View source for Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare State

=Discussion=


==Welfare state and value diffusion==

Teppo Eskelinen:

"Next, I will turn to questions of how the conception of value in
community economies can resonate with the welfare state ethos.


As noted in the introduction of this book, this implies two separate
questions:

'''1. How could the welfare state protect the abilities of community economies to operate – in this case, to sustain their value form?;''' 

and

'''2. To what extent can welfare states assume the value conception of community economies?'''


The distinction between the welfare state ethos and institutions
is crucial. The welfare state as an ideal; and as a practice, should be
kept clearly separate.

As for the first, a key concept organising the discussion has
been ‘the partner state‘, as, again, mentioned in the introduction
of this book. When it comes to the value form, the partner state
assumes a new function: that is to say the state apparatus could
aim at protecting community economy ideas and practices from
capitalist expansion. As capitalism expands, it transforms ever new
aspects of social life into commodities, or functions in assisting 
capitalist value creation.

'''A further step is to ask: What aspects of the welfare state are
in line with the value model of community economies described
above? And as an accessory question: Could the existing welfare
state further assume this value model as part of its functions to
produce and deliver services?''' It is not fully clear, how the welfare
state should be interpreted in this context. To some extent, welfare
states, as we know them, lean heavily on a ‘commodified sphere‘,
and even push forward new frontiers of hypercommodification
in an attempt to finance the welfare institutions. This function
necessarily leans on the mainstream economics conception of
value in which the welfare state is seen as merely a vehicle of
redistribution. On the other hand, welfare states clearly have a
role in maintaining commons through the governance over public
goods relevant to the well-being and health of a given population,
such as health and education, as long as the governance is
sufficiently participatory. Further, welfare state institutions are (at
least ideally) human-made and democratically planned structures
which uphold a strongly egalitarian and social rights-based
conception of the distribution of services.

To some extent the community economies’ value conception
is an explicit attempt to rival the welfare capitalist model as we
know it, so the two value conceptions can be seen as somewhat
conflictual. However, as noted, the welfare state in itself is a highly
contested terrain. For these reasons it needs to be analysed, what
kinds of ideas of values are inherent in welfare state institutions,
what are possible, and what are impossible. This will enable analysing
how far can welfare states be pushed in the way of the community
economies’ value conception.

Yet what needs to be kept in mind as a critical point is, that
any activity is potentially vulnerable to commodification. This
includes several aspects of the conception of value outlined above.
The downside of the fact that ‘the economic‘ and ‘the social‘ are
not ontologically separate is, that many social and emotional 
functions can become commodities. Affects, social relations, and
generally ‘the social factor‘ can be turned into new spheres of
capitalist accumulation. So ‘value diffusion‘ should be understood
as value attached to practices which are distinctly anti-capitalist,
and the ideal welfare state as a mechanism protecting diverse value
conceptions."
(https://jyx.jyu.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/68219/1/ECEWAWS_The-conception-of-value.pdf)


==Conceptions of value within the welfare state==

Teppo Eskelinen:

"I will turn next to debating what ideas and practices associated with
the welfare state resonate with the conception of value discussed
above. In line with the distinction made in the introductory
chapter, my focus here is on the welfare state ethos, rather than
the current manifesting forms. It is so that this ethos can be seen
to entail ideas resembling the community economy approach
more than the currently existing systems of governance.

Firstly, the notion of trust is clearly part of the welfare state
tradition. Generalised social trust or general trust within a society,
which economists prefer to call ‘social capital‘ is often used to
explain the success of economies with generous welfare systems
(Halpern 2010; Whiteley 2000; World Bank 1998). While such
findings as clear correlations between trust towards strangers and
the economic conditions can indeed be shown, social capital tends
to emerge in economics as a category for everything which cannot
be explained by the traditional means of economics. This confirms
how such economics is devoid of means to develop a theory on
trust.

Sometimes the concept of ‘endogenous growth‘ is used to refer
to the totality including ‘investments‘ targeted at the social fabric
that reproduces and generates social capital: education being the
typical example. Together with low income disparities and the good
governance of basic institutions such investments foster a sense
of mutual trust and secure social cohesion. It is indeed possible
to discern the ‘virtuous circle‘ of the welfare state consisting of
an entanglement of strictly economic value and social goods as a 
single social-economic project (Hagfors et al. 2014).

