- Link to the scientific book: Ferrera M., Mirò J., Ronchi S., Social Reformism 2.0 Work, Welfare and Progressive Politics in the 21st Century, Edward Elgar Publishing (2024).
"Le altre scienze" – "The Other Sciences", in English – is our podcast with questions (and answers) on politics and society. It's in Italian.
Since this 8th episode is particularly relevant, we wanted to share it with a broader audience.
Please read below the English transcription of this podcast interview with Maurizio Ferrera, professor of Political Science at the University of Milan.
GR: Here we are. Welcome, everyone, to a new episode of "Le altre scienze," hosted by Giulia Riva, a podcast from NaspRead.eu with questions and answers from the world of social and political sciences. And welcome to Professor Maurizio Ferrera, a political science professor at the University of Milan, and author, along with two colleagues – Joan Mirò and Stefano Ronchi – of a new text for Edward Elgar Publishing titled "Social Reformism 2.0. Work, welfare and progressive politics in the Twenty-first Century." The online version is available for open access, so it's freely accessible to anyone who wants to learn more. Welcome, Professor Ferrera, first of all.
MF: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation.
GR: Your book kicks off with an image, "Il Quarto Stato" by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. It depicts the proletariat, which – after the Industrial Revolution – fights for political power: united, aware, and cohesive. Does it still exist?
MF: Well, actually, the image on the cover is a remake of the painting. An image created by a graphic designer implicitly responds to your question because it depicts a group of people representing the new proletariat, let's call it that for a moment, which is very different from the proletariat depicted about a century ago. In the remade image on the cover of our book, we see those who are now precarious workers, a very heterogeneous mix of people: some wearing ties because there's also intellectual precariousness, and many are young with bicycles because they represent delivery workers. In this image, we tried to portray, in its great heterogeneity, the mass of people – mostly young, but not only – who have become, we could say, the Fifth Estate. The Fourth Estate, that is, the old proletariat, hasn't completely disappeared. The new major transformation that has affected European societies in the last twenty years, the last thirty years, is the transition from industry to services: to what is called the knowledge society. The answer to your question is no, or rather, only partly does the old proletariat still exist. And to the extent that it exists, also thanks to welfare guarantees, it has become a part – albeit a smaller one – of the middle class.
GR: Are we still facing a society structured pyramidally, or can today's society be summarized differently?
MF: I prefer to use the image of a diamond, a rhombus. In the middle, corresponding to the horizontal angles, there is what I call the middle mass, the so-called guaranteed (including the upper tier of what remains of the industrial proletariat). Then there's an upper part that narrows more and more until it becomes very thin because it includes the so-called hyper-rich, who are a few thousand people in the world, but who are at a huge distance from the rest of society. At the bottom, the diamond narrows again, and in the lower corner, we find the members of the Fifth Estate: especially precarious workers, young people with low qualifications, who have no other resources, who don't have resources coming from the family or welfare. For example, in Scandinavian countries, where there are universalistic welfare systems that protect people regardless of their job position, precarity exists in the sense that people have contracts other than the standard indefinite ones, but these new contracts don't create a situation of extreme vulnerability or need because income can come from the welfare system. It's in countries like Italy or other Southern European countries – partly also those in the center – where welfare doesn't fulfill its function, and therefore either resources are coming from the family of origin, or one falls into a state of great vulnerability, and therefore precarity becomes a sociological condition.
GR: But is there social mobility in a diamond-shaped society?
MF: So, social mobility depends a lot on the educational system and recruitment systems, which in the labor market should be open to people with credentials and natural talent. Unfortunately, the educational system has become less and less capable of serving the function of social mobility because now having a degree is no longer a distinguishing factor; you need to have something more. You need to have done an internship, or extracurricular activities. In many countries, you need to have the right connections. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the universalization of access to education allowed a first generation of young people – also from less affluent social classes – to emancipate themselves because they were the first to obtain the necessary credentials to access better-paid, more reputable positions with greater social hierarchy, now the universalization of access has completed its course, and competition has shifted to what happens immediately after completing higher education. And there, strong distortions and new inequalities are created, so those who can afford an internship (perhaps unpaid) because they have family support or can access an internship because they have the right connections, advance. So, the new frontier for equalizing opportunities and promoting social mobility is to universalize access to these additional credentials, which have now become necessary to enter the labor market.
GR: Let's go back to your title for a moment: Social Reformism 2.0. Does it imply that we've already moved past reforms? What is the second major transformation we are undergoing?
