Interview with David Casassas

Maciej Szlinder: In your book La ciudad en llamas [The City in Flames. The Validity of Adam Smith’s Commercial Republicanism], you've analysed the thought of very well-known philosopher and classical economist Adam Smith. Being a leftist what have you found interesting in this icon of free-market and contemporary liberal thinkers?

David Casassas: One thing you can do if you want to think in emancipatory terms is to try to defend your allegedly own values and goals, such as community, equality, etc. This is very important. But there has been a huge mistake within the emancipatory thinking of the twentieth century: that of offering very important values in our left-wing tradition as a present for the conservatives, fort the right. For instance, freedom has supposed to be liberal; the individual seems to be bourgeois; the private sphere seems to be something necessarily atomistic that can only be dominated by the few. I think it is very important that we go into these values and concepts and try to make and emancipatory sense of them, as they only make full sense through emancipatory lenses. If this is your goal, you should go to some classical thinkers that have been kidnapped by the liberal hermeneutics, which has given an interpretation of them that has nothing to do with the kind of world they were aspiring to. I'm thinking of political philosophers such as, for instance, Locke, Kant, Robespierre, or Adam Smith. They all have been related to the liberal tradition by liberals, and sometimes also by some Marxists for whom they were all liberal-bourgeois intellectuals. In my opinion, this is completely false. Adam Smith, as the other members of the Scottish Enlightenment did, thought about manufacture and commerce in a way that has nothing to do with the features of really-existing capitalism. Capitalism is something incompatible with free market, at least as it was defined by Smith.

So you propose some kind of strategy of re-capturing or regaining the notions that have been appropriated by the right? A kind of Trojan strategy?

You can say that, yes. The important thing is to go in depth into the works of these authors, see “the text in context”, to put it in the terms of Skinner, and realise that there was an emancipatory project of abolishing serfdom, of creating undominated social relations. In fact, all this is strongly connected with the long republican tradition, which was still very important in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Scotland, England, France, North America etc. I think it is important to recover these authors from the claws of the liberal interpretation.

One of the ways to recover Adam Smith is to fully understand and present his social ontology, that is, his vision of what a society is. What was his view of the individual, of power relations in the making of the collective and how it differs from the liberal point of view?

If you are a liberal (in the European sense of the term), you tend to think that the world is made of psychological relations. If I sign a contract with you, it is because I prefer what you have and you prefer what I have, this being the reason why we make an exchange. Sometimes the thing you have is your labour force, and what you prefer is to work for me. This is all a matter of preferences. A republican social ontology shows a world which is criss-crossed by all kinds of (materially- and culturally-based) power relations. This is very clearly present in the works of Adam Smith. In a long passage from the Wealth of Nations on the fixation of wages, Smith describes a world which is completely pervaded by strong forms of power relations, in which workers are very likely to lose a lot in an interaction that is defined by a very dissimilar access to resources. Smith uses a very nice image to show this when he says: “In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate” (WN, I, viii, 12). In other words, workers need capitalists (or income from them) right now, because the alternative is dying from starvation. On the contrary, capitalists need workers too, but only in the long-run. In this conflictive interaction, capitalists have many more opportunities to win, to end up building social relations that respect their wishes and whims and that are extremely exploitative for others. You can find this presence of power relations in the analysis of social life all along the work of Adam Smith, as well as in Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, the Levellers and the Diggers, Locke, Robespierre, Jefferson, Kant: in all the republican tradition.

But what about the probably most well-known Smithian metaphor, that of “the invisible hand”, which is used by liberals against any regulation of the market? What is the significance and place of this metaphor in Adam Smith’s theoretical construction?

