The free market reveals its true colours

 

Corporate profits, not workers’ wages, are the largest factor behind the inflation afflicting Europe, it was revealed last month.

This was the conclusion of the International Monetary Fund, a body not noted for its pro-worker outlook. Rather it’s been a bastion of the austerity mania besetting the world over the last few decades.

The IMF conceded that domestic profits were responsible for 45% of the inflation that occurred in Europe over the last year. Rising import prices, by contrast, contributed 40% and labour costs 25%.

This rather contradicts the assertion of conservative commentators that we are in the grip of a ‘wage-price’ spiral. This idea was always fantastical in the context of the longest wage stagnation in Britain since Napoleonic times.  Costs – labour costs – that are going down, or barely rising, in real terms, can’t be responsible for soaring prices (inflation).

Gouge Away

In contrast, the evidence for a ‘profits-price spiral’ is strong. One recent book on the cost of living crisis in Britain found that the biggest companies increased their “mark ups” – prices above the cost of production – from 58% in 2002 to 82% in 2020. The Bank of England has recently found that goods price inflation (prices) is still rising while the cost of inputs is falling. Now we have the IMF – hardly a neutral body – admitting that “firms have passed on more than the nominal cost shock” [of the rise in commodity prices caused by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine etc.] to consumers.

But what is really interesting is that if mainstream economics is remotely trustworthy as a description of reality this profits-price spiral shouldn’t be happening at all.

The core belief of mainstream economics is that we inhabit an innately competitive, self-regulating market economy whose defining characteristic is price competition. As neoclassical economist Milton Friedman asserted, competition exists when there are a large number of firms and none of them can control price levels even though they might want to. “An individual firm is powerless to intervene in ways that change the basic competitive forces it or another firm faces,” he said. “The fate of each business is thus largely determined by market forces beyond its control.”

Fellow ‘free market’ economist, and favourite of Margaret Thatcher, Friedrich Hayek echoed, “the price system will fulfil its function only if competition prevails, that is, if the individual producer has to adapt himself to price changes and cannot control them”.

Essentially, under the system, if one firm raises prices way beyond the cost of production, it will immediately face competition from another firm offering lower prices. Either it relents, or it goes bust.

But this is true only if it is the case that we live in this fabled market system, where impersonal competition is the rule everyone must abide by. But what if we don’t? What if, in fact, we live – whether we like it or not – in a corporate capitalist system where large, dominant firms are able to determine prices and levels of investment?

Marxist truth bomb

This is the conclusion of a variant of Marxist economics, known as monopoly capitalism. A group of large firms, it says, – not just one as the name suggests – rise to dominance and, as a result, are able to collude in raising prices, controlling levels of investment and the introduction of new technologies, and making it difficult for smaller firms to gain a foothold in the market.  This process is enabled by the fact that markets in general are becoming more concentrated – i.e. mergers mean that larger and larger firms dominate markets as opposed to the competitive idyll of a welter of small firms.

A think-tank report last summer in Britain found that, at the close of 2021, the profits of the largest non-financial companies were up 34% compared to pre-pandemic levels, with over 90% of the increase accounted for by just 25 companies. “Some firms could have considerable market power with very few competitors,” the report argued, “and this could be making the cost of living crisis worse by raising prices beyond what would be economically justified.”

What gives credence to the idea that the ‘market economy’ is not as innately competitive as claimed is that a profits price spiral was happening before the current spate of run-away inflation. As I noted in my 2019 book The Disobedient Society:

In 2016 The Economist magazine analysed 900 sectors of the US economy and found that 2/3rds became more concentrated between 1997 and 2012. As a result, corporate America was raking in ‘exceptional profits’ of about $300 billion a year, equivalent to a third of taxed operating profits. And contrary to ‘one of the fundamental principle of economics’—that prices equal marginal costs—these profits were not being passed on to the consumer, with some more concentrated sectors of the economy, according to The Economist’s analysis, seeing prices rises of double the rate of inflation.

Of course, back in 2016, consumer inflation wasn’t an issue, it was negligible. Rather, the fear was deflation and what that would do to the economy. Which does beg the question of what the original cause of the inflation we are now experiencing was? Possibly price gouging, therefore, didn’t spark the jump in inflation, but is helping to prolong it.

