Pandemic and beyond - From the crisis of the welfare state to Commonfare as a horizon

I- Pandemic.

Within a few days the government suspended all movement on public roads, except for essential

activities, closed schools, universities and public offices, while the national authorities imposed

a lock out of commercial businesses and factories. At the same time, we have been confined to

the meantime, social control imposed from above is spreading, as is the case of cyber patrols of

the networks, from the Ministry of National Security, and our social relations are mediatized

through platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. While social networks, the media and

politicians in general invite the population to stay at home through hashtags, declarations and

decrees, business associations such as the UIA, CAME and the owners of industries and

companies put pressure in various ways to get out of quarantine and start up their factories and

businesses. The government acts legitimised by a "scientific technical committee" while

drastically restricting that fundamental elementary freedom, the freedom of movement and

movement of the body. The Supreme Court, for its part, says nothing about this flagrant

violation of the republican constitution. When science becomes the foundation of truth, it ends

for everyone, acquiring a class character. What the pandemic crisis makes transparent are the

deficiencies, biases and unequal constitutive process of substitution of public health by private

health, which started a few years ago and has been maintained by the last governments. One

wonders, "How do you discuss and resolve the self-quarantine of a person who shares a small

room with a dirt floor with 6 or 8 people in the slums? How do you advise the "social,

preventive and obligatory distancing" of a cartonero or a person who lives on a handout? How

do you tell one of the many inhabitants of the slums of the conurbano, who struggles for one

meal a day, to prioritize hand disinfectants? While these are post-colonial questions, they are

nonetheless crucial to the picture of disease management. In urban slums, the big question is

about what kind of public health measures are applied there and finding affordable alternatives,

services. Because, in retrospect, a hospital is not a company.

Homes are not safe places for many women in the face of increasing domestic violence, while

abuse and feminicide are on the rise. Hence the concern of the feminist movement to organise

the defence of women at risk during quarantine.

However, we also know that neither governmental desires, the epidemic nor the unique times

we live in are capable of banishing politics from social life. We are far from the reign of

techniques and police control. We live in times where proposals, however radical they may be,

can suddenly become part of common sense. It is not possible to know what will be the next

step and how the emergency will transform the standards of the social and political order. But

we are sure that this change will take place and that there is a big space for politics, even under

conditions where it is not possible to go out on the streets, gather and protest.

Our society has mutated drastically in the last twenty years: formal and dependent work is no

longer the model, but a multiplicity of precarious, self-employed, informal, intermittent jobs

where discontinuous unemployment and immigrant workers now shape a new social

composition, excluded from the traditional social safety nets of the welfare state. It is not only

about the services associated with welfare state. The income linked to the imposed lock out

increase allocated to it will be insufficient. The health emergency comes on top of the job

insecurity and the hurricane that has hit informal work. Moreover, the extraordinary expansion

of the social safety net promoted by the government will leave many variants of workers by the

wayside: some domestic workers, some in the informal economy and many others in the folds

of precarious work.

The IMF in its latest report, The Great Lockdown

, estimates for our country a fall of close to

6% of GDP this year and unemployment of 11%. It forecasts a fall of 3% of GDP globally and

6% for the advanced economies. CEPAL forecasts for Latin America the worst economic

contraction in its history, more than 5%, higher than that of 1930 and 1914. We are facing a

unique, different crisis of capitalism: a global production crash forced from above, the result of

We hear left and right that the world to come will not be as it was before. That enormous

changes are taking place, which are difficult to pinpoint and determine today. We do not know

if it will be a long transition, but we do know that it will be built on current social and economic

trends. The need for a return to normal times is spreading socially. However, as Naomi Klein

reminds us, "normality is deadly. 'Normality' is an immense crisis. We need to catalyse a

massive transformation to an economy based on the protection of life"

. Naomi Klein speaks of

a return to the previous normal, i.e., the crisis period of neoliberalism. Everything seems to

indicate that we are facing a worldwide event, never experienced before and in such a

globalized way. Which is more than the political generalization of the state of exception, as

proposed by G. Agamben

; the necessary overcoming of capitalism, S. Zizek

common good and public spending appears as an indispensable lever for capital. We have no

International Monetary Fund, World Economy Outlook, Chapter One, The Great Lockdown, Abril

N. Klein, “La gente habla sobre cuando se volverá a la normalidad, pero la normalidad era la crisis”,

G. Agamben, L’épidémie montre clairement que l’état d’exception este devenue la condition normal, Le

answers to many questions about the capitalism to come: what about the underground

tendencies, as well as about authoritarianism and social control, mounted on cyber patrolling

and/or data management? How effective will a politics of terror and fear based on the discourse

of war, when today the virus appears as the enemy, and tomorrow the system will designate a

different one? This crisis, which is deconstructing the global productive map, may also mortally

wound the idea of a globalization centered on connectivity. What could be the future of the One

Belt-One Road Project, globalization in Chinese style?

potential autonomy of the cooperation of cognitive labour and the self-government of

production. It is about imagining a new economic and social order articulated on a completely

different hierarchy between the common, the public and the private.

