Surveying Utopia

Surveying Utopia  A Conversation about the Myths of Capitalism and the Coming Society By Raul Zelik and Elmar Altvater

[The following chapter on economics published in: Surveying Utopia (“Vermessung der Utopie,” 2010) is translated from the German on the Internet.]

Raul Zelik, b.1968, works in the border area of literature, social sciences and political activism. Zelik was a guest professor for politics at the National University in Bogota. Elmar Altvater, b.1938, is an emeritus professor for political economy at the Free University of Berlin. His books on globalization have been bestsellers. Altvater is a member of the academic advisory council of Attac Germany.

The Book

The “free market” seems unable to solve basic social and economic problems – whether climate change, industrial over-capacity, unemployment or distribution of wealth. Is a society beyond capitalism even conceivable? In their conversation Raul Zelik and Elmar Altvater give a critical analysis of the present. Their common attempt to develop a utopian model of society starts from an idea of the economy that and is based on reason and includes ecological and social public interest

Raul Zelik: On first view, surveying utopia is a rather strange undertaking. A non-place, “a land that is not yet,” can hardly be measured. Perhaps where this land is not could be defined first. I believe the failed emancipation attempts in the history of humanity encourage something like a negative survey. One can read how it did not happen. The time for this venture is good. The present crisis shows firstly that another policy is possible and necessary. We witnessed how quickly another strategy can be developed if the readiness exists. In the bank crisis, several hundred billion Euros were mobilized within a few days. In the years before we were told the financial resources necessary to eliminate hunger or provide African HIV-sufferers with medicine did not exist – although a fraction of the mobilized funds would have sufficed. Thus changes of course are possible at any time if the will is there and the dominant interests agree. In other words, hunger and the African Aids-catastrophe are results of the dominant political will. Secondly, alternatives become urgent. This is obvious in the crisis which is actually several crises. This is not a beauty contest between systems in dreaming up a “better world.” The survival of humanity and the sharing of humanity are put in question by the developments.

Elmar Altvater: I don’t know whether something negative can be surveyed. In “surveying utopia,” Daniel Kehlmann’s novel comes to mind. His novel makes “surveying utopia” artfully plausible. A theoretician, the mathematician Gauss, deduces the world and doesn’t need to leave his hometown, the peaceful Gottingen. Very differently, the empiricist Alexander von Humboldt crawled into every possible hole on the planet, waded through every puddle and climbed every summit to survey the entire world and bring knowledge out of it. Science compiles this knowledge n a system and generalizes the rules of this system. This was and is authority. Science can establish the course of human and natural development in the past, present and perhaps future.

Raul Zelik: That is the hope.

Elmar Altvater: Utopia is not only a non-place, “a land that is not yet.” No, it is a full-blown contradiction. The concept of measuring must break down in the utopian. Therefore utopias have such a bad reputation. Progress seems to go from utopia to science. That was Friedrich Engels’ perspective. Wanting to measure utopia is itself a presumptuous utopian undertaking. This is shifting a little. A “new surveying of the world” is suddenly not entirely utopian any more. It has become the theme of realpolitik. The necessary new surveying is the activity of those think tanks that are paid for their scholarly advice to politics. Political consultation is not our goal. The utopia that is central here has to do with another measurement – that appears in a text by Heinrich Heine from 1835. There we read: “We have surveyed the land, weighed the natural forces, calculated the means of industry and behold we discover that this earth is big enough to offer adequate space to build the huts of their happiness, that this earth can feed all of us reasonably well if we all work and don’t want to live at the expense of others and that we don’t need to expel the poorer class to heaven.”

We people – the nine billion that we will soon be – could all have a reasonably bright life but must do something for that and simultaneously refrain from many things. We must reorganize the earth and spruce it up ecologically so to speak. Nature was ruthlessly exploited in the few centuries since the fossil and industrial revolution. We must prevent climate catastrophe and ensure that the intensifying battle for raw materials does not result in a bloodbath. We must prevent financial- and economic crises further aggravating the social oppositions. In an interview, the English historian Eric Hobsbawm recently voiced the fear that the crises of capitalism could lead to a great and extremely bloody war. I hope these were only the fantasies of an old man who lived through two world wars and the “age of the extreme.” However I fear Hobsbawm could be right with his scenario. Thus the standards for a utopian project are clear: enable people on earth to live reasonably well and not banish them to Paradise any more.

Raul Zelik: What is central is not only “bread,” the basic provision of people, but something that could be described generally and concisely with the term happier life, a life in which communication, work and social relations have another rank and substance.

