Erik Olin Wright’s Optimism of the Intellect*

Abstract

ABSTRACTErick Olin Wright’s Real Utopias Project was concerned to establish the intellectual grounds for an open-ended politics that was still inspired by the goal of replacing capitalist systems by socialist ones. Conceived when ‘civil society’ was still all the fashion, its emphasis on the need to concentrate on institution-building in civil society was a testament to what Gramsci had called ‘patience allied with perseverance’. Yet the exemplary cases highlighted by Wright - above all the Participatory Budget institutions in Porto Alegre Brazil and those of Quebec’s Chantier de l’economie sociale - lacked the sober assessment actually needed to confirm Wright’s theory of ‘empowered participatory governance’ let alone to reconstruct that theory in light of its inadequacies. What was most problematic about Wright’s real utopias project was its lack of concern with what Gramsci focused on, i.e., the kind of institutional design mass socialist parties needed in order to engage in hegemonic practices as agencies of both class formation and social transformation. This was recognized by Wright himself in his final work.