VERCELLONE, From the Crisis to the Welfare of the Common as a New Mode of Production
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From the Crisis to the 'Welfare of the Common' as a New Mode of Production
Article in Theory Culture & Society · October 2015
DOI: 10.1177/0263276415597770
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Available from: Carlo Vercellone Retrieved on: 28 October 2016
Special Section: Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common
From the Crisis to the ‘Welfare of the Common’ as a New Mode of Production
Carlo Vercellone
CNRS et Universite´ Paris 1
Theory, Culture & Society
2015, Vol. 32(7–8) 85–99
! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276415597770 tcs.sagepub.com
Abstract
The aim of this article is to show in what sense the institutions of the welfare state are key to the struggles that are developing around the debt crisis and against the austerity policies carried out in its name. The first part is dedicated to isolating some elements which contribute to explaining the nature of the current crisis of capitalism and the strategic issues at stake in the policies of expropriation of welfare institu-tions. The second part emphasizes how, around the question of welfare institutions, the crisis articulates two alternative models of society and regulation of a knowledge-based economy. Within this framework, we will put forward a few lines of analysis in order to think of a different model of development, one which is founded on the ‘Welfare of the Common’ as a new mode of production.
Carlo Vercellone é uma expressão emblemática à esquerda da esquerda no debate sobre os commons. Ele toma como referência na sua estrate´gia discursiva a crise em curso e, como objeto as instituições do bem estar social (welfare institutions), ou melhor, as implicações das políticas de expropriação das “collective welfare institutions (health, research, pensions, etc.)”
A partir deste recorte institucional da crise, ele evidência dois modelos de sociedade e de regulação para a nossa economia contemporânea baseada no conhecimento: I) A Rentier Model of ‘Accumulation through Expropriation’ e II) A Model of Commonfare and ‘Communalization’ of the Credit System
. O primeiro modelo é fundado “na colonização das instituições do bem estar como a útlima fronteira para a extensão da influência das relações mercantis e financeiras”. Enquanto o segundo é um modelo um "modo de desenvolvimento alternativo fundado na logica do common, envolvendo tanto as normas de produção e consumo, como as de distribuição, o qual ele vai contrapor ao primeiro. Este segundo modelo é articulado " […] around a politics of reinforcement and democratization of welfare institutions, understood in their twofold function as systems of production and systems of distribution of income. " Segundo ele framework deste modelo alternativo de desenvolvimento pode ser organizado em torno de três principais eixos: i)
Em outras palavras, traça os contornos de um modelo de desenvolvimento diferente, o qual é fundado no que ele chama de "Welfare of the Common’ e que se configura como um novo modo de produção, o qual se ancora “[…] num deslocamento do público para o common ou, de forma mais precisa, em uma articulação hierárquica diferente entre o público, o privado e o common.”
Neta direção ele recupera “interpretação dada ao desenvolvimento histórico que é constante usado pela teoria econõmica para caracterizar a emergência da economia baseada no conhecimento”, ressaltando alguns aspectos desse desenvolvimento “que são sistematicamente ignorado pelos economista mainstream”, a exemplo dodo “[… living knowledge incorporated and mobilized by labour plays in the social organization of production”. Neste processo de desvelamento ele considera mais quatro aspectos: a) o trabalho imaterial associado aos serviços coletivos do bem estar, b) a expansão do salário socializado(pensões, o seguro desemprego) que assegura a mobilidade e escolhar entre diferentes formas de atividades criadora de emprego, c) as condições e as instituições chaves estão além da grande empresa, mas a uma produção coletiva garantid pelas “common instituions of the welfare state” e por fim e) os fatores chaves da competitividade de uma região (território) em uma economia baseada no conhecimento depende dos fatores coletivos de produtividade, a exemplo do nível geral de educação e treinamento da força de trabalho, as interações dentro dos territorios, a qualidade a infra-estrutura e pesquisa etc)Mas, a despeito da relevância dos fatores elencados acima, para a compreensão não só das instituições do bem estar social, mas também dos objetivos das política focadas no seu desmantelamento, o que se observa é que
“[…] these facts are systematically concealed by mainstream economists. The reason for this concealment lies in the stra-tegic issues that, for capital, are at stake in the biopolitical control and the mercantile colonization of welfare institutions. Health, research, edu-cation, training and culture, in fact, not only shape lifestyles, they also sustain the mechanisms of transmission and production of knowledge. These sectors also represent a growing part of the social production and the social demand that, at least in Europe, have hitherto mainly been satisfied independently of the market logic and through a form of labour that does not produce capital or, in other words, surplus value. […] here can be no doubt that the extension of the mercantile logic into these sectors is theoretically possible. It is nonetheless important to note how health, education, research, etc. can be subjected to the economic rationality of capital only on condition that resources are rationed, creat-ing profound social inequalities and, ultimately, drastically reducing their social efficiency. This, in the long run, risks undercutting the very foun-dations of the knowledge-based economy that feeds cognitive and finan-cialized capitalism (on this point, see Vercellone, 2010). [PP. 65/66”
