The only caveat from the P2P Foundation point of view is that, it still assumes that capitalism is the only system that creates value, but counter-balanced by investments of the state in the human economy. What is still lacking is an understanding of how the commons itself is a value creation engine, that needs to be recognized.

See our own approach via our report: Value in the Commons Economy.

And without further ado, here is …

Marc Saxer:

Ever since the Second Industrial Revolution petered out, global capitalism has faced a demand crisis. If you think that all we need now is to stop austerity and spend our way out of the crisis, think again. Over the past few decades, developed economies were kept alive through artificially created demand. The inflation of the 1970s, the public debt of the 1980s, the private debt of the 1990s and the quantitative easing of the 2000s were all strategies to inject future resources for present consumption. Even if the dystopian vision of a world without work does not come true, workers’ waning consumer power can no longer fuel growth. This means progressive hopes for a Keynesian revival or a return to Fordism are misguided.

Progressives must find new answers to the challenges posed by the digital revolution. In a global economy, rejecting technological innovation is not an option. But the new technologies should also be embraced in their own right: the automation of dirty, dangerous, physically demanding tasks is set to improve workplace safety and satisfaction.

Yet, digital capitalism is ripe with potentially fatal contradictions. Mass un- and underemployment could aggravate the demand problem to a point where the world economy implodes. If digital automation continues to threaten the security and dignity of the majority population, the current revolt against globalism will only be a small foretaste of what is to come.

What we need is a new development model for the digital age. Front and centre of this new model must be the need to create decent livelihoods. Our best chance to create decent livelihoods in the digital age is the Human Economy.

The Human Economy is composed of two interwoven economies. The digital capitalist economy, which generates the surplus needed to remunerate work for the common good. And the human commons, which creates the consumption demand needed to keep the digital capitalist economy going.

Decent jobs: Make the workforce fit for the digital economy

In the digital economy, entrepreneurs will hire humans to perform new tasks. Human work also continues to be in demand in the service industries, from tourism to entertainment, from design to fashion, from food to arts and crafts and from research to development. To realise this potential for decent human jobs, the skills of the workforce will have to be permanently upgraded.

Decent livelihoods: Remunerate work for the human commons

The human economy needs to be built around the recognition of human contributions to the common good. Millions of livelihoods could be generated in the human commons, from health services to elderly care, from child raising to education, from providing security to generating knowledge. However, many of these tasks, which are beneficial for society, do not generate enough income in the capitalist economy. In order to create decent livelihoods, remuneration mechanisms for these tasks must be created.

Five policies to bring about the Human Economy

1. Level the playing field for human work. Under fair conditions, there is still a need for humans to work together with Artificial Intelligence, robots, and algorithms. By shifting the tax burden from labour to capital, the playing field can be levelled for human workers. We need to explore how robots and data can be taxed with the aim of delaying the rationalization of work until new livelihoods are created.
2. Invest in full capabilities for all. Humans excel at communication and social interaction, creativity and innovation, experience and judgement, leadership and foresight, flexibility and learning. Harnessing these talents is the industrial policy of the Human Economy. To fully explore human talents, our education systems need to be fundamentally overhauled. To allow for the necessary public investment in public goods, the austerity paradigm must be reversed.
3. Boost consumption demand through basic income. The debate over the best way to boost consumption demand has sparked the first political battle of the digital age. The opposing camps in the debate over basic income run counter to the left-right formation characteristic of the industrial society. On one side, Silicon Valley techies who seek to boost consumption demand, Davos billionaires who fear the coming of the pitchforks, neoliberals who want to cut back the welfare state, corruption fighters who seek to cut out the middleman, and Marxists who dream of the end of alienating work in the leisure society; on the other, unions who defend their role in collective bargaining, socialists who smell a Trojan horse to do away with social security, economists who warn against moral hazard and social justice advocates who fear social exclusion. As the debate shows, the usefulness of basic income schemes will depend on their design, and many alternative approaches are being introduced. The Institute for the Future calls for Universal Basic Assets, e.g. entitlements to open source assets such as housing, healthcare, education and financial security. Yanis Varoufakis calls for a Universal Basic Dividend, financed by a Commons Capital Depository.
4. Distribute sources of wealth more evenly. If robots replace humans, then the question is: who owns the robots? In an economy where capital increasingly replaces labour, capital ownership needs to be democratized. Richard Freeman suggests a ‘workers share’ could spread the ownership of companies amongst employees to make them less dependent on wage income. An alternative can be Sovereign Investment Funds which could re-socialise capital returns.
5. Remunerate socially beneficial work. If the digital capitalist economy fails to create enough jobs, the state needs to play the role of employer of last resort. This economic necessity may become politically useful. In the vertigo of change, more effort is required to strengthen social cohesion. The state can encourage such contributions to the common good by remunerating them.

