Democratic experimentalism and the socialist compass

Following a talk given by one of my comrades, I determined to read the late, great Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias rather than just grabbing little excerpts of his work on class analysis off the internet. Judging by the comments made by several comrades at the talk, Envisioning Real Utopias is, or at least should be, considered one of the modern classics of socialist theory — it's been widely read and widely beloved in the (admittedly rather small) world of people who read left theory; there are comrades who have acquired multiple copies and lent them to people (sometimes not getting them back — so basically, it's the Good Omens of left theory), which certainly indicates a certain stature. Despite my current level of burnout, which is hovering around "Has to stop and play FreeCell on my phone every two pages" levels and has been for months, I finally made it through all 400 pages.

 

It was definitely worth it. Stylistically, it's fairly accessible by the standards of "full-length theory books written by professional sociologists"; it's certainly not a breezy read but it's pretty good at explaining the jargon it has to use and is otherwise a readable introduction to the subject matter for a reasonably well-educated adult reader. The tone is decidedly not polemic, which can be a nice change of pace when reading leftist writings; it takes a fairly evenhanded, nuanced approach to sorting through the various criticisms and counter-criticisms of each topic it covers. It is also nice and straightforwardly organized: There is a prefatory section, explaining the Real Utopias project and Wright's understanding of the tasks of "emancipatory social science"; there is a diagnostic section, in which he critiques arguments in favor of capitalism and explores why an alternative is desirable; there is an "alternatives" section, which looks at seven different alternative structural proposals and a handful of case studies in building non-capitalist institutions of various sorts; and lastly, there is a "transformation" section, which discusses different approaches to creating social change. Since it covers a lot of ground, some of the coverage of specific projects must necessarily be a bit shallow, but it's meticulously cited so the reader has more than enough resources on hand if they wish to learn about, say, the Mondragon cooperatives in greater depth. And the information that is there is still quite solid and informative -- this isn't a book to rip through; there's far too much to chew on.

 

I think this book is an especially good fit for DSA comrades who want to move beyond ABCs of Socialism-level stuff because it fits very well within the DSA's general multitendency ethos. Some other organizations  — and even comrades within DSA itself  —  sometimes lament our lack of a single political "line," seeming to take it for granted that not having one unified plan for smashing capitalism means we're just hopelessly bumbling along. Olin Wright does a good job of laying out the the reasoning for taking a "democratic experimentalist" approach to social change and unifies a seemingly disparate bundle of projects under the guiding principles of a "socialist compass." The book doesn't so much set out a method for building socialism as it does set out methods for figuring out how to build socialism, which, considering nobody has actually figured out how to build socialism yet (and anyone who says they have is selling something — in this case, probably newspapers) is much more useful.