Transforming Capitalism through Real Utopias

Foundations

All varieties of social science that have critical and emancipatory aspirations, whether they are anchored in values and beliefs of the left or the right, share two foundational positions:

Foundational Proposition of Critical Social Science: Many forms of human suffering and many deficits in human flourishing are the result of existing institutions and social structures.

Foundational Proposition of Emancipatory Social Science: Transforming existing institutions and social structures in the right way has the potential to substantially reduce human suffering and expand the possibilities for human flourishing.

The first proposition affirms the very general idea that significant aspects of human suffering and deficits in human flourishing are not simply the result of human nature, acts of God, or variations in people’s attributes, but are the result of social causes. Stated in this abstract way, this proposition is accepted by nearly all sociologists, whether or not they explicitly identify with any of the traditions of critical sociology, and is thus not controversial. The proposition becomes very controversial, of course, when concrete claims are made about the specific mechanisms that generate these harms. Writers have proposed many social sources of harms: the core structures of the capitalist economy; unintended effects of the welfare state; enduring social and cultural structures of racism and sexism; educational institutions; changes in family structures; and particular kinds of technology. A great deal of sociological research attempts to identify these sources of harm and adjudicate among rival arguments.

The second proposition should not be considered a simple corollary of the first. It could be the case that various causal processes connected to capitalism explain much human suffering, and yet any deliberate attempt at transforming the fundamental structures of capitalism would only make things worse. The cure could be worse than the disease due to unintended and uncontrollable effects of attempts at deliberate social transformation. This is essentially Hayek’s (1988) argument in his attack on radical reformers. Following a long tradition of classical conservative thought, Hayek makes two central claims (although not stated in precisely these terms): first, the negative unintended consequences of deliberate social change are generally greater than the positive unintended consequences; second, the larger the attempted social transformation, the bigger the negative unintended consequences are likely to be. ¹ Taken together, these arguments suggest that even if one accepts the first proposition, in general the second proposition should be rejected. The emancipatory proposition constitutes the “fatal conceit” of intellectuals, in Hayek’s (1988:27) words, that “man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes.”

While I disagree with Hayek’s pessimism and embrace the foundational proposition of emancipatory social science, I do not think such arguments can be dismissed out of hand. The folk aphorism “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” has too many historical examples to be ignored, many of them animated by emancipatory aspirations. The idea of real utopias is a way of thinking about alternatives and transformations that responds to these concerns.

The expression “real utopia” is meant to be a provocation, for “utopia” and “real” do not comfortably go together. Thomas More coined the word utopia in the early-sixteenth century as a kind of pun, combining the Greek for place—topos—with two prefixes that sound the same in English—ou meaning “not” and eu meaning “good.” Utopia is thus both a nowhere place and a good place. It is the fantasy of a perfect world that fully embodies our moral ideals. When politicians want to summarily discredit a policy proposal without having to provide serious arguments, they call it utopian. Realists reject such fantasies as a distraction from the serious business of making practical improvements in existing institutions. The idea of real utopias embraces this tension between dreams and practice: utopia implies developing visions of alternatives to dominant institutions that embody our deepest aspirations for a world in which all people have access to the conditions to live flourishing lives; real means proposing alternatives attentive to problems of unintended consequences, self-destructive dynamics, and difficult dilemmas of normative trade-offs. ² A real utopian holds on to emancipatory ideals without embarrassment or cynicism but remains fully cognizant of the deep complexities and contradictions of realizing those ideals.

The exploration of real utopias is an integral part of a broad agenda of an emancipatory social science that includes four basic tasks:

I like to think of these tasks using the metaphor of a voyage: the first two tasks tell us what is wrong with the world in which we live and why we want to leave it; the third tells us something about the destination we seek; and the fourth helps us understand how to get from here to there. The rest of this address will look at each part of this voyage.

Moral Principles

Many different moral principles can be used as standards with which to judge existing institutions and social structures, frame the elaboration of alternatives, and define the tasks of transformation. Different moral principles animate different voyages. Here I will focus on three principles: equality, democracy, and sustainability.