Reneging on the Deal

But what this does unquestionably do is undermine the whole justification of the ‘market’ economy.  Essentially, we in the West were presented with a deal. Put up with submission to the will of an employer in the form of wage labour, in addition to skyrocketing inequality, and you will be rewarded with cheap food and other consumer goods. In mainstream economics, labour is the burden for which consumption enabled by wages is the compensation. But this compensation is looking remarkably threadbare, and for many, non-existent. In the process, the whole concept of the market economy – competitive markets allocating scarce resources and ensuring the consumer gets the best possible outcome – is revealed to be something that exists in the pages of a textbook rather than in the real world.

The logical consequence is that if we can’t rely on the putative ‘market’ economy to do what it is supposed to do, then – at the very least – it needs to be properly regulated in the public interest by some body that is genuinely independent of corporate interests. Policies such as an excess profits tax and price caps become ways to correct what the market – because it isn’t a real market – is failing to do.

Meanwhile, we continue to reap the benefit of the ‘free market’. Even though it isn’t free and it doesn’t operate like a market.

The Banality of Obedience

 

In trying to understand the Milgram obedience experiments, the most important thing, in my opinion, is not to be dazzled by what they purport to show. The surface narrative – still loyally recounted in popular renditions every time the name Stanley Milgram is uttered – is that ordinary people can effortlessly be transformed into heartless torturers, that beneath our civilised veneers lurk potential concentration camp guards. In the next breath there are, invariably, earnest warnings about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

In fact, the truth is simultaneously more mundane and more disturbing.

What Milgram actually said was that we easily allow ourselves to be turned into agents for those above us in hierarchical organisations, doing what they want rather than what we ourselves would do. “Relationship,” as he put it, “overwhelms content”. That content can involve inflicting pain and death but – and this is rarely remarked upon – it can also involve content that is neutral, even benevolent or merely one link in a chain whose ultimate purpose is destructive or damaging. The specific action might appear innocuous but when placed together with other innocent looking parts of the whole, the ‘end product’ might be immensely harmful.

The crucial element is the relationship. Clearly the Milgram experiment (s) would not have achieved lasting fame had he asked volunteers if they wouldn’t mind passing a stapler (‘Psychology professor reveals we are all stapler-passers under the surface!’). Though it would have been interesting to know if anyone would have refused.

Commonplace obedience

This little noticed element in obedience to authority in fact produced the highest obedience rates. When Milgram’s subjects were merely asked to read out the word-pairs while a confederate of the experimenter actually pressed the buzzer supposedly inflicting electric shocks (the experiment was presented as a test of the effect of punishment on memory), obedience levels went through the roof. They registered 92.5%, the highest in the entire series of experiments.

Most replications of Milgram in the 1960s and ‘70s produced broadly similar results. One study didn’t however. That was by Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann in Australia in 1974. They reported obedience as low as 40% (and 16% for female subjects). This was the “notable exception” alluded to in Part One. However, when Kilham’s and Mann’s subjects became mere ‘runners’ – transmitting the experimenter’s instructions to a person playing the role of the teacher/shocker – disobedience was transformed into obedience. It hit 68% for men and 40% for women.

This is how contemporary obedience researchers, Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, describe this variation of the Kilham and Mann study:

As it turned out, people whose task was simply to transmit successive instructions to press the generator’s switches were even more pliant than those who – as in Milgram’s original experiment – were supposed to be the direct (physical) culprits responsible for causing physical pain to another person. This demonstrates that the role of being a cog in the bureaucratic machine facilitates the sense that one is neither the instigator of anything evil, nor directly causing any harm. As can be seen, in this particular type of situation, it is particularly easy to generate submissiveness and obedience. (From The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, pp 39-40)

The “particular type of situation” which lends itself so effortlessly to kindling submissiveness and obedience, is as emblematic of the corporation – which is in essence a private bureaucracy – as it is of the state machine. This is difficult to see in part because of the vehement ideology of freedom that accompanies corporate capitalism. But it is also obscured by the image, assiduously developed over the last 40 years or so, of the individual as a self-interested aggrandizer, always on the look-out for the best online deals, demanding faultless service, perpetually seeking fitness and attractiveness, constantly honing their CV. We may be irredeemably selfish but under a ‘free market’ system, we answer only to ourselves and our own desires.

However this was never true and still isn’t. As noted by the mid-20^th century economic historian Karl Polanyi, if we were purely self-interested negotiators always seeking the highest price for selling the commodity of our own labour, as theoretically we should do under the ‘laws’ of the market economy, we would be “almost continually on strike”. This obviously isn’t the case and is not solely due to coercion and the power of the law and the police. The added ingredient is the power of obedience.