The social democratic path to the human economy

Creating decent livelihoods in the digital age will require massive investment in public goods. Generating the revenue to pay for these investments is not an easy political task. While the rich too often find ways to dodge taxes, the poor cannot afford to pay them. The middle classes, feeling abused by the “self-serving elites” and the “entitled poor,” are in open revolt. This is the political reason why the tax burden must be shifted from labour to capital.

In the political economy of today, however, the proposed policy shifts will certainly be an uphill battle. Whether the political economy of digital capitalism will be more conducive for the Human Economy is an open question. On the one hand, distributed technologies and the networked economy have the potential to democratize the means of production. On the other hand, the unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of digital platform companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon points to the opposite direction.

The bizarre alliance around basic income schemes indicates a window of opportunity. Digital capitalism is reshuffling political fortunes, and progressives should go out of their way to build coalitions around the need to boost demand. After half a century of supply-side economics and cost-cutting politics, putting incomes back into the centre of economic thinking is an opportunity progressives must not miss.

Building the Human Economy is not a technical task, but the outcome of political struggles. Only a broad societal coalition will be able to implement the necessary policy shifts. To build this transformative alliance, we need a platform onto which as many communities as possible can come together. This platform cannot be a smorgasbord of policies, but a narrative which explains how we can make the digital transformation work for everyone.

What could this narrative sound like? Amidst the conflicts over sovereignty, identity and distribution transformation, we need to strengthen the foundations of solidarity among all members of the society. This can only be done through a new social contract for the digital society. This social contract needs to be brokered around a compromise between all stakeholders.

The Human Economy offers such an inclusive compromise. In essence, it transcends the conflict between capital and labour by making human capital the engine of the economy. For capital, the Human Economy offers a solution to the existential threat of collapsing consumption demand. For the working population, the threat of mass unemployment is mitigated through decent livelihoods. And for political decision makers, the looming threat of social unrest is relieved.

The social democratic path to development, in other words, creates the necessary demand to sustain the digital economy, the social security people need to embrace permanent change, the political stability required for the implementation of disruptive reforms. The social contract for the digital society, in a nutshell, is to provide full capabilities to everyone who is willing to contribute to the common good.

Originally published on socialeurope.eu

Photo by fumi

The post The Human Economy: Creating Decent Livelihoods In Digital Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

* George Souvlis: On Syriza’s strategy after the defeat of the new memorandum agreement: can we perhaps historicize this defeat by separating it in two different moments? The first one is between two electoral periods, 2012 and January of 2015. Which were the main pitfalls of the party during this period?

Andreas Karitzis: As you can imagine, there are various levels of analysis for this question. I will focus on examples of internal party functioning that reveal the underlying conditions in terms of political imagination, methodology and organizational principles that shaped the range of our preparation, rhetoric, decisions and the eventual strategy.

In the summer of 2012 – in the midst of a joyful atmosphere that comes with being the major opposition party – there was a fundamental issue, at least to my mind, we had to address: the allocation of human and financial resources. We had the opportunity to employ several hundred people, mainly due to having a larger parliamentary group than before. The allocation of human and financial resources is not a secondary issue but the material basis of one’s political strategy. However, instead of engaging in a serious assessment of the present and future needs of the party and an operational distribution of resources (for social organizing, the growth of neo-Nazi groups, trade-union organising, preparation for being in government and for the negotiation process, and so on), there was instead an attitude of “business as usual”. The traditional political imagery, methodology and priorities prevented SYRIZA from assessing the importance of the “material” conditions for its political strategy of countering austerity and neoliberalism. SYRIZA didn’t focus on this crucial issue of preparing for government, and instead reproduced outdated organizational modes and habits.

The outcome was that it maintained the traditional priorities and party functions, as if this were a normal time of social and political activity. The inertia that came with seeing parliamentary work as the most important duty of the party, mainly under the influence of the MPs who tend to prioritize their work in political planning together with the fact that the MPs were the ones who employ all these people, created a framework that ended up with only small changes. That is, a bit more collective work within the parliamentary group, the solidarity4all institution and a minimal increase in various aspects of party functioning. Instead of having a radical rearrangement of forces, SYRIZA just improved the traditional ways of party functioning which were becoming outdated and insufficient to back up its political strategy.

