Changing the World Starts with Interpreting It

It is a great honour to be invited as a speaker for the Ravindra Narahari Godbole Memorial Lecture. And it is an even greater honour to do this at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), well known as a fortress of critical thinking in India and throughout the world. I cannot refer to any personal impressions or encounters with Ravindra Narahari Godbole. I have never had the privilege to meet him. But from all that I have read, tells me that he was a very able and committed trade union leader who built a strong union of banking officers and successfully negotiated on their behalf.

There are certain moments in history when trade union leaders rise to national or even global prominence of heroic stature. Names that become known to the world like Lula da Silva who led the workers movement against military dictatorship and later became the President of his country, Brazil; Lech Walesa, the leader of the freedom struggle of the Polish Solidarnocs; Cyril Ramaphosa, when he was the inspiring leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM); or Anasuya Sarabhai, who was not only the first woman trade union leader in this country but also led, together with Mahatma Gandhi, the garment workers strike in Ahmedabad nearly a hundred years ago.

But many other impressive trade union leaders like Ravindra Godbole are less visible and let me say ‘heroes of incremental change’. In a process of never-ending campaigns, negotiations and lobbying, they are engaged in making life better for ordinary workers. Raising wages, improving health and safety, reducing working time and protecting against daily abuse of employers, they are working tirelessly for the many small things that make a big difference for the daily lives of workers. With incremental changes that involve many compromises and setbacks, their lives are not generating narratives about heroic fighters. They are rather engineers than poets of change.

However, these two types of labour leaders are not mutually exclusive models of trade unionists or unrelated from each other: the struggle for fundamental change on the one hand and the daily attempts to make live bearable in a reckless and unfair capitalist economy are probably equally important, and any one is impossible without the other. The inspiring vision of a better society is an indispensable motivational power for engaging in the arduous work of compromising and bargaining to achieve some often very basic improvements. On the other hand, even successful movements for regime change quickly evaporate, when protest cannot be consolidated into organizational and institutional power. The discursive power and mobilizing enthusiasm of the moment remains an elusive event, if not translated into hardwired political decisions and real changes. And finally a vision cannot survive, if it is discredited by the practice of its proponents.

What is needed are changes that make a positive difference to the lives of people, changes that give people decision-making power over their own lives and destiny individually and collectively. This should not be confounded with change in the sense of Schumpeterian creative destruction in modern market capitalism. The creative destruction sees the competitive market as the machine of progress, profit maximization as the ultimate purpose, and innovation and economic growth as the side effects of this never-ending race towards a more senseless more of the same. Its future lacks imagination, vision and sense.

A progressive movement needs to have a long-term vision and a practice that is a constant progress towards that vision. The change for the better has to materialize itself already in the daily reality, otherwise only semi-religious believers will join a radical sect, but abstract radicalism will not connect with the people at large.

Looking backwards, we sometimes can understand better the importance of maintaining this link between positive change and long-term vision. Let me explain what I mean by comparing two movements of revolutionary changes during the twentieth century.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Leon Bronstein and Vladimir Ulyanov, two intelligent, passionate and charismatic Russian revolutionaries, better known as Trotsky and Lenin, replaced the Marxist orthodoxy of historical materialisms by revolutionary voluntarism and consolidated the anti-czarist discontent of the masses into a party dictatorship to build a socialist future. The October Revolution resonated with millions of people around the world. The radical part of the international labour movement rallied to its defence and sacrificed convictions, principles, the idea of democratic socialism and many even their lives for defending the citadel of anti-fascism and anti-capitalism. However, with hindsight, we must say that the Great October Revolution failed.

The utopian power of the socialist idea did not survive the depressing reality of Stalinist terror, forced collectivization, economic inefficiencies, environmental degradation and finally gerontocratic stagnation. At the end, the whole system imploded as even the party bureaucrats were unwilling to defend it. With this, the confidence in a revolutionary act of liberation evaporated, leaving the radical left disarmed as the traditional Marxist analysis does not see much potential for improving life within capitalism. The aspired socialist transformation rather requires the revolutionary abolition of capitalism as its starting point. Today, the flame of the October has lost its imagination. It might be resurrected at some time in the future, who knows, but I don’t see any signs of it at the moment.

