![]() Haunting Utopia for Realists are the ghosts of epochal leftwing defeats – unnoticed by its author and never exorcised.Īll of Bregman’s ideological weapons are drawn from the side of optimism and potential: what could be done with the tremendous powers of 21st-century capitalism – a “fantastic engine for prosperity” – if only there was the political will to achieve it. The entire socialist project, not to mention dozens of national liberation struggles, suffered a grotesque perversion symbolised by Stalinist dictatorships. It is not just that welfare becomes surveillance, liberty becomes starvation, and flexibility becomes precarity. This is where anti-utopianism, or “realism”, derives its ideological power. This is significant not just because it makes clear there are rightwing versions of the policy he favours, but in indicating how, in general, Bregman tends to ignore the way utopian aspirations are so often appropriated and turned into their opposites. But he glosses too swiftly over the fact that one of the intellectual authors of Nixon’s minimum income plan was the neoliberal ideologue Milton Friedman. When welfare states turn punitively moralistic, we want independence. In an age of precarity, we want security. The policy that Nixon implemented, working tax credits, was closer to the actual Speenhamland system – as are many workfare-style policies.īregman’s arguments for a universal basic income are seductive. He is mistaken to claim that under the system “everybody in need had a right to relief” it was a wage subsidy for the “industrious” not the unemployed. Yet as he rightly points out, borrowing from the sociologists Fred Block and Margaret Somers, Speenhamland successfully reduced poverty – and not at the expense of wages or productivity. He blames negative myths about that system for Richard Nixon’s failure, in a different age and continent, to implement a guaranteed minimum income. And the lessons are not always the right ones.įor instance, Bregman takes a revisionist look at the Speenhamland poor relief system, introduced in Britain in 1795, as part of his argument for a universal basic income. When we are told, for example, that “history is not a science that serves up handy bite-sized lessons for daily life”, it feels like unconscious self-mockery: much of the book is precisely about taking handy bite-sized lessons from history. There are points in the book where journalistic flair doesn’t quite smooth over the contradictions. ![]() It is a welcome sign of life in the reformist imagination. And if some of what Bregman proposes is uncontroversial enough to be policy – as deficit-spending and universal basic income already are in Canada – the book tries to radicalise these ideas and push them beyond the current liberal mainstream. Myths about the poor, migrants and GDP are ritually slaughtered with gusto. ![]() ![]() Venerable leftwing causes such as affordable housing, and a reduction of the working week, are refurbished with new data, expert interviews and historical anecdotes. If the book contains little news, it makes the old feel new. ![]()
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