Another example is the exponential deterioration of collective internal functioning. The problem I would like to underline is not the obviously negative fact of the marginalization of democratic decision-making and accountability. The problem was even deeper. During this period, the implicit premise that rapidly transformed the political behavior in the party was that the competing views within SYRIZA should be promoted via the occupation of key-positions in the parliamentary group, the government and the state, after a victorious electoral result. This premise led to marginalization of collective planning, competition between groups and individuals and the fragmentation of SYRIZA. Fragmentation deprived the political organs of the ability to collect information, assess it and deploy a complex strategy. Eventually, enormous amount of time was consumed in the efforts of the political personnel to take the lead regarding future positions in the parliamentary group and the government. Of course there was always a political reasoning justifying this move to ever increasing competition among various groups and individuals.

The interesting thing was that the decline of internal collective functioning was predicated on an implicit common premise. That is, that what is needed to stop austerity and neoliberal transformation was an electoral victory along with people supporting the government through demonstrations. Apart from that, the only thing that seemed to matter was who and what group would have more influence and hold the key-positions in the government and the state.

There was an ignorance and indifference towards issues such as the subtleties and the complexities of the implementation process when in government, the operational demands of the negotiation process (multi-level, multi-personal, highly coordinated processes etc), and the methodology and the expertise needed to mobilize people in order to develop alternative ways of running basic social functions. Let me add here that it is necessary to gain some degrees of autonomy in terms of performing basic social functions in order to stop the strategies of the elite (in any way one may think is the right one), since the latter have unchecked control over those functions and can easily inflict collective punishment on a society that dares to defy its power. Issues like these necessarily promote a collective/democratic functioning instead of fragmentation and competition and a focus on people’s capacities and methods of “extracting” them effectively in order to upgrade people’s leverage.

The underestimation of similar issues was even more striking at the Programme Committee and its working groups. It was extremely difficult (if not impossible) to restructure the forms of work from the usual articulation of lists of demands towards managerial/organizational issues regarding steps and methods to implement our policies. Instead, they were sites of political argumentation in the most general and abstract terms.

The ignorance and indifference towards questions of how you implement power was supported by the dominant rhetoric within SYRIZA: that the crucial issues are political and not technical. So all we have to do is decide what we want to do, rather than explore the ways in which we can implement them. The implicit premise here was that the crucial point was to be in the government taking political decisions and then, somehow, these decisions would be implemented by some purely technical state mechanisms.

Apart from the fact that this attitude contradicted with what we were saying regarding the corrosive effect of the neoliberal transformation of the state and the complexities of being in the EU and the Eurozone, the major problem was that a mentality like this ignores the obvious fact that the range of one’s political potential in government is determined by what one knows how to do with the state. The implementation process is not a “technicality” but the material basis of the political strategy. What was considered to be the political essence, namely the general, strategic discussion and decision is just the tip of the iceberg of state-politics. Instead of just being a “technicality”, the implementation of political decision is the biggest part of state politics. Actually, it’s where the political struggle within the state becomes hard, and the class adversaries battle to shape reality. The tip is not going to move the iceberg by itself as long as it is not supported by multi-level implementational processes with a clear orientation, function and high-levels of coordination. This is the integrated concept of state-politics that we have forgotten in practice and by doing so we tend to fail miserably whenever we approach power.

Being at the leadership of SYRIZA during the period of preparation for power, I came to the conclusion that one major failure of the Left is that it lacks a form of governmentality which matches up with its own logic and values. We miss a form of administration that could run basic social functions in a democratic, participatory and cooperative way. The fact that we are talking about a current inside the Left which includes governmental power within its strategy, the low level of awareness regarding the importance of these governmental processes (among other equally worrying weaknesses) reflects the degree of obsolescence of the Left organizations and justifies fully the need for a radical redesign of the “Operating System” of the Left.

*GS: A second period would be between the electoral victory of Syriza and the signing of the third MOU past August. What about this period? Were there mistakes and miscalculations made by the party’s leadership during this time?

AK: I think that the mistakes made during this period reveal crucial structural weaknesses of SYRIZA – and of the political left more broadly – due to the inability to adapt to the new way you must do politics in the institutionalised neoliberal framework of the EU and the Eurozone.

It seems that the weaknesses of SYRIZA in power resulted from the failed preparations in the previous period that I mentioned above. The appointment of government officials was dictated by the outcome of the internal power games during the previous period, and their mandate was to do whatever they could do in vague terms without having concrete action plans that would support a broader government plan.

In the same vein, there weren’t any organisational “links” that would align the government actions with the party functioning and the social agents willing to support and play a crucial role in a very difficult and complex conjecture. The lack of connecting processes was mainly – among other things – the outcome of a widely shared traditional political mentality that reduces, firstly, the party from a network for the massive coordination of people’s action, deliberation and production of popular power into a speech making device that supports the government, and, secondly, peoples’ mobilization from a generator of real popular power and leverage against the elites’ hostility into traditional forms of demonstration.

