Envisioning Real Utopias
2. Four examples.
"1. 'Participatory city budgeting'
In most cities in the world that are run by some form of electred government, city budgets are put together by the technical staff of the city's chief executive--usually a mayor. If the city also has an elected council, then this bureaucratically constructed budget is probably submitted to the council for modification and ratification. The basic shape of the budget is determined by the political agenda of the mayor and other domiant political forces working with economists, engineers, city planners, and other technocrats. That is the situation in the existing world.
Now, imagine the following alternative possible world: Instead of the city budget being formulated from the top down, suppose that the city is divided into a number of neighborhoods, and each neighborhood has a participatory budget assembly. Suppose also that there are a number of city-wide budget assemblies on various themes of interest to the entire municipality--culturual festivals, for example, or public transportation. The mandate for the participatory budget assemblies is to formulate conrete budget proposals, particularly for infrastructure projects of one sort or another, and submit them to a city-wide budget council. Any resident of the city can participate in the assemblies and vote on the proposals. They function rather like New England town meetings, except that they meet regularly over several months so that there is ample opportunity for proposals to be formulated and modified before being subjected to ratification. After ratifying these neighborhood and thematic budgets, the assemblies choose delegates to participate in the city-wide budget council for a few months until a coherent, consolidated city budget is adopted.
This model is in fact the reality in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Before it was instituted in 1989 few people would have thought that a participatory budget could work in a relatively poor city of more than one and a half million people, in a country with weak democratic traditions, plagued by corruption and political patronage. It constitutes a form of direct, participatory democracy fundamentally at odds with the conventional way that social resources get allocated for alternative purposes in cities. We will discuss this case in some detail in Chapter 6."
2. " 'Wikipedia'
By mid-2009 it contained over 2.9 million English-language entries, making it the largest encyclopedia in the world."
"In 2009, roughly 65 million people accessed Wikipedia monthly." "While, as e wills ee in chapter 7, a variety of rules have evolved to deal with conflicts over content, Wikipedia has developed with an absolute minimum of monitoring and social control. And, to the suprise of most people, it is generally of fairly high quality. In a study reported in the journal 'Nature', in a selection of science topics the error rates of Wikipedia and the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' were fairly similar.[2. Jim Giles, "Special Report: Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head," 'Nature' 438 (2005), pp. 900-1.]" "In the year 2000, before Wikipedia was launched, no one--including its founders--would have thought possible what has now come to be."
"3. 'The Mondragon worker-owned cooperatives'
The prevailing wisdom among economists is that, in a market economy, employee-owned and managed firms are only viable under special conditions. They need to be small and the labor force within the firm needs to be fairly homogeneous. They may be able to fill niches in a capitalist economy, but they will not be able to produce sophisticated products with capital intensive technologies involving complex divisions of labor. High levels of complexity require hierarchical power relations and capitalist property relations.
Mondragon is a conglomerate of worker-owned cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. It was founded in the 1950s during the Franco dictatorship and is now the 7th largest business group in Spain and the largest in the Basque region with more than 40,000 worker-owner members. [3. Mondragon Annual Report 2007, p. 3.] The conglomerate is made up of some 250 separate cooperative enterprises, each of which is employee-owned-there ar eno non-worker owners--producing a very wide range of goods and services: washing machines, autoparts, banking, insurance, grocery stores. While, as we will see in chapter 7, it faces considerable challenges in the globalized market today, nevertheless the top management continues to be elected by the workers and major corporate decisions are made by a bord of directors representing the members or by a general assembly of the members.
4. 'Unconditional basic income'
The ideas of an unconditional basic income (UBI) is quite simple: Every legal resident in a country receives a monthly living stipend sufficient to live above the "poverty line." Let's call this the "no frills culturally respectable standard of living." The grant is 'unconditional' on the performance of any labor or other form of contribution, and it is 'universal'--everyone receives the grant, rich and poor alike. Grants go to individuals, not families. Parents are the custodians of underage children's grants (which may be at a lower rate than the grants for adults)."
