The word “common” is used to characterise the non-proprietary regime of natural resources, the state of social cooperation, the human ability to work together, and the way in which singular subjects, occasionally, manage to invent a new subjectivity: composite, multitudinal, coherent, and capable of giving itself unprecedented institutions. The large meso-political context of this new general economy – which links together singularities, multitudinal composition and production of the common – is the idea that politics, today, cannot ignore the environment. The environment, understood not simply as the space that is conquered by an ever expanding biopolitics, but on the contrary as the realm of possible resistance, is a living environment, the space-time where existences are inscribed, and practices and experimentations are given, precisely under the aegis of the common. This permanent interaction between the environment and life defines the contours of new political institutionality, within which we already exist and continue to practice.

Toni Negri (*1933 in Padua / Italy) is a political scientist and leading representative of the “workerist” (Operaismo) reading of Marxism. He was a professor of Philosophy of Law at the Institute of Political Science of the University of Padua. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was one of the leaders of the Italian social and political opposition movement. Negri’s work focuses on political philosophy and globalization issues. Together with the American philosopher Michael Hardt, he authored the books Empire (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), Commonwealth (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), and Assembly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). His most recent book is Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021).