As in fairy tales, the imaginary monster is not always the real enemy. As the pandemic

continues, the political debate about the "after" is rekindled. An "after" that, for now, it is clear,

does not end with the pandemic, but with the pandemic in progress, with the infection and death

curve a little flattened. With the prospect, moreover, of a sinuous tendency of this curve, which

could increase again, after the attenuation of social distancing, the resumption of work and with

the autumn-winter in progress. "After" means not only the gradual restart of production and

services, but also emergency measures for transition and the implementation of a post-pandemic

imperial role. There is no metaphysical state of exception, but experiments in the preservation

of power based on the spread of fear and terror, against which we will have to fight with

persistent resistance. The war and the enemy remain the same as in normal times.

The globalization of the last decades has accelerated our time, transforming it into an endless

period of work (where sometimes not even two jobs are enough to make ends meet) - towards

growth, GDP, unbridled consumption, unnecessary entertainment, digital hyper-speed. But will

the Corona virus of this indefinable 2020 be enough to modify all these plans and lead us to a

new world to come?

The authoritarian becoming of the pandemic....

social distancing. All this with a discourse where we will initially be told that this data

collection will respect anonymity and that it will be carried out "only" to understand mass

behaviour. Then come the individual sanctions. Those above a certain age will have to stay at

home or go to the doctor or pharmacy at most, with prior notice; only those with an essential job

and also with prior permission, will be able to move around the city or take a plane. If we have a

fever, a sensor will show it and communicate it directly to the person who processes the

complete image of our profile. Individual biometric data, data on our movement, data on our

economic situation, data on our sleep and leisure time, will transform society and the way it is

managed, highlighting the social areas to support and those to sacrifice. This is what can await

desire of states and markets to reorganize the crisis and post-crisis, or the permanent crisis? It is

the collection of data, this big data, which allows society to be managed. And this data, in order

to minimize risks, must be as accurate and precise as possible. Risk for whom? For the market,

growth and productivity. If there are too many sick people, then assembly lines and social

cooperation will offer gaps in their course, affecting growth and expected social productivity. If

discontent is growing, then the danger is potential unrest and helicopter money

will need to be

put into operation, albeit temporarily. These are measures that, even if they are described as

visited a city: "More than the massive and binary division between the ones and the others, [the

plague] calls for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an in-depth organization of

surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power"

"Everyone, in his place, is securely locked up in a cell where he is seen from the front by the

watchman; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions.

”

Surveillance was based on a system of permanent recording and reporting: reports of

observations during the course of visits: deaths, illnesses, complaints and irregularities. In our

times, we can now speak of societies of control, of biopower over life, of a coronopticon in

operation, as published in the pages of The Economist

. Where the surveillance of capital over

our bodies has gone from behaviour and intentions to control and information about our bodies,

element of survival seems to be a decisive step towards greater control. The Google-Apple deal

is another step in the rise of Silicon Valley & C. to global power. The multinationals of platform

capitalism have a habit of directly intervening in global governance with their applications used

by billions of users

We are faced with a combination-superposition of demodées surveillance measures, typical of

feudalism - quarantines - with others that are truly coherent and typical of times when societies

of control reign. The attempts of neoliberalism, of modern capitalism, are not limited to

sweetening subjectivities with mercantile consumption, but now propose to advance towards

new stages of domination.

A type of monetary stimulus of last resort, which involves printing large sums of money and distributing

Ibídem, p. 120.

Ibídem, p. 121.

Tendenze e contraddizioni del capitalismo in crisi”,

Biohypermedia is the area of interaction and integration of ICT with the sphere of life. This is realised by

However, as we know that this crisis does not originate in the banks but in the real economy, the

reaction will probably not mean that finance capital will try to move in to vampirish welfare and

labour conditions, but that we face something as pejorative as this: a possible control, direct and

selective, over populations and resources. That making live and letting die in action. The power

to manage life instead of the power to dispose of life. An attempt by capital, which, in

conceiving the factory society, persists in extracting value from our lives and resources in order

to accumulate profits.

population control are powerful enemies that, together, can do us immense harm, to the point

that they can reverse the developments that have been woven into the fabric of the movements

since the previous crisis”

.

