Erik Olin Wright: Transcending capitalism, SCORAI Colloquium on "Consumption and Social Change"

thank you I will take my instruction seriously to keep my comments to 2025 minutes or so so that at 12:30 we can shift over to discussion and what I thought I would do is not march through the central arguments of the paper although what I have to say is fully congruent with the paper but rather focus specifically on the problem of transformation and just very briefly to launch that discussion embedded in the broader agenda so the big agenda in which my work on real utopias is embedded is what I call a man's Batory social science which I construct as having four big tasks which have to be accomplished and if we could really accomplish all four we'd have a fantastically powerful and coherent approach to changing the world in the way we want so the four tasks are elaborating the normative foundations the diagnosis and critique the second task is the diagnosis and critique of the world as it is on the basis of those normative foundations the third task is elaborating an account of alternatives that would better realize those normative principles given the diagnosis and critique of the world as it is and the fourth task is a theory of transformation how to get from here to there I think the fourth tasks is the hardest of all its you can ask a first-year undergraduate in a big sociology course as I do tell me what kind of world you would like to live in imagine what would be an alternative set of institution and just don't worry about how we can get there well anybody can come up with something know some of its pretty cracked it's not necessarily very well informed but still those three tasks are very hard clear normative foundations is not a simple matter the diagnosis and critique of the world as it is is what so critical social scientists have been doing but it's hard and of course carefully theorizing alternatives that have any plausibility as viable and sustainable institutions is tough but all of that I think is fundamentally easier than the problem of how do you get from here to there and partially that's because there's so much contingency uncontrollable contingency in the problem of transformation so I'm gives me what I want to do is focus mostly on the transformation issue what that means and that's really where the idea of real utopias is located let me just briefly though comment on not so much on the normative foundations that's a whole big discussion I suppose one little note for those of you have read the paper I have further elaborated the normative foundations and their current work I'm doing beyond what's in the paper just to signal that to you my current framing of this issue is that there are four interconnected the normative foundations which I to give you the labels are equality democracy community and sustainability those four I think from the point of view of this circle of people adding sustainability as a part of a quartet of normative issues but I see sustainability as in effect the sustainability of the three other normative foundations there's an egalitarian principle of a just society a democratic principle of an empowered society and a communitarian principle of solidarity and all of them are vulnerable to erosion intergenerationally and so the sustainability problem is basically how do we create a world for future generations in which the values we hope to realize in the present equality democracy community are inherited and sustainable in the long run that's not anchoring sustainability just in the environmental issue the environmental issue becomes part of the necessary conditions for the sustainability of the just society a democratic society in a solid heuristic society well that's not what I want to talk about I'm sure there's lots of you who many of you who would like to engage those themes of course in our discussion we can do that as well let me say a little bit about the diagnosis and critique I focus on capitalism as a institutional complex that organizes the way economic practices take place the way in which we engage in economic activities capitalism is one of a variety of ways of doing it and I have a particularly of both analyzing capitalism and how it works and criticizing it my work is very much embedded in the Marxist tradition in this respect indeed one way of even defining the Marxist tradition is it's a tradition of anti-capitalist theory that insists on the necessity of thinking about alternatives I mean practically everything that is interesting in the Marxist tradition can be subsumed under the idea of a systematic scientifically rooted critique of capitalism that points to an alternative not just carping at the world as it is but both imagining and theorizing the problem of creating the world as it could be well let me just briefly say something about my critique of capitalism I want to pose two problems first we live in a world now in which capitalism generates enormous harms and yet most people seem to believe it's the only way of organizing a complex economic system specifically with respect to the environment the argument would go something like this capitalism inherently generates environmentally destructive forms of economic growth this isn't a contingent fact of capitalism it's an intrinsic fact of capitalism it's built into the very way that is organized its organizational principles that doesn't mean that you can't have better or worse forms of capitalism but it's an intrinsic feature of a capitalist way of organizing economic activity namely an economic system in which resources are allocated to maximize profits which are appropriated by private persons you know if you have an economic system in which the way you allocate resources is to maximize your profits and individuals appropriate those maximize profits so they ask what's good for me in that process if you get a system like that it's going to be environmentally destructive growth and the accompanying problem of consumerism are intrinsic to capitalism and the question then is can these negative effects of capitalism unlimited growth we can discuss exactly the nuances of what that idea means and its accompanying consumerism can this be neutralized without transcending capitalism itself is there a way of having capitalism and having a non environmentally destructive form of economic activity with consumerism under control is that possible as a stable sustainable system that's the first problem the second problem is connected but actually I think theoretically needs to be thought of as a distinct issue so the first one is that capitalism generates these harms but the second problem is capitalism also generates