It has frequently been intimated in these sketches that sociology ought to lead to commitment and engagement beyond Burawoy’s recommendations, and one that recovers and explores alternative modes of social organisation that promise a better society. I have drawn on critical realism to suggest that this is consonant with a general notion of human emancipation. I want briefly to return to Bhaskar’s ideas of ‘human flourishing’ and the ‘eudaimonistic society’, both of which have been attracting attention within and without the critical realist network. In Bhaskar’s The Order of Natural Necessity, which saw the light of day in 2017, he includes the following statement:
The eudaimonistic society, the goal put forward by critical dialectical realism, depends on the transcendence of all master/slave-type relations. Here is it useful to distinguish between two concepts of power: power 1, which is transformative capacity, and power 2, which is oppression. Clearly what we need to do is for the oppressed to have more of power 1 in order to transform the power 2 relation between their oppressors and themselves and in order to transform the relationship itself … the other thing perhaps to mention is in the ethical dialectic of dialectical critical realism; a big role is played by what I call the logic of dialectical universalised ability. We can get the gist of this logic by looking at two kinds of ethical dialectics that it postulates. The first, the dialectic of desire or agency: this proceeds from an agent having a desire. Then what is argued is that this desire contains with it a meta-desire to abolish any constraints on that desire. The logic of universalised ability insists that an agent so committed must logically be committed to the abolition of all dialectically similar constraints. And so it moves in the direction and necessitates a solidarity with others. Similarly, in the dialectic of discourse the starting point is the expressive veracity of the statements of solidarity, which entail commitment to the person and situation one is in solidarity with, entailing action, which again, proceeding through the logic of universalised ability, will be aimed at the transformation of all dialectically similar constraints, and ultimately all dialectical constraints on human freedom and flourishing as such.’
I have tried to avoid quotations in these sketches, especially longish ones, but this summary statement of Bhaskar’s manages to combine, and link, human flourishing and the eudaimonistic society. I am not concerned here to open up debates that have exercised philosophers since, even before, the pre-Socratics. What I want to emphasise is precisely the necessary relationship between individual flourishing, which has been represented historically by many different words and phrases, and the eudaimonistic society, which has often been broached via some version of the ‘good’ society. Bhaskar catches this necessity.
It will be apparent from previous sketches that I judge extant structural and cultural conditions in Britain to reflect power 2 relations, see them as typically oppressive; and that, taken in combination, these conditions cut across many contexts or figurations to constrain the multiple opportunities for power 1 relations, and in consequence for human flourishing, for many citizens. It should not need pointing out that this sits comfortably with Habermas’ portrayal of system/lifeworld dynamics in modernity. As a neo-Marxist, I have put considerable emphasis on the resurgence of objective/identity-neutral class relations in post-1970s financialised or rentier capitalism in Britain. To repeat myself, this is not to underplay either the undoubted fact that capitalism was from its onset both gendered and racialised or that it remains so. Britain lives on a both as a patriarchal society and as a neo-imperial/colonial power displaying, and currently rebranding and re-energising, many of the properties of ‘internal colonialism’. There is a predictability to people in which sectors of society are likely to be constrained/oppressed by power 2 relations. It helps, for example, to be born a white male to parents with fulsome resources in terms of Bourdieu’s four types of capital or my asset flows. To those who preach gradualism via parliamentary reform, my riposte is always: ‘how many generations do you want those who are structurally/culturally ‘disadvantaged’ to wait, and are you going to tell them, or should I?’
I feel an obligation to accept the challenge to address the complex and controversial issue of how best to promote human flourishing and the eudaimonistic society. Predictably, while professional, policy, critical and public sociology have helped furnish relevant theories and data, this thorny but pivotal issue also brings foresight and action sociology into play. By way of a prolegomenon, a few general points. The signs for change are not propitious. Britain’s rentier-rich economy is rampant even as I write this. Moreover, an increasingly ‘hollowed-out’ authoritarian state is more subservient than ever to members of the capital executive in general and to capital monopolists in particular (who have now personally burrowed their way into the Conservative cabinet and even, recently, into Prime Ministerial office in the form of Sunak). Underlying this is the shift of the entire party/parliamentary spectrum to the right. The MacMillan/Home Conservative governments, let alone the Wilson/Callaghan Labour governments, were well to the left of Starmer’s current neoliberal-friendly, exclusionary, ‘Stalinist’ Labour Party. Moreover, as Ralph Miliband argued long ago, the ease with which Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader was undermined – largely from within the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) – merely confirms that the PLP is a wholly improbable agent of social transformation. The joke is that Ralph had two sons to prove his point.
