If we are to save the planet, it will mean developing a vivid sense of the kind of world we want – and that may involve taking the whole notion of Utopia more seriously. The conventional assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish and destructive is not supported by evidence – and is actively disproved by the sense of community and caring displayed in the wake of disasters. In a more equal world, jobs would serve community needs rather than profit, caring roles would be a priority and automation would encourage skilled work rather than eliminate it. But to arrive there we will need to undermine the ‘apparatus of justification’ on which inequality depends.
The global environmental crisis had been apparent before 1973 but in or around that year a tipping point was crossed: the global economy finally moved into ‘eco-deficit’. It started using biological resources faster than natural processes could regenerate them, so that (as the Global Footprint Network think tank put it) ‘by the late 2030s humanity will need the equivalent of two Earths to keep up with our demands’.1 At the same time, climate change began to become a public and political issue. James Lovelock spelled out the implications in his ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ in the 1970s, publishing it as a best-selling book in 1979.2
Over the same period, the diversity of plant life has collapsed, as farming has become more and more industrialized.3 A WWF report published in December 2014 found that the world had lost half of all of its vertebrate life forms in the four decades from 1974; most of this loss was due to intensified exploitation of habitats for commercial purposes.4
These times demand radical action yet a tragic fatalism has paralyzed our politics. This is not helped by the cod-Darwinian notion of ‘progress’ that makes it difficult to imagine alternatives. We are encouraged to believe that a ‘technological revolution’, which few of us can understand, still less shape to our needs, is following its predestined course. We seem rather like Hollywood extras in this revolution. It will happen anyway, with us or without us, the path being blazed for us by a supposedly brilliant few, without democratic assistance.
In 2013, the New Yorker’s George Packer found that companies like Google and Facebook are full of people who fervently believe they are changing the world more effectively than any government can, and that it is entirely appropriate to become extremely rich by doing so. Packer found the phrase ‘change the world’ used constantly in these companies and among their backers, yet they were surrounded by (and oblivious to) levels of homelessness and poverty that had been unknown in San Francisco a couple of decades earlier.5
The Chilean experience of 1970-73 provides a reality-check to the revolution we’ve been offered. Cybersyn was there to support a drive for equality; for the production of the things people needed and wanted in the here-and-now rather than in some hypothetical future, within an economy organized for that purpose. This was revolution in the real world, focusing on real-world practicalities, including land redistribution and a turnaround in the economy from dependency to self-sufficiency, producing even the kinds of consumer goods ‘developing countries’ were supposed to buy from wealthier ones. This was done by public, political decisions and debate, and by individual and collective action. For some Chileans this was an outrageous violation of fundamental laws of the universe. For many, it was a real taste of Utopia.6
Then, we still have the ingrained belief, alluded to in the last chapter, that oppression is somehow destined to prevail and that humane projects, like Chile’s democratic socialist revolution, are doomed to bitter failure. The 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s contention that humans are fundamentally selfish and destructive, and therefore need strong rulers, retains a powerful hold. Objective evidence increasingly discredits the Hobbesian version, but that doesn’t stop rightwing ideologues from using every scrap of evidence they can lay their hands on to ‘prove’ that we aren’t as nice as we think we are – and it doesn’t even prevent many apparently democratic and liberal types from going along with it.
A spectacular example of gratuitous Hobbesianism appeared in a column by the leftish-leaning Oxford historian and columnist Timothy Garton-Ash, after the city of New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, killing nearly 2,000 people. Instead of addressing the disaster’s implications for the global-warming debate, or condemning the sheer economic injustice that had starved New Orleans’s flood-protection system of necessary funds and left thousands of people to fend for themselves for days on highway overpasses and in buildings without electricity or clean water, he wrote a loud lament against human nature, inspired by early rumors of looting and mayhem that he had picked up from the media:
Katrina’s big lesson is that the crust of civilization on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you’ve fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog… remove the elementary staples of organized civilized life… and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all.7
It turned out that rightwing media and think tanks had systematically concocted enormous lies that bore no relation whatever to actual events.8 When the true story finally emerged it received little coverage. As we will see below, Katrina’s ‘big lesson’ was about patience, heroism and mutual aid on a huge scale, but that did not fit with the media or government narrative, or even with the deep assumptions of some quite liberal-minded people.
Why this readiness to accept the Hobbesian counsel of despair? Could it be that despair is a kindlier bedfellow than the nightmare of facing and challenging the overwhelming terror that modern governments can unleash? Does it go: ‘I can see the situation is unjust but, if humanity is fundamentally flawed, then there is no point struggling for a better world and I am off the hook’?
ENVISIONING UTOPIA: THE WORLD TURNED RIGHT WAY UP
After the 2007/8 financial crash expectations were high of a global, popular backlash against the system that had created the crisis, but the system has survived. In 2015, the rich were getting richer than ever and the poor, poorer. By January 2016 just 62 people controlled as much wealth as the world’s poorest 50 per cent, some 3.6 billion people.9 The environmental crisis deepens commensurately, and the forces that are causing it proceed almost unhindered.
Why so little opposition to them, and so muted? Could it be that we lack a positive and lively sense of the kind of world we want?
The case for serious political change is made in generally negative terms. ‘The usual green promise,’ says environmental writer George Monbiot, is ‘follow us and the world will be slightly less crap than it would otherwise have been.’10 The message is often some version of ‘unless we change our ways of thinking about consumption and resource use, unless we demand that government provide really sustainable solutions, we as a society and species are headed for disaster’,11 which is true but bleak. A 2013 statement called ‘Premises for a New Economy’, drafted by a group of 18 sustainability experts led by the economist Stephen Marglin, called for ‘an actual reduction in conventional measures of standard of living’, but also indicated the need for
an economics that places higher value on discretionary time [that], in part, would supplant private consumption with new public amenities and spaces that create non-commodified opportunities for leisure and self-development. A second substitution is to build community and other forms of human connection, thereby enriching people’s lives without enlarging ecological footprints.12
…which sounds potentially exciting, but is tantalizingly vague.
We need a more detailed vision, and a sense of how it might be reached, starting from where we are now. The technological stories described in the earlier chapters show, I hope, that there are always plenty of alternative paths for human development, and how tolerating inequality means that those paths become closed off to us as positional interests close in. We can begin to develop a sense of how the size and power of those positional interests, and the presence or absence of constraints on them, predict the speed and thoroughness with which alternatives are eliminated and obliterated, and why the most harmful alternatives will tend to be favored when power inequalities are allowed free play.
Rolling the film backwards, as it were, we can even begin to develop a reasonably detailed idea of what those alternative paths might be, and even of what life would look and feel like subjectively, if we were to grasp the nettle, and call time on inequality.
UTOPIAN PRACTICALITIES: FOOD AND WORK
Food is a good indicator of what happens to diversity, health, and human environmental impact as the battle between elitism and egalitarianism ebbs and flows. As inequality advances (for example, through the free-trade deals that oblige countries like Mexico to accept subsidized US food imports, or which favor the eviction of peasants from their land and its sale to foreign agribusiness) food diversity collapses and environmental impact soars. The industrial agriculture that’s encouraged by this process produces a large part (about 14 per cent) of global greenhouse-gas emissions; a further 17 per cent are added by deforestation, which is largely for the benefit of large-scale, commodity crop and meat production. Yet, for all its impact, this kind of agriculture produces only 30 per cent of the world’s food.13
When the contest goes the other way, and peasant movements reclaim land from big estates and farm it for food rather than profit, diversity tends to return and the soil becomes an absorber rather than an emitter of greenhouse gases (largely because peasants and smallholders tend to farm without artificial inputs). Via Campesina, the worldwide peasant movement for food sovereignty founded in Brazil in 1993, helps to co-ordinate and has documented many inspiring examples of this counter-movement from all over the world. There are some particularly inspiring examples from Zimbabwe and Tanzania, for example, where tens of thousands of peasants are implementing organic methods and restoring land that had been depleted during colonialization.14
Throughout modern history, peasant agriculture has been portrayed as the epitome of backwardness, and treated merely as an easy source of revenue and cheap human labor. It has almost never been on the receiving end of social investment, let alone on the scale that investment has been showered on market-oriented industrial agriculture. Even so, it still produces 50 per cent of the world’s food. A further 25 per cent is now produced by small-scale agriculture within cities. Peasant and small-scale agriculture also provides the rich diversity of food that industrial agriculture has abandoned. And where this kind of farming receives even quite modest investment, huge increases in yield are often achieved – using entirely organic methods. In Nepal, increases of 175 per cent are recorded; in Tigray, Ethiopia, yields have been reported that are three to five times greater than those achieved using chemical fertilizers.15
IS YOUR JOB REALLY NECESSARY?
We are encouraged to think that being modern means being busy – but, as Chapter 8 argued, when you strip away all the sales-oriented effort involved in a modern economy, not a lot is left.
We might all work a lot less in Utopia than we do now, but it depends on what you call work. In the early 1900s a North American agronomist, FH King, who studied peasant agriculture in China, remarked on the prevalent notion in the US that Chinese people were lazy. Yet wherever he went in China, he found extraordinary productivity and creativity. The apparent contradiction stemmed from the peasants’ different approach to work – more like art than like toil:
The oriental farmer is a time economizer beyond all others. He uses the first and last minute and all that are between. The foreigner accuses the Chinaman of being always long on time, never in a fret, never in a hurry. This is quite true and made possible for the simple reason that they are a people who definitely set their faces toward the future and lead time by the forelock.16
His interviewees produced enormous amounts of food from tiny plots of land without any artificial inputs and not a scrap of waste, generally managing to live fairly well despite extortionate rents. Without those rents their lives really would have been ones of ease. The key to the riddle of the ‘lazy’ Chinese peasants and their long, creative working hours clearly lay in their famous culture of reciprocity, known as guanxi.17 These people were oppressed, but at the village level there was great equality and solidarity, and from this came an autonomous approach to work, setting their own schedules and tasks, and the overall sense of good-humored self-assurance and strength that King fell in love with.
