In ‘a tale of two Marxisms’, his stimulating critique of the life-work of Erik Olin Wright, Michael Burawoy raises a crucial question for the left.footnote1 What is the relationship between capitalist development and the project of socialism? In the classical Marxist schema, the competitive and unplanned nature of capitalist investment meant that manufacturing overproduction would result in periodic, and perhaps worsening, crises. At the same time, capitalism was producing a new class, the industrial proletariat, with the capacity to establish another form of social production based on democratic planning—and with a keen interest in so doing. The scientific analysis of capitalist development was thus intimately linked to the socialist political project. The factory and, later, the large corporation contained the cell form of the planned society to come, while the working class provided the social muscle for its achievement.
The strong point in this account has always been its explanation of the rhythms of capitalist production; its weak point was its sociology of class formation. As Bernstein observed in 1899, capitalist society does not simply produce class polarizations, but a host of intermediate positions as well. Subsequent thinkers, from Sorel to Wright and Burawoy’s ‘sociological Marxism’ and beyond, have pondered whether these layers could unite in an anticapitalist coalition.footnote2 Yet as Burawoy points out, Wright’s interventions in this discussion were somewhat paradoxical. Rather than producing a new synthesis of class analysis and socialist politics, the two demarcated different phases of his intellectual career: class theories and empirical investigations of increasing scale and complexity preoccupied Wright through the seventies and eighties; the ambitious international project of Envisioning Real Utopias and its satellite volumes consumed his energies over the next thirty years. In this cursus, class analysis and real utopias seemed to have little to do with one another.
This poses what Burawoy correctly identifies here as the central conundrum of Wright’s work: the move ‘from a class analysis without utopia to utopia without class analysis.’footnote3 What is missing, Burawoy argues, is ‘any consideration of the dynamics of capitalism’, which might have enabled Wright to conceptualize the links between the two. In his conclusion, Burawoy asks what theoretical resources might help in the endeavour of linking ‘real utopias’ to capitalism and suggests that Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944) could be a good place to start. How should we assess this analysis? Burawoy is absolutely right in his assessment of the central question posed by Wright’s work—how to link class analysis with ‘utopia’—and I would agree that the solution lies in an account of capitalist development. However, I have several doubts about Burawoy’s attempt to solve the ‘conundrum’ Wright leaves us with. These centre around Wright and Burawoy’s conceptualization of ‘real utopias’ and Burawoy’s deployment of Polanyi.
The first problem is to clarify what exactly is meant by ‘real utopia’—both the nature of its ‘reality’ and its existence as an alternative social form. According to Burawoy, the term refers to ‘actually existing organizations, institutions and social movements which operated within capitalist society, but followed anticapitalist principles’—‘concrete phantasies’ that exemplify the possibility of a post-capitalist future, and which might form the basis of ‘a counter-movement to the commodification of everything.’footnote4 How do we decide whether a particular institution or social movement is anticapitalist or not? Neither Wright nor Burawoy are particularly explicit; but they seem to suggest that any organization run on non-profit principles can be described as anticapitalist. In Wright’s terminology, these involve social empowerment; in Burawoy’s, decommodification.
It’s worth underlining the mode of conceptualization at work here. For both Burawoy and Wright, the capitalist or anticapitalist character of an organization can be defined in terms of its ‘principles’. The one institution for which this approach is entirely appropriate is the political party. Since parties aim to use state-power to achieve their goals, something at least can be learned about them from studying their programmes or ‘principles’. But, strikingly, parties are mostly absent from Burawoy’s list of potential candidates for real utopia, and entirely absent from Wright’s. This is particularly surprising in Burawoy’s case, given the centrality of Gramsci to his understanding of Marxism; the Prison Notebooks clearly identify the party as the key agent of socialist transformation.footnote5
Instead, non-party institutions dominate their analyses of ‘real utopias’. Here the problems with their conceptualization become clear. In extracting the ‘principles’ of Wikipedia, participatory budgeting, Mondragon or the university, they are in fact proceeding in a highly abstract way. For ‘actually existing’ institutions ‘actually exist’ in capitalist society, and their capitalist or anticapitalist character is determined by their relationship to the whole of which they are a part. It can only be determined by putting them in the context of capitalist society, and asking whether they serve to reproduce that society or not. The attempt to define a ‘real utopia’, however specified, in abstraction from a notion of society as a whole, faces intractable methodological difficulties. It is a version of what Parsons called, following Whitehead, the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, or what Lukács termed ‘reification’, the process of conceptual ‘isolation and fragmentation’ from the ‘whole life of society’.footnote6
In this case, the term ‘real utopia’ is applied to an abstracted part of society—an institution—when properly speaking it refers to a totality of social relationships. An analogy may clarify the problem. Calling an organization ‘anticapitalist’ just because it isn’t oriented toward profitability or doesn’t run on market principles is a bit like calling orange peel ‘anti-orangist’ because it is oily and bitter, as opposed to juicy and sweet. The mistake is to isolate the parts whose relationship constitutes the thing one refers to as ‘an orange’, whose bitter peel protects the juicy flesh. Similarly, the non-profit public schools and universities that Burawoy cites may function to reproduce capitalism by providing free or cheap knowledge and high-skilled labour. Among Wright’s examples, the Basque Country’s Mondragon cooperative network, though imbued with social-Catholic values, became a capitalist firm (with a somewhat peculiar structure) through the compulsion of the market.footnote7 Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre soon became a matter of achieving democratic popular consent for limited municipal budgets. Wikipedia, conceived by the Ayn Randian Jimmy Wales, successfully mobilizes unpaid labour to provide a public good, but can hardly be said to pose a threat to capitalist property relations. This is not to say that there is nothing to be learned from these experiments in making, ruling and knowing; quite the contrary. But we should be careful not to dress them up as more ‘anticapitalist’—more radically pre-figurative—than they actually are.