First of all, it is important to know that this metaphor appears seriously only twice in his works (and once as a sort of a joke in the History on Astronomy): once in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and another time in the Wealth of Nations (1776). However, liberal hermeneutics has turned it into the allegedly main idea within Adam Smith’s thought. But let's take the metaphor seriously. What is Adam Smith exactly telling us? He is telling us that he believes in a world in which we can enjoy undominated decentralised exchanges of goods and services, where we can conduct them without having to ask at all time for the permission of the State or the leadership of guilds. When these undominated decentralised exchanges take place, societies tend to achieve higher degrees of efficiency, freedom, happiness and self-realisation – Adam Smith is one of the main theorists of alienation and self-realisation: in fact, Marx picks up Adam Smith's views when he writes his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. But the most important issue is that such decentralised exchanges need to be effectively undominated, that is, they need to be free from any power relations or bonds of dependence binding the many to the few. Thus, for these decentralised exchanges to take place in a free way that respects everyone's wishes, preferences and interests, that is truly tolerant vis-à-vis everyone’s life plans, it is extremely important that State intervenes in order to cut bonds of dependence and to create social spheres where you and I can meet and look, as Philip Pettit would put it, “at each other’s eyes”, without me having to turn my head down because it occurs that I depend on you in order to live. There is something like “the invisible hand”, but such “invisible hand” is far from being a metaphysical entity, but something to be constituted by the republican polity. You don't have any “invisible hand” without State intervention. So we can say that Adam Smith's thought has to do with the civilising project of politically instituting the invisible hand. All markets are of course politically constituted, and Adam Smith is very well-aware and clear about it all.

In one of your articles you say even a little bit more, namely, that all markets are a result of State intervention, and you add that markets have always existed. Which is then your understanding of the State?

I understand the State – or, rather, political institutions in a broad sense of the term – as normative bodies that have been created by men and women – mainly man – in order to organise social life. Of course, as Polanyi teaches us – and anthropologists like Jack Goody and others insist on that –, markets have existed since the Bronze Age, or even before. So you can't say that “the market” – in singular – is the result of capitalism or the modern State. What it seems to me is that we have always had, at least from the Bronze Age, a political and cultural “Polanyian decision” on how to exchange goods and services. If I say that all markets are politically constituted, it is because they all are the result of the sedimentation of many layers of implicit or explicit rules of what to commodify and how to commodify it. Of course, the making of these rules depends on a certain correlation of forces between social groups – between social classes. Markets are not metaphysical entities, they don't fall from heaven. They are forms – in plural – of decentralised exchanges that emanated from the introduction of certain rules. Do left-wing political forces intervene in the making of markets? Yes, of course they do, and I think they should do it still more precisely. And does the right intervene in the making of markets? Of course it does, and it does it massively! It is a myth that the right does not regulate markets. Markets are always the result of layers and layers of legislation. And when I use the term “legislation”, I do it in a broad sense of the term, as any kind of regulation, from what we can find within the civil code and the commercial law to the “moral economy of the crowd”, as E.P. Thompson put it, which, by the way, was oriented to a political constitution of inclusive markets that was finally blocked by the unfolding of capitalist modernity.

In what sense then capitalist markets are not “free markets”? You say capitalist markets block competition and other values and procedures defended by Adam Smith.

There are two things to say with regards to all this: one is related to workers and the other one is connected with Adam Smith's ideal of the “free producer”. Both things, I believe, should be central in the analysis of contemporary capitalism. The problem with capitalist markets, which Adam Smith knew very well, is that they rest on a massive process of dispossession of the vast majority, which forces the commodification of the labour force of this majority of people. Markets, including labour markets, are something that you should be able to access when you wish to access them – and when I say “you”, I mean every individual and the society as a whole. On the contrary, forced commodification is a problem from the republican point of view, that is, from Adam Smith's point of view. Another problem is that capitalism creates very harsh entry barriers: there are monopolies, oligopolies, predatory price fixation processes, dumping, advertisement, etc. These are many forms of expelling from markets potential producers that might want to access them. I think it is very important not to see market as the devil, but as a space where part of the externalisation of our capacities can occur. For this to happen, markets should be institutions that we, as a society, decide to use in certain moments, scenarios and contexts. And this includes the idea that we should also have the possibility to say “no” to markets. This is the only way we can really conceive of “free markets”. This is like in a marriage: marriage is only free and potentially civilising when you can choose to leave it – because you have the right to divorce – and then you maybe decide not to leave it, but to nourish it. But we need that right to divorce. And capitalism denies us the right to divorce from markets, from mercantile relationships. We need the real possibility of choice. I’m not saying that all spheres of social life should be decommodified; what I’m saying is that all of them should be at least decommodifiable. And capitalism denies that possibility.

One of the measures you propose to enable us to say “no” is basic income. What do you mean by that?