Diagnosis and Critique

The principles of equality, democracy, and sustainability provide criteria for a moral audit of any specific institution, social structure, or even entire society. We can determine how well schools and medical institutions or gender and racial structures realize these values. I focus here on the problem of capitalism. ⁹ This is not because I believe that all harms generated by existing social institutions are somehow reducible to the effects of capitalism, but because I believe that exploring real utopian alternatives to capitalism is an especially pressing matter in this historical period.

Alternatives

The third task of an emancipatory theory is developing an account of alternatives, both for specific institutions and for macro-structures of society. Alternatives can be evaluated in terms of their desirability, their viability, and their achievability. If you worry about desirability and ignore viability or achievability, then you are just a plain utopian. Exploration of real utopias requires understanding these other two dimensions. The viability problem asks: If we could create this alternative, would we be able to stay there or would it have such unintended consequences and self-destructive dynamics that it would not be sustainable? Achievability asks of a viable alternative: How do we move from here to there?

At this particular moment in history, I think it is especially important to focus on the viability problem. It might seem sensible to begin by establishing whether an alternative is really achievable and only then discuss its viability. Why waste time exploring the viability of unachievable alternatives? It turns out that the achievability problem is simply too difficult, at least if we want to understand whether something might be achievable beyond the immediate future. What public policy innovations and institutional transformations might be achievable in, say, 2040? There are too many contingencies to even begin to answer that question in an interesting way. But there is an even more fundamental reason why I think the question of viability should have priority over the question of achievability: developing credible ideas about viable alternatives is one way of enhancing their achievability. People are more likely to mobilize around alternatives they believe will work than around alternatives they think are pie in the sky. Moreover, such widely circulated discussions may enhance cultural resonance for actions in line with such viable ideas. Viability affects achievability. This reflects an interesting aspect of the notion of the “limits of possibility” in social contexts in contrast to the natural world. Before Einstein demonstrated that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, it was still true that the speed of light was the absolute limit of possibility. The reality of those limits of possibility did not depend on their discovery. Limits of social possibility are not quite like that because beliefs about the limits of social possibility are one of the things that affect what in fact becomes possible. Evidence for the viability of alternatives has the potential to shape such beliefs.

Two other preliminary comments on the idea of alternatives are needed to set the stage for the exploration of real utopias.

First, how one thinks about alternatives depends in part on one’s conceptualization of the idea of “social system.” One metaphor for thinking about social systems depicts them as analogous to an organism whose parts are tightly integrated into a functioning whole. There is some degree of freedom and variability in how the parts function, but basically they constitute a totality of functional interdependency. If you remove critical parts of the whole or try to dramatically transform them, the whole disintegrates.

An alternative metaphor is that a social system is more like an ecosystem. Think of society like a pond. A pond contains many species of fish, insects, and plants. Sometimes an alien species is introduced to an ecosystem and it thrives; sometimes it does not. Some ecosystems are quite fragile and easily disrupted; others can tolerate quite significant intrusions of invasive species without being seriously affected. If you think of society as an ecosystem, it still is the case that everything is interdependent, but interactions do not constitute a tightly functionalized totality. This opens up a different way of imagining alternatives. One way to transform an ecosystem is to introduce an alien species that initially finds a niche and then gradually displaces certain other species. The idea of real utopias as a way of transforming a society is more in line with the ecosystem view of society than with the organismic view.