Similar things have been written about traditional industries in England. George Sturt, in his classic The Wheelwright’s Shop, wrote that:
…in those days a man’s work, though more laborious to his muscles, was not nearly so exhausting yet tedious as machinery and ‘speeding up’ have since made it for his mind and temper. ‘Eight hours’ today is less interesting and probably more toilsome than ‘twelve hours’ then.18
A ‘chair-bodger’ from Herefordshire called Phil Clissett (who taught the art to architect and craftworker Ernest Gimson in 1890)
…could turn out his work from cleft ash poles on his pole lathe, steam, bend and all the rest. He seems to have made a chair a day for 6/6d [six shillings and sixpence] and rushed it in his cottage kitchen singing as he worked. According to old Philip Clissett, if you were not singing you were not happy.19
A lot of the most productive work that people do looks like playing around or staring into space. Some of the most counter-productive, or even destructive work is done in paid employment. And the world of paid employment barely acknowledges or actively impedes the most important work of all: caring work, especially looking after little children and old people. Hunter gatherers offer an interesting reality check. Most of them live in harsh, marginal environments where you would expect survival to be very hard work indeed. But Richard Lee measured the working hours of the Dobe indigenous group in 1969 and found that they spent on average 2.5 days a week ‘working’ (much of the time spent gathering and hunting was heavily diluted by breaks for conversation, sleep and so on). Even lower working hours were recorded among people in Arnhem Land, northern Australia, and workloads were similar or not much greater all over the hunter-gatherer world, from Lapland to Tierra del Fuego.20
Can an industrial society offer lives of similar ease? Otherwise, what’s the point of living in one? In 1905, the novelist HG Wells thought that, in view of the levels of automation then available, there need be ‘no appreciable toil in the world’.21 In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes reckoned that a 15-hour week would be possible by 2030.22 In 1977 the Adret collective, a group of French workers that included a docker, a nuclear physicist, a secretary and a factory shift-worker, put their heads together and published their assessment of the possibilities under the title Travailler deux heures par jour23 (‘Working two hours a day’). Two years later Christopher Evans (see Chapter 13) was predicting a zero-hour day.
There is a catch to predictions like these. They are often based on an assumption that we are comparing like with like when we compare the time taken to make the goods we need now and in the past. An automobile, or a shirt, or a loaf of bread that’s produced so quickly now is a very different thing from the automobile, shirt or loaf of 20 or 50 years ago – sometimes in good ways, but also in regrettable ways. Automation under capitalism is less to relieve drudgery than to relieve manufacturers of some of their wage bills and reduce their reliance on skilled workers.
The work content that has been squeezed out of automobiles, for example, includes the hand-stitched upholstery and lacquered paint finishes and many other nice touches that collectors of veteran cars like so much. The work content that has been squeezed out of the food chain has removed locally grown food from most people’s diets and many varieties of fruit and vegetables, often species with higher nutritional value, because they needed more labor to pick and process.24 The work content that has been squeezed out of houses has left them without stained glass, ornamental plasterwork, moldings and tile work, the clever paint finishes that Robert Tressell’s ‘ragged trousered philanthropists’ knew how to do,25 and panelled doors.
Much of the work that has been squeezed out of the process is work people enjoy doing, and the only thing wrong with it was that it was so badly paid. And people tend strongly to prefer the things it produced. The rich always make sure they have access to it.
A hallmark of egalitarian societies is that skill is a major social asset and source of personal value, and this is exactly what makes the villages and clothes and artefacts of traditional societies so very attractive to Westerners. If we could eliminate or merely reduce wealth inequality we could find human work flowing back into our material environment as the positional forces that have concentrated workplaces into larger, more widely separated units, lose their power and importance. It would also be promoted actively, through the kinds of economic policies more egalitarian countries tend to pursue, almost irrespective of their official politics. Cuba and the Scandinavian countries have successfully pursued educational policies aimed at providing the entire range of options to all children, even in the remotest parts of the country.
After the Second World War Norway adopted a policy of protecting and supporting regional rural economies and their craft industries, rather than sacrificing them to large-scale industry, and in 1994 Norway voted to remain outside the European Community, in order to protect them from transnational capital. Interestingly, the leader of Norway’s ‘No to EU’ campaign was computer pioneer Kristen Nygaard, co-inventor of the first ‘object-oriented’ computer language, SIMULA, which was originally designed precisely to support this kind of people-based economic planning.26
BEAUTY AND LOWER IMPACT, FROM THE BOTTOM UP
What would our environments be like if, instead of being used to eliminate skilled work, automation were used to support and expand it (as advocated by Nygaard, and in Britain by Mike Cooley, Howard Rosenbrock and other proponents of the ‘socially useful production’ movement – mentioned in Chapter 7)?
Some artists have shown what’s possible (for example, the British artist Grayson Perry’s richly detailed ceramics and tapestries – which take state-of-the-art, computerized looms to the limit of their capabilities, and draw big audiences, including people who don’t normally go to art galleries27). In the 1970s, David Pye developed his own, much simpler techniques for putting machinery at the service of skill, including what he called a ‘fluting engine’ and other devices for taking wood-carving into realms of bewildering virtuosity. He believed machinery should be used to extend the ‘workmanship of risk’ in the way that good sports equipment allows climbers, for example, to tackle bigger challenges, without in any way eliminating the danger of failure. His fluted and turned wooden bowls and intricate, precise wooden boxes give a taste of the kind of world that is possible when machinery is an extension of skill rather than of management.28
The fact that the purpose of automation, and especially computerization, under capitalism has been to eliminate autonomous labor explains how we lost so much diversity – and how we succumbed to the idea that you couldn’t have diversity (nice places to live and nice things around you) if you also wanted automation.
The architect Mark Jarzombek begins a book surveying the beautiful, efficient, low-impact architectures of ‘first societies’ (broadly, societies that are not based on agriculture) with the observation that ‘organization of space is an integral aspect of human society, as fundamental as language and fire’.29 The computer is a wonderful tool for exploring that language.
Christopher Alexander’s 1977 book, A Pattern Language, applied the ‘language’ approach to architecture.30 He drew from, and inspired, other disciplines as well, especially computer systems design. The book originated at Berkeley, California, amid the ferment of activity around computers, the new sciences of cybernetics and General Systems Theory31 as well as Noam Chomsky’s idea of ‘generative grammars’,32 which says that the infinite richness of human language is built, bottom up, from finite numbers of words, assembled according to a compact set of innate rules that all humans share, whatever their culture.
Alexander and his collaborators showed that buildings can, and argued that they must, be created in the same way – starting from their smallest elements and the rules that govern them. Alexander’s ‘grammar’ is described as a set of 253 ‘patterns’, each of which:
describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use the solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.33
The first of these is called ‘Independent Regions’; others are named ‘Degrees of Publicness’, ‘Old People Everywhere’ and, getting down into the detail, ‘Public Outdoor Room’, ‘Short Passages’ and ‘The Fire’.34 Alexander argues that most traditional buildings and communities were built in more or less unconscious obedience to those rules, which is why older ones are so often preferred to modern ones (and his next book was called The Timeless Way of Building – 1979). Alexander maintained that:
People should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea… comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.35
The ‘grammatical’ approach can be applied as we get into the fine detail of our environments. The best-loved ones have a ‘vocabulary’ of constructional elements: particular kinds of doorways and porches, windows and window fixtures, bricks and blocks, particular combinations of materials and finishes, the ratios between one element and another, and so on, which can then be combined freely, producing the kind of pleasing variety and subjective feelings one experiences in an old town center, where a fairly limited palette of timber and brick types and finishes, ironwork, windows, and so on, has yielded an enormous variety of shapes and sizes of buildings, with no two exactly the same.
These environments were not and cannot be created by decree. They are typically the results of social processes of negotiation and communal discussion, and draw on conventions and routines that have been worked out in a similar way. This isn’t necessarily always a harmonious process, but it never produces disasters on the scale that become possible when design is done top-down. And they imply approximate equality or at least the absence of unchallenged, self-confident dominance.
Computers could easily have aided a power-shift in that direction from the late 1970s onwards, had we been better at recognizing the opportunity and the threats to it. Computers can help individuals and communities surround themselves with the kind of richness otherwise only found in stately homes and so-called ‘primitive’ societies. This can happen when inequality retreats.
By the mid-1980s, just as the world was being reclaimed by the elites, cheap personal computers were making it possible for people to design and create dwellings for themselves that met their own needs better and fitted better into their surroundings than any corporate offering. For example, simple architectural design software existed for at least one of the first home computers (the BBC B – or ‘Beeb’) that did ‘ray-tracing’. This allowed you to work out sight-lines for a building (so as not to impinge upon neighbors’ outlooks), and the fall of sunlight and shadow in different spots at different times of the day and year. These features are now routine in the much more powerful Computer-Aided Design (CAD) packages used by large architecture and building firms – but for speedy, profitable construction that complies, where necessary, with government and local regulations, rather than making things nice for the neighbors and the plants.
A Beeb-owning friend of mine owned a small, sloping, irregular bomb-site and wanted to build a workshop on it. He used his computer to create pictures of it (colored in by hand) for each of his dozen or so neighbors, showing what it might look like from their own windows. Most people liked it; some had objections which he addressed, and then printed out revised drawings and took them around again, door to door. After a couple of weeks of this, everyone was happy. It took a lot of care and time, but nothing like the amount of care and time people put into their homes anyway during their lives, trying to make them look nice, as we say, but oblivious of what the thing looks like from the outside.
The main constraints on ‘making a home look nice’ were usually laid down long ago with a 4H pencil and ruler by someone in a legal organization, disregarding any undulations in the land, wildlife, customary uses, trees or small streams that get in the way. Most of us are stuck with our rectangular plots as if God had ordained them. However much money we spend on them, our aspirations can never go further than ‘my pink half of the drainpipe’.36
If the kind of computing power the big firms now enjoy were deployed instead on behalf of individuals, households and groups of neighbors, townscapes could become as magical as the ones people pay large amounts of money to bask in for a week or two every year in places as varied as the Greek island of Mykonos or the Italian city of Florence.
Each dwelling built in this way would inevitably be different from its neighbors, yet complementary to them, in the way traditional buildings are all different and for the same reasons. They would fit in with their neighbors, and with the terrain, like pieces of a puzzle, enhancing its features, however modest they might be (instead of obliterating them, even when they are fairly substantial, as happens in current building practice thanks to the relative cheapness of earth-moving equipment and fossil fuels, compared to human labor).