I think that if we try to present basic income itself as a sufficient way to guarantee social power to leave markets, to decommodify the labour force, we would make a mistake. But we can present it as a part of a project of contradicting the dispossessing nature of capitalism by helping create, as a right, a set of material and immaterial resources that could guarantee an existence in dignity. And this right to a decent existence, which is guaranteed by other rights to related things such as health care, education, care policies, etc., would give you the kind of bargaining power that you lose when you are dispossessed. Basic income plays a crucial role in this context because it can help consolidate sets of resources that could give us this bargaining power to say “no” to what we don't want to do. It is a capacity to oppose social relations that shouldn’t be linked to the idea of building an atomised world, without social relations, but to that of building an interdependence – which is unavoidable – that is truly based on autonomous decisions by all parties. In any case, basic income shouldn't be a “unique” measure, but a part of a package of measures. But because of its unconditional, universal and individual nature, it is an excellent example of the kind of counter-dispossession policies we should endeavour in present times.

How this possibility of having an exit option and this rise in bargaining position that basic income could help to give us is related to the amount of such basic income?

This is very relevant. Basic income only works when this set of resources allows you to cover your basic needs. A partial basic income could be important in terms of fostering your well-being, but not in terms of fostering your freedom. Having 200 euros every month unconditionally allows you to buy some food or books, but if you want to be effectively free, what you need to have is a basic income at the level of the poverty line and a package of measures guaranteeing that you have your basic needs fully covered. If you are not above this threshold, the freedom-enhancing potential of these measures vanishes. Without that, you lack the exit option and the bargaining position deriving from it, and therefore you don't have the kind of republican, effective freedom that we need. It is important that all societies interpret what this threshold is and how to achieve it for all.

How this republican freedom-based defence of basic income differs from other freedom-based justifications of this proposal, such as libertarian ones like Philippe Van Parijs’ “real libertarian” scheme?

Philippe Van Parijs’ views on basic income – and here I’m referring to Real Freedom for All – are very interesting from an abstract point of view, but they are a little bit vague in sociological terms, when it comes to assess the material conditions for this kind of freedom to emerge. Having “the capacity to do whatever you might want to do” – which is Van Parijs’ idea of freedom – is something that I buy, but I think we need to go down in terms of levels of abstraction and analyse the economic institutions that really promote this capacity. The republican tradition gives you this kind of sociological awareness on these institutions. Related to this, another thing that is absent in Van Parijs' approach is the importance of bargaining power, which is not mentioned in Real Freedom for All. All this is a problem of the social ontology you operate with. If you still operate with a social ontology that is related to neoclassical economics – which, in some way, is what happens when you embrace Rawlsian schemes –, you don't need to think about power relations. But if you acknowledge that world is criss-crossed by many forms of power relations – which is what republicanism does –, you should get into deep institutional analysis. In general terms, libertarian thinking is far from these ontological concerns on bonds of dependence and power relations, which is highly problematic, especially in the context of contemporary capitalism. Another problem within (right- and left-)libertarians is that they “just” think that the world was owned in common, then there was an unfair appropriation of resources that left many people without them, and they add that this needs to be repaired. In practical terms, the (left-)libertarian “reparation rationale” and the republican rationale of ex-ante empowering people might tend to converge, but things can work in a very different way as well. If this is only a question of reparations, you might forget plenty of situations in which we can't identify that there was a concrete violation of property rights, and therefore we wouldn’t bother ex-ante distributing to everybody the kind of packages of measures I was mentioning before. I think that the pre-distribution debate that is nowadays emerging thanks to the work of philosophers such as Stuart White or Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson, which is related in many ways to the republican approach to freedom, is broader and aims at guaranteeing that all of us effectively access these sets of resources. But if you limit yourself to a “mere” reparation of the violation of property rights, you might end up leaving people without the kind of socio-economic empowerment I'm pleading for.

In one of your articles you use the notion of “political economy of democracy”. What is that?

Only liberals – again: in the European political sense of the term – can deny that democracy requires material conditions. As stated by the bulk of the republican tradition, freedom and democracy can only appear when certain social and economic conditions have been implemented in order to help us co-determine how we live in common. There's a long history of republican thinking about freedom and democracy, although it must be added that not all republicans have been democrats. According to the republican point of view, democracy is connected to collective projects of self-determination, and these can only occur when all of us enjoy real voice and the capacity to codetermine social relations. And his requires that all of us be equally empowered so that all of us can enjoy material independence. Otherwise, a really democratic polity cannot emerge.