And at this moment the point is not simply to behave well and obey all the rules of social

distancing, but to understand which political model is functional to these rules. Or, what other

attempt is it possible to imagine, beyond that which ends up minimising the loss of life, to

guarantee the social economic model that led us to this crisis? In these times of confinement, we

must assume that the other (the population over 70) is not something to be controlled by fear

and terror, but someone to be understood. When Donna Haraway says that only from some

concepts can we think of other concepts, she suggests that everything is in a "specific

the other [the plague], analysed and distributed"

, only in this case one is based on the other.

Exclusion, separation, identification, confinement: all must be deployed interchangeably, or all

at once to immobilise a city, to gain control of all individual bodies, because that is how the

spread of the Corona virus will be stopped. The image of the leper "cut off from all human

contact" and that of the people of the city segmented and interned, accounts for the two

elements of a mixed strategy of exclusion. We need not dwell on this point, but pay direct

attention to the profound relations between this strategy of exclusion and the production of race.

The operation of the exclusion strategy is rooted in the way affected communities and

population groups participate in the identification and exclusion of potential victims of the

disease. To defend the community, vigilantes build barriers, patrol cities to keep out outsiders,

time, can we think of a different form of biopolitics, one that does not segregate populations

along lines of caste, race or occupation, but one that thinks of society in a different way and

addresses the task, "How can the whole of society be defended?" Of course, this requires a new

kind of social power, a new republican authority built on the sans culottes of society where trust

appears crucial. Just as patients trust doctors, which is why patients follow medical

prescriptions, society must put aside all distrust behind the construction of a new biopolitics.

Biopolitics from below, if one can use that rather awkward phrase, which allows us to formulate

the question differently: can we imagine a society based on collective practices to assist the

producers of food, medicine, electricity, connectivity etc. It means self-organisation, as a first

condition for producing a new public power.

In the meantime, the course of the crisis will operate directly, as it already does, by lowering

wages (work suspensions recognise only 70% of wages) and making working conditions more

flexible (work shifts are being modified, while home work is being implemented), that is to say,

making the workforce more precarious. On the social horizon, the possibility of direct selective

control over populations and resources is looming on the horizon. Financial activity will no

longer be enough: what capital will need is a designed extermination of lives and control over

resources.

before", or in the nostalgia for the past, which takes shape in the desire that "we must return to

normality as soon as possible", the truth is that the future to be built depends strongly on some

anticipations of the present: how to decide under a state of emergency, which refers us to the

political environment; what economic policies to adopt and how to sustain them, which directs

us to the economic space; how we want to live in a pandemic that sends us into social drifts.

Undoubtedly, this comprehensive anticipatory desire will condition new balances and

hierarchies, and direct transformations and conflicts. Although we must recognise that the how

is difficult to predict. The apocalyptic character of the pandemic lies not in the end of

something, be it the human species, capitalism or the form it takes as neoliberalism. But in its

capacity to reveal features and contradictions of the world we live in: from the dominant role of

pandemic.

But the pandemic, like the 2008 recession, does not unfold in a neutral context, but within

precise historical and social coordinates that shape both the phenomenon and its consequences.

As before, neoliberalism is questioned as a total project (not only economic, but also political,

cultural and social) hegemonic in the construction of these social-historical coordinates. This

does not mean that we are witnessing the end of the neoliberal project or even of capitalism.

Rather, an extremely uncertain phase seems to have opened up before us, the results of which

are far from obvious. And for this reason, it is important to develop transformative thinking

about our present, not only to understand the knots around which the state of affairs we are

While neoliberalism postulates the immutable nature of the free market, competition and the

individual owner, the social Darwinism of the sovereign and racist right strips this anthropology

of the promises of future prosperity and transforms competition into a civil war between

identities. In both cases, the present state of affairs is not in question, but only a different way of

relating to it. In both cases, political action is the privilege of a few, in one case of economic

technicians and in the other of populist leaders.

