‘Britain’s Project’ problematised
In his essay concerning the search for post-Brexit national projects for the UK (‘New Statesman’, 17 March 2021), Roberto Mangabeira Unger has recycled many tropes from his most recent book (The Knowledge Economy, Verso, 2019) and his teaching collaboration with Dani Rodrik. This pêle-mêle mashup of universal diagnoses and prescriptions bars Unger from engaging with the situational intricacies of the UK political condition in 2021 AD. If we are to accept Unger’s invitation to search for emancipatory proposals, we need a more accurate mapping of forces of disempowerment.
The UK has a national project
Unger’s analysis is preoccupied with the productive sector of the economy. The case for the primacy of the production sector may be misleading given how financialized everyday life in the UK has become. The UK has a unique arrangement for generous savings allowances in the form of income- and capital gains-tax exempt Individual Savings Accounts. One type of these accounts, the Stock and Shares ISA, allows profiting directly from investing in financial products. The issue of savings — and specifically, how to strike the balance between stability and risk in investments for pension schemes — has also recently surfaced in the political discourse thanks to the 2018–2020 university strikes. Another key sphere of life pervaded by finance is the provision of healthcare. The National Health Service, despite its common characterisation as an emblematic public body, has long relied on private finance initiatives for funding new infrastructure. These are not the only faces of financialisation. On the large scale, since the 1980s the UK economy has become heavily dependent on rent-seeking from assets. On the micro scale, it is hard not to notice that the nature of commodities has changed as a result of freer trade in risks. A particularly acute case of disastrous impacts generated by finance has been the 2007–2011 food crisis stemming from speculation on the commodity derivatives market. The choices we make in everyday life — regarding what we eat or how we save money — are mediated by financialisation.
But few have the agency to make the most out of it. The financial labour market and those who have the resources to hire such labour constitute a minority. What is problematic about this state of affairs is that considerable capital flows are redirected away from democratic allocation. The political institutions have not acted as restrainers of the financialisation trends. In contrast, they helped to elevate London to the status of a global finance hub by facilitating a legal infrastructure friendly to the banking network. From this perspective, we can observe that there is something uncoincidental about the status of finance in the UK. Perhaps it is not far-fetched to assert that financialisation is the UK’s national project. Unger insists that a new national project has to be coined against a vacuum of post-Brexit imaginative prostration. In doing so, he does not recognise the connection between the Thatcher-initiated deindustrialisation and the rise of finance as a shortcut to guarantee steady economic growth.
However, that is not to say that finance does not feature in Unger’s rich body of thought. In The Knowledge Economy, he asserts that ‘[f]inance should be a good servant rather than a bad master. It should serve the productive agenda of society rather than being allowed to serve itself.’ It is a statement that probably any supporter of the progressive cause could agree with. Yet with the sedimentation of finance in the sphere of everyday life, it is somewhat naïve to suggest that the sovereign can prepare a simple straitjacket to tame all the tentacles of the beast. The search for radical democratisation of finance is only crawling. From academic debates alone we find indicia that 1) financial inclusion is hardly a panaceum; 2) that instead of representative democracy mechanism, perhaps we should stir popular engagement and weaken the business capacity to engage in de-democratisation. Anyone interested in sketching out a new national project that will come to supersede financialization will need to engage with these ideas.
Plasticity of the UK constitution
The most original contributions from the New Statesman piece consider the UK constitution. However, despite the soundbite’ish wording that would enchant any first year constitutional law student, the section on constitution relies on an intellectual shortcut that casts doubt on the plausibility of Unger’s argument. Commenting on devolution, Unger remarks that ‘[e]xperience has run ahead of constitutional imagination.’ This state of affairs came to be ‘by force of circumstance more than by design.’ Unger’s assumption that the recent UK constitutional changes have been influenced by chance reflects a ‘false contingency’ fallacy: the masking of historical possibilities as random, accidental or arbitrary.
What systemic processes, then, might have influenced the peculiar rollout of UK devolution arrangements? A part of the answer is supplied by Andreas Rahmatian, a commercial law scholar based at the University of Glasgow. Rahmatian describes the UK constitution as a feudal creature. He argues that key institutions of UK public law, including parliamentary sovereignty, are rooted in feudalism. The modernising moves such as devolution are hardly reflective of reform if:
it is not a constitution that enacts — from a lawyer’s perspective — the legal structures of a democratic system, but it is rather political consensus from time to time that moulds the British constitutional system from the ‘Ancien Régime’ into a modern democracy.
Rahmatian hammers against the portrayal of UK constitution as eccentric and innocent in its eccentricism. He notes that this feudal framework is malleable and more likely to adapt to ‘post-democratic phenomena’. While not outrightly retaining vassalage, the constitution could accommodate a neo-feudalism that emphasises the proprietary element of beneficium. In the light of the findings about financialisation and rent-seeking from the previous section, Rahmatian’s remarks appear oracular.
Education for emancipation
Another pertinent proposal put forward by Unger calls for reimagining the education system. In terms of the overarching goal, the UK needs to nurture critical thinking. In terms of the infrastructure, it should break free from the chains of elitarism and class injustice. Unger’s intervention does not land in a vacuum. One of his main interlocutors in the debate about education in the UK would be Dominic Cummings. Cummings, who in 2013 published a 237-page-long ‘essay’ entitled Some thoughts on education and political priorities, pities the intellectual capacity of modern leaders. He claims that whereas ‘our ancestor chiefs understood bows, horses, and agriculture, our contemporary chiefs (and those in the media responsible for scrutiny of decisions) generally do not understand their equivalents, and are often less experienced in managing complex organisations than their predecessors’. He makes a plea for an ‘Odyssean education’, with a curriculum emphasising, inter alia, extended writing, and hard skills in modelling and problem-solving. As much as Cummings seems to be concerned with the gap between the world’s complexity and our understanding thereof, we should not forget that he delivered a successful Brexit campaign that made use of data analytics and targeted advertising. In other words, Cummings orchestrated a campaign using high skilled methods while being fully aware that the average voter (let alone the politicians) would not be able to make sense of the complexity of this new digital politics scaffolding.
What is the relevance of Cummings for Unger’s education policy proposals? If everyone understands now that schools are lagging and do not endow pupils with tools for self-empowerment, we should perhaps mimic Cummings’s pragmatism and think of appropriating the technologies that enchain us to the end of delivering meaningful education. We can no longer rely on formal schooling as the sole force capable of actuating a counter-movement against the sense-defying postmodern condition. Instead, we should also be paying attention to the informal avenues for carrying educational resources — not necessarily as an end in itself, but due to their potential to stimulate inquiry and to direct people to formal heterodox education channels.
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Roberto Mangabeira Unger remains an outstanding thinker and theorist and will continue to inspire readers from across the globe. My three footnotes to his discussion of the UK’s post-Brexit predicament do not mean to disprove his theses. I rather intended to show that currently, the UK cannot have a discussion on a ‘national project’ along the lines of installing and mass-spreading a new vanguard of production according to the vision outlined in The Knowledge Economy. Perhaps as a first step, we should go back to one of his earlier writings — Democracy Realised (Verso, 1998) — and grapple with updating his ideas on radical democratic experimentalism, institutional and post-institutional alternatives for the post-Brexit era.
