Another World is Possible!

Neal Lawson would, under normal circumstances, be a UK Labour MP but is one of these rare characters who, somehow, understood that such a career path would constrain him and is living proof of the adage that “another world is possible”. Some 2 decades ago, he founded the centre-left Compass which seeks alliances with others seeking a better society and, since then, has inspired the most creative conversations mainly via pamphlets which force us to look at the world in a different way eg 45 Degree Change (2019)

Earlier this year he had a fascinating podcast discussion with Geoff Mulgan who is of more academic bent but had also founded a famous centre-left Think Tank (Demos) a full decade previously which he had left in 1997 to be Head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unit. Since then he has pursued a more academic career – with books on “good and bad” government; strategy; capitalism; social innovation; AI and, most recently, on imagining better societies.

Mulgan’s books actually don’t impress me. He’s clearly very well-read but his writing is a bit too nuanced and soporific for me – on the one had, this. On the other had, that... I need a little bit more guidance in my reading.

But put Lawson and Mulgan together and the results are much better. This is one of some 70 podcasts Lawson has done

Mulgan’s latest book is actually called “Another World is Possible” – the title as it happens of quite a few other books inc this one reflecting the World Social Forum discussions. A piece Mulgan wrote a couple of years earlier gives a very good sense of the argument -

Some fields are good at thinking far into the future – business invests heavily in visions of future smart homes, smart cities or health. Fiction is adept at exploring the future boundaries of humans and technology. Mainstream culture finds it easy to imagine apocalypses – what would happen if temperatures rose 4 or 5 degrees or AI enslaved humans or even worse pandemics became the norm?

But we struggle to imagine positive alternatives: what our care or education systems, welfare, workplaces, democracy or neighbourhoods might be like in 30-40 years. And we appear to be worse at doing this than in the past. This lack of desirable but plausible futures may be contributing to the malaise that can be found across much of the world. It’s certainly linked to a sense of lost agency and a deepening fear of the future.

The institutions which in the past supported practical social imagination have largely dropped out of this role.

• In universities social science frowns on futurism. You’re much more likely to succeed in your career if you focus on the past and present than the future. Mulgan indeed used a lecture to his own London college to develop this critique

• Political parties have generally been hollowed out and lack the central teams which at one point tried to articulate imaginative futures to shape their programmes.

• Think-tanks have been pulled back to the present, feeding into comment and news cycles.

This very much echoes what I was feeling a decade ago when I posted

Political parties are a bust flush - All mainstream political parties in Europe have been affected by the neo-liberal virus and can no longer represent the concerns of ordinary people. And those “alternative parties” which survive the various hurdles placed in their way by the electoral process rarely survive.

• The German Greens were an inspiration until they too eventually fell prey to the weaknesses of political parties identified a hundred years ago by Robert Michels.

• More recently, “Pirate” parties in Scandinavia and Bepe Grillo’s Italian Five Star Movement have managed, briefly, to capture public attention, occupy parliamentary benches but then sink to oblivion or fringe if not freak interest.

• What the media call “populist” parties of various sorts attract bursts of electoral support in most countries but are led by labile individuals preying on public fears and prejudices and incapable of the sort of cooperative effort which serious change requires (I was wrong about this!!).

NGOs are no match for corporate power - The annual World Social Forum has had more staying power than the various “Occupy movements” but its very diversity means that nothing coherent emerges to challenge the power elite whose “scriptures” are delivered from the pulpits of The World Bank and the OECD There doesn’t even seem a common word to describe our condition and a vision for a better future – “social change”? What’s that when it’s at home?

Academics are careerists - the groves of academia are still sanctuary for a few brave voices such as Noam Chomsky and David Harvey to speak out against the careless transfer by governments of hundreds of billions of dollars to corporate interests

• Henry Mintzberg, one of the great management gurus, has in the last decade broken ranks and now writes about the need for a profound “rebalancing” of the power structure - Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and centre

• Economists who challenge the conventional wisdom of that discipline are now able to use the Real-World Economics blog.

• Daniel Dorling is a geographer who focuses on inequalities eg his powerful Injustice – why social inequality persists.

Think Tanks play safe – and….think
Most Think-Tanks play it safe (for funding reasons) – although there are honourable exceptions eg -

• Susan George, a European activist and writer, who operates from the Trans National Institute and, amongst her many books, has produced two marvellous satires – Lugano I and Lugano II

• David Korton’s books and Yes Magazine keep up a steady critique.

• Joseph Stiglitz, once part of the World Bank elite, writes scathingly about economic conventional wisdom.

• Pope Frances has the resources of the Vatican behind him; and is proving a great example in the struggle for dignity and against privilege.

Geoff Mulgan has a more balanced take and argues that

Although there are fascinating pockets of creative social imagination – for example around the idea of the commons, zero carbon living, radical new forms of democracy, new monies, food systems or ways of organising time -they tend to be weakly organised, lacking the critical mass or connections to grow and influence the mainstream. The World Social Forum used the powerful slogan: ‘another world is possible’. But the fate of the WSF – now only a pale shadow of what it was 15 years ago -is symptomatic of what’s gone wrong.

As a result, the space these ideas might fill is instead filled either with reaction and the search for a better past, with narrowly technological visions of the future or with fearful defence of the present.

So what can be done to address this gap? This is a huge task, involving many people and methods. In this paper (“The Imaginary Crisis”) I set out a few thoughts on the what, the how and the who.

And indeed the last link gives important excerpts from that paper.

In the podcast, Mulgan gives examples of leaders he’s worked with globally and raises the key question - Why is UK political leadership so unimaginative?

I have a feeling that they’re scared of the responsibility they’ve had thrust on them and just can’t see that the way to deal with this is ensure that a lot of people in the nation’s cities and organisations are actually helping you - through a real programme of decentralisation.

He also makes an important point that we need to reward the “doers” rather than the “thinkers”