Two Routes to Degeneration, Two Routes to Utopia

Abstract

It sometimes appears that alternative organizations are doomed to perpetuate the systems they aim to transform, as efforts to avoid co-optation lead these organizations to retreat from the very engagement necessary for social change. Scholars then face a dilemma: reveal these degenerative processes in existing alternative organizations and reinforce disillusionment, or avoid such critique and endorse ineffectual strategies. This paper thus asks how we can engage in necessary critical work without thereby stifling social change efforts. Erik Olin Wright’s real utopias approach is first used to distinguish two broad strategies adopted by alternative organizations – symbiotic and interstitial – associated with distinct degeneration risks. The former set, exposure degeneration, are well-studied by the alternative