The ease with which the Corbyn/McDonnell left-populist moment was seen off, culminating in the two general election defeats in 2017 and, more decisively, 2019, is instructive. Indeed, the way ahead for left-oriented theorists and activists is less than clear. John McDonnell was surely perspicacious and right to argue in the aftermath of the 2019 defeat that the cart had found itself ahead of the horse. A briefly rejuvenated Labour Party had found itself contesting an election before the sufficiently robust extra-parliamentary movement that might have underwritten and powered it had been formed. So what remains of ‘the left’, and what now are its prospects of advancement? It is striking that of the many contemporary commentaries from left-supporting writers, and however sophisticated these scribes may be, many manifestos seem to add up to a despairing: ‘Well, I wouldn’t start from here!’ Others have proposed a series of principles upon which future action might be based. In her discussion of ‘utopia as architecture’ that concludes her Utopia as Method, Ruth Levitas goes beyond this to advocate strong emphases on: the notion of human flourishing; the necessary linkage between dignity and equality; a basic income guarantee alongside improved public services; a restructuring of work away from the longstanding capitalist ‘imperative to work’; a recognition of the value of unpaid work, especially caring; and an overriding commitment to sustainability. Levitas adds that what she calls the ‘‘architecture’ in ‘utopia as architecture’ is, of course, a metaphor, but the actual architecture, the physical infrastructure, matters too. Sustainable, energy-efficient and affordable housing, schools, hospitals and the availability and physical character of public spaces are all fundamental to material and social wellbeing.’ Sociologists, she rightly observes, are too often marginal to discourses and action oriented to societal transformation.
In my paper in Frontiers in Sociology, I make a concrete and illustrated distinction between ‘attainable’ and ‘aspirational’ reforms. Before exploring this in more detail, it might be helpful to characterise the confrontation between the structural and cultural, or power 2, impediments to transformative – utopian – change achievable by agential, or power 1, drivers. It should not be surprising that I continue to put the emphasis on relations of class, not least via the class/command dynamic, the most potent of the quintet of dynamics that have informed my sociologies of health and sport. I take my point of departure from the writings of Eric Ohlin Wright, sadly no longer with is. He distinguished between ‘smashing capitalism’ (involving that subset of revolutionaries who regard capitalism as unreformable); ‘dismantling capitalism’ (involving those who eschew the notion of rupture and emphasise state-directed reforms that incrementally introduce a socialist alternative ‘from above’); ‘taming capitalism’ (involving those committed to neutralise the harms of capitalism without replacing it); ‘resisting capitalism’ (involving those who resist capitalism from outside the state and lack the motive or ambition to capture state power); and ‘escaping capitalism’ (involving those hold that capitalism is too powerful too resist and take refuge in sheltered or cooperative communities). Wright himself commends an amalgam of these logics, basically exposing and exploiting the fissures of what I have called the fractured society, which he refers to as ‘eroding capitalism’. He goes on to address the thorny issue of structurally and culturally constrained ‘collective agency’.
I will stick to Wright’s analysis for the moment since his neo-Marxism is much allied to my own. He argues that three concepts require elucidation before the potential of the collective actor can be adequately addressed: identities, interests and values.
- ‘Identities’ are crucial for recruitment for collective action, especially those forged via structured inequality and domination leading to what Wright terms ‘real harms’ (eg disrespect, deprivation, disempowerment, bodily insecurity and abuse). Identities are malleable and those emergent from movement engagement, activity and struggle are of special import.
- ‘Interests’ vary along a spectrum in line with what matters to a person and his or her hope and chances for a better life; but people can be (subjectively) unaware of their (objective) interests.
- ‘Values’ have to do with what people think is good and right and occupy a fraught relation to interests. People might, for example, look positively on the false neoliberal/ideological view that cutting taxes for the well-off will ‘trickle down’ to the benefit of all citizens.
Obviously, this trilogy of identities, interests and values does not, as it were automatically, precipitate collective action. Bearing the trilogy in mind, Wright considers three challenges to the task of constructing and mobilising collective actors capable of sustained political action: overcoming privatised lives; building class solidarity within complex, fragmentary class structures; and forging anti-capitalist politics in the presence of diverse, competing non-class-based forms of identity. He ends up prescribing a series of building blocks towards eroding capitalism:
- Unconditional basic income (UBI) – UBI represents a fundamental redesign of income distribution. It would be funded from taxes paid by higher earners and would lead to the elimination of public programmes of income support (except those relating to special needs); and render redundant minimum wage laws. As well as eliminating poverty, Wright contends that UBI would allow people to say ‘no’ to the capitalist labour market, thus opening up new possibilities like worker cooperatives and other ‘life-affirming’ ventures.
