*** RUTGER BREGMAN: Utopies réalistes. En finir avec la pauvreté. Editions du Seuil (25 bld. Romain-Rolland, F-75014 Paris. Tel: Internet: http://www.seuil.com ). 2017, 250 pp, €20. ISBN 978-2-02-136187-2.
The world has never had it so good. Ever! At the start of this book, Dutch historian and journalist Rutger Bregman lists figures and examples that bear witness to the fantastic progress, economic progress, accomplished on Earth over the past two hundred years. Before that, ‘during about 99% of the history of the word, 99% of humanity’ was ‘poor, hungry, dirty, fearful, stupid, ugly and ill.’ Then everything changed: ‘While 84% of the world population was still living in extreme poverty in 1820, that percentage had fallen to 44% in 1981; today, just a few decades later, it stands at less than 10%.’ Over the past two centuries, growth in prosperity has been as ‘exponential’ as growth in population and, to give an example, ‘the average Italian is fifteen times richer than in 1880.’ And this applies throughout the world, even in Africa: while it is not yet the case there as in the rest of the world ‘that it people suffer more frequently from obesity than from hunger,’ one cannot fail to note that ‘of the seven billion inhabitants of the planet, six billion had a cellphone’ in 2013.
The land of milk and honey that people dreamed of in the Middle Ages is thus here in front of us! But, at the same time, only 4.5 billion of our contemporaries ‘have access to toilets.’ And while these days antibiotics and vaccinations ‘save more lives each year than world peace would have saved in the twentieth century,’ it is also the case that in our lands of milk and honey, ‘the average child living in North America at the start of the 1990s was suffering greater anxiety than patients in psychiatric hospitals at the start of the 1950s.’ The economic miracle that has been brought us by capitalism is therefore not the end of history; instead, anyone ‘hungry for a radical antidote’ to the pernicious effects of unbridled financial capitalism, namely ‘both xenophobia and inequalities,’ should remember Thomas More’s Utopia which, five hundred years ago, ‘consisted above all of a case against a greedy aristocracy that demanded ever more luxury whilst ordinary people were living in extreme poverty.’
This essay is not by an ideologue or a romantic. If it calls for a return to utopia, it is because he is realistic and tots up the sources and data demonstrating that the world these days is stuck in an impasse. Solidly shored up, his argument is convincing because he strips bare the stupidity of many so-called ‘realistic’ economic measures in the neoliberal world and reveals the perfectly wise nature of measures deemed by conservative minds to be ‘unrealistic.’ Whence this credo that runs through the essay: ‘It is time to return to a utopian thinking.’ The fact that his book, written initially in Dutch, was translated into English before French, is now being translated in 17 countries and is top of the bestseller lists, shows that his ideas about an iconoclastic (un)realism resonate with clear citizen expectations – and that they may well be taken on board...
It is clear that Rutger Bregman will disturb some readers, but one can wager that some of them will also be shaken by the arguments he puts forward. The idea, for example, of ‘giving everyone money’ will be deemed folly by many until the point where he explains experiments in Great Britain have shown that giving £3000 to thirteen homeless people costs less than the £400,000 a year that society devotes to them in terms of expenditure on the police, the justice service, social services and healthcare... Other data, from the United States, shows that giving money unconditionally does not encourage people to be lazy. And that goes for everywhere in the world. Hence this question, which is not as provocative as it seems, especially if you take account of recent current events in London: ‘What’s the point of paying so much money to send white people in sports vans to villages in Africa when all you need to do is to give their salaries to the poor?’ For the author, there is no doubt that time has now come to introduce the ‘basic income’ that Richard Nixon considered for a long time before giving it up for the wrong reasons – and going down in history for other equally bad reasons. His arguments are all the more convincing in that he multiplies examples illustrating the fact that everywhere, including in many European Union member states, ‘the social welfare system (...) has turned into a perverse monster of control and humiliation.’ Hence, instead of dealing with the ever-more prevalent problem of poverty, of which the homeless are an indicator, ‘We are still fighting its symptoms: police chasing the homeless, doctors treating them only to send them back onto the streets, and social workers putting sticking plasters on festering wounds’... Worse still is the ambient ‘bureaucratic mess’ even trapping people in poverty, states are not involved in a ‘war on poverty’ but rather an aberrant and thus vain ‘war on the poor.’
The author reserves his bitterest comments, in turn, for GDP and its supercilious adorers (he explains accusingly that ‘the contribution to GDP of a CEO who unwisely sells mortgages and derivatives to gain millions of dollars or euros in bonuses is, in the current state of affairs, higher than that of a school stuffed with teachers or a full factory’) and anyone in this rogue (because financial) economy that we live in, ‘who has a job that could easily be done away with,’ traders moving money about without creating it, unlike teachers, police officers and nurses who genuinely participate in creating prosperity. Everything indicates that the world is going mad and it is high time to bring ‘realistic utopias’ to life again in order to breathe new ‘life into democracy’ and break with our ‘epoch of apolitical technocracy.’ Perhaps this comment is aimed particularly at the European Union and the way it works these days...
Michel Theys
*** WILLY GIANINAZZI: André Gorz. Une vie. Editions La Découverte (9 bis rue Abel-Hovelacque, F-75013 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 44088401 – Email: ladecouverte@editionsladecouverte.com – Internet: http://www.editionsladecouverte.fr ). 2016, 383 pp, €23. ISBN 978-2-7071-9103-8.
