Envisioning Real Utopias
Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright, Verso 2010
http://realutopias.org/envisioning-real-utopias
Rising inequality of income and power, along with recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet few are attempting this task—most analysts argue that any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations is utopian.
Erik Olin Wright’s major new work is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. A systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors, Envisioning Real Utopias lays the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system.
Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this book will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.
Read Chapter I:
INTRODUCTION: WHY REAL UTOPIAS?1
There was a time, not so long ago, when both critics and defenders
of capitalism believed that “another world was possible.” It was
generally called “socialism.” While the right condemned socialism
as violating individual rights to private property and unleashing
monstrous forms of state oppression, and the left saw socialism
as opening up new vistas of social equality, genuine freedom
and the development of human potentials, both believed that a
fundamental alternative to capitalism was possible.
Most people in the world today, especially in its economically
developed regions, no longer believe in this possibility. Capitalism
seems to them part of the natural order of things, and pessimism
has replaced the optimism of the will that Gramsci once said
would be essential if the world was to be transformed.
In this book I hope to contribute to rebuilding a sense of
possibility for emancipatory social change by investigating
the feasibility of radically different kinds of institutions and
social relations that could potentially advance the democratic
egalitarian goals historically associated with the idea of
socialism. In part this investigation will be empirical, examining
cases of institutional innovations that embody in one way or
another emancipatory alternatives to the dominant forms of
social organization. In part it will be more speculative, exploring
theoretical proposals that have not yet been implemented but
nevertheless are attentive to realistic problems of institutional
design and social feasibility. The idea is to provide empirical and
theoretical grounding for radical democratic egalitarian visions
of an alternative social world.
Four examples, which we will discuss in detail in later chapters,
will give a sense of what this is all about:
1. Participatory city budgeting
In most cities in the world that are run by some form of elected
government, city budgets are put together by the technical staff
of the city’s chief executive—usually a mayor. If the city also has
an elected council, then this bureaucratically constructed budget
is probably submitted to the council for modification and ratification.
The basic shape of the budget is determined by the political
agenda of the mayor and other dominant political forces working
with economists, engineers, city planners, and other technocrats.
That is the situation in the existing world.
Now, imagine the following alternative possible world: Instead
of the city budget being formulated from the top down, suppose
that the city is divided into a number of neighborhoods, and each
neighborhood has a participatory budget assembly. Suppose also
that there are a number of city-wide budget assemblies on various
themes of interest to the entire municipality—cultural festivals, for
example, or public transportation. The mandate for the participatory
budget assemblies is to formulate concrete budget proposals,
particularly for infrastructure projects of one sort or another, and
submit them to a city-wide budget council. Any resident of the city
can participate in the assemblies and vote on the proposals. They
function rather like New England town meetings, except that they
meet regularly over several months so that there is ample opportunity
for proposals to be formulated and modified before being
subjected to ratification. After ratifying these neighborhood and
thematic budgets, the assemblies choose delegates to participate
in the city-wide budget council for a few months until a coherent,
consolidated city budget is adopted.
This model is in fact the reality in the city of Porto Alegre,
Brazil. Before it was instituted in 1989 few people would have
thought that a participatory budget could work in a relatively
poor city of more than one and a half million people, in a country
with weak democratic traditions, plagued by corruption and
political patronage. It constitutes a form of direct, participatory
democracy fundamentally at odds with the conventional way that
social resources get allocated for alternative purposes in cities. We
will discuss this case in some detail in chapter 6.
2. Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a large, free-wheeling internet encyclopedia. By
mid-2009 it contained over 2.9 million English-language entries,
making it the largest encyclopedia in the world. It is free to anyone
on the planet who has access to the internet, which means that
since the internet is now available in many libraries even in very
poor countries, this vast store of information is potentially available
without charge to anyone who needs it. In 2009, roughly
65 million people accessed Wikipedia monthly. The entries were
composed by several hundred thousand unpaid volunteer editors.
