"We must deny that the dictatorship of no alternatives is forever". Roberto Unger pushes for “an experimental and imaginative” Britain. But starting at what level?
Our button badge on the front of the site contains a quote from the Brazilian philosopher-statesman Roberto Unger. It still works for us: “How can we live in such a way that we die only once?” Which we’ve always compared to Bob Dylan (“he not busy being born is busy dying”) and Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality (as opposed to mortality):
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, 'natural' ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new people and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. [From “The Human Condition”]
Well, we’re idealists. So it was very intriguing to see that Unger had been invited to deliver a “State of the British nation” essay for the New Statesman last week. In one body, Unger preaches the message of an experimental, deeply innovative society, trying out initiatives relentlessly - and a state that respects and response to such a society of free creation and invention.
Some dream, some might say. But it’s good to dwell with Unger’s optimism that the top-down and the grass roots can dynamise each other, for a while. The choice quote is below, beginning from the Brexit vote:
The struggle over Britain’s departure from the EU revealed the chief division in the country. The losers – the victims of the economic upheavals of recent decades, and the insulated, the well-heeled but disengaged or retired denizens of the south-east – voted in the majority to leave. The winners – who hold favoured places in the economy, and the ambitious, who vie for such places – voted, for the most part, to remain. They did so with the support of those who regard themselves, in the academy and the media, as guardians of respectable opinion.
A national alternative requires a reshuffling of this polarity: that the losers and the ambitious come to be allied against the winners and the insulated. As for respectable opinion, the best that can be hoped for is to divide it. The making of such a coalition sets a daunting task because it involves assumptions, anxieties and aspirations as well as class interests. It is, however, the kind of task implied by any attempt, in politics, to make the necessary possible.
Like the liberals and socialists of the 19th century, we have reason to recognise the primacy of structural, and above all institutional alternatives in politics. We cannot, for example, deal with economic stagnation and inequality effectively without narrowing the gap between the advanced and the backward parts of the economy. After-the-fact redistribution through taxation and social spending would have to be enormous to redress the inequalities that result from that division. To contain these inequalities, we need to reshape both our economic and our political institutions.
Unlike the classical liberals and socialists of the 19th century, however, we understand that we must resist entrusting our futures to rigid institutional blueprints. We must imagine and achieve structural alternatives without succumbing to structural dogmatism. Thus one of the most important attributes our institutions should possess is the capacity to facilitate their own revision in the light of experience. As they create opportunities for continuous innovation, they weaken the dependence of change on crisis, and the influence of the past on the present and future. These commitments contradict a prominent strand in contemporary British and European culture.
After the misadventures and calamities of the 20th century, the British people have come to believe that it is natural for human life to be small, except when war and emergency call for sacrificial action and release us from the bonds of belittlement. For contemporary Britons to put experiment and imagination at the core of their economic and constitutional arrangements is for them to reject this belief and to deny that the dictatorship of no alternatives is forever.
It is to act on the idea that the overriding aim of progressive politics is to empower ordinary men and women, so that we may become bigger together, and that the preferred way of achieving this goal is change in the institutions that define the market economy, democratic politics and independent civil society. While almost always piecemeal and gradual in its method, such change can nonetheless become revolutionary in its outcome.
More here. What’s almost as interesting as Unger’s essay are the responses the NS has assembled around it. For example, Andy Haldane’s call for a “community capitalism”:
The UK’s skills, productivity and regional problems are closely related to each other. Despite its importance to most people’s lives, the foundational economy has been hiding in plain sight and has remained out of policymakers’ minds. Only at times of national crisis, such as the pandemic, is the true value of the foundational economy, and its key workers, clear for all to see and applaud. Yet historically, such applause has been temporary.
Unger’s policy prescription for these deep-rooted problems is an institutional reformation of the UK, national in scope and ambition, but local in design and execution. This reformation would be neither state-managed nor subcontracted to the private sector. It would instead be driven by locally governed institutions, run by and on behalf of local communities and citizens. Neither of the market or the state, this might be called “community capitalism”.
Unger proposes localised hubs for sharing technology experience and disseminating innovation best-practice among companies, enabling local businesses to adopt and adapt. Be the Business, a not-for-profit movement launched in 2017, is working with local businesses across the UK to do just that.
More here. John Gray points out in his response that
Unger’s project neglects crucial political facts, the most important of which is that Britain is not a nation-state but a multinational polity. He argues, with much logic, that what is needed is not federalism but a combination of more radical devolution and centralised initiative. The state capitalism that developed from the financial crisis of 2008, which has become deeply entrenched in the course of the pandemic, requires continuous government intervention in the economy alongside wide scope for decentralised initiative. A mix of this kind is possible only after a hard Brexit, but it also requires that the forces of nationalism do not pull the British state apart – a realistic possibility.
More here. From our own cosmo-local, neo-anarchist perspective, the point is to strengthen “decentralised initiative”, “radical devolution”, or in Unger’s words, “putting experiment and imagination at the core” of power structures of economy and polity.
Yet there is still a bit too much of the “state” in Unger as philosopher-statesman. His invitation to “progressives” to somehow combine new standards from the centre, and an unpredictable energy coming from “independent civil society”, feels like it has no advocates at the moment. (Though as our editorial will outline tomorrow, the current Tory government are in a good place, and perhaps aware enough, to be able to seize this kind of political big story - though on their own terms).
At A/UK, we are focussing on independent, self-determining and autonomous voices and forces, connecting local and global through our own “experiments” in civic and economic structures (the CANs of legend). Let the bigger UK national picture evolve and emerge: the irrepressible Unger has laid out a compelling anticipation of how things might come together.