The second general comment about alternatives concerns two contrasting ways of thinking about how to make the world a better place—ameliorative reforms and real utopian transformations. Ameliorative reforms look at existing institutions, identify their flaws, and propose improvements that can be enacted. These improvements matter—they reduce harms and enhance flourishing—but they are limited to proposals that directly act on existing structures and move one step beyond. Real utopias, in contrast, envision the contours of an alternative social world that embodies emancipatory ideals and then look for social innovations we can create in the world as it is that move us toward that destination. Sometimes, this turns out to be the same as an ameliorative reform, but often ameliorative reforms do not constitute building blocks of an emancipatory alternative. Consider, for example, affirmative action policies around race. Affirmative action is one of the critical policies for combating the pernicious effects of ongoing racism, not merely the legacies of racism in the past. But affirmative action is not, I would argue, a building block of a world of racial justice and emancipation. It is a necessary means to move toward such a world, but it is not itself a constituent element of the alternative that we seek.

To embrace real utopias in this way is not to reject ameliorative reforms. In the practical world of struggling to create the social conditions for human flourishing it is important to be a pragmatic idealist. Often this means muddling through with patchwork programs that do not prefigure emancipatory alternatives. Sometimes this is the best one can do. But sometimes it is possible to move struggles for equality, democracy, and sustainability beyond such narrow constraints and create institutions that are constitutive of a more profound alternative.

Examples

As a practical object of research, the study of real utopias mainly focuses on institutions that in way or another prefigure more radical emancipatory alternatives. Sometimes these are created in contexts of political struggles; other times they emerge quietly, without sharp confrontations. Sometimes they are in deep tension with dominant institutions; other times they occupy nonthreatening niches in the socioeconomic ecosystem. Before elaborating a systematic theoretical map of real utopian alternatives to capitalism, it will be useful to briefly describe a number of specific examples. Most of these are discussed in more detail in Wright (2010).

A General Framework for the Analysis of Real Utopian Alternatives to Capitalism

Both social democracy and socialism contain the word “social,” but generally this term is invoked in a loose and ill-defined way. The suggestion is of a political program committed to the broad welfare of society rather than to the narrow interests of particular elites. Sometimes, especially in more radical versions of socialist discourse, “social ownership” of the means of production is invoked as a contrast to “private ownership,” but in practice this is generally collapsed into state ownership, and the term social itself ends up doing relatively little analytical work in the elaboration of the political program. I will argue that the social in social democracy and socialism can be used to identify a cluster of principles and visions of change that differentiate socialism and social democracy from both the capitalist project of economic organization and what could be called a purely statist response to capitalism.

At the center of the analysis is a power-centered framework for understanding capitalism and its alternatives. Power is an especially elusive and contested concept in social theory, often formulated in opaque ways that make it very difficult to use in concrete discussions of institutions and their transformation. In the present context, I adopt a deliberately stripped-down concept of power: power is the capacity to do things in the world, to produce effects. This might be called an “agent-centered” notion of power: people, acting individually and collectively, use power to accomplish things.

With this broad definition of power, we can distinguish three kinds of power deployed within economic systems: economic power, rooted in control over the use of economic resources; state power, rooted in control over rule making and rule enforcing over territory; and what I term social power, rooted in the capacity to mobilize people for cooperative, voluntary collective actions. Expressed as a mnemonic slogan, you can get people to do things by bribing them, forcing them, or persuading them. Every economic system involves all three forms of power, connected in different ways.

Three ideal types of economic structures—capitalism, statism, and socialism—can be differentiated in terms of the dominant form of power controlling economic activity: ¹⁹

Capitalism is an economic structure within which economic activity is controlled through the exercise of economic power.

Statism is an economic structure within which economic activity is controlled through the exercise of state power. State officials control the investment process and production through some sort of state-administrative mechanism.

Socialism is an economic structure within which economic activity is controlled through the exercise of social power. This is equivalent to saying that the economy is democratic.

These three forms of economic structure can never exist in the world in pure form but are always combined in various complex ways. Real economic systems are always hybrids that vary according to how these different forms of power interact. To call an economy capitalist is thus shorthand for a more cumbersome expression such as “an economic hybrid combining capitalist, statist, and socialist economic relations within which capitalist relations are dominant.” The idea of a structural hybrid can be used to analyze any unit of analysis—firms, sectors, regional economies, national economies, even the global economy. The possibility of socialism thus depends on our ability to enlarge and deepen the socialist component of the hybrid and weaken the capitalist and statist components.