Any entry can be modified by an editor and those modifications
modified in turn. While, as we will see in chapter 7, a variety of
rules have evolved to deal with conflicts over content, Wikipedia
has developed with an absolute minimum of monitoring and
social control. And, to the surprise of most people, it is generally
of fairly high quality. In a study reported in the journal Nature, in
a selection of science topics the error rates in Wikipedia and the
Encyclopædia Britannica were fairly similar.2
Wikipedia is a profoundly anti-capitalist way of producing and
disseminating knowledge. It is based on the principle “to each
according to need, from each according to ability.” No one gets
paid for editing, no one gets charged for access. It is egalitarian
and produced on the basis of horizontal reciprocities rather than
hierarchical control. In the year 2000, before Wikipedia was
launched, no one—including its founders—would have thought
possible what has now come to be.
3. The Mondragon worker-owned cooperatives
The prevailing wisdom among economists is that, in a market
economy, employee-owned and managed firms are only viable
under special conditions. They need to be small and the labor
force within the firm needs to be fairly homogeneous. They may
be able to fill niches in a capitalist economy, but they will not
be able to produce sophisticated products with capital intensive
technologies involving complex divisions of labor. High levels
of complexity require hierarchical power relations and capitalist
property relations.
Mondragon is a conglomerate of worker-owned cooperatives
in the Basque region of Spain. It was founded in the 1950s during
the Franco dictatorship and is now the 7th largest business group
in Spain and the largest in the Basque region with more than
40,000 worker-owner members.3 The conglomerate is made up
of some 250 separate cooperative enterprises, each of which is
employee-owned—there are no non-worker owners—producing
a very wide range of goods and services: washing machines, autoparts,
banking, insurance, grocery stores. While, as we will see
in chapter 7, it faces considerable challenges in the globalized
market today, nevertheless the top management continues to be
elected by the workers and major corporate decisions are made
by a board of directors representing the members or by a general
assembly of the members.
4. Unconditional basic income
The idea of an unconditional basic income (UBI) is quite simple:
Every legal resident in a country receives a monthly living stipend
sufficient to live above the “poverty line.” Let’s call this the “no
frills culturally respectable standard of living.” The grant is
unconditional on the performance of any labor or other form of
contribution, and it is universal—everyone receives the grant, rich
and poor alike. Grants go to individuals, not families. Parents are
the custodians of underage children’s grants (which may be at a
lower rate than the grants for adults).
Universalistic programs, like public education and health care,
that provide services rather than cash, would continue alongside
universal basic income, but with the latter in place, most other
redistributive transfers would be eliminated—general welfare,
family allowances, unemployment insurance, tax-based old age
pensions—since the basic income grant would be sufficient to
provide everyone with a decent subsistence. This means that in
welfare systems that already provide generous antipoverty income
support through a patchwork of specialized programs, the net
increase in costs represented by universal unconditional basic
income would not be large. Special needs subsidies of various sorts
would continue—for example, for people with disabilities—but
they would also be smaller than under current arrangements since
the basic cost of living would be covered by the UBI. Minimum
wage rules would be relaxed or eliminated since there would be
little need to legally prohibit below-subsistence wages if all earnings,
in effect, generated discretionary income. While everyone
receives the grant as an unconditional right, most people at any
given point in time would probably be net contributors since their
taxes will rise by more than the basic income. Over time, however,
most people will spend part of their lives as net beneficiaries and
part of their lives as net contributors.
Unconditional basic income is a fundamental redesign of the
system of income distribution. As we will see in detail in chapter
7, it has potentially profound ramifications for a democratic
egalitarian transformation of capitalism: poverty is eliminated;
the labor contract becomes more nearly voluntary since everyone
has the option of exit; the power relations between workers and
capitalists become less unequal, since workers, in effect, have an
unconditional strike fund; the possibility of people forming cooperative
associations to produce goods and services to serve human
needs outside of the market increases since such activity no longer
needs to provide the basic standard of living of participants.
