Entrepreneurship and expropriation

Abstract

Entrepreneurship plays out today in an ideologically mediated contest between production in common and expropriation of the common. On the one hand, it is possible to locate a ‘positive’ moment of the increasing socialization of work through which production has become social and cooperative, involving production from the common, in common, of the common. On the other hand, there is a ‘negative’ moment that seeks to separate, enclose and capture this common. Entrepreneurship is a key ideological operator in the expropriation of the common, through localizing production and claims to value in one particular element of socialized production. Although entrepreneurship research today recognizes that entrepreneurship rests on production in common, it hesitates to come to the radical conclusions required by this recognition. Caught between production in common and expropriation of the common, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship research today confront the prospect that those whose production in common is daily expropriated might turn the tables on the expropriators.

For more than a decade now, critics and activists in the English speaking world have been responding to the thinking that first emerged out of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s under the names of ‘workerism’, and then ‘postworkerism’ and ‘autonomism’. For many these ideas entered public consciousness with the publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire in 2000, although Hardt and Negri represent only one, albeit important, moment in this line of thinking. Alongside and in contestation with Hardt and Negri, this strand of thinking has become an important reference point for an increasingly significant group of intellectuals and activists.

Our principal goal in this article is to articulate what autonomist thought might contribute to the critique of entrepreneurship. While autonomist thought has become relatively well known in social and political theory, in history and cultural studies, it is only relatively recently that it has begun to bite into the inner sanctum of management and organization studies. We have thus begun to see increasing attention to autonomist thought in critical management studies through the work in and around journals such as ephemera and the French language journal Multitudes, and an increasingly visible set of scholarly interventions (Beverungen, 2011; Dowling, 2007; Fleming and Mandarini, 2009; Harney, 2005, 2006, 2011; Mandarini, 2005; Shukaitis, 2008, 2009). This article builds on and hopes to contribute to this ongoing conversation.

We do not, however, want to uncritically import autonomist ideas for the critique of entrepreneurship. The case of entrepreneurship presents certain difficulties with these ideas, and these will lead us to note specific limitations of autonomist thought. A second goal of this article is, therefore, to make some critical remarks about autonomist thought. In particular, we are critical of the dangers of historicism in autonomist thought, in which historical changes are overstated, and also the risk of thinking that radical social changes might follow automatically from economic changes. Although the bulk of this article is oriented towards the task of accounting for what autonomist thought can illuminate regarding entrepreneurship, in the discussion section of the article we will deal with these difficulties.

Beyond the particularities of the ideas that we seek to introduce here and their contribution to understanding entrepreneurship, a third goal relates to a broader argument for the analysis of phenomena such as entrepreneurship within the frame of political economy. In one sense it might seem uncontroversial to suggest that entrepreneurship is an economic and political category. If one conceives of entrepreneurship as ‘an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organizing, markets, processes and raw materials through methods that previously had not existed’ (Shane, 2003: 4) then it is clear that entrepreneurship takes place within a definite economic context. Likewise, we see that entrepreneurship is a political and economic category when, for example, Max Weber distinguishes ‘commercial classes’ from what he calls ‘property classes’ and ‘social classes’, and identifies those as ‘positively privileged’ within the commercial classes as typically being ‘entrepreneurs’ and those as ‘negatively privileged commercial classes as typically laborers with varying qualifications’ (1978: 304, emphasis in original).

We want to stress, with Armstrong (2005), that entrepreneurship is a political project and that this project must be understood in terms of developments in the political economy (see also Henrekson and Douhan, 2008). This is not to say that entrepreneurship does not involve cultural dynamics, discourse, narrative and identities (Hjorth and Steyaert, 2004). Entrepreneurship is simultaneously both a political and economic category and one that rests on symbolic and ideological fantasies. Here we seek to show how complex social and cultural dynamics are fundamentally implicated in political decisions about the recognition of the contribution to production of some, and at the same time the denigration or denial of recognition of others.

Here we are drawing on previous efforts to provide a critique of entrepreneurship, which are now reasonably well established (see Armstrong, 2005; Calàs et al., 2009; Görling and Rehn, 2008; Hjorth and Steyaert, 2009; Jones and Spicer, 2009; Jones and Murtola, 2012; Ogbor, 2000; Sørensen, 2009). If we make a contribution to the critique of entrepreneurship here then it might be in fleshing out something of the political economic context that is often missing from or underplayed by such critiques. We should also stress that even if some of the particulars of the political economy outlined here may remain limited, we argue throughout that an understanding of political economy is essential for a critical understanding of phenomena such as entrepreneurship.

The article is divided into three sections. In the first section we describe the ‘positive’ moment that has been outlined by autonomist thought regarding the transformations by which production has increasingly become production in common. In the second section we outline the ‘negation’ of these developments in the ongoing enclosure and expropriation of the common. In the third section we argue that entrepreneurship is a key ideological operator between these positive and negative moments, and seek to show how entrepreneurship research has come to recognize the positive moment but not its negation. In doing so, we propose to outline the contradictory space within which the theory and practice of entrepreneurship function today.

For the sake of simplicity, we will here use the term ‘autonomist thought’ in the place of the possibly more accurate expression ‘Italian workerism, postworkerism and autonomism’. There are diverse usages of such terms and the overlapping traditions to which they refer (see Lotringer and Marazzi, 2008; Virno and Hardt, 1996). The relations between traditions and intellectual conversations are often messy. Although we seek to focus on autonomist thought, clearly there are residues in this article of thinking in the analysis of ‘cognitive capitalism’ (see for example Boutang, 2012; Gorz, 2010) and from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who are important for autonomist thought and also at key moments later in this article. We explain aspects of autonomist thought below, but for now let it suffice to say that we use the term to refer to the traditions emerging out of Italian workerism and postworkerism which stress the political priority of life over capital, which results from the fact that capital requires life outside it for its expansion, while life is quite possible and indeed does take place outside of and autonomously from capital (see Tronti, 1979).