REFERÊNCIAS
MARAZZI, The Privatization of the General Intellect. [Boa análise de um segmento da instituição do bem estar (welfare institution) vinculada a competência da força de trabalho, e como tal, fundamental para o desenvolvimento do capitalismo)
https://pt.scribd.com/document/332765399/MARAZZI-The-Privatization-of-the-General-Intellect-3-Pp
Keywords
basic income, cognitive capitalism, Common, crisis, knowledge-based economy, welfare state
The aim of this article is to show in what sense the institutions of the welfare state are key to the struggles that are developing around the debt crisis and against the austerity policies carried out in its name.1 The article is divided in two parts. The aim of the first part is to isolate some elements which are often concealed and which, at the same time, contribute to explaining the nature of the current crisis of capitalism and the strategic issues at stake in the policies of expropriation of welfare institutions. The aim of the second part will be to emphasize how, around the question of welfare institutions, the crisis articulates two possible alternative models of society and regulation of an economy based on knowledge and its dissemination. Within this framework, we will put
Corresponding author: Carlo Vercellone. Email: [email protected] Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
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forward a few lines of analysis in order to think of a different model of development, one which is founded on the shift from the public to the common or, more precisely, on a different hierarchical articulation between the public, the private and the common.
Cognitive and Financialized Capitalism vs Knowledge-based Economy: The Stakes of the Institutions of Welfare
The debt crisis expresses and exacerbates the structural contradiction between the rentier logic of cognitive and financialized capitalism and the conditions of reproduction of an economy based on knowledge and on the productions of man for man. At the heart of this contradiction there is the welfare state system, which, in its twofold function as a mode of production and distribution of wealth, represents the main target of lib-eralization and austerity policies pushed by financial markets and by the famous Troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank [ECB] and International Monetary Fund [IMF]). In this sense, Franc¸ ois Chesnais (2011) is perfectly right when, in his last book on illegitimate debt, he recalls how a 2010 IMF document made it clear that the debt crisis is, at the bottom, nothing but the long-awaited oppor-tunity to ‘succeed where other approaches have failed’ (quoted in Chesnais, 2011: 8). While facing the predatory and destructive logic pro-moted by neoliberal capitalism, it is nonetheless essential to note how a large part of the left and of organic economists have often withdrawn into themselves and accepted, fatalistically, the iron laws of financial markets. At best, they take a stance which merely defends the social progress achieved by the welfare state. This attitude is founded on an approach that has internalized, de facto, the first premise of mainstream economic theory, according to which we ‘have been living beyond our means’. The welfare system is essentially perceived as a cost that weighs on the competitiveness of private enterprises and whose financing depends on the taxation imposed on the mercantile capitalist economy. Note how even a deeply critical Marxist thinker like David Harvey seems to agree with a similar and very traditional interpretation of the policies of expropriation of collective welfare institutions. It is in this sense that, in the afterword of his latest book, The Enigma of Capital, he claims that, despite the extent of their perverse effects on demand, the essential objective of such policies is solely to ‘free capital from the responsibility of bearing the cost of the social reproduction of the labour force’ (Harvey, 2011: 269).
Like many economists, Harvey, here, is forgetting two key and closely interconnected points, which characterize the role of the reproduction of the labour force and the welfare system under the new capitalist system:
.far from being a mere cost, the conditions for the reproduction of the labour force are nowadays more and more directly productive;
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.welfare institutions, in their twofold function as systems of distribution and production, constitute the primary productive force that has allowed the development and reproduction of the knowledge-based economy that feeds cognitive and financialized capitalism.
Even though weakened by 30 years of neoliberalism, the collective services and the resources mobilized by welfare institutions (health, research, pensions, etc.) still essentially obey a logic that, at least in Europe, escapes capital’s commercial and financial circuits. In this respect – and here we are dealing with one of the key stakes of the crisis – the welfare system appears somehow ‘outside’ of capital. This, however, is not a pre-capitalist ‘outside’ (esterno), in Rosa Luxemburg’s sense, but a new outside built through struggles within the very develop-ment of capitalism and which, as such, outlines a radical alternative.
