Abstract
Left social theory has long faced a complicated set of unresolved dualisms: reform versus revolution? Social reproduction versus crisis? Democracy versus planning? Civil society versus the state? The tensions around these divides are palpable. On one side are the attractions of liberalism, market efficiencies, and freedom versus the dangers of compromise and retreat; on the other, the promise of certainty, coherence, and consistency but the dangers of determinism and irrelevance. In those contexts where left political strength is significant (or at least appears so to intellectuals), the attractions of liberalism are regularly denounced in favor of uncompromising positions of social transformation. In such contexts, rhetorics of state-smashing and proletarian dictatorships appear romantic, not nightmarish. By contrast, periods of weakness make reformism (or retreat, as some would have it) the dominant position. Former revolutionaries and their offspring settle for programs of modest social change if they remain committed to egalitarianism at all. More than a century of sectarian name-calling has done little to resolve the underlying issues.
To be sure, since Marx many creative thinkers on the left have attempted to provide a bridge across these core tensions. The most successful among them, such as Gramsci, acknowledge and embrace them in all their messy detail while still seeking some kind of transcendence. Done well, with a kind of Millsian cool or Habermasian erudition, the inherent conflicts of radical thought are obscured by the promise of theoretical novelty. But these rarely come with any kind of programmatic or strategic specificity that has produced any theoretical momentum toward a fundamental reorientation of the historic project of the left.
Perhaps the most politically significant of the recent attempts at transcendence comes from work on what has come to be known as “radical democracy.” Central to the early New Left, only to be washed away by more orthodox urges in the post-1968 surge, the reemergence of radical democracy was popularized—if “popularization” can be applied to a body of work that most find impenetrable—by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in the mid-1980s. Here, the underlying problems of “socialist strategy” in an age in which command central planning no longer seems a plausible route to emancipation are solved by seeking social spaces in which discourse, uncontaminated by economic power, can occur. Through discursive practice, in such spaces citizens will presumably discover their inner-socialist, egalitarian selves. The triumph of socialism may be blocked from above, but through democratic practice from below the possibilities of a radical “post-Marxist” breakthrough are still possible.
The basic premises of radical democracy as a political strategy for citizen empowerment start from a surprising position of strength. Small-d “democracy” is perhaps the one idea that all social scientists to the left of public choice theory can agree upon as inherently preferable to any existing alternative. Efforts to get more citizens involved and participating in planning processes at the local level can be found all over the world, and a growing social science literature on the democratization of social life in many arenas has begun to appear. The most popular model of modern organizational management is the development of “flattened” hierarchies and “participatory management.” Much of the motivation in the latter case may be efficiency and increased profitability. But because capitalist interests are, at least potentially, threatened by too much democracy, radical democracy has a kind of anti-capitalist veneer that makes the “radical” part appear at least plausible. If this is a bad time for socialism, it is, at least in some respects, a good time for democracy.
In his new work, Envisioning Real Utopias (henceforth ERU), Erik Olin Wright seeks to reinvigorate the radical democracy movement by explicitly (re-)attaching it to an anti-capitalist socialist agenda, albeit a form of socialism that is decidedly “non-statist” in character. Wright starts from the premise that socialism as central planning is no longer politically feasible or desirable as an economic alternative to capitalism. Instead, he envisions a future defined by “radical democratic egalitarianism,” in which citizens and civil society will find and use democratic means to achieve egalitarian ends. The task of “emancipatory social science” is to “generate scientific knowledge relevant to the collective project of challenging various forms of human oppression” (p. 10) and to make one or another of the radical democracy projects Wright describes convincing to an audience of disillusioned social scientists, as well as newcomers to the debates in search of a road map.
ERU is long book, building upon a 15-year project Wright has been organizing, in collaboration with Verso books and his research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to hold conferences and publish volumes examining “utopian” proposals infusing classical left visions with fresh ideas. One immediately asks, why utopia? Especially in dark times when left-wing utopias seem ever so far from the possible, and the gains of the left in the twentieth century are under enormous threat? Wright asserts that projecting viable utopias is necessary to counter “a cynicism about the human capacity to realize [left] values on a substantial scale” (p. 8). He makes the very good point that right-wing thinkers have no hesitation in promoting ideals of radical free-market utopias and being taken seriously, so why not the left as well?
Fair enough.
Wright argues that “real” utopias, and the emancipatory social science which is to undergird it, require three steps: (1) elaborating a plausible critique of the existing social order, (2) envisioning a “viable” set of alternatives, and (3) outlining a strategy for getting there. The argument of the book unfolds in three parts that correspond roughly to this agenda. Part One provides an extended fifty-page analysis of what he thinks is wrong with capitalism. Part Two describes the various alternatives Wright has in mind, divided into two sections: one involving how exactly civil society might gain democratic control over the state, and the other how the economy might be reorganized along more “democratic” lines. The final part turns to an examination of the factors that maintain capitalism, and strategies for its demise.
It is impossible not to appreciate the sharpness of Wright’s theoretical mind, his passion and willingness to engage grand themes otherwise so out of fashion these days, and his very open and pluralistic account. Yet I find much of ERU to be disappointing. In spite of its claims to be a contribution to scientific inquiry, to interrogate “real” utopias, the examination of actually existing alternative institutions is entirely superficial. For example, a discussion of the participatory budgeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre centers on a formal description of how it works but offers no good evidence that “better” outcomes are achieved elsewhere. If there has been more investment in poor neighborhoods and reduced tax avoidance since 1989 (when the participatory budgeting begun), claims of success that have been challenged by some analysts generally ignored by Wright, how do we know this is not the result of the end of the military dictatorship and the coming to power of center-left national and regional governments as opposed to local participatory budgeting? Further, how do we know Porto Alegre has done better than other Brazilian cities in this same period?
