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Erik Olin Wright
© Soundings 2007
To be a radical critic of existing institutions and social structures is to identify harms that are generated by existing arrangements, to formulate alternatives which mitigate those harms, and to propose transformative strategies for realizing those alternatives. There was a time when many intellectuals on the Left were quite confident in their understanding of each of these. . Today there is much less certainty among people who still identify strongly with Left values of radical egalitarianism and deep democracy. While Left intellectuals remain critical of capitalism, many acknowledge - if reluctantly - the necessity of markets and the continuing technological dynamism of capitalism.
Socialism remains a marker for an alternative to capitalism, but its close association with statist projects of economic planning no longer has much credibility, and no fully convincing alternative comprehensive model has become broadly accepted. And while class struggles certainly remain a central source of conflict in the world today, there is no longer confidence in their potential to provide the anchoring agency for transforming and transcending capitalism.
This is the context in which there has emerged on the left a renewed interest in thinking about broad visions and imagining new ways of approaching the problem of alternatives to the existing social world. (The recent publications of Compass are good examples of this kind of work). I call the problem of exploring alternatives "envisioning real utopias" to highlight the inherent tension between taking seriously emancipatory aspirations for a radically more humane and just world, and confronting the hard constraints of realism. This is a difficult endeavor. It is much easier to be a realist about what exists than about what could exist, and much easier to dream of a better world without worrying about the practical problems of unintended consequences.
Social alternatives can be elaborated and evaluated by three different criteria: desirability, viability, and achievability. These are nested in a kind of hierarchy: Not all desirable alternatives are viable, and not all viable alternatives are achievable.
In the exploration of desirability, one asks the question: what are the moral principles that a given alternative is supposed to serve? This is the domain of pure utopian social theory and much normative political philosophy. Typically such discussions are institutionally very thin, the emphasis being on the enunciation of abstract principles rather than actual institutional designs. These kinds of discussions can be quite valuable, for they help to clarify the normative goals of projects of social change and help us evaluate whether or not we are moving in the right direction, but by themselves they tell us little about how to actually design institutions.
The study of viability is a response to the perpetual objection to radical egalitarian proposals "it sounds good on paper, but it will never work." The exploration of viability brackets the question of the political achievability of the proposed alternative under existing historical conditions and focuses instead on the likely dynamics and unintended consequences of the proposal if it were to be implemented. Two kinds of analyses are especially pertinent here: systematic theoretical models of how particular social structures and institutions would work, and empirical studies of cases, both historical and contemporary, where at least some aspects of the proposal have been tried.
The problem of achievability of alternatives is the central task for the practical political work of strategies for social change. It asks of proposals for social change that have passed the test of desirability and viability, what it would take to actually implement them. This turns out to be a very difficult undertaking, especially because of the high levels of contingency of conditions in the future which will affect the prospects of success of any long-term strategy. Generally, as a result of this uncertainty, discussions of achievability tend to become quite short term, focusing on existing configurations of social forces and potential political coalitions that can plausibly be persuaded to adopt specific projects of change.
The discussion of desirability, viability, and achievability are thus all relevant to the understanding of alternatives to existing social structures and institutions. At this point in history I believe that the most pressing intellectual task of these three is the problem of viability. In a sense, the problem of desirability unconstrained by viability and achievability is too easy: it is too easy to elaborate the moral principles and values we want to see embodied in alternatives and to show how these values are represented by various schemes. And the problem of achievability is too hard: there are simply too many contingencies and uncertainties for us to assign meaningful probabilities to the achievability of a given viable alternative very far into the future. The problem of viability is particularly important because there is so much skepticism among people who are convinced of desirability and willing to participate in the political work to make alternatives achievable, but have lost confidence in the workability of visions beyond the existing social order.
Discussions of the viability of new institutional designs that bracket the problem of the actual political achievability often encounter strong objections. What is the point, it is sometimes argued, of talking about some theoretically viable alternative to the world in which we live if it is not strategically achievable? There are two responses to the skeptic.
First, there are so many uncertainties and contingencies about the future, that we cannot possibly know now what really are the limits of achievable alternatives in the future. The further we look into the future, the less certain we can be about the limits on what is achievable. Achievability is often determined by historically contingent windows of opportunity that open up unexpectedly rather than anticipated strategies understood well in advance.
Second, the actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on the beliefs people hold about what sorts of alternatives are viable. This is a fundamental if sometimes elusive point about the very idea of there being "limits of possibility" for social change: social limits of possibility are not independent of beliefs about limits. The beliefs people hold about limits systematically affect what is possible. Developing systematic, compelling accounts of viable alternatives to existing social structures and institutions of power and privilege, therefore, is one component of the social process through which the social limits on achievable alternatives can themselves be changed.
For these reasons, the analysis of the viability of alternatives to existing institutions should not be short circuited by the problem of political achievability. Of course, if it could be shown that in principle a given proposal could never be achieved under any conceivable conditions, this would reduce the interest in understanding its potential viability. Nevertheless, even in this extreme case, the discussion of viability could be productive insofar as it clarifies issues of the workability of institutional design which might have implications for modified versions which could be implemented.
Finally, while the central problem of envisioning real utopias concerns the viability of institutional alternatives that embody emancipatory values, the practical achievability of such institutional designs often depends upon the existence of smaller steps, intermediate institutional innovations that move us in the right direction but only partially embody these values. Institutional proposals which have an all-or-nothing quality to them are both less likely to be adopted in the first place, and may pose more difficult transition-cost problems if implemented.
What we ideally want, are waystations that are intermediate reforms that have two main properties: first, they concretely demonstrate the virtues of the fuller program of transformation, so they contribute to the ideological battle of convincing people that the alternative is credible and desirable; and second, they enhance the capacity for action of people, increasing their ability to push further in the future. Waystations that increase popular participation and bring people together in problem-solving deliberations for collective purposes are particularly salient in this regard. This is what in the 1970s was called "nonreformist reforms": reforms that are possible within existing institutions and that pragmatically solve real problems while at the same time empowering people in ways which enlarge their scope of action in the future.
Erik Olin Wright is Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. Since 1992 he has directed The Real Utopias Project which explores a range of proposals for new institutional designs that embody emancipatory ideals and yet are attentive to issues of pragmatic feasibility. His most recent publication is Deepening Democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance (with Archon Fung), Verso, 2003). More...
This is a shortened version of an article that will appear in Soundings 36
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