This way of thinking about economic systems means abandoning a simple binary notion of capitalism versus socialism. An economic structure can be more or less capitalist, more or less statist, more or less socialist. ²⁰ Our task, then, is to clarify the alternative ways in which we can conceptualize the deepening of hybrids’ socialist component. I refer to this as the problem of structural configurations of social empowerment.

A Visual Vocabulary

To explore the problem of deepening the socialist component within hybrid economic systems, it will be useful to visually depict different patterns of interconnection among the three forms of power within economic systems. Figure 1 illustrates the visual vocabulary I use for this purpose.

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Figure 1.

Visual Representation of Power Configurations

Arrows in Figure 1 indicate the direction of influence of one form of power over the use of another; the arrows’ width indicates the strength of this relationship. Thus, in the first illustration in Figure 1, state power is subordinated to social power. This is what is meant conventionally by political democracy as “rule by the people”: people voluntarily form associations—most notably political parties—for the purpose of controlling the use of state power through the institutional mechanism of elections. In a democracy, state power is still important—Why have a democracy if the state has no capacity to do anything?—but this power is not autonomously exercised by state officials; it is subordinated to social power.

In the second illustration, economic power subordinates social power. An example is the unrestrained use of donations by corporations and the wealthy to fund political parties in the United States. Political parties still matter—they are the vehicles for selecting state officials who directly exercise state power—but the social power mobilized by political parties is itself subordinated by the exercise of economic power.

These configurations can be connected in chains of power relations, as in the third and fourth illustrations. In the third illustration, corporate influence over state power occurs through subordination of political parties to economic power. Finally, in the fourth illustration, social power subordinates economic power through the mediation of state power. This is the ideal of social democracy: the state effectively regulates the behavior of capitalist firms but is itself democratically subordinated to social power.

Figure 2 illustrates the different aggregate configurations of forms of power within a dominant capitalist hybrid economy and within a dominant socialist hybrid economy. In these diagrams, the arrows are all directed toward explaining control over economic activity: investments, production, and distribution of goods and services. In the picture of capitalist empowerment, both social power and state power are subordinated to economic power in control over economic activity; in the case of socialist empowerment, both economic power and state power are subordinated to social power.

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Figure 2.

Aggregate Configurations of Capitalist Empowerment and Socialist Empowerment

Configurations of Socialist Empowerment: Elements for Building a Socialist Hybrid

For my purposes here, these schematic representations make it possible to differentiate salient configurations of social empowerment. Different kinds of progressive policies, institutional innovations and proposals, strategies, and reforms can be located within seven such configurations: (1) statist socialism; (2) social democratic statist regulation; (3) associational democracy; (4) social capitalism; (5) the core social economy; (6) the cooperative market economy; and (7) participatory socialism. I will discuss each of these briefly.

The configuration in Figure 3 corresponds to the classical definition of socialism in which social power controls economic activity via the state. The economy is directly controlled by the exercise of state power—through, for example, state ownership and control over the commanding heights of the economy—while, at the same time, state power is itself subordinated to social power by being democratically accountable to the people. This is the configuration at the core of traditional Marxist ideas of revolutionary socialism. This is not, of course, how twentieth-century revolutions that occurred in the name of socialism turned out. Once the power of revolutionary parties was consolidated in the form of the one-party state, “actually existing socialism” became a form of authoritarian statism in which, as illustrated in Figure 4, both social power within civil society and economic power were subordinated to state power.

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Figure 3.

Statist Socialism

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Figure 4.

A Configuration of Statist Empowerment: Authoritarian Statism

The experience of authoritarian statism has justifiably led to great skepticism about the desirability of the centralized state planning model of socialism. Nevertheless, the power configuration of statist socialism remains an important component of any prospect for transcending capitalism, particularly for large infrastructure projects, various kinds of natural monopolies, and probably for at least some elements of the financial system.

