One of my favorite, and most intense, writing projects this year has been preparing a contribution to an in-progress volume celebrating the work and life of my late friend Erik Olin Wright. The essay, provisionally called “If you’re a socialist you need the Real Utopias Project whether you like it or not”, was prompted by reading and hearing numerous criticisms of either Erik’s book Envisioning Real Utopias, or the Real Utopias Project more generally. So what the essay does is argue for the importance of the RUP against those criticisms in a way that is much more defensive, combative, confident, and irritable than I would ever be discussing my own work. It’s been fun, though also quite strange to so inhabit the thought of someone to whom I was so close for so many years: I have had ‘new’ conversations with him in my head as the paper has unfolded.
I’ll share the final section below the fold, which will give you a sense of what I think. But, taking a leaf out of JQ’s book, I also thought some of you might like to read the whole draft and, even better, might be able to give me some feedback on it.
For those of you with more sense than to read an entire paper, here’s how the essay (currently) concludes:
Wright says: “Particularly in the Marxist tradition, radical intellectuals have insisted that wholesale redesign of social institutions is within the grasp of human beings. This does not mean, as Marx emphasized, that detailed institutional blueprints can be devised in advance of the opportunity to create an alternative.” In the early days of the project, he considered calling it “Society by Design”, and rejected that title exactly because it connoted a technocratic elite imposing designs from above. The title he chose is more appealing, and better reflects his intent as well as his personality.
In deference to Wright I have so far avoided the term “blueprint”. But I think the Real Utopias Project is usefully seen as a process of scrutinizing… well, blueprints. Socialists who think they do not have an obligation to offer real, practicable, designs, thereby express disdain for those who they are inviting to make commitments and sacrifices and to take the risk of everything going wrong. As Wright says, “vague utopian fantasies may lead us astray, encouraging us to embark on trips that have no real destinations at all, or, worse still, which lead us towards some unforeseen abyss”. How can anyone judge whether those commitments, sacrifices, and risks are worth taking, without being offered a blueprint? You wouldn’t ask to redesign someone’s house, still less ask them to pay for it, and still less to risk their lives for it, without offering them a blueprint. “Trust me, we’ll work it out together” or, worse, “Trust me, you’ll work it out” or “Trust me I’ll work it out”, sound like empty promises at best, and attempts to disguise a hidden agenda at worst. Basic respect requires one to offer up for consideration, scrutiny, revision, or rejection, a proposal that one has already diligently scrutinized oneself. The approach socialists should take, if any designs pass muster in something like the RUP is this: “Here’s is a blueprint. We’ve worked hard on it, using the expertise available to us, and we think there’s a good chance it will work to realize the goals that we can offer you reasons to share with us. Of course, you might reject it. Or maybe you have a better one. Let’s compare them! And of course, if you accept ours, it’s not written in stone, any more than yours is if that’s the one we settle on. They’re blueprints, not commandments. We’ll work, together, to revise the blueprint, so that we can make the house we share the best it can be, as we build it together”. The more risky and costly the transition, and the less detailed and well-scrutinized the blueprint, the more contemptuous the offer. And, coincidentally (and fortunately) the less likely it is to win support.
History does not suggest that there will be plenty of second chances if we get it wrong in one instance. And it does suggest that getting it wrong can be catastrophic. If you’re a socialist you need the Real Utopias Project whether you like it or not.
{ 33 comments }
Luis Villa 10.01.21 at 7:06 pm
Thanks for sharing this, Harry. As a Wikipedian and open source developer (and once-upon-a-time theory undergrad), I eagerly devoured ERU ahead of CT’s symposium, and did not fully understand the mostly lukewarm reception it received here. Hopefully this is a useful corrective to a project that (it seems to me) should be better known in future-optimistic circles.
reason 10.01.21 at 9:16 pm
I dunno, I’m sceptical of Utopias, they always fail on the humanity has it’s share of sociopathic arseholes hurdle. As I wrote to my Anarchist daughter recently – history is full of failed idealisms and also full of successful reforms. I prefer to stick to thinking – what can we do to improve the current situation. The idea of taking two steps back to make three steps forward, seems a massive risk to me.
J-D 10.01.21 at 11:40 pm
Would this count as an example of the sort of thing you mean?
‘Eight hours of work, eight hours of play,
‘Eight hours of rest, and eight bob a day.’
