Political Theory, Political Manifesto

Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Commonwealth is the third book of their trilogy theorizing the emergence of global sovereignty, developments in capitalism, and contemporary prospects for communist revolution and absolute democracy. It diagnoses the present, explains how we got here, and calls for new political subjects to surpass those political and economic institutions repressing, capturing, and feeding off of our creative labors. One of the strengths of this trilogy is the way that it encourages us to see all the ways that we are already strong. We already possess the capacity to live autonomously. We think that we need things like law, the state, and systems of discipline and organization to supplement something that we lack. Actually, we lack nothing. Creativity is immanent to our being, and that which we think we need to force us to be productive, to come together for the purposes of government, in fact captures us, and leeches off our constant invention of new ways of being all the time. We are independent of the system that steals the fruits of our labors and tells us that we are dependent on this organized theft.

And yet we don't revolt. The problem with sovereignty since Thomas Hobbes is that we are presented with two choices: the current political structure, or the chance that things could be worse. Much worse. Presented with this choice, we opt for what is merely bad to avoid the worst. We lack political imagination, hope, and faith in others so we won't continue to be blackmailed to accept the bad lot we are presently given by politics today. We don't recognize how the structure channeling our productivity into a form that can be captured and stolen is a parasite feeding off of what we create. The structure is represented as a product of either knowledge or necessity, rather than as a system of oppression, and we lack a proper critical consciousness to see through this misrepresentation. The system of exploitation needs to be represented for what it is. Finally, and this is one of the most significant contributions of Commonwealth, we need the perseverance to see through an effort to put in place something better than what we have at present. We lack the capacity currently to become otherwise than we presently are, and we lack the institutions to sustain us in this revolutionary endeavor.

The paradox afflicting radically democratic efforts (those sharing some sort of a relation to the Marxist legacy) to change our collectively worsening political and economic lives is the following. Political concepts and institutions like law, the state, and systems of representation, or "sovereignty," have stunted our capacity to imagine being otherwise. "Discipline" has increased the capacity of labor, hence the profits extracted from those who labor. Institutions organize and stabilize these exploitive systems. In order to reject, totally, systems of exploitation, some may be tempted to eschew not only the substantive concepts and institutions that have captured us and then fooled us into accepting our capture as the best life has to offer, but transcendentals, discipline and institutions period. The obsession with revolutionary purity can become messianic, satisfied with nothing less than seeking or waiting for entirely new grounds to begin life again, ones that are totally unrelated to, and uncontaminated by, the corruption that has preceded us and gives place to us. Or, this kind of obsessive purity can itself capture revolutionary energies and keep them suspended in (re)enacting "spontaneous" revolt and destructive violence, since any "structure" would be a limit to life's unthinkable potential. In refusing all limits, however, this manner of "revolution" becomes infinitely destructive of efforts to constitute and conserve better ways for us to be, collectively. It is self-immolating or suicidal. Yet, in seeking to institutionalize democratic gains against reaction, to support economies sustaining our collective welfare and happiness against necessity and the fearfulness necessity breeds, to create the new political subjects capable of sharing in these collective efforts, and the institutions...