, the poor, non-experts and socially marginalised people (see also Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011: 43–54, 221). As a result, the squares became ‘a magnetic furnace where strangers that once walked anywhere alone meet, mix and melt’ (Dhaliwal 2012: 259). The intent to make democratic representation common was echoed powerfully in the regulations of self-governance. These purported to enforce the rule of ‘whoever, whenever s/he wishes’ against the hegemony of leaders, elites, sovereign representatives and a homogeneous people bound to be present en masse in decisive political functions. The 2011 Indignant movements thus implemented binding mandates and alternation in the posts of spokespersons, discussion moderators and special working-groups. They set strict time limits and used rotation and lot to allocate the opportunity to speak in the assembly. They recognised only individuals, and no groups, as equal participants in the procedures of political deliberation. They introduced flexibly regulated, impersonal processes of consensual decision-making and upheld them as ‘the commons of democratic government’: the shared good of government over and against the sovereign authority of any individual office or closed body (Dhaliwal 2012: 262–3; Stavrides 2012; Nez 2012: 132–4; Giovanopoulos and Mitropoulos 2011: 52–66, 113, 333; Lorey 2014: 50–5). It is in this context, and in close connection with face-to-face interaction and urban spaces, that the role of digital technologies in ‘commoning politics’ could be situated and duly appreciated. Digital communication networks, Internet communities and ‘social media’ are well known to have catalysed the 2011 democratic mobilisations, from the Arab Spring to the Indignant and the Occupy (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012; Mason 2013). Digital platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, have made it possible for ‘anonymous’ individuals and groups to act politically in self-organised ways. Through the new media, any connected individual can originate and circulate political messages, call for action, disseminate critical information, participate in collective debates, and initiate and organise mass action. By means of such popular, accessible and densely knit networks of communication, ordinary citizens were able to coordinate themselves and to occupy public squares, bypassing

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics not only state-controlled fora and institutions but also corporate media and any established ‘representative’ organisations, such as political parties and trade unions (Bimber et al. 2015). In recent years, digital communication technologies have facilitated a personalised engagement with political causes and collective action, making for flexible coordination and individually variable degrees of commitment. In contrast to modern vehicles of political coordination, which rested on centralised organisations and required ideological convergence, new digital media shift the burden of coordination to individuals themselves, lending more room for personal differences and autonomy. They enable self-directed interaction between individuals on both small and large scales, diminishing the importance of elites and organisations. As a result, the new media environment is conducive to effective collective action. It advances the ‘commoning’ of politics by opening political activity to a multitude of ordinary citizens in their differences, beyond the confines of formal organisations and professional politics (Castells 2012: 230; Bennett and Segerberg 2011: 771–5; Bimber et al. 2015: 21–6; Xenos, Vromen and Loader 2014: 151–5). This ‘commoning’, however, comes through an impure, ongoing and hybrid process. It negotiates a variable combination and interaction between collective and ‘connective action’; formal representative politics, parties, elites and diverse civic engagement; and hierarchical and horizontal, decentralised structures, rather than a full displacement of the one by the other (Halupka 2016; Tormey 2015; Chadwick 2013). In sum, the digitally powered ‘square’ movements in 2011 did not abolish representation in their ranks or with regard to society at large. But they implanted institutional impediments to avert the usurpation of collective power by particular individuals or groups, and they empowered anyone to take part in institutions of social self-management, removing both gate-keeping barriers and exclusionary terms of full commitment. The occupied squares thus put together common pools of representative self-governance that anyone could easily join, according to their various degrees of resource availability and interest (Morell 2012: 390).

Trajectories of change and agonistic democracy Historic figures of participatory democracy and its present-day enactments are rife with hints and insights that open up paths of political autonomy beyond both hegemonic representation and democratic presentism. The collaborative production and management of collective 232

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common democracy goods today illustrate practices of self-government in common that could evolve, proliferate and coalesce in larger associations across society to fuel a grassroots democratic empowerment. A process of ‘commoning’ social self-governance could issue mainly from the bottom up, through civic initiatives in such fields as the social economy of collectively selfmanaged enterprises and community services or the lowest tier of state administration on the local level. Common democratic empowerment could not plausibly be spearheaded by a top-down process. Ruling elites would have little or no interest in dispersing and diluting their power downwards. However, the example of the 2011 radical democratic movements intimates that collective political participation is unlikely to carry on over time unless it addresses everyday problems, amasses decisionmaking power over key matters of public concern and devises institutions that combine efficacy and openness with moderately demanding levels of civic commitment. Critical engagement with ruling state apparatuses will thus be required in order to gain decisive powers or to launch effective political initiatives that push forward open and common representation. Consequently, grassroots democratic agency will need not only to build its own institutional spaces but also partly to ‘colonise’ state institutions, if influence on the state to progress towards ‘common democracy’ could hardly be expected from the top. It is important, then, also to navigate through hybrid forms that introduce participatory representation of the common people in state administration, such as municipal participatory budgeting, or perhaps political parties organised bottom-up through local assemblies that are open to every citizen (see, for example, Wright 2010: 155–67). Yet, the advance of ‘common democracies’ leads to a rupture with dominant logics of state rule and capitalist markets, by instituting open, inclusive, horizontal and egalitarian self-government over and against existing exclusions, hierarchies, injustices and asymmetries of power. This could hardly be a smooth process of incorporation of grassroots democracy into extant state apparatuses, then. More plausibly, a politics of antagonism and struggle will strive both to craft an independent institutionality and to ‘occupy’ representation in state institutions in order to induce deep democratic transformations under actual conditions. A counter-hegemonic endeavour to common politics should be driven, then, from the bottom up, through open, plural and inclusive participation that contests any remaining or newly arising divisions between representatives and represented. Hence, any project of ‘commoning’ democracy will be an instance of agonistic democracy. Ongoing agon or struggle will be required to 233