Apart from a few initiates, heterodox economists and old-fashioned marxists, who these days has heard of André Gorz, who died in September 2007 at the side of and at the same time as his wife? However, this self-taught intellectual had been one of the thinkers most critical of contemporary capitalism. Marked by the thinking of Marx, Husserl, Sartre – who he was close to and whose thoughts he continued in his own way – and Illich, he is even one of the people whose analysis could prove the most pertinent in this time when the certainties of orthodox economists are clashing with the hard reality of the state of the job markets and the rarefaction of the planet’s resources. Historian and specialist in revolutionary trade unionism, Willy Gianinazzi devotes what is in all respects an exemplary biography to the man, focusing the projectors in complex and unclassifiable being who spent most of his time to a persistent criticism ‘of alienation, consumerism, labour and the pillage of the middle of one’s life,’ also singing the praises of ‘autonomy, freed-up time, creative activity and good living.’ Born Gerhart Hirsch in Vienna in 1923, he left the city in 1939 for Switzerland and at the same time stopped speaking German and started speaking French. At that time, he changed his name from Hirsch to Horst, as the ambient anti-semitism in Austria had encouraged his father to play the card of caution in terms of surname. He would go on to change his name again often in the future: he was then registered as Gérard Horst; and then G. Bosquet, Michel Bosquet and André Gorz, ‘nom-de-plumes for his incursions respectively into the translation of novels, journalism and literary or theoretical prose.’ This goes to show that his biographer is to be praised for discerning the path of this existentialist and anticapitalist thinker, a new type of marxist who was close to the Italian far left and, when he became a French national, incarnated the spirit of 68 at the same time as Dany Cohn-Bendit. This intellectual prepared to cast doubt even on the dogmas he was able to come close to had the ‘unmoving objective of getting proposals to flow from reality that should give free rein to utopia in practice, explains the author. He is right – while Adam Smith based political economy on labour and even Marx saw labour as a natural condition of human existence, André Gorz made himself the herald of abolition of labour and the ‘end of working society,’ and in 1978, he suggested gradually reducing the working week to... 20 hours. In this connection, he was going to make himself a prophet, urging people to look ‘beyond salaried society’ and calling for a ‘guaranteed social income’ and universal benefits, the latter he felt must necessarily be absolutely ‘unconditional.’ In his view, it was therefore necessary to move ’in the direction of a civilisation of free time at the epoch of the intangible,’ his battle leading him also to defend ecology because ‘it alone wants to understand the living, not to dominate it but to husband it.’ In these pages, Willy Gianinazzi introduces us to this fascinating figure at the crossroads of literature, philosophy and journalism, where scientific erudition meshes nicely with pedagogy. (MT)
*** PLATON TINIOS: Les pensions de retraite en Europe. Editions Papadopoulos (9 Kapodistriou, GR-14452 Metamorphosi. Tel: (30-210) 2846074 – Fax: 2817127 – email: info@epbooks.gr – Internet: http://www.epbooks.gr ). ‘Petites introductions’ series. 2017, 112 pp, €10.99. ΙSBN 978-960-569-780-8.
Retirement pension systems were one of the great leaps forward of the twentieth century, supporting growth and relieving the anxiety felt with approaching old age. They were successful because they married individual solutions with collective management. How do pension-delivering systems work? Are the ideas of their designers still valid? What exactly are the different types of pension system? What are the pros and cons of each? Are these systems sustainable now that work is collapsing and people are living longer and longer? How did the financial and sovereign debt crisis affect them, particularly in Greece? It is to these and plenty more questions that economics professor Platon Tinios (Piraeus University), an expert on social security questions, provides precise and scientifically backed-up answers. A useful book on one of the trickiest questions currently facing society in Greece and other places. The book includes an analytical glossary of terms used in the public debate about pensions, which should encourage readers to take part in the discussions. (AKa)
*** HesaMag. European Trade Union Institute (Unité Conditions de travail, Santé et Sécurité, 5 bld. du Roi Albert II, B-1210 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 2240560 – Fax: 2240561 – Email: etui@etui.org – Internet: http://www.etui.org ). 2017, No. 16, 50 pp.
This sixteenth issue of this publication from the European Trade Union Institute contains a rich special report on what will become of ‘work in the digital era.’ An ETUI researcher after lecturing at Namur University, Gérard Valenduc coordinates the special report and has written an article in it on working conditions in digital environments that pit workers and trade unions against a raft of new challenges, as is borne witness by the other studies of working and living conditions of people who home-deliver takeaway food, the digital transformation of companies in the light of the specific case of logistics service-provider DHL, the real virtues of exoskeletons for difficult or repetitive tasks, the ‘producers of false news’, and ‘crowd working’ and the ‘on-demand economy.’ Laurent Vogel looks in the editorial at ‘the Grenfell Tower crime’ that killed 80 in London, all of whom, he writes, ‘paid the price for the rapid growth of social inequality.’ Another contribution, by Fabienne Scandella, denounces the fact that DG Employment at the European Commission has ignored the topic of psychosocial risks at work, thus contributing to the removal or marginalisation of the link with the conditions of work and employment from which they stem. In this connection she incriminates ‘sustained lobbying work at European level’ by a raft of associations active in the mental health field. (MT)