What about critical thinking understood as movement thinking that transforms the present state

long-term structural processes and how they come into play to define the current situation. The

pandemic, measures to combat contagion for the protection of health, its impact on the economy

and society: in all these cases, the pairs life/death, health/work, reproduction/production become

the axes around which political discourse is reformulated. But how do we situate these

categories within the neoliberal project in which we all live? Looking at the near past of our

present means, at the same time, asking ourselves what directions the events we are

experiencing may take; it means imagining which trends may undergo an acceleration and,

conversely, a reversal; it means identifying what is the battlefield and which players on the

field. The seriousness of the pandemic crisis goes beyond the impact it will have on the

economy: it is revealed by its transversal and pervasive character

.

external to the capitalist system, originating in the transmission of a virus that has mutated?

It seems unquestionable to propose that the capitalist crisis of 2007-2008 was an internal crisis

of the capitalist system, insofar as the financial market - arguably the engine of the capital

valorisation process - revealed, in a forceful way, the weaknesses of the system. The current

crisis, we are told, is different. It is not comparable. It would be expressing a crash, an external

shock, with no warning to deal with it. However, this is a simplifying response that operates as a

balsam, in the face of the magnitude of the crisis we are facing, without being really true. In

reality, according to the experts, it is the mutation of a virus, a zoonosis, in the face of which

human activity cannot be considered exempt or indifferent. Mutations in nature are not neutral,

they do not occur occasionally, but always depend on human behaviour and actions. We are in

from the natural to the artificial, he could also dominate nature. This is simply a counterfactual

assumption. This fantasy has generated a series of known effects: the increase in the average

temperature of the earth, climate change, the ozone hole, etc., and even genetic transformation,

in a context where, since 2004, the writing of the genome has been achieved. What did this

discovery mean? The revelation of the writing of the alphabet of life, because the writing of the

genome, i.e., the deciphering of DNA, made it possible from that moment on to create living,

living matter artificially. We are now at a stage where it is claimed that artificial production can

control natural production. In other words, we have entered the stage of creating living material

from artificial material. This is an epochal change, similar to the answer cemented by the

Russian Mendeliev in 1865, who, by discovering the alphabet of physical matter, was able to

construct his table of elements

would enable the manufacture of polymers, synthetic fibres and plastics, which would devastate

nature in a few years' time.

It is not an epidemic reminiscent of other epidemics, but one that leads us to human action

the state of public health services globally. Faced with this scenario, the most widespread

political response that transcends all geographies is the return of state interventionism in its

different facets. The thinking of the global political mainstream considers that the pandemic has

caused an almost mortal wound to neoliberalism and globalisation, based on a triple reading: a)

on the one hand, the preponderance assumed by the state to face the crisis and design a way out;

b) on the other hand, the difficulty of the world capitalist system to build a globalised response,

as in the crisis of 2008/2009. Today, the nationalism of states prevents the creation of a global

management in the face of the real-world emergency. Each country faces the pandemic alone, as

if there were 197 national epidemics; c- finally, the health crisis revealed by the immense deficit

of a public health system that was privatised in the era of neo-liberalism; d- finally, the crisis in

critical reading that would allow us to perceive a collective response as a different alternative.

At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented monetary issuance, massive government

intervention that does not distinguish ideologies, which alters any fiscal balance, contradicting

the basic principles of neoliberalism: Trump and Johnson; the European Central Bank (ECB)

and the governments of Conte, Macron and Sanchez; as well as the Latin American

governments, Piñera, Fernandez, Lopez Obrador. Isn't what has been called helicopter money,

i.e., the creation of currency financed by the Central Bank, a return to the Keynesianism of the

early days? If so, and given that it is a strong incentive to demand, it should assume a permanent

character and everything indicates that these are non-recurrent, exceptional, short-lived policies

that will disappear once the productive blockade has been overcome and social control has been

triumphant return of the state as the gravedigger of neo-liberalism. All the more so, when the

sovereigntist-nationalist role of states in confronting the pandemic has been exacerbated. Recall

how some of them, the USA (America first again), issued an informal declaration of war against

the rest, to arbitrarily dispose of the available production of masks, test kits, respirators etc.,

emulating a return to the days of the filibusters.

