I posted this extended comment under the above entry on May 13, and it a little later elicited a warming response from "Potter." I used the material in a email letter to Sherman Lewis in the Fall of 2013, and at that time also edited it slightly and posted it here.
This
is about modernization and gradually shaping a new modernity.
Tony
Judt’s indictment in “Ill fares the Land,”
of the intensely capitalist countries, mainly the United States, the UK and
others on our model, and his lamentation for the state of their culture are
well founded.
Judt’s
title, with the foreboding it conveys for future if we go on as now, is not exaggerated. It is a
perceptive and humane rejoinder to the hyper-individualistic and mercenary
culture and economy, which mainstream social sectors in the U.S. are currently
practicing, espousing and politically enforcing on the country as a whole,
often in the name of “conservatism.” Absolutely central to the problem is our unsustainable
and damaging concentration of wealth, our economic and social inequality, where
Judt makes a strong reference to Wilkinson and Pickett’s indispensable “The
Spirit Level.” It doesn’t have to be
that way, he says, rightly.
Chris Lydon, on his blog, Radio Open Source (Spring 2012), said that Judt
is raising matters which need talking about in a discussion oriented to action,
even action that in some way can come into play in the 2012 U.S. election
campaigns. Fair enough --that’s right.
Judt
is an historian who sees situations in a path driven, past-dependent, way. The present picture is for him a regrettable falling
away from a better past, one which he refers to as “social democracy,” fixing the downward political break-point around
1980, the advent of Reagan and Thatcher.
But I suggest that that the postwar social democracy (which strongly
favored the very bright young Tony Judt) never really existed quite as he
remembers it. We are faced less with a
task of recuperating and reviving an old form of better community and social
solidarity than with a job of creating a new one.
Judt’s perspective has two other structural
elements in addition to being the frame of a person formed in one period and
reacting to a succeeding one. Another
frame operating here is the thinking of a person coming from a still
family-focused semi-urban setting with a strong note of social solidarity,
moving into a more fully urban setting, seemingly a chaotic
whirl of unmoored individuals. A third
shift of setting is that of someone coming from a small, relatively intimate
social world into a larger one with necessarily
diluted social bonds and very different political dynamics and economic
institutions. Compared with 1950, the
world facing a typical American or European is larger now in at least three
ways: communication that can make people
present to us is infinitely faster and more extensive, world population has close to tripled, and
also many people who were more or less excluded from the active mainstream of national
societies, such as blacks and other immigrants, sexual minorities, and even the
half of the population that are women, are now very much more present.
Both
urbanization and movement toward larger and less intimate social and political worlds
are important parts of modernity.
Moreover, both are massive autonomous ongoing trends. If we are
in an action mode, they are not controllable, or “operable factors.” They can be modified, but not stopped. They also have values of their own: we do not
want to halt the broadening of social inclusion in the effort to renew
community. Similarly, economic
“globalization” is not a debatable and potentially reversible choice made by political
and corporate leaders, but is based on concrete technical changes:
communication and information management by electronic means has come close to
eliminating distance and indeed, locality, for everything that is informational
and not material (which is a lot), while for concrete physical things, similar
if weaker delocalizing advances in transportation (for example, containerized
shipping that brings a new car from Asia to America for $200 (1% of its price)),
are not going to be reversed.
So
the challenge is not recapturing a lost “social democracy,” but building a new
one in new circumstances, which starts with imagining and describing it. The discussion has to go deeper than
politics. It is about society, and
while it is about economic distribution, it goes a good deal deeper than
economics, well into culture and the most fundamental values. Freud said that the two great domains of
human life are work and love, taking love very broadly to mean social and
community relations in general. This
subject is at that level of depth. It’s about creating and building a more favorable
and humane social structure of modernity.
There
is at least one major asset that we have now, although it brings its own
complications. Even before we get to
issues of distribution, there must be something to distribute. Poverty is not a good thing, and by
comparison with the earlier time, we now have a great deal more property or
goodness to distribute. Since the seventies,
there has been a great deal of production of both public and private goods —of houses,
roads, buildings, transportations systems, communication systems, even
institutions, factories and factory
equipment, tools including the machinery of industrialized agriculture and so
on. Not only have many infrastructural and even
social goods been produced, but they are better and more durable than in the
past, so that once built, they don’t have to be produced again and again. Their maintenance takes less work than their
production. And not just fixed products, but productivity
itself: there is a greater capacity to
generate intellectual and physical goods and services, and do so using much
less labor. We certainly have issues of
distribution, but we have a lot more to distribute.
But this achievement has left us with a big
problem: The traditional mode of
distribution of material and social goods has been in exchange for work
(thinking of capital as “congealed work”).
This exchange relationship is now deep, deep in our culture. Work is
the basis of entitlement to share in social product and indeed to enjoy, both
objectively and subjectively, integration in society’s self-respecting
mainstream.
