Commonfare

Commonfare, or Welfare of the Commonwealth, is a new idea of welfare, suitable for the current phase of the so-called "Western" capitalist countries and developed inside a general theory of accumulation. It is able to describe the evolutions of the social relations of production without limiting to productive and technological features, but also highlighting their cognitive dimension. Amongst the main representatives of this theoretical branch there are Andrea Fumagalli, Antonella Corsano and Carlo Vercellone.

The current debate on welfare

In the current socio-economic debate, there are two conceptions of welfare that, in particular, attract the attention of scholars and politicians: workfare and, alternatively, the Keynesian public welfare.

Workfare

Workfare is not a universal welfare system. Instead, it is a system in which welfare is guaranteed only to those who have the financial means to pay for it. It is a self-financed welfare system: examples include contemporaryretirement systems in most European countries, in which workers are expected to provide their own pensions, often through investments managed by private companies.This kind of system is often promoted by those who see a balanced public budget as a primary economic goal, and is therefore consistent with the austerity policies imposed by the European Troika.

Workfare is predicateded on the idea that aid should only be provided as a last resort, where there are existential conditions that do not allow one to work and thus to access those rights that labour is able to provide. The idea of workfare is also complementary to the privatization policy of much of the public welfare, from health and education, to retirement planning. Therefore, workfare is complementary to the so-called principle of subsidiarity, according to which the State may take action only if and in so far as the objectives (social services) cannot be satisfactorily achieved in a private way.

The Keynesian public welfare

The Keynesian public welfare adopts essentially the opposite approach. In this system, the State delivers a universal intervention guaranteeing some basic social services (such as health, education and social security) to all citizens (which does not always coincide with residents). According to the famous definition given in the Beveridge Report, 1942, these basic services should be available to all from cradle to grave. In a Keynesian system, there is space for private action to supplement or augment state provision, but such action is not the primary source of welfare.

Others welfare conceptions

These two visions have been followed by other, hybrid conceptualizations: on one side, the Scandinavian welfare model that gave rise to the policies of flexicurity, which are presented as a synthesis of the universalistic Keynesian welfare, but tailored to the needs of the flexibility of the labour market; on the other side, the Latin-Mediterranean welfare model based on family, a mixture of workfare and selective welfare.

Arguments in support of the necessity of Commonfare

However, current Western economic conditions, and those in Europe in particular, suggest that new models of welfare need to be developed. Commonfare is a model that explicitly takes into account two important features of these conditions:

• labour and life precarity and debt conditions as apparatuses of social control and dominance;

• the generation of wealth emerging from social cooperation and general intellect (commonwealth).

Commonfare and precarious condition

Increasing numbers of people are experiencing precarious work and financial conditions, and/or personal debt. The figure of the industrial worker, with a reliable wage and a job for life, is at the core of Keynesian welfare, as the universal state provision is paid for through the taxation of such workers. While this kind of figure may be emerging in many parts of the globe, it is declining in an almost irreversible way in Western countries. Instead, it is being replaced by a varied multitude of atypical and precarious, para-subordinate and autonomous workers. The ability of such workers to organize for representation and action is more and more limited by the prevalence of individual bargaining. Furthermore, in times of crisis, the condition of precariousness is strengthened by increasing debt conditions, in a vicious circle.

At the same time, there has been a change in the way (economic) value and wealth are conceived of. The production of wealth is no longer based solely on material goods and manufacture. The existence of learning economies, which generate new knowledge, and network economies which allow knowledge to diffuse beyond the network in which it was generated, is at the origin of the increased productivity that we are witnessing. Productivity, indeed, results more and more from the direct exploitation/expropriation of the commonwealth and from the privatization of common goods.

Commonwealth and common goods

Commonwealth is different from common goods. Commonwealth is, nowadays, the source of the production of commonas well as private and public goods, where goods themselves are reconceived as including knowledge, skills and even time, not just material objects and services

It follows that, in this context, a redefinition of welfare policy should be able to respond to the unstable trade-off inside the accumulation process of cognitive bio-capitalism: the negative relationship between precarious living conditions and social cooperation. More particularly, it is necessary to remunerate social cooperation, on one side, and favor forms of social production, on the other.

The two main pillars of commonfare

Basic Income

The remuneration of social cooperation implies the introduction of individual, unconditional basic income for everyone who lives in the territory regardless of his/her professional and civil status. The unconditional basic income (UBI, referred to in some countries as a citizen’s income) should be understood as a kind of monetary compensation (remuneration) for the social productivity and productive time that are not recognized and rewarded by existing labour contracts. It occurs at the primary level of income distribution (indeed, it is a citizen’s primary income), hence it cannot be considered merely as a welfare intervention, as in the workfare and Keynesian logics.

The introduction of a basic income should be accompanied by the introduction of a minimum wage, in order to avoid a substitution effect (dumping) in which firms see the basic income as an excuse to reduce what they pay workers. Basic income, together with minimum wage, makes it possible to expand the range of choices in the labour market, i.e, for an individual to refuse a “bad job” or to define their own labour conditions. The unconditional possibility of refusing a job, or particular work conditions, opens up opportunities of liberation which go far beyond the mere distributive measure.

Management of the commonwealth and common goods

The second pillar of the commonfare approach concerns how both the commonwealth and common goods are managed.

The idea of commonfare implies, as a prerequisite, the social re-appropriation of gains arising from the exploitation of commonwealth that are the basis of the idea of accumulation today. This re-appropriation does not necessarily lead to a transition from private to public ownership. As previously stated, we need to distinguish between common goods and commonwealth. As far as basic services such as health care, education, or mobility – services increasingly privatized – are concerned, the goal is to provide a public management of their supply as use-value, against any attempt of commodification.

