Common Good in the Age of Knowledge? Arguing for a Radical Political Economy

The recent debate on the socio-economic transformation transformation of Western countries emphasizes the crisis of the Fordist model. In order to define the current evolutionary stage of capitalism, most scholars utilize the term post-Fordism. (Lipietz, 1997 and Fumagalli, 2007) intended as “a social model in which production is no longer dominated by hierarchically organised forms of communication or by the negotiation of wealth distribution carried out by representatives of collective bodies and supervised by the State. On the contrary, the post-Fordist model is characterised by forms of flexible accumulation that can integrate and connect highly diversified modes, times and places of production” (Zanini and fadini, 2001). […] Because it calls for the absence of compulsory control over personal conduct by society interfering with economic agents doing as they like and associating on terms initially agreed upon, contemporary mainstream economics will be here referred to as the political economy of freedom. […] Refusing to take for granted the patterns of economic relations endorsed by the political economy of freedom, the approach to political economy that we shall develop here, and which we shall refer to as the political economy of reciprocity, stresses the normative aspect of the discipline, namely that relating to the ideal form of social organization. The emphasis is placed upon the normative aspect because mainstream economic doctrine fails to give an account of the true extent to which the majority of ordinary people are pitted against a socio-economic order that favours an over-privileged minority that is free to impose, more or less at will, socio-economic arrangements that undermine both autonomy and well-being of a powerful multitude.