As multiple globalized crises simultaneously crash in on each other, does dystopia become inevitable? In his new book, Escaping Dystopia: Rebuilding a Public Domain, McMaster University Professor Stephen McBride argues that we can escape dystopia by pointing to the contemporary relevance of democratic socialism, embedded in a close analysis of the multiple overlapping crises of neoliberalism. A radical transformation of these institutions is needed to stop multiple crises from sending us to complete disaster.

McBride's starting point is to argue that the simultaneous crises we face today, from rising inequality to the climate crisis, to COVID and economic instability, are rooted in and exacerbated by neoliberal ideology and institutions. Neoliberalism cannot simply be solved through reformist measures. Escaping Dystopia documents the rise of populist and anti-system politics in the advanced capitalist economies, and the serious threats they pose to the norms of liberal democracy. McBride judges that traditional social democracy is also complicit in weakening democracy, thanks to its reformist embrace of neoliberal policies since the 1980s and growing disconnection from the working-class.

The nation-state, however, remains absolutely central to politics. McBride argues that the neoliberal state constructed an international order to protect capital against democracy, but also this cannot be reformed without a major progressive political shift within nation-states. 

Rather than dreaming of a global alternative, the left must take a leaf from the populist right (while rejecting cultural nationalism) in calling for the restoration and exercise of political power at the level of the nation-state. One way to push back against neoliberal decay, for example, is to limit the constraints on national economic policy imposed by corporate interests through international trade and investment agreements. 

McBride argues forcefully that the solidly entrenched neoliberal order has manifestly failed to live up to its promises of shared prosperity and has lost legitimacy after the global financial crisis. It has failed to deal with rising inequality, increasing insecurity, and the climate crisis after decades of stagnation. While we have seen some well-intentioned, modest proposals for reform, such as subsidies to green industries and calls for a stakeholder format of capitalism, the fact is that fiscal austerity, low taxes, and weak regulations remain in the current paradigm.

After imposing neoliberal reform to national economic and political institutions, no government was prepared to seriously redress the imbalance of power between labour and capital, or challenge control of investment by banks and private finance. States could not seriously equalize income and wealth inequality through major tax reforms while serving the interests of capital.

Ultimately, reforms flounder because of the entrenched political and economic power of capital combined with the weakness of serious alternatives. The capitulation of the traditional left to neoliberal ideas is seen a serious barrier to systemic change.

In the most important chapter entitled “Radical Transformation,” McBride argues for control of capital while expanding the public domain and related policies which he embeds squarely in the democratic socialist tradition. To escape dystopia, he calls for stronger controls on international flows of capital, controls on private investment through public ownership of banks, democratic control over the “commanding heights of the economy” such as public utilities, natural resources, and manufacturing industries, and serious redistribution of wealth.

Massive state intervention is needed to shape investment that can meet human needs, rather than maximize profits and returns to capital. Economic planning and socialized investment are necessary to address the climate crisis, economic instability, and to close huge gaps in wealth that currently exist between the richest and the poorest.

Escaping Dystopia can and should be seen as a major re-statement of the case for democratic socialism today, drawing heavily on the state socialism model of the 1930s and 1940s which inspired the post-War Labour government in the United Kingdom, and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Canada. However, McBride advances some proposals to make the expanded public sector accountable to the wider society, including labour and communities. He also specifies some needed reforms to democratize political institutions.

As an aside, McBride suggests that Keynes worked to save capitalism from itself, prolonging its life through modest reform. Yet Keynes himself (see James Crotty, Keynes Against Capitalism) called for massive socialization of the investment process, the euthanasia of the rentier class, and capital controls at the international level sufficient to give national governments control of their economic destiny. Whether or not Keynes’ intentions were to prolong or end capitalism, what is demonstrated is that institutional change is necessary for a radical Great Transformation.

McBride's book is much richer than this brief summary suggests, but his argument is underdeveloped when it comes to agency. The author certainly recognizes the important linkages between the labour movement and democratic socialism in the past, and the political consequences of the decline of unions since the 1970s and 80s. However, McBride has had little to say on how to build a new labour movement committed to a democratic workplace and socialist politics, or on how to change existing social democratic parties from within.

That said, this book needs to be read and debated by anyone interested in how to move beyond neoliberal dystopia.

Stephen McBride is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Public Policy and Globalization at McMaster University. His research deals with issues of comparative public policy, globalization and political economy.

Escaping Dystopia: Rebuilding a Public Domain by Stephen McBride is now available from Bristol University Press.

As greenhouse gas emissions ramp up, housing prices reach astronomical heights, and we all stay stuck in traffic, Paris Marx’s new book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation looks at how the quest for market share got us to this point and why visions of the future from California tech billionaires cannot solve these problems.

To understand where Silicon Valley’s ideas for the future of passenger transport are coming from, Marx looks to the origins of the automobile, where class dynamics, industrial interests, and state collusion built capitalist economies around the personal combustion engine vehicle. The Ford Model T and early cars were put on streets with a “move fast and break things” ethos that flaunted any laws, regulations, or community consultations. Despite increasing injuries and deaths to pedestrians and passengers caused by increasing speeds and instead of regulating speeds, governments chose to induce demand and build infrastructure and cities around the promise that higher speeds would make life better and that car ownership promoted individual freedom. With strong subsidies, cars were able to overtake public transit in market share despite initial unprofitability. Meanwhile, the working-class who lived on these streets lost previous access to a public good as pedestrians, became isolated on sidewalks, and faced more danger with ever-increasing automotive speeds.

