‘We Go To Sleep And Drown Our Sorrows In Consumption’
Roberto Unger is a renowned political and social theorist who has also served as Brazil’s Minister of Strategic Affairs. He sat down with Cora Currier to discuss what he considers the tragic narrowing of political imagination and the need to generate change without crisis.
The European: For many years now, you have been calling for an alternative to the reining economic ideologies on the left and the right. Does the economic crisis of recent years create opportunities for political and economic experimentalism?
Unger: The horizon of programmatic debate in the whole North Atlantic world has been increasingly narrowed for a very long time, to the point that most of it has to do with a single organizing theme: how to reconcile American-style economic flexibility and European-style social protection within the horizon of the inherited institutional framework. My view is that all the fundamental problems of the European societies, and the world as a whole, require the reinvention of the conventional institutional arrangements for the organization of democracies, market economies, and civil societies. The financial and economic crises beginning in 2007 and their long sequel of halting or failing recovery presented an immense transformative opportunity. The opportunity for change has already been largely squandered. But the opportunity for insight, not yet, and insight today can mean transformation tomorrow.
The European: Can you give me some concrete examples?
Unger: In the treatment of the crisis, one suppressed theme is the reorganization of the relation between finance and production. In all of the major market economies of the world, the truth is that production is largely self-financed on the basis of the retained and reinvested earnings of private firms. This provokes the disquieting question: what then is the point of all that money in banks and stock markets? Theoretically, it is to finance production. In fact, the vast majority of financial activity under the current arrangements has only an oblique or episodic relation to the funding of production. It is not enough to regulate finance; it is necessary to reshape the arrangements governing the relation between finance and production so that finance becomes the servant rather than the master of the real economy. So that the accumulated saving of society is in fact channeled into its productive agenda, rather than being wasted in a casino. A second suppressed theme in the debate is the link between recovery and redistribution. All of these societies organized in the course of 20th century around a market in mass consumption goods. Mass consumption requires popularization of purchase power, which requires progressive redistribution of wealth, but above all of opportunity and capability. For the most part what happened was the opposite. You had an over-weaning expansion of credit and debt. The consequence is a fake credit democracy instead of a property holding democracy. So there you have two huge opportunities to democratize the market economy in the context of the crisis, which have not been seized. One might have expected the left to advance as a result of the crisis, when in fact on the whole its situation is worse than it was before. And so that reveals what the basic underlying problem: the absence of a real progressive project. The truth is that the project of the left in the U.S. and Europe is basically to sugarcoat a reality that they despair of reimagining or reshaping. The humanization of the inevitable is the leitmotif of their politics.
The European: What is a true progressive or leftist today?
Unger: Someone who understands that the goal of greater equality is subordinate to the goal of raising the ordinary man and woman up to a greater life. No one wants rigid equality as an end in itself. We combat entrenched inequality as a restraint on this much more important objective of enhancing the capabilities and intensifying the experience of ordinary humanity. We also do not to accept the established institutional structure as the horizon. It is contingent, just a moment in history. This combination of the idea of the devotion to the greatness of the ordinary and the disposition to experiment with the institutional arrangement is what defines a progressive or a leftist. But by that criteria there are almost none! This has to change. There has to be a struggle. And before there can be a struggle in politics, there has to be struggle in ideas…