Erik Olin Wright, sociologist, died in 2019. For most of the 21st Century, he worked very much in the direction I’m trying to think through in these essays, with much the same underlying rationale: that to have a politics that aims for the better world which is possible, we have to try and imagine actual institutions, practices, local cultures, lived subjectivities, that incarnate or work towards that better world. As he put it in his 2010 book Envisioning Real Utopias, we have to have empirical data about real experiments in human living as well as empirically-informed theoretical models and propositions that we believe people can and should undertake as soon as possible.
I can’t develop much attachment to forms of radicalism that trust in abstract teleological propositions about the future—the triumph of the Multitude over Empire and so on—or that accept in some form the permanence of our status quo and therefore look to explore ways of living that evade, subvert or hide from the powers that be—fugitivity and so on. I understand where both of those pathways come from and why some walk on them. I know that concrete experiments that reach for our better possible worlds have a long history of frustration, failure and exclusion behind them. But like Wright, I think we have to keep trying.
So how has this 2010 book held up? It’s a complex intellectual project that offers first an extensive theoretical infrastructure that tasks social science and social analysis with a diagnosis of the capitalist present and with an emancipatory conceptualization of possible futures. Wright then sets out to gently rehabilitate socialism from Marxism, arguing for a broader conception of socialism as “increasing social empowerment over the state and economy”, and subsequently moves to explain precisely what he means by social empowerment. Finally, he grapples with how we might actually get from here to there, and the dangers of a “ruptural strategy” (e.g. revolutionary political action).
Working through it, I admire the thoroughness of Wright’s theorizing—in many ways he’s trying to provide a comprehensive updating and upgrading of Capital for the 21st Century. And yet it doesn’t have the suppleness or flexibility of the most useful kinds of social theory—there’s a reason why Piketty’s work made such a splash whereas Wright was pretty much limited in his impact to leftist social theorists. In the end, I also think he falls short on the promise to concretize his politics, though he reviews a lot of good existing projects that many of us tend to overlook or undertheorize (such as Wikipedia) and there’s some specific ideas that seem completely plausible and attainable.
I suppose in this sense that he is disappointing in the same way that perhaps this column is disappointing to readers (and to myself): it’s a lot easier to diagnose what’s wrong with the status quo, and the causal underpinnings of what’s wrong, than it is to envision something better. As soon as you get specific about institutional designs or campaigns for social justice, either you sound little different from conventional policy experts, or your examples seem banal and underambitious. (In Wright’s case, a few of his real-world examples have already flamed out or developed serious flaws in the ten years since the book was published.) And when someone asks you how some of what you’re imagining could possibly happen, you mostly have to punt. As Wright put it, "there is opacity about the future limits of possibility”, that the more you try to sketch out a map from here to there, the more likely you are to be badly wrong.
I do think he’s absolutely right on the money in thinking through why people who believe in a better world nevertheless tend to shy away from drastic political actions. He acknowledges that it is reasonable for many people to reject any such pathway even if they believe that the present global order is heading for inevitable disaster and that a better socialist world is actually attainable. It is a classic problem for utopian futurisms, and not just on the left—utopian libertarianism has something of the same issue. If you believe there is a highly desirable alternative dispensation of political, social and economic institutions that will make human life dramatically better, you tend to believe that in that better future people will be in some sense quite different than they are now, and that this will be both a consequence and a cause of that better future. You can’t have those different people right now, or expect people to live as if they are already in that dispensation—and you can’t make political plans that depend upon people having achieved that future subjectivity in advance of that better dispensation.
I don’t find Wright’s conceptual vocabulary very “sticky”, e.g., memorable in the terms that he puts it, but I find it persuasive when it comes to the political scenarios required to push through to a better world. Rather than “ruptural” events, Wright looks to “interstitial transitions” and “symbiotic transitions”. By the former, he means various local or institutionally specific projects to subvert, evade or reconfigure capitalism and the nation-state: open-access software, ‘intentional’ communities or experiments in utopian living, demands for democratic transparency and accountability within workplaces, and so on. By “symbiotic transitions”, he more or less means “big-tent” coalitions across class boundaries where different social groups ally themselves to pursue a shared interest in reducing the power of neoliberal capitalism and the state through non-ruptural means (e.g., electoral or mass action). You could argue, for example, that the best prospects for a symbiotic transition to a better possible world lie in a general recognition across a broad social coalition of the fact that climate change and capitalism are mutually entangled and only a major transformation of the latter can mitigate the former. Or more narrowly, you could imagine that everybody from professionals making $200,000 a year to people below the poverty line might see a common interest in reversing the widening of income inequality and the dramatic increase in economic precarity that has accompanied it.
I also have various issues with the specifics of Wright’s analysis. For example, he spends some time talking about capitalism and inefficiency (trying to demonstrate that capitalism is in fact inefficient) in a way that reminds me that his vision of “real utopia” is still shaped by an older model of modernist rationality that assumes that the better world of social empowerment would define its beneficience in somewhat utilitarian terms, by exerting power over nature and over society. One reason I’m really drawn to “good enough” as a concept is that there are a lot of imaginable configurations of better worlds, some of which might be gloriously inefficient in many ways. And I assume that one attribute of “better” would still be some form of pluralism, some chaotic multiplicity of human forms and practices, some of the excess and fecundity that capitalist materiality brings to our world.
I think that leads me to a deeper disquiet, which is “social empowerment” itself: an assumption shared broadly across most left theory that if we had society without capitalism and without the modern state as we have known it, we would have a benevolent force that we could trust with power. That comes back to the problem of having to trust that if we can engineer a transition to a better future world, the people who will live in it will be better at being human. There’s no getting away from the need to do that, but there’s also almost no way to imagine concretely what “society” means independently of the modernity that has produced us.
Image credit: "Erik Olin Wright: Envisioning Real Utopias - im Kapitalismus und über ihn hinaus" by rosalux-stiftung is licensed under CC BY 2.0