For many progressives today – or at least those who have not resigned themselves to capital’s absolute triumph – the objective of political struggle should essentially be to the restore the welfare state and protect it from further neoliberal incursions. From celebrating the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt to commemorating the anti-Nazi resistance, this brand of progressivism is dedicated to defending and even extending the undeniable achievements through which the working class and the population more generally gained access to important public services and programs, such as healthcare, education, pensions, etc. But given the increasingly uninhibited attacks on the welfare state from the right, in combination with the cynical concessions from the “socialist” left, this strategy risks blinding us to the very real limits of the welfare state as it was established at the end of the nineteenth century. For we must never forget that the common has been historically suppressed by the very welfare state that monopolizes much of the left’s attention today. Thus any genuine politics of the common must, first and foremost, focus on the democratization of those social institutions currently under the control of a state administration bent on narrowing the welfare state’s scope and adapting the latter to the “constraints of competitiveness.”
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the so-called “social” or “welfare” state has been the guarantor of the “principle of solidarity.” At the end of the nineteenth century, the prior liberal conception of civil society as an agreeable association of co-contracting proprietors, represented by wise and enlightened elected representatives, was shaken by the clear evidence of industrial pauperism and the concomitant emergence of socialism. Threatened liberal governments across the Western world were then compelled to establish various forms of income transfers and public services, without which a substantial part of the population would have been condemned to poverty. The “welfare” dimension of modern societies was thus organized as an institutional system, one that differed from one country to the next, that integrated the non-property-owning sector of the population into political society by guaranteeing it a modicum of security (i.e., “social security”) through various forms of voluntary and obligatory insurance programs and other systems designed to re-distribute income through taxation.
The principle of the welfare state is to inject a certain degree of social “solidarity” within a capitalist system of private property regime in order to stave off the worst outcomes of capitalist accumulation. The welfare state can therefore be interpreted in two fundamental ways: first, as a program of partial deproletarianization and partial labor decommodification;1 and second, as a “welfare” support system necessary for perpetuating an economic system in which the accumulation of private wealth is facilitated by universal wage labor. In other words, while the welfare state indeed mitigates the most negative effects produced by the private ownership of the means of production, it ultimately does so in order to protect the overall system by pacifying social relations.
The welfare state is thus the end product of a series of governmental strategies that responded to worker protest and were designed to quell the threat of revolution by undermining the strictly political aspects of social and economic conflicts. As Giovanna Procacci has shown, a new type of government, a “government of misery” (gouvernement de la misère) developed in France between the outbreak of revolution in 1789 and 1848 in order to deal with mass poverty and thereby “defuse the potential for antagonism”2 linked to proletarianization. The concept of “welfare” therefore designates the methods by which the state turned to new administrative practices to deal with a series of problems relating to health, political discontent, and criminality arising from economic crises, and a more general state of revolt and public unrest. In other words, the state was forced to adapt older forms of governmental power to a political environment shaped by liberal doctrines. For neither classical political economy nor liberalism’s legal conception of individual rights were effectively able to respond to these new forms of “modern misery” so aptly documented by Alexis de Tocqueville’s Memoir on Pauperism (1835). Socialism, on the other hand, offered its own menacing response (from the perspective of the ruling classes, that is) by advocating for the “right to work” and the right for labor to assert its power through various forms of cooperation and associationism. By 1848, the republican bourgeoisie was compelled to come up with some means of reconciling the otherwise contradictory logics of the market, citizenry, property, and fraternity. Its sociological, legal, and political answer was “solidarity.”
Léon Duguit perfectly summarizes the conception of welfare that gradually emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century:
Society is now a great cooperative in which everyone benefits from the advantages produced by the division of labor. If, however, this division of labor causes some members of the community to suffer a particular harm, if the cooperative malfunctions, or if circumstances are such that some experience greater losses than others, then the whole community must intervene in order to address these injuries. State revenues thus become a kind of mutual insurance program designed to benefit all members of society.3
This conception of society as a “cooperative” and the state as a kind of “insurance program” was, of course, met with fierce resistance from liberal economists and conservative legal thinkers. For what this new concept of welfare calls into question, as Duguit was well aware, was not only the principle of proprietary exclusionism, but the definition of the state’s role as limited to the maintenance of public order and the integrity of the national territory. In any case, these two complimentary absolutisms were quickly eroded by the emergence of the “welfare” principle. For this was the long-term outcome of a contradiction that emerged in 1848 with the advent of universal suffrage, which was supposed to guarantee both popular sovereignty and the exclusive right of bourgeois property.4 Hence the “strategic” re-interpretation of solidarity by republicans who strove to install welfare as the principle of a progressive republic by renewing Condorcet’s remarkably anticipatory calls for universal education and social security.