5. "...poverty is eliminated; the labor contract becomes more nearly voluntary since everyone has the option of exit; the power relations between workers and capitalists become less unequal, since workers, in effect, have an unconditional strike fund; the possibility of people forming cooperative associations to produce goods and services to serve human needs outside of the market [inside a commons] since such activity no longer needs to provide the basic standard of living of participants.
No country has adopted an unconditonal basic income... there has been one experimental pilot program for a basic income in a very poor country, Namibia."
Chapter Outline
8. "We will begin in chapter 2 by embedding the specific problem of envisioning real utopias within a broader framework of "emancipatory social science." This framework is built around three tasks: diagnosis and critique; formulating alternatives; and elaborating strategies of transformation. These three tasks define the agendas of the three main parts of the book. Part 1 of the book (chapter 3) presents the basic diagnosis and critique of capitalism that animates the search for real utopian alternatives. Part II then discusses the problem of alternatives. Chapter 4 reviews the traditional Marxist approach to thinking about alternatives and shows why this approach is unsatisfactory. Chapter 5 elaborates an alternative strategy of analysis, anchored in the idea that socialism, as an alternative to capitalism, should be understood as a process of increasing social empowerment over state and economy. Chapters 6 and 7 explore a range of concrete proposals for institutional design in terms of this concept of social empowerment, the first of these chapters focusing on the problem of social empowerment and the state, and the second on the problem of social empowerment and the economy. Part III of the book turns to the problem of transformation--how to understand the process by which these real utopian alternatives could be brought about. Chapter 8 lays out the central elements of a theory of social transformation. Chapters 8 lays out the central elements of a theory of social transformation. Chapter 8 lays out the central elements of a theory of social transformation. Chapters 9 through 11 then examine three different broad strategies of emancipatory transformation--ruptural transformation (chapter 9), interstitial transformation (chapter 10), and symbiotic transformation (chapter 11). The book concludes with chapter 12, which distills the core arguments into seven key lessons."
Chapter 2. The Tasks of Emancipatory Social Science
10. "Emancipatory social science seeks to generate scientific knowledge relevant to the collective project of challenging various forms of human oppression. To call this a form of social 'science', rather than simply social criticism or social philosophy, recognizes the importance for this task of systematic scientific knowledge about how the world works. The word 'emancipatory' identifies a central moral purpose in the production of knowledge--the elimination of oppression and the creation of the conditions for human flourishing.[1] And the word 'social' implies the belief that human emancipation depends upon the transofrmation of the social world, not just the inner life of persons.
To fulfill this mission, any emancipatory social science faces three basic tasks: elaborating a systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists; envisioning viable alternatives; and understanding the obstacles, possibilities, and dilemmas of transformation. In different times and places one or another of these may be more pressing than others, but all are necessary for a comprehensive emancipatory theory.
The starting point for building an emancipatory social science is identifying the ways in which existing social institutions and social structures systematically impose harms on people. It is not enough to show that people are suffering or that there are enormous inequalities in the extent to which people may live flourishing lives. A scientific emancipatory theory must show that the explanation for such suffering and inequality lies in specific properties of institutions and social structures. The first task of emancipatory social science, thereforce, is the diagnosis and critique of the causal processes that generate these harms."
12.
"Social justice: 'In a socially just society, all people would have broadly equal access to the necessary material and social means to live flourishing lives.
Political justice: In a politically just society, all people would have broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions about things which affect their lives. This includes both the freedom of individuals to make choices that affect their own lives as separate persons, and their capacity to participate in collective decisions which affect their lives as members of a broader community."
15. Equal access vs. equal opportunity
"A just society is one which everyone has broadly 'equal access' to these conditions. "Equal access" is a criterion for equality that is similar to the idea of "equal opportunity." The difference is that equal opportunity would be satisfied by a fair lottery in which some people ended up with ample means to live a flourishing life and others lived in abject poverty so long as everyone had exactly the same chance of winning the lottery in the first place, whereas the "equal access" criterion is inconsistent with a lottery.