The vast majority of us willingly enter – or we think we do – Milgram’s agentic state, where we temporarily become instruments for the wishes of people above us in the hierarchy (as they are instruments for people above them). The crucial element, as Milgram observed, is the sense of voluntary choice. This creates a sense of obligation, allied to a feeling of being absolved of any real responsibility, which is a powerful and dangerous brew.

The element of our economy which is always stressed by the media and the powerful is our freedom as consumers. But this, as the book elaborates, is at best half the story. We also spend much of our lives within – or bound to – hierarchical organisations which operate under the expectation of unquestioning obedience.  

As above, so below

It would be a mistake to think this cast of mind is restricted to the lower half of the economy, though it may be more explicit there. Most of us are agents for others. Since the 1970s, for example, ‘the agency theory of the firm’ has grown in popularity. This asserts that a company’s senior managers (chief exec, head of finance etc., often on salaries which place them in the 0.01%) are mere ‘agents’ of its ‘principals’, the shareholders, and should be expected to do their bidding. Whether these managers are in fact genuine agents for the company’s owners is open to question. At the higher echelons of the economy, people often have the power and wealth to pursue their own interests. But what is interesting is that they’re expected to be٭.

If anything obedience has grown in intensity since Milgram’s time, though not in the way that might be first thought. It occupies an unrecognised, though essential, space in the economy. Thanks to burgeoning information technology, ‘scientific management’ can control and keep tabs on employees’ behaviour in ways never dreamed of by its 20^th century pioneers. In efforts to increase productivity and minimize ‘loafing’, workers are regularly spied on and tracked by their own smartphones, with data compiled about their activities. Online wanderings are subject to screen capture and keystroke monitoring.  In some cases, a worker’s every action is planned out by headsets or hand-held devices, with punishment for deviation.

As one writer observes, this is not just about maximising profitability but “a vision of obedience and acquiescence”.

Gratefully oppressed

What makes these developments especially sinister is that they are accompanied by a powerful feeling that, beyond extreme infractions, this is the way things should be. In a market economy, where we freely choose which little dictatorship to rent ourselves out to, it is only natural that we obey the instructions of superiors.

In The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, Doliński and Grzyb give numerous examples of employees, or people assuming the role of employees in psychological experiments, obeying the instructions of superiors to carry out ethically dubious actions. For instance, racially selecting new employees or marketing an unsafe drug. Interestingly, the crucial factor does not seem to be an inherent desire to maximise profits, but fulfilling the wishes of senior figures in the organization of which these ‘employees’ are a part.

In my opinion, this is a form of obedience unique to the corporate capitalism societies we inhabit. There is an often fervent identification with the interests and aims of employers but one that can be seamlessly transferred to a competitor. This is serial obedience – in contrast to older types of obedience, around a nation or a religion for example, which tend to be quite fixed.

This feeling of habitual obedience is stiffened by a pervasive aura of disposability – the fear that if we don’t live up to expectations there is always someone else, maybe a robot, who can replace us. In this mindset, there is nothing wrong with obedience. Quite the opposite, it is questioning obedience that is pathological.

Evolution’s children

The natural objection to this thesis is that obedience is not imposed on us, but evident throughout history – so much so that it might be thought of as part of human nature.  In The Disobedient Society I refute Milgram’s contention (which echoes historical giants like Darwin) that obedience is an “evolutionary adaptation”. Actually, the evidence suggests that early humanity was able to knowingly flit between hierarchical and egalitarian social relations. Features such elite rule, social ranking or territoriality might be put into effect at certain times of the year and then dissolved. This indicates an element of choice in obedience which debars it from being a genetic flaw, or depending on your view, an innate advantage.

I refer also to Murray Bookchin’s distinction between first and second nature. Evolution, in the form of first nature, endows humans with the capacity to develop extra-biological tools and to consciously intervene in the natural world through a sophisticated collective organisation. However, the nature of this collective organisation is not determined by first nature. It lies in the realm of second nature – the domain of experimentation which can take many forms and is not governed by the ‘laws’ of natural selection.

The belief that obedience is immovable really relies on a different contention, however. That with the fragmentation of tasks within the complex organisations of the modern world, a degree of obedience is essential. We can never return to the simple freedom of earlier stages of human development, where a person might undertake an action and see it through to completion without the input of others. In short, if we want civilisation, we have to have obedience.

