MARIO ANTUNES MARINO

Over the last three decades, the concept of commonwealth has gained relevance in academic production. This condition reactivates the question of the governmentality of economies not governed by the principles of the market and property. In the Marxist field, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt propose the concept of common as a mode of production that heralds a post-capitalist world. This thesis indicates some paths for the constitution of economic-political knowledge of the commons. We examine the propositional project of the common from the point of view of political economy: would there be in this project an economic-political knowledge not guided by the market nor by the principle of generalized privatization of life, a well-constituted knowledge that can be an instrument for theories and struggles that are alternatives to market-driven thinking? First, the thesis evaluates the question posed by Foucault, whether there was an autonomous economic thought in “really existing socialism”. We agree with Foucault in this specific case of non-capitalist economies, but we verify, from the economic school called “ordoliberal”, that this theory enables an economic framework not informed by the market. Next, we point out that the project of the common is poor in propositional economic knowledge, especially because it is based on molar concepts such as multitude and common, whose ambition is to be universally valid, deriving from this their condition of possibility. Finally, placing ourselves in the perspective of the multiplicity, we argue (from Althusser and Massimo De Angelis) that there are several existing modes of production – one of which is dominant – and we indicate that it is a matter of aiming at a non-molar horizon of economic knowledge, considering the current existence of several altercapitalist modes of production whose knowledge must be promoted, especially based on what Foucault called the knowledges of the struggles, in its radical diversity.