We do not intend to give a comprehensive statement here of the entirety of autonomist ideas, nor do we wish to give a ‘balanced’ view. Exposition and critique exist elsewhere (Balakrisnan, 2003; Murphy and Mustapha, 2005, 2007; Passavant and Dean, 2003; Wright, 2002). Within autonomist thought we draw largely on the ideas of Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others connected with them. We selectively focus on what we see as most important in this tradition, in particular for the critical understanding of entrepreneurship in light of expropriation. Although we will return to certain limits of autonomist thought in our discussion, we will argue here that autonomist thought offers grounds for important insights into entrepreneurship, and at the same time that similar approaches, grounded in an effort to understand transformations at the level of political economy, are vital if we are to understand the operation of categories such as entrepreneurship.

Production in common

The first or ‘positive’ moment we want to outline here relates to transformations in the organization of production and in particular the place of the common in the labour process. In autonomist thought these transformations are often articulated in an historical argument relating to changes in the workplace and in particular to the tendency towards the socialization of work through the 20th century. This is often described in terms of a shift from a Fordist logic of mass production to what became apparent with the rise of ‘post-Fordism’ from the 1970s on, in terms of new sets of relations in the workplace, new conceptions of work and changing relations between work and society. This involved a change in the technical composition of capitalism and also a shift in its social composition. What is important is the rise of increasingly socialized and cooperative forms of work, and with this a shift from the Fordist ‘mass worker’ to the post-Fordist ‘socialized worker’ (Negri, 1989).

While such transformations of work have often been understood in the literatures of management as a liberating escape into a world of postindustrial knowledge work, these same dynamics are understood in autonomist thought from below, that is, with an attentiveness to their politics. The socialization of work involves a radical investment in work of elements of life that were previously at least formally external to work. Thus while factory work was widely claimed to separate or to alienate workers from their work, ‘Today the capitalist organization of work aims to overcome this separation, to fuse work and worker, to put to work the entire lives of workers. Skills, rather than professional qualifications, are put to work and with them workers’ emotions, feelings, their after-work lives, we might say the whole life of the linguistic community’ (Marazzi, 2008: 50, emphases in original). In cooperative work of a post-Fordist kind, skills of cooperation and communication become central. These are skills we learn in ‘life’. Thus:

Today, work and life, production and reproduction are entirely mixed together—they feed on one another. In other words, the material wealth of the world arises through forms of collaboration, of cooperation—and not only through intellectual work: contacts, relationships, exchanges, and desires have become productive. (Negri, 2004: 62)

What comes into focus with the idea of the socialized worker is the way that skills, languages and forms of life acquired outside of the workplace become central to work. In such a situation, Lazzarato argues, ‘what is “productive” is the whole of the social relation’ (1996: 146; see also Lazzarato, 2004; Morini and Fumagalli, 2010).

To comprehend these changes, autonomist thought focuses on the new forms of work that have emerged in recent years, which are typically described in terms of ‘immaterial labour’. Immaterial labour is ‘the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133), that ‘produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication’ (Hardt, 1999: 94, see also Hardt and Negri, 2000: 290). Immaterial labour is not immaterial in the sense that it is disembodied or does not involve physical effort. What is immaterial is the product or the result of the labour. The result of immaterial labour is information, a relationship, a sense of self, an affect or a form of life.

At the same time, as the results of labour become immaterial, work today is enabled and indeed made possible by a vast range of forces which are not obviously material. Immaterial labour draws on a range of intangible knowledges and relationships and thus the inputs to immaterial labour are equally not simply material instruments of production but are drawn from outside the workplace. With this, a significant shift takes place: ‘The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor…is not defined by the four walls of a factory. The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 137).

This ‘social factory thesis’ does not assert that factories no longer exist, but rather that the relationship between workplaces and their outsides have become increasingly porous and that the abilities that are used inside the workplace increasingly come from outside. This involves the unpaid work in the home which is vital for reproducing labour in the workplace, but beyond this the social factory thesis stresses how the sphere of life and modes of cooperation that develop outside the workplace, which are typically not seen as work, are today central to what is called work. Thus, ‘work has become diffused throughout the entire society. This is because it is carried on both within and outside the factory … Every subject of this productive complex is caught up in overpowering cooperative networks’ (Negri, 1989: 77).

Therefore, ‘The factory can no longer be conceived as the paradigmatic site or the concentration of labor and production; laboring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society’ (Hardt and Negri, 1994: 9). This is a dynamic exercising ‘the capacity of capital to subsume society’ (Negri, 1991: 145), or, as Negri puts it elsewhere, ‘the capitalist regime … no longer produces through factories alone, but makes the whole of society work for its own enrichment; it no longer exploits only workers, but all citizens; it does not pay, but makes others pay it to command and to order society. Capitalism has invested the whole of life’ (2003: 144).

These transformations in work, which involve the rise of cooperative and immaterial labour and the emergence of the social factory, coalesce in the notion of the ‘general intellect’. This idea appears in the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in Marx’s Grundrisse (1973: 690–712). Here Marx describes the development of large-scale industry, and in this process how ‘the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time’ (Marx, 1973: 704). Marx posits that these agencies, shaped and framed by the development of capitalism itself, have the potential to unleash great productive powers:

In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour that he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body—it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. (Marx, 1973: 705)

Marx thus predicts that in a situation of fully socialized, cooperating individuals, faced with and surrounded by machines and technology, the worker ‘steps to the side of the production process’ (1973: 705) in order to attend to the vast productive apparatus that social production has produced. Machines and technologies are, he stresses, not provided by nature:

These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct source of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. (Marx, 1973: 706, emphases in original)

This fragment is taken up in autonomist thought to comprehend the transition to contemporary conditions of post-Fordist production. While the movement towards production based on manufacture from that of handicrafts involved the ‘formal’ subsumption of labour, the development of the specifically capitalist organization of production, which transformed the methods of production and in particular the labour process, involves the ‘real subsumption’ of labour, in which completely new techniques of production and cooperative technologies emerge (see Marx, 1976: 1024). Thus, as Negri puts it ‘we have gone beyond Marx, and the socialized worker has become a reality. In Marx’s outline of the successive phases of subsumption, the idea of the socialized worker is merely hinted at and described as a possibility; we, on the other hand, experience the actuality of the concept’ (Negri, 1989: 84, emphasis in original). As Virno puts it, ‘Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the “Fragment on Machines” by Marx’ (2004: 100).