I don’t believe, however, that obedience is synonymous with the division of labour. Rather it is a kind of reflex, an unthinking giving away of authority and ethical responsibility to others. Obedience has a habitual character – it is a form of behaviour it is easy to slip into without noticing.

But the habit can be broken, just as a person who is lightly dozing can be jolted into wakefulness. Despite its tenacious hold, the origins of obedience are not evolutionary. And disobedience, does not, in spite of its reputation, repudiate complex organisation and discipline. Murray Bookchin coined the phrase “episodic sovereignty” – in reference to the Indian Crow societies of North America – to indicate how the yielding of individual initiative can be temporary and limited to rational and well-defined ends. Permanent institutions based on the expectation of command and obedience are not inevitable.

Basic disobedience

Not inevitable, but certainly well-entrenched, however.  I would suggest that if the grip of obedience is to be loosened, radical steps need to be taken. One is a basic income set at a level that a person can live well on without the need to become an “agent” for the hierarchical organisations that pepper and essentially control society. This would instil a sense of confidence and security, a willingness to breach conformist norms and the self-assurance to resist the demands of ‘the economy’. The cowed and malleable workforce of today would be transcended and more genuine forms of democracy might follow.

Secondly the perpetual motion machine of capitalism needs to be halted. At its molecular level capitalism entails the re-investment of profits which leads (usually) to more profits which have to be reinvested again, and so on ad infinitum. This leads to an irresistible imperative to meet existing consumer demand, and create new needs to satisfy this ever-growing “wall of money”. Thus the signature institutions of capitalist society embody obedience – hierarchical organisation with employees obeying precise instructions from above – as simply the most efficient means to achieve the task in hand. If society is ever to advance beyond command and obedience, this background fixation needs to change.

I am not suggesting that obedience did not exist before capitalism or that it may not infuse the kind of society that will exist after capitalism. But Milgram’s insistence on the essentially voluntary nature of obedience makes him, sixty years after his original obedience experiments, presciently relevant.

 

٭ The problem of a corporation’s executives not actually being genuine agents for its owners was thought to have been circumvented by paying them partly in stock options. This, it was believed, would align their interests with those of the shareholders, in that both would want a high share price. However this ‘solution’ also managed to subvert a core principle of the market economy. Theoretically, a company share price should reflect whether investors think it will make healthy profits – and thus pay healthy dividends – in the future.  However, paying executives partly in stock options encouraged the practice of share buy backs, whereby a company buys its own shares to jack up the overall price. This practice was legalised in Britain in 1981 and in the US the following year. Share buys backs are now a huge ‘industry’, ironically diverting funds which may have gone into actual industry.

The Disobedient Society

In the mid-1970s American psychologist, Stanley Milgram wrote a book that attempted to explain the findings of his infamous obedience experiments that had taken place more than a decade earlier. In the experiments a sizeable number of quite ordinary people had shown their willingness to inflict what they believed were excruciatingly painful, possibly lethal, electric shocks on innocent strangers. In Obedience to Authority, Milgram developed the concept of the “agentic state” to explain the frighteningly powerful hold of obedience – subjects had entered a psychological state where they became unthinking agents for people of higher status. Milgram, and others, deployed the agentic state to explain why terrible atrocities occur so regularly when the people that carry them out are often not monstrous, psychopathic individuals, oblivious to the pain of others.

In actual fact the agentic state is far better at illuminating far more mundane social relationships. As one contemporary psychologist puts it: “Forget Nazis; think of workers who bend to the will of employers when told to ignore evidence that their product is unsafe.” Or, indeed, workers who bend to the will of employers generally; all workers, in other words.

Milgram thought that obedience was humanity’s “fatal flaw”, one implanted in people by aeons of evolution. In The Disobedient Society I take the opposite tack – asking what if obedience is a product of social development, not biology. If so, is a disobedient society possible?

The following is an interview about the book published by New Compass

Why have you chosen to write a book about obedience in 2019? The concept itself seems to be something of the old days. Hasn’t the ‘obedience’ that people previously performed in schools, hospitals, the workplace and the like, been replaced by subtle forms of oppression and domination?

I think obedience is subtle actually. I don’t think obedience entails knuckling under because someone orders you to do something and threatens terrible consequences if you don’t. It’s more complicated than that. In my opinion, obedience involves an element of collusion on the part of the obedient person. That is to say, they might not agree with the contents of the acts they are asked to perform, but they feel they ought to – morally should – obey. That’s something different to outright coercion.

