On Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias – Diane Coyle

“Most “real utopias” mentioned (participatory city budget of Porto Alegre, Wikipedia, Mondragon co-ops, Slow Food, and Fair Trade) are Western in origin.”

Sampling bias?

I find this review to be as vapid as apparently the reviewer does Wright’s book. I’ll just focus on the lowlights:

“The empiricist in me says that it’s all a matter of degree or context. Capitalism has also caused huge increases in prosperity, and declining inequality, at various stages of its history.”

The empiricist in you might also note that this was not caused by “capitalism” but rather by organized labor forcing economic gains to be distributed in a more egalitarian manner. The Keynsian bargain that resulted has been blown to pieces.

“So are there better examples of ‘real utopias’, or rather idealism put into practice? Yes. From the anti-globalisation movement, Slow Food and Fair Trade.”

Slow Food is a culture exercise by those who have the time and money to be gastronomes. It is specifically a romantic project, not a utopian one, trying to reclaim some lost past when terroir mattered. Fair Trade exoticizes Third World peasants in order to get American consumers to spend extra on chocolate. Its benefits only accrue to those lucky enough to have land or find work on such farms (oh, and the intermediary). It does nothing for the vast majority of those made landless and proletarian by the unholy combination of land reform, land grabs, and free trade agreements. In sum, Fair Trade is a valorization scheme, not a utopian project.

“An interesting reflection on real utopias would look at why practical idealism is hard to scale up or replicate”

No, this would be boring (unless you’re a good storyteller). The answer is always that “scaling up” means forming some sort of counter-hegemony that threatens those who are enriched by the status quo.

“So are there better examples of ‘real utopias’, or rather idealism put into practice? Yes. From the anti-globalisation movement”

That strikes me as very strange indeed. The globalisation of the last 30-40 years has at the very least coincided with if not caused the greatest reduction in absolute poverty in the history of the species. I would argue caused. Looking back at the verbiage spewed out by Paul Ehrlich in the 60s and 70s as an example, the thought that billions would rise up out of destitution into the petit bourgeois lifestyle of three squares a day would have been regarded as pretty utopian.

Yet protesting against this is regarded as utopian now?

Also….` The globalisation of the last 30-40 years ….Why not globalisation since 1945? Was no one raised out of poverty in the UK or the US after 1945? Obviously some people were, but you chose that time period because between 1945 and (very roughly) 1979 in the UK and the US we still had a social democratic framework….nationalised industries (in Western Europe), a welfare state, the remains of the New Deal and the Johnsonian War on Poverty in the US etc. etc. Remember average growth FELL in those countries after the Thatcherite-Reaganite `revolution`.

As for the fall in global poverty as the Econonomist tells us `The new estimates show that in 2008, the first year of the finance-and-food crisis, both the number and share of the population living on less than $1.25 a day (at 2005 prices, the most commonly accepted poverty line) was falling in every part of the world.`

BUT….

`A lot of the credit goes to China. Half the long-term rate of decline is attributable to that country alone, which has taken 660m people out of poverty since 1981….. If you exclude China, the numbers are less impressive. Of the roughly 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 a day in 2008, 1.1 billion of them were outside China. That number barely budged between 1981 and 2008, an outcome that Martin Ravallion, the director of the bank’s Development Research Group, calls “sobering”.`

Now. Two points.

1. In the gospel according to Jung Chang Mao Zedong was the most evillest man who ever evilled his way out of Evil Town and spent his whole life writing `Evil Things To Do Today` in his little red `Book of Evil`. But as Will Hutton (no socialist) writes `The negative side of the Maoist balance sheet is well-known: mass murder, famine, injustice, and economic waste. But there are less well-known positives. Industrial output climbed 13-fold, albeit from a tiny base. The rail network doubled. Half of Chinese land became irrigated. There was a dramatic lowering of illiteracy. Near universal healthcare was established. Life expectancy rose; and despite Mao’s appetite for imperial-style concubines, women were given the same right to petition for divorce and education as men. Their position was transformed.

And if Mao created an economy that while desperate for reform at least existed to be reformed – a statement that could not be made in the hyperinflation of 1949 when the Communists took over – he also bequeathed an ideological legacy that would permit reform. `

Etc. etc. etc.

2. Since 1981 of course the Chinese have ignored the `Washington Consensus` and have instead pursued protectionism and kept their industries under state control which is of course a good thing as it protects their growing industries from unfair competition. American led globalisation leads to poverty. no `ifs` `ands` or `buts`.

As the Economist also goes on to argue `All this is good news. It reflects the long-run success of China, the impact of social programmes in Latin America and recent economic growth in Africa.` By “socıal programmes” of course the Economıst means Chavism and other socialist programmes although it can`t quite bring itself to name him. The improvement in Africas fortunes comes mainly from an end in Russian and American meddling in their affairs-….in the last few decades the US Empire has been bogged down in the middle east and has lacked the firepower to cause havoc elsewhere.

