About five years ago, I was still working for a large corporation, and increasingly unhappy about what I saw both inside and outside of it. Inside, a creativity-deadening atmosphere, and deadly turf fights at the top; increasing short-termism around monetary targets, endlessly fiddling with the corporate data to suit political ends; and increasing stress levels amongst the employees. Outside: a neoliberal economic system where all the indicators where going in the wrong direction: terrorism, ethnic strife, species extinction, global warming. I seemed to me then that society once again needed major structural reforms, and that neither the corporate world, nor the political world, which is now organized as a mirror image of the corporate world, were able to offer any solutions. But through my work I could see a thriving sector of civil society experimenting with new techno-social practices through internet-based cooperation.

But how to think about this? After so many years reading management and technical literature, where to turn for critical thinking. The key to my transformation was Tony Negri’s Empire. I understood only a fraction of what he was saying, but the visionary breadth and the reformulations of political theory, such that we already live in global system, and the use of the concept of the global multitudes, I found inspiring. But as much as I appreciate the critical analysis, it is still not at all clear what the proposed political strategy is.
Now, thanks to Pat Kane of the Play Ethic, I may have found a second innovative political thinker: the Brazilian Roberto Unger. He combines a radicality of purpose (we need radical structural reform), with a choice for political experimentalism (such a change cannot be imposed from the top down or instituted in one go, but must be experimented, pretty much as happens on the internet); he combines empowerment of the individual, knowing that the individual must feel safe in society (and thus opposed to neoliberal precarity and the struggle of the fittest), with a stress on connectedness.

This is very abstract of course, so I invite you to first read the introduction by Pat Kane, and then to move on to the personal pages of Unger, with his own writings , and then to move on with the page where other political thinkers offer a commentary on his work.

Here is how Roberto Unger presents his own work, his political program proposes:

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six large convergent directions: the financing and facilitation of the new; the endowment and the equipment of the individual worker and citizen; the democratizing of the market economy, that is to say, the decentralization of access to productive resources and opportunity; the organization of a caring economy and its superimposition on the production system; the development of an institutionalized high-energy politics requiring greater civic engagement and encouraging the accelerated practice of structural reform; and the independent organization of civil society outside the state but beyond the limits of private law.

The spirit of this program is the attempt to combine empowerment with connection. The forms of empowerment most readily available to us in the contemporary world are acquired at the price of disconnection from others. The forms of connection to which we have easiest access are sustained at the price of some belittlement, some diminishment of our powers of individual and collective self-transformation. What we should chiefly desire is to find ways to empower ourselves, individually and collectively, that also connect us, and ways to connect us that also empower us.

The chief instrument for the development and the execution of this program, understood as a direction rather than as a blueprint, is the quickened practice of institutional experimentalism: motivated, directed, and cumulative experimentation with the institutional forms that now define representative democracy, market economy, and free civil society. In the history of modern social thought our idea of structural discontinuity has ordinarily been associated with a conception of revolutionary or total change. Our commitment to gradualism has ordinarily been connected with repudiation of the idea of structural reinvention. We must jumble these categories up. We should associate the disposition to structural discontinuity with an acknowledgement that the reinvention of structure ordinarily takes place step-by-step and part-by-part.”