This would be an obvious role for the ‘plan factories’ envisaged by Cornelius Castoriadis (mentioned in Chapter 12) and their scope need not (and should not) stop at buildings, but could also include transport, provisioning, maintenance and employment, leisure, childcare, healthcare… everything that comes within anybody’s range of awareness. The calculations are complex, but the multi-party, multi-dimensional negotiations they involve are exactly the kind of challenge that gave rise to the invention of linear programming (described in Chapter 12) in the 1930s and 1940s, where large numbers of constraints had to be balanced against each other in turn in the search for a few optimal solutions. Personal computers made it possible for a single household within its own, small neighborhood to do the same kind of number-crunching calculations that could once only be done for massive national projects.
This is exactly the kind of scenario people quite correctly call ‘Utopian’, although they don’t necessarily mean that as a compliment. Yet it is entirely practicable – in fact, far more practical (if only on grounds of resource use and sustainability) than anything the dominant, top-down approach to building human environments can offer. It seems unrealistic, however, if your yardstick is what powerful people might allow rather than what the terrain and available resources will permit. The more one lives in the shadow of power, the more ‘Utopian’ any idea for change whatsoever is likely to seem.
AN ‘UNEXPLORED TERRITORY’ AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
The small details and surface textures of a building may affect those who use it more than its overall design (to which one pays little conscious attention after the first visit or two): its doors, doorsteps and doorknobs, walls, corridors, windows, steps… places where you sit, stand, cook, read, find privacy, meet people… and, at the tactile level, the materials they are made of and how they have been finished. This fits with what is now known about our sense of touch: all of our other external senses are derived from it. A physiologist, Ashley Montagu, who wrote a book about the sense of touch in 1971 calls it ‘a new dimension, a new discovery, and unexplored territory holding much promise of secrets yet to be revealed’.37
It also fits with what David Pye had said only a few years earlier about ‘the extreme paucity of names for surface qualities [which] has quite probably had the effect of preventing any general understanding that they exist as a complete domain of aesthetic experience, a third estate in its own right, standing independently of form and color.’ These qualities are largely the result of craft rather than design – yet ‘In the last 20 years there has been an enormous intensification of interest in Design… But there has been no corresponding interest in workmanship’.38 Were inequality to recede, such skilled craft would flow back into our environments in interesting and wonderful ways. (To start with, imagine the increased need for skilled repair and assembly work, when the outlawing of workplace exploitation has made sweatshop-produced, throwaway products impossible to manufacture.)
For Pye, the term ‘workmanship’ covered not only human craft, but the work of nature that one recognizes in naturally formed materials such as sea pebbles, marble and the grain of wood. It explains the almost universal preference for materials that have been longer in the making: for close-grained hardwoods, for example, in preference to loose-grained pine. Pye’s world did not overlap with those of Benoit Mandelbröt (who discovered the detail-within-detail forms known as fractals – see Chapter 7) or Christopher Alexander, but his sensibilities did. He might have been talking about fractals when he wrote that craft carries design down to the limits of awareness and below, and speculated that:
The downward extension of design to the minutest scale of workmanship is governed by the same law which determines the appearance of a distant mountain or gigantic building, or… that the elements on the threshold of recognition are important at every range.39
This finer level of detail is not always perceived consciously yet it is very important for a person’s sense of well-being or even for health. Researchers in the new field of environmental psychology have found that people are attracted to and reassured by fractal shapes in the same way they are by natural ones – and not by the kinds of shapes one is surrounded by in a typical urban environment, which lack the important ‘detail within detail within detail’ quality.40 Dementia sufferers are happier and less dependent in such environments, as are children with attention disorders.41
Work by a Canadian ecological economist, Jing Chen, links this to the ‘universal law’: the entropy law described in Chapter 9. He theorizes that the human mind ‘being a product of natural selection, calculates the entropy level [of what it sees] and sends out signals of pleasure for accumulating and displaying low entropy, and signals of pain for dissipation of low entropy.’42 So it is not surprising to find that people function better mentally, and recover from illnesses more rapidly, when they have access to natural rather than artificial environments, and in built environments made from natural materials.
Design, it could be said, has been adopted as a substitute for craft and the tactile qualities it creates. As practised under capitalism, and especially computer-assisted capitalism, it is quintessentially heteronomous and bland: design from afar, by others. Almost everything in a modern working-class home is produced that way, including the home itself: designed on a computer in some property-development company’s headquarters with minimal regard for its ultimate setting or the people who will live in it.
SHRINKING ROADS, EXPANDING DIVERSITY
If we are in an anthropocene age, then today’s road networks are its characteristic geological formations: visible, ubiquitous evidence of what happens when a society allows the course of its economic development to be decided by positional competition between unequal players. There is a self-creating drive to over-capacity in areas where the competition is intense, and depletion everywhere else.
Paradoxically, a more equal world would need far fewer roads, yet offer much greater freedom of movement. In history, the main limitation on human movement was never that the highways weren’t big enough, but the laws imposed by dominant groups on subordinate ones to prevent them moving around. This was so in ancient empires, in feudal Europe, and today, when multi-lane highways proliferate at the same time as frontier walls and high-tech border-protection systems. Roads and travel restrictions have often arrived simultaneously. In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson pointed out that the ‘opening up’ of a country to colonization always went hand in hand with strict laws restricting freedom of movement. Many developing countries’ first taste of modernity has been a metalled road, for the benefit of mining or logging companies, or for the military. Europe’s own canal, rail and road systems were introduced to increase the profitability of production and distribution.
As explained in Chapter 6, positional competition demands infrastructure that can meet peak demands – and therefore stands largely idle the rest of the time. The new spare capacity then creates new opportunities for competitive concentration of offices, depots and so on, setting in train new congestion problems, requiring yet more infrastructure… and increasing the amount of travel the rest of us have to do, the amount of transportation needed, and the diversion of creative energy required, simply to maintain day-to-day existence.
When the veil of illusion that all this is necessary is lifted, as it is sometimes by accident, the reality can seem unbelievable. Recall the extreme redundancy of resources exposed by the Cybersyn project in Chile in 1972 (see Chapter 13) when it turned out that only a fraction of the country’s trucks were needed to keep essential goods flowing as normal.
The Chilean example fits with what we know about other societies that enjoy greater equality. People have to commute less in countries that are more equal. Materials are moved around a lot less. As mentioned in Chapter 4, people also enjoy greater social mobility – they can change careers and jobs more easily. The ‘faster is slower’ effect goes into reverse. And because fewer, smaller fortunes depend on competitive speed there is more scope for people to explore varied technologies.
Cycleways are tiny indicators of the almost unimaginable possibilities of a world with radically fewer highways, where people are nonetheless free and able to travel wherever they wish, when they wish. Cycleways are a characteristic of cities where power is already more evenly balanced between different social groups, along with high-quality public transport, which is sometimes provided free. The leading examples are all in more egalitarian places, such as Gröningen in the Netherlands, Freiburg and Karlsruhe in Germany, and the Canadian city of Vancouver – which, in addition to being more egalitarian than similar-sized US cities, is the only major city in North America that does not have a multi-lane highway running into its central district.43
Bicycles, and even horse-drawn vehicles, already turn out to be rather faster than cars, when due account is taken of the time a person must spend earning sufficient money to own one. In 1977, a member of the Adret collective calculated that:
When you look at the hours a car can save you and the hours you spend paying for it, you start yearning for the days of cycling and walking. A worker who owns a car has to dedicate, each year, for its purchase, upkeep, repairs and insurance, at least 375 hours or about two months of work.44
In 2006 Conrad Schmidt, of Canada’s Work Less Party, calculated that working to pay for his car consumed almost three times as much of his time as he spent actually driving it: 82 hours each month to travel 1,200 kilometers – an average speed of 14 kph, which is slower than cycling, as he explains in his book Workers of the World, Relax!45 And James Boyce (whose work on the relationship between inequality and environmental impact was mentioned in Chapter 4) regularly asks his economics undergraduates to carry out this same calculation; they come to similar conclusions, and many of them become confirmed non-car owners.
Wind power is a major technology that was pushed to one side by the fossil-fuelled capitalist epoch, but it has never gone away or stopped developing.
Sailing ships were not eclipsed for straightforward reasons. The fact that steam vessels had to carry their own fuel was a major handicap. However, the steel, coal and then oil interests that would profit from steam were becoming powerful enough to shape the outcome. The Panama Canal, opened in 1914 after expensive political and military interventions had made the project possible, gave steam an advantage in the trade between the Atlantic and Pacific. Until that point, sail still carried a sizeable fraction of international cargoes46 and its technology continued to evolve, with ever-bigger, faster vessels, culminating in huge, fast, steel-hulled barques with advanced rigs and power assistance for raising and trimming sail – such as the Hamburg-built five-masted barque Preussen, launched in 1902.47 Sailing-vessel numbers fell during the two World Wars – they were more vulnerable to attack and did not fit the convoy system. But even so, tall ships returned to serious work in the Baltic after the wars were over, and a Hamburg-built four-master, the Pamir, built in 1904, was put to profitable transatlantic work by its owner and its enthusiastic crew until 1957, when it was overwhelmed – not by market forces but by a hurricane off the Azores.
Enormous possibilities are offered by new materials and computerized, servo-assisted rigs, and people are constantly looking for ways to bring them into service. For example, the Dutch yacht builder Dykstra was ‘planning an entire armada’ of large four-masted ‘Ecoliners’ in 201248 – although these seemed unlikely to offer a particularly radical departure from the present norm while they have to fit in with a maritime freight system based on containerization (and as of March 2016 the project was still only ‘ready to leave the drawing board’).
Aircraft have become synonymous with environmental destruction, but how much of their destructiveness comes from flight itself, and how much from the capitalist way of flying – governed as it is by maximizing speeds and payloads? Birds and insects can stay aloft all day, without worrying whether they can afford to or not, adding to the diversity of their environment while they are about it.
