modern railways, for instance, “if the children of those who perished by
the thousands while excavating the railway cuttings and tunnels �were to
assemble one day, crowding in their rags and hunger, to demand bread
from the shareholders, they would be met with bayonets and grapeshot”
([1892] 1995, 17).38
Importantly, Kropotkin does not say that such a person deserves a
share of wealth because he or she works a certain amount. On the contrary,
the entire production apparatus must be treated as a single, common
inheritance. I therefore deserve a share of production not because I
labor but because I own (via inheritance) a share of the entire production
apparatus. Kropotkin appeals to labor, to be sure, but not just the labor of
the present. Instead, it is past labor that is most fundamentally the source
of the productive apparatus that we all inherit, so the heritage of labor is
as important as its current condition. What is more, he grounds the right
to a common inheritance not just in a long, shared history of work but
equally in other historical accumulations such as inventions as well as
forms of suffering, deprivation, and bloodshed (cf. Moore 2005). In this
broad panorama, which encompasses the �whole history of all of mankind,
there can be no accounting of who produced how much or whose
suffering was greater; the only practical as well as ethical conclusion is, as
he famously put it, “All belongs to all” ([1892] 1995), 19).
More recently, autonomists have revitalized this old tradition of theorizing
about “the common.” Thus Michael Hardt (building on Virno
2004) has argued that value is really produced not by labor in the narrow
sense but by society as a �whole (2000). For instance, when an advertising
campaign makes money using a hip-�hop-�themed jingle, where does the
value originate? Not, he suggests, in the labor of the individual advertising
employee, who is just repackaging creative musical ideas heard at a
club the previous night—Â�but not either in the individual perÂ�forÂ�mance of
the hip-�hop artist at the club (who has likewise borrowed and sampled
from the prior creativity of others). It is society as a �whole that produces
such value, and society as a �whole thus has a claim to appropriate the
fruits of such production (2000, 27). (Indeed, Antonio Negri has recently
suggested that, given the centrality of such social creativity in generating
value today, the metropolis might properly take the place that the factory
held for Marx as a principal site of struggle [Negri 2008, 211–30].) The
key claim �here belongs not to the wage laborers but to the members of