For Virno, the concept of the general intellect points to the generalization of intellectual activity today, and the dispersal of thinking beyond any one particular individual thinker. Thus, while Aristotle and Hannah Arendt saw thinking as an individual matter, ‘when speaking of the general intellect we refer to a public intellect. In post-Fordism, the ‘life of the mind’ becomes extrinsic, shared, and common’ (Virno, 2007: 7). The general intellect is radically social and shared. For Virno, ‘The “general intellect” comprises formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical inclinations, mentalities and “language-games” ’ (2007: 5). In the context of a rising general intellect ‘Science, information, knowledge in general, cooperation, these present themselves as the key support system of production—these, rather than labor time’ (Virno, 2004: 101). Thus ‘thought becomes the primary source of the production of wealth’ (Virno, 2004: 64).

To the extent that the general intellect is actualized in production today, we see not only the increasing role of science, technology and knowledge in production, but also how these are spread out across the social space, across the common. It should be noted that such dynamics were seen by Marx as one aspect of the ‘historical tendency of capitalist accumulation’, which he described as involving:

the growth of the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the planned exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the means of labour into forms in which they can only be used in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime. (1976: 929)

This leads to two consequences. On the one hand, production becomes possible only on the basis of previous cooperation, which appears in the form of objectified knowledge, in machinery, technology and in established sciences, and a generalization of the intellect in the form of a trained and constantly communicating workforce. On the other hand, there is a transformation in the results of production whereby sociality, which is drawn on as a means of production, is also the result of the production process: ‘production today has to be conceived not only in economic terms but more generally as social production—not only the production of material goods but also the production of communications, relationships, and forms of life’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: xv). This production of forms of life thus means that today we are not merely producing products but are also producing ‘the common’.

The common refers to shared resources and capacities. There are two elements to the common. ‘This common is not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 139).

By ‘the common’ we mean, first of all, the common wealth of the material world—the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty—which in classic European political texts is often claimed to be the inheritance of humanity as a whole, to be shared together. We consider the common also and more significantly those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth. (Hardt and Negri, 2009: viii, see also Hardt, 2010: 136)

This second aspect of the common is artificial or produced, and produced not by one but by many. ‘Ideas, images, and codes are produced not by a lone genius or even by a master with supporting apprentices but by a wide network of cooperating producers’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 173). The common is thus antecedent to and coincident with production as well as being its result. ‘Our communication, collaboration, and cooperation are not only based on the common, but they in turn produce the common in an expanding spiral relationship’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: xv).

One might doubt the extent to which these dynamics are completely new, and indeed the formation of relations of cooperation is central to the development of capitalism. With the move from manufacture, which brought together workers using existing technologies into one place, to capitalist production proper, which created the conditions for the real subsumption of labour within new cooperative techniques, cooperation became increasingly central to capitalism. With cooperation, ‘Not only do we have here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new productive power, which is intrinsically a collective one’ (Marx, 1976: 443).

Aside from the question as to the extent to which the socialization of work and production in common is new, the labour process today is thoroughly socialized. Clearly, this socialization plays out differently in different places. What we have identified here is something quite specific to the dynamics of production today, and in particular the place of the common in this process. Thus, we have provided a sketch of production in which we can say that production today is production in common. This takes place in three ways. First, production draws on the common, the general intellect, all previously acquired knowledges, sciences and analytic capacities. Second, production is in common, in the sense that work today immediately involves vast networks of cooperative relationships, direct and indirect. Third, production is production of the common, that is, of forms of life, shared experiences and ways of being together. In short, production today is production from the common, in common, of the common. What remains is to consider what happens to the claims put on this production, and then the place of entrepreneurship in the dialectic that we are outlining here between production in common and expropriation of the common.

Expropriation of the common

At the same time that production today is production in common, it also faces a constant process of separation and capture. The positive moment of production in common that we have described faces its negation in the form of continuous claims on the fruits of that production. This negative moment is the expropriation of the common.

The history of capitalism involves a constant process of expropriation, in which things that can be separated from another person are constituted as property and that property is then captured and laid claim to. Before continuous accumulation of capital could take place there had to be what Adam Smith called accumulation that is ‘previous’ to the routine operation of capitalism (1999: 372). This bringing of things into capitalism is often known as ‘primary’ or ‘primitive accumulation’ and, as Marx stresses, ‘is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure’ (1976: 873).

The classic examples that are usually given to explain the process of primitive accumulation are the enclosures of land in England from the 15th century onwards, which are described in detail in the closing chapters of volume one of Capital. Similar instances of enclosure of common land were the concern of the young Marx, who in 1842 published a series of articles in the Rheinische Zeitung concerning the exclusion of peasants from customary lands in the Rhine area in which they had traditionally collected firewood. In these enclosures, Marx identified a dynamic by which resources that had previously been held or produced in common were later subjected to capture and expropriation.

Similarly, in recent years we have also seen, again and again, the way that natural resources have been brought into the cycle of capital, and with this people are dispossessed of their homes, lands and previous ways of life (see, for example, Banerjee, 2008; Roy, 2002). Primitive accumulation is thus not something that takes place only at the beginning of capitalism. Rather, it is an ongoing process that is constantly repeated (De Angelis, 2001, 2004; Federici, 2004). This is in part what David Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ enables us to grasp. For Harvey, accumulation by dispossession refers to ‘the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as “primitive” or “original” during the rise of capitalism’ (2005: 159).