Modern passenger jets are claimed to be very efficient on the basis of how much fuel it takes to move one passenger one mile or kilometer. The giant Airbus A380, for example, claims 78 passenger-miles per US gallon, but calculations like these are based on the assumption that several hundred people are to be carried simultaneously, very fast, over distances of several thousand miles, and does not include any of the costs of enlarging airports, runways and other infrastructure to cope. In terms of shifting a given tonnage of aircraft a given distance, the latest jets are only slightly more efficient than piston-engined airliners were in the 1950s.49
If speed became radically less important, as it would do in a world without entrenched positional competition, that would alter all the bases of calculation. As the materials scientist JE Gordon pointed out (Chapter 8), some kinds of aircraft can be more durable than cars, and it is possible that smaller, lighter, slower aircraft might be more fuel efficient.50 Airships would become viable, and these can have negligible environmental impact, as well as being a very different kind of experience.51 These were the comments of BBC correspondent Anthony Smith, who took a flight on a prototype in 2007:
We just cruised for 40 minutes, but could open the windows, speak without effort, enjoy watching the world go by 1,000 ft (300m) below, and tell ourselves what it must have been like when far bigger airships were having their heyday. Such as the Graf Zeppelin which went around the world in 1929 in four hops, starting from the US, touching down in Germany, then in Japan, and then in California.
What a flight, with meals in the dining room, cabins to sleep in, and our beautiful planet not six miles down and invisible but usually a mere 1,500 ft (450m) below.
Think of all such trips. Perhaps down to Rio in one hop, dancing if you felt like it, walking about, and not just to a doll’s-house loo.52
Paradoxically, slower modes of transport might deliver a greater diversity of goods. For example, the practice of flying fruit and vegetables all over the world has gone hand in hand with a radical reduction in choice: a global system favoring varieties that can survive long periods under refrigeration without unsightly blemishes, and can be grown at different latitudes to take advantage of different growing seasons. At the beginning of the 20th century, 7,098 varieties of apples were known in the US.53 Fifteen varieties now account for 90 per cent of all apples sold in the US, and the biggest sellers are varieties recently developed (and even patented) in New Zealand for the new, globalized fruit trade. One variety, Royal Gala, ranks second in the US and accounts for 20 per cent of all apples sold in the UK. Another variety bred for global trade, Braeburn, appears year round in British supermarkets, from New Zealand, France, Chile and sometimes from England as well.
Conversely, slow transport can have a surprisingly long reach. According to my mother (born 1919), English greengrocers in the 1930s had most of the same foreign fruit that supermarkets have now and some things that they don’t: bunches of fresh mimosa would appear every February, having been brought overnight by train from southern France, which seems quite wonderful (and certainly seemed so to her). There were also many more kinds of more locally grown apples, plums, pears, even within my own lifetime. The labor content of such food is higher, but so is the nutritional value.
PUTTING BABIES AND CHILDREN AT THE HEART OF THE ECONOMY
The challenge is to restore the concept of ‘work’ to democratic debate and control – and make sure people can afford to do the work they value, and which their families and communities need and want. This Utopian notion would become a lot easier to contemplate, if the positional pressures that make life difficult and expensive were eased.
Any calculation of how much work would be necessary in an ideal society is bound to be flawed if it is based on industrial productivity, and the kind of work that is done in things called ‘jobs’, for wages. It ignores at least half of the world’s work – the unpaid work that women usually end up doing. Capitalism likes to ignore all this, and assumes that its most valuable assets appear, ready for action, out of thin air: the able-bodied, clear-thinking, adaptable people it needs in order to function. This magical army is the product of ‘reproductive labor’: not just the business of making babies, but also bringing them up, clothing and feeding them, keeping roofs over their heads, providing warmth, food and pleasure, and so on. In the 1970s some radical socialist groups tentatively proposed placing such activities at the center of economic life. This is from a book by a group of trades councils in northern England:
‘How would we organize the economy in order best to care for and support our children?’ Not a question asked very much, if at all, in conventional economic policymaking… It implies a reversal of all the most central economic relationships which make up the taken-for-granted framework of policymaking.54
Ursula Huws has pointed out that this unpaid, reproductive workload increases when we allow ‘work’ to be defined as paid employment. So-called ‘labor-saving devices’ created almost as much work as they allegedly saved during the 20th century, and it is still mainly women who are doing it. She writes:
Each housewife, isolated in her own home, duplicates the work of every other housewife, and requires her own individual washing machine, refrigerator, stove, vacuum cleaner, and all the other items that make up a well-equipped home, from lemon squeezers to deep-fat fryers, many of which are probably out of use 95 per cent of the time. There is thus no economy of scale, which is often the main saving that automation brings. Getting out the food processor, assembling the bits, dismantling it, washing it up, and putting it away again takes as much time whether one is cooking for 2 or 20, and the same applies to hundreds of other operations that all women carry out separately.55
In 2005, US women were spending 29.3 hours per week on average on ‘home production’ and men 16.8 hours – a total of 46.1 – not enormously different from the total for 1900 (50.7 hours).56
Huws notes a tendency among some leftwing writers to ignore all that, and see signs of a revolutionary future in the kinds of creative work (‘cultural labor’) that have blossomed among computer users: programming of various kinds, and now writing blogs, exchanging messages and organizing one’s life via social media. But the housework still has to be done. She writes:
A vision of the future that filters reproductive labor out of view runs the risk of failing to predict the next big wave of commodification. And a Utopia that focuses only on those activities that currently take place visibly within the market runs the risk of leaving the gender division of labor intact and disregarded. While Adam blogs, we must ask, who is cleaning the toilet?57
We need a real revolution in the design of all work. Radical though that sounds, it can start in ways that don’t look very glamorous (like the co-housing project mentioned in Chapter 4), and ones that lurk on the fringes of society. Gypsies and travellers live wherever they can and their lives are hard, but they know about autonomy, they know their own and each other’s skills and strengths, and they know where their livelihoods come from. This has made them a tough nut to crack for the authorities that want to get rid of them.
SHARED WORK: UTOPIA’S POWERHOUSES
Work that’s shared feels radically different from work done in isolation. Stephen Marglin (in The Dismal Science, his damning analysis of his own discipline, economics) contrasts the harsh, isolated lives of women in the Texas hill country in the 1920s (described in Robert Caro’s biography of President Lyndon Johnson, who grew up in that area) with the lyrical account given by writer Sue Bender of performing identical tasks in the Amish community where she went to live in the 1980s.58 Among the Amish, community takes the highest priority. Hard and unappealing tasks are done communally and sociably if possible. They reject technologies that would subvert the communal life but embrace ones that support it.
Unfortunately, a great many technologies produced in the outside, capitalist world seem specifically designed to eliminate communal activity. It would be commercial suicide for a capitalist firm to produce a washing machine that a number of people can share, when it could sell each person an entire laundry of their own. The same logic forces us all to buy our own computers instead of sharing them, even though they are built on technologies that were perfected for that very purpose (via time-sharing, as described in Chapter 11).
Eric Brende (a computer scientist who has lived in an Amish community) found that computers can be perfectly acceptable among the Amish because they are so useful for doing the farm accounts. But internet access in the home is generally not accepted, because of the ease with which it can draw a user into a different and possibly damaging world, separating them from their community.59 Brende, interviewed in 2004, touches on an important difference between ‘friendship’ as understood in modern societies and as practised in, say, social media (between people you like rather than dislike) and the kind of social relationship, and communication, that comes out of doing necessary things together:
People get together not just because they like each other, but because they need each other. There’s a strong incentive not to sweat the small stuff.
There’s another whole layer of more subtle dynamics at work. When you are working with your hands, or whatever limbs, out in the field, pretty soon that work becomes self-automating. It thereby frees up the mind for conversation. Meanwhile, the labor serves as a kind of musical undercurrent that gives a certain depth to the experience. It’s like the difference between hearing a choir singing in unison, and one singing in harmonies, with basses at the bottom.60
This bond between people that happens ‘Not just because they like each other’ is a constant and politically vital feature of solidaristic experiences, as we will see below.
But single-community solutions have their limits. All individual or local attempts to lead autonomous lifestyles are forced to exist in opposition to the wider world, unable to use most of its resources because they have been configured to undermine autonomy. But one can begin, perhaps, to imagine how different that wider world, and theirs, would be, if those resources were deployed to support autonomy instead.
COMMUNITY IS STRONGER THAN WE THINK: ‘DISASTER UTOPIAS’
In A Paradise Built in Hell Rebecca Solnit describes a number of episodes when whole societies were briefly transformed by spontaneous, self-organized mutual help networks that sprang up from communities, in the immediate aftermath of disasters: explosions, earthquakes, hurricanes and the like.61 She calls them ‘disaster Utopias’. In all the disasters she researched (natural ones and human-made) the common factor was the sudden absence of normal, hierarchical organization. Autonomy immediately replaced heteronomy and proved much more effective. Accountability vanished and was replaced by trust, even in complete strangers, and it almost always proved to be more than justified.
She interviewed a young man, Tobin James Mueller, who set up a free coffee stall in Union Square, Manhattan, the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. His only previous experience had been organizing rave parties but his initiative somehow grew within a couple of days, into a highly efficient, 200-strong operation locating, collecting and delivering materials to firefighters and rescue workers, and organizing temporary housing. Mueller had made it a policy never to turn away volunteers (which official relief organizations did):
A hopeful would-be volunteer comes up to me and asks if there is anything she can do. I give her a job and that’s the last direction I need to give. Each volunteer becomes a self-motivated never-say-die powerhouse… they find 100 other more jobs to do… it’s so much fun to participate in I forget to sleep… it’s difficult to bring oneself to go back home… My one rule: I never say ‘no’. That’s one of the reasons it becomes a Utopia.62
Solnit found this to be a constantly recurring theme. It revolutionized people’s lives, and some of those revolutions have continued. For example, the factory occupation movement that started in Argentina after the country’s financial system collapsed in 2001-2 has matured and spread. When New Internationalist magazine’s Vanessa Baird visited in 2013, she found ‘a growing legacy of… “everyday revolutions”. Of people interacting with each other, on an equal footing and with respect, to meet their needs, improve their lives and create a measure of social justice.’63 This movement had spread far beyond Argentina, especially after the 2007/8 financial crisis. In February 2014 there were enough worker-controlled factories in France and Italy to justify an international meeting of the movement, which was held at a worker-controlled herb-processing factory in Marseille.64
After every one of the disasters that Rebecca Solnit studied, the authorities and media predicted an outbreak of looting and ‘bestial behavior’; what evolved instead was a riot of self-organized mutual aid, which was far more effective than anything the authorities could organize. The pattern was so pronounced as to call in question what we mean by ‘normality’: who is protecting whom against what?
