This essay was written by Tiziana Terranova and originally published in Euromade.info

Tiziana Terranova: This essay is the outcome of a research process which involves a series of Italian institutions of autoformazione of post-autonomist inspiration (‘free’ universities engaged in grassroots organization of public seminars, conferences, workshops etc) and anglophone social networks of scholars and researchers engaging with digital media theory and practice officially affiliated with universities, journals and research centres, but also artists, activists, precarious knowledge workers and such likes. It refers to a workshop which took place in London in January 2014, hosted by the Digital Culture Unit at the Centre for Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths’ College, University of London). The workshop was the outcome of a process of reflection and organization that started with the Italian free university collective Uninomade 2.0 in early 2013 and continued across mailing lists and websites such as Euronomade, Effimera, Commonware, I quaderni di San Precario, and others. More than a traditional essay, then, it aims to be a synthetic but hopefully also inventive document which plunges into a distributed ‘social research network’ articulating a series of problems, theses and concerns at the crossing between political theory and research into science, technology and capitalism.

What is at stake in the following is the relationship between ‘algorithms’ and ‘capital’—that is, the increasing centrality of algorithms ‘to organizational practices arising out of the centrality of information and communication technologies stretching all the way from production to circulation, from industrial logistics to financial speculation, from urban planning and design to social communication.¹ These apparently esoteric mathematical structures have also become part of the daily life of users of contemporary digital and networked media. Most users of the Internet daily interface or are subjected to the powers of algorithms such as Google’s Pagerank (which sorts the results of our search queries) or Facebook Edgerank (which automatically decides in which order we should get our news on our feed) not to talk about the many other less known algorithms (Appinions, Klout, Hummingbird, PKC, Perlin noise, Cinematch, KDP Select and many more) which modulate our relationship with data, digital devices and each other. This widespread presence of algorithms in the daily life of digital culture, however, is only one of the expressions of the pervasiveness of computational techniques as they become increasingly co-extensive with processes of production, consumption and distribution displayed in logistics, finance, architecture, medicine, urban planning, infographics, advertising, dating, gaming, publishing and all kinds of creative expressions (music, graphics, dance etc).

The staging of the encounter between ‘algorithms’ and ‘capital’ as a political problem invokes the possibility of breaking with the spell of ‘capitalist realism’—that is, the idea that capitalism constitutes the only possible economy while at the same time claiming that new ways of organizing the production and distribution of wealth need to seize on scientific and technological developments². Going beyond the opposition between state and market, public and private, the concept of the common is used here as a way to instigate the thought and practice of a possible post-capitalist mode of existence for networked digital media.

Algorithms, Capital and Automation

Looking at algorithms from a perspective that seeks the constitution of a new political rationality around the concept of the ‘common’ means engaging with the ways in which algorithms are deeply implicated in the changing nature of automation. Automation is described by Marx as a process of absorption into the machine of the ‘general productive forces of the social brain’ such as ‘knowledge and skills’³,which hence appear as an attribute of capital rather than as the product of social labour. Looking at the history of the implication of capital and technology, it is clear how automation has evolved away from the thermo-mechanical model of the early industrial assembly line toward the electro-computational dispersed networks of contemporary capitalism. Hence it is possible to read algorithms as part of a genealogical line that, as Marx put it in the ‘Fragment on Machines’, starting with the adoption of technology by capitalism as fixed capital, pushes the former through several metamorphoses ‘whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself’⁴.The industrial automaton was clearly thermodynamical, and gave rise to a system ‘consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs so that workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages’⁵. The digital automaton, however, is electro-computational, it puts ‘the soul to work’ and involves primarily the nervous system and the brain and comprises ‘possibilities of virtuality, simulation, abstraction, feedback and autonomous processes’⁶. The digital automaton unfolds in networks consisting of electronic and nervous connections so that users themselves are cast as quasi-automatic relays of a ceaseless information flow. It is in this wider assemblage, then, that algorithms need to be located when discussing the new modes of automation.

Quoting a textbook of computer science, Andrew Goffey describes algorithms as ‘the unifying concept for all the activities which computer scientists engage in…and the fundamental entity with which computer scientists operate’⁷. An algorithm can be provisionally defined as the ‘description of the method by which a task is to be accomplished’ by means of sequences of steps or instructions, sets of ordered steps that operate on data and computational structures. As such, an algorithm is an abstraction, ‘having an autonomous existence independent of what computer scientists like to refer to as “implementation details,” that is, its embodiment in a particular programming language for a particular machine architecture’⁸. It can vary in complexity from the most simple set of rules described in natural language (such as those used to generate coordinated patterns of movement in smart mobs) to the most complex mathematical formulas involving all kinds of variables (as in the famous Monte Carlo algorithm used to solve problems in nuclear physics and later also applied to stock markets and now to the study of non-linear technological diffusion processes). At the same time, in order to work, algorithms must exist as part of assemblages that include hardware, data, data structures (such as lists, databases, memory, etc.), and the behaviours and actions of bodies. For the algorithm to become social software, in fact, ‘it must gain its power as a social or cultural artifact and process by means of a better and better accommodation to behaviors and bodies which happen on its outside’.⁹

Furthermore, as contemporary algorithms become increasingly exposed to larger and larger data sets (and in general to a growing entropy in the flow of data also known as Big Data), they are, according to Luciana Parisi, becoming something more then mere sets of instructions to be performed: ‘infinite amounts of information interfere with and re-program algorithmic procedures…and data produce alien rules’¹⁰. It seems clear from this brief account, then, that algorithms are neither a homogeneous set of techniques, nor do they guarantee ‘the infallible execution of automated order and control¹¹.

From the point of view of capitalism, however, algorithms are mainly a form of ‘fixed capital’—that is, they are just means of production. They encode a certain quantity of social knowledge (abstracted from that elaborated by mathematicians, programmers, but also users’ activities), but they are not valuable per se. In the current economy, they are valuable only in as much as they allow for the conversion of such knowledge into exchange value (monetization) and its (exponentially increasing) accumulation (the titanic quasi-monopolies of the social Internet). In as much as they constitute fixed capital, algorithms such as Google’s Page Rank and Facebook’s Edgerank appear ‘as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude’¹². And that is why calls for individual retributions to users for their ‘free labor’ are misplaced. It is clear that for Marx what needs to be compensated is not the individual work of the user, but the much larger powers of social cooperation thus unleashed, and that this compensation implies a profound transformation of the grip that the social relation that we call the capitalist economy has on society.

From the point of view of capital, then, algorithms are just fixed capital, means of production finalized to achieve an economic return. But that does not mean that, like all technologies and techniques, that is all that they are. Marx explicitly states that even as capital appropriates technology as the most effective form of the subsumption of labor, that does not mean that this is all that can be said about it. Its existence as machinery, he insists, is not ‘identical with its existence as capital… and therefore it does not follow that subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery’.¹³ It is then essential to remember that the instrumental value that algorithms have for capital does not exhaust the ‘value’ of technology in general and algorithms in particular—that is, their capacity to express not just ‘use value’ as Marx put it, but also aesthetic, existential, social, and ethical values. Wasn’t it this clash between the necessity of capital to reduce software development to exchange value, thus marginalizing the aesthetic and ethical values of software creation, that pushed Richard Stallman and countless hackers and engineers towards the Free and Open Source Movement? Isn’t the enthusiasm that animates hack-meetings and hacker-spaces fueled by the energy liberated from the constraints of ‘working’ for a company in order to remain faithful to one’s own aesthetics and ethics of coding?

Contrary to some variants of Marxism which tend to identify technology completely with ‘dead labor’, ‘fixed capital’ or ‘instrumental rationality’, and hence with control and capture, it seems important to remember how, for Marx, the evolution of machinery also indexes a level of development of productive powers that are unleashed but never totally contained by the capitalist economy. What interested Marx (and what makes his work still relevant to those who strive for a post-capitalist mode of existence) is the way in which, so he claims, the tendency of capital to invest in technology to automate and hence reduce its labor costs to a minimum potentially frees up a ‘surplus’ of time and energy (labor) or an excess of productive capacity in relation to the basic, important and necessary labor of reproduction (a global economy, for example, should first of all produce enough wealth for all members of a planetary population to be adequately fed, clothed, cured and sheltered). However, what characterizes a capitalist economy is that this surplus of time and energy is not simply released, but must be constantly reabsorbed in the cycle of production of exchange value leading to increasing accumulation of wealth by the few (the collective capitalist) at the expense of the many (the multitudes).

Automation, then, when seen from the point of view of capital, must always be balanced with new ways to control (that is, absorb and exhaust) the time and energy thus released. It must produce poverty and stress when there should be wealth and leisure. It must make direct labour the measure of value even when it is apparent that science, technology and social cooperation constitute the source of the wealth produced. It thus inevitably leads to the periodic and widespread destruction of this accumulated wealth, in the form of psychic burnout, environmental catastrophe and physical destruction of the wealth through war. It creates hunger where there should be satiety, it puts food banks next to the opulence of the super-rich. That is why the notion of a post-capitalist mode of existence must become believable, that is, it must become what Maurizio Lazzarato described as an enduring autonomous focus of subjectivation. What a post-capitalist commonism then can aim for is not only a better distribution of wealth compared to the unsustainable one that we have today, but also a reclaiming of ‘disposable time’—that is, time and energy freed from work to be deployed in developing and complicating the very notion of what is ‘necessary’.

The history of capitalism has shown that automation as such has not reduced the quantity and intensity of labor demanded by managers and capitalists. On the contrary, in as much as technology is only a means of production to capital, where it has been able to deploy other means, it has not innovated. For example, industrial technologies of automation in the factory do not seem to have recently experienced any significant technological breakthroughs. Most industrial labor today is still heavily manual, automated only in the sense of being hooked up to the speed of electronic networks of prototyping, marketing and distribution; and it is rendered economically sustainable only by political means—that is, by exploiting geo-political and economic differences (arbitrage) on a global scale and by controlling migration flows through new technologies of the border. The state of things in most industries today is intensified exploitation, which produces an impoverished mode of mass production and consumption that is damaging to both to the body, subjectivity, social relations and the environment. As Marx put it, disposable time released by automation should allow for a change in the very essence of the ‘human’ so that the new subjectivity is allowed to return to the performing of necessary labor in such a way as to redefine what is necessary and what is needed.

It is not then simply about arguing for a ‘return’ to simpler times, but on the contrary a matter of acknowledging that growing food and feeding populations, constructing shelter and adequate housing, learning and researching, caring for the children, the sick and the elderly requires the mobilization of social invention and cooperation. The whole process is thus transformed from a process of production by the many for the few steeped in impoverishment and stress to one where the many redefine the meaning of what is necessary and valuable, while inventing new ways of achieving it. This corresponds in a way to the notion of ‘commonfare’ as recently elaborated by Andrea Fumagalli and Carlo Vercellone, implying, in the latter’s words, ‘the socialization of investment and money and the question of the modes of management and organisation which allow for an authentic democratic reappropriation of the institutions of Welfare…and the ecologic re-structuring of our systems of production¹³. We need to ask then not only how algorithmic automation works today (mainly in terms of control and monetization, feeding the debt economy) but also what kind of time and energy it subsumes and how it might be made to work once taken up by different social and political assemblages—autonomous ones not subsumed by or subjected to the capitalist drive to accumulation and exploitation.

The Red Stack: Virtual Money, Social Networks, Bio-Hypermedia

In a recent intervention, digital media and political theorist Benjamin H. Bratton has argued that we are witnessing the emergence of a new nomos of the earth, where older geopolitical divisions linked to territorial sovereign powers are intersecting the new nomos of the Internet and new forms of sovereignty extending in electronic space¹⁴. This new heterogenous nomos involves the overlapping of national governments (China, United States, European Union, Brasil, Egypt and such likes), transnational bodies (the IMF, the WTO, the European Banks and NGOs of various types), and corporations such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc., producing differentiated patterns of mutual accommodation marked by moments of conflict. Drawing on the organizational structure of computer networks or ‘the OSI network model, upon with the TCP/IP stack and the global internet itself is indirectly based’, Bratton has developed the concept and/or prototype of the ‘stack’ to define the features of ‘a possible new nomos of the earth linking technology, nature and the human.’¹⁵ The stack supports and modulates a kind of ‘social cybernetics’ able to compose ‘both equilibrium and emergence’. As a ‘megastructure’, the stack implies a ‘confluence of interoperable standards-based complex material-information systems of systems, organized according to a vertical section, topographic model of layers and protocols…composed equally of social, human and “analog” layers (chthonic energy sources, gestures, affects, user-actants, interfaces, cities and streets, rooms and buildings, organic and inorganic envelopes) and informational, non-human computational and “digital” layers (multiplexed fiber optic cables, datacenters, databases, data standards and protocols, urban-scale networks, embedded systems, universal addressing tables)’¹⁶.

In this section, drawing on Bratton’s political prototype, I would like to propose the concept of the ‘Red Stack’—that is, a new nomos for the post-capitalist common. Materializing the ‘red stack’ involves engaging with (at least) three levels of socio-technical innovation: virtual money, social networks, and bio-hypermedia. These three levels, although ‘stacked’, that is, layered, are to be understood at the same time as interacting transversally and nonlinearly. They constitute a possible way to think about an infrastructure of autonomization linking together technology and subjectivation.

Virtual money

The contemporary economy, as Christian Marazzi and others have argued, is founded on a form of money which has been turned into a series of signs, with no fixed referent (such as gold) to anchor them, explicitly dependent on the computational automation of simulational models, screen media with automated displays of data (indexes, graphics etc) and algo-trading (bot-to-bot transactions) as its emerging mode of automation¹⁷. As Toni Negri also puts it, ‘money today—as abstract machine—has taken on the peculiar function of supreme measure of the values extracted out of society in the real subsumption of the latter under capital’¹⁸.

Since ownership and control of capital-money (different, as Maurizio Lazzarato remind us, from wage-money, in its capacity to be used not only as a means of exchange, but as a means of investment empowering certain futures over others) is crucial to maintaining populations bonded to the current power relation, how can we turn financial money into the money of the common? An experiment such as Bitcoin demonstrates that in a way ‘the taboo on money has been broken’¹⁹ and that beyond the limits of this experience, forkings are already developing in different directions. What kind of relationship can be established between the algorithms of money-creation and ‘a constituent practice which affirms other criteria for the measurement of wealth, valorizing new and old collective needs outside the logic of finance’?²⁰

Current attempts to develop new kinds of cryptocurrencies must be judged, valued and rethought on the basis of this simple question as posed by Andrea Fumagalli: Is the currency created not limited solely to being a means of exchange, but can it also affect the entire cycle of money creation – from finance to exchange?²¹.

Does it allow speculation and hoarding, or does it promote investment in post-capitalist projects and facilitate freedom from exploitation, autonomy of organization etc.? What is becoming increasingly clear is that algorithms are an essential part of the process of creation of the money of the common, but that algorithms also have politics (What are the gendered politics of individual ‘mining’, for example, and of the complex technical knowledge and machinery implied in mining bitcoins?) Furthermore, the drive to completely automate money production in order to escape the fallacies of subjective factors and social relations might cause such relations to come back in the form of speculative trading. In the same way as financial capital is intrinsically linked to a certain kind of subjectivity (the financial predator narrated by Hollywood cinema), so an autonomous form of money needs to be both jacked into and productive of a new kind of subjectivity not limited to the hacking milieu as such, but at the same time oriented not towards monetization and accumulation but towards the empowering of social cooperation. Other questions that the design of the money of the common might involve are: Is it possible to draw on the current financialization of the Internet by corporations such as Google (with its Adsense/Adword programme) to subtract money from the circuit of capitalist accumulation and turn it into a money able to finance new forms of commonfare (education, research, health, environment etc)? What are the lessons to be learned from crowdfunding models and their limits in thinking about new forms of financing autonomous projects of social cooperation? How can we perfect and extend experiments such as that carried out by the Inter-Occupy movement during the Katrina hurricane in turning social networks into crowdfunding networks which can then be used as logistical infrastructure able to move not only information, but also physical goods?²².

Social Networks

Over the past ten years, digital media have undergone a process of becoming social that has introduced genuine innovation in relation to previous forms of social software (mailing lists, forums, multi-user domains, etc). If mailing lists, for example, drew on the communicational language of sending and receiving, social network sites and the diffusion of (proprietary) social plug-ins have turned the social relation itself into the content of new computational procedures. When sending and receiving a message, we can say that algorithms operate outside the social relation as such, in the space of the transmission and distribution of messages; but social network software places intervenes directly on the social relationship. Indeed, digital technologies and social network sites ‘cut into’ the social relation as such—that is, they turn it into a discrete object and introduce a new supplementary relation.²³

If, with Gabriel Tarde and Michel Foucault, we understand the social relation as an asymmetrical relation involving at least two poles (one active and the other receptive) and characterized by a certain degree of freedom, we can think of actions such as liking and being liked, writing and reading, looking and being looked at, tagging and being tagged, and even buying and selling as the kind of conducts that transindividuate the social (they induce the passage from the pre-individual through the individual to the collective). In social network sites and social plug-ins these actions become discrete technical objects (like buttons, comment boxes, tags etc) which are then linked to underlying data structures (for example the social graph) and subjected to the power of ranking of algorithms. This produces the characteristic spatio-temporal modality of digital sociality today: the feed, an algorithmically customized flow of opinions, beliefs, statements, desires expressed in words, images, sounds etc. Much reviled in contemporary critical theory for their supposedly homogenizing effect, these new technologies of the social, however, also open the possibility of experimenting with many-to-many interaction and thus with the very processes of individuation. Political experiments (se the various internet-based parties such as the 5 star movement, Pirate Party, Partido X) draw on the powers of these new socio-technical structures in order to produce massive processes of participation and deliberation; but, as with Bitcoin, they also show the far from resolved processes that link political subjectivation to algorithmic automation. They can function, however, because they draw on widely socialized new knowledges and crafts (how to construct a profile, how to cultivate a public, how to share and comment, how to make and post photos, videos, notes, how to publicize events) and on ‘soft skills’ of expression and relation (humour, argumentation, sparring) which are not implicitly good or bad, but present a series of affordances or degrees of freedom of expression for political action that cannot be left to capitalist monopolies. However, it is not only a matter of using social networks to organize resistance and revolt, but also a question of constructing a social mode of self-Information which can collect and reorganize existing drives towards autonomous and singular becomings. Given that algorithms, as we have said, cannot be unlinked from wider social assemblages, their materialization within the red stack involves the hijacking of social network technologies away from a mode of consumption whereby social networks can act as a distributed platform for learning about the world, fostering and nurturing new competences and skills, fostering planetary connections, and developing new ideas and values.

Bio-hypermedia

The term bio-hypermedia, coined by Giorgio Griziotti, identifies the ever more intimate relation between bodies and devices which is part of the diffusion of smart phones, tablet computers and ubiquitous computation. As digital networks shift away from the centrality of the desktop or even laptop machine towards smaller, portable devices, a new social and technical landscape emerges around ‘apps’ and ‘clouds’ which directly ‘intervene in how we feel, perceive and understand the world’.²⁴). Bratton defines the ‘apps’ for platforms such as Android and Apple as interfaces or membranes linking individual devices to large databases stored in the ‘cloud’ (massive data processing and storage centres owned by large corporations).²⁵

This topological continuity has allowed for the diffusion of downloadable apps which increasingly modulate the relationship of bodies and space. Such technologies not only ‘stick to the skin and respond to the touch’ (as Bruce Sterling once put it), but create new ‘zones’ around bodies which now move through ‘coded spaces’ overlayed with information, able to locate other bodies and places within interactive, informational visual maps. New spatial ecosystems emerging at the crossing of the ‘natural’ and the artificial allow for the activation of a process of chaosmotic co-creation of urban life.²⁶ Here again we can see how apps are, for capital, simply a means to ‘monetize’ and ‘accumulate’ data about the body’s movement while subsuming it ever more tightly in networks of consumption and surveillance. However, this subsumption of the mobile body under capital does not necessarily imply that this is the only possible use of these new technological affordances. Turning bio-hypermedia into components of the red stack (the mode of reappropriation of fixed capital in the age of the networked social) implies drawing together current experimentation with hardware (shenzei phone hacking technologies, makers movements, etc.) able to support a new breed of ‘imaginary apps’ (think for example about the apps devised by the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theatre, which allow migrants to bypass border controls, or apps able to track the origin of commodities, their degrees of exploitation, etc.).

Conclusions

This short essay, a synthesis of a wider research process, means to propose another strategy for the construction of a machinic infrastructure of the common. The basic idea is that information technologies, which comprise algorithms as a central component, do not simply constitute a tool of capital, but are simultaneously constructing new potentialities for postneoliberal modes of government and postcapitalist modes of production. It is a matter here of opening possible lines of contamination with the large movements of programmers, hackers and makers involved in a process of re-coding of network architectures and information technologies based on values others than exchange and speculation, but also of acknowledging the wide process of technosocial literacy that has recently affected large swathes of the world population. It is a matter, then, of producing a convergence able to extend the problem of the reprogramming of the Internet away from recent trends towards corporatisation and monetisation at the expense of users’ freedom and control. Linking bio-informational communication to issues such as the production of a money of the commons able to socialize wealth, against current trends towards privatisation, accumulation and concentration, and saying that social networks and diffused communicational competences can also function as means to organize cooperation and produce new knowledges and values, means seeking for a new political synthesis which moves us away from the neoliberal paradigm of debt, austerity and accumulation. This is not a utopia, but a program for the invention of constituent social algorithms of the common.