Elmar Altvater: Right. Utopias can be presumptuous and not do justice to reality. We should be aware of this double meaning. One cannot simply escape the danger. Obviously we can be presumptuous when we speak about something that does not exist or does not yet exist. Thus we3 need to reflect about utopian projects and answer to what extent these projects are somewhat realistic. We must size up whether they are fit and make possible a good life for people – in the ecological, social and political regards. Whether they enable the basic needs of all people to be satisfied with the preservation of nature, whether they lead to a rule-free world in which people can form their life and their working activity themselves and are not subservient. We must attempt this even if we know that every experiment to realize these goals will meet with harsh political resistance.

Raul Zelik: Every utopia mirrors existing conditions and develops as criticism of those conditions. Before we speak about utopia, we should first try to survey the conditions in which we live. Let us begin with the term economy. Elmar Altvater: Agreed. Raul Zelik: Dietmar Dath, one of the few younger German-speaking authors who takes seriously anti-capitalist positions, published the book “Machine Winter: Manifesto for Socialism” in 2008. There he says: “A society is obviously disgusting that gives running shoes with inbuilt computers to its top athletes while refusing co-payment for wheelchairs to senior women and tolerating a care emergency of which hordes of apes would be ashamed. A society is obviously repulsive that allows all these things in its horribly apolitical winner terrains. I won’t speak about that. Morality is a matter of luck and assumes covering the most important essentials. One usually has other concerns. All this is not rational and therefore cannot function.

Whoever denies the possibility of ordering things better is not evil but either lazy enough to deceive himself or suffers in this negativity from a birth accident. That seems to me a good starting point. In the first place, the system in which we live and which lives through us is immoral. It is unreasonable, irrational and inefficient.

Elmar Altvater: This is well-known since the beginning of the middle class. One of the first who pointed to this unreasonableness or stupidity was the physician and philosopher Bernard de Mandeville. In his “bee fable,” he showed that the system can only exist when people commit small crimes and gross nastiness. Corrupt and disgusting conduct keeps the economic cycle going and increases the “wealth of nations,” not virtue. Where ther4e is no crime, no locks are needed. Where there are no locks, there are no locksmiths and where there are no locksmiths, there is no work. In other words, crime is necessary so this economy can carry on. Very beautifully and very ironically with many examples, Mandeveille showed how public virtues can arise out of private vices. A society that needs private vices – the repression of the other – can only be unreasonable.

Besides Mandeville, we can find many other examples from literature and science that critically decry the irrationality of capi8talism. Raul Zelik: The market economy is a paradoxical system. The market exists because we need others and society. No one can live from the fruits of his specialized work. No baker can eat a thousand loaves a day. An office worker doesn’t get any practical value from the documents that he or she worked on. Our work first has a utility or gives a benefit through its socialization. Paradoxically the socialization of our life functions through the market where we meet as rivals in predatory wage battles against one another. Thus division of labor is based on cooperation while the market is based on competition and struggle.

One could argue the market functioned very well in the past for a long time. Economists explain that competition and “severe budget restriction” – the threat of going bankrupt – prompted market actors to act frugally and efficiently. However the wasteful side of the market appears in a drastic way in crises. In the last5 months, assets in the billions were destroyed. Produced goods are destroyed – including food – to maintain the prices of unmarketable goods. Finally, climate change is a clear sign that capitalism will destroy our foundations of life. In this regard, the economy with which we are involved in totally uneconomically. Elmar Altvater: The first one to systematically criticize this was Karl Marx. Vance Packard continued this in 1960… The system in which we live and which lives through us is unreasonable, irrational and inefficient. We could rewrite the forgotten cultural-critical book about “planned obsolescence” (“The Waste Makers”) in which Packard lists many examples of waste and the intentional production of garbage within a capitalist market economy.

Expecting rationality from the market is naïve; disappointment is certain… Why is a market economy wasteful? A market economy is wasteful because its actors follow a micro-economic rationality that is not true for macro-economic reason. We see this very clearly in the current financial crisis. Rational micro-economic conduct causes a macro-economic catastrophe. When an individual bank receives credits with higher interests to start businesses and thus becomes indebted, that is completely obvious micro-economically. The lower the capital holding requirement and the higher the sum of conferred credits, the higher the profits. But when

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 16.08.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-4409-7

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Widmung:
To all who feel excluded and marginalized, to the stone hewn from the mountain without human hands, to the invisible Son giving his peace to everyone, to all striving for authenticity and truthfulness who see life as fragmentary and interdependent and fulfillment in the other, to visionaries, dreamers, writers, idealists and iconoclasts who see beyond the corporate "ladder of success" and the imperial "race to the bottom."