Utopian thinking in the ether: an interview with Boris Frankel

https://overland.org.au/2019/12/utopian-thinking-in-the-ether-an-interview-with-boris-frankel/







Is utopian thinking akin to casting a net into the ether – collecting the unimaginable and dragging it into the realm of the possible? Or, by neglecting to consider any parameters of the possible, is it a fanciful distraction from meaningful politics? Well, perhaps it depends on the type of utopian thinking. In Fictions of Sustainability: The Politics of Growth and Post-Capitalist Futures, social theorist Boris Frankel takes aim at certain types of utopian thinking: proposals that he argues are unrealisable or unsustainable regardless of whether political obstacles have been removed or transformed. Throughout the book, which was released earlier this year, Professor Frankel seeks to ask the difficult questions surrounding concepts such as green growth, degrowth and post-scarcity, not with the aim of opposing radical solutions, but to facilitate the development of more plausible and effective policies. Political-economic dilettante Zacharias Szumer met with Frankel recently to try to get his head around this somewhat heavy going but important book.

ZS: In the conclusion of Fictions of Sustainability, you write that one of your aims in writing the book was to “bridge the political and theoretical chasm or ‘analytical apartheid’ that characterizes so much socio-economic policy on the one side and environmental analyses on the other.” What do you mean by analytical apartheid? And how did you attempt to bridge this chasm?

BF: In the past, conservatives, liberal Keynesians, Marxists and anarchists were divided over how to analyse capitalism and debated its virtues and failings. Today, it is not enough to have a knowledge of political economy, whatever the political perspective, if it excludes crucial environmental issues. On the other hand, you’ve got many people who are active and concerned about environmental issues, but who neglect political economy. The ‘analytical apartheid’ I refer to is that environmental issues cannot be separated from political economy yet, political economists and environmentalists talk past one another and rarely consider one another’s issues and positions. Despite environmental crises being highlighted for over fifty years, traditional political economists and many on the left still treat environmental issues as marginal to the main issue of capital versus labour. This is now changing. But you’ll still find many leading political economists are completely silent on environmental issues. It’s important to bridge these two worlds. Similarly, many committed environmentalists have a detailed understanding of the damage being done to so many ecological habitats and the need to transform existing consumption and production. But apart from generalised ‘wish lists’ have a very limited understanding of how existing political institutions and the economy of capitalism works. So, in order to achieve their environmental goals, it’s critical that they become more familiar with the political economic debates that have been developed by non-environmentalists.

ZS: You refer to popular leftist thinkers such as Paul Mason and Inventing the Future authors Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams as “technological Prometheans” in your book. Could you explain your critique of those theorists?

BF: I call these people technological Prometheans because they believe that all that you need is to take the most advanced technologies that capitalism has developed, change the ownership of capitalism and utilise them in a different way in a socialist society.

There are some fantastic schemes put forward by a whole range of left theorists about how we’re going to have fully automated luxury communism. However, in most of those scenarios what people focus on is mainly ‘software’ rather than on ‘hardware’. Certainly, you can bring about a whole range of new innovative software-driven technologies, but mobile phones, iPads and 3D printers are all hardware. And who makes the hardware? Low-paid workers in low- and middle-income countries getting infinitely less per day and per week, than what workers in Australia or other equivalent countries are getting. So, if you don’t consider how the hardware is made plus the environmental resources used in production or the enormous problem of mountains of E-waste, then your software is not going to get you too far. Most of the examples that people like Paul Mason and others use are in communications, for example, CDs, publications, etc which can be made at almost zero marginal cost and reprinted or distributed free via the internet. But freeing intellectual property from the Googles and Apples of this world is quite different to ‘free’ hardware of everyday life. In order for people to live, they need access to tangible items, not just software. People forget that 3D printers use toxic chemicals to reproduce material things. And what about food? In places such as Australia, America, Europe and Japan, transforming the food production, distribution and food consumption system is a massive political task. People can point to alternative eco-agriculture or organic food or reduced meat consumption; all of these things are fine in theory or limited practice. But implementing these necessary alternatives requires major changes that will be bitterly resisted in capitalist countries. Currently, the production of food on the land in advanced capitalist countries is capital intensive. Only about 2 percent of the workforce now work and produce food in our countries. Agro-ecology and organic food is much more labour intensive. You would have to shift the population from the cities to the food areas (which have poor basic services) or transform cities into food baskets which affects property prices. Transforming monopolies such as Coles, Safeway, ALDI, or the corporations running the transport system is a major political struggle. How do you change the cost of food and still keep workers and low-income people onside if their wages and pensions aren’t increased and would result in riots as we’ve seen in a number of countries? All of these issues are neglected by the ‘technological Prometheans’. Utopian dreaming that ignores environmental and political limits is self-defeating as creating post-capitalist societies requires a combination of imagination and practical on-the-ground answers.

Regarding the proposal for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), which has been flavour of the month across the world, I used to support a guaranteed adequate income about 30 years ago, but I changed my mind in recent years because I regard a UBI as politically and economically unattainable and divisive. You could certainly implement a UBI that paid a pittance, but this wouldn’t be enough to live on. Srnicek and Williams and other advocates are proposing a UBI that would free workers from wage labour and accelerate the process of capitalist disintegration. In other words, they are not looking at what is feasible at the moment, but how to use the UBI as a political strategy to bring about the end of capitalism. My argument is that this is putting the political cart before the horse. They are not considering how you would actually implement a UBI, which segments of the working class would actually be supportive of a UBI given, and this is what they ignore, that the bulk of direct and indirect taxation in capitalist countries is paid for by the working class.

Normally the calculations made about a basic income are based on adding up all the type of taxes avoided or increasing them so that you can cover the cost of a UBI. But once you start to add all of these up and close all the tax havens or levy taxes on robots that replace workers, the total does not add up to an adequate UBI and is either a one-off that dries up in subsequent years or creates a Depression if companies flee rather than pay higher taxes. Supporters of UBI say, ‘well, that’s a beginning.’ This is what we were told a century ago when they introduced old age pensions and said welfare will expand into a larger system. Well, it did expand a bit, but it never reached a full welfare state anywhere in the world. Even the so-called comprehensive welfare states in France, Sweden and Denmark have people begging on the streets.

If a UBI does not cut all the other aspects of welfare support such as pensions, housing, rent subsidies, health, childcare or whatever, as the right-wing versions of a UBI propose, then this would double or triple the welfare bill. Any UBI that equalled aged pensions would be much higher than most UBI proposals and if you’re not going to cut other welfare subsidies then you’re talking about a massive shift in the political economy of capitalism. Now, that’s fine by me if you can achieve it, but if you’re not counting on revolution, you’ve got to be able to deliver this through the electoral system. No party is going to go to the election on a platform of a UBI (apart from the Greens), which involves large tax increases for wage workers or a massive tax increase on businesses which already oppose and want to cut the inadequate welfare system.

My objection to the UBI is not an objection to what it could hopefully achieve such as freeing up time for people to have more fulfilling lives, for sole parents, women especially, to be able to look after their children or for people on welfare entitlements to avoid the type of absolute hounding by bureaucratic Centrelink and other social security departments around the world. These are all incredibly important objectives, but they cannot be achieved under proposed UBI frameworks. So, I’d like to see, a) how the UBI is funded, b) whether they’ve considered the political divisions it will certainly cause and c) at what level, if it were implemented, would it not result in major economic dislocation. Remember, once there is major economic dislocation, you don’t have the funds to pay a UBI, because it must come out of general tax revenue. If the economy has gone into a depression, how are you going to fund it?