In addition to the sources cited above, and the texts contained in this volume, we offer the following expandable bibliographical toolkit or open desiring biblio-machine. (Instructions: pick, choose and subtract/add to form your own assemblage of self-formation for the purposes of materialization of the red stack):

— L. Baroniant and C. Vercellone, Moneta Del Comune e Reddito Sociale Garantito (2013), Uninomade.

— M. Bauwens, The Social Web and Its Social Contracts: Some Notes on Social Antagonism in Netarchical Capitalism (2008), Re-Public Re-Imaging Democracy.

— F. Berardi and G. Lovink, A call to the army of love and to the army of software (2011), Nettime.

— R. Braidotti, The posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

— G. E. Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012).

— A. Fumagalli, Trasformazione del lavoro e trasformazioni del welfare: precarietà e welfare del comune (commonfare) in Europa, in P. Leon and R. Realfonso (eds), L’Economia della precarietà (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2008), 159–74.

— G. Giannelli and A. Fumagalli, Il fenomeno Bitcoin: moneta alternativa o moneta speculativa? (2013), I Quaderni di San Precario.

— G. Griziotti, D. Lovaglio and T. Terranova, Netwar 2.0: Verso una convergenza della “calle” e della rete (2012), Uninomade 2.0.

— E. Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

— F. Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).

S. Jourdan, Game-over Bitcoin: Where Is the Next Human-Based Digital Currency? (2014).

— M. Lazzarato, Les puissances de l’invention (Paris: L’empecheurs de penser ronde, 2004).

— M. Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2013).

— G. Lovink and M. Rasch (eds), Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Culture, 2013).

— A. Mackenzie (2013), Programming subjects in the regime of anticipation: software studies and subjectivity in In: Subjectivity. 6, p. 391-405

— L. Manovich, The Poetics of Augmented Space, Virtual Communication 5:2 (2006), 219–40.

— S. Mezzadra and B. Neilson, Border as Method or the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

— P. D. Miller aka DJ Spooky and S. Matviyenko, The Imaginary App (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming).

— A. Negri, Acting in common and the limits of capital (2014), in Euronomade.

— A. Negri and M. Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009).

— M. Pasquinelli, Google’s Page Rank Algorithm: A Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect(2009).

— B. Scott, Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (London: Pluto Press, 2013).

— G. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), University of Western Ontario

— R. Stallman, Free Software: Free Society. Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (Free Software Foundation, 2002).

— A. Toscano, Gaming the Plumbing: High-Frequency Trading and the Spaces of Capital (2013), in Mute.

— I. Wilkins and B. Dragos, Destructive Distraction? An Ecological Study of High Frequency Trading, in Mute.

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1. In the words of the programme of the worshop from which this essay originated: http://quaderni.sanprecario.info/2014/01/workshop-algorithms/ 
2. M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative (London: Zer0 Books, 2009); 2009, A. Williams and N. Srnciek, ‘#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics’, this volume XXX-XXX. 
3. K. Marx, ‘Fragment on Machines’, this volume, XXX–XXX. 
4. Ibid., XXX. 
5. Ibid., XXX. 
6. M. Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008); F. Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009)  
7. A. Goffey, ‘Algorithm’, in Fuller (ed), Software Studies, 15–17: 15. 
8. Ibid. 
9. Fuller, Introduction to Fuller (ed), Software Studies, 5 
10. L. Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, Space (Cambridge, Mass. and Sidney: MIT Press, 2013), x. 
11. Ibid., ix. 
12. Marx, XXX. 
13. C. Vercellone, ‘From the crisis to the “commonfare” as new mode of production’, in special section on Eurocrisis (ed. G. Amendola, S. Mezzadra and T. Terranova), Theory, Culture and Society, forthcoming; also A. Fumagalli, ‘Digital (Crypto) Money and Alternative Financial Circuits: Lead the Attack to the Heart of the State, sorry, of Financial Market’ 
14. B. Bratton, On the Nomos of the Cloud (2012). 
15. Ibid. 
16. Ibid. 
17. C. Marazzi, Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist Power 
18. T. Negri, Reflections on the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, (2014), Euronomade 
19. Jaromil Rojio, Bitcoin, la fine del tabù della moneta (2014), in I Quaderni di San Precario. 
20. S. Lucarelli, Il principio della liquidità e la sua corruzione. Un contributo alla discussione su algoritmi e capitale (2014), in I Quaderni di san Precario 
21. A. Fumagalli, Commonfare: Per la riappropriazione del libero accesso ai beni comuni (2014), in Doppio Zero 
22. Common Ground Collective, Common Ground Collective, Food, not Bombs and Occupy Movement form Coalition to help Isaac & Kathrina Victims (2012), Interoccupy.net  
23. B. Stiegler, The Most Precious Good in the Era of Social Technologies, in G. Lovink and M. Rasch (eds), Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Culture, 2013), 16–30. 
24. G. Griziotti, Biorank: algorithms and transformations in the bios of cognitive capitalism (2014), in I Quaderni di san Precario; also S. Portanova, Moving without a Body (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2013 
25. B. Bratton, On Apps and Elementary Forms of Interfacial Life: Object, Image, Superimposition  
26. S. Iaconesi and O. Persico, The Co-Creation of the City: Re-programming Cities using Real-Time User-Generated Content 

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The idea of a rising ‘sharing economy’ is currently a hot topic in an international debate that builds on the emergence of peer-to-peer network exchanges that rely more on access than on property, on relations more than an appropriation,to call into question the sociological understanding of the relationship between the society and the market that goes back to authors such as Polanyi, Marx and Sombart.

The aim of this monograph is therefore to bring together a selection of contributions that will help identify the analytical categories and indicators needed to interpret this phenomenon from a sociological perspective on a global scale. Through a collection of original empirical research on this topic, from Western and non-Western contexts, by both established and junior scholars and experts, this monograph will make a pivotal contribution to the study of what themes, methods and issues characterise the rise of ‘sharing’ as a socio-economic model and a new frontier of sociological research. In particular, this monograph aims to answer the following questions: what do we mean with ‘sharing economy’? What kind of positive innovations or possible criticalities might this socio-economic model bring? Does ‘sharing’ really represent an alternative to capitalism, or an example of its transformation? In which areas, and how, is the way of doing business in society changing as a result of the diffusion of ‘sharing economies’?

Photo by Burns Library, Boston College

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As our demands grow bolder—true full employment, the rebuilding of the social safety net starting with Medicare for All, an overdue green and just transition—so will the naysayers’ inevitable refrain: “How will you pay for it?” This Left Forum panel on June 5, 2018 moderated by Gar Alperovitz brought together the speakers listed above. They show a way out of the austerity trap and reveal that the obstacles to bold action at a national scale on jobs, healthcare, and climate are political, not economic. This is a partial, edited transcript.

Gar Alperovitz: One of the things that’s happening around the country, as you probably know, is  there’s an upsurge of interest in the idea that the banks ought to be under public control. There are public banking initiatives in something like 30 or 40 cities and a couple of states around the country. There was a forum on this  only six years ago promoting the idea. We’re seeing all over the country a very, very fast pick-up on this, including in Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and several other cities. State legislation pending in Michigan and Washington state.

The subject we’re going after today is probably the other piece of the puzzle, monetary policy and money, because there’s a revolution going on in that area as well. It’s not simply the establishment of public banks, but actually getting down to how money works, a subject that has been obfuscated for many, many decades.

We’re going to go into how the revolution is emerging very, very fast on the ground as well as in theory.

Our first speaker, Stephanie Kelton, is currently a professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University. She was also chief economist on the minority staff of the Senate Budget Committee. More important, she was the key economist behind Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, so we’re delighted to have her. She is also one of the leading experts in this field and getting a lot of attention, deservedly so, for not only for opening a way to rethink monetary theory or monetary practice, but for explaining it to the public in serious terms.

The ‘pay-for-it’ trap

Stephanie Kelton: I’m going to try to focus my remarks on three broad topics. I’m aiming at a progressive audience obviously, but honestly I give a version of this exact same talk most of the time to conservative audiences. The response that I get in those audiences, it would surprise you probably, is extremely positive.

What is it about what I’m going to say that can resonate both with audiences like this and with a very fiscally conservative audience? Let me jump in and we’ll see where this takes us.

This is just to tell you the kinds of things progressives are up against when they propose a big, ambitious agenda.

Bernie Sanders runs for president on the most ambitious agenda I have seen in my lifetime. Hillary Clinton publishes in her book a bit of an exchange she had with someone who said, “Man, it’s awful. Every time we propose something, he goes bigger. We say we want debt-free college. We want to help make college more affordable. He says, ‘Let’s make it free.’ If we say we want to make health care more affordable and increase access, he says, ‘Let’s just make it free.’ Every time we propose something, he goes bigger.” In this exchange that is included in her book somebody said, “This is like Bernie saying, ‘I think America should get a pony.’” Hillary, the fiscally responsible voice in the room says, “How will you pay for the pony?”

It’s the idea that all of this stuff is so grandiose that it’s beyond reality. This is what we’re up against as progressives, putting forward a bold agenda.

This again is Hillary Clinton, from years before the 2016 campaign, when she’s a senator. She’s talking about the reality of being in Washington D.C.She says, “The reality is you cannot cut taxes or increase spending unless you can pay for it.”

What she’s saying is, and I worked on the budget committee, if you propose to do something, you’ve got to show people how you’re going to pay for it. If you want to cut taxes or you want to put more money in education or infrastructure or defense or anything else, you’ve got to show where the money is going to come from. A congressional budget office has to take a look at it. Things are supposed to be done in a deficit-neutral way so that you’re not adding to future deficits so that you’re not increasing the size of the national debt.

Okay, so Senator Sanders gets accused of putting forward a big proposal and not paying for any of it, right? Everybody “knows” that. That was the accusation, but that wasn’t the reality. He actually attempted to play by Washington rules, which are you’ve got to pay for the stuff you want to do. If you go down his agenda, every item on the agenda, you could really draw a line from what it was he was proposing to the source of revenue that was supposed to pay for it all, whether it was Medicare, infrastructure, making public colleges and universities tuition-free. If you actually looked at what he proposed, it was paid for in the conventional sense of the word.

Now, obviously if you have to find the money, as Hillary Clinton says, then where do you look when you need money? Who’s going to pay for stuff? Who’s got the money? Obviously the rich people have the money. It’s a natural place to look when you’re trying to find the money to pay for a big ambitious agenda. You go for the billionaire class or you go for Wall Street, and you say Wall Street will pay.

If it’s making public colleges and universities tuition-free, which was one of the things he proposed, the pay-for on the other side of that was a tax on Wall Street speculation. You’ve all heard this probably 100 times.

How do you pay for a progressive agenda if these are the constraints because this is the current narrative? This means that you have to fight two battles. You have to fight for the agenda that you’re fighting for, and you have to sell policies on their own merits, and you simultaneously have to wage war on another front, which is you have to fight to raise the revenue. You have to get people to vote for the tax increase, for the closing of the loopholes of whatever it is that’s giving you the additional revenue. You’re waging two battles when you do this. My spending proposal is this, and here’s where I propose we get the money. This one can’t happen unless and until this one happens and you have success on the revenue front.  It actually means that you are in a very real sense dependent upon the rich because you can’t feed a hungry kid, you can’t fix crumbling infrastructure, you can’t provide health care for all, unless and until you can claw some cash away from the people who have it. You need their money. It makes you dependent upon the wealthy.

I think progressives should ask themselves, “What is the purpose of tax?” If your instinct, if your impulse is to say to pay for the stuff we want, my suggestion is you’re doing it wrong.

Rethinking taxes

In the 1940s, the New York Federal Reserve Bank was headed by a guy named Beardsley Ruml. He wrote this really important piece in 1946 called “Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete’” What’s he saying? I don’t know that I need to read the whole thing, but he says basically the need for the government to raise taxes in order to remain solvent and run its affairs is completely yesterday. We don’t do that anymore. Why? Because we have a central bank and because we went off the gold standard. The fact that we changed the monetary system in this fundamental way opens up space for us to do stuff we couldn’t do before when we had to find the money.

You’re trapped in a gold standard framework when you’re operating in this frame of mind that money is this finite thing that exists somewhere, it’s physical and you’ve got to find it, and you’ve got to go get it in order to spend it. Ruml says, no, no, no, that’s not how it works in the modern era – by the way, modern in the 1940s, and we still haven’t caught up with this reality.

Ruml goes on to say the purpose of the tax is not to fund the federal government. The purpose of the tax is multifold. One important thing it does is it allows the government to remove some money from the economy so that you don’t overheat the economy through government spending. In other words, taxes help you keep a lid on inflation. If you just spent money into the economy but you didn’t tax anything back, you’d run the risk of overheating the economy, causing an inflation problem.

Another thing taxes do is affect the distribution of income. You lower taxes on some folks, they end up with more take-home pay. You raise taxes on others, it takes the money away. You impact the distribution of income. You use taxes to incentivize or disincentivize behavior. A carbon tax is a good example. You don’t want as much pollution. You don’t want certain activities taking place, put a tax on it. You want to encourage certain other things like people driving electric cars, give a tax incentive or some form of a subsidy to encourage that.

The last one is he says you might want for some reason or another to have a line item where you can keep track of a certain program, like for example Social Security or the Highway Trust Fund or something like that. Taxes do a lot of stuff that’s important. What they don’t do is provide the government with revenue that it needs in order to operate.

Go back to this picture. You don’t tax the rich because you need their money in order to feed a hungry kid or fix a crumbling bridge. You tax the rich because they are too damn rich and extreme concentrations of wealth especially, but also income, are bad for the functioning of the economy, are bad for democracy. That’s the rationale for taxing the rich. Not because we can’t do other things unless we get money from them to pay for it.

You tax Wall Street speculation because you want to discourage certain behaviors, not because you need their money that you raise from a financial transaction task in order to pay for free college. Think it through. Suppose you said, “We’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free in the US. It’s going to cost about $70 billion a year to do that.” Now, to pay for it, we’re going to put a tax on Wall Street. Every time somebody buys stocks or engages in derivatives trading or bond trading, they’re going to pay a small transactions tax. That’s our tax.

Now, you simultaneously have said you want to break up the banks, you want to make banking boring, you want to shrink the size of the financial sector, and you have made yourself completely dependent upon what in order to fund your education proposal? Wall Street speculation. Not only do you need Wall Street to continue to speculate, but you’re going to need them to do more of it over time and grow because of the amount of money need to pay for college and university. You don’t want to hitch your wagon to the very thing that you loathe and are trying to shrink as part of your overall economy. There is a rationale for doing it, right? That would be to discourage certain behaviors, not to fund programs.

The household fallacy

My argument is that when we think about the government’s financial operations we tend to do so with reference to our own. We think of the government as a household. I say, “Well, I can’t go on spending more than I take in year after year and borrowing. I’d go broke.” This is a huge mistake, and if progressives do it, they need to stop it right now. The federal government is nothing like the household. The federal government plays by a completely different set of rules compared to all the rest of us.

If we want to go out and buy a car tomorrow, we have to have the money in the bank or be able to prearrange the financing. The dealership is not going to let us drive off the lot with a car until we have security financing to pay for the car, right? What we think is that the government prearranges its financing – the T.A.B. or “taxes and borrowing”; it collects taxes from the rest of us, it engages in borrowing when it sells bonds. It arranges the financing. It raises the revenue. It has money and now it goes out and spends. The spending comes last.

That’s completely backwards. What happens in reality is the federal government – the House and Senate – get a budget together. If the budget passes, there’s an appropriations process. It is through the appropriations processes that the budget authorization for government spending is triggered. That’s how the government pays for everything. We spend first, and the taxes and borrowing are secondary. The rest of us can’t do this. Money matters.

The fact that the federal government has control of the U.S. dollar, creates it, issues it, and is its sole source, means it can never run out of money.. You can try to create it, but you’d get arrested for counterfeit. You can’t do it. You can’t create high-powered money. The government’s money is special.

How should progressives answer the question, “How will you pay for it?” It’s a trap. Don’t fall into this. What they’re really asking is not how will you pay for it but who will pay for it. The question is designed to name the enemy. Who’s going to be footing the bill? In other words, who’s paying the T.A.B.? Don’t answer that question.

The bottom line is all this pay-for stuff is built around the idea that deficits are bad. They aren’t. Dr. Evil told us a long time ago that deficits don’t matter. Well, it turns out they do, but not the way we usually think about it. Deficits matter, but not because they add to the national debt, burden future generations and all that kind of stuff, create instability in the economy. Deficits matter because the government’s deficits become surpluses somewhere else in the economy. Guess what? Dick Cheney knows it and the Republicans know it. How do I know that? Because they just passed tax cuts that will add $1.5 trillion to deficits over the next 10 years. Why did they do that? Because they know that when a government is increasing its deficit somebody else’s surplus is going up, and they know exactly whose surplus it is. They’re using the budget deficit to channel financial resources to the people they are trying to help. Democrats or Greens or whoever could be using budget deficits to channel financial resources, infrastructure, real things, to the people they’re trying to help.

How should progressives talk about money, debt and taxes? Don’t repeat this stuff about taxes paying for federal government programs. It’s not taxpayer money. This is the wrong frame. Don’t talk about the debt as if it’s something that we owe. It’s something that some of us own. You may have treasuries. Mostly they are concentrated in the hands of wealthier individuals. Don’t talk about government money as if it’s something that the government needs to get from us. They’re the source of the money. We get it from them. They don’t need it from us.

An economy on FIRE

Gar: The next person is going to give us the next step. Michael Hudson is the distinguished professor of economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City. He’s also a research fellow of the Democracy Collaborative. Michael has been in this for a long time. Michael, take it away.

Michael Hudson: My first discussion of modern monetary theory really was in Canada 40 years ago. I was the financial advisor to the Canadian government. At that time the big problem from Canada was how provinces would get enough money to build infrastructure. I’m going to talk a little bit about that because it’s the same problem that the United States is facing today. You can understand it, I think, more clearly in the international sense.

There are two ways of financing infrastructure. One would be if the government, the Bank of Canada, which was more than any other bank able to create its own money, spent the money into the real economy for infrastructure. The banking lobbyists – I won’t call them conservatives; they were radical reactionaries and lobbyists for the banks – said, “Look, if the government creates the money, you’ll have to borrow it, and you’ll have to pay 5 percent, 6 percent, but you can save half a percentage point by borrowing German marks or Swiss francs.”

This was Trudeau’s liberal government, and you can’t get more right-wing than the liberals in Canada. What they did was they borrowed billions for Deutsche marks and Swiss francs that were turned over to the government central bank. What did the government do? All this domestic spending in the real economy was in Canadian dollars to hire Canadian labor, to buy Canadian goods and services, to build the infrastructure.

My point was, why do you need Swiss francs and German marks if you’re going to create dollars? The Swiss francs and German marks ended up in Canada’s central bank as its foreign exchange reserves. What did it need these reserves for? If the government is going to create the money as a result of this borrowing abroad, why have the foreigners?

Well, the answer from the banks was you need the foreign banks as an honest broker because they’re responsible. In literature, you think of bankers as being responsible, but they’re really not responsible. What happened after 1979 was that the Canadian dollar went down from about $1.06 into the $0.80s. The Swiss franc went way up. The German mark went way up. The result was that Canada had to pay a 50 percent premium on the capital as a result of having the banks work as the honest broker for them.

None of this was necessary. The government could spend it into the real economy. The problem is the private sector is not just the real economy. The private sector also is the FIRE – finance, insurance and real estate – sector. You can see today the ability of the government to spend money into the economy through the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, technically bailout money to subsidize the finance, insurance and real estate sector. This is considered to be noninflationary.

Who gets to create money

You have to ask, what kind of inflation are people talking about? When they talk about government spending into the real economy and running deficits, they say there will be price inflation. What they really mean is wage inflation. What they want to do is keep wages down. When they talk about inflation of prices, they really mean living standards going up. We don’t want that, do we, because we call that consumer price inflation. We don’t call that rising living standards. The fact is, there’s a disconnect. There’s no reason why consumer prices should rise when wages go up. There’s a disconnect with the largest increase in prices that we have today, whether it’s housing prices and rents, as you have in New York, or medical care.

The government is able to create money now for the financial sector, but there is this patter about why you can’t run a deficit for the domestic economy. Now, what is true for Canada is exactly what Stephanie has explained for the United States. Banks can create money simply on their computers. If the rich people lend this money to be spent, how is the price effect any different from the government simply creating the money? The effect is exactly the same. That’s what they don’t get. You don’t need to borrow to spend into the economy at all. It’s a science fiction story, a parallel universe, as if the governments are somehow dependent on the banks.

All this developed about 100 years ago when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and ‘14. Before that, there was a crisis in the United States in 1907. Congress had maybe 18 volumes of national monetary commission reports. One of the volumes explained everything that the Federal Reserve had done, creating money, moving it around 12 districts, pumping it into the economy for the autumnal drain when you have to move the crops. All of this was done by the treasury. The difference is that the treasury was controlled in Washington. I have on my website from an Indian journey all of the documents of how the Federal Reserve was created, essentially to take control of the money supply out of Washington and distribute it to the banks in the various Federal Reserve districts.

You have a whole political fight between the FIRE sector and the government sector. You can only understand this fight by looking at the politics of it.

