The central premise of the present book is to reassert the ‘idea of communism’ as a fundamental necessity in all revolutionary politics. Put simply ‘the word “communism”, which was for a long time the name of that power, has been cheapened and prostituted. But if we allow it to disappear, we surrender to the supporters of order, to the febrile actors in the disaster movie.’

Badiou’s project, therefore, is to show that, despite the ignominy towards the term over the past 20 years, the idea of communism – whatever we may call it – is the leitmotif of every historically significant struggle we care to think of. The book reflects on three moments of revolutionary upheaval – 1968, China’s cultural revolution and the Paris commune – to illustrate this thesis. While these events may by now seem tired caricatures, they nonetheless serve to illustrate that despite their respective failures, each contributed to the development of the communist idea – of a world other than capital. The task at hand, according to Badiou, is not for us to repeat these historical events and their failures but to find (many) ways to manifest the communist hypothesis appropriate to contemporary conditions.

The book is dense in places, as Badiou has a tendency to insert his often obscure philosophical concepts where they are perhaps unnecessary. Furthermore, his account of the cultural revolution perhaps serves more as an attempt to reconcile the failings of his own Maoist past than it does to develop upon his argument. Nonetheless, the central premise of this book is persuasive and is arguably important in understanding and developing a new wave of politics capable of confronting and going beyond capital. Perhaps it’s time for us to start calling ourselves communists again?

To fully understand the implications of the Bolivian experience, it is crucial that we interpret the MAS as a product of the uprisings that began in 2000. The election of the MAS was not an end in itself, nor the aim of the numerous mobilisations, but a product of the struggles between people and capital – between people and the privatisation of hydrocarbons, the use of fertile land to underwrite investment instead of providing campesino farmland, the attempt to treat water as a source of profit instead of life. The election of the MAS had nothing to do with choosing between politicians and everything to do with movements looking to institutionalise their gains.

The role of the MAS in Bolivian politics can be compared with the New Deal brokered in the turmoil of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s. In the case of the latter, the economic crisis meant capitalism was failing to guarantee access to basic necessities for large parts of the population. This crisis led to F D Roosevelt literally brokering a ‘deal’ between the interests of capital and a strong and rebellious working class, guaranteeing concessions such as social security in exchange for tying wages to productivity.

Less cynical

Whereas the introduction of the welfare state was arguably a conscious move on behalf of the US government to pacify an agitated working class, the election of the MAS was far less cynical. In the case of Bolivia, large proportions of the population were being denied access to the basic necessities of life not because of a failure of capital, but because 20 years of unchecked privatisation had torn millions of people from their land and livelihoods. Furthermore, the coca eradication programmes, part of the US ‘war on drugs’, led to an estimated 50-70,000 job losses annually during 1997-2002.

These included many people who had become cocaleros (coca growers) after being forced out of the tin mines following their privatisation in the 1980s. When the World Bank demanded the privatisation of the water services in 2000, appropriating the infrastructure and more than doubling water bills, the people fought back.

In contrast to the US Great Depression, when the government was able to broker a liberal deal that would both pacify the working class and lead capital out of its crisis, there was no capital-friendly solution to the unbearable conditions that had been created in Bolivia. The neoliberal ideologues that had ruled for 20 years were wholly incapable of providing such a deal – at least not one that the people would stand for – and successive presidents were forced to resign. The election of the MAS came as the solution to this impasse, but rather than arriving with the aim of pacifying the workforce in the interests of further capitalist accumulation, the MAS was an avowedly anti-capitalist response.

While Morales and the MAS offered a clear break with the neoliberal regimes that came before, the similarity of the Bolivian project with the New Deal lies in the fact that both rely fundamentally on the health of capitalism to function. In this sense, Roosevelt and Morales both ultimately occupy the role of guarantors of further capital accumulation. But where the former was concerned with doing just enough to ensure a compliant workforce, the latter aims concretely to improve people’s lives in the process of a ‘move towards socialism’.

This contradiction between needing to maintain the health of capitalism while at the same time desiring revolution is not lost on the Bolivian vice president, Álvaro García Linera, who recognises that: ‘As much as you are the state, you need resources and growing surpluses in order to meet the basic needs of all Bolivians . . . and there, obviously, tension arises.’

What we seek to learn from the Bolivian experience, then, is whether we can improve our immediate living conditions by gaining concessions from capital mediated by the state, while at the same time freeing ourselves from our bonds to the capitalist system. Has the MAS succeeded in overcoming this tension, developing its anti-capitalism within capitalism, or despite the best of intentions, is it merely the New Deal dressed up in radical rhetoric?

New extractivism

The MAS project is based on harnessing a proportion of surplus value and using it to support and expand ‘processes of campesino, communitarian and small-scale modernisation’. In other words, it is hoping to use ‘more capitalism’ to create more ‘non-capitalism’. What this means in practice is a reliance on mineral extraction – especially hydrocarbons – in what Eduardo Gudynas, a senior researcher at the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology, has termed a ‘new extractivism’. The state takes direct control of resources or imposes large royalties on foreign corporations so as to generate the ‘surplus’ necessary to fund government redistribution projects. As in the case of the lithium industry (Bolivia is home to almost half the world’s known lithium reserves), the plan is to further divert a proportion of this surplus towards the industrialisation of Bolivia.

This project leads to two interrelated dangers, raising significant questions about the capacity for the state to be used in challenging the dominance of capital. First, extractivism demands the physical enclosure of lands and livelihoods that otherwise exist predominantly outside of the capitalist sphere. For example, as one campesino explained to me at the third Feria Internacional Del Agua, an event held in April to mark the tenth anniversary of the ‘water wars’, many campesinos are being displaced from their rural subsistence economies because of the pollution of rivers they rely on for potable water. Indeed, while she was telling me her story, miners were occupying the offices of the Japanese-owned San Cristobal mine and overturning freight trains in protest at the contamination of their communities’ water resources with waste water from the mine.