Women found themselves doing ‘men’s’ jobs, like firefighting, construction and organizing, while men lost their inhibitions about doing ‘women’s’ tasks like feeding people, childminding and helping the injured.
The mutual-help networks that sprang up in the devastation of New Orleans in 2005, after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and many other disasters, had an almost festive quality, making the experiences perversely positive for many of those involved. All were suddenly equal. Nobody doubted anyone else’s good intentions. Money became irrelevant. There was real work to be done – far more important and real than their day-to-day work had been – and everyone piled in to help with no bidding and tremendous efficiency. People found a sense of purpose they had craved all their lives and, having found it, were disinclined to accept anything less. After the San Francisco earthquake, wealthy people could not find servants. Lots of people were unemployed, but they didn’t want the jobs.
During blackouts in Manhattan in August 2003, people turned out to help neighbors they’d never even spoken to before. Along with the air-conditioning, the street lighting went off, so people could see the stars for the first time, suggesting to Solnit that:
You can think of the current social order as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster. In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, co-operative, and local society… [The suddenly visible stars are remote] But the constellations of solidarity, altruism and improvization are within most of us and reappear at these times. People know what to do in a disaster.65
There was nothing mystical about this eruption of trust and good humor. A fundamental biological system was at work here that capitalism systematically suppresses: the faculty that Heidi Ravven called ‘the self beyond itself’, which socialists call ‘solidarity’ and which Peter Kropotkin, the founder of modern anarchism, called ‘mutual aid’. Kropotkin argued in 1902 that this is a major emotional mechanism found throughout the living world and, in fact, ‘a factor of evolution’ (the subtitle of his book Mutual Aid, written as a riposte to the idea that evolution proceeds by ruthless competition, advanced by Thomas Huxley in Evolution and Ethics, in 1893). In his introduction to Mutual Aid, Kropotkin is at pains to demolish what he considers a false opposition that has dominated attempts to understand human nature: it is either aggression or ‘love that makes the world go round’. Kropotkin writes that:
to reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbor – whom I often do not know at all – which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals.66
A US neuroscientist, Donald Pfaff, referred to by Heidi Ravven, believes the response is the same one that creates the bond between mother and baby: a blurring between one’s sense of oneself and of another person (the sense of empathy) mediated by identifiable interactions between neurotransmitter chemicals, oxytocin in particular, and specific networks of brain cells. He mentions a man called Wesley Aubrey who jumped down into the path of an oncoming New York subway train to rescue a total stranger who had fallen onto the track during an epileptic fit. Pfaff writes that:
Mr Aubrey’s brain must have instantly achieved an identity between his self-image and the image of the victim who fell in front of the subway train. This identification did not occur by some complex highly intellectual act – it came about by… blurring the distinction between the two images. In addition, Mr Aubrey was demonstrating the kind of prosocial caring feeling that (I hypothesize) normally develops from parental or familiar love.67
As everyone knows who has ever responded to another’s need, or cried while watching a movie or even when reading some story of self-sacrifice, this ‘loss of self’ is a physiological phenomenon, and it happens faster than thought. It is a stark testament to the oppressive ideologies we have learned to accept, that we should need scientific approval to take seriously what John Donne wrote nearly four centuries ago, in the much-quoted paragraph from his Meditation 17 (written while he was recovering from typhus during the epidemic of 1624, and the funerals of other victims were taking place all around):
No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine… any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Why has that little paragraph such emotional force? Everyone recognizes its truth, whether they know their Kropotkin or their neuroscience or not. Pfaff says we actually do recognize it in our guts. Pauline Jacobson, a survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, wrote:
The individual, isolated self was dead. The social self was regnant. Never even when the four walls of one’s own room in a new city shall close round us again shall we sense the old lonesomeness shutting us off from our neighbors.68
Rebecca Solnit says: ‘The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay.’69
No wonder the Right invests so much energy, and takes such big risks, in destroying the power that comes from the solidarity that develops in workplaces.
THE RIGHT KNOWS THE POWER OF SOLIDARITY, EVEN IF THE LEFT DOESN’T
Even filthy, dangerous workplaces can be Utopias according to many who work in them, because of the solidarity that reigns there. One thinks of the dynamic role played in revolutions and struggles for justice by people who come from exactly those kinds of workplaces where people develop and take pride in their own powers: sailors, printers and miners in particular – tin miners in Bolivia, copper miners in Peru, coalminers everywhere. The Right is often better at recognizing their power than are politicians of the Left.
Britain’s neoliberal prime minister Margaret Thatcher instinctively hated trade unions, whom she labelled ‘the enemy within’. Defeating and neutralizing organized labor was central to her mission to reverse the post-War trend of reducing inequality, and defeating the coalminers was the central part of that task. Most of Britain’s 200,000 coalminers lost their livelihoods soon after their defeat in a strike (1984/5) provoked deliberately by the government to destroy trade-union power.
Given the extreme discomfort and danger of coalmining work, it can seem extraordinary that people would fight so hard and suffer so much to preserve it – but perhaps it is no more extraordinary than the lengths dancers, musicians, writers and climbers will go to, to do what they have set their hearts on doing. It may seem odd to speak of coalminers in the same breath as ballet dancers and composers, but that may reflect more on the inequality of a society in which these different communities have so little mutual contact, than it does on the nature of their work per se.
Miners and their communities prized the solidarity and the equality that came from pit work. A Welsh miner my partner met during the strike spoke of his frustration at being restricted by ill health (caused by working underground) to surface work in a comfortable office. Underground, all were equal; management was left behind at the pit-head.
In 2009 I asked a Durham miner and union organizer whether he still missed working underground after all those years. As I recall, he said: ‘I miss it terribly, every day’.70 A few years later I asked another pit veteran what he thought about the man’s remark. Could someone really feel that way about the pit?
‘Oh absolutely!’ he replied. ‘There’s no stress at the coal face. You’re surrounded by terrible dangers, but there’s no stress!’ He described the camaraderie. It’s impossible for anyone to try to pull rank because everyone is filthy and either naked or semi-naked (because it is hot underground). The humor is constant and hilarious: ‘everyone takes the piss out of everyone else’. Rivalries and even animosities can be intense, but solidarity overrides them, instantly, when there’s any external threat to any member of the group. ‘All out! No two ways about it!’71 John David Douglass’s autobiography, Geordies – wa mental, overflows with the gleeful sense of strength that comes with a life of tackling real, tough issues with comrades – who one may not even like, but who are one’s equals.72 A comrade is not necessarily the same thing as a friend.
Comradeship spells trouble for oppressors yet if they ever managed to get rid of it completely they would have killed the goose that lays their golden eggs. The merest scrap of Utopia can sustain the most downtrodden worker, more so even than food, as the following example shows: the art critic and social reformer John Ruskin found it in his Daily Telegraph in early 1864, and read it out in Manchester to a gathering of the great and good, to their annoyance. He published the lecture as Sesame and Lilies, and got the printers to print the passage in red (and it continued to be printed that way in later editions till at least 1927).
Michael Collins, aged 58, of Spitalfields, London, had died of starvation and overwork in the winter of 1863-4. He, his wife and son were ‘translators’ of boots: they collected worn-out ones from the rubbish tips, repaired them, and sold them to bootmakers’ shops, which then sold them to people who couldn’t afford new ones.
At the inquest, the coroner said to Mr Collins’s son, Cornelius: ‘It seems to me deplorable that you did not go into the workhouse.’ Cornelius replied:
‘We wanted the comforts of our little home.’ A juror asked what the comforts were, for he only saw a little straw in the corner of the room, the windows of which were broken. The witness began to cry, and said that they had a quilt and other little things… In summer, when the season was good, they sometimes made as much as 10 shillings profit in the week…
A juror: ‘You are dying of starvation yourself, and you ought to go into the house until the summer.’ –
Witness: ‘If we went in we should die. When we come out in the summer we should be like people dropped from the sky. No one would know us, and we would not have even a room. I could work now if I had food, for my sight would get better.73
The younger Collins’ passionate rejection of ‘state benefit’, such as it was, expressed something much less comfortable than the terms ‘hard-working families’ and ‘strong work ethic’ convey, which the authorities like to applaud.74 These were the defiant words of a human being, determined to preserve his last, infinitesimal scrap of the comradeship, warmth and dignity a human being needs, or die in the attempt.
The inquest jury very likely also knew that the workhouse wouldn’t get anywhere near such good value from him as he’d produce, starving, through his own desperate efforts. Down the centuries, London’s workhouses never produced much of a profit, if any, from their inmates, no matter how strictly regulated the regime.75 The Victorian workhouse functioned, and was intended to function, mainly as a threat, to keep people working and maintaining themselves at their own expense – or have their humanity confiscated.
A market economy wrings serious profit from the tiny Utopias that sustain free labor – even while denying that they play any part at all in the proceedings, or that they even exist.
UTOPIA: NOT A WISPY ASPIRATION BUT A TOUGH REALITY
The big lesson of Rebecca Solnit’s work – and even more, that of Petr Kropotkin and other anarchist thinkers, not to mention modern neuroscience and social psychology – is that Utopia not only exists but that we know where and how it exists. It resides in the absence of domination, and in the autonomy and solidarity that become possible when domination is absent. Utopia emerges spontaneously, rapidly and fully formed in the way a plant emerges from a seed, the moment hierarchies of power are out of the way or people are resolved to be rid of them. Those hierarchies know this by instinct, and invest large amounts of their own and society’s time and resources in the battle to suppress Utopia and deny its existence, while trying to find ways of creating private Utopias for themselves.