In the second configuration (Figure 5), social power regulates the economy through the mediation of both state power and economic power. This is a key aspect of social democracy. Capitalist economic power directly controls economic activity—capitalists continue to make investments, hire managers, and organize the labor process—but this power is regulated by state power, which is in turn subordinated to social power. Through a transitivity of power relations, this means that social power exerts regulative control over the exercise of economic power. Forms of the regulation of capital that improve working conditions and job security and protect the environment generally reflect this kind of democratic imposition of constraints.

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Figure 5.

Social Democracy I: Social Democratic Statist Regulation

Statist regulation of capitalist economic power, however, need not imply significant social empowerment. As in the case of statist socialism, the issue here is the extent and depth to which the state’s power is a genuine expression of democratic empowerment of civil society. In actual capitalist societies, much statist economic regulation is in fact itself subordinated to economic power, as illustrated in Figure 6. In capitalist statist regulation, state power regulates capital but in ways that are systematically responsive to the power of capital itself. In the United States, for example, industry associations are heavily involved in shaping federal regulation of airlines, energy, agriculture, and other sectors. Perhaps even more pervasively, the state’s structural dependency on the capitalist economy underwrites this configuration of power relations. ²¹

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Figure 6.

A Configuration of Capitalist Empowerment: Capitalist Statist Regulation

Associational democracy (Figure 7) covers a wide range of institutional devices through which collective associations in civil society directly participate in various kinds of governance activities, usually along with state agencies. The most familiar form of this is probably the tripartite neo-corporatist arrangements in some social democratic societies in which organized labor, employers’ associations, and the state bargain over various kinds of economic regulations, especially concerning the labor market and employment relations. Associational democracy can extend to many other domains, such as watershed councils that bring together civic associations, environmental groups, developers, and state agencies to regulate ecosystems, or health councils in which medical associations, community organizations, and public health officials plan various aspects of health care. To the extent that the associations involved are internally democratic and representative of interests in civil society, and the decision-making process in which they are engaged is open and deliberative, rather than heavily manipulated by elites and the state, then associational democracy can contribute to social empowerment.

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Figure 7.

Social Democracy II: Associational Democracy

I use the term “social economy” to designate all configurations of social empowerment within an economy in which the state is not directly involved. ²² The first social economy configuration is “social capitalism.” This is not a standard expression. I use it to describe a power configuration in which secondary associations of civil society, through a variety of mechanisms, directly affect the way economic power is used (Figure 8). The Solidarity Funds in Quebec are a good example. Stakeholder boards of directors of corporations, in which all stakeholders in a corporation’s activities are represented, are also a form of social capitalism.

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Figure 8.

Social Economy I: Social Capitalism

The simple fact that social power has an impact on economic power, however, does not mean that it constitutes a form of social empowerment. In Figure 9, social power affects the exercise of economic power but it does so in a way that is itself subordinated to economic power. An example would be trade associations formed by voluntary cooperation among capitalist firms for the purpose of setting industry standards. This kind of collectively organized self-regulation constitutes a configuration of capitalist empowerment, not socialist empowerment.

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Figure 9.

A Configuration of Capitalist Empowerment: Corporate Capitalist Self-regulation

The core social economy goes beyond social capitalism by constituting an alternative way of directly organizing economic activity that is distinct from capitalist market production, state organized production, and household production (Figure 10). Its hallmark is production organized by collectivities directly to satisfy human needs, not subject to the discipline of profit-maximization or state-technocratic rationality. The state may be involved in funding these collectivities, but it does not directly organize them or their services. Quebec’s system of daycare provision is a good example. In 2008, parents paid only seven Canadian dollars per day for preschool-age children for full-time daycare provided by community-based nonprofit daycare centers, but provincial government subsidies ensured that providers were paid a living wage. These daycare centers were often organized as “solidarity cooperatives,” an organizational form governed by elected representatives of staff, consumers (parents in this case), and community members. Wikipedia is another striking example of the core social economy. Wikipedia produces knowledge and disseminates information outside of markets and without state support; funding comes largely from donations from participants and supporters.

