The future’s at stake: the left must show it could create an iPad

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/23/socialism-innovation-ipad-john-mcdonnell

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John McDonnell last week promised “socialism, with an iPad”. His aim – you can practically sniff the air of the meeting in which this was dreamt up – must have been to shake off the 80s dust from the Corbyn project. But could an iPad have been created by a socialist society? Or would socialism have taxed the entrepreneurs until their pips squeaked, leaving them too tired to innovate?

Related: John McDonnell to unveil 'socialism with an iPad' economic plan

Does socialism seek to foster a prizes-for-all culture that deadens the human zeal for excellence? Is socialism inseparable from its suffocating bureaucratic apparatus? And if so, McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, has no right to his vision: recalling Thatcher’s motto that the problem with socialists is that they eventually run out of other people’s money; they can’t base a platform, either, on other people’s ideas.

Of all Thatcher and Reagan’s visions, this might be the one that has enjoyed the greatest popular buy-in: the notion that humanity progresses through innovation; innovation is a function of the brilliance of the individual; individuals can only fulfil their potential with personal freedom; and the state, in all its guises, whether regulatory or taxational, is the main barrier to that freedom.

Technological, indeed all progress, in this frame, is placed in direct opposition to community. Society prospers not through cooperation, but when it allows its stars to get on and shine, bringing light to the rest of us troglodytes (who, by the way, could all use a little more gratitude).

One of the most elegant expressions of the view is by the economist Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois series, the fourth of which (out next year) encapsulates it neatly: Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. This school of thought needn’t even trouble itself with the precise pitfalls of socialism, since its conclusions are so clear: entrepreneurs need free markets, and the world without entrepreneurs looks like 15th century Belgium, all mud and hay and infant mortality. Ergo humanity needs free markets, and anything that hinders that freedom – whether socialism, cronyism, democracy or corruption – is also a hindrance to modernity.

Human progress is about more than the iPad, it is about more than personal consumption

For debating purposes, it always comes down to the iPad. Steve Jobs, a private individual, working in the private sector, dredged an idea from his genius-private mind, and turned it into billions of dollars, thereby raising the rest of us out of penury, as well as giving us Candy Crush.

Literally and philosophically, at a granular level and a broad one, this is incorrect. To make the iPad desirable in the first place, the internet had to exist, which it wouldn’t have without British universities and the American military, both heavily supported by the public purse. Jobs got the idea for the graphical user interface from Xerox, who let him visit in 1979 on the tacit understanding that cooperative networks were a better support for innovators than rigid protectionism and hierarchy; individuals were lost on their own.

Jobs himself – ironically, given how often he is used as the embodiment of individualism driving progress – was fascinated by sharing. “We speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean, we’re constantly taking things,” Jobs said in a 1983 interview. “It’s a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.”

He was just one man, of course – we couldn’t extrapolate from this that all inventors and entrepreneurs are driven by the thrill of building communal expertise, or seek to build a socialist utopia of the mind in which knowledge moves freely between connected individuals, creating a kind of futuristic super brain.

Yet the opposite position is more perverse. The underpinning assumption of free-market fundamentalism is that inventors are driven by money. In fact, money in large amounts is pretty crude, good for nothing but consumption, which itself is base and unenlightening.

We’re talking about society’s most inventive thinkers, its visionaries, its sages, its masterminds: the more you think about the special intellectual traits needed to breach the limits of human understanding, the more preposterous it is to think those people would care whether they had £1m or £100m. Using Jobs as a poster boy for the creed of wealth-creation is like using JK Rowling as an advert for tax avoidance. It’s the exact opposite of the way he saw himself.

Related: Where’s the socialism that involves sharing life’s joys?

When socialism allowed the iPad to be seen as the achievement of the right, it ceded more than the product – it ceded its natural territory. As Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams describe in their book Inventing the Future: “From early communist visions of technological progress, to Soviet space utopias, to the social democratic rhetoric of the ‘white heat of technology’, what set the left apart from the right was its unambiguous embrace of the future.”

Once human progress had been elided with entrepreneurship, and annexed as a subset of business, the left’s account of itself as a frame of thought that even understood modernity, let alone could embrace and embody it, shrivelled.

This territory is quite easily retaken: human progress is about more than the iPad, it is about more than personal consumption, it is about the betterment of the human condition. There is no basis for the assumption that the state, any state, is inimical to creativity; and more importantly, no basis for thinking that it is the availability of limitless money that spurs ingenuity.

There is no discovery in human history that wasn’t created by pooled resources, demonstrably the pooling of public money, but beneath that, the pooling of expertise. Never mind, could socialism produce the iPad? Socialist principles already did.