Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

by Rutger Bregman

But to get hired in Silicon Valley you’ll need inordinate talent, ambition, and luck. That’s one side of what economists call “labor market polarization,” or the widening gap between “lousy jobs” and “lovely jobs.” Though the share of highly skilled and unskilled jobs has remained fairly stable, work for the average-skilled is on a decline.27 Slowly but surely, the bedrock of modern democracy–the middle class–is crumbling. And while the U.S. is leading this process, other developed nations aren’t far behind.28

Standing has predicted the emergence of a new, dangerous “precariat”–a surging social class of people in low-wage, temporary jobs and with no political voice. Their frustrations sound eerily like those of William Leadbeater. This English craftsman who was afraid that machines would destroy his country–or, indeed, the entire universe–was a part of such a dangerous class, and of a movement that laid the foundations of capitalism. Meet the Luddites.

The Battle of Rawfolds Mill April 11, 1812–Some 100 to 200 masked men have gathered on a darkened plot of land near Huddersfield, between Manchester and Leeds in England. They’ve congregated around a stone column known as Dumb Steeple, armed to the teeth with hammers, axes, and pistols. Their leader is a charismatic young cropper by the name of George Mellor. He raises his long pistol–brought from Russia, some say–up high for all to see. Their target is Rawfolds Mill, a factory owned by one William Cartwright. A wealthy businessman, Cartwright has just introduced a new type of power-loom that can do the work of four skilled weavers. Since then, unemployment among the Yorkshire Luddites, as these masked men call themselves, has soared.

But Cartwright has been tipped off. He has called in soldiers, and they are lying in wait. Twenty minutes, 140 bullets, and two deaths later, M...

And they’re right; the specter of Luddism remains with us to this day. It was at the beginning of the First Machine Age that textile workers in central and northern England rose up in rebellion, taking their name from the movement’s mythical leader Ned Ludd, who was supposed to have smashed two looms in a fit of rage in 1779. Because labor unions were outlawed, the Luddites opted for what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “negotiation by riot.”

“How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?” wondered the late eighteenth-century clothworkers of Leeds. “Some say, Begin and learn some other business. Suppose we do; who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task; and when we have learned it, how do we know we shall be any better for all our pains; for… another machine may arise, which may take away that business also.”32

And so they are. The word “robot” actually comes from the Czech robota, meaning “toil.” Humans created robots to do precisely those things they’d rather not do themselves.

According to Wilde, the ancient Greeks had known an uncomfortable truth: Slavery is a prerequisite for civilization. “On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”34

However, there’s something else that is equally vital to the future of our world, and that’s a mechanism for redistribution. We have to devise a system to ensure that everybody benefits from this Second Machine Age, a system that compensates the losers as well as the winners.

Not much, according to many economists. The trends are clear. Inequality will continue to increase and everybody who hasn’t managed to learn a skill that machines cannot or will not be able to master will be sidelined.

Though the lower classes might have access to new amenities like cheap solar power and free Wi-Fi, the gap between them and the ultra-rich will be wider than ever.

People with a college education are moving to live closer to other people with a college education. In the 1970s, the most learned American city (in terms of the percentage of residents with four-year degrees) was 16 percentage points more educated than the least educated city. Today, this difference has doubled.36

So it’s not surprising that our standard response has been to call for more money for education.

Alternatively, we could take a tip from Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner. When asked what his strategy would be if he were pitted against a computer, he didn’t have to think long. “I’d bring a hammer.”

Anyone who wants to continue plucking the fruits of progress will have to come up with a more radical solution. Just as we adapted to the First Machine Age through a revolution in education and welfare, so the Second Machine Age calls for drastic measures. Measures like a shorter workweek and universal basic income.

The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living. The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately there’s only one choice left, and that’s redistribution. Massive redistribution. Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots.

Not long ago, the French economist Thomas Piketty had people up in arms with his contention that if we continue down our current path we’ll soon find ourselves back in the rentier society of the Gilded Age.

Barring a resurgence of strong, inclusive growth (rather unlikely), high taxation on capital (equally improbable), or World War III (let’s hope not), inequality could develop to frightening proportions once again.

In the end, the only solution is a worldwide, progressive tax on wealth, says Professor Piketty, though he acknowledges this is merely a “useful utopia.” And yet, the future is not carved in stone.

a law of common progress fails to manifest itself of its own accord, there is nothing to stop us from enacting it ourselves. Indeed, the absence of such a law may well imperil the free market itself. “We have to save capitalism from the capitalists,” Piketty concludes.39

This paradox is neatly summed up by an anecdote from the 1960s. When Henry Ford’s grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Without missing a bea...