Harry 10.02.21 at 1:55 am
reason (#2): I take a central assumption behind the RUP to be that the burden of proof for utopians is very high indeed, because the skepticism you express has a lot of authority.
oldster 10.02.21 at 3:57 am
“As Wright says, “vague utopian fantasies may lead us astray, encouraging us to embark on trips that have no real destinations at all, or, worse still, which lead us towards some unforeseen abyssâ€. How can anyone judge whether those commitments, sacrifices, and risks are worth taking, without being offered a blueprint?…[without blueprints, utopian plans are] empty promises at best, and attempts to disguise a hidden agenda at worst.”
Indirect confirmation of the wisdom of this stance can be gained by considering the behavior of the Bush crime cartel in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Repeated requests for detailed accounting were met with breezy assurances that the problems would solve themselves. Every promise of democracy and reconstruction hid the real agenda of hegemony and ruin.
The events that people plan for show what they really intend; the events they are willing to leave vague and indeterminate are those that they won’t mind never happening. The Bush crew left nothing to chance when it came to counting up the Tomahawk missiles, but as for the stabilization of the postwar government and economy, that was not their department.
Attention to that episode may serve as a rhetorically effective appeal to socialists in particular, who will find it a particularly unflattering mirror in which to see their reflections.
Alan White 10.02.21 at 5:01 am
Harry, thank you for this–I learned a lot about your perspective reading your draft. I see it as primarily a meta-critical defense of RUP and think it’s very good on that level.
One specific thing that struck me in Wright’s 11 bulleted points about capitalism’s wrongness is how many of them today are being pushed in a way that I do not see directly addressed in your piece or how you represent his work: the role of capitalism in manipulating the emotions of huge masses of people, and as I suppose always through the manipulation of controlled media. Today we can see tons of evidence that millions of people here in the US and around the world have been channeled into information silos that primarily just reinforce emotional attitudes about issues that render followers impervious to any adjustment of those attitudes by resort to facts and argument running against the information source. This is sharply apparent in the fact that many people who get serious cases of Covid paradoxically flock to the science-based embrace of hospitals in emotional desperation after they steadfastly have refused to simply take a proven vaccine by a contrary emotional stance previously instilled by repeated exposures to lies. And all this is due to capitalist infusion into self-reinforcing media sources cultivated over many years. How can any RUP conquer that kind of profound cultish emotional manipulation by capitalists on the scale we see it today?
Gorgonzola Petrovna 10.02.21 at 9:14 am
@2 “…humanity has it’s share of sociopathic arseholes hurdle.”
But is it the cause or effect of the existing social arrangements?
Obviously it’s not that simple, it’s more like a vicious circle, but still. There’s a once popular doctrine that social conditions created and maintained by enlightened authoritarianism (or even enlightened totalitarianism?) would lead to a radical positive change in ‘human nature’. A ‘New Man’ would gradually emerge, prioritizing collective interests over personal. Steven Pinker would disagree, but still, that the theory.
Tim Worstall 10.02.21 at 9:38 am
I do grasp the background here – the assumption that capitalism must go, some form of socialist organisation should or must replace it, the radically egalitarian society and so on.. But even so this does seem a little exclusionary:
“Socialists who think they do not have an obligation to offer real, practicable, designs, thereby express disdain for those who they are inviting to make commitments and sacrifices and to take the risk of everything going wrong.”
Why is this true only of socialists? Any design needs to meet that standard, doesn’t it?
Jake Gibson 10.02.21 at 12:30 pm
I’m more anti-dystopian than Utopian.
For one thing, one person’s Utopia is another’s dystopia. And we should never underestimate the ability of the human race to fuck up a wet dream.
Russell Arben Fox 10.02.21 at 12:53 pm
Thanks very much for sharing this, Harry! I look forward to reading it, and the whole collection whenever it finally comes out. Wright’s arguments and observations in ERU were some of the most influential on my political thinking that I’ve ever read; I only met the man once, but his impact upon me, with the powerful, ofttimes persnickety, insistence of his ideas, have been with me for years (for one example, see here), and probably will never leave.
JimV 10.02.21 at 2:25 pm
“Here’s is a blueprint.”
British slang?
Speaking as someone who used to do design work that involved blueprints, they are drawn by skilled drafters according to set rules and lots of experience. Occasionally something new is proposed and a preliminary drawing of a prototype must be made, but 1) it is made using established procedures as much as possible; and 2) if after much testing a useful design results, the final manufacturing blueprint will vary considerably from the initial proposal.