Unforeseen financialization

The fact is that Karl Marx was much too optimistic about the financial system. His volume three of “Capital” was all about how finance tended to grow and extract more and more from the economy. The FIRE sector today essentially funds real estate. It extracts rents. It raises prices. It backs great monopolies. Banks don’t create money into the real economy basically. They create money to buy companies, divide real estate already in existence. They transfer wealth, but they don’t really produce.

I’m working with Gar’s group to re-describe how the gross domestic product accounts. We actually treat the FIRE sector, finance, as a subtraction from gross domestic product, not an addition to.

Getting back to Marx, Marx expected in the late 19th century that the historical destiny of capitalists, he wrote, was to take banking and money creation out of the feudal stage, out of the medieval European stage and industrialize it and essentially move towards public banking. The whole 19th century was doing this. There are three volumes of the national monetary commissionary report on the right spot for the large German banks and how German banks were working hand in hand with government to finance industry. The Bank of Canada was formed during this time.

Things had not worked out that way. World War I changed everything, and now you have instead of industrializing finance, you’ve had a financialization of industry. What you’re having instead of the government spending into the real economy, it’s starving the real economy.

What happens when a government doesn’t pump money into the economy? That means there are only two sources. One source is international. You borrow the money abroad in a foreign currency that you’ll have to repay at a currency risk. The other source is domestic; you borrow from the banks or you let the banks pump the money into the economy. The problem is the banks don’t pump the money into the economy. The banks only lend essentially for the real estate, corporate raids, corporate loans. They even make loans to corporations to pay dividends. The beneficiaries are the 1 percent or the 5 percent.

The real question of the budget deficits or modern monetary theory is who’s to get the benefit of the money? Will it be the 1 percent or will it be the 99 percent? The answer can be increasing the flow of funds, and the flow of funds, who gets what will make it very clear. Who gets the result of the government spending in forms that do not take the form of a deficit or if it runs the deficit, is it into the real economy or the FIRE sector? You need to divide the private sector into FIRE and into the industrial, agricultural and infrastructure.

Gar: Let me say, I suspect there are people out there, because I’ve done this myself several times, who hear the words ‘the banks will create the money’, and that doesn’t ring straight for most people, that money is actually created. Those questions, I’m sure, are going to hang in the air into which modern monetary theory has the answers. I want you to understand that.

Another way to think about it, although we can easily get into a trap about taxes here: When the government wants to run a war, money does not seem to be a problem. It creates money when it wants to, and it taxes back some of it if it likes to. By way of comment, having talked to a number of folks, the word ‘create’ kind of gets in the way sometimes if you’re not economists.

Fear of a job guarantee

Our next speaker is Pavlina Tcherneva, an associate professor and chair of the department of economics at Bard College and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute. She’s led the way in showing very, very practical applications of the theory.

Pavlina Tcherneva: Thank you. You are all, I’m sure, familiar with the seven deadly sins. Today I would like to address the seven deadly fears of economic policy. Mostly I’d like to address and face those fears and how to defend a progressive agenda, whatever that may be.

The policy proposal that I’ve been working on for 20-odd years is an employment program that has become known as the job guarantee program that has recently entered the mainstream conversation. A number of senators and representatives have endorsed the program. There are lots of versions of the program out there, but it is a recognition that the government has a responsibility to do something about the persistent problem of unemployment.

What I’d like to do today is basically address some of those seven deadly fears. As the program has discussed, there’s a lot of response, both on the right and on the left, and a lot of it is quite alarmist, frankly. I’d like to ease our fears by addressing each one of them.

First, what is the job guarantee? Essentially, it’s a public option for jobs that offers decent work at decent pay. The public sector acts as an employer of last resort, if you will, when people seek work and they’re unable to find good work at decent pay.

It is a permanent program. The unemployment problem is an ongoing problem, and thus, this program is a standby option for jobs. It’s federally funded but locally administered. It’s voluntary. Nobody is asked to work for their benefits. It’s open-ended. You can go to the unemployment office, and you seek work. There will be a list of options for you. The way we propose it is that those list of options will largely focus on public service and the neglected areas of public sector work. It’s open to all people irrespective of their labor market status, race, sex, color or creed.

The way I think of this program is that it’s an employment safety net, the way we have safety nets for various other problems. If the problem is that you don’t have retirement insurance, we guarantee it; we have Social Security. If the problem is access to food, we guarantee that there will be access to food.

It’s also a transitional program where people essentially get their starter jobs if they need to. They get their stepping stone. They enter into this program and then transition out of it if they so desire.

Overcoming the spending myth

Let’s discuss the fears. The first one that we normally have to address is the fear of spending. It’s based on a deep misunderstanding of what money is and what it does. Again, Stephanie explained how normally there are images that are conjured in our mind that, “Gee, my hard-earned money. I’ve been saving it, and now the government wants to tax it away from me so that it can pay for these policies. Who knows if they’re going to be good or bad?”

We just need to give up this myth of the taxpayer money because this is not how actually the public sector spends. I want to add one other purpose of taxes to the list that Stephanie provided: taxes create demand for money; for the dollar, in a sense. Just think of it this way: If the government tomorrow decided to tax you in Canadian dollars and April 15 you have to deliver Canadian dollars or euros, what will you ask your employer to pay you? Will you ask them for dollars or will you ask them for euros? The tax in this coercive way, if you will, creates demand for the very thing that the government issues: the dollar. The reason is the government needs to be able to spend something that we value to be able to fulfill its various public service objectives.

Here’s one way of thinking about it. The government is the monopoly issuer of the dollar. It is the ultimate source of dollars. Unemployment in a way is people seeking dollars but not able to find them. Whatever the other arguments for addressing the problem of unemployment, and we can discuss that, there is one key aspect to this problem. It is that there is only one sector that can actually choke up the demand for dollars. There’s only one sector that can actually provide it to those who need it, and that is the public sector.

Another piece to the story is that the unemployed are already in the public sector. The government is already responsible for the unemployed. We do the right thing. We provide unemployment insurance, as inadequate as it might be. We provide various other income supports, even though those programs are also underfunded. We have this understanding that we have to provide for people who don’t have access to decent employment or decent incomes.

We provide a slew of programs, but we don’t provide the one that many people need, and that is employment. We are not only responsible for the unemployed, but we also bear the costs of underemployment poverty. If you think of virtually all social, economic and political problems, in one way or another they are connected to communities that have lost their economic life, people who have lost economic opportunities. The distress that families feel not being able to provide for themselves. These are large invisible but very real costs that we already bear.

The fear of spending is the first fear that we need to debunk. This is a bit of an esoteric point, but I want to put it out there. If the government sector is the monopoly issuer of the currency, and it provides the currency in exchange for employment in the public sector, public sector work, then there is an exchange. We establish some sort of baseline value for that currency. We anchor the value of the currency and labor power. We know exactly what it is worth. It is worth $10 or $15 for one hour of publicly useful labor. In a sense, it’s our gold standard. It uses not gold, but it uses labor to anchor the value of the currency.

Big numbers and big government

The next fear is the fear of inflation. I think that that is really the fear of big numbers when we estimate what a job guarantee would cost. We have a proposal that you can find at the Levy Institute website that estimates a job guarantee would cost between $300 billion to $500 billion a year to employ 50 million people. A lot of people have said, “Oh gee, this is an enormous program. It’s going to be very inflationary.” Is $300 billion really inflationary? The Department of Defense, including the war budget, is about $900 billion. Social Security is upwards of $1 trillion. Medicare is $700 billion. Medicaid is $600 billion.

Somehow $300 billion is supposed to generate this massive inflation that will erode the value of the currency. This is not really the problem. A lot of people are actually worried that this actually might push up wages, that it might actually provide wages at a decent living level. We understand that the job guarantee will be the effective minimum wage for the economy, so why would you work for $7 an hour if there’s a public option of $15? The private employer has to match this. We have modeled this, and we find negligible impact of this very bold program on inflation.

The other thing that virtually everybody misses in this discussion is that a one-time adjustment in prices and wages across the economy, across the board, is not inflationary. Inflation is when prices keep going up. If the wage goes up from $15 to $16 to $20 to $25 to $30, then the private sector will have to match it. Yes, that will be inflationary, but no, we are anchoring the floor. We are raising the floor, and we are anchoring it at $15.

The second piece that everybody misses is that the job guarantee actually shrinks when the economy is growing. When the economy is growing, when private employment is growing, when there are ”inflationary pressures” in the economy, the program shrinks. Actually, it’s a dampening effect on inflation, not a fueling effect to inflation.

There’s a fear of big government, of course, but most people ignore the fact that we already have big government. What I already pointed out is that government has devoted enormous amounts of financial and real resources to deal with the fallout from unemployment, underemployment and poverty.

In this sense, the way to think about this is that the job guarantee actually reduces the costs of unemployment.

Whatever you discuss, whatever your policy priority is, always separate the financial cost from the real cost.

When you defend Social Security, don’t fall into the trap of this discussion of how will we pay for it. The question is what would we do with a whole bunch of people who are retiring who don’t have the goods and services that they might require to live a decent life. It is not a matter of financially providing for them but providing for them in real resources.

It’s the same thing with unemployment. It’s not the problem of paying for unemployment, but the problem is, do we really want to maintain this paradigm of neglect, of abandoning our public spaces, of abandoning our public purpose, of allowing people to suffer all the consequences that come with unemployment.

Double standards

There’s also fear of the administrative burden. This is a unique double standard that the job guarantee faces. We never hear that we can’t go to war, we can’t engage in nation-building because it’s going to be an administrative nightmare. The job guarantee uses the existing institutional infrastructure to simply expand the number of jobs out there.

Is it really so difficult to employ 50 million people? Is this really the biggest problem that the government is facing? Well, public education serves 50 million students. Nobody is saying we have to take it away because it’s an administrative nightmare. Social Security, 50, 60 million people. Medicare 44 million. Medicaid 70 million. Yeah, it’s easy to sign a check, but all of this involves a fair amount of administration, and we don’t discuss these.

Fear of boondoggles. This was the fear during the New Deal that somehow the government is going to create bad jobs. Well, just go to the Living New Deal map, and you will find what we did and the legacy that we left. Don’t fall into the trap of productivity. What’s the productivity of these jobs? It’s a natural impulse to say, “But what will people really do?” I can give you a very long list of what they can do. Good useful jobs. The way to answer this question is what is the productivity of the unemployed today? It’s negative productivity. You have malnourished children that go to school because their parents don’t have income to provide for them. That is the productivity you need to be focusing on.

Finally, there’s the fear of political revolution. This was raised by Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post. He says, “Imagine people who work in the private sector who suddenly realize the public option provides Medicare and child care, and they don’t have it. This is going to be enormously disruptive to the business as usual model.”

Look, in information technology, disruptions are considered great, right, progressive. In public policy, disruptions are awful, terrible. This is a defense of the status quo. It is the defense of a model where firms are only profitable when they pay poverty wages. We don’t want to defend this model. We want to disrupt it.

Finally, I think all of this amounts to pure change, but Americans are really not so afraid of it; a recent survey showed that the job guarantee had overwhelming support, and even in deep red states upwards of 70 percent of respondents supported it.

Those of us that have been working on this project are very encouraged, excited that it is in the mainstream, but my cautionary note is that we put way too much on the shoulders of the job guarantee. We have had decades of neglect of the public sector. We have enormous environmental challenges. We are suddenly putting all of these problems on the shoulders of the job guarantee and saying, “Hey, look, see, this is the program that will solve these problems.” It will not.

This program provides jobs for all. This program is a very crucial piece of the progressive agenda, but we need so much more than that.

Rethinking the monetary system

Gar: I want to introduce Raúl Carrillo, who’s the staff attorney at the New Economy Project and a member of the board of directors at the Modern Money Network, and he’s going to talk about actual on-the-ground projects that he’s working on and how they relate to this theory.

Raúl Carrillo: What I’m going to try to do, depending on your opinion, is synthesize or bastardize some of the ideas that were just presented by three of my heroes here and articulate those in a language that is useful, I think, to organizers, activists, people who are in this economy trying to heal the wounds, trying to take care of other people, trying to actually introduce some of these intellectual paradigms to work on the ground.

I’m particularly going to focus on two movements that I’m a part of. The first is the Modern Money movement. I’m affiliated with a number of modern money organizations, but principally Modern Money Network, which a few of us started several years ago when we were law students at Columbia and activists. We started thinking how does this kernel of what we consider to be factually correct analysis of the economy connect to law, organizing, technology, all these other things? How can we build bridges? How can we create packages that are useful for activists and organizers to use?

Over the last five years or so we’ve held about 70 symposia in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Brazil and a few other places, trying to connect MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) to other things.

The other one is that I work for the New Economy Project, which is a 20-year-old nonprofit here in New York City, and we do two things. One is we fight corporate power. I personally operate a financial justice hotline where folks can call when they have problems with banks, debt collectors, landlords, etc. They come to the office. We try and help them out on a very individual level. We also bring some impact litigation.

The second thing that we do is community economic development. We try to build community land trusts, financial cooperatives. We work with co-ops, all the good stuff that I know a lot of people in the audience are involved in already.

What is “the New Economy movement”? The essential idea is we’re trying to move out capitalism, but we have a very, very strong focus on environmental sustainability. The production system with FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) on top of it, as Michael mentioned, is tricking us, so how do we get out of here?

The New Economy Project has a particular focus on something called the “just transition,” which arose in the 1980s and 1990s. The idea here is that we don’t just want to go to an economy that’s more sustainable. Along the way we want to heal some of the wounds that have been caused. We want to help people who face the biggest threats from ecological disaster. That means a particular focus on racial justice, gender justice, all the various forms of social justice that need to come along with a push to an environmentally sustainable world.

How does Modern Monetary Theory help? I’m actually going to borrow a quote from one of the organizers of this panel: ‘What MMT and PK theory does is it concentrates our minds on the real limits, on the real things we need to make more sustainable.” That means we’re focusing on the real: What’s happening to people, what’s happening to communities, what’s happening to the planet.

The dig-burn-dump economy

If we’re talking about an economy with limits, money is not necessarily the enemy. In fact, a lot of MMTers agree. A dear friend, Fidel, often says our economy runs on waste now. One of the fears, fear of waste for the job guarantee, fear of financial waste, fear of fiscal waste. That’s nothing. We make that stuff. It’s a legal construct. It’s a social construct. Really, the problem is when money is used to burn up a planet.

This is how an environmental justice group in Oakland called the Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project describes the process that the industrial production system applies to our planet and thus to us: We dig up resources, we burn them, then we dump the waste, we churn it up.

Not only does the industrial production system do this to nature, but the financial system does this to people. FIRE burns people. It’s right there in the name.

What does the FIRE system do? It converts a participant in the economy, you or I whether in our capacity as a worker, a tenant, a borrower, a debtor of some sort, and it turns us into nonrenewable participants. It treats us like it can draw money out of us and then discard us, whether that’s in a place of employment, whether that’s in the credit system. It treats us like we’re disposable. We are waste.

How did we get here? Again, lots of different leftist stories on how this is done, but I think that MMT adds a particular element to this. We all know the story of enclosure, property rights, etc. People become dispossessed. They become part of a labor force that is roving. We don’t have property. We can’t work just for biophysical resources. We can’t just find some land and grow some food, even if we wanted to. We have to pay taxes. By taxes, what we really mean is any kind of fines, fees, obligation with the state. That means the fees you get for walking while black in Ferguson. That means student loan interest. That means a wide variety of things.

The point is the system is set up so we have to get money, and people take advantage of that. Now capitalists are not only trying to control the means of production. They’re trying to control the means of the means of production, the FIRE system, as well as the industrial production system.

How does this system keep going? It acts like the money comes from the users, from the resources that are being used rather than by the system itself. We talked about the taxpayer money frame, how that’s particularly harmful. When we think that the money to keep a machine running has to be extracted from people, we get some really terrible political dynamics.

The other lie is that banks are just either making money wildly or they’re using our deposits and turning back around and the banks rely on us. I would say that the banks are rogue public utilities. They have been chartered by the government, licensed by the government, regulated by the government, and they’re out here not doing their job. When we talk about pushing them to do particular things, we have to recognize that it’s even worse than we thought. They’re powerful. They have the money power. They can create and generate credit at the point of lending. They can do a wide variety of other things that are very, very terrible.

Austerity makes room for financial extraction. If the government is not putting money into the economy, the banks are controlling the borrowing process, and we’re all going to die if we don’t stop it.

Money doesn’t grow on rich people, not on wealthy taxpayers, not on banks. What we want to do is get the money power away from the banks, away from rich people by making claims on the state. You’ve got that giant piggy bank, call it what you will, money can come out of the state. Monetary sovereignty means that you can spend on people, on planet, on communities.

The way that we stake our claim and make the state do that is we establish rights to the things that we want. Then the dynamics for fiscal spending become repooled. We pull money out of state coffers, depending on how much we need based on each eligible individual instead of waiting for whoever in Congress, rich folks, to write that check and change the dynamics.

Basically what we’re talking about here is that MMT allows activists and people to, once they establish rights, pull money out of the system rather than wait for them to push.

What does that mean for activists, for organizers, for leftists? We’re establishing rights. We’re marching for jobs. We’re marching for various other freedoms. We want the entitlements. Fiscal austerity is the enemy even though we might want to be austere towards nature and other sorts of respects.

The plant-nurture-thrive alternative

Now I’m going to go out on a real, I think, new limb here. I’m going to suggest that MMT combined with a new-economy focus on environmental sustainability can take us away from the dig-burn-dump model and into a plant-nurture-thrive model.

Plant. We establish rights with this right to housing, with its right to jobs. We free up space to grow, to pool funding and to have a space outside of the profit motive, even outside of the revenue motive. We can start to do new things within that space. We fertilize the space with more of that sweet, sweet money from the public government. We can start to heal wounds, start to do things more equitably. People from bad sectors will leave to new jobs and a job guarantee. People from bad buildings will leave to new houses and new forms of shelter with the home sprawl movement that’s going on.

I’m just going to do a little bit of implementation here and talk about how MMT can potentially change things. I think that public money for public purpose is awesome, and that’s going to give us a platform to do new things. Eventually, it can be public money for public power. We can do even more. The way that dynamic works is by reversing essentially the dig-burn-dump cycle that we have going on here.

We can eventually move on to even stronger things like unions, to collective bargaining. People leave spaces that are extractive. No one wants to be a part-time prison guard anymore. No one wants to work in fast fashion. No one wants to work in fast food. Not necessarily everybody is going to leave, but it provides people with the opportunity to do so, so we can move again towards a regenerative economy, towards people leaving extractive industries.

Eventually, you can layer on democratic processes into the job guarantee, into the new space that’s been created. Participatory budgeting and worker co-ops can fold into the job guarantee.

Just two more examples of implementation. Extractive finance in housing is dispossessing people, either through the initial capture of land or gentrification. The landlord is in charge. The landlord kicks you out. The landlord doesn’t like you. The landlord segregates people. You get redlined. You get gentrified. You get surveilled by all these crazy consumer reporting systems. Then the threat of homelessness keeps you in line. This is true even for the middle class who’s enthralled to the banks, if not to landlords.

With MMT, what does it look like? You establish a right to housing. MMTers don’t necessarily believe in that, but I do. The point is that you can establish a right. You create a space. Once it’s guaranteed that everyone gets this thing, now you have room to maneuver. The rights pull the money down to tenants. You can have things like social housing projects. Then you can start doing things that are more democratic over time. Community land trusts, mutual housing associations. These things can all be contemplated once we have the funding and public capital. Again, that sweet, sweet fertilizer.

In East Harlem, the New Economy Project is helping to build a community land trust where you take land off the market, the residents own it. These things can be helped by MMT.

Finally, everybody is familiar with the access to credit scenario. I think that in and of itself is a problem that we think that people don’t have enough loans. Really what we want is for people to get more money, for people to get money from the state and from benefits. More people will get higher wages whether that’s through a job guarantee program or something else.

In the instance that people need credit, right now they’d be set with a bunch of predators, whether that’s payday lenders, whether that’s banks acting terribly, whether it’s this new fintech stuff from online, which actually turns out to be just as predatory as the analog version. What you can do with an MMT framework is again, establish public infrastructure. Establish rights. You can do some forms of postal banking. You can do public banking. From then on out the threat of you having to go to a payday lender is gone, so you have room to maneuver. Again, political room and fiscal room. You can start doing things like complementary currencies. You can start doing things like public banking. You can start doing all these more democratic things once the public sector is putting pressure on the private sector and giving civil society room to grow.

As you see here, there is a regenerative model for all of these things. You just need the public money. My friends in Reston, England have a complementary currency program. They generate money, or you could say their own forms of IOUs, which they use in the local community so that people only do business with local business. They’re keeping what they call “clone town London” out of there. These are acceptable in receipt of taxes, which is very interesting.

Finally, Gar mentioned the public banking movement. The New Economy Project and a coalition of other grassroots groups are launching an effort to create one here in New York. The idea there is that the public bank will generate credit to lend to democratic enterprises, ideally we would want federal money, but this is something that is powerful that municipalities can do, and in the process we can highlight a lot of what money really is. It’s a public feature that should be used for the public good, and we can do a lot of political education with this as well as whatever material healing help to organizations throughout New York City. Public money for public power.

Gar: Let me just say one thing. I’m from Racine, Wisconsin. I had an aunt who ran a little tiny Jewish bakery. She used to say, “You know, during the Depression there wasn’t any money around. Then they decided to run a war, and there was all kinds of money around. Why can’t we do that when we want to do that?” That is probably the point.