configurations of power that obstruct solutions to the harms it creates this is really the key to understanding why capitalism is such a stable social system in spite of its disruptions it's chaos it's harms does the socio-economic system generate a stable system is has the following character a stable socio-economic system is stable when a distributions it generates distributions of power in which those that benefit from the operation of the system also have the power to block challenges and that's the fantastic feature of capitalism it generates systems of power in which power is allocated to precisely those classes of people who benefit most from the harms it generates now in the 19th century that was thought and Marx indeed thought this that if you democratize the political system that would totally disrupt that connection Marx wrote you know before democratic institutions were very widespread in capitalism to paraphrase it the capitalist class would be crazy to give the franchise to workers I mean this is a lunatic solution to their problems if you give workers who are harmed by the system the power what's going to happen it's not gonna be stable social order it's actually from a sociological point of view and an incredible achievement of the social structures of capitalism as it developed that it managed to develop through a very difficult process of trial and error one might say a way of having stable formal democratic institutions which are not phony I mean even with all the corruption of American democracy it's not a phony democracy it's a thin democracy but not a phony democracy how do you have a stable democratic world along with the private appropriation of the social surplus and its use for personal gain given all the harms that generates well that's the second problem of capitalism that it's managed to successfully create that configuration of power to block the challenges to a system that generates harms the problem here is not that we don't have very good and clear ideas about how to avoid most of these harms it's you know I'm not saying that we have a nice blueprint for a future world in which everything we know in advance will work smoothly of course not but it is not a great mystery what you need to do in order to create sustainable stable patterns of consumption that would be compatible with the environment in a world with this population even given uneven development we've got solutions to that and that's something that you've all worked on a lot it's the problem that the concentrations of power created by the advantages in this world block the movement to an alternative world now what I want to really focus on is then how do you challenge the system what are the what's our menu of ways of doing it well I think there are basically four menu four ways that you can be a committed anti-capitalist and imagine you're dealing with capitalism in my in the abstract which I sent I only listed three but I've added a fourth recently for forests that it so it's almost for literary purposes aesthetic purposes as you'll see okay then these can be captured with them with slogans here are your four slogans smashing capitalism is the first way taming capitalism is the second escaping capitalism is the hippie route and eroding capitalism is the real utopian route okay let me explain what's mashing taming the the playfully added one is escaping and eroding as a sidebar here as a as a theoretical sociologist whenever I see a list of three things I know there's a missing fourth and that's because underlying any typology our dimensions they're not just lists and dimensions typically our binary in their labeling and their conception even if there's continua and if you've got three of something there's a missing cell in the 2x2 table and I think escaping capitalism that was the missing cell in my previous ability for those of you who teach so if there are other sociologists a really nice thing to do for advanced undergraduates and graduate students is just ask them to produce for four fold tables to buy two tables on whatever they're working on and it's very revealing of theoretical ideas it helps to clarify things okay enough of that a smashing capitalism this is identified with revolutionary socialism and communism the basic logic of the strategy can be called a ruptura strategy the basic idea of eruption strategy is we live in a system that is intolerable and it's Unruh formable you cannot successfully modify it in a way that deals with its harms because every success will be undermined quickly that is you can't stabili succeed what you have to do is wipe it out and start with a clean slate smash first build second the typical scenario for this is to try to seize the power of the state because smashing requires a lot of power and the state is the typical center of power which makes that possible so the idea of of the classical revolutionary vision is to see state power to very rapidly change the institutions of the state itself to make it a suitable instrument for smashing capitalism because the prior the state was just not organized in a way suitable to that task so you transform the state rapidly that's the revolutionary moment and then you use the transformed state to transform the basic under law social structure this fantasy I would argue is expressed in the famous lines of the wobbly song solidarity forever in our hands is placed a power greater than their holded gold greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old now those are stirring lines and that reflects the rupture 'el strategy the problem is after the empirical evidence of attempts at this in the 20th century that we do know that you can bring a new world from the ashes of the old it's just not the kind of new world we want what we we have no example of a rupture 'el strategy that has successfully been able to build a democratic a gala Terry and emancipatory alternative on the ashes of the old so while I do think that there are aspects of the rupture old vision which remain important the notion that there are winners and losers not everything is smiley self positive some games you sometimes have to defeat opponents in order to make progress and that in particular institutions you may need ruptures there may be sites of rupture partial rupture as part of any project of social change so there may be discontinuities but the idea of a system level discontinuity I think is just not on that is a fantasy and it's an attractive fantasy especially for young people I mean I continue to have wonderful revolutionary undergraduates who are just so frustrated and want change now of a systemic nature and I don't even try to talk them out of it because I