And what do you mean by saying that republicanism is, in itself, true political economy?

I'm very much worried about romanticised approaches to republicanism as a tradition. You can find this in the nineteenth century, as well as in the works of Hannah Arendt and, more recently, authors such as Michael Sandel or Richard Dagger. In some way, they all say that republicanism has to do with very much appreciating the public sphere, with fostering warm ties with others, with promoting a true vita activa, as Hannah Arendt would say, without considering the material conditions of all these projects. This is highly problematic for conceptual reasons but also from an hermeneutical point of view. If you go to the classics of republicanism, from Aristotle to Marx, you very easily realise that the bulk of this tradition defines “civil society” as a normative concept that has to do with creating a public space where we all have been empowered in order to build an undominated interdependence. Republicanism does two things: the first one is a descriptive analysis of power relations – with their material and cultural dimensions – and the second one is a definition of a normative endeavour suggesting measures of many sorts in order to eradicate bonds of dependence and promote undominated social relations. To the extent that republicanism does this, we can't limit ourselves to say that it is a vague political theory claiming that the political realm is important, but we must underline it is a very definite political economy recognising the presence of bonds of dependence – and showing their exact form – and suggesting ways of getting rid of them. Classical political economists, from Adam Smith to Ricardo and Marx, did exactly those two things.

Which measures does republicanism, as a political economy, suggest?

Firstly, there's need for an “economic floor” – hence basic income and the packages of measures such as those presented in Guy Standing’s Precariat's Charter. What I appreciate from this idea of a charter of rights is that it can allow us to rethink welfarist measures in a fully universal and unconditional way. Secondly, there's need for an “economic ceiling”. Even if you have been ex-ante empowered with some basic and relevant resources, when you try to enter the economic sphere as a “free producer”, as Adam Smith would put it, it occurs that there are some powerful actors – strong oligarchs or “economic monarchs”, to put it in Roosevelt’s terms – preventing you from doing so. When this is the case, you have a big problem in terms of republican freedom. We may want to develop a project as free cooperative producers, but if we can't access the space where production, distribution and exchange occurs because there are three or four guys controlling it and turning it into a “select” club of economic vampires, we lose our republican freedom. Therefore, thinking about freedom and democracy requires also conceiving of an economic ceiling. To put it in simple terms, we can say that there are two strategies to achieve that. First, there is the “Rousseaunian strategy”, according to which we should directly and actively cut inequalities by, for instance, reducing top salaries – hence Sam Pizzigati’s work, for instance. The second strategy is the “Rooseveltian” one, which is connected to the progressive side of the North American self-understanding. It is a strategy according to which we may accept the presence of people with a lot of money and other resources, but we must politically restrict their opportunities set to avoid those freedom-limiting practices that seek to expel the vast majority of the population from the social and economic spheres where we expect to operate as free agents.

Which of these two approaches is, in your opinion, the best one?

I don't want to act as a “creationist”, as Toni Domènech used to say, and decide ex nihilo what each and every particular society needs to do. But I have the Rousseaunian intuition that an ex-ante measure avoiding the emergence of huge inequalities is preferable to an ex-post restrain of the opportunities sets of the most powerful economic actors. At the same time, I should also add that I tend to appreciate diverse societies where diverse people with diverse life plans end up with very different material outcomes. This is not necessarily unfair or unjust. If we take Marx’s criterion to make distributive arrangements within a communist society – “from each one according to their ability, to each one according to their need” –, we will immediately realise that this can lead us to a world with people with unequal outcomes. So the problem is not that there are economic inequalities, but that they are so big that they prevent most of us from developing our own life plans.

So we have and economic floor, certain economic ceilings, and...