As a result of this displacement, often to already overcrowded city slums, many are forced out of their ‘plural economies’ and into an urban, capitalist economy. Other examples of enclosures include the case of indigenous groups in the Gran Chaco region, who have declared themselves in a ‘state of emergency’ and demonstrated against the government’s authorisation of oil extraction in their territories, a violation of their constitutional rights. Elsewhere, the building of the Inambari hydroelectric dam in the Peruvian Amazon, under the auspices of the regional development agency UNASUR, of which Bolivia is an enthusiastic member, will flood 45,000-plus hectares of forest and displace numerous indigenous communities. Far from protecting and bolstering non-capitalist economies, this development model is inadvertently leading to a process of proletarianisation, as people are being forced off their lands and into selling their labour.

Second, there is a real danger that this reliance on surplus value (and the subsequent distributive projects) is creating an economic subjectivity, whereby discussions become less concerned with whether land and labour should be appropriated and more about who should do the appropriating and what the percentage should be for various parties.

Widespread criticism

While this development model has support from many of the Bolivians who benefit from this exploitation, the government faces widespread criticism. The final declaration of the Mesa 18, a working group excluded by the government from being an official participant at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, concluded that while the Bolivian government entertains ‘a critique of capitalism . . . the development plans of these [ALBA] governments, including the Bolivian government, only reproduces the development model of the past’.

We can only draw tentative and partial analyses of what is occurring. In this respect, Bolivia has shown us that neoliberal regimes really can be overthrown, and there really is an alternative to the neoliberal management of capital. However, it remains an open question as to whether the state can go beyond the role of managing the excesses of capitalism, whether it really can be used as a ‘political instrument for the sovereignty of the peoples’ or whether it is structurally bound to serve in the interests of capitalism.

Bertie Russell is co-author of Space for Movement: Reflections from Bolivia on climate justice, social movements and the state, available online at http://spaceformovement.wordpress.com/

by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Scathingly described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘a witches’ brew of contemporary radicalism’, Hardt and Negri’s most recent book Commonwealth is a timely contribution to our understanding of contemporary capitalist relations and the potential revolutionary conditions they create. Michael Hardt is a professor of literature at Duke University, while Antonio Negri is a sociologist and philosopher who was a major figure in the development of Italian ‘workerism’ and the Autonomy movement from the 1960s until his arrest for his political activities in 1978.

Negri spent the following years, until 1997, as an exile in Paris, where he became friends with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, whose work made a large impact on his own. Together Hardt and Negri’s work is considered to be responsible for a resurgence of interest in non-orthodox Marxism and its political manifestations.

Commonwealth is the final part of a trilogy that began with Empire in 2000, a book that was published during the emergence of the alter-globalisation movement. Multitude followed in 2004, developing the ideas that had been introduced in Empire, in particular the concept of the multitude as a new revolutionary subject. Commonwealth is a worthy addition to the trilogy, expanding and clarifying on the understandings in the previous books, but perhaps more significantly grounding their analysis within an extended discussion of ‘the common’.

Hardt and Negri understand this as ‘the common wealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty [but] also and more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledge, languages, codes, information’.

The common therefore incorporates two of the key concepts of autonomous Marxist theory, that of ‘immaterial production’ (production of knowledge, information, culture and so on) and the production of ‘the subject’ itself, commonly known as ‘bio-political production’. This moves us beyond orthodox assessments of capitalism and consequently the type of ‘revolution’ that is capable of overcoming increasingly complex social relations of capital.

The common stands in contrast to the historical experience of 20th-century politics, defined by the tension between socialism and capitalism. For Hardt and Negri, these are two sides to the same coin, two ways of managing property – either public management through the state or private management through the market. The political projects that stem from this binary split all continue with the march of capitalism and offer nothing in the way of radical potential.

The notion of the common allows us to make a radical break with the tired and miserable political history of the past century, instead providing the ground for a new political project that failed to be realised through ‘actually existing socialism’. Hardt and Negri refer to this as communism. As Hardt has written elsewhere, ‘what private property is to capitalism and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism’.

It is indicative that Michael Hardt was present in Copenhagen during the COP15 summit in December giving a talk on the common and its relationship to the emergent climate justice movement. What we are witnessing, and taking part in, is not the proliferation of single issues, but rather the struggle over our commonwealth.

As a movement that brings together organisations as diverse as Via Campesina, Filipino fishing communities and European anarcho-autonomists, the climate justice movement may well represent the emergence of a new subjectivity against capital. We may be witnessing the development away from the environmentalist approach to climate change that has dominated the past 20 years towards a political approach to climate change based on a shared yet diverse opposition to capital.

The concept of the common is what provides for the communicability between struggles, a refrain that resonates through them, a common language that helps our movement of movements develop what Hardt and Negri describe as the ‘iterability of struggle’. Any move towards a post-capitalist society will need to find its affinity in the common, where struggle is not reduced to isolated campaigns against corporations, seed patents or the privatisation of education.

Commonwealth is a book that challenges presuppositions about the utility of Marx, and introduces the possibility of combining his insights with the ideas of other significant authors such as Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, who are not traditionally associated with the radical communist project. The extent to which the authors are successful cannot be judged on the content of the book alone or the consistency of their ideas. To fully judge Commonwealth and the concepts they introduce, we need to understand how these ideas are put to use in a radical project for the 21st century. As Massumi has noted: ‘A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.’

Bertie Russell and Andre Pusey

This book can be purchased here.