Early dreams of a high-speed future are encapsulated in Marx’s description of General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. This envisioned future illustrated speed, limitless interstate expressways, driverless cars, and elevated walkways that would preserve access to the public sphere of the streets without impeding faster speeds. The full promise of this industrial imagination has obviously not played out, but this vision, dreamt up by the wealthy, was sold to policymakers in capitalist countries in the post-war boom. This would lead to the decades-long financial undertaking of constructing mega highways between and across cities, transforming communities and locking-in car dependence. While stuck in gridlock created by a prior industrial dream, Silicon Valley billionaires continue to believe in this ethos to sell technological fantasy as a means of escaping traffic–an ethos that benefits the rich while leaving everyone else behind in the exhaust fumes.

This early coordinated capitalist mode of production rings familiar with the recent news of Uber’s aggressive efforts to dodge regulations and force advantageous policy concessions in cities around the world. To Marx, this news would be familiar to the whole Uber story. Road to Nowhere traces the transformative vision Uber sold on how its technology would change the future of transportation. It certainly has influenced cities today, in the increased gridlock it has produced, the dissolution of unionized taxi industry everywhere, and changes to labour policies that put workers in more precarious positions. Irrationally, Uber’s strategy in its transportation “revolution” has been to kill any alternative to transit with business practices that keep it unprofitable, propped up by cheap liquidity and share prices, with the vision that long-term sustainability comes from consumers left with no choice but to use their apps. Uber’s road to nowhere leaves behind a scorched earth.

Marx also highlights how tech companies aiming to “revolutionize” the future of transport with novelties like driverless or flying cars, tunnels for cars, or sci-fi hyperloops. These are technological roads to nowhere that are a distraction from real alternatives to car dependency. Public relations carpet bombing promising fictional hyperloop technology coming soon, for instance, helped to break any resolve in California to build high-speed rail across the state. These technological visions of the future of transportation, again, come from the perspective of the wealthiest who believe these novelties to be solutions without considering the consequences.

As economies locked in their emissions around car dependency, electric cars today are touted as a new way to maintain the status quo in mobility while cutting greenhouse gasses. But electric cars are not novel–they’ve been around for more than a century. The technological limitation of speed that combustion promised, as well as the state’s organized effort to back fossil fuels, killed the first electric cars by the 1920s. Today, however, Marx argues they are not quite the climate solution promised by people like Elon Musk. Despite billionaire visions of solving the climate crisis through electric cars, they do not see the excesses in resource extraction and production emissions necessary to build the batteries that power them.

Without fully transforming economic and social relations around car dependency, the same inefficiencies will persist and emissions will not be drastically reduced. The proliferation of this old technology, subsidized by governments and still relying on capitalist modes of production will keep cities gridlocked. While countries in Europe and Asia continue to build public transit and choose to rebuild their cities for sustainability at a comparatively feverish pace, North America’s solution to the emissions made by cars is to build more cars. This is not to downplay the need to cut the reliance on the combustion engine, but the literal vehicle to depend on should not be the personal automobile.

These revolutionary dreams offered by Silicon Valley tech execs don’t change the status quo at all, and are primarily innovations that satisfy the rich while the working-class pay more for gas, wait for the bus, and get stuck in traffic. These tech solutions won’t save us. In an ulterior way, these are technological distractions that continue the car-centered economy while delaying or canceling badly needed public goods, such as transit, housing, and environmental protections. “Technology should be built to serve the public, not to shape how they live to increase the power and profits of major corporations,” Marx concludes. As demonstrated with real world technological innovations centered as public goods like mRNA vaccines or the internet, technology built to serve the public has more potential for revolutionizing our socioeconomic relations than apps that eat up market share.

Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer whose work has been published by NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, Tribune, Passage, and Canadian Dimension among many others. Paris is also a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland and the host of the critical technology podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx is now available from Verso Books.

Watch our full conversation with Paris Marx about Road to Nowhere and the future of climate action and tech, held on August 16, 2022.

The Broadbent Institute would like to congratulate Professor Frances Abele on her newly announced appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada by Governor General Mary Simon. This appointment recognizes Professor Abele for her outstanding, “contributions to public policy and administration as one of Canada’s pre-eminent scholars of northern policy and Indigenous political development.”

“On behalf of the Broadbent Institute, I offer my warmest congratulations to Dr. Abele for her appointment to the Order of Canada in recognition of her foundational work on Indigenous political economy,” said Executive Director Jen Hassum. “Through this high honour, I hope that Canadians continue to use her research to inform Indigenous relations and in building community governance.”

In addition to her work as a Broadbent Fellow, Professor Abele is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University, Senior Research Fellow of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation, and Faculty Associate of the Centre for European Studies.

For the last thirty-five years, she has worked with Indigenous peoples all over Canada and in some parts of the circumpolar Arctic. From 1992 to 1996, she was seconded to the research directorate at the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, where she was responsible for research and policy on the North and the Commission’s work on governance.

Raised in Alberta, Dr. Abele has lived in Yellowknife, Toronto, Gatineau and for the last twenty years, Ottawa.

We share the anger, fear, and disappointment that many are feeling today on both sides of the border.

All people have equal worth and equal rights. We all deserve a life of dignity with access to essential services, and that includes bodily autonomy and the right to comprehensive public health care - including abortion.

The Broadbent Institute will always fight alongside women, trans and non-binary people for these rights.

We encourage Canadians to be vigilant and wish our American friends every success in their fight to restore abortion rights in the United States.