In order to make both the economic floor and the economic ceiling possible – and to make sure that they both serve the republican goal of creating social positions of invulnerability for all –, we need the third component of our republican political economy: we need democratically controlled public intervention. This is very important within the republican tradition and within its contemporary heir – namely, the socialist tradition. We shouldn't delegate these tasks of imposing economic floors and ceilings to alleged experts that will make decisions without our collective supervision. Rather, our task is to inhabit all those institutional spheres – the State, self-managed spaces, etc. – where these arrangements are made. We need to control them all and, in the end, co-determine the making of such arrangements. These institutions should be our institutions. This is crucial: in the end, we are constructing complex apparatuses that have a very important task to do in terms of the enhancement of our freedom, so we should make sure that they really work for all of us. And the problem is that under capitalism – especially under neoliberal forms of capitalism – they work for the few. So the bottom line of all this is that of course we need a vita activa within the agora, as Hannah Arendt would put it, but we need it not in abstract terms or for voluntarist reasons, but for instrumental reasons: the ultimate goal is to make sure that these institutions guarantee the material conditions of freedom – and I fear Arendt’s “republicanism” was very much against this project. In sum, if we have those three things – the floor, the ceiling, and the democratic control over the ways institutions implement them –, we count on the necessary conditions for people to live freer lives, which, by the way, entails the collective control over the means of production – these means broadly understood.

But if republican freedom is something to be guaranteed individually and is based on “property”, how do you reconcile it with this idea of a “collective” control over the means of production? Do you wish to abolish the private property?

Not at all. I think private property is something we should also reconquest from the right, which has a very narrow “absolute” vision of it. I don't think that the fact that you create a productive space of your own – in this sense, a “private” space – is necessarily problematic. It can be a huge problem, on the one hand, if it is related to the dispossessing processes that force all of us to do wage-earning work, and, on the other hand, if it has the do with the capacity of certain powerful actors to limit our access to the economic space as free producers. In fact, this is what is nowadays happening. Current forms of interdependence are ruled by the wishes and interests of the few. But what about universalising the running of such interdependence so that we all can decide which (im)material goods and services we wish to produce with others, and how? How to create (re)productive spaces that respect everyone's freedom and autonomy? Unconditional measures such as basic income can help a lot. For instance, they can help us decommodify the labour force – as Aristotle and Marx said and should be recalled once again, wage-earning work is incompatible with freedom – and create productive spaces, private or common, in which we can collectively control the many ways in which they operate. I think this is a contemporary way of interpreting the old motto of the “collective control over the means of production”. “Collective control” means democracy: we all should be entitled to participate in the decision-making processes on what to produce, on how to make it, on how to allocate the tasks – avoiding social, sexual, and racial division of labour –, on how to distribute it all, etc. And the idea of certain sets of “means of production” has to do with the presence of all those material and immaterial assets that we can use in these productive processes. I know I’m talking in abstract terms, but I want to leave it open for different societal interpretations about proper institutions and procedures to achieve these goals.

Which contemporary movements are fighting for the goals you present?

I think that many movements that have appeared after the rupture of the post-World War II social deal are claiming that we need to recover what the left had renounced to around 1945, with these deal, namely: the control over production – and reproduction, we must add. If you take a look at the 15-M Movement, at Occupy, at Nuit debout and many other social movements in Europe or Latin America – the Chilean student movement is also a very good example of this –, you’ll find that they are all concerned about collective economic sovereignty. And these movements try to overcome the neoliberal turn of capitalism by developing projects of social, cooperative, and solidary forms of organizing social and economic life. But they do not limit themselves to the task of fostering projects within the domain of self-management; they also claim that there is need to empower all individuals with unconditional public policies – the language of rights is very much present within these political environments – in order to help all of them make many kinds of undominated decisions within such social and economic life, which means that these movements are very keen to explore the synergies between public policy and self-management. To go no further, this is the reason why these movements ask for true “citizen rescue plans” providing everyone with an equal footing to conceive of and put into practice many projects of our own, from urban vegetable gardens to cooperative housing, caregivers support groups, and self-managed forms of production and distribution, among many others.

Are these demands related to the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state and the current crisis of such neoliberal form of capitalism?

