A new eco-social civilization model: A good life for all!

The idea of a good life is an old preoccupation which already inspired philosophical deliberation in the antique Greek Polis, a public place for free citizens. The good life, that was the common denominator, is a life that permits human flourishing and happiness. While concrete suggestions varied, there was a certain pragmatic understanding that the good life is related to the care for oneself, a happy, but moderate conduct of life. The human flourishing of male property owners went, however, hand in hand with the exploitation of slaves and the subordinate position of women and foreigners: A good life for a few.

It was up to the French Revolution to question class and political privileges: Liberty, equality and fraternity became the slogan of an historical inflection of demo-cracy, the government by the people. The idea was so revolutionary that it was not digested immediately, but led to ongoing discrimination by class, gender and ethnicity. Olympe de Gouges was decapitated by the guillotine, the struggle for slave liberation in Haiti combated by European powers with all means. However, the vision of Enlightenment, the joint flourishing of equality and freedom, started to challenge the idea that a few have the privilege to lead a good life while the rest is born to serve.

The 19th century took up the idea of liberty, more precisely the freedom of the propertied citizens, the bourgeois and the successful who were able to accumulate and to consume. They obtained civil rights which protected them from state arbitrariness. As they had money, they were able to consume what was produced in manufacturing. “Social wealth appears as a formidable collection of goods”, with this words Karl Marx opened his opus magnum. But it remained a divided class society and a consumer society for the few. And it went hand in hand with colonialism and imperialism, the exploitation and discrimination of the others.

This changed after the big world depression in the 1930s and World War II. Western Europe and Northern America widened their consumer societies, permitting the participation of ever increasing parts of the working population in mass consumption. The golden age of capitalism, the post war welfare capitalism, was a unique realization of the good life for all who were part of a certain territory and people, famously expressed by the Swedes as “people´s home”, understood as full employment and generalized social security. For a few decades it became the leitmotif of an anti-Fascist consensus: To avoid that social unrest undermines the pillars of liberal democracy, society has to offer a good life for all. A social form of democracy was perceived as the key ingredient of social peace, cohesion and individual flourishing.

The result was a dramatic shift of huge parts of the population from marginalized workers to consumers and citizens. It was a good life for all (or at least most), within a national power container, a huge progress in relation to exclusionary liberal capitalism, but remaining within the constraints of capitalist consumerism, a labour regime based on exploitation and its focus on commodities for the satisfaction of human needs. The welfare state was the pillar on which the middle class society of the 20thcentury was erected in the global North and South: Cars for everybody is the emblematic expression of this credo.

All this was undermined by neoliberalism as a deliberate class project in favour of the concentration of power in the hands of a few and the well-being of the fittest. Inequality is a main trait of current policies of supply-side policies to enhance competitiveness. Neoliberalism undermined the national power container, shifting power within nations and on the world market towards corporations and the finance sector. The hollowing out of the welfare state resulted in an increasing insecurity of the middle classes.

With respect to the good life of all, the world is today faced with a contradictory double movement. While the social democratic ideal of the good life for all in a capitalist consumer society inspires the creation of welfare capitalism in emerging countries, Europe and North America are confronted with a different challenge. The current emergence of competitive welfare capitalism in Brazil, China and other nations of the Global South lead to the emergence of a world-wide middle class consumption society and the spread of a way of life which was limited until recently to Europe and North America. This is the paradox of current development: While the Global North threatens its middle class structure, a strong middle class is emerging in the Global South. The result is a reduction in poverty in countries like Brazil, while inequality and insecurity raise nationally and huge segments of the Global South remain stuck in poverty. The North Atlantic West is, for the first time in its 500 year old world dominance, faced with a situation in which the rules of a capitalist world economy are turning themselves against its creators. Industry is moving to the global South and with it power, technology, capital and control. In Europe, the fringes in the South and East are already abandoning the prospect of welfare capitalism, increasing class cleavages and social disintegration. Capitalist accumulation does no longer deliver social cohesion. Social inequality increases and the fruits of welfare are harvested by less and less.

I am proposing a political strategy to achieve a good life for all globally which differs from the dominant strand of the movement for another globalization. The lessons learned in the 20th century indicate that a territory, a power container, is a constraint as well as a prerequisite for democratic social development. It is not without irony, that current Western nostalgia of post-war welfare capitalism takes place during its most severe crisis. Indeed, it was the most advanced civilizational model with respect to equality, even within the straightjacket of consumerism and class cleavages. Culturally, it created a middle class society, a society dominated by universal modes of living and working. The challenge for the 21st century consists in safeguarding these achievements, while overcoming the capitalist accumulation imperative, the cultural limitations of consumer society and the lack of awareness of the ecological embeddedness of socioeconomic development. Therefore, I argue for a geopolitical and geoeconomic order which is multipolar, based on territories which create their context-specific forms of accommodating freedom, equality and solidarity. These territories have to be power containers with a set of rules valid within, while permitting the maximum of permeability to avoid discrimination and to respect universal human rights. But most of the social innovations which are discussed in academia and implemented in thousands of initiatives have a territorial base, a situation reinforced by ecological constraints. Social innovations, like participatory democracy in the neighbourhood as well as participatory budgeting and planning for regional development are steps to empower citizens locally. Solidarity economy and flourishing regionalized markets as well as innovative forms of public service delivery are further means of organizing socioeconomic development with and for the people. All this has to be organized in specific territories, from neighbourhoods to regions, and it has to be embedded in supra-local regulations be it nationally or – as in the case of Europe – on a continental scale.

Without denying the dangers of climate change, there is a potential future for the Global South in direction towards welfare capitalism, imitating the consumerist way of life. But there is more than one reason to be pessimistic about Europe´s future: Be it with respect to the current efforts to reinstall “competitiveness” as the sole objective of European integration, the economic shape of its periphery, the only rudimentary democratic, but still highly fragmented form of European government or its rapidly declining geopolitical and geoeconomic position. But decay is not unavoidable. If there is hope, it lies in the West´s rich legacy to struggle for a good life for all, often in critical situations of crisis. Red Vienna, like many other innovative forms of municipal socialism at the beginning of the 20th century, fostered a political culture against class privileges and authoritarianism. The New Deal and other innovative responses to the World Economic Crisis of the 1930s legitimized a social form of democracy against fascism.

For Europe, learning the lessons from the struggle for a good life for all, the way forward in the 21st century has to focus on the creation of a democratic polity which permits all to lead a good life on this planet with its respective constraints. In the European case this means a European social citizenship as a prerequisite for social cohesion in European cities and regions. This does not mean a uniform Europe-wide system of entitlements, but a place and inhabitant-based arrangement which allows a good life for all, embedded in democratically decided Europe-wide regulations based on the principles of a mixed and regionalized economy. And all this embedded in a global governance structure based on common values and mutual respect. Obviously, this requires social innovations to organize mobility for all, care-taking for all as well as work for all. This is utopian, but in tune with Ernst Bloch, who ended his opus magnum on the “Principle of Hope” with a plea for concrete utopias identified not in an unaccessible future, but in a radical temporal-spatial return … “in creating something in the world, that shines back to childhood and were nobody has yet been: Home.“ (so entsteht in der Welt etwas, das allen in die Kindheit scheint und worin noch niemand war: Heimat) (Bloch 1959: 1628).