Let us compare this experience with the other mass movements that probably led to the most fundamental change of the last hundred years: feminism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were not allowed to vote, they were not allowed to make any business decision on their own, women were de facto excluded from higher education, in sports no women were seen, nearly all leadership positions were occupied by men and many prestigious jobs, from lawyer to doctor or professor, were men’s only. Sexual abuse was rarely a matter of discussion, abortion was a crime and feminists were looked at as the modern equivalent of mediaeval witches. Don’t get me wrong. There are still many forms of gender discrimination persisting in many countries, but I think it cannot be denied that future historians will probably look at the last one hundred years as the most radical changes in gender relations in the history of humankind.

In a permanent revolution of incremental change, there is not the one revolutionary moment of regime change and its fundamental impact only becomes really visible in retrospective. Fundamental change is the outcome of an endless process of transformation, and in this process, progress is always possible and never guaranteed. This demand for change has to be visionary and practical at the same time. It is the quantity of small and not so small changes that result in a qualitative transformation over time.

Why did I choose the women’s movement and not social democracy as the mirror image to the failed transformation through revolutionary power grabbing? Well, social democracy is massively losing support in its Western European heartland and in other parts of the world. The decline of social democracy is nearly universal and it cannot be explained by failure of particular party leaders or some country-specific situation.

There are several reasons for that: the implosion of the Soviet Union and the rise of globalization have changed the power balance in societies. The rise of globalization meant that the economic and political elite even in advanced capitalist countries no longer saw the same need for inclusive capitalism. As so ably explained by Professor Patnaik in the opening speech to this conference, globalization also globalized the industrial reserve army. Global capital mobility and the ability to relocate industrial production to other parts have changed the balance of power. To the extent that capital liberated itself from national constraints including liberating itself from the obligation to pay taxes, redistributive policies were increasingly limited to socialism within one class. In other words, the revenues for social policies had to come from taxing the broad middle class. And a considerable part of this middle class became hostile to redistributive policies, where the rich systematically evade their tax obligations and used their economic power to increase corporate welfare measures. Or, as Joseph Stiglitz put it, governments increasingly became the governments of 1 per cent, by 1 per cent and for 1 per cent of the people.

Social democracy’s attempts to convince capital to return to a model of social dialogue are falling on deaf ears in this new world of disembedded markets. There is no gratitude in politics. Being reasonable, responsible and fair to your political opponents in a moment of strength does not mean that they will do the same when the balance of power shifts. This has been the bitter experience of German social democracy after the First World War, of Salvador Allende and Unidad Popular in the 1970s, and of the Workers’ Party (PT) and Lula today.

Following electoral defeats in the 1970s and the triumph of the West in the Cold War, social democracy decided: if you cannot beat them join them. Accepting the liberation of capital through globalization as the inevitable necessity of modernization, social democracy became hostage to a logic that was contrary to its own values. As the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder famously said—and I am sure you can find similar quotes from many other social democratic leaders of that time—that there are no right- or left-wing economic policies anymore, but only stupid or smart ones. He was expressing with ignorant arrogance the confidence that his government would undertake these smart policies to help Germany to become globally more competitive.

However, the decisions to lower the tax for the rich by 14 percentage points, to create a massive low-paid sector through labour market deregulation, to promote financialization as a good way to increase market efficiency, forcing trade unions to include opt-out options in industry-wide collective bargaining agreements, etc., did not prove particularly helpful for social democracy. This is not surprising, as such a strategy resulted in a reduction of income and protection of workers in order to increase international competiveness. This is not to say that Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton or Francois Holland acted as deliberate traitors to the cause of labour. Tragically, they and many of their political friends genuinely believed that they were doing the right thing, that there was no better alternative to their policies. It shows the totality of neoliberal hegemony in the 1990s and how successfully they colonized the thinking of their opponents.