Equal access does not imply that everyone should receive the same income or have identical material standards of living, both because the "necessary means" to flourish will vary across people and because some amount of inequality is consistent with everyone still having equal access to the 'necessary' means to live flourishing lives. Nor does the radical egalitarian view imply that everyone would in fact flourish in a just society, but simply that any failures to do so would not be due to inequalities in access to the necessary social and material resources that people need in order to flourish."
23. "...when a biologist argues that in the absence of certain conditions, life is impossible, this is a claim about objective constraints. Of course both the physicist and the biologist could be wrong, but the claims themselves are about real, untransgressable limits of possibility. Claims about social limits of possibility are different from these claims about physical and biological limits, for in the social case the beliefs people hold about limits systematically affect what is possible. Developing systematic, compelling accounts of viable alternatives to existing social structures and institutions of power and privilege, therefore, is one component of the social process through which the social limits on achievable alternatives can themselves be changed."
Challenging conformity
"People are preoccupied with the tasks of daily life, with making a living, with coping with life's pains and enjoying life's pleasures. The idea that the social world coud be deliberately changed in some fundamental way that would make life significantly better for most people seems pretty far-fetched, both because it is hard to imagine some dramatically better workable alternative and because it is hard to imagine how to successfully challenge existing institutions of power and privilege in order to create such an alternative. Thus, even if one accepts the diagnosis and critique of existing institutions, the most natural response for most people is probably a fatalistic sense that there is not much that could be done to really change things."
37. Eleven Criticism of Capitalism
"
1. 'Capitalist class relations perpetuate eliminable forms of human suffering.
2. 'Capitalism blocks the universalization of conditions for expansive human flourishing.'
3. 'Capitalism perpetuates eliminable deficits in individual freedom and autonomy.'
4. 'Capitalism violates liberal egalitarian principles of social justice.
5. 'Capitalism is inefficient in certain crucial respects.'
6. 'Capitalism has a systematic bias towards consumerism.'
7. 'Capitalism is environmentally destructive.'
8. 'Capitalist commodification threatens important broadly held values.'
9. 'Capitalism, in a world of nation states, fuels militarism and imperialism.'
10. 'Capitalism corrodes community.'
11. 'Capitalism limits democracy.'
55.
Static efficiency
"...(sometimes also called "allocative efficiency") refers to the efficiency in the allocations of resources to produce different sorts of things. Capitalism promotes allocative efficiency through the standard mechanism of supply and demand in markets where prices are determined through competition and decentralized decision making. The story is familiar: if the supply of some good falls below the demand for that good, prices will be bid up, which means that the producers of that good will in general make extra profits (since they can sell their goods at higher prices without their costs per item proportionately increasing). This higher than average level of profits leads to an increase in production of the product in short supply, and thus resources are reallocated from less profitable activities. This reallocation continues until the price of the good falls as the demand is met."
Dynamic efficiency
"...refers to technological and organizational innovation that increases productivity over time. This has already been discussed in conjunction with proposition 1 above: Under the threat that other capitalist firms will innovate and lower costs (or innovate and improve quality), each firm feels the pressure to innovate in order to maintain profits. Of course, devoting time, resources, and human energy to innovation is risky, since much of this effort will not issue in useful results. But it is also risky to refrain from seeking innovation, since if other firms innovate, then in the long run a firm's viability in its market will decline. Competitive pressure thus tends to stimulate innovation, and this increases efficiency in the sense that gradually fewer inputs are needed to produce the same output."
56.
"Six sources of inefficiency in capitalism are especially important: the underproduction of public goods; the under-pricing of natural resources; negative externalities; monitoring and enforcing market contracts; pathologies of intellectual property rights; and the costs of inequality."
62.
"In 1999, healthcare administrative costs in the US amounted to 31 percent of healthcare expenditures but only 16.7 percent [using 'single payer' methods] in Canada."
82.
Income equality prevents dictatorship
"As Adam Przeworski has shown, in 100 percent of cases (so far), in no capitalist society in which the per capita income is above about $6,000 (in 1985 "purchasing power parity" dollars) has a democratic government ever turned into a dictatorship. [42. "Self-enforcing Democracy," ... 'Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)] "
ALTERNATIVES