Photo by kevin dooley

The post Money Matters! Why Monetary Theory and Policy Is a Critical Terrain For the Left appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Massimo De Angelis is a thinker very much in the autonomist tradition; he mentions being a student of Harry Cleaver. This comes through loud and clear in his focus on the self-activity of ordinary people, and on the centrality of their self-created and -governed institutions as the kernel of a postcapitalist successor society.

For De Angelis, the defining feature of common goods is not any inherent quality of the goods in question. It is the objective fact of commoning, that is being currently governed as a commons by its members.

By and large, the commons imply a plurality of people (a community) sharing resources and governing them and their own relations and (re)productive processes through horizontal doing in common, commoning…. [I]n the last few years we have witnessed several cases of alignment of social movements to the commons, a commons which offers great potential….

…I believe there is a social revolution in the making that, if recognised and able to attract more energies from people around the world, could give us a chance to embark on a process of transformation towards postcapitalist society. My underlying conception of revolution is aligned to that of Marx which sees social revolutions — that is, the growth of alternative modes of production — as the material condition for any political revolution. A radical transformation of our world implies that people come together into communities that develop these alternatives to the logic of capitalism, multiply them and interconnect them: I understand commons to be such alternatives.

A huge portion of our lives takes place within the commons, particularly those social functions involving the reproduction of labor power and of the larger social fabric.

We are generally born into a commons, even if it only consists of interactions with our parents or carers, siblings and friends…. Values practices, such as loyalty to friends, conviviality, mutual aid, care, and even struggles, are developed in the commons.

As soon as these networks of social cooperation develop into systemic patterns in neighborhood associations, cooperatives, social centres, food networks and social movements(and given the development of communication and information technologies), these commons-based forms of social cooperation have the potential to expand and reshape their boundaries, renew their social compositions, develop multicultures of horizontality, destabilise official science… and give rise to commons ecologies, that is, plural and cooperating commons with institutions and arrangements we cannot predict.

As George Caffentzis writes in his cover blurb, De Angelis does for the commons what Marx did for capital. He posits the commons circuit (C-M-C) alongside Marx’s circuit of capital (M-C-M).

While for Marx the commodity is the elementary form of capitalist wealth, so for me common goods are the elementary form of wealth of a postcapitalist world.

De Angelis criticizes Marx for largely focusing on capital, to the neglect of the role that the commons play in social reproduction under capitalism.

The commons circuit, C-M-C, is a “selling-in-order-to-buy circuit.” The difference between the two circuits is that “[t]he first has at [sic] its goals the satisfaction of needs, and money here is a mere means for the satisfaction of these needs. The second has as its goal the realization of money: the means becomes here the end.”

This selling-in-order-to-buy circuit is nothing more than a membrane of exchange between commons and capital systems, the boundary separating commons from capital. As a subset of a larger commons circuit, the simple selling-in-order-to-buy circuit only appears as contingently necessary, and different commons may be distinguished by the degree of their dependence on capital’s monetary circuits.

* * *

The point is that unlike the capital circuit, the simple commodity circuit is just a means, hence scalable, depending on the external context, to the structure of needs and desires and the resources that can be mobilised in non-commoditised forms (through for example pooling, gift circuits or administrative transfers).

Hence the commons, by growth, can reduce its need for interaction with the circuit of capital via the cash nexus, and incorporate more and more basic functions of life into itself.

The commons are constrained by the fact that they coexist with capital and the state.

It is up to the commons, therefore, to develop their own politics to attempt to shift these constraints….

The commons and capital circuits have coexisted since the beginning of capitalism, with the boundary and correlation of forces between them constantly shifting. The “structural coupling” between the two circuits “allows one system to access and use the complexity of other systems.” The correlation of forces at any given time determines the comparative power of the commons circuit and capital circuit in setting the terms of their mutual interface through the cash nexus, and whether the boundary between them is such that capital on net uses the commons as a means to its own ends more than the commons uses capital, or vice versa.

…even if it is true that capital can co-opt commons, the opposite is also true: the commons can access the complexity of capital systems for their own development.

* * *

Commons and capital are two distinct, autonomous social systems; that is, they both struggle to ‘take things into their own hands’ and self-govern on the basis of their different and often clashing, internally generated codes, measures and values. They also struggle to be distinct autopoietic social systems, in that they aim to reproduce not only their interrelations but also the preproduction of their components through their internally generated codes and values. They do this of course, in a clear, distinctive way. Capital can reproduce itself only through profit and its accumulation, which ultimately imply the exploitation of labour, the creation of divisions among the working class, and the trashing of nature. Commons can reproduce through commoning, doing in common, which is a social process embedded in particular values that defines a sharing culture in a given time and context, through which they reproduce resources and the community that comprises them…. Commons are generated in so far as subjects become commoners, in so far as their social being is enacted with others, at different levels of social organization, through a social practice, commoning, that is essentially horizontal and may embrace a variety of forms depending on circumstances…, but ultimately is grounded in community sharing. Capital, by contrast, tends to objectify, instrumentalize and impose hierarchical order….

…[T]he commons and capital/state are often linked, coupled through the buying-and-selling site of the market, that is, the ‘economy’. Both capital and the commons buy and sell, although with different priorities and as parts of different movements…. Capital buys in order to sell at a profit… or as means of production, to turn resources into commodities…. Commons, on the other hand, tend to sell commodities in order to buy means of sustenance and reproduction. For example, some members of a household sell their labour power to gain an income in order to be able to purchase the goods necessary for reproduction of the household; or an association engages in petty trade to fund itself; or a social centre sells beer at a concert to purchase the materials to build a kitchen. Buying in order to sell and selling in order to buy are two opposite praxes…, the former governed by a life activity ultimately wasted in accumulation and the latter governed by the needs and desires of reproduction…. In other words…, while reproduction of labour power is a feature of the commons production of the commodity labour-power sold to capital, capital does not necessarily control (or controls only in part through the state and the education system) the labour of reproduction which is fundamental to the commons.

…Furthermore, the environment of present-day commons is dominated by capital loops, the circuits of capital that all wish to enclose and all wish to turn into a profitable enterprise and overwork or destitution for others. If we were to take the large, bird’s-eye view of history, of the original accumulations of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in South America, Africa, Asia and Europe up to the most recent transition from the post-1945 Keynesian deal to neoliberal, several books could be written about the co-evolution of capital and the commons, about how commons sustained the enclosures of the former by regenerating newer forms in different areas, and how capital has regenerated itself under the impulse of commoner struggles on the shop floor, in neighbourhoods, in bread or antiracist riots or women’s struggles.

I would add that books could be written — and I think a couple actually have been by Kropotkin at least — on how the commons was the fundamental basis of human society from the first neolithic open field villages until the rise of class differentiation and the state, and that successive systems of class exploitation and class states since then have been parasitic layers extracting surpluses from the commons.

With the rise of hyper-efficient small-scale means of production not amenable to centralized capitalist control, and the revolution in networked many-to-many communications, we’re entering a new transition period in which the productivity of the commons is becoming too great for capital to successfully enclose or parasitize upon, and in which the commons will ultimately reabsorb the whole of life and leave the parasitic economic classes and their state to starve.

De Angelis refers to the stocks of common goods that accumulate within commons systems and are available to them for internal use as “commonwealth.”

Like capital, commonwealth is thus a stock, but unlike capital the flows it generates possess different goals and it is enacted through different practices. However, like any other systems including capital, its flows aim at going back to stocks, reproduce them, replenish them and enrich them…

He advocates a synergy between the commons and the new social movements, such that

…they are weaved [sic] in virtuous cycles with their own task: the social movement to shift the subjective and objective constraints set in place by state and capital, and the commons to expand in this new space with new commons-based modes of production.

* * *

The strategic problem faced by postcapitalist commons is here how to extend the boundaries of their operations, through development, boundary commons and commons ecologies [i.e. uniting different commons into larger interconnected systems], to include the ecological and capitalist systems with which they interrelate.

He argues that the most critical area of expansion of the commons is “all those activities that serve the immediate purpose of reproducing life….” like “accessing healthy food, housing, water, social care and education.”

How can commonwealth be used to create a new commons system, one that increases the incidence of alternative modes of production, and increases the independence of commoners from capitalist systems…? How can commonwealth be used in order to increase the power of the commons vis-a-vis capital?… Capital can reproduce itself only by putting to work the physical, mental, and affective energies of people for its own purpose: accumulation…. Capital can mobilise social labour and subject it to its measure, to its valuing of things, through different means…. But the one thing upon which the power of capital is ultimately based, the one thing that enables it to deploy all the other means of its power, is its withdrawal of the means of existence, its ability to control, manage, distribute and shape the meaning of resources that are directly responsible for sustaining human and social life: water, land, food, energy, health, housing, care and education and their interrelated cultures in the first place. An increased ability to govern collectively these resources, to democratise their reproduction, to commonalise them by keeping state and market at bay, are conditions for emancipation for all in all other spheres of life and for make [sic] these spheres of life into a type of commonwealth that is enabled to feel a distance from capital…. To have access to these resources would allow people and communities not only to grow more resilient, to share conviviality and enjoy life, but to build a common social force to expand their power vis-a-vis capital….

In summary, commons that make use of the commonwealth more directly linked to (re)production of bodies and the earth is a condition for the expansion of commoners’ empowerment vis-a-vis capital, and a condition of the reduction of the degree of dependence on capital markets…. It corresponds to the development of a sphere of autonomy from capital…, that allows movements to construct a powerful ground upon which all other struggles can be waged for all sorts of other commonwealth uses.

And the intensification of capitalist crisis and further proletarization “creates the conditions for the flourishing of reproduction commons….”

This fundamental stratum of commons would, in turn,

be such a crucial strategic asset that they would form the material basis of a new commons renaissance in many spheres, building its foundation on these reproductive commons. This is because not only would they give us the benefit of new communities, new cultures, and new methods of establishing wellbeing, security and trust within complex organisation, they would also protect us from the whims of financial markets, and especially, increase our security and power to refuse the exploitation of capitalist markets. The more that capital can blackmail us into poorer conditions, higher insecurity and ever-more gruelling work rhythms, the less we have the power to refuse its logic. Conversely, this power grows the more we have alternative means for our reproduction.

The Parliamentary Enclosures of common pasture, wood, and waste in the UK were carried out to facilitate the kind of blackmail De Angelis writes of; they were motivated by the fact that independent access to the means of subsistence enabled labor to accept or refuse wage labor on its own terms. In the propertied classes’ press of the late 18th century capitalist farmers complained that, because of access to subsistence from pasturing livestock on the commons, gathering food and firewood from common woodland, and the possibility of the landless cottaging on the waste, the rural laboring classes only felt the need to work for wages intermittently. Because of their ability to fall back on the commons, they could not be forced to work as long or as hard as their employers wished.

The commons circuit’s analog to capital’s expansionary circuit is “boundary commoning.” As more activities and sources of sustenance are incorporated into the commons on a non-commodity basis, and the necessary inputs of those activities in turn are recursively incorporated, the boundary between circuits shifts in favor of the commons circuit and incorporates a larger share of society, the balance of power shifts from the capital circuit to the commons circuit and the commons has increasing say over the terms on which it interfaces with the capital circuit.

This parallels the writing of Jane Jacobs and Karl Hess on import substitution — in both cases starting with repair, gradually expanding piecemeal via the production of selected spare parts, and culminating in the production of entire ecosystems of goods — as a way of achieving community

Through commoning, the commons not only can develop new forms of social cooperation with other commons to meet new needs, or increase the non-commodity… diversity of its resources…, it can also establish new markets (such as participatory guarantees or some aspects of fair trade), and bring to the markets goods that fill an old need in new ways, with attention to environmental issues, producer ][pay, quality or minimisation of distance travelled of goods. Commoning also produces local supply chains to reduce the dependence of an area on capitalist commodities and revitalise a local economy. Commoning can thus organically articulate existing skills and resources over a territory, helping a depressed region to realise the wealth that resides hidden with it.

De Angelis denounces the “fallacy of the political,” which sees radical change as an abrupt process brought about through the seizure of political power. Rather, it is a long-term process that involves “the actual production of another form of power” by building commonwealth over time and expanding it at the expense of the capital circuit. He quotes Marx on the “beginning” of “the epoch of social revolution.”

This conception obviously implies that for a historically defined period, both commons and capital/state cohabit the social space, their struggles and relative powers giving shape to it, with the result that unevenness and contradictions are many, as well as strategic games to colonise the other’s space with one’s own values and decolonise one’s own space from the other’s values. The struggle is therefore continuous.

He calls for a social revolution based on the “multiplication of existing commons,” and “coming together and interlacing of the different commons so as to leverage social powers and constitute ecology and scale” and “growing commons powers vis-a-vis capital and the state.”

The process of social revolution is ultimately a process of finding solutions to the problems that capital systems cannot solve…. This implies the establishment of multi-scalar systems of social action that reproduce life in modes, systemic processes, social relations and value practices that seek an alternative path from the dominant ones and that are able to reproduce at greater scale through networking and coordination….

* * *

The effect of a significant number of commons ecologies in a single area is intense: it produces a new culture, norms, networks of support and mutual aid, virtuous neighborhoods and villages. For sustained social change to occur, commons ecologies need to develop and intensify their presence in social space up to a point where they present a viable alternative for most people. This point is the point of critical mass.

“Territorialisation” — building up an interlinked ecology of commons, and particularly those involving survival and subsistence, in recuperated areas — is especially important.

I suggest we should take Marx’s warning about radical transformation beyond capitalism seriously, when he says in Grundrisse that if we do not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.

The corollary is that the formation of the successor society will be an open-ended process, not the blueprint of any vanguard leadership, and its form will emerge from the self-creation of the commoners as creative subject.

It is only when a class of social subjects emerges out of a new mode of production that they helped to shape, sustain and develop that there emerges a new social force to contrast with capital and the state, to deeply transform them, even to commonise them and abolish their worst aspects.* Thus the class for itself that Marx contrasts with the class in itself defined by capitalist exploitation, is the class of struggling commoners, the new subjectivity empowered by the new ecology of social systems they have set in place and intertwined: the commons.

His mention of abolishing the worst aspects of capital and state echoes ideas found in similar thinkers of shifting the nature of states (ranging from Saint-Simon’s substitution of “administration of things” for “governance of people” to Proudhon’s “dissolving the state in society” to Orsi’s and Bauwens’s Partner State) and corporations (experiments in self-management, open-sourcing IP, etc.) even under the existing system, in order to make them somewhat less extractive and hierarchical, and lay the groundwork for a fundamental alteration in their character when the larger system they are a part of reaches its tipping point. The nature of the corporation or state agency is determined by the nature of the larger system of which it is a part (e.g. the evolution of craft guilds from a cooperative ethos at the height of the Middle Ages to an essentially corporate capitalist model dominated by large masters engaged in the export trade in early modern times). The legacy institutions that are able to negotiate the transition process and survive with some degree of organizational continuity in the successor society may still have the same names, but they will be largely different in substance.

A commons movement is not simply a movement against the valuation processes and injustices of capital as well as the hierarchies of the state, but a movement that seek [sic] to commonalize many functions now both in private and state hands, especially those functions that have to do with social reproduction, and that define the quality and the quality of services available….

Aside from the strategy of creating commons from the ground up…, another strategy is to commonalize its existing private or public systems and transform them into resilient organisations, which in turn imply [sic], much deeper democratisation and cooperation, namely basic commons coordinates.

The objective to turn more and more spheres of societies into sustainable and resilient spheres thus coincides with that of adopting commons as a central kernel of the architecture of a new mode of production integrating many types of modes of production….

Commonalisation means to shift a public or private organisation into a commons or, more likely, into a web of interconnected and nested commons giving shape to metacommonality, with the overarching goal of resilience….

For a public institution or private corporation, commonalisation does not mean that a given final result is optimal, but that a process has begun along which there is a collective effort, through the commoners’ democratic management of constraints, costs, and rewards, to increase all sorts of commoning across different social actors involved in the corporation or public service….

1. the parameter of democracy: democratisation of a state service or a corporation along a scale that has as its two opposite poles management versus direct democracy…;
2. maximum accountability and transparency and the ability to recall every public servant… and other stakeholder involved in the production of the service;
3. opening the boundaries between different types of practices and subjects thus allowing maximum cognitive diversity as well as increasing the porosity of the system boundaries to a variety of subjects, knowledges and practices….

He mentions Barcelona en Comu as an example, with such experiments in direct democracy and transparency as participatory budgeting, open policy proposal wikis, etc.

Likewise, he refers to the commons being able to make use of capital on favorable terms “because there is an echo of the commons inside capital or state systems, and thus it is possible to define meta-commonal relations across capital, state and commons.” It is important to remember that state agencies and capitalist corporations are not monoliths; they are governed by hierarchies precisely because the individuals and social groups within them all have interests that may not coincide with the official goals of the organization or the interests of its leadership, so that it becomes necessary to resort to power relations in order to enclose their cooperative interactions — interactions that may function, internally, on the basis of something like Graeber’s “everyday communism” — as sources of value for the organization.  Authoritarian institutions are always subject to concupiscence, the kind of “war within their members” that St. Paul described in the individual. The commons sector can often hope to find friendly individuals and subcultures within the “Belly of the Beast.”

De Angelis sees a cybernetic principle called Ashby’s Law, or the Law of Requisite Variety (“in order to have a system under the control of a regulator, the variety of the regulator must match the variety of the system”; “the greater the variety of the system in relation to the regulator, the greater is the need of the regulator to reduce the system’s variety or increase its own variety”) as both a source of hope and a strategy for victory.

State regulations like health and safety rules are often a means by which capital artificially simplifies society by suppressing the commons, either by imposing administrative costs on the commons that small-scale production cannot absorb, or forcing it into illegality and thereby marginalizing it. For example: “Different households are discouraged from trusting each other when they cannot share at a school party their cakes and biscuits made at home, but instead have to show that they have purchased the product.” Likewise organic certification regimes with such high costs that only relatively large producers can afford them, effectively keeping small producers from legally using the “organic” label. The commons sector has in some cases responded by devising its own certification regimes enforced along Ostromite lines by the participants themselves, although the formal legality of such practices varies from location to location and the attitudes of local political authorities.

To achieve victory the commons sector must increase its internal capacity to self-regulate, while overloading its variety relative to the regulator in order to overload the latter with information.

Here a sub-system of society is comprising a set of self-regulation of the commons…. This wider commons ecology, defended and enlarged by social movements, reduces the power to regulate complexity of the state/capital regulator, who is left with the increasingly impossible task of matching society’s variety in order to regulate. This is the case when commons movements outflank the state and capital.

I would note here that a self-governed system’s regulatory capacity is inherently greater in variety relative to the internal matter to be regulated because the complexity and enforcement costs of regulation are directly proportional to the conflict of interest between regulators and regulated. This is even more so if the self-governed system is largely stigmergic or permissionless, on the model of Wikipedia or open-source software design. A commons ecology that decentralizes and modularizes the complex subsistence and reproduction activities of the spheres of capital and state, and reorganizes them on a permissionless basis, will render them far less complicated than their authoritarian counterparts.

In addition, new technologies of decentralized and small-scale production that make the commons increasingly efficient relative to state and capital also have the effect of increasing the complexity of the commons relative to state regulators. For example, the enforcement of industrial patents traditionally assumed very low transaction costs because most production was carried out by a few large manufacturing corporations, consisted of a few major variations in product design, and was marketed through a handful of major retail chains served by a centralized distribution network. When the product ecology expands by orders of magnitude to include a whole host of open-source designs or pirated proprietary ones available as CAD-CAM files on a micro-manufacturing version of The Pirate Bay, and they’re produced for neighborhood consumption by hundreds of thousands of garage factories run by workers cooperatives of a few people each, the transaction costs of enforcement become astronomical.

Finally, in the event that state and corporation attempt to render the commons more governable by forcibly simplifying them (making them more legible, in James Scott’s terminology), the enforcement of such measures is itself a form of regulation that can be thwarted by making the task of enforcement more complicated than the regulators can cope with (in particular, technologies of evasion or circumvention like encryption).

The disruptive effect on the regulator’s ability to cope with complexity can be greatly intensified, as well, when commons-based social movements engage in the kinds of leaderless swarming or saturation attacks described by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt.

If commons movements become the expression of a political recomposition that is one with a mode of production to expand, to develop and to set against the dominant mode of production, then we have acquired a common sense-horizon, not one that establishes a future model, but a present organisational unit that seeks to evolve and have a place in the contemporary cosmopolitan and globalised world because its power resides in diversity, variety and complexity….

A society is in movement because a large part of it is constituting itself in terms of a growing web of interactive commons, capable of sustaining livelihoods… and of deploying its social force not only to resist enclosures but to sustain and expand its commons. In short, emancipatory social transportation is predicated not only on increasing complexity, but also on the multiplication of commons governing such a complexity.

Somewhat similar to Negri’s and Hardt’s choice of “multitude,” De Angelis prefers “commoners” to “workers” as a name for the subject engaged in constructing a postcapitalist society, because it includes “the self-activity of this class in so far as the many-faceted (re)production of livelihoods outside capital,” and “captures both an underpinning relation to capital and a quest for the production of alternatives.” And, I would add, Marx saw the working class’s ultimate task as abolition of itself as a class; this is an ongoing task at present under capitalism, as part of the construction of the successor society here and now.

He identifies, as one of the ideological barriers to the emergence of commoners as a growing class subjectivity, the idea of the “middle class.”