Social democracy gave up any passionate vision of real change, but tried to convince society at large, and capital in particular, that they are the most intelligent managers of modern capitalism. Clinton, Blair, Schröder, Holland, Renzi, Dijsselbohm as well as many social, democratically orientated people at international institutions like the United Nations (UN), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank, fully accepted global capitalism. They reduced the social democratic vision of social justice to education and skills development as the individual path towards social justice.

Therefore, it seems that the labour movement got it wrong and feminism got it right. Got it right in fighting for greater gender equality on many fronts like access to education, gender neutral language, closing the gender pay gap, demanding equal legal status, fighting sexual abuse, demanding gender quota and insisting on affirmative action, while not losing sight of the radical programme to fully transform gender relations throughout society.

The women’s movement succeeded in changing the discourse radically. Today, no one dares to argue publicly that girls should not have the same access to education. Arguing that women are not capable of rational political judgement and should therefore not have the right to vote is unimaginable in our times. It is clearly recognized as outrageous that only 30 per cent of parliamentarians are female, while people are not bothered that hardly any parliamentarian is a worker and not a single non-millionaire is a member of the US Senate.

The women’s movement successfully highlights unequal gender representation in public and private institutions, while labour fails to raise its voice in a similar way against the social exclusion of working people. There seems to be less passion about social exclusion in the labour movement in comparison with the passion that the feminist movement has for gender equality.

It may be argued that capitalism can incorporate gender equality easily in its accumulation model than the ideas of social justice and equity of the labour movement. I am not sure about this. On the micro and macro levels, capitalism tends to adapt to changing power relations. Whenever there was a demand for change, be it the abolition of slavery or child labour, the introduction of unemployment insurance, the right to strike or maternity protection, capital was predicting economic disaster. But in reality—to borrow the title of this conference—we saw the reincarnation of capitalism. If the rules of the game change, capital adapts their strategies of profit maximization to the new rules. Capitalism is very capable of adaption and uniquely successful as an engine of growth. Therefore, it is not about killing the animal, but to domesticate it. Is the transformation of the capitalist wolf into a market poodle serving people’s needs possible? That seems to me the open question to which we must have the optimism to answer affirmatively.

While the gender discourse has shifted radically in favour of gender equality, in economics an opposite trend has been seen. The hegemony of neoclassical economic theory has turned economics into a world of highly sophisticated models based on simplistic semi-religious assumptions. To call it semi-religious seems to be fair. The great financial crisis proved the assumption of markets that would balance themselves through rational expectations as utterly wrong, but even this did not shake the confidence of the profession in the truth of their almighty theory.

Admittedly, the crisis has slightly increased the space for policy debate; it is no longer the case that people just smile at those questioning the nearly unconditional supremacy of the market as they did in the 1990s. Critics of the market were hardly seen as worthy of an argument back then; they were looked at as the dinosaurs of a gone period who just failed to understand the imperatives of modernity.

The structural constraints of global capitalism are a reality and cannot be voluntarily wished away by taking a firm anti-capitalist position. However, there is a fundamental difference between embracing them as inevitable and seeing a most successful adaptation to them as the ultimate goal of politics; or thinking about initiatives to resist and ultimately overcome the subordination of the people under the iron logic of ‘the market’.

It is just not true that there is no policy space. It is not true that it is impossible to use national and international rule-making to govern the market. It is not true that there is no alternative to total capital mobility. It is not true that tax evasion cannot be tackled. It is all not easy, but not easy and impossible are not the same. There are always alternatives, and if progressive ones are missing, reactionary ones will be chosen. This is what we are witnessing today. The people are voting against a system that does not deliver for them. An important reason for the turn to the right has been the double vacuum on the left.