No country has adopted an unconditional basic income,
although the most generous welfare states have incomplete,
fragmented versions and there has been one experimental pilot
program for a basic income in a very poor country, Namibia.4
It is a theoretical proposal which necessarily involves some speculation
about its dynamic effects. It thus could turn out that a
generous basic income, if implemented, would not be viable—it
might self-destruct because of all sorts of perverse effects. But,
as I will argue later, there are also good reasons to believe that it
would work and that it could constitute one of the cornerstones
of another possible world.
These are all examples of what I will call “real utopias.” This may
seem like a contradiction in terms. Utopias are fantasies, morally
inspired designs for a humane world of peace and harmony
unconstrained by realistic considerations of human psychology
and social feasibility. Realists eschew such fantasies. What we
need are hard-nosed proposals for pragmatically improving our
institutions. Instead of indulging in utopian dreams we must
accommodate ourselves to practical realities.
The idea of “real utopias” embraces this tension between dreams
and practice. It is grounded in the belief that what is pragmatically
possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself
shaped by our visions. Self-fulfilling prophecies are powerful forces
in history, and while it may be naively optimistic to say “where
there is a will there is a way,” it is certainly true that without a
“will” many “ways” become impossible. Nurturing clear-sighted
understandings of what it would take to create social institutions
free of oppression is part of creating a political will for radical
social changes to reduce oppression. A vital belief in a utopian
ideal may be necessary to motivate people to set off on the journey
from the status quo in the first place, even though the likely actual
destination may fall short of the utopian ideal. Yet, vague utopian
fantasies may lead us astray, encouraging us to embark on trips
that have no real destinations at all, or, worse still, which lead us
towards some unforeseen abyss. Along with “where there is a will
there is a way,” the human struggle for emancipation confronts
“the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” What we need,
then, is “real utopias”: utopian ideals that are grounded in the
real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible
waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform
our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions
for social change.
The idea that social institutions can be rationally transformed
in ways that enhance human well-being and happiness has a long
and controversial history. On the one hand, radicals of diverse
stripes have argued that social arrangements inherited from the
past are not immutable facts of nature, but transformable human
creations. Social institutions can be designed in ways that eliminate
forms of oppression that thwart human aspirations towards
living fulfilling and meaningful lives. The central task of emancipatory
politics is to create such institutions.
On the other hand, conservatives have generally argued that
grand designs for social reconstruction nearly always end in
disaster. While contemporary social institutions may be far from
perfect, they are generally serviceable. At least, it is argued, they
provide the minimal conditions for social order and stable interactions.
These institutions have evolved through a process of
slow, incremental modification as people adapt social rules and
practices to changing circumstances. The process is driven by
trial and error much more than by conscious design, and by and
large those institutions that have endured have done so because
they have enduring virtues. This does not preclude institutional
change, even deliberate institutional change, but it does mean that
such change should be very cautious and incremental and should
not include wholesale transformations of existing arrangements.
At the heart of these alternative perspectives is a disagreement
about the relationship between the intended and unintended consequences
of deliberate efforts at social change. The conservative
critique of radical projects is not mainly that the emancipatory
goals of radicals are morally indefensible—although some
conservatives criticize the underlying values of such projects as
well—but that the uncontrollable, and usually negative, unintended
consequences of these efforts at massive social change
inevitably swamp the intended consequences. Radicals and revolutionaries
suffer from what Frederick Hayek termed the “fatal
conceit”—the mistaken belief that through rational calculation
and political will, society can be designed in ways that will signifi -
cantly improve the human condition.5 Incremental tinkering may
not be inspiring, but it is the best we can do.
Of course, one can point out that many reforms favored by
conservatives also have massive, destructive unintended consequences.
The havoc created in many poor countries by World
Bank structural adjustment programs would be an example. And
furthermore, under certain circumstances conservatives themselves
argue for radical, society-wide projects of institutional design, as
in the catastrophic “shock therapy” strategy for transforming
the command economy of the Soviet Union into free-market
capitalism in the 1990s. Nevertheless, there is a certain apparent
plausibility to the general claim by conservatives that the bigger
the scale and scope of conscious projects of social change, the less
likely it is that we will be able to predict ahead of time all of the
ramifications of the changes involved.
