Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias
Jacoby, Russell
BOOKS Real Men Find Real Utopias RUSSELL JACOBY Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright Verso, 2010, 394 pp. A book on Utopias by a Marxist sociologist seems promising, perhaps even...
...These three directions of social empowerment are connected to an array of linkages among the forms of power and the economy...
...Professor Wright will explain before turning to the four "limits and contradictions" of social reproduction such as "strategic inten-tionality and its ramifications" and "contingency and unpredictability...
...It might be time for him to take a break...
...He posits three types— direct, representative, and associational—each of which has two forms, "thin" and "deep...
...His vast theoretical apparatus is jimmy-rigged and empty...
...He has read all of his works and finds them remarkable...
...Their broad understanding has enabled them to identify seven elements of democratic enterprises...
...Wright can only brush the surface, but the first claim "revolves around three ideas: human flourishing...
...He will look at real utopias with three criteria: desirability, viability, and social empowerment...
...Is this clear, students...
...He offers no examples of such entities—what is deep democratic associational corpora-tivism?—but he does introduce an acronym, without which a sociologist dies a miserable death in the profession...
...It consists of unpaid and egalitarian participation with democratic governance...
...A hundred and twenty pages earlier he had posited desirability, viability, and achievability as the foundation of an emancipatory social science...
...Who couldn't come up with "Devolution and decentralization...
...So Wright does get out...
...Wright finds at least seven, each of which he diagrams and discusses...
...The Real Utopian Project name came to him, he reports, while he walked his golden retriever in the early 1990s...
...Yet only sociologists force-fed as graduate students will not choke on this book...
...Everything suggests Wright has the talent to pull it off...
...the "social economy" of Quebec...
...But if this book exemplifies academic Marxism, conservatives can rest easy...
...Real utopias" for Wright exist as a subset of the broader enterprise of developing an emancipatory social science...
...In case this is opaque, Wright thoughtfully diagrams it...
...The sheer randomness is stunning...
...Any questions about the important difference between "affects" and "shapes" or on the technical use of "over...
...He often lectures at universities across the globe...
...In the next two chapters Wright takes up four examples of "real Utopias," the budget process of Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil...
...We have done this, he explains, "on the basis of our research on Porto Alegre . . . as well as our understanding of broader issues in the theory of democracy...
...The Madison department is where C. Wright Mills received his doctorate, and it housed his mentor, Hans Gerth, an emigre scholar who was a student of another sociologist, Karl Mannheim, whose 1929 Ideology and Utopia remains a touchstone study...
...We are only on page thirteen and already we have utopias that depend on a social science that depends on a theory of justice that breaks down into two parts, social and political, the first of which subdivides in three ways...
...More theoretical brush clearing is required...
...He states, "Only a thinker of Wright's genius could sustain such a badly needed political imagination without losing analytical clarity and precision...
...Some things can be desired, but not viable, and viable but not achievable...
...Now we are methodologically armed to address real utopias...
...A fully developed theory of social transformation" consists of four components...
...He distills the criticism of capitalism into eleven principles...
...The first is a theory of social reproduction...
...He moves fluidly between Wright of 1985 and Wright of 2010, as if history has not changed...
...Who cares...
...Real Men think about Real Utopias—or at least their punishing theoretical implications and lessons...
...He teaches history at UCLA...
...These include such entities as "Social democratic statist economic regulation" and "Participatory socialism: statist socialism with empowered participation...
...After all, he is no old-school Marxist crank or outsider...
...He refers to exactly one book in the utopian tradition, Martin Buber's 1949 Paths in Utopia...
...He provides a table of "The Degree of Democraticness" to visualize the six possibilities...
...Is it a step on the path to utopia or empowerment...
...With Wright as elected president of the sociological profession, the conservative nightmare of radicals taking over the university has in part come to pass...
...In fact a macho element wafts through his "Real Utopias Project," which Wright has launched as an ongoing discussion and series of books...
...Now we have "Capitalist class relations perpetuate eliminable forms of human suffering," "Capitalism is inefficient in certain crucial aspects," and "Capitalist commodifi-cation threatens important broadly held values...
...After all, the kibbutz is a "real utopia" with a socialist ethos and decades of practice...
...Daniel Gavron's suggestive book The Kibbutz, subtitled "Awakening from Utopia," sought to appraise its past and future...
...Wright seeks to reinvent the Marxist wheel...
...Associational Democracy exists as a Thin "Bureaucratic corporativism" and a Deep "Democratic associational corporativism...
...Nor does he say much about the "real utopias" in Brazil, Canada, and Spain...
...It is dirty and difficult work but some conceptually rugged professor has to do it...
