Slides from a presentation given on Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias - TASC offices, Parliament St, Dublin 2. 12 December 2013.

1. Transforming Capitalism Through
Real Utopias: A Critical
Engagement
TASC, Dublin
12 December 2013

2. It is not possible to leapfrog transitions.
The challenge for those seeking to transform the world is
to hold on to their emancipatory ideals ‘without
embarrassment or cynicism’ while remaining ‘fully
cognizant of the deep complexities and contradictions of
realizing those ideals.’ (Wright 2012: 3)

3. It is not possible to leapfrog transitions.
The challenge for those seeking to transform the world is
to hold on to their emancipatory ideals ‘without
embarrassment or cynicism’ while remaining ‘fully
cognizant of the deep complexities and contradictions of
realizing those ideals.’ (Wright 2012: 3)
The types of real utopias he has in mind are impossible
without the transformation of capitalist ‘power relations
within the economy in ways that deepen and broaden the
possibility of meaningful democracy.’ (Wright 2012: 4)

4. Overall goal:
All people would have broadly equal access to the social
and material conditions necessary for living a flourishing
life.
All people would have broadly equal access to the
necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions
about things that affect their lives.
Future generations should have access to the social and
material conditions to live flourishing lives at least at the
same level as the present generation

5. Capitalism:
• Allows private wealth to affect political power
• Excludes crucial economic decisions from public
discourse
• Allows workplace dictatorships
• Generates huge societal inequalities
• Threatens sustainability through its relentless pursuit of
profit-seeking growth
Not all societal problems are reducible to capitalism, but
‘exploring real utopian alternatives to capitalism is an
especially pressing matter in this historical period.’ (Wright 2012: 6)

6. Possible counter-capitalist institutions and practices:
Wikipedia
Participatory budgeting
Public libraries
Solidarity finance
Worker-owned cooperatives
Urban agriculture
Internet-based reciprocity economies
Randomocracy
Unconditional basic income

7. Participatory socialism:
‘The transformation of power relations over economic
activity, both in terms of how social power is directly
involved in shaping economic activity and how it indirectly
shapes economic activity through the democratization of
the state.’ (Wright 2012: 19)

8. The fact that these alternatives have been around for so
long means that capitalism has had time not only to absorb
these alternatives and nullify them but to actually make
them fully-fledged capitalist strategies of marketization
and financialisation.
Today, social enterprises are put forward by capitalism ‘as
an evolution to public bodies.
As we speak, the shedding of state services within the
social economy – in effect the mass re-privatization of that
social sphere – is being enabled by some of the very
mechanisms that Wright puts forward as socialist-building
strategies.

10. Financialization refers to the increasing importance
of financial markets, financial motives, financial
institutions and financial elites in the operation of
the economy and its governing institutions, both at
the national and international levels.
Gerald Epstein, ‘Financialization, Rentier Interests, and Central Bank Policy’,2002
1970s – The Monetarist revolution
1980s – war on labour
1990s – Credit as a substitute for wage increases
2000s – Credit solution for wage stagnation fails
Present day – open conflict over monetary policy once again

12. “In the case of the United States, financialization during
the 1990s led to a closer alignment of large industrial
and financial firms in the U.S., leading to a greater
emphasis by Alan Greenspan and the U.S. Federal
Reserve in financial asset appreciation as a goal of
monetary policy.”
Gerald Epstein (2001)

13. “In the case of the United States, financialization during
the 1990s led to a closer alignment of large industrial
and financial firms in the U.S., leading to a greater
emphasis by Alan Greenspan and the U.S. Federal
Reserve in financial asset appreciation as a goal of
monetary policy.”
Gerald Epstein (2001)
“The goal of monetary expansion has been to do just
enough to stabilize financial asset prices without going
far enough to produce catch-up growth in the labor
market”
Matthew Yglesias, Rentiers and Financialization (2011)

14. “What [the wealthy], businesses and
banks share is a common interest in
supporting asset prices, a lack of
interest in seeking full employment
unless it is a prerequisite for
supporting asset prices, and an
aversion to any policies that can
trigger wage inflation.”
Ashwin Parameswares (2011)

16. Over the past thirty years, despite
their being essential to human
life, neoliberal restructuring across
the world has privatised, eroded and
demolished our shared
resources, and ushered in a ‘crisis of
social reproduction.’
‘Cuts are a Feminist Issue’, Soundings
(Dec 2011), p.73.

17. The term social reproduction encompasses
all the means by which society reproduces
its families, citizens and workers. It includes
all the labour that is necessary for a society
to reproduce itself: the biological
production of people and workers, and all
the social practices that sustain the
population – bearing children, raising
children, performing emotional work,
providing clothing and food, and cooking
and cleaning.

18. The term social reproduction encompasses
all the means by which society reproduces
its families, citizens and workers. It includes
all the labour that is necessary for a society
to reproduce itself: the biological
production of people and workers, and all
the social practices that sustain the
population – bearing children, raising
children, performing emotional
work, providing clothing and food, and
cooking and cleaning.
As a concept social reproduction has been
key to feminist social theory, because it
challenges the usual distinctions that are
made between productive and
reproductive labour, or between the labour
market and the home.

19. The term social reproduction encompasses
all the means by which society reproduces
its families, citizens and workers. It includes
all the labour that is necessary for a society
to reproduce itself: the biological
production of people and workers, and all
the social practices that sustain the
population – bearing children, raising
children, performing emotional
work, providing clothing and food, and
cooking and cleaning.
As a concept social reproduction has been
key to feminist social theory, because it
challenges the usual distinctions that are
made between productive and
reproductive labour, or between the labour
market and the home.
Labour in this sphere is often devalued
and privatised, and is typically
performed by women in their ‘double
day’ or ‘second shift’, alongside paid
wage labour. But reproductive labour
of this kind is just as central to
capitalist accumulation as are other
forms of labour, which means that
struggles over its structure and
distribution are fundamental to any
understanding of issues of power and
the relationships between labour and
capital, as well as the potential for
their transformation.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_co
mments/cuts_are_a_feminist_issue

20. Two aspects of modern globalisation:
1. Concentration of capital in fewer
hands and the domination of TNCs
2. The growing role of finance capital
Visible transfers, that is, the trade in
goods, have lost their importance vis-ávis invisible transfers like banking
transport, insurances, tourism.
Finance transactions play the most
important role in this shift.

21. … right from its beginnings the capitalist
economy has been a world system, based
on colonialism and the marginalisation
and exploitation of peripheral countries
and agriculture. This colonial structure
was and is the basis for what became
known as “free trade” in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries
Due to its inner logic of permanent
growth or accumulation, capitalism has
to strive towards universality and
globalism.

22. Colonies were not only necessary to initiate the
process of capital accumulation in what has been
called the period of „primitive accumulation‟ at the
beginning of capitalism. They continue to be
necessary even today to keep the growth mechanism
going.
Therefore we talk of the need for „on-going primitive
accumulation and colonization‟.
The ever-expanding process of capital accumulation is
based on the maintenance or even re-creation of
patriarchal or sexist man-woman relations, an
asymmetric sexual division of labour within and
outside the family…
This sexual division of labour is integrated with an
international division of labour in which women are
manipulated both as „producer-housewives‟ and as
„consumer-housewives.‟