…which I define not as a homogeneous social group, with a given level of income, but as a stratified field of subjectivity disciplined to a large degree to the norms of behaviour of a modern society in which capital has a fundamental role in organising social production through disciplinary markets, enclosures, governance and its profit-seeking enterprises. In other words, ‘middle-classness’ is constituted through an idea of the betterment and order achieved within the boundaries of the capitalist system.

This is especially true, I think, of the United States, which in many ways as a settler society on the frontier of Western capitalism has become simultaneously the savior of old-world capitalism and — with such components of the American ideology as “American Exceptionalism” and “the American Dream” — an intensification of its most toxic tendencies. Building class consciousness against exploitation is probably harder in America than anywhere else in the developed capitalist world because of this internalized tendency of ordinary people to see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” To see this, one need only go to any tweet or Facebook post critical of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, and look at the dozens of replies from sycophantic dudebros outraged at the blot to their escutcheon.

Among other important points, finally, De Angelis stresses the need for intersectionality within the commons as a source of unity.

Photo by nikita_nikiforov

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Chris Hedges: A number of the reigning oligarchs—among them Mark Zuckerberg (net worth $64.1 billion), Elon Musk (net worth $20.8 billion), Richard Branson (net worth $5.1 billion) and Stewart Butterfield (net worth $1.6 billion)—are calling for a guaranteed basic income. It looks progressive. They couch their proposals in the moral language of caring for the destitute and the less fortunate. But behind this is the stark awareness, especially in Silicon Valley, that the world these oligarchs have helped create is so lopsided that future consumers, plagued by job insecurity, substandard wages, automation and crippling debt peonage, will be unable to pay for the products and services offered by the big corporations.

The oligarchs do not propose structural change. They do not want businesses and the marketplace regulated. They do not support labor unions. They will not pay a living wage to their bonded labor in the developing world or the American workers in their warehouses and shipping centers or driving their delivery vehicles. They have no intention of establishing free college education, universal government health or adequate pensions. They seek, rather, a mechanism to continue to exploit desperate workers earning subsistence wages and whom they can hire and fire at will. The hellish factories and sweatshops in China and the developing world where workers earn less than a dollar an hour will continue to churn out the oligarchs’ products and swell their obscene wealth. America will continue to be transformed into a deindustrialized wasteland. The architects of our neofeudalism call on the government to pay a guaranteed basic income so they can continue to feed upon us like swarms of longnose lancetfish, which devour others in their own species.

“Increasing the minimum wage or creating a basic income will amount to naught if hedge funds buy up foreclosed houses and pharmaceutical patents and raise prices (in some cases astronomically) to line their own pockets out of the increased effective demand exercised by the population,” David Harvey writes in “Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.” “Increasing college tuitions, usurious interest rates on credit cards, all sorts of hidden charges on telephone bills and medical insurance could steal away the benefits. A population might be better served by strict regulatory intervention to control these living expenses, to limit the vast amount of wealth appropriation occurring at the point of realisation. It is not surprising to find there is strong sentiment among the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley to also support basic minimum income proposals. They know their technologies are putting people out of work by the millions and that those millions will not form a market for their products if they have no income.”

The call for a guaranteed basic income is a classic example of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci’s understanding that when capitalists have surplus capital and labor they use mass culture and ideology, in this case neoliberalism, to reconfigure the habits of a society to absorb the surpluses.

In the wake of World War II, for example, the capitalists’ problem was solved by heavy investments in the military and war industry, ideologically justified by Red baiting and the Cold War, and by massive infrastructure projects, including the building of highways, bridges and houses, to move people out of cities into suburbs, where consumption rose. The social engineering projects were done in the name of national security and progress. And they made the oligarchs of that day richer.

“The development of a whole new suburban lifestyle (acclaimed in popular TV sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and I love Lucy which celebrated a certain kind of ‘daily life of peoples’) along with all sorts of propaganda for the ‘American Dream’ of individualized homeownership stood at the centre of a huge campaign to construct new wants, needs and desires, a totally new lifestyle, in the population at large,” Harvey says in his book. “Well-paid jobs were required to support the effective demand. Labour and capital came to an uneasy compromise at the urging of the state apparatus in which a white working class made economic gains, even as minorities were left out.”

This phase of capitalism ended once industry moved overseas and wages stagnated or declined. The well-paying unionized jobs disappeared. Jobs became menial and inadequately compensated. Poverty expanded. The oligarchs began to mine government social services, including education, health care, the military, intelligence gathering, prisons and utilities such as electricity and water, for profit. As a publication of the San Francisco Federal Reserve reportedly noted, the country—and by extension the oligarchs—could no longer get out of crises “by building houses and filling them with things.” The United States shifted in the 1970s from what the historian Charles Maier called an “empire of production” to “an empire of consumption.” In short, we began to borrow to maintain a lifestyle and an empire we could no longer afford.

Profit in the “empire of consumption” is extracted not by producing products but by privatizing and pushing up the costs of the basic services we need to survive and allowing banks and hedge funds to impose punishing debt peonage on the public and gamble on tech, student debt and housing bubbles. The old ideology of the New Deal, of government orchestrating huge social engineering projects under the Public Works Administration or in the War on Poverty, was replaced by a new ideology to justify another form of predatory capitalism.

In Harvey’s book “A Brief History of Neoliberalism” he defines neoliberalism as “a project to achieve the restoration of class power” in the wake of the economic crisis of the 1970s and what the political scientist Samuel Huntington said was America’s “excess of democracy” in the 1960s and the 1970s. It achieved its aim.

Neoliberalism, Harvey wrote, is “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

American oligarchs discredited the populist movements of the 1960s and 1970s that had played a vital role in forcing government to carry out programs for the common good and restricting corporate pillage. They demonized government, which as John Ralston Saul writes, “is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good.” Suddenly—as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, two of the principal political proponents of neoliberalism, insisted—government was the problem. The neoliberal propaganda campaign successfully indoctrinated large segments of the population to call for their own enslavement.

The ideology of neoliberalism never made sense. It was a con. No society can effectively govern itself by basing its decisions and policies on the dictates of the marketplace. The marketplace became God. Everything and everyone was sacrificed on its altar in the name of progress. Social inequality soared. Amid the destruction, the proponents of neoliberalism preached the arrival of a new Eden once we got through the pain and disruption. The ideology of neoliberalism was utopian, if we use the word “utopia” as Thomas More intended—the Greek words for “no” and “place.” “To live within ideology, with utopian expectations, is to live in no place, to live in limbo,” Saul writes in “The Unconscious Civilization.” “To live nowhere. To live in a void where the illusion of reality is usually created by highly sophisticated rational constructs.”

Corporations used their wealth and power to make this ideology the reigning doctrine. They established well-funded centers of propaganda such as The Heritage Foundation, took over university economic departments and amplified the voices of their courtiers in the media. Those who questioned the doctrine were cast out like medieval heretics, their careers blocked and their voices muted or silenced. The contradictions, lies and destruction within neoliberal ideology were ignored by those who dominated the national discourse, leading to mounting frustration and rage among a populace that had been abandoned and betrayed.

Read the full text here.

Photo by Wendy Longo photography

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Étienne Le Roy: Writing about commons as a member of a scientific community, which itself has developed only recently, has raised a number of problems for me.

First, there is the time lag with which the complex problem of the commons gained our attention in the first place. Why didn’t that happen fifty years ago? Why did it take so long to overcome the obstacles that made us unable to recognize social phenomena as commons phenomena and to think about them as such? Even though I had answers to many questions and was already writing within the paradigm of sharing, I was still unable to ask the questions using commons terminology.

The second problem lies in the fact that opening up the topic of the commons triggers a kind of domino effect. As soon as the first domino falls over – by invoking the commons – many of the concepts on which the idea of modern Western civilization rests lose their apparent balance, and the whole edifice, previously believed to be well-founded, collapses onto itself: the state, the law, the market, the nation, work, contracts, debts, giving, the juristic person, private property, as well as institutions such as kinship, marital law, and the law of succession, are suddenly called into question. We often consider these concepts to be universally valid, but intercultural comparison reveals that they are only a custom, a folkway that deeply influenced our modern Western legal tradition (which itself proves to be a folk law of its own).

Finally, the third problem has to do with the highly political, even polemic character of the contemporary commons debate, as currently expressed in France by Pierre Laval and Christian Dardot in their book Commun. Even the subtitle does not mince words: “Essay on the revolution in the 21st century.” Laval and Dardot bring important questions back into the academic debate, questions that Karl Marx raised as early as the mid-nineteenth century when reflecting upon the meaning and the role of capital.

The attention currently granted the commons suggests approaching these problems one by one, first in order to make the “question of the commons” comprehensible, and then to examine how they relate to contemporary law. One thing should be clear from the outset, however: theoretically, commons could be an alternative to the market and the state, but practically, we are a long way from achieving that. And if we follow Professor Elinor Ostrom, then the unresolved social question of the twenty-first century.¹ should in any case focus on how commons and private property might coexist and complement each other.

I graduated from university with degrees in anthropology and public law in 1964. While I was conducting research for my thesis (corresponding to a master’s degree today), I discovered Michel Alliot, a young professor coming from Africa, as well as the scientific discipline of legal anthropology and the land question in Africa, particularly in Senegal. These three discoveries were to change my life.

I selected Michel Alliot as my academic advisor and wrote my doctoral dissertation, one of the first in legal anthropology in France (Le Roy 1970), about the Senegalese land reform and Law 64-46, which was one of the first dissertations on legal anthropology in France. My ambition was to comment not only on the origins and roots of this reform, but also to explain what it actually sought to cover and regulate: namely consuetudinary law, or customary, unofficial types of law.²  I dug into the history of possession of land in a sub-Saharan African society, all the way back to the sixteenth century, and discovered the field of the commons, but could not find a concept, a term for it.

I later discovered that this was because of the ethnocentric ideology of colonialism³ and the foundations on which the thinking of the modern age and the notion of development of that time rested.⁴ So-called consuetudinary law was an Unidentified Scientific Object (USO). Only a few scholars had attempted to actually comprehend its more profound features. The scientific community usually dealt with legal phenomena in Africa as if they were the opposite of Western legal concepts developed over the past three centuries. Primitivism⁵ and scientific arrogance are never far apart.

This USO status of consuetudinary law also has to do with the fact that its rules are not formulated according to generally recognized standards or the impersonal criteria of modern laws; instead they manifest themselves as enduring patterns of behavior and the willingness of people to engage in certain forms of action that is stable over time. Now, these can be grasped and researched only by employing specific models, so I decided to use a matrix to represent consuetudes as legal acts. Legal acts not in the sense of written law, but in the sense of patterns that are expressed in behavioral rules that can be found in the various communities.

That is how I succeeded in responding to a phenomenon that I had just discovered and that challenged received bodies of research: legal pluralism. It was surprising that even by organizing my research according to the principles of a matrix analysis, I had already discovered the basic elements of the description of the commons – without being aware of it: a community in which everyone has status, an activity recognized and appreciated by the others, and a resource that – symbolically – permits the intentions and dispositions of everyone involved to be interconnected. In sum, a sanctionable system that amounts to “law.”

In my early works and in those of the 1970s in which I developed the anthropological models of the relationship of human beings to land (Le Roy 2011), I focused on the problem of communities. I could discern fundamental community-based conceptions that influence actions, and my discussions also included the civil-law concept of common goods. But however surprising from today’s perspective, the term “commons” never appeared in my work, even though the mbock thinking of the West African Wolof had already left its mark on my analyses.

Mbock – in the Wolof language – means kinship, and at its core, it also means sharing. At times, it refers to common ancestors, at others, to a particular field (with its specific area and boundaries), a herd, forest areas, and many other things. The discovery that sharing is preferred to exchange suddenly challenges all those insights that anthropology felt to be certain: namely, limited exchange within kinship relations, according to the theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss,⁶ the concept of the gift according to Marcel Mauss,⁷ that of property according to Maurice Godelier⁸, and others. Sharing is the predominant principle of organization in the commons. But I came to understand that only between 1980 and 1990 while I elaborated a new model for managing land and areas for fruit cultivation (Le Roy 1996). In that model, I attempted to explain how Africans (and other humans, too) combine various legal forms of property and resource uses in their complex practices – transcending cultural boundaries that we imagine as defining. Modern science considers the incompatibility or even incoherence of many such combinations practically a truism.

A Reform of Unforeseen Consequence

I told the stories of all these intellectual adventures in my synthesis on land policy on Senegal, from a theoretical perspective (Le Roy 2011). In it, I combined the legal relationships of individualistic modernity (public and private) with those of communitarianism (external, internal and coalitions). In other words, I correlated the categories publicand private, or a combination of the two, with external and internal, respectively. The concept of the common proved useful in ordering these relationships according to the following logic:

•  public = belonging to all
•  external = belonging to “n” groups
•  alliance = belonging to two or more groups
•  internal = belonging to one group
•  private = belonging to a juridical or physical individual, or legal entity

Doubtless, all these possibilities of collective organization did not already lead to what contemporary commons theory (Bollier 2014; Dardot & Laval 2014) considers to be “commons,” but since 1996, avant la lettre, at least this concept of the common has been at the center of my analyses of land policy. With a thirty-year time lag!

One of the reasons for this false start lies in the anthropological paradigm itself. It concerns itself with “the law” – in my case, regarding land use in Senegal. Accordingly, the conceptual and methodological tools that are required for understanding what has not and literally cannot be thought in the realm of consuetudinary law, can only be expressed in the intellectual categories of lawyers – in other words, norms and legal provisions. Whereas from the anthropologists’ perspective, “law [is] not so much what the texts say, but rather what the actors do with it” (Le Roy 1999). The texts are important, but how they are interpreted and applied is even more important. Or as a French saying goes, “It’s a long way from the cup to the mouth.” In the endogenous, oral African contexts, there are no texts that could be interpreted and no explicit norms which could be the subject of legal commentary. One can only observe the practices! By granting the requisite attention to the positions and roles of actors, their status, their actions and their interrelationships, anthropologists are able to escape the abstractions that fundamentally structure Western legal systems, but which are not to be found in the Wolof and other societies that anthropologists study.

The concept of the commons is an abstraction circulated first and foremost by the field of economics. And it is precisely in economics that Garrett Hardin’s all-too-famous “tragedy of the commons” parable has gained currency since its publication in 1968.⁹ For at least a generation this make-believe idea that shepherds are unable to use their pastures jointly has undermined and marginalized research on collective resource management. Incidentally, I admit that I did not take this laughable story seriously until the mid-1980s when I began to recognize the collateral damage of this pseudo-theory and its sloppy generalizations.¹⁰

The second reason for the false start of the commons in the intellectual debate concerns the theories on “development” applied to countries that were called “underdeveloped” at the time. By passing the Law Concerning the Territory of the Country,¹¹ Senegal finally emancipated itself from a development model that is fundamentally connected to the market and private property. This took place in the name of an African socialism that was at least as open to poet-president Léopold Senghor’s¹² Négritude – a poetic discovery of African roots – as it was to breaking with capitalism. Yet in this case, it was not about breaking with capitalism, but about placing limits on the outright dominance of private property norms – a legacy of the colonial era. Accordingly, Law 64-46 did not seek to abolish private property; it even permitted completion of all pending proceedings concerning private rights still awaiting resolution in land registry processes. Applications above and beyond this (for example, for recording further private real estate in the land registry) would thereafter be subject to the control of the administration. This provision was intended to prevent private property, which President Senghor called “egoistic” in a 1964 speech, from having direct effects on social relationships.

According to this reform, the only justification for transforming local, endogenous property rights into state property is to enable market transactions for the public good (Article 13), which then authorizes the state to transfer the rights to private individuals. This approach is based on the assumption that public institutions in Senegal, like any institutions of a liberal, democratic state, are neutral and fair-minded – a presumption that was unfortunately disproven by later facts. We shall see how this “nationalization” flirts with socialism. To this end, we shall first examine the wording of the law and then its practical application.

From the Wording of the Law…

Formally speaking, 96 percent of Senegal’s territory belongs to the nation-state; the remainder is publicly administered plots of land or private landholdings that have already been recorded in the land registry. This “territory belonging to the nation” has no legal personality and is not a legal entity, and so by default it belongs to the Senegalese state. Accordingly, what truly matters in a legal and political sense is the interpretation of the term “belong.” Article 2 interprets it in the sense of trust in a common-law context.

In other words, Law 64-46 changes the arrangements concerning possession of land in a way that is to prove forward-looking for Senegal, for colonial law usually treated these tracts of land as the private property of the state; they were considered unused, “ownerless” areas available to the administration for whatever it chose. Today, by contrast, they are entrusted to specific local administrators and divided into four areas subject to different regulations: 1) urban land; 2) development land (zones classées); 3) land in rural areas (zones de terroirs); and 4) pioneer areas.

A substantial part of this very brief law – just seventeen articles – is concerned with these zones de terroirs that are managed by rural collectivities (communautés rurales). This is where the most references to commons are to be found. The law states that “the land in rural areas (zones de terroirs) are used by members of the local municipalities who guarantee its management and conduct it under state control (…)” (Article 8) and that the decisionmaking power for specific uses (Article 9) or setting aside land (Article 15) lies with the relevant councils of the municipality rural community in question. That is one provision that would actually have authorized self-organization among people to create and formalize a culture of the commons – had party politics not interfered. And this is where real life comes into play.

…to Real Life

Building on my first fieldwork in 1969, and making use of my contacts with the Minister of Rural Development, Ben Mady Cissé, I wanted to get to the bottom of the land-policy questions raised by the experimental implementation of Law 64-46. Following the defense of my doctoral dissertation in 1970, I actually sent my research findings to President Senghor, who unfortunately entrusted them to his Minister of the Interior Jean Colin. Colin, a former colonial civil servant, had become Senegalese by marriage. He saw my findings as a threat to his own plans to place the rural communities under government supervision (in typical French-Jacobin manner) and manage them as regional grassroots collectives (collectivités territoriales de base). The transition from the principle of self-organization to integration in a central administrative network fundamentally changed the role of the rural municipalities’ communities despite the decentralization of government power in 1972.

Commons theory usually underlines the independence of commons from both the market and the state. While markets in Senegal were at a distance from commons, the state got quite involved in land use at the local level by reducing the autonomy of rural communities. The idea of the commons was not only nonexistent as a legal concept, but any disagreements about the commons were settled – at least officially.

Yet the Senegalese people on the ground continued to take up the original reform ideas. Despite a lack of sufficient administrative procedures and overly detailed interventions by the relevant divisions, people took on responsibility for managing their own resources and rallied behind an ethic to curb the spread of private property rights. Even the powerful religious Muslim brotherhoods cooperated, which cannot be said of domestic and foreign investors. They have called for repeal of Law 64-46 since 1980. But despite all the many controversies and conflicts, the law marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2014. Amazingly, despite political, economic, and procedural ambiguities and at times radical opposition in the highest echelons of the Senegalese state, in the end a logic of the commons prevailed in practice. Was this a unique case?

Functional Rather than Institutional Logic

In 2012, I decided to attend a conference for lawyers and legal historians at the University Paris VIII-Saint-Denis on the topic, “The Resurgence of the Commons: Between Illusions and Necessities,” whose debates were later documented in a publication (Parance and Saint Victor 2014). The conference painted a much more positive picture of the commons than was discernible at first from the invitation. I developed three arguments in my presentation:

1. Our modern society has lost the experience of commons and commoning.
2. The rediscovery of the commons suggests that the paradigm of sharing is more attractive than that of exchange.
3. The rise of commons necessarily raises the question about legal pluralism.

To provide evidence for this, I referred to two different experiences: land reforms in Africa and the island states of the Indian Ocean, as well as observations about French society in both urban and rural areas.

Land Reforms and the Limits of Private Property

Putting land reform into practice is always a delicate undertaking. In the African context, it also poses conundrums, because one often must create ownership of land in the first place where previously no such ownership existed – and at times the communities involved refuse to accept its existence at all. And for good reason: they feel safer if they are protected by kinship or other relationships where they live, and not by remote civil institutions directed by people unknown to them. The world has surely changed, but not for everyone, and not in a linear fashion.

The Senegalese land reform illustrated a combination of political concerns, lobbying by international donors, and uncertainty about the dynamics of rapidly changing societies. In the end, experts seeking to set policies face a dilemma. On the one hand, there is an officially proclaimed commitment to so-called modernization at the global level, which must in no case be abandoned; and on the other hand, the resilience¹³ of communities and societies in the face of countless changes must be supported or there may be outbreaks of unprecedented violence (Appadurai 2013). If it is impossible to reject “progress” in the modern capitalist sense, then at least changes must correspond to the needs of the entire population, and not only to those of the Westernized elite. And they must recognize the limits of reproducible and sustainable “development” driven by globalization.

Even if we researchers have not understood everything over the course of these roughly thirty years, at least we have all learned a lot, in particular through activities of the Association for the Advancement of Research and Studies on the Possession of Land in Africa (APREFA)¹⁴, which I chaired from 1986 until 1996. At the time, we established a technical committee – i.e., without political decisionmaking power – on possession of land and development, within the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We sought to bring together the researchers’ expertise with diplomats and development cooperation staff who need informed analysis. The committee pursued a notion of applied research and development cooperation practice, and at the same time sought to promote interdisciplinary basic research. Here, too, the central research question was about the extent and form in which private ownership of land was to be recognized.