Radicals on the left have generally rejected this vision of human
possibility. Particularly in the Marxist tradition, radical intellectuals
have insisted that wholesale redesign of social institutions is
within the grasp of human beings. This does not mean, as Marx
emphasized, that detailed institutional “blueprints” can be devised
in advance of the opportunity to create an alternative. What can
be worked out are the core organizing principles of alternatives
to existing institutions, the principles that would guide the pragmatic
trial-and-error task of institution building. Of course, there
will be unintended consequences of various sorts, but these can be
dealt with as they arrive, “after the revolution.” The crucial point
is that unintended consequences need not pose a fatal threat to the
emancipatory projects themselves.
Regardless of which of these stances seems most plausible, the
belief in the possibility of radical alternatives to existing institutions
has played an important role in contemporary political life.
It is likely that the political space for social democratic reforms
was, at least in part, expanded because more radical ruptures
with capitalism were seen as possible, and that possibility in turn
depended crucially on many people believing that radical ruptures
were workable. The belief in the viability of revolutionary
socialism, especially when backed by the grand historical experiments
in the USSR and elsewhere, enhanced the achievability of
reformist social democracy as a form of class compromise. The
political conditions for progressive tinkering with social arrangements,
therefore, may depend in significant ways on the presence
of more radical visions of possible transformations. This does not
mean, of course, that false beliefs about what is possible are to
be supported simply because they are thought to have desirable
consequences, but it does suggest that plausible visions of radical
alternatives, with firm theoretical foundations, are an important
condition for emancipatory social change.
We now live in a world in which these radical visions are often
mocked rather than taken seriously. Along with the postmodernist
rejection of “grand narratives,” there is an ideological rejection of
grand designs, even by many people still on the left of the political
spectrum. This need not mean an abandonment of deeply egalitarian
emancipatory values, but it does reflect a cynicism about the
human capacity to realize those values on a substantial scale. This
cynicism, in turn, weakens progressive political forces in general.
This book is an effort to counter such cynicism by elaborating
a general framework for systematically exploring alternatives that
embody the idea of “real utopia.” We will begin in chapter 2 by
embedding the specific problem of envisioning real utopias within
a broader framework of “emancipatory social science.” This
framework is built around three tasks: diagnosis and critique;
formulating alternatives; and elaborating strategies of transformation.
These three tasks define the agendas of the three main
parts of the book. Part I of the book (chapter 3) presents the basic
diagnosis and critique of capitalism that animates the search for
real utopian alternatives. Part II then discusses the problem of
alternatives. Chapter 4 reviews the traditional Marxist approach
to thinking about alternatives and shows why this approach is
unsatisfactory. Chapter 5 elaborates an alternative strategy of
analysis, anchored in the idea that socialism, as an alternative to
capitalism, should be understood as a process of increasing social
empowerment over state and economy. Chapters 6 and 7 explore
a range of concrete proposals for institutional design in terms of
this concept of social empowerment, the first of these chapters
focusing on the problem of social empowerment and the state,
and the second on the problem of social empowerment and the
economy. Part III of the book turns to the problem of transformation—
how to understand the process by which these real utopian
alternatives could be brought about. Chapter 8 lays out the central
elements of a theory of social transformation. Chapters 9 through
11 then examine three different broad strategies of emancipatory
transformation—ruptural transformation (chapter 9), interstitial
transformation (chapter 10), and symbiotic transformation
(chapter 11). The book concludes with chapter 12, which distills
the core arguments into seven key lessons.
1 Parts of this chapter appeared in the preface to the first volume in the Real
Utopias Project, Associations and Democracy, by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers
(London: Verso, 1995).
2 See Jim Giles, “Special Report: Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head,”
Nature 438 (2005), pp. 900–1.
3 Mondragon Annual Report 2007, p. 3. Available at: http://www.mcc.es/ing/
magnitudes/memoria2007.pdf.
4 Claudia Haarmann, Dirk Haarmann, et al., “Making the Difference! The
BIG in Namibia: Basic Income Grant Pilot Project Assessment Report, April
2009”; http://www.bignam.org.
5 Frederick A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
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