The post-World War II social consensus was an arrangement for the Western world in which we, the working population, were guaranteed some economic security, in return of our explicitly renouncing to the control over production. Some people – some far and autonomous lefts, etc. –, always said that this was too much of a renunciation, that this was a huge mistake. There’s no time here to dwell into this, but the fact is that we took part in this agreement. On the other side of the table, capitalists agreed on something they really didn't want, which is the guarantee for all of us of certain degrees of social and economic security – hence welfare-state measures. I think this was a very imperfect arrangement, but still it has reformed capitalism for many years and decades. What we are witnessing today is very well explained in an article Marco Revelli, the Italian social theorist, wrote in 2010. The title of this article is really telling: “The first infuriate generation of post-growth”. In this text, Revelli mentions a painting on a wall at the Polytechnic Institute of Turin that reads as follows: “You've taken too much from us; now we again want it all.” The bottom line of the painting is that we had renounced to the most important goal within contemporary emancipatory traditions: the control over production. And then it occurs that neoliberalism constitutes a unilateral move of the oligarchy breaking the deal in question – as we all know, social and economic security for all is no longer possible under the current form of capitalism. Therefore, it is completely legitimate that we do not limit ourselves to the act of defending those partial goals that were part of the former agreement, but that we go back to the original scenario, which is the point in which we were still aiming at controlling production. In this vein, I think basic income, the package of measures accompanying it, the ceiling and the democratic control over these institutions we have been discussing constitute a very clear strategy aiming at putting back to the agenda, and using 21^st Century terms, the old project of collective control over production – and reproduction, we must add. Of course, the crisis of capitalism and the oligarchic attempt at responding to it again in neoliberal terms have helped people understand that the old welfare consensus won’t be politically possible any more – the rentier oligarchy is no longer interested in it –, which has urged many social actors to seek for new rebel ways not only to achieve security, but also to (try to) recover higher degrees of freedom and economic sovereignty.

Your vision of “our” struggle for basic income against “them” – the economic oligarchy – stands in contradiction with the strategy of convincing “them”. Many proponents of basic income claim that it can be good for “both sides” – hence the use, for instance, of Milton Friedman's arguments for a negative income tax while discussing basic income with Friedman’s neoliberal heirs. Can we say that your position in this point is different from, for instance, Guy Standing's attempt at convincing “them” all too?

I think this is all very contextual. Standing's strategy might make sense in some societies in certain moments. And I know that this view is widespread in the basic income movement all over the world – many people have embraced it. But I think this is very dangerous. There is need to think which basic income society we are interested in. I really think some models of a neoliberal basic income society constitute a real dystopia. For instance, when the goal is to have a basic income for workers to enjoy higher degrees of security – which is good – while capitalists pay lower salaries – which means that an important part of salaries are paid by tax-payers –; when the objective is to have a basic income to dismantle the welfare state; in none of these cases there is an inter-class handshake or some kind of a win-win scenario. I really think this approach has a very limited political and social ambition. For me and for other people like Daniel Raventós, Antoni Domènech and other members of SinPermiso – and for Guy Standing himself in many texts and talks, and for Louise Haagh and Michael Krätke, and for Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght in some passages of their new book, and for Erik Olin Wright and Carole Pateman, and for the basic income supporters within German left-wing party Die Linke, etc. –, the aim is to create a world in which you can decommodify the labour force. This does not necessarily mean that you’ll have to become an individual or collective entrepreneur. It “just” leads you to a more diverse world with many other economic options and projects. And I do not think this will help us convince the capitalist oligarchy. I do not think they will easily agree with providing all of us with very relevant levels of bargaining power to determine the share of the product and to decide what and how we produce or whether we do it with/for them or on our own. When the goal is placing basic income within a broader project of an essentially anti-capitalist nature, I very much doubt capitalists will be happy. This is why it is much more important that we build a coalition with all those who are really aiming at contradicting the dispossessing nature of capitalism, and then see what role basic income and other specific measures can play within this project. I think this is better than trying to build a coalition with every single basic income advocate: this might lead us to a world where we had a basic income but not the kind of “social power” republican and socialist proponents of basic income seek to achieve for all of us to avoid wage-earning work – if we wish that – and for all of us to easily enter into markets as free producers or to develop many forms of self-managed cooperative economic environments. I think Guy Standing is a really inspiring progressive thinker, but I do not agree with this particular idea of a handshake with those that want all of us to remain obliged to sell our labour force to them.

The interviewer received funding for preparation of PhD thesis from Polish National Science Centre as part of PhD scholarship decision DEC-2015/16/T/HS1/00295.