Now,
partly due to the already achieved stock of property and productive capacity which
we have, in contrast to China which is building its stock, there is dramatically
less work to be done than in earlier decades.
Purposeful development and
application of specifically labor-saving technology, over decades, has also
reduced the amount of work needed, as does the offering of cheaper labor from
countries at different stages of
development, and the creation of channels, like “outsourcing,” that bring such
workers into competition with those here.
There is not enough work.
How
can we maintain social and economic solidarity and inclusion for people who would normally earn them through
work, but for whom now there is no work.
The long-term and
unavoidable dwindling of traditional work, notably physical brawn work, demands
that we cut the deeply traditional connection between work, on the one hand, and income and social entitlement and
participation, on the other. Not only we,
but all the developed countries are facing more or less overt crises of
employment, falling particularly, and particularly ominously, on their young
people. Our work-based system for the
distribution of social goods is thoroughly out of whack. Although new forms of work, some of them
fully meritorious, are emerging continuously, the active broad trend is toward
a net loss and increasing scarcity of jobs.
The
proposition that is offered to young adults now is: “Your must work, but,
sorry, there is no work for you.” That
is an impossible fundamental proposition for a society to make to its
members. It is cruel for individuals, but
it’s also not a foundation for a coherent. sustainable and reliable
society.
There
must be a redefinition of the mode of distribution of wealth and social
entitlement, a redefinition away from the traditional channel or medium or
requirement of work.
One temptation is to preserve work of all
kinds, to “create jobs,” without much regard for the genuineness or quality of
the work. But in fact there is a large
amount of bad or at least very dubious work which, case by case on the merits,
should be ended not preserved, and certainly not created new. False work has many kinds, from hiring
security guards where the better choice is to bring down crime, the now dispensed-with service station
attendants and even retail store clerks,
up to those in the medical insurance industry, or to those pouring
brilliant tactical work into strategically bad causes, like soldiering in
Vietnam or Iraq. Some work can and
should be automated away. Some work is
being exported to lower cost providers, e.g. China, but that is not
straightforward or stable. Large
amounts of work need rethinking when they supply large sectors that should be curtailed
rather than perpetuated —for example, the urban automobile, or our current day
defense budget, and perhaps even small-holder agriculture. Better city planning could silently eliminate
the immense “work” of commuting two hours per day to a job-site. But it has to be admitted that, in practice,
if we don’t create “make work,” the
dwindling of work will continue and even accelerate.
How
will society adjust? The pattern of certain successful social groups
which go, over one or several generations, from the hardest of work in enterprise
building to more esthetic lives of cultural self-consumption will be seen more
often, and be more accepted.
More
broadly, the new remedy to the employment dilemma will come in principle from
the left. A larger measure of social
entitlement will come to be territorial
(just being in the country) rather than economic—earning money. Once a
floor level of income is provided for all, many activities which are good human
activities but which now are not paid or are not locally socially entitling,
will be encouraged, perhaps with stipends, such as local sports, local music
and theatricals and other forms of what are now considered hobbies or volunteer
activities, and the social treatment of them will be more like “work.”
At
the same time, the field, and a broad one, has to be left open, and
incentivized, for work. There has got
to be room and rewards, for example, for the hardworking teacher of German
language that Tony Judt had in secondary school, or for individual surgeons and
groups of computer and instrument developers who are bringing us laparascopic
surgery—we’ve just had a quasi-miraculous application in our neighborhood -- or
true miracle drugs. What should be the
income/wealth differential between those who make the genuine and great
contributions, and those who just stay out of jail and maintain a temperature
of 98.6°? Maybe, once a baseline of adequate income
exists for everyone independent of work, there could be a multiple of three or four—Francois Hollande
proposed to tax incomes above € 1M at 75%, which could be a useful marker.
How
to revalue work and handle both the distribution both of work itself and of its
fruits, is one of the dilemmas in building a more solidary Judtian “new social
democracy,” and there are lots more—where to draw the line between the market
and the state? How to delineate roles
among other circles and entities as well, such as the non-profit sector, and
even among the local, intermediary, national and international spheres of
action. I don’t think either Judt’s nostalgia or
Siddartha Mukherjee’s call for innovation on Chris's Radio Open Source really
fill the bill—we do need and want continuing innovation, but it is also basically
dis-employing, is it not?
What
about applications to the curent political situation? Some parts of what would become a “New
Social Democracy” program are total no-brainers and are already in play:
universal access to medical care, more progressive taxation, free tertiary
education, a much smaller defense budget, re-election of Obama over Romney, but
the penitential note is how much opposition these simple and over- due steps
have elicited out—nothing is easy.
Should the existence and undoubted public support and effectiveness of
Mitch McConnell stop us from thinking and talking about how the country could
be much better? Probably it should
restrain the further flights of idealism, but otherwise, clearly no. 
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