Political sovereignty cannot exist without social solidarity between the classes. Thus, through the influence of proponents like Léon Bourgeois, social solidarity became the driving philosophy of the Third Republic in France and the governmental technique of state insurance became its modus operandi.5 As the threat of shared or communal property (des partageux) increased, the response from the progressive factions of the bourgeoisie was the “the socialization of risk” and “equality of opportunity.” These reforms justified the institution of private property by facilitating its more widespread attainment through education and work, and by protecting those deprived of property through the development of the “insurance society.”6 The new principle of welfare thus deflects criticism away from private property and makes the bourgeois proprietor seem financially responsible. It is, in any case, the price the bourgeoisie must pay if they want to keep and quietly enjoy their property.
If solidarity was initially a socialist ethic and a proletarian practice that was antagonistic to the institution of private property, it was now state policy and was used to stabilize capitalist bourgeois society. Even Pope Leo XIII admits its usefulness in his encyclical on Capital and Labor (1891): “the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State.” The state thus becomes pastoral: “and it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government.” Curiously enough, the French republicans, who consistently opposed the Catholic Church’s hold over public affairs in France, pursued largely the same policies, even if their philosophical justification was very different from the Church’s.7 What ultimately unites these two otherwise heterogeneous concepts of social solidarity, however, is the assertion that a state-based welfare system owes nothing to any form of institutional practice “from below.” Social solidarity, and its associated benefits, are dispensed by an administrative providence harmoniously adapted to the nature of the social world (in the case of French republicans) or as morally demanded by a natural law of divine origin (in the case of the Catholic Church). In either case, the modern welfare state is fundamentally grounded on the negation of the common as a form of social co-activity. It is not the members of society that construct the institutional rules shaping their relations, but rather the benevolent and beneficent state that determines the rules of reciprocity, mutual aid, and the distribution of production. Solidarity between employees and citizens is transformed into a debt we owe to the benevolent state.
What we call the “welfare state” is, of course, also a legal reality that has transformed the nature of work and workers, and its legal framework makes labor something more than a simple commodity negotiated on the labor market. Labor and labor relations in the welfare state are governed by laws, collective agreements, and insurance programs that are part of a more general development of “social law” designed to re-integrate labor back into the society (to borrow Polanyi’s phrase). But has the welfare state not simply consolidated relations of domination and exploitation? What about the socialist promise to emancipate labor from exploitation?
The overall sociological consequence of these developments, according to Robert Castel, was the advent of the “wage society” by 1945, wherein social protections were extended to the majority of the population. This new form of society succeeded in “surmounting the gap between owners/non-owners” by constructing a whole continuum of comparable but different social conditions, and by replacing the class struggle with a more diffuse struggle for status within a generalized wage society built on bourgeois norms.8 Under these conditions, however, welfare becomes detached from democracy, and socialism’s earlier desire for collective self-organization gradually disappears from popular consciousness. The notion that society is the product of specific relations that can be overthrown thereby fades with the decline of the traditional labor movement. The role of unions in the management of welfare – which, in France, was already substantively weakened by the paritarisme9 established in France after the Liberation – lost much of its influence with the growth of state administration and supervision. The welfare state thus increasingly became a providential state that distributed benefits according to exogenous economic constraints that always took precedence over the rights of citizens. In other words, the welfare state began to resemble what Tocqueville feared when he anticipated the emergence of a great, anonymous bureaucratic machine that operates according to universal principles, without the possibility of citizen intervention over the decisions that impact their lives. The socialist concept of “solidarity” was thus transformed by a state that undoubtedly protected workers from some of the intrinsic risks of the market, but which concomitantly excluded workers from political deliberation and decision-making through the strictly bureaucratic administration of public services and social protections. In short, democracy-based social solidarity, as imagined by the socialists, was only realized in the form of state-organized social protections. Welfare thus resembled a form of state property that was itself continually subject to potential political reversal.
