Governance and the Undercommons Stefano Harney The Third Term
 1. Governance is a third term, beyond sovereignty or
governmentality. Although the term governance may still mark a form
of government. It is longer only a political term. Governance is
also now a term of the economy, not in the sense that the economy is
also governed, as in corporate governance, but as economy itself.
Governance is a form of economic production itself. 2. Sovereignty establishes the public and private. Governmentality
makes this establishment of the private productive, through the
production of the public. Governance today marks the emergence of
the public as directly productive. No longer is the public, in all
its micropolitics of subjectivity and macropolitics of population, an
instrument for creating a private that can then be exploited. Today
the public itself in all its anti-social glory, because the public is
the most anti-social moment of capitalist society, is also a direct
and dominant source of capitalist wealth. This is because the public
holds all of the social qualities of the general intellect up to the
light, making the general intellect obvious even in its disfiguration
in the figure of the public, and offering up this captured aspect of
the general intellect for exploitation. 3. Governance puts the public to work, or, perhaps we could say,
after Mario Tronti, governance is the new labour process. Mario
Tronti said the capitalist brings only this labour process, brings
only work, while the worker brings her class relation, her
socialisation, and her living labour, in short she brings the
capital. Today we could say the capitalist brings only governance,
as for instance one might understand the Davos meetings, or the rise
of the business schools of ignorance, or the sinister efforts of
African debt relief, all experiments in governance as labour process,
in governance as the effort to locate the general intellect and, as
Tiziana Terranova says, to harness it. The capitalist brings
governance as a desperate attempt to arrange a labour process beyond
his control. And how does he do this? How does governance work as a 
labour process?

Invaders from Marx: On the Uses of Marxian Theory, and the Difficulties of a Contemporary Reading By Michael Heinrich, Berlin [The following text is the slightly reworked version of an article which appeared on 21 September 2005 in “Jungle World”, a leftist German weekly newspaper. In a previous issue, Karl Heinz Roth. one of the main German representatives of Operaismo, had argued that some important Marxian categories are not able to grasp contemporary capitalism. The text at hand answers this critique, stressing the difference between Marxian theory and traditional Marxism, emphasizing the “new reading of Marx”, which developed through the last decades. The German text can be found at the website of the author: www.oekonomiekritik.de] In the past 120 years, Marx has been read and understood in widely varying ways. In the Social Democratic and Communist worker’s movement, Marx was viewed as the great Economist, who proved the exploitation of the workers, the unavoidable collapse of capitalism, and the inevitability of proletarian revolution. This sort of “Marxist political economy” was embedded in a Marxist worldview (Weltanschauung) which provided answers for all pre-existing historical, social, and philosophical questions. This omniscient kind of “Marxism” was analytically without much use, but was eminently well-suited as a means of propaganda and as an instrument of authority against those who questioned the party line. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, a Left critique of such Marxism emerged, but was nonetheless choked off by Stalinism and Fascism and did not receive a hearing in the Cold War era. This situation began to change in the 1960s, as Marx was read anew during the rise of the student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. A New Left arose beyond the classical worker’s movement which saw itself positioned on two fronts: on the one hand against the global capitalist system, on the other hand against an authoritarian and dogmatically petrified Communist movement, which was viewed as a force propping up domination.

What is the Left?
Hydrachist

An excerpt from The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics in Polemics, Verso, 2006.

To start with, let's note that before the Commune there had been a number of more or less armed popular and workers' movements in France in a dialectic with the question of state power. We can pass over the terrible days of June 1848 when the question of power is thought not to have been posed: the workers, cornered and chased from Paris upon the closing of national workshops, fought silently, without leadership, without perspective. Despair, fury, massacres.

Civil Society, Citizenship and the Politics of the (Im)possible: Rethinking Militancy in Africa Today by Michael Neocosmos Abstract The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This paper makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil