By Vassilis Taktikos
The social economy is a necessary condition in our time for two reasons: firstly, to address social economic exclusion and poverty and secondly, to expand employment in sectors of social benefit, which, although vital, are abandoned due to lack of profitability. In the social economy, however, they can function as non-profit enterprises.
The transition from the 2nd and 3rd industrial revolution to the 4th industrial revolution creates favourable conditions for the development of the social economy as there is a contraction of wage labour and at the same time pressure for self- employment and co-operative work.
Another reason is that state interventionism has reached its limits in relation to tackling social exclusion and unemployment and needs the complementarity of the social economy.
What we can also observe is that the law of “supply and demand” in labour is not self-regulating at least as much as classical theories promise. State intervention is not always done in a rational way for the needs of society. They may of course meet the requirements of economic growth and wealth production, but they ignore the part of the population that lives in poverty.
The classical labour theory of value does not work as it is believed and needs revision. According to the thinking of three classical economists. Smith proposes labour as a measure of value, in the sense that it is a means of expressing the purchasing power of the commodity, just as money is a means of expressing the purchasing power of the commodity in its price.
In this sense, work is simply a measure of value, a “real standard” of measurement.
Ricardo argued that all production ultimately comes from the employment of labour, capital and land. That is, he argued that the value of goods is affected by the amount of capital in the form of tools used to produce them.
Marx argued that labour was the only substance that creates value and that the total working day is divided into two parts, one of which reproduces the survival of labour, the other of which provides the surplus value of capital.
Keynes, the great twentieth-century economist, observed that new technologies were boosting productivity and reducing the cost of goods and services at unprecedented rates. They also drastically reduced the man-hours required to produce goods and services. Thus he introduced the term ‘technological unemployment’. Keynes was quick to add that technological unemployment, although inconvenient in the short term, is a great blessing in the long term as it means that humanity will move to abundance and work fewer hours.
If this has not yet happened despite the huge technological development, it is because the monopolies and multinational companies that control the large capital and investment resources are directing them exclusively to highly speculative sectors for which there is no free competition and the concept of competitiveness is a myth.
The economic oligarchy is certainly not interested in the social economy. In our time its planning is facilitated as labour is not the absolute measure of wealth accumulation, while its deficit is the source of poverty. Moreover, other factors intervene to substitute paid labour with unpaid digital labour of users and consumers and beyond the value of land, intellectual property.
In conclusion, the old “classical” conceptions of work are one-dimensional. They see only one side of the hill whereas today work is a multidimensional affair. There is of course paid wage labour on the large scale, there i s self-employment, self- employment and voluntary work, which contributes to the total product of society. The internet, for example, is teeming with digital content and free software the product of unpaid work.
There are therefore sectors of the economy that tend to reduce costs in favour of the consumer, such as the IT and digital economy sectors, as well as mild forms of solar energy. There are also natural monopolies in public infrastructure guaranteed to private individuals by the state itself which arbitrarily increase costs – see fossil fuels. There are also sectors such as the food and health sectors where human labour is not being substituted by robots and have increasing needs for human labour. Sectors where labour intensity will remain as it cannot be replaced by new technologies. All this needs to be considered in a multifaceted way.
The designers of labour policy should take into account all these parameters of self- employment and unpaid work, and not only the parameter of paid employment, which they try to maintain with continuous training programmes, betting on those areas where objectively no new jobs can be created.
To tackle the problem of unemployment, social exclusion and poverty we need a new theory, a new ‘software’ for the value of work and unpaid digital work on the internet as we have another dimension of work.
The transformation now taking place at the level of the economy and labour is not like the transformation of manual labour in the past into mechanical labour, which again required labour. Now it is intellectual labour that is being transformed into artificial intelligence that not only substitutes for labour and intellectual labour by reducing the human factor within companies.
To put Adam Smith’s theory forward today to explain modern phenomena is like having Aristotle talk about another system beyond the slave ownership he knew.
The big profits of big business today do not come from the goodwill of their very well paid high paid executives, but from the unpaid self-service work of customers through the digital state of digital banks of digital big business.
That is, we have a self-management and customer service and an intangible profit mechanism that is exploited by large monopolistic corporations.
In other words, there is what we could divide it up schematically and see it as relativity in the values of work, within an economic system that has no moral constraints on the kind of activities it does or does not engage in.
It’s fine to build new casinos and toxic bonds at the same time that there are huge social needs in the social welfare sector.
Google and Facebook and other internet platforms do not earn the huge amounts of profit that they do, from the labour of their employees, but mainly from the unpaid labour of accumulating the data of their own members and consumers that they manage. In this sense the big digital technology companies do not only need employees but mainly consumers and customers who buy the services they themselves manage, the software available and the robots.
There are other symbolic and intellectual values that become commodities and conditions for the accumulation of wealth that are not defined horizontally by wage labour.
All sorts of stars of sport and art who enjoy huge salaries and financial rewards are not determined by the uniform system of wage labour and cannot in any way be justified by the logic of converting raw material into useful material products.
On the other hand, there is the concentrated cultural heritage, family investment in education, volunteerism and unpaid intellectual work on the internet, exploited sometimes by the state and sometimes by the private sector to concentrate resources and manage wealth.
Increased taxation also funds activities with a symbolic value in culture. Finally there is religious faith, either simply sports teams expressing hobbies, and followers indirectly feeding economic activity with masses of believers and volunteers with a large circle of speculation.
In these fields, the law of “supply and demand” does not succumb to material needs, but to the collective imagination and the entertainment needs that have been formed in society and become a “product” of the multiplicity on television and the internet.
This is why the culture and the propaganda that is being practiced at any given time, where the investments will be made and where new jobs will be created, is so important.
When the “product” is the spectacle and through it advertisements not the “bread” the welfare and care of the people then jobs will be continually reduced, instead jobs will increase as the social economy develops with public benefit purposes to the real needs of the people.
This meaning in the transformation of work can be better understood now with the global energy crisis.