- The cooperative market economy – the notion of ‘cooperatives’ embraces a range of non-capitalist possibilities, like consumer, credit, producer, housing and solidarity cooperatives. Preconditions for setting up worker cooperatives are: UBI, which would reduce the dependency of worker-owners on market income generate by the cooperative enterprise; public programmes to facilitate the conversion of capitalist firms into worker cooperatives; specialised public credit institutions to support worker cooperatives; publicly supported cooperative development initiatives (g local municipal and community trusts); and publicly funded educational programmes for cooperative organisations and management.
- The social and solidary economy – an umbrella term covering heterogeneous community-anchored organisations committed to social justice (eg non-profit, mutual, voluntary). UBI relevant here too. Underwritten by the state, such organisations might prove the optimal way of providing certain services, like childcare or care for the elderly.
- Democratising capitalist firms – this involves extending constraints on the property rights of capitalist firms (eg minimum wage laws, health and safety laws), plus enhancing the decision-making power of workers to counter authoritarian workplace practices (eg in large firms, via bicameral board of directors, one elected by shareholders and the other by workers on a one-person one-vote basis).
- Banking as a public utility – the introduction of public banking: ‘in capitalism the mandate of banks is to maximise profits for their owners; in a socialist economy, banks would be treated as a public utility and their mandate would be include a range of social priorities.’
- Nonmarket economic organisation – increasing the role and prominence of nonmarket organisation via, for example, the decentralised state provision of goods and services (eg health and social care); peer-to-peer collaborative production (eg Wikopedia, Linux), notably decentralised IT-enabled small-scale production, extending to non-proprietary design libraries, and the knowledge commons, via the creation of ‘open access’ licences (eg Copyleft, Pantentleft, Creative Commons Licences, and Biological Open Source licences)
Wright’s citizenship of the US is apparent in places, but his propositions nevertheless warrant attention; and there have been signs that similar political moves are seeing the light of day in the UK, witness some of the ideas in the Corbyn/McDonnell Labour manifestos for 2017 and 2019 (and John McDonnell’s edited volume entitled Economics for the Many, published in 2019).
My own take on transformative change is underpinned by a reconstructed Enlightenment project oriented to the ‘good society’. I advocate extra-parliamentary alliances and mobilisation on multiple fronts, including building pressure on the state. The phrase I have used to represent this approach is permanent reform. This strategy of permanent reform might perhaps best be cast as ‘escaping capitalism’ plus ‘resisting capitalism’ through ‘dismantling capitalism’ towards ‘smashing capitalism’! In my paper in Frontiers in Sociology, I summarise it along the following lines. Social structures like class, gender and race, understood as enduring (beneath-the-surface) causal or generative mechanisms, have long and firmly established tap roots and are exceptionally resistant to (on-the-surface) agential efforts to revise, deconstruct or disassemble them. Within the UK’s existing system of a rentier capitalist democracy, a parliamentary route to transformative structural change is all but inconceivable, as has been evidenced by the rapid and effective undermining of the Corbyn challenge. Principal among the mechanisms responsible for wealth and income (and health) inequalities is the class/command dynamic, reinvigorated during rentier capitalism, which, to reiterate, asserts that these inequalities derive above all else from the transnational sway of a tiny minority of owners of capital assets who buy power from the political elite to implement policies to their advantage. Given the ongoing ‘contamination’ of the state’s power elite and the impotence of parliament, the only way to affect structural change is by mobilising the populace. A precondition of the effectiveness of a people’s movement is that it is class-based, in other words, underwritten by the working class, which, as Wright maintains, when push comes to shove unites the bulk of those who ‘work to live’. The likelihood of this kind of working-class unity and class-based collective action – and hence of an effective people’s movement – remains slight, and it can (perhaps only) occur in the event of a ‘trigger event’ occasioning what Habermas has called a crisis of ‘state legitimation’. Such a people’s movement will necessarily involve a series of alliances across overlapping interest and campaign groups. A crisis of state legitimation typically occurs after a major world event, like WW2. The global financial crisis in 2008-9 and/or COVID in 2020-21 might have precipitated such a crisis but didn’t for want of a trigger event. The optimal strategy in present circumstances could be one of permanent reform, that is, a continuous and coordinated push for reform across a spectrum from the attainable to the aspirational (eg. from local municipal and/or cooperative initiatives to those that expose and call into question enduring social structures and cultural recipes).
