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

[Michel Bauwens]

some of you may find this book, which sees a polanyan double movement at
work at a meta-historical level, of interest:


** Book: The invisible hand?: How market economies have emerged and
declined since AD 500. by Bas van Bavel. Oxford University Press, 2016*

URL =
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-invisible-hand-9780199608133?
Review[edit
<https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php?title=How_Market_Economies_Have_Emerged_and_Declined_Since_AD_500&action=edit&section=1>
]

Branko Milanovic:

"The recently published “The invisible hand?: How market economies have
emerged and declined since AD 500” (Oxford University Press, 2016, 330
pages) by Bas van Bavel has, like all important books, a relatively simple
core theory which Van Bavel, a well-known economic historian teaching at
the University of Utrecht, illustrates on five historical examples: Iraq
between 500 and 1100, Central and Northern Italy 1000-1500, the Low
Countries 1100-1800, England 1800-1900, and the United States 1800-today.
(The first three cases are discussed in detailed separate chapters, each
running to 50-60 pages, while the last two, to which Western Europe may be
appended, are discussed in a single chapter called “Epilogue”).

Van Bavel’s key idea is as follows. In societies where non-market
constraints are dominant (say, in feudal societies), liberating factor
markets is a truly revolutionary change. Ability of peasants to own some
land or to lease it, of workers to work for wages rather than to be
subjected to various types of corvées, or of the merchants to borrow at a
more or less competitive market rather than to depend on usurious rates, is
liberating at an individual level (gives person much greater freedom),
secures property, and unleashes the forces of economic growth. The pace of
activity quickens, growth accelerates (true, historically, from close to
zero to some small number like 1% per year) and even inequality, economic
and above all social, decreases. This is the period so well recognized and
analyzed by Adam Smith. Van Bavel, in a nod to Braudel, shows that very
similar “essors” have existed in the pre-medieval Iraq (then the most
developed part of the world), medieval Central and Northern Italy
(Florence, Venice, Milan, Genoa..) and on the cusp between the late
medieval Europe and early modern period in the Low Countries.

But the process, Bavel argues, contains the seeds of its destruction.
Gradually factor markets cover more and more of the population: Bavel is
excellent in providing numerical estimates on, for example, the percentage
of wage-earners in Lombardy in the 14th century or showing that in Low
Countries wage labor was, because of guilds, less prevalent in urban than
in rural areas. One factor market, though, that of capital and finance,
gradually begins to dominate. Private and public debt become most
attractive investments, big fortunes are made in finance, and those who
originally asked for the level playing field and removal of feudal-like
constraints, now use their wealth to conquer the political power and impose
a serrata, thus making the rules destined to keep them forever on the top.
What started as an exercise in political and economic freedom begins to
look like an exercise in cementing the acquired power, politically and
economically. The economic essor is gone, the economy begins to stagnate
and, as happened to Iraq, Northern Italy and Low Countries, is overtaken by
the competitors.*

As this short sketch shows, Bavel’s theory has many links, or can be
juxtaposed, to several contemporary views of economic history. Bavel is
dismissive of a unilinear view that regards the ever widening role of
factor markets, including the financial, as leading to ever higher incomes
and greater political freedom. His view, although not fully cyclical (on
which I will say a bit more at the very end of the review) is “endogenously
curvilinear”: things which were good originally, when they hypertrophy,
become a hindrance to further growth. It is thus a story of the rise and
fall where, like in Greek tragedies, the very same factors that brought the
protagonists grandeur, eventually hurl them into the abyss." (
http://glineq.blogspot.com.es/2017/04/a-theory-of-rise-and-fall-of-economic.html
)

On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 1:30 PM, pat commonfutures <
pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

> Hi Michel and Alex
>
> The commons work in Ghent is great to see. Also the Bologna regulations
> work of Christian Iaione are needed to help commons and local government
> partnerships and social contracts to be negotiated.
>
> Why GDH Cole and guild socialism ideas are relevant to the present is that
> Cole proposed in 1919 in his book on Guild Socialism Restated that guild
> congresses for economic democracy should complement local government and
> regional and national governments and that social economic actors involved
> in production and reproduction could be a co-operative economic counterpart
> to parliamentary democracy. Therefore economic democracy would become a
> separate form of democracy complementary to political democracy. A system
> of checks and balances.
>
> Garden city ideas where all the land would be commonly owned and economic
> rent captured for residents transparently was a foundational concept for
> Cole for the guild assemblies locally.
>
> Remember Polanyi showed that the capitalist system is oppressive and
> structured historically because people, money and land have been enclosed
> and commodified. What was interesting about the guild socialist ideas in
> the early 1920s that Bertrand Russell, RH Tawney and GDH Cole were working
> on is that the garden city ideas and socialist planning would take land out
> of the market for new housing, workspace, commons spaces etc, workplace
> democracy advancing then and across Europe would end wage labour and the
> further step would be pursued as Clfford Douglas argued by taking money out
> of the market by issuing social credit as a national dividend that would be
> locally managed by monetary authorities that could be part and parcel of
> the guild economic congresses so that underconsumption would no longer be
> addressed by more capitalist debt issuance by banks but by transparent
> monetary reform to democratise money.
>
> Tawney and Cole did not push for what Douglas was arguing for which was a
> pity. Polanyi only wrote about the tripartite need to take people, money
> and land out of the market in his Great Transformation in 1944. But these
> three reforms are the bedrock for a commons mode of production to pursue
> structurally the paradigm shift to advance economic democracy and to secure
> co-operative commonwealth.  Sadly Massimo De Angelis only mentions Polanyi
> in passing in his latest book and missed all this. Otherwise his book is
> excellent I think.
>
> On your query about mutuals and co-op innovations and the doubt you have
> Alex about the state replicating these. Keynes's gets his ideas of 'cheap
> money' which is not the same as social credit from Clifford Douglas and
> Silvio Gesell. See the last chapter of the General Theory by Keynes.
>
> In 1943 when the National Health Service was being designed, co-operative
> and mutual health services in the UK were patchy but being then provided by
> 23,000 mutual friendly societies set up over decades of social movement
> struggles and almost all promoted and supported by diverse trade unions for
> their members. There was an effort to incorporate these mutuals into the
> NHS but authoritarian socialists refused to allow this to happen.
>
> Also if you look at the reconstruction of housing and new towns after 1948
> in the UK, they used co-op Garden City ideas for guidance for public land
> and public housing design but left out the ecological dimensions and
> pursued post War reconstruction from the top down.
>
> Pat
>
> On 27 January 2018 at 19:40 Alex Foti <alex.foti at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Pat,
>
> thanks for your observations on mutualism and the ecological and social
> rights to the city. i'm a big gdh cole fan, btw. the weekend has
> overwhelmed me with obligations. i ll try to come back to in more detail
> tomorrow with more time. however the only thing i m doubtful the fact that
> mutualism is replaced by the welfare state which was a way of neutralizing
> and institutionalizing the commonist and separatist tendencies of the
> working class. at least since 1919 it seems to me social democracy opted
> for state intervention rather than self-reliant mutualism (or worse,
> syndicalism).
>
> best ciaos!
>
> lx
>
> 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:
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

#82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20180129/3586f8e0/attachment-0001.html>