Revolutionary radical power grabbing has largely disappeared, or continuous as mere nostalgic rhetoric not speaking to anyone else but the converted. Social democracy has shifted from incremental change with a transformative vision to a goal of efficient repair and maintenance of the existing regime, by and large giving up any passionate vision of real change. Rather, social democracy tried to convince society at large and capital, in particular, that she is the most intelligent manager of modern capitalism.

One reason for this is that social democracy policymakers also abandoned a fundamental insight of the earlier labour movement. Social democracy cannot be an enlightened elite project, it has to be a movement of, for and by the working people. Karl Marx did not only analyse the logic of capitalism, but in his narrative the exploited are also the heroes of the story. It is the exploited and oppressed who are the agents of liberation and their liberation will be the liberation of everybody. Progressive policies need not only be good policies for workers, but also policies that are negotiated and owned by the workers. And the organizations of the labour movement have to be institutions that provide the space and the possibilities for working people to become leaders. It is not about an enlightening middle class to care about the socially disadvantaged, but about a movement that wins respect, recognition and well-being through its strength as a collective voice of the people themselves.

While the rising inequality is an important reason for the turn to the right, it would be short sighted to see this as the single reason. The discomfort with the system is not limited to economic issues. But it is also the dissatisfaction with the commodification of lives that seems to replace all rules, traditions, values and interpersonal relations by a hierarchy of individual purchasing power. The inability of governments to either defend national sovereignty against globalization and financialization, or democratize international rule-making is rightly seen as a fundamental failure of the political system.

In the richer countries, the desire to limit global mobility of labour has been another dimension of discontent that the left has ignored for too long. Not that people are against mobility per se. We love to visit other countries as tourists, but are less keen to see these foreigners coming in large numbers as migrants to our neighbourhoods. It is a hard sell to the poor people in the North to show solidarity with the far poorer people in the world, if at the same time, they are losing through growing inequality and poverty in their own societies.

Those of us, like myself, who live a privileged life in diverse, vibrant but nicely gentrified inner-city communities, should not overlook the fact that the benefits and costs of migration are quite unequally distributed in rich societies. The wealthier section benefits disproportionally from the services of cheap migrant labour, while the poorer people disproportionally compete for housing, jobs and schooling. The challenges of daily multiculturalism are not where members of the liberal and progressive chattering class like me are living.

Those who welcome the vibrant, colourful and multifaceted life of global cities should also recognize the undeniable challenges of neighbourly cultural tolerance and should not underestimate the comfort and security that homogeneity can provide in particular in times of change. In a society where many rules and norms are fully internalized by a large majority, people tend to feel that their way of life is unquestionable and should uniformly apply to everyone. Such a feeling provides a sense of cultural stability which people like and they feel offended if they are increasingly regarded as the twenty-first century misfits because they want to maintain a traditional lifestyle that is regarded as rather backwards by the cultural trendsetters in vibrant global cities. Therefore, there is a rise of conservative identity politics against diversity, minority identity politics and the cultural shifts that are shaking traditional values and world views.

In this context, the right wing is managing to construct a narrative combining anti-globalization, injustice, racism, identity, corporate greed, plain talking, tradition, family values, islamophobia, and law and order that speaks to lots of people and can be summarized in the slogan: ‘Frustrated of the world unite against those weaker and poorer as yourself’. Thus, multilayer discontent is channelled into a mobilization of disgruntled supremacists to maintain and partly resurrect a world that resonates with their comfort zone of normality. Leave or love the country is the short cut for this narrow concept of integration. Minorities should adapt in favour of the dominate culture or are legally and socially delegitimized. The defenders of traditional stability against cosmopolitan change feel that they have the right and obligation to resist intended or de facto societal changes induced by the presence of the other. Neoliberalism as we know tended to be culturally tolerant and dogmatically pro-free market and business. The authoritarian right is—at last ideologically—far more willing to pursue policies of cultural intolerance and intervene in the market for pro-business nationalism. In the name of ethno-cultural identity or Judeo-Christian values, this new authoritarian nationalism is trying to resurrect the supremacy of traditional values and lifestyles without providing any real solution for the challenges of the undeniable diversity of modern societies.

