Envisioning Real Utopias

"It does. It’s much more a book from the conventional left. It’s looking at the question, “If we abandon not only communism, but the whole idea of a revolutionary overthrow of the existing order, what kind of utopia can we think about?” Reorganising the labour movement, industrial democracy and things of that kind are a lot of the central themes of the book. The classic example that people look at is Mondragon in Spain, which is a quite large network of largely manufacturing enterprises that are worker controlled. The big question for utopians is, “Why hasn’t that model been replicated on a large scale elsewhere? What are the obstacles to achieving that kind of transformation? To what extent can we extend that kind of model? How many of the constraints on it are to do with the market economy, and the financial sector” and so forth? It’s a question I haven’t got a good answer to. Part of the problem is you need to have lived experience of these things. For me, as an academic, in a sense I’m part of a historical tradition that is very like that. But it’s hard to imagine a university faculty as a global model for the future. Part of the story has to be a return to the trend that was continuing for most of the 20th century – and has been reversed, particularly in the US – towards shorter working hours, more leisure and more generally a situation where bargaining powers are on the side of the workers rather than the employers. How can we reverse the huge erosion of trade union rights and trade union density and membership that’s happened, particularly in the Western countries, over the last 30-40 years, while, at the same time, avoiding the kinds of economic failures that happened in the seventies and eighties? The last time we seemed to be on the verge of achieving some of these things, the whole thing ended in this inflationary spiral and blow-up. As a result, all the goals that were being pursued, things like the Meidner Plan in Sweden, and the general push towards some form of industrial democracy were derailed. We need to not only restore the balance, but figure out how we can manage things better, based on the failures of the 1970s. Yes, my experience with Wikipedia has been like being a character in a Culture novel. On the one hand, it’s this incredibly utopian achievement – in the space of a decade or so, lots of people, including me, have built an encyclopaedia that has long since surpassed the best achievements of Britannica. On the other hand, you see people at their worst, fighting intense battles about a sentence or the spelling of a particular word. But to come back to the broader utopian theme, Wikipedia – and the Internet generally – does point to a way of doing things differently. Amateur efforts have built so much of the Internet, things like open source software, Wikipedia, blogs. The Internet itself was built, essentially, by the university sector. It outperformed and displaced a whole bunch of commercial networks that were attempting to extract rent. And the capitalist, or commercial, society has been very much parasitic on these efforts that weren’t driven by market motives. Dan Hunter and I have written a bunch of articles on this. Google relied on open source and public type efforts, the Internet protocols were all developed in a non-commercial framework. The same is true of blogs that things like Facebook and Twitter are commercial adaptations of. They still depend entirely for their value on the contributions of people, not on anything that is being provided by the enterprises themselves (beyond the framework on which this stuff happens). A very simple thing we would have achieved in the social atmosphere of the 1960s – which has been a failure because of market constraints – is free public Wi-Fi. That’s something a bunch of places have attempted, but because it’s had to pay its way and had commercial sponsors, it’s never really been achieved. But it’s something that governments, with the kind of visions they had in the fifties and sixties, would have laid on. We have a small attempt at this in Australia with the National Broadband Network, which is being rolled out now. It’s something that really cries out, to quote the cliché, for information wanting to be free. But the important thing in terms of the broader intellectual argument here is that all the really striking innovation of the last 20-30 years, all the real productivity growth, has come from the Internet, and the Internet itself has come, initially, from the university sector and then from the household sector, from people just doing stuff. All the attempts at applying a business model, to the extent that they haven’t been failures, have really just been taking advantage of the unpaid efforts and unpaid inputs of others."