Dughera Stefano - Cognitive capitalism, welfare and labour : the commonfare hypothesis

This book deals with the transformations of both accumulation process and labour in the transition from a Fordist to a cognitive capitalism paradigm, with specific regard to Western economies. It outlines the advent, after industrial capitalism, of a new phase of the capitalist system in which the value of cognitive labour becomes dominant. In this framework, the central stakes of capital valorisation and forms of property are directly based on the control and privatization of the production of collective knowledge. Here, the transformation of knowledge itself, into a commodity or a fictitious capital, is analyzed.

Building on this foundation, the authors outline their concept of commonfare. This idea of commonfare implies, as a prerequisite, the social re-appropriation of the gains arising from the exploitation of those social relations which are the basis of accumulation today. This re-appropriation does not necessarily lead to the transition from private to public ownership but it does make it necessary to distinguish between common goods and the commonwealth. This book explains this distinction and how common goods and the commonwealth require a different framework of analysis.

This volume will be of great interest to all scholars and researchers, as well as a more general readership, who wish to develop a critical thinking of the mainstream analysis of this topic. Contributing to the Marxism-heterodox approach using rigorous theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, it is aimed at all those who act socially and aspire to a better understanding of the development and the contradictions of contemporary capitalism.

Andrea Fumagalli is Associate Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics and Management at University of Pavia, Italy. He also teaches at IUSS Pavia and his research focuses on issues of labour precarity, on basic income and transformations of contemporary capitalism.

Alfonso Giuliani is a Research Fellow at Centre dconomie de la Sorbonne, Universit Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne, CNRS UMR 8174, France. His research focuses on issues of institutional economics, political economy of commons, cognitive capitalism, monetary theory of production and history of economic thought.

Stefano Lucarelli is Associate Professor in Economic Policy at University of Bergamo, Italy. His research projects include institutional economics, cognitive capitalism, monetary theory of production, financialization, stock-flow consistent models and complementary currencies.

Carlo Vercellone is Full Professor at Universit de Paris 8, France, Department of Culture and Communication. He is also a member of Centre dtudes sur les Mdias et lInternationalisation (CEMTI), Associate Researcher at CNRS-Centre dEconomie de la Sorbonne (CES) and Sophiapol (Universit Paris Nanterre). His research focuses on the knowledge economy, cognitive capitalism, welfare state and basic income.

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Gendering Economic Inequality in the Age of Capital

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260. Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour

The Commonfare Hypothesis

Andrea Fumagalli, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli and Carlo Vercellone

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First published 2019

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2019 Andrea Fumagalli, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli and Carlo Vercellone

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ISBN: 978-1-138-65430-3 (hbk)

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After the post-Fordist period, started in the mid-1990s, a new paradigm has emerged in a sufficiently hegemonic and pervasive way in a large part of the globe. Some scholars (including the authors of this book) have thus begun to speak of cognitive capitalism, a term which, as is well known, has conveyed a lot of controversy, especially within orthodox Marxist approaches that still consider Fordist ways of extracting surplus value as dominant. According to this view, real subsumption, the sharp separation between machines and humans, between productive waged labor and tendentially unproductive (residual) labor that incorporates cognitive and relational/intellectual activities still represented the basis for defining the nature and form of exploitation within the capitallabor relation.

First the crisis of the net-economy (2000), then the subprime crisis (20072009), have made this continuist reading even more obsolete. There are several reasons that justify this statement. The first concerns the nature of the accumulation and valorization process that followed the financial and GDP collapse in the two-year period from 2008 to 2009.

The subprime crisis can be read as the result of a deviation between a process of exploitation of a labor activity, however internal to the labor market governance (which caused an increasingly precarious and compressed remuneration) and a process of financial valorization characterized by a private ownership structure that wanted to be increasingly widespread even if increasingly impoverished.

The profits of large multinational companies only partially derived from the direct exploitation of labor, and if this happened that was the exploitation of some parts of the entire cycle of subcontracting and production: in particular, the nodes not directly concerned with the core production and technology. Despite the increase in the intensity of exploitation (high precariousness, reduction of previously acquired rights, decomposition of work, incapacity and often connivance of trade unions), this basis for extracting surplus value was no longer sufficient when confronted to the spread of global competition and the redefinition at the global scale of the geo-economic structure, with the emergence of new capitalist economic powers. Capitalism thus needed new value-sources. Financialization, on the one hand, and commodification of territories and natures alike, on the other, could provide an adequate response. However, that has proved insufficient.