Our work showed that private property¹⁵ and property (as its equivalent in common law) are necessary only in contexts in which the market, organized along capitalist principles, is ubiquitous. Various intermediate forms between a lack of titles of ownership on the one hand and “absolute” property on the other, can both accommodate the needs of local producers and reduce the risk of land-grabbing. The models for dominance and control of soil and natural resources described above are based on this assumption. So are the solutions used by various communities of practice who also implement a commons logic and ethic, but whose practices have rarely been described theoretically. This, too, is a lesson arising from our work: the illusions of development, according to which everyone was to somehow become a private property owner and entrepreneur. Such narrative ideals conceal the necessary displacement of populations, the consolidation of land rents into few hands, and the decline of smaller, more locally oriented producers.

Let us remember: good governance in twenty-first century land policy should include variable configurations of private and common property, always aligned to the needs of respective groups of people on the ground. The Senegalese experience began by desiring to control the expansion of private property rights. For this purpose, the state was accorded a role that it exceeded so tremendously that it in effect eclipsed the commons as a functional and legal entity in Senegalese villages. At the same time, we must recognize the importance of different types of property, just as various kinds of commons exist. This is precisely what my experience on the Comoros has taught me since 1986.

At the time, the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) asked me to head a group of experts tasked with stabilizing land policy on the Comoros. A former French colony, the country experienced a revolutionary crisis between 1975, when it gained independence, and 1978. Among other things, this brought about the occupation of the former colonial properties, where vanilla and flowers for perfume were grown. It also resulted in all land registers being burned; entire archives were annihilated – and with them, the titles of ownership. In 1986, in an economically unstable situation and under pressure from international donors, the government was forced to clarify land policy in order to attract investors, and to do so without provoking new rounds of violence.

Since I was an expert on land rights, my job was to propose various scenarios. I outlined six options and described their potentials and limits. They ranged from “everything” (proactive and rapid expansion of private property to the entire population) to “nothing” (the government would settle for resolving the most sensitive conflicts, thus permitting local power relationships and local forms of negotiation to prevail). If, after almost thirty years, it looks like we are close to “nothing,” because no reform was ever formally put into practice, then we would be closing our eyes to the intellectual and technical revolution that permitted the functionaries of rural development to tackle the problem of land use according to the principle of inalienability that the government approved in 1987. The parliament of the Comoros was unable to fully implement the wording of the law because Hamed Abdallah, the president of the republic, was murdered in November 1989.

The future of major transnational corporations was in danger. And our challenge was now to stabilize smallholder agriculture, so that it could feed the country and guarantee the export of certain colonial goods. To do so, some innovations were necessary, for example, the enclosure¹⁶ of plant material on those lands that had previously been freely accessible and had been managed as village commons, but were used by individual families.¹⁷

In addition, technical consultants and rural technicians helped hold regular village administrative council meetings: reliable, but hardly formalized meetings of farmers and elders every Friday evening as they left the mosque. The meetings were intended to prevent problems and resolve local tensions before they developed into conflicts. The options I had presented in my legal texts were implemented in social practices because a culture of negotiation prevailed at all levels of political-administrative life, and because the notion of inalienability was favored over that of absolute property. The development consultants had two beneficial effects: they saved the government the political costs and uncertainties of land reform, and they guaranteed the citizenry a lifestyle that, although modest and often close to poverty, was more dignified than that of many of the country’s neighbors (such as Madagascar, which in 1991 had fallen back to its 1896 poverty level again).

Later on, I was to work in Madagascar, too, but only after two more assignments: the first one took me to Niger to contribute to drafting the country’s agricultural legislation (Code rural), the second to Mali, where I observed numerous legal inconsistencies concerning the possession of land. I had been tasked with helping to rescue the country’s cotton industry. All three countries – Niger, Mali and Madagascar – already had their own histories of land tenure law, so simply “copying and pasting” systems that seemed to work in other countries was unthinkable. That would have produced problems similar to those arising in the aftermath of colonialism: private ownership of land that could be used or sold for any purpose; undue state interference in property ownership; and no legal recognition of people’s traditional practices in managing land.

In Madagascar, I plunged into the so-called real economy and observed the wood energy sector. The communally managed eucalyptus plantings on the so-called tanety¹⁸ provided a livelihood for the local population. Then I expanded my research to the contractual relationships as I was interested in the substance and extent of leasehold clauses¹⁹ as well as sharecropping²⁰ and the true nature of the relevant property rights. I collaborated very closely with Alain Karsenty – a social economist working for CIRAD²¹, the French research center for international agricultural and development questions – and in 1996, I witnessed the adoption of the so-called GELOSE legislation by Madagascar’s government.

The law does not refer to “absolute property rights.” Instead, it authorizes the parties involved to negotiate resource management contracts, provided the relative security of property rights to land is guaranteed. In 2005 this step resulted in a more far-reaching land reform that permitted a trading office to be established in every municipality where so-called land certificates can be discussed and negotiated. The certificates are legally binding. They are legal documents that ensure the security of the transaction in the relevant administrative region, whereby the desire for more security naturally continues to be linked to the idea of (registered) land registry titles. The certificates provide an interesting middle course between communal management by like-minded people and land titles freely exchangeable on the market, but they are also called into question precisely for this reason. The experience in Madagascar has attracted a great deal of attention internationally, but has not been reproduced elsewhere.

Commons Re-emerge in France, Too

My other world of experience stems from the fact that since the mid-1970s, I have been thinking about how a scientific approach that up to then was exclusively Africanistic could be applied to French (or European) society. The basic idea was to establish legal anthropology, which was still an exotic field, “at home,” too, to get beyond ethnocentric perspectives. And while I was asking myself time and again what law actually was, I developed the idea to expand the fieldwork I had done in Senegal in 1969 and then in the Congo in 1972/73. I was looking for ways in which collective aspirations and communitarian practices were expressed in France – in the relationship between humans and land, and then in negotiations for managing conflicts in France’s juvenile justice system of the 1980s.

In exploring this question, I selected my own ethnic group as the object of investigation, since my cultural belonging made it easy for me to access certain pieces of information and behavior patterns; also, the people of Picardy in northern France are renowned for their consuetudinary law and I had privileged access to detailed information about a specific area within Picardy, the medieval county of Vermandois: it was genealogical material, “commonplace books,” a kind of calendar in which all economic activities, all sales and purchases, all work activities, special weather or political events, even laborers’ jokes, were recorded. The commonplace books as well as the business managers’ records provided the key to understanding how communal practices were retained in a world of farming that was increasingly subject to the capitalist market.

This world fell victim to the trenches on the Somme in 1916, which destroyed the historical legacy as well as the architecture and the landscape of the area.²² Since the eighteenth century, private property had become increasingly powerful in this region of the world. And in the nineteenth century, it continued to spread, but various social and legal practices still bore witness to common points of reference, to the obligation to “keep something jointly,” just as one “keeps company.” For example, commoning means sharing the art of hunting, the social protocols of weddings and funerals, the patronage of one’s own clients and workers, and all the traditions that express social belonging and solidarity in the face of life and death. In France as in Africa, the local agricultural milieu is rich in family relationships and professional ones. And just as in Africa, the limitations on one’s behavior that this entails are experienced and perceived intensely, but not mentioned – and certainly not to a stranger.

Pluralism is a condition for a community to function harmoniously, but this is usually not made a topic of discussion as such. My interviewees agreed in that regard, yet they had never thought about the problem of land from a pluralist perspective before! Examining the structure of ownership revealed that in the villages where I worked, everything belonged to someone. Not a single place was unowned. The land is expensive and among the best in France. Giving away even the smallest portion of land is unthinkable. And indeed there were only a few communal organizational structures in the swamp landscapes along the rivers running through the area.

Yet the physical areas devoted to specific common activities bear witness to longstanding common practices even on “private property,” e.g., playing fistball or gathering forest fruits. That was my first lesson. It was to be confirmed in the Amiénois, my own area of Picardy: a “common” function which is thus inherent and not made explicit can be superimposed on a right of ownership that is exclusive and absolute in principle. That function would then limit the exercise of this right, to the benefit of all members of a certain community insofar and as long as this function requires it. In the absence of players, for example, the fistball fields were transformed into community squares, flowerbeds, places for storing materials, and the like.²³ Functional logic triumphs over institutional logic!

These practices illustrate that notions about common space that usually remain in the dark emerge when one starts to look at common uses and the sharing of places. These notions about space are familiar in African societies, but have been forgotten here in Europe where geometrical notions about space dominate. Geometrical notions lead to the surveying and measuring of space, thus enabling people to assign an exchange value to the measure and finally to marketize what has been surveyed and measured (Le Roy 2011); social uses disappear from view. In a topocentric concept, by contrast, all spaces are identifiable by a place (location, point) that retain their own functional identities. These spaces can overlap if they fulfill different functions, and they can create borders and even territories if the functions are similar. The functions may be political, economic, religious, or otherwise. All of this characterizes how a territory is formed.

In other words, one can observe how commons with different functions overlap in a single area. At the same time, a physical space is generally assigned to concrete ownership rights according to the rules of positive law. Of course, such “layerings” of the law with various forms of control complicate the understanding of the people’s culture and their networks. After all, fundamentally speaking, as soon as we enter into the logic of the commons, some of our accustomed mechanisms for interpreting the functioning of a society and its formal regulatory authorities fail. At times, all they can do is represent information in a distorted way – or more likely, as caricatures.

I returned to Michel Alliot’s analyses (2003), in which he asserted that a community shares in three ways: areas of life, a particular type of behavior, and a decision area. This threefold sharing makes communities potentially totalitarian if the practices of sharing are not corrected by plural belongings and identities. By default, as a fact of life, we live in many worlds simultaneously, after all: family, school, political circles, professional life, sports, etc. In each of these worlds, we have a status of our own and an identity of our own. Even if societies transformed by market-oriented norms and state control no longer recognize traditional, communal, threefold sharing as a general rule, practices of sharing continues to flourish among communities comprised of people with multiple part-time identities. I call these groups “neo-communities.”

A supplement to Le Monde of April 4, 2014, on sustainable development, with the suggestive title “Betting on sharing,” took up the commons from the perspective of “alternative consumption.” Above all, it sketched the effects of carpooling and forms of living in cooperatives as promoted in France by the ALUR Act (Law on access to housing and urban redevelopment) following the German model. Journalist Marie-Béatrice Baudet commented that “customs are changing, especially among young people. That is certain, but not yet a revolution.” She quoted Remy Oughiry of the opinion research institute IPSOS: “The followers of collaborative consumption do not reject the consumer society at all. They simply want to regain control over it.” And Oughiry added, “The desire to own property remains very strong.”

Just as Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s The Bourgeois Gentleman (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) discovered that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, we have been practicing commoning through and in our common experiences that we no longer call common. After all, under the influence of neoliberalism, the concept of community has been transformed in French political debate into something negative, an antithesis to the idea of the good life and a negative buzzword in the political debate, with all the side effects that entails (Hatzfeld 2011).

As a result, we are confronted with a difficulty that I linked to an enigma in the land question at the beginning of this chapter. We participate in sharing behaviors that are often long-lasting, but are not identified as commoning. And if people try to name these behaviors, then tend to use terms like “common good,” which have a convenient semantic and political ambiguity but may in fact be undermined by the legal realities. In civil law, a good is a thing in private possession and which can be disposed of at will in any way desired, while a commons must remain intact as a collective resource and cannot be sold at will. For this reason, I will devote the final section of this essay to the legal status of the commons. In principle, this would require that new categories and legal concepts be introduced, but I will refrain from doing so due to a lack of space.

The Legality of the Commons

The commons, singular or plural²⁴, confront us with two problems: the fact that the law is silent, and yet a torrent of legal words purports to regulate what existing law cannot regulate effectively at all. This obvious contradiction requires a kind of anthropological demystification of the state of the law in order to clarify the difficulties of conventional law in managing commons.

The fact that lawyers abuse the law is explained by the very practices of their profession. Still, a majority of citizens continue to trust formal law to deal with problems that it can hardly grasp, or not at all. That is not acceptable. My anthropological experience as a researcher makes me concede that formal law, which we claim is universal in human thinking, is nothing but a construct that credibly corresponds to a particular temporal and local situation and has endured for several generations (for example, in Rome). In Europe, it is only since the seventeenth century that people have come to believe that law can take on a life of its own, largely independent of human agency and more and more specialized, finally brokering an alliance between the state and the market. Bound to political and economic power in this way, and in the course of the colonial adventures of the nineteenth century, this originally Western form of law has now spread to the entire world. Yet the rule of weapons and capital cannot make us forget that what is called “law,” and what goes hand in hand with the modern state, does not correspond to the experiences of three or four billion of our contemporaries around the world. For them, law instead triggers their mistrust and resistance.

In terms of the history of mankind, the law is only a folk law, a local interpretation of a process that is much more general. I call this process legality, or juricidité. If this legality is barely studied, it is because powerful political, economic and ideological interests prevent it. They are the same interests that do not permit the commons to be apprehended and named.

In addition, there is a problem in how to characterize law. If only the law itself is considered as autonomous (Le Roy 2009) – and if its interpreters derive normative categories from it and can treat them semantically as categories of law – then other experiences, whether they are Confucian, indigenous, Muslim, animist, or other traditions, are in principle heteronomous.²⁵ They may resemble law, but they are instead based on social traditions. Legality, by contrast, is identifiable in and through those practices that can be held legally responsible by an authority that is nominally empowered by the group itself to exercise appropriate sanctions. Legality in this sense is tautological because its grounding in social practice may or may not even exist!

This apparent lack of formal recognition of what is and is not law is deeply unsettling to European minds, especially for the Cartesian ones. For they tend to practice a kind of juridification (juridisme), to use Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) term. Bourdieu considers this a bad habit of anthropologists and others – to formulate legal rules and thus orient rules along the particular conventions of the law in cases where there is actually only habitus, i.e., material for representing structural conditions of existence, preferences that are stable over time. For this reason, it is imperative that two things be respected: on the one hand, not to consider anything to be law which is actually only a standard enacted and recognized by the state (in other words, what is called positive law); and on the other hand, to treat everything else that emerges organically from communities as an authentic product of legality as relevant phenomena: the li²⁶ and fa²⁷ of Confucianism, the Hindu Dharma,²⁸ the Muslim Fiqh²⁹ and Sharia, customs and traditions, etc. Laws belong to the legal order and are its dominant expression, but other forms of social expression and regulation have always existed as well, and will continue to unfold – in particular, forms that regulate the relationships among people in managing their shared wealth. It is precisely these practices that we need to use if we are to enable people to “be commoners” and to take paths that are secured in a different way – not purely through the legality of laws and property rights. If we think that legality offers inappropriate answers, then we must rely on innovative forms of the legal order. And it is up to us to invent them.³⁰

From the Law to Control: About Masteries for Exploring a New Legal Order

Two innovations have already been put up for discussion. I now come back here to legal dominance and control over soil and resources. The idea has taken hold that one could exercise a right to land (ius in re) or could have a claim to be allotted a plot of land or to be a creditor. It has taken hold so firmly that it is difficult to admit that this, too, is only a specific product of our way of thinking. In this way of thinking, law becomes autonomous; it is considered something independent. It is also a condition for constituting the autonomy of the individual in society. The great adventures of democracy in England, America and France are all based on important declarations of rights. Other cultural traditions tend to try and conceive of human beings as parts of complex networks in their interactions with and their obligations toward others, as well as in their ability to mobilize these networks.

In order to do justice to both approaches, I have decided to use an intercultural concept, that of maîtrise,³¹ of dominance and control, which I first define as follows:

The concept of control mastery suggests a power and a force that grants particular responsibility to those who reserve the rights to a territory more or less exclusively because they are actually affected by what happens there. The concept permits sovereignty and property to be combined – the two concepts provide a “frame” for the debate about land use (…) – by emphasizing that rights and responsibilities can arise from a concrete relationship to space [Translator’s note: Here: “land”] and that this responsibility must be retained or ensured at its core. (Le Roy 1995:489)

By taking up anthropological and intercultural aspects, this concept of control, following Catherine and Olivier Barrière, enables the establishment of “a system for managing the assets of socioecological relationships at the heart of the internal and external relationships of communities.” (Barrière & Barrière 2002:315)

This concept – as well as further clarity about the forms in which resources and their communal management are appropriated and used – enables us to evaluate what does and does not stem from a commons logic in accordance with the conventions of each group, community, or society at a particular moment in its history. As a scientific approach, this concept does not require an a priori definition of what commons are “in their essence.” Instead, it focuses our view on what people share, and it moves strategies of communal management to the center of attention.

Conclusion

Making commons come alive again in everyday life and in the economic and legal systems seems like a revolution that can be interpreted through two lenses. Is it a rediscovery of precapitalist and prestate organizational principles or is it a break with the current political order? Perhaps even this framing does not do justice to the issue. In the epilogue to their book quoted above, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval write: “Commons are the new political rationality that must replace the neoliberal rationality” (2014: 572). They regard revolution as the self-institution of society, an idea of Promethean dimensions of greatness.

I believe their most important hypothesis is summed up in the following quotation: “As a principle, commons define a norm of inappropriability. This indeed requires establishing all social relationships anew, with this idea as a starting point: Inappropriability does not mean… that it would be impossible to appropriate something, but that it is socially unacceptable to appropriate it. In other words, that appropriating something as one’s private property is not permitted because that thing is reserved for common use.” (Dardot and Laval 2014: 583) “There are no common goods; what matters is creating commons.”³²

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Alliot, Michel. 2003 [1980]. “Modèles sociétaux : les communautés,” Le droit et le service public au miroir de l’anthropologie, Paris. Karthala. S. 73-78.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2013. Condition de l’homme global. Paris: Payot.

Barrière Catherine aund Olivier. 2002. Un droit à inventer. Foncier et environnement dans le delta intérieur du Niger. (Mali), Paris. IRD.

Bollier, David, 2014. La renaissance des communs, pour une société de coopération et de partage. Paris. Éditions Charles Léopold Mayer.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “Habitus, code et codification, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 64, septembre, S. 40-44.

Dardot, Pierre aund Christian Laval. 2014. Commun, essai sur la révolution au XXI° siècle. Paris, Le Découverte.

Hatzfeld, Marc. 2011. Les lascars, une jeunesse en colère. Paris. Autrement, 2011.

Le Roy, Étienne. 1970. Système foncier et développement rural, essai d’anthropologie juridique sur la répartition des terres chez les Wolof ruraux de la zone arachidière nord, Sénégal. DiplomarbeitPH Dissertation. FDSE Paris. Ronéo.

———. 1995. “Le pastoralisme africain face aux problèmes fonciers,” Daget Philippe, Godron Michel, editors, Pastoralisme; Troupeaux, espaces, societies. Paris. Hatier AUPELF-UREF, S. 487-510.

———. (with A. Karsenty und A. Bertrand). 1996. La sécurisation foncière en Afrique, pour une gestion viable des ressources renouvelables. Paris. Karthala.

———. 1999. “Au delà de la relation public-privé, l’apparition de la notion de ‘communs’ dans les expériences actuelles de décentralisation administrative en Afrique francophone,” in Rösel Jacob und von Trotha, Trutz (Hg..), Dezentralisierung, Demokratisierung und die lokale Repräsentation des Staates. Köln, Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, S. 69-78.

———. 2009. “Autonomie du droit, hétéronomie de la juridicité.” In Sacco Rodolfo, editor, Le nuove ambizioni del sapere del giurista: anthropologica giuridica e traducttologia giuridica. Rome. Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, Atti dei convegni Lincei 253, S. 99-133.

———. 2011. La terre de l’autre, une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière. Paris, LGDJ, col. Droit et société, série anthropologie.

———. 2014 [2012]. “Sous les pavés du monologisme juridique, prolégomènes anthropologiques.” In Parance et al. 2014. S. 81-101.

Parance Béatrice. Saint Victor Jacques de, editors. 2014. Repenser les biens communs. Paris, CNRS éditions. Saïd Mahamouadou, 2009. Foncier et société aux Comores. Paris. Karthala.

Étienne Le Roy (France) is emeritus Professor of Legal Anthropology at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris 1 where he has directed the research Laboratory for Legal Anthropology of Paris from 1988 to 2007 and Curricula of African Studies, from 1993 to 2003. Since the mid-Sixties he has devoted his fieldwork to the study of land tenure systems and policies governing the appropriation of territories in Africa. Among many publications, Le jeu des lois, (Paris, LGDJ, 1999) offers his theoretical contribution to a legal “dynamic” anthropology and La terre de l’autre, une anthropologie des régimes d’appropriation foncière is the synthesis of forty years of research on land issues.

Photo by Rosmarie Voegtli

The post Patterns of Commoning: How I Have Been Conducting Research on the Commons for Thirty Years Without Knowing It appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Writing at New Economic Perspectives, Eric Tymoigne, a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute, argues that the fair price of Bitcoin is zero.

Tymoigne’s reasoning is based on the the fact that money is a financial instrument. The value of a financial instrument can come from being redeemable to its issuer, from providing an income stream or from having a collateralized value. For example US Dollars are redeemable against taxes. Bonds bear interest and stocks pay dividends. Gold coins contain gold, which can be sold as a commodity.

Since Bitcoin is not redeemable, provides no income and has no collateralized value, it is worthless as a financial instrument. Thus, its “fair price” is zero. Eric concludes that “Bitcoins are purely speculative assets.”

From the point of view of modern finance, Bitcoin is not money at all.

The inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, did set out to create a new kind of money. The very first words of the Bitcoin whitepaper state that a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

Bitcoin is intended to be money. A different kind of money. A form of money that is not a financial instrument issued by a bank or government, as Tymoigne understands it, but a form of money that is independent of financial institutions, governments and all other intermediaries.