...The first six concern aspects of the internal design of EPG institutions...
...Even more promising, Wright wants his book accessible to those "not steeped in academic debates...
...Capitalism is efficient in certain crucial aspects...
...is Wright's next chapter...
...Why these four...
...Wright seems to have hatched these ideas himself...
...Underlying the first task—the diagnosis—is a theory of justice...
...Wright is a man of the Left and undoubtedly supports with his heart, mind, and resources good causes...
...necessary material and social means...
...To do this he offers what he calls "real utopias," which might appear a contradiction or oxymoron...
...Actually, Wright is just warming up for his ensuing discussions of "interstitial" and "symbiotic" transformation, which are numbingly baroque and that he clarifies with diagrams that might as well be satires...
...So far, Wright's book might be classified as an Undesirable Nonviable Alternative...
...For all its success, he asks, what is the impact of Wikipedia...
...With his examples out of the way Wright returns to more pressing issues, to a theory of transformation, which takes up the remainder of the book...
...In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright seeks to counter widespread cynicism about radical social transformation...
...What is one to make of this morass...
...Russell Jacoby's new book, Bloodlust: The Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present (The Free Press), will be published in the spring...
...With the correction that Wright is no genius and that the book is suffocatingly narrow in scope, impossibly cramped in imagination, and irreparably muddy in execution, the blurb is accurate...
...Still he is not quite ready to plunge into his subject...
...His command of Marxism seems limited...
...Wright, Erik Wright's favorite source is Erik Wright...
...For Wright, Wikipedia exemplifies "the anti-capitalist potential of information technology...
...Wright not only provides examples of "real utopias," but situates them within the broader framework of an "emancipatory social science," a task that involves understanding how capitalism can be transformed...
...First he must consider types of democracy that will allow an evaluation of real utopias under the rubric of social empowerment...
...Any questions...
...This theory rests on two "claims," one about social justice and one about political justice...
...He gives us a graph of "Interstitial Transformations Paving the Way to Rupture" with one axis: "Historical Time...
...Buber's book closed with a discussion of the kibbutz, a subject that would seem to call out to Wright...
...Without missing a beat Wright sashays from a real cooperative in Spain to a Rube Goldberg plan of "coupon-based" market socialism as contrived by John Roemer and of "Parecon" (or "participatory economics") as detailed by Michael Albert...
...Now the difficulty begins...
...He cites official sources and does not appear to have made an effort to find out what these enterprises mean for their Brazilian, Basque, or Canadian participants...
...Wright lives in a bubble of like-minded sociologists and political theorists...
...What sinks Wright's little boat is exactly such vacuous and clumsy statements coupled, as they are, to a relentless faux precision of definitions, diagrams, and graphs...
...Wright has to be given credit for parading his anticapitalist sensibilities, but his critique reads like a lecture at the hootenanny weekend of the Socialist Hiking Club, Berkeley Chapter...
...It has become turgid, vapid, and self-referential...
...Now he has dropped the last term and added another...
...He follows this with many more pages to set out the lessons he and a colleague have drawn...
...Gerth translated Max Weber, and together with Mills put out a collection of Weber's writings...
...We should all fear, however, what it suggests about the contemporary university and its scholarship...
...What's So Bad about Capitalism...
...In a memoir elsewhere, Wright comments that every September since kindergarten in 1952 he has been in school...
...That he did not label this book Volume One and promise Volumes Two through Ten shows restraint...
...In the current period we need "hard-nosed proposals for pragmatically improving our lives" or utopian ideals grounded in reality...
...The seventh element "concerns an important aspect of the sociopolitical environment of such institutions which contributes to their robustness and stability...
...The graphs are inane, the writing atrocious...
...Wright can barely open one set before another set pops up...
...and Mondragon, the Basque cooperative corporation...
...C.Wright Mills, who despised sociological jargon, has been succeeded by Erik Olin Wright, once given the C.Wright Mills Distinguished Professor Award at Wisconsin, who cranks out sociological cant...
...Moreover, in their murk-iness the propositions could just as well be reversed...
...By page 150, Wright finally turns, almost, to "real utopias...
...Figure 2.1 gives us "Three Criteria for Evaluating Social Alternatives...
...Wright no sooner introduces his examples than he drops them in order to snag larger prey, sociological critters...
...We have yet to get to the third component of his social science, "Transformation," which relies on four theories, such as "A Theory of the underlying dynamic and trajectory of unintended social change...
...At their best these sociologists addressed contemporary social issues with an enviable lucidity, theoretical savvy, and historical acumen...
...To call this book dull as dish water maligns dish water...
...But a reader would never know it...