MF: According to Karl Polanyi, one of the most brilliant authors in describing the first Great Transformation – the one that occurred between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century – great transformations have two different moments. A moment of creative destruction, we could say paraphrasing Schumpeter, and then they have a second movement of response by society to the new risks and needs that this creative destruction has produced. In the first Great Transformation, after a period of local experiments, the establishment of large national welfare schemes followed. In the case of the Second Transformation, the one we are experiencing today (in recent decades), the second movement, the response, had to face an obstacle that didn't exist in the First Great Transformation, namely the existence of old schemes that had been designed and calibrated on the needs structure of the industrial society: think of pensions, think of unemployment benefits, etc. Reformism 2.0, by necessity, must first strive to recalibrate, change, and modify existing structures to redirect part of the protection expenditure towards new categories and new needs. Think, for example, of the Italian case, of the abolition of Article 18, which rigidified the labor market: it closed the doors to defend the so-called guaranteed, but also blocked access to young people pressing to enter the labor market, who remained relegated outside this fortress without adequate guarantees. Since the resources available in the public budget are limited, to adapt welfare systems to new risks and needs, some of the bottlenecks must be reduced: think of the wave of pension reforms that have affected all countries including ours. This operation has sparked many political resistances, so this first step has been very difficult, but it's essential to be able to deploy new schemes for those categories – the Fifth Estate – that are excluded, to be recovered.
GR: In the book, there's also talk of a dilemma: the dilemma between capitalism and democracy, two forces that can together generate freedom and prosperity but can also come into tension (and thus weaken each other). Can we explore this dilemma together?
MF: Well, capitalism is based on the individual and the market, therefore on free competition inspired by profit logic. If left to itself, capitalism creates wealth and provides incentives to produce goods most efficiently. But it also produces a differentiated social structure, that is, it produces inequality: often poverty and social exclusion. Democracy – a shortcut term, because actually it should be called liberal democracy (or rather welfare-based liberal democracy, this is democracy today in Europe) – is a system that guarantees not only popular participation in the choice of representatives (thus of governments) but also a system that guarantees a series of rights in civil, political, and social spheres. Let's say it programmatically contrasts the unequal effects of the capitalist market because it establishes within society a kind of "space of equality" supported precisely by rights, which allows individuals, when placed within this space of equality, to respond to their needs and rely on resources independently of their market position. So if there is a universal healthcare system and if it works well, the satisfaction of people's health needs becomes independent of income, which in turn depends on their position in the capitalist market. These two institutions – capitalism and liberal democracy – balance each other out, they produce some mutual constraints but also mutual opportunities. But this balance is also fragile: capitalism is based on innovation, also on the famous "creative destruction," and sometimes it creates new forms of inequality that are neither foreseen nor compensated by that "space of equality" created by liberal democracy. On the other hand, the dynamics that occur within that space of equality (for example, through trade union mobilization) can distort those incentives on which the efficiency of the capitalist market depends. So, it's a dynamic balance, it needs to be continuously managed and recalibrated. When there are major transformations, maintaining the balance between democracy and capitalism can be a very difficult operation, there can be phases where a lot of inequality is created – as has been the case in all Western countries, especially in the United States but partly also in Europe, in the last thirty years – without liberal democracy being able to keep up with this change in terms of the social de-structuring of capitalist logic. We find ourselves amid a Second Great Transformation, therefore in a moment of imbalance, of difficult balancing. Especially this balance cannot be adequately restored at the level of individual nation-states anymore. With globalization, European integration, and interdependence, the capitalist market has greatly expanded its scope, and so it becomes difficult for the institutional systems of the nation-state to introduce protections. Because if protections are introduced, companies may decide to relocate, to produce elsewhere, and thus we end up losing jobs.
GR: One of the proposals in your text is to accompany the European economic and monetary union with a social union. That is, how could this social union be concretely realized?
MF: A social union should not be a centralized and federal welfare state, it should be a framework of elements that facilitate, on the one hand, the adjustment of national welfare systems to new risks – new needs – and on the other hand provide a guarantee, extraordinary assistance when countries are hit by catastrophic risks (a pandemic that required the creation of a large fund with 800 billion euros to promote the recovery and resilience of European economies). So, a welfare system that ensures national welfare states and that facilitates (through a series of coordination processes) adjustment to new changes and the famous Second transformation.
GR: Thank you to Professor Maurizio Ferrera for taking the time to speak with us. To our listeners, see you in the next episode.