Elites are uncomfortably if dimly aware that the ideas and technologies that give them their power and wealth emerge from exactly the kinds of Utopias they dread. Fortunately for them, the Left in general is shy of Utopia and hopes only for ‘a bit less rape’, as it were, so the capitalists can play with Utopia to their hearts’ content in their managerial Prospero-islands and billion-dollar creative playpens, without too much risk.
But no wonder the Left is timid. To abolish hierarchy has come to seem such a tall order that we would rather try to change our natures than to confront it – and we do this every day, every time we pass a beggar in the street. But an apparently rock-solid consensus in favor of elitism can evaporate when an ‘egalitarian turn’ is in the air. People who might otherwise oppose egalitarian policies can cease doing so, or support them, if that is where they believe their interests lie.
The turn towards greater equality in Europe and the US during and after the Second World War came about, not thanks to a society-wide Damascene conversion to egalitarianism, but because people of all shades of opinion and background saw and felt that extreme wealth was no longer generally approved. This vague but pervasive sense of where society was heading provided a sort of ‘feed-forward’ signal that, as can be seen in retrospect, started to shift society into what could have been a far less damaging course of development.
When the tide of opinion seems to be flowing against privilege and poverty, unlikely people can show support for the oppressed. Elites are exquisitely sensitive to threats to their legitimacy, and can seek to recoup moral ground by isolating and punishing members of their own class who push their elitism too far. In his book Cotters and Squatters, Colin Ward tells how, during the acute housing shortage in post-War Britain, property owners who tried to evict squatters, and officials who condoned the evictions, were vilified by some traditionally conservative town councils and newspapers, and the policy was changed.76
But how to change the sense of a society’s direction? Robert Axelrod, who has spent his career studying co-operative behavior, found that for a social norm to become established, it is not enough for society to disapprove of those who deviate from it; society must also and especially disapprove of those who fail to show their disapproval of the offending behavior. This second-order norm-enforcement mechanism is called a ‘metanorm’.77
In today’s unequal world, metanorms tend to be used oppressively: they are what makes ‘family honor’ such a cruelly effective way of controlling the lives of young women. A father is condemned by the whole community for not keeping his womenfolk under proper control. Similarly, rightwing media can control the freedoms of trade unionists, migrants, single mothers, public employees and so on by vilifying those who support them, or who are thought likely to do so: social workers, school teachers, and especially any politicians who look as if they might be ‘soft on’ the deviance in question.
The ‘zone of criminality’ is made as wide and vague as possible, so that people must make strenuous efforts to avoid identification with it. The accusation of ‘closet Marxist’, ‘bleeding-heart liberal’ or ‘fluffy do-gooder’ can start a stampede for cover, leaving the ‘benefit scroungers’ and ‘asylum cheats’ isolated and defenseless. Liberal-minded politicians start competing to show how tough they are, and finally end up doing their opponents’ dirty work for them.
But these tactics ought to work even better for the egalitarian Left than they do for the hierarchy-loving Right because that is where they evolved. The rich variety of ‘counter-dominance’ strategies observed in traditional societies by anthropologists such as Christopher Boehm (see Chapter 1)78 for ‘taking someone down a peg or two’ with jokes, gossip and so on, are powerful mechanisms for maintaining their egalitarianism and health. No trace of an aura of approval or respect has a chance to develop around potential tyrants. A good metapolitical strategy might be to turn the spotlight of criticism not just onto its obvious targets, the ‘fat cats’ and super-rich, but also and especially onto those who curry favor with them, write their speeches, do their advertising and PR, or feature them as objects of admiration in the media.
In this way, a general realization can quite suddenly ripple right through society (as the Algerian activist and writer Frantz Fanon put it in 1960) that ‘rich people are no longer respectable people’.79 The subjective reality of living in a society can change totally, long before its physical structure does, producing the universal, galvanizing sense of having arrived in ‘a paradise’ or ‘a new era’, described by Gustave Courbet during the Paris Commune in 1871, and by George Orwell in Republican Barcelona in 1936. One moment oppression seems universally assumed to be the norm for now and evermore; next moment it is impossible to find anyone who was ever in favor of it. It is not that people are fickle and have changed their minds but that certain long-suppressed, unarticulated beliefs and feelings are suddenly free to come into the open.
But people will never have a sense that things might move in an egalitarian direction if nobody will declare publicly that equality plain and simple is what we need. And no new era will last beyond its dawn, if its people start to tolerate inequality again.
The likelihood of rightwing terror can never be dismissed, but solidarity is the best defense against it. That’s why elites have always sought to stigmatize and destroy sources of solidarity. The struggles of mine workers and slum dwellers, not to mention soldiers, show that when people have solidarity they can endure things the mere thought of which would make a lone individual throw in the towel.
EQUALITY, TRUTH AND THE EXPERIENCE OF BEING BELIEVED
We can recognize Utopia by the feelings it evokes; in fact, without those feelings it is not Utopia. Equality, freedom from the fear of domination, is always the root of the matter.
One thing that stands out is how important truth-telling is in the lives of hunter-gathering and foraging peoples – and how important the converse, avoidance and denial of the truth, is to a modern society. Hunter-gatherers’ candor can even be quite shocking. But theirs is a culture that cannot afford falsehood. Survival can depend on disclosure of every possible scrap and nuance of information. Hugh Brody believes that:
The apparent sturdiness of the hunter-gatherer personality, the virtual universality of self-confidence and equanimity, the absence of anxiety disorders and most depressive illness – these may well be the benefits of using words to tell the truth.80
In class societies, the lower one’s status, the less one can expect to be believed. The least powerful must work the hardest to prove that they are not lying. Credibility is an attribute of high status, traditionally males, especially white ones. Low-status people always have to prove that they are not lying, especially if they are ill or in need. Victims of sexual abuse and migrants are often the least likely to be believed, especially in the most unequal countries. The simple matter of being taken at your word – a basic assumption among ‘primitive’ people – is like a miracle. This was said by a woman who had been raped, quoted in a recent UK government report:
You need someone to say ‘I believe you’. That’s the most important thing. Anything after that is great, but that’s what screws your head: someone calling you a liar.81
The emotional impact of simply being believed at last, when you are used to being disbelieved and having everything you say challenged, is transformative and empowering. Another woman, describing her arrival 40 years ago in an overcrowded refuge for battered women, where her story was finally believed, said ‘my life began in the refuge’.82
Credibility is fundamental to autonomy, and autonomy is anathema to a class society; it would not do for the lower orders to decide for themselves what they need, let alone ‘help themselves’ to food or housing, even when there is plenty of it lying around and going to waste. The poor and sick must submit their most intimate sufferings to tribunals, which decide whether those sufferings are real or not. Stigmatized minorities are non-credible by default. Subordinate workers have to justify taking time off work, or complete time sheets to prove their attendance, or even ask permission to go to the toilet. At the other end of the credibility spectrum, a superior might say ‘I feel a bit rough this afternoon; I think I’ll head off home now’, and his colleagues and underlings will soothe and support him in that intention.
Inequality turns credibility into a sort of an invisible, official currency that touches the parts of our lives ordinary currency cannot reach. Instead of being something one simply has and can rely on, one finds that it lies in the hands of others.
In fact, you could say that ‘credibility is like money’ is more than analogy: it is money. As a number of writers have shown recently (for example, the anthropologist David Graeber83 and the economist Ann Pettifor84), money, and especially credit (which is what nearly all modern money is, created by banks at the stroke of a pen on conditions that they define) is just a reification of the older notions of trust and reciprocity that humans always used among themselves. To find oneself beyond its reach is the very stuff of Utopia. To be believed, to be treated as if one’s feelings, thoughts and experiences were as worthy of respect as anyone else’s, to be given as much time as one needs: these are Utopia’s basic ingredients. Compared to this, the physical conditions can be of minor importance.
Rightwingers are fond of warning about the utter mayhem that will ensue if social justice has its way, but the ‘new heaven and new earth’ can unfold with little apparent change to the physical situation (think of the transformation that can happen in a workplace, when the boss is away).
It might be a case, simply, of existing institutions starting to do what they already claim to do (‘serving the community’ and so on), rather than having to pretend all the time. One question worth considering is: how much of the existing structure of society comes from inequality, and how much of it comes from the Utopian impulses and dreams that keep the whole thing running?
There might even be a role for a marketing department in a firm run by equals, for equals: one that did what marketing people have always said they do: find out what people want, and then find ways of getting it to them.
WHO’S AFRAID OF PETER SAUNDERS?
Dare we demand equality? Given all the evidence, you would think that if we did we would be pushing on an open door. Few seem to object to the idea of greater equality. Even those who support the status quo don’t explicitly demand less equality (although they back policies that lead in that direction). On the other hand, hardly anyone seems willing to suggest a level of inequality that would be ‘about right’. The UK Green Party at least proposes a maximum wage of sorts (a 10:1 maximum ratio between top and bottom salaries in organizations) but why the factor of 10? Perhaps they think it is a realistic goal, one that powerful elites might not oppose as violently as they might 5:1 or 2:1, let alone equality plain and simple.
Instead of confronting the problem of excess wealth, liberal-minded political groups usually focus on relieving poverty, perhaps by enforcing and raising minimum wages. But raised minimum wages are easily negated when earnings and wealth at the top explode, driving up the price of housing and further augmenting the power of interests that are inimical to things that support general welfare, such as public transport, schooling and healthcare. As wealth gaps widen, the poor rely more on credit, which further enriches the already wealthy. Investment becomes increasingly focused on financial opportunities. The principle of inequality, unchallenged, becomes further entrenched.
The epidemiological evidence suggests that inequality is a bit like asbestos: it has no known ‘safe level’. Why not ban it? Or why not at least discuss banning it, to draw out all the arguments pro and con? The writing on the wall suggests that the only safe level of inequality we should contemplate is zero. But why the silence? Are we at a historic moment, like one of those moments of stunned silence at the end of a stupendous performance, when nobody dares to be the first to clap?
Elitism’s defenders have often argued that inequality is needed to spur innovation. The evidence gathered by this book contradicts that. The story of computers and high technology, in particular, tells us that tolerating inequality becomes downright dangerous as technology gets more powerful. The idea that big rewards (or even any material reward at all) are helpful in any productive sense, has no support from any of the relevant sciences and has been publicly demolished in thousands of academic studies and a slew of popular books (see Chapter 1).
