Isocracy. The Institutions of Equality 978-3-030-00694-5

Table of contents :
Foreword......Page 6
Contents......Page 9
List of Figures......Page 10
List of Boxes......Page 11
1 What Is the Aim of a Good Place to Live?......Page 13
2 Power as the Fundamental Motivation......Page 16
3 Power Is a Sure Cost for Those Who Are Subject to It and an Uncertain Change for Those Who Hold It......Page 20
4 Complex Equality and Simplicity of Power......Page 25
5 Distributive Justice and Political Justice......Page 32
6 From Power Distribution to Power Production......Page 35
7 Isocracy as a Coherent and Sustainable Ideal......Page 39
References......Page 45
Abstract......Page 48
1 Premise......Page 49
2 Cooperative Controlled by Shares (Labour–Capital Partnership)......Page 50
3 The Social Dividend......Page 57
4 The Common Goods Sector......Page 60
5 The Social Salary......Page 63
6 Currency and Money......Page 68
7 The Redistribution of Working, Care, Leisure, Creativity and Politics Times......Page 73
8 Socialisation and Investment Planning......Page 85
9 Taxation on Income and Wealth......Page 89
10 The Transformation of the Positional Competition......Page 92
11 Drawing Conclusions......Page 95
References......Page 96
Abstract......Page 101
1 Representative Democracy and Radical Conflicts......Page 102
2 From Representative Democracy to Political Isocracy......Page 111
3 Institutions Based on Reputation of Impartiality......Page 116
4 The Institutions of Distributed Power......Page 122
5 The Institutions of Power-Sharing......Page 127
6 Partisans Institutions......Page 128
7 Federalist Institutions......Page 133
8 Drawing Conclusions......Page 148
References......Page 149
Abstract......Page 156
1 Premise......Page 157
2 Passions as Foundation of the Human Condition......Page 159
3 From Passions to Needs and Emotions......Page 170
4 The Capitalist Removal of (Hot) Passions......Page 176
5 Power to the Imagination......Page 182
6 Conflictual Passions......Page 185
7 Drawing Conclusions......Page 189
References......Page 190
Abstract......Page 195
References......Page 205
Index......Page 207

Citation preview

NICOLÒ BELLANCA

THE INNSTTITTUTIONS OF EQUALITTY

Palgrrave Sttudiess in Classsical Liberralism

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism Series Editors David Hardwick, Vancouver, BC, Canada Leslie Marsh, Vancouver, BC, Canada

This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presuppositions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected, or misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches. The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the DNA of the modern civil condition. With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liberalism emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral economics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors are soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency. Sole or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collections, broadly theoretical or topical in nature.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15722

Nicolò Bellanca

Isocracy The Institutions of Equality

Nicolò Bellanca University of Florence Florence, Italy Translated by Maria De Pascale

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism ISBN 978-3-030-00694-5 ISBN 978-3-030-00695-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00695-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930710 Translation from the Italian language edition: Isocrazia: Le istituzioni dell’eguaglianza by Nicolò Bellanca, © Castelvecchi Editore 2016. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Seksak Kerdkanno/EyeEm/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

It is of course entirely correct, and a fact confirmed by all historical experience, that what is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible. Max Weber (1919, p. 369)

James Mead was among the greatest economists of the last century: a pupil of Keynes, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977. Towards the end of his life, he embarked on a journey, bravely looking for the Island of Utopia. As he himself recalls, it was only after a long and arduous navigation and failing to reach the “Perfect Place” that he hit by chance on a nearby island, called “A good place to live”. The journey made by Meade is still, and possibly even more so today, one of the most relevant intellectual expeditions worth pursuing. It explores the possibilities of a future that we believe to be better, according to well-argued criteria and ones that can be refuted by anyone. On my side, without being Meade and following a somewhat different route, I went on a quest for the remnants of Socialism, Communism and Anarchy. Unable to arrive at these, to my surprise I was nonetheless able to catch a glimpse of a “good place to live”, called “Isocracy”. In this place, inhabited by actual human beings, the State has not completely disappeared nor has the Market, or Enterprise; there is still inequality and unfairness, no agreement on where the common good lies with conflicts arising whenever attempts are made to define what it is or strive to reach it. The recipe for happiness has not been found there either. We can define isocracy as a kind of society where people do not rule or obey, a place where there is order without power, and a non-hierarchical cooperation. Its main conscious aim is to level out relationships of power in whatever realm they might appear. Because citizens move towards equality of power, every contrast, v

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Foreword

every abuse, every deception and every mistake are completely reversible, as nobody is given the possibility in the long term to hold on to whatever privilege he or she may have acquired. The idea of an isocratic society “simply points to a perspective of change that deals with fundamental aspects of today’s social life and must be formulated with theoretical tools that go beyond those currently afforded by disciplines encompassed by the social sciences” (Napoleoni 1985, p.169). It does not assume that single individuals will ameliorate their “nature” nor that mankind as a whole will wisen up to follow the “correct” path towards harmony. Neither will it assume that “cynical and instrumental” markets will become harnessed within more restricted and regulated boundaries. Rather, the idea of isocracy attempts to understand and strengthen some of the historical trends that are pushing people to distinguish ordinary life from the world of goods. Understanding these trends is achieved through philosophical analysis whereas attempts to strengthen them, call for collective actions—“political actions”, in a wider sense—based on the geometry of the forces at play. From this point of view, even if we acknowledge (along with Meade) that “Utopia” cannot be found, the discussion on isocracy to all intents and purposes constitutes a “concrete Utopia”. On the one hand, this analysis still maintains some utopian traits as it relates to the horizon of the readily acceptable possibilities; on the other, it has a “real” quality as it does not go beyond the pale of the accessible possibilities. In other words: it is a form of utopia in that it is still not really represented by any existing institutional or political setting; however, it has a tangible character because it stems from real widespread needs and from existing material processes. Isocracy does not propose a complete breakaway, for which it would not be able to envisage agents and means, rather it suggests innovations (both at institutional level and in organised forms of social life) that could be embraced, or at least not opposed, by several political subjects. In this book, I want to talk about Isocracy, in as simple and concise terms as I can muster and to the extent the topic will allow me. To narrate the journey in the most direct way, I will speak in the first person and will avoid showing, comparing and discussing the many elaborations that exist on each of the topics we deal with. Bibliographical references have been kept to a minimum, mainly provided with the intent to point out some material that can be used for further research. Besides, the chapters are divided in numbered paragraphs that can each be read and used either as an independent unit or in conjunction with the adjacent ones. Ordinarily, acknowledgements are more of a pleasure than a duty, as it is nice to remember those who have shared with us their experiences, reflections and affection, and have bestowed upon us their esteem. In this particular instance,

Foreword

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however, it would prove impossible to name everyone as the gestation of the book coincides to a large extent with my own life. I am first and foremost indebted to Giacomo Becattini who through his example and extensive discussions has kindled my interest on the topics dealt with in this book. I also want to mention the intellectual “training grounds” of journals like “Il Ponte”, “Jura Gentium” and “MicroMega”, the amazing Economic Development students from Florence University and a number of friends and colleagues: Stefano Bartolini, Luigino Bruni, Thomas Casadei, Paolo Flores D’Arcais, Giulia Eusebi, Rino Genovese, Stefania Innocenti, Renato Libanora, Giorgio Lunghini, Roberto Martino, Ugo Pagano, Rosario Patalano, Ernesto Screpanti, Giorgio Tutino and Danilo Zolo. I owe a special gratitude to Angelo Antoci, without whose generosity this English version would never have seen the light, to Maria De Pascale, who translated the book, and to Hervé Baron, who has read and commented with meticulous acumen the whole manuscript. I also want to thank my editors at Palgrave, Laura Pacey and Clara Heathcock, who believed in this project throughout its development. I can never be thankful enough to my partner, Liliana Gilli, for her love and support, and to whom this book is dedicated. Please note that most of the bibliographical references are in English. Any texts originally written in other languages are quoted only in their English translation. For texts published exclusively in French, in Italian or in Spanish, the translation provided is ours. Florence, Italy

Nicolò Bellanca

References Napoleoni, Claudio. 1985. Dalla Scienza all’Utopia. In Claudio Napoleoni, Dalla scienza all’utopia. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992. Weber, Max. 1919. The Profession and Vocation of Politics. In Max Weber (eds.), Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Contents

1 2 3 4 5

A Good Place to Live. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Economic Institutions of Isocracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 The Political Institutions of Isocracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The Anthropological Mutation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 The Structural Possibility of an Alternative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199

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List of Figures

Chapter 2 Fig. 1 Specialisation of roles and coordination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Chapter 3 Fig. 1 A matrix model of federalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 Chapter 5 Fig. 1 From choices to beliefs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

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List of Boxes

Chapter 1 Box 1 Box 2 Box 3 Box 4 Box 5 Box 6 Box 7

The time of freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 From simple to complex equality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Polyarchy as a concrete approximation to Isocracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Universal talent and universe of talent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Enlarge and reduce bottlenecks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 The superpower of capital. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 On the intellectual sources of the book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Chapter 2 Box 1 Box 2 Box 3 Box 4 Box 5 Box 6 Box 7

On the experience of the Mondragón group of cooperatives. . . . . . 40 Sharing the returns of capital and wealth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 The common property trust. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Against basic income. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 On the distinction between currency and money. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Creative idleness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Distributed leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

Chapter 3 Box 1 Box 2 Box 3 Box 4 Box 5 Box 6

The political parties and inclusive interests in Isocracy . . . . . . . . . 100 The political parties in the Digital Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Which electoral system? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 We pay taxes to express preferences on public policies . . . . . . . . . 116 The media in Isocracy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Jus migrandi and jus nexi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 xiii

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Box 7 Box 8

List of Boxes

Unbounded demos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 An approach to environmental problems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137

Chapter 4 Box 1 Box 2 Box 3 Box 4 Box 5

Feelings and homeostasis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Appropriate passions are not necessarily moral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 On the obsessive and harmonious passions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 The rational rider and the intuitive elephant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Shared imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

1

A Good Place to Live

Abstract

The book is part of the renewed debate on equality. In the wake of a leftist libertarian approach, equal freedom is in my opinion the fundamental characteristic of a “good place” to live is equal freedom. However, if someone is subordinate to the power of others, he is not free; and if someone leads others, exercising his power, he cannot enjoy the interaction with free people. Therefore, an effective equal freedom requires equality of power. Isocracy is a society where nobody commands or obeys; a place where there is order without power, where cooperation is non-hierarchical. More precisely, in order to prevent someone from prevailing over others, his power must be neutralised by another power. Isocracy is a society in which institutions try to facilitate the mutual balancing of the various forms of power. Even without reaching the perfect and definitive levelling of powers, those who come to lead within a certain sphere cannot prevail also in other spheres, without bearing costs, ultimately dominating overall.

1 What Is the Aim of a Good Place to Live? There are many contrasting notions about what is and what could be, a good place 1 to live. Each of them stems from different value judgments placed on the meaning of associated life and from conjectures on how this works. None of these, though, can be placed in a neutral sphere where there are some basic principles regarding justice, freedom, equality, efficiency, dignity, progress that have been unquestionably accepted on rational grounds by everyone (Sandel 2009). My task © The Author(s) 2019 N. Bellanca, Isocracy, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00695-2_1

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will therefore consist in taking sides, declaring clearly what my point of view is on the matter, and arguing openly the value judgements that I submit to the reader’s opinion (Jaeggi 2015). I shall start by summarising in a few points my fundamental idea. The idea of a good place to live is strictly connected to the ideal according 2 to which freedom can only be expressed in a mutual fashion: I can manifest my freedom on condition that you can manifest yours and vice versa.1 “The rule of social coexistence does not lie in the fact that my freedom ends where somebody else’s freedom starts, so that somebody else’s freedom dictates the limits of my own, on the contrary, the other person’s freedom is the very condition of my own freedom: if they are not free neither am I” (Napoleoni 1988, p. 125). I cannot separate my freedom from yours, or yours from mine, and freedom can only be considered from a collective point of view. A good place to live, though, does not necessarily mean a place where some wonderful ideal is always flaunted, but a place where serious attempts have been made to translate this abstract ideal into the real world. The golden rule to get close to the realisation of that ideal is to “neither command, nor obey” (Colombo 2014, Chapter 4). This rule clearly shows that if nobody is able to take advantage of anybody else then nobody is potentially subordinate to anyone. This happens when in a society all the subjects are equals as far as power is concerned, and the asymmetrical and hierarchical connections between the individuals gradually fade away together with the possibility that there is somebody who gives orders and somebody who is subject to these. Therefore, the golden rule becomes the means through which the ideal of shared freedom is brought to life and effectively pursued: if I rule over you, I can widen my opportunities and means of gratification while you, by submitting to my orders, can often become frustrated and feel limited. But as far as freedom goes, we are in the same position: by ruling over you I lose my opportunity to take part in your freedom, thereby becoming enslaved myself. When subjects are not equal in terms of power, they cannot share their freedom either.

1It

is worth reporting three famous quotes that belong to the top of libertarian culture. “In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association” (Marx and Engels 1845–1846, p. 87). Communism is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Marx and Engels 1848, p. 262). “It is not true that freedom of one man is limited by that of other man. Man is really free to the extent that his freedom, fully acknowledged and mirrored by the free consent of his fellowmen, finds confirmation and expansion in their liberty. Man is truly free only among equally free men; the slavery of even one human being violates humanity and negates the freedom of all” (Bakunin 1866, p. 76).

1  What Is the Aim of a Good Place to Live?

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The golden rule cannot be realised by voluntarily surrendering the will to rule 3 or obey. Let us imagine a group where there is a high level of trust and propensity to cooperate among its members. If some of them rule and others obey, it means that the former detain some form of power while the latter do not, thus creating an asymmetrical relationship. In such a situation, if those who are in power want to implement the golden rule they will have to voluntarily give away their power on condition that those who are currently obeying will not seize it. However, one of the defining characteristics of power to which we shall come back (see §13) is its ability to modify the status quo most of the times, if not always. The fact that at the beginning of a process most subjects are prepared to trust each other and willing to cooperate does not guarantee that once power comes into play, things will not change. After all, since fire has the ability to burn and water to wet, once you start a fire or let water flow, you cannot always control the outcome of your actions, no matter how good your intentions are. In the same way, there is no guarantee that power—which is by definition the ability to change the status quo—once it changes hands will not be used by those who acquire it (Acemoglu 2003). Unless there is another source of power comparable to it, which is able to keep the first one in check, in the same way it would be able to put out the fire or drain the water. This means that in order to fulfil the golden rule, whoever is in charge in the community under consideration, cannot just voluntarily renounce their power, but must do so only on condition that nobody will come and take their place, which would result in a simple exchange of the current roles. Therefore we are faced with the paradox that the respect of the principle of reciprocity—I will cease to exercise my power as long as you do not take advantage of it—can only be guaranteed by the existence of a counter-power. That is to say that in order to override a power, you need another one. In the following pages, we will be dealing on how is possible to live in a shared freedom condition, being aware that just wishing for it, does not necessarily lead to its achievement. How are we meant to follow the golden rule of neither obeying nor being obeyed, being fully aware that those in power will not relinquish it of their own accord, not even if they themselves want to follow the golden rule? As the golden rule cannot be achieved through the voluntarily relinquishing 4 of power, it cannot therefore be classified as a social or personal ethics principle. It does not give us suggestions about the desirable behaviour, as these indications would not be feasible. Rather, the golden rule points to the sound reasons of why we need to select a political strategy that will make the ideal of shared freedom closer to reality. The theoretical point can be made as follows: it would be utopian to imagine that we could eliminate, sic et simpliciter, hierarchical structures and asymmetrical relationships, since power tends to re-emerge and recollect.

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The counter-powers are the only antidote: power can only be balanced by another set of powers. We need therefore to imagine and design a type of society where the citizens are endowed with as much equality of power as possible in any situation. This type of society is what I call “isocracy”. In an isocracy, we still have institutions like the market, organisations like the state and the firm; we still have conflicts between groups, individuals and institutional spheres, inequalities, resistance to shared improvements and unsustainable environmental situations. But if the power in its main expressions is levelled, anything which is negative for somebody is especially prone to being modified. Isocracy is, among societies, the one which is more open to change: even in the event that we do not like a change, there is the possibility to revers it, since nobody has the permanent power to uphold it. To summarise: the golden rule “neither command, nor obey” is a method by 5 which we can get closer to the ideal of shared freedom, and not an ethical or moral principle. On the other hand, it is also true that the ideal of shared freedom can only be achieved as freedom among subjects with equal power. As soon as we admit this theoretical point, the ideal of shared freedom turns into that of isocracy. In this respect, isocracy is the ultimate libertarian ideal, because it combines both the ideal of shared freedom and the method (the golden rule), that can actualise it. Being an ideal that combines the aim of freedom with the tool that can help achieve it, isocracy is also, as I will argue in §28, a criterion or normative principle of social justice, according to which we must reject and dismantle any unequal distribution of power.

2 Power as the Fundamental Motivation 6 If in the good place to live, the citizens enjoy equality of power, we need to start defining the concepts that we will be using. For the time being, we can define power in the intuitive and so far rather loose terms, as my ability to perform an action in relation to others. Bearing in mind the interdependence of associative life, I cannot pursue my goals without considering those of my neighbours. The scope of my action depends both on how much others allow me to act and on how much I allow them. My margins for manoeuvring are influenced by the capacity of others to act in relation to me just as they are by my same capacity towards them. In the many circumstances when both I and other people operate in a limited field and with uncertain goals, my power over them clashes with the power they hold over me: if I have more power than they do, then my scope for action increases and vice versa (Friedberg 1993). Under normal circumstances, power

2  Power as the Fundamental Motivation

5

is an asymmetrical relation, in which each party involved tries to gain a greater capacity for action so that they can mould the actions of others. This is why power is the real issue at stake in the conflicts among human beings. The great majority of the philosophical approaches tend to explain human 7 behaviour in the light of individual internal characteristics. The reasons why a person behaves in a certain way can all be explained according to spiritual vocations, moral values, ethic choices or psychological motivations. For these approaches, it is vital to ask which motivations are prevailing, and which are the ones that ought to prevail instead. For instance, if we turn our attention to the motivational pair of selfishness and altruism—self-interest versus prosocial impulse—the debate focuses on the degree of egotism characterising human beings and on the social and personal conditions that could make them more selfless. The common trait among these approaches is that they have the underlying idea that the subject has an “inner” and an “outer” substance (Rorty 1979). Every person is supposedly provided with an “inner cavity” (where willpower and free-will dwell), which is ultimately responsible for the conscious choices of the subject. According to these theories, the inner nature (interiority) of an individual is what constitutes the ultimate trigger for action, however influenced this might be by the socio-institutional environment. Social sciences mostly developed in the course of the eighteenth century in the 8 shadow of philosophical approaches that focused mainly on the inner life of human beings. Michael Mann remarks that almost always, social theorists have attempted to elaborate models of human behaviour based on the motivational drives identified at one time or other as the most important ones (Mann 1986, p. 4). In the case of economic science, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the prevailing paradigm has been the neoclassical one, according to which the fundamental motivational drive of human beings is their personal self-interest.2 This means that every subject makes rational choices, in so far as he acts in order to maximise his well-being; he consistently follows the criterion of not embarking on an action unless this leads to an outcome whose marginal benefits at least break even with its marginal costs.3 However, as many of the most important critics of the neoclassical paradigm have pointed out, self-interest as the sole motivational drive is inadequate

2See

Hirschman (1986). I shall come back to the topic of the paradigm of the homo economicus taking shape with the so-called neoclassical economists and not with the classical ones (Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Mill) in Chapter 4. 3The neoclassical paradigm requires that “preferences” or “tastes” of the subject be stable, predictable and very similar to those of other subjects (see Stigler and Becker 1977).

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to account for the complexity of human behaviour (Hirschman 1984). In particular, it cannot account for or explain the wide range of those activities that could be classified as “excessive”, such as those that go beyond the physical and temporal horizon of a person. For instance: Why do we engage in a war which we do not have a chance to win? Or keep on hoarding resources that we will never be able to use? Or yet, why do we get upset about something when we have everything to lose in doing so? Why do we use up all our available energy in order to express ourselves through music or dance? Why do we suffer because of a lost or unattainable love? Why do we opt for solidarity or revenge even when it is just for their own sake? Unlike that which is envisaged by neoclassical economic theory, Amartya Sen notes that by asking ourselves these questions, we do not assume that there is an automatic correspondence between the choices a person makes and his well-being (Sen 1977). We can see that there are many, even crucial, circumstances where the subject decides consciously not to pursue his own best interest, regarding both how to achieve it and the ways to do so. Rather, in these occasions he follows aspirational outcomes and goals that he will not even be able to experience first-hand. What are then the motivations able to account for our “excessive” actions, the 9 ones that do not conform to the proportionality of the relation between means and goals, and that, we must add, by and large, confer meaning to our existence? Without attempting to make a complete and exhaustive list, I can nonetheless notice that the two main candidates in the history of ideas are the quest for freedom and that for power. I will examine later in more detail (see especially §19) how the tension towards freedom and the one towards power interplay with each other. For the time being, let us just consider the drive for power. In this respect, Bertrand Russell very perceptively is able to detect the huge difference between those who favour the theory of personal interest and those who favour the theory of power: “The orthodox economists, as well as Marx who, in this respect, agreed with them, were mistaken in supposing that economic self-interest could be taken as a fundamental motive in the social sciences. The desire for commodities, when separated from power and glory, is finite, and can be fully satisfied by a moderate competence. The really expensive desires are not dictated by a love of material comfort. […] When a moderate degree of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth: they may seek wealth as a means to power, or they may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic” (Russell 1938, pp. 3–4). Since Russell mentions the traditional economists in a polemic way, we will 10 try and reformulate the thesis of the importance of power relations to explain

2  Power as the Fundamental Motivation

7

human behaviour, with the terminology of the recent economic science. According to a definition that has become widely accepted in the last few decades, the science of economics studies how men respond to incentives. By incentives we mean the rewards and punishments that guide our conscious choices: these could be material or symbolic, intrinsic or extrinsic, monetary or in kind, direct or context-related and so on (Gneezy et al. 2011). The crucial point is that as incentives concern voluntary actions they require the subject to exercise his capacity to perform an action, i.e. that he is provided with an agency (Schlosser 2015). All subjects are provided with the ability to act, but not everyone exercises it. We cannot take for granted that agency exists, and even if it does, that it is adequately able to formulate and make intentional choices. There are many circumstances in which individuals are not subjectively able to accomplish something that even in their own opinion would represent an improvement (Elster 2007). If we all had an agency that conformed to our motivations, each one of us would accomplish their purposes. This is obvious but it does not happen in reality. That is not enough. Even if agency existed and were adequate, it would still be 11 vulnerable to power relations. Those who detain power are always able to shape the horizon of what are the possible alternatives available to the subordinates. In 1937, Maurice Dobb writes: “of three alternative commodities, A, B, and C, which might have been introduced on to the market, the consumers, if put to the test, might greatly have preferred C. But since producers with whom the initiative lies, offer only A, consumers spend their money upon it and thereby enable it to register its commercial success, because they have no means of expressing their superior preference for C” (Dobb 1937, p. 308). Even without exercising direct constraint, those who are at the top are able to select both the real opportunities and the imaginable possibilities for those who are at the bottom, thus conditioning also the extent and the way the subordinate subjects exercise their capacity to act. This circumstance helps to clarify my proposal for a shift of attention from incentives to the power nexus. As long as we keep examining individual responses to incentives, as neoclassical economic science does, we are assuming that subjects are provided with an agency and that this is adequate.4 If, on the other hand, we decide to abandon the uncertain premise of the existence and ade-

4According

to these economists, the power relation would only be “one of the ways in which one person can get another to pursue a course of action he would not otherwise have chosen to pursue is by affecting the incentives facing him, so that it is rational for him to choose this course of action” (Taylor 1982, p. 11).

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quacy of an agency, a detailed analysis of the conditions under which behavioural responses can be predicted, becomes crucial. Maximum predictability is achieved when a person cannot refuse to respond, 12 and can only do so in certain ways, that is when a person has to obey. It is within an asymmetrical relation then, that we can explain some behavioural outputs which we would not be able to explain otherwise, if we were to refer to the voluntary choices induced by incentives. In particular, we are talking about those “excessive” or unbounded behaviours that choose intentionally to ignore any proportionality between the desired goal and the means used to reach it (see §8). These can only be explained within the cogent mixture of dominance-submission and of constraint-persuasion that is the power relation. Moreover, just as the incentive approach cannot take for granted the existence of an agency, the power approach cannot take for granted that the existing agency will be maintained forever through the sole exercise of asymmetry, nor that power will be able to prevent the birth of a new agency. The possibility of transgression and non-compliance is integral to the power relation. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority” (Wilde 1891). We shall come back to this topic in Chapter 4.

3 Power Is a Sure Cost for Those Who Are Subject to It and an Uncertain Change for Those Who Hold It 13 In this part of the chapter, I will put forward and discuss a more rigorous definition of the concept of power. While this is an essential development for building a theoretical framework of the argument, it can be disregarded by the reader who is happy with the intuitive definition (as outlined in §6) and wishes to engage directly with the practical implications. “Power over” other human beings is the only form of power I am dealing with 14 here, and this is usually conceived as the ability of a subject in the relationship with other subjects to produce the intended and foreseen effects (Wrong 1979, p. 2). Power is a social relation in which—it is argued—somebody obtains obedience by somebody else; it is a potential (or dispositional) ability that does not necessarily have to be exercised: if for instance subject B submits of his own accord without being asked by subject A, A expresses his power, without using his capacity. The limitation of this view, in my opinion, lies in not differentiating between the two facets of the power relationship: on the one side, power always

3  Power Is a Sure Cost for Those Who Are Subject …

9

imposes a cost, or at least a very substantial part of it, to the subordinate part5; on the other, from time to time it attempts to modify whatever the subordinate part is or does. So, on the one hand, there is always someone or something that enforces a cost upon someone else: if the relation were not an onerous one, it could be ignored by the subordinate subject B (who could behave as if it did not exist); if it were not imposed, he could elude it or forsake it. On the other hand, the transformation of subject B is an incidental attempt that can be pursued today or tomorrow and that can yield full, partial or no result at all. While people who are at the bottom of the ladder always bear the cost of power, they do not always necessarily agree to be changed. The power nexus holds together what is a sure cost for the “weak” and what is an uncertain change for the “mighty”. I define a social relationship “asymmetrical” one in which only one of the two parts bears a cost or the majority of the cost. I call a social relationship “of dominance” one in which one of the parts, due to their hierarchically superior position, attempts to change the other part. According to my definition, we have a power nexus when subject A or structure X is always able to enforce a cost upon subject B, while occasionally, at the same time, they also attempt to change the nature or behaviour of B. In short, power is a dual relation: asymmetrical in so far as the subordinate subject has to pay and “of dominance” in so far as the subordinate subject ought to change. My definition comprises both the actual use of power as well as power meant 15 as capacity: the former (always) expresses an asymmetrical relation, while the latter manages (occasionally) to enforce a relation of dominance. Firstly, the “dominance” relation exists even in those cases in which subject B does not respond adequately to the authority or control of A or X: this consists in the attempt, on A’s or X’s part to manipulate B; and this attempt is the ultimate aim of power even when it is not achieved. Secondly, the power over B is sometimes exercised by a subject A and sometimes by a structure X, most often by both. In the third place, the criterion to ascertain whether there is a change in what B is or does and to what extent is established by A or X; where this not the case we would not have a “dominance” relation. In the fourth place, the compulsory cost implied by the power relation can take different shapes: it can be a material cost or a psychological one, direct or indirect, can be immediate or deferred, of a strictly individual nature or something that concerns a group or a whole community. This means

5In

this respect, we have a power relation when somebody or something have the “capacity to impose a cost” over somebody else (Barzel 2002, p. 18).

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that there is not just one way to observe and evaluate that cost: we need to apply, in any case, an interpretative procedure; it is only on the basis of the selected evaluation criterion that we can establish whether the relation implicates a cost for B. Finally, whose task is it to establish whether a social relation is asymmetrical, based on the fact that A or X transfers a cost over B? More precisely, who decides that what is being transferred over to B is, in fact, a cost? This is the main difficulty we face in the conceptualisation of power. We can articulate the difficulty in these terms: while the change and its extent 16 regarding B has to be unequivocally evaluated by the “mighty” side of the power relation, who is able and willing to evaluate the dimension and the extent of the cost, on behalf of the “weak” part B? The answer would be an easy one, if subject B were the one exclusively and legitimately entitled to evaluate the relation. Sometimes, though, what really happens is that while B approves of the relation with A or X, external subjects (such as other social groups, researchers, a hypothetical impartial Observer) see it as asymmetrical. This happens every time power does not express itself only, or even predominantly, through a direct relation of dominion and control, but by taking the decisions that need to be taken and securing the silent compliance or even the enthusiastic acceptance by the subordinates (Lukes 2005). In these situations, a relation of submission on B’s part is not perceived as an oppressive relation by B, but by another subject C. The definition becomes then ambiguous: we have a power relation when subject A or structure X, while sometimes attempting to change what B is or does, always transfers a cost over B, according to C’s evaluation. The ambiguity stems from the fact that C by denouncing and opposing power on behalf of B, attempts to change B (dominance relation) and sometimes, by altering the relationship between B and A or X, forces a cost over B (asymmetrical relation). But who will be, in turn, the one to judge whether in the relationship between C and B, there is a cost for B? Will it be B himself, or C, or another subject D? (Some argue that C promotes a “transformative power”, whose aim is self-annihilation, through which it confers power to B) (Wartenberg 1990). Subject B would unquestionably be entitled to the evaluation if he were a “free” subject, in the full sense of the term, that is free from interferences and capable of self-realisation and self-determination (see the definition of freedom in §§17 and 19). However, if B were indeed completely “free”, the power relation would not exist and so, paradoxically, the very object of the evaluation would disappear. To summarise: power, which displays itself on two different fronts, is 17 definitely a dominance relation, because “history is written by the winners”, that is, the evaluation that prevails is the one offered by the “mighty”. As an asymmetrical relation, on the contrary, it is intrinsically and unavoidably ambiguous,

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11

because any social subject can judge whether the subordinate subject B is being made to pay a cost. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has made it yet clear how we can make this serious ambiguity disappear. It is my opinion, that we can only limit its scope. The concept of freedom is defined along three dimensions (Clark 2013). The first dimension comprises the whole set of attainable alternatives, within which the subordinate subject B is not subjected to interferences from A, or X or C’s part. The second dimension is concerned with the whole set of the desirable alternatives: subject B achieves self-realisation within a suitable and appropriate set of possibilities. The last aspect relates to the totality of actual alternatives, that is, chosen and achievable: the subjectivity of B wants and can achieve certain outcomes. Since the totality of attainable alternatives is a space free from interference, 18 power cannot enter it, but it can exercise itself by widening or reducing its boundaries: in this sense, B is free from power, only “where”, power lets him. In the case of the whole set of chosen and achievable alternatives, the agency (the exercise of the capacity to act) of B is at play: the stronger the agency, the wider the set of possibilities. In this sense, B is free, only as far as his own agency allows him: Nelson Mandela was freer during his prison years than a young, spoiled, good for nothing rich kid will ever be. It follows then, that the totality of attainable alternatives and of the actual ones, do not pose excessive problems: we can either verify the ways in which A, X or C, restrict B’s autonomy; or we can verify the extent to which B is able to emancipate himself from the relationship with A, X or C. The only real difficulty arises in relation to the set of desirable options: Who designs or defines it? Is it B who desires his own desires or does he merely desire what A, X or C leads him to desire? This question cannot be given a biased answer, that is from the points of view of B, A, X or C. Every answer is, in its turn, the result of power struggles; it arises from a conflict and contributes to feed it. We can overcome this difficulty not by demanding an unbiased ideal answer but by distributing equally the power of all subjects in all social relationships. If A, B and C have equal power in relation to X, the difficulty disappears: the three subjects will have equal importance in designing the set of desirable options for B. There will not be reasons anymore for A to impose a cost over B or for C to fight on behalf of B. Isocracy is the solution. We will close this part of the chapter with a more detailed analysis of the 19 connection between power and freedom. If we accept the widespread definition of power (like we did in §14) according to which power is a social relation in which some are able to obtain obedience from others (Emerson 1962; Wrong 1979), it becomes easy to conclude that power is lack of freedom: talking about power and freedom is like describing the concave and convex sides of the same

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object. “Power and freedom are two interrelated terms: in an interpersonal relationship, to an increase of one of the subject’s power over the other, corresponds the restriction of freedom of the other subject”.6 If, however, we decide to take a closer look, we can see that in large part the realms in which freedom and power operate do not always (and necessarily) coincide. To start with, power does not manifest itself solely, or even mainly, through non-freedom meant as coercion, but rather by restricting the possibility for action from the horizon of the alternatives that can be chosen and from that of those that can be imagined (see §17). Secondly, the connection between obedience and self-realisation is very ambiguous: the “happy slave”, or the “willing servant”, finds self–realisation by submitting to power, since it is quite possible that somebody feels to be self-realised, and in this respect, free, while is being dominated (see §16). Finally, self-determination can be interpreted in at least two different ways. If we see it as the manifestation of the “will” or “spirit” of a person, then it is possible that Gandhi or Nelson Mandela is free while kept in jail and/or subjected to beating. If, on the other hand, we see it as empowerment—the ability to follow your own decision-making path—then, as the word itself suggests, we are within the realm of power, rather than within that of freedom. In short, discussing about freedom and power is not the same thing. In order to track down or build a good place to live, we have to analyse separately these two different dimensions. In this book, I will focus on power, even though I consider freedom just as important. Box 1 The time of freedom

In economic terms, time is the only genuinely scarce resource. As Georgescu-Roegen notes, “even in the land of Cockaigne, where all pleasures can be satisfied absolutely freely, there will still be an economizing problem. Only if the inhabitants of Cockaigne were immortal would they have no economic problem” (Georgescu-Roegen 1983, pp. lxv–lxvi). The (limited) time of freedom, not subjected to power relations, is the “discretionary time”: that which is spent according to individual choice. It is not free time, but rather a time during which the subject determines his own agenda and calendar, whatever he is doing. More precisely, free time is the time that remains after that which is devoted to personal care and paid and unpaid work. Rather, the discretionary time for each individual is the amount of time left over after the minimum

6Bobbio

(1999, p. 643). The complementarity of freedom and power influences all human actions: “Men wish to be free rather than slaves, but they also wish to command rather than obey” (Bobbio 1995, p. xiii).

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13

necessary time spent on paid and unpaid work, and personal care. The required minimum number of hours of paid work is linked to a social standard, for example, the minimum necessary to generate an income above an agreed poverty line; while the required minimum number of hours of unpaid work and personal care time are defined by population averages. Discretionary time represents temporal autonomy, the degree of control that a person has on the scarcity of time, while free time represents only the result of an assigned choice. To illustrate the contrast, let us consider the case of a young professional who works long hours in an extremely skilled job, compared to that of a parent employed in a low-income job and who takes care of his children. The two people can have just as little free time, but the professional has a considerably longer discretionary time: he could increase the free time reducing the hours of paid work, without the risk of falling below the poverty line (Goodin et al. 2008; Burchardt 2010). Given that in an isocratic society the time devoted to work will be reduced, as I will argue in Chapter 2, it is important to understand that the non-work time which one is free to spend as one pleases is discretionary time, as opposed to free (leisure) time.

4 Complex Equality and Simplicity of Power If a good place to live is characterised by the equality in power of its citizens, 20 we need to ask how this equality can be conceived and put into practice. To this purpose, we will first make a distinction between simple and complex equality. We can talk about simple equality when the subjects are provided with an equal endowment or the same opportunity to enjoy a certain benefit X, be it income, wealth, property, opportunities, rights, resources, freedom, well-being or something else. The premise is that this benefit X is measurable for all the subjects and that it is possible to ascertain if there is equality in regard to its distribution. However, this premise is no longer true if we admit that the society in which we live can be described as radically pluralistic, where the most important categories of the “social goods” require evaluation criteria that are complex and cannot be assessed against a single standard: a good friend is neither better nor worse than a good car, since we lack a common unit of measurement which could express their relative value.7 A totally pluralistic society cannot compensate inequality in 7For

“social good” I mean a means, process or activity to which (at least) a part of society (however small) attributes a certain value. Only a fraction of social goods is economic and a smaller fraction still is mercantile.

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access to cars, by adding a few spare friends or a bit of education, health care, the right to have children, opportunity to move abroad, fiscal subsidies or electoral votes (Anderson 1993). In fact, every “social good”, historically, is treated according to specific criteria of distribution (Tobin 1970): from seniority to queueing, from physical strength to technical knowledge, from waiting lists to commercial exchange, from family prestige to caste, from merit to political allegiance, from the hierarchical title to the democratic decision, from the residential state to the juridical status, from need to efficiency, from sexual orientation to mental characteristics (Elster 1992). Therefore, in a radically pluralistic society an egalitarian strategy that evens out advantage X (whatever that might be) for all the social goods is neither meaningful nor feasible. The concept most apt to describe a radically pluralistic society is that of com21 plex equality. “Where a society recognizes many separate spheres of distribution, individuals will characteristically rank very differently in the several spheres. Some will be successful at making money, others will achieve recognition as artists or scientists, others, will gain prominence in political circles. Because the goods they enjoy are incommensurable with one another—there is no common currency in terms of which money, recognition and power can be valued against one another—it is not possible, from a social point of view to rank individuals against one another overall. One cannot say that Smith, a successful businessman, stands higher than Jones, a well-regarded scientist, in general, although, Smith of course will rank higher than Jones in the sphere of money just as Jones ranks higher than Smith in the sphere of recognition” (Miller 1995, pp. 206–207). Let us consider the case of two subjects, A and B, who cross several institutional spheres, in each of which circulates a specific social good. Let us assume that A controls a higher percentage of the good as compared to B in spheres 1 and 2, whereas B controls a higher percentage of the good, in relation to A in spheres 3 and 4. We have complex equality when A is unable to use the advantage he holds over B in spheres 1 and 2 to take advantage of B in spheres 3 and 4 as well, and vice versa. “In formal terms, complex equality means that no citizen’s standing in one 22 sphere or with regard to one social good can be undercut by his standing in some other sphere, with regard to some other good. Thus citizen A may be chosen over citizen B for political office, and then the two of them will be unequal in the sphere of politics. But they will not be unequal generally so long as A’s office gives him no advantages over B in any other sphere—superior medical care, access to better schools for his children, entrepreneurial opportunities and so on”.8

8Walzer

(1983, p. 19). In Walzer’s passage citizens A and B are called X and Y.

4  Complex Equality and Simplicity of Power

15

Strictly speaking, we do not know if within each sphere, the good is distributed according to justice: in a radically pluralistic society, we cannot identify a universal criterion of social justice; the most we can see is that each sphere distributes its good according to a “local justice” criterion, based on hegemonic convictions and conventions. Furthermore, complex equality does not require that subjects A and B be levelled in relation to advantages X, Y, K or Z (or, in relation to the distribution of specific goods in spheres 1, 2, 3 or 4). The basic and sufficient requirement is that nobody is able to add advantages of one sphere to those of another in order to reach a dominant social position, or overall dominance altogether. There are many possible limited inequalities, each of which can be minimised in its own way, but what is prevented is the formation of a big single inequality with an impact on all social goods. If we take in consideration the case of a society where the majority of the citizens score low points in every institutional sphere, while only few of the rich, or political power holders and so on, stand out, we see that it can still express a complex equality, so long as the strongest subjects in some spheres are not so to the point that they are able to convert their goods into goods pertaining to other spheres. Even in that kind of society, it still holds true that if A leads the game in relative terms in a certain sphere, B can still have the upper hand in another. Box 2 From simple to complex equality

People or social groups (classes, nations, ethnic groups and genders) are different, both in terms of identity and in terms of economic and material resources. The concept of equality indicates that the identity differences are all of equal value, and that the differences in resources must be reduced; it therefore represents an ideal criterion by which to deal with individual and social differences. Very often, this criterion is intended as “simple equality”: it aims to equalise subjective rights (to confer equal value to identities) and to level out opportunities or results (to minimise resource disparities). However, an approach that aims to equalise the value of identities and resources does not consider that each person tends to use his identities and resources also to take advantage of other subjects: society is informed by power dynamics, through which interpersonal asymmetries continually come together and then undone. It follows that simple equality is a static notion, unable to account for the conflicting shift of power games among humans. An alternative criterion is that of “complex equality”, which does not claim to eliminate disparities, and in fact admits that in society people are fighting to remain different. A situation is on the whole equal if no one has a winning hand, through which he can seize the entire winnings on the table. In other words, a situation is (complexly) equal if Anne, despite having acquired an advantage over Bob in an institutional

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sphere, cannot extend it without costs in other spheres. Let us imagine, for example, that Anne dominates Bob in the political sphere: she cannot easily extend her supremacy to the mercantile sphere as well, or the cultural sphere and so on. In cases where Anne does not reach a total power without limits on Bob, we say that Anne and Bob, despite remaining different as far as identities and resources are concerned, are (complexly) equal. The crucial point is that Bob, while being below Anne in a given sphere, maintains the possibility to be equal or even superior to her, in another sphere. A society conceived in this way exalts the differences, but prevents disparities from spreading across the board. It does not require that all be equal, but that inequalities in one area can be counteracted by inequalities of the opposite sign in other areas. The popular phrase, that variety is the spice of life, fits perfectly: a society is (complexly) equal, when the capacities and the resources that create advantage in a sphere are usually different from those that create advantages in another sphere. The implications of the transition from a political approach aimed at simple equality, to one that promotes and protects complex equality, are enormous. The first strategy tries to assign entitlement to those who do not have it and withdraw it from those who have too much. Therefore it answers the classic question “who has and who has not”. Instead, the strategy based on complex equality aspires to enhance the polyarchic—or polycentric, or pluralist—character of society, to articulate and multiply the sources and the places of power. It answers the question: “how do I balance your power with mine?” The one strategy intervenes on a society to standardise it, in terms of rights and resources; the other grapples with a society that is and remains an explosion of differences, seeking to avoid that any difference becomes so strong so to wipe out the other. 23

This complex conception of social equality inevitably clashes with the simplifying capacity of power. There are as many different social goods as there are forms of power, “for instance, wealth, armaments, civil authority, influence on opinion. No one of these can be regarded as subordinate to any other, and there is no one form from which the others are derivative. […] Wealth may result from military power or from influence over opinion, just as either of these may result from wealth” (Russell 1938, p. 4). This passage by Bertrand Russell captures an important point. Both social goods and forms of power are not comparable between themselves: there is no common unit by which you can measure the goodness of a car or that of a friend (see §20), but there is not one either to compare the quality of economic power with that of civil power. There is, however, a fundamental difference: while it is not possible for me to compensate a bad car

4  Complex Equality and Simplicity of Power

17

with a good friend, I can use a form of power to obtain another form of power. Under certain given circumstances I could, for instance, use economic power to increase social power and vice versa. This happens because power is exactly my capacity to act in relation to others, that is, my ability to modify my scope for action within a social sphere. It follows that power does not accept that a sphere where a social good 24 ­circulates is in actual fact kept separate from the sphere where another good is distributed; on the contrary, it always tries to modify each sphere’s boundaries in order for the subject to obtain greater relative advantages. This is the case of a society in which money not only buy commodities but also electoral votes, access to prestigious institutions, better medical care and privileged building permits. Those who have money take advantages over others in more than one way: the relative advantages afforded by money are not cashed in just one of the social spheres, but the rewards are added or even multiplied across several spheres. According to Michael Walzer, the remedy would consist in blocking exchanges between the main social goods: keeping to the quoted example, money should not be allowed to circulate in electoral campaigns, or in schools, hospitals, etc. (Walzer 1983). It is obviously a remedy that is not operationally feasible. Indeed, a double circulation takes place in the various social spheres: the one of social goods and the one of forms of power. While the circulation of goods can be regulated, the actual goal of the circulation of power is in fact the crossing of boundaries and the changing of rules. To sum it up, power simplifies the complexity of equality by making the citi- 25 zens unequal, or to be more precise, it transforms complex social equality into a form of simple inequality, in which all the citizens are evaluated against one single advantage X, which is the level of power they hold over each other. The simplicity of power lies in the ability—which is its peculiar characteristic and unique to it—to cross the boundaries of different institutional spheres, force the conversion of one good into another and aim towards overall dominance in the general social system. In order to undermine any attempt to build complex equality, all is needed is being unequal by detaining more power. Even more importantly, the same is true for the reverse condition: in order not to override the complexity of equality, all we need to do is to level the power of each citizen. Society will open up to the quest for complex equality only if the simple inequality between those who are in charge and those who obey fades into disappearance. Isocracy is the associate form of living that fosters the equal exploitation of differences by reducing the simplifying capacity of power and by undermining the possibility that somebody is able to rule through institutional spheres. While it does not directly aim at achieving complex social equality, it makes it possible.

18

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We need to make explicit an important implication of this line of reasoning: “The freedom of each is therefore realisable only in the equality of all” (Bakunin 1866, p. 76). Equality on what? Pro-capita income? Wealth? Opportunities of self-realisation? Starting points? Subjective happiness? Collective well-being? Non-interference in the private sphere? State’s intervention? Political influence? Social status? Historically, we have many different answers. The perspective I suggest here is that the direct aim of a good place to live is to strive towards equality in power for citizens, in order to approach indirectly the goal of complex equality. As we know (§14), power is a dispositional capacity that is possible not to exercise, as in the case of B that submits without being ordered by A: in this case, A expresses power without using his capacity. On the other hand, submission is an effective outcome regardless of whether power is being exercised or not: there may not be the change desired by the person who holds the power in relation to the one who is subject to it, but a cost on the latter will be sure. Therefore the direct aim of a good place to live is the equalisation of the outcomes of the subjective power levels, rather than that of the availability of access to power, with “subjects” being both individual and collective (Coleman 1990, pp. 531–552). It is a matter of lightening and balancing the burden on the subjects involved in the power relation, whether or not the relation succeeds in modifying the social reality. Box 3 Polyarchy as a concrete approximation to Isocracy

A more concrete way of representing Isocracy consists in delineating the actual situation that most closely approximates it: Polyarchy, a society animated by a multiplicity of sources and places of power. Polyarchy emerges in cases where “various groups that had been at each other’s throats for a prolonged period had to recognize their mutual inability to achieve dominance. Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups” (Hirschman 1991, p. 168). It is also established in societies with a heated and uncertain competition among the elites, in which a marginalized group can access some form of power, in exchange for the support of one of the contenders, with the obvious consequence that other elite groups can reciprocate by offering opportunities to other marginal groups. In short, two processes occur: one in which the ruling elites in order to curb one another, break down the various forms of power; and another in which subaltern groups, taking advantage of the paralysis of the elites, are able to obtain significant concessions. These processes allow the weaker social groups not to succumb in the relationship with the stronger groups, and therefore to act independently.

4  Complex Equality and Simplicity of Power

19

To limit the hegemony of one group over the others, or to avoid the centralisation of power, the most effective mechanism is to subdivide society into different institutional spheres: commercial, bureaucratic, of citizenship, of gender, employment related, political, religious, familial, of friendship, national, ethnic, regional. Each person crosses, or can cross, many of these spheres simultaneously. Instead of fully adhering to the goals of a single sphere, the person cultivates his social opportunities by being included in heterogeneous networks, each with specific rights and resources. He can draw advantages from a network thanks to rights and resources acquired in another network: to gain a stronger position on the capital market thanks to his ethnic origin, to find work through contacts made at the club, to enter political activity because of his religious role and so on. Let us also consider the reverse: a non-polyarchic (monocratic) society is defined by the high correlation between the characteristics of its various institutional spheres. It works as if each of its members belonged to a single sphere. Because race, gender, level of income and wealth, residential location, professional profile, religious belief, cultural level and so on work along the same lines; society is organised through islands of segregation: those who have studied in the best schools are also those who mingle with influential people, and also happen to be the richest and so on. It suffices to know the position of a subject in a given sphere to know his standing in any other sphere. In short, a society is all the more polyarchic, when the subjects within it are simultaneously members of different groups, and the majority of groups belong to institutional spheres which are not overly correlated. In such a society, everyone can combine the different affiliations to build his own social identity (Centola and Macy 2007; Centola 2015).

Box 4 Universal talent and universe of talent

Imagine that a certain human trait—intelligence or beauty or physical ability—is rated as the most valuable in all social spheres: cultural, economic, political and so on. Let us call this the “universal talent”. If the individual Anne had that talent, she could accumulate and multiply her power by moving from one sphere to the other. Complex equality would fail, not on account of the general prevalence of a good, but rather because of the universal talent. Another scenario that would eliminate complex equality would be one in which an individual, Bob, possessed the whole gamut of “universal talents”, being smart, handsome, athletic and so on. Again, he could accumulate and multiply his power by moving from one sphere to the other. A crucial hypoth-

20

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esis, which is at the basis of the reasoning of this book, is that subjects like Anne or Bob do not exist. Those like Anne would have space in a society that tends to be monocratic, in which a single type of talent is exalted; however, ours is a polyarchic society (see Box 3). As for those like Bob, no one has ever met them: “this brilliant mathematician is a political idiot. This talented musician doesn’t have the faintest idea about how to deal with other people. This skillful and loving parent has no business sense. This adventurous and successful entrepreneur is a moral coward. This beggar on the street or criminal in prison is a competent craftsman, or a secret poet, or a superb orator. These easy contrasts are commonplace and obvious, but they hardly reach to the real complexity of individual men and women, for each of whom we could put together a long list not only of different but also of contradictory qualities, interests, and capacities” (Walzer 2007, p. 92).

