Commonwealth Paperback – March 7, 2011

CommonwealthExceptionally insightful! I have all three of the Negri/Hardt books and all are excellent. This gives you an insight into what is happening and why on the macro/international socioeconomic level. It is high level reading, and and will be slow going for most people, but is well worth the effort. Hart has done an exceptional job of translating. Hart has several youtube interviews posted about Commonwealth. He is not as good a speaker as he is translator/writer, but these are also well worthwhile to watch after you have read the books. The _South of the Border_ by Oliver Stone dvd is a good companion to this showing how the new global commonwealth is being resisted in Latin America as the human cost is just too high.

The book by Hardt & Negri is excelent and I'm not going to go into its academic value per se -- enough has been said here as to how good it is. I would like however to comment on the REALLY POOR QUALITY of the Kindle edition: not only the notes have no link - making it impossible to access them while reading the text proper - but there are a number of hyphenated words (that were probably in the end of a line in the paper book), leading one to believe the editors merely converted the pdf archive to the ebook format, without any regard to a proper revision and to reading experience. It is by far one of the worst Kindle editions I've come across so far, but, nonetheless, it cost $12, while the paperback goes for $15 - and I can imagine it's much better edited. I have to say that, if I lived in the US, I would go for the paperback edition and would put up a fight every time I spent my hard earned money in such a scam. Lucky for Amazon and the editors, the book is so good all else becomes irrelevant...

The authors at least tried to develop consistent theory relate to possible way, did not stop at interperetation of the world

Finished first chapter and it is hard going. The language is opaque and unnecessarily jargon laden. These authors do not really want to communicate rather demonstrate their erudition. The work entirely explains why sociology has lost ground to politics and economics as a discipline within which to understand the world. I will persist but only because I paid good money for it and other writers I do respect have cited the book...

Regardless of one's political views (myself a risk professional in the realm of global capital), Hardt and Negri's work is a remarkably vital, anticipatory and accurate analysis of the evolution of capital. For the more libertarian reader, I'd still strongly recommend the Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth "trilogy" given the significant accuracy of analysis the authors provide which is a necessary study regardless of ideology and advocacy. Capital is indeed becoming post-capital, infusing the cultural values brought forward through critical theory and postmodernism, and is increasingly anticipatory of poststructural thought. For those of us involved in the analysis and formation of corporate strategic thinking, these trends and their systemic ramifications are a necessary study.

I'd have to believe that a Fordist business person of the early 20th century would find the entire region of the humanities, critical theory, postmodernity, ethics, etc. to be a complete waste of time, yet as such, they would have complete difficulty in understanding our (post)modern workplace where differences are not only tolerated, but increasingly embraced given the intersubjective perceptual strength such multiplicities of difference bring toward product creation, marketing innovation, risk management, etc. From the perspective of Hardt and Negri's work, all three are necessary for the thoughtful, ethical professional (regardless of political or economic ideology) in the evaluation of the global system emerging.

This was in disgusting condition. Extremely water damaged and just dirty. I threw it away as soon I open it from the box.

Hardt and Negri unfortunately fail to answer this most excellent question. In that they are on solid ground, for Marx never presumed to tell the workers how to organize either, but their analysis is quite provocative. I have been following Negri's trajectory as an engaged intellectual since the early Eighties, and I usually find his writings to be valuable imagination pumps.

Antonio Negri has been since the Sixties a leading proponent of autonomist marxism, and this multivarious tendency has always defied categorization along the traditional Reform (Bernstein)/Revolution (Lenin) axis. Following on from council communism, autonomist marxists reject both the reformism of electoral politics and the centralized Marxist-Leninist party organizing for a seizure of state power. Autonomous practice looks more like anarchism than the traditional marxism of either reformist social democracy or "revolutionary" vanguard party-ism. But it is based on unorthodox marxist class analysis rather than in anti-authoritarianism per se or on identity politics.

In his collaboration with Michael Hardt, including the trilogy Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and COMMONWEALTH (2009), Negri continues to develop the same basic ideas of autonomy he has been arguing since the late Sixties, but moves ever further from standard marxist concepts. In the last pages of Marx Beyond Marx, written in prison in 1979 and first published in English in 1984, Negri says "Some say we must modernize, that we must reposition, at the present phenomenological level of capital, and within the social development of capital, the fundamental concepts of the Marxist tradition: the concept of capital, of working class, of imperialism. How can we respond other than in the affirmative?" (p. 187). And that is what he has been doing ever since.

