[P2P-F] My review (bauwens) of Alex Foti's General Theory of the Precariat

[Michel Bauwens]

thanks pat,

I agree with the challenge,

this was by the way my key message for the commoners in Ghent, but
de-fragmenting their efforts is an uphill battle,

in fact, while the commoners failed to organize a common assembly, it is
now convenced by the city itself on march 2, but the good news is that a
public-commons dialogue around commoning and provisioning systems will
start,

but this is also where precarious self-organization as proposed by alex
could play a role,

my suggesting is not too mobillize only for protest, but also to support
this vital commonification of infrastructures,

Michel

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 7:27 PM, pat commonfutures <
pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

> Hi Michel and Alex
>
> My two cents......
>
> Enjoyed reading your review Michel and hearing loud and clear the comments
> from Alex. Glad to see you recognise strategically the role for economic
> democracy organisations to come together to develop commonwealth solutions.
> Challenge is to animate and mobilise co-ops, trade unions, mutual aid
> organisations and commons movements and other actors to cross connect.
>
> Capital needs to be on tap not on top. Labour needs to hire capital. Thus
> economic democracy is the operative mantra. But how.....?
>
> I think the analysis of Massimo De Angelis in Omnia sunt communia that
> focuses on commons solutions for provisioning to address precarious
> housing, precarious work, precarious social services, etc. is the way to
> increasingly Walk the Talk.
>
> But so much of the infrastructure needs aligning to develop a generative
> system to build the new to replace the toxic old. In the period from 1910
> to 1948 it was the working class self-organisations and partnerships with
> municipalities that co-developed a turn key system for affordable housing,
> mutual insurance services for access to health care, patient finance
> instruments, etc.  As you highlight Michel, without this proving of the
> possible, the Post 1945 welfare states would not have been practical.
> History has airbrushed out of memory all the working class achievements
> leading up to social democracy's action to rebuild war torn Europe with
> guidance from Keynes. Keynes himself took credit for what commoners had
> innovated and brought into being over many decades.
>
> But we are back to the same situation again.
>
> To pursue pluralist commonwealth post capitalist futures, the facts are
> similar at least as a pattern to 1945...
>
> Many good solutions that emerged out of commoner struggles since the 1970s
> now exist as viable and proven models. Examples include Community Land
> Trusts for housing and workspace, social co-operatives for care services,
> community renewable energy, freelancer co-ops, etc but we lack the general
> assembly of protagonists to plan and co-ordinate them all and bring them
> together into a viable system.  Neoliberalism continues to repress and
> marginalise these Cinderella Liberties that if nurtured and united could
> tackle the multiplying wants that make no sense among economies of plenty
> perversely allocated.
>
> The Garden City movement pioneers developed socialist planning guidance in
> 1906 which played a key role to unite the fragments. We need to revive
> democratic planning again and make this participative to set in train
> evolutionary urban and rural reconstruction and to help animate, activate
> and co-ordinate economic democracy in action. Garden cities were on the
> right road as they sought to unite urban and rural life in ecological
> resilient ways.
>
> The guild socialist ideas of GDH Cole in the early 1920s are worth
> revisiting. As Danny Dorling shows in his book on the 1%, between 1918
> and1978 social and economic inequality reduced across developing countries
> and indeed as forms of socialism advanced stage by stage.
>
> Today socialism needs to be planned and re-implemented with deeper
> democracy methods and on a co-operative and ecological economics
> foundations to produce commonwealth via a commons mode of production. I
> look forward to reading your book Alex.
>
> Thanks to you both for the joint inspiration.
>
> Pat
>
> On 26 January 2018 at 12:38 Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
> wrote:
>
> hi alex,
>
> very happy to engage, and I fully understand the legitimacy of your
> strategic choices, though your vision of a successful new new deal is also
> a sign of optimism in itself .... I agree we have to fight for it
>
> this is a very good overiview of the other polarity, I think at the p2p
> foundation, we are somewhere in between, even as we are very liberally
> cited in this overview of commons-based relocalization:
> https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Networked_Cities_as_
> Resilient_Platforms_for_Post-Capitalist_Transition#Excerpt
>
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 10:34 AM, Alex Foti <alex.foti at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Michel, Dear Friends,
>
> a trillion thanks for this thoughtful and appreciative review. i look
> forward to co-developing a veritable post-capitalist strategy by embodying
> the commons-based approach and i find your criticism of an excessive
> capitalist realism justified (lost a few nights' sleep about it, but i am
> very fearful of cryptofascist reaction, and think we can force liberal
> capitalism into a social compromise - which you're right would make funding
> and reclaiming the commons a central feature of society - and also i guess
> i wanted to avoid excessive utopianism given that current historical
> reality is so dystopian). again thanks for taking the time to read and
> engage with the book's arguments.
>
> best milanese ciaos,
>
> lx
>
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 9:25 AM, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
> wrote:
>
> see also link here at  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net
> /General_Theory_of_the_Precariat#Evaluation
>
> "This book is essential reading for all commoners that want to think
> through the right strategy for social change. It squarely places itself