think it's an important part of their self-development to come to terms with the limits of that idea not for me to instruct them to get rid of it prematurely but I don't think smashing capitalism is a viable approach towards transcending capitalism well the second historically important approaches taming capitalism this is what progressive social democracy thought it could do the basic logic of taming strategy as taming capitalism is what I call a symbiotic strategy so the first one was a little up chiral the second one is symbiotic the basic idea is to introduce changes in the rules of the game that simultaneously solve problems in the functioning of capitalism that are seen as problems by elites so you're doing something to elicit significant segments of dominant classes and elites because they see the transformations that are being proposed as solving a problem that they have difficulty solving so you simultaneously solve problems for them but also make life better for ordinary people in ways that expand their capacity for popular power this means using the state and collaborating with elites in ways that enhance the prospects for future transformation rather than curtail them by expanding the domains of popular power democracy itself was that kind of reform the very emergence of democratic institutions in a capitalist society was one that solved problems for elites while at the same time expanding the scope of popular power this is using the state then rather than just smashing the state this strategy was enormous ly successful way beyond the expectations certainly of any revolutionary thinkers in a brief period three or four decades there was this golden era so-called after World War two when in significant parts of the of Europe and to some extent in the United States as well there was what could be called a positive class compromise in which capitalism was in significant ways tamed and it became way more egalitarian with much greater capacity to intervene to deal with its externalities than would have been thought possible a globalization and financialization of capital have weakened but not destroyed that possibility I think it's easy to exaggerate the incapacitation of states and democratic processes that's come from globalization but nevertheless there is an incapacitating the the reason why there this undermines possibilities is that when wealth has a capacity to move to exit when it since when can strain Tsar imposed on it that undermines the ability to impose those constraints and that's what globalization combined with financialization it's really two together that's this nasty bit it's not just globalization in the sense of trade it's globalization in the sense of the speed at which capital can move that's the feature which makes it just too easy for people who have personal command over wealth to decide I don't like what's going on here I'm going to move elsewhere with relatively small costs not none there are transactions costs they face but it's relatively small whereas when wealth was geographically cabined in a particular place it was vulnerable to popular forces and in which compromises could be forged which didn't make life terrible for the elites it just meant that they weren't getting the maximum returns that they would otherwise get that's taming capitalism the third one which I've added for literary purposes escaping capitalism simply says the world is intolerable I can't put up with us anymore I'm gonna find a way of just living my own life voluntary simplicity in the wood there's a right-wing version the militia movement in Idaho where you know people go and create these fortresses of survivalist armed encampments and there's the hippie version the countercultural version but is essentially giving up the project of trans in capitalism had such by transforming just ones immediate environment in ways that are more makaula terian and communitarian that's escaping capitalism no longer an attempt at any vision of how you can deal with the system as a whole but you can deal with the the immediate environment of one's own life a lot of the voluntary simplicity I you know that's a complicated expression it encompasses many different strands but a significant piece of that is escapist in that way the fourth idea though is eroding capitalism this is less visible it it hasn't been trumpeted as much as taming and smashing as ways forward it has some roots in the anarchist tradition of anti capitalism a pendulum in the 19th century in his arguments for worker cooperatives it was essentially in a road in capitalism perspective what Putin argued was you create worker owned firms they will simply be so much more desirable to work in and more effect efficient than capitalism because you won't need managers to supervise them that workers won't put up with capitalism anymore they'll all join workers and own cooperatives and capitalism were wither just because it'll be out competed by these better forms of firms and when who don't introduce that idea initially Marx ridiculed it he thought it was completely stupid he called them petty little experiments that would amount to nothing but later in his life actually Marx celebrated this is kind of a nice story he thought worker poppers were fantastic and that they really were wonderful models for the world as it could be and felt that the reason why they couldn't thrive in capitalism was not because they wouldn't weren't more efficient than capitalism but it was because the power of capital simply wouldn't let them and he didn't say it this way but I think one can if you read his account a big part was because capitalists controlled credit markets and it was impossible for worker owned firms to get credit in ways that would enable them to scale up in the way the capitalist firms well whether he was right about that diagnosis or not there is a certain pedigree in the anti-capitalist tradition for the vision of eroding I like to think of this as a way of thinking of how do we challenge and transcend capitalism that's more like how capitalism came to supplant feudalism then has typically been seen after all if you go back to the 12th or 11th century in feudal societies you already begin to see what could be called the nascent seeds of pre capitalist relations in the cities there was emerging merchant classes that were investing and engaging in competition and accumulating capital but in very small niches they occupied the spaces where they could do their thing inside of a social order that was organized on very different kinds of principles and then what happens is gradually segments of the feudal elite see advantages in hooking up using that term both in the modern