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Figure 10.

Social Economy II: The Core Social Economy

In a fully worker-owned cooperative firm in a capitalist economy, the egalitarian principle of one-person one-vote means that power relations within the firm are based on voluntary cooperation and persuasion, not the relative economic power of different people. Through democratic means, all workers, or members, jointly control the economic power represented by the capital in the firm. And if individual cooperative firms join together in larger associations of cooperatives—perhaps even a cooperative-of-cooperatives, collectively providing finance, training, and other kinds of support—they begin to transcend the capitalist character of their economic environment by constituting a cooperative market economy (Figure 11). The overarching cooperative in such a market stretches the social character of ownership within individual cooperative enterprises and moves governance toward a stakeholder model, in which cooperative enterprises are governed by democratic bodies representing all categories of people whose lives are affected by the enterprises’ economic activity. The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation is an example. Such firms remain a hybrid economic form, combining capitalist and socialist elements, but the socialist component has considerable weight.

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Figure 11.

Social Economy III: Cooperative Market Economy

The final configuration of social empowerment combines the social economy and statist socialism: the state and civil society jointly organize and control various kinds of production of goods and services (Figure 12). In participatory socialism, the state’s role is more pervasive than in the pure social economy. The state does not simply provide funding and set the parameters; it is also, in various ways, directly involved in the organization and production of economic activity. On the other hand, participatory socialism is also different from statist socialism, for here social power plays a role not simply through the ordinary channels of democratic control of state policies, but directly inside the productive activities themselves. A good example is the participatory budget in urban government. Because these budgets constitute allocations of resources to produce infrastructure to meet human needs, they should be treated as an aspect of economic activity; participatory budgets are thus not simply a form of democratic participation in the state, but are part of a participatory socialist economy.

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Figure 12.

Participatory Socialism

The Seven Configurations Together

As summarized in Figure 13, these different configurations of social empowerment can be clustered into three broad groups, each corresponding to different political traditions of socioeconomic transformation: a socialist cluster, a social economy cluster, and a social democratic cluster. These different clusters vary in the role they accord to the state and the extent to which they attempt to subordinate rather than bypass capitalist economic power. What all of the configurations have in common is the idea of democratization of power over economic life by subordinating economic and state power to social power—power rooted in voluntary cooperation for collective action. Of course, the ideal of socialism involves much more than this. Equality and social justice are also core traditional socialist values, to which environmental sustainability should be added today. What this model of socialism stresses, however, is that the realization of all these values depends on the transformation of power relations over economic activity, both in terms of how social power is directly involved in shaping economic activity and how it indirectly shapes economic activity through the democratization of the state.

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Figure 13.

Combined Configurations of Social Empowerment

Transformation

Transforming capitalism in a socialist direction means democratizing the economy through the seven configurations summarized in Figure 13. In this process, the economic structure remains a hybrid combining capitalist, statist, and socialist practices and relations, but the socialist dimension gains weight and centrality. Extending and deepening social power in any one of these configurations may be quite compatible with maintaining the dominance of capitalism, but if it is possible to increase social power within all of these configurations, the cumulative effect could be a qualitative transformation in which socialism becomes the dominant form of relations within a complex economic hybrid, subordinating both capitalism and statism within democratized power relations.

This, of course, is a very big if. Skepticism toward socialism at the beginning of the twenty-first century is at least as much about the prospects of challenging the dominance of capitalist relations as it is about the viability of alternative institutions. The power of capital seems so massive that if ever social power seemed to threaten the dominance of capitalism, it would be relentlessly attacked and undermined. Real progress in advancing the project of democratizing the economy through these configurations seems impossible so long as capitalism is dominant. For this reason, radical anti-capitalists have often believed that decisively breaking the power of capital is a precondition for significant movement toward socialism rather than mainly a consequence of such movement.