...On page 322, he thanks Marcia Kahn Wright, his wife, for suggesting to him "the term 'interstitial'" as a way of expressing something about "strategic logic," whatever that is...
...Wright raises some questions before moving on to child care in Quebec (of which he diagrams four types) and the Quebec Federation of Labour's Solidarity Fund...
...Wikipedia...
...In a blurb, Michael Burawoy, a previous president of the American Sociological Association and a prominent leftist sociologist, calls the book "encyclopedic" in its breadth and "daunting" in its ambition...
...This assumes two forms (active and passive) that rest on three "claims" and operate in "four clusters of mechanism" (coercion, institutional rules, ideology, and material interests) that "interact in a variety of ways" that produce two especially important "configurations": despotism and hegemony...
...For Wright, however, utopias are not fantasies, or not only fantasies...
...No matter...
...How many...
...Capitalist commodification supports important broadly held values...
...But even an informed citizen, unless trained in the broader issues of democratic theory, would probably have missed the fifth element, "Recombinant decentralization...
...Apart from Mrs...
...Wright's own theory is what he calls Radical Democratic Egalitarianism...
...Wright seems to know nothing about the history of utopian thought, communities, or cooperatives...
...But why eleven propositions...
...With Wright that sociological tradition, alas, is dead...
...EPG refers to "empowered participatory governance...
...In Wright's PowerPoint sociology, Parecon might just as well be a billion-dollar Spanish corporation as a province in Canada...
...Wright doesn't plot history, but Time itself...
...Wright's discussion of Mondragon, which now owns the largest Spanish grocery chain (Eroski), takes up six pages and gives basic information, available from any source, on how it functions, but it is swamped by the succeeding twenty pages on the schemes of two leftist American economists on how to introduce socialism...
...How does Wikipedia fit with the other three...
...His main source for the Quebec Federation of Labour's Solidarity Fund is its annual report...
...Get that before we turn to the second component of social transformation...
...Some of these might be obvious to any lay person...
...Mills also published an anthology, Images of Man, that contained selections of social thinkers from Durkheim to Michels and Veblen...
...A book on Utopias by a Marxist sociologist seems promising, perhaps even courageous...
...An emancipatory social science has three components, he tell us: a systematic diagnosis of existing society, viable alternatives, and an understanding of social transformation...
...Wright says nothing about the kibbutz or the literature on it...
...To elaborate an emancipatory social science means opening up theoretical nesting eggs lined up on a shelf that stretches into the horizon...
...His discussion of Utopia must wait until he explains what socialism is all about, which he contrasts with capitalism and something he calls statism...
...Viability, for instance, breaks down into two parts, "Nonviable Alternatives" and "Viable Alternatives...
...That many of them have come to adore this stuff is only striking proof of the discipline's collapse...
...Unfortunately, these are not ideas...
...nor are they written in English...
...He is more eager to pronounce on how to think about how to approach the preconditions that underlie the claims that support "real utopias" or on the numerous principles and subprinciples of social transformation they infer than to tell us anything about these practical ventures...
...Follow...
...Actually, for Wright, history has not changed...
...Why not five—or fifty...
...Are there lessons to be found here...
...He teaches in what many consider the finest sociology department in the country, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison...
...The book is startling and depressing evidence of what has happened to American academic Marxism, at least its sociological variant, over the last thirty years...
...He is a chaired professor who has just been elected president of the American Sociological Association, the premier professional organization of the field...
...Wright offers neither rhyme nor reason...
...The second task of Wright's social science envisions alternatives, which can be evaluated by three different criteria: desirability, viability, and achievability...
...Needless to say, these claims are complicated and difficult to spell out...
...These men were steeped in history and sociological thought...
...He writes that social empowerment can be "over the way state power affects economic activity" or "over the way economic power shapes economic activity" or "directly over economic activity...
...The empirical information he provides is perfunctory at best...
...His discussion of the decentralized budget decision-making in Porto Alegre runs five pages...
...Wright's gargantuan theoretical edifice, with its multiple appendages, add-ons, and attachments steals all attention from "real utopias," about which he shows little enthusiasm...
...A hundred, perhaps a thousand, Marxists have already written about the state, state capitalism, and its many variants...
...Moreover, he spurns on-the-ground investigation...
...He says little about anything...
...Exploitation, profit, and alienation have disappeared from Wright's improved Marxism...
...broadly equal access...
...His historical reach extends to his own earlier works...
...The issues that rivet Wright unfold in an eternal graduate sociology seminar where the clock has stopped...
...In any event, Wright is most interested in how socialism leads to what he calls "social empowerment," of which there are three types...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