Even some hard-liners are abandoning the claim that inequality helps innovation. In 2009, the rightwing UK think tank Policy Exchange commissioned a veteran opponent of wealth redistribution, Emeritus Professor of Sociology Peter Saunders, to challenge the arguments made for reducing inequality (if not actually eliminating it) by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in their book The Spirit Level. He conceded that:
No association between any of [the] indicators of economic vitality and the degree of equality or inequality of incomes in a country can be identified [and] a lot of defenders of free-market economics might also be wrong in arguing that radical income redistribution will necessarily choke off the spirit of enterprise and innovation in a country.85
Saunders made some attempt to show that inequality did not cause higher levels of morbidity, mortality and crime but Pickett and Wilkinson easily exposed his reasoning as highly selective and self-contradictory.86
They said nothing, however, about the stream of judiciously modulated abuse in which Saunders’s objections came wrapped – as one might reasonably, in different circumstances, ignore someone’s faux pas, either to avoid a scene or to avoid humiliating them. But this was not just a regrettable lapse by someone who knew no better. It was a sustained attack on Pickett and Wilkinson and those around them, whom he cast as ‘leftwing intellectuals’ with covert ‘ideological’ motives:
The Spirit Level is more than just an academic book. It is a manifesto. Its apparent ‘scientific’ backing for a core, traditional element of leftwing ideology is being used to spearhead a new political movement aimed at putting radical income redistribution back at the heart of the political agenda.
Saunders asserted that because an ‘agenda’ lay behind their work, they were a discreditable source, part of a clandestine leftwing movement; anything they produced was bound to be tainted and it would be dangerous to base policy on it. Setting aside the question of whether Saunders might have had an ‘agenda’ himself, or represented any kind of political movement, the real force of his article was its innuendo (the inverted commas around ‘scientific’, the continual identification of the authors and all those around them as ‘leftwing’ and ‘left-leaning’). Pickett and Wilkinson were not actually called ‘reds under the bed’ but when the factual discussion was stripped away, what you had left was classic rightwing intimidation in academic language, with footnotes.
THE ‘APPARATUS OF JUSTIFICATION’
The French economist Thomas Piketty’s major 2014 study of inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, warns that global inequality is entering unknown territory with ‘potentially terrifying’ consequences.87 In the US, income inequality is on course to set a new world record by 2030, with 60 per cent of all earnings going to the wealthiest 10 per cent.88
No society, says Piketty, has ever survived that kind of inequality without some kind of breakdown or revolution. Whether our present situation will prove sustainable or not depends to a large extent on what he calls ‘the repressive apparatus’ – which is indeed terrifying and unprecedented. It consists of militarized police forces, equipped with everything from tazers to drones and firearms of astonishing destructive power, backed by authorities who take an increasingly indulgent attitude to torture and imprisonment without trial. But also, before we ever get that far, we have to face rightwing media that have become expert at singling out potential enemies and useful scapegoats, hounding and humiliating them and those around them so effectively that nobody wants even to be seen anywhere near them, lest they get the same treatment.
But Piketty goes on:
Whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the effectiveness of the apparatus of justification. If inequalities are seen as justified, say because they seem to be a consequence of a choice by the rich to work harder or more efficiently than the poor, or because preventing the rich from earning more would inevitably harm the worst-off members of society, then it is perfectly possible for the concentration of income to set new historical records…
I want to insist on this point: the key issue is the justification of inequalities rather than their magnitude as such.89
I hope Piketty is correct to say that the apparatus of justification is the core problem, because (as I hope this book has shown) the very thing so many people see as capitalism’s greatest justification, its claim to have given us a benign technological revolution, is a sham. In practice, huge media, industrial and financial interests do not want that claim undermined and will defend it tooth and nail with all the means at their disposal. But the facts are emerging, and bit by bit they are making their way into public consciousness.
Saunders’s attack on The Spirit Level’s authors shows that the justificatory and repressive systems are not separate. Clear intimations of the scapegoating that precedes outright oppression are there in the ‘measured’ rightwing language. It is meant to undermine them, to prejudice readers against them, and to warn people off supporting them.
Verbal undermining is fundamental to the maintenance of inequality and injustice. Not challenging it or even drawing attention to it hands power to those who wish to preserve privilege and oppression. Pretending that one’s attackers are fellow seekers after truth who share one’s own values when it’s clear that they regard them with contempt, betrays the entire constituency of the oppressed. It also hands oppressors and their helpers carte blanche to waste everyone’s time with spurious or mendacious objections, which they can produce in endless quantities – demonstrated by the successful rearguard actions waged over decades by the tobacco industry against the evidence of its role in destroying the health of whole populations, and now by fossil-fuel interests against the evidence on climate change.
The linguistic scientist George Lakoff abandoned academia in the 1990s to throw the spotlight on how rightwingers win arguments by defining the terms and the language of the debate, and how the Left becomes complicit in its own defeat when it fails to challenge their basic tenets. As Lakoff has explained, rightwing values are known to be toxic (discipline, authority, punishment), yet rightwingers are completely open about them, shouting them from the rooftops, declaring that they are good and necessary, and defying all the evidence to the contrary. Facts are far less important in their world-view than values.
People of the Left (‘liberals’ in Lakoff’s terminology) do the exact opposite. They tend to focus on the facts, as if this will get us out of dangerous, emotional territory, and soft-pedal on values for the same reason. Liberals then become complicit when they couch their own arguments in illiberal terms, on the grounds that these are now the terms of debate and it is impossible to do anything else in the current climate. For example, instead of plainly opposing workfare, they offer some ostensibly less cruel form of it, claiming that it will be a more effective way to coax more people into jobs – and justify their failure to call cruelty by its proper name by claiming that they are being realistic, because public opinion has shifted so far to the right that open opposition would be political suicide.
In the years after the Chilean putsch and the Thatcher/Reagan period, social democratic governments across the wealthy bloc of Western countries opted increasingly for this tactic for holding onto political power – from Bill Clinton in the US through Tony Blair in Britain to François Hollande in France. All ended up supporting tendencies most of their supporters found insupportable. All embraced the language of ‘toughness’ as applied to the poor and precarious, and became brave opponents of power only when the power concerned was that of trade unionists or of human rights groups.
Many people holding positions of responsibility for the state provision of healthcare tried to keep some control of the agenda by finding their own ways to enforce performance targets, pursue one-sided ‘partnerships’ with for-profit hospitals, and cut staff – and often sanctioned those who spoke out against what was happening. Many, perhaps most, campaigners for the rights of migrants and refugees believe the greatest problem is immigration controls themselves, which sooner or later will have to be scrapped. But many of them fear to say so openly and even turn angrily on those who do, saying that doing so could be ‘counter-productive’ because it would ‘put people off’ and ‘put us beyond the political pale’, or is even ‘too advanced for the working class’.90
TELLING THE TRUTH
Inequality and the injustices and waste that go with it have gone from strength to strength since the landmark year of 1973, not despite these careful, ‘realistic’ tactics, but because of them, according to George Lakoff’s analysis. To change anything we need to state our values openly. Unless we do so, nobody will be able to agree with them. We may find that the real ‘silent majority’ has been longing for clear statements of humane political principle, and will support them despite what the feared rightwing media may say. This has been demonstrated over and over again recently in the huge turnouts in elections wherever a genuinely radical alternative was being offered: in Greece, in Spain, and in Britain, where the landmark event was the Scottish referendum on independence in 2014. Many observers noted that the referendum had brought politics back to life and engaged the entire population because policies were being discussed that no Westminster party had dared to raise in public for some decades: free education at all levels; renationalization of public assets; an end to privatizations; a relaxation of anti-immigrant laws; and redistribution of land.91
So it’s important to state what we want: equality, not just less inequality by some vague amount. Henceforth any inequality will need to be justified. This is not such an enormous conceptual leap from where we are now. Significantly, some of the most straightforward objections to excessive wealth have come from successful entrepreneurs. For example, the late Klaus Zapf, an energetic and successful entrepreneur who built up Germany’s biggest removals firm yet lived in a small flat on a modest, worker’s salary, is quoted as saying: ‘I don’t need money; it just makes us unequal’.92
There is an objection which points out that absolute equality is not achievable. That has never stopped societies outlawing other intractable injustices such as rape, murder, apartheid or even slavery. All the great battles against injustice, in which modern societies take such pride, were considered unwinnable until, suddenly, they were won. And some of society’s most mundane underpinnings depend on equally ‘unachievable’ goals. Perfect verticality is a completely unachievable abstraction but it does not stop bricklayers continually checking that walls and lintels are as vertical and level as they can possibly be; we would never trust a bricklayer who did anything else. Nor does it stop us riding bicycles; and no ship’s crew would throw themselves overboard in despair on learning that it is impossible to keep a seagoing vessel on a completely even keel.
No living organism or community of organisms has ever existed in a state of perfect and unchanging equilibrium until it was thoroughly dead. Life is always in ‘a steady state of balanced tension’93 – and that’s mainly why we like it. However, life does approach permanent equilibrium at the bottom of a power hierarchy, which is why it is so often described as a ‘living death’.
Let us agree not to restrict each other’s aspirations in deference to what we feel we can get away with. Let’s assume that the commitment to human equality that’s written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights means exactly what it says, and take it from there.
1 A Viable Food Future, Part 2, Utviklingsfondet (The Development Fund, Norway), Nov 2011, p 28, nin.tl/viablefuture, citing The Ecological Wealth of Nations, Global Footprint Network, 2010.
2 James Lovelock, Gaia: A new look at life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 1979.
3 A Viable Food Future, op cit, Part 2, pp 24-26.
4 Damian Carrington, ‘Earth Has Lost Half of Its Wildlife in the Past 40 Years, Says WWF’, The Guardian, nin.tl/wildlifeloss. Accessed 7 Dec 2014.
5 George Packer, ‘Change the World: Silicon Valley transfers its slogans – and its money – to the realm of politics’, The New Yorker, 27 May 2013.
6 For some powerful accounts of individual workers’ and campesinos’ experiences, see Colin Henfrey and Bernardo Sorj, Chilean Voices: Activists describe their experiences of the Popular Unity Period, Branch Line, 1977.
