Utopia for Realists – Or rather, Idealists
First published in 2014, ‘Utopia for Realists’ is an intervention by ‘rock star historian’ Rutger Bregman to rescue the Left (who are terminally boring) by injecting fresh and radical thinking into stale policy debates. And his ideas certainly are radical. Utopia for Realists unapologetically advocates for a Universal Basic Income (UBI), the abolition on migration controls, and a 15 hour work week. With these three ideas, Bregman sets out to do two things. First, to expand our horizons and teach the Left how to think big again. And second, to demonstrate that all three policies are actually less utopian, and more plausible and beneficial, than most of us think. To do this, Bregman takes us through a lightning, though well-referenced, argument for all three proposals, and he certainly manages to persuade of their plausibility.
The whirlwind pace, though, as well as the book’s tendency to rely on sweeping generalisations, do at times make it feel somewhat like a TED Talk or Buzzfeed listicle in book form: “Three Easy Steps to Revolutionise Your Society”. On closer inspection, the eloquence and academic rigour with which Bregman puts forward his proposals don’t fully manage to obscure some glaring gaps in his analysis. Of these, the one that will confront the reader most prominently is the question why, if these proposals are both just and efficient, we are nowhere near adopting them. If, as Bregman contends, his ideas make for better societies for everyone, then what is holding us back?
Bregman’s explanation for this is rooted in an idealist analysis of how society works, which is rather ironic given the title of the book. According to Bregman, these policies have not been adopted because they haven’t won the argument in ‘the marketplace of ideas’. This argument shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that Bregman ends the book with a full chapter dedicated to the power of ideas as a motive force for change. The purpose of the book, then, is to advance the argument for these policies as a way of getting them adopted.
This belief in the power of ideas is mirrored by a near aversion to contemplate other forms of power, in particular political or class power. Utopia for Realists bases its arguments on what is best for the common good of society, but in doing so fails to consider what interests would be negatively impacted by its ideas, and would hence oppose them. This analytical limitation leads the book into bizarre and naïve conclusions, which become increasingly frustrating as it progresses. Despite Bregman frequently concluding that it is capitalist structures (e.g. the determination of wages by the market) that result in undesirable social outcomes, he is evidently unwilling to diagnose capitalism itself as the force opposing his ideas for the good society. This leaves him with the common conceit that what we have is a form of ‘bad capitalism’, and that if we could only replace it with ‘capitalism with a human face’ through some palatable policies, the outcome would be better for everyone. Capitalists themselves included.
This disinclination to see the inherent dynamics of capitalism itself as a driving force for situation we find ourselves in can clearly be seen from, among many examples, the way Bregman explains US President Nixon’s failure to implement UBI. As Utopia for Realists would have it, Nixon was misinformed by an incorrect understanding of the Speenhamland system (an early British welfare programme). Bregman responds with an argument for why the story about Speenhamland was wrong, and why UBI actually does work. What he doesn’t do is interrogate why one of Nixon’s advisors would go through the trouble of digging out a study of an esoteric British welfare programme to torpedo UBI, and what interest they might serve in doing so.
This is a blindspot that Utopia for Realists finds itself in time and again. The book references David Graeber’s critique of ‘bullshit jobs’ to argue that waste collectors have greater social value than bankers, but doesn’t question why bankers get paid more regardless. It rails against means-tested welfare, without analysing how it functions as a means of social discipline. When discussing the education system, the book simply declares that ‘we’ rather than ‘the market’ can dictate what worthwhile education is, without considering whether ‘the market’ isn’t the reward system that ‘we’ use to do just that. It is almost as if Bregman has taken Graeber’s injunction that it is us humans who ultimately shape reality to mean that we can simply negate structural forces like markets through sheer force of will, rather than through collective work to create something better.
That neither force of will nor good ideas are sufficient has been amply demonstrated by the 10 years since the book was first published. In that time we have seen the rise and fall of left wing movements both the UK and the US that share a programmatic similarity with the prescriptions in Utopia for Realists. Yet while the ambitions of the Sanders and Corbyn programmes were if anything much less radical (because moderated by the need to be ‘electable’), the response was not a spirited debate about policy, but a ‘nuke it from orbit’ approach that was shared by everyone from the Right to the liberal centre-left, with the nadir in the UK probably being a BBC Presenter asking whether Corbynistas would nationalise sausages. It is telling that this one period when the Left wasn’t ‘dull as a doorknob’ and managed to generate popular excitement, Bregman couldn’t bring himself to endorsing it. One wonders what he thinks now that normality has been restored with Biden and Starmer.
Even before these defeats, the contention that society is shaped through a fair battle of ideas was naïve at best, and disingenuous at worst. The use of disinformation (Big Tobacco, climate denialism, ‘think tanks’) has been understood for decades, and where that fails there is always simple repression (e.g. the gagging and anti-union laws in the UK). Power to turn ideas into reality doesn’t only come from the barrel of a gun, but it has to come from somewhere.
Where Utopia for Realists succeeds is in expanding the discursive space around matters of working hours, free movement and a fundamental right to dignity. And even there, the book is hardly as original as it presents itself to be, it’s claim to novelty being more indicative of a lack of engagement with anyone to the left of Ed Miliband. Bregman may be a ‘phenomenon’ (according to the dust jacket), but his failure to acknowledge, let alone contend with, the structural forces arrayed against his proposals might make this book salonfähig in the liberal talking circuit, but those who want to understand how to realise utopia are better off looking elsewhere.