According to the neoliberal thinkers who really define our age (people like Hayek and Milton Friedman), obedience is confined to the past, however. It’s limited to chattel slavery, feudalism, communism, and, in their view, 20^th century ‘socialism’. But once the economy is liberated from archaic or state-imposed forms of intervention and control, obedience simply vanishes. Society merely becomes a reflection of our innermost desires, represented by the innumerable contracts we agree with other free individuals.

However, this is a complete misnomer. I think obedience is actually stronger than ever. It’s primarily evident in the labour contract which is, in essence, the promise of obedience in exchange for wages, the means of life. In the book, I go back to the 20^th century psychologist Stanley Milgram (who conducted the famous ‘electric shock’ experiments in the 1960s and later wrote a book about why people obey). He concluded that, in order to work effectively, obedience has to be based on “voluntary entry”. Milgram said people have to choose to enter what he termed the “agentic state”; willingly becoming an agent for a person of higher status. Without this aura of free will, compliance can only be achieved by perpetual surveillance.

I think that’s an important insight into why wage labour, which is now absolutely ubiquitous, works so effectively. As the 19^th century economist, Henry George said, it’s slavery “under the forms of freedom”. And the ideology of freedom that surrounds it – the feeling that we voluntarily agree to wage labour so therefore it must be devoid of all relations of control – is integral to its functioning.

Of course, I don’t for a second subscribe to the notion that wage labour is, in reality, a genuinely voluntary transaction. Most of us have no choice but to rent ourselves to others in order procure the means to survive or care for others. But wage labour has, very assiduously, been given the patina of a voluntary transaction – because if it is widely perceived as voluntary then obedience should naturally follow because the employee feels they have moral obligation to obey. They have signed a contract after all.

I’m not discounting the role that bare coercion plays by the way. But the fact that we all – or the vast majority of us – go along with this process is crucial as well. Murray Bookchin said that “epistemologies of rule” are at once subjective and material – i.e. rule works both by creating a system of material control that is very difficult to resist and by organizing the “psychic structures” of individuals so that they conform.

Milgram also noted that obedience, despite its reputation, doesn’t take the form of “a dramatic confrontation of opposed wills or philosophies”. Rather it inhabits career aspirations, work relationships and technical routines. Obedience has far more of an everyday, almost unnoticed quality, than we want to admit.

Ok, let’s turn to Milgram’s ‘electric shock’ experiments. You base a significant portion of your argument on them. When I studied sociology at university, however, I learned that these experiments were ethically dubious, and the results were questionable. You don’t agree?

I agree they were ethically dubious (although not in the same league as the Stanford Prison experiment with which Milgram is often erroneously paired). Some of the original participants were traumatized by what they believed at the time they had done. You can see some of the reactions in the recent film, Experimenter. Ethical rules were changed after Milgram to protect those taking part in psychological experiments so that it’s not impossible to replicate the experiment in its entirety nowadays.

(For people who at this point haven’t got a clue what we’re talking about, I should say the Milgram experiment, which dated from the early 1960s, involved instructing people to administer possibly lethal electric shocks on a stranger. About 2/3rds of participants obeyed the instructions. But it was hoax; there were no shocks). 

However, I’ve not seen persuasive evidence that the results were invalid. There have been several ‘Milgram-esque’ experiments in recent years and they’ve produced very similar outcomes. That said, I’m not much interested in chewing the fat over whether Milgram really did ‘demonstrate’ that ordinary people are capable of doing horrendous things ‘under orders’. To me that is missing the point.

Milgram undertook about 19 variations on the basic experiment. This is something that – to my knowledge – subsequent Milgram-like experiments haven’t done; they have just tried to replicate the original experiment. Among the variations was one in which participants merely assisted the person who actually delivered the ‘shocks’. In this case, obedience rates went through the roof – they were something like 93%. That indicates to me that the willingness (or not) of people to commit atrocities is not, on reflection, what the Milgram experiments are really about. What they really show is the strength of obedience to authority figures, or institutional situations, considered to have legitimacy – what Milgram called the agentic state.

Milgram said that American liberal-democratic society did not insulate its citizens from a propensity to commit brutalities at the behest of malevolent authority. What he should have said is that liberal-democratic society doesn’t insulate its citizens from obedience per se, malevolent or otherwise. In fact it relies on it.

But Milgram didn’t only explore the conditions under which people are willing to commit atrocities on behalf of authority, but also when they choose to disobey? How does that influence your book?