Harvey clarifies the way that the most recent phase of capitalism, neoliberalism, has repeatedly involved not the production of new wealth but the redistribution of existing wealth. Harvey argues that accumulation by dispossession ‘takes a seemingly infinite variety of forms in different times and places’ (2010b: 244). It ‘is ongoing and in recent times has been revived as an increasingly significant element in the way global capitalism is working to consolidate class power’ (Harvey, 2010a: 310). Equally, Hardt and Negri write:

primitive accumulation continually reappears and coexists with capitalist production. And insofar as today’s neoliberal economy increasingly favors accumulation through expropriation of the common, the concept of primitive accumulation becomes an even more central analytical tool. (2009: 138)

For Hardt and Negri, drawing on Harvey, accumulation by dispossession is ‘a form of appropriation that involves not primarily the generation of wealth but rather taking possession of existing wealth, usually from the poor or from the public sector, by legal or illegal means, and most often in situations where the limits of legality are unclear’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 231, see also 266). Accumulation by dispossession, which as Rosa Luxemburg (2003: 432–433) emphasized is related to but not reducible to capitalist exploitation of labour, is however only a part of capitalist expropriation. Beyond and in addition to the exploitation of wage labour and accumulation by dispossession, ‘Capitalism sets in motion a continuous cycle of private reappropriation of public goods: the expropriation of what is common’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 301).

One such strategy of expropriation of the common involves the seeking of rent. In the claiming of rent, resources, acquired by whatever means, are closed off from public use and access to them is made dependent upon payment:

natural riches and common goods can be confiscated through the creation of artificial barriers that reserve the enjoyment of them to those who pay for a right of access. It is possible, through the privatization of routes of access, to transform natural riches and common goods into quasi-commodities that will earn a rent for the sellers of the access rights. (Gorz, 2010: 38–39, emphasis in original; see also Rifkin, 2000)

In the specific context of the expropriation of the immaterial or ‘artificial’ common, the strategy takes on a new shade. Due to their often infinitely reproducible nature, the only way rent can be claimed on immaterial goods is through a strategy of artificial enclosure and restriction. In the case of cultural goods, or goods for which the cost of their mass distribution is minimal or nothing, we find the forcible limitation of their circulation, ‘the creation of an artificial scarcity of resources’ (Vercellone, 2010: 91). We find such dynamics in the practices of branding, licensing, patenting, and so on. This dynamic of enclosure is inextricably linked to the capture of wealth today:

The exchange-value of knowledge is linked entirely to the practical ability to limit its free dissemination, that is to say, to limit by legal (patents, copyright, licences or contracts) or monopolistic means the possibility of copying, imitating, ‘reinventing’ or learning the knowledge of others. (Rullani, 2000: 90)

Intellectual property rights therefore play a pivotal role in the ongoing expropriation of the common. Crucial for this strategy of expropriation is, on the one hand, the exclusion from a particular resource of those who might otherwise have had free access to it and, on the other, the existence of a figure that can justify a claim to be in a position to exclude others from that resource. An ongoing contestation of this expropriation takes place, for example, in different forms of ‘piracy’ on the Internet and elsewhere.

With expropriation of the common we should not overlook exploitation of labour in the labour process or the violence of ongoing accumulation by dispossession. But with the idea of expropriation of the common we can see how capital expropriates the very relations of commonality that are the foundation and the result of production today. What is vital is the way that today ‘capital expropriates cooperation’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 140, emphasis in original). This is no less violent than exploitation of wage labour or accumulation by dispossession. ‘Capital is predatory, as the analysts of neoliberalism say, insofar as it seeks to capture and expropriate autonomously produced common wealth’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 141). So although the idea of exploitation as expropriation of the common might appear to underplay exploitation of wage labour and accumulation by dispossession, it can also be seen as a third level that accompanies these, or better, works alongside the exploitation of wage labour and accumulation by dispossession. Hardt and Negri insist on the ongoing nature of exploitation but seek to expand the meaning of exploitation. In this third sense, ‘Exploitation is the private appropriation of part or all of the value that has been produced as common’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 150).

Again, it should be noted that this situation is not completely new. Hardt and Negri identify the continuity of this contradiction and stress that this intensifies in contemporary conditions, which they call conditions of ‘biopolitical production’, production that involves life and produces forms of life.

This is not, of course, an entirely new phenomenon. Since Marx’s time the critique of political economy has focused on the contradiction between the social nature of capitalist production and the private nature of capitalist accumulation; but in the context of biopolitical production the contradiction is dramatically intensified (2009: 149).

For Hardt and Negri the expropriation of the common and contestations of this process constitute the terrain on which social conflicts do, and increasingly will, take place: ‘the results of our past labors and means of autonomous production and reproduction for our future. That is the field of battle’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 164). Today, as Gorz puts it, we see ‘a class struggle shifted on to a new terrain—that of the control of the public domain, of shared culture and collective goods’ (2010: 85–86). What remains to specify is the place of entrepreneurship in this struggle.

The open secret of entrepreneurship

The entrepreneur is a character shrouded in ideological mystification. This ideological mystification is inextricably interlinked with political and economic processes, and so we propose to place the discourse of entrepreneurship in relation to the politico-economic dynamics in which these entrepreneurial characters are involved.

Individualization plays a key part in entrepreneurial ideology and myth. This is noticeable both in academic and popular discussions of entrepreneurship. For example, for Casson, ‘the entrepreneur is a person, not a team, or a committee, or an organization’ (2003: 20). For Grebel, ‘It is the entrepreneur, a man of action, a heroic person, who is the key element of economic prosperity’ (2003: xiii). It has been argued that such acts of locating the innovative and creative forces in one particular individual are characteristic of the ideology of classical entrepreneurship literature (see Ogbor, 2000).

Given this, if production today takes place involving a general intellect caught up in dispersed flows of cooperation, the idea of a figure that would count as ‘The Entrepreneur’ has become increasingly anachronistic, a figure from a time that has passed. It has therefore been argued that ‘With cooperation on an ever-extending scale…the idea of entrepreneurship becomes increasingly implausible’ (Jones and Spicer, 2009: 108). Equally, as Hardt and Negri write:

Corporations such as Apple and Microsoft survive by feeding off the innovative energies that emerge from the vast networks of computer and Internet-based producers that extend well beyond the boundaries of the corporation and its employees. Biopolitical production, in fact, is driven from below by a multitudinous entrepreneurship. (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 297–298)

Likewise, for Lazzarato the idea of the individual entrepreneur is no longer relevant in the present context. He argues that ‘The legitimation that the Schumpeterian entrepreneur found in his or her capacity for innovation has lost its foundation. Because the capitalist entrepreneur does not produce the forms and contents of immaterial labor, he or she does not even produce innovation’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 146).