Marx had an elegant solution to this problem. He believed that in the long run capitalism destroyed its own conditions of existence: the laws of motion and contradictions of capitalism ultimately make capitalism an increasingly fragile and vulnerable system in which the ability of the ruling class and its political allies to block transformation becomes progressively weaker. Eventually capitalism simply becomes unsustainable. This was a strong prediction, not simply a weak claim about future possibilities. ²³ This does not solve the problem of how to build an emancipatory alternative to capitalism, but at least it makes the problem of overcoming the obstacles of existing power relations much less daunting in the long run.

Relatively few people today—even those who still work within the Marxist tradition—feel confident that capitalism will destroy itself. Capitalism may be crisis-ridden and cause great suffering in the world, but it also has an enormous capacity to effectively block alternatives. The problem of its transformation, at least in the developed world, therefore cannot be treated as mainly the problem of seizing the time when capitalism through its own contradictions becomes so weak and chaotic that it is vulnerable to being overthrown. Rather, the problem of transformation requires understanding how strategies of transformation have long-term prospects for eroding capitalist power relations and building up socialist alternatives.

Three strategic logics of transformation have characterized the history of anti-capitalist struggle. I refer to these as ruptural, interstitial, and symbiotic strategies.

Ruptural transformations envision creating new emancipatory institutions through a sharp break with existing institutions and social structures. The central image is a war in which victory ultimately depends on decisive defeat of the enemy in a direct confrontation. Victory results in a radical disjuncture in which existing institutions are destroyed and new ones are built fairly rapidly. In most versions, this revolutionary scenario involves seizing state power, rapidly transforming state structures, and then using these new apparatuses of state power to destroy the power of the dominant class within the economy.

Interstitial transformations seek to build new forms of social empowerment in capitalist society’s niches and margins, often where they do not seem to pose any immediate threat to dominant classes and elites. Prodhoun’s vision of building a cooperative alternative to capitalism within capitalism itself is a nineteenth-century version of this perspective. The many experiments in the social economy today are also examples. The central theoretical idea is that building alternatives on the ground in whatever spaces are possible both serves a critical ideological function by showing that alternative ways of working and living are possible, and potentially erodes constraints on the spaces themselves. ²⁴

Symbiotic transformations involve strategies in which extending and deepening institutional forms of social empowerment involving the state and civil society simultaneously help to solve practical problems faced by dominant classes and elites. In the 1970s, this was called “nonreformist reforms”—reforms that simultaneously make life better within the existing economic system and expand the potential for future advances of democratic power. It is also reflected in a variety of forms of civic activism in which social movements, local leaders, and city governments collaborate in ways that both enhance democracy and solve practical problems.

All three of these strategic logics have historically had a place within anti-capitalist social movements and politics. Ruptural strategies are most closely associated with revolutionary socialism and communism, interstitial strategies with some strands of anarchism, and symbiotic strategies with social democracy. It is easy to raise objections to each of them. Ruptural strategies have a grandiose, romantic appeal to critics of capitalism, but the historical record is pretty dismal. There are no cases in which socialism as defined here—a deeply democratic and egalitarian organization of power relations within an economy—has been the result of a ruptural strategy of transformation of capitalism. In practice, ruptural strategies seem more prone to result in authoritarian statism than in democratic socialism. Interstitial strategies may produce improvements in people’s lives and pockets of more democratic egalitarian practices, but nowhere have they succeeded in significantly eroding capitalist power relations. As for symbiotic strategies, in the most successful instances of social democracy they have certainly resulted in a more humane capitalism, with less poverty, less inequality, and less insecurity, but they have done so in ways that stabilize capitalism and leave intact the core powers of capital. Historically, any advance of symbiotic strategies that appeared to potentially threaten those core powers was massively resisted by capital. The reaction of Swedish capitalists to proposals for serious union involvement in control over investments in the late 1970s is one of the best known examples. These are all reasonable objections. Taken together they suggest to many people that transcending capitalism through some kind of long-term coherent strategy is simply not possible.