7 Timothy Garton Ash, ‘It Always Lies Below’, The Guardian, 8 Sep 2005. Quoted in Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, Penguin US, 2010, p 241.
8 Jamie Peck, ‘Neoliberal Hurricane: Who Framed New Orleans?’ Socialist Register 43, no 43, 19 March 2009, nin.tl/neoliberalhurricane
9 Larry Elliott, ‘Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world’s population, says Oxfam’, The Guardian, nin.tl/richest62
10 George Monbiot, ‘The British Thermopylae’, 28 Aug 2014, nin.tl/Thermopylae
11 Conrad Schmidt, Workers of the World, Relax: The Simple Economics of Less Work, Work Less Party, 2006. Introductory note by Professor Christopher Shaw.
12 Stephen A Marglin, ‘Premises for a New Economy’ Development 56, no 2, June 2013, 149–154.
13 A Viable Food Future, op cit, Part 1, pp 27-29.
14 Shifa Mwesigye and Salena Tramel, ‘Building a Peasant Revolution in Africa’, La Via Campesina, 2 Oct 2013, nin.tl/peasantrevolution
15 A Viable Food Future, op cit, Part 1, pp 40-43.
16 FH King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, Mrs FH King, 1911, p 10.
17 T Schumilas, ‘Alternative Food Networks with Chinese Characteristics’, Doctoral Thesis, University of Waterloo, Ontario, 2014.
18 G Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop, Cambridge University Press, 1930, pp 16-17.
19 M Greensted and M Batkin, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Cotswolds, Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993, p 13.
20 Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Original Affluent Society’, in John M Gowdy, Limited wants, unlimited means: a reader on hunter-gatherer economics and the environment, Island Press, 1998, p 23.
21 HG Wells, A Modern Utopia, 1905.
22 Larry Elliott, ‘Economics: Whatever Happened to Keynes’ 15-Hour Working Week?’ The Guardian, 1 Sep 2008, nin.tl/Keynes15hour
23 Adret Group, Travailler deux heures par jour, Éditions du Seuil, 1977, p 132 (author’s translation). A summary in English can be found at nin.tl/work2hours
24 Wayne Roberts, No Nonsense Guide to World Food, New Internationalist, 2013, pp 102-104.
25 Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 1914.
26 Åke Sandberg, Nordic Lights SNS Förlag, 2013, nin.tl/Nordiclights Accessed 4 March 2014. See also Kristen Nygaard’s address to the 1996 Information Research in Scandinavia (IRIS) conference: ‘We are not against Europe. We are against Norwegian membership in the European Union’, nin.tl/Nygaardlecture
27 ‘Craft in the information age’, The British Museum blog, 15 Sep 2011, nin.tl/craftBMblog
28 Some examples of Pye’s work are shown here: nin.tl/Pyework See also a description of Pye’s approach by Simon Olding, University of the Creative Arts, June 2009, nin.tl/lookingbackwards
29 MM Jarzombek, Architecture of First Societies, Wiley, 2014, p. ix.
30 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa & Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, 1977.
31 ‘Christopher Alexander’, Wikipedia, 13 August 2014, nin.tl/1RaMjtG
32 Noam Chomsky’s theory of ‘generative grammars’, published in 1958, argues that all human languages are generated by a brain structure, common to all human minds, that allows a finite number of rules to turn a finite number of words into an infinite variety of utterances. The Russian linguist Vladimir Propp had had a similar insight in the 1920s about the way folktales are created. Propp’s book The Morphology of the Folktale (Leningrad, 1927) was first translated into English in 1958 – the very year Chomsky published his own seminal work. Neither, however, was aware of the other’s work. Propp’s work has been the inspiration behind many computer-based ‘story generators’ – which have numerous uses, for example, in computer games.
33 Alexander et al, op cit, p x.
34 For the full list of patterns, see nin.tl/patternlanguage
35 A Pattern Language, dustflap text, quoted by Wikipedia.
36 Vivian Stanshall’s ‘My pink half of the drainpipe’ (1968) was released on the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse, Liberty Records (UK):
My pink half of the drainpipe
I may paint it blue
My pink half of the drainpipe
Keeps me safe from you!
37 Ashley Montagu, Touching: the human significance of the skin, Columbia University Press, 1971, p 311.
38 David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Studio Vista, 1964, p 99.
39 Pye, op cit, p 68
40 Caroline Hagerhill et al, ‘Fractal dimension of landscape silhouette outlines as a predictor of landscape preference’, Journal of Environmental Psychology, June 2004.
41 MG Berman, J Jonides & S Kaplan, ‘The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature’, Psychological Science, 19 (12), 2008, pp 1207-12, and sources referred to by them.
42 Jing Chen, The Physical Foundation of Economics, World Scientific Pub, 2005, p 11.
43 Conrad Schmidt, Workers of the World, Relax: The Simple Economics of Less Work. Vancouver: Work Less Party, 2006. p 117.
44 Adret Group, op cit.
45 Conrad Schmidt, op cit, p 117.
46 M Beenstock & A Vergottis, Econometric Modelling of World Shipping, Springer Science & Business Media, 1993.
47 Lance E Davis, Robert E Gallman & Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan, University of Chicago Press, 2007, p 262.
48 ‘Hybrid Container Ship Wind-Driven With “Automatic” Sails’, TreeHugger, nin.tl/hybridcontainer Accessed 27 Sep 2014.
49 ‘Fuel Economy in Aircraft’, Wikipedia, nin.tl/fueleconomyaircraft Accessed 11 Dec 2014.
50 BH Carson, ‘Fuel Efficiency of Small Aircraft’, in AIAA Aircraft Systems Meeting, Anaheim, California, 4-6 Aug 1980.
51 John Rennie, ‘Does Global Warming Help the Case for Airships?’ nin.tl/airshipscase Accessed 17 Dec 2014.
52 Anthony Smith, ‘Flying from a Different Perspective’, BBC, 13 Oct 2007, nin.tl/flyingBBC
53 A Viable Food Future, op cit, Part 1, p 26.
54 Coventry Trades Council, State Intervention in Industry: A Workers’ Inquiry, Spokesman Books, 1982, p 162.
55 Ursula Huws, The making of a cybertariat: virtual work in a real world, Monthly Review Press, 2003, p 37.
56 Ursula Huws, ‘When Adam Blogged’, in Gender and Creative Labour, ed Ros Gill & Stephanie Taylor, Wiley, 2014.
57 Ibid.
58 Sue Bender, Plain and Simple, Harper, 1989.
59 Eric Brende, Better Off, HarperCollins, 2004.
60 John Zmirak. ‘The Simple Life Redux: An Interview with Eric Brende’, Godspy, 1 Nov 2004, nin.tl/Brendeinterview
61 Solnit, op cit.
62 Solnit, op cit, p 206.
63 Vanessa Baird, ‘Argentina’s challenge: Turning trouble into triumph’, New Internationalist 463, June 2013.
64 ‘Report from the “Workers’ Economy” International Meeting, January 31 and February 1, Occupied Factory of Fralib, Marseille’, nin.tl/Marseillemeeting Accessed 9 April 2014.
65 Solnit, op cit, p 10
66 Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual aid, a factor of evolution, Extending Horizons Books, 1955, p 6.
67 Quoted by Heidi M Ravven, The self beyond itself an alternative history of ethics, the new brain sciences, and the myth of free will, New Press, 2013, p 376 from Donald W Pfaff & Edward O Wilson, The Neuroscience of Fair Play Dana Press, 2007, pp 202-3.
68 Solnit, op cit, p 148
69 Solnit, op cit, p 7.
70 Conversation with David Douglass at The Anarchist Bookfair, London, 2009.
71 Conversation with Paul Winter at Ruskin College Oxford, 18 September 2014, at a meeting in support of Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, otjc.org.uk
72 DJ Douglass, Geordies – wa mental, Read’n’Noir, 2008.
73 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, Dent, 1907, pp 35-37.
74 Jim Pickard, ‘Tory Ministers Try to Flog the Phrase “hardworking” to Death’, Financial Times, 30 Sep, 2013, nin.tl/FThardworking
75 LB Luu, Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500-1700, Ashgate, 2005.
76 Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters: housing’s hidden history, Five Leaves, 2005.
77 RM Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation, Princeton University Press, 1997.
78 Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, Harvard University Press, 2001.
79 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1965, p 154.
80 Hugh Brody, The other side of Eden: hunters, farmers, and the shaping of the world, North Point Press, 2001, p 195.
81 Taskforce on the Health Aspects of Violence Against Women and Children, Responding to violence against women and children: the role of the NHS [The Alberti Report] Available at: nin.tl/Taskforce, 2010.
82 Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 15 Nov 2014, nin.tl/BBCNov2014 Accessed 18 Dec 2014.
83 David Graeber, Debt: the first 5,000 years, Melville House, 2011.
84 Ann Pettifor, Just Money: how society can break the despotic power of finance, Commonwealth Publishing, 2014. Also Mary Mellor, The future of money from financial crisis to public resource, Pluto, 2010.
85 Peter Saunders, Beware False Prophets, Policy Exchange, 2010.
86 The Equality Trust, ‘The Authors Respond to Questions about The Spirit Level’s Analysis’, July 2010, nin.tl/SpiritLevelresponse
87 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014, p 571.
88 Piketty, p 264
89 Piketty, p 264
90 This was the position of the British Socialist Workers’ Party in the early 2000s, when it was building an alliance with the maverick ex-Labour MP George Galloway to form the short-lived Respect Party. An organization called ‘Strangers into Citizens’, which campaigned for a limited regularization of undocumented workers, also had heated arguments with Open Borders groups at around the same time. Yet both organizations agreed privately that immigration controls were in principle wrong and immoral, and should go.
91 Jonathan Freedland, ‘Scotland Started a Glorious Revolution’ The Guardian, 19 Sep 2014, nin.tl/Westminsteranoraks
92 ‘Eccentric German Millionaire Who Lived on Less than £300 a Month Dies’, Mail Online, nin.tl/KlausZapf Accessed 13 Dec 2014.
93 William Gray, Frederick J Duhl & Nicholas D Rizzo, General Systems Theory and Psychiatry, Little, Brown, 1969, p 12.