The problem, though, is how it could be that the idea of entrepreneurship persists, and with such fervour. Indeed, in the popular imagination and in the talk of business leaders and those elected to regulate their activities, the idea of entrepreneurship, far from falling into disrepute, continues to play an ever-expanding role, with the promotion of enterprise and entrepreneurship almost everywhere (Armstrong, 2005; du Gay, 2004; Keat and Abercrombie, 1990).

What this suggests is that the idea of the entrepreneur operates at quite a different level from what is usually suspected. It is exactly this that clarifies the place of the entrepreneur in contemporary ideology. It may be that at the ‘objective’ level of the operation of the global interconnected economy the idea of the entrepreneur is invalidated, but at the ‘subjective’ level of socially recognized understandings, the idea of the entrepreneur continues to hold sway. It is to this level of socially recognized understandings that we must turn. These are, of course, not so much ‘subjective’ as they are intersubjective, that is to say they are socially agreed upon understandings that have come to take on a certain self-evidence over time, in part because they are so widespread, and in part because of the strength of the actors and agencies that have promoted such views.

To a certain extent we are pointing here to the place of entrepreneurship in the sphere of the distribution of the rewards of economic activity. It has been noted that the entrepreneur functions as an individualized claimant on value (Jones and Spicer, 2009). From such a position, the entrepreneur acts as a justificatory mechanism that serves to legitimate a certain distribution of opportunities, rewards and wealth. But by focusing on the expropriation of the common we are not looking solely at the distribution of the results of production, but stressing that the common is antecedent to and coincident with production. Today production requires the common and production is done in common. And what is important is the symbolic means by which this production in common is recognized or misrecognized.

In autonomist thought the recurring image of production is one of an interconnected network. Elements of this are taken from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to comprehend how production today is ‘rhizomic’. That is, it is not localizable in a single point as one might think when one looks at a tree, but is more like the interconnected network of a rhizome such as grass or seaweed. In the context of production in common, we can see that entrepreneurship exists in such flows of commonality and, moreover, is only possible because of these flows. At the same time, the political function of the entrepreneur is not merely to ride the waves, but to mobilize these flows and to capture them. Entrepreneurship is an operator in the terrain of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call an ‘apparatus of capture’ that localizes flows and reduces them to individual moments within these flows.

Lazzarato explains that in the context of flows of labour, flows of consumption, flows of communication and flows of desire, ‘The function of the entrepreneur is thus to encourage these flows and capture them … The new capitalism constitutes itself on the power of flows, on the differential of their speed of circulation, so the entrepreneur is defined by his capacity to function as a relay and multiplier of their speed of circulation’ (Lazzarato, 2007: 88–89). Likewise, Jones and Spicer argue that ‘Entrepreneurship is a matter of control and capture’ (2009: 108). But the question remains as to how this apparatus of capture works and how it is symbolized.

Here it is crucial to recognize the way that ideas reflecting aspects of the common have featured in entrepreneurship research in recent years. Entrepreneurship research has increasingly recognized elements of the social antecedents to and consequences of entrepreneurship. Even if the term ‘the common’ has not appeared, many of the collective dynamics that we have described above have not gone unnoticed in entrepreneurship research, as we will seek to establish here.

If production today involves production from the common, in common, of the common, it is possible to identify the way that all three of these elements are discernible with increasing frequency in recent entrepreneurship research. Social context was already an important element of any account of entrepreneurship for Schumpeter, and such recognition is continued and elaborated today in a variety of locations. Research in the sociology of entrepreneurship, for example, ‘targets levels of analysis beyond the individual entrepreneur, addressing the role played by interpersonal networks, organizational structure, population, and field-level processes, as well as the broader institutional environment’ and pays ‘attention to the symbolic and cultural dimension of entrepreneurial activity’ (Ruef and Lounsbury, 2007: 2).

Explanations that admit the place of the common as antecedent to entrepreneurship are today widespread in entrepreneurship research, often emphasizing for example the place of institutions in creating the possibility for entrepreneurship. We have seen this in institutional and ‘new institutional’ theories of entrepreneurship. As proponents of this position put it, ‘it has increasingly become clear that issues such as culture, legal environment, tradition and history in an industry, and economic incentives all can impact an industry and, in turn, entrepreneurial success’ (Bruton et al., 2010: 422). Institutions, culture and tradition refer to elements of what we are here calling the common.

Entrepreneurship researchers have equally identified the enabling role of social networks and trust relations, and again, trust and social networks refer to the social bond, to the continuing unity of human being that we are here calling the common. Explanations grounded in trust have stressed the place of trust as a condition of possibility for cultivating entrepreneurship (Höhmann and Welter, 2005). We have seen discussions of the role of ‘social capital’ in enabling entrepreneurship. Social capital has been identified as ‘Relations within and beyond the firm’, and it is argued that ‘Social capital is the final arbiter of competitive success’ (Burt, 2000: 282–283). Further, it is stressed that social capital ‘is a thing owned jointly by the parties to a relationship. No one player has exclusive ownership rights to social capital’ (Burt, 2000: 282).

These diverse schools of entrepreneurship researchers emphasize the way that entrepreneurship takes place within a context, and are indicative of an increasing acknowledgement of context in enabling entrepreneurship. ‘There is growing recognition in entrepreneurship research that economic behavior can be better understood within its historical, temporal, institutional, spatial, and social contexts’ (Welter, 2011: 165). Indeed without this context, which in the terms we are using here is production from the common, in common, of the common, it would be difficult to imagine the possibility of entrepreneurship.

The second aspect of the common in entrepreneurship thus concerns the place of the common in the process of entrepreneurial venturing itself. The fact that entrepreneurship is not conducted by an isolated entrepreneur was already recognized by Schumpeter. Indeed, for Schumpeter, entrepreneurship does not even require an individual to be identified as the entrepreneur: ‘the entrepreneurial function need not be embodied in a physical person and in particular in a single physical person’ (Schumpeter, 1951: 255). In entrepreneurship literature today there is therefore widespread discussion of the way that entrepreneurship can be disseminated across the corporate form. These remarks by Schumpeter have recently found a new audience in those seeking to challenge the reduction of entrepreneurship to individual entrepreneurs.