On the one hand, given how the tendency to stagnation has kept growing since before the beginning of the crisis, the colonization of wel-fare institutions is one of the last frontiers for the further extension of the influence of finance and mercantile relations. Even more than that, its internalization on the part of capital appears as an essential condition for the biopolitical control of populations, as well as for the direction of the knowledge-based economy. We will come back to this point later.
On the other hand, the welfare system also contains, in embryo, the possibility of evolving into an alternative mode of development founded on the logic of the common, both in relation to the norms of production and consumption and to those of distribution.
In order to illustrate these theses, we shall start from the interpretation given to a historical development that is often used by economic theory to characterize the emergence of the knowledge-based economy. We are referring to the historical dynamic by which, in the US, starting from the mid-1970s, the so-called intangible part of capital (R&D and, above all, education, training and health) is said to have surpassed material capital in the global stock of capital and to have become the most decisive factor of economic development and competitiveness (see Kendrick, 1994). There are many important and interrelated aspects to this development that are systematically ignored by mainstream economists. These aspects are nonetheless essential to understand both the role of welfare institu-tions and the ultimate, often dissimulated, objectives of the policies involved in dismantling and privatizing these institutions.
At the conceptual level, the first aspect concerns the manner in which immaterial and intellectual capital is in truth incorporated into human beings and, therefore, corresponds essentially to the intellectual and cre-ative faculties of the labour force. To put it differently – and following the Marxian method of critique of political economy – the very concept of immaterial capital (which today represents the most important part of the capitalization of stock markets) is a true oxymoron. Following Karl Marx’s terminology, it is possible to affirm that this notion does not
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express at all – or, at best, it distorts – the predominant role which the living knowledge incorporated and mobilized by labour plays today in the social organization of production, as compared to the dead knowledge incorporated in constant capital and in the managerial organization of companies.
The second aspect concerns the manner in which the increase of the immaterial part of capital is tightly tied to the development of the insti-tutions of the socialized wage and the collective services of welfare. This tendency was accelerated by the social conflicts that, between the end of the 1960s and the 1970s, caused the end of Fordism and led to the mon-etarist counteroffensive. In particular, mass schooling was made possible by the collective services of welfare, which played a key role in the for-mation of a diffused intellectuality or collective intelligence: the latter, in fact, is responsible for the major part of the increase of intangible capital, which, as said, represents today the essential factor of a nation’s growth and competitiveness.
The third aspect is that the expansion of the socialized wage (pension, job seeker’s allowance, etc.) has mitigated the dependence on wage rela-tionships and has facilitated the mobility and choice between different forms of wealth-creating activities, training and work (even though this tendency has been progressively put into question by neoliberal workfare policies). The expansion of the socialized wage has thus been accompa-nied by a liberation of time, which – to use Marx’s remarks on the general intellect – appears as an immediately productive force from the point of view of the knowledge-based economy. Note how this point of view sup-ports Bernard Friot’s (2010) thesis, which defends the principles of the distributive pension system by mobilizing an understanding of what we would label as an institution of the common, and goes so far as to assert that it is in fact the free labour of the pensioners that pays for their pensions.
The fourth aspect is expressed by the fact that, contrary to what is usually believed, the social conditions and the key institutions of a knowledge-based economy are not located in the big enterprises’ R&D private laboratories. On the contrary, they correspond to the collective productions of man for man, as traditionally guaranteed by the common institutions of the welfare state (health, public and university research, etc.) according to a non-mercantile logic. This conclusion is also con-firmed by a comparative analysis at the international level. In fact, against the neoliberal paradigm, we should lay stress on the strong posi-tive correlation between the development of non-mercantile services and welfare institutions on the one hand, and the indices of development and economic and social efficiency of knowledge-based economies on the other (cf. Lucarelli and Vercellone, 2011). This observation is also sup-ported by the fact that a low level of social, wage and gender inequality is usually accompanied by a wider diffusion of more advanced forms of
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work organization (Vercellone, 2010), which makes the economic system less vulnerable to the international competition of emerging countries (Lundvall and Lorenz, 2009).
