Roberto Unger on the Progressive Agenda

Roberto Mangebiera Unger, one of the most incisive philosophers, has an interview where he outlines what he thinks should be the progressive agenda in the US. It has applications well-beyond India, especially in India. 

The progressive program the country needs would address the supply as well as the demand sides of the economy, production as well as consumption. It would seek to innovate in the economic, educational, and political arrangements that shape the primary or fundamental distribution of advantage and opportunity rather than devoting itself solely, as the humanizers of the supposedly inevitable have, to the after-the-fact correction, through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, of market-generated inequalities. More generally, the individual should be secured in a haven of capability-assuring educational and economic endowments and of safeguards against private and governmental oppression. Society all around him, however, should be opened up to contest, experiment, and innovation. In that storm, the individual, once safe and equipped, can move unafraid. The storm does not arise spontaneously. It needs to be arranged. The true aim of the progressives should be a deep freedom, achieved by changing the structure of social life, rather than a shallow equality. The struggle against entrenched and extreme inequality is subsidiary to the larger goal, to become bigger together. And the method should be structural change—the criterion of depth—change in the established institutional arrangements and ideological assumptions. Real structural change is not the replacement of one indivisible, predetermined system—socialism for capitalism—by another. It is fragmentary but cumulative. The goal of shared empowerment and the refusal to take the established institutional form of society as an unsurpassable horizon are what together oppose the progressive to the conservative.

Two areas of reform he touches on are taxation and education. His argument on tax reforms highlights the reality that taxes have to rise,

No progressive program is feasible without a substantially higher tax than the United States now implements. Comparative fiscal experience reveals the truth about taxes. Structural or institutional change reshaping the fundamental distribution of opportunity and advantage decisively overshadows anything that can be achieved by retrospective redistribution through tax and transfer. Moreover, in determining the overall impact of the budget on both its revenue-raising and spending sides, the aggregate level of the tax take and how it is spent count for more than the progressive profile of taxation. A tax that is neutral toward relative prices may make it possible to raise much more public revenue with much less economic trauma, as the European social democracies do through heavy reliance on the avowedly regressive value-added tax, and then to spend it on redistributive public services. That is not a reason to reject the steeply progressive taxation of both individual consumption and wealth, so long as we understand that the redistributive effects of these taxes are likely to be modest unless we have the power and will to radicalize them and to tolerate the resulting economic disruption.

He dismisses all attempts to work around the need for higher tax rates, like efficiency enhancing measures like rationalisation of slabs, removal of tax exemptions and so on, and printing money as "pietistic measures". The progressive agenda today focuses primarily on additional spending and more efficient allocation. There is no space for changes in the taxation structure, beyond marginal tinkering. This will not only not change things, it will also end up further entrenching the status quo (which ultimately has to go).  

And on education, 

The United States suffers from a severe form of educational dualism. Its schools are some of the best and the worst among high-income countries. There are two tasks. The first task has to do with the institutional setting of the school system. In this vast, unequal country, organized as a federation, the priority is to reconcile the local management of the schools with national standards of investment and quality. Such a reconciliation is incompatible with the exclusive dependence of the schools on local public finance. And it requires cooperation within the federal system to take over failing schools and school systems, fix them, and return them fixed. The second task is to recast education on a model of teaching and learning that gives primacy to the acquisition of analytic and synthetic capabilities over the mastery of information. That does so by preferring selective depth to encyclopedic superficiality in dealing with content. That puts teamwork among students, teachers, and schools in the place of individualism and authoritarianism in the classroom. And that deals with every subject from contrasting points of view. This approach is no less suitable to practical, vocational training than to general education, once the focus of such training shifts from job-specific and machine-specific skills to the higher-order capabilities required by the knowledge economy and its technologies. But it does depend on the creation of a nationwide teaching career through cooperation within the federal system.

The second part is as much relevant to any other country as it is to the US.

Again, unlike Unger calling for deep reforms about the way schooling is financed in the US, the progressive agenda is about charter schools and more private participation.

I have always thought Unger's agenda is a bit unrealistic given the times. But his clarification makes great sense,

I am a revolutionary by conviction as well as by temperament. I believe it is likely that I am living in a counterrevolutionary interlude in a long revolutionary period in the history of humanity. I am determined that my thoughts and actions not be controlled by the biases of the interlude. But I understand that revolutionary change today must differ in form and method as well as in substance from what it was in the past. For any program, the direction and the choice of the initial steps are crucial. It does not matter that the steps are longer or shorter. It matters that they be the right moves in the right direction. My criticism of the American progressives is not that the steps they take are too small. It is that they are steps in the wrong direction, taken under the influence of bad ideas about the future, the present, and even the past.

The notion of a sudden leap into another regime of social life is a fantasy. Its practical role today is to serve as an excuse for its opposite. Once its fantastical nature has been exposed, what remains for the disappointed fantasists is to sweeten the world that they have despaired of reimagining and remaking... Every consequential agenda for change in society builds its own base over time. But that effort has to begin by engaging the classes, communities, and forces that exist. It must move them to revise, little by little, their imagination of the possible as well as their understanding of their interests and identities. A program like the one that I have outlined must go in search of a transracial progressive majority. That convergence needs to include large parts of the blue-collar and white-collar working class, of the racially stigmatized underclass, of the small-business class, and even of the restless aspirants of the professional and business class.

This is of great relevance when we look at the progressive agenda today.  

Where are the meaningful proposals on addressing issues like business concentration, executive compensation excesses, anti-competitive behaviours, low minimum wages, pro-rich and pro-capital tax codes, declining labour bargaining power, health and housing markets and policies which favour the rich, unaffordable tertiary education, and so on? Where are proposals to this effect from the mainstream intellectuals whose opinions ring loud in the oped pages? 

When one looks around at the mainstream progressive agenda in the US, one cannot but not get the feeling that it skirts around all deep-rooted structural issues and is confined to tinkering at the margins. It is all about safety valves and pacifiers to buy out the handful of the vocal among the vast mass of discontented. 

In this milieu, I am inclined to think that the excessive focus on the new Green Deal, while important, is, in the net, a distraction. All the public issues mentioned earlier are atleast as much, or perhaps more in proximate terms, important as environmental sustainability. But unlike the others, there is a post-modern and cool feeling, cutting across population categories, about espousing green issues. This is perhaps because environmental issues have a universal ring to it - as the pandemic has shown, it does not spare the rich and elites. Besides, the trade-offs required in meaningful resolution of the other issues are much greater and unsettles very strong vested interests and demands changes in the rules of the game. 

In the circumstances, for the progressives and the conservatives alike, the Green Deal becomes a convenient excuse. For the former, it is a very important issue that can benefit from the  channelling of youth energies, and for the latter, it is a convenient safety valve to let out the discontentment among the youth. Also, for both parties, their support would be seen as being on the right side of a popular buzz-theme of the times. But, as with the Occupy movement which frittered out, when all is said and done, more would have been said than done!