We find elements of this in notions such as ‘intrapreneurship’, in which individual employees are encouraged to embark upon entrepreneurial activities from within an organization. Beyond this, it has been argued that ‘The locus of entrepreneurial activity often resides not in one person, but in many’ (Gartner et al., 1994: 6). We find these ideas in discussions of the expansion of entrepreneurship to teams and to whole organizations. Arguments for ‘entrepreneurial teams’ object that ‘the leading economic theories of entrepreneurship tend to locate the entrepreneurial function within a single person’ and against this argue that ‘realizing creative ideas can require joint entrepreneurial actions’ (Harper, 2008: 615–616).

Entrepreneurship researchers therefore talk of ‘business groups as entrepreneurial systems’ (Iacobucci and Rosa, 2010: 353). Those defending the notion of ‘collective entrepreneurship’ rail against ‘the idea of the traditionally heroic figure of the solitary entrepreneur’, and argue that ‘If firms want to remain competitive in today’s climate, they should begin by promoting internal collective cooperation (within their own organizations), on the basis that the joint effort of all organizational members is greater than the sum of its individual contributions’ (Comeche and Loras, 2010: 23–24).

At the same time that entrepreneurship researchers have moved towards a recognition of the place of the common as antecedent to (production from the common) and coincident with entrepreneurship (production in common), we have equally seen a turn in recent years to seeing entrepreneurship as having consequences for the social sphere, rather than just for entrepreneurs and organizational members. It is almost a commonplace in entrepreneurship literature that the activity of entrepreneurs has a major impact on our collective fortunes. Today the almost universal starting point of entrepreneurship discourse is that entrepreneurship is an activity that has an enormous impact on the lives and livelihoods of us all. Because entrepreneurship is claimed to contribute to economic growth, it is also taken to be the source of social well-being.

Beyond this, in recent years many have emphasized the specifically social function that entrepreneurship can play. This partly reflects the non-economic motives that inform economic action, which were already stressed in Schumpeter’s recognition of the role of non-hedonistic motives for entrepreneurship when he spoke of ‘the joy of creating, of getting things done, or simply of exercising one’s energy and ingenuity’ (Schumpeter, 1934: 93). This also comes clearly to the fore in discussions of what is known as ‘social entrepreneurship’, in which entrepreneurship is seen to work towards social causes. Social entrepreneurs ‘deploy entrepreneurial skills for social ends’ (Leadbeater, 1997: 2).

In these discussions we have seen a widespread blurring of the boundaries between the economic and non-economic activities of entrepreneurs, as entrepreneurship has apparently moved into a variety of new domains. We have seen discussion of ‘political entrepreneurship’ to refer to the seeking of entrepreneurial opportunities in the sphere of politics (Holcombe, 2002). We have heard of the good that can be done in the name of ‘civic entrepreneurship’ (Leadbeater and Goss, 1998) and ‘public entrepreneurship’ (Hjorth and Bjerke, 2006). Equally, entrepreneurship researchers today speak of ‘sustainable entrepreneurship’, which is ‘focused on the preservation of nature, life support, and community in the pursuit of perceived opportunities to bring into existence future products, processes, and services for gain, where gain is broadly construed to include economic and non-economic gains to individuals, the economy, and society’ (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011: 142, emphasis in original).

Discussions of social entrepreneurship have morphed into discussions of ‘entrepreneurship as social change’, which, it is proposed, ‘conceives entrepreneurship through concepts of sociality such as relation, community, social cauldron, legitimacy, spatiality, resistance, citizenship and the public’ (Steyaert and Hjorth, 2006: 2). In this we witness a turn from a narrow focus on economic opportunity seeking to the role of entrepreneurship in social change and the wide variety of social consequences of entrepreneurship (Calàs et al., 2009). All of these discussions, across their variety, point to the place of entrepreneurship in the creation of common life.

This recognition in entrepreneurship research of the role of the common in the three aspects of production from the common, in common, and of the common, signals the way that this research has begun to recognize the socialization of capitalist production. This leads us to suggest that with or without the word, some notion of the common is increasingly evident in entrepreneurship research.

A recognition of the other side, of the expropriation of the common, is however hardly discernible. Entrepreneurship research seems, paradoxically, to recognize the increasingly socialized nature of production and the way that effective entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship in common, that draws on the common and produces the common, but is hesitant to acknowledge the way that this falls increasingly in conflict with the continued individual and corporate expropriation of the common. This is why we argue that the fact that entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship in common is known, in concept if not in name, but that the expropriation of the common is the open secret of entrepreneurship.

One very clear way in which expropriation of the common takes place, which we might think of as a founding parable of the entrepreneur as expropriator of the common, is in the blunt separation and capture that appears in the moment when the entrepreneur stands up and—ignoring the cooperative efforts antecedent to and coincident with production—declares ‘it was me, I did this!’. This way of thinking about creation is so deeply embedded that we say ‘the Pharaohs built the pyramids’, ‘Brunel built the Clifton Suspension Bridge’, or ‘Edison invented the light bulb’. Technically the correct linguistic form would be, for example, that Brunel had the bridge built, that he designed it with the aid of many apprentices and workers and a state of development of science that his age had bequeathed him.

Western culture is cut through with such dynamics of hypostatization, in which a process is transformed into a substance. We should not be surprised to find this in a culture amongst whose founding myths is the thinking of processes of change as originating from a singular, creative demiurge. With this we have the positing of an origin, that is, a subject as origin. ‘I’, this subject, am subject. I am the agent who has created this, I am the source.

Flows are more difficult to grasp in thought. The flow of capital is difficult to conceive, as are the flows of desire, labour and time. The constant deterritorialization of capital is stitched up, captured, and the flow of capital becomes tangible in the moment when the entrepreneur stands up and claims ownership. Expropriation is here a cutting short of the rhizome. To say ‘I’ is an act of enclosure, and this happens whenever one treats multitudinous entrepreneurship as individual or indeed corporate entrepreneurship. In this we see the violence of separation, the violence of saying ‘I’, the violence of the one who says ‘I have created this thing from which you are excluded, and therefore you must pay to enter’.

