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The Left Alternative Free FREE THE LEFT ALTERNATIVE PDF Roscoe Roberto Mangabeira Unger | 192 pages | 19 Oct 2009 | Verso Books | 9781844673704 | English | London, United Kingdom The Left Alternative by Roberto Mangabeira Unger Despite appearances, there is an alternative to the world as it is. We cannot simply humanize the world; we have to change it, and this requires reshaping production and politics. We have to take the familiar institution of the market economy, representative democracy, and civil society as a subset of wider institutional possibilities. We have to hold to a bias towards equality and inclusion in economic growth and technological innovation, rather than after-the-fact tax and transfer policies. Part of this enhancement would be an educational system devoted to developing conceptual and practical capacities, rather than job-specific skills. It also requires an idea of social inheritance, in which everyone has a basic minimum of resources upon which they can draw at turning points in life. Social solidarity cannot be reduced to money transfers—rather, it has to be the responsibility people have for one another. Another goal is the creation of a high-energy democracy, an increase The Left Alternative popular participation in politics. The guiding The Left Alternative of this version of the Left is not the redistributive attenuation of inequality, but the broadening of The Left Alternative and opportunities The Left Alternative everyone. There are five institutional directions the Left should stand for. The first is that national rebellion against the global political and economic orthodoxy depends on certain practical conditions. One condition is a higher level of domestic savings than a standard understanding of economic growth might justify. This is basically the creation of a war economy without a war. The second institutional idea is that social policy has to be about empowerment and capacity. A few things follow from this. First, there has to be a commitment to both early and lifelong education capable of developing conceptual and practical capabilities. The initial idea is to broaden the current The Left Alternative of class and The Left Alternative the next idea is to dissolve class and fully realize a meritocracy. The third idea is the democratization of the market economy. We cannot The Left Alternative regulate it or retroactively compensate its inequalities; we have to make it work for more people in more ways. This is basically expanding the possibilities for economic relations. It requires expanding access to productive resources and opportunities, and an increase in the returns on labour. We need to produce a series of breakthroughs in the constraints on economic growth. Each breakthrough has effects on the supply and demand sides of The Left Alternative economy; we want these breakthroughs to have a bias towards greater inclusion and a diffusion of capabilities. The initial goal of interventions on the supply side—which I think refers to capital investment—is to expand access to credit, technology, and markets, especially for small businesses. The larger goal is the expansion of advanced methods of production in order to democratize the market for everyone. These interventions have to work alongside other initiatives to reduce the declining share of labour in national income and the increase of inequality within the labour force. These measures need to practically evaluated for applicability in a wide range of contexts. For example, profit sharing might first be applied to high-wage workers, and then extended to larger and larger proportions of the population. Or, laws strengthening the ability of organized labour to cooperate with unorganized labour might be useful for mid-wage workers. For low-wage workers, the best solution might be subsidies for training and employment, along with the abolition of payroll charges and taxes. None of this is inherently inflationary, and can enhance the power of labour, producing sustainable rises in returns on labour. A fourth institutional idea is the refusal to treat cash transfers as a basis for social solidarity, which must be instead grounded on a universal responsibility to care for others. Civil society needs to be organized, or to organize itself, so it can fulfill this responsibility. This high-energy democracy is an expansion of the freedom the Left seeks, and is a condition for the four other themes. Rather, it would seek to enhance our powers and expand our experience. Its agent and beneficiary are identical: the self-interested individual. These five themes require a set of supporting ideas. One of the key points here is The Left Alternative defend the ideas of structural alternatives, removing them from determinism and fatalism. We also need to repudiate the mix of rationalization, humanization, and escapism that dominates contemporary thought. We have come to associate reformism with a rejection of systemic change, and vice versa. This is the source of the difference between two kinds of politics: the revolutionary, which depends on a vanguard and majority support during a period of crisis, and the reformist, which looks for marginal redistribution and other concessions in non-emergency states. Unger thinks the two styles need to be mixed: cumulative changes with transformative ambition, a kind of revolutionary reformism. It mixes organized minorities with disorganized minorities, refuses crisis as a condition of change, and has to be informed by political economy and legal analysis. This project requires agents, but not the traditional leftist agents. For one, the working class is no longer the industrial proletariat, which was a unionized force in a capital-intensive industry. Most people now work in under-capitalized sectors, often in quasi-legal circumstances. Importantly, their outlook is more petty bourgeois than proletarian; they want prosperity and independence. However, the relation between their interests and the proposals is very different than the Marxist account of class interests. For Marx, the more intense the class The Left Alternative, the less room there is to evaluate the class interests being contested. It will all be resolved by conflict. Unger does not think that the interests of groups have clear, objective content. The Left has to turn this ambiguity of group interest in an opportunity. It has to acknowledge that there are always two ways to define and defend group interest. One way is institutionally conservative, which takes the current niche of the group as natural and groups close to it as rivals. The second way is solidaristic: neighbouring groups are potential allies. The left must alway be biased towards solidarity. In a negative, general sense, it is easy to The Left Alternative what this implies for the defence of working class interests: it is incompatible with keeping them in traditional mass The Left Alternative. It The Left Alternative to work with other nations to reform global economic arrangements; experimental pluralism has to replace imperial power. Next, we need to develop institutions and practices which are not dependent upon crisis for change. There is no in-built dynamic of transformation; transformation can only be a goal. It also has to be prized because of its connection to economic growth and technological innovation. We can no longer assume that development and emancipation are historically connected. We have to make them intersect. The Left Alternative basic goal is to both humanize and energize our institutions. All but the poorest countries in the world are class societies. Unger says Marxism as a doctrine is dead. But class survives as a hierarchical organization of social life. The character of class is determined by two contrasting principles: inheritance and meritocracy. The hereditary transmission of economic and educational advantages restricts mobility even in The Left Alternative most fluid societies. Eliminating inheritance would amount to a revolution. Meritocratic competition has modified and limited the advantages of inheritance. The two principles, inheritance and meritocracy, are in tension. Their opposition is weakened by the apparent lack The Left Alternative alternatives in the national politics of most countries. First, ambitious upstarts are fully assimilated. In the least unequal countries, even the most advantaged expect some of their children to drop in class, and children from other classes to rise. The Left Alternative hope to turn class privilege into commonly but not universally inherited advantages. The result of these two tensions is a set of four classes which overshadow the life chances of people. At the top is the class The Left Alternative professionals, managers, and rentiers who concentrate wealth and act largely with impunity. Second is a small business class reliant on self-exploitation. They are educated in schools that teach obedience as their chief concern. In many developing countries, this class is a major part of the population. They often The Left Alternative themselves as stuck—waking up one day to discover they are leading the only lives they will ever lead—and, in large numbers, they are stuck. The basic promise of democracy The Left Alternative that people have a chance to become freer and greater, The Left Alternative class system contributes to a failure of this promise. Unger says there are hopeful signs in developing countries: the aspirations their people have to modest prosperity and independence. They study at night and open small businesses. There The Left Alternative a moral element to this, beyond yearning for material pleasures. They want to build themselves. All over the world, the industrial working class is a diminishing part of the labor force. The Left Alternative desire to become petty bourgeoisie has become a universal hope for emancipation, and this all across the globe. Nationalism was one of the most surprising and powerful forces in modern history. While it appears dangerous, if redirected properly, it could become a tool for advancing progressive alternatives. Since the Western powers colonized the rest of the world, their internal rivalries have become global.
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