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the common and counter-hegemonic politics take on material inequalities and entrenched political hierarchies in contemporary liberal states. Moreover, even if movements towards ‘common democracy’ manage to influence or partly colonise the state, resistance and fight against top-down rule and hierarchies will have to be endless, as vertical and exclusionary logics are deeply embedded in contemporary state and movement politics. Finally, democratic agonism – that is, the legitimation of conflict, antagonistic pluralism and the amenability of institutions to challenge and change (Mouffe 2000, 2005; Connolly 1995) – should be a building block not only of contemporary projects of transformation but of any ‘common democracy’ to come, since inequalities, injustices, hierarchies and exclusions are likely to subsist or to arise anew in any form of democratic society.

Inconclusive thoughts We are accustomed to thinking representation in ‘hegemonic’ or ‘sovereign’ terms, whereby political representatives make decisions for those they represent on the basis of standing divisions that deprive the represented of any effective influence in representative government. Accordingly, the aspiration to radical, empowered and inclusive democracies has often assumed the form of an all-out rejection of representation in both contemporary theory and practice. However, a full negation of representation is neither feasible nor desirable. It would require a people fully and permanently present in institutions of governance and able to reach consensus on all political questions that matter. In any inclusionary, participatory democracy that exceeds the bounds of a small and homogeneous community, it will normally be only a fraction of the whole that will be engaged in decision-making on different occasions and will assent to the decisions taken. It is crucial to recognise that this part still re-presents a whole that is absent and to which the part should remain responsible and accountable. Assuming that participatory collective self-governance can eliminate political representation as such entails the risk of obscuring partiality and the need to hold random people accountable to the absent whole. Hence, to deepen and expand democracy in our historical present we should rather set out to make political representation common – that is, truly accessible to all on a footing of equality, participatory and accountable – instead of fantasising a democracy that has totally dispensed with any sense of representation. This is precisely what various historically known instances of participatory and egalitarian 234

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common democracy self-governance have striven to do by deploying their constituent powers and their institutional imagination. A ‘common democracy’ of any and all would also remain inherently agonistic, alert to its limits and hospitable to dissent, antagonism and struggle, in order to fulfil its radical commitments to freedom and equality.

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Notes

Chapter 3 1. For this conception of hegemony in Laclau, see, among others, Laclau 2000b: 207–12; Laclau 2005a: 100. For Gramsci’s hegemony, see Gramsci 1971: 152–3, 181–2, 333, 418. 2. At the time of writing this chapter, Hardt and Negri’s latest intervention, Assembly (2017), had not come out. It was not possible thereafter to probe in depth the displacements and innovations it introduces in their thought and their approach to hegemonic politics. On its publication, a major shift was discerned in their explicit endorsement of ‘hegemony’, which they construe as ‘taking power’ in order to transform society directly by ‘Overthrowing the existing institutions and creating new ones’ (Hardt and Negri 2017: 277). In effect, they identify three paths towards the transformation of ruling structures and the cultivation of new modes of social organisation: the strategy of ‘exodus’, which withdraws from dominant institutions and creates miniature new ones and ‘prefigurative practices’; antagonistic reformism, which grapples with existing institutions in order to transfigure them from within; and hegemony, which seeks to take power in order to put in place a new society (Hardt and Negri 2017: 274–9). They bring out the limits of each and they argue for their combination. Taking power should serve to open space for autonomous practices and the slow, long-term transformation of prevalent institutions. The argument of this book shares this outlook on transformative strategies. Yet Hardt and Negri’s last reflections on a ‘three-faced’ political strategy remain sketchy and underdeveloped (Hardt and Negri 2017: 274–9). This lack is not accidental. They actually reaffirm a leitmotif of their political theory from the Multitude (2004) onwards. 236

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notes For them, the key is to be found in the actual ability of the multitude to organise their productive lives and their forms of cooperation in biopolitical labour. This ‘demonstrates the necessary political capacities. And in the biopolitical context, social organisation always spills over into political organisation’ (Hardt and Negri 2017: 279).

Chapter 7 1. Different examples of this elision can be found in the account of the Occupy movement by Prentoulis and Thomassen (2012), and in Dean (2012) and Tormey (2012). 2. For an account of Rousseau’s democracy in terms of a full, direct and homogeneous presence of the sovereign people in self-legislation, see Urbinati 2006: 60–100.

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