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Building Real Utopias: The Emerging Project of Evolutionary Reconstruction

In his famous 1845 eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx declared: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” By “change” he meant systemic change, of course. It is a message that has all too often fallen by the wayside in the academic and political debates among the modern “philosophers” of our time. Today, more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failure of state socialism in the Soviet Union and in what was then Eastern (now Central) Europe still looms large. But the question remains: “If you don’t want capitalism and you don’t want socialism, what do you want?” In tackling precisely this question, Erik Olin Wright performs a valuable service. Although we differ from Wright’s approach in certain key areas, three of his contributions are particularly worth highlighting at the outset: First, Wright develops a typology for examining capitalist, state, and popular power in distinct social, political, and economic spheres. Second, Wright’s idea of “hybrid structures” provides a useful framework for thinking about a range of potential political-economic regimes with different combinations of state, capitalist, and social power. Third, stemming from these first two contributions, Wright provides a fresh way of thinking about the problem of transition from present day American corporate capitalism, for example, to a more democratic political economy. The economic, social, and state power spheres that Wright develops, of course, are interconnected and not fully independent of each other. Nonetheless, Wright is able to use his distinctions to illuminate possible axes of resistance to capitalism. These include ways to leverage the obvious tensions between democracy and capitalism, but also less obvious areas of tension, such as a variety of divergent logics among business leaders and government officials. Also important is Wright’s emphasis on hybrid structures—“no actual economy has been purely capitalist” Wright reminds us. The point is at once simple and obvious, yet profound. Too often, progressives and radicals get mired in a debate between the twin poles of reform and revolution. Reform, of course, is often devoid of significant impact—and, these days, increasingly so in the United States where globalization and the decline of labor unions have combined to constrain liberal politicians, especially in the arena of economic policy. Meanwhile, revolution vacillates between being a meaningless Madison Avenue advertising slogan or, if taken seriously, a seemingly impossible outcome. If reform is devoid of meaning and revolution unviable, why should anyone be surprised when we encounter political apathy? Wright points us in a different direction: the question is not revolution or reform—rather, it is about using the levers of power that we do have, where we have them, to effect change that, over