That is to say, like everything else, design works by trial and error, with a large ratio of errors to trials. Make your blueprints, but don’t trust them until you have empirical confirmation.
morg 10.02.21 at 2:55 pm
Does it not? The stakes get higher and higher, it’s true, but every political development since the original turn to (pick your poison) animal eusociality, agrarianism, language, religion, etc is in a sense a second chance to go back over and improve or replace an imperfect institution; and the dialectical process of revision you discuss is as well a study in second chances.
CarlD 10.02.21 at 7:55 pm
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.†– Dwight D. Eisenhower
Matt 10.02.21 at 8:38 pm
Interesting stuff, Harry. I wonder how you see it connecting (if at all) to the debates in political philosophy around the need for/desirability of ideal theory. (I’ve only skimmed the paper, and saw two quick mentions there, but it didn’t seem like this was the focus. If I’ve missed more discussion, pointing me to it is helpful!) I have in mind in particular claims made by people like Sen, Gauss, and Elizabeth Anderson that we don’t need, and maybe shouldn’t even want, ideal theory, because a more piecemeal working out of problems will suffice. In an interview (I think) Anderson said something like, “when driving at night, you can only see as far as your headlights, but can still get all the way home.” I thought that was a good metaphor, but that it showed almost the exact opposite of what she was suggesting. You can get home that way – but usually only if you either already know where you’re going and how to get there, or else if there are clear signs along the way – otherwise you might just go around in circles or get totally lost. As someone whose read a couple of the ‘real utopias’ volumes, but not as much of Wright’s own work, it seems like his idea has a lot of similarity with “ideal theory”. Does that seem right?
Harry 10.03.21 at 1:05 am
Thanks Matt,
In the first version I did talk about the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction, and put Erik’s work in the ideal camp (I think I’m on the same side as you about this — I don’t see how you can do non-ideal theorizing without the guidance of ideal theorizing, and the various analogies that are supposed to help — like the headlights; the the comparing the height of mountains — all seem to me to point toward that, once you bring out the hidden assumptions). But… I anticipate that the audience for the book will mainly be sociologists, not philosophers, so I really tried only to say what was needed for defending the project to them.
John Quiggin 10.03.21 at 4:45 am
It’s worth looking over the book event we did on Envisioning Real Utopias back in 2013. My contribution focused on a defence of utopian thinking as a counterweight to the managerialism and an incrementalism of day-to-day politics in a neoliberal society
https://crookedtimber.org/2013/03/16/why-utopia/
J-D 10.03.21 at 7:42 am
The end of this sentence has gone missing:
J-D 10.03.21 at 7:49 am
Something’s gone wrong with the numbering here:
Stephen 10.03.21 at 9:09 am
Alan White@6: You mention as one aspect of capitalism’s wrongness “the role of capitalism in manipulating the emotions of huge masses of people, and as I suppose always through the manipulation of controlled media”.Â
Do you really believe that socialist states have not used intensely controlled media to manipulate the emotions of huge masses of people? Is it the manipulation you object to, or the capitalism?
Frank Wilhoit 10.03.21 at 2:35 pm
As always, it is much simpler and much worse, and it deserves to be stripped down to the bones so that things can be called by their right names.
The problem with capitalism is perverse incentives. ALL of the incentives of EVERY private enterprise are perverse. The game between business and customers is zero-sum. What is good for the customers is bad for the business and vice versa. There are no exceptions.
Historically the two approaches to addressing this problem have been regulation and public ownership. Both lead to corruption.
…but you know what else leads to corruption? Pretense. Pretending that there is no problem; pretending that the problem is other than what it is; pretending that the solutions in use are not in use, or that they are working when in fact they are not. These things are generously explanatory of corruption all by themselves; they need no help. And they are utterly corrosive: no one who participates in such a system can respect it or themselves.
Business have spent living memory pursuing regulatory capture, with, at this date, nearly complete success. We pretend otherwise; but the point here is the parallel pretense, namely that capitalism is self-regulating. All right, so it is, but what if it is? The mechanisms of internal regulation can be captured just as easily as those of external regulation; and so they have been. So there is no relief there: but, again, we pretend otherwise.
Who still makes an argument for capitalism in light of these facts is arguing for universal unaccountability (and pretending otherwise). But unaccountability leads to corruption.