Bitcoin is intended to be a kind of money that can be used to make payments across the internet in a way that makes government unnecessary and doesn’t reveal real names or physical locations. As such, it does not have properties that would tie it to an issuer who could redeem it, or provide a money income, or be collateralized with a physical commodity. Decentralized money can not have the properties on which Eric Tymoigne bases fair price.

The economic school most associated with the Bitcoin community is the Austrian school, especially its libertarian capitalist adherents. This school views money as being firmly rooted in what Tymoigne refers to as its collateralized value, i.e. the gold content in a gold coin, what Austrian-influenced economists call “sound money.”

While the modern finance view holds that even with gold coins, “the gold content of the coin is not a monetary instrument, and it is not what makes the coin a monetary instrument” as Tymoigne puts it, on the hand the Austrian view is that it is specifically the gold content of a gold coin that makes it money.

Frank Shostak, associated scholar of the Mises Institute, claims “An object cannot be used as money unless it already possesses an objective exchange value based on some other use.” Murray Rothbard, one of the key theorists of libertarian capitalism, states that money cannot originate “by everyone suddenly deciding to create money out of useless material, nor by government calling bits of paper ‘money.'”

Rothbard further explains that the only way money can come to exist is “by beginning with a useful commodity under barter, and then adding demand for a medium for exchange to the previous demand for direct use.”

Though inconvenient to Bitcoin proponents, it’s clear that Austrian theory would not consider Bitcoin money, since it’s a “useless material,” which never had any “value based on some other use” prior to being money. Despite this, Bitcoin’s design has been influenced by a faulty application of the Austrian theory of sound money, especially the “gold standard.”

The logic of the gold standard is that the supply of sound money, a useful commodity such as gold, determines the value of paper money issued by governments. Paper money is not a useful commodity and therefore has no intrinsic value. The government should be limited in the amount of paper money they create to the amount of gold they have. The gold standard is a proposal to have a fixed ratio between sound money, e.g. gold, and paper money.

It is not the amount that is fixed, but the ratio. Neither the amount of gold, nor the amount of paper money is fixed in the gold standard, the ratio between them is. If the government gets more gold, it should also create more paper money according to the theory, to keep the exchange value of money stable.

The Bitcoin software is programmed so that a fixed total supply will be eventually be mined, 21 million Bitcoin, and the rate at which Bitcoin is mined is also fixed. Starting at 50 BTC every 10 mins, the rate is reduced by half every four years. As of 2016 the rate of Bitcoin creation is 12.5 Bitcoins every 10 minutes, and will become 6.25 in 2020.

Bitcoin’s creators attempted to follow the reasoning of the gold standard by fixing the number of Bitcoins, understanding it to be like paper money, but as Bitcoin does not have a source of sound money to fix the supply of Bitcoin to, they just made up a wacky formula out of thin air. Essentially attempting to fix the money supply by decree, and encode that decree into Bitcoin’s software. In the Austrian view, this results in a broken digital currency that lacks a ratio to sound money.

Bitcoin can not be rational. Its face value can not be expressed as a consistent ratio with a supply of useful commodities. It is irrational by design, just like Bitcoin would have zero value from the point of view of modern finance, it would also have zero value from the point of view of Austrian theory. Both views consider the entire exchange rate of Bitcoin to be a speculative bubble, but neither can elaborate on how this bubble came to exist.

The Austrian schools of thought subscribes to the “subjective theory of value” developed by economists such as William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the late 19th century.

Without an objective measure of value, money has to be itself a thing that can be used. For value to be subjective, money has to be an object, the utility of which measures the price of all of the things priced in it. For this reason, the Austrian school can not see the forest for the trees when it comes to Bitcoin, because it can not see the obvious source of value as being the computational power used to mine Bitcoin, as Bitcoin is not directly backed or collateralized by the mining rigs and the power they consume.

The subjective theory of value was developed in opposition to the labour theory of value, especially in opposition to socialist views and the ideas of Karl Marx. However Marx’s theory of money is not rooted in redeemability, nor collateralization, nor income, nor usefulness, but rather in labour.

Ironically, while libertarian capitalist theories of money can not account for Bitcoin, Marxist theories of money can. The face value of Bitcoin represents a certain worth in terms of the labour time embedded in the computation power used to mine it. The Marxist theory of money is a Proof of Work theory.

For Marx, the value of all commodities is not subjective, but objective; all commodities have a value that is created by the labour required to produce them. The reason that money can be used as a way to express the price of other commodities is because it represents a certain amount of labour, which is also what the worth of the other commodities is based on. As Marx states in Grundrisse “1/x ounce of gold is in fact nothing more than 1/x hours of labour time materialized, objectified.”

Marx illustrates that the face value of money is a rational number. It always represents a specific ratio. In the case of gold, Marx employs the ratio between the amount of gold and the amount of labour, the work:gold ratio. The value of the total volume of gold is derived from the amount of work required to produce it.

For something to be money, it needs to have a rational value, and it is that value in which the prices of all other commodities are expressed. Money, as such, has no price, and can not.

Take for example an economy that produces apples, oranges and coconuts, you could have a table of prices that lists apples and oranges in terms of coconuts, oranges and coconuts in terms of apples, and apples and coconuts in terms of oranges. You could not have a price of apples in terms of apples, nor oranges in terms of oranges, nor coconuts in terms of coconuts, or rather that price would always be 1.

If we chose to use coconuts as money, presumably because we’re coocoo for them, how many apples are worth a coconut? How many oranges are worth a coconut? The value of the coconut is its socially necessary labour time. Say that is 10 hours. Therefor a coconut is “worth” 10 hours. Say an orange is worth 2 hours and apple is worth 5 hours, the price of the orange is 0.20 coconuts (20 cococents), and the apple is 1/2 a coconut.

As coconuts are money, more are produced than are used, since once you use it to make a chutney, you can’t spend it as money, and you can’t save it. So its original use value as food is replaced by its new use value as money.

Yet, the value of a coconut is still rooted in socially necessary labour time, like the commodities that are priced in it, this is why it can be used to compare all the other commodities, because its value is rooted in the same thing: labour.

If there are not enough coconuts for the savings needs of the economy, demand for coconuts will go up. The exchange value of coconuts will temporarily rise, but will fall back to its value as more labour is drawn into coconut production, and away from the production of the other commodities. The market regulates the value of coconuts.

Money can express the value of commodities, because both money and the commodities priced in it can be reduced to a ratio of work to supply.

While the libertarian capitalist theory is not useful in determining the value of Bitcoin, Marxist theory is. Bitcoin does not need to be backed or collateralized in any reserve of useful commodities, but instead in the labour time required to produce it. Proof of work.

The Bitcoin software employs an algorithm that increases the difficulty of the work needed as more mining capacity is added to the pool to keep the rate at the current limit that is configured in the software. This means that while the face value of Bitcoin represents a certain worth in terms of labour, this worth is not consistent. There is no fixed ratio between work and coin. More work creates more value, but instead of creating more coins with the same value each, it creates the same number of coins. Each coin has more value.

As more computational power, representing ever greater amounts of labour, is employed in Bitcoin mining, the number of Bitcoins produced does not go up, instead, the value of each Bitcoin goes up, creating a positive feedback loop. The more Bitcoin goes up, the more people are attracted to mining it, the more it goes further up.

The Bitcoin creators model Bitcoin as a kind of paper money with an arbitrarily fixed supply and therefore an irrational value, attempting to follow Austrian theory, rather than model it as a money commodity according to Marxist theory, which is regulated by the market.

While at first Bitcoin’s exchange rate was only of interest to the economy of enthusiasts who are attracted to its intrinsic decentralized features, eventually investors and speculators took notice, and Bitcoin become the purely speculative asset Tymoigne accuses it of being. The positive feedback loop quickly became a short circuit, and kick-started an asset bubble.

As the bubble grows, the capital gains from Bitcoin become larger, and exceed returns from other forms of investment. Investment portfolios will over time start to carry a larger portion of Bitcoin, squeezing out other investment options.

During a bubble, It becomes perfectly rational for investors to pay a foolish price for an asset if they are certain that it can be sold for a higher price to a greater fool. The exchange rate of Bitcoin become detached from the labour time embedded in the computational capacity of the mining pool and become underwritten instead by the supply of the greater fool.

This turns the bubble investor into a judge in a kind of a beauty contest described by Keynes as not being one where we choose the prettiest option, but where “we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.”

Like a game of betting on the answers of the contestants on Family Feud, so long as the investors believe that the average opinion expects the average opinion to be that Bitcoin will go up, Bitcoin will win the Keynesian Beauty Contest and the bubble will continue to inflate. However, the greater fool regularly has a crisis of confidence, which causes frequent crashes during the rise.

So long as exchange rate doesn’t stay below the cost of mining Bitcoin for very long, the bubble won’t pop and Bitcoin’s positive feedback loop will quickly begin to push the exchange value up again. So long as the capital gains are still better than returns on other investments, portfolio compositions will continue to shift to holding more Bitcoin.

At the same time, as long as the return on capital gains of Bitcoin are greater than real interest rates, portfolios will become more leveraged. Investors will borrow more and more, as the payment of the interest is less than the expected return from the Bitcoin exchange rate going up.

Hyman Minsky describes three kinds of investors, “hedge” investors, which have enough income to pay both the interest and principal on their loan, “speculative” investors, that can pay the interest but not the principle, and “Ponzi” investors, investors who can not pay either the principal or the interest, and depend on the assets that they own to increase in exchange value.

As returns on Bitcoin continue to be greater than other investments, Bitcoin will become a larger portion of investment portfolios, as Bitcoin does not pay interest or dividends, this means that the income of investors will go down as a result. While returns on Bitcoin are be greater than real interest rates, investors take on more and more loans. As a result, more and more investors will “go Ponzi.”

Every time there is a crisis of confidence of the greater fool, the Ponzi investors will go bust, as they can’t pay their loans, even after they sell off all their Bitcoin. As more investors go Ponzi, these will cause deeper and deeper crashes in Bitcoin, each crash will make Bitcoin a little less pretty, eventually Bitcoin will start losing the Keynesian beauty contest, perhaps to other alt-coins, perhaps to other investments completely, and the supply of the greater fool will dry up.

As the bubble bursts, Bitcoin will quickly become a toxic asset, with many holders wanting to sell, but finding few buyers. Miners will begin to abandon Bitcoin, and the positive feedback loop will begin to operate in reverse. Less miners will not mean less Bitcoin being produced, but instead the proof of work will become less difficult and the same number of Bitcoins will be produced. The value of each Bitcoin will fall. Eventually, falling to its “fair price” of zero, as Eric Tymoigne determined, or close enough to it. It will go back to simply being the in-game currency of libertarian capitalist fantasies.

The Austrian idea of money needing to be in fixed supply, drawing inspiration from “the gold standard,” is the undoing of Bitcoin. The coding of this bad idea into the Bitcoin software means, ironically, that the market can’t regulate Bitcoin. As more people invest in mining operations and the mining pool grows, the supply of Bitcoin doesn’t go up, so return on investment can’t regulate its exchange value.

Meanwhile, the bubble in the exchange rate of Bitcoin has made it useless as money. Price instability and high transaction costs have forced many vendors and payment processors who accepted it as payment to drop it as an option. This includes most of its most prominent mainstream supporters, like the digital distribution platform Steam or the payment processor Stripe.

As Bitcoin is still a relatively small part of overall investment portfolios, it’s impossible to know when exactly the bubble will burst. It’s likely that the libertarian capitalist bent of the community will actually work to delay this, as this community is a rich source of the greater fool, and probably is less likely to take on loans. We are very likely a long way away from a “Minsky Moment,” where a large number of Ponzi investors going bust causes a meltdown.

Not only has Bitcoin failed as money, but the asset bubble it has created has diverted investment from real production of goods to speculation, and the mining process consumes a phenomenal amount of energy, with catastrophic environmental effects. Meanwhile, it has done nothing in terms making the economy more fair or reducing the power of either governments, banks or any of the intermediaries it was meant to displace. There is no question that Bitcoin is a failure, a rather disastrous one, even if some speculators have been spectacularly enriched by it.

If there is value in the original vision of Bitcoin, to have a form of money that can be used to make payments across the internet in a way that makes government unnecessary and doesn’t reveal real names or physical location, it needs to be programmed differently. Such a currency would need to work in such a way that the supply of the currency increases when more mining capacity is added to the pool. This allows the market to regulate its exchange value by the natural increase and decrease of investment in mining relative to demand for the currency.

It is possible to create a cyptocurrency with a with a stable value by simply eliminating the feedback loop, creating a rational cryptocurrency with a consistent work:coin ratio. Bitcoin could be made rational by increasing and decreasing the number of Bitcoins produced per block along with the increase and decrease of the difficulty of the proof of work. This way, the number of Bitcoins produced would scale in proportion with the investment in mining.

However, there may not be much interest in doing this. As miners would need to choose to use their hashing power to make a standard rate of profit mining the rational cryptocurrency instead of chasing speculative returns by mining bubble-prone, intentionally irrational cryptocurrencies. Another obstacle would be get attention for it, as a rational cryptocurrency would not attract hype, because it would not have fantastically skyrocketing exchange rates.

Bitcoin was intended to be digital money for an ideal perfect market for libertarian capitalists, instead Bitcoin has turned out to primarily benefit bankers and speculators at the expense of the environment and the real economy.

For any that remain committed to the original vision of Bitcoin, a decentralized money that one could use with out revealing their real name and location, the path forward lies in creating a rational cryptocurrency, based on the Marxist and not the Austrian theory of money.

Yet, even with a rational cryptocurrency, it is unlikely to play a major role in the global monetary economy, given that governments are not constrained by reserves, crypto or otherwise. Even with a “gold standard” governments can still spend more by securitizing future tax obligations. Banks are likewise constrained only by qualified demand for their loans, not their own reserves. This means that the money in the global economy will remain government and bank money at the macro level.

Even if a rational cryptocurrency can not play the sort of revolutionary role that animates the dreams of libertarian capitalists, it can still provide a payment option that is international, convenient and privacy respecting, which remains worthwhile.

However, the institutions that would most likely create a rational cryptocurrency would be the banks or a fintech startup seeking to disrupt payment processing. While hardly heralding in a libertarian capitalist paradise, this would certainly be a better use of work than the misguided and harmful bubble Bitcoin is today.

Photo by zcopley

The post The Face Value of Bitcoin: Proof of Work and the Labour Theory of Value appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This book should be read through to its end, i.e. chapter five, because its first four chapters on the precariat are only set in a more complex geopolitical context in that final chapter. To be honest, I was quite reactive at times during the reading of the first four chapters, because two very important structural elements were missing in Foti’s analysis. First is the commons itself, the other side of the antagonistic struggles of the precariat; and second is the ecological crisis, the very material conditions under which this struggle must occur today. Foti indeed calls for economic and monetary growth, and sounds like an unabashed neo-Keynesian, but only in the last chapter does he stress that this growth should be thermodynamically sound (i.e. he calls for monetary growth, but not growth in material services). Foti also almost completely ignores the role of the commons and ‘commonalism’ in the first four chapters, only acknowledging in a few parts of chapter 5, that it is a vital, constituent part of the precarious condition. If you don’t read chapter 5, you could mistakenly see Foti’s analysis as an exercise in re-imagining the class dynamics and compromises of the New Deal and post-WWII European welfare states, simply replacing working class with precariat, working class parties with social populism, and the New Deal with a social compact for green capitalism. For example, it would have really helped to know from the beginning that Foti realizes that material growth is impossible, something not clear in his language until the last chapter.

So, the fact that this is a remarkably well thought-out book about contemporary strategy for social change should be tempered by a few paradoxes that the author has not completely resolved.

Indeed, at the heart of the book also lies an enduring paradox: Foti calls for the most radical forms of conflict, and identifies with the more radical cultural minorities, acknowledging their anticapitalist and anarchist ethos, yet calls for mere reformism as a focus and outcome. This is, therefore, not a book about transforming our societies to post-capitalist logics; this is a book about a new reformism. This is a book against neoliberalism, not against capitalism. At times, it is plain ‘capitalist realism’, as Foti explicitly acknowledges that he sees no dynamic value creation outside of capitalism. For Foti, it is clear that if sufficient conflict and precariat self-organisation can occur, then a new regulation of capitalism can occur. He justifies this by a detailed analysis of the different regulatory modes of capitalism (Smith-ism, Fordism, jobs-ism) and how they relate to the Kondratieff economic cycles, drawing on the insights of Carlota Perez and others. Foti distinguishes crises of demand, where there is too much accumulation of capital, and not enough distribution. These crises, he says, are essentially reformist crises as people mobilize to restore balance in the redistribution, but not against the system per se. The crisis of the 30s and the crisis after 2008 are such crises, he convincingly argues. Other crises are caused by a failing supply, due to over-regulation of capital and falling profit rates, such as the crisis of the 70s, and these crises, which are inflationary, are revolutionary. This distinction between crises of accumulation and crises of regulation is, in my opinion, very insightful and true. This recognition may, of course, be troubling, but if true, we must take serious stock of it. We simply are not in revolutionary times right now, but rather in a struggle between national populism and social populism. From this analysis, Foti then argues that the first priority is for the precariat to re-regulate for a distribution of wealth, much like the old working class achieved after WWII.

But even if we acknowledge this conjuncture, I would argue that Foti insufficiently balances his outlook between reforming capitalism and constructing post-capitalism, between antagonistic conflict and positive construction of the new. He argues that without income, there can be no such construction. This is very likely true, so we need to rebalance redistribution in a way that income growth can lead to immaterial growth compatible with the ecological limits of our planet, and use these surpluses to transform societal structures. Foti calls for social (or ‘eco’ populist) movements and coalitions as the political means to that end, pointing to Podemos and En Comu, and perhaps Sanders and Corbyn, as such forces, supported by to-be created Precariat Syndicates. He also puts forward the thesis that the enemy is national populism, an alliance between retrograde fossil fuel capitalism and the salariat. On the other side, we find a possible alliance of green capitalism (a real effort, not a marketing ploy) with the precariat, with the former fighting for top-down coalition and the second for bottom-up regulation. This division of the working class is, in my view, far too stark and perhaps even defeatist. I would very strongly argue to seek alliances and develop policies that can give hope to the salariat. The thrust of our work for the Commons Transition aims at precisely that. (Elsewhere in the book, Foti does call for an alliance with progressive middle classes, but if these are not the workers with jobs, where then are these?)

Foti correctly critiques, in my view, people like Mason and Rifkin for failing to problematize the post-capitalist transition. They make it seem like an inexorable process if not affirming that we are already post-capitalist, as some others do, but in my view, Foti himself fails to pay proper attention to this transition. What if the re-regulation of capitalism doesn’t work, for example? Then at some point, say in about 30 years, as Kondratieff cycles would indicate, we would still face a crisis of over-regulation, and a more revolutionary moment. For Foti, we have to take it on faith that green capitalism will be a successful new regulatory mode of capitalism. What if it turns out to be a unworkable compromise and that more drastic action is needed? But Foti has no faith in alternatives to capitalism, which means that the only alternatives would then be eco-fascism as a new feudalism with only consumption for the rich, lifeboat eco-hacking, a situation akin to that of medieval communes, or dictatorial eco-maoism — say, Cuba on a global scale.

Contra this ‘capitalist realism’, our contention at the P2P Foundation is that post-capitalism is both necessary and possible, even if we recognize that today is possibly a reformist moment in that evolution/transformation. In that context, the construction of seed forms, the recognition of other forms of value creation (which can be monetized!), of other forms of self-organization, are absolutely a vital side of the coin in the dialectic of construction and conflict. Foti seems to forget that the traditional working class did not simply ‘fight’, but constructed cooperatives (both consumer coops and producer coops), unions, parties, mutualities and many fraternal/sororal organizations. The very generalization of the welfare system was an extension, by means of the state, of the solidarity mechanisms of the working class, which had taken decades to develop. But vitally, the identity of the working class itself was always more than a mere reaction to capitalism: this was a movement toward another type of society, whether expressed through socialism, social-democracy, anarchism, and other variants. When that hope was all but lost, that was also the end of the strength and identity of working class movements. There can be no offensive social strategy without a strong social imaginary, and reformist designs alone won’t do. So commonalism (Foti’s term for what we’d call “commoning”) is not just something that we do when we come home from work, or tired from our conflictual organizing against an enemy from whom we want mere redistribution. On the contrary, it is vital part of the class formation and identity. This is why we stress our identity as not just precariat, which is a negative formulation that characterizes us as the weaker victims of the capitalist class, but as commoners, the multitude of co-constructors of viable futures that correspond to contemporary, emancipatory desires. We cannot simply trust green capitalism; we vitally need to build thermodynamically sound and mutualized provisioning systems as commons, even if we have to compromise with capitalism. Post-capitalism should not be essentialized as something occuring ‘after the revolution’, but as an ongoing process, dynamically inter-linked with political self-organizing and conflict.  In this book, Foti is only really good at conflict. Even if we look at conflict, I would argue that the strength of the reformist compromise after WWII was very much linked to the fear of the flawed alternative that existed, and that the forms of compromise were the result of decades of invention of new forms.

If we take that view, then I believe the contradiction in Foti’s book can be resolved. In that case, we do not have to ask the radical precariat to give up its values for a reformist compromise, but to productively combine them with a radically transformative post-capitalist practice.

