We are still living in the long 20th Century. We are stuck with its redundant technologies: the internal combustion engine; thermal power plants; factory farms. We are stuck with its redundant politics: unfair electoral systems; their capture by funders and lobbyists; the failure to temper representation with real participation.
And we are stuck with its redundant economics: neoliberalism, and the Keynesianism still proposed by its opponents. While the latter system worked very well for 30 years or more, it is hard to see how it can take us through this century, not least because the growth it seeks to sustain smacks headlong into the environmental crisis.
Sustained economic growth on a planet that is not growing means crashing through environmental limits: this is what we are witnessing, worldwide, today. A recent paper in Nature puts our current chances of keeping global heating to less than 1.5°C of at just 1%, and less than 2° at only 5%. Why? Because while the carbon intensity of economic activity is expected to decline by 1.9% a year, global per capita GDP is expected to grow by 1.8%. Almost all investment in renewables and efficiency is cancelled out. GDP, the index that was supposed to measure our prosperity, instead measures our progress towards ruin.
But the great rupture that began in 2008 offers a chance to change all this. The challenge now is to ensure that the new political movements threatening established power in Britain and elsewhere create the space not for old ideas (such as 20th Century Keynesianism) but for a new politics, built on new economic and social foundations.
There may be a case for one last hurrah for the old model: a technological shift that resembles the Second World War’s military Keynesianism. In 1941, the US turned the entire civilian economy around on a dime: within months, car manufacturers were producing planes, tanks and ammunition. A determined government could do something similar in response to climate breakdown: a sudden transformation, replacing our fossil economy. But having effected such a conversion, it should, I believe, then begin the switch to a different economic model.
The new approach could start with the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury. There is not enough physical or environmental space for everyone to enjoy private luxury: if everyone in London acquired a tennis court, a swimming pool, a garden and a private art collection, the city would cover England. Private luxury shuts down space, creating deprivation. But magnificent public amenities – wonderful parks and playgrounds, public sports centres and swimming pools, galleries, allotments and public transport networks – create more space for everyone, at a fraction of the cost.
Wherever possible, I believe such assets should be owned and managed by neither state nor market, but by communities, in the form of commons. A commons in its true form is a non-capitalist system, in which a resource is controlled in perpetuity by a community, for the shared and equal benefit of its members. A possible model is the commons transition plan commissioned by the Flemish city of Ghent.
Land value taxation also has transformative potential. It can keep the income currently siphoned out of our pockets in the form of rent – then out of the country and into tax havens – within our hands. It can reduce land values, bringing down house prices. While local and national government should use some of the money to fund public services, the residue can be returned to communities.
Couple this with a community right to buy, enabling communities to use this money to acquire their own land, with local commons trusts that possess powers to assemble building sites, and with a new right for prospective buyers and tenants to plan their own estates, and exciting things begin to happen. This could be a formula for meeting housing need, delivering public luxury and greatly enhancing the sense of community, self-reliance and taking back control. It helps to create what I call the Politics of Belonging.
But it doesn’t stop there. The rents accruing to commons trusts could be used to create a local version of the citizens’ wealth funds (modelled on the sovereign wealth funds in Alaska and Norway) proposed by Angela Cummine and Stewart Lansley. The gain from such funds could be distributed in the form of a local basic income.
And the money the government still invests? To the greatest extent possible, I believe it should be controlled by participatory budgeting. In the Brazilian city of Porto Allegre, the infrastructure budget is allocated by the people: around 50,000 citizens typically participate. The results – better water, sanitation, health, schools and nurseries – have been so spectacular that large numbers of people now lobby the city council to raise their taxes. When you control the budget, you can see the point of public investment.
In countries like the UK, we could not only adopt this model, but extend it beyond the local infrastructure budget to other forms of local and even national spending. The principle of subsidiarity – devolving powers to the smallest political unit that can reasonably discharge them – makes such wider democratic control more feasible.
All this would be framed within a system such as Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics which, instead of seeking to maximise growth, sets a lower bound of wellbeing below which no one should fall, and an upper bound of environmental limits, that economic life should not transgress. A participatory economics could be accompanied by participatory politics, involving radical devolution and a fine-grained democratic control over the decisions affecting our lives – but I will leave that for another column.
Who could lead this global shift? It could be the UK Labour Party. It is actively seeking new ideas. It knows that the bigger the change it offers, the greater the commitment of the volunteers on which its insurgency relies: the Big Organising model that transformed Labour’s fortunes at the last election requires a big political offer. (This is why Ed Miliband’s attempts to create a grassroots uprising failed).
Could Labour be the party that brings the long 20th Century to an end? I believe, despite its Keynesian heritage, it could. Now, more than at any other time in the past few decades, it has a chance to change the world.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate
5 Comments
I don’t remember the details of the debate James, but George has a great deal of faith that markets can be tamed by more direct forms of democracy and that the competitive drive can be moderated. Or that this is a “realistic” transition etc… We see this same accommodation in his acceptance of nuclear energy.
He has really embraced Raworth so he is basically getting very close to Parecon. BTW, he presented via skype at a local climate symposium put on by high school students here in Montana, so he is pretty generous with his time.
Hope you and yours are well in the dental floss state, Dave. Details foggy here too, just that I remember him pressing Precon onits ability to hold off recalcitrant behaviour, which I thought weird, considering the institutiona structure of parecon was designed to foster and maintain shared values. He never showed how Parecon could be undermined, just that it most likely would. Don’t see why or how any other idea he embraces couldn’t be just as easily undermined. Being facetious really.
As far as Raworth goes, just another one in the line eh! How many of these things, “visions”, has the NSP released? How many do “we” have to read, if “we” read them at all? How many of these things does the average punter, who someone like Russell Brand may be talking to, understand or know exist? Are they really all that different, doughnuts, commoning etc.? And the issue often is down to market allocation versus participatory planning of some sort, or a mix, like what Alperovitz is suggesting…planning around major institutions like universities or hospitals. But even Raworth’s doughnuts is not the easy for the average punter to digest. There needs to be some serious visionary symposium where all these things can be analysed, broken apart, and shown to be what they probably actually are, variations on a theme, in order for the average punter to understand and support. The NSP has published upwards of anout 25 of these things…who god dam remembers any of them and how different are they anyway. Personally, I don’t think there are many alternatives to a post cap economic system, most likely maybe a few or even only one…of course it must be maximalist/minimalist, open to textural and cultural variation bit basically institutionally sound on a large level. Better stop, crowding out. Keeping fishing Dave!
Ye olde commons transition eh? http://commonstransition.org/ Seems ye olde Monbiot has been reading similar stuff put out by ye olde NSP. Like ye olde doughnut economics. Maybe he could help pull the NSP out if its US centric focus. And he mentions ye olde participatory economics eh? Obviouly not the one he debated with Albert. Pity, he couldn’t embrace ye olde Parecon, or at least aspects of it, with a more openminded attitude. Wonder what he wants to do with ye olde markets? Well, eventually that is, maybe not immediately. But I do hope that Monbiot, while advocating all these possibilities, these new institutional arrangements, which are a good start, can also show that none of them can be undermined by human greed and cunning or some desire for greater wealth, the resurgence of anti-social market behaviour, which he so emphatically kept stating could so easily and probably would arise to undermine a Parecon. Maybe I’m being too harsh.
put my reply to you above, oops.
The most succinct and comprehensive statement of the desirable and achievable goal that should inspire the global mass movement that is urgently needed to save the one known liveable planet from heat death caused by one of its own species, we humans.