The fifth aspect of this historical development concerns the key factors of growth and competitiveness of a region (territorio) in a knowledge-based economy. As Aglietta (1997) has noted, these factors increasingly depend on what economists call the collective factors of productivity (the general level of education and training of the labour force, its inter-actions within a given territory, the quality of infrastructure and research, etc.) . At the macroeconomic level, this means that the condi-tions of the labour force’s training and reproduction are today directly productive and that – to paraphrase Adam Smith, while reaching an opposite conclusion – the origin of the ‘wealth of nations’ is increasingly reliant on a form of productive cooperation external to the enterprises.
Despite their importance, these facts are systematically concealed by mainstream economists. The reason for this concealment lies in the stra-tegic issues that, for capital, are at stake in the biopolitical control and the mercantile colonization of welfare institutions. Health, research, edu-cation, training and culture, in fact, not only shape lifestyles, they also sustain the mechanisms of transmission and production of knowledge. These sectors also represent a growing part of the social production and the social demand that, at least in Europe, have hitherto mainly been satisfied independently of the market logic and through a form of labour that does not produce capital or, in other words, surplus value. Even more importantly, in the context of the current crisis, the productions of man for man (health, education, etc.) are among the few sectors that are still sheltered from the tendency to stagnation, which is hitting all OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) economies and in which the social demands continue to grow (on this theme see Negri and Vercellone, 2008). All these factors, along with the all too material interests that they excite, can explain the enormous pressure by capital to privatize (or, at any rate, to subject to its rationality) the collective services of welfare, by introducing, for example, the logic of competitiveness and quantified results, which are promoted by New Public Management and are a prelude to the affirmation of the logic of value as absolute and uncontestable (see especially Laval et al., 2011). Contrary to the prevailing ideological discourse stigmatizing the cost and the alleged unproductiveness of welfare institutions, the aim of capital is not so much to reduce the absolute amount of such expenses, but to reintegrate them within the financial and mercantile circuits. The debt crisis was and still remains the excuse to accelerate these tendencies, while exacerbating the economic and social contradictions that they generate. This is, arguably, the most logical explanation for the macroeconomic irrationality of the pro-cyclical policies and the austerity plans demanded
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by financial markets and the famous Troika (the IMF, European Commission, ECB).
There can be no doubt that the extension of the mercantile logic into these sectors is theoretically possible. It is nonetheless important to note how health, education, research, etc. can be subjected to the economic rationality of capital only on condition that resources are rationed, creat-ing profound social inequalities and, ultimately, drastically reducing their social efficiency. This, in the long run, risks undercutting the very foun-dations of the knowledge-based economy that feeds cognitive and finan-cialized capitalism (on this point, see Vercellone, 2010).
Three main arguments corroborate this thesis. The first is linked to the intrinsically cognitive, interactive and affective character of these activ-ities, in which labour does not consist in acting on inanimate matter, but on man himself, in a relation of co-production of services. It follows that
– as already suggested by Marx in some passages of the unpublished Chapter VI of Capital, dedicated to immaterial labour – the productions of man for man can hardly be subsumed into the productive rationality of capital, since the subjectivity of the workers, like ‘the product[,] is inseparable from the productive act’ (Marx, 1971: 98). In short, neither the act of labour nor the product (which corresponds to man himself, as the singularity of each individual) can actually be standardized. In terms of results, efficiency depends on a series of qualitative variables linked to communication, to the density of human relations, to unselfish care and to the time we spend caring for others, which analytical accounting can only integrate as costs or wasted time. The attempt to increase the prod-uctivity and profitability of these services can only be carried out at the expense of their quality and social output. Here, at the level of the social organization of production, we are facing a blatant contradiction between the capitalistic and quantitative conception of productivity and the social conception of productivity, which is the result of the intrin-sically common character of those activities and their material and imma-terial outcomes.2
The second argument refers to the profound distortions ensuing from the application of the principle of solvable demand to the right of access to these common goods, which causes a deterioration to the collective quality of the labour force. In other words, for the sake of social justice and economic efficiency, the productions of the common must be founded on them being free and with free access to them. Their funding, therefore, can only be guaranteed by the collective and political price represented by the tax system, social subsidies and other forms of com-munalization (mutualizzazione) of resources.
The third argument relates to the non-existence (in the sphere of health and education, for example) of the mythical figure of the consumer who makes his choices on the basis of a rational calculation of costs and benefits, with a view to maximizing his investments in his own human
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capital. Fortunately, this is not the criterion on the basis of which stu-dents search for knowledge. This is even less true in the case of sick people, who are prisoners of a state of anguish which prevents them from making rational choices and which, instead, delivers them into the traps of a mercantile logic in which selling hopes and illusions is a means to making profits.