urban sense and and in less salacious terms hooking up with these emerging merchants too because there were problems that they had that could be solved by accumulating some capital through non feudal mechanisms and you know this is a simplified stripped-down version of the story but those emerging merchant enclaves became very corrosive cities grew they became escaped places people could actually leave feudalism and enter an alternative space where different economic practices were possible I refer to a roading capitalism as an interstitial strategy so you have ruptura strategies symbiotic strategies and interstitial strategies building alternatives in the spaces where this is possible build alternative in the cracks niches where it's possible in such a way that the alternatives are not merely an escape from the dominant institutions but in one way or another they erode the dominance of capitalism that's the idea can you can we imagine ways of building alternatives in the spaces where this is possible which prefigure the world you want move us concretely in that direction because you're actually creating building blocks of what you want but and this is the hard part in such a way that it actually is corrosive of the dominance of the principle system production relations system of production capitalism now I think that is completely implausible you know it's just less implausible than the smashing capitalism which is completely implausible and the taming capitalism which seems to have such severe limits under contemporary conditions my general perspective then is that actually we need to combine taming and eroding it's really the combination of interstitial strategies building new institutions from the bottom up and symbiotic strategies eliciting the state to solve problems in the functioning of the existing world it's combining those two that creates some prospect for expanding the viability and vitality of alternative ways of organizing economic activities then what's the scenario so you know scenario building is part of the literary tradition I suppose in which these kinds of ideas this is not a simulation model I don't think it's possible for this kind of thing to do that in a way that generates novel insights you'd have to have them insights first and then you say what equations will give me the insight I already have as opposed to here's a set of coherent equations aha my god that's the way that that's what's possibly denied that's my skepticism not not for the kinds of model building that that the Telus Institute is engaged in but for this kind of problem anyway what would be the kind of scenario so that the scenario is essentially goes something like this what you'd like to do is to build alternative economic practices and spaces for them so that as they expand the people who opt to live in those spaces become less and less vulnerable to the exit strategies of capital so that even if at some point wealth large wealth holders say I can't put up with this anymore I'm going to move my capital you can say goodbye good riddance to bad rubbish we don't need you and you don't need them because you have built sufficiently robust networks and practices of provisioning of livelihood generation that makes possible the kind of alternative lifestyles and world that you imagine not just for particular persons but for communities there are some aspects of this kind of thinking in some of the more radical versions of transition town discussions from time to time one can one sees this in there's some very interesting work by a guy named Michael Bauwens baw ENS who was the founder of the p2p foundation and he has work on transitioning to a commons based society that's really interesting and it's all basically about how can you build up the social infrastructure of alternative economic practices anchored in the peer-to-peer Commons idea but including material production and land Trust's for urban agriculture and all sorts of other elements how can you build this up in ways that generates sufficient law hood four people provisioning that makes the system more resilient against counter moves by powerful actors well that's almost exactly a half hour from when I started one last little Kota so a key thing is to not think of this as just the anarchist moment that is the idea of what can we build from the bottom up ignoring the structures of power I think there are crucial ways in which this has to interface with the state and one of the what I think is a pivotal idea is unconditional basic income so unconditional basic income requires state action that cannot be done from the bottom up it has to involve a mechanism for appropriating part of the social surplus maybe distributing it to the population on a per capita basis unconditional basic income can be thought of as a mechanism which makes possible people opting for an alternative economic circuit makes it possible for people to full fully engage in building these alternative economic institutions in a way that's blocked if they only way they can get a stream of income sufficient to live in a reasonable way is by participating in a significant way in the capitalist economy either in labor markets or in other kinds of markets so I think basic income which is a feasible reform it's a symbiotic reform because it solves various kinds of problems for the capital system basically them can actually make capitalism work better in some ways it's on the agenda in some European countries there's going to be a referendum on it in Switzerland next year I believe certainly being discussed in various places I think that's a key non reformist reform to use an older formulation inside of capitalist economies that can open up the space then for this more bottom-up building of alternative economic organizations all right enough introduction you

Channel: SCORAI

Views: 6,744

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, Capitalism (Political Ideology), SCORAI, sustainable consumption, Tellus Institute, systemic change, University Of Wisconsin-Madison (College/University)

Id: X-KcHtYCtTs

Length: 33min 26sec (2006 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 26 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/logicwon]

The Question and Answer session associated with this video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZXGD3YO_Q

[u/[deleted]]

Great hair!

[u/logicwon]

This appears to be Erik Olin Wright's first time on this subreddit...enjoy :)

[u/santsi]

Interesting! A perspective that's neither the traditional Marxist view of directly taking down capitalism nor the Smith's view of pleading to the rich class and their sense of prestige to support public projects.