7.1.E. Towards a civil society-based ‘Common-ism’?
7.1.E. Towards a civil society-based ‘Common-ism’?
Following the summary by Bruno Theret of a school of thought in anthropology, human society can best be understood in the form of an “original debt". Humans owe their lives to the totality and are therefore thankful to its representatives, who eventually become real human and spiritual powers. Up to modernity, people owed their lives to the sovereign, representing the sacred order, and paid back this debt materially. This is the basis of the premodern and ‘feudal’ system of allegiance and tribute. But this symbolic process is reversed in modernity. It is now the sovereign which is indebted to the individuals, he gets his power from them, since democratic sovereignity derives now from the people. From the point of the individual, he now faces a 'differentiated society'. Family life is increasingly liberated from patriarchal domination and becomes an egalitarian alliance based on love, with a debt from the parents towards the children (instead of the other way around in premodernity). In the family, the person is integral. However, in the economic order, he 'lends' his labour power to the enterprise, who pays back this debt in form of salaries. Politically, he delegates his 'political power' to the sovereign, as embodied in democratic societies. For Bruno Theret, the existence of a differentiated domestic order is of crucial importance, as it is the domain of fraternity and reciprocity, while the market is the domain of freedom, and the political order is the domain of power. But based on the domestic order of the family, civil society is being created, based on the same principles of fraternity, solidarity, reciprocity, eventually giving rise to the great post-war compromise, in which the market was re-embedded in the social, with salaries and a juridical order to protect the social.
This for him, is the seed of a third type of society, not based on a totalitarian market (the neoliberal order of the 80s and 90s), which only protects 'freedom', and in which the market dominates everything, nor on a totalitarian state, which only protects equality. Rather we have a domestic order, which if it succeeds in expanding civil society so that it becomes dominant rather than subordinate, can develop a model of 'civil socialism'. In order to avoid becoming itself a totalitarian communautarian order, it abandons the aim of 'simple equality' for complex equality. Such a system accepts partial monopolies in certain differentiated fields, but avoids that such monopolies can be converted in other fields.
The above paragraphs are a summary of a long argumentation by Bruno Theret. They point to the material basis of a new social and political movement, which no longer seeks the takeover of state power, but rather focuses on the extension of civil society and its egalitarian values. It is no longer ‘communist’, in the Marxist sense, but rather ‘Common-ist'. It is not lead by a bureaucratic layer of functionaries which aim to be integrated in the state system, but is an autonomous growth within civil society, using processes of peer governance. This is the social movement which will find its expression in the peer to peer paradigm and is constructing a social and political alternative.