Two Opposite Models of Society and Regulation of an Economy Based on Knowledge and Its Dissemination
In a context embittered by the aggravation of the crisis, it is reasonable to foresee two opposing models of society and regulation of the knowledge-based economy, both of which revolve around the central question of welfare institutions.
A Rentier Model of ‘Accumulation through Expropriation’
Unfortunately, we know the first model all too well. It corresponds to the intensification of the neoliberal policies of austerity and dismantling of the welfare state, under the aegis of the power of rent and the collusion between an increasing hybridization of the logic of the public and the private, as attested by the implementation of the principles of the New Public Management or by the criteria adopted by governments to bail out and unconditionally recapitalize the banking system.
Note, however, how this regime of ‘accumulation through expropri-ation’ and the model of regulation which sustains it must inevitably face some serious contradictions, both in the short and in the medium to long run. Why? On the one hand, as far as the short-term macro management of the crisis is concerned, it accentuates European Union (EU) econo-mies’ tendency to stagnation, thus further increasing, rather than redu-cing, states’ debt and deficit, while aggravating the risk of a crisis of insolvency that could hit the states and the banking system simultan-eously.3 On the other hand, as already noted, the dismantling of welfare institutions and services risks also, and above all, undercutting the long-term conditions of growth and competitiveness. This is one of the most visible expressions (brought to an extreme by the current crisis) of the paradox typical of the rentier model of cognitive and financialized cap-italism; a paradox which might bring it, endogenously, to the brink of self-destruction, if its predatory instincts were given free rein.
To put it differently, the attempt to secure the maximum extraction of value in the short term relies on, and has as its consequence, the pro-gressive destructuration of the mechanisms of growth that allow this rentier extraction to take place and to renew itself through time.4 Even though its reasons are opposite to those identified by Garret Hardin’s well-known article (Hardin, 1968), this is what we could call the new ‘tragedy of the commons’, which is caused by the dynamics of cognitive
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and financialized capitalism and which – it is important not to forget – is also attended by the tragedy of the anti-commons related to the privat-ization of knowledge. This destructive logic hides, nonetheless, a some-how positive element: this mode of accumulation is neither economically nor socially sustainable and, to put it in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, it is becoming a pure system of coercion deprived of any real hegemony. Moreover, this model might implode quite quickly, well before having accomplished the expropriation of the common and of the social and institutional conditions of the knowledge-based economy. The reason is that the debt that finance pretends to be fighting is actually one of the structural pillars of its logic of valorization and biopolitical control of society. The power of finance cannot reproduce itself without creating the conditions of a general indebtedness, whether it be that of financial insti-tutions (the lever effect), states, families, students, or others. We are dealing with a blind and self-referential logic that, if brought to the extreme, might also produce its structural limits.
Hence, the crisis of public debt, on which finance is blissfully speculat-ing, has not cancelled at all the crisis of private debt and of the banking system from which it originated. On the contrary, it has strengthened its interdependencies and its systemic potential in the case of crisis. In effect, saying that the crisis of private debt was simply followed by a crisis of public debt is misleading. Today, at the beginning of 2013, as confirmed by the case of Cyprus and by the possibility of a new general recession, we are still facing the risk of a double crisis of the public debt and the banking debt. The structural imbalance between the centre (Germany especially) and the periphery of Europe could further exacerbate this double crisis, leading not only to the sinking of the Eurozone but also, as in 2008, to the collapse of the credit system – a sort of Lehman Brothers multiplied to the nth degree. This systemic risk, moreover, is aggravated by its fundamental difference from the situation in 2008: the resources and the political context that allowed states to rescue their banks unconditionally are no longer there. The proof of this is that Moody’s, for example, has already lowered the rating of some British banks, in the belief that the state is no longer able to come to their assistance. This was followed in 2012 by the downgrading of the British public debt by Moody’s and today also by the rating agency Fitch. This evolution is straining the material basis of the well-established neoliberal alliance between the public and the private, states and finance, which was constituted in the 1980s. In the event of a new banking crisis, moreover, bypassing the question of the socialization of the credit system will not be as easy as it was in 2008.
It is for this reason, too, that it has become more important than ever to understand how the concept of the common may help us to think of the foundations of a new mode of development.5 In what follows we will try to put forward a few lines of analysis concerning what we could call a
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model of Commonfare, based on the democratic reappropriation of the welfare state and the re-socialization of money and credit.