5 Distributive Justice and Political Justice 27 As we keep exploring the good place to live, we notice that the discussion about complex social equality is not sufficient (see §§20–26). “Equality is just a relation: what gives this relation meaning and makes it a desirable human goal, is its being just” (Bobbio 1995, pp. 7–8). We may have the case of a society that we regard as just, despite it having some internal forms of inequalities, or one that we judge as equal, even if it does not conform to the justice criterion that we have approved. The concept of social justice needs therefore to be examined independently. Every criterion or justice principle establishes to treat equals in an equal way. 28 The difference among criteria depends on the greater or lesser degree of inclusivity. If we take the members of a specific human collectivity, the criterion according to which “to each the same” that treats everybody equally is genuinely equalitarian (Sartori 1987, pp. 99–104). There is hardly any justice criterion that comes close to this omni-inclusivity, since, usually, besides allocating equal parts (of benefits or costs) to the equals, it also distributes unequal parts to the unequals according to merit, talent, effort, skill, need, result, rank, strength and so on. A criterion that formally achieves full inclusivity is isonomy: this is an ancient Greek term that signifies the exclusion of any unjustified juridical discrimination by establishing that law and rights are the same for all (von Hayek 1960, pp. 239–241). However, “Thomas Jefferson could be a slave owner and at the same time think it self-evident that the creator had given to all men certain inalienable rights” by simply avoiding to put slaves among men (Rorty 1998, Chapter 9); that is to say that the inclusivity of isonomy reaches only as far as the power relation

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between subjects, both individual and collective allows it. This in turn leads to the criterion of isocracy, according to which any unequal distribution of power is unjust. To me, this looks like the only substantial universal criterion, and therefore the only one that allocates equal parts to everyone. The balancing of power makes sense in so far as it does not exclude anyone; as soon as even a single subject is able to keep or gain—in a non-casual or temporary fashion—a greater power, isocracy will collapse. Just as for shared freedom (see §2), isocracy is either valid throughout the whole social body with no exceptions, or it will disappear. The consistent purity of the indivisibility prerequisite helps us to understand why it is this couple, namely the ideal of shared freedom and that, more comprehensive, of isocracy (see §5), that runs through modern libertarian culture (and, on a more modest scale, that feeds the reflection put forward in this book). What subjects are to be treated as equals? Equality, for whom? The answer to 29 this question obviously depends on our choice of whom to include in the human community, and as Jefferson’s case reminded us (§28) is bound to be influenced by historical factors. Will then be women and men of any race, ethnic origin, social class and status or gender? Adults? Physically disabled people, with no mental impairments? Residents and non–residents of a certain place? On a more general level, what property do these subjects have in common that make us recognise them as equals despite their many very different profiles? John Rawls argues that all we have to do is to select a “range property”. This would qualify all those who meet this condition as members of a specific community regardless of the different degrees and extent to which they do so. “For example, the property of being in the interior of the unit circle is a range property of points in the plane. All points inside this circle have this property, although their coordinates vary within a certain range. And they equally have this property, since no point interior to a circle is more or less interior to it than any other interior point” (Rawls 1971, p. 444). Rawls identifies in consideration, or mutual respect, the property range according to which human subjects deserve to be treated equally. Instead, my proposition puts power, meant as the capacity of action of somebody over somebody else, at the centre. The difference here is crucial, because if someone treats someone else with mutual respect, it means that he is treating this someone else equally already, whereas whoever exercises power is trying to prevaricate others, sometimes to the point of denying them, as in the case of sexism or racism, the status of human beings. Rawls’ property range already contains the justice principle is trying to assert. If we shift our attention to power instead, we find that social justice is not a principle that has to be founded metaphysically but rather a political claim, that can be put in action through the several “local justices” that make up complex equality (see §22). We can see that Rawls’ approach

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and the isocratic one refer to two opposite views of justice that we will summarise briefly for the sake of convenience. “Philosophical thinking about justice has developed along two very broad lines. 30 One line focuses on the goods persons receive in a distributive scheme, comparing their share either with what relevant others have or with what persons need or deserve by some ethical standards, or both; the other line focuses on the relationship between the persons involved and their relative standing within a scheme of exercising power. One could call the first a focus on distributive justice, the latter one on political justice. The former is interested in the end-state of distributions and in the material well-being of persons, the latter in the legal and political standing of individuals (or groups) in an order claiming to be legitimate” (Forst 2007, p. 260). The most widespread among contemporary theories about justice seem to belong to the first approach group. They define what constitutes a “good society” according to a normative criterion of distribution of goods (Young 1990). According to Rawls, for instance, the state can admit distributive inequalities, without violating subjective rights, as long as they go to the advantage of the more underprivileged members of society; for John Harsanyi, the best distribution is the one that maximises the sum of practical advantages in a society; for Robert Nozick, the criterion is that ownership of goods, even when it generates inequalities, be fairly acquired and exchanged voluntarily, and so on and so forth (Vallentyne 2007, pp. 548–562; Ezra 2015, pp. 75–93). All these theories assume a point of view which is external to the conflict of social life and, purporting to be based on rationality, they invoke universal axioms. However, the uninterrupted debate among theorists clearly shows us that no universally accepted axiom has been found. Moreover and most importantly, the distributive paradigm overlooks the political dimension of justice: the one in which, according to the conception we are arguing for, social justice is achieved when people are able to reach symmetrical positions within a power structure. The more a society is isocratic, the fairer it is. Box 5 Enlarge and reduce bottlenecks

“Bottlenecks” are narrow passages that an individual must overcome to have access to an array of opportunities. A bottleneck can arise when you need a certain degree, or a critical skill, or some instrumental good, such as money, to pursue the paths society offers. According to the criterion of complex equality (see §§20–22), we cannot and do not want to aim for the levelling of opportunities for all. Rather, the political goal is to change the structure of the bottlenecks in order to allow everyone to make the most of their potential and realise their passions. We can either intervene by loosening the

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constraint directly, or by mitigating its impact on the context in which it operates. “For example, in a society where speaking English is a powerful bottleneck, in the sense that without English, one cannot hold most jobs or social roles, the solution is both to provide more opportunities to learn English and, at the same time, to attempt to enlarge the range of paths open to those who cannot speak English” (Fishkin 2014, p. 19). In some cases, only one strategy makes sense: if there is race discrimination, the answer lies not in changing race, but in making sure that an increasingly greater proportion of all opportunities is regulated by mechanisms not shaped by stereotype and stigma.

6 From Power Distribution to Power Production Let us imagine a society in which decisions are taken according to a criterion 31 that first outlines what a correct result should be and then go on to introduce the procedure that will lead to such a result. If a pie is to be divided between two persons, one establishes the criterion, while the other only executes it: one slices the pie, the other chooses the slice. The first person is aware that if the pie is divided according to very uneven portions, the second person can react—both out of his own self-interest, but also as a reaction to what he judges as an unfair criterion—by grabbing the biggest slice. It follows that whoever chooses the criterion is compelled to be egalitarian: if all the slices have equal dimensions, nobody is set to gain or lose out. This is a “pure” isocratic situation where we are lacking the reasons to give orders or obey, to overpower or submit. The simplicity of this example is deceptive because we take the pie at face value, concerning ourselves only with how to distribute it. It is however, just as important, to investigate how the pie has been produced and where its ingredients are coming from. We could then have behind an apparently perfect isocratic distribution, a production of the good which is instead pervaded by power relations. “Instead of focussing on distribution, a conception of justice should begin with the concepts of domination and oppression” (Young 1990, p. 3). Let us examine then the process of formation of power relations. Without any pretentions to be exhaustive, we turn our attention to the economic sphere of work relations, both because this is the sphere I am most familiar with, and because it represents the paradigm of an analysis that can be replicated in other spheres too. “Picture a capitalist economy as a sea dotted with many islands, some large, 32 some small. The sea is the market and each island is a firm producing a particular product. The islands exchange their products with other islands, and they also sell

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products to individuals. The trades among islands and individuals involve (horizontal) market exchanges; but, within islands, production is organised by means of (vertical) command relations” (Bowles et al. 2005, p. 288). In the capitalist enterprise, the controlling power over the employee rests on two pillars that we are now going to examine: the employment contract and the fragmentation of the tasks that need to be executed. We define “work” any economic activity which is being intentionally used by 33 the subject as an attempt to transform the institutional sphere—not necessarily economic in nature—of which he is part: we can for instance, acknowledge as forms of work, economic activities aimed at modifying the artistic, religious or political spheres of society. In more specific terms, we define “paid work” “any work that directly or indirectly, in the factory, in the offices, at home, or in society at large, is a provision of professional services whose quantity, quality and remuneration depends on the decisions of capital regarding its own economic modalities and reproduction policies, with particular regard to the choice of goods to produce, to production techniques and to forms of labour organisation” (Lunghini 2001, p. 101). In order for generic human labour to become paid employment, it is not necessary for a class to impose and exploit to its advantage, the set-up of property rights based on private enterprise. What is needed is for that class, called here of the functionaries (of the capital),9 to own the domain of the labour process. Once this domain is in place, workers forsake their freedom to the members of that class, also called “employers”, for a certain daily amount of hours. More specifically, the workers sign an agreement—the “job contract”—on the basis of which they will have no control over which activities they will be asked to perform during the agreed working hours, under the direction of the functionaries. They receive wages, or a salary, which is not determined, unlike in other social contexts, by a correspondent value in the tasks performed during the production process. In fact, the nominal value of their remuneration (wage) is established ex ante, regardless of what will happen during the working hours. This happens because—thanks to a radical asymmetry in power—the real nature and extent

9With

the expression “functionaries (of the capital)”, I refer more specifically to that fraction of the wider capitalist class who is in charge of strategic direction and management tasks in agricultural firms, industrial factories and in the field of services. There are also other segments of the class in the background among which stands out that of the “functionaries” of financial capital (see Lapavitsas 2013).

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of the services provided are outlined in the contract in a vague manner, giving scope for them to be established de facto during the production process.10 Workers remuneration is nothing else than compensation for the obedience commitment. This commitment is advantageous for whoever buys the working hours, as long as he is able to gain some added value from the activities of the workers that exceeds, before the interests, the price he is paying them; the conditions of being able to obtaining this advantage have to do with his skill in adequately raising the productivity levels while keeping the wages levels reasonably low. It is then with the employment contract that the worker loses control on the pro- 34 duction process: when to apply himself to a certain task and to what extent is a decision that is for others to take. This detachment of the worker from the conditions of his own labour reaches its culmination in the context of the modern capitalist enterprise through the fragmentation of labour tasks. In all types of economic societies, there is a social division of labour that organises associate life according to several different functions, each appropriate to a production sector: weaving, spinning, fishing, building, trading and so on. It is only with the capitalist enterprise that technical or fragmental division of labour—all the processes involved in the production of a good or service are broken down into several smaller tasks and executed by different workers—takes root and becomes commonplace.11 This marks a historic turning point as far as the long history of mankind power relations is concerned: “While the social division of labor subdivides society, the detailed division of labor subdivides humans. […] Not only are the operations separated from each other, but they are assigned to different workers. […] In destroying the craft as a process under the control of the worker, he reconstitutes it as a process under his own control” (Braverman 1974, pp. 51, 54–55). For the first time in history, power is introduced inside the labour process, whereas in all other previous societies it was exercised through political and ideological systems, outside the production mode. For the first time in history, a power relation splits up, fragments, segments the subject: as a worker, the 10There

are multifold and systematic reasons behind the lack of precision of the employment contract: some have to do with the limited rationality of the subjects, the asymmetry in information, opportunism, social diversification regarding aversion to risk-taking, controlling costs, transaction costs and specificity of investments. But, on a deeper level, the main reason lies in the fact that the employment contract is the result of a power relation between parts and therefore in its application oversteps the formal indications to oblige to the requests of the people in charge. For the whole §33, see Screpanti (2001). 11“What, on the other hand, characterises division of labour in manufactures? The fact that the detail labourer produces no commodities. It is only the common product of all the detail labourers that becomes a commodity. […] The division of labour in the workshop implies concentration of the means of production in the hands of one capitalist” (Marx 1867, pp. 475–476).

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subject is reduced to a partial organ of a whole process, divided into sequences of particular actions that can only be put back together under the capitalist direction (La Grassa 1996). 35 To tell the truth, the division between manual and intellectual work is an ancient one: purposeful planning, usually comes before the intended execution of the planned work; somebody conceives an idea, which is subsequently carried out by somebody else. However, both slavery and serfdom keep the unity of the tasks, allowing the worker full autonomy in carrying out a particular job: while still subjugated to the master, the peasant, the farmer, the artisan or the merchant have the whole mastery of their trade. On the contrary, in capitalist enterprise, the ideation process becomes separated by its execution, through the detailing of every single task and bit of knowledge. There is no employee, whether working in the private sector or in the public/mixed one, who is able to carry out a production process from start to finish. From the simplest of the production processes to the most sophisticated ones, we can see that they are all being subdivided into multiple operations. All these operations: (1) need to be coordinated, (2) depend on some technical apparatus, and (3) do not possess or control any intrinsic knowledge which could allow independent reproduction. Whether this can be attributed to the complexity of the processes and to the nature of the technology itself is a hotly debated matter. Controversial is also the question if sometimes can be possible and to what extent, the use of this approach alongside one that aims to rescue and promote some independent competencies within a single professional figure able to master one whole unity within the working process. While I will not go into these discussions in detail, I wish to highlight the crucial theoretical point: it is the technical division of labour that fosters the emergence of the new professional figure of the functionary (of the capital), whose pivotal function within the enterprise consists in coordinating tasks and applying techniques and knowledge. This is the outcome of a power relation: “The essence of the capitalist’s contribution is not capital, but his organizing ability; to secure a reward for this service, he must impose an organizational form that makes him essential to the production process on a continuing basis” (Marglin 1984, p. 150). In the economic sphere of the capitalist society, we encounter then a double 36 deepening of the power relation. On the one hand, the obligation to obey becomes the voluntary acceptance of the employment contract. On the other hand, workers are internally divided in performing their duties, being unable to undertake tasks that are not internally broken down into pieces. Those who are in charge, that is the functionaries (of the capital), offer an employment contract and detail the tasks with the purpose of controlling the ideation process and the whole production system. The core of the contemporary economic domain lies in this mecha-

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nism,12 and this is the key to understanding why in this book we will concentrate on how to supersede the economic capitalist institutions currently existing rather than engaging ourselves in a generic discussion on how to move towards an isocratic society. More specifically, in Chapter 2, we will focus on a radical re-thinking of the organisational enterprise formula. Box 6 The superpower of capital

Let us consider the set of human behaviours aimed at achieving power and how they trigger unlimited processes: we think of Alexander the Great’s lust for military conquest, Julius Caesar’s ambition to rule but also the thirst for dominion by religious castes or technocracies. However, before capitalism, power was difficult to transfer: the dynasties (political, military, priestly or academic) try to perpetuate it over time, but the uncertain personal variables play a big role (if Alexander dies prematurely, or if Caesar has too young a son, the transmission of power takes unwanted paths). Furthermore, it is difficult to accumulate power: the resources are added to each other, like the battalions of an army or the bureaucratic apparatus of an empire. Everything changes with capitalism. Power becomes now easily transmissible: for example, in its monetary form, it can be managed by a trust, thus guaranteeing future wealth even to inept heirs. Above all, power can be accumulated: because of the compound interest—thanks to which partial interests accrued in each period are not collected, but reinvested—the resources multiply along an exponential curve. In short, with capitalism, those who seek power act within a different framework of opportunities. Politics, war, religion and culture remain important means of power; but all become subordinates to capital and its operating logic. This is the reason why, in §32, I observed that, in examining the nexus of power, the capitalist economic sphere is crucial.

7 Isocracy as a Coherent and Sustainable Ideal Having reached this point, we want to discuss a topic that is as important as it 37 is overlooked: Are there any differences between different ideals both from the point of view of their internal consistency and from that of their historical fea-

12Therefore, within the historical horizon of capitalism, Norman Brown’s remark is extraordinarily acute: “The ultimate category of economics is power; but power is not an economic category” (Brown 1959, p. 251).

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sibility? We shall start by examining the internal consistency. What is the explanation behind some deep-rooted popular convictions and believes? This question is at the basis of many never-ending debates stemming from opposing views in the field of social sciences. We will limit ourselves to reminding just a few of the best known theoretical approaches. We will just mention how the emergence and diffusion of an ideal or of a set of beliefs has been attributed to a host of different factors, such as universal and subconscious archetypes, cultural trends, needs driven by class identity, civilisation differences, socialisation mechanisms, primordial traditions, structural determining factors especially of an economic nature, social selection of ideas, unique and unrepeatable historic circumstances and many others. Without thoroughly examining the various positions, we propose to differen38 tiate between those ideals that directly link means to goals and those that completely separate them from one another. Take for instance Christianity. Jesus’s message as it has been passed down to us through the Gospels refers to a community of believers and followers that was organised in a non-hierarchical way and was not concerned with struggles meant to achieve and maintain secular power. After the crucifixion, his closer circle, wait in prayer for the end of time. What comes in its place are signals that instead encourage the followers to become organised and to proselytise. From that point onwards, the community morphs into an organisation with a strong vertical structure that has the double purpose of opposing the existing powers and gaining power itself. This transformation on the one hand sets the path for a long historical duration, while on the other sees the original goals being upturned and exchanged with the means. The original goals of “fraternity in Christ” and priority of spiritual life over mundanity are taken over by the means, which results in the establishment of an ecclesiastical hierarchy and in the pursuit of political, economic and even military resources. Or we can consider communism. Marx’s message envisages a society that overcomes the constraints due to economic scarcity and is able to guarantee that everybody is given according to his own needs while contributing according to his own capabilities; this society will see class conflict disappear, and with it all the repressive institutions, especially the state. When the possibility of bringing about a worldwide proletarian revolution that would pursue a communist society becomes highly unlikely, both Marx and his most effective follower, Lenin, overturn the means in relation to the goals: in order to achieve the conditions for true freedom, what is needed is a violent and Jacobin dictatorship, as it is easier to start the transition from a backward society than it would be from a richer one of the mature capitalist kind. This, despite the fact that in the former is more difficult even to fulfil the basic needs of physical survival. In these cases, in order to firmly anchor

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themselves in human history both the ideals of Christianity and of Communism make goals and means antithetical to each other: the goals should be achieved thanks to some kind of “heterogenetic process” or of “dialectical negation”. Through these, the most hierarchical organisation should become a community of equals, and the fiercest of dictatorships should lead to a world free from coercion. There are however, few other ideals, which, at least in not too unfavourable 39 conditions, succeed in linking means to goals and in making them inherently consistent. Among these, we find the democratic ideal, whose realisation method is in the words of William Riker “that of free and equal participation for each subject to the political life of the community, that is involvement in the control of the social environment. […] What makes democracy unique is that means and goals are linked to each other or we can even say that they are the same thing in an ideal or instrumental key. According to the democratic theory, democratic goals can be pursued through democratic means” (Riker 1982, pp. 4–5, italics added). Another ideal of our age that succeeds in aligning means and goals within its own internal logic is that of the decentralised market economy. The argument is put forward with striking efficacy in a classic text of economic science: “But if I am making or doing anything not because I have any direct interest in it, but because someone else wants it, and that other person will either do what I want done or put me in command of it, then I am furthering his purposes as a means of furthering my own. I am indirectly forwarding my purposes by directly forwarding his […]. The economic organism, then, of an industrial society represents the instrumentality whereby every man, by doing what he can for some of his fellows, gets what he wants from others” (Wicksteed 1914, pp. 772–773). Therefore, ideals are not all constructed in the same way: while there are many 40 that pitch means against goals which are different if not opposite in nature, a small minority succeeds in harmonising means to goals. It thus creates a virtuous circle by which the very use of the available means brings the achievement of the desired goals closer, just as the reverse process becomes true. According to this analysis, both democracy and the decentralised market feature prominently in this small group. Nonetheless, it is generally agreed upon that, for the internal consistency of both means and goals and of the various stages of the processes involved to become real, we would need some prerequisites to be fulfilled. In both cases, we would need to get rid of the many objectionable “imperfections” linked to the actual functioning of the processes in reality, which for obvious reasons are systematic and entrenched. This of course leaves the correspondence between ideal and reality in the realm of desire. In the small minority of ideals that offer an internal consistency, we can 41 definitely include isocracy: its final goal is to achieve equality in power among

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c­ itizens, and the means to pursue it consists in balancing—in the strongest, most accurate and exhaustive ways—the powers of the subject (individual or collective) in relation to the powers of other subjects. For isocracy too, there is an alignment of means and goals: the more we improve the former, the closer we get to the latter. But it does not stop here either. In my view, isocracy is the only ideal that provides, along with internal consistency, the requisite of actual historical realisation. By this, I do not mean that there are the conditions of an immediate and certain application of the ideal to reality, but rather, that if it were to be embraced it would automatically reproduce itself, i.e. would be able to self-replicate in time, through an endogenous mechanism. There are at least two reasons why these characteristics apply to isocracy: it draws a path which pursues the balancing of power relations between subjects (individual and collective). When this path is successfully pursued is able to last as it leads to a situation of complex equality. In such situation, even though not all the inequalities and disparities are eliminated, it becomes difficult to add up or multiply power with power, which in turn leads to a relative stability of the social set-up. Furthermore, being isocracy a normative criterion as well, it stipulates that “everyone is entitled to the same amount” of the good under discussion, i.e. power, and therefore treats everyone equally. Being a criterion that involves all the subjects in the same way, there are no needs, wants or demands that are left outside its boundaries that could arise and cause a possible upheaval of the current social setting. The systemic sustainability of this criterion lies in its omni-inclusivity: everything concerns power, and power concerns everyone. The following chapters will be concerned with the main institutions of isoc42 racy. To better introduce the topic, it may be useful to expound on the implication that can be drawn from the thesis outlined in §41: the final goal of the isocratic ideal is equality of power among citizens, which it pursues through the means of the balancing of powers. This means, that in a realised isocratic society, with the goal fully achieved, the power asymmetries will have mostly disappeared, but to follow the path leading to that society, the main means at our disposal are the countering of one power with another. To put it in another way: a society without power requires power. To approach a society model where nobody is in charge and nobody obeys, we need to set up institutions where various forms of power find a way to balance themselves in relation to the others. This is the paradox that lies at the core of my reflection, and this is why the core of my thoughts concerns the institutional design of an isocratic society. The institutions of equality is therefore the appropriate subtitle for this book. 43 In the following chapters, I will put forward arguments on the possible ways in which these political and economic institutions could work in a society which,

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for reasons that I have already explained, I prefer to the present one. I am deeply convinced that this is not an idle exercise, as people must be able to visualise an idea in order to be spurred into action. I will not go much into the real historical paths that could lead us closer to isocracy, but I believe that my attempt to formulate a consistent and sustainable ideal will help us identify when and where these paths are starting to take shape. Box 7 On the intellectual sources of the book

This book challenges academic specialisms because it contains pages of philosophical discussion, economic analysis and political theory. A first obvious risk is to remain at an amateur level in each of the disciplines. Nevertheless, as the nature of the problem under discussion requires transdisciplinarity, the risk is unavoidable. A second possible pitfall concerns eclecticism. I am aware that the impression of a bundling together of disparate and sometimes incompatible intellectual sources—drawn from philosophical reflection, economics, as well as political science—can easily arise. If, with extreme simplification, I had to indicate a single author, as the main inspiration of the four central chapters of the book, I would point out Michael Walzer (a liberal with communitarianism leanings) for the first chapter, James Meade (a democratic socialist of Keynesian formation) for the second, Frederick von Hayek (an Old Whig or classic liberal) for the third and Alfred Sohn-Rethel (a neo-Marxist, close to the Frankfurt School) for the fourth. If I had then to indicate the author who provided inspiration across the whole book, I would point out Bertrand Russell (a neo-illuminist libertarian). Well, is it not eclecticism try to keep together such different scholars? However, the interpretative key I use in this book avoids eclecticism by attempting a theoretical synthesis between two great strands of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social thought: classical liberalism and the critique of capitalism. I will focus my attention on three pillars of classical liberalism. This firstly concerns itself with the exploration of the institutional paths by which to reduce arbitrary power, or rather, in the words of Hayek, “the chief evil is unlimited government, and nobody is qualified to wield unlimited power” (von Hayek 1960, p. 525). Secondly, this approach does not aspire to a catharsis of humanity, thanks to which people would be able to create and maintain a Good Society. On the contrary, it theorises—to use again Hayek’s words—“a system under which bad men can do least harm. It is a social system which does not depend for its functioning on our finding good men for running it, or on all men becoming better than they now are, but which makes use of men in all their given variety and complexity, sometimes good and sometimes bad,

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sometimes intelligent and more often stupid” (von Hayek 1948, pp. 11–12). Finally, from an anthropological point of view, classical liberalism emphasises the passions (see §12 of Chapter 4), developing a non-reductionist concept of the human being. Conversely, there are also three pillars of critical thinking on capitalism— Marxist, socialist and anarchist—on which I will concentrate. Firstly, at the heart of this economic system is an institution, the firm, in which arbitrary power is predominant. For example, as Julia Cagé writes, “in a typical jointstock company, there is no countervailing power. Whoever owns the most shares also has the lion’s share of the voting rights” (Cagé 2015, Chapter 3). Secondly, in capitalism, the human being does not produce for himself, but for another; performs a hetero-direct and often repetitive work; lives every social relationship in terms of commercial exchange. He thus tends to become estranged from what he does and from other people to the point of not recognising himself. This phenomenon of alienation even changes his way of feeling and thinking and is for him a fundamental source of suffering and unhappiness. Thirdly, because of the predominance of arbitrary power, capitalism is an extraordinarily unequal society and, because of the spread of alienation, an oppressive one. However, at the same time, it is the first polyarchic society in human history, being compartmentalised in many institutional spheres, relatively separate from each other, which allow each of us to act in different ways and with different outcomes, depending on the sphere in which we find ourselves. Therefore, due to its polyarchic nature, capitalism also contains a tremendous potential for liberation. Critics of capitalism have, in many cases, imagined alternative societies based on the idea of “new” men, better than those who operate today. In theorising these “new” men, critics have often marginalised the hot passions (see Chapter 4), imagining behaviours derived almost exclusively by a collective rationality. Furthermore, they have often underestimated the internal conflicts within groups that are supposed to promote historical change and have often given the task of “overcoming” capitalism to forms of arbitrary political power. The three pillars of classical liberalism constitute the most effective antidote to the difficulties posed by these positions. On the other hand, though, the exponents of classical liberalism have often reduced capitalism to a simple decentralised market economy, eliminating the asymmetries of power. Their battle against arbitrary power has thus remained abstract and partial. ­Moreover, the realistic, if not pessimistic, lookout on human behaviour is often too generic, not taking into account the historical specificity of the condition of alienation. Finally, they tend to exclude the possibility of a sustainably

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post-capitalist economy and society, as if the current historical horizon were the only thinkable and viable one. In short, each of the two approaches helps to highlight and rediscuss the limits of the other. This is why an attempt of their theoretical synthesis does not respond to an extemporaneous whim, but rather to the need of reflecting more deeply about an isocratic perspective.

References Acemoglu, Daron K. 2003. Why Not a Political Coase Theorem? Social Conflict, Commitment, and Politics. Journal of Comparative Economics 31: pp. 620–652. Anderson, Elizabeth S. Anderson. 1993. Value in Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bakunin, Michail. 1866. Revolutionary Cathechism. In Sam Dolgoff (eds.), Bakunin on Anarchy. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Barzel, Yoram. 2002. A Theory of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bobbio, Norberto. 1995. Eguaglianza e libertà. Torino: Einaudi. Bobbio, Norberto. 1999. Teoria Generale della Politica. Torino: Einaudi. Bowles, Samuel, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosvelt. 2005. Understanding Capitalism, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. Brown, Norman O. 1959. Life Against Death, 2nd ed. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1985. Burchardt, Tanya. 2010. Time, Income and Substantive Freedom: A Capability Approach. Time & Society 19 (3): pp. 318–344. Cagé, Julia. 2015. Saving the Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Centola, Damon. 2015. The Social Origins of Networks and Diffusion. American Journal of Sociology 120 (5): pp. 1295–1338. Centola, Damon, and Michael Macy. 2007. Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties. American Journal of Sociology 113 (3): pp. 702–734. Clark, John P. 2013. The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism. New York: Bloomsbury. Coleman, James S. 1990. Foundations of Social Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Colombo, Eduardo. 2014. El Espacio Politico de la Anarquía. Madrid: Klinamen. Dobb, Maurice. 1937. Political Economy and Capitalism. London: Routledge. Elster, Jon. 1992. Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Elster, Jon. 2007. Agir contre Soi. La Faiblesse de Volonté. Paris: Odile Jacob. Emerson, Richard M. 1962. Power-Dependence Relations. American Sociological Review 27: pp. 31–41. Ezra, Ovadida. 2015. Distributive Justice. In Andrew Fiala (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 75–93.

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Fishkin, Joseph. 2014. Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forst, Rainer. 2007. Radical Justice: On Iris Marion Young’s Critique of the “Distributive Paradigm”. Constellations 14 (2): pp. 260–265. Friedberg, Erhard. 1993. Le Pouvoir et la Règle. Dynamique de l’Action Organisée. Paris: Seuil. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. 1983. Hermann Heinrich Gössen: His Life and Work in Historical Perspective. In H. H. Gössen (eds.), The Laws of Human Relations. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Gneezy, Uri, Stephen Meier, and Pedro Rey-Biel. 2011. When and Why Incentives (Don’t) Work to Modify Behavior. Journal of Economic Perspectives 25 (4): pp. 191–210. Goodin, Robert E., James Mahmud Rice, Anti Parpo, and Lina Erikson. 2008. Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Hayek, Friedrich A. 1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. von Hayek, Friedrich A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Hirschman, Albert O. 1984. Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating Some Categories of Economic Discourse. In Jeremy Adelman (eds.), The Essential Hirschman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Hirschman, Albert O. 1986. The Concept of Interest, From Euphemism to Tautology. In Jeremy Adelman (eds.), The Essential Hirschman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Hirschman, Albert O. 1991. The Rethoric of Reaction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jaeggi, Rahel. 2015. Towards an Immanent Critique of Forms of Life. Raisons Politiques. Revue de Théorie Politique 57 (1): pp. 13–29. La Grassa, Gianfranco. 1996. Lezioni sul capitalismo. Bologna: CLUEB. Lapavitsas, Costas. 2013. Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. London: Verso. Lukes, Steven. 2005. Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lunghini, Giorgio. 2001. I nuovi compiti dello Stato. In Michel Aglietta and Giorgio Lunghini (eds.), Sul capitalismo contemporaneo. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Mann, Michael. 1986. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marglin, Stephen A. Marglin. 1984. Knowledge and Power. In Frank H. Stephen (eds.), Firms, Organization and Labour: Approaches to the Economics of Work Organization. London: Macmillan. Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1845–1846. The German Ideology. New York: Prometheus Books, 1967. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1848. The Communist Manifesto. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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Miller, David. 1995. Complex Equality. In David Miller and Michael Walzer (eds.), Pluralism, Justice, and Equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Napoleoni, Claudio. 1988. Nella Storia non c’è Salvezza. In Claudio Napoleoni, Cercate ancora, ed. Raniero La Valle. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1990. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Riker, William H. 1982. Liberalism Against Populism. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1938. Power, a New Social Analysis. London: Routledge. Sandel, Michael. 2009. Justice. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Sartori, Giovanni. 1987. Elementi di Teoria Politica. Bologna: Il Mulino. Schlosser, Markus. 2015. Agency. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/agency/. Accessed September 15, 2017. Screpanti, Ernesto. 2001. The Fundamental Institutions of Capitalism. London: Routledge. Sen, Amartya. 1977. Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioural Foundations of Economic Theory. Philosophy & Public Affairs 6 (4): pp. 317–344. Stigler, George J., and Gary S. Becker. 1977. De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. American Economic Review 67 (2): pp. 76–90. Taylor, Michael. 1982. Community, Anarchy and Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tobin, James. 1970. On Limiting the Domain of Inequality. Journal of Law and Economics 13 (2): pp. 263–277. Vallentyne, Peter. 2007. Distributive Justice. In Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit and Thomas Pogge (eds.), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. London: Blackwell, pp. 548–562. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books. Walzer, Michael. 2007. Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 1990. The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wicksteed, Philip H. 1914. The Scope and Method of Political Economy in the Light of the ‘Marginal’ Theory of Value and Distribution. In Philip H. Wicksteeed (eds.), The Common Sense of Political Economy, vol. 2. London: Routledge, 1933. Wilde, Oscar. 1891. The Soul of Man Under Socialism. http://libcom.org/library/soul-ofman-under-socialism-oscar-wilde. Accessed September 15, 2017. Wrong, Dennis H. 1979. Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses. Oxford: Blackwell. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2

The Economic Institutions of Isocracy

Abstract

In this chapter, the economic institutions of Isocracy are identified. Capitalism needs to be subdivided and emptied to favour forms of economic pluralism. In competition with the traditional firm, there is the cooperative controlled by shares, managed by members, some of which contribute with their work, while others bring venture capital (the labour–capital partnership). The institutional circuit in which currency circulates (which trades the goods and transfers the resources over time) is distinct from that in which money circulates (which allows the accumulation of capital). Currency and money can convert into each other in rationed amounts, in order to prevent the marginalisation, by financial capitalism, of the markets in which value in use is exchanged. A key role is played by the bodies that manage common goods. In this sector, the ownership of commons is assigned to fiduciary institutions that are bound to hold and manage them on behalf of everyone, and especially future generations. Among the measures of economic pluralism, we remind again of the partial disconnection of personal income from employment, to protect workers in those cases where remuneration is reduced or becomes risky. A source for funding the decoupling is the “social dividend”: revenues deriving from the return of socialised capital. Another source comes from the incomes of enterprises in the sector of common goods. A third source is the “social salary”: a basket of goods that society deems worthy of being universally provided at controlled prices. Finally, retrieving an idea originally elaborated by Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice (1797), on reaching adulthood, every citizen receives an identical portfolio that includes shares of some of the medium-big enterprises of the country. This enables him to acquire proper financial wealth, the biggest part of which goes back to the community after his death through © The Author(s) 2019 N. Bellanca, Isocracy, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00695-2_2

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a form of taxation on inheritance that becomes progressive with the passage of generations. The last sections of the chapter are devoted to the redistribution of work and care time, and to the socialisation of investments. According to Bellanca, the institutional network made up of these pre-distribution strategies is able to regulate financial capitalism thereby progressively weakening its negative effects in terms of inequality and of overall dominion on the part of a restricted group over everyone else.

1 Premise 1 In this chapter, I will examine the economic institutions of a post-capitalist society of the isocratic type. The following discussion is by no means exhaustive. I decided, though, to dwell in particular on the topics that I find more relevant, in a perspective of gradual change from the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism does not have to be abolished by some law decree, nor eliminated 2 through the seizure of political power, nor still, be devoid of meaning by some kind of magical and mysterious upturn of values and culture: all that is needed is that is pragmatically articulated and emptied in order to favour forms of economic pluralism. The more the collective action is able to promote and sustain multiple economic forms, the more chances there are to stop capitalism dominating the entire social landscape. The crucial point concerns the link between market and capitalism. Whereas market is an allocation mechanism, capitalism is a socio-economic system. Market and capitalism can exist independently from each other. It is only in the capitalist system that market is given the additional function to allocate social standing as well: in view of the universality of transactions, the quantity of money accumulated usually coincides with the level of success achieved, as well as the amount of power and the degree of other people’s approval. Subjective identity is built on the individual’s capacity to make money through the market system, which generates that reversal of roles between person and thing that Marx calls economic alienation. Therefore to eradicate alienation, we need to loosen the connection between money and virtue, income and prestige, material possessions and self-realisation. In the words of André Gorz, “the only hope of abolishing relations of domination is to start by recognising that functional power is inevitable. This recognition will enable us to look for ways of effectively restrict it to areas where it cannot be dispensed with. This will teach us to dissociate power from domination, keeping the first where necessary, doing away with the latter everywhere and upholding the specific autonomies of civil

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society, the political society and the state” (Gorz 1980, p. 65). Claudio Napoleoni makes the same argument in strikingly brilliant terms: “It is not a matter of getting out of capitalism to enter into something else but to widen as much as possible the difference between society and capitalism, that is, to widen the area in which man does not identify himself with that ‘inverted’ subjectivity” (Napoleoni 1988, pp. 215–216). Let us find out how this is realised in isocracy, starting with the sphere of production, that is, with the form of enterprise.

2 Cooperative Controlled by Shares (Labour–Capital Partnership) Characteristic of the capitalist enterprise is the rights of control of its economic 3 activities by private investors. These rights mainly consist in organising the way the company works, in delimiting its boundaries and in profiting from the difference between revenues and cost. In more mundane terms, these rights allow the discretional use of the working time of the labourers, the ability to decide who is fired, and that of earning the profits. Capitalist enterprise is a hierarchical and authoritarian structure, because the ultimate controlling power—the one that cannot be taken back by any other internal authority—belongs to the investors or the managers who represent them (Bowles 2004, Chapter 10). The alternative enterprise form is the production cooperative managed by 4 workers. The partners–workers borrow the capital, on to which they pay an interest as fixed remuneration, subsequently distributing the net income which results from the difference between management costs and revenue, to themselves. In this way, the whole relationship capital–labour is completely reversed (Vanek 1970; Jossa 2014). It is, in short, a form of enterprise in which the workers take on the risks linked to the investments and the responsibilities of making strategic decisions, obtaining in return the whole surplus. However, this kind of enterprise has serious functioning problems. For instance: in view of the fact that the retribution of the cooperating partners varies according to the variation of the net income, a new intake of working partners would result in more people having to share that amount. There are therefore conflicting interests between those who are already working inside the company and benefiting from it, and those who would like to join it. If we want to protect the workers already cooperating, the business becomes a closed one and based on privilege. If, on the other hand, we choose to let more people join it, the firm will implode because the people already working there will lose the motivation to make it work at its best. The other difficulty concerns the fact that the cooperating partners will not be able to attract venture

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capital, because this normally looks for profitable investments rather than for fixed retributions, which is what is being offered in this kind of enterprise. Historically, this has resulted in a very limited ability on the worker-controlled firm’s part to compete successfully with capitalist firms; it has also done so only under particular circumstances and has never been able to crowd them out completely in any economy: it remains a relatively small sector.1 Box 1 On the experience of the Mondragón group of cooperatives

In actual economy, cooperatives have experimented innovations that sometimes were able to mitigate the difficulties mentioned in §4. The most famous case is that of the Mondragon group of cooperatives in the Basque region of Northern Spain. In this group, created in 1956, when a cooperative realised an operating profit, 20–30% of it went to a collective equity account, while its majority, about 60%, was earmarked for members’ individual equity accounts. Both the collective fund and the individual accounts fed the group’s investment bank, Caja Laboral Popular, which financed the activities of the cooperatives, making them independent from the credit and financial markets of the capitalist economy. In addition, the Caja carried out three other important functions: fostering the birth of new cooperatives; transforming disrupted traditional firms into cooperatives; monitoring the activity of the financed firms, with a direct power of intervention that affected their management choices and could even limit their sovereignty (Thomas and Logan 1982; Ellerman 1984; Whyte and Whyte 1991). In this way, some critical issues of the single cooperative firm were resolved, moving them to group level. However, the Mondragón experience—in which the workers were the capital providers—does not seem easy to replicate. It appears to be linked to three peculiar circumstances. The firms of the group were initially located in a limited area with a homogeneous culture, which facilitated the relationships of interpersonal trust. Moreover, in the first decades of the group’s life, the breadth and loyalty with which the workers of the cooperatives poured their savings onto the Caja depended also on the high unemployment level of the area, and the related lack of alternatives (Bradley and Gelb 1982, 1983). Finally, the concentration in the Caja of lending, business promotion and supervision functions was possible during a low-regulation period in the financial field; at a later time, the Caja was reduced to a commercial bank,

1Foley

(2017, pp. 5–7). For a more in-depth analysis see Dow (2003, Chapters 8, 9 and 11).

2  Cooperative Controlled by Shares (Labour–Capital Partnership)

41

while the functions of financing and entrepreneurship were assigned to new specialised divisions. These three circumstances led to the success of the Caja, at a much faster rate than the group that founded it: its financial reserves became so high that, in 2009, the group of cooperatives absorbed only 3% of the bank’s lending capacity (Sanchez Bajo and Roelants 2011, p. 195). On the other hand, the Caja ceased to be an adequate support for Mondragón, when the major firms of the group entered the global competition, investing in many countries. This reinforced the need for financing these firms through share capital (equity investment), which has the advantage of not committing the firm to the return of the capital. To address this need, the Caja is not enough. What is needed is the isocratic business model that I illustrate in §§5–12. This weakness of the Mondragón group contributes to explain the bankruptcy, in 2013, of the group’s oldest and largest industrial cooperative, Fagor Electrodomésticos, a multinational corporation competing in the global home appliance market.2 The form of enterprise that seems closer to the isocratic model is the coopera- 5 tive controlled by shares or labour–capital partnership that has been examined by James Meade during his quest for a Good Place to Live (see the Foreword). This is completely different from the capitalist enterprise in that it levels the power of both capitalists and workers. It is also different, though, from the pure cooperative enterprise, because it tackles the problem of the difficulty of access of new workers and that of attracting venture capital. “The firm is run by partners some of whom contribute work to the firm and some risk-bearing capital. The partners share in the management and risk-bearing of the firm and they divide the residual profit of the concern between them in predetermined shares according to the amount of work and/or risk-bearing capital which they put into the firm. In this structure neither capital hires labour, nor labour hires capital but, worker and capital partners together decide on the management of the firm including decisions about the terms on which new worker or capital partners should be engaged by the firm” (Meade 1993, p. 194). In the labour–capital partnership, the net income belongs to both the work- 6 ing partners and the investors (capital partners), in the form of shares. When

2“Regarding

its financial strategy, Fagor […] financed the acquisitions with significantly more debt than equity ” (Errasti et al. 2017, p. 9). Sergio Treviño, Fagor’s chief executive, planned to turn Fagor into an ordinary company with outside shareholders (Economist, November 9, 2013).

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a different form of enterprise becomes a cooperative controlled by shares (labour–capital partnership), the share certificates are distributed in proportion to the net income amount that every subject had in the previous firm, so that the income that everyone receives remains unchanged. When the labour–capital partnership is instead created from scratch, it issues share certificates of capital in order to attract adequate financial resources, and share certificates of labour to attract adequate labour, using them as a total or partial substitute for the fixed salary that workers receive in the capitalist enterprise. In view of the fact that all share certificates entitle to the same rate of dividends, the variation in both the income from labour shares and that from capital shares follows the same trend. Therefore, the interests of both capitalists and workers tend to overlap. In addition, all the shareholders have the equal right to vote and nominate the firms’ managers. In this kind of firm, “no capitalist is hiring a worker at a fixed wage to do his bidding” (Meade 1993, p. 98). The reverse is also true: no worker borrows capital at a fixed-rate interest as it would happen in the case of a pure cooperative enterprise. It follows that both groups, that of the capitalists and that of the workers, take part jointly and on an equal basis in the running of the business. The chairman of the labour–capital partnership is selected externally by the 7 partners and acts as an independent guarantor/arbitrator figure. The working partners and the capitalist partners nominate respectively half of the members of the management board and half of the members of the supervisory board. The members of the first body are managers who decide whom to hire and fire, how to coordinate the organisation of the work tasks, as well as some short-term interventions. The members of the other board deal with supervisory tasks and strategic planning. This dual governance structure helps balancing the power of one of the boards with that of the other.3 All the managers are chosen from the existing partners, or in case they are taken from outside, they will become partners. This arrangement means that their main source of income comes from the share certificates and therefore their best interest coincides with the firm’s best interest. Every manager’s appointment can be withdrawn by the partners’ board. In the current economic system, there is also a managers’ market, which leads to the managers taking care of their own reputation, giving their best in their current role and building a good track record with a view to the possibility of changing company in the future. Lastly, since in labour–capital partnership only the partners are

3See Mallin (2013, Chapter 8). In this paragraph, we deal with a topic not addressed by Meade.

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entitled to net revenue and to decide who takes decisions, there is no other enterprise to control this enterprise. This implies that, in contrast to what happens in the capitalist system, there will not be a two-tier managerial structure, with higher grade managers holding direct and indirect power on lower grade managers and enterprises: here hierarchies are minimised and apply only to the internal structure of the self-governed body, that is the labour–capital partnership. Both capitalist enterprises and cooperatives can change into labour–capital 8 partnerships, thanks to preferential legal and credit treatments and suitable tax breaks. The new form of enterprise can appeal to many both on the grounds of efficiency, and of its ability to balance power and increase participation. Another convincing feature for the economic subjects could be its different social distribution of risk. In the capitalist enterprise, workers take on the employment risk, while capitalists take on that of revenue. In the pure cooperative enterprise, it is only the workers who bear all the business risk. In the labour–capital partnership (cooperative limited by share) instead, all the partners whether workers or capitalists are equally subject to the fluctuations in the share dividends and therefore totally partake in the entrepreneurial risk. However, whereas capital shares can be freely bought and sold, labour shares are tied to the individual working partner; this means that while capitalists can spread the risk by investing in more than one business, workers earn their whole income from just one firm. One way to start reducing this asymmetry is to add a fixed remuneration to the variable dividend for the working partners. Another way can arise from the decision by the partners to not distribute all the net income as dividends but to reinvest it in the enterprise. They issue new capital shares equal in value to the total net revenue which is not being distributed and redistribute them among themselves in proportion to the shares of any type (capital or labour) they already own. In this way, the working partners also acquire capital shares that they can trade, partly spreading their own risk.4 A further way consists of three innovative institutional plans which we will detail later: the collective dividend, the social salary and the attribution to every citizen on reaching adulthood, of a portfolio of shares, which entitles him to a dividends’ quota generated by the securities he holds. These three provisions

4Meade

(1989, 1993, pp. 112–113, Part II: The Treatment of Undistributed Surplus). This second book appeared in Italian in 1989. It contains the first and broader presentation of the theme by Meade, at the conference organised in 1988 by the League of Italian Cooperatives. In §11 we will examine the issuing of capital shares which are due to the working partner, at the time of retirement.

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would offer the worker an initial diversification of the risk, on which basis subsequent decisions regarding both work and investment would be taken. 9 Capital shares continue to yield dividends regardless of who their owners are as long as the capital is kept invested in the firm and they keep their full value when the capital partners leave the enterprise. Labour shares, instead, are issued in favour of individual workers, fully or partly replacing their salaries: indeed just as wages are not paid anymore when the worker changes company or retires, so the shares expire when the worker deliberately chooses to leave the firm. However, the nullification of the value of the labour shares may not be total at the moment of retirement: in a dynamic perspective, “these shares do not cease to exist at the moment of the worker leaving the firm, but they keep on yielding a temporary return. This is subject to a progressive reduction according to a discount rate that reflects the gradual fading away of the worker’s contribution in time to the enterprise’s results. This base rate could be negotiated according to the different sectors based on the rate of technical progress and obsolescence of the technology involved” (Brunetta 2014, p. 112). Furthermore, labour shares do not expire when the worker who leaves the enterprise does not so voluntarily, such in the case of unemployment: in that case, the shares of the working partners keep on yielding returns, providing them with a guaranteed source of income. When a new worker joins the enterprise, he is given a smaller number of shares 10 than the insiders, on the understanding that the difference will be progressively phased out. In this way, the entry of a new working partner suits both the capitalist partner and the existing working partner, because the joining partner owns less shares and therefore costs less, unlike what happens in the pure cooperative, where the level of retribution is the same for both new partners and existing ones. The labour–capital partnership pays attention to the sustainability in time of 11 the choices being made. Firstly, the shares whether capital or labour ones allow participation to a net revenue, which is linked to the middle-term results of the enterprise. The reason for this is to avoid that somebody decides to choose the enterprise attracted by the prospect of better immediate revenue margins. In second place, the pension of every working partner is financed through the contribution that have been paid both by him and the enterprise, whereas his labour shares are nullified, either immediately or gradually, with the end of employment. However, during the working years of that labour partner, the enterprise may achieve some permanent improvements that generate increased net revenue to distribute. In order to show appreciation for the contribution of that working partner to the improvements, the firm gives him a part of the increased net revenue

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in capital shares equal to the quota of the labour shares he owned while working. In this way, the retiring working partner becomes a new owner of capital, thus spreading the capitalist property. Thirdly, while at the beginning the shares are distributed in proportion to the quota of net income that every subject had in the previous enterprise or in a way suitable to attract adequate capitalists and workers, it can happen that in time some partners may ask to renegotiate the shares quota to their advantage. The ensuing controversy will then be dealt with by an arbitrating body and this will signal that conflicts are still present even in the labour–capital partnership and it cannot be taken for granted that these will find an internal solution. There may be cases of the group not accepting the outcome of the negotiation and possibly leaving the firm. However, it must be stressed that this form of enterprise is isocratic by nature, as no group is favourite ex ante by the organisational rules which give it an automatic and permanent advantage over another one. This means that when a group claims a bigger quota of shares the reasons must be found outside the internal structure of the firm and are not based on privileges acquired within the enterprise. Should these reasons, such as, for instance, the increasing lack of certain competences in the market, persist, it is likely that the other groups will acknowledge them. Should these be, on the other hand, temporary, the other groups know that the group which is favourite by today’s circumstances will not be able to keep their position tomorrow just by exploiting an asymmetry in the rules. In view of this fact they tend not to leave the enterprise, accepting a reversible loss and at the same time reinforcing the sustainability of the enterprise. The labour–capital partnership relies on the joint participation of work- 12 ers and capitalists. There is a long critical thinking tradition—which includes Marxism, socialism and anarchy—that maintains that it is only the work factor to be “truly” productive and therefore there is not any economic justification in joining forces with the capital factor. This is the topic of “unproductive and/or parasitic activities” already central to the classical school of economics reflection (Perrotta 2018). I want to draw attention to the fact that when we define an activity as being productive, or unproductive, or even parasitic, or in receipt of revenue, what we are doing is an interpretative operation that depends on the theoretical framework we are referring to; in this respect, we are engaging ourselves in a contest towards achieving cultural hegemony. Fully aware of this, I define “productive activities” the jobs and investments that contribute to the socio-economic development (which is different from the market growth measured by the gross domestic product or GDP). These are identified from whatever development indicator we decide to choose: a good indicator is the Better Life

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Index, or life improvement index proposed by the Ocse in 2011.5 Instead, I define “unproductive activities” the jobs and investments that are limited to redistributing a given amount of resources (what the “resources” are depends on the theoretical approach and on the linked indicator). Among the “unproductive activities” I place the productive ones that receive a rent; by rent I mean the non-­equitable distribution of a certain production factor. (What do we mean by “equity” does, once again, depend from the chosen theoretical frame: it could be the surplus earning as compared to what it would be received in a free competition environment, it could be a criterion regarding equal opportunities, or something else). Finally, I define parasitic activities (or not sustainable) those jobs and investments that actually reduce now or in the future, the quantity of available resources. The main implication of the definitions exercises just attempted is that even capital can be productive, provided it is invested in a way that can contribute to the socio-economic development; this implication validates the model of the labour–capital partnership and this is the reason why I am discussing it here.