As Deleuze (1991: x) says, we are still in the habit of saying ‘I’ (see also Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 3; 1994: 48). This habit is hard to kick, and is at once an historical anomaly but also deeply embedded in the history of the idea of the subject (de Libera, 2007). When, for instance, Sørensen (2008) exemplifies the history of entrepreneurial fantasies with the biblical exclamation ‘Behold, I am making all things new’ (Rev. 21:5), what is important here is not so much the making of the new as the ‘I’ that claims the place of the making. What the realization of production as production from the common and in common does is to show that production is not the result of an original mover. It is no longer a matter of saying ‘I’. It is rather a ‘we’, an unspecifiable ‘we’. Today, we create. We create from what we and our forbears have created. We, creators of common wealth.

According to the entrepreneurial myth, technically speaking anyone can become an entrepreneur, which is part of the strong appeal of the idea, that is, the breaking of class boundaries and the promise of unimaginable rewards. These rewards may justifiably be claimed by someone recognized as an entrepreneur and therefore seemingly the rightful beneficiary of these rewards. Thus the entrepreneur stands as the figure that justifies the reaping of certain rewards for the benefit of specific individuals, as if innovations and productive capacity originated from their person.

Expropriation of the common is this claiming of what is in common as one’s own. This is the localization of innovation when it is said, for example, that ‘Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth’ (Drucker, 1985: 30). As Schumpeter explains, the entrepreneur does not create anything new, but appropriates what already exists. For Schumpeter, the ‘carrying out of new combinations’ is the task of those referred to as entrepreneurs (1934: 74). Entrepreneurial profit is based on the ability of an individual to make a claim on the wealth created by bringing together already existing resources. The reward of the entrepreneur is based on the ability to make an invention profitable on the market. This is the point that Schumpeter makes regarding the relationship between inventions and innovation: ‘As long as they are not carried into practice, inventions are economically irrelevant’ (1934: 88).

Schumpeter explicitly recognizes the previous social production that enables entrepreneurial leadership: ‘It is no part of his function to “find” or to “create” new possibilities. They are always present, abundantly accumulated by all sorts of people. Often they are also generally known’ (1934: 88). Equally, he stresses that the science on which entrepreneurship draws is part of what he calls the ‘public mind’:

We start from the work of our predecessors or contemporaries or else from the ideas that float around us in the public mind. In this case our vision will also contain at least some of the results of previous scientific analysis…this compound is still given to us and exists before we start scientific work ourselves. (Schumpeter, 1949: 350)

The entrepreneurial function lies in this ‘making things happen’, which means to mobilize existing ideas and to bring them to market with an eye to reaping rewards. The entrepreneur presents something new to the market as if it were theirs to present. And in case the creations that are brought to market were shared out in common, we have the various apparatuses of capture that we discussed above, which are the staple fare of entrepreneurial practice: branding so as to retain exclusive rights of reproduction, legal protection in the form of intellectual property rights, creation of artificial scarcity so as to claim monopoly rent. This is what it means to bring the common to market and to claim it as one’s own.

Bringing to market means disseminating a product, but not disseminating it freely or globally. To do so would not return a profit. Ownership must be secured and the product must be distributed, but this distribution must take place through a market and must involve restriction of access. Hence, entrepreneurship involves not merely innovating and disseminating, but controlling flows and in doing so separating, enclosing and capturing, and thus expropriating the common.

Further, entrepreneurship equally involves finding new methods for the expropriation of the common. The function of entrepreneurship is to separate from the common and to exclude others from what they desire, to take charge and then allow entry only to a paying clientele.

Entrepreneurship is not a question about the production or creation of value, which is today overwhelmingly reliant on already existing ideas and forms of life. Ideas such as that of ‘value creation’ are ideological notions that occlude the way that value today is produced in common. In doing so, they disguise the way that the particular individuals who claim responsibility for ‘value creation’ are not so much creating value as they are claiming value for themselves, which is in fact produced in common from the common.

Entrepreneurship is a matter of dispossession or expropriation of value produced in common, of inserting oneself into the flows of capital and labour and then systematically denying one’s place in that network so as to claim that one has created by oneself, that one or one’s corporation has been the source and locus of creation. In doing so, the entrepreneur and the society that believes in the myth of entrepreneurship denies the necessary history of collective social production that is antecedent to and coincident with entrepreneurship.

Discussion

We have sought to establish that production today is production from the common, in common, of the common. It is important that we are clear about the potential limits of some of the ideas that we have been drawing on here, or at the very least we note points on which further qualifications need to be made.

Although production in common is the general frame in which production takes place today, we should be clear that in specific empirical circumstances the relation of actors to the common differs greatly. This will vary in different forms of work, and in different places of production, with differential access to the common. Nevertheless, whether production involves taking to hand a tool that has been produced from the most limited technological advances through to communicative labour in which the capacities for action draw on a vast repository of previous human development, there is no production today that does not in some way or another participate in the common.

Autonomist thought shows how production today is production in common. Although we do not want to enter into easy criticism, we should acknowledge some specific difficulties that we have with certain ideas in autonomist thought, at least in some versions of it. First of all, we are not particularly wedded to the idea that production in common is a radically new phenomenon, or that it is limited to post-Fordism. We therefore depart from the kind of ‘historicist’ arguments sometimes found in autonomist thought. We do not want to imply here any simple epochal shift from production in isolation to production in common. The risks of such epochal arguments have been clearly identified by Paul du Gay (2003). To a certain extent social life has always been rhizomic, and production has always been production in common. If we see any historical shift then it is in the way that certain forms of production today illustrate production in common very clearly. That production in common has become more visible is perhaps one of the reasons why it has come to be so widely recognized by entrepreneurship researchers.

If we have one abiding reservation with autonomist thought, then it regards what might be taken as a blind optimism when it is assumed that the shift to production in common will inevitably result in a recognition and liberation of the common. This is where political realities bite, in a context in which the key actors of capitalism seem intent on ruthlessly pillaging even our most sustained relations of cooperation and what we have produced in common. Although Hardt and Negri do acknowledge that recognition of the common is a political project, there is a sense that they sometimes seem to imagine that this process will merely organize itself, and that the opponent will fall under the weight of changes in the mode of production.