A Model of Commonfare and ‘Communalization’ of the Credit System
An alternative model should revolve around a politics of reinforcement and democratization of welfare institutions, understood in their twofold function as systems of production and systems of distribution of income. The framework of this model of development might be organized around three main axes.
The first axis consists in giving priority to investments in non-mercantile collective services and in the productions of man for man that guarantee, at the same time, the satisfaction of essential needs, the reproduction of a knowledge-based economy and a socially and ecologic-ally sustainable development. The implementation of this model obvi-ously entails questioning the prevailing economic paradigm, according to which the collective expenses and services of welfare only represent a cost whose funding relies on the taxation of the value and surplus value created in the mercantile private sector (which is wrongly deemed to be the only one producing wealth). On the contrary, the collective expenses and services of welfare should be considered as the pivotal factors of a society based on the highly intensive use of knowledge and social services. The latter, in fact, through their own activity of production, generate a non-mercantile monetary wealth ‘which is not transferred, but is produced directly’ (Harribey, 2004: 1). To better understand this statement, it is necessary to extend the argument that frees the idea of investment from any presupposition of a preliminary accumulation of savings, the funding coming instead from the creation of monetary value through credit.6 To put it differently, we have to consider how the expenses and social investments of welfare, in truth, do nothing other than anticipate and ‘pre-validate’ the creation of a non-mercantile wealth produced in order to satisfy collective needs, which will be paid back, ex-post, through taxes, as the collective price or compensation for that wealth.7
This point obviously raises two other, connected questions, which are essential for thinking through the passage from the public to the common: a more general question about the socialization of investments and money (to which we will return at the conclusion of the article) and a question about the organizational and managerial models that would allow for an authentically democratic reappropriation of welfare institu-tions. As to the latter, it is essential to note that the productions of man for man represent a source of highly qualified employment, in which the cognitive and relational dimensions of labour are paramount. In short, they are almost always, by definition, a co-production of services. Within this framework, it would then be possible to experiment with democratic and innovative forms of self-management of production, which would
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involve the users directly, according to a model that could progressively be extended to other sectors and economic activities. This opens up a field of research essential to thinking the mode of production of the common on the basis of a radical break with the principles underpinning the privatization of knowledge and with the New Public Management, which somehow combines the worst aspects of the bureaucratic logic of the public with the private’s logic of quantified results and quantitative productivity.
The second axis would entail strengthening the logic of a socialized wage by extending the forms of access to guaranteed income, on the basis of objective rights and mechanisms that are the opposite of those of subjective and economic dependency formed through debt.
In this respect, it might be worth considering the establishment of an unconditional Guaranteed Wage or Social Income (GSI), independent of employment. This basic income would be at one and the same time an institution of the common and a primary income for individuals, that is to say, an income directly deriving from production and not from redis-tribution. Note, moreover, how these two dimensions, the primary income and the institution of the common, are tightly interwoven. In effect, our approach to the common, in the singular, is founded historic-ally on the increasingly cognitive and social character of labour and relies on the critique of the naturalistic conception typical of the economic theory of the commons (beni comuni).8
The basic income would be an institution of the common, therefore, because it does not depend on the public sphere but corresponds, ‘after all, to the communalization of a part of what is produced in common, either intentionally or otherwise’ (Gorz, 2003: 101). This would be something totally different from a contributive logic based on the relations of measure and proportionality between individual efforts and the right to income.
The basic income would be a primary income because the idea of the GSI, as an institution of the common, rests on the re-examination and extension of the notion of productive labour carried out from a twofold point of view (see Monnier and Vercellone, 2007). The first of these refers to the concept of productive labour, as conceived by the prevailing trad-ition of political economy, as the labour that generates a profit and/or contributes to the creation of value. The issue here is to realize that we are currently witnessing a considerable extension of working time, beyond official working hours, which is either directly or indirectly impli-cated in the creation of the value captured by companies. From this point of view, the GSI, as a social wage, would correspond to the collective remuneration for the increasingly collective dimension of these value-creating activities that unfold in the totality of social time and that give rise to an enormous mass of labour, which is neither recognized nor remunerated. Pushing this argument even further, it would also be possible to say that, starting from an irreducible base, the progression of
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this first element of the GSI could become the object of periodic collect-ive negotiations between the totality of the labour force, on the one hand, and capital and the state on the other.