Finally the real silence is not about the reduction of poverty in India and China. The real silence is about how they got poor in the first place.

http://www.economist.com/node/21548963

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/jan/18/comment.china

JQ: ” the thing to do is inject a little socialism where possible. So that amounts to incremental, pragmatic improvements in the direction of a fairer society. Who could disagree?”

In the context of society in the USA, or maybe even Australia, very few. In a wider context, I think you provide a good example of something I mentioned on an earlier thread: the path towards utopia in the US is not necessarily the path towards utopia in other countries, or towards a world-wide utopia. At some places and times, improvements in the direction of a fairer society have involved a considerable reduction in socialism.

“Of course markets sometimes fail, but state or collective interventions fail in the same situations and for the same reasons – information asymmetries, principal-agent problems, pure externalities and so on.”
This is based on the false distinction between capitalism and the state, when the particular state that I assume you are referring to is the capitalist state.

@ #9

Compare the precipitous drop in strikes in the last 30 years with the simultaneous increase in income inequality. I use strikes as a proxy for the activity of organized labor. We could use other metrics, like percentage of labor force belonging to a union, which has had a similar bottoming out.

Work stoppages data:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkstp.t01.htm

Income inequality:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/24/us/politics/income-stagnation-and-inequality.html?_r=0

Corporate profits:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=CP

In addition, the idea that increased labor productivity leads to higher wages has been definitively disproved by the experience of the last 30 years.

http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/

Indeed, there is no reason to think that being more productive on the macro level leads to a macro response in terms of higher wages. Rather, we’d expect (in a market “freed” of interference by organized labor) that more productive workers means you need less workers which increases the size of the unemployed labor pool, driving down the price of labor.

I think Wikipedia is a pretty good example. For some reason, Internet projects often have a strong utopian flavour to them. While many of these attempted techno-Utopias fail disastrously, Wikipedia is a partial success: it’s not so good on controversial topics, and often the writing quality is mediocre, but on a non-controversial topic, it’s usually mostly right. That a project as utopian as Wikipedia worked at all is somewhat remarkable, and deserving of attention.

Linux probably also counts a sucessful utopian project in the technological domain; and furthermore, it’s one that offers an alternative to the usual capitalist way of doing things. (Definitely works well when it’s geeks producing software for other geeks… less clear how far its model can be extended, e.g. to software intended for use by people who aren’t programmers, or to the production of things other than software).

Is Wikipedia actually worse than paper encyclopedias at controversial topics? I grew up with three sets of encyclopedias, published thirty-forty years apart, which were extremely educational for comparing contemporaneous and current views.

QS@14

Thanks for the links. I certainly agree that shorter term, productivity alone will not necessarily lead to higher wages, it can also lead to lower prices relative to wages (which feeds into better living standards) or higher corporate profits (which leads to more investment in pursuit of profits and thus eventually back to more demand for workers).

There are some other trends which dwarf the union membership trend though. The most important of which is supply, especially the supply of low skilled workers in the marketplace. Since 1980 there has been a massive increase in minority and female participation in the work place. Much, much more important though was the entrance of about 2 billion lower skilled workers from previously communist and third world nations.

Indeed, I would argue that this massive influx of competitive supply of labor is the same thing which both suppressed wages and undermined unions. Another way to frame it is that workd wide workers are finally getting a fair shake, but the returns are going to what were previously peasants that were unfairly kept out of the market.

Labor is doing great. More people have risen out of poverty worldwide in the past decade than ever before in history. American workers are not capturing much of this dividend because they lost their previously “privileged ” status of protection from competition with these newcomers to the market.

Although I’m critical of Marx in most respects, one thing I agree with him on is that an alternative social order to capitalism is going to have to solve a problem capitalism cannot solve or cannot solve efficiency. It is best if it is not purely a moral problem, as the stunning human capacity for leaving moral problems unsolved is evident all over history. We have such a problem now, but it is not one Marx predicted, nor one that fits well into his theory. It is that the material of the economy is increasingly disembodied information (as opposed to information that is part of the value of a material good), Once produced there is no natural scarcity of disembodied information given contemporary technology. Markets are a technology for addressing scarcity, but are useless without it. Hence we have DRM and excessive IP laws to try to create scarcity. But it would be more efficient to fund development differently and not constrain the distribution of information, as information gains in value the more it is combined with other information. IP is inefficient.

Of the projects discussed here, only Wikipedia seems concerned with this, and it is not the best example, as what it is displacing – encyclopedias and, to a degree, libraries – were never at the core of capitalism anyway. In the 90s, major players like Microsoft and Oracle made serious plays to rule the web server space. They ran into a wall named Apache.

There are I would say, two alternative ways to fund production: socialist and anarchist. Socialist is government funding of universities, research, the arts…. well established in our society, but restricted to certain domains. Anarchist is patronage, like Kickstarter. I think the question now is which combination of these approaches can fund the development of all the informational goods our society can use. Either could be seen as utopian, but it seems clear that one or both are necessary. And necessity can propel even the outlandish.