Negri was an intellectual leader of Potere Operaio (Workers Power), a militant organization active in the Hot Autumn of 1969 in Italy. Several years later this tendency developed into Autonomia Operaia (Workers Autonomy). It was the late Sixties/Seventies militant movements beyond the shop floor that inspired Negri's thinking. He developed the concepts of "social capital" and the "social worker" through that period (not to be confused with the use of social capital in conservative social science or social workers as the helping profession), extending from the factory to all of society. The concept of the social worker and immaterial labor later morphs into a Multitude of Singularities practicing "biopolitics."

A key turning point in Negri's thinking is his 1985 collaboration with Felix Guattari (also while in prison after being wrongly convicted of crimes he did not commit): New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty, published in English in 1990 as Communists Like Us (Semiotext). Here is the moment when Negri begins to incorporate concepts from Deleuze & Guattari and from Foucault. He begins to conceive of networks of new social relations -- "rhizomes" -- and of individuals as "singularities." In an attempt to reformulate and salvage "communism," Negri & Guattari argue that it has nothing to do with the repressive regime of the USSR, and proclaim: "[Communism] is the singular expression for the combined productivity of individuals and groups ("collectivities") emphatically not reducible to each other. If it is not a continuous reaffirmation of singularity, then it is nothing..." (p. 17).

Another important milestone is The Politics of Subversion, written in 1989. Critical here is his use of Marx's distinction between the formal subsumption of labor and the real subsumption of labor, based on passages from both Capital and Grundrisse. He argues, quite controversially vis a vis most other marxists, that with the full development of capitalism and the real subsumption of labor, "...[P]roductive labour ... is to be found everywhere, by means of the social, production and reproduction constitute a completely uniform, undifferentiated network ... The [factory] is no longer recognized or considered to be the specific site of the consolidation of labouring activity and its transformation into value ... The prerequisites of these processes are present in, and diffused throughout, society" (p. 89).

This paves the way for the Hardt & Negri argument of EMPIRE that we now live under the rule of undifferentiated global capital. Of course the 2000 book becomes the focus of intense, widespread debate because of its appearance immediately following The Battle In Seattle of late 1999 and the emergence of the so-called "anti-globalization movement," which comes to be known as the global justice movement, and as a "movement of movements."

Here we find the latest effort to "reposition fundamental concepts" promised in 1979. Empire is a new term for capital. The Multitude is a new term for the working class. And The Commons and Commonwealth are new terms for all that is produced by human labor, material and immaterial. While currently occupied and exploited by Capital/Empire, it represents the potential for communism, for a free domain of singularities fully expressing their creativity and Love.

A central concept in the development of this third book in the Hardt & Negri trilogy is Foucault's concept of "biopolitics," a difficult concept defined as "corporeal resistance" (p. 31), and as "production of forms of life and social relations -- subjectivity itself" (p. 145). This is the latest reworking of social labor and immaterial labor. Here is a passage which captures, I believe, the core of the book:

"All the objective conditions are in place: biopolitical labor constantly exceeds the limits of capitalist command; there is a breach in the social relation of capital opening the possibility for biopolitical labor to claim its autonomy; the foundations of exodus are given in the existence and constant creation of the common; and capital's mechanisms of exploitation and control increasingly contradict and fetter biolitical productivity... Capitalist crisis does not proceed automatically to collapse. The multiplicity of singularities that produce and are produced in the biopolitical field of the common do not spontaneously accomplish exodus and construct their autonomy. Political organization is needed to cross the threshold and generate political events" (p. 165).

So once again Negri puts forward an optimistic vision of the creative potential of the Multitude (formerly the working class), but no concrete or specific ideas to assist what used to be known as the class struggle.

I would give the book less than four stars for that reason, but I am convinced that Negri's strength has always been his implacable opposition to Capital and his optimistic projection of workers autonomy. Any militant who reads this book is likely to come away inspired and invigorated for the next round of struggle. How can I complain too much about a book that attempts to theorize communism as immanent and altogether realizable and ends by proclaiming of capitalist exploiters that "[t]hey will be buried by laughter"?

(verified purchase from a large brick-and-mortar bookstore)