Of course, the welfare state is now under almost constant attack by the combined forces of the right and the so-called “socialist” left on the grounds that the former lacks appropriate “competitiveness.” The struggle against these forces thus presents the left with a new opportunity to revive the demand for the common in a new way. The principle of the common is not based on a simple defense of the achievements of the welfare state, because the notion of the social at work in the logic of the common is fundamentally different from that upon which the welfare state is based. Whereas the notion of the “social” in the logic of the welfare state is a mere object of insurance and assistance programs managed by state technocrats who distribute these benefits as individual commodities, the notion of the social in the logic of the common is based on a more fundamentally politically and historically original understanding of “social democracy”; it is a view of social democracy as a set of institutions that the members of society build for themselves in order to re-distribute a portion of what they produce based on what they think is most important. This presupposes that the members of society themselves are its democratic governors and that they both determine long-term strategic goals and manage everyday services. Of course, it is unrealistic to think that some level of bureaucratic management will not exist. Each local organization cannot completely re-invent and govern its own “social common,” since most social insurance programs require large-scale participation. But the social institutions they create will not be state properties managed by dominant oligarchies subordinated to the global imperative of “competitiveness” or the European practice of “social dumping” – i.e., a process of competitive bidding in which labor contracts are awarded to the lowest-paid workers.
The logic of the common is based on direct political participation in the decisions and the management of that which is shared in common. The financial flows that circulate between contributors and beneficiaries do not belong to anyone “in particular,” nor are they an “expense” borne by the employer. They are the collectively managed and individually allotted uses of production itself. The principle of the common, in other words, demands a complete revision of the meaning and organization of solidarity. Democratizing the social relations that govern these organizations is thereby a means to transform state administrations into the social institutions of the common.
The great practical question thus concerns the role of “citizenship” in society and in the economy. Yet the term “citizenship” is not really optimal here, since it refers to an individual who simply “belongs to a political community” without doing anything other than passively enjoying political rights, often without even defending them. There has been a fairly common diagnosis of the modern citizen going all the way back to Tocqueville: the citizen is little more than an “idiot” (in the Greek sense of idiōtēs, or a “private” person) immersed in the insatiable consumption of individual goods and the passive enjoyment of his subjective rights. Whatever the accuracy of this description, it is a negative view that ignores an entire range of other features that fall under the term “citizenship.”
According to British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall, “social citizenship” is the greatest invention of the twentieth century.10 For Marshall, “social citizenship” refers to the ensemble of social rights related to social security, education, health, work, and the rights guaranteed by the state that are stacked on top of the first two sedimentary layers of rights: first, the civil liberties gradually acquired in Europe since the eighteenth century (personal freedoms, freedom of thought and expression, property rights, contract rights, and the right to sue, etc.); and second, the array of political rights that were expanded and strengthened during the twentieth century (suffrage, election laws, etc.). When he penned his analysis in 1949, Marshall had little doubt that the egalitarian dynamic that had enlarged and deepened citizenship in England and the other advanced Western countries would eventually lead to a “war” between the dynamics of citizenship and the dynamics of capitalism. This conclusion seemed obvious to Marshall, insofar as the history of the last few centuries was marked by struggles that tried to make active use of previously acquired rights. Social citizenship emerged out of the massive and prolonged exercising of the right to collective action, particularly union activism, and was therefore only conceivable as a result of the political activism of wage workers. Generally speaking, then, every form of citizenship was, for Marshall, based on some prior form of activity, on the rights and possibilities of political action, and this in turn explains the dynamic extension of rights as such. Social citizenship, therefore, only arose as a result of the prior institutionalization of forms of collection action in the sphere of labor. Marshall did, however, foresee a limit to this forward momentum. If collective action led to a significant change in the structure of social inequalities, there was no reason to think it would not eventually cease to be compatible with capitalism. Marshall’s analysis was thus one of the earliest and most prescient discussions about the theoretical limitations of the compromise between the welfare sate and an economic system based on inequality. However, Marshall seems less prescient that the welfare state compromise would be one whereby the recognition of rights relating to social protection and economic re-distribution would be balanced by the renunciation of any real notion of economic citizenship in the workplace, and involve submission to the most ruthless standards of workplace organization, which would eventually lead to the weakening and near collapse of autonomous collective action by workers.
As Bruno Trentin showed,11 the official European left (and even the global left), as well as the trade unions and the parliamentary movement, collapsed in on itself because it was unable to prolong and extend the workers’ protests against Taylorism and Fordism during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the struggles of the Italian councils, the mobilizations of the French OS workers (ouvriers specializes, or semi-skilled workers), or the shop stewards’ resistance in England. Instead, the left adopted the double principle of scientific management and social welfare. The so-called Fordist compromise, in which the left played an active role, tried to marry the progress of technical rationality with a dose of re-distributive solidarity. The Great Compromise meant workers would tolerate alienated productive activity for the security of the welfare state; oppression at work was traded for the bureaucratized protection of one’s existence. One of the central goals of the politics of the common must therefore be to disrupt this compact and re-introduce communal activity into the workplace.