Or consider another example. Wikipedia is invoked by Wright as an example of how a non-capitalist cooperative venture could take on and achieve comparable results in terms of quality in for-profit encyclopedias, using the voluntarily labor of large numbers of citizens around the world. Wikipedia is indeed intriguing. But what is its larger significance? Perhaps it shows that collectively-run organizations can work as well as hierarchical organizations, but it is also possible that this is a one-off context in which people drawn to intellectual life find it pleasurable to spend time on the dissemination of knowledge (their own and others) that makes this venture work. If that is true, it may have no relevance for building houses or collecting garbage. It is frustrating that in the “real world” examples Wright points to, there is little systematic effort to sort through the issues and even pose the questions that need to be answered before serious readers might be convinced.
Modern social science has the analytical tools to investigate rigorously such questions: evaluation research with quasi-experimental is a flourishing subfield. If the feasibility of radical utopia is to be advanced one inch by existing examples, it is incumbent to test it using some of these tools. But none of that is on display here. It is possible to compare whether workers prefer working for a firm in which they have an ownership interest and elect their managers, or whether such firms are more efficient. In fact, there are literatures on these questions, and they are by no means uniformly favorable to worker cooperatives. What is discussed in the book raises plenty of doubts. For example, Wright (somewhat sheepishly) notes the fact that the famous worker-owned Mondragon cooperatives in northern Spain now have a majority of non-owner employees, and that the worker-owners have often been reluctant to let the new workers become owners and sometimes have opposed unions for the regular employees. Kudos to Wright for forthrightly discussing it, but it brings sharply into focus some of the potentially non-egalitarian consequences of democratic processes even in the existing “best case” scenarios.
Wright’s faith in forms of direct democracy, and criticisms of the limitations of existing forms of representative democracy, are also untested with any systematic evidence. Many questions need to be addressed here. “All power to the Soviets” proved rather difficult to implement in practice. Representative democracy may be flawed in many ways, but multi-party electoral systems with more or less equal resources and access to the media have proved remarkably robust. Most importantly, representative democracy is the most realistic vehicle (compared to any existing alternative) for communicating all citizens’ preferences (not just those of activists) to elected officials. Further, many hard questions have been posed in the democracy literature that are not fully answered or even considered in ERU. For example, participation itself always has the potential to introduce new inequalities. The book reports that eight percent of the citizens of Porto Alegre participate in budget planning. Does this small group make it a more representative process than having elected city council members (chosen by all voters) decide? Perhaps. But not everybody is available for endless meetings, and not everybody has the tools to participate successfully even if they do.
Wright’s assertions about the lack of “human flourishing” under capitalism is the bedrock claim of the book, the foundation for the argument that we should seek to go beyond capitalism as it exists today. Is this convincing? One problem is that much of the discussion of “capitalism” that Wright provides is far too abstract and general to test specifically the proposition. In spite of Wright’s theoretical (but highly abstract) insistence that no social system is unitary in its logic, his discussion of capitalism rarely acknowledges or seems capable of appreciating its empirical varieties. A huge gulf has opened between a neo-classical model of capitalism or the model currently practiced in the United States versus the “social market economies” that have evolved in Western Europe over the past 50 years. The existence of SMEs suggests that market capitalism can co-exist with empowered workers in strong unions, dramatically reduced (although still not trivial) levels of income and wealth inequality, reduced working hours, and declining racial and gender inequality. In the SMEs working hours have fallen and citizens have more time to pursue “human flourishing.” Capitalism has not proven, in short, universally incapable of improving the prospects for human flourishing, and for all we know that may continue for the indefinite future. Failing to examine systematically the wide varieties of actually existing capitalisms around the world, Wright’s critique leaves open the questions of just how far or how much better radical democracy might be.
Turning to the alternative institutional designs proposed in Part Two of the book, we find that Wright’s discussion is admirably pluralistic, but vague. Readers seeking a blueprint of any kind will be sorely disappointed. In abandoning the classical pathways to socialism via public ownership and central planning in favor of radical democracy, he leaves indeterminate exactly how a radically democratic society might start to reduce the power of private investment in market economies without central planning. Few truly concrete policy agendas are endorsed in the book, with the exception of universal basic income grants (which are mentioned but not discussed in any detail as to how many grants might be provided, what kinds of existing government programs would be replaced by the grants, and so forth). The devil here lies in the details.
My biggest concerns about the book come in Part Three, where the political conditions for the “social reproduction” of capitalism are treated, along with three strategies of transition: rupture, building up alternative non-capitalist institutions, and finding models where workers’ and capitalists’ interests overlap. The discussion of social reproduction takes us back to an “oldies but goodies” 1970s literature on ideology and constraint, but largely ignores the vast literatures since then on how citizens and mass publics reason about political questions, and why, ultimately, the vision of democratic egalitarianism postulated in the entire book may be unpersuasive. The strategic discussion in Part Three is unsatisfying for a different reason. Wright argues that the three pathways are supposed to reinforce each other—important developments either within capitalism or institutional developments outside of it open up possibilities in the other, with rupture strategically invoked but only vague examples offered.
Social scientists today have, I think, largely abandoned utopian visions not because they have lost hope or concern for social change, or because equality has gone out of style, but rather because they are generally and appropriately skeptical that social science models exist (or can be found) in favor of any version of radical utopia. Further, there is a good deal more appreciation for the varieties of capitalisms and the equality- generating improvements represented by the rise of social market economies than there was a few decades ago. In an era of retrenchement, where welfare states are under attack, the challenge of simply maintaining and defending existing achievements, or building upon and incrementally improving them, has become the main priority. For all of these reasons, and in spite of its challenging erudition, I fear ERU will not be likely to motivate action in a different direction.