But if we refer to the commonwealth, the framework is different, since the fruit of social cooperation and general intellect are neither private nor public goods. The only way to manage the commonwealth is through self-organization, by imagining a different régime of valorization, based on what Marazzi calls “a production of human beings in favor of human beings”.

Commonfare policies

As far as re-appropriation of common goods is concerned, commonfare approach suggests policies able to:

• liberate people from the hierarchy imposed by the economic oligarchy of commodities and utilities, which was subject to extensive privatization over the last 20 years as a consequence of the Cardiff Process (1996) on the regulation of the market for goods and services (access to common materials goods);
• provide institutions of the common, at the local level, regarding essential common goods such as water, energy and environmental sustainability through forms of Municipalism from the bottom-up (democratic principle);
• guarantee free transport and housing.

As far as commonwealth is concerned, the commonfare approach requires policies able to:

• reduce intellectual property rights and patent laws in favor of greater freedom of circulation of knowledge and the ability to acquire free information infrastructures, through appropriate and innovative industrial policies. At the same time, it should be able to guarantee a self-organized and free education process (cognitive commonwealth).
• provide all the means necessary to build up relational activities, care needs, health insurances, free access to internet (breaking monopolies) (reproductive commonwealth).

Tab. 1: Commonfare policies

Social needs	Relevant instruments of commonfare policy
Income stability	Unconditional Basic Income
Education	Public and self-organized education centresup to university-level education
Information and communication	Free and universal access to information and knowledge, through free availability of immaterial infrastructure (wi-fi, network, open-source and so on). Removal of intellectual property rights and their regulations
Health	Totally free] at point of service health system and care system
Housing	Guaranteed housing: opportunity for everyone to have a space for the creation and organization of their own lives
Mobility	Low cost or free public transport service, and free circulation of bodies in the territory, that is, no internal borders.

Critical points

The idea of Commonfare opens some questions which need to be deepened. The first problematic deals with the public provision of some social services like health and education. Should they be state owned or even self-organized?

A second order of critics has to do with the proposal of basic income, especially if unconditional.

They focus on two main aspects:

• significant decrease in the motivation to work among citizens, with unforeseen consequences for the national economy
• it would require a complete restructuring of the taxation, social insurance and pension systems, which will cost a significant amount of money.

From an orthodox Marxist point of view, some scholars fear that Commonfare hypothesis will favour the liberalisations of social service, whilst from a liberalist point of view, Commonfare is seen to have a negative impact on free market efficiency.

See also

• Common good
• Common ownership
• Creative Commons
• Copyleft
• Common land – Account of historical and present common land use, mainly British Isles.
• Global commons
• Network effect
• The Magic Cauldron – essay on the open source economic model
• Tragedy of the anticommons
• International Association for the Study of the Commons
• Patentleft
• P2P Foundation
• The commons

References

• Michel Bauwens, "P2P revolution and commons phase transition", Commons Transition, http://commonstransition.org/p2p-revolution-and-commons-phase-transition/
• Emanuele Braga, Andrea Fumagalli (a cura di), La moneta del comune. La sfida dell’istituzione finanziaria del comune, Alfabeta2 – DeriveApprodi , Roma, 2015.
• Andrea Fumagalli, Stefano Lucarelli, Finance, Austerity and Commonfare, in Theory, Culture and Society, vol.32, n. 7–8, pp. 51–65, 2015.
• Andrea Fumagalli, “Cognitive, Relational (Creative) Labor and the Precarious. Movement for “Commonfare”: “San Precario” and EuroMayDay”, in G. Cocco, B. Szaniecki (eds.), Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity. Radicalities and Alterities, Lexington Books, Maryland, Usa, 2015, pp. 3–25.
• Andrea Fumagalli, “Commonwealth, Commonfare and the Money of the Common: the challenge to fight life subsumption”, in M. Bak Jorgensen, O. GarcìaAgustìn (eds), Politics of Dissent, Peter Lange, Frankfurt, pp. 157–179, 2015.
• Andrea Fumagalli, Trasformazione del lavoro e trasformazioni del welfare: precarietà e welfare del comune (commonfare) in Europa. In: Leon P., Realfonso R. (a cura di), L'Economia della precarietà, p. 159–174, Rome: Manifestolibri, 2008.
• Euronomade, “Lotte nella metropoli e welfare del comune: direzione Europa”: http://www.euronomade.info/?p=1089
• Christian Marazzi, “Capitalismo digitale e modello antropogenetico del lavoro. L’ammortamento del corpo macchina”, in Laville J. L., Marazzi C., La Rosa M., Chicchi F. (eds), Reinventare il lavoro, Sapere 2000, Roma, 2005.
• Provisional University, "The abduction of Europe III": https://provisionaluniversity.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/the-abduction-of-europe-iii-commonfare/
• Carlo Vercellone. Crisi e istituzioni del welfare. Nuove note sul capitalismo cognitivo. Gli algoritmi del capitale. Accelerazionismo, macchine della conoscenza e autonomia del comune a cura di Matteo Pasquinelli, Ombre Corte, pp. 147–157, 2014.
• Carlo Vercellone, “Towards a welfare of common”, in Ekonomski pregled,Vol.65 No.2 Svibanj 2014: http://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=clanak&id_clanak_jezik=179605
• Carlo Vercellone, (2010), Modelli di welfare e servizi sociali nella crisi sistemica del capitalismo cognitivo, Common, 2010, pp. 32–39: http://hal-paris1.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00544744/fr/

Footnotes

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