Communism is the Ruthless Critique of all that Exists

Interview with Michael Hardt

Interview conducted by “Praktyka Teoretyczna” editorial collective on the occasion of publication of the Polish translation of Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth.

Commonwealth is an attempt to answer the question: how can we reexamine the conditions and horizons of the communist political praxis and theory today. It is not only a successful revival of the seventeenth century tradition of treatises on government, but also a kind of a political manifesto. However, looking at the reception of different leftist theoretical propositions in Poland, we can expect a quite harsh welcoming of this book in our country. Could you somehow try to convince readers from the post-socialist countries, “disappointed” by Marxism as an epistemological perspective and ideologically waterproofed to the most of leftist proposals, to familiarize with the communist project presented in the Commonwealth?

I can well imagine that for many Polish readers the concept of communism has become so corrupt that they do not want to hear anything more about it. In standard discourse today for many people (in post-socialist countries and elsewhere) “communism” means rigid state bureaucracy, total state control of economic and social activity, suppression of political dissent, workers’ sacrifice for the national good, restrictions on public speech, and so forth. For Toni and me, however, and indeed for many others, communism means something entirely different – not the exaltation of the state but the abolition of the state, not the celebration of work but the liberation from work, as well as experimentation with forms of freedom and democratic participation that go well beyond what exists in contemporary capitalist societies.

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