Given this reality, the left needs to develop an alternative narrative focusing on inclusion instead of exclusion, and mobilizing for changes that liberate societies from the structural straightjacket of global capitalism. The better future needs to be imagined as something achievable or in more popular language: ‘We can get it, if we really want’. Let me map out just four areas that, in my view, need to be part of such a narrative.

Reigning in Globalization

While international trade has many benefits, this should not be used to justify the many flaws of the current globalization regime. There are a number of areas that urgently need to be addressed and where political resistance can be mobilized. There is no serious benefit in short-term capital mobility. Tax havens and all kinds of offshore operations whose only real functions are to facilitate capital flight and enable tax evasion can technically be closed down easily. Finally, globalization can only be justified as a global project when developing countries get access to the markets of the industrialized world while maintaining the right to protect themselves against over-mighty competition.

Democratizing Our Societies and Economies

Free markets tend to create economic inequalities that frequently translate into political power. There can be no political democracy without reigning in economic power and economic freedom. Isn’t it absurd that the ownership of mass media by a tiny stratum of moguls is justified in the name of freedom of speech? By changing public services into private businesses, societies exclude many poor from health, education, care or housing. Abolishing labour market protection injects insecurity and fear into the lives of millions while giving the ability of abuse and the pleasure of power to employers. Creating publicly owned and governed media, limiting private funding for election campaigns, creating greater equality through universal public services, and ensuring democratic rights of representation and participation at the workplace are key elements of a change agenda.

Democratizing Our Own Organizations

However, we do not only need to democratize societies at large, but those who want to be the changemakers also have to change themselves. No one will convince others of being a credible proponent on democracy, fairness, respect, tolerance and honesty, if he or she personally, and the organizations to which they are belonging, are not living up to those standards. Moral integrity is probably the biggest capital progressive movements have. I am not saying we always have to be perfect; flawless perfection does not exist. However, principle and values have to be part of our daily practice.

Thinking Justice as a Global Task

Most political successes have been in the context of the nation state, but can we really limit the distributional struggle to fights within a nation. Can the 20 per cent of the world population that consume 80 per cent of its resources really continue to demand continuous growth for themselves? It seems to me that we need nothing short of a cultural revolution. Instead of more money, more time must become the currency to remunerate those already comparatively well off. At the end of the day, we should work in order to enjoy our lives and not live in order to work. Don’t get me wrong, the poor on this planet need growth for many years to come, but the lifestyle of the rich has to transform from consuming money to enjoying time already now. This is not an impossible dream; just imagine how much less the United States—still the world’s largest polluter—would consume, if Americans would work only 1,363 hours per year, like the Germans, instead of 1,783 hours per year. Is it not time to think about the Marxian realm of necessity and the realm of freedom within capitalism? Should the rise of productivity not result in a radical reduction of working time instead of more income?

Progressively taxing the rich is just another way of expressing the proposal that people above a certain income threshold should choose time over money. If the marginal tax rate is at 95 per cent, as it was in the United States, under Roosevelt, only those high-income earners will continue to work endless hours who love what they are doing. Others will be the pioneers for a meaningful post-capitalist life. Changing the pattern of ever-growing consumption has to start at the top, and as the rich seem to be too weak to make this obvious decision themselves, democratic societies need to help them by taxing them to their own benefit, the benefit of societies at large and the billions of poor that would double their income by just having two dollars more a day.

Change is not only imaginable, it is also possible. It requires inspiring visions pursued by incremental radicalism. The challenge is to create pluralistic unity by interpreting our societies through the prism of social justice, freedom, choice, tolerance and respect. It is about connecting different but compatible desires for a better life in order to translate them into practical policies of positive change. Passion and reason are two indispensable ingredients for any progressive movement. Cold reasoning tends to lead to technocratic modernization and pure passion to authoritarian intolerance. Getting the balance right is the skill of a true radical.