3 The Social Dividend 13 Workers need external sources of income outside the firm to protect them in case the retribution coming from work is drastically reduced or becomes at risk. If we except professional gamblers or speculators, the majority of people do not have a propensity to risk and are willing to undertake initiative with no certain outcome only if they feel they are somehow covered. In this respect to guarantee everyone a basic income will favour creative, innovative and experimental behaviours. Furthermore, the access to additional income is an institutional mechanism of the isocratic kind: subjects who have less mobile resources—work is less mobile than capital—depend more on the enterprise’s economic performance and more in general on the economic context which they are part of. If the enterprise is not performing well and the context is not favourable, these subjects become

5This

takes into consideration some subjective opinions regarding the personal level of satisfaction, along with other ten more objective indicators, ranging from income to employment, social relationships to work-life balance. Obviously, the more aspects are being taken in consideration the more difficult it becomes to assign a weight to each: the Better Life Index allows each person to formulate their own index, attributing to their own judgement a different weight according to the different dimensions. See http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex. org/. Accessed September 15, 2017. On the debate regarding the indicators post-GDP, see Kahneman (2006), McKerron (2012).

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vulnerable. Unless they control multiple sources of income, in which case they are able to level their power to that of the capital owners. To respond to the need for sources of income that do not come from work, 14 Meade proposes that the community becomes the owner of a part of the economic resources of a country and uses the returns from capital to fund a social dividend for all the citizens (Meade 1989, Part III). Public-sector budget runs up a deficit when the expenditures exceed the revenues, that is to say, when public spending is bigger than net tax revenue. If the budget is in deficit, usually the government goes into debt in order to cover it, that is, it finances it through borrowing operations. Public debt is the result of deficit accumulation: interests paid on that debt are the cost for deferring a fiscal liability. However, this sequence—starting with excess expenses, going on to accumulate annual deficits and ending with a debt that burdens the citizens—is not unavoidable. The deficit of the budget account can be counterbalanced in the medium term by the positive effects of the productivity of public investments and, in the short term, by an advance in the balance sheet (which reports the state of assets and liabilities, and whose balance equals the net public equity). When public spending concerns the running of public services, it can be considered current expense; but when its purpose is that of maintaining and increasing the productive capital and the assets, then it is capital expenditure. Capital expenditure first and foremost funds infrastructural goods that help to increase the productivity of the private economy (such as roads, bridges, buildings and communication networks), or capital goods for public services that improve productivity indirectly (such as hospitals and schools). These public investments can be even more efficient than private ones,6 so much so that, according to some recent official estimates, a public investment of one dollar can bring a productivity increase worth three dollars (International Monetary Fund 2014, Chapter 3). Secondly, capital expenditure buys assets from the private sector. In this case, 15 it is an expense that can generate revenue through the returns coming from the management of public owned equity, and that can supplement taxation in finding financial means. Meade suggests that the government buys a quota of the main private enterprises’ shares alongside a quota of national assets.7 He believes though, that it would be better to socialise only the benefits deriving from the

6According

to some reliable researches, public investments are more productive than private ones. See, for instance Aschauer (1989). 7More appropriately, for reasons that will become apparent in Chapter 3, we need to substitute both here and in the following chapter, the usual reference to the nation with a more generic one to a “political community”.

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ownership of the assets, while assigning their ordinary running to a fund managed by the Central Bank and/or several private investment funds. The revenue deriving from the income of the socialised capital is made up of dividends and accrued interest, plus some possible capital gains; it constitutes a form of nontax revenue used to feed a new source of income—the “social dividend”—which is equally distributed among citizens. The amount of this form of supplementary income is in general rather moderate. The purchase of assets and subscriptions to shares are in fact normally funded by tax on capital or inheritance tax, either by gift or inheritance (see §§51–54) or by the sale of marketable assets that the government holds in excess, or through the privatisation of non-strategic public enterprises that are not being managed efficiently. These operations usually generate an income that can be turned into a moderate contribution to the social dividend.8 It is obvious, on the other hand, that their main relevance to the isocratic economic system is not to be found as much in the revenue generated as it is in two other aspects: the virtuous path of debt reversal (from debt to credit) taken by public finance and the socialisation of commons. We shall examine these two aspects in §16 and §§17–19 respectively. Here we will take into consideration a response to the need for sources 16 of income that do not come from labour, which is apparently more simple and radical than that of the social dividend. This would consist in giving each person a single basic income or citizenship income that should be universal, unconditional and unlimited in duration (Widerquist et al. 2013). It needs to be noted that the social dividend pursues a very different logic compared to that of the basic income. While the second is funded through the tax revenue, and sooner or later will feed the public deficit, the first is funded exclusively by a non-tax revenue—the proceeds from public assets—that is increased in time through revenues, profits, interest and dividends. Also, the social dividend is the result of the socialisation of property coupled with management by the Central Bank and/or the private sector. This path offers the advantage to help shifting public expenditure entries towards capital expenditure entries; it improves the performance and the sustainability of the system by raising financial means through the net return on public investments. The perspective of a public credit becomes the final source of an additional income of a non-tax nature for any citizen; but first and foremost, it becomes also the path of a tangible relief of the fiscal burdens linked

8The

version of the social dividend that we are discussing here is different in several ways from the original one introduced by Meade, taking also into account critical observations like those by Smith (1992).

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to public debt formation. It is an important step, even if not as ambitious as the basic income, towards the achievement of economic independence for each and everyone. I shall return on the subject of basic income in §24. Box 2 Sharing the returns of capital and wealth

A universal basic dividend does not have to be funded by taxes. In addition to the proposal outlined in §§13–15, it is possible to draw on the profits of large corporations. As a matter of fact, the great technological innovations usually rely on public investments in basic research, while the most innovative companies exploit a collective production of wealth, as in the case of big data (Mazzucato 2013). However, the resulting profits are distributed exclusively among a limited number of shareholders. In an isocratic society, on the other hand, the benefits are extended to the whole community. A small percentage of the shares of all the companies listed on the stock exchange are transferred into a public property fund. This fund receives annual share dividends, just as any other shareholder, and then allocates them among citizens in the form of per capita income (Diem25 2016, §2.5).

4 The Common Goods Sector Among the assets whose ownership needs to be socialised in order to activate the 17 social dividend are the commons. However, because of the important and peculiar nature of this particular category of goods, it is not sufficient to give their control to an administrative fund managed by the Central Bank and/or a portfolio of private investment funds (see §15): in the isocratic economic system, a proper dedicated sector needs to be created for them. In order to better understand this need, it is useful to remind ourselves that the primary goal of the capital’s functionaries is the maximum possible increase in time of the worth of the capital that they manage; they are pushed in that direction by both internal competition from other capital’s functionaries and the circumstance that their social standing depends primarily on the extent of the capital they control. The means to reach this goal consists in the maximisation of the profit, that is to say, the difference for each period, between the value of the goods sold and that of the means of production employed. We can see that capitalism as an economic system is perfused by this inherent fundamental contradiction between short- and long-term interests, or in other words, between the immediate horizon of profitability and a developmental scenario that would be sustainable over an extended period of time. It is in this respect that we need to consider the very important

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topic of the commons, which we can define as the resources that are essential to the maintenance and exploitation of the long-term development potential of a systemic context.9 As gifts inherited by the socio-natural environment or as resources created collectively, commons include air and water, natural habitats and ecosystems, languages and cultures, science and technology, political and juridical systems, social infrastructures and much more. In a capitalist system, common social, cultural and natural goods are concentrated in the hands of restricted elites that exploit them in order to maximise profits, or alternatively, are run by the public sector that add a lot of heavy deficiencies to the quasi-total inability to make individuals pay for the social cost of their use. Besides, there is not an established price for them and they are either over or underutilised by the markets. The isocratic society deals with these difficulties by adding to the public- and 18 private-sector enterprises, a purposefully developed enterprise sector in charge of the commons. In this sector, the ownership of the commons is assigned to fiduciary institutions: the trusts. Trusts are organisations which are set up without lucrative purposes, and with the intention to hold and manage the property of something on behalf and for the benefit of somebody else, especially future generations. A trust is a legal instrument adequate to handle commons both operationally and strategically, because it allows for the separation between enjoyment of the good and its administration. The community does not relinquish property of the commons but entrusts it to a fiduciary body that manages it for the pursuit of particular outcomes, joined by a “guardian” who acts as a counsellor and supervisor. In this way, the commons are “given property rights” without being neither privatised nor nationalised, more precisely, they are subject to a peculiar “proprietary regime” of a private-social nature. On the financial aspect, trusts are the result of partnerships between public and private subjects in which even private capital takes on public interest finalities. They are obliged to use the funds raised according to the modalities set out in the body’s statute and this happens in a participative way as the investor is a shareholder partner as well and as such has voting rights in the boards. It is the trusts and not the governments or the markets that decide what eco19 nomic value is given to the commons. When the commons appear scarce or threatened, the trusts claim a price for them that could limit their use.

9The

following discussion is inspired by the analysis and proposal put forward by Barnes (2006).

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By doing so, the trusts pursue the double purpose of safeguarding the commons and obtaining revenues that become distributed among citizens. This insures that an amount is received regardless of paid work, thereby contributing to the “social dividend” (see §§14–15). When the commons, on the other hand, are unlimited, as in the case of culture or the Internet, the trust commits to give the most benefit to the maximum possible number of people at the lowest possible cost, thus contributing to level the economic condition of everybody and everyone’s well-being (that is to say, contributing to the “social salary” discussed in §§20–23). In both circumstances, the commons sector follows a logic which is opposite to the one operating in the capitalist system. The role of the government consists ultimately in guaranteeing the commons; in assigning the trusts property rights; in financing the re-purchasing of commons that have become private property, such as lands or the rights to water. Box 3 The common property trust

Across the UK, the National Trust, a non-governmental charity founded in 1895, owns over 247,000 hectares of countryside, 778 miles of coastline, and over 500 historic houses, castles, ancient monuments, gardens and parks and nature reserves. It has an annual income of £592 million and over 11,000 permanent and seasonal staff, 4.8 million members who elect half of its thirty-six-person governing council (the other half are appointed by non-profit organisations that share the trust’s goals). Its activities are financed by membership subscriptions, contributions from charitable and other trading activities, donations as well as gifts in wills and grants (Reynolds 2016; National Trust 2016/17). The National Trust is a wonderful example of a common property trust: “a special kind of trust that manages assets that come from the commons and are meant to be preserved as commons” (Barnes 2006, p. 84). However, despite its merits, during the twentieth century, 1155 historic buildings, often built by leading architects, were demolished in England alone. Among these, one of Robert Adam’s masterpieces (the Big House of Bowood, Wiltshire), the Rococo style houses, numerous neoclassical villas, the greatest monument of the Greek Revival (Grange Park, Hampshire) and the most important Victorian villa in neo-Gothic style (Eaton Hall, Cheshire). This happened because, in that country, there was no law of protection, and the owner was free to do what he wanted without any state control. Only in 1968, the Town and Country Planning Act made the demolition of monuments illegal, which nevertheless continued at least until 1980 (Settis 2007, Chapter 3). This example documents the decisive role of the government in assigning property rights over commons to trusts.

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5 The Social Salary 20 In capitalism, there is a spontaneous but limited tendency towards free sharing, that is, free allocation of goods: the “indirect salary” is a retribution in kind made up of accessory benefits (fringe benefits)—lunch vouchers, paid holidays, accommodation, company car, health and welfare insurance, financial loans—that some employees benefit from either free or at better conditions than those offered on the open market. Alongside this, we also find another tendency, even more important, towards free sharing. Already in 1937, Oskar Lange observed that some commodities are treated by the consumer as if they were free goods (Lange 1937). A reason for this behaviour has to do with the reduced weight of the goods being considered in the basket of consumer goods: if the subject spends a negligible amount of his income on bread, soap, marked down jeans, second-hand bikes or web access, he neglects these goods in making his consumer’s choices, that is, behaves as if these goods did not cost him anything. In other terms, the consumer knows that “generic” goods concerning nutrition, hygiene, clothing, transportation and culture/information have a minimal impact on his overall expenditure. This phenomenon also features the peculiarity that the demand of the consumer has a reduced flexibility not only when the price goes up but also when it goes down. It is a common occurrence that demand is rigid when there is a price increase: if for instance the price of petrol raises and the consumer finds it difficult to swap the car with alternative means of transport he must keep on buying more or less the same quantity of petrol. But the fact that demand does not vary when there is a price drop represents an anomaly: when there is a reduction in the unitary price of a good, the quantity bought should increase. This anomaly can be explained with the fact that the need of the subject for that particular good has reached a saturation point. He already enjoys an abundance of the good even when this is being sold at a normal price; if the price drops (even up to zero), he could freely stock up on the good, but has no reason to consume more. We are considering a special category of goods, which is nevertheless very 21 meaningful in practice. Each of them costs the consumer a small amount in relation to his financial income and is plentiful if compared to the need he has for it, which is why the consumer does not change his financial behaviour following a variation in the price of the good. It follows that as an allocation method the mercantile system does not work any longer with this category of goods, in so far as the price signals do not succeed in aligning the quantities demanded with those supplied. These goods are being allocated as if there were a free sharing system or free allocation of the goods, since everybody takes them according to their needs and since the demand for them does not increase even when the price is null.

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In the economic isocratic system the free sharing mechanism, that in capital- 22 ism appears only in the two feeble forms just mentioned, is fully implemented. All the citizens are in receipt of a “social salary”, which is not a financial income, but a basket of final goods that are offered either at zero price, or at a price highly reduced if compared to the one that would be found on the market.10 Unlike the “indirect salary” (see §20), the social salary is given to anyone, regardless of their personal, financial or working situation; also, unlike “Lange’s goods” (see §§20– 21), it contains the majority of goods which are very relevant for the subject, such as health care, education, the environment, justice, science, art, culture, independent information, accident prevention, social security and insurance, the web. It realises an old proposition of the libertarian culture. As Bertrand Russell remarks “in the anarchic conception of society all the commoner commodities will be available to everyone without stint, in the kind of way which water is available at present. Advocates of this system point out that it applies already to many things which formerly had to be paid for, e.g., roads and bridges. […] If this system were extended to all the necessaries of life, everyone’s bare livelihood would be secured, quite regardless of the way in which he might choose to spend his time. As for commodities which cannot be produced in indefinite quantities, such as luxuries and delicacies, they also according to the Anarchists, are to be distributed without payment, but on a system of rations, the amount available being divided equally among the population. No doubt, though this is not said, something like a price will have to be put upon these luxuries, so that a man may be free to choose how he will take his share: one man will prefer good wine, another the finest Havana cigars, another pictures or beautiful furniture. Presumably, every man will be allowed to take such luxuries as are his due in whatever form he prefers, the relative prices being fixed so as to equalise the demand” (Russell 1919, Chapter 4, § “Wages or Free Sharing?”). Therefore, the social salary either eliminates or reduces the cost of the filling 23 of a basket, which is defined each time, containing goods that society judges as deserving to be universally provided.11 Some of the goods in the basket have a marginal cost that tends to zero; this means that after paying the fixed initial cost, it is possible to produce them at will without any additional cost: their price is

10The

expression “social salary” belongs to (Mandel 1962, vol. 2, pp. 656–659). See also Mandel (1986, 1987). It is obvious that the form of centralised planning socialism advocated by Mandel comes from an idea of society very distant from the isocratic one. 11The basket of social salary may contain private goods, public goods and mixed goods; they are all to be considered as merit goods, on which see Musgrave (1959, pp. 13–15).

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null with a potential for excess of supply. Other goods, though, which require retribution for labour and capital for each of the produced unity, are sold at a positive price and go to each according to his needs within the scope of social resources. This second category of goods, scarce and expensive, is included into the social salary only if it is partly funded by the general progressive tax system, according to which citizens pay tax in increasing proportion to their income or wealth (see part 9 of this chapter) (Screpanti 2007, p. 151). As Russell points out in the passage just mentioned, every citizen can take a basket of these goods of equal value, which means they are given a price, albeit lower than it would have been on the market. Social salary is therefore a key element in partly disengaging personal income 24 from paid employment (see §16). There are, of course, other ways of approaching this goal, in particular that of a citizen or existence income, which has no relation with work (see §16). The proposal of a basic income seems rather at odds with the project of a society where your freedom is the condition of mine.12 In fact, if we hypothesise a jobless growth over a long period—a situation in which at every growing point in the gross domestic product corresponds an ever decreasing availability of new jobs—the basic income would be the only source of living for constantly increasing sectors of the population. However, even in this scenario, in which the dissociation between basic income and employment would be at its greatest, we cannot ignore the “crude fact” that there would still be managers and subordinate workers among the remaining working population; unless there is a radical overhaul of the working process, which in any case would require some time. So, if I were in receipt of an income without working, and were happy with it, this would imply my delegating to other people (the managers) the task of taking strategic decisions, and at the same time that I would be parasitic in relation to people performing executive tasks. On the contrary, in the isocratic logic, work which is needed for social purposes, i.e. all the jobs that must be carried out (see §§38–41) must be distributed among everyone. This distribution is still unequal— as not everybody has the competences and the ability to fly a spaceship, and also some of us can be excluded at least partially, from some executive tasks hard and unrewarding—and so it remains an object of conflict. The sheer existence, though, of a system of work distribution and the necessity to “regulate” it, eliminates the possibility that somebody, taking advantage of his basic income, avoids to take part in it.

12See

quotations of Marx-Engels and Bakunin, in Note 4, Chapter I.

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Box 4 Against basic income

I already mentioned the basic income in §§16 and 24. In the meaning of Philippe Van Parijs, who is probably its most authoritative living advocate, basic income is a flow of money freely donated regularly by a political community to individuals, without time limits and mainly funded by tax revenue.13 This uniform monetary benefit is the maximum sustainable amount (approximately equal to 25% of GDP per capita). It aims to ensure economic security; is for anyone who has legal residency in a given territory and is independent from work commitments as well as other income received. It seems like we are in the presence of a policy capable of simultaneously tackling several of the major contemporary social issues: growing inequality, the lack of an adequate number of decent jobs, the implosion of traditional welfare states, the environmental limits of economic growth, the structural contraction of human labour in production processes, increasingly based on intelligent machines. Give free money to everyone forever seems like the new panacea able to reconcile individual freedom and collective justice, sustainability and development, openness to innovation and risk protection. It appears to be “a capitalist road to communism”, to quote the provocative title of a Van Parijs’ essay written over thirty years ago (Van der Veen and Van Parijs 1986). Nevertheless, is this the reality? We can articulate the objections to the basic income in three positions. Some critics note that if this proposal were to go ahead, physically skilled but lazy people would exploit industrious people. The historical background of this argument, which corresponds to a still very widespread notion of social justice, can be traced back to the natural law philosophy, especially in the version re-elaborated by both classical economists and Marx, according to which human living labour is the sole source of economic value. In sum: “those who do not work do not take free money”. Other critics observe that human collectivities rest on some reciprocal pact between members, according to which each member has rights and duties, opportunities and constraints. Those who choose to spend their time on a surfboard on the beaches of Malibu enjoy an asocial type of freedom while abandoning the pact of reciprocity, and therefore cannot ask for resources from those who are involved in the pact. In short: “those who do not take part in the social contract do not take free money”. Finally, the third type of criticism, discussed here in §24, considers the production of monetary income alongside its distribution. The income of a community is generated (also) by an 13Van Parijs and Vanderborght (2017). The political community can coincide with a national state, but it can be a municipal, regional or international public authority.

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amount of heteronomous work (demanded by others or by circumstances). As long as there are still autonomous (“high”) and heteronomous (“low”) tasks, no one, in a just society, can escape their distribution. We cannot accept an egalitarian distribution of basic income, while the distribution of heteronomous work is not. The Malibu surfer is privileged because, even if he takes free money like everyone else, he leaves to others the issue of who performs executive or managerial, qualified or unqualified, creative or routine jobs. In short: “those who do not participate in the distribution of heteronomous work do not take free money”. Obviously, the theses of human labour, considered as the sole source of value, that of the social contract and that of the conflicting division of heteronomous work, move from different normative foundations. However, they have a common denominator: those who do not participate in the functioning of the social economy (by working, reciprocating or contributing to the less rewarding activities) cannot expect to be treated like the others. With regard to the three powerful lines of attack mentioned above, the most pragmatic reaction of the basic income defenders consists in affirming that some societies have now reached such a general level of prosperity, that they are able to guarantee a minimum of food, shelter and clothing to anyone. This fulfils the twofold purpose of preserving everyone’s health and work capacity; and of avoiding excessive tensions, both between affluent and poor groups, as well as within the individual who feels discomfort when confronted with the suffering of others. However, on closer inspection, this position does not automatically lead to basic income. With it, the benefit might not go beyond a modest integration; might not be provided in cash; might be non-permanent and, above all, might require conditional clauses. In sum: “Society is rich enough, to consider it right and appropriate to give a minimum amount of help to all those who need it”. Rather, the most ambitious and coherent defence of basic income principle stems from the normative assumption that all those who are active in the economy today (capitalists as well as workers) add only a marginal contribution to the wealth accumulated by past generations. Since it is difficult to establish whose ancestors are relatives, whose investments and commitment most contributed to social wealth, and which of the ancestors could not transmit their contribution to the descendants, it seems right to treat all equally. It follows that the basic income is the social dividend of the resources inherited from our predecessors. In summary: “social wealth belongs to all; anyone out there can tap into it” (Van Parijs and Vanderborght 2017, especially on the pp. 70–73, 104–107, 200–201, and 243). In fact, Van Parijs’ approach focuses on the already appreciated wealth (as a set of values in use) that passes from one generation to the next, not on that

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which is being appreciated by the current generation. To withdraw from a past stock of wealth is a very different act from that of committing to reproduce and possibly expand that stock into the present. One who believes heir to a shared wealth certainly has the right to draw from it, but may not collaborate in its maintenance and growth. He certainly collects from past societies, but may not feel like a member of today’s society, remaining at leisure to ride the waves on the surfboard. The most coherent and complete justification of basic income, therefore, applies to atomistic individuals who may be drawn out of society. However, the possible abstention of these individuals certainly favours those who, within society, jostle to conquer asymmetries of power. Thus, although basic income is designed as an equalising measure, may ratify and extend the divergences between individuals and groups. It tends to move away from isocracy. Finally, with regard to the economic consequences of basic income, I assume that giving a generous income without obligations would lead to work less or not work at all. Furthermore, I fear that basic income would be equivalent to a social subsidy for private firms, which would offer precarious and low-paid jobs, thanks to the fact that employees would also benefit from free money provided by the public authority. In this respect also basic income appears hardly compatible with an isocratic perspective.

6 Currency and Money How can an institutional system curb the unbridled dynamic of capitalist accumu- 25 lation without imposing limits on the dynamic of innovations and socio-economic development? Any answer to this question in order to aspire to become operational must be simple and understandable, even if not completely effective and exhaustive. In the isocratic society, the root of the solution has been identified in the distinction between the institutional circuit in which currency circulates and the one in which money circulates.14 Both currency and money are goods that 14The

closest model to the one I am about to describe here has been proposed in Roemer (1994); there are however several differences over which I cannot dwell here. For a recent discussion of Roemer’s proposal, see Thomas (2017, pp. 246–252). This approach also recalls the distinction introduced by Silvio Gesell, between the proper function of currency, which is the intermediary in the exchanges, and the function of capital as a general purchasing power that yields interest or profit. Gesell aims at abolishing capital in favour of currency as the sole means of exchange. To this aim, he would impose a tax on liquidity, in order to separate currency from the productivity of capital, which would then turn into real rather than financial productivity (see Gesell 1916).

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are useful only if disposed of: both have no intrinsic value but are only valuable for the goods and services that they permit to obtain. Bearing this in mind, we are proposing here a definition of currency as the means of payment that circulates in the exchange circuit of commodity-currency-commodity or in that of currency-currency&interest. It is used in the trade of final goods and instrumental goods, to pay for income (wages, interests, revenues and profits), but also for savings (liquidity deferred from today to tomorrow) or loans (liquidity brought forward from tomorrow to today). The use of currency for production, retribution or consuming purposes does not require any particular explanation. Instead, let us consider savings, taking for instance a saving book, a deposit account, a Treasury bill, a bond. The common denominator between these usages is that with them, the subject (the bank, the state or the firm) that issues debt securities commits itself to give back the amount borrowed with the addition of a fixed margin of interest to the customer who bought those securities, at determined intervals. The saver owns only the debt security for as long as it is valid, not a quota of the bank, the state or the firm. By subscribing to a liquidity request he is able to make a gain. Conversely, the subject applying for a loan wishes to acquire an immediate purchasing power, committing himself to return it later with an added margin of pre-agreed interest. In the sense that we are here proposing, money is instead the means of pay26 ment that circulates in the exchange circuit of money-capital-more money-more capital. Capital is a specific form of wealth whose final destiny is not that of exiting the circulation process for ever, but instead that of being invested with a profit margin not known ex ante, depending on the power of capital over other economic resources. The most immediate characteristic of the capital is its tendency to grow indefinitely, to never-ending accumulation. Since money is what allows capital to grow, it too increases, when capital makes a profit. The way in which money turns into capital consists in the acquisition (partial or integral) of property of any form of profitable investment. In contemporary economies, the most widespread modality by far of the money-capital exchange process is that of the trading of shares. These transfer the buyer a quota of the property of the firm that issues them. An economic system that allows a mixed circulation of money and currency in a pure and simplified form is not sustainable in the long term. In effect, the means of payment which holds more power subjugates the other: money becoming capital becomes more money whereas currency becomes the means of transactions where nobody gains or at most, somebody makes some gain on pre-fixed interest margins on the repayment of a loan. As money is therefore more lucrative than currency, money drives out currency or currency turns into money. Money drives out currency when an activity which previously

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would not make a profit becomes capitalistic. Currency turns into money when, instead of being used mainly for consumption expenditures, retributions and loans, it devotes itself to (more) profitable investments. It follows that coexistence of money and currency is unstable and ends with the supremacy of money. In Marx’s terminology, simple mercantile circulation succumbs in favour of capitalist circulation. This outcome does not arise, though, as a result of some “natural order” but rather from a particular institutional set-up that allows the intermingling of the two means of payment and the contamination between the two. An alternative institutional set-up to this can be proposed, that keeps the circulation of currency distinct but not separate from that of money. In an economic system where the currency circuit and that of money are dis- 27 tinct, currency is dedicated to trading commodities or transferring economic resources through time, whereas the task of money is the trading of property rights of enterprises. More precisely, currency is the means of payment used in the transactions concerning consumer goods, instrumental goods and retribution of resources, loans and savings. Money, on the contrary, is a means of payment for transactions of securities, in particular of shares concerning the ownership of medium-big enterprises. Money and currency can be mutually converted through banks or other financial intermediaries. The conversion of one means of payment into the other happens according to the rate established by the Central Bank which can manipulate it in such a way so to direct investments in certain directions. First of all, companies sell shares in exchange for money but then they have to convert money into currency to buy capital goods and to pay salaries. Also, convertibility helps avoiding that the economy is segmented in sealed off compartments: the distinction of the circulation circuits does not prevent the possibility of getting rich with currency or that of raising consumption and incomes with money. However, as we have just seen, if conversion is not regulated, money will end up displacing currency: the circuit of financial capital voids the one that is oriented on value in use. Therefore currency and money can be converted only in limited quantities, since every citizen can convert into currency only a limited quota of his money just as, conversely, he can convert into money only a quota of his currency. The quota is reduced with the increase of the amount of money or currency at his disposal. The obligation to limit the conversion of one means of payment into the other follows the same logic as that of progressive tax on income in the case of currency, and of progressive tax on capital in the case of money (see part 9 of this chapter). The objective is not that of achieving full equality in income and financial wealth but rather making it impossible to multiply in time their advantages. Let us imagine that a skilled worker, who receives a high salary for several years, is able to set aside 1000 in currency. Let us also

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imagine that an investor trades stocks with companies and people and is able to increase, through luck and skill, the worth in money of his financial assets to 10,000. Let us assume that the worker can convert only 60% of his currency into money whereas the investor can only convert 40% of his money into currency. Even though there is a range of different retributions among workers and a range of financial endowments among investors, whoever is stronger on one side can only take limited advantage on the other side. Since no institutional mechanism is perfect there is the possibility of formation of “black markets” in the case of the official rate not being very advantageous or in the case of rationing being too strict. Even if it is not possible to eliminate completely these illegal markets, they can nonetheless be marginalised through good governance concerning relative prices and quantities as well as an effective application of the law.15 Box 5 On the distinction between currency and money

The economic reform illustrated in §§25–27 has the merit of not discriminating between economic agents. It imposes constraints on their behaviour. But it is like rain on the city: all the inhabitants act freely, given the constraint of the rain. Rain is a known fact that affects everyone, not an event that arbitrarily favours someone. It is obvious that people adapt better or worse to rain, but none is privileged. More exactly, the non-discrimination of this reform manifests itself through two changes to the rules of the economic game. Firstly, the reform is based on a proscriptive rule, which indicates what cannot be done. This rule establishes only certain general constraints known ex-ante. Since no one, realistically, ever acts in the absence of constraints, the proscription specifies the circumstances in which his freedom is being exercised, but does not diminish it. For example, the seats of a theatre première are very limited, but to get them you only have to pay a hefty price and soon will be able to join the queue. Anyone who meets these conditions can obtain them. Similarly, the institutional design to which I am referring expresses a proscriptive rule: currency cannot perform the functions of money (whatever they are), and vice versa. Secondly, the economic reform of §§25–27 also requires

15Foreign

investors, who have authorisation to invest in a country’s enterprises, could offer citizens the opportunity to capitalise their endowments by cashing in their shares’ quotas. Also, some citizens could join forces and request that the enterprises of which they are shareholders sell off their assets and pay the whole enterprise’s value as dividends. In these two cases, some citizens could hold a big amount of money, but would be discouraged by the exchange rate between money and currency and by the limit of the amount of money they would be able to convert.

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a prescriptive rule, which describes what citizens can do with currency (or with money). This kind of rule is insidious: it can reduce people’s freedom by providing the list of legitimate behaviours, with a paternalistic and interventionist approach. For example, if a reward is reserved for those with red hair, no (loyal) behaviour of others can make it accessible to them. To obtain the reward, everyone must comply with the prescription, which establishes who has the “right” requirements to claim it. However, even a prescriptive rule can be non-discriminatory if it follows a universal criterion that applies to all particular cases, without considering whether the effect on individuals is desirable. This is what happens to the prescriptive rule of our reform: under precise conditions, to which everyone can have access, currency is convertible into money, and vice versa. Obviously, these conditions favour some and penalise others; but nobody is prevented from accessing them due to non-modifiable requirements, as it happens in the case of red hair. Therefore, the behaviours that the rule authorises do not discriminate against anyone. The isocratic society introduces two further redistributive mechanisms 28 concerning the money circuit: this is the sphere that particularly needs being regulated, because it is where capitalist accumulation happens and where the highest opportunities of profit are concentrated. Firstly, as soon as a citizen becomes an adult he receives an identical portfolio that includes, year by year, shares of some of the medium-big enterprises of the country.16 The value of the money in the portfolio is variable, since it reflects, as it always happens in the stock market, the opinions of the stockbrokers regarding the future profitability of the enterprises. By acquiring this portfolio, every citizen comes of age with a proper financial wealth, which enhances his independence in making the existential choices that are really important: which job to choose and how many hours to work, where to live and with whom, if and when to have children. Secondly, each citizen can entrust his shares to an investment fund that manages them on his behalf, can personally exchange them with other shares or even within the limit of the rationing, sell them to convert the money cashed into currency, in order to have a bigger purchasing power in the monetary circuit. However, when a citizen dies, the financial assets that he has been able to build during the course of his entire life do not go all to his heirs, but instead, its biggest part goes back to the community that initially gifted it to him. This is achieved through a progressive

16The

historic root of this idea is to be found in Paine (1797, p. 327).

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tax on inheritance and on gifts and donations among the living: a measure that we shall examine later in part 9 of this chapter. The aim is to limit the accumulation of wealth through time, that is, the formation of big assets that are able to multiply themselves from one generation to another only because of the sheer size of their dimension. The importance of these assets has been and still is crucial in the history of capitalism. To avoid that different stock profits obtained during a lifetime are being accumulated through time is tantamount to disempower one of the most important channels that contribute to the creation and strengthening of economic inequalities (Piketty 2013).

7 The Redistribution of Working, Care, Leisure, Creativity and Politics Times 29 A crucial characteristic of capitalism is its dynamic ability to increase labour productivity (the ratio between production value and the number of hours worked). This implies that a bigger quantity of goods and services is being produced with less human labour. The question has therefore always been: Are we going to reduce the workweek or the workforce in order to adapt to the rise in productivity? In other words, are we going to choose more leisure time or ever growing legions of jobless people? (Rifkin 2004). If we rule out the answer about the reduction of the working time, this is what happens in the words of Bertrand Russell: “Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world, this would be thought demoralising. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt and half of the men previously concerned with making pins are thrown out of work. There is in the end, just as much leisure as in the other plan, but half of the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?” (Russell 1932). How could we promote, outside capitalistic logic, an increase in leisure time, 30 in economically sustainable terms? According to Claudio Napoleoni, it would be a matter of “introducing a reduction of the working hours for each worker that

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would match exactly the increase in productivity caused by the application of new technologies. In this way, if we assume the hypothesis of constant production, we would have constant employment, constant salary per person, and a rising hourly wage. If this process were allowed to continue, we would eventually reach big reductions in the working times: that is to say that the working day could even be halved, if not reduced more, whereas the salary with real spending power for each worker would stay unchanged, but so would the profits, due to the relation between increase in productivity and decrease in the working time supplied” (Napoleoni 1987, p. 137). It goes without saying that the process of reduction of the working time in 31 favour of more leisure time is not as linear as it appears in the simple statements quoted above. First of all, the new technologies slash production costs and so allow the possibility to offer existing goods at a lower price, which in turn increases customers’ purchasing power and, by widening the markets, boosts employment rates. But, above all, capitalist economy does not limit itself to perform the same activities to satisfy the usual needs at a faster pace; rather, it multiplies the number of productive activities and creates new needs (whether “true” or “artificial”). So, those who save time at work reuse it (also) in other activities to fulfil other needs. This again contributes further to the expansion of the economic system, along with the broadening of the old goods’ markets. Indeed, the appearance of new activities that are added to the existing ones and the increase in the average hourly productivity in both old and new activities leads to a proliferation in goods and end services. This economic growth, though, finds some objective and subjective limits 32 as far as the creation of new jobs is concerned. For a new sector to absorb new jobs more quickly than the fading of the old sector releases, the production of the new sector must grow faster than its productivity. This seemed to be the case with the transition from industrial production to that of services17; there was the widely held belief that services would facilitate some mild increase in productivity while the workers employed in the sector would have had the same salaries as industrial workers, because of the competition (Kaldor 1966; Baumol 1967). That thesis however has abundantly been disproved. The new sectors concern in great part services: to companies, logistics, commercial, real estate, insurance, financial,

17“If

it were not for the expansion of jobs in the so-called service sector of economy (including government), the plight of the worker who must sell his labor power in order to earn his livelihood would be indeed desperate” (Baran and Sweezy 1966, pp. 343–344).

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security, communication, or even some kind of services to people, from health care to hospitality. These, thanks to information technology and flexible organisational models, have productivity levels on a planetary scale, not at all inferior to those of industrial activities (Ghani and O’Connell 2014). On the other hand, even if we admitted that the production of the new sector grows more rapidly than its productivity, the increase of the supply should meet a demand able to pay; but this, as history teaches us and as Keynes explains, does not happen automatically. A trend follows, regarding the connection between production and employment: “While it is still true that if production drops, so does employment, no longer so is the reverse that, if production resumes, so does employment” (Lunghini 1995, p. 41). The limits to the creation of new adequate jobs are also subjective: the workers 33 must choose to devote to the work activity the minimum time needed for society to reproduce itself to the present material level, instead of devoting it to various forms of life’s activities. Not even this step is granted. As a matter of fact, today a worker is occupied for half of the time compared to a worker at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but he gets in return a whole amount of goods and services, and therefore a real income, which is thirty or forty times higher (Mazzetti 1997, p. 263). Salary is not just the price of work, but also that of leisure time. Whoever decides to enjoy an additional hour of leisure forfeits the income that he would earn if he were to work during that hour. The question is: How does the job offer vary with the increase of monetary income? People can choose to work more and increase their working hours, provided they find an employment that allows them to do so, or they may choose to enjoy more free time. It is easy to realise that at a time when the worker had to fulfil basic needs, he was inclined to work more. It is also easy to understand that if hourly retribution were extremely high, free time would become very expensive too. In the current situation, we find the answer between these two extremes: the majority of the labour force has already fulfilled its basic needs, even without receiving particularly high salaries. So it looks plausible that many workers are pondering whether they would be better off working more, provided they could, or enjoying more free time. Their doubt is solved, to a large extent, at a systemic level: it is not an individual possibility, to be considered in isolation, but of a choice strongly linked to certain aspects of the way the whole economic system works. The two aspects that I consider crucial in this respect concern the positional competition and the proliferation of the “bullshit jobs”. Until we are confronted with the necessity to fulfil a basic set of needs, we 34 are in the sphere of material economies and the competition relates primarily to performance: how to “best” get the goods able to satisfy those needs. Once these basic needs have been by and large fulfilled, competition reappears in its pure

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form: a race to make us stand out from other people, in which goods are not so much material means to fulfil needs, as they are symbolic means to achieve social distinction. This is a “competition for a place, or positional” in which improvement of individual welfare tends to be identified with the acquisition of goods that puts someone in higher position on a social ranking ladder (Hirsch 1976). To help fix ideas, let us define “positional goods” through a thought experiment. “The first choice is between a world A, in which you will live in a 4000-squarefoot house and others will live in 6000-square-foot houses; and world B, in which you will live in a 3000-square-foot house, others in 2000-square-foot houses. […] If only absolute consumption mattered, A would be clearly better. Yet most people say they would pick B, where their absolute house size is smaller but their relative house size is larger. […] I use the term positional good to denote goods for which the link between context and evaluation is strongest” (Frank 2005, p. 137). A managerial position, a house with exclusive features or a holiday on an unspoilt tropical beach are significant cases in point. But positional goods permeate every economic process. Let us take for instance the case of health care: the possibility of better medical care probably does not subtract anything from somebody who is obliged to resort to inferior care and as such is not a positional good stricto sensu; it is the expression though of a status good, whose symbolic value goes beyond its economic price and in this respect shows an element of positionality. In positional competition, the economic activity does not consist anymore in buying and selling and eventually consume, certain goods; it consists in working, earning, saving in order to reach a position which is relatively better compared to that of somebody else. This is a race where it is not sufficient to get ahead, but it must be done faster than anybody else. It is, therefore, an endless race: everybody runs not to be left behind. This causes frustration among those who are excluded and pushes somebody towards working more rather than exploring the potentialities of free time. (I shall come back to this topic, in part 10 of this chapter). Here we come to the second aspect. “The ruling class has figured out that a 35 happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them” (Graeber 2013, pp. 10–11). The result is a proliferation of “bullshit jobs”. “One easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class to simply disappear? […] It is not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish” (ibid.). This analysis by David

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Graeber is provocatively bright, but lacks rigour. To make it deeper, we need to reformulate the definition put forward by the classical economists of the “unproductive and parasitic activities”; earlier on, I briefly stated my position on the subject (see §12). Here I can only limit myself to note that twentieth-century capitalism has set up in motion a series of sectors that cannot be soundly defended in terms of public utility or efficiency; it is to this, though, that, to a great extent, we owe the curb of mass unemployment, which, on the other hand, has meant the non-reduction of the average working time. I have recalled some of the most important reasons why capitalism obstructs 36 the process of reduction of working time that would lead to more free time. We must not forget, however, the reason most directly linked to its core structure: in this economic system, we have a subaltern subject who typically does not own assets that yield him non-work-related income; therefore, he looks for chances of employment and is willing to offer his labour for all the time that is required of him. By contrast, in the isocratic society, each citizen controls sources of income and wealth which are independent from his working time: this is due, as we have seen, to an institutional network made up of the labour-capital partnership, the social dividend, the commons sector, the social salary and equity endowment in money. On this basis, the isocratic citizen can plan his life—in order to increase his well-being—through voluntary variations of his original endowment of free time.18 This endowment is the same for everybody and consists (roughly) of 24 hours of non-working hours per week, that is a reduction erga omnes of the working day to half time. However, there are no authorities or laws that force the single worker to work effectively that amount of hours. Every citizen can decide autonomously how to allocate his non-working time endowment. In so far as [the non-working time] is really free, we cannot see on what grounds those who wish to do so should be denied the right to perform an economic activity with monetary value as a result of free choice (Aznar 1993, pp. 183–184). The available hours can be sold, increasing one’s monetary income: stock exchanges for labour, in which everybody can sometimes work more and sometimes less in the same company, are being created; or anybody can add to the 24 hours of the main job some other working hours in less specialised sectors of the economy (agriculture, construction industry, retail or handicraft). The available hours can also sometimes be employed in non-commercial activities to increase extra-monetary well-being: sometimes citizens plan their activities independently (as it happens

18This

paragraph is freely inspired by Gorz (1980).

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in the case of reading a book), some other times they create cooperative or community activities, and lastly, some other times, stock exchanges of time are created (in which anybody can offer his contribution now, with a view to indirect mutuality, by which he will be helped by somebody else at the time of a possible future need). “A job which takes up less than 1,000 hours per year no longer has the same nature or meaning as one lasting 40 hours or more a week, year in year out. To be “obliged” to work about 1,000 hours a year means you work two and a half days a week, or two weeks a month, or five months in a year; it means you can share a job with someone else, combine or alternate several occupations, mix heteronomous work with freely chosen activity, and so on”.19 Box 6 Creative idleness

In mature capitalist countries, the average life is about 80 years, which is equal to more than 700,000 hours. If a young graduate immediately enters the labour market, and never leaves it, he starts working at age 25 and retires at age 65, after 40 years. If he—as it happens in countries that have only 15 days of vacation and 5 national holidays—works 8 hours a day for 345 days a year, the sum in his career is of 110,000 hours. It follows that about 590,000 hours of life, i.e. 84% of the total time, will be devoted to non-work. If in his 80 years of life, he spends on average of 10 hours a day to sleep, eat, take care of his body and the home, the total is about 290,000 hours. 300,000 hours of time remaining for him to study, play, travel and conviviality: over 34 years of life that he can only devote to free time. How does he spend free time? In the countries that work the most, people watch up to 5 hours a day of television, which equals to 9 years of life.20 Rather, in an isocratic society, people are not only trained for work, but are also prepared for creative idleness. For the ancient Romans, the term otium did not mean “doing nothing”, but indicated the discretionary time (see Box 1 in Chapter 1), autonomous from repetitive and boring commitments, during which it was possible to be open to a creative dimension. Creative idleness should be conceived and practised as an activity in which the fundamental dimensions of our active life—work

19Gorz

(1983, p. 53). Another reason why in an isocratic society working time is sharply reduced has to do with environmental sustainability of the economy. If this dimension is put to the centre, society pledges to increase the productivity of the natural capital; but this implies a reduced use of the work factor: see Knight et al. (2013). 20See https://www.statisticbrain.com/television-watching-statistics/. Accessed September 15, 2017.

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to produce wealth, study to produce knowledge, play to produce well-being—­ hybridise and blend together allowing the act and the creative product (De Masi 1995). 37

Therefore, in an isocratic society, each adult citizen can decide how much to work and what jobs to do: his commitment can be made up of a mosaic of activities, some heteronomous, performed to obtain money, and some self-chosen, performed out of passion. In its turn, this freedom of choice, in order to widen its extent, needs a departure from marginality of those self-rewarding activities that contain their own finality. When the extension of the self-determined activities does not occur, as it is the case in capitalism, free time becomes the empty time of “rest” and “play”, or the neurotic time of compulsive consumption. (We will discuss this topic more in depth in Chapter 4.) In an isocratic society, the availability to all of income and wealth independent from working time allows (even if does not guarantee it!) an allocation of the daily time to working time, time to be with yourself, time to bond with others, time to create, time for politics. This redistribution of time in five spheres has the obvious consequence of a complete revision of both the horizontal and the vertical distribution of work. The horizontal division of tasks concerns functional specialisation: body shop 38 mechanic or neurosurgeon, information technology expert or electrician. As economists have been explaining for ages, horizontal division facilitates the increase in the hourly productivity of work and makes innovation thrive. It is also widely acknowledged, on the other hand, that when specialisation becomes exclusive and excessive, its marginal returns decrease. In view of this, it would be worth considering an agreed balanced mixture of tasks and duties, within which everybody could cultivate his specialisation but adding alongside it some other tasks of a different nature: more manual, for those who specialise in intellectual jobs and vice versa. An institutional mechanism able to balance duties during the lifetime of individuals was proposed by Ernesto Rossi, and some other theorists of federal democracy, around seventy years ago.21 It consists in the setting up of a general and compulsive national community service that would distribute some of the more coercive and less qualified tasks by “enrolling” everybody for a set

21See

Rossi (1946, Chapter IV), Levi (2002, Chapter 7). Levi retraces, especially in the chapter we are referring to, the ideas that were expressed by Robert Aron and Alexandre Marc in the same years in which Ernesto Rossi wrote the book.

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period of time (12–16 months) at a particular age, or for several short periods at regular intervals. This is a simple way, individually acceptable and without social costs, to make the social division of work more flexible and egalitarian: it aims at overcoming the artificial division between tasks: manual or intellectual, masculine or feminine, for the young or the old. A social mechanism that contributes towards the enforcement of these 39 balanced mixes is that of social esteem and social censure. Jennifer Nedelsky remarks that: “If today a man in his thirties attends a party and claims that he has never worked and has no intention to look for a job, he says something that attracts strong social reproach, while just one or two centuries ago this condition would have been considered as a sign of aristocracy (and therefore a cause for social envy). I want a world where if you are a person (whether man or woman) who, when going to a party introduce yourself by saying: “I have never done any care work either for me or anybody else” you should be ashamed of yourself and prepared to be blamed by others. Similarly, you should not get any social approval if you say: “I have no time for cooking, or ironing or taking care of my parents or my community, because I have a job so important that takes up all of my time”. We should quickly come to the point when we say that these “only work, no care” lives, are socially immature lives that do not deserve our esteem. And we should overcome them, just as we got over the idea of nobility associated with non-work related rent and income” (Nedelsky 2014). The hierarchical or vertical division of tasks pertains to the reproduction of 40 power relations: someone heads, coordinates, plans, whereas others execute orders. If, for instance, the neurosurgeon is the most qualified member of the hospital staff, he is able to make the most of his competence and talent only if everybody else is at his disposal, i.e. if he plays a leading role. This argument is proved wrong, though, under two important circumstances that the isocratic society is committed to implement. The first circumstance is represented in the two juxtaposed images in Fig. 1, by several models of role specialisation. In the model on the right, I label it model X, there are ample overlapping areas that spontaneously develop a certain degree of integration and coordination. In the model on the left each operator is separated from the others, and they can only interact through the manager/entrepreneur. The second model is suited to simple activities whereas the first is more appropriate for activities that require continual adaptation to the outside environment and produce new knowledge with the help of new experimental professional roles. While there are still needs for coordination even in the first model, here the need for hierarchy is less strong. Therefore we can say that a first partial decrease of the need for hierarchical relations is proportional to the consolidation in the isocratic society, of the first model.

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1. 2. 3.

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The three roles do not have activities in common; Each has a well-defined and independent operational field; They communicate through a connecting figure.

1. 2. 3.

The three roles have some activities in common; And some other activities that they perform without anybody else’s presence; They communicate through the activities that they share.

Fig. 1   Specialisation of roles and coordination

41

The second circumstance comes from incentives to “team production” (Holmström 1982). Often, it is difficult to detect individual productivity within a team: because what is being performed is a joint activity whose aggregated productivity is far more superior to the sum of that performed by a single individual or by smaller groups.22 Because there is not a means of measuring the variation at the margin of production, based on the separate effort put in by the single individual, it becomes difficult to reward an individual on the basis of effort. The “team leader” or coordinator must not, in this situation, hierarchically precede his “agents”. His monitoring activity would be costly, with little results and many risks of collusion. He must, rather, enter an agreement with the members of the team, setting it up in a way that if the team achieves the target result, in order to achieve which everybody has to put in a very high level of effort, then, everybody will get a bonus on top of the base salary. The team’s earnings are then

22“A

hundred men, uniting or combining their forces, produce, in certain cases, not a hundred times, but two hundred, three hundred, a thousand, times as much. This is what I have called collective force” (Proudhon 1851, pp. 81–82).