The second point of view refers to the concept of productive labour, in as much as it produces use-values and it is the source of a kind of wealth that escapes the mercantile logic and the logic of dependent wage labour. In other words, the idea is that labour may produce wealth even when it does not produce capital and that, in this case, it should be compensated with an income. From a strictly technical point of view, moreover, this is already happening within non-mercantile public services that produce wealth but no value. The unconditional character of the GSI is nonethe-less radically different from the wage paid to the workers in these services, since it is neither based on dependent employment nor does it require the wage-earners to demonstrate the social utility of their activities. It pre-supposes the recognition of a wealth-creating activity and a productive cooperation which develops before and independently of the administra-tive logic of the public sphere and the mercantile profitability of the pri-vate, even when it intersects them and contributes to their reproduction.
Note also how, in this respect, in the development of cognitive capital-ism, these two contradictory forms of productive labour entertain a rela-tion that is at once both antagonistic and complementary. The expansion of free labour is in fact accompanied by its subordination to value-produ-cing labour, as a consequence of the very tendencies that are blurring the traditional frontiers between labour and non-labour, the sphere of pro-duction and that of reproduction. The political question posed by the GSI is therefore not only the acknowledgement of this second dimension of productive labour, but also, and above all, the question of its emancipa-tion from the sphere of value and surplus value production. In this sense, the weakening of wage relations and the liberation of time enabled by the GSI would be essential for cognitive labour to regain control over its own living time and utilize the time and psychic energy thus liberated for the development of the different forms of production of the common.
In short, the GSI appears simultaneously as an institution of the common, a primary income and a collective social investment in know-ledge. As such, it would allow establishing – just as the expenses and col-lective services of the welfare system do – a form of development based on the primacy of the non-mercantile and of forms of cooperation alternative to the organizational principles of both the public and the market.
Finally – as far as the third axis is concerned – we cannot deny the fact that the only function of finance that is not parasitic consists of its capacity to channel accumulation and allocate capital.9 This is why it is not possible to conceive of any real alternative without questioning – along with illegit-imate debt – this function of economic coordination and planning secured through finance. We are dealing with one of the key issues at stake in the struggles revolving around the question of debt and its cancellation.
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96Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8)
The question is, therefore, how to think of the re-socialization of money and of the credit system and – beyond that – how to think of money as a true common good, that is to say, as a social construction, which belongs, indivisibly, to the political community that utilizes it and that, accordingly, lays down the rules of its aims and functions, thus preventing its unilateral appropriation by either the logic of the private or by state power. We are dealing with a crucial and extremely complex question, one which would actually deserve an in-depth analysis.
In order to contribute to opening up this debate – especially as far as the Eurozone is concerned – the following analysis will limit itself to some brief observations on two key and closely interconnected problems.
The first of these concerns the necessity to break with the principle of the alleged autonomy of the ECB, since its independence actually only corresponds to the constitutionalization of finance’s power and to the de facto quasi-privatization of monetary creation. In order to do that, the first step would consist in re-establishing those Keynesian mechanisms that subject monetary policy to a political power expressive of a demo-cratic community. Given the urgency of the crisis, this is essential in order to allow the monetization of public deficits and the financing of the public debt outside of the markets and their arbitrary decisions. In effect, only the ECB’s virtually unlimited capacity to create money would be able to suffocate speculation, while at the same time securing the long-term collective investments necessary to the implementation of a mode of development founded on the Commonfare and the ecological reconver-sion of our productive systems.
The second problem concerns the re-socialization of the banking system, which in an ideal world could go hand in hand with the changes in the constitution and aims of the ECB. In this respect, it is possible to identify in the current debate, especially as it takes form in France, two main positions.
The first proposes re-establishing a centralized public system, centred on a classic politics of nationalization of the main banks; in other words, a model in which the near totality of monetary creation and of the credit system would be under the control of the state and of a system of public property. The chief historic model of this form of centralized regulation of the banking system and of monetary creation is the well-known ‘treasury circuit’, which characterized the period of Fordist growth in both Italy and France, for example. Compared to the current regime of privatization of money, this system would undoubtedly have various advantages, among which is that of allowing the partial and indirect re-socialization of money through the state monetization of social conflicts. This model, however, also contains a number of risks, which are inherent to the auton-omization of public power from the democratic management of money as a common good. At one extreme, there is the temptation of public man-agement to select credit on the basis of nepotistic criteria, while, on the
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other extreme, there is the risk of imitating the norms of governance and financial profitability of the private sector, as shown by the events at the Cre´dit Lyonnais in France, to mention just one very well-known example (on this point see Lordon, 2009).
