Chapter 1: Subjective Figures of the Crisis ... - Negri in English

and the like, are not concentrated in factories but are spread out
across the social terrain. Indeed the metropolis is one privileged
site where these forces reside and interact. In this context, banks,
in coordination with finance capital, appear on the market as
central agents to "gather together" collective social competencies
and to "integrate" fragmented knowiedges in order to make these
productive capacities available to business. In effect, finance
capital still operates according to the relationship between banks
and business as it did in the industrial era, despite the changed
conditions of production, and this is one factor that has led to
recent economic catastrophes. We need to imagine how these
functions of gathering together competencies and integrating
knowiedges can be put to use in a democratic planning of social
production and reproduction. Production must be understood
not as isolated to limited, separated domains, such as the factor}',
but as spread across the entire society. In the interests of the
common, then, the bank would not disappear but instead its
functions to register, foster, and support the whole range of
productive social relationships would have to be increased and
enlarged.
This is how the constituent principles of freedom and
access to the common can penetrate the banking institution,
making it a buttress of other democratic institutions. It is clear
that today struggles have to assail the banks and the finance
industries to denounce the injustices of their practices, including
the ways they increase social insecurity', exacerbate social
inequalities, and restrict freedoms. Tomorrow', however, the
struggles will have to find ways to transform the banks and the
instruments of finance, bending them to fulfill the functions
necessary to plan the production, reproduction, and distribution
of social wealth through democratic participation.
Education. In order to make education an institution of
the common, we need to try to apply the three principles that
guided us in the examples of water and banks: make resources
common, develop schemes of self-management, and subject all
decisions to procedures of democratic participation. Knowiedge
is a common good par excellence, and education relies on access
to knowiedge, ideas, and information. Creating schemas of open
access to these goods is obviously a prerequisite for any notion of