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distributed among the whole team.23 It follows that “the team leader” belongs to the production process and that his unique real task is that of making the teamwork: his is in fact a role that sums up the self-coordination of the group and does not acquire within the team systematic power asymmetries over others (Sacconi 1992, p. 191). The same observation concerning organisational model X expressed before can be held valid for this approach: in an isocratic society is a matter of disseminating the condition of its validity. Enterprise is the fundamental hierarchical structure of capitalist economy. The 42 isocratic society considers extremely important the democratisation process of this form of organisation. In this regard, both model X and the team’s incentives offer two promising perspectives. More in general, in isocracy we seek answers to questions of this kind concerning how the enterprise works: Is the number of people able to take part effectively to the formulation and implementation of relevant decision being maximised? Is the number of hierarchically higher positions being minimised? How many of the hierarchically higher positions are occupied by individuals who have been freely elected by constituents of the organisational units that hold the positions? How many of the roles have a fixed term? How many of the roles are liable to the members of the organisation? How many individuals have the opportunity to train so that they are able to occupy a wide spectrum of senior positions and can apply as credible candidates for a variety of roles? Is the number of individuals applying for managerial positions superior to the number of the positions themselves? Are they free to compete with each other in order to get the collective mandate? In order for a subject to be given an advantage when taking decisions, do negative externalities for other subjects within the enterprise need to be taken into consideration? (Estlund 2003, Parts 2 and 3; Gallino 2007, especially pp. 39–40; Chartier 2009, pp. 94–120 and 185–225). The citizens of the

23If,

on the other hand, the target is missed, even if it is just because of one free rider, everyone stays with their base salary. It must also be added that the “team leader” (or coordinator) will only succeed if the basic salary is not so low as to prevent the team from forming. That is to say if the difference between basic salary plus bonus is such to become an incentive for everyone to put in an effort; in other terms, if it is superior to the amount that the free rider would receive if he were to save on effort while receiving the same salary. Also, if the target is achievable and not as overambitious as to be easily missed even if everyone puts in the right amount of effort; if the boss has authority to deny the bonus to that part of the team who worked best while the rest of the team has not (but the mechanism which generates his authority is endogenous to the team); if he is himself part of the team (since the revenue which has not been redistributed in the case of not reaching the optimal level output will not be collected by him, but will be reinvested, put aside or given to a solidarity fund).

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isocratic society are aware that there is not just one single and simple answer to similar questions, but they are also aware that both their well-being and the nature of social life depend to a great extent on the attempts to respond to these questions. Box 7 Distributed leadership

Spira Mirabilis, founded in 2007 and composed of young musicians from many countries, is a classical orchestra without a conductor. The concerts are prepared by discussing and trying the pieces in every nuance until the instrumentalists coordinate themselves. The “miraculous spiral”, from which the orchestra takes its name, is a geometric figure that, in whatever size is drawn, always overlaps with itself, given that each of its parts has the same shape of the whole. In the same way, the orchestra can go, without altering the way it functions, from the few elements required by the chamber repertoire, to the 123 musicians involved in the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Traditional orchestras, immersed in a business mindset, give the maximum number of concerts with the minimum amount of rehearsals and force its members to a routine career. On the contrary, Spira Mirabilis solicits every orchestral to know the whole musical score, instead of just the part concerning his instrument. It encourages them to listen to each other, engaging creatively in order to reach an interpretative consensus, and to perform in often unusual and informal venues, open to the reactions of a wide audience not necessarily already involved or experienced in classical music.24 Placing an equitable way of sharing music at the centre of its activity, Spira Mirabilis challenges the “common perception”, according to which a symphony orchestra can only be organised as a centralised hierarchical structure, which is subjected to the conductor’s autocratic power. The image of Maestri who, on the podium, point the wand to direct the musicians, and who shake their fluent hair to affirm their charisma, is so strong and widespread, that we find it difficult to conceive a conductor-less orchestra. Yet the experience of Spira Mirabilis has important precedents, including the New York-based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra which, founded in 1972, operates with a distributed leadership: its nearly thirty members manage themselves, exchanging governing roles, debating alternative interpretations and learning to give the attack by themselves without waiting for a gesture or a look. The results are of planetary excellence. Orpheus reproduces a procedure introduced in the 1920s by the Soviet Persimfans, the first

24See

http://www.spiramirabilis.com/. Accessed September 15, 2017.

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self-conducted orchestra in history. Addressing the most complex and broadest works, its members nominate a core group of a dozen instrumentalists, which by rotation represents the different sections (violins, cellos, wind instruments and so forth). This subgroup establishes the coordinates of the execution and makes the various parts of the orchestra homogeneous. Only in cases of persistent dissent, the decisions are put to vote. Over time, Orpheus develops a culture that, by emphasising collaborative creativity and shared choices, facilitates the relationship between the core group and the orchestra. It also elects managers who take care of the administrative, logistical, financial and commercial aspects, although the orchestra controls their actions.25 That a group can achieve first-rate performances without an external and formal guide is a crucial theme of libertarian reflection. The best experiences of self-managing organisations help to relativise the hierarchical structure that pervades private and public companies in capitalist societies. This is not, of course, equivalent to underestimate the difficulties. In the case of the conductor-less orchestras, the democratic approach is time-consuming: more time is needed for a collective deliberation than for the arbitrary decision of a leader. This has consequences on the profitability of the orchestra. The members of Spira Mirabilis mostly play in other high-level orchestras, choosing to spend together a few weeks a year to study and perform musical scores: participation becomes a gratifying luxury, to be paid by traditional activities. Rather, the members of the Orpheus manage to sell their organisational model: a system in which everyone, at all levels, expresses decision-making and problem-solving skills becomes a “brand” which sells management seminars to private companies, non-profit organisations and business schools. Paid work shops centred on team building practices, conflict resolution and participatory management constitute the second heading in the orchestra’s budget. Another difficulty concerns the size of the orchestra: the wider it is, the greater the need for a core group to which delegate some phases of the decision-making process. The third difficulty is the maintenance of the culture of listening and accountability: to this end, the selection of the new members of the Orpheus also considers their degree of adherence to the collective project, after a trial phase. Finally, it seems certain that the unconducted orchestra is favoured by the high

25See

http://orpheusnyc.org/. Accessed September 15, 2017. Three excellent essays on the Orpheus Orchestra are: Banai et al. (2000), Seifter and Economy (2001), Hackman (2005). We also remember the important experience of the French orchestra Les Dissonanze: see https://www.les-dissonances.eu/. Accessed September 15, 2017.

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professional competence of its members: while the “knowledge workers” have strong motivations to reject hierarchical constraints, this tendency is weaker among the executive workers. These difficulties can be understood in two opposite ways. The first interpretation suggests that self-managing organisations require, in order to flourish, peculiar conditions that are neither easy nor frequent, and that therefore the experience of the orchestras without a podium is not very extensible. The alternative interpretation observes, rather, the extreme relevance of experiments in which a great orchestra without a conductor performs (very well) some of the most challenging pieces of the symphonic repertoire, or in which a chamber orchestra with 45 years of life comes to be, in the opinion of authoritative music critics, the first in the world.26 Similar experiments show that when sharing and consensus emerge as important dimensions, nothing prevents us from eliminating hierarchy, through models of distributed leadership, however costly and difficult this might prove. Étienne de La Boétie formulated this great theme in the mid-1500s: “resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed” (La Boétie 1549, p. 47). The autocratic leader is not even necessary to perform Beethoven’s Ninth. A group with a complex organisation can adopt a self-leadership. Its members promote leadership as the art of leading, not that of commanding, to draw inspiration from and regulate their behaviour accordingly. This means turning around the way leadership usually works, by building and possibly revoking it, within the group.

8 Socialisation and Investment Planning 43 Investment is an activity whose aim is that of producing or acquiring additional capital. Investment decisions, by increasing aggregate demand and broadening productive capacity are of crucial importance to the functioning of the economy. In capitalism, they are taken following an existing fundamental power asymmetry: “community is divided into two different groups, of whose the first, the one of the entrepreneurs, has access to bank credit and benefits from a purchasing power not tied to the level of income and wealth, whereas the second, the one made up of workers-consumers, is allowed to spend only the income already earned” (Graziani 2003, p. 26). It is only the entrepreneurs who can produce or

26Vedi,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus_Chamber_Orchestra. Accessed September 15, 2017.

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acquire new assets, by obtaining funds from the banking sector. The isocratic society reduces this asymmetry by introducing methods of socialising and planning the investments. In his General Theory, Keynes argues in favour of a comprehensive sociali- 44 sation of the investment, pointing out that “it is not the ownership of the instruments of production which is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary” (Keynes 1936, p. 378). The Keynesian proposition suggests that the government controls the market that in its turn controls the investors; that is to say that, in order to reach its objectives, the government manipulates the market through the use of incentives. In the current situation, it is widely acknowledged that politics has (temporarily) lost its ability to regulate the financial system. This implies that the intervention that Keynes hopes for, in order to become feasible, must recover in the first instance the ability on the government’s part to regulate the totality of financial activities; it is only then that it will be able to select the quality and quantity of investments. In order to regulate financial capitalism, there are many effective measures 45 that can be taken, such as separating commercial from investment banks. While the first should focus on deposit and credit functions and record on their balance sheet all the equity securities, the second should not be allowed to conduct business outside their budget and should only make limited use of the leverage effect through credit27; “making hostile takeovers difficult (thereby reducing the gains from speculative investment in stocks), banning short-selling (the practice of selling shares that you do not own today), increasing margin requirements (that is, the proportion of the money that has to be paid upfront when buying shares) or putting restrictions on cross-border capital movements” (Chang 2010, Chapter 22). Lastly to introduce a Tobin tax or a tax on financial transactions (Haq et al. 1996; see also Stiglitz 2016). The main indirect modality that the government has of socialising and plan- 46 ning investments consists in policies of credit allocation. The conditions of access to an adequate amount of liquidity are the main requirements in order to realise each decision to invest. Therefore the government can use differential interest rates in order to direct the level as well as the sectoral and territorial allocation of

27Leverage,

or relation of debt, indicates the proportion between owns’ resources and third parties’ in financing employments; it signals the participation of private capital to enterprise risks. See Gallino (2011, pp. 279–281 and 286–287), Stiglitz (2012, Chapter 10).

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the private investments. It also holds the power to establish what kind of access to the credit the enterprise is entitled to (in terms of volume, guarantees and time of repayment) according to the type and duration of the investments that it proposes. Finally the government can introduce “a system of ‘asset reserve requirements’ which would oblige financial institutions to maintain cash reserve funds in proportion to the high-risk assets in their portfolios, (and) would encourage banks, hedge funds, and the rest, to channel credit to high priority and less-risky areas” (Pollin 2009, p. 11). On the whole, “these policies are effective because they create a means of significant social control over major finance and investment activities, while still allowing considerable decision-making freedom both for intermediaries and businesses. Private intermediaries are still responsible for establishing the creditworthiness of businesses and the viability of their projects. Indeed, businesses are still free to pursue non-preferred projects, and banks can still finance them” (Pollin and Dymski 1994, pp. 388–389). 47 The government can also regulate the direction and the quantity of capital accumulation by modifying opportunities and benefits of private investments, through direct public investments. Direct investments are involved in economic activities, which, as Keynes once more remarks, no private would otherwise do (Keynes 1926, p. 317). Alongside investments for needs that fall outside the markets, we find those that promote radical innovations: Internet and nanotechnologies have all been brought about thanks to governmental funding and because of the beacon role that public institutions have played in dealing with investments with uncertain outcome (Mazzucato and Jacobs 2016). More in general, direct public interventions do not limit themselves to steer private economy, but create and shape markets for socially desirable investments. It is therefore inevitable that in order to pursue such a demanding objective there has to be some kind of planning. As a famous liberal American economist observes, even by being aware that “nobody in his right mind should advocate rigid central planning (in which the government tries to fix wages, prices, and outputs across the economy)”, it is difficult to maintain that questions of systemic complexity such as in the case of technological, social or organisational innovation, or climate change or even the evolution of collective needs, “can be addressed without a careful, multiyear planning process within government” (Sachs 2011, Chapter 12). In an isocratic society “the planned initiative does not start either from the top or the bottom (these concepts reflect a view of a hierarchical type of society), but at the same time from all decisional levels and results in a simultaneous and endless process of adaptation. Base units, intermediary organisations, national systems, and the general government system, each at their own level, define their plan which becomes a message sent to all other units of the system, from which they receive

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information back. The resulting continuous verification and adjustment process becomes then, the general plan”.28 The government always adopts an ambivalent strategy whether it allo- 48 cates credit in order to influence private investments or undertakes direct public investments. This strategy is meant in the first place to make the original economic decision of investing or not investing independent from the goal of profit (Strachey 1956, Chapter 11). Nonetheless, in those cases in which the intervention strategies are influenced by the elites, there is the possibility that it produces the opposite outcome: it can socialise the costs and risks of investments while at the same time privatising the revenues for the enterprises. On the one side, there would be a re-balancing of asymmetries between social groups, on the other, these would be brought back and widened. There is not a straightforward solution able to dispel this ambivalence once and for all, because it is an expression of the social conflict. In the isocratic society there are, however, institutional instruments able to reduce it. One of them is that of the public–private investment funds, specially dedicated to the start-up of socially desirable and/or innovative enterprises; within them the government can indicate the strategic lines on which to invest, making a profit on the successful investment. Another instrument is that of the public control of the banks for development, so that the government can raise revenues for future investments. I will show in more detail in part 7 of Chapter 3 that the most effective instru- 49 ments appear when isocracy takes hold on a global level. In this situation, the governments in order to regulate the direction and the amount of capitalist accumulation can levy a coordinated tax on big multinational corporations considered as single companies. Indeed, in capitalism, even though corporations have consolidated balance sheets for all their activities, they work in every country as if they were several different companies.29 This allows them to avoid tax, shifting profits realised in other parts of the world to the places where they are less taxed (Zucman 2015), but even more importantly, it allows them to decide discretionally where and how much to invest, with the freedom to leave a territory as soon as social and political “problems” materialise.30 The abolition on a planetary

28Ruffolo

(1976, p. 44). Ruffolo was one of the few among the intellectuals of the Italian Political Left, to follow a theoretical path similar to that of this book: see Ruffolo (1985). 29See Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, Declaration of June 2015, http://www.icrict.org/declaration/. Accessed September 15, 2017. 30On corporations in capitalism see Hymer (1979), Chandler and Mazlish (2005).

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scale of the legal pretence of the principle of separate entity gives the isocratic policy an efficacy able to counter the power of the giant companies.

9 Taxation on Income and Wealth 50 If we consider the costs of associated life, the question arises as to who has to pay what? To try and obtain an answer we must remember that two of the most important taxes are those on income and those on capital.31 Without entering into too much detail, let us consider the approach to this kind of tax by an isocratic political community. The tax on income—which concerns revenue from both work and capital (profits, dividends, interests, rents)—has a progressive character, that is, its rate or percentage increases as the personal income increases. A fiscal system, which is by and large progressive, is in the first instance a way of sharing the cost of public services in favour of the less affluent groups. Furthermore, in an economic setting, it is an instrument for redistribution of revenue, so that inequalities are mitigated on a personal level, but also to level wealth, because as the level of tax increases with the increase of the business dimension, “the progressive tax leads to the splitting up of the big property and of the big enterprise” (De Viti de Marco 1934, p. 166). The role of progressive taxation is different in capitalism and in isocracy. 51 In the first type of society, it is on a structural level that the economy gives rise to sharp inequalities which under favourable political circumstances become mitigated through taxation (Rosanvallon 2011; Atkinson 2015, Chapter 7). So when there is the possibility of progressive taxation, alongside the basic rate paid by all, for those sections of the population who are higher earners, the effective rate can reach between 60 and 80% of the monthly income (Landais et al. 2011, pp. 86–87; Piketty 2013, p. 513). On the contrary, in isocracy, it is the seven pre-distribution strategies that we have already discussed that are central: the shift to the labour–capital partnerships, the redistribution of the working time, the distinction between currency and money, the social salary, the collective dividend, the sector of the commons and the socialisation of investments. Progressive taxation in an isocratic context is therefore a residual instrument. In order to set its

31To

these must be added, the tax on consumption and the social insurance contributions (that finance both substitute incomes, such as pensions and unemployment benefits and social expenses from which everybody benefits, such as child benefits and sick pay) that are not being discussed here.

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79

own rate, every group of citizens asks what is the variance between the recipient of income (either from labour or capital) at the top of the social ladder and that of the one at the bottom, which needs to be taken into account and claimed on political grounds; on the basis of the background observation by Keynes, according to which “it is not necessary for the stimulation of [economic] activities […] that the game should be played for such high stakes as at present” (Keynes 1936, p. 374, square brackets added). The rate of progressivity is not set on some presumed universalistic justice criterion but on the basis of the current provisional outcome of political conflict. However, since in an isocratic society the whole of institutional regulations and pre-distributional strategies is built in such a manner that no particular group has a permanent and clear advantage over any other, progressivity (or its opposite, regressivity) does not have the same function it often has in capitalism. It is not used to defeat and dispossess a group but rather to balance the income earned in the market circuit with contributions towards collective expenditures. In 1893, Émile Durkheim came up with a classic argument in favour of tax- 52 ation of capital, that is, assets: “the hereditary transmission of wealth suffices to render very unequal the external conditions for the struggle, since it gives to some the benefit of advantages that do not necessarily correspond to their personal value” (Durkheim 1893, p. 314). The other argument which is often mentioned concerns the loss of democratic sovereignty for a community in which wealth is intensely concentrated in a few hands. Admittedly, as Armand Trousseau remarks around the middle of nineteenth century, “the equal distribution of wealth should consist in the fact that no citizen is so rich as to be able to buy somebody else and nobody so poor that he is obliged to sell himself”; when this happens, the rights of citizenship of the poor are in effect voided. The instrument that these arguments legitimate is the taxation on inheritance and gifts: the first affects the transferral of assets (property, money and possessions) following the death of the owner, while the second concerns the free transferral of property as gifts and donations between living people. In the isocratic society, there is debate on how to apply these taxes. The first and easiest way to apply this taxation is to make almost all wealth virtually not transferrable to the next generations. To this purpose, inheritance and gifts taxes have rates remarkably high (Meade 1993, p. 92). However, these rates are not applied to the whole property and are reduced in three specific circumstances. First of all, in order to affect only big assets, there is a threshold under which these taxes are not paid (exemption). Secondly, the taxes are lowered when the owner of the property distributes his assets in small portions among a relevant number of people instead of leaving it whole to a few (Lewis 1949, Chapter 2). Finally, tax is not charged at all

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when the property is transferred to non-profit foundations devoted to common goods (see part 4 of this chapter).32 The second application suggests that in order to avoid the accumulation of 53 assets it is not necessary to expropriate them every time they are transferred. Rather, each person can leave to others only the amount he himself has added to his own inheritance or gift received, while all the rest is subject to tax (Nozick 1990, Chapter 3). Since everybody can only leave what they have earned, assets can only be transferred once and do not benefit several generations anymore. On this single property transferral only a moderate tax will be levied, which will be further reduced when one of the three circumstances mentioned in §52 occurs. The last approach introduces a time-related progressivity to the tax: when a person wishes to leave as inheritance or give away his assets, this becomes split into quotas taking into account the number of times each of them has already been passed on as inheritance or gift. In this way, it is possible to make a distinction between assets that are made up of the savings of the donor or deceased (and that have never been transferred), those that the person had inherited from somebody else and originate from their savings (one transferral), those that he had inherited from somebody who in their turn had inherited it from somebody else (two transferrals) and so on. The rate of the tax on the gift or inheritance increases with the number of transferrals of a particular property, and after a limited amount of transferrals can reach 100%.33 None of these methods is definitely better than the others: one limits wealth within a person’s lifetime; one allows it to be transferred once; one reduces it until extinction, with each subsequent generational transferral. The important point here is that the three methods share a common goal: avoiding the “snow-ball” effect by which wealth is accumulated just with the passing of time due to the “law of compound interest”.34 The main argument against the kind of policies just mentioned maintains 54 that people would not be enticed anymore to accumulate and invest, knowing that their economic project would not be able to span generations. However,

32Obviously,

these trusts or foundations have nothing to do with family trusts that are trust funds through which the head of the family can tie his assets which are inherited, but not managed directly, by his heirs. 33This criterion was formulated by Ernesto Rignano at the beginning of the twentieth century: see Erreygers and Di Bartolomeo (2007, pp. 605–638). 34“Compounding” is a mechanism thanks to which interest on assets is not paid just on the initial sum but on the whole amount of interest already accumulated. The result is an exponential curve of non-linear growth. See also Box 6 in Chapter 1.

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as Michael Walzer comments in this respect: “It is often said that economic entrepreneurs won’t come forward if they cannot hope to own the companies they found. But this is like saying that no one would seek divine grace or knowledge who did not hope to come into hereditary possession of a church or “holy commonwealth”, or that no one would found new hospitals or experimental schools who did not intend to pass them on to his children, or that no one would sponsor political innovation and reform unless it were possible to own the state” (Walzer 1983, p. 303). People learn from the social context in which they live; if this values beauty, knowledge, quality of relationships, it is likely that people wish to realise economic plans whose raison d’être is not that of a property to leave as inheritance. The objection is a tautology as it is only valid if we admit a premise—the motivation of the entrepreneurs consists in obtaining private property to pass on—which already contains it.35

10 The Transformation of the Positional Competition In capitalism, as we recalled (see §34), the subjective well-being depends to a 55 large extent on goods that represent power and status. These goods are called “positional” since those who benefit from them hold a higher place on a hierarchical ladder of social positions. The distribution of these goods is such that if somebody obtains some of them, somebody else becomes deprived of them: if Tom acquires more power or prestige, this is valid in relation to Harry, whose position worsens. Positions that give power or prestige are selected by mechanisms based on price (high, for a meal at a starred restaurant) and on rationing (access to an elitist exclusive school is by selection; you can enter either by passing a test, or with the right “connections” of family and friends’ networks). These filters create social scarcity: there is no room for a fourth restaurant in the list of the three best restaurants in town, just as only 10% of youth population can access the best 10% of the best schools. It follows that there can never be a levelling of the opportunities towards the top: if a restaurant enters the Olympus, or if a child is enrolled inside the exclusive school, somebody else will lose the place;

35“There

is no reason, a priori, why it should be easier (or harder) to produce this motivation [to pursue the goals that the firm has set itself] in organizations aimed at maximizing profits than in organizations with different goals” (Simon 1991, p. 28, square bracket added).

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what is gained by those who are at the bottom will be lost by those who are the top (Hirsch 1976, p. 177). In order to counter the sharp and conflictual inequalities fuelled by the posi56 tional race, the most consolidated answer resorts to paternalism. Since positional goods end up being a source of frustration for almost everybody, the remedies would be actions reinforcing ethical principles and social rules inspired by frugality of habits, the enforcement of a “healthy” market competition whose final aim is the achievement of the best quality at the least possible price, and the imposition of taxes geared towards “vices” and conspicuous consumption. To this regard, it is suggested a tax on actual expenditure. People would not be taxed on the earned income but on the amount of money spent. More precisely, instead of taxing single goods and services at the time of purchase, the tax would hit the difference between the annual income of a person and the amount he saves or invests with a progressive rate (Frank 1999, Chapters 14 and 15). To be able to assess how much somebody has spent over a period, it should be taken into account how much a person owned at the start of that period, add the sums received during that period and subtract what has been left at the end, including in this last figure the net purchases made during the year of capital activities of all kind.36 In this way, there would be a limitation of consumption of positional goods: those who spend more on consumption would be taxed accordingly in higher proportion. However, a tax on expenditure can produce undesired outcomes. First of all, it exempts saving from taxation, favouring capital accumulation and therefore economic power asymmetry. It also assumes that any expenditure over a certain income threshold is intended for positional goods and for this reason should be taxed. But, apart from the fact that the assumption is very questionable (somebody can spend a considerable sum on a violin just to play for himself or his friends and therefore have nothing to do with the positional race), this also makes the government penalise wholesale the consumption of luxury goods, deciding that they do not fulfil legitimate needs. In the isocratic society, the wish to lessen the positional competition is not 57 based on ethical evaluations but rather on the observation that it feeds and multiplies the disparities in power: it is a race in which only very few winners take it all, while those who come in second place are as much losers as those who come

36Kaldor

(1955). While some time ago it was held difficult to be able to estimate the applicable amount of tax in this way, there has been at present a notable technical improvement in the traceability of expenses.

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83

last. A non-paternalistic counter-strategy consists in “enriching” society with several heterogeneous positional ladders, leaving everybody free to climb the ones they prefer. This is an additive rather than subtractive approach and an invitation to pluralism: instead of blocking, penalising, channelling or suppressing altogether the opportunities for power and prestige, these need to be multiplied and scattered so that the positional race is transformed from a zero-sum game into a positive sum game.37 People can freely aspire to power and status, as long as they believe that their well-being depends on that aspiration; on its part, society only broadens and structures the set of alternatives available for people to choose: that is, it increases the number of dimensions in which people can compete. David Hume remarked that “a poet does not envy a philosopher or a different kind of poet, or one belonging to another age or a different nation”. If the dimensions in which people can compete are multiplied, then the number of positions that can confer some sort of power or status increases. Let us consider for instance the theory of the multiple intelligences which does not treat human intelligence as a unity that can be measured by standard tests, but breaks it down into different abilities: linguistic, musical, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily kinaesthetic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, naturalist, existential and pedagogic (Gardner 1983). It is far easier for any of us to achieve high results in at least some of these many forms of intelligence. Another modality consists in raising the number of the comparison groups for a given dimension: Who am I competing with? Family, friends, neighbours, cosmopolitan elite, past generations? If we multiply the comparison groups, as it happens in pluralistic societies, the number of high power and status positions increases (if compared to that of monolithic societies or those based on just one single predominant scale of values). In short, instead of redistributing a fixed amount of opportunities of access to positional goods, the isocratic strategy consists in widening the scope of these opportunities so that the positional quality of the good itself is somehow reduced and so is the harshness of the competition for prestige and power. I am going to reformulate the concept expressed in the previous para- 58 graph (§57) in a more insightful way. All the forms of human coexistence are pluralistic, in so far as in them is present a multiplicity of “social goods”.38

37A

zero-sum game is a strategic situation where the victory of one contestant corresponds to the loss of another one. In a positive sum game, on the contrary, everybody can win. 38As already explained in Chapter 1 (§20), by “social good” I mean a means, a process or an activity to which some form of value is attached by at least a part (however small) of society.

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To be more precise, we can actually describe the isocratic society not just as pluralistic but rather as “polyphonic”. In polyphonic music, there are more voices that resound simultaneously and even if they weave in and out of each other, each voice keeps its own pitch and none becomes dominant over the others. So while in a society generically pluralistic we find power asymmetries able to influence individuals’ choices, it is only in a polyphonic society that each subject can effectively choose which and how many goods to pursue, since no single good forces its working model upon the others and therefore individuals have no reasons to give up their own choices of goods. Isocracy finds its full realisation in a polyphonic type of society in which every subject can express his potentiality to the full, by being free to choose, learn and make mistakes. It is only in a polyphonic society, where so many different sounds are played with equal intensity that positional competition will lose the pivotal role that has acquired in mature capitalism.

11 Drawing Conclusions 59 In an isocracy, any person can receive economic revenues from multiple fonts: he is provided with a basic wage, with the dividends of the shares that he holds as an employee, with the dividends of the shares he holds as a capital partner, with the dividends of the shares that he holds as a citizen (receiving a one-time endowment), with a percentage of the social dividend, with the goods of the social salary, with the commons managed by the trust foundations and with fiscal transfers. Not all these sources are always active, nor are they always financially substantial, but they are all part of an institutional network able to free anyone from the risks linked to total dependence on work-related income. Furthermore, we can see other strategies at work in an isocracy that help balance the positions of economic power: the distinction between the circuit of money circulation and that of currency circulation, the socialisation of investments, the transformation of positional competition in a polyphonic type of society, progressive taxation on income and that devised with the purpose to stop the integral transferral of assets from one generation to the next. Therefore, in an isocracy, no citizen fears to slip in such a condition in which he needs to sell himself to others in some capacity, just as nobody can take advantage of somebody else in a persistent and cumulative manner.39

39We

are not far from Mill’s wisdom: “the best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back, by the efforts of others to push themselves forward” (Mill 1848, p. 754).

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La Boétie, Étienne de. 1549. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. Auburn (Alabama): Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008. Landais, Camille, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. 2011. Pour une Révolution Fiscal. Un Impôt sur le Revenu pour le XXl e Siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Lange, Oskar. 1937. On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two. Review of Economic Studies 4 (2): pp. 123–142. Levi, Lucio. 2002. Il Pensiero Federalista. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Lewis, W. Arthur. 1949. Principles of Economic Planning. London: Routledge, 2003. Lunghini, Giorgio. 1995. L’età dello Spreco. Disoccupazione e Bisogni Sociali. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Mallin, Christine. 2013. Corporate Governance, 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mandel, Ernest. 1962. Marxist Economic Theory, vol. 2. New York: Monthly Review Press. Mandel, Ernest. 1986. In Defence of Socialist Planning. New Left Review 159: pp. 5–37. Mandel, Ernest. 1987. The Myth of Market Socialism. New Left Review 161: pp. 108–120. Mazzetti, Giovanni. 1997. Quel Pane da Spartire. Teoria Generale della Necessità di Redistribuire il Lavoro. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Mazzucato, Mariana. 2013. The Entrepreneurial State. London: Anthem Press. Mazzucato, Mariana and Michael Jacobs (eds.). 2016. Rethinking Capitalism. London: Wiley-Blackwell. McKerron, George. 2012. Happiness Economics from 35,000 Feet. Journal of Economic Surveys 26 (4): pp. 705–735. Meade, James. 1989. Agathotopia: the Economics of Partnership. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Meade, James. 1993. Liberty, Equality, and Efficiency: Apologia pro Agathotopia Mea. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mill, John Stuart. 1848. Principles of Political Economy. In The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. III. London: Routledge, 1965. Musgrave, Richard. 1959. The Theory of Public Finance. New York: McGraw-Hill. Napoleoni, Claudio. 1987. La Politica degli Orari di Lavoro. Un’Intervista. In Carla Ravaioli, Tempo da Vendere, Tempo da Usare, 2nd ed. Roma: Datanews, 1994. Napoleoni, Claudio. 1988. Critica ai Critici. In C. Napoleoni (ed.), Dalla Scienza all’Utopia. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1992. National Trust. 2016/17. Annual Report. http://www.nationaltrustannualreport.org.uk/. Accessed September 15, 2017. Nedelsky, Jennifer. 2014. I Care, il Segreto del Successo, interview by Luigino Bruni. Avvenire, October 4. Nozick, Robert. 1990. Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. New York: Simon and Schuster. Paine, Thomas. 1797. Agrarian Justice, reprinted in Paine, Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Perrotta, Cosimo. 2018. Unproductive Labour in Political Economy. London: Routledge. Piketty, Thomas. 2013. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pollin, Robert. 2009. Tools for a New Economy. Boston Review (January–February). Pollin, Robert, and Gary Dymski. 1994. The Costs and Benefits of Financial Instability: Big Government Capitalism and the Minsky Paradox. In Gary Dymsky and Robert Pollin (eds.), New Perspectives in Monetary Macroeconomics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1851. General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969. Reynolds, Fiona. 2016. The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future. London: Oneworld Publications. Rifkin, Jeremy. 2004. Introduction. In J. Rifkin, The End of Work (1995). New York: Putnam Book, 2004. Roemer, John. 1994. A Future for Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosanvallon, Pierre. 2011. The Society of Equals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Rossi, Ernesto. 1946. Abolire la Miseria. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2002. Ruffolo, Giorgio. 1976. Per un Progetto Socialista. In Progetto Socialista. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Ruffolo, Giorgio. 1985. La Qualità Sociale. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Russell, Bertrand. 1919. The Proposed Roads to Freedom. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Russell, Bertrand. 1932. In Praise of Idleness. Harper’s Magazine 165: pp. 552–559. Sacconi, Lorenzo. 1992. I Costi dei Governi e i Benefici della Proprietà dei Lavoratori. In Elena Granaglia and Lorenzo Sacconi (eds.), Cooperazione, Benessere e Organizzazione Economica. Milano: Franco Angeli. Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2011. The Price of Civilization. New York: Random House. Sanchez Bajo, Claudia, and Bruno Roelants. 2011. Capital and the Debt Trap: Learning from Cooperatives in the Global Crisis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Screpanti, Ernesto. 2007. Libertarian Communism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Seifter, Harvey, and Peter Economy. 2001. Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra. New York: Times Books. Settis, Salvatore. 2007. Italia S.p.A.: L’Assalto al Patrimonio Culturale. Torino: Einaudi. Simon, Herbert. 1991. Organizations and Markets. Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (2): 25–44. Smith, Stephen C. 1992. Review of James Meade’s Agathotopia. Journal of Comparative Economics 16: pp. 370–376. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2012. The Price of Inequality. New York: W. W. Norton. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2016. Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy. New York: W. W. Norton. Strachey, John. 1956. Contemporary Capitalism. London: Random House. Thomas, Alan. 2017. Republic of Equals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Henk, and Chris Logan. 1982. Mondragon: An Economic Analysis. London: Allen and Unwin. Van der Veen, Robert J., and Philippe Van Parijs. 1986. A Capitalist Road to Communism. Theory and Society 15 (5): pp. 635–655. Van Parijs, Philippe, and Yannick Vanderborght. 2017. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vanek, Jaroslav. 1970. General Theory of Labor-Managed Market Economies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Walzer, Michael. 1983. Spheres of Justice. New York: Basic Books.

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Whyte, William Foote, and Kathleen King Whyte. 1991. Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics or the Worker Cooperative Complex, 2nd rev. ed. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Widerquist, Karl, José A. Noguera, Yannick Vanderborght, and Jurgen De Wispelaere (eds.). 2013. Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Zucman, Gabriel. 2015. The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3

The Political Institutions of Isocracy

Power must check power. Montesquieu (1748, p. 155)

Abstract

In this chapter, starting with an appreciation of radical conflicts (­antagonistic but non-destructive), the political institutions of isocracy are illustrated through five perspectives, partial but complementary to each other. The reputation of impartiality animates assemblies devoted to the preventive check of laws and independent authorities that follow a liberal tradition combining the Montesquieu approach with Friedrich August von Hayek’s proposals. The diffused power favours, inter alia, the electoral mandate with the right of revocation and the referendum with a preliminary random selection of participating citizens. In addition, it allows control over the financial remuneration of elected representatives and establishes that each citizen receives a token in currency that he can use to finance the electoral campaign of some candidate. The power-sharing incentivizes, inter alia, the proportional distribution of positions and resources, the positive discrimination policies and the multilateral horizontal surveillance (with which the members of each group submit their political actions to the scrutiny of the peer members of all the other groups). A “partisan” institution is, for instance, the multiple votes, taken from John Stuart Mill but applied to the parents of minors (including single-parent families, those with more than two parents and those made up of same-sex parents) in order to grant political representation to those who are not given a voice on the grounds of age. Another one is the “tribunate”, a peculiar form of counter-power (with the option to place a veto on choices not agreed upon) retrieved from Machiavelli and the tradition of republicanism. © The Author(s) 2019 N. Bellanca, Isocracy, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00695-2_3

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Finally, in tune with the polyarchic method that is the underlining fil rouge of the whole treatise, the federalist institutions also play a very important role. Multiple non-state governments, or jurisdictions, can perform all public functions, apart from a few crucial public goods, whose provision is assigned, through constitutionally defined procedures, only to one jurisdiction. This configuration is extended on a planetary scale in order to establish a multipolar and multilevel balance of power.

1 Representative Democracy and Radical Conflicts 1 Representative democracy—as opposed to autocracy, which is the government of a single minority—constitutes a peaceful method of alternation of power between leading groups: one elite gains power competing for electoral support, whereas the voters must be able, whenever they wish, to switch their support from that to the leaders currently in power to their rivals. The crucial reason why this political system is based on representation rather than direct participation has to do with the size of the community: each subject’s contribution becomes less important and more expensive with the widening of the community. “If participation means to take part in person, than my taking part is proportionally inverse to the numbers of people taking part. So, in a group of five, my taking part is worth (weighs, counts) a fifth, in a group of fifty a fiftieth, and in a group of hundred thousands, almost nothing. To sum it up, taking part can be operationalised as a fraction in which the denominator measures the part (weight) of the person taking part: so the denominator increases in proportion to the loss of impact of the single participant” (Sartori 2000, p. 79). As far as the increase in the cost of direct participation goes, let us consider 2 a political assembly in which all citizens wish to actively take part in the debate that precedes and shapes the decision. If the polis is made up of hundred citizens, and each of them is entitled to speak for only ten minutes, sixteen hours are needed to conclude the discussion; if the number of speakers increases to one thousand, then the hours needed become one hundred and sixty-seven; with ten thousands speakers, there should be a meeting lasting for two hundred and eight days of eight hours each. On the one hand then, it is inevitable that due to the size of the group many opt for delegating authority to a few. On the other hand, and especially in the vaster group, the relationships among citizens are altered anyway in favour of one or more minorities. Let us imagine that the elected candidates are motivated by the most noble of intentions in representing the members

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of their constituency as effectively as possible. Even with the best of intentions, they cannot interact with the represented without recreating the same very problem that led to their nomination: were they to devote even as little as ten minutes to meet each of the ten thousand citizens of their constituency, they would be required to engage in this activity for half of the year (Dahl 1998, pp. 105–108). We are therefore faced with the paradoxical situation that for the elected politicians to best represent their electors’ interest they need to neglect direct contact with them. They must limit themselves to the occasional and indirect acceptance of their electors’ requests, or to deal with them in a paternalistic way. In a wide community, direct democracy is not feasible but, to a certain extent, neither is the so-called deliberative democracy meant as government by public discussion.1 Modern democracy is therefore essentially representative in nature: the delib- 3 erative and participatory aspects are marginal and accessory.2 It becomes a historic possibility through complex social conditions (Przeworski et al. 2000; Robinson 2006), among which stands out “the existence of a moderate state of conflict” among groups (Lipset 1960, p. 83). This is a historical and theoretical point crucial for the continuation of the reasoning. If we consider it from a historical point of view, such moderation assumes either that the class struggle has subsided sufficiently enough for the opponents to be willing to coexist within the existing regime and agree to attempt to modify it only by available legal means,

1In

a deliberative process, the only force that should be used is the one of the best arguments. Politics should not be used as a field where particular interests play against each other in order to gain more power. It should become an inclusive arena, egalitarian and pluralistic in which citizens discuss which is the best way to address a problem following a transparent and universalistic reasoning (not a rationality) which can select the most relevant and persuasive arguments able to elicit universal acceptance. The shift would be from a voting-centric democracy to a talking-centric one. In the first view, which is that of representative politics, public decisions are the results of concentration of interests and competing preferences that manage to become prominent thanks to money or power or size or status. In the second view, public decisions become deliberative in so far as they reflect the outcome of an open communicative process held on an equal basis among participants who are able to explain reasons that can be understood by others too. 2On participative democracy, see Pateman (1970), Barber (1984). On deliberative democracy, see Dryzek (2006). There are many important authors who do not agree with my thesis concerning the essentiality of the representative character of democracy. They believe that the conditions for applying direct democracy are opening up again. This happens, paradoxically, not because we would be going back towards simpler and more restricted political communities, but, on the contrary, because the growing complexity, volatility and variety of institutional systems make inefficient the hierarchies and processes in which knowledge proceeds from the principal (or delegator) to the agent (or delegated); see Cohen and Sabel (1997).

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or that the unrepentant (diehard) revolutionaries are far too few to be able to pose a real threat to the system (Duverger 1972). From a political theory point of view on the other hand, that moderation indicates that “democracy does not work when the antagonism between the majority and the minority is so strong that no compromise is possible and the rule of the political game, the submission of the minority to the will of the majority, is questioned, when the government, rightly or wrongly, is afraid of being overthrown by force” (Kelsen 1955, p. 85). When, during the second part of the twentieth century, this political system becomes established in many countries worldwide, “a central compromise in most cases of democratization was what might be termed ‘the democratic bargain’, the trade-off between participation and moderation” (Huntington 1991, p. 169). Lastly, the condition of moderation of contrasts is valid also on a normative analysis basis: Rawls argues that the coexistence of positions expressing very different values can be reached through “an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 1993, p. 134, italics added); this means that we can obtain a concordance among multiple, moral, philosophical or religious perspectives if there is a shared decision to exclude radical conflicts, that is to say that to reach political harmony there must be an unspoken consensus on how to solve differences. The main problem that this stance presents lies in its inability to explain 4 why social conflicts, which are genuine and not artificially created and manipulated from above, should be negotiable, at all. The conflicts that are beneficial to democracy should never concern an either/or, or, an all or nothing situation, but an optional choice on which one (this or that), and to what degree/extent (Hirschman 1994; Mouffe 2005). But what assurance can be given that dealing with the latter will not lead to slipping into the former? What can offer the guarantee that the fight between social groups will always be fought following the subdued forms of concordia discors, according to which there is an underlying shared way of feeling? Can it be civic virtue? Constitutional ties? A geopolitical context which is already democratic? These are not really “solutions” as they are actually implied in the questions they are supposed to answer: how and why subjects are willing to become virtuous citizens, to abide by some “regulations” or make democracy prevail everywhere. In contemporary societies, we find non-negotiable conflicts mainly in situations 5 that involve power imbalances and identity recognition. To define the first, we start by observing that the distribution of social goods is negotiable every time they are divisible and therefore a discussion can be opened about the quantity that anyone is allowed to take of them, as in the case of a tug of war regarding the amount of monetary income or access to public health care or higher education, all often resulting in conflicts of a gradualist nature. On the contrary, social conflicts tend

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to radicalise when power relationships result in a serious inequality in the control of social goods. There are cases in which the subjects are so “big” and “powerful” that just by taking decisions they cannot help having an impact on others. Sometimes, this can even occur in a way which is independent from either their will or contracts or laws: as, for instance, in the case of the repercussions that the behaviour of a multinational corporation has on a local community. Such an impact on other people’s freedom and welfare that economists call “negative externality” cannot usually be divided at will and therefore cannot be adequately negotiated upon. If there is a clash, this will follow an “all or nothing” logic. The other social conditions where radical conflicts are produced and reproduced lie at the basis of individual construction of personal identities. Here, again, conflicts are not very much negotiable as they express radical needs that “are not limited to the productive process in itself, but concern time, space, relationships, individual’s self. There are questions that deal with birth, death, health and illness and put at the forefront the relation with nature, sexual identity, communication resources, and the deep biological and affective structure of individual behaviour” (Melucci 1996a). These are needs that hit at the core of the theoretical foundations of social rules: the social movements that champion these needs “ask where we are going and why. Their voice is a difficult one to hear, because they speak from a particular point of view that changes according to a specific condition (that of being young, women, and so forth). Nevertheless they speak to society in its entirety. The questions that they raise concern the whole logic of contemporary systems” (Melucci 1996b). The efficacy of non-negotiable conflicts can be understood through the distinc- 6 tion between de jure and de facto power. While the first one is the juridical codification of power relations among social groups, the second is brought about by a collective action that aims to alter, break and transgress the given rules. In the words of Norberto Bobbio: “Law, as a set of behavioural rules whose minimal aim is that of guaranteeing the survival and conservation of a social group fulfils its purpose mainly by assigning to everyone their own share of power and by delimiting the power of someone in relation to everybody else’s power. The legal system, on the other hand, in its function of distributor and controller of power is in itself the outcome of a social power […]. The control that Law exerts over power can only reach a certain limit, beyond which there is a power or a conglomeration of de facto powers, that we can call without fear, legibus soluti, that is those forces that spur social movement and prevent law to crystallise in definitive forms” (Bobbio 1979, p. 110). These considerations raise a crucial question: as radical conflicts trigger the so-called de facto power and therefore escape the pre-established political and juridical schemes, how can they enrich, innovate and nurture democratic life instead of disrupting its natural functioning?

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In order to tackle this problem, we need to differentiate between antagonism and social destructivity. A conflict can be defined as “antagonistic” when the transition from one type of institutional system to another cannot happen within the rules of the starting system, while it can be defined as “socially destructive” if, in attempting to change the rules, it interrupts the reproduction of the initial institutional setting. The first type of conflict rejects the rules of the game while still playing it, while the other type destroys the reproducibility of a certain social game. We think by analogy of the difference between those who, by refusing to play chess, move the horse as a bishop, and those who break the chessboard. In both cases, we are facing conflicts that break the structure of the existing compatibilities. Both move from the need, whether openly acknowledged or not, to change the forms of political institutions: transforming those authorised by the same existing institutions into something different and deemed more adequate. If we look at the matter from the point of view of those who currently hold power, both forms of conflict appear deleterious and completely superimposable. If, on the other hand, we consider it from a systemic point of view, we can see that their difference is, in fact, substantial. In the first form of conflict, we find an opposition of the kind “enemy vs friend”, or “in vs out”, whose aim is that of deleting and expelling the second term of the relationship. In this kind of conflict, the attainment of a status of peace is usually conditional to the disappearance/defeat of the other “player” and therefore of any further need to negotiate. On the other hand, the second form consists of an attempt to change the rules of the game; this too implies breaking the existing status quo, whose laws are being violated together with the rejection of the current political order. But in this second instance, neither aim nor means are necessarily destructive in nature. Important examples of non-destructive antagonistic conflicts are civil and social disobedience. The first one is an action that breaks a law in a public and non-violent way, even when this law has been approved and implemented following democratic procedures.3 The other one is an action that 3“Civil

disobedience arises when a significant number of citizens have become convinced either that the normal channels of change no longer function, and grievances will not be heard or acted upon, or that, on the contrary, the government is about to change and has embarked upon and persists in modes of action whose legality and constitutionality are open to grave doubt” (Arendt 1970, p. 74). “Does it make sense to talk about consensus if no reference is made to the possibility of dissent? If democratic legitimacy requires absolute and unconditional obedience from the part of the citizen, is it still possible to talk about democracy? […] What is a citizen supposed to do in order to avoid that political representation, which is a necessary tool, becomes renunciation of freedom? How can he strengthen his opinions and make them understood, if these are not even taken into consideration? […] If civil disobedience gets an official recognition as a legitimate tool within the political culture

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safeguards, protects, occupies and utilises social spaces and resources following criteria different from those imposed by convention, traditions, cultural rules, property relations, contractual links and using in their place self-regulatory strategies related to the degrees and forms of law violation, excluding some forms of violence or violence tout court. For both types of disobedience, the conflict is radical, because they both pit rights, needs, interests and identities that are non-negotiable according to the current rules of the game, against a power set-up.4 In §6 I asked myself how can democracy not be overwhelmed by radical con- 8 flicts? The answer that I am trying to formulate consists in giving value to nondestructive antagonistic conflicts. In contrast to liberal-democratic theories according to which democratic governments can only benefit from gradual forms of dissent, I believe that non-negotiable conflicts that are set off by subaltern social groups in relation to power inequalities (and identity recognition issues) are ­important too. This does not happen under all circumstances but only when these conflicts take up the form of a non-destructive social antagonism which increases critical political participation by changing the rules of the game while playing it, thus opening up new avenues for wider opportunities and further rights. It is in this theoretical perspective that we can better interpret the historical passage from

of a community, the very concept of state is modified as it is the relationship between politics and the other informative-normative systems. The occurrence of disobedience, originally due more to ethical rather than juridical reasons, has become a political phenomenon and touches the institutional question. The very fact that it is in essence a political phenomenon has raised it both above the simple reference to individual moral conscience that would make the act absolute and therefore pitch it against society, and the particular economistic interest. The fact of being political implies a reference to others’ opinions and, moreover, a reference to the dialectic of opinions that is inextricably linked to democracy” (Serra 2002, pp. 79 and 92; see also Braithwaite 2009). In article 50 of the Project of the Italian Constitution, which was not approved by the Constituent Assembly, we can read: “When Public Powers violate fundamental freedom and rights which are guaranteed by the Constitution, resisting the oppression is both a right and a duty on the part of the citizen” (Costituzione italiana 1969). 4See

Kellner (1975). About Barber (1984), Adamson notes that “Barber is caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand his reformism must be aggressive enough to alter the present “climate of antigovernment privatism” in a participatory direction; on the other hand, he recognizes that “above all, strong democracy needs to advance its program in a temperate spirit”. It must be “prudent” by “adding participatory ingredients to the constitutional formula, not by removing representative ingredients”. Unfortunately, Barber’s prudence would seem to risk profound political disappointment and frustration. For if the existing fundamental structures of power remain intact, to increase opportunities and pressures to participate outside those structures might well mean that participation would be perceived as making no real difference” (Adamson 1989, p. 133).

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civil rights to political ones and to social ones,5 or the circumstance under which occurrence many of the main democratic innovations became established after being introduced in a conflictual way by new collective actors in areas where the “exchange between participation and moderation” was less stable and mature.6 This shifts the terms of the problem referred to in §6 that now becomes: how 9 can we best take advantage of non-destructive antagonistic conflicts in democratisation processes? To answer this question, we need to note that collective action—especially when it takes place in vast and heterogeneous groups—meets substantial difficulties (Bellanca 2007) that I have already outlined in §§1–2 and that can be synthetized as such. The “participation principle” stipulates that when there is a decision at stake that affects my values and interests in a substantial manner, my active involvement is required regardless of the content of the decision itself, because it concerns my autonomy. This first aspect though clashes

5“When

those who had the right to vote were just property owners, it was natural that they should ask the public authority to perform a single basic function: the protection of private property. This gave rise both to the doctrine of the limited state, the night-watchman state, or, as it is known now, the minimal state, and to the constitution of the state as an association of property owners for the defence of that natural right which was for Locke precisely the right to property. From the moment the vote was extended to the illiterate it was inevitable that they would ask the state to set up free schools, and so take on board a responsibility unknown to the states of traditional oligarchies and of the first bourgeois oligarchy. When the right to vote was also extended to non-property owners, to the have-nots, to those whose only property was their labour, it resulted in them asking the state for protection from unemployment, and in due course for state insurance schemes against illness and old age, for maternity benefits, for subsidized housing etc. So it was that the Welfare State came about, like it or not, as the response to demands emanating from below, demands which were, in the fullest sense of the world, democratic” (Bobbio 1987, p. 38; see also the classic Marshall 1950). 6For this interpretative key, see Markoff (1999, pp. 229–246). Some examples are: the first national success for female suffrage was obtained in New Zealand; the uniform adoption of the secret ballot was introduced in Australia; written national constitutions started at the end of the eighteen century in the former colony of the USA, followed by Poland in Europe; Denmark abolished its slave trade before England, while the new independent States of Latin America and Haiti even before, preceded the USA in the abolition of slavery; many of the states of the newly formed USA started to abolish the requirements based on census (wealth and property) for voting rights, followed by some of the Swiss Cantons; the inclusion for the first time in a Constitutional Chart of the right to water by Uruguay, in 2004. When on the contrary it is the dominant classes and the ruling elites that activate the de facto power, they actually trigger a conflictual process that aims to break the “exchange between moderation and participation” that does not appear adequate to them any longer, and therefore to restrict or suppress democratic spaces and practices. See Acemoglu and Robinson (2006).