Given these risks, a second position corresponds, in many respects, to what Fre´de´ric Lordon calls the ‘communalization’ of the banking system. While supporting a large-scale de-privatization of the credit system, this model proposes recuperating, on the basis of entirely new foundations, the tradition of the cooperative banking model. It would thus become possible to find an innovative institutional compromise between the pure and polarized models of centralization and fragmentation of the banking system described by Michel Aglietta and Andre´Orle´an in La Violence de la monnaie (The Violence of Money; Aglietta and Orle´an, 1982). This would be an innovative compromise because a socialized system of credit would not lead to the monetary monopoly of the state (as in the case of a unified public system), but would be articulated around decen-tralized entities endowed with operational autonomy. Their autonomy, however, would not be of a ‘private’ nature: their constitution and respective functions would be founded on precise basic specifications subjecting ‘explicitly the concession [of the power to issue credit] to a principle of public service’ (Lordon, 2009). Hence, these are the funda-mental elements of a project for the re-socialization of the credit system and money, by means of the concept of the common.
To conclude on an optimistic note – an optimism based on ‘will’ as much as on ‘reason’ – the very richness of this debate on an alternative model of society, by interrogating and questioning the most essential institutions of capitalism, such as money, shows all the potentialities and the constituent power (forza) characteristic of all those struggles which develop at the heart of the crisis.
Acknowledgement
The TCS editors would like to acknowledge the help of Paolo Palladino in the general editorial process for the section and improving the translations.
Notes
- This is, for the most part, the transcription of an intervention at the seminar organized by UniNomade in Milan on 3–4 December 2011.
- In this respect, as Hardt and Negri (2010: 135–6) have observed, in a more general sense, ‘biopolitical products tend [. . .] to exceed all quantitative meas-urement and take common forms which are easily shared and difficult to corral as private property’.
- The risk is even higher for those countries such as Greece, Portugal, Spain and, to a lesser extent, Italy, which cannot compensate for the contraction of their internal demand by increasing exports. Whereas Germany has been able to escape this vicious circle thanks to neo-mercantilist policies and a mighty
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98Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8)
industrial apparatus, these external outlets depend, to a large extent, on the demand of Southern European countries. The result is a negative-sum game at the European level, whose effects could soon be felt by Germany itself. On this point, see also the recent essay by Aglietta and Brand (2013).
- This contributes to explaining the ambiguous reactions of the markets to the austerity measures that they had themselves demanded.
- Without it being circumscribed to economic enclaves concerning specific goods like water, for example, and to a subordinate position in which it would only serve to remedy the shortcomings of the public–private pair, as the economic theory inspired by the works of Elinor Omstrom often tends to do.
- This is because ‘investments can be hampered by the lack of money, but never by the lack of savings’, as Aglietta (2001) has noticed, recalling Keynes’ essential teaching.
- In other words, whether it be mercantile production or the collective services of the welfare state, in both cases, it is the injection of money in the form of wages and investments to set the economic circuit into motion and allow the distribution of income that will then be spent for buying mercantile goods or paying taxes (see Harribey, 2004).
- For a critique of this aspect of the economic theory of the commons, see Baronian and Vercellone (2015).
- Besides its increasingly explicit power to govern and determine the orienta-tion of the economic policies of different states through its institutions, its rating agencies and its public officials, as the case of the Monti government in Italy clearly shows.
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Carlo Vercellone is Maıˆ tre `aConference of Political Economy at the University of Paris I, Panthe´on-Sorbonne, CES CNRS, where he teaches Economic History, Economic Theories and Economics of Knowledge. He specializes in issues involving the knowledge-based economy, cognitive capitalism, basic income and labour transformations. He has published in a wide variety of journals, including Historical Materialism, Capital and Class, Economie Applique´e, Ge´ographie, e´conomie, socie´te, European Journal of Economic and Social Systems, Multitudes, and Basic Income Studies. He has edited Ecole de la re´gulation et critique de la raison e´con-omique (l’Harmattan, 1994), Sommes-nous sortis du capitalisme industriel?
(La Dispute, 2003), Capitalismo cognitivo (Manifestolibri, 2006) and
Cognitive Capitalism and its Reflections in South-Eastern Europe (Peter Lang, 2011). Since 2014 he has been involved as a senior researcher in the D-cent research project funded by the European Commission.
This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section, Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common, edited by Tiziana Terranova, Adalgiso Amendola and Sandro Mezzadra.
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