The government was gradually isolated and the pressure on it from various domestic and international agents initiated a process of adjustment of the new government to the existing neoliberal norms and regulations. Deprived of any real tool for reshaping the battlefield, the government and the party gradually moved from fighting against financial despotism towards merely a pool of political personnel with a good reputation that could reinvigorate the neoliberal project. In an era with a complex network of political antagonisms and class struggles, SYRIZA, as a collective agent, couldn’t even realise the form of the fight it had been involved in. This is still true for plenty of people in the Greek Left today, but things are changing and the difficulties force us to adapt.

The negotiation process and especially the way it had been understood and experienced within SYRIZA is indicative of the sloppy and cursory way that preparation for power took place, and of the inability of the party to adapt. But it also reveals the underlying premises that supported those qualities. Starting with the agreement of the 20th of February until the day that the lenders announced that the only real possibility was the continuation of the neoliberal project (1st of June), a pattern emerged regarding the way in which the government and party officials assessed what was occurring. Although the negative indications were overwhelming compared with the hopeful ones, they were focusing on the latter, distorting reality. Or better, they were replacing reality with what they hoped for; what they would have liked to be reality. I am not saying that the problem was that government and party officials were being dishonest; although some of them might be; individual dishonesty cannot explain a collective pattern.

The non-existent reality they were clinging onto was the only one in which the traditional political left knows how to do politics. And since people and collectives are determined not by what they say but by what they know how to do (a material dictum that has been forgotten in political left), it is impossible to become relevant with the real reality without a modification of methodologies, organizational principles and political imageries related to a practice that reflects reality. The problem was that collectively we hadn’t adapted sufficiently into how to do politics in reality. In the case of lack of adaptation of this kind, reality will be imposed on people and collective bodies the hard way…
This non-existent reality that government and party officials were clinging on to was built on the assumption that the elites were committed to accepting the democratic mandate of an elected government. If they do not like the policies that it promotes, they would have to engage in a political fight; opposition parties must convince the people that the policies are not desirable or successful and use the democratic process for a new government of their preference to be elected.

Supposedly, the post-war global balance of forces inscribed in the state institutions a considerable amount of popular power, rendering them quasi-democratic. This consists simply in tolerating – on behalf of the elites – a situation where people without considerable economic power have access to crucial decisions. SYRIZA knew how to do politics based on the premise that the institutionalised (in the past) popular power was not exhausted. By winning the elections, the remaining institutional power – mainly in the form of state power and international respect of national sovereignty – would be enough and it would be used to stop austerity (in all versions of how that would happen, within eurozone, leaving eurozone etc). Based on the premise that the framework within which politics is being conducted hasn’t changed significantly, SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: supported social movements, built alliances, won a majority in the parliament, formed a government. We all know the results of doing politics only in this way today.

During that summer, the gap between the kind of politics we collectively knew how to do and the new reality grew massively, producing both hilarious and tragic events. The referendum and its aftermath was definitely the peak of this. From the “traditional way of doing politics” point of view, we were using all democratic means available. It was obvious to me and others that we were engaged in an escalation that was not supported by anything that would make the lenders accept a compromise. The traditional, democratic means are simply outdated for doing politics in the new European despotism (although, if embedded in a different methodology of politics, they can still be very useful). But it was a way for the people to step in at a historic moment and give a global message that transcends the SYRIZA government and its short-term plots.

During the week of the referendum a massive biopolitical experiment took place: the closure of the banks; the extreme propaganda by the media, the threats by the domestic, European and international political and financial establishment; the terrorism in workplaces; the hostility and threats towards “no” supporters on interpersonal level and so on, created an environment we have never encountered before. Our opponents used all their resources and they lost! Greek people refused to voluntarily declare that they embrace a life without dignity in order to avoid a sudden death. We are talking about an extremely hopeful and important event for the battle against neoliberalism. Greek people proved that the biopolitical control and influence over people is not so powerful as we might think it is. The message was crystal-clear and gave courage to plenty of us despite the ominous predictions for the immediate future: the battle is not over yet; human societies will not surrender easily.

On the side of SYRIZA, the transformation of government and party officials had already occurred. The Greek government didn’t negotiate strictly speaking. There wasn’t a coherent negotiation strategy, no improvement of our position in time, no gaining of some leverage, etc. There was only a desperate act of postponing a decision it had to make. By the time that the referendum took place, things had changed. The leadership had shifted the central features of its assessment regarding how best to serve peoples’ needs: from “non-compliance with financial despotism” to “stay in power”. What happened after the agreement is just the natural outcome of this process of adjustment.”

Photo by Carlos ZGZ

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