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with two others. The “result principle” indicates that it is in my interest to accept the decision-making method which gives the best outcome regarding my values and interests, regardless of the fact that my participation is required or not. The “economic principle” indicates that, if I am able to devote only a limited amount of time and energy to other activities that are still involving my values and interests, it is in my interest to approve of a decision-making process that makes the outcome of participation at least equal to that provided by alternative activities. The contrast between the first principle and the other two offers a powerful explanation of the ebb and flow of political participation: the result principle explains why we are often compelled to delegate the political process to tutors and specialists, while the economic principle clarifies why mass activism is costly and sporadic (Stoppino 1974). We can see then that on the one hand, political participation of subaltern 10 groups is not so widespread, committed and persistent, as to eliminate in general the elitist nature of democracy.7 On the other hand, though, historical experiences provide evidence that there have been many relevant occasions when collective subaltern subjects, even without a constant mobilisation, have activated a de facto power which was able to deeply modify the social content of the political regime. The non-destructive antagonistic conflicts, besides informing episodes like those mentioned in §8, also set important democratic milestones such as the abolition of slavery, the removal of census requirements regarding the right to vote, the adoption of secret ballot and women’s suffrage. All these results have been reached not thanks to the far-sightedness of the political ruling classes, but rather because of the changes that have occurred in the communis opinio, sometimes gradual and consensual, sometimes abrupt and highly conflictual (Markoff 1996). (We shall return to this topic in Chapter 5) Furthermore, non-destructive

7Confronted

with such difficulties, socialist, Marxist and anarchic thinkers have provided, with very few exceptions, an answer that transformed what was a hope into reality: the masses of people are endowed with a “class (or group) consciousness” and this is why they will fight their way towards a systematic and persistent participation in the decision-making processes of politics and the economy until the elitist connotations of democracy will be transformed. This wishful thinking is currently undergoing a crisis, especially after the collapse of real socialism regimes and the victory of neoliberal capitalism, but more often than not, it is just a change of skin. If we take in consideration the literature produced by both the current social opposition movements and by economic activities of a social, ethical and cooperative nature, we can see that the now obsolete concept of class consciousness has been replaced with those of “shared visions”, “ethical visions” and “collective planning”, without making a real progress in gauging the scope of the difficulties being faced.

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a­ ntagonistic conflicts have introduced various methods of surveillance, interdiction and evaluation of the elites in the shadow of the formal liberal-democratic institutions. These extra-electoral methods, often informal or perhaps not even legal, have given birth to networks of indirect power woven inside the fabric of society that Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracies” (Rosanvallon 2006). Box 1 The political parties and inclusive interests in Isocracy

“In the broadest sense, a political party is a coalition of men seeking to control the governing apparatus by legal means” (Downs 1957b, p. 24). In Isocracy, there are many coexisting social groups that are placed in several institutional spheres (see Box 3 in Chapter 1). If each group tried to express its political values and interests through its own party, so many parties would be created. If the parties were many, they would all risk being of little relevance. Rather, in a society that is attenuating the asymmetries of power also among the groups, a party can increase its relevance in relation to the increase in the number of social groups it represents. Furthermore, the more the power of the various groups is actually balanced, the more indifferent it becomes for one party to strategically represent one group instead of another. This reinforces the tendency of the parties to constitute moments of synthesis of the political demands placed by the greatest number of groups, however heterogeneous, in the awareness that a synthesis is never the “lowest common denominator”, but the result of a conflictual mediation. Given this search for synthesis, Isocracy while is socially animated by many groups, politically tends to express few relevant parties. It follows that in it the political system converges towards inclusive majorities, as each of the few relevant parties represents large and varied sectors of society. The existence of inclusive majorities has a positive impact on the quality of the political system. In fact, the more a majority is inclusive, the greater is the coincidence between its interest and the collective interest. A simple demonstration takes into consideration the tax levy. The higher the tax, the lower the income that, ceteris paribus, remains in citizens’ pockets. On the other hand, the tax levy finances public goods, which contribute to the increase of the citizens’ income. Everyone agrees to pay an additional euro of taxes until it creates a euro of additional income, i.e. to the point where the marginal cost equals the marginal benefit. When the majority coincides with the totality of the population, “each citizen pays a share of the cost of the public good that is exactly proportional to his or her share of the gains (marginal and average) from the public good” (McGuire and Olson 1996, p. 80). The greater the majority, the closer we are to this result. Therefore, in Isocracy, thanks to inclusive majorities, the citizen who governs takes little or no advantage of the citizen who is being governed.

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Box 2 The political parties in the Digital Age

In the twentieth-century model of the political party, direct participation was difficult to achieve, especially because it was expensive to meet physically. The central place of participation was the “base unit”—the section or the circle—based on territory. In this place, the meetings of the members were held periodically, discussing the political line and electing those who would represent them at the highest-level meetings, regional or national. Today, on the other hand, the digital party builds a free space for collective interaction, using digital platforms of the era of apps and social media. Participation is no longer bound to the physical place in which everyone is located. On the digital platforms, there are direct assemblies of all the members, who have the right to vote. This eliminates the delegates of the basic units, the traditional intermediaries between the low ranks and the top ones that dominated the twentieth-century politics. In addition, this changes the function of the basic units: they are no longer spaces for decision, which is entrusted to the digital assembly. They have now become spaces for debate and action, which are in charge of supporting in practical ways the collective line decided by the party and adapting it to local conditions. Direct participation can be steered through instruments that favour the introduction and the equal circulation of proposals, the deliberation via the multiple preferences method and delegations for thematic areas, always revocable. Obviously, the digital party, with its organisational innovations, is not enough on its own to eliminate the authoritarian dynamics of the leadership. It can, however, make decision-making procedures less opaque, favouring the control of the base and that of the public opinion. Above all, it takes away power from the intermediate levels of representation, reducing the distance between citizens and their representatives (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). It is not a panacea, but it can contribute to the flourishing of an isocratic society.

2 From Representative Democracy to Political Isocracy Political participation, which as noted (§9) is partial, limited and occasional, is 11 not sufficient to channel and exploit in a suitable manner the non-destructive antagonistic conflicts and the de facto power that they generate, nor are counter-democratic initiatives that, albeit able to shake the status quo, cannot go as far as to modify the system in a permanent and stable way (§10). The crucial step

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consists in being able to accumulate and keep accessible the outcomes of the de facto power by transforming them into appropriate new forms of de jure power. In other words, the challenge involves discovering and initiating institutionalisation processes that will work as “photovoltaic cells”, which are devices able to convert light energy into electricity and use it when the sun is covered by the clouds. In this respect, it is useful to remark that democracy is also a planned order. In order to better frame the question of how important political planning ability is, I would like to recall one of the most relevant and ingenious Institutional inventions ever put in place. (We shall return on the possibility to bring it back to life in the present situation in §49.) It is attributed to Cleisthenes, who was the archon of Athens in 508 BC (Fornara and Samons 1991, Chapter 2; Thorley 1996, Chapter 3; Rhodes 2015, pp. 131–145). The democratic constitution of Cleisthenes establishes a new political-administrative unit, the deme, into which he divides the Attica region. Every Athenian citizen at the time of birth is registered in a deme, which—and this is the first innovation that I want to highlight—weakens the dependency on everyone’s familial group (the citizen is now being identified not only by his own name and that of the father, but also by that of the deme of birth or that of residence). The original demes are hundred, grouped in ten tribes, with each tribe in its turn subdivided into three subgroups, called trittyes. One trittys is located in the plains, one in the mountains and one on the coast. Each of them thus represents a different social class: in the plains aristocracy prevails, on the mountains peasants do and on the coast fishermen. From this follows that—and this is the second major innovation—none of the new tribal configurations has a local character, but on the contrary contains a sample of the whole Athenian population and also that in every tribe the poorest classes are the majority as they are represented in two trittyes out of three. Each of the ten tribes nominated fifty counsellors who would be part of the boule, a council consisting of five hundred members, which was grouped in ten prytanies (commissions). It is only for few political roles, such as those of the army’s general (stratega) and those concerning finance, tasks that require a very high level of specialisation, that the system used is that of nomination through voting. Cleisthenes invokes for other public political roles—and this is the third institutional innovation—a non-renewable yearly election, to be held by sortition among citizens older than thirty. The elected candidates are subject to scrutiny both before and after their mandate. There are two main arguments that he brings in favour of the sortition method: (a) to avoid that somebody becomes a politician by profession and by doing so accumulates too much power; (b) to make sure that every citizen is guaranteed the equal possibility to take up political leadership. Lastly— and this is the fourth innovation—the power to take the ultimate decisions (peace

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and war, ratification of international treaties) belongs to the ecclesia or the popular assembly, which is made up of all the citizens. This, at the helm of its power, convenes forty times a year. For Cleisthenes, the democratic regime, besides being an evolutionary order, is also a purposeful invention able to elicit consensus and participation. In this book’s terminology, his is an isocratic constitution that successfully impacts on both incentives and ties of the subjects: family and class allegiances are weakened in favour of a stronger citizenship; at the same time, we see the establishment of institutions where a balance can be reached between decisional efficacy and popular participation. Cleisthenes’ democratic constitution therefore was also meant to prevent more 12 powerful citizens to exercise excessive political influence. While in the subsequent historical experiences of democratic regimes this intention has been often overlooked, it needs to be carefully reconsidered and put at the centre of a new institutional design of representative democracy. There is though, a possible objection that must be discussed beforehand. A fundamental principle of modern democratic constitutions concerns isonomy or formal equality of all citizens before the law (see Chapter 1, §28). The most coherent expression of this principle is expressed by the universal suffrage that enacts a revolution in human relations, decreeing that people are not socially tied by a hierarchical universe, nor by a mercantile system or some collective belief, but by their qualitative equality, expressed by the criterion “one person, one vote” (Rosanvallon 1992). This objection suggests that if we introduce institutions that treat citizens differently according to the amount of power they hold, the isonomy principle collapses and situations in which the opinions or the vote of someone becomes more valuable than someone else’s become legitimate. This objection rejects the argument according to which the new institutions would become legitimate by virtue of their opposing the effects of a substantial inequality in the power relations among people. It is indeed undesirable, the objection would argue, to reduce formal democracy to implement a substantial one as this could lead, as history has tragically taught us, to justify any form of dictatorship (fascist, populist, Stalinist and so on), “in the name of the people (or class)”. In order to answer, we will examine more thoroughly the logic of Cleisthenes’ 13 constitution. The crucial point here does not concern the respect of the formal equality of the subjects but whether an institutional rule, even when makes distinctions among citizens, can be considered as (1) non-discriminatory, (2) nonarbitrary and (3) freely chosen. This happens when the rule is known to all ex ante and can be reversed by anyone (see also §18 and Box 5, Chapter 2). So, the Athenian citizen knows that in every tribe the lower classes have the majority as they are represented in two out of three trittyes. It is a rule that differentiates

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among citizens preventing those who inhabit the plains to prevail but does not block those who live on the mountains or on the coast to move to the plains and vice versa. Any Athenian can choose between two combinations: more wealth and less influence in the boule (symbolically he chooses to live in the plains), or less financial means but more political relevance. The rule therefore does not discriminate as does not preclude any social position: any citizen can be more or less well off in economic terms and more or less influent in politics. It is also non-arbitrary, because it is only limited to establish, in a way known to all, incentives and sanctions. Lastly, it is a rule that reflects the criterion of complex equality (see Chapter 1, §§21–26), according to which nobody can add the advantages gained in one sphere with those gained in another one, until they reach an overall dominant position. This criterion insures that the Athenians have a real freedom of choice: among those of who are willing to sacrifice a little wealth, they do so in order to gain a little political influence and vice versa. If instead, a principle of simple equality should prevail (see Chapter 1, §20), and power would increase (decrease) according to the growth (reduction) of a single type of social goods, such as wealth, then only those who had lost this particular good would leave the plains. We would still have a rule that is non-discriminatory and non-arbitrary, but it would be devoid of freedom of choice: the citizen could only be subjected to it. It must be specified, on the other hand, that democratic regimes can tempo14 rarily accept rules which lack some of the requisites of non-discrimination, non-arbitrariness and freedom of choice. For instance, in multi-ethnic democracies, “rights of special representation” can be established when the disadvantages caused by belonging to a minority group are considered to be systemic; there are also rules—the so-called methods of power-sharing—aimed at the formation of a system of government where all the “politically relevant” groups in society permanently hold a share of power (Jarstad 2013, pp. 246–256; we shall return to the topic in §§31–32). Similarly, in democracies that are characterised by marked and persistent distortions related to gender and race, “gender quotas” and “affirmative actions” are introduced.8 We are confronted with exceptional circumstances, justified by the need to lessen large power asymmetries. As it happens for all exceptional circumstances, the crucial aspect does not concern as much the application of the rule that they brought about, but rather the bases on which they are brought into being and those that will bring them to an end. The more rigorous is

8On

gender quotas, see Phillips (1995, Chapter 3). On affirmative action, see Anderson (2004). We shall return to the topic in §32.

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the definition of their being provisional and contingent, the more acceptable the exceptions to some of the three requisites discussed in §13 will be. To give to the modern representative democracy an isocratic twist, what is 15 needed is an institutional setting in which subaltern groups exercise their electoral responsibilities, as well as specific attributions in constitutional, judicial, legislative and administrative matters. These extra-electoral isocratic institutions draw their inspiration from both the most advanced political experiments in ancient history as well as the most courageous and innovative contemporary practices (Smith 2009). These practices have been grouped here into five categories: those based on reputation of impartiality, those based on distributed power, those based on shared power, partisan ones and also federalist ones. In the isocratic society, there is a discussion and sometimes a heated debate on which one is the more appropriate and effective version of one or the other institution. The level of controversy is particularly high as far as the partisan institutions are concerned, so much as to prevent so far their introduction altogether (see §§33–37). In this Chapter, I shall limit myself to illustrate in the most concise way, the form that to me looks like the most convincing for each institution, without claiming to be exhaustive. I am attempting to show that beyond the details, we can see a neat and consistent pattern emerging from the new institutional framework. Box 3 Which electoral system?

Different electoral systems have different political effects on the quality of Isocracy. For the sake of simplicity, let us consider two extreme models: majority rule in the single-member district and proportional representation rule (see, for a theme framework, Norris 2004). In the first model, the college elects a single absolute winner. In the second, the college elects more candidates, more or less in proportion to the votes received. The number of political parties influences the electoral system: the presence of few parties tends to establish a majority rule, while that of many inclines towards a proportional rule. On the basis of Box 1, Isocracy tends to have few parties, and therefore a majority system. Every electoral system has, of course, advantages and disadvantages. The proportional system is often blamed for leading to the formation of unstable and ineffective governments, based on large and heterogeneous coalitions. On the other hand, the most serious criticism concerning the majority system is that it tends to generate tyranny over minorities; that is, it does not take into adequate consideration the demands of the electors of the defeated parties. It follows, for the isocratic society, a dilemma: to what extent, in the sphere of political representation, the parties must synthetize the values and interests of multiple groups, in order to

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simplify the party s­ ystem and to affirm a majority electoral rule? To put it in reverse, to what extent does this simplification risk to impoverish the political vitality of groups in society? Obviously, the answer varies from place to place and from moment to moment. The decision-making paths, indicated by the institutional mechanisms illustrated in this chapter, can help select the best choice.

3 Institutions Based on Reputation of Impartiality 16 Joseph Schumpeter argues that “the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyses in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests” (Schumpeter 1942, p. 262). However, “given time the collective psyche will evolve opinions that not infrequently strike us as highly reasonable and even shrewd” (ibid., p. 264). Therefore, the difficulty for democracy lies, in his opinion, in the contrast between single citizens, who are easily manipulated in the short term and the people as a whole who are wise in the long run. Friedrich von Hayek is less pessimistic and believes that it is possible to reduce this difficulty if we put at the centre of the political order an institution where the people who take part in it are (1) aware of making a difference; (2) have at their disposal an ample temporal horizon; (3) are free from daily cares and material worries; and (4) link both their current and future position exclusively to the reputation they enjoy among their peers.9 Among these requisites, reputation is the one that has the biggest importance in the ancient words of Pericles: “we are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deep respect. We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially […] those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break” (Thucydides about 400 BC, II, 37. Pericles’ oratio dates back to 430 BC). In relation to the conceptual framework of this book, it must be observed that 17 reputation is not politically neutral, because it thrives or deteriorates within particular social groups, which usually are in conflictual terms with other groups.

9While

I am resuming what I believe to be “the heart” of Hayek’s idea, I am modifying some of its aspects, without illustrating to the reader the differences in details (but see Footnote 13). For a detailed presentation of his thought on these topics, see Nemo (1988, sixième partie, pp. 329–368), Vanberg (2001, Chapter 5).

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If we take for instance a leather artisan, a functionary of the World Bank or a professional politician, every one of them places relevance on good reputation, but they all wish to receive this recognition within the circle which is relevant and therefore most meaningful to them (Pizzorno 2007). However, any political community, even with its internal conflicts, shares a common destiny, in view of the fact that it shares a network of social goods that characterises to a large extent the freedom and well-being of its social members. Whereas conflicts tend to multiply particularistic interests, the common destiny encourages designing shared political institutions. These do not exclude conflicts but promote longsighted behaviours. The more important the common destiny aspect is deemed, the more reputation becomes a socially transversal issue, that is to say that crosses over a constellation of groups with particular interests. Let us go back to Hayek and to his design of a political institution based on 18 reputation. Whereas Hayek does not deal with the question of isocracy—that of balancing the power of people and groups—he nevertheless addresses the question of reducing arbitrary power. He puts as pillar of the free political order, the distinction between impartial rule, or nomos, and a specific order, or thesis. The impartial rule introduces rights and duties which are unconditional as they are always valid for everyone, or are dependent on circumstances that are accessible to anyone (see also §13 and Box 5, Chapter 2). It does not, for instance, confer the right to vote only to white skinned people or those who are taller more than 180 cm, since someone who has coloured skin or is short in height cannot modify their condition, but a nomos can instead decree that only residents or those who pay taxes are allowed to vote, since we are dealing with requisites that can be met in principle by anyone.10 It is worth pointing out that the term “impartial” in this historical context does not mean disinterested or even neutral: it only indicates a non-arbitrary form of de jure power. In contrast to this, the specific order is an ad hoc and ad personam coercion that sanctions rights and duties linked to peculiar characteristics of a person and to particular circumstances of time and place. For example, a government decree or a parliamentary law that favours pharmaceutical firms or banks or career politicians over any other group of citizens can be considered a thesis. Hayek defines as arbitrary a power that allows the thesis and has a disenchanted view of the class of career politicians: “It is an illusion to expect

10Unless,

of course, there is a specific order that forbids taking up residence or paying taxes in the territory under consideration.

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from those who owe their positions to their power to hand out gifts that they will tie their own hands by inflexible rules prohibiting all special privileges. To leave the law in the hands of elective governors is like leaving the cat in charge of the cream jug—there soon won’t be any, at least no law in the sense in which it limits the discretionary powers of government” (Hayek 1973–79, p. 373). So, in order to encourage citizens to elaborate and apply impartial rules as 19 opposed to specific orders, Hayek suggests entrusting the task of safeguarding the nomoi to a body, which is different from those, both executive and legislative, made up of career politicians. Assembly I or nomothete, devoted to the preventive check of abstract rules of law, must be separated from Assembly II that makes laws on concrete normative acts and from the government as the executive body. In order to implement this separation, Assembly I must respond to an incentives’ system devised to make its members independent from support by particular groups. This system rests on two cornerstones: the reputation that people receive from their peers and the absence of worries about the future. Let us consider the totality of citizens who, on becoming fifty, have entered the mature age. Each of them has already had the chance to show society their own aptitudes and abilities and therefore can be evaluated by other members of the group, that is that of their peers, on grounds such as “probity, wisdom, and judgment” (ibid., p. 448). The evaluation takes place in two phases: first, delegates are elected at regional level, and then, the regional delegates elect the members of Assembly I at national level. This process of indirect election allows the reputation of impartiality to be formed at a local level, in a close environment and full of relatively intense contacts; it also allows every region to be compelled to select quality candidates to maximise their chances to be re-elected in the second round. In order to be a member of Assembly I, candidates must not have been career politicians and in particular not have been elected in Assembly II. To prevent any members from having personal worries, his is a non-renewable role that lasts for fifteen years.11 At the end of this long commitment, he will be sixty-five and will receive a well-remunerated public prestigious post, on condition that he will have behaved correctly during his mandate and will not apply for new political offices.12 Finally, in order to face possible inappropriate actions or

11This

implies that every year, citizens who become fifty in the same year will replace a 15th of Assembly I. 12This is a well-tried and tested mechanism in modern representative democracies. The most famous instance is that of the US President, who can hold office for up to two fouryear terms, but afterwards can only hold honorary positions.

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cases of negligence from Assembly I, a council of former members with supervising powers is established.13 The classical liberal approach of Madison, and, before him, Montesquieu, 20 known as the theory of checks and balances (“weights and counterweights”), countervailing theory or system of powers and counter powers, it is often reduced to the juridical division between legislative power, executive and judicial ones (Holmes 2003; Panebianco 2004). Hayek’s proposal, on the contrary, retrieves its deepest meaning, according to which the balancing of power is achieved essentially through a political division, that is to say, an institutional design in which the various bodies (historically: King, High Chamber and Low Chamber) influence each other.14 The division of tasks between the two Assemblies is guided by the distinction between impartial rules and specific orders (§18). The legislative function is an exclusive prerogative of Assembly II, which has been elected through the usual voting system based on party competition and is therefore subject to the conflictual dynamics of particular interests. Its legislative acts express practical measures and possible sanctions in issues such as taxation, health, security, industrial and labour policies and so on. These pieces of legislation need to be scrutinised under the criterion of impartiality: are they introducing rights and

13According

to de Jasay, Hayek “[writes that] ‘To limit power does not require that there be another power to limit it’. Power, he explains, is derived from opinion. To make sure that opinion sets the right sort of limits, leading to the kind of government liberals can approve, he wants to entrust its formulation to a representative body, a second or third chamber, above coalitions of particular interests. No reason is advanced why the opinion enunciated by this body would be accepted as binding by a society, or any substantial part of it, in a situation where it wanted to use the ‘power’ of collective decision-making for breaking down the very limits ‘opinion’ has erected against it” (Jasay 1997, p. 53). It is easy to note that these objections are sympathetic to a certain extent to the ones I raise in this book. It is in this perspective that the system of isocratic political institutions includes the ones of distributed power, of shared power, partisans and federalist ones. However, de Jasay does not acknowledge, in his critique, that beliefs constitute one of the main sources of power (see Chapter 1, especially §§15–19). If we take this point seriously, as I do in §§16–17, we can understand why Hayek’s contribution is not inconsistent with the isocratic approach. 14In the eighteenth century, the British constitution was an expression of the balanced government theory and achieved a vitality and primacy it had not had in antiquity. The division of British society into three classes: Kings, Nobles and People, and their personification in the Crown, Chamber of Lords and the House of Commons, seemed to realize almost miraculously the ancient dream of balancing the simple forms of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy within just one single constitution. State and society had become one thing. It is no surprise then that intellectuals like Montesquieu, from anywhere in the world, looked at the English constitution with admiration and fear. See Wood (1969, Parts II and III).

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duties dependent on circumstances that are only accessible to some people and are therefore forms of arbitrary power? As Stuart Mill already explained, to the nomothete belongs the task “to revise the whole of the laws, and keep them consistent with one another” (Mill 1861, p. 126). Hayek specifies that all the rules that could foster arbitrary power, “would have to have the sanction” of Assembly I.15 So, the nomothete is not some kind of permanent constituent Assembly that promulgates and reviews the “normative rules” of the legal system. While it does not promulgate laws, it operates a check on the legitimacy of the choices made by the legislator, which is mandatory on organic laws (those that regulate the functioning of constitutionally relevant institutions) and on parliamentary regulations (with which Assembly II regulates its own functioning), but it is optional in the case of ordinary laws.16 In actual fact, the nomothete is a constitutional court enhanced on two accounts: rather than being made up of nominated jurists and judges, its members are elected citizens; instead of intervening only via checks made afterwards, by verifying the constitutionality of laws already enacted, it exercises independent preventive controls during the adopting procedure of the normative act. As in the case of the constitutional court, every evaluation by Assembly I has validity erga omnes: all the laws that do not pass the scrutiny need to be modified by Assembly II and by the government within a set time frame. In a perfect world, Assembly I would be a watchdog that never barks: Assembly II, aware of the strict nature of the preventive control it is subject to, would be careful to promulgate only impartial laws. Even though Isocracy is not a perfect world, it is true that the more the function of the nomothete gains credentials, the less it has to work. To Assembly I, devoted mainly to preventive check on parliamentary laws, are 21 assigned two other important tasks. We shall deal with the first one in §46. The second consists in nominating the functionaries of independent administrative authorities. These authorities, just as Assembly I, constitute a political institution based

15Hayek

(1973–79, p. 450). In addition, Hayek maintains that another tasks the nomothete should perform is that of promulgating impartial rules or laws proper (ibid., p. 454 and passim). This thesis appears weak because it aims at making the nomothete a permanent Constituent Assembly. Hayek himself recognises that there would be ongoing difficulties in distinguishing between which laws are impartial rules and which others are specific orders which would lead to the necessity to create a Constitutional Court, nominated by a Senate of former members of Assembly I, that would deal with conflict of competences between the two Assemblies (ibid., p. 455). 16For some characteristics of Assembly I, I got some inspiration from the original model of the French Conseil constitutionnel: see Roussillon (2008).

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on the reputation of impartiality of its members. They are public agencies with ­regulatory functions related to social goods in the face of multiple interests and particularly in cases of conflict between public and private interests. A simple list of the topics they deal with is enough to clarify their relevance: Central Bank; Regulator body for the media and information industries (Office of Communication), Data Protection Agency, Tax-payer rights agency, the Ombudsman for the rights of prisoners, Citizens Advice Bureaux, Public Services Regulator, Pension Protection Funds Ombudsman, Competition and market authority, Stock Exchange Regulator, Insurance market Regulator and Food Standard Agency.17 Working as a third party in relation to vested interests, the Authority increases the probability that the power stakes are subtracted from the logic of the thesis (§18). It is run by functionaries who place great value on their reputation (on social and economic grounds before and above ethical ones) and therefore tend to act in an impartial way; they deliberate in a collegial way, usually involving a number of members between five and ten,18 who are not removable from the executive; and who have a fixed-term, non-­ renewable mandate.19 In order for the Authority to apply the logic of the nomos, this needs to be enshrined in the wider institutional design aiming at isocracy. Indeed, as already argued in §17, as long as society expresses huge power asymmetries, it is likely that the college of authorities aspires to receive reputational acknowledgements from stronger subjects. Admitting it does not disqualify the institution of independent authorities, but helps to avoid the illusion according to which it would be able to act in a super partes capacity just on the sheer virtue of the people who runs it.

17On

Independent Authorities, see King (2007).

18“Independent

authorities derive their legitimacy from the procedures they use to reach their decisions. They deliver their judgments only after exchanging information and mulling over arguments. In the course of debate, members may change their views without renouncing any of their convictions. […] Each member of a commission has the same right to make his voice heard and the same acknowledged competence to participate in debate. Since internal deliberations are not public, members need not feel compelled to strike a pose. The better argument has real force in such a group. Finally, because the panels are small, members feel psychological pressure to express themselves in a mature, deliberate manner. All work together toward a common goal. The structural prerequisites of rational deliberation are thus at least approximated, if not fulfilled” (Rosanvallon 2008, pp. 92–93). 19“Finally, it is generally the case that not all members of an independent commission are replaced at once, and this further reinforces the virtuous effects of collegiality” (Rosanvallon 2008, p. 93).

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4 The Institutions of Distributed Power 22 How can the de facto power of subaltern groups transform democratic political regimes? How can it change closed institutional spaces where decisions are taken through mechanisms of transmission of authoritarian power and rules, and where representation is manipulation or, at best, consultation? Where conflictual and/or negotiation procedures proliferate and where knowledge is formed and circulates from the bottom to the top as well? A partial answer can be found in the institution of the revocation of the elected, with which citizens can revoke the mandate conferred to a representative before the natural end of the term. The revocation starts with a petition, a written request with attached the collection of a certain required number of signatures. Article 72 of the Venezuelan Constitution states: “All magistrates and other offices filled by popular vote are subject to revocation. Once half of the term of office to which an official has been elected has elapsed, a number of voters constituting at least 20% of the voters registered in the pertinent circumscription may extend a petition for the calling of a referendum to revoke such official’s mandate. When a number of voters equal to or greater than the number of those who elected the official vote in favor of revocation, provided that a number of voters equal to or greater than 25% of the total number of registered voters have voted in the revocation election, the official’s mandate shall be deemed revoked, and immediate action shall be taken to fill the permanent vacancy in accordance with the provided for in this Constitution and by law”.20 In order to be able to exert continuous control on the political class from the 23 bottom, in particular on the members of parliament of Assembly II, it is possible to build a reliable mechanism that allows the revocation of the mandate given to one’s own representative; in its turn, the awareness of this power is likely to increase the will to participate on the part of the electors/delegators. In the original version, a mechanism based on the imperative mandate is envisaged, according to which the delegate is obliged to respect the prescriptions of the delegators (Screpanti 2013). At the beginning of the electoral campaign, each candidate illustrates on his own site his personal version of the programme of the party to which he belongs. His potential electors can put forward critical remarks and suggestions on how to improve the programme in the course of that electoral cam-

20Constitution

of the Bolivarian republic of Venezuela; http://venezuela-us.org/live/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/constitucioningles.pdf, p. 28. Accessed September 15, 2017.

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paign. Few days before the elections, the definitive programme becomes public and is filed in a municipal office. From that moment onwards, if the candidate is elected, it becomes a mandate pledge. However, there are two major objections that can be moved against the imper- 24 ative mandate. The first one suggests that any authentic debate offers the possibility to change opinion after considering the different arguments. To be tied to a signed programme is therefore stupid and stops both the deliberative process of learning and openness to new things. The second objection makes the point that the more the mandate pledge links consensus towards the delegate to a bundle of particular interests, the more it becomes harmful for the community. With the mechanism just described, every Member of Parliament is associated with the whole of his electors, whose list is transmitted to him by a computer that acts as an electoral commission. It is true that he is given the electors’ nicknames and not their passwords or their personal identity data. But the list of the nicknames is public or at least known to the Member of Parliament and his voters. This entails the danger that a voter opens a private forum to which he enrols the members of the list, who like him are “deeply concerned” with issues like raising funds for a basketball court, or homosexual rights, or the neighbourhood policeman or the carbon tax, etc. In this way, the delegate ends up entirely in the hands of a restricted faction of his electors all of which will try to push him towards a particular aim, being able to credibly threaten him to join forces to collect enough signatures necessary for a revocation of the mandate. In order to allay these concerns, the mechanism needs to be redesigned: there is no definitive programme by the candidate; if he becomes a Member of Parliament, his electors are identified anonymously by a central software run by the Interior Ministry (Home Office); during the parliamentary term, this particular subset of electors takes part in a forum where they can discuss issues with the delegate putting forward critical remarks and suggestions; the delegate is responsible for the modifications the programme undergoes to, following the debate between himself and the electors, and in case he does not respond in an adequate manner, a qualified majority of electors can start the procedure of a vote of no confidence and revocation of the mandate. The direct revocation and the mandate with the right of revocation belong 25 to the institutions of (semi) direct democracy. This political form—which retains parliament, government, tribunals and other organs of representative democracies—includes also the abrogative referendum (if a certain number of citizens wishes so, a law which has been voted by the parliament can be submitted to the whole electorate so that they can decide whether to accept it or reject it), the right of initiative (groups of citizens can request the modification of existing

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laws or the promulgation of new ones) and the right of revision (the ability to request a reform of the fundamental law of the state, that is the constitution).21 An institution that reinforces this institutional framework is the mandatory or confirmative referendum that contrary to the abrogative one does not require a preventive collection of signatures (Verhulst and Nijeboer 2007, pp. 17–19 and 82–83). The electors are called to vote on some types of laws so crucial to the nature of the political order, that for them even the restricted control of Assembly I, is not deemed enough. These laws concern modifications to the constitution and international treaties that transfer sovereignty to other organisations. If a law is approved through a referendum, its rank is superior in the juridical hierarchy to the laws approved by Assembly I and Assembly II. In addition, a law that has been directly approved by the people cannot subsequently be scrapped by the Assemblies. The more the institution of the referendum is used, the more its running costs 26 increase in organisational terms for the community and in terms of collection of information for the citizen. Furthermore, the bigger the size of the political community the more these costs rise. To counteract these difficulties, the isocratic society adds to the form of the plenary referendum another form based on the preliminary random selection of the participating citizens (Mueller et al. 1972; Bernheim 1985). This innovation stems from the premise that even if the right to vote is universal, not all the citizens have to exercise it on every occasion. However, they can renounce their right to vote only if the procedure that excludes them on that occasion is categorically impartial (see §§13 and 18). In no sense whatsoever the one-time waiver must equal to the loss of the corresponding right. The only impartial mechanism is one that guarantees the equal probability to be selected: a random draw, which already had a central role in classical Athens (§11) (Manin 1997, Chapter 1). Therefore, when a referendum is called—with a preliminary collection of signatures, if it is abrogative, or directly, if it is propositional—it is submitted to the vote of a subgroup of citizens randomly chosen by draw. This option is the preferred choice in cases that involve very large political communities that can even encompass the whole planet (Frey and Stutzer 2007). Those who represent citizens in Assembly I and II carry out a public service 27 that does not involve the acquisition of privileges. In order to insure that representatives receive adequate economic means, their retribution is decided for

21For

a classical contribution, see Rensi (1902); for a recent contribution see Frey and Stutzer (2013).

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every five year period by the council of ex members of the Assembly I (§19). This council, being made up of subjects who enjoy a high reputation and who are not able to access executive roles, offers guarantees of a balanced evaluation. Roughly, the retribution of the elected can be twice or three times bigger than the average income of the population. In addition, at the end of the mandate in Assembly I or II, every elected member must offer documentary evidence of how his income and patrimonial position is changed in comparison with the start of the mandate. This financial statement is examined by a group of ten citizens chosen by a random draw. In case this popular jury finds serious clues or even evidence of corruption, it hands over the case to the ordinary court. In the isocratic society, there is the institution of a national holiday, called the 28 Deliberation Day, which is held two weeks before the most important Election Day (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004). Registered voters will be called together in neighbourhood meeting places. Everybody is randomly placed in a small group of fifteen people who will first sit and watch together a live television debate between the candidates, then nominates a moderator and, after two turns of ninety seconds in which everybody speaks, they choose two questions with a secret ballot that will be submitted to a larger assembly made up of five hundred people. This assembly will meet for an hour and will be moderated by a non-partisan local leader, who will select at random ten of the questions raised in the small groups in order to listen to the answers provided to these by local politicians. After a lunch break, there will be a repetition of both small and large groups meetings for further debate and additional questions. The day ends with a third meeting of the small groups, in which each of the deliberators will sum up their opinions and feedback on the experience. No votes will be taken. Just as when citizens are called to serve in a jury each deliberator will receive a fair retribution for his day’s work of citizenship. It will amount to a considerable sum, but we need to remember how in the capitalist society much larger sums are spent yearly just on television adverts about cars. “Without forcing anyone, the proposal has multiple aims: not only increas- 29 ing the level of information the citizens receive on average, but also the direct acquaintance with the ethos of democratic discussion by debate. Also, above all, the immediate creation of a political communication market which will make not rewarding anymore to invest in heavy media campaigns made up of slogans as much emotional as ambiguous (with catchphrases such as “less tax for all” or “safer cities”), and with little practical implications. The obsessive repetition of slogans can stand as a form of political communication only where collective reflection is the exclusive prerogative of some restricted privileged

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circles (elites). Filling school classrooms, as it already happens with polling stations, with small groups of citizens who debate on a series of issues on the same day, means that even without preaching “participation” it can become possible to influence those who produce political communication. They will have to offer a product that can withstand that particular test under the media scrutiny structured in a competitive way” (Ferrara 2005, p. 10). In addition, the permanent consequences of the deliberation day will have an even deeper effect on the “chromosomes” of the average citizen. Political activism is in effect, a “virus” which, if not neutralised immediately, will take roots and spread and be able to modify the genetic make-up of a democracy: this is why active participation has always been feared by the elites and whenever possible, deprived of political connotations. The isocratic society sees the introduction of the law for the sovereignty of 30 the citizen (Ackerman and Ayres 2002). The law establishes that every citizen is given a token in currency that he can use to finance the electoral campaign of some candidate. He can decide to whom donate the token through some automatic machines placed in allocated public places. On the other hand, it prescribes that private contributions to electoral campaigns must be strictly anonymous through a mechanism of blind trust with which the citizen can finance a public body declaring to whom he wants to direct it; in its turn the body sends the overall sums to the beneficiary without disclosing the names of the donors. Finally, each candidate must choose between public and private financing, so that if one resorts to private donors, he leaves a greater amount of tokens available to his rivals who decide to opt for the contributions given by the citizens. Since in a densely populated area the voters are dozens of millions, they can spend various millions, making it advantageous to renounce private financing to try and drain away public financing from their political rivals. Box 4 We pay taxes to express preferences on public policies

Many citizens agree to voluntarily pay taxes, if they can derive benefits from them, not only of a general and indirect kind but also specific and direct ones (Listokin and Schizer 2013). This is what happens in Isocracy. Citizens can allocate at least part of their taxes in the areas of expenditure they choose and can check how their contributions are actually used by the jurisdiction to which they belong. They thus have a further modality, in addition to the electoral one, to assert their preferences in terms of public policies. This modality reduces tax evasion, since it calls for increased citizen participation to the collective destiny (Lamberton et al. 2018).

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5 The Institutions of Power-Sharing In societies characterised by deep divisions both among groups and among peo- 31 ple, there is the possibility to introduce institutional mechanisms which aim to disseminate power in a systematic manner (Hartzell and Hoddie 2007, especially pp. 21–63). Intervention policies (1) reduce conflict by dispersing it, widening and diversifying the points of dispute to take the heat off a single focal point; (2) part of the conflict may be shifted from the interethnic level to the intra-ethnic one, if this activates subgroups competition for goods difficult to obtain; (3) create incentives for interethnic cooperation; and (4) encourage alignments based on interests other than ethnicity (Horowitz 1985, pp. 598–599). These methods contribute to the constitution of a political system in which all the groups of society permanently hold a relevant part of power and the radical conflicts are transformed into non-destructive antagonisms (see §§4–10) (Morrow 2005, pp. 45–48). The methods of power-sharing are varied and numerous.22 The selection of 32 one rather than the other depends on the specifics of the situation. For the sake of my argument, it is sufficient to mention some of them in order to conjure the kind of logic on which they are based. (1) The executive or Assembly II can raise a conflict of interests (on a political level) or of attribution (on a legal level) in relation to an act which is being examined by a different institution. (2) Public offices and resources are distributed according to a proportional criterion. (3) Every legislative act relating to the exercise of constitutionally protected rights and to the position of the minorities cannot be adopted unless there is the favourable vote by the representatives of the same communities; or the minority groups have a suspending veto power on the legislative procedure which has the effect to activate a balanced agreement between the groups on the act’s content. (4) In order to mitigate the structural inequalities between groups, economic and social policies of positive discrimination are temporarily implemented (see §14). (5) Finally, with the multilateral horizontal supervision the members of each group submit their political actions to the scrutiny of the peer members of all the other groups; the particular advantage of this method lies in its non-hierarchical participatory character, and with an effective sanctioning mechanism that consists in the simple exclusion of the defectionists from the intergroup collaboration: if being inside

22See

Reilly (2001), Lijphart (2007). The majority of this literature is of liberal inclination; as a result, for instance, it tends to reject the affirmative action that I mention in point (4) of §32.

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the collaborative group brings tangible advantages, expulsion from it, works as a non-violent, adequate and credible threat.23 Box 5 The media in Isocracy

Isocracy needs quality information, whether paper or digital. In fact, the production of information—centred on professional journalism—is decisive to let pluralism of opinions, values, and interests flourish. In order to be independent from external shareholders, advertisers and public authorities, the media rely on readers/users, employees, and appropriate funding methods. The governance model is a hybrid between that of a non-profit foundation and that of a joint-stock company: the non-profit media organisation (NMO). Those who invest capital in NMO cannot get it back, nor can they receive dividends from it because the profits are reinvested in the company; they can nevertheless still earn thanks to attractive tax advantages. The NMO carries out commercial activities as a corporation, with the difference that, beyond a certain level of participation, voting rights would cease to be proportional to the shares owned. A threshold is introduced, equal (e.g.) to 10% of the shares, beyond which the right to vote increases only by one third compared to the excess shares held by the individual investor. In exchange for the reduction of voting rights, investors receive certain tax breaks. In addition, the NMO transforms crowdfunding participants into shareholders, giving them the right to representation. In summary, the NMO model has two main strengths. The State intervenes indirectly in the financing of the media through tax relief, but implements a neutral policy, because it treats all the media in the same way. The widespread and balanced forms of ownership are favoured, with access granted to both the publishing company’s employees and the readers/users (Cagé 2015).

6 Partisans Institutions 33 The adjective “partisan” applies to a political institution that formally favours a particular group of citizens. In contrast to the positive discrimination policies (see §§14 and 32), the advantage assigned to a group of citizens is not temporary. The first partisan institution that we are going to take into exam is that of multiple voting with which the electoral suffrage gives more votes to certain electors based on some requisites they need to possess. Its introduction in the isocratic political

23For

an application of this method, see Footnote 47.

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order is much debated. In order to evaluate it, we will refer to a specific requisite: that of being parents of minors. In the case of this specific requisite, multiple voting is justified by two sound premises (Campiglio 1997, 1998). The first one remarks that the vote expresses the right of the citizen to participate in the distribution of collective benefits, which in monetary form, happens mainly through public expenditure. The other premise realistically acknowledges with Anthony Downs, that “political parties in a democracy formulate policy strictly as a means of gaining votes. They do not seek to gain office in order to carry out certain preconceived policies or to serve any particular interest groups; rather they formulate policies and serve interest groups in order to gain office” (Downs 1957a, p. 137). In order to maximise the value of the current votes, the actions taken by parties are “short-sighted”: they are not concerned with long term issues, but tend to emphasise choices likely to raise the level of immediate consensus. In the language of economists, the government choices made over multiple periods are sub-optimal as the government cannot trade current votes with future ones, contrary to the private individual who can exchange his current income with his future one: votes are not subject to discount rates,24 and this happens because those who will be tomorrow’s citizens do not vote today. This inefficiency in the democratic procedure can be mitigated if minors are given their political representation and therefore the right to vote since birth. It is a matter of adding a right to vote with which minors delegate their parents to choose the candidates on their behalf. A “parent”, whether biological or not, is an adult who, either by himself or with other adults takes responsibility on the basis of fact or law of at least one child: in the definition are included single-parent families, those with more than two and those made up of same-sex parents. Parents exercise the right to multiple voting until their children reach adulthood, alternating between them at each election.25 The relevance of the subject is crucial. Today, children are only a part of the 34 population, but tomorrow they will be the totality of adult citizenship. Their needs

24The

discount rate calculates the value of money in time; more precisely the value that a future capital would have today. 25It is obvious that if the parent who has been delegated uses it just as a mere “multiple voting”, without factoring into account the shadow of times to be and therefore supporting the short-sighted view of the competing parties, the consequences on the efficacy of democratic life could be even worse. Campiglio however, offers good arguments in favour of the thesis that parents are normally quite sensitive to their children interests. Another aspect which is worth considering is that of giving a bigger political voice to single parent families who are at a bigger risk of social exclusion.

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do not constitute therefore some kind of sectoral requests, but are the expression, in the truer meaning of the term, of the interests of the community in the long term. If children vote (by proxy), the content of the manifestoes of the political coalitions, must pay a greater attention to those issues that are now still at a developing stage but are likely to become crucial in the near future in order to get some advantage in the electoral competition: far-sightedness becomes thus a political resource able to gain consensus. It must be remarked that in an isocratic society everyone is aware that violating the principle of “one person, one vote” means making the suffrage unequal and this can only be accepted if, besides balancing a huge power asymmetry, it complies with the logic of the impartial rule (see §§13 and 18, but also Box 5, Chapter 2). According to this reasoning, an institutional rule, even when differentiate between citizens, can still be (1) non-discriminatory, (2) non-arbitrary and (3) freely chosen. This happens if the rule is known to everybody ex ante and if it allows everyone to follow or reject it. The multiple voting in favour of parents of minors follows this logic. In actual fact, given the definition of “parent” (§33), no citizen is excluded from the possibility to be one. Any citizen can choose, in regard to this particular right, between two combinations: more children and so more influence in the polling booth or less children and therefore less electoral influence. The rule therefore does not discriminate, since any citizen is able to keep or not the option of multiple votes. Furthermore, it is not arbitrary as it only establishes incentives and sanctions in a way that is clear and known to everyone. Another partisan institution is the “Tribunate”. This deserves to be illustrated as 35 it opens a perspective of counter-power completely different from any other. However, for the reasons discussed in §37, the isocratic society has failed so far to adopt it. For the purpose of placing the institution of the tribunate in a clearer perspective, we need to remove one of the basic tenets of the doctrines on which liberal democracies are based: “The presumption that all citizens are “equal” and the assumption of the general influence of all on the institutions of government” (McCormick 2001, p. 310). That presumption is weak, as in order to make an elite accountable,26 it is not sufficient to threaten it to not re-elect its members at the next elections,

26By

accountability we mean the responsibility with which those in power are held to account for their decisions in front of an electorate able to make competent and independent evaluations. More precisely, the accountability of an organisation is expressed in five main ways: transparency (revealing the data of its performance), responsibility (facing the consequences of its performance), checkability (has it fulfilled the authorised representative’s demand?), reactivity (in learning from mistakes and following rules) and ability to respond (in meeting expectations). These five ways are not mutually exclusive. See Koppell (2010, Chapter 2).

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but there is the need for effective extra-electoral instruments capable of obtaining from the elite credible commitments. In details, it is a matter of setting up political institutions specifically devoted to champion the positions of disadvantaged groups, in relation to existing institutions that protect mainly the interests and beliefs of dominant groups. This is the theoretical position held by Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy.27 He gives a reconstruction of the Roman Republic which, while not being flawless from a historiographic point of view, offers nevertheless valid general implications. The situation in Rome at the time can be synthesised, very shortly, as a class struggle between the Patrician nobility and the Plebeians, that is to say, between the political and economic elite and the bulk of the population. In order to keep in check the power of the Senate and the Consuls who were the expression of the elite, the institutions of the Concilium Plebis and the Tribunes were created which were directly expressed by the subaltern classes. The assembly of the council would elect Tribunes who could hold office for a year only. The Tribunes were protected by the law and by the popular militia and had the power to place their veto on Senate’s laws, initiate legal enquiry proceedings against citizens accused of corruption or abuse of power and hold popular consultations or referendums (plebiscita). As David Held observes: “if the rich and the poor can be drawn into the process of government and their interests found a legitimate avenue of expression through a division of offices between them, then they will be forced into some form of mutual accommodation. Ever watchful of their own positions, they will expend great efforts to make sure that no laws are passed that are detrimental to their interests. The outcome of such efforts is likely to be a body of law that all parties can agree on in the end, […] The basis of liberty may also be in conflict and disagreement through which citizens can promote and defend their interests” (Held 2006, pp. 41–42). John McCormick has taken up again and made contemporary the Machiavelli 36 an indications with a reform proposal of the US Constitution (McCormick 2011). There should be an Assembly made up of fifty-one tribunes, nominated through a ballot draw among citizens who have never held any significant public office (mayor of a city, or federal/state representative) twice in a row and whose asset does not place them within the richest ten per cent of the population. The tribunes would stay in office for a non-renewable and not repeatable year, would be remunerated and would be given the guarantee to be able to return to their job after the

27For

a reconstruction of the debates on the Tribunate before and after Machiavelli, see Catalano (1971).

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end of the mandate. The duties of the tribunes would consist in the scrutiny of the federal government balance sheet, even by inviting external scholars and political experts; to place a veto, by a majority decision to one legislative measure, one decision of the Supreme Court and one executive order (the institution that would be subject to the veto, would be able to put forward their initiative again only after a year from the end of that mandate), hold one national referendum on any topic, approved by a majority decision; start with the approval of a qualified majority, one impeachment proceedings against a public elective administrator or a federal functionary. It needs to be highlighted, that this institutional move, is different from the one, just as decisive, that divides and balances powers: “The equilibrium of powers, is, in effect, a means by which the powers, all in a broad meaning (lato sensu) governmental (and therefore as such, competing agents that act along “parallel lines” […] limit each other, or establish a “relative” form of limitation, without it resulting in a total (“absolute”) limitation of their combination. Instead, with the tribunate, a further power is introduced in the mechanism of powers [that] demonstrates “opposite” value in relation to the others” (Lobrano 1982, p. 88). The neo-Machiavellian theoretical stance tries to devise an institutional setting 37 inside which political participation can express its own force even when single members of the population are more prone to delegating or to apathy, or even to giving temporary allegiance to parties representing the elites. The key-point of this design consists in a “class countervailing power”: all of those who do not belong to political or economic elites, set up institutions whose main task is that of controlling and limiting the decisions taken by the democratic institutions dominated by the elites.28 The crucial instrument is the veto power: Machiavelli teaches us that the more the populace is able to gain credentials in establishing its veto power, the more the elitist character of the political regime is undermined.29

28The

idea of institutions based on class affiliation is obviously a very ancient one. For instance, in the blueprint designed by Cleisthenes (see §11) the nine archons or supreme magistrates (civil and military), were still elected only among the “cavalry” even though the boule could exercise control on their actions.

