Envisioning Real Utopias.
| Author | Davies, William |
Erik Olin Wright
VERSO, 2010
The new consensus amongst political elites in Britain is that we have been over-reliant on both the market and the state. Senior Labour figures, such as Ed Miliband and James Purnell, have used the opportunity of the financial crisis to denounce the myth of the self-regulating market--but at every turn, they have also confessed that New Labour was excessively credulous of the state's capacity to affect micro-social outcomes and alter behaviour. The Conservatives' critique of big government is less of a departure for them, but it is now framed in communitarian terms of promoting a 'Big Society', rather than in the neo-liberal language of relinquishing control to the market. Liberal Democrats might, with some justification, claim that this is what they've been arguing for all along.
Erik Olin Wright agrees. But he agrees not on the utilitarian grounds that state and market have both failed to 'deliver' adequately, but on the radically democratic grounds that neither state nor market (as currently constituted) allow people to exert meaningful power over their own lives. Socialism, for Olin Wright, prioritises 'social power' over both 'economic power' and 'state power', and the task for socialists is to work strategically on the socialisation and democratisation of both the economy and the state. Social power lies in civil society, and understanding how it might practically be grown and mobilised under conditions of contemporary capitalism is the purpose of Envisioning Real Utopias.
It is in many ways the author's sad, reluctant farewell to a lifelong partner--Karl Marx. The political anger, the frustration and the yearning that fuel this work are Marxist to the core. But analytically and pragmatically, Olin Wright wants to start from scratch. He ditches core tenets of historical materialism--the inevitability of capitalist collapse, the intensification of class processes, the inevitability of socialism--on empirical grounds. Against this, his goal is to provide a 'compass' via which to pursue socialist forms of ownership and control that are 'desirable', 'viable' and 'achievable'. There is a grown-up realism to this project, perhaps even a mildly regretful one. In a chapter ultimately dismissing the benefit and likelihood of a 'ruptural transformation' of capitalism, he recognises the idea's sustained value to younger activists, of which he once was. It's not you, Herr Marx, it's me.
How, then, to start from...
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