The crisis of the welfare state

However, the question that arises is whether we can expect the strengthening of that Fordist-

social democratic welfare state that protected public health, strengthened public education,

research etc. etc. etc. Recognising that the political economic mainstream tends to simply

defend the social progress achieved by the welfare state. By invoking the state as an abstract

protective entity, a sort of political pater who will save us (I recall the thought of R. Segato,

"maternal state because it takes care of us"), we forget that it is, above all, an administrative

underpinned the long cycle of virtuous accumulation, the 30 glorious years, built on social

benefits to the Fordist factory workers, accompanied by substantial state involvement in the

social management of labour power and currency, as well as in the areas of social welfare and

education that allowed mass production to be coupled with mass consumption. But this social,

factory labour world, with the hegemony of industrial production in the dynamics of

accumulation, no longer exists

were based in the 20th century no longer exist. The nexus constructed between wages and

productivity served to simultaneously drive technological innovation and counteract workers'

resistance. Indeed, as a result of workers' pressures, the factory wage was complemented by the

social wage, born out of the payments made for the different social plans, headed by the

social institutions which, during industrial society, allowed the foundation and stabilisation of a

certain regime of growth.

The starting point of this questioning, which led to the disorder and real upheaval of the

industrial Fordist model of accumulation, is based on the conflictive dynamics exercised by the

mass worker who de-structured the foundations of the scientific organisation of labour, leading

to a formidable expansion of the guarantees and collective services of the welfare state, beyond

any possible compatibility with Fordism. As a result of this process, there was an attenuation of

the monetary restriction of the wage relation, as well as an important process of collective re-

appropriation of the intellectual command of production. Meanwhile, within capital itself, the

elements of a commonality and an ontological transformation of labour were being constructed,

the state - became ineffective in containing workers' struggles and resistance.

Capital's response to the struggles and resistance of the Fordist workers was to take production

beyond the factories, exploding the institution of labour which, as a social institution,

guaranteed integration between the singular and society. In effect, productive integration, the

heart of the wage relationship, validated the right of workers to demand and enjoy the social

rights that the welfare state guaranteed: the right to education, the right to health, the right to

housing, the right to public services such as telephones, electricity, gas, water, sewer, etc. Social

allows the worker the possibility of refusing unwanted or heavy work, affecting working

conditions, and opening up prospects of liberation, which go far beyond the simple distribution

measure. In fact, contrary to approaches in terms of the end of labour, the current crisis of the

Fordist employment norm is far from signifying a crisis of labour as the main source of (non-

market) value and wealth production. On the contrary, cognitive capitalism is not only a

knowledge-intensive economy, but at the same time, and perhaps even more so than in

industrial capitalism, it constitutes a labour-intensive economy, although this new dimension of

time devoted to production, during official working hours, becomes only a fraction of the social

production time. By its very nature, cognitive work is in fact presented as a complex

combination of reflective activity, communication, relational exchange and knowledge

exchange, which takes place both inside and outside of firms and contract time. As a result, the

traditional boundaries between work and non-work are blurred, generating a contradictory

dynamic. On the one hand, leisure is no longer reduced to a therapeutic function, associated

with restoring the energy capacity of the workforce. Today, the reproduction of the workforce

acquires social characteristics that transcend family boundaries. As C. Morini recalls with

reference to the female role, social reproduction fulfils the functions of "housewife of capital"

.

The second pillar of commonfare concerns the management of the commons and the common,

management of their use as use-value in the face of any attempt at commodification.

But if we refer to the common, the picture is different, since it is from the common based on

social cooperation and general intellect that the new intangible common and the possibility of

their management emerge. The only way to manage the common is self-organisation, autonomy

and the configuration of a different valorisation regime. On this basis Marazzi defines it as "a

production of man by man"

.

The welfare of the common presupposes autonomy and independence, and therefore requires the

activation of processes of self-organisation or self-government. Although these internally

promoted practices are known to require time for experimentation and are not always

immediately productive. In this sense, it is essential to guarantee fully autonomous

The currency of the common

is therefore the expression of the welfare of the common and

defines its framework of implementation. This is the third institution of commonfare.

These three aspects, among others, highlight a perspective of overcoming the capitalist

productive logic in its most immaterial dimension of valorisation. It is possible, thanks to the

growth of the "immaterial" sectors, to really think about alternative forms of production,

compatible with environmental constraints and respectful of human nature. In short,

commonfare could favour, better than any other ad hoc economic and industrial policy, better

governance than the current anthropocene-capitolocene phase where life is at the centre of the

process of accumulation and exploitation, and therefore of valorisation.

The proposed notes aim to incorporate points of view that contribute to prefiguring our world to

come, based on trends present in the current economic situation. In the wake of the crisis of

Health opens the field of discussion on the profile of the new (?) welfare, without leaving aside

the intervention on public spending in relation to unconditional basic income. Last but not least,

social reproduction and care, as institutions promoted by the global feminist movement, appear

as crucial spaces to be incorporated in the design of new commons, public but non-state spaces,

far from any patriarchal contamination.