29Watered-down

versions of this theoretical stance tend to resurface periodically. Let us remind, first of all, “of the trend towards ‘ombudsmen’ (increasingly common at various levels: supranational, state level or that of the ‘independent local administrative authorities’) [as] an important signal of a strong need […]: finding a solution to the question of defending those who are ruled against the consolidated unity of those who rule (in the broadest meaning of the word)” (Lobrano 1996, p. 289). If we look at the history of projects of constitutional reforms, it is worth mentioning some more or less radical proposals, including, as far as Italy is concerned, that of Gianfranco Miglio: the creation of a “‘civic

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The institution of the Tribunate, however, is subject to two main objections. The first relates to the fact that the aim of the isocratic society is that of levelling the power of the subjects which cannot be reduced or linked to a particular class and comes in many forms. The Tribunate therefore could be compared to a cannon that fires at the clouds: its projectile is able to pierce material objects but has no impact on steam, because, by hitting only one aspect of inequality of power, it is not able to minimise complex inequality (see Chapter 1, §§21–26; and above, §13). The second objection observes that contrary to the multiple votes given to parents of minor children (§§33–34), it is very difficult to argue that the prerogatives conferred to the Tribunate respect the criterion of impartiality described in §§13 and 18, but also in Box 5, Chapter 2. If we examine once again the logic of Cleisthenes reform (§§11 and 13), we realise that the citizens of Attica could choose voluntarily to move from a social-territorial area to another, because in doing so, they would gain something on one plane while simultaneously losing something on another. This is a crucial prerequisite that lacks for the Tribunate candidate. He should give away part of his wealth and renounce to a secure political career and rely only on the infinitesimal probability to be among the fifty-one drawn by lot. This institution introduces then a discriminatory and arbitrary form of power which is not compatible with isocracy.

7 Federalist Institutions The basic and generic definition of federalism is that of an institutional arrange- 38 ment, that divides public authority between two or more levels of government, constitutionally defined. There are different responsibilities attached to separate and overlapping levels of government, with each level able to determine both the expenditure levels for the activities assigned to it and the taxes to cover these expenditures (Mueller 2003, p. 210). Alongside the well-known

prosecutor’ with established enquiry powers to be exercised with the same investigative powers (and of course, the same limits) of the judicial authority. His task would be that of prosecuting either automatically or following a legal action all the elective administrators and functionaries who are responsible for bad administration, and to take their actions to be assessed by the Court of Accounts (National Audit Office) and by the ordinary judiciary system. […] Candidates should be drawn from an ad hoc list of judges holding this specific role within the Court of Accounts” (Miglio 1992, pp. 74–75).

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merits,30 this setting poses the wider range of problems with regard to the relation among the Federal State, Federate States and Local Authorities). In its most traditional setting, called dual federalism, each level of government takes on completely different responsibilities: for instance, the federal government deals with foreign policy and national defence; the federate governments with public welfare, infrastructures and higher education; local authorities with primary education, housing and territorial planning. The Federal Constitution safeguards the autonomy of lower level jurisdictions, whereas the solution of conflicts of competences pertains to the Supreme Court. Each of the federated units of government is sovereign and their relations are characterised more by tensions than by cooperation, due to the separation of powers between central government and states.31 A way to ease tensions between jurisdictional levels could be the federalist 39 approach of the competitive interdependence, which acknowledges that all government levels can have competences on some tasks and objectives. It follows that different levels have an overlapping area where they develop an institutional

30I

wish to remind here some of the main merits that can be attributed to federalism. (1) The decentralised structure of the public authority brings the government closer to the citizens thereby reinforcing their degree of participation and also their ability to control the government itself. (2) Local governments have more opportunities to put forward innovations in policies, both as a result of being smaller/more agile, and above all, of the creation of forms of competition: vertical competition between federal states and the federal government, when they both pursue the same objectives through different policies; horizontal competition, when citizens compare performances of various local governments. (3) According to the subsidiarity principle for any given “level” of offer of public goods, the same “level should be available to the government and the user. Economic efficiency entails that there will be coincidences in areas in which: (a) the local public good is useful; (b) those that finance the good have their residence; (c) the electors of the local government who implements the choices related to the good belong. If a ≠ b, there are beneficiaries who do not pay, or there are people who pay without enjoying the good; if c ≠ a and b, the one who choses can either chose not to pay or not to enjoy the good. Therefore the situation in which a = b = c. is more efficient. In this situation the political institutions of a higher level (that of the federal government) need to take care only of the public goods which cannot adequately be looked after by institutions of a lower level (that of the federal states or the local bodies). There is a distinction between “vertical subsidiarity” (the distribution of competences among Federal Union, National State, Regions, Local Bodies) and “horizontal” (the distribution of functions between public entities and members of the civil society). In both cases, the subsidiary intervention happens when it is brought to the level closest to the citizens: for instance, regional public goods are decided upon, paid for and used on a regional scale. See Wellisch (2004, Chapter 1). 31On historic and theoretical variants of federalism, see Riker (1987).

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competition (Brosio and Piperno 2009, Chapter 2). Nevertheless, this approach presents some problems too: some of the benefits (damages) of the local public goods (evils) fall under more than one jurisdictional level, thus making it difficult for citizens who benefit from (or cause) them, to pay; sometimes jurisdictions multiply, becoming so small as not to be able to fully exploit their economies; furthermore, the more jurisdictions there are, the more the cost of coordination rises; finally, when a jurisdiction tries to tax the rich to support the poor, the first leave while the latter arrive (Frey and Eichenberger 1999, Chapter 4). The main problem from an isocratic point of view, is that competitive interdependence has a tendency to encourage the proliferation of semi-overlapping jurisdictions, implementing in this way a “type of decentralisation where some or all the attributes of a state with centralised power are assigned to minor “states”, that is to say, territorial agglomerations that reproduce on a smaller scale the dismembered state, thus achieving a closer and more direct relationship with the territory. Following such a path can result in leaving the structure of power unaffected by change, still rigid and altogether lacking participation” (Toesca 1998, p. 35). In order to outline an isocratic federalist approach, which overcomes both the 40 weaknesses of the dual federalism and those of the competitive interdependence, we shall start by distinguishing between three types of entities: nation states, jurisdictions and territorial organisational unities. A political entity can be defined “nation state” when it holds sovereignty over an entire territory: it can create and apply binding rules through the use of force as a last resort (Kelsen 1945, second part; Bobbio 1985, especially pp. 84–86). A “jurisdiction” is a territorial public entity (for instance: a region, a metropolitan city area, a municipality) that can promulgate legislation, including taxation and administrative acts. Finally, we have a territorial organisational unity (from now on TOU) when a juridical subject (person) whether public, private or a combination (for instance: associations, foundations, universities, enterprises) operates mainly in a certain territory and is recognised by the legal system. Within the contemporary capitalist society, the nation-state is no longer 41 ­sovereign over an entire territory, due to the proliferation of new sub-state or suprastate political functions (Ruggie 1993; Slaughter 2004; Rodden 2006, especially Chapter 10; Koppell 2010). “More simply, nation-states are fast losing control of some of their traditional areas of authority and regulation, such as macroeconomic policy, external trade, competition policy, telecommunications, and financial transactions. National governments are experiencing diminished ability to regulate or control the flow of goods and services, ideas, and cultural products. […] Globalization is therefore gradually unbundling the relationship between sovereignty, territoriality, and state power. This transformation implies that governance and authority

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will be diffused to multiple centers within and beyond nation-states” (Boadway and Shah 2009, pp. 540–541). As Manuel Castells points out, “if power relationships exist in specific social structures that are constituted on the basis of spatiotemporal formations, and these spatiotemporal formations are no longer primarily located at the national level, but are global and local at the same time, the boundary of society changes, and so does the frame of reference of power relationships that transcend the national. This is not to say that the nation-state disappears. But it is to say that the national boundaries of power relationships are just one of the dimensions in which power and counter-power operate. Ultimately, this affects the nationstate itself. Even if it does not fade away as a specific form of social organization, it changes its role, its structure, and its functions, gradually evolving toward a new form of state” (Castells 2009, p. 18; see also Sassen 2006). Whatever the political configuration that is emerging within capitalism, there is a crucial point that must be made: at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can see the main politicaljuridical entities of capitalism, i.e. the nation-states, to be on the wane. As I reminded in §40, the canonical form of the nation-state is characterised 42 by sovereignty as supreme, exclusive and non-derivate power; as ultimate source of political authority that stays before and above all others (Matteucci 1983). Sovereignty is indivisible, because if somebody or something was able to fragment it, it would contradict its very nature by exercising a superior power over it. In this respect, every properly defined federation lacks of sovereignty, since in the same territory coexist several layers of powers “neither fully sovereign and neither superior to the other” (Keating 2001, p. 14). Some scholars talk about partial sovereignty, shared and not absolute: so many oxymorons used to recognise that sovereignty in its rigorous unitary meaning has disappeared. Others maintain that it is possible to detach sovereignty from the state form (Lipping 2010); what we need to underline here though, is the fact that we cannot denote a nation-state without recurring to the notion of sovereignty. If, however, the nation-state is either sovereign or it cannot be classified as such, then, a fully realised federalism does not co-ordinate nation-states but rather non-state governments, or jurisdictions, and other entities like the TOUs, within a constitutional setting. Since the isocratic society pursues a consistent form of federalism, its politi43 cal organisation resembles a “polyphony” of jurisdictions and TOUs. As we have seen in §58 of Chapter 2, polyphony in music is the simultaneous combination of more than one individual voices. When the spatial metaphor (see §38) is being used within the federalist view, this is meant to show multiple entities that are striving to carve out their own position or that are overlapping each other in the same area. The polyphonic metaphor, instead, conjures many sounds, that can combine into new melodies without losing their individual character

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(Shapiro 2009, p. 94). Polyphonic federalism, rather than decentralisation is non-centralisation as there are no higher or lower, central or peripheral centres of power, only larger or smaller arenas of political decision-making and action. This can be conceptualised through a matrix model—reproduced below—where power is spread in a non-hierarchical manner between various jurisdictional levels.32 Each cell in the matrix stands for an independent political actor and an arena for political action. Some cells are bigger than others and the functions they perform can reflect this difference, but none is more important than any other. Also, in the matrix there is never a separation between tasks which are never exclusively assigned to just one jurisdictional level. On the contrary, all jurisdictional levels can in principle have competences on anything: from labour policies to measures against corruption, from education laws and regulations to interventions regarding migration flows, from health to scientific research, from social services to land planning. It follows that jurisdictions and TOUs provide different answers to the same problems thus realising a multipolar and multilevel power configuration. Since no function is under the exclusive control of any jurisdictional level or TOUs there is a redundancy as a result which is not, however, a waste but a necessary source of experimentation and change, as it happens in complex adaptive systems such as the political one (Adelman and Engel 2009). The constitution supports the transition from state sovereignty to the polyphony of jurisdictions and TOUs, holding the structural frame of the system as a whole, without bestowing superior powers on anyone; it works alongside a network of communication channels and a series of formal and informal agreements between jurisdictions and TOUs. Let us focus now on jurisdictions that, unlike TOUs, can promulgate and enforce 44 laws and levy taxes. Let us imagine a society in which jurisdictions differ just as far as territorial extension is concerned: they can encompass the whole planet on topics like global warming or Earth’s Outer Space, but can also deal with small areas with regard to local public goods. Since every jurisdiction normally offers several public goods its perimeter is limited by the more inclusive goods.33

32See

Elazar (1987, p. 37). In Elazar’s matrix the states still appear, but his discussion clearly points in the direction represented by my Fig. 1.

33These

two characteristics, taken together, imply that “there is generally no reason why smaller jurisdictions should be neatly contained within the borders of the larger ones. On the contrary, borders will be crossed, and jurisdictions will partly overlap” (Casella and Weingast 1995, p. 13). Besides, the two characteristics do not prevent some of the jurisdictions from covering non-bordering territories rather than a whole uniform area, which makes them unevenly spread, or “patchy”.

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Federal constuonal order JUDICIARY Territorial organisaonal unies

Public subject

Regions Metropolitan city areas

Municipalies

Private subject

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH

EXECUTIVE BRANCH

Jurisdicons

Mixed subject

ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM Fig. 1   A matrix model of federalism

Let us assume that none of the jurisdictions has advantages in terms of ­organisational and financial resources, that is, that they all express the same power. Let us also hypothesise that every person is free to get in and out of the jurisdiction at will: since there is the full right of association and secession, anyone can join more jurisdictions simultaneously, making citizenship multiple and flexible (see Box 6) (Eichenberger and Frey 2002). This fascinating scenario is, however, impossible to translate into reality. In fact, it entails that contribution to any public good is strictly on a voluntary basis: for instance adults without children, since they decide not to join (the parts of) the jurisdictions that offer these services do not pay for territorial education services, even though they enjoy the benefit of the positive externalities deriving from living in an educated society. Furthermore, this scenario does not succeed in dealing with the problems that arise from goods that have to be offered under monopoly conditions: if, for instance, in a medium-sized town were to be built two Opera theatres, the size of the customer base for each would be inadequate, raising the cost to the detriment of the quality of the shows; whether the theatre is public or private but under public regulation, it can only

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be one.34 In short, in the isocratic federalism the one to one relationship according to which each government owns a particular territory and each territory is owned by one particular government is no longer valid. Even though no government has full sovereignty over a territory, there may be governments that are territorial monopolists of some public goods. These governments need institutional mechanisms able to establish the legal obligation to taxation and therefore the obligation of the citizen to belong to their jurisdiction, and also which public goods need to be monopolised on their territorial scale. Box 6 Jus migrandi and jus nexi

In the classical liberal tradition, Jus migrandi, the right to migrate, has always been considered a fundamental right. In the French Constitution of 1793, we read: “Every foreigner fully twenty-one years of age, who, domiciled in France for a year, lives there by his own labor, or acquires property, or marries a French woman, or adopts a child, or supports an aged man, […] is admitted to the exercise of the rights of French citizenship”.35 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including her own, and to return to her country”.36 However, this right often comes into conflict with citizenship: a legal and political status within the context of a nation-state. At present, for most people in the world, citizenship is assigned by where or to whom they were born. More precisely, it is rooted in two legal principles: jus soli (attribution on the basis of the place of birth) and jus sanguinis (attribution on the basis of descent). These principles also regulate Jus migrandi, because they establish which people have free

34The

reason for a local monopoly is economic if the costs sustained by a sole entity to satisfy the whole demand for a good, are lower than the ones that would be incurred by more entities: it is what usually happens for public services such as energy, telecommunications and road transport. In order to avoid that a private monopolist exploits consumers, the jurisdiction usually decides to assign the procurement to a public body or, in alternative, to regulate the private production. Instead, the reason for a local monopoly is political when the jurisdiction decides that the provision of a public good from more than one entity would entail crucial disadvantages: this is what happens for instance, in the case of the management of major artistic and monumental goods, or for services relating to civil protection or organs donations. 35See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/French_Constitution_of_1793. Accessed September 15, 2017. 36See http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. Accessed September 15, 2017.

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access and the right of permanent residency in a territory.37 In this way, the extent of Jus migrandi is extremely reduced. The birthright membership can be progressively emptied by expanding the access criteria of citizenship. The legal principle of jus nexi (citizenship by connection to the country), proposed by Ayelet Shachar, affirms the priority of the actual affiliation with the communities over and above privileges obtained through inherited entitlement. It privileges people who have resided in certain countries for extended periods, but do not have a traditional claim to citizenship. The process of inclusion is the effective participation in the political community, on the basis of observable factors such as the time of residency in a place, the learning of the local idiom, the academic commitment, the paid and care work carried out, voluntary activities, family and community ties. The reverse is also true: the “entitlement to birthright citizenship is weakened as we get further away from the original point of acquisition; on this declining entitlement account, the attribution of political membership to the 2nd, 3rd, or Nth generation of heirs must be accompanied by genuine links to the relevant political community in order to survive the intergenerational distance” (Shachar 2009, p. 172). In general, citizenship refers to membership within a political community. This community may not be a nation-state. In federalism—the theoretical perspective upheld in this Chapter—we have a phenomenon of coexistence of distinct polities on the same territory and people can belong simultaneously to multiple membership schemes. Therefore, it may happen that a person receives a citizenship due to birthright, while he obtains another thanks to jus nexi. The existence of divided and overlapping sovereignties can result in a multilevel citizenship, regulated by multiple principles (Maas 2017). The pluralism of membership schemes facilitates the free movement of people. In fact, with federalism, people can more easily enter a territory, since borders overlap; with the jus nexi, they can remain more easily in a territory, since the attainment of citizenship depends (only) on their active connection with that community. Therefore, at the intersection of federalism and jus nexi, the effectiveness of Jus migrandi increases: people can both enter and stay in the territories they choose. 45

Before we examine these mechanisms it is worth asking whether there are public goods that have to be offered under territorial monopoly conditions. I will not dis37We

cannot to keep distinct immigration law, the rules defining which aliens have legal access to a territory and sometimes thereafter to its citizenship; and laws defining the prerogatives of citizens, including the rules defining what legal rights aliens in a territory have in comparison to citizens. See Bosniak (2006, Chapter 3).

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cuss arguments that would take out of the lists goods like defence and currency,38 but I limit myself to note that there are substantial reasons to leave at least security and justice. If, the security good were indeed to be privatised, in order to protect myself I would have to become the client of a privately run police service. If I had an argument with somebody we would both call our own private police. If police agencies would not want to clash with one another they would have to resort to an arbitrator. His decision, though, would only be executable if both police agencies agreed on the rules of the game or if the arbitrator possessed a higher power. The first case is weak: a police force would be tempted to flout the sharing of common rules in order to gain more customers with the promise to beat the competition. But if one police agency acted in this way, the others would have to do the same, if they wanted to stay on the market and so customers would be attracted by the police that proved stronger, in turn making it even stronger to the point for them to reach monopoly in the protection of that territory. In the second case, the higher power of the arbitrator over the single private police services would lead to the same result: he would hold monopoly over the protection of the citizen from others’ violence,39 With a similar reasoning in

38The

main critical arguments are brought forward by “libertarian” thinkers (minianarchists and anarchic-capitalists, also known as libertarians in the Anglo-Saxon culture, who have nothing to do with the leftist libertarian approach from which this book draws its inspiration. “Even in the absence of a defence (strategy) which is common to the fifty states of the North American federation, a defensive pact could well emerge on the basis of which every state community would be asked to pay its quote. In this case, Minnesota or California—due to their independent status—could refuse to join, but it is clear that the other subjects would soon find non-violent means of persuasion and/or boycotting (some of which probably effective). By investing their resources with an eye on protection from air-attacks, the members of the defence pact would feel encouraged to neglect defending the geographical areas which are home to the political entities that do not finance the project” (Lottieri 2001, p. 229). On the subject of currency, apart from the “libertarians” we can refer to the greatest among the classic liberal contemporaries: according to Hayek, it would be possible to stop the legal value of currency, putting currencies of various nationalities in competition between them and let private currencies arise whose reliability would depend on the reputation of those who circulate them: see Hayek (1978). 39Miller (2003, pp. 27–28). There is another line of argument, just as sound, that is worth recalling. An exclusively private repressive system would be based on the assignment of rewards to those who are able to identify the culprits and provide evidence of their guilt. With big enough rewards it would be able to work effectively as a deterrent. The criminal would not be able to avoid the sanction by paying in person the reward to the bounty hunter because the payment needed to bribe the bounty hunter is in fact a sanction in itself. The higher the reward, the more the criminal would be required to pay to avoid the sanction, incurring in fact in another sanction, with positive effects on deterrence. The problems with this scheme would rather lie on the lack of transparency of the repressive process that could

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relation to tribunals, we can argue against the full privatisation of justice. Anyhow, whatever the public goods to be added to the list may be, the crucial point is that regardless of the strict and strong objections by scholars such as Murray Rothbard, that list is not empty (Rothbard 1982; Long and Machan 2008). If for public goods such as security and justice the territorial monopoly is 46 obvious, for all the other ones the pros and cons need to be identified, appraised, and finally judged. In the isocratic society to Assembly I (see §§19–21) is assigned the periodical task to establish: (1) which public goods are to be offered on a monopoly basis, that is, taken off the competition of the markets and jurisdictions; (2) which, among these public goods on monopoly offer, need to be allocated to the common goods sector (see Chapter 2, §§17–19); by which jurisdictional level they have to be offered. When Assembly I updates the list of such goods, it starts a decisional procedure that will unfold in two stages. In the first one, each member of the Assembly proposes a public good that is not to be made competitive or alternatively he suggests the status quo. After an order of voting is picked at random, in the second stage everyone removes one of the proposals. The remaining narrow set of goods expresses the strongest preferences of the delegates and it is on them that the final selection and deliberation will focus.40 Once the list of goods has been selected, Assembly I decide to which levels of jurisdiction the various goods need to be offered. The task to establish how to finance the provision of the public goods pertains to Assembly II. It must take into account the criteria set out in the Federal Constitution (see Chapter 2,

lead to blackmailing and extortions on the part of the bounty-hunters, that would in turn result in an excess of investment on the part of bounty hunters, being this a race where the first wins it all: it would be ineffective in cases where the enforcer himself needs to uncover the offence. This last occurrence seems to be the main difficulty. Let us consider the case of the violation of the street code. The bounty hunter would be interested in making checks only if he were expecting to find wrong-doings. But if the sanction was able to fully exercise its deterrent power the drivers would not be breaking any rules and the hunter would have no reason to perform checks. If, on the other hand, there would be no checks, the drivers would violate the code. Therefore the perfect sanction would be one that works fully as a deterrent and makes any checks redundant. But a private enforcer would have no reason to perform negative checks. See Franzoni and Marchesi (2006, p. 164). 40Mueller

(1978). The author demonstrates how, if the subjects keep on subtracting in successive stages the alternative which is the least attractive in that particular moment, they can finally find a winning alternative that does not receive any veto. These further stages are not useful for the purpose of my discussion.

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§§50–54). To the fiscal obligation—the citizen pays taxes even when does not enjoy the public good—it can add for each jurisdiction a semi-voluntary mechanism: if a person wishes to exit or enter a jurisdiction, he has to pay a price that reflects the investments or collective advantages that he leaves or those he gains access to. Finally, the independent courts, and in case of appeal, the Supreme Court would decide the concrete terms of application of the rules set by Assembly I and also settle the possible controversies among jurisdictions. The last topic we need to deal with is perhaps the most difficult too: what plan- 47 etary configuration does the isocratic political system assume? For the purpose, we are going to make a distinction between the setting that can be identified under the present conditions, and the one that can be realised under evolved conditions: these will be brought about when the transition to the isocratic society will have levelled the power between the collective actors on a worldwide scale. The immediate solution, following a gradual and realistic approach, proposes a polyarchic and polycentric mode, in which both the multiplicity of the governance processes41 and the plurality of power sources, make sure that no kind of power or particular social group prevails permanently. The itinerary starts by acknowledging that “a shift is taking place from government to multilevel global governance. […]. An institutional structure exists, comprising elements of local, national, regional and global governance. At different levels, individual communities (albeit often imperfectly) are protected and represented; their collective interests require both multilateral advancement and domestic (local and national) adjustment if they are to be sustained and promoted” (Held and McGrew 2003, p. 36). The next step “does not neglect the persisting centrality of the nation-states, but aims to develop democracy both at the level above them, through the creation of supranational coalitions […] and that below, through the development of local autonomies, and laterally, with the diffusion of non-governmental organisations (NGO), movements and other components of a global civil

41The concept of global governance, which is different from that of government, refers to the actuation of norms and the exercise of power on a worldwide scale on the part of states, religious organisations, financial enterprises, governmental and non-governmental organisations, collective movements, local communities, as well as epistemic communities (such as the international academy). Therefore, the main actors in the governance are, alongside the state, the private sector and the civil society. Unlike a governmental structure, governance sometimes also includes (when not mainly), institutions and informal regimes that can warrant both the respect of the rules and of informal agreements which individuals and institutions believe to be in their interest.

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society”.42 To this follows the progressive overcoming and gradual reconciliation of national interests within supranational unions in the various areas of the world. Alongside this central axis, further power would be given to global organisations of political, financial or legal nature,43 NGO of the international civil society,44 and local forms of participative democracy, in order to establish a multipolar and multilevel balance of power. If these forces were to reveal themselves as sufficiently systematic and persistent, a multiplicity of clusters—provided that they were not subordinate to one another, thus falling back on an “imperialistic” configuration model—it would increase the mutual interest to limit the discretionary power of each and to accept some shared institutions (Walzer 2000). It is in this framework that should be included an International Human Rights Tribunal with a permanent transnational Peacekeeping Force45; a Fiscal Authority in charge of the financing and offering of global public goods46; a multi-disciplinary research Institute with the task of constantly monitoring problems related to the environment, health and security.47

42Martinelli (2004, p. 163). As a good example of a supranational union the author mentions the European Union: I removed this reference, as I believe that since at least 2004, the European Union has undergone a serious involution in an antidemocratic direction. 43These organisations comprise the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Commerce Organization, the International Court of Justice and others as well. The institutional setup of these organisations is not very democratic and should undergo radical reforms: for an authoritative synthetic review on the subject see Beetham (2005, pp. 109–123). 44NGOs are from 1700 to today, the most relevant of the transnational civil society. See Davies (2014). Stressing this point, does not affect the judgement given to the main current NGOs. 45This institution would judge cases considered as important by the international community in its majority. And the sentence should be enforced on the looser side, even, through a dedicated military Force. The more adequate the Force, the less occasions there would be to use it as it would represent a credible threat. On this and on the other minimal proposals presented in this paragraph see Sandler (1997, especially Chapter 5). 46Since nations tend to safeguard their fiscal sovereignty the creation of such an institution is not unproblematic. Nonetheless, it is the clear specificity of its competences that can make it actually feasible. See Kaul et al. (2003). 47The funds to finance this Institute must be independent from political and national pressures. One modality could consist of introducing the levy of a dollar on every plane ticket purchased: as three billions are issued each year. To this we can add a levy of a cent for every sms sent: they are hundreds of billions per day. And we can conclude the sequence with the levy of ten cents on every payment made in the world by credit card. What we have achieved is not a tax, but a private agreement between airlines, between mobile phone service providers, between credit card companies. In this way the huge difficulties that any international taxation could face would be avoided. The national governments would only have to exempt from taxation the

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The future isocratic political configuration, like the one outlined in §47, moves 48 from historical trends already in place. Drawing on the reflections made in §§41 and 42 about the decline of the nation-state let us imagine how the new post-state legal-political units could take shape.48 These units will in the first place have a perimeter “(1) that is as small as possible but nonetheless (2) includes as equals all the persons significantly affected […] by decisions of this kind” (Pogge 1994, p. 104). The criterion will be the typical federalist one that makes the spatial impact of the costs and benefits of the public goods to coincide as much as possible with that of the jurisdiction that offers them.49 Secondly, the new political units will express a complex equality in terms of power (see Chapter 1, §§21–26). This will not signify a levelling in their every dimension—geographical extension, population, natural resources above and below the territory, and so on—but instead, that it will not be possible to add the advantages of any dimension to those of another one in order to achieve an overall position of dominance.

funds raised in this way. These would be measures hardly felt by the people being subjected to them and therefore likely not to alter the functioning of the markets. They would generate a consistent and stable flow of resources by making general and automatic the source of supply. Finally, a procedure of this kind would not require the preventive consensus of all the concerned enterprises or that of all countries. An initial agreement between, for instance, the main five telephone companies or a start on fiscal exemption on the part of the European Union alone could be sufficient to elicit the possible joining by others. Indeed, if we were to weigh the reduced competitive advantages that a company or a nation would obtain from not taking part in the initiative against the negotiating power and the positive image deriving from joining, we would realise that often the scales tip in favour of participation. See Landau (2004). 48The disintegration of the nation-state with the transition to the post-capitalist society is a thesis cherished by the most important anarchist, socialist and Marxist thinkers. See Stedman Jones and Claeys (2011, Chapters 14, 16, 17, 23 and 24). 49See Footnote 30; and also Inge Kaul et al., “How to Improve the Provision of Global Public Goods”, in Inge Kaul et al. (ed. by) Providing Global Public Goods, cit., pp. 27–28. “Three tests can be proposed to help filter and guide policy issues to the different level of governance: the tests of extensiveness, intensity and comparative efficiency. The test of extensiveness examines the range of peoples within and across delimited territories who are significantly affected by a collective problem and policy question. The test of intensity assesses the degree to which the latter impinges on a group of people(s), and, therefore, the degree to which national, regional or global legislation or other types of intervention are justified. The third test, the assessment of comparative efficiency, is concerned to provide a means of examining whether any proposed national, regional or global initiative is necessary in so far as the objectives it seeks to meet cannot be realized in an adequate way by those operating at ‘lower’ levels of decision-making”; David Held, Democracy and the Global Order, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, p. 236.

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In order to better favour the transition regarding the complex equality of political-judicial units, the evolutionary processes of §48 will be supported and strengthened by a deliberate project, whose roots lie in Cleisthenes’ institutional inventions (§11).50 The isocratic political order will be based on a shared constitution51 and on aggregations that balance multiple post-state units that are unequal among them in terms of power. There will be ten demes or global divisions, each comprising three trittyes or political-legal units. The demes will not be formed on historical or geographical bases, but on the basis of the position of each trittys within the complex equality system. In each deme there will be trittyes respectively endowed with a high, medium and low position in the power world ranking. The composition of the demes will be established by drawing lots. As Cleisthenes suggested, one of the merits of this system will consist in the weakening of the identity bonds based on territorial proximity, on the nature of socio-economic systems and on cultural, ethnic, or religious similarities. As time goes by, the sense of solidarity within each deme will increase. There will be a planetary Assembly or boule made up of five hundred representatives—fifty for each deme—with the responsibility to check the working of the global executive and deliberate on the most important questions at international level; it will not subtract competences from levels and forms of government discussed in the previous paragraphs of this Chapter, but it will only deal with the external relations of the divisions and not the relationships among the different units of a division, unless it is a threat of war or some anti-constitutional action.52 The executive power will be attributed to each deme on a six-month rota basis. The executive will have administrative autonomy but every relevant political decision will have to be approved by the five hundred members of the boule. Finally, there will be a Supreme Court, which will settle the contrasts between boule and demes and executive and boule, on constitutional grounds; whereas ten courts will deal within demes, with controversies between them and trittyes.

50See

Philip Resnick, “Twenty First Century Democracy, or Cleisthenes Revised”, in Id., Twenty First Century Democracy, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 1997, pp. 13–28. Reisnick’s proposal is here modified on several aspects. 51“It is not unreasonable to expect convergence on a variety of fundamental legal norms, even as diverse territorial or nonterritorial legal systems continued to exhibit significant diversity. Provided central norms were consistently upheld, fair cooperation would be possible”; Gary Chartier, Radicalizing Rawls, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014, p. 34. 52Bertrand Russell, Has Man a Future? Allen & Unwin, London, 1961, p. 80. In the original text, Russell talks about federation and states, rather than global demes and trittyes.

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Box 7 Unbounded demos

Two characteristics of Isocracy on a planetary scale are polyphonic federalism and jus nexi. With polyphonic federalism, multiple jurisdictions can perform all public functions, apart from taking care of a few crucial public goods, whose provision is assigned, through constitutionally defined procedures, only to one jurisdiction (see §§42–46). With jus nexi, everyone can be a citizen of several jurisdictions (see Box 6). When jus nexi applies to polyphonic federalism, everyone wants to have multiple citizenships. In fact, the collective decisions taken by each jurisdiction fall, in many important cases, not only on the members of that political unit but also on subjects external to it: think about the choices regarding environmental, commercial, financial, scientific policies and so on (Abizadeh 2012, pp. 876–877). In these cases, which constitute the norm, even those who initially are not members of a certain jurisdiction, have an interest in becoming its members, in order to partake in these decisions. Since this tends to happen for all jurisdictions, an unbounded demos (or people) emerge. All humans can and want to be involved in the collective decisions of all jurisdictions. In normative terms, the regulatory principle is as follows: “all persons beyond the boundaries of formal status citizenship and beyond territorial boundaries, who have basic interests affected by or are subject to the coercion of a [jurisdiction]’s policies, should have the opportunity to participate in the making of those policies” (Song 2009, p. 616, square bracket added; see also Goodin 2017). The full symmetry between rulers and ruled is thus realised: everyone who is subject to a collective decision has the opportunity to influence that decision. Box 8 An approach to environmental problems

Environmental problems are at risk of a double failure: both by markets and by politics (at national states level as well as supranational). There are no institutional mechanisms (mercantile and/or political) that can effectively address regional public goods (such as protecting local ecosystems) or global ones (such as CO2 reduction). As for all public goods, individuals are incentivized not to produce them; but, with environmental public goods, national governments also fail to exploit to the full the potential benefit of investing in them. Indeed, in many circumstances, environmental challenges are difficult to face. Earnings are placed in a rather indefinite future, while costs must be borne immediately. This difficulty is intensified by the existence of elected professional politicians who only worry about upcoming elections’ results, as well as that of entrepreneurs and financiers, who are aiming for short-term gains. Furthermore, environmental challenges require the contribution of a large and heterogeneous number

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of countries and companies: implementing and maintaining this coordination is complicated and costly. It should be added that addressing an environmental need often conflicts with the management of another, which limits the possibility of using the means jointly for more than one challenge, making it more costly to tackle each of them separately. Finally, crucial participants may change over time, and their number may change over time: this applies primarily to entrepreneurs, but also causes problems among states, because the government of each is reluctant to limit their own future flexibility. In these circumstances, the temptation not to commit displaces both mercantile “solutions” and political ones. However, even in the face of these serious difficulties, the global community may achieve some notable collective action successes. There are indeed many conditions that facilitate the provision of public goods (global or regional). A case in point is the Weakest Link, in which the supply of the public good depends on the minor individual contribution: an individual defection is enough to nullify everyone else’s commitment. Here the strong subjects are induced to support the weak ones, according to the logic of “either all, or none”. Another case concerns public goods of the Threshold type, whose offer depends on overcoming a certain level of cooperation: if the threshold necessary to produce a public good is not reached, then the collective advantage becomes null. This increases the commitment of those who initially participate to add more contributors in order to reach and exceed the threshold. The two modalities just mentioned, and a dozen other similar methods can favour (global or regional) collective action in several important special circumstances.53 In an isocratic society, the levelling of power among the subjects involved facilitates these multifaceted and partial responses: no one is strong enough to neglect another; no one is so weak as to be irrelevant. However, it must be admitted that not even isocracy is able to provide a general and lasting solution to environmental problems.

8 Drawing Conclusions 50 Not even an isocratic society is able to realise direct democracy, since participation and deliberation will still be sporadic and costly activities. What the isocratic society does, though, is to retake, exploit, and make systematic, the institutional innovations that in the capitalist society result from radical conflicts. The aim of these innovations is that of supervising, opposing to, and evaluating the elites even

53An

excellent summary in Sandler (2010). See also Sandler (2004), Barrett (2007).

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8  Drawing Conclusions Table 1   Isocratic political institutions Based on reputation of impartiality

• Assembly devoted to the preventive checks of laws • Independent authorities

Of distributed power

• Direct revocation and electoral mandate with right of revocation • Abrogative and confirmative referendum • Referendum with preliminary random selection by draw of participating citizens • Right of initiative and revision • Check on the retribution of the elected representatives • Deliberation day • Law of the sovereignty of the citizen

Of power-sharing

• Executive based on the distribution of power • Incentive to the intergroup vote pooling • Proportional distribution of offices and resources • Right to absolute or suspension veto • Positive discrimination policies • Multilateral horizontal surveillance

Partisan

• Forms of multiple votes • Tribunate with veto power?

Federalist

• Multipolar poliarchic setting • Non-state isocratic federalism

during those times when collective action, and therefore the de facto power of subaltern groups, appears less vigorous. In other words, the aim of political isocratic institutions is not that of eliminating the difference in values and interests between those who govern, legislate, judge, administer, and all other citizens; it is rather that of introducing a system of weights and counterweights (checks and balances), that makes it difficult for the elite to acquire permanent advantages. This configuration is comprised of institutions that rest on the reputation of impartiality; on distributed power; on shared power; and finally on partisan and federalist institutions. Table 1 shows them at a glance, giving a summary of the whole argument.

References Abizadeh, Arash. 2012. On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy, and the Boundary Problem. American Political Science Review 106 (4): pp. 867–882. Acemoglu, Daron K., and James A. Robinson. 2006. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Ackerman, Bruce, and Ian Ayres. 2002. Voting with Dollars: A New Paradigm for Campaign Finance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ackerman, Bruce, and James S. Fishkin. 2004. Deliberation Day. New Haven: Yale University Press. Adelman, David E., and Kirsten H. Engel. 2009. Adaptive Environmental Federalism. In William W. Buzbee (ed.), Preemptive Choice: The Theory, Law, and Reality of Federalism’s Core Question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277–300. Adamson, Walter L. 1989. Convergences in Recent Democratic Theory. Theory and Society 18 (1): pp. 125–142. Anderson, Terry H. 2004. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arendt, Hanna. 1970. Civil Disobedience. In Crises of the Republic. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & co., 1972. Barber, Benjamin R. 1984. Strong Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barrett, Scott. 2007. Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beetham, David. 2005. Democracy. Oxford: Oneworld. Bellanca, Nicolò. 2007. L’economia del Noi. Dall’Azione Collettiva alla Partecipazione Politica. Milano: Università Bocconi editore. Bennett, Lance W., and Alexandra Segerberg. 2013. The Logic of Connective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernheim, John. 1985. Is Democracy Possible? Cambridge: Polity Press. Boadway, Robin, and Anwar Shah. 2009. Fiscal Federalism: Principles and Practices of Multiorder Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bobbio, Norberto. 1979. Il Problema della Guerra e le Vie della Pace. Bologna: Il Mulino. Bobbio, Norberto. 1985. Stato, Governo, Società. Torino: Einaudi. Bobbio, Norberto. 1987. The Future of Democracy. Minneapolis: Polity Press. Bosniak, Linda. 2006. The Citizen and the Alien. Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Braithwaite, Valerie. 2009. Defiance in Taxation and Governance: Resisting and Dismissing Authority in a Democracy. Cheltenam: Edward Elgar. Brosio, Giorgio, and Stefano Piperno. 2009. Governo e Finanza Locale, IV ed. Torino: Giappichelli. Cagé, Julia. 2015. Saving the Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Campiglio, Luigi. 1997. Political Participation, Voting, and Economic Policy: Three Problems of Modern Democracies. In Albert Breton, et al. (eds.), Understanding Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196–208. Campiglio, Luigi. 1998. Prima le Donne e i Bambini. Chi Rappresenta i Minorenni? Bologna: Il Mulino. Casella, Alessandra, and Barry R. Weingast. 1995. Elements of a Theory of Jurisdictional Change. In Barry Eichengreen, Jeffry Frieden, and Jürgen von Hagen (eds.), Politics and Institutions in an Integrated Europe. New York and Heidelberg: Springer. Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Catalano, Pierangelo. 1971. Tribunato e Resistenza. Torino: Paravia. Cohen, Joshua, and Charles Sabel. 1997. Directly-Deliberative Poliarchy. European Law Journal 3 (4): pp. 313–340. Costituzione della Repubblica italiana illustrata con i lavori preparatori. Roma: Colombo, 1969.

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4

The Anthropological Mutation

All the passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate. Nicolas de Chamfort (1795, p. 45)

Abstract

The institutional design outlined in the previous chapters can converge towards Isocracy only if people become again protagonists of their own lives. A real “anthropological mutation” is needed. This revolves around the reintroduction of those “hot passions” that capitalism tends to “freeze” and therefore “empty”. There are four main differences between the behaviour of homo oeconomicus and that of a passionate human being. Firstly, passions emerge through non-intentional acts, a loss of control by the subject. Secondly, any action nurtured by passions may worsen the subject’s well-being. Thirdly, passions exclude reciprocity: there is no indirect or future do ut des mechanism in the transactions motivated by passions because any action originated and nurtured by passions places its own raison d’être in itself. Finally, passions are not directly dependent on monetary rewards, because they do not vary (within a relevant interval) if the latter change. If people are passionate, no mechanism of domination and alienation can erase the world of life for the benefit of a political authority or the expansion of markets. It follows that revitalising hot passions is the main subjective condition that can be used as a means to widen the sphere of society within capitalism and to head towards an isocratic society. Passionate behaviours—both those “ethically virtuous”, and all the others—upset the status quo. There are no right or wrong passions, and it is possible that the wild, unbridled, uncontrollable passions regulate themselves endogenously, without the intervention of a tamer. The task of the (economic © The Author(s) 2019 N. Bellanca, Isocracy, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00695-2_4

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and political) isocratic institutional set-up is not that of regulating passions, but only that of avoiding that the subjects who advocate certain passions can gain a permanent advantage over other subjects.

1 Premise 1 According to Bertrand Russell, “when elementary needs have been satisfied, the serious happiness of most men depends upon two things: their work, and their human relations” (Russell 1919, Chapter 8). However, in the capitalist society, people are trapped in a negative spiral: they work too hard; when they stop working they look for passive pleasures; this kind of pleasures leads to impoverished human relationships and generate boredom, which in turns pushes people to turn back to work with even greater effort. Every single step of this spiral is hugely important. The first argument is that in a capitalist society people work too much, without there being a real need for it (see the passage by Russell, quoted in §29 of Chapter 2). The second argument makes the point that “the pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part” (ibid.). The third step is the most problematic, as it seems to contradict the previous one: “most people, when they are left free to fill their own time according to their own choice, are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. […] To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level” (Russell 1930, p. 208). On the one hand, then, Russell maintains that it should be sufficient to work less in order to regain the taste for active pleasures; and on the other, he argues that the ability to enjoy leisure time in a creative way is a luxury for the few. Are the two theses in contradiction with one another? Or do they contribute to the understanding of the anthropological mutation brought about by the diffusion of markets in general and of capitalist economy in particular? In order to answer this question, we need to focus on the terms that make up our anthropological condition: what are the ways in which humans lead their lives? And in what sense has capitalism provoked a mutation in this condition? In this chapter, I will argue that the “human condition”—the way people live 2 their lives, or to say it in philosophical jargon, how they are being in the world— is basically characterised by passions. More than anything else (needs, reason,

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rationality, ethical sense and others), it is the passions that provide the subjects with motivational stimuli and that fill their actions with meaning. If human beings were to be deprived of passions, they would just be soft clay puppets, or, in more contemporary terms, robots. Acknowledging this leads to the more controversial subjective contradiction that every power system has to face: if dominion were able to cancel the passions of the subaltern subjects, then, paradoxically, exercising power would not bring big advantages, because dominion would be exercised only on “empty shells”, unable by definition to “bring their own” to whatever they do or are forced to do; if, instead, whoever is in charge believes that it is important to have command on people who are vital, then these people’s passions can be repressed or harnessed but not cancelled altogether. As we will see later on, passions either flow spontaneously or to put it simply, they are not passions. Passions, if they are to stay passions, cannot be tamed completely. In other words, if whoever is in charge demands obedience from vital subjects, he cannot kill their passions; nor can he regulate them, as this would equal to kill them. As in the platonic myth of the winged chariot (Plato 370 BC, pp. 471–477), the charioteer can sometimes spur or incite his passions-horses, but cannot really control them totally; if he did that, he should stop them being horses who go up and down the heavens on a whim, and by doing that, he would impede himself to be a charioteer. I will argue later that capitalist institutions are anthropogenetic instruments, 3 that is to say, able to rein in human beings in an attempt to generate a new anthropos. They have been able to contain passions, favouring the moderate or “cold” ones to the detriment of the unbridled or “hot” ones. However, the contradiction just mentioned—power systems try to tame passions, which are not, though, completely controllable, in order for the systems to function—is at the core of the possibility to switch from capitalism to isocracy. Capitalism is the most efficient charioteer ever expressed in human history; its own control over passions has gone so far as to risk suppressing them altogether, and in the process suppressing itself too. The isocratic society stems from the vital exigence to make the horses-passions run, and by doing this, giving some meaning to who we are and what we do. The design of the isocratic economic and political institutions is a strategy aimed at freeing all passions, as well as levelling the main forms of power. Nonetheless, an extremely popular cultural tradition, has led us to think, starting exactly with the platonic myth, that the colour of at least one of the passion-horses is black, that is to say that some of the passions are “depraved”, “worthless” “low level”. Is it possible to escape this view? If all the passions were to be liberated, what would then be the “excesses” brought about by some of the unbridled horses? I will conclude the chapter by asking the questions of whether

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it is possible to limit those excesses without using any kind of bridles, be they the repressive or the persuasive type.

2 Passions as Foundation of the Human Condition 4 Until the mid-eighteen hundreds century, there was the firm and almost unanimous conviction among scholars of social sciences that rational choice was like a small island amidst a large ocean of behaviours dictated mostly by unintentional habits and non-rational passions.1 From then until now, passions have been removed or marginalised by philosophers, social scientists and particularly, economists’ analyses.2 Let us try and understand in a very schematic synthesis, what has happened and why. Passion (or “basic” emotion) differs from the simple or “situational”, fleeting 5 emotion in that it is chronic and the attention is polarised around a single sphere or constellation of meanings; it has a complex organisation that alongside the immediate manifestations of the somatic organism (neurophysiological aspects) encompasses motor-expressive, cognitive, motivational and evaluative factors. Passion therefore operates, in a culturally determined way, even though through neuro-biologically given conditions.3 “A somatic or affective experience (a ‘feeling’ of the body or the soul, e.g., muscle tension, emptiness, agitation, shakiness, a pain in the chest, nausea) becomes an ‘emotional’ experience (e.g., anger, disgust) rather than just a somatic or affective experience […], when physical, social, and moral

1See

two very good collections of essays: Morton Braund and Gill (1997), Kahn et al. (2006). 2Among the most important treatises on the subject of passions, by contemporary economists, see Frank (1988), Hirshleifer (1993), Loewenstein (1996), Brams (1997), Andrade and Ariely (2009). For this part of the chapter, the handling of the subject draws some inspiration from my previous contributions: Bellanca (2014), Bellanca and Baron (2014), Bellanca and Pichillo (2014). 3As far as the topic of the universality of human passions is concerned, I believe that the most convincing position is the one which maintains that “all or most of the enumerated emotions are universal in the sense that their typical physiological and behavioural expressions are found in all societies, but that some societies may lack a cognitive label for a given emotion” (Elster 1998, p. 48). The contributions offered by ethnopsychology do not undermine this position in that they answer a different theoretical question: “What does it mean being moved?” becomes: “In which world can emotions be expressed, which world allows it?” (see Despret 1999, Chapter 4).

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events (loss of control, violations of expectations, success at goal attainment, insult, ethical failure, community censure, a challenge from an unworthy inferior, vulnerability to danger, transgressions of the natural order of things) psychosomatically reach in and touch one’s feelings in ways that implicate the self. It is primarily for that reason that the ‘emotions’ should be viewed as the symbolic/intentional/interpretive side of somatic and affective experience”.4 Even if it is not always directly functional to survival (see §14), passion is 6 often stronger than instinct5; and above all, it comes into being regardless of the degree to which the instinct is satisfied. It is not a luxury to which one accedes after the basic needs have been met. Rather, it provides the basis for our interest in life and gives us the most energetic motivational stimulus. To tell it in the words of Erich Fromm, there are some “simple stimuli” like immediate and almost unintentional reactions to physiological needs, such as hunger or sex; and there are the “activating stimuli” that express the strongest intentional dispositions of the subject by putting him in relation to the world and this generates a tension, as the subject actively tends towards a goal (Fromm 1973). The first ones, if repeated, loose their stimulating effect and their intensity must be increased constantly or they have to change their content. The second ones on the other hand, continuously change, renew or multiply their impact because of the proactive reaction that they cause and never give the person the sensation to have “enough of it”. The activating stimuli, that is to say, passions, shape the character and personality of every human being, so much so that the biggest difference between individuals lies in the diversity of the passions that dominate each one.6 Passions never end or decrease in intensity; they give meaning to our existence, with tears or laughter. They really are what truly count for us. Passion is almost never the outcome of some rational calculation, but 7 rather the secondary and uncertain effect of actions undertaken with different goals. Just as it is not possible to decide if and when to fall in love, if a subject wishes to become passionate about something, he cannot set this as a deliberate goal, as nothing is less enticing than a behaviour that purports to entice.

4Shweder

(1994, p. 39). Shweder uses the term “emotion” which I always reformulate as “passion”. On these shifts in terminology, see later references in the text. 5“It is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man, so weak, but it mates, and masters, the fear of death” (Bacon 1625, pp. 9–10). 6“We are ourselves not much in the sense that we stay identical to ourselves, but in the sense that there is a constant way of desiring a certain set of tropisms of unique passions that pushes us through the flux of life” (Benasayag and Schmit 2004, p. 45).

