David Macfarlane and Glenda Daniels
This week South Africa celebrated the 46th anniversary of the Freedom Charter a nostalgic reflection on a utopian moment in our history. Considering the numerous ways in which we now fall short of this ideal, it is timely to ask what possibilities utopian thinking still holds for achieving social equality.
If everyone worldwide received a livable monthly grant from the state, and participated directly in government decisions, this would be a fairer world and injustice would evaporate.
Sounds like a utopia? It is indeed. But utopian visions are necessary even if they are not perfectly implemented, says American academic Erik Olin Wright, who presented a paper, Envisioning Real Utopias, at Wits University’s Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences last week.
Real utopias formulate “ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity”, Wright argues, and should be fundamental to a worldwide left project. The alternatives are cynicism about the very possibilities of social change, whole-scale surrender to capitalism and decreasing state intervention. “We now live in a world in which traditional radical visions of social change are often mocked rather than taken seriously,” says Wright, professor of humanities at Wisconsin University and the director of the Real Utopias Project.
He considers in practical terms the feasi- bilities of a “universal basic income” and “empowered participatory democracy” just two examples of what real utopian thinking can achieve. For cynics, liberals and other supporters of unfettered markets, these ideas are pie-in-the-sky. For Wright, they are essential to create the conditions for progressive social change.
A universal basic income means that “every citizen receives a monthly stipend sufficient to live at a culturally defined respectable standard of living, say 125% of the poverty line. The grant is unconditional on the performance of any labour and it is universal everyone receives the grant as a matter of citizenship right.”
The advantages are numerous. You work if you want to, which “reduces one of the central coercive aspects of capitalism … Capitalism between consenting adults is much less objectionable than capitalism between employers and workers with little choice but to work for wages,” he says.
Greater egalitarianism would be promoted in that “if workers are more able to refuse employment, wages for crummy work are likely to increase relative to wages for highly enjoyable work”. The system would also counteract some traditional inegalitarian practices. Normally unpaid labour, such as housework, would be recognised as socially valuable, for example.
Wright doesn’t think too many people would become couch potatoes and parasitic, leading to a problem of labour supply: “Most people actually want to live their lives contributing towards the good of others.”
Also, welfare, family allowances, unemployment insurance and old age pensions would be eliminated, so that the costs of the grant “would not be extraordinary”.
His second example of a real utopia focuses on democracy. For him the idea of democracy provides an instance of utopian thinking: “What an extraordinary, radical, egalitarian ideal: power should be vested in the people, not a hierarchy, not a king, not an elite, but the people.”
But Wright argues both that democracy is in trouble and that the left’s defence of democracy has been weakening: “Although the left has not come to accept unregulated markets and a minimal state as morally justifiable or economically efficient, it is much less certain that the institutions it defended in the past can achieve social justice and economic well-being in the present.”
Many have settled for the idea of representative democracy as the best humanity can achieve: we elect decision-makers in elections, and can voice our opinions. But that’s about it: the people are not directly involved in making decisions that vitally affect themselves.
As a result, “deregulation, privatisation, reduction of social services and curtailments of state spending have been the watchwords, rather than participation, greater responsiveness … and better forms of democratic state intervention”.
But if the problem has more to do with the specific designs of our political institutions than with the tasks they face, then perhaps there is an alternative. Wright calls it “empowered participatory governance” a system whereby ordinary citizens get involved directly in the problem-solving arenas where public decisions are made.
Wright acknowledges barriers to achieving this ideal: massive social divisions such as those of wealth and race make it difficult even to imagine processes of genuinely consensual policy-making.
Even so, Wright finds evidence that empowered participatory governance could be more than a pipe dream. City government in Porto Alegre, Brazil, provides one example. A left-wing party controls the mayor’s office, but not the city council. So the party “faced the problem that their budget priorities massive redirection of city spending to the most disadvantaged parts of the city were likely to get mucked up by the city council”.
The solution was “a kind of dual power idea”. The city is divided into regions, each of which has a budget assembly, which any resident of the region can attend. A process involving delegates elected by the people, and hearing residents’ own needs, produces a budget that the mayor then approves.
Wright believes this process is a serious experiment in “deepening participatory democracy”. Citizens have attended meetings at “high and sustained” levels. There has been a massive shift in spending towards the poorest parts of the city yet tax compliance has increased. That is, the rich and the middle class appear more willing to pay taxes when they see their money isn’t going to politicians and contractors. And the right has been unable to demonstrate any corruption in the process despite “considerable efforts”, Wright observes.
Clearly, envisaging utopias runs into problems. Chairing the seminar at which Wright spoke, Professor Tom Lodge asked what kind of state could implement both an income grant and participatory democracy: the two seem to require radically different states a larger state bureaucracy in the case of the latter, for instance.
Even so, utopian thinking, for Wright, “can inform our practical tasks of muddling through in a world of imperfect conditions for social change”.
And South Africa is certainly muddling: the government’s macro-economic policies for instance continue to appal the left. Time for a return to the Freedom Charter?