The risk that we are drawing attention to here is that of thinking that a changing economic process necessarily or automatically creates radical change in social relations. This was the danger that many years ago Gramsci was keen to alert us to, when he showed the risk of belief in the mechanical impact of economic relations on social relations. Gramsci explained this hopeful faith in economic changes leading to social changes perceptively: ‘When you don’t have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance, of cohesion and of obstinate perseverance’ (1971: 336).

There is no necessity that the fact that production today is production in common will lead to recognition of or the victory of the common over apparatuses of capture. This is because of the ongoing expropriation of the common, and also because of the perceived legitimacy of that expropriation when it is explained in terms of the great achievements of great entrepreneurs. Belief that the great productivity of contemporary production is the result of a few individuals is in practical terms an incredibly powerful ideological fantasy, seizing also those who have the most to lose from embracing such an ideology. This is why ideas such as entrepreneurship require thoroughgoing analysis and critique. We are arguing, then, that it is not enough to affirm the productive potential of social life, as autonomist thought does, even though this is also important. We must also confront the apparatus of capture, which is what we are doing here by identifying the place of entrepreneurship in the dynamics of separation, enclosure and capture, that is, expropriation of the common.

We are confident that readers will add their own criticisms of both autonomist thought and our brief and limited overview of this tradition here. Beyond the particularities of autonomist thought, however, we are here arguing for the merit of placing entrepreneurship within political economy. We hope that even readers who remain unconvinced by what we have here taken from autonomist thought will recognize the value of comprehending entrepreneurship in the context of political economy. Political economy provides the general landscape in which economic activity takes place, and points to the political contestations that it involves. It does not necessarily show us which way struggles will turn out, but describing the terrain enables us to decide on how and where to intervene. Within the frame of political economy, at least one element of the stakes of entrepreneurship today can be found in the dialectic between production in common and the expropriation of the common.

Conclusion

We began by outlining the positive moment of the socialization of production, through which production today has become production in common. By production in common we have referred to three aspects of the common in production: production draws from the common, is done in common, and produces the common. Production in common has unleashed massive productive capacities and great wealth. In working together and in drawing on our previous cooperation we are able today to produce with comparable ease what earlier generations toiled to achieve. Beyond this, production in common, drawing on the general intellect, is able to create things and new forms of knowledge, cooperation and affects that were previously all but unimaginable.

In the second section we then turned to the way that this positive moment of production in common is caught in relation to its negation, which comes in the form of the expropriation of the common. In the expropriation of the common we find an apparatus of capture in which the productivity now spread out across the entire social body is claimed and therefore possessed by one particular body that stands in the place of the whole. This capture is not merely a mental mistake, but is part of the metonymic violence in which a part comes to stand in for the whole that is a part of the history of the West. In expropriation, production in common is claimed to result from the activity of a part, and in doing so the common is symbolically denied its contribution and hence its legitimate reward.

Entrepreneurship, we then argued, plays a crucial role as ideological operator in this ongoing dialectic between production in common and expropriation of the common, and we tried to demonstrate how this dialectic plays out. At its most vulgar and simple, the claim of entrepreneurship is the claim that the body of one is responsible for what has been produced by the many.

We also sought to show the way that entrepreneurship research is today caught up in this dialectic. In the various elements of the entrepreneurship literature discussed, we showed the way that entrepreneurship research has come to recognize the place of the common in the entrepreneurial process. We showed how entrepreneurship research is aware of the way that production today is production from the common (institutional, cultural, social and legal environment, tradition and history, social capital, relations within and between firms, trust), is production in common (intrapreneurship, entrepreneurial teams, joint entrepreneurship, collaboration, collective entrepreneurship) and of the common (wealth creation, social, public and civic entrepreneurship, products which create new forms of cooperation and life). In turning attention to the place of cooperation in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship research recognizes production in common.

The other side of the dialectic, that is, expropriation of the common, remains, however, the open secret of entrepreneurship. This dialectic plays out in a constant to and fro between production in common and expropriation of the common. Entrepreneurship is a key ideological operator in the capturing of flows, and this takes place in a variety of ways, not merely through the individual heroic entrepreneur that seizes bags of profit, but equally when for example a corporate form claims responsibility for entrepreneurship and hence claims the rewards. In the cases of both individual and corporate capture there is a diversion of attention from the reality of production in common. In doing so, capture is effected through strategies of expropriation in which the common is enclosed, divided and constituted as a private resource from which all but the holders of that legal right are excluded and must pay for access.

We are surrounded daily with production in common and the expropriation of the common. We work with one another, drawing on what others have produced, in order to produce new possibilities for ourselves and others. In these processes, which are becoming increasingly recognized, the figure of the entrepreneur plays a key role in the expropriation of the common. Entrepreneurship researchers have acknowledged this production in common, but have been hesitant to account for the other side, the capitalist capture and expropriation of the common in which the figure of the entrepreneur plays a crucial role. The reason for this, we suggest, is that to do so would involve admitting that capitalism is a system built on brutal dispossession and expropriation of common life. Entrepreneurship acknowledges the common, and must increasingly do so today. But at the same time, under capital, that common is not taken as something to be respected, but rather rendered as something to be seized, manipulated and exploited.

In denying these dynamics of expropriation, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship research are then pulled in two irreconcilable directions. On the one hand we see that production today is production in common. On the other hand, the allocation of credit and reward pulls in the direction of individualization and separation. This is today the field of contestation and entrepreneurship plays a central role in it. What is to be done with such a realization, and the outcome of this dialectic, is not determined in advance by any particular necessity. Although we are in the situation of production in common, nothing in this situation will lead inevitably to the widespread social recognition of this state of affairs. Indeed, we may go on imagining that the productivity of the social body is the result of a few brilliant creative geniuses, who climb their way up the list of billionaires. To contest this requires recognition of the contemporary reality of the common and its central place in the process of production. In the contemporary labour process for that reality to become effective an intervention is required in the sphere of ideas outside of the academy, and in the ways in which fictions such as entrepreneurship are understood and deployed. Faced with the continued violence of the expropriation of the common, such an intervention can only be a political act.