The keystone of the arch is the understanding that the debate about capitalism is (despite pretense) the debate about corruption, and the debate about corruption is (despite pretense) the debate about who benefits from corruption.
Seekonk 10.03.21 at 5:24 pm
While we look for a blueprint, I suggest that we might also focus on a goal: optimal standard of living.
21st century technological capability means that clean water, sanitary toilet facilities, health care, etc., should surely be universal. And we should be seeking maximal leisure time and disposable income.
Harry 10.03.21 at 5:40 pm
Tim Worstall @8: “Why is this true only of socialists? Any design needs to meet that standard, doesn’t it?”
Yes, absolutely. I suspect that the socialists I am specifically targeting in the paper are particularly prone to disregarding it. But, on reflection about so much political discourse, maybe that’s a little unfair.
J-D 10.03.21 at 11:46 pm
I read that in a comment on a blog post, so it must be true.
Tim Worstall 10.04.21 at 2:12 pm
” I suspect that the socialists I am specifically targeting in the paper are particularly prone to disregarding it.”
Well, yes, but then I would think that.
Trader Joe 10.04.21 at 3:24 pm
“History does not suggest that there will be plenty of second chances if we get it wrong in one instance. ”
I appreciate you may be using this as something of a call to action and intend it as more a throw-away line than an actual truism – but in fact History is nothing but second chances (and third chances, and twentieth chances). Indeed implicit in any dialectic is the presumption of second chances.
Kiwanda 10.04.21 at 4:13 pm
The recent death of Charles Mills has brought up his concerns with ideal vs. non-ideal, specifically as this relates to race. Despite some discussion here and here, I don’t quite understand where he’s coming from; this clip suggests that he thinks that Rawls and others think that the US is close-enough to ideal, that it could characterized as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage”. There’s some evidence that Rawls did not think that; but that’s not the entirety of Mills’s critique. Closer to here: an attempt at a summary by someone of what Ingrid thinks on ideal vs. non-ideal.
engels 10.05.21 at 12:43 am
How can anyone judge whether those commitments, sacrifices, and risks are worth taking, without being offered a blueprint? You wouldn’t ask to redesign someone’s house, still less ask them to pay for it, and still less to risk their lives for it, without offering them a blueprint.
Apologies if I’m stating the obvious but have you noticed that the house is ON FIRE?
Stephen 10.05.21 at 7:27 am
Possibly worth learning from the other Engels (Frederick):
“People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make. That is what Hegel calls the irony of history, an irony which few historic personalities escape.“
Letter to Vera Zasulich, 1885. I would say, an accurate prophecy on the whole.
Harry 10.05.21 at 2:13 pm
Stephen @28: thanks, that’s great.
engels 10.05.21 at 2:44 pm
Isn’t Stephen’s/Engels Sr’s point (which I agree with ofc) rather probematic for the “blueprints for the houses of the future” approach to socialism? What’s the point of choosing the bath taps years in advance if the holiday cottage you’re digging the foundations for turns out to be a tower block?
burritoboy 10.05.21 at 5:01 pm
Completely by coincidence, the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is currently running a reading group on Envisioning Real Utopias. Also by coincidence, I run it and the next meeting is tonight at 6:30pm Pacific Time. We are discussing Chapters 6 and 7.
The Zoom link is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83957465708
Harry, we would love for you to present to the group at a future point.
engels 10.05.21 at 6:19 pm
Btw should say I don’t think it’s fair to conflate Wright’s Real Utopias project with Cohen-style justice-mongering. Wright evidently adopted a lot of Cohen’s anti-Marxian arguments but his project is quite disinct from Cohen’s and stands and falls independently of it imo (whatever he may have thought himself).
burritoboy 10.07.21 at 5:33 pm
“Isn’t Stephen’s/Engels Sr’s point (which I agree with ofc) rather probematic for the “blueprints for the houses of the future†approach to socialism? What’s the point of choosing the bath taps years in advance if the holiday cottage you’re digging the foundations for turns out to be a tower block?”
The book spends a fair bit of time discussing this. Wright has a rather tall order in this one book, because, of at least one central problem, is that socialists do not tend to focus on politics as politics very much. (It’s strange because socialists tend to think they are so much focused on politics – but they’re not: they’re focused on things above and below and structural and critical and yadda yadda – but most don’t actually take politics on the level of politics very seriously.) So Wright has to do a lot of work within the book explaining and expanding on that difficulty.
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