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“Doing something with the purpose of being a ‘certain kind of person’ is self-contradictory, since all that could be achieved is being ‘a person who wants to be a certain kind of person’ at least in one’s own perception” (Pizzorno 2007, p. 257). It has been objected that social actors have developed an evolutionary mechanism with the specific ability for self-deception, as this would help them to deceive others in a more convincing way (Trivers 2011). “Some of us, under the appropriate cultural influence, get to be quite good at [concealing emotions], but in essence what we achieve is the ability to disguise some of the external manifestations of emotion without ever being able to block the automated changes that occur in the viscera and internal milieu” (Damasio 1999, pp. 62–63). Faking becomes especially impossible when it calls for the qualities required by the authentic behaviour: faking a laugh or a state of excitement that can truly deceive others, equals to laugh for real or get truly excited; faking a passion for knowledge, or to say, originality in the arts or science, cannot impress for real other artists or scientists, unless one is truly original. The only way to be credible is to be genuine (Elster 1983, pp. 71–77). The possibility of using an emotion rationally does not imply that emotions are intrinsically rational. We can sometimes treat emotions strategically, as instruments to achieve our ends, only because passions are usually spontaneous and involuntary (Holmes 1995, Chapter 3), that is to say they usually do not respond to rational calculations. Passion therefore is different from rational choice in the first place, because 8 it manifests itself through spontaneous and unintentional acts: rage, falling in love, or sacrifice oneself for the sake of glory, respond to “reasons for acting” that can normally only be reconstructed ex post. This happens because passion implies a loss of control that makes inapplicable both a consistent criterion of choice (that is to say a form of rationality) and full awareness or consciousness in the course of action. In the words of David Hume, “When I am angry, I am actually possest with the passion, and in that emotion have no more a reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot high”.7 Also, from the loss of control, it does not follow that passion is always and in any

7Hume

(1739, p. 636). In the Hume’s interpretation that I follow, he elaborates an approach that identifies passions with feelings: “so, for instance, fear might be identified with the distinctive edgy feeling that we experience in the gut and limbs, and anger might be identified with the irritable feeling that pervades the spleen or chest”; however, “emotions are feeling states that might be experienced in the body (or might be causally dependent on the body), but are not in any way representations of the body. On the Humean view, emotions are feelings, but feelings are to be understood non-representationally” (Whiting 2009, p. 281).

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case a tumultuous flux without structure. In fact, an automatic emotion regulation, different from the simple emotion reactivity can take place. In general, the regulation of emotions refers to the ability to identify, label, experience, modulate and express emotions. The important point is that this ability can be deliberate or automatic. “Automatic processes are characterized by their unintentional, relatively effortless (i.e., efficient; minimal attentional resources required) and uncontrollable nature and operation outside awareness” (Bargh and Williams 2007, p. 432). The automatic emotion regulation modifies a person’s emotional trajectory without the necessity of conscious control. In recent years, a large amount of experimental research documented that people might regulate their emotions without exerting deliberate efforts to do so (Mauss et al. 2007; Gyurak et al. 2011). Emotional goals can be pursued in an automatic manner and, at the same time, be able to self-regulate. Here, we are facing an empirical aspect of great theoretical relevance: it helps to overcome the idea that emotions/passions can only be adjusted if subjected to reason, and therefore, only if repressed/distorted as such. Box 1 Feelings and homeostasis

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio places at the centre of his most recent studies the concept of homeostasis: when a living organism is maintained within a physiological range suitable for its survival and development, it has a valid milieu intérieur (internal environment). Homeostasis, therefore, refers to the ability, typical of every living organism, to preserve and improve its functional activities. In humans, this is not a uniquely unconscious and automatic mechanism. In effect, Damasio distinguishes between emotions—behavioural manifestations of a physiological and material nature—and feelings—their conscious perception of a mental nature. The order of events is external stimuli, emotions as physical states arising from the body’s responses, feelings as mental experiences of body states. For example: I am threatened, experience fear and feel horror. “The emotions-proper – disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, sympathy, and shame – aim directly at life regulation by staving off dangers or helping the organism take advantage of an opportunity, or indirectly by facilitating social relations” (Damasio 2003, p. 39). Rather, at the level of feelings, and therefore of the conscious mind, homeostatic intervals are expressed as pleasant feelings, while dangerous intervals manifest themselves as unpleasant or even painful feelings (Damasio 2010, Chapter 2; 2018, Chapter 8). Feelings, as a mental and partly conscious expression of homeostasis, create a self-regulating mechanism of affections, which supports what is illustrated in §8.

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9

Secondly, passion is different from rational choice in that the passionate act can lead to a (non-transient) worsening of the conditions of the well-being on the part of its actor. Take for instance envy, defined as the propensity to be like the other: “If anger brings the pleasure of revenge, avarice the pleasure of possession, lust the pleasure of the senses, we can say that envy is a sin without pleasure, a mere suffering, a simply negative condition that is not compensated in any way by some form of corresponding enjoyment” (Curi 2013, p. 33). Therefore, envy does not translate into forms of behaviour towards the subject of envy that gives us pleasure; it has, on the contrary, a nihilistic vocation that perpetuates pain as such. Thirdly, passion does not require any do ut des, nor even indirectly or for 10 the future: even if, for instance, we were to state that its reward is glory meant as positive recognition by other people, we should still acknowledge that there is no expectation of that feedback opening up advantageous opportunities. As in Horace’s verses, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“it is sweet and honourable to die for your country”), the reward is placed in a dimension that transcends any temporal horizon. Passion therefore gives value to a certain act not because it is related to a given interest, or to a certain rational motivation, nor because of the act’s efficiency or efficacy of its taking place, but because of the act in itself. To say it in the words of Hannah Arendt, “Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement” (Arendt 1958, p. 206). The characteristic just mentioned—spontaneity, the uncertain effect on 11 well-being and finding its raison d’être in itself—imply that passion is a phenomenon that cannot be discussed from a moral point of view, as its potential (destructive as well as constructive) does not tolerate limitations and does not respect proportions. The idea of codifying the legitimate reasons and the means allowed to morally practise, say, anger, eros, fear or imagination would just be wishful thinking.8 However, this connotation of inability to be discussed from a moral point of view does not imply that passions are the primary source or motor of “depraved” behaviours. First of all, because the very notion of “vice” is debatable, and furthermore, because, as poignantly remarks Antoine de Rivarol “vices are often habits rather than passions”.9 Lastly, and above all, because “there

8Here,

we are reformulating, with reference to the totality of passions, the arguments that have been listed in relation to the destructive potential of human aggression and war: see among many others (Zolo 1997, Chapter 3). 9See also Footnote 13.

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are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ combinations of reason and passion, which we distinguish rationally and passionately” (Walzer 2004, p. 127): just as the right leg and the left one contribute equally to our ability to walk, the two human dispositions— reason and passion—are always mingled when we act, so that one cannot detach itself from the other in order to evaluate it and therefore a distinction cannot be made between a “virtuous” and a “depraved” one. Box 2 Appropriate passions are not necessarily moral

As I argued in §11, passions may have subjective criteria of appropriateness that diverge from, and indeed may conflict with, ethical norms. The thesis that it is morally wrong or vicious to feel a certain passion differs from the thesis that that passion is unfitting. A passion can be appropriate despite its being wrong to feel. For example, a “politically incorrect” joke may give us an irrepressible laugh, which improves our mood and is, therefore, appropriate for us. However, we are convinced that the content of the joke should arouse moral indignation. “If some offensive jokes are funny, we should expect two things. First, moralists will not be inclined to laugh at them, since that would involve an expression of amusement; nor are they likely to admit to being amused, since by their lights that would be tantamount to admitting to sexism. Second, moralists can be expected to feel guilty about any morally dubious amusement to which they remain prone. These pressures might well ultimately efface both their laughter and their amusement entirely. But while this process may be one of moral ascent, it can equally well be described as a matter of growing progressively less sensitive to an aspect of the funny” (D’Arms and Jacobson 2000, p. 81). In this case, not only does passion and morality diverge from one another, but the moral ascent occurs thanks to the repression of passion. Behind the “same” behaviour, we can find passions that are sometimes quiet 12 and can be graded, and other times hot and unrestrained.10 We can go to war as 10In

my opinion, there is not much sense in classifying passions: for an ambitious attempt in this respect, see TenHouten (2007). My own personal list, which I do not claim to be superior to any other, includes aggression (propensity to destruction and self-destruction), ambition (propensity to supremacy), love (propensity to emotional bonds), greed (propensity to possession), eros (propensity to pleasure and desire, or anticipation of pleasure), play (propensity to express creativity), justice (propensity to react with indignation towards abuse and injustice), imagination (propensity to create change), envy (propensity to be like the other), freedom (propensity to weaken ties), fear (propensity to face the danger of loss), science (propensity to knowledge), thymòs (propensity to look for recognition) and Thanatos (propensity to the elimination of all passions).

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a mercenary soldier, but also in search of glory. We can love our partner in a composed fashion or we can be swept over by amour fou. We can kill animals because of hunger or other men for interest, but also torture and kill because of some aesthetic pleasure that we draw from it.11 We can loyally cooperate with the institution to which we belong but simultaneously damage that very same institution by hindering with rage and rancour the successes of colleagues whom we envy. We can obey for decades the humiliating orders of a supervisor, but also break suddenly and with great consequences a work contract for the sake of our dignity. Until passions are moderate, or, in other words, “cold”, they are infinitely gradable so that one fades into the next just as colours in the rainbow and none of them has an exclusive and separate nature: just as a consolidated marital love fades into a friendly sexless cohabitation. If, on the contrary, passions are unbridled, i.e. “hot”, each stands out on its own and very often is set against the others: as when the safeguard of dignity appears non-negotiable and creates an antagonistic conflict. When in §8 I highlighted the casual and spontaneous nature of passions, I did not assert that this is the only way passions manifest themselves, but that every passion contains that quality as well and that its “hot” manifestation cannot be completely and predictably regulated. In the fourth part of this chapter, I will show how one of the characteristics of the capitalist era consists in its attempt to try and tame the hot passions while favouring the systematic prevalence of the cold. Among its own great theorists of the previous period— authors such as Locke and Smith, Madison and Mill—it was still very common the idea that “hot” passions play a central role within the human psyche. “They all assumed, quite realistically, that passions can crowd out interests. Human beings, they thought, are ceaselessly engaged in a wide range of non-calculating and non-selfish forms of behavior: punishing nonconformists, falling hopelessly in love, avenging group humiliations, looking wistfully out the window, pitying

11The

last statement requires some qualification. I am not maintaining that violence is part of “human nature”, but that it is impossible to explain genocides such as two worldwide wars, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Dresden, Stalin’s gulags, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Ruanda, the former Yugoslavia and so on, if we do not confront individual and collective processes of violence that lack measure, or in other terms, overstep any proportion between means and goals. These processes, especially according to the reconstruction given by the perpetrators, seem to respond to passions for their own sake and very often unrelated to the contingent reasons behind the conflict. Many actors talk about the aesthetic pleasure derived by killing. I limit myself to three references coming from diverse but converging literary fields: Hillman (2004), Goldhagen (2009), Payne (2015).

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the unfortunate, spoiling for a fight, ruining other people’s happiness, feeling petrified before an audience, gossiping pointlessly, blushing at a neighbor’s embarrassment, hating themselves, trying to understand the past, and so forth” (Holmes 1995, p. 43). The centrality of passions, and in particular of the hot ones, finds its appro- 13 priate justification within an anthropological conception based on vulnerability. According to Arnold Gehlen, Homo sapiens is different from the other higher mammals because he is characterised by an anatomical-functional deficiency and by a non-specialised (to the end of self-protection) instinct, that, in original conditions, make him vulnerable and defenceless (Gehlen 1940). Because the non-specificity of his instincts does not unequivocally match certain drives to particular stimuli, man is exposed to an overload of external perceptions and internal urges. His biological weakness is however compensated by a highly flexible and polyhedric ability to adapt: he learns to reduce the complexity of both internal and external environment, selecting the perceptions and drives that help him to build his own orderly world. It is along this learning path that, his instincts become transformed into what I define passions: dispositions that attribute value only to some actions and, by doing so, push Homo sapiens to concentrate all of his energy on them. The human being, by moulding his feeble instincts into intense passions, builds himself in the process of building a world. So much so that getting hold of the world is getting hold of oneself at the same time, the stance towards the external world is also a stance towards one’s own interior world (ibid., Chapter 16). Some scholars differentiate between the non-rationality of passions in a 14 descriptive sense (they are not the product of thoughtful intellectual reflection) and their rationality in a normative sense (they are functional from an evolutionary point of view as they lead to results that are either optimal or at least adaptive for the subject) (Tooby and Cosmides 1992; Ben-Ze’ev 2001, Chapter 6). While I noted in §§7–10 that all the “hot” passions do not take into account any deliberate calculation of benefits and costs, there are some that take the further step of excluding any link whatsoever between the subject’s action and an improvement of his fitness (in reproductive terms). The case that escapes this link in extreme terms, and therefore cannot even be ascribed to a normative rationality, is that of Thanatos: the propensity towards the extinction of any passion. Freud classifies it as a drive and places it “beyond the pleasure principle”, since the subject, in strict terms, does not look to reach gratification through it (even though through pain, as in the case of masochism) or pain (albeit in its own sake, as in the case of envy). The subject in the case of Thanatos looks for the end of change, the boundary condition of the status quo, the obsessive involution into oblivion, death.

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Thanatos is the tension towards restoring a previous state of things, the eternal recurrence and the compulsion to repeat.12 As a destructive and self-destructive passion, it lacks any adaptive function.13 On the basis of the characteristics that we have listed in §§5–14, we can reach 15 a definition that grasps the pivotal point of this chapter: passion is a strong and long lasting intentional disposition that escapes personal and social control. “Disposition” is a potential ability that might not be exercised (see Chapter 1, §14): wood has a disposition to burn, but it only does so under precise conditions; in the case of human beings, disposition inclines or disposes the subject towards some courses of action rather than others.14 Disposition is usually spontaneous and unintentional, which does not imply, however, passivity on the part of the subject. In the case of irascibility, for example, disposition does not just indicate a high level of reactivity to frustration, but also the more or less conscious active search of situations that are perceived as frustrating by the subject (Rorty 1978, p. 144; see also Gross 2008). It follows that passions are not just mere reactions, but dispositions that we intentionally nurture. “Intentionality” refers to otherness and implies a subject who carries the intention: passion is always the passion of, or in, Y from the part of X; by linking an experiencing subject to an immanent

12Freud

(1920, pp. 16–17, 30 and 51). Whereas all other passions stir urges to act, it is only Thanatos that, by attempting to deny all the others, possesses a compulsive nature. After the original radical formulation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in his Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) Freud subdues Thanatos making it part of some pleasure accounting system where the pursuit of Thanatos is explained in economic terms and justified on the basis of the personal benefits exceeding the costs: “even where [the death drive] emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfilment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence. The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed towards objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature” (Freud 1929, p. 68, square brackets and italics added). 13According to a famous definition, vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property, whereas crimes are those actions by which a man harms the person or property of another (see Spooner 1875). In this sense, the Thanatos analysed by Freud coincides with depraved passion. 14On the dispositional character of passions argues effectively (Wolheim 1999).

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object gives meaning to the action.15 Whereas disposition selects the class of actions to perform, intentionality gives it a position and a value in comparison to the actions not undertaken. We can therefore say that intentionality is an interpretation: if we do not give the world some “coloured” connotation, or in other words, we are not able to distinguish between the whole and the parts in a circular manner, we are unable to give it any sense and to act consequently.16 Put it in even simpler terms, we can say that passion is a subjective technol- 16 ogy of response to vulnerability, that in order to simplify complexity and reduce contingency, “takes a stance” towards the world, i.e. interprets it; and it is also the most important and effective response, since is the only one that involves all the dimensions of human action: instinctive, neurophysiological, motor-expressive, cognitive, evaluative and motivational. The interpretation or “colouring” of the world that derives from a hot passion is overwhelming because—as Homer, Dante or Shakespeare show—comes to “possess” the person and so, directs one’s mind as well as behaviour.17 As William Godwin argued, if we were to assume that all men were in a condition of external freedom, but without the internal sentiments of magnanimity, energy and firmness that make up almost all that has value in a condition of freedom, to be free would be something of little value (Godwin 1793, Chapter 7, §6). Therefore, if all human beings had the means and occasions, but were not motivated by passions, they would not know what to do with their freedom. Box 3 On the obsessive and harmonious passions

According to Robert Vallerand, there are two types of passion (Vallerand 2015). Obsessive passion emerges from a partial behavioural integration of the activity that one loves. With it, individuals experience an uncontrollable urge to partake in the beloved activity, but they are overwhelmed by it passively and

15Moravia

(1995, pp. 17 and 33). A subject generates an intentional disposition if he is capable of relating to things, states or events; but such disposition does not require the mind or consciousness. The thesis that intentionality can be expressed also by non-­ mental objects has found several justifications in the debate of the last few years, see Dretske (1995), Millikan (2000). 16Interpretation does not always require a criterion of judgement, since we can interpret phenomena even when we are not evaluating them, see Gardner and Macklem (2006). 17“Give me that man that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart. As I do thee” (Shakespeare 1600–02, Act III, Scene 2, p. 111).

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become its slaves. On the other hand, a harmonious passion is characterised by a balanced and agreeable involvement in the passionate activity. It emerges from full behavioural integration and refers to a strong desire to engage in the activity that remains under personal control. With it, individuals commit to an activity by free choice and, thus, the activity becomes part of their identity without any contingencies attached to it. Vallerand’s Dualistic Model of Passion assumes that both the obsessive and the harmonious passions represent with equal intensity the lived life of people. However, the two types have different evolutionary results. The obsessive passion occurs when norms, beliefs, values and contingencies related to the activity have been imposed on the person by the social environment and are not fully self-endorsed. The activity presents discord with one’s sense of self and conflict is thus present among the internalised elements. It can, at times, overspill into compulsion, negative emotion, and rigid persistence. On the contrary, the harmonious passion comes from an autonomous internalisation of the activity, meaning that it is in correspondence with one’s own sense of self and involves a highly adaptive capacity. In arguing this position, Vallerand stands in continuity with a copious array of philosophers and scientists, who, since ancient times, have pledged to distinguish the “good”, “healthy” and “noble” passions from the “evil”, “perverse” and “trivial” passions.18 In my opinion, the deepest reason for this recurrent dualistic approach is not only an ethical requirement—to separate virtue from vice—but it stems from in the difficulty in managing the uncontrollable force of passions on a personal as well as social level. In a famous example, initially discussed by Stuart Mill, Socrates is wiser and more virtuous than a pig, but his greater awareness imposes on him a control of his passion, making him less satisfied than the other; and this can also apply to the long term (Ward and King 2016). It follows that between pursuit of satisfaction and the search for virtues there may be no connection: not very virtuous actions can bring satisfaction, both immediate and lasting. Frank Abagnale, the leading character of Steven Spielberg’s film Catch Me If You Can, observes about his first scam: “I was heady with happiness. Since I hadn’t yet had my first taste of alcohol, I couldn’t compare the feeling to a champagne high, but it was the most delightful sensation I’d ever experienced”.19 The satisfaction of the pig, or that of Abagnale,

18See

the concise, but precise, historical reconstruction in Chapter 2 of Vallerand (2015). quote is reported in Ruedy et al. (2013).

19This

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has the same origin as the Socratic quest for virtue and knowledge: the flow of some passion. To resort to the language of Vallerand, Socrates is animated by a harmonious passion, while the pig or Abagnale is driven by an obsessive passion. However, a “low” passion may prove to be no less strong and durable than a “high” one. The history of Homines sapiens is crossed by many passions: artistic and spiritual creativity, generosity and the struggle for justice, the collaborative impulse and the search for knowledge; as well as cultivating relationships based on superiority and hatred towards others, stirring their own jealousy and that of others, exacerbating narcissism or the accumulation of “stuff” that one is not even able to use. The Dualistic Model of Passion illustrates the complexity of these motivations, but claims to distinguish the nature and performance of the various passions. Once again, it adopts an attitude that avoids looking into the contradictions of the human soul. There are no right or wrong passions. There are passions, and that is it. The decisive theoretical problem shifts: is it possible that the wild, unbridled, uncontrollable passions regulate themselves endogenously, without the intervention of a tamer? This is the theme I will discuss on several occasions during the course of the chapter.

3 From Passions to Needs and Emotions The third and fourth parts of the chapter (§§18–31) are devoted to a discus- 17 sion of the reasons why the passions, and especially the hot passions, have been expunged by economic and social sciences and by capitalist society. The non-interested reader can jump to the fifth part (§32). In the history of Western civilisation, it is difficult to come across an unre- 18 stricted and unconditional praise of passions.20 In particular, “for the most part, philosophy has always been the business of reason, and emotions have been considered alien if not enemies to reason” (Solomon 2003b, p. 70). In classical political economy, “the passions constitute the material from which the interests are created. One could also say that the interests represent a socially acceptable and beneficial expression of the original passions” (Keppler 2010, p. 101). In the

20My

knowledge of non-Western cultures is far too limited to make me be able to extend this proposition to them.

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subsequent economic theory of marginalism, from the last quarter of the nineteenth-century passions disappear altogether.21 In their place, we find instead needs meant as states of dissatisfaction that come along with the awareness of the existence of a good (or means) able to subdue or stop these states. One of the first and most rigorous formulations of the connection needs—goods goes back to Hermann Gössen: both the magnitude of a need and the pleasure that can be derived by its fulfilment decreases till satiety; when the satisfaction of the need is repeated, not only does the greatness of the pleasure that can be derived lessen but each further pleasant sensation becomes shorter and smaller (Gössen 1854). Therefore, the idea is that the more each need gets closer to total satisfaction the more diminishes in its intensity and duration, and this is valid for both the single satisfaction process and for the relations between one satisfaction process and the next one. We encounter an exception with behaviours linked to pathologic dependencies: for instance, “you start smoking out of curiosity, continue because of habit, and finally, you depend on it […]. The need decreases in the various stages of the process of satisfaction but it resurfaces with increased intensity when the impact of the consumed good on the individual has faded away” (Del Vecchio 1961, p. 22, italics added). The other exception occurs with needs that arise from voluntary choices rather than dependencies and whose increase follows the increase of the quantity of the means that we use to satisfy them: for example, “the more good music a man hears, the stronger his taste for it is likely

21An

economic theory that can be called “marginalist” or even “neoclassical”, attempts to describe the workings of the economic system on the basis of the following exogenous data: technology, initial endowment of the individual both in terms of resources and preferences (described essentially in terms of utility functions). Given the resources at his disposal, each subject decides either to consume them or to exchange them on the market on the basis of his own preferences in order to maximise his personal utility. From the application of a criterion of (constrained) maximisation arise, the supplies and demands related to the resources that the individuals collectively decide to exchange on the market. The prices of the transactions will have to be such as to make the system move towards equilibrium between supply and demand given by the resources (market-clearing postulate). Prices are therefore indices of (relative) scarcity of resources as compared to the demands for the same resources. It is important to note that starting indeed from the last quarter of the nineteenth century this model is applied by all the possible variants of economic analysis commonly accepted: from the original models of pure exchange to the models with production, up to the models that contemplate the possibility of capital accumulation (whether they are of short or long run, and whether they deal with temporary or intertemporal equilibrium). In all cases, the logical premises are the same. The same also applies to the modern “non-perfectionist” versions, which make up the current mainstream economic theory.

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to become” (Marshall 1890, p. 79). These “exceptions” are nevertheless so important, to the point of undermining the whole theoretical marginalist construct, because they recall what has been removed: human passions, that, as triggering stimuli (see §5), never make us tired of listening to good music or keep pushing us to adopt destructive behaviours. Tibor Scitovsky is probably the author who makes the most systematic 19 and coherent unorthodox modification to the classic and gössenian theoretical approach (Scitovsky 1976). In his view, the subject can either avoid the pain that a need causes him or choose to pursue the pleasure that trying to satisfy the need involves. When the subject avoids pain, he fulfils a need (a necessity), since ultimately there is only one way to eschew suffering, when he obtains pleasure he fulfils a want (a psychological necessity) since there are infinite subjective ways of improving his condition.22 The first condition to ease pain is comfort: physically satiated, sexually satisfied, free of illnesses and surrounded by every amenity, the subject is also lacking stimuli. On the other hand, the condition that brings pleasure is based on constantly intensifying variations of excitement: the sexual act, sports, games, physical exercise, cultural practices and scientific research are some of the behaviours by which the subject attempts to free himself from too much comfort. According to Scitovsky, the fate of the subject consists in swinging perpetually between comfort and excitement: if he avoids pain slips into boredom; to escape boredom, he seeks pleasure; when excitement exceeds bearable levels, he turns again to the search for yet more comfort and so on and on in an endless cycle. In the conceptual horizon of the neoclassical economists, as well as in that of 20 unorthodox scholars like Scitovsky we are confronted with a shift in the anthropological conception: for the first time in history, in capitalism the human subject is not moved by passions. Until the person is motivated by authentic passions, he deploys limitless potential and planning capability, and finds the meaning of his action in the action itself rather than devoting himself to allocate scarce means wisely among multiple needs to fulfil; or instead of swinging between boredom and excitement, between intervals of existential emptiness and instants of compulsive consumption. If, on the other hand, passions are absent, the terms of the discussion around idleness, i.e. the time not devoted to work, are subverted; if we, like Gössen, only take in consideration the relationship between the search for pleasure and the means to satisfy it; or if, like Scitovsky, we limit ourselves

22Here,

I am using a different terminology from Scitovsky.

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to extend the analysis to the link between the pursuit of comfort and the quest for pleasure, we keep excluding from the discussion the triggering stimuli and the passions that are behind them. What follows is a vision according to which the human being becomes excited and then relieved with a decrease of the intensity and duration of the intervals parallel to an increase of the number of times the phenomenon occurs. What is left out from this conceptual horizon is the idea that the human being is in fact capable of passions that “characterise” him, that is to say, make up his character and therefore make him unique and feed his motivations and actions with continuity and force. This idea belonged to many great philosophers such as Plato and Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume, Hegel and Nietzsche and to all most important artists. It highlights that human beings fall in love and kill, consume and accumulate, initiate and imagine, work and die not just out of personal interest, nor even just because of cool passions that can be subjected to rational thinking, but also and perhaps mainly, because of hot and unrestrained passions. With the full establishment of capitalism, the reflections and expressions of all these philosophers and artists suddenly appear as anachronistic.23 Eschewing passions from human motivations, economists record and justify, in the most radical way among scholars of social sciences, a contradiction of historic proportions: capitalism has developed the economy to the point that it is possible, at least potentially, to free people from the trammels of work; but it has also created a social structure in which people, once devoid of passions can only spend their time working, chasing needs and wants or getting bored. This is exactly the contradiction that Russell highlights in §1. In scientific debates of the last few decades, after the transition from passions 21 to needs, we witness the transition from passions to emotions.24 In the most widespread definition, emotions are adaptive responses to fundamental life’s problems; they are characterised by instability, partiality, intensity and short duration, and they are made up of an intentional side (cognitive, evaluative and motivational) as well as a sentimental one (Ben-Ze’ev 2001, Chapters 2–4). On the basis of this definition, there is an approach that focuses on the intellectual dimension (the appraisal theory) and which opposes the approach that focuses on the

23Among

the huge quantity of material documenting this change of era, I choose one episode: “when Anton Fugger, the greatest banker of the sixteenth century died, none of his possible heirs accepted the succession: they reckoned that they had more important or more rewarding things to do than earn money” (Gorz 1988, p. 121). 24For an internal reconstruction in the field of history of ideas of the decline of the category of passions see Dixon (2003, 2012).

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feeling aspect instead (the so-called embodiment theory). In the first view, emotions are cognitive states that constitute intelligent evaluations of the world; they are non-neutral thoughts that place a positive or negative judgement on things; they are usually accompanied by feelings but this is not an essential feature as we can, for instance, be afraid of a hypothetical threat without getting upset. The embodiment theory, on the other hand, denies passions an intellective character and instead considers them mainly as gut reactions (or gut feelings): we can feel them, without elaborating any evaluation, when we listen to music, rejoice for an unexpected pleasant event, or shake with terror watching a horror film, even though we are aware of the fact that we are in a safe cinema; evaluative judgments often accompany emotional experience, but they are neither the necessary nor sufficient condition to it.25 According to the appraisal theory, to quote Martha Nussbaum, emotions are 22 also “value judgments”, they are to be represented “as thoughts” and “suffused with intelligence and discernment” (Nussbaum 2001, pp. 1, 4, and 16, italics added; see also Solomon 2003a). This thesis devalues the anarchic “unruliness” of passions: as Jack Hirshleifer, one of the few eminent economists to study the subject, points out, the loss of control is the one connotative character of passions we cannot leave out (Hirshleifer 1993, p. 186). “We cannot voluntarily, intentionally, or deliberately feel hungry or thirsty, feel an urge or an impulse, be compulsively obsessed with something; nor can we recklessly, negligently, or inadvertently feel excited or amazed (agitations), cheerful or depressed (moods), angry or frightened (emotions)” (Hacker 2018, p. 5). When a loss of control occurs, what is “lost” is exactly the judgment criterion Nussbaum refers to.26 On the other hand, one merit of the embodiment theory lies in acknowledging the impossibility on the part of the rational mind to deal with emotions: “Imagine yourself in a state of terror, and then systematically subtract away each of the bodily symptoms that usually accompany that state. Imagine your facial expression and muscles are completely relaxed, your heart is beating at a comfortable

25For

a very good summary of the whole debate from a point of view very closed to the one I am proposing here, see Prinz (2004). “Emotions are somatic signals, not cognitive states. But emotions represent concerns [without requiring cognition]. This means that an emotion can be unwarranted or warranted, and it also allows that two emotions can have different content despite being somatically indistinguishable” (Prinz 2007, p. 68, square bracket added). For psychology, the approach closest to Prinz is that of Damasio (1999). 26Among the most effective criticisms of the appraisal theory, see Griffiths (1997, Chapter 2), DeLancey (2002, Chapters 2 and 3), Robinson (2005, Part one), Brady (2009, pp. 413–430).

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rate, your breathing is calm, you have no goose bumps or knots in your belly. If you go through this mental exercise, […] there will be nothing left that you would call emotion. Deprived of bodily symptoms, emotions disappear. There is no terror without trembling, no anger without a disposition to clench one’s fists, no grief without a lump in the throat, and no delight without an urge to smile. This intuition is confirmed by umpteen brain imaging studies. Whenever neuroscientists look at brain activity during emotional states, they see heightened responses in exactly those brain areas that are known to register and regulate bodily changes” (Prinz 2012, p. 244). This approach, however, neglects the dispositional nature of emotions: I can love a partner on a permanent basis even if she or he does not always provoke me some kind of gut reactions. The disposition to have an emotion is not an emotion itself, but is, in fact, a passion.27 In short, passion is the “technology”, that is the repertoire of methods of subjective response to vulnerability (see §16), whereas emotion is a “technique”, that is a temporary specific response within that repertoire. The attention paid to emotions does nothing to diminish the theoretical importance of passions. Box 4 The rational rider and the intuitive elephant

In recent debates in the fields of economic psychology and cognitive neuroscience, a well-known position is the one called dualist.28 This theory pos­ tulates the existence of two parallel modes of cognitive functioning. On the one hand, there is the “experiential”, “emotional” cognitive mode, otherwise simply labelled as “system 1”. This proceeds in many ways: affective, intuitive, rapid, associative, non-verbal, metaphorical, impressionistic, narrative, automatic and barely conscious. On the other hand, there is the “analyticalrational” side of cognition, also referred to as “system 2”. It is based on conscious, slow, effortful, rule-based, reflective and deliberative processes based on formal reasoning. As a recurring thesis in this literature suggests, “there are strong elements of rationality in both systems of thinking. The experiential system enabled human beings to survive as they evolved. Intuition, instinct, and gut feeling were relied upon to determine whether an animal was safe to approach or the water was safe to drink. As life became more complex and

27The

terminology is obviously not yet completely established. Peter Goldie differentiates between emotions and episodes of emotional experience to indicate something close to my distinction between passions and emotions: Goldie (2000). Similarly, Jesse Prinz distinguishes between attitudinal emotions and state emotions: Prinz (2004, p. 180). 28For a recent review, see Evans (2008, pp. 255–278).

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humans gained more control over their environment, analytic tools such as probability theory, risk assessment, and decision analysis were invented to ‘boost’ the rationality of experiential thinking” (Slovic and Peters 2006, p. 322). In particular, according to Gerd Gigerenzer and his colleagues, it is not very meaningful to define system 2 on the base of “true” rules of logic and statistics, according to which there would be the occurrence of bias and errors. The human mind does not mainly work on the basis of a “stock” of algorithms of formal reasoning, but rather, according to heuristics. “A heuristic is a strategy that ignores part of the information, with the goal of making decisions more quickly, frugally and/or accurately than more complex methods” (Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2001, p. 454). The heuristics constitute processes that are suboptimal compared to those in system 2 but are often compliant with an ecological rationality, that is, the ability to adapt to a specific environment. This dualism helps to investigate the theme of emotions/passions. The automatic processes of system 1 were forged by natural selection in order to trigger rapid actions that cause pleasure and pain, whereas the controlled processes of system 2 can help to improve the choice, but do not motivate it. A metaphor, which exactly represents the situation, describes a rider on the back of an elephant. The rider is the conscious thought, controlled and with an analytical-rational connotation, while “the elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system” (Haidt 2006, p. 17). The rider holds the reins in his hands, but only as long as the elephant does not manifest its desires. If the elephant really wants to do something, the rider is not able to prevent him to. The crucial point is that both the elephant and the rider are cognitive animals, but one uses intuition, while the other uses reasoning. This is not a question of opposing the analytical-rational, conscience and evaluative capacity to the affective, associative and barely conscious one; rather, it is a matter of distinguishing between two cognitive activities. The dualism between automatic processes and controlled processes does not coincide with the dichotomy between emotion/passion and reasoning. Both are forms of cognition. Nevertheless, emotions/passions cannot be controlled by reason (Haidt 2012, Chapter 2).

4 The Capitalist Removal of (Hot) Passions To recapitulate, the human being does not just have the physiological need of 23 certain real objects; nor does he only have a psychological desire of unending goods and services, sometimes directed by external sources; he has, mostly and

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above all, the need to find a meaning to what he experiences. But the need to find meaning stems from and is fed by passions. Without passions the human being would be a robot, or to use a more fashionable word, a computer; he would be incapable of being on his own as well as to relate to others, to feel happy as well as sad (Fromm 1956, p. 99). Passions however are not very easy to tame at individual level. As it has been remarked by Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de Chamfort in the opening quotation: “All the passions exaggerate and they are passions only because they exaggerate”. Hot and unrestrained passions can cause fear and a desire to control them on the part of the single individual, and there is a host of modern authors who have been thinking about ways of purging or restraining such passions. It is, in fact, mainly at collective level that a social system can successfully help to strengthen the effort to control and manipulate passions. In the course of human history, foraging and antagonistic societies have since long, repressed passions: “For the vast majority of the population, the scope and mode of satisfaction are determined by their own labor; but their labor is work for an apparatus which they do not control, which operates as an independent power to which individuals must submit if they want to live. And it becomes the more alien the more specialized the division of labor becomes. Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions. While they work, they do not fulfil their own needs and faculties but work in alienation” (Marcuse 1955, p. 45). The capitalist society marks however an incredible deepening of the process of emptying passions: it is in this society that we witness in an unprecedented way, the systematic repression and exorcising of hot passions.29 In order to examine this point, I will mainly base myself on unorthodox scholars with a Marxist background. I will start by illustrating a structural mechanism that runs through every mercantile economy and reaches its fulfilment and intensification in capitalism and then I will continue by recalling routes more specific to contemporary times.

29According

to Elena Pulcini, the modern individual is not a rational and calculating agent moved by a cold and instrumental interest, as the usual image of the homo oeconomicus would want us to believe. He is instead motivated by a peculiar predominant passion: the love of self. This expresses its tendency to better its condition both as an unlimited impulse to self-affirmation and a compulsion towards self-preservation. In other words: both as a passion of the Ego (the competitive desire to distinguish oneself from others and obtain recognition at all costs) and as an acquisitive passion (the desire to own wealth and material goods without limits). The thesis of this scholar is very convincing and enlightening under many points of view. It does not, however, take into adequate account the distinction between hot and cold passions: the historic peculiarity of capitalism does not lie in my opinion, in getting rid, sic and simpliciter of passions, but rather in the purging of hot passions. See Pulcini (2001, p. 11; 2003, pp. IX and 65).

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In the capitalist society, the generalisation of the market is realised.30 24 Every worker produces goods according to private procedures, whereas the socialisation of production is realised indirectly through mercantile exchange. Goods that are circulating on the market are not considered for what they are (their value in use), but for what they are worth (their value in exchange). More precisely, on the market all the various goods are valued quantitatively as commodities, that is to say, as general wealth, and thus, their concrete use value is not taken in consideration. Goods are not equal; it is the process of exchange that makes them so. What happens on the market is that x good A = y good B. But how is exchangeable to equate goods in terms of their value? By asking this question, Alfred Sohn-Rethel shifts the theoretical focus from the commodity abstraction, on which Marx’s reflexion is based (Marx 1867), to the exchange abstraction. His answer points out that while goods undergo the process of being 25 exchanged between their owners, they have to suspend any act of use. During exchange acts, the only allowed change refers to the proprietary status of the commodities, whereas their status as objects of acts of use must remain unchanged. The very fact that no acts of use occurs is indeed the pre-requisite to the occurrence of exchange acts. “Exchange serves only a change of ownership, a change, that is, in terms of a purely social status of the commodities as owned property. In order to make this change possible on a basis of negotiated agreement the physical condition of the commodities, their material status, must remain unchanged, or at any rate must be assumed to remain unchanged. […] While exchange banishes use from the actions of marketing people, it does not banish it from their minds. However, it must remain confined to their minds, occupying them in their imagination and thoughts only. […] As commodity production develops and becomes the typical form of production, man’s imagination grows more and more separate from his actions and becomes increasingly individualised, eventually assuming the dimensions of a private consciousness” (Sohn-Rethel 1978, pp. 24–26). The relevant nexus point highlighted by Sohn-Rethel refers to the circumstance 26 whereby every exchanger learns how to detach the acts of use of the commodity confined to a private sphere following the closure of the market, from the exchange acts, during which, the concrete qualities of the commodity remain unchanged.

30“Karl

Marx’s thesis is that the production of goods is general, that is, it dominates social production only in the capitalist mode of production, or, which is the same, that mercantile production is general only when even work itself is a good” (Napoleoni 1976, p. 59).

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On the market, the exchanging agent’s interest for the use of a commodity cannot be translated into action but it must stay in the imaginary realm: the goods are in the shop windows and cannot be touched; the subject and the object are separated by an invisible barrier hard as glass. Commodities express an identity that cannot change during exchange; their circulation is a pure movement through an abstract temporal-spatial dimension, void of qualitative connotations. In the exchange process, human actions are abstract even before their thoughts. But in the long run, even the mental representation of exchange becomes abstract. In order for this to occur, there must be the intervention of the coin-form. This is the symbol that by social agreement and political ratification is to be considered devoid of any use property. “In coinage the previous relationship by which the value status of a commodity serving as money was subordinated to, and covered up by, its material status is reversed. A coin has it stamped upon its body that it is to serve as a means of exchange and not as an object of use. […] A coin, therefore, is a thing which conforms to the postulates of the exchange abstraction and is supposed, among other things, to consist of an immutable substance, a substance over which time has no power, and which stands in antithetic contrast to any matter found in nature. Anybody who carries coins in his pocket and understands their function, bears in his mind, whether or not he is aware of it, ideas which, no matter how hazily, reflect the postulates of the exchange abstraction” (Sohn-Rethel 1965, p. 120). To summarise, according to Sohn-Rethel, the most profound watershed intro27 duced as a result of mercantile exchange in our anthropological condition lies in the separation on a temporal level between acts of use and acts of exchange. If, while we exchange cannot produce nor use/consume the commodity at the same time, this means that the characteristics of the goods are not affected and therefore remain unchanged; and because we are only able to imagine them, we substitute direct experience with its abstract representation. Money is the social form (increasingly more and more abstract in itself, going from money– commodity to money–sign up to virtual money) that summarises this severance. But if an exchange of goods becomes an exchange of commodities only if and when the acts of use are abstracted from it, then, the severance that happens in the process of commodities circulation between acts of use and acts of exchange entails also a separation among people, since private producers become acquainted with each other only through exchange.31 If social relations, in turn,

31We

are now turning our attention to the economic subjects, expounding on some considerations that are not directly expressed by Sohn-Rethel but which I believe to be consistent with his approach.

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are not directly manifest, characteristics typical of relations between things during the exchange will be transferred to the relations between people. The relation between private jobs (such as, e.g., weaving and spinning) is expressed as the relation between commodities (cloth and thread) through the monetary value in exchange. This is the so-called process of “reification” or objectification of people. In mercantile economies, it is not possible for economic subjects to express or modify their identity during exchange acts since those are detached from useacts. Just as the identity of commodities needs to remain unchanged, so subjectivity must remain objectified. Whoever exchanges commodities is not a person, because the act of exchange leaves aside his being a person. If it is the mercantile exchange that reifies people by abstracting the concrete 28 content from acts of use, it follows that this is also the social sphere where passions are being inhibited. Passions can indeed be defined as the subjective flow of events that gives meaning to actions and to beliefs about actions. But as we have already argued, the flow of passions is a spontaneous activity that loses one of its defining characteristics if there is an attempt to “fix” it during transactions and exchange. This is remarked in a penetrating way by Erich Fromm: “Only those qualities that result from our spontaneous activity [or from our passions] give strength to the self and thereby form the basis of its integrity. […] This implies that what matters is the activity as such, the process and not the result. In our culture the emphasis is just the reverse. We produce not for a concrete satisfaction but for the abstract purpose of selling our commodity; we feel that we can acquire everything material or immaterial by buying it, and thus things become ours independently of any creative effort of our own in relation to them. In the same way we regard our personal qualities and the result of our efforts as commodities that can be sold for money, prestige, and power. The emphasis thus shifts from the present satisfaction of creative activity to the value of the finished product. Thereby man misses the only satisfaction that can give him real happiness − the experience of the activity of the present moment − and chases after a phantom that leaves him disappointed as soon as he believes he has caught it − the illusory happiness called success” (Fromm 1941, Chapter 5, §2). So far the analysis has been concerned with the mercantile aspect, but capi- 29 talism is a mode of production. In capitalism, the productive apparatus becomes a crystallised power outside and above the single person, which rules his life and is completely out of his control. As Paul Baran observes, this has made necessary “what is probably one of the most far-reaching transformations of ‘human nature’ experienced thus far. If in the course of preceding history man had been made submissive by exploitation and domination, the working principles of the capitalist order demanded that he should acquire the ability to calculate and the

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habit of acting with forethought and deliberation. What was left of his elemental emotionality, of his spontaneity, after having been disciplined for centuries by the whip of his titled overlords, came now under the much more systematic, much more comprehensive pressure of the callously and accurately calculating market” (Baran 1960, p. 16). The process of emptying the hot or unbridled passions, which started on the markets, becomes deeper in the production sphere. This is the last stage: the extension of this emptying process to every col30 lective and personal life sphere. Capitalism is a reproduction system that is capable of and needs endless growth. We will explain shortly what this growth consists of. In order for this to happen, the system has to be scalable, that is, able to grow both horizontally and vertically. Horizontal scalability consists in increasing the nodes in the system, such as when new markets are being opened or when computers are added to an existing network. Vertical scalability occurs instead, when the nodes change within a single unit of the system, such as when a company acquires more plants or when a computer increases its memory. Capitalism is a scalable system because those who amass and invest capital become rich, being able in turn to accumulate and invest further, in an endless spiral. In Box 6 of Chapter 1 and in §53 of Chapter 2, I have already recalled the mechanism of “compounding”, according to which the interest on (or the growth of) money-capital is paid on calculated not just on the initial sum, but on the whole amount of the interests (growth) that had been accumulated previously. This rule of compound-interest, or cumulative growth, is a case of non-linear expansion, in which gains multiply by themselves, becoming huge: a series of positive investments increases the money-capital not by addition, but by multiplication, creating great inequality. If this is always true in the case of the money-capital form, which is “unchained from any physical limitations” (Harvey 2014, p. 233), it can sometimes apply to commodities as well, when “each additional unit introduced for sale approaches ‘near zero’ marginal cost. In other words, the cost of actually producing each additional unit − if fixed costs are not counted − becomes essentially zero, making the product nearly free”.32 In short, capitalist reproducibility can break any restraint and limit, both in 31 the processes of cumulative growth of money and in the productive ones, which obtain incremental gains without incurring additional costs.33 These are the cases

32Rifkin

(2014, p. 4). This happens in particular for knowledge that concerns reproducible processes: if this is freely available, it can be multiplied without costs; see Rullani (2004). 33This is a contradictory possibility not a certain outcome: see Harvey (2010, 2014).

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in which capitalism expresses itself at its most powerful. In these “pure” situations to which historical reality can sometimes get close, the capitalist market is so much stronger than society as to not to be bound by any banks: “the consumer market is ubiquitous (it is everywhere); that it is omnipresent (it is ‘all the time’ and aspires to fill up all time); it is addictive (it creates its own forms of reinforcement); it is self-replicating (it spreads virally); and it is omnilegitimate (it engages in active self-rationalization and self-justification, eroding the moral bases for resisting it)” (Barber 2007, Chapter 6). When the capitalist market permeates in this way time and space, as well as the interior life and the external behaviour of the subject, the emptying-out of hot passions reaches its peak. However, not even “pure” capitalism is able to elude the fundamental contradiction highlighted in §§2–3: until we deal with “power on”, that is, until those who rule want to be obeyed, passions are indispensable because they are what give life to subjects. But passions are such only if they are allowed to flow freely. Therefore, every power system, in order to subjugate persons, must allow them to be persons, that is, it must leave them the freedom to become passionate about something. In other terms, as already stated, power systems try to regulate passions which, for the systems to function, must not be completely tameable. This contradiction does not disappear even in the most “pure” or extreme form of capitalism. The subjects retain their potential to feel passions as capitalism would destroy itself should it suppress passions entirely. It is now the time to ask what are the transformative implications of this potential.

5 Power to the Imagination Passionate people are the most radical falsification of the homines œconom- 32 ici and therefore are potentially non-capitalist subjects. “Every riot, every revolution, reveals a passionate quest for exuberant life, for total clarity in human relations, for a collective form of transformation of the world” (Vaneigem 1967, p. 237). It follows that revitalising hot passions is the main subjective condition that can be used as a means to widen the sphere of society within capitalism and to head towards an isocratic society. In §7, I maintained that nobody is able to choose deliberately to become passionate about something. This does not imply, though, that all we can do is to wait. In §15, I have actually argued also that the unfolding of passions as intentional dispositions can in fact be triggered and directed by the subject. There is one further delicate and important step that we need to take: is there a hot passion whose activation is particularly able to have a knock-on effect on triggering other hot passions? According to Hume, there is

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and it is imagination.34 In order for the mind to ignite a passion after having experienced another one or to extend the object of a passion to other objects, there must be something the builds bridges between passions or between objects that would otherwise remain alien to each other. This “something” is, in its turn, a specific passion—imagination—that expresses the intentional disposition to create and to establish new meaningful relationships for the subject (Hume 1739, pp. 526–533). Imagination is not just the cognitive ability to imagine; it is also and probably above all a passionate attitude to link in unusual ways activities and things. “The imaginable is linked to the conceivable, the conceivable to the possible” (Hacker 2013, p. 462). In contrast with the majority of the other passions, imagination can be exercised anywhere and anyhow: it does not need resources or involve any cost, it does not respect constraints. A person who is weak and with no means, confined in a dark and narrow jail, can still have the most thriving imagination. This favours the expression of its most crucial characteristic: among passions, imagination is the one most adept at challenging the status quo; it can act as an excellent lever with which to prise up the symbolic and physical horizon of capitalism. “What revolutionaries do is to break existing frames to create new horizons of possibility, an act that then allows a radical restructuring of the social imagination” (Graeber 2011, p. 61). In strict terms, imagination refers to an object which is not present to the 33 senses and that has never existed (or that on the basis of our current knowledge has a very low probability of existing). This type of imagination can be further divided into two kinds: (a) the subject does not know about the falsity of the imagined content; (b) the subject knows. The first type—which does not interest us here—includes cases of hallucinations, illusions and simple mistakes. In the second type, which may be termed “counterfactual imagination”, the imaginary content is false and is known to be so. This type involves fantasies and reference to alternatives that could occur (Ben-Ze’ev 2004, pp. 78–79). As is it has been noted by Richard Day, “the ability to form and communicate images is at the foundation of human thought and language. […] Rational thought in general

34“It

is remarkable, that the imagination and affections have close union together, and that nothing, which affects the former, can be entirely indifferent to the latter” (Hume 1739, p. 649). According to the Humean approach, imagination is the human faculty of recreating cognitions. Depending on the cognitive state, the sensorial imagination is modelled on perceptions, the intellectual imagination on beliefs or on judgements, the affective or passionate imagination on feelings. In these paragraphs, the reference is mainly to this latter type of imagination.

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and economic rationality in particular rests in that same creative capacity […]. To choose rationally is to compare imagined stories, to select one and then to design a sequence of actions that will make those stories come true” (Day 1995, pp. 1476–1477). A subject develops “expectations” when he anticipates in his mind what will 34 happen; often his expectations are “self-reflecting” in that they contribute to modify the events towards their realisation. Instead, a subject develops “fictional expectations” when he imagines what could happen, and when this mental image influences his decision-making process, both because it opens up new options and because changes his expectations by making him reinterpret the past events (Beckert 2016). With the expression “fictional expectations”, we refer to mental representations of future states of the world that we consider possible. These possible states allow us to explore through our ability to imagine, the possible alternative paths of a very uncertain future. Above all, these possible states influence our decisions just if they were actual states, because we organise our action according to what we imagine could happen. Therefore, while with the usual expectations we use past information and experiences to foresee what is going to happen to us, with the fictional expectations we plan a future, by adapting our current behaviours and evaluation of the past to that plan.35 But what does exactly mean to conjure a possible world? “The future is not 35 something which exists independently of human actions. The plans which emerge from human imagination and inventiveness themselves create the future, though not simply in the ways expected by the decision-takers” (Wiseman 1991, p. 153). Originality is expressed—both in reliving the past and in facing the future—by imagining events never imagined until now and, therefore, until now neither possible nor impossible. “The problem is not simply that we do not know which of a possible set of futures will be the actual future; it is that we do not know the content of the possible set” (ibid., p. 152; see also Shackle 1955, p. 57). By inventing possible futures, the capacity to imagine is able to transcend the information known and the given context in order to plan a different world. “The truth value

35When

we state that current decisions are conditioned by past events, we emphasise action as a commitment to reach a proposed outcome, outside the action itself. Beckert instead draws our attention on a complementary side, which is all the more relevant the more the situation that surrounds us is complex and the less its evolution is predictable: it is the images of the future that influence the current decisions. This time, action is conceived as a process during which means and goals form and modify on the basis of how the mind creates the future.