To append to Wright’s prescriptions for change, I have defined and illustrated attainable versus aspirational reforms. This is not the occasion to go into detail, and I will restrict myself here to mentioning a few candidates for economic reforms. Attainable reforms are on the cusp of the possible, while aspirational reforms go deeper and are all the more ambitious and tougher for doing so. For example, such measures as ‘cost of living’ public sector pay increases, restoring trade union rights, abolishing fire and rehire practices, ending zero hours contracts, increasing sick pay, raising and extending Universal Credit, increasing the UK’s parsimonious state pension, doing away with the charitable status of ‘public schools’, resisting further privatisation and restoring adequate funding to the NHS, and expanding public housing, might be regarded as attainable measures, or at least feature towards that end of the spectrum. As we move towards the aspirational end of the spectrum, we might include the likes of UBI and go on to engage with the kind of policies advocated by Wright and by Brett Christophers in his Rentier Capitalism (published in 2020). Christophers focuses on competition policy and countering the negative policy of pervasive monopoly routinely facilitated by the state: what he terms ‘unconstrained’ capitalism tends towards the monopoly conditions favoured by its most powerful actors. He counsels attainable-to-aspirational reforms to modify the tax system to limit rentiers’ ability to make excess profits, for example by reducing the present tax-based subventions supporting rentiers as well as by increasing tax rates. Tax havens should clearly be closed.
As mentioned before, in his ambitious best seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century published in 2014, Pikkety estimates that the return on assets (r) globally before tax has always been greater than the rate of economic growth (g); and for the bulk of the history of capitalism, r after tax has also been greater than g, hence his claim that, all things being equal, wealth inequality increases under capitalism. Unusually during the decades of welfare state capitalism after WW2, g exceeded net (post tax) r, in the process stalling inequality by a combination of unusual growth and progressive taxation policies. Now, in rentier capitalism, Pikkety argues for higher taxes on assets to bring r back below g to counteract surging wealth inequality. George Monbiot has likewise exhorted, in his article Wheel of Fortune (2014), breaking the power of ‘patrimonial capital’ and the vicious circle of wealth accumulation and inequality.
Christophers correctly asserts that UK governments have done more than ‘featherbed’ rentiers. They have actively encouraged them to become rentiers by the device of tax subsidies. Taxes on incomes earned from non-rentier activities could be lowered, he suggests, ‘utilising what economists refer to as the ‘negative reinforcement’ aspect of taxation: removing an aversive stimulus in order to strengthen what is deemed to be a positive behaviour or outcome’; and taxes on rentier assets and income streams could be introduced, or increased, thereby discouraging rentierism (eg by introducing a land-value tax). He also promotes the idea of a state investment bank, which would have the potential to contribute to seeding/funding a transition away from rentierism. This would need to be accompanied by a shift towards a low-carbon future. The state should invest in workers and their skills rather than non-human assets and their sealing off from competition. He adds that investment should also focus on the collective consumption of essential ‘foundational’ goods and services, including material services (eg pipes and cables, networks and branches distributing water, electricity, banking services and food), and ‘providential’ services (eg education, health and social care and income maintenance).
I am not an economist, as will have become apparent I’m sure, but special reference should be made to the issue of ownership. Any meaningful transition out of rentier capitalism must see the present transfer of ownership from the pubic to the private sector reversed. This requires shrinking the portfolio of exclusive proprietory assets on which the rentier is able to ‘earn’ private rents. As Monbiot puts it, ‘the economic power of owners of wealth translates into political power. The richer a tiny segment of society becomes, the better it is able to capture politics and undermine democracy. Eventually, we get a government of the elite, by the elite, for the elite.’ Christophers argues that this is the current state of play in Britain. It will, I hope, not have escaped the attention of any readers, that my class/command dynamic fits neatly with, and helps explain, precisely these phenomena. It is not a field that should be left to the economists.
None of this of course amounts to an economic programme, let alone a more comprehensive manifesto that would have to include cultural change. But it does define and illustrate the attainable/aspirational dichotomy and its orientation to permanent reform: that is, the progressive exposure of and accumulation of pressure on structural and cultural ‘constraining ills’ leading to a legitimation crisis. I have one further point to make. It is apparent that cross-issue coalitions uniting class fractions require leadership. I have argued, with Wright, that working-class unity, in its broadest sense, is critical. What I have gradually learned after many virtual conversations with Lisa McKenzie and others is that working-class leadership is also vital.