There is another issue with Foti’s book. He strongly stresses the superdiversity of the precariat, and the key role of gender and race/migration unity in their struggles. He also mentions en passe the need for a potential Eurasian alignment between Europe and China, now that the Atlantic unity has been broken by Trump. But, at the same time, this is really a very Eurocentric book, calling for a new compromise in Europe and ‘advanced western states’. Obviously, since in the Global South it is the salariat and proletariat which are growing, there is a theoretical difficulty here. But what if, as we contend at the P2P Foundation, a thermodynamically sound economy would require a cosmo-localization of our global economy combining global sharing of knowledge with substantial relocalization of physical production (as even big bank reports now recognize)? Only if we acknowledge this, can we actually have a new global view of solidarity, as both elements benefit workers, salaried and precarious, in the whole world.

In conclusion, I find Foti’s book to be an excellent first half of a book, which would have been much better and sound if it had more extensively struggled with the commons equation of the precariat. The commons is not something we do ‘afterwards’, after a successful New Green Deal; it is something that is as ongoing and vital. Theoretically, in a few paragraphs at the end of the book, Foti seems to recognize this but does not integrate it in his strategic vision, or only marginally.

Readers who miss this aspect could look at the ten years of research and analysis the P2P Foundation has conducted on that other half of the equation. However, we may suffer from the other weakness. We have intentionally not focused on the conflict part — the natural inclination of the left, which needs no help. Instead, we focus on showing how the self-organization and construction of commons (which inevitably comes with conflict) is just as essential a part of the programmatic alternatives of the precariat. Not only as proposals of electoral parties and syndicates, but as expressions of actual practice. Our orientation is to try to achieve a greater understanding by emancipatory forces — of the salariat, the precariat, and progressive entrepreneurial groups — of the importance of integrating the commons as a programmatic element in their struggles and proposals. We will probably retain our bias towards the constructive side of the equation, fully aware that this alone is insufficient, and requires the kind of understanding of struggle and its attendant strategies as provided by Foti.

In conclusion, Foti’s enduring quality is to have systematically worked out what the conflict part of the equation entails, and that is a very important achievement. Bearing in mind what we think is missing in this book, there is nonetheless much to be learned. I believe that among the different perspectives and weaknesses in the approaches of people like Foti and the commons-centric approaches of the P2P Foundation (and others), there is ample room for convergence and mutual enrichment.

Photo by Andrew Gustar

The post A P2P review of Alex Foti’s General Theory of the Precariat appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description

“From the fast-food industry to the sharing economy, precarious work has become the norm in contemporary capitalism, like the anti-globalization movement predicted it would. . It investigates the political economy of precarity and the historical sociology of the precariat, and discusses movements of precarious youth against oligopoly and oligarchy in Europe, America, and East Asia. Foti covers the three fundamental dates of recent history: the financial crisis of 2008, the political revolutions of 2011, and the national-populist backlash of 2016, to presents his class theory of the precariat and the ideologies of left-populist movements. Building a theory of capitalist crisis to understand the aftermath of the Great Recession, he outlines political scenarios where the precariat can successfully fight for emancipation, and reverse inequality and environmental destruction. Written by the activist who put precarity on the map of radical thinking, this is the first work proposing a complete theory of the precariat in its actuality and potentiality.” (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/just-out-alex-fotis-general-theory-precariat-geert-lovink/)

About the author

Alex Foti is an editor, essayist and activist based in Milano. He was among the founders of ChainWorkers and EuroMayDay, early instances of the self-organization of precarious workers in Europe. Trained in economics, sociology, and history at Bocconi, the New School and Columbia, he has written several articles and books, including Anarchy in the EU: Grande Recessione e movi.menti pink, black, green in Europa (2009).

Excerpt

Precarious Labor and Autonomous Marxism

In a literal sense, the precariousness of labor has existed since the dawn of steam-powered, industrial capitalism. Karl Marx addresses the issue in the first volume of Das Kapital,38 when he discusses the reserve army of labor. He described how the wage demands of the factory-bound proletariat were kept in check by the precariousness of labor demand, due to the irregular, crisis-prone process of capital accumulation (i.e. investment). If laborers didn’t organize, unchecked exploitation and misery would befall those working in the mills and fields. However, below the proletariat in the socio-economic hierarchy was the lumpenproletariat, whom Marx wrongly despised (and Bakunin eulogized): thieves and other petty criminals, prostitutes, tramps, vagrants, etc. The lumpenproletariat made up a reserve army of potential replacement laborers, keeping those in the factories in line, and keeping wages low.

A temporary workforce is a permanent feature of certain industries, exemplified by seasonal workers in sweatshops, and laborers in commercial agriculture. In this respect, things have not changed much since the 19th century. Informal labor remains the norm in emergent and developing economies. However, the recent swelling of the precariat is a symptom of a troubling return to informal labor markets inside the relatively wealthy societies of advanced capitalism.

While contingent labor has always existed in capitalist societies, Italian Autonomous Marxism was the first to argue that precarious labor had moved from the peripheral position it occupied under keynesian, industrial capitalism, to a core position in neoliberal, informational capitalism. Negri and others argue that informational capitalism − the current technological and social paradigm, according to Manuel Castells’ seminal work of social theory The Information Age

is based on casual, affective, creative, immaterial, and precarious labor.

However, a theory of the precariat is not immediately able to slot into the world as understood by Autonomous Marxism. The precariat comprises of two categories of workers with very differ- ent levels of skill and education: pink-collars working in retail and low-end services (cashiers, cleaners, janitors, cooks, waiters, etc.) under constrictive but standardized employment norms, and the digital creative class (editors, graphic artists, programmers, etc.) who are temping, sometimes at high wage rates, in the information economy connecting the world’s major cities. Furthermore, the precariat is also a plurality of young people of different genders, different classes, and different ethnicities.

Aside from Autonomous Marxism, contemporary Marxist thought tends to discount the notion that this precarious plurality constitutes an analogue of the 20th century working class; there might be precarity, but there’s no precariat. At most, they make up a section of the working class. I deny this. The precariat is the successor of the working class, emerging from the new form of informational neoliberalism expanded and radicalized in the crucible of the Great Recession. The precariat is a generation becoming a class. It has become a new historical subject, and is the only subject capable of progressive collective agency; it’s the precariat that both performs general labor, and constitutes the general intellect (to use Marx’s terms). The precarious have their identity based on exclusion from social status, rather than on nationalist, or cultural norms. The centrality of the service precariat for 21st century capitalist accumulation is equivalent to the role played by the industrial proletariat in determining the fortunes of 20th century capitalism.

Autonomous Marxism, as elaborated by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno and others, places the revolutionary agency of the exploited subject at the center of philosophical analysis. After the defeat of the 1968-1979 insurgency of the western working class,40 the theorists of operaismo (workerism) turned to focus on urban movements, as well as emerging forms of service and intellectual labor, as a new Post-Fordist, digital economy was consolidating out of the ashes of industrial Fordism. In the work of Negri especially, this position is made clear: the precariat must be radicalized, in order for the multitude to cast off the dominating weight of imperial structures. It is within the relative obscurity of this intellectual tradition that the radical theory of precarity was forged in the 00s, centered around Milan, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, and Liège.

To summarize my previous point differently: the new digital capitalist class is confronted by a multitude of young precarious workers. It is the precariat’s labor, communication, and distribution that is making internet billionaires rich beyond imagination. The oligopolists have long acted jointly to protect their class interests (low taxes, low wages, etc.). However, the time has come for the precarious to act as class, and work with their collective interest in mind. It is time to cut into profits and end income insecurity. Just as Henry Ford needed to be buried for Fordism to rise, not only Steve Jobs, but also his free-market ideology, needs to die for Jobsism to rise. Although in vastly different technosocial paradigms (industrialism and informationalism, respectively), the implications of the Fordist and Jobsian compromises are the same regarding regulation: let workers share the bounty of productivity, either individually in the form of wages, or socially in the form of welfare, else risk economic crisis and class warfare. If an egalitarian solution to capitalist crisis was found against National Socialism in the last century, it can also be found against national populism in this century. Capitalism can be reformed. It has been reformed before, during the Belle Époque, and again after World War Two. However, today we need a simultaneous revision of both social and ecological regulation of capitalism. Social regulation has been experimented before with success, yet ecological regulation has not. If we consider Piketty’s laws of capitalist motion valid, and I think any thinking left-leaning individual should, then growth must be restarted, so that it can jump above the profit rate, and reduce capital-labor disparity. However, this ‘red’ (social) objective is posed to clash with the ‘green’ (environmental) objective, since additional growth would lead to even greater carbon emissions, pushing the planet further towards environmental chaos.41

Of course, anti-capitalists of all tendencies will just question why we don’t simply ditch capitalism instead. My answer to them is that capitalism makes innovation and mate- rial progress possible in ways that state communism has been unable to deliver at any latitude, even under well-meaning leaderships like those of the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere. Communism simply doesn’t work as an eco- nomic system; look at what China accomplished when it switched from Mao Zedong’s communism to Deng Xiaoping’s capitalism. Immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s GDP was still larger than China’s, at exchange rates reflecting purchas- ing power parities. By 2016, China’s GDP was more than five times larger that Russia’s (536% larger), making the country the workshop of the world, pulling hundreds of mil- lions out of poverty. It is hard to argue with these facts. Although the Communist party officially retained power in spite of the Tiananmen Square student rebellion, the lives of over one billion people were drastically improved by market reform: the rate of extreme poverty in China went from almost 90% in 1980, to less than 2% in 2013 (World Bank data). China’s might be state-controlled capitalism, but it’s capitalism nonetheless. In light of this, I do not see a viable economic alternative that can replace firms and markets. To adopt an effective, populist strategy, the instinctive anti-capitalism of the precariat must be of the transformative kind: changing both the state, and market institutions, in order to achieve social and ecological regulation of capital, abolishing the dictatorship of global finance, and expanding the domain of commons-based peer production, as an alternative to both state and market production.

Evaluation

Michel Bauwens: (a very provisional evaluation after reading the first 40 pages, roughly ch. 1 and 2)

I’m currently reading the book, and there are some surprising aspects to it:

• the author sees the precariat as a ‘class in formation’

• the author advocates a reformist outcome within capitalism, i.e. a new regulation of capitalism but calls for growth to allow for redistribution, recognizing that this may class with green objectives

• he calls for an alliance of the precariat and the underclass against the traditional working class seen as allied to national-populism (he calls for social populism as an alternative)

• there is relative little connection to be seen in this book between the precariat and commoning/commons, though Foti calls for expanding commons-based peer production within a capitalist reformation process and with CBPP seen as distinct from market and state production.

Discussion

Reading notes by Giorgos Anadiotis: “I found the book to be a step in the right direction, as it focuses on the class with the most potential of driving social change, and does so under the lens of class-conscious analysis, which is sorely needed. I have however also found some things i am skeptical about, and some others that i find clearly flawed.

To start with the positives, Foti’s background in economics and involvement in grass-roots politics shows. To his credit, unlike many of his counterparts his style makes the book both accessible and interesting. His analysis of modern capitalism and the strata of the precariat is to the point, as well as the critique on the traditional left and its unions.

However, some of the book’s premises, as well as the ending and conclusions were somewhat lacking to say the least.

I am extremely wary of approaches that border on identity politics. Foti himself has some words of warning against that, but he seems imo to cross that border too. He does for example mention queer and feminist movements as possible actors of change. While i am all for emancipation and sympathetic to such causes, i am yet to find elements of radicality in such movements. Liberal capitalism gladly embraces those.

Perhaps he knows something i don’t, but citing for example a Women’s Strike in March 2017 as a sign of mobilization and radicalization does not make sense. This was largely unnoticed and unaffective (never heard of it before), reported only by Vogue. I understand his point was mostly the trans-national nature of the organization, and we all need to see hope where we can, but this seems way far fetched.

His overall reformist and EU-centric views are also something i am not really comfortable with. While i do see their pragmatism and the need for broad alliances, i think these can only be used as stepping stones towards more radical approaches. History shows that ambivalence, half-baked attempts and the logic of “lesser evil” do not really serve well in the long run if left to their own devices.

Foti for example speaks of free trade as alternative to war, which is true to some extent. But he does in this context also speak of the invalidation of treaties such as NAFTA TTIP and the like by Trump as a setback, without a word of critique on the treaties themselves. If you know anything about the treaties or the way they are negotiated and enforced, this is deeply problematic.

As for the EU, i find his thesis of defending and preserving it problematic too, both from an ideological and a pragmatic POV. While the EU is certainly the most progressive-looking among state apparatuses today, you don’t have to dig too deep to find its true nature. That has justifiably got it a bad name, which the nationalist populists are riding on, and a movement that would associate itself with the EU has no chance of appealing to the disenfranchised.

While i am all for internationalism, a union of europeans would have to be reinvented and rebranded to stand any chance of success. Hoping to simply capture the deeply flawed and malfunctioning cross-state apparatus that is the EU and fix it from within, while not breaking with its practices and trademarks is a doomed strategy imho. Just look how that worked for Syriza – been trying to make that point forever, sorry to see it proven.

But the most serious flaw i see is the assesment of the precariat’s position and leverage as referred to in the final part of the book. The claim there is that the precariat owns the means of production (smartphones, laptops etc), therefore if it becomes a class per se and claims its role in the productive process it can interfere with it and influence things.

“In a networked information economy, it is the precarious, not the capitalists, that control the strategic means of production – the computing power of connected smartphones and PCs – and enable the production and distribution of information, culture, and knowledge, through networks which are making the age of mass media obsolete”.

Wishful thinking at best, but flawed and dangerous. This is hard to explain for someone who has otherwise been so diligent in his economic analysis and classification of different sub-layers of the precariat in previous parts of the book. It’s certainly not true for the service precariat or platform users. It’s not even worth analyzing how (most) Amazon or Wal-Mart workers have nothing to do with this.

Uber or Foodora drivers may be owners of their vehicles for example, but what really makes the wheels turn are the platforms (algorithms and data) and they have no access to those. That is not to say they are powerless and they should not unionize etc, but it’s an important distinction.

Similarly, social media users do not directly produce value for the platforms, they mainly act as a target audience for advertisers. Fleeing en masse would put pressure on the platforms, data sovereignity and control issues can and should be raised, but it makes no sense to classify this as a traditional employer – employee relationship and this heterogenous crowd has very little potential for common awareness and action.

The only part of the precariat for which this somewhat applies is the cognitive precariat. Software and data engineers, content creators, artists etc are indeed the owners of the means of production since in that case production is mostly cognitive and digital.

Even they however they have no ownership of the networks required to distribute and run their products en masse (cloud and web platforms) and they must either pay (both money and skills-time) to use them, or rely on one-off contracts without redistribution, hence non scalable.” (https://www.facebook.com/ganadiotis/posts/10159815548640322?)

Photo by Keturah Stickann

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Once we recognise that capitalism itself is diverse, however, we may find that there are some forms of it, suitably regulated, that make a positive contribution overall to our well-being. Given this possibility, we can no longer simply dismiss all capitalism on the grounds of Marx’s spurious theory of exploitation. Instead of applying the formulaic dogma of Marx’s labour theory of value, we need to evaluate forms of capitalism by identifying their real tendencies and assessing their actual effects against explicitly stated and justified ethical standards.

Excerpted from Dave Elder-Vass:

“We could change our economy by progressively altering the mix of economic forms, steadily reducing the more harmful forms of capitalism and building more human forms of economy alongside. Indeed, it is only if we do build alternatives alongside capitalism that viable alternative economic futures can be developed, and we should welcome the work of thinkers like Erik Olin Wright and Yochai Benkler who are examining some of the ways in which this could occur.

On the other hand, however, this optimism must be qualified. As we have seen, alternative appropriative practices can themselves be entangled in capitalist forms, and ultimately the viability of alternative forms will depend not only on growing them within our existing economy but also on finding ways to criticise and curtail the role of capitalist appropriative practices. Capitalism, despite being only part of our contemporary economy, is still capable of generating massive harms – notably extreme exploitation, alienation, inequality, massive distortions in the use of resources, environmental damage and support for oppressive political regimes. It is still backed by enormous political and discursive power, and it constantly tends to subvert alternatives to its thirst for profit.

Once we recognise that capitalism itself is diverse, however, we may find that there are some forms of it, suitably regulated, that make a positive contribution overall to our well-being. Given this possibility, we can no longer simply dismiss all capitalism on the grounds of Marx’s spurious theory of exploitation. Instead of applying the formulaic dogma of Marx’s labour theory of value, we need to evaluate forms of capitalism by identifying their real tendencies and assessing their actual effects against explicitly stated and justified ethical standards. When we do so I believe we will find, for example, that forms of capitalism that rest on the provision of free content by users are considerably less harmful than those that rest on the extraction of minerals by slave labourers in Africa (Fuchs, 2014, pp. 172–81) and those that rest on the creation of unstable financial assets. These forms can be separated. They are not all parts of one monolith, and they should be treated differently: lightly regulated, heavily regulated or abolished entirely depending upon their impact on human flourishing.

Alongside the less harmful remnants of the capitalist economy, we need to support the development of other forms. The state has an important continuing role to play in the provision of essential services that are made available to all irrespective of their ability to afford them, and in the provision of public goods that we all benefit from. Non-capitalist commodity forms should also continue to be important: family businesses and co-operatives, for example. But the gift economy, particularly if we include large parts of the household economy, is already as important as these, and the digital gift economy is particularly promising. As we have seen, the gift economy is particularly suited to the distribution of digital goods, with their trivial marginal costs, and innovative forms of collaborative production have flourished there, with benefits not only for the users but also for the creators of the content that they share.

Nevertheless, there are also good reasons to restrain claims for the potential of the digital gift economy. One limitation arises from the same factors that give the digital gift economy its advantages: virtually costless distribution of gifts that entails no sacrifice by the donor is only a characteristic of digital information goods. There is little reason to believe that similar economic processes might roll back the non-digital market economy in the way that the open-source movement has generated a tendency for the decommodification of software. Indeed, the digital gift economy itself clearly depends on other sectors of the economy that are currently dominated by the market: for example, the hardware and networks that make the digital gift economy possible are themselves physical products created in the commercial economy, and independent programmers that contribute to open-source software must have other sources of income to support them, which are often derived from the commercial economy (Barbrook, 2005).

Certain elements of the digital gift economy also face attempts at outright suppression by government, acting in the interests of pre-digital media corporations. Most notably, governments have been persuaded by lobbyists for these corporations to extend copyright protection in an attempt to prevent the free distribution of vast amounts of digital media products (Gillespie, 2007, chapter 4; Lessig, 2004). Open-source software seems likely to escape this, partly because of some clever work on copyleft licensing, but perhaps more so, ironically, because of the many ways in which it has become embedded in commercial business. Many IT businesses have found ways to make money out of open-source software, and at least some major open-source software products are predominantly developed at the expense of such companies (Elder-Vass, 2015c). But this is only half of the picture: we must also recognise that commercial companies are amongst the largest beneficiaries of the financial savings that arise from using free open-source software – these savings are a major reason for the massive ‘market’ shares of products like Linux and Apache.

Such entanglements warrant scepticism towards suggestions in the literature that phenomena like open-source software herald the replacement of capitalism (Berry, 2008, p. 98). But once we recognise the diversity of the economy, we no longer need all-or-nothing alternatives to capitalism. The issue we face is not a choice between a gift economy and a commodity economy; the issues are how much of the economy will take a gift form, what kinds of gift form, how much will take a commodity form and what kinds of commodity form.

Let me end… by asking what role a book like this can play in advancing such changes. Books alone do not change the world; any impact they might have depends upon influencing people, and movements of people, but where are the movements that might back a progressive shift towards a gift economy? Part of the problem we confront is what David Harvey calls a ‘double blockage’: ‘the lack of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative’ (D. Harvey, 2011, p. 227). As Harvey rightly says, the solution to this double blockage is inevitably iterative: the relation between these two absences ‘has to be turned into a spiral’ (D. Harvey, 2011, p. 227).

That spiral is already in progress, though its overall direction is uncertain. There are already movements working towards aims compatible with the ideas expressed in this book, for example Green parties, the Occupy movement, many of the groups that combine in the World Social Forum, and the movements against austerity policies in Europe. And there are already huge numbers of people participating in gift forms of economy. Though many of them do not even recognise that they are forms of economy, these are people who could be persuaded to back further growth of these forms. There are already, too, writers expressing ideas that complement those in this book, for example those who have contributed to the Convivialist Manifesto (Clarke, 2014), and those whose work is collected in The Human Economy (Hart et al., 2010). This book and the political economy of practices that it advocates are, at best, another turn of the spiral, one that encourages a more open but more realistic alternative vision of a future that could enable more of us to flourish rather than being subjected to a logic of pointless accumulation that ultimately benefits no-one.

We cannot know exactly what kind of economy and what kind of society this will lead us to, not least because there is no end point and no single overriding logic to social development but rather a continuing process of change in a fundamentally open system. The mix of economic forms within that system will inevitably develop in response to emerging possibilities but it is up to us, collectively, to find ways to encourage those forms that seem most beneficial for all human beings in the light of ethical debate. We will only be able to engage productively in such a process by abandoning monolithic visions of nirvana and working instead towards multiple partial real utopias. This is not a step backwards but a step forwards for progressive politics: we must reject the dogmas of both of the old political economies and instead engage creatively with our diverse economy and its open future.”

[This post reproduces text from pages 228-232 of Elder-Vass, D. (2016) Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge UP.]

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