Pessimism is intellectually easy, perhaps even intellectually lazy. It often reflects a simple extrapolation of past experience into the future. Our theories of the future, however, are far too weak to really make confident claims that we know what cannot happen. The appropriate orientation toward strategies of social transformation, therefore, is to do things now that put us in the best position to do more later, to work to create institutions and structures that increase, rather than decrease, the prospects of taking advantage of whatever historical opportunities emerge. Building real utopias can both prefigure more comprehensive alternatives and move us in the direction of those alternatives.

In these terms, I think the best prospect for the future is a strategic orientation organized around the interplay of interstitial and symbiotic strategies, with perhaps periodic episodes involving elements of ruptural strategy. Through interstitial strategies, activists and communities can build and strengthen real utopian economic institutions embodying democratic egalitarian principles. Symbiotic strategies through the state can help open up greater space and support for these interstitial innovations. The interplay between interstitial and symbiotic strategies could then create a trajectory of deepening socialist elements within the hybrid capitalist system.

Worker cooperatives are a good example. Under existing conditions, worker cooperatives face serious obstacles to becoming a significant component of market economies: credit markets are skeptical of worker-owned firms; risk-averse workers are reluctant to sink their savings in a venture that has low probability of success; and cooperatives face supply chains in which, because of scale, they pay higher costs than capitalist corporate rivals. Symbiotic strategies directed at public policy could address all of these issues. Given the potential for worker-owned cooperatives to help solve problems of unemployment and deteriorating tax bases, new rules of the game to support cooperatives could gain political traction. Even within the logic of market economies, the positive externalities of worker cooperatives provide a justification for public subsidies and insurance schemes to increase their viability. Such policies could, over time, expand the weight of a cooperative market economy within the broader capitalist economic hybrid.

Such a combination of symbiotic and interstitial strategies does not imply that the process of transformation could ever follow a smooth path of enlightened cooperation between conflicting class forces. What is at stake here is a transformation of the core power relations of capitalism, and this ultimately threatens the interests of capitalists. Although elites may become resigned to a diminution of power, they are unlikely to gracefully embrace the prospect. Symbiotic transformations help solve problems within capitalism, but they often are not optimal for elites and are thus resisted. ²⁵ This means that a key element of ruptural strategies—confrontations between opposing organized social forces in which there are winners and losers—will be a part of any plausible trajectory of sustainable social empowerment. The purpose of such confrontations, however, is not a systemic rupture with capitalist dominance, but rather creation of more space for the interplay of interstitial and symbiotic strategies.

Conclusions

The framework proposed here for a socialism rooted in social empowerment involves a commitment to institutional pluralism and heterogeneity. Instead of a unitary institutional design for transcending capitalism, the configurations of social empowerment open up space for a wide diversity of institutional forms. Worker cooperatives and local social economy projects, state-run banks and enterprises, social democratic regulation of corporations, solidarity finance, and participatory budgeting all potentially undermine the dominance of capitalism and increase the weight of social power within the economic hybrid.

The institutional pluralism of the destination suggests strategic pluralism in the practices of transformation. Within some of these configurations, strengthening social power requires state power. But other configurations can be advanced without state involvement. This is especially true for the social economy initiatives. Activists on the left, especially those on the radical left, often regard these kinds of locally oriented, community-based initiatives as not being very political, because they do not always involve direct confrontation with political power. This is a narrow view of politics. Interstitial strategies to create real utopias involve showing that another world is possible by building it in the spaces available, and then pushing against the state and public policy to expand those spaces. For many people these kinds of interstitial initiatives also have the advantage of generating immediate, tangible results in which each person’s contribution clearly matters. A vision of emancipatory alternatives anchored in the multidimensional and multiscalar problem of deepening democracy can encompass this wide range of strategies and projects of transformation. Because democracy is such a core value in most developed capitalist societies—both symbolically and substantively—a broad political project for a truly democratic society may also capture the popular imagination.