Milgram compared obedience to being in a light sleep. It’s always possible for the obedient person to wake up – or be woken up. One of the most effective ways to encourage disobedience, Milgram concluded, was other people being disobedient or “peer rebellion”. In one of the experimental variations, actors refuse to go along with the experimenter’s instructions to shock the victim. And when they disobey, invariably the genuine subject does too. Paradoxically, conformity – doing what other people are doing – is an important element in disobedience.

The lesson here is that disobedience or rebellion is rarely a solitary event. It involves a moral transgression which normally successfully inhibits disobedience but when growing numbers of people join in the rebellion, these inhibitions are overcome. “The revolt against malevolent authority is most effectively brought about by collective rather than individual action,” said Milgram. “This is a lesson every revolutionary group learns.”

Your book doesn’t only revolve around Milgram’s experiments and his takes on obedience. You also present your own views on how obedience has become ‘naturalized’ through history, and it’s evolution with capitalism. Could you sum up your analysis of this?

There is a definite ‘so what’ quality to Milgram’s view of obedience despite the illumination his experiments impart. If you totally buy in to his world view you could imagine conducting a similar experiment in 2119 – or whenever – and producing virtually identical results. That’s because Milgram believed obedience was a fatal flaw in human nature or, to use his actual, rather cold-blooded, words, has been “bred into the organism through the extended operation of evolutionary processes”.  A capacity for obedience is in all of us and the only defence against it, in Milgram’s eyes, is to be aware of its existence.

This is where I part company with Milgram – thankfully for the book which would have been rather pointless otherwise! Obedience is definitely deeply ingrained but it’s not, in my opinion, genetic. It’s a product of social history, not biology. In the book, I go back to early human history – late Paleolithic times – in an attempt to demonstrate that human society was not always hierarchical and rooted in command and obedience.

For instance, Bookchin examined the characteristics of what he termed “organic society” – hunter-gatherer and scavenging bands that existed before the arrival of agriculture. He concluded that they practiced an “ethics of complementarity”, rather than separating people into subordinate and superordinate roles. They ensured everyone had an “inalienable right” to food, shelter and clothing and followed usufruct – the idea that the resources of the community belonged to the user as long as s/he needed them.

I’m well aware that Bookchin has been criticized for painting far too rosy a picture of early humanity. In particular for basing his conclusions on surviving tribal societies – e.g. Australian aborigines – and assuming humans 30,000 years ago were just like them. However, serious investigations of the nature of upper Paleolithic society (which is not a simple matter) have – while not totally validating Bookchin – discounted the idea that obedience has always been part of us, that it’s an evolutionary adaptation. For instance, David Wengrow and David Graeber, who have attempted to fuse the insights of archaeology and anthropology, assert that hunter-gatherers consciously alternated between political forms according to the seasons – for instance submitting to coercive authority in winter but dispersing into smaller, egalitarian groups in summer. Hence an awareness was implanted that “no social order was immutable: that everything was at least potentially open to negotiation, subversion and change”.

I think we need to have a better understanding of where biology ends and social history begins – at the moment the slide rule, following Milgram and many others subsequently, is far too far towards the biology end.

I believe Bookchin’s concept of first and second nature – which I elaborate in the book – is much more credible. I’m amazed actually it hasn’t been accorded greater attention. First nature is a strictly biological realm – humans are part of first nature, we are mammals and primates and are moulded by evolution to intervene collectively and intentionally in the natural world. This is not a ‘blank slate’ argument. But we also have a second nature which is creative and open-ended. Hence the character of our “collective organization” is not preordained by nature. Societies – as history shows – can take many different forms and will in the future. Obedience is not written in our genes.

Milgram would counter that though societies change and mutate, obedience is a constant. We learn obedience in early life and then, as adults, function within hierarchical organizations. And if malevolent forces capture the commanding heights of these hierarchies, then this ‘natural’ obedience can engender nightmares.

However, an opposing view, as I’ve outlined, is actually more plausible. Early humanity didn’t inhabit fixed, hierarchical structures and hierarchy, once it developed as civilization spread, was always accompanied by its subterranean nemesis. Unquestionably obedience and hierarchy have been the dominant characteristics of society for thousands of years. They are extremely durable. But an opposite way of being was never entirely eradicated. And sporadically, it could break out into the open, as evidenced by the direct democracy of ancient Athens or the council systems of the famous revolutions – the French, Russian and German etc. These democratic councils were not created by political parties and, though wiped out, aspired to permanence. Thus, another world – a disobedient society – is possible.