If there were ever two people who dedicated their lives to building castles in the sky with preternatural certainty that they would someday be proven right, it was the founders of neoliberal thought. I’m an admirer of them both: the slippery philosopher Friedrich Hayek and the public intellectual Milton Friedman.

Nowadays, “neoliberal” is a put-down leveled at anybody who doesn’t agree with the left. Hayek and Friedman, however, were proud neoliberals who saw it as their duty to reinvent liberalism.14

This particular story begins on April 1, 1947, not quite a year after Keynes’ death, when forty philosophers, historians, and economists converged in the small village of Mont Pèlerin in Switzerland.

later years, they would be known as the Mont Pèlerin Society.

All forty thinkers who came to this Swiss village were encouraged to speak their minds, and together they formed a corps of capitalist resistan...

Milton Friedman was also at the meeting of minds.

In fact, no fewer than eight members of the Mont Pèlerin Society would go on to win Nobel Prizes.

However, in 1947 no one could have predicted such a star-studded future. Large swaths of Europe lay in ruins. Reconstruction efforts were colored by Keynesian ideals: employment for all, curbing the free market, and regulation of banks. The war state became the welfare state.

In the 1970s, Hayek handed the presidency of the Society over to Friedman. Under the leadership of this diminutive, bespectacled American whose energy and enthusiasm surpassed even that of his Austrian predecessor, the society radicalized.

In the preface to his bestselling Capitalism and Freedom, he wrote that it is the duty of thinkers to keep offering alternatives. Ideas that seem “politically impossible” today may one day become “politically inevitable.”

“Stagflation,” as this effect was called, wasn’t even possible in Keynesian theory. Friedman, however, had predicted it.

For the rest of his life, Friedman never stopped emphasizing that his success would have been inconceivable without the groundwork laid since 1947.

Margaret Thatcher. When asked what she considered to be her greatest victory, Thatcher’s reply was “New Labour”: Under the leadership of neoliberal Tony Blair, even her social democratic rivals in the Labour Party had come around to her worldview. In less than fifty years, an idea once dismissed as radical and marginal had come to rule the world.

In hindsight, Friedman’s arrival marked the dawn of an era in which economists would become the leading thinkers of the Western world. We are still in that era today.22

We inhabit a world of managers and technocrats. “Let’s just concentrate on solving the problems,” they say. “Let’s just focus on making ends meet.” Political decisions are continually presented as a matter of exigency–as neutral and objective events, as though there were no other choice.

“Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,” he wrote, “are usually the s...

Naturally, we should still take pride in the liberty that generations before us fought for and won. But the question is, what is the value of free speech when we no longer have anything worthwhile to say? What’s the point of freedom of association when we no longer feel any sense of affiliation? What purpose does freedom of religion serve when we no longer believe in anything?

Ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again. “Indeed,” wrote Keynes, “the world is ruled by little else.”26

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I’ll never reach it. So what’s the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking. Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015)

As the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck famously said, “Politics is the art of the possible.”

I’m talking about Politics with a capital P, one that’s not about rules, but about revolution. Not about the art of the possible, but about making the impossible inevitable.

It was Joseph Overton, an American lawyer, who first explained the mechanisms of uppercase Politics in the 1990s. He began with a simple question: Why is it that so many good ideas don’t get taken seriously?

Overton realized that politicians, provided they want to be reelected, can’t permit themselves viewpoints that are seen as too extreme. In order to hold power, they have to keep their ideas within the margins of what’s acceptable.

Anybody who forays outside the “Overton window” faces a rocky road. He or she will quickly be branded as “unrealistic” or “unreasonable” by the media, the fear-some gatekeepers of the window.

And yet, despite all this, a society can change completely in a few decades. The Overton window can shift. A classic strategy for achieving this is to proclaim ideas so shocking and subversive that anything less radical suddenly sounds sensible. In other words, to make the radical reasonable, you merely have to stretch the bounds of the radical.

What we are witnessing is a colossal change in course. Historically, Politics was the preserve of the left. Be realistic, demand the impossible! rang the rallying cry of the Paris demonstrators in 1968. The end of slavery, the emancipation of women, the rise of the welfare state–all were progressive ideas that started out as crazy and “irrational” but were ultimately accepted as basic common sense.

These days, however, the left seems to have forgotten the art of Politics.

underdog socialist caves in to the arguments of the opposition, always accepting the premise on which the debate takes place. “National debt is out of control,” they concede, “but we can make more programs income-dependent.” “Fighting poverty is terribly expensive,” reason the underdog socialists, “but it’s part of being a civilized nation.” “Taxes are high,” they lament, “but each according to his ability.”

The underdog socialist forgets that the real problem isn’t the national debt, but overextended households and businesses. He forgets that fighting poverty is an investment that pays off in spades. And he forgets that, all the while, the bankers and the lawyers are polishing turds at the expense of waste collectors and nurses.