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of imagination relates not only to the past but also to the future: the forms of freedom and happiness which it invokes claim to deliver the historical reality. In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by the reality principle, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy” (Marcuse 1955, pp. 148–149). Box 5 Shared imagination

Imagination is not just an individual ability. It exists also and perhaps primarily, at the intersubjective level (Castoriadis 1975). The species Homo sapiens imagines things collectively: money, the state, individual rights, the corporation, Christianity, democracy, and the nation are examples of imagined orders; phenomena that exist only within interpersonal networks of meaning. I believe in an imagined order because my neighbour believes in it, and my neighbour believes in it because I believe in it. By sharing the same imagination, Sapiens promote “imagined communities” that contain millions of strangers, create complex institutions and establish themselves as the only species in the world capable of cooperating in a flexible way on a large scale (Anderson 2006). An imagined order depends on myriad individual convergent decisions and, to change it, requires that a critical mass of members of the collectivity be coordinated around a new Gestalt: “in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order” (Harari 2011, p. 92). Therefore, the ability to imagine is also at the base of the processes of institutional transformation: a theme on which I will return.

6 Conflictual Passions 36 Imagination is the passion that by triggering the other passions, replaces the capitalist monotony of cold passions with the polyphony of the entire gamut of human passions. Imagination therefore provides an essential contribution to the transition towards a post-capitalist society. In the latter, the isocratic institutional set-up aims to the levelling of power among citizens and in so doing, greatly reduces the distortions that favour one or the other passion, to the effect that none of them can enjoy a systematic and permanent advantage in more than one social sphere. In fact, being passions embodied in human beings they have the same possibilities of subjects and groups to be just as levelled in terms of power. We can say that a complex equality is established towards passions, just as it is towards single subjects and groups (see Chapter 1).

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The isocratic institutional set-up avoids that some passions prevail over all the 37 remaining others. Nonetheless, it can happen that the flourishing of passions can lead to outcomes that contrast with the values and preferences of some members of society. As soon as the Pandora’s Box of human passions is open, these spill out from it in every direction. Every passionate human relationship, as a response to one’s own, as well as other people’s vulnerability, can be a source of bonds and inclusion as well as of conflict and detachment. Every human relationship can be triggered by passions such as aggressiveness, ambition, greed, jealousy or envy, just as it can set off by passions like love, love of games, justice, freedom or imagination.36 It would be detrimental to try and control the direction of the flow, since even the passions that we consider “depraved”, dangerous or downright destructive, give meaning to our life and motivations to our actions. As Nietzsche observes, “destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity − today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who ‘pluck out’ teeth so that they will not hurt anymore” (Nietzsche 1888, p. 172). Therefore, exiting from an epoch devoid of hot passions like that of capitalism does not equate to moving towards a New Man, anyhow conceived,37 but to opening up to the (dangerous and sometimes unpleasant) giddiness of freedom.

36See the classification in Footnote 10. Passions can trigger abusive and controlling behaviours just as they can give rise to empathy and cooperation on an equal basis. We do not know which will be the prevailing outcome, since, if we are dealing with authentic passions, they escape our control and ability to foresee. One of the great topics of philosophy and the social sciences is the question whether ‘human nature’ tends essentially towards the first or the second type of behaviour. For a recent version of the optimistic thesis, see Tomasello (2009); for the pessimistic thesis, see Joan B. Silk’s intervention, on pp. 111–122 of the same book. 37This is also suggested by Keynes in a passage worth to be quoted in its entirety: “When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard” (Keynes 1930, pp. 369–370).

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38

The most sensible method to face the vertigo seems to be, once again, the one which the majority of the previous chapters have been dealing with: to introduce the levelling of a certain passion with another one able to contain it, just as one power is used to counter another. It is a self-regulatory mechanism of passions that, in order to avoid any excess, opposes them to one another, with a homeopathic strategy that aims to cure the like with the like. In the past, the applications of this method have been based on arranging passions in “high” and “low”, “nobles” and “worthless”, “virtuous” and “depraved”; on substituting the former passions with the latter ones in every situation where it was possible; on attempting, furthermore, to weaken the strengths of the latter passions by favouring institutionally and ethically the former ones (Hirschman 1977, pp. 20–31; Pulcini 2009, p. 124; 2011, pp. 76, 105, 147–150). However, the method of countervailing power does not depend on some kind of distinction between “acceptable” and “reproachable” passions. It can, in fact, completely disregard what passion opposes the other. The important point is to obtain the balancing of power of each so that all can find expression. In order to better understand this crucial passage, let us consider the hot pas39 sions. A car can start a “wild” ride that disregards limits and constraints, even if it is not provided with a balanced mechanical distribution and a fully functional brake system. But in order to keep a high speed, the car must keep itself on the road; and, if it wishes to prolong the ride, it must use the brakes when it approaches a bend. It follows that its ride is never completely “wild” after all: on the contrary, it is the hold over the road that allows the car to keep control of the ride and increase its speed. In the same fashion, in order to find full expression and be long lasting, a hot passion requires homeostatic mechanisms: it is “unbridled” but not without restraint. David Hume who grasps this paradoxical point writes: “The more men refine upon pleasure, the less will they indulge in excesses of any kind; because nothing is more destructive to true pleasure than such excesses. […] And if libertine love, or even infidelity to the marriage-bed, be more frequent in polite ages, when it is often regarded only as a piece of gallantry; drunkenness, on the other hand, is much less common; a vice more odious, and more pernicious, both to mind and body” (Hume 1741–42, p. 170, italics added). Hume maintains that a society culturally refines its way of conceiving and practising passions, in order to avoid that beliefs and actions actually destroy the very same passions. In such a society, eroticism prevails and intensifies as “no gratification, however sensual, can of itself be esteemed vicious” (ibid., p. 176). On the contrary, the so-called vice38

38See

the critique to the concept of vice, in Hume (1739, pp. 458–463).

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refers to those passions that, due to their being “more hurtful both to private persons and to the public” (ibid., p. 177), cannot last and, therefore, become limited temporary emotions that do not forge the character or influence the well-being of people. To sum it up, eroticism is a car that runs fast, not least because it uses the road and the brakes, whereas alcoholism is a passion that sooner or later will derail and will lead to a bad ending. Acknowledging this premise does not imply placing a moral judgement on one or the other, it only means analysing their respective sustainability. There are passions capable of lasting the course of a whole life, while others can only last momentarily. The passions of the first kind are those that are self-limiting, not because of some external pressure or tie, but on the contrary, to better express themselves. A passion can erupt and be destructive, but if it gets to the point where it destroys the subject or the social group that hold that passion, in actual fact it destroys itself. No power can tame it; it is its very “running” that helps it to stay on the road and to use the brakes, and it is on this characteristic that a more heightened awareness can be introduced and eventually lead to “cultural refinement”. According to Hume, culture can in fact heighten and increase those passions that maintain the conditions of their own reproducibility. We are here describing a mechanism that allows self-limitation on the part of 40 passions without the need for repression or curbing actions. If we go back to the platonic myth of the winged chariot (see §§2–3), the passion-horses contain their own excesses without the intervention of the charioteer’s bridles, be they those of repression or of persuasion. I wish to delve deeper into this point, by stressing upon the difference between “direct collision” and “conflict” which is irreducibly complex. I will introduce it once again through an analogy with road traffic (Scott 2012, pp. 80–83). In the last few years, in several countries, the regulation of mixed traffic (cars, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians) has witnessed the decline of traffic lights at crossroads in favour of roundabouts. The regulation of traffic flow through traffic lights is based on a binary logic: with the green you can go, with the red you have to wait. The idea behind this is that accidents, which are clashes between vehicles that compete to pass, can only be avoided by following strict rules that are self-enforcing because whoever strays from them (ignoring the red lights) is usually the first one to pay the consequences. Traffic lights, however, stop the fluidity of road circulation, with situations in which vehicles stop even when there are no incoming vehicles from the other side; they also involve an excess of road signals along the carriageways to which corresponds an innate tendency to ignore them. The roundabouts, on the contrary, work like skaters who, in a crowded rink, coordinate their respective trajectories in order not to bump into each other: each driver, being aware of the danger, becomes very alert and pragmatic, he does not go through when it is his turn, but rather when it is sensible to

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do so (the pedestrian and the bike proceed cautiously even when it is their turn). This has resulted not only in a drastic drop in the rate of accidents, but also in a redefinition of the very concept of accident. When two skaters touch each other, nobody usually perceives the event as some sort of duel meant to prove one’s superiority over the other, and therefore, there are no traffic lights on the rink. Likewise, collisions are seen today as bilateral coordination errors of the trajectories rather than a “chicken game” in which everybody tests each other’s courage.39 While “head on collisions” oppose winners and losers, “conflict” is a matter of 41 symmetrical coordination among heterogeneous agents. Passions do not “clash” one against another, but enter in conflict within a larger field of forces. Conflict runs along a multiplicity of dimensions and has no end: no passion ever eliminates another and none ever obtains a definitive victory, since all the passions make up the “character” of a person in a set of intertwined processes. “Conflict is self-­affirmation, self-organisation of phenomena. It is not a simple set of confrontations. […] The segments and the main arguments that constitute the conflict go through all the characters involved in an indistinct and complex way. When I oppose X, even if I am in the right, I must not forget that X possesses some segments of myself just as I possess some of X’s segments. As if they were theatre actors, the agents of a life’s situation are the carriers of segments of the pièce, they are connected to each other, to the scenography, to the period, in a completely interwoven plot” (Benasayag and Del Rey 2007, p. 81). In the same way, inside the person every passion refers to any other one while conflicts with it, or, to put it better, just because it conflicts with it. Being both cohesion and friction inside the individual, conflict is not a total war, but it self-limits its destructive potential in order to reproduce itself, that is, never to have a solution. This is the endogen mechanism that regulates hot passions: in the absence of a traffic lights-like regulating system, there is only a roundabout, around which many different vehicles keep the “right” distance.

7 Drawing Conclusions 42 Passions are the foundation of the human condition. In order for someone to exercise power on somebody else, it is necessary that those who obey must be vital, that is to say that are animated by passions. Passions are such, though, only if they are

39In

game theory, the “chicken game” is a situation in which two cars run towards the edge (or towards each other on a collision course). The winner is the driver who swerves or stops last; but if neither driver yields both will die.

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unbridled and not repressed, from which follows that they are a thorn for any power system: they would ideally eliminate them, but it is not possible to live without them; they should be emptied and tamed, but one of their “vices” is the tendency to express themselves in a “hot” and unbridled fashion. Capitalism is the socio-economic system that has gone furthest in the attempt to restrain passions to their moderate or “cold” expression. But even capitalism has failed, opening up to the possibility of isocracy: a system of economic and political institutions, outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, in which no passion is censored and none is systematically privileged. The task of the isocratic institutional set-up is not that of regulating passions, 43 but only that of avoiding that the subjects who advocate certain passions can gain permanent advantage over other subjects. If it is true that isocracy is the institutional condition that allows all human passions to flow, it is also true, though, that nobody is able to predict which combination of passions prevails from time to time. As I argued before, this libertarian society does not produce a self-destructive chaos, since passions are usually capable in the process of becoming “hot” to regulate themselves as far as the sustainability for the subject who feels them is concerned. In other words, there is a tendency towards the establishment of a homeostatic mechanism that balances passions and avoids their “excesses”. We must, on the other hand, acknowledge that we are on the threshold over which freedom is, inevitably, danger, and choice becomes a political project: there are no objective frameworks and no subjective authorities that can guarantee the existence and the adequacy of this homeostatic mechanism. In the course of this chapter, we acquired the awareness that due to our human nature, it is fundamental that we let all passions flow freely; also that the unleashing of passions is a process that, by its own nature, can produce outcomes that we do not necessarily like; and finally, that the network of the economic and political institutions of isocracy helps also protect the passions that will be weaker in the scenario that will emerge. On the basis of all this, we are also aware that the possibility of an exit from capitalism will be again a feasible political project, when, many of us will acknowledge that confronting the risk of passions, represents, ipso facto, an improvement of our own condition.

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5

The Structural Possibility of an Alternative

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be. Paul Valéry

Abstract

In this brief final chapter, we ask ourselves about the achievability of Isocracy. We distinguish between the objective or structural side and the subjective one. On the first side, the most debated trajectories of institutional change are those planned from above and those that emerge from the spontaneous interaction of individual behaviours. In my opinion, a third modality is particularly important today. It works by temporarily breaking the rules of an institution, on the part of a coalition however small. When many of these interventions converge on the same “narrative”, they take on a unitary meaning and can shape new institutional rules. Rather, on the subjective side, it is necessary that multiple coalitions defy existing rules. As long as the imagination of people lies within the horizon of power asymmetries, the change stagnates. It can happen, however, as some models analyse rigorously that small alterations in someone’s narrative multiply and amplify to become a critical mass. In conclusion, Isocracy represents a theoretical project, whose structural and subjective possibility is rooted in the multiple conflictual dynamics of capitalism. Organisational setups of economic pluralism as well as political pluralism, promoted by humans who self-regulate all their passions, can together conjure up a real utopia: its forms are those of “polyphony”, a plurality of settings, spheres, arenas, where power is diffused, balanced, distributed on more levels and freedom is shared. The social world is always imperfect. We can never achieve a perfect ideal. However, we can design an ideal for imperfect people.

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Bellanca, Isocracy, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00695-2_5

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1

We are heading towards the conclusion. Rather than summarising the main theses illustrated in the previous chapters, I would like to dwell a little longer on the nature and purpose of this book (see the Foreword). Jean-Claude Michéa observes that one of the clearest signs of the decline of critical thinking is the inability of an ever-increasing number of our own contemporaries to envisage an image of the future which is not a simple amplification of the present (Michéa 2002). On my part, I attempted this critical exercise by analysing the foundational ideal as well as the main political and economic institutions pertaining to one among the many alternative socio-historical configurations. My own elaboration can be examined taking into account more than one aspect: is the “place” that I plan desirable, in other words, is it a good place to live? Is it viable, i.e., are its theoretical premises coherent and is it actually possible to found its institutions? Lastly, is it achievable? In other words, is there a structural possibility for its existence?1 We will leave to the reader’s judgement whether the criteria of desirability and 2 viability apply to isocracy, and will concentrate instead on discussing its achievability. This aspect concerns the structural possibility of “a good place to live” radically different from capitalism, whether of an isocratic nature or not. To examine this aspect, I begin by noting that the capitalist economic system can change through various types of trajectories (Wright 2010, Chapters 8–11). All types of trajectories reconfigure, in a conflicting way, the power relations among subjects, groups and territories. From this follows a very precise political and theoretical implication: every time power conflicts are triggered, there is no guarantee that the conflict dynamics will stop within the framework of the existing institutions (see in particular §§24–25 of Chapter 1). Any trajectory of change can reach points of no return that make relative the horizon of capitalism. Any trajectory generates structural possibilities in that it can permanently diverge from the institutional equilibrium whence it originated. Among the economic examples of “possible divergences” which we encountered in this book, I wish to remind of the “Lange’s goods”, for which market’s prices stop working (see §§19–20 of Chapter 2), the systemic reduction in the working time (see part 7 of Chapter 2) and commodities being produced at marginal cost nearly close to zero, for which there is no profit being made (see §22 of Chapter 2 and §30 of Chapter 4). Among the political cases, I recall the radical conflicts in liberal democracies (see part 1 of Chapter 3) and the strategies of “counter-democracy” (see §12 of Chapter 3), whereas the main case on the cultural front is represented by the unstoppable unleashing of

1For

a discussion on the three aspects, see Wright (2010, Chapter 2).

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hot passions (see §§2–3 and 31 of Chapter 4). In the end, it is the very conflictual nature of the capitalist paths of transformation that leads to points of no return, which in turn open up alternative configurations (be they isocratic or not). Let us try to focus on the trajectory of change that seems more frequent and 3 more fruitful in the current historical period. A large part of the literature on collective action, since Mancur Olson, focused on free riding, or on individual defection (Olson 1965; Sandler 2015). For example, if a person avoids paying the ticket by climbing on the city bus, he diverts in isolation from the rule, but the bus carries on as before, i.e. the institution continues to operate according to the current “rule of the social game”. (Obviously, if many do not pay the ticket, in the end the bus will stop travelling, but this is another matter.) Suppose instead that a small group of passengers on the city bus insults a migrant and forces him to get off, even though he has paid the ticket. This event modifies the behaviour of other passengers, frightening them. The driver can stop or, on the contrary, look the other way. Those who would like to get up, confronted with the commotion, prefer to wait for the next ride. The police can intervene or, reversely, abstain from taking action. The public opinion will react on learning about the episode in the next day’s newspapers and so on. That small group is temporarily breaking the city bus institutional rule according to which those who have paid can travel, without substituting it with another rule. We are confronted not with a simple individual defection, but with the deviation from the rule by a decisive coalition, which is able to alter in the short term the rule to apply. The “decisive coalition” can be as small as we like it—at its minimum, even be 4 composed of just two subjects—on condition that it is able to temporarily break the formal rules of an institution (Shepsle 1989). If it intervenes repeatedly, and if other decisive coalitions are present and active, then the shared rule, which is the institution, tends to run around in circles. At the same time, the formal rule is not replaced by another rule, but by continuous and provisional transgressive interventions. In fact, the complex of temporary violations of the formal rule does not usually express a strategic planning coherence. Rather, it gives rise to a process of change by way of exceptions, representable as a sort of Harlequin’s dress. In the Italian Commedia dell’arte, Harlequin was a poor servant who was originally dressed in a white shirt and pants. Little by little, the shirt began to be covered with coloured patches that had irregular shapes and different from each other’s, until Harlequin’s dress had no connotations of poverty anymore and began to look even luxurious. Each “patch” is a provisional violation of the institutional rule. The set of “patches” may create a colourful and fascinating informal institution. If we look at the sequence of temporary deviations, we realise that each one, although not able to modify the whole dress, colours a part of it; and that

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sometimes, in the long run, this is a way in which the whole dress changes: the set of “patches” can spark an institutional patchwork. “Rule breaking […] may have the longer-term consequences of more rule breaking, a diminished legitimacy accorded previous ways of conducting business, and a great deal of self-imposed uncertainty over exactly what game is being played” (Shepsle 2017, p. 54). There are institutions that change spontaneously, and others that change delib5 erately. Alongside these two widely studied paths, there is a third one, almost completely neglected, which concerns precisely the cases of institutional patchwork. When we witness a repeated breaking of the rules, and the overlapping of “patches” of various shapes and colours, nothing assures us that a new institution is emerging, or that Harlequin will eventually have a dress. It could just be that many pieces of cloth would eventually lie on top of each other without construct or purpose. In order to obtain a trajectory of change, what is needed is an interpretation of the sequence of the pieces establishing that what emerges is a dress. This interpretation changes the institution only if it is shared by the members of multiple decisive coalitions. We have indeed specified that every decisive coalition, considered on its own, is able to transgress the institutional constraint, but not change it permanently. This, on the other hand, requires that more coalitions that are decisive agree on the same new social rule, until they constitute a critical mass sufficient to provoke change. Obviously, this can only happen if the coalitions share the same interpretation of the “patches” as a dress, i.e. if they accept the same narrative. “Narratives” are compelling stories about the interpretation of reality and the 6 position in the world of the members of a social group. A narrative tells where we come from, who we are and where we go; it is a set of stories that, stringing events along a plot, give sequential and causal coherence to the world and/ or to the experience of our group in the world. In game theory terms, narratives can be thought of as fixed strategies, which are to be played in multiple games simultaneously. Let us ask ourselves how the same narrative can spread among several social groups (in our scenario, among more decisive coalitions).2 We introduce the analysis with a simple example: two very different people meet for the first time. They want to relate to each other and then return to their respective groups. The logic of this situation helps to understand situations that are more complex. Let us imagine, therefore, that a Venetian merchant, Marco, travels along an ancient caravan route to meet Xi, a Chinese spice merchant. Marco is not migrating to China; he only wants to negotiate with Xi, buy the spices

2This

paragraph summarises (Antoci et al. 2018).

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profitably and return to Venice. He is aware that Xi belongs to another human group, speaks another language and observes different customs and traditions. He is therefore aware that before making commercial negotiations, he must understand who Xi is, what are his social identity, values and behaviour. If Marco does not comprehend who is in front of him, he cannot make a meaningful exchange with him. He may perhaps carry out a single transaction with an uncertain outcome, but cannot conduct complex and mutually reliable negotiations. So, how does Marco understand Xi’s social identity? By sharing bread with him, riding alongside him, joking about women and loves, listening to him talking about the glories of his motherland. Moreover, he must put Xi in the position to do the same with him. In short, Marco and Xi, members of different groups, must make their narratives interact from the outset in order to carry out their transaction successfully. During their meeting, each “wears” a social identity, encapsulated in a narrative, which we imagine is represented by a coloured jacket. Suppose that in Venice the “white” narrative dominates, while in China it is the “black” that dominates. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that Marco adapts to the narrative that dominates in his group, and that so does Xi. Therefore, Marco wears a white jacket, while Xi wears a black one. Marco and Xi each have a meeting with another randomly selected member of their group, and at the same time, they take part in a mixed or translocal meeting, where we assume that they, Marco and Xi, are the randomly selected partners from Venice and China. What happens in the mixed encounter is decisive. Marco and Xi seek to coordinate by converging on the same equilibrium, whatever this might be, yet this equilibrium can benefit, in many cases, one or the other. Suppose the payoff matrix offers Xi a clear advantage over Marco. During this phase of the game, Marco wears the white jacket, with which he obtains a total payoff which is the result of the sum of the one collected in his group, and the one collected in the mixed encounter. If the meeting with Xi goes very badly, Marco will tend over time to change jacket, switching to the black one. He will then play the next rounds by circulating the black narrative, in both local and mixed encounters. This implies that inside Venice there will be one more member who will propagate the narrative of the other group, opening up to the possibility that, if others will join, at some point the white narrative will be replaced by the black one. In this case, the function of mixed encounters is to select the narratives: in Venice, we will move over time from the dominion of the white narrative to that of the black one. The translocal encounters can also be places of contamination of narratives, in cases where a narrative remains dominant in a group and attracts a share of adherents from the other group, or can promote the biodiversity of narratives, in cases where members of both groups adhere to both narratives. Encounter after encounter, the subjects’ evaluations

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keep on changing, to the point where they are able to switch from any one of the three scenarios to another. Finally, we imagine that groups are decisive coalitions, each capable of an issue- and time-specific infringement of a certain institutional rule, and that the coalitions are not binary, but can be an indefinite n. We identify each coalition with the name of a colour. Encounter by encounter, the randomly chosen members of a couple of coalitions confront each other. In the selection scenario, one of the narratives will become dominant in the long run in all coalitions. In the biodiversity scenario, the members of both coalitions will adhere to both narratives, along a path that will eventually make a single “mixed” narrative prevail everywhere. In these scenarios, the result will be that “pieces” (narratives) of many colours will compose a Harlequin Dress: numerous and sporadic violations of the rules will be perceived as a new rule. In sum, institution is a rule of the game. It already exists and works. The rule 7 can be written or unwritten; created, communicated and enforced inside or outside officially sanctioned channels; weak or strong (see, for example, Levitsky and Murillo 2009). Our crucial theoretical point concerns the temporary and sporadic nature of rule breaking as a short-run departure from institutional practice. If a rule is always disregarded, we have anarchy. If a rule is regarded as selfenforcing, there is no reason for deviating from it. If a rule is fully sanctioned, or if receives a full consensus, it always works. In our scenario, on the other hand, the rule is recognised as a constraint, except when a decisive coalition decides to deviate from it. A single coalition has no interest, and probably not even the ability, to establish a new rule. We are faced with transgressions, each of which is an exception. These multiple and varied temporary deviations may remain just episodes devoid of structure and meaning, or they may be inscribed in a narrative that gives them a unitary sense and represents the patchwork trajectory that leads to a new institution. In the last case, an institution changes by hopping from one occasional infringement to the next. The §§3–7 outlined a trajectory of conflictual change based on decisive coa8 litions, temporary breaches of rules and convergence on the same narrative. This constitutes, in my opinion, the most promising and effective structural possibility of opening up the capitalist system. However, this trajectory requires the action of the decisive coalitions. It is necessary that many groups, even small ones, transgress the given rules. How can this happen? In this respect, we argued that imagination is the passion able to set in motion and connect the subjective side of the paths of change (see §§32–35 of Chapter 4). We need to ask what it is that blocks and exhausts our “fictional expectations”. What is it that compels us to project into the future only the ties and miseries of the present? To start answering this question, we need to note that we use on a daily basis a series of

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cultural instruments that we did not invent or elaborate personally. Among these stand out the narratives, which we have illustrated in §6, and which are the most important component of the “shared mental models”. It is through these mental models that we elaborate passions and emotions, evaluate decisions, set off behaviours, deal with the problems of collective actions, abide by or transgress social norms. These models are not imposed by some explicit power or through direct social pressure, and therefore, they do not need enforcement mechanisms; they spread because it would be very difficult and costly for each individual to evaluate and substitute them in a systematic manner. As a matter of fact, usually a subject tends to focus his critical attention only on a limited area of the vast space encompassed by shared mental models, following instead some sort of inertia principle for everything else. Mental models persist in him or they undergo a gradual transformation until the intervention of a subverting force to which he may also contribute but which is always much bigger than his single personal input (Denzau and North 1994; Ostrom 2005; World Development Report 2015). Shared mental models provide the frame within which we observe reality and 9 select information. For the reasons set out in §8, they tend to confirm past evaluation that thus becomes prejudices. Prejudices in their turn have the obstinate capacity to last, ignoring the circumstances that disprove them, or in other terms, they tend to form self-confirming equilibria. It is not necessary that the subjects know and fully understand the situation in which they are immersed; they can even hold false beliefs on the strategies followed by others. All is needed and sufficient is for people to make errors that become reinforced by looking at other peoples’ choices. In a famous tale, the Emperor is naked but everybody is silent, because even though nobody believes he is dressed, everybody believes that anybody else does. Likewise, if we get our wires crossed when we communicate and for instance I tell you “down” and you understand “gown”, and you tell me “gown” while I understand “down”, there is the creation of a stable equilibrium between us, consistent with our mutual experience. A similar set-up will only disintegrate when someone, due to internal or external reasons, starts moving outside that path of equilibrium and to keep with the example above, realises that the other person is saying something different from what he is saying (de Figueiredo et al. 2006; Willer et al. 2009). Furthermore, prejudices spread and become entrenched by influencing the 10 way in which everyone represents himself. If they belittle the identity of a subject, they have a negative impact on his performance. In a series of experiments carried out in India, children belonging to different castes were asked to solve puzzles. Until they were required to proceed in an anonymous way, there were no differences in performance that could be linked to the caste they belonged to.

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When, on the contrary, the members of the inferior caste were identified as such publicly, their performance turned out much worse than that of the members of the higher caste. This shows that there is a mechanism at play through which people internalise a prejudice against themselves and conform their actual behaviour in accordance, thereby confirming it (Hoff and Pandey 2006). 11 As long as prejudices reign, imagination is chained. However, “Nobody, no matter how alienated, is without (or unaware of) an irreducible core of creativity, a camera obscura safe from intrusion from lies and constraints. If ever social organisation extends its control to this stronghold of humanity, its domination will no longer be exercised over anything save robots, or corpses” (Vaneigem 1967, p. 89). Let us consider a country where political power is contended between two factions, the government and the opposition (Kuran 1995). Every member of society has to publically choose one of the factions, even though he can privately make the opposite choice. When his public preference differs from his private one, we have a “preference falsification”. Let us presume that S is the size of public opposition, in terms of population percentage. At the beginning, S is close to zero. A riot can be seen as a remarkable jump in S. By the term payoff, we mean the evaluation on the part of the subject, of the obtained outcome or of the one he is expecting to obtain. Usually, a citizen who is privately opposing the government makes his opposition public according to the rise in opposition. In actual fact, his external (or public) payoff varies positively with S. The bigger S is, the bigger the mass of the opponents and the smaller the risk of being individually persecuted. His internal (or private) payoff depends rather on the psychological cost of the preference falsification: how much unease does he feel in applauding/supporting a government he does not approve of? Private preference thus plays an indirect role in the choice of public preference. The higher the internal payoff, the greater the stimulus is to “come out” by joining the crowds. If the internal payoff remains constant, the public preference depends only on 12 S. With the increasing of S, we reach a threshold value above which the costs of obedience and conformism overcome those of joining the opposition. Obviously, every person has a private preference to which corresponds a specific mobilisation threshold. Let us consider a population consisting of ten persons with the following sequence of thresholds:

A = [0, 20, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100] Individual number one (with 0 threshold) supports the opposition regardless of the size of S, whereas individual number ten (with threshold = 100) always supports the government. The private preferences of the other eight persons are affected by S. At the beginning, opposition is made up of only one person

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(10% of the population), so that S = 10. Since the other nine persons have all thresholds above 10, this S remains unchanged in time. But the equilibrium reveals itself vulnerable to even little changes in A. Let us suppose that individual number two has an unpleasant experience with the government, which reinforces his alienation from the regime. What follows is an increase in his internal payoff and a consequent lowering of his threshold from 20 to 10. Since S = 10, individual number two joins the opposition, thereby raising S to 20. The new S is able to self-increment, dragging individual number three to the 13 opposition as well. In this case then, S = 30 and therefore is joined by individual number four. Then, S = 40 so to it is added individual number five, in which case S = 50 thus adding individual number six. Then again, S = 60 to which individual number seven is added, making S = 70 thereby adding to it individual number 8. This makes S = 80 therefore adding individual number 9. This is the new equilibrium. A little change in the threshold value of someone has caused a subversive bandwagon effect (the demand for a particular good is said to be subjected to bandwagon effects when the individual demand for that particular good increases as a result of its consumption by other people). Now, we are going to consider the sequence:

B = [0, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100] This differs from A for the only circumstance that the third element shows 30 instead of 20. As in the previous case, we presume that the threshold of individual number two goes from 20 to 10. The pre-existing equilibrium changes and raises S from 10 to 20. This time, though, the rise in opposition stops here, since S = 20 does not self-increase. Since neither private preferences nor the corresponding thresholds are common knowledge, nobody is able to tell whether a society shows sequence A or B or yet another one. This implies that theoretically nobody is able to predict a conflictual break-up, since antagonism comes as a surprise for the authority who tries to tame or suppress it; furthermore, if we assume that the difference between situation A and situation B is very subtle, the transition from subjugation to rebellion often depends on deceptively meaningless subjective changes. Small variations in the relation between the private and public preferences 14 of someone can thus trigger chain reactions in other subjects that build up to disrupt the status quo. But what are the basic conditions able to provoke these small changes? Under which conditions does the Emperor appear naked to his subjects? In §12, I introduced an example based on the hypothesis that a subject suffers an unpleasant experience in his relationship with the ruling faction so powerful that it leads him to lower his threshold level between obedience and rebellion. In order to make a generalisation, we need to distinguish between shared mental models,

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which include also beliefs about what the world consists of and how it works (see §8), and the “second-order belief”, which is the belief on the adequacy (or hegemonic capacity) of the mental models.3 To understand the crucial role played by the second-order belief, let us assume that the green caste is superior to the red caste, according to the prejudices reinforced by the current shared mental models. Let us also presume that some external or internal event alters the faith in the adequacy of mental models: the greens lose their fight against the yellow people, or greens and reds get in contact with the yellow people’s culture, or the imagination of some of the greens is rekindled and they question the inferiority of their social position. On the basis of one or more similar events, mental models as such can still stand. The system of concepts, categories, stereotypes, single beliefs and ideologies can indeed hold out thanks to the three mechanisms mentioned above: by complying with an inertia principle (see §8), by forming self-confirming equilibriums (see §9) and by influencing behaviours that reinforce it (see §10). However, what begins to fall apart is the shared nature of the mental models since the greens do not represent themselves anymore as a caste and even the reds do not take labelling themselves as the superior caste for granted. In other words, the mental models are shared (or hegemonic) if and until the second-order belief is accepted: see the Fig. 1. The main theoretical and political challenge on which the framework of this book is based is that the three conservative mechanisms just recalled do not apply or apply less to second-order beliefs. This is to say that these tend to change faster and more often than the mental models. It is a gamble that cannot be demonstrated by some mathematical theorem and whose outcome relies on the imagination of the single individuals, on collective action and on political conflict. This is what activates the structural possibility of a “systemic divergence” from the current historic configuration. Isocracy is a libertarian theoretical project that imagines the institutions of “a 15 good place to live”. Its structural and subjective potential lies inside conflictual dynamics of capitalism. A great deal of the significance of this project is summarised by some of the authors I draw inspiration from. According to Bertrand Russell, “in a world where none could acquire much power, the desire to tyrannise would be much less strong than it is at present” (Russell 1919, Chapter 5). James Mead adds that to get closer to that world, we need to conjure up “good institutions for imperfect people” (Meade 1993, p. 106). Edgar Morin concludes that “Giving up the best possible world, does not mean giving up on a better world” (Morin 2010, p. 122).

3The

“second order belief” is called Überideology by Hoff and Stiglitz (2010).

5  The Structural Possibility of an Alternative Fig. 1   From choices to beliefs

197

Choices/performances

Prejudices

Shared character of mental models

Belief in the adequacy (or capacity) of the mental models

References Antoci, Angelo, Nicolò Bellanca, and Giulio Galdi. 2018. At the Relational Crossroads: Narrative Selection, Contamination, Biodiversity in Trans-local Contexts. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 150: pp. 98–113. Denzau, Arthur T., and Douglass C. North. 1994. Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions. Kyklos 47 (1): pp. 3–31. de Figueiredo, Rui J.P., Jr., Jack Rakove, and Barry R. Weingast. 2006. Rationality, Inaccurate Mental Models, and Self-Confirming Equilibrium. Journal of Theoretical Politics 18 (4): pp. 384–415. Hoff, Karla, and Priyanka Pandey. 2006. Discrimination, Social Identity, and Durable Inequalities. American Economic Review, Papers & Proceedings 96: pp. 206–211. Hoff, Karla, and Joseph E. Stiglitz. 2010. Equilibrium Fictions: A Cognitive Approach to Social Rigidity. American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 100: pp. 141–146. Kuran, Timur. 1995. Private Truths, Public Lies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levitsky, Steven, and Maria Victoria Murillo. 2009. Variation in Institutional Strength. Annual Review of Political Science 12: pp. 115–133. Meade, James. 1993. Liberty, Equality, and Efficiency: Apologia pro Agathotopia mea. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Michéa, Jean-Claude. 2002. Impasse Adam Smith. Paris: Éditions Climats. Morin, Edgar. 2010. La mia sinistra. Trento: Erikson, 2011. Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ostrom, Elinor. 2005. Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1919. The Proposed Roads to Freedom. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Sandler, Todd. 2015. Collective Action: Fifty Years After. Public Choice 164: pp. 195–216. Shepsle, Kenneth A. 1989. Studying Institutions: Some Lessons from the Rational Choice Approach. Journal of Theoretical Politics 1 (2): pp. 131–147.

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Shepsle, Kenneth A. 2017. Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vaneigem, Raoul. 1967. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Rebel Press. Willer, Robb, et al. 2009. The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms. American Journal of Sociology 115 (2): pp. 451–490. World Development Report. 2015. Mind, Society, and Behavior. Washington, DC: World Bank. Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.

Index

A Abrogative referendum, 113 Affirmative action, 104, 117 Agency, 7, 8, 11, 111, 131 Alienation, 32, 38, 168, 195 All-or-nothing logic, 95 Anthropogenetic, 149 Anthropological mutation, 148 Appraisal theory, 164, 165 Appropriate passion, 155 Arendt, Hannah, 96, 154 Asymmetrical relation, 3, 5, 8–10 Automatic emotion regulation, 153

B Bandwagon-effect, 195 Baran, Paul, 63, 171, 172 Basic income, 46, 48, 54–57 Belief, 19, 28, 63, 103, 109, 121, 160, 171, 174, 193, 196, 197 Better Life Index, 45, 46 Bobbio, Norberto, 12, 20, 95, 98, 125 Bottleneck, 22, 23 Bullshit job, 64, 65

C Capital, 19, 24, 26, 27, 39–50, 54, 58, 59, 74, 76, 78, 79, 82, 84, 118, 172

Capitalism, 27, 31, 32, 38, 39, 49, 52, 53, 62, 66, 68, 75, 77–79, 81, 84, 126, 148, 149, 164, 168, 171–174, 177, 181, 188, 196 Capitalist enterprise, or firm, 24–26, 39–43 Capitalist market, 173 Castells, Manuel, 126 Chamfort, Sébastien-Roch Nicholas de, 168 Change by way of exception, 189 Checks and balances, or weights and counterweights, 109, 139 Children vote, 120 Classical liberalism, 31, 32 Cleisthenes, 102, 103, 122, 123, 136 Collective action, 38, 95, 98, 138, 139, 189, 193, 196 Collective dividend, 43, 78 Comfort, 6, 56, 163, 164 Commodity, 25, 58, 169–171 Commodity abstraction, 169 Common good, or Commons, 49, 80 (The) common goods sector, 49, 132 (The) common property trust, 51 Complex equality, 13–19, 21, 22, 30, 104, 135, 136, 176 Conflict, 4, 5, 11, 22, 28, 32, 45, 54, 73, 77, 79, 93–99, 101, 107, 110, 111, 117, 124, 129, 138, 155, 156, 160, 177, 179, 180, 196 Conflictual passion, 176

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2019 N. Bellanca, Isocracy, Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00695-2

199

200 Constitution, 97, 98, 102, 103, 109, 112, 114, 117, 121, 124, 127, 129, 132, 136 Cooperative controlled by shares, 39, 41, 42 Cooperative managed by workers, 39 Council of ex members of Nomothete, 115 Counter-democracy, 188 Creative idleness, 67 Critical mass, 176, 190 Currency, 14, 57–61, 78, 84, 116, 131

D Day, Richard, 174 Decisive coalition, 189, 190, 192 De jure and De facto power, 95 Deliberation day, 115, 116, 139 Deliberative democracy, 93 Deme, 102, 136 Democracy as planned order, 102 Democratic socialism, 31 Diffused power, 92, 188 Digital political party, 101 Direct democracy, 93, 113, 138 Discretionary time, 12, 13, 67 Discrimination, 20, 23, 117, 118 Disposition, 8, 18, 151, 155, 157–159, 166, 173 Distinction between antagonism and social destructivity, 96 Distinction between currency and money, 38, 60, 78 Distributed leadership, 72, 74 Distribute power, 105, 112, 139 Distributive justice, 20, 22 Dobb, Maurice, 7 Dominance relation, 10 Domination, 23, 38, 171, 194 Downs, Anthony, 100, 119 Dual federalism, 124, 125 Dualistic model of passions, 160, 161 Durkheim, Émile, 79

E Economic alienation, 38

Index Electoral system, 105 Embodiment theory, 165 Emotion, 150–153, 160, 161, 164–167, 179, 193 Endless growth, 172 Enforcement mechanism, 193 Environmental problems, 137, 138 Exchange abstraction, 169, 170 Exchange between participation and moderation, 98 Excitement, 152, 163 Exploitation, 17, 50, 171 Externality, 95 Extra-electoral methods, 100

F Federalism, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130, 137, 139 Federalist approach of the competitive interdependence, 124 Federalist institution, 123, 139 Feeling, 32, 65, 94, 150–153, 157, 160, 165, 166, 174 Fictional expectation, 175, 192 Fiduciary institution, or Trusts, 50 Formal rule, 189 Freedom, 1, 2, 6, 10–13, 18, 24, 28, 54, 55, 60, 61, 68, 76, 77, 95–97, 104, 107, 155, 159, 173, 176, 177, 181 Free good, 52 Free riding, 189 Free sharing, 52, 53 Free time, 12, 13, 64–68 Fromm, Erich, 151, 168, 171

G Gehlen, Arnold, 157 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, 12 Gigerenzer, Gerd, 167 Godwin, William, 159 (The) golden rule of equality, 2 (A) good place to live, 18, 20, 41, 188, 196 Gorz, Andrè, 38, 39, 66, 67, 164 Gössen, Hermann, 162

Index Graeber, David, 65, 174 Gut reactions, or gut feelings, 165–167

H Harlequin’s dress, 189 Harsanyi, John, 22 Hayek, Friedrich von, 20, 31, 32, 106–110, 131 Held, David, 121, 133, 135 Heteronomous work, 56, 67 Heuristics, 167 Hirshleifer, Jack, 150, 165 Homeopathic strategy, 178 Homeostasis, 153 Horace, 154 Horizontal distribution of tasks, 68 Horizontal scalability, 172 Hot and cold passions, 32, 156, 157, 159, 161, 168, 173, 176–178, 180, 188 Human condition, 148, 150, 180 Hume, David, 83, 152, 173, 174, 178, 179

I Identity, 15, 28, 38, 94, 95, 97, 113, 136, 160, 171, 193 Idleness, 67, 163 Imagination, 154, 155, 169, 173–177, 192, 194, 196 Imagined community, 176 Imagined order, 176 Impartial rule, 107–110, 120 Incentive, 7, 8, 70, 71, 75, 103, 104, 108, 117, 120, 139 Inclusive majority, 100 Independent administrative Authority, 110 Inequality, v, 13, 15, 17, 55, 95, 103, 123, 172 Inertia principle, 193, 196 Inheritance tax, 48 Institution, 4, 17, 27, 28, 30, 32, 38, 76, 96, 100, 103, 105–107, 109–115, 117, 118, 120–124, 133, 134, 139, 149, 156, 176, 181, 188–190, 192, 196 Institutional invention, 102, 136 Institutional patchwork, 190

201 Intentionality, 158, 159 Interest groups, 119 Isocracy, or Equals in power, 4, 11, 17, 18, 21, 29–31, 39, 57, 71, 77, 78, 84, 100, 105, 107, 110, 111, 116, 123, 137, 138, 149, 181, 188, 196 Isocratic constitution, 103 Isonomy, or formal equality of all citizens before the law, 103

J Jobless growth, 54 Joint activity, 70 Jurisdiction, 116, 124–129, 132, 133, 135, 137 Jus migrandi, 129, 130 Jus nexi, 129, 130, 137

K Keynes, John Maynard, 64, 75, 76, 79, 177

L La Boétie, Étienne de, 74 Labour-capital partnership, 39, 41–45, 78 Lange’s good, 53, 188 Law for the sovereignty of the citizen, 116 Leftist libertarianism, 1 Legislative assembly, 105, 108 Libertarianism. See Classical liberalism Locke, John, 98, 156 Loss of control, 151, 152, 165

M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 121, 122 Madison, James, 109, 156 Mandatory, or confirmative referendum, 114 Mann, Michael, 5 Marginalism, 162 Market, v, 4, 7, 19, 23, 24, 29, 32, 38, 40–42, 45, 50, 52–54, 60, 61, 63, 67, 75, 76, 79, 82, 111, 115, 131, 132,

202 135, 137, 148, 162, 169, 170, 172, 173, 188 Marx, Karl, 2, 6, 28, 38, 55, 59, 169 (A) matrix model of federalism, 128 McCormick, John, 120, 121 Meade, James, 31, 41–43, 47, 48, 79, 196 (The) media in Isocracy, 118 Michéa, Jean-Claude, 188 Mill, John Stuart, 5, 84, 110, 156, 160 Mixed, or translocal meeting, 191 Mode of production, 38, 171 Mondragón group of cooperatives, 40 Money, 7, 14, 17, 22, 38, 55–61, 66, 68, 75, 79, 82, 84, 93, 119, 170–172, 176, 177 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de, 109 Multilateral horizontal supervision, 117 Multilevel citizenship, 130 Multilevel global governance, 133 Multiple coalitions, 188 Multiple voting, 118–120 Multipolar and multilevel power, 127

N Napoleoni, Claudio, 2, 39, 62, 63, 169 Narrative, 166, 190–193 Nation-state, 125, 126, 129, 130, 135 Nedelsky, Jennifer, 69 Need, 3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 28–30, 33, 38, 41, 46, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 61, 62, 64, 66–69, 71, 73, 76, 79, 82, 84, 93, 95–98, 103, 104, 109–111, 113, 115, 118–120, 122, 126, 129, 132, 133, 138, 148, 151, 161–164, 167, 168, 171–173, 179, 192, 195, 196 Neoclassical economics, 5–7, 163 Net income, 39, 41–43, 45 New institutional rule, 188 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 164, 177 Nomos, or impartial rule, 107, 111 Nomothete, or Assembly I, 108–110, 114, 115, 132, 133 Non-discrimination, 60, 104

Index Nonprofit media organization (NMO), 118 Nozick, Robert, 22, 80 Nussbaum, Martha, 165

O Obedience, 8, 11, 12, 25, 96, 97, 106, 149, 194, 195 Obsessive and harmonious passions, 159 Olson, Mancur, 100, 189

P Paid work, 13, 24, 51, 73 Partisan institution, 105, 118, 120 Passion, 22, 32, 68, 148–168, 171–174, 176–181, 192, 193 Paternalism, 82 Personal income, 54, 78 Piketty, Thomas, 62, 78 Planetary assembly, or boule, 102, 136 Pleasure and pain, 167 Pluralism, 18, 38, 83, 118, 130 Poliarchy, 18 Policies of credit allocation, 75 Political justice, 20, 22 Political participation, 97, 99, 101, 122 Political party, 100 Polyphonic, or isocratic federalism, 125, 127, 129, 137, 139 Polyphonic society, 84 Positional competition, 64, 65, 81, 82, 84 Positional good, 65, 82, 83 Positive discrimination, 117, 118, 139 Post-capitalist society, 38, 135, 176 Power, 2–25, 27–32, 38–43, 47, 57, 58, 61, 63, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 81–84, 92–105, 107–112, 117, 120–123, 125–128, 131–136, 138, 139, 149, 168, 170, 171, 173, 176, 178–181, 188, 193, 194, 196 Power relation, or Power on, 3, 6–10, 12, 18, 20, 23, 25, 26, 30, 69, 95, 103, 117, 133, 173, 180, 188 Power-sharing, 117 Pre-distribution strategies, 78

Index Preference falsification, 194 Preliminary random selection of citizens, 114, 139 Prescriptive rule, 61 Private preference, 194, 195 Progressive taxation, 78, 84 Proscriptive rule, 60 Public good, 53, 100, 124, 125, 127–130, 132–135, 137, 138 Public preference, 194, 195

R Radical conflict, 92, 94, 95, 97, 117, 138, 188 Rational choice, 5, 150, 152, 154 Rawls, John, 21, 22, 94 Real utopia, 188 Redistribution of working and care time, 38 Reification, 171 Representative democracy, 92, 101, 103, 105 Reputation of impartiality, 105, 106, 108, 111, 139 Retribution of the elected, 115, 139 Revocation of the elected, 112 Revocation of the mandate, 112, 113 Right of initiative, 113, 139 Right of revision, 113 Rights of control, 39 Riker, William, 29, 124 Rivarol, Antoine de, 154 Rossi, Ernesto, 68 Rothbard, Murray, 132 Rule breaking, 190, 192 Rule of law, 108 Rules, 17, 45, 60, 82, 95–97, 104, 108, 110, 112, 120, 125, 130–133, 167, 171, 179, 190, 192 Russell, Bertrand, 6, 16, 31, 53, 54, 62, 136, 148, 164, 196

S Satisfaction, 46, 158, 160, 162, 168, 171 Schumpeter, Joseph, 106

203 Scitovsky, Tibor, 163 Second-order belief, 196 Self-confirming equilibrium, 196 Self-deception, 152 Self-determined activity, 68 Self-enforcing, 179, 192 Self-managing organization, 73, 74 Self-regulatory mechanism of passions, 178 Sen, Amartya, 6 Shachar, Ayelet, 130 Shared freedom, 2–4, 21 Sharing the returns of capital and wealth, 49 Simple equality, 13, 15, 16, 104 Smith, Adam, 156 Social distribution of risk, 43 Social dividend, 46–49, 51, 56, 66, 84 Social good, 13–17, 83, 94, 95, 104, 107, 111 Social identity, 19, 191 Social imagination, 174 Socialization of investments, 38 Social justice, 4, 15, 20–22, 55 Social salary, 43, 51–54, 66, 78, 84 Socrates, 160, 161 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 31, 169, 170 Sovereignty, 40, 79, 114, 125–127, 129, 134 Spielberg, Steven, 160 Structural possibility, 188, 192, 196 Subjective well-being, 81 Supreme Court, 122, 124, 133, 136

T Tax breaks, 43, 118 Tax(ation) on capital and wealth, 48, 59, 78, 79, 82 Tax(ation) on expenditure, 82 Tax(ation) on income, 59, 78, 84 Tax(ation) on inheritance, 48, 62, 79 Tax(ation) on multinational corporations, 77 Temporary breakdown, or violation, or deviation, 189, 192

204

Index

Territorial organisational unity (TOU), 125–127 Thesis, 107, 111 Tobin tax, 75 Tribunate, 120–123, 139 Triggering stimulus, 163, 164 Trittys, 136 Trousseau, Armand, 79

Value in exchange, 169, 171 Value in use, 59, 169 Van Parijs, Philippe, 55, 56 Vertical or hierarchical distribution of tasks, 68, 69 Vertical scalability, 172 Voting rights, 32, 50, 98, 118 Vulnerability, 151, 157, 159, 166, 177

U Unbounded demos, 137 Unproductive and/or parasitic activities, 45, 66 Utopia, v, vi, 3

W Walzer, Michael, 14, 17, 20, 31, 81, 134, 155 Weber, Max, v

V Valéry, Paul, 188 Vallerand, Robert, 159–161

Z Zero marginal cost, 172