Secondly, the idea of recognition can be discerned in the
welfare state tradition, even if not as an economic quality. It has
sometimes appeared in the form of the notion of ‘talent reserve‘,
which refers to the necessity of egalitarian education to avoid
socio-economic disparities leading to wasted talents in the lack
of opportunities to develop them. The tradition has also involved
some notions of ‘extended community‘, such as referring to the
welfare state as the ‘people’s home‘. Some cash transfer schemes
can be seen as mechanisms for recognising everyone’s input and
value as human beings. For instance, certain family allowances
that allow parents to take care of children at home can be seen
to come close to the recognition of the core economy. Future
universal recognition might take place through non-conditional
transfer schemes in terms of universal basic income. In essence,
one argument often made in support for universal basic income
is that it would recognise the social contribution of all individuals.
Thirdly, the reproductive is seen to depend on the productive.
Currently, this hierarchical order of value creation is quite central
to welfare state thought; being inscribed in the very notion
of the coexistence of the commodified and decommodified
spheres. While reproduction is to some extent supported, the
commodified sphere is seen as ‘buying‘ the operational space for
the decommodified sphere. In order to reflect the community
economy conception, there would have to be a recognition of the
reproductive sphere as equally or more value-creating. Fortunately,
the welfare state tradition, using the notion of ‘the virtuous circle‘,
could accommodate this kind of idea.

It appears that co-production (of public services) can be
integrated into the welfare state tradition if there is political will
to do so. Evidently, such ideas already exist within the current
discussion about organising public services, even if the wider
trend is towards the commodification of services and to economies
of scale. It is an open question, which also invites legitimate 
scepticism: To what extent will the co-production approach permeate
service provision? The answer requires transcending several binary
categorisations, such as producer/recipient, producer/product, or
professional/nonprofessional – yet there is nothing inherent in
the welfare state tradition, which would form an unsurmountable
obstacle to this.

Of course, it is a difficult matter to change welfare state
organisations, and to attempt to intermingle public functions
with community economies. The major obstacles stem from path
dependency and the deeply assumed preference for centralisation,
which have long permeated welfare state practices. Ideas like the
‘virtuous circle‘ and realising the potential from a talent pool within
a community ultimately have leaned on increased production and
hierarchical governance, even if this need not necessarily be the
case.

Because of these ingrained tendencies, there is a need to find
concrete examples of diffusing the alternative economy value
conception. One suggestion in this direction was the call to
extend the Helsinki timebank’s ‘time tax‘ into allowing municipal
tax payments. This initiative was put forward when when the
Finnish tax administration declared timebanks to be tax liable
(Eskelinen et al. 2017). Taxation on a euro equivalent value was
strongly opposed, as timebanks see their time-based currency,
materialising the ethos of everyone’s time being worth the same,
to be not convertible to capitalist money.

The proposal was to use the timebank’s platform to implement
municipal taxation in time currency. Already now, in order to
maintain its ‘infrastructure‘, the timebank collects a small levy
(in time) on each transaction. This levy could be used to pay
the municipality of Helsinki where the timebank is based, if the
municipality would open a timebank account to receive such
payments. According to the proposition, the municipal account,
in which time taxes accumulate, could be used by community-level
municipal service providers (community centres, day care centres, 
parks, etc). While in a timebank no-one is obliged to provide
a service, this municipal account would practically be used to
reward (in time currency) people for volunteering in communitylevel service provision. A further function of the ‘time tax‘ would
be to challenge the category of ‘work‘ through the official semieconomic recognition of the value of community engagement.

This suggestion serves as an example of recognising the virtues
of the welfare state while pushing the community economy
conception of value within the municipalities. More generally,
the ‘municipal tovi tax‘ would imply a) recognising timebanks as
contributing to the community; b) diffusing the commons values
into the realm of municipal services; and c) recognising the existing
internal time tax model as a legitimate system of self-governance.9
A further issue is, if in addition to transforming public service
provision this value conception could inform relations in the
sphere currently referred as to ‘the market‘. Part of the community
economy value conception is to cast the user-producer instead
of the consumer as the protagonist, which opens more diverse
economic subjectivities. While the matter is contested, some
optimistic theorists do argue that there is a general ‘move towards
commons format‘ (Bauwens and Ramos 2018) taking place, and
that this would eventually define future forms of the economy. An
often noted feature of this shift is a move from possession to access,
and while the latter does not automatically guarantee community
economy virtues to permeate the economy, it would perhaps more
easily allow this to take place. Further, some scholars expect to see
a turn into ‘ethical values‘ in the broader market, as production
tends towards the production of social goods instead of tangibles
in the current market (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2016)."
(https://jyx.jyu.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/68219/1/ECEWAWS_The-conception-of-value.pdf)

=Source=

'''* Article: Eskelinen, Teppo (2020). The conception of value in community economies. In Eskelinen, Teppo;
Hirvilammi, Tuuli; Venäläinen, Juhana (Eds.) Enacting Community Economies Within a Welfare
State. MayFly, 23-45.''' 

URL = http://mayflybooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ECEWAWS_final_ebook.pdf [https://jyx.jyu.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/68219/1/ECEWAWS_The-conception-of-value.pdf self-archived copy]

[[Category:P2P State Approaches]]
[[Category:P2P Solidarity]]