> from the point of few of the new social groups (or class in formation, as
> Foti would have it) that have grown under the conditions of neoliberalism
> and its decline, or in other words under the emergence of cognitive
> capitalism or 'informationalism'. This key group are the various
> constituent parts of the precariat, all the people who can no longer work
> with dependable classic labor contracts and the steady income and
> protection deriving from it.
>
> This book should be read through 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 last 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 his 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 stresses 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 be
> mistaken for seeing Foti's analysis as an exercise in re-imagining the
> class dynamics and compromises of the New Deal and post-WWII european
> welfare states, and has simply replaced working class with precariat,
> working class parties with social populism, and the New Deal with a social
> compact for green capitalism.
>
> So, the fact that this is a remarkably 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 lies also 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 he sees no dynamic value creation
> outside of capitalism. For Foti, it is clear, 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 30's and the crisis after 2008, are such crises, he in my
> view convincingly shows. 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 have to take serious stock of it. We are
> simply 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, beween 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
> that is 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, with on the other side
> 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 way 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 are these then ?)
>
> Now 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 then in his turn he
> fails to pay proper attention to it. 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 a possible 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 is 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 coosp 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 mechanism
> of the working class, which had taken decades to develop. Also vitally, the
> identity itself of the working class was not just as a part of capitalism,
> but as a movement for another type of society, whether that was expressed
> through socialism, social-democracy, anarchism, and other variants. When
> that hope was lost terminally, that was also the end of the strength and
> identify of working class movements. There can be no offensive social
> strategy without a strong social imaginary, and mere reformist designs
> won’t do. So commonalism 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 not just
> as 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 just 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. Foti in this book, 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
> however 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. Indeed in that case we do not have to ask the radical
> precariat to give up it's values for a reformist compromise, but to
> productively combine radically transformative post-capitalist practice.
>
> There is another issue with Foti's book. He very much stresses the
> superdiversity of the precariat, and the key role of gender and
> race/migration unity in their struggles. He also mentions en passant 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 is growing, there is a theoretical
> difficulty here. But what if a thermo-dynamically sound economy would
> require a cosmo-localization of our global economy, as we contend at the
> P2P Foundation, combining global sharing of knowledge with substantial
> relocalization of physical production (as even big bank reports now
> recognize) ? Only if we recognize this, can we actually have a new global
> view of solidarity, as both elements benefit workers, salaried and
> precarious, in the whole world.
>
> So, 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 is something that is as ongoing and vital. Theoretically, in a
> few paragraphs at the end of the book, Foti seems to recognize it, but it
> is not integrated in his strategic vision, or only marginally.
>
> Readers who miss this aspect, could look at the ten years of research and
> analysis we have conducted on that other half of the equation, at the P2P
> Foundation. We may have the other weakness though, and in fact we purposely
> have focused not on the conflict part, which is the natural inclination of
> the left and needs no help, but in pointing out how any self-organization,
> and construction of the commons, which inevitable comes with conflict, is
> just an essential part of the programmatic alternatives of the precariat.
> Not just 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 both the salariat, the
> precariat, and progressive entrepreneurial groups, of the importance of
> integrating the commons as a programmatic element in their struggles, and
> their proposals. We will probably stick to this bias towards the
> constructive side of the equation, tempered by a full awareness that this
> is by itself insuffient, 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 worked out
> systematically, 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 much to be learned, and I believe the different
> perspectives and different weaknesses in the approaches of people like Foti
> and the P2P Foundation (and other) commons-centric approaches, there is
> room for a lot of convergence and mutual enrichment."
>
> --
> Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at:
> http://commonstransition.org
>
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
> #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at:
> http://commonstransition.org
>
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
> #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
>
>


-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org


P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
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#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
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