Where capitalism fits in to this picture is, as I’ve said earlier, in the realm of ideology. The ‘free’ labourer who sells their services on the market was seen as the antithesis of obedience because once we enter the realm of contracting with others, everything is seen to flow from our own desires. But this is a fiction – obedience has merely been camouflaged. Not to mention that ‘unfree’ labour – e.g. prison or migrant labour – is more important to capitalism than is often given credit for. But that’s another story.

In the book, it seems like you argue that obedience isn’t just a matter of ideology, but also of material conditions – and that today’s technological development may make wage labour obsolete. Is that a correct interpretation?

Obedience, I argue, is in part a collateral effect of economic organization. So the corporation, our signature economic entity, embodies obedience – it is organized as a pyramid with senior managers reporting to a board of directors and below them workers obeying precise orders from above. It is held together by a career structure in which promotion is conditional on appraisal by superiors. Promotion was regarded by Milgram as an “ingenious” way of preserving hierarchical structures because it has such a motivational effect on the individual. A “profound emotional gratification”, he observed, is inculcated in those who successfully climb the ladder.

But any system of material control and oppression isn’t really seen in its true light until it is also regarded as economically superfluous. So in the 19^th century temporary wage labour gradually replaced chattel slavery as the economically rational social arrangement, embodied in the joint stock company, later called the corporation. Wage labour brought in its train terrible suffering – disease, overcrowding, malnutrition – but, apart from the socialist movement, few people wanted to dispense with it (some wanted to ameliorate it) because it was seen as crucial for wealth creation and productivity.

Now, however, you can observe that technological advancements – for example, 3D printing – are theoretically making human input into the production process much less important. So wage labour, which is all about the necessity of human involvement in the production process, should decline as well. American social theorist, Jeremy Rifkin – who is no leftist – predicts that in a few decades’ time people will look upon wage labour with the same sense of utter disbelief that we now reserve for slavery and serfdom – as something “primitive, even barbaric” and a “terrible loss of human value”. But this enlightenment will only occur once wage labour is seen as unnecessary.

You can in theory predict that as economic organization changes, obedience will fade away. As robots become capable of cognitive, as well as physical tasks, and miniaturization and nanotechnology develop, centralized, large-scale production will be superseded and the kind of human being needed to make that sort of production function will die out.

However, before we get too excited about what awaits us, it’s worth considering things which militate against that happening. Firstly, the economic system that surrounds us – capitalism – is no longer capable, in my opinion, of delivering epoch shattering technological change. Productivity and business investment are at historical lows and the gale of creative destruction has given way to an oppressive stillness. So, to happen, radical technological change needs a different economic system.

Secondly, material change doesn’t automatically rule out the continuation of obedience. Economic entities could still function without much human input, leaving the vast majority of the population to scrap over the remaining jobs (although that scenario has obvious problems with effective demand). Or obedience could continue in a non-material way, going back, in a way, to how it first started.

All you can say is that technological change – or the possibility of it occurring – does represent an opportunity for those of us who believe in an egalitarian, non-obedient future.

For some, one opportunity that arises from our present day technological advancement is universal basic income (UBI). You are also a proponent of UBI, but so are also several people on the liberal right. Thus, this proposal remains controversial on the Left. How does UBI fit into your indisputably Leftist vision of a disobedient society?

I support unconditional basic income almost by default. One of the book’s basic arguments is that wage labour – though it is presented as a voluntary transaction – is really a continuation of the obedience of the past. It involves obeying the instructions of someone of higher status in return for the gift of life – money to live on. I align with one of the notions of classical republicanism that a person is not free if subject to another’s will, regardless of how that subjection came about and whether the person somehow voluntarily chose it.

So if the problem is this fundamental unfreedom you can’t solve it by making everyone an employee of a socialist state or even by transforming the economy into a collection of worker-controlled enterprises. A free society has to involve independence for everyone, which implies untrammelled access to the means of life, which implies an unconditional basic income – what Erich Fromm called “the right to live, regardless”.

I’m from the UK and I’m painfully aware that the removal of a person’s income is now a major plank of government policy, in that it is seen as an essential threat to motivate people to accept any kind of paid employment. Sanctions (the taking away of all benefits for a set period) are widespread and a ‘Work Capability Assessment’ ensures that disabled and ill people are often denied any kind of financial assistance at all. The UK welfare state, now more accurately classed as a punishment state, has been described as “an insult to human freedom” and I agree. In such circumstances, the priority 

must be giving people security of income, which is another way of saying a basic income.

Yes, elements of the liberal Right – Silicon Valley billionaires and corporate ‘thought leaders’ like Richard Branson – are in favour of a basic income. The thinking here is that in future the main source of work will be serving the billionaire class in some way and that, with the disappearance of traditional permanent employment and employments rights, people will need a minimum of income to survive. Hence calls for a basic income at a rudimentary level; “continuous income for discontinuous work”. But there is another kind of larger basic income which is intended to be sufficient for people to engage in “multi-activity” – political, participatory, sporting, artistic etc. If a genuinely participatory society ever comes about, it would have to be buttressed, in my opinion, by a large basic income simply to give people the time to participate.

To be honest, as society is presently structured, the only kind of basic income I can see on the horizon is the first kind. But given the problem of complete destitution in putatively rich countries, maybe even that will be a form of progress.

So, universal basic income is one element of what you call a ‘disobedient society’. What other elements does this vision consist of? And why do you use the phrase ‘disobedient society’ in the first place?

The most important element is participation in political and economic affairs. At present we live under – if we are lucky – a very limited version of democracy. We usually spend the majority of our lives within hierarchical, dictatorially-organized institutions and give our consent every few years to a suite of policies – austerity, liberalized financial markets, low corporate taxes, for example – that actually we may violently disagree with. In fact, this bestowing of consent seems absolutely crucial to the rulers of society, much like forced labour or ‘modern slavery’ is seen as totally beyond the pale. There has to be an element of voluntarism – however empty – about the whole process.

However there is another form of democracy. In contrast to periodically electing a representative – who may well simply conform to the dictates of seemingly immovable national and global elites – the idea is to seek the wishes and desires of people at the base of society and then transmit them upwards through a series of levels or councils. Officials (chair-person, secretary) are frequently rotated and delegates can be recalled if they don’t faithfully amplify the views of people they are intended to give voice to. It’s a living system, as opposed to the ossified institutions of liberal-democracy, in which the practice of democracy is as important as any outcome. It can be observed in operation in Rojava in North-East Syria, despite the fact that the revolution there is under concerted physical attack.

This council system of democracy also has also unfailingly cropped up in every major revolution in modern history – the French, Russian and German for example. It has been termed the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition by philosopher Hannah Arendt. Unquestionably these councils were set upon by conservative forces and the authoritarian Left, and this is a major reason why their existence was so ephemeral. But they were also swimming against the tide of inescapably economically scarce conditions. “There was”, as I say in the book, “a palpable discrepancy between their ambition – that everyone who wishes to should be able to participate in the forming of public policy and the future course of society – and the economic realities that surrounded them.” They were, in a way, before their time.

A genuinely participatory system requires time, or leisure as the ancient Athenians put it. If universal free time does not exist, and the vast majority of people are engulfed in working to make a living, participatory structures, should they exist, will always struggle and succumb to, at best, more consensual forms of democracy. But if technological change enables work-time to be radically reduced, then the council democracy of past revolutions might not be seen as fleeting utopian outbursts, but as harbingers of the future.

The phrase “a disobedient society” might appear to be an oxymoron – in fact that’s why I employ it. To Stanley Milgram and many other others, society had to involve obedience. If obedience was absent, society couldn’t function. But that is precisely what I dispute. Obedience is unthinkingly following the instructions of people of higher status. It’s unknowing and irrational and involves deliberately closing your mind – an “alteration of attitude” as Milgram phrased it. But disobedience does not imply the end of discipline, coordination or episodic sovereignty. It does not mean anarchy in a pejorative sense. It merely involves the rational acceptance of temporary authority for agreed purposes.

A disobedient society can still be conformist by the way. Conformity – mirroring the thought or behaviour of peers – is not the same as obedience which involves carrying out instructions of ‘superiors’  regardless of whether you agree with them or not. Conformity is the hidden danger of a disobedient society and is why I’m a strong believer in Bookchin’s concept of dissensus. But a disobedient society is not a contradiction in terms.

I’m not overly optimistic. Some very powerful people and forces will devote all their energy to snuffing out any moves in this direction. They are doing now. But the reason I wrote the book was to point out that ‘human nature’ itself is not a fatal obstacle to a disobedient society coming about. As the slogan goes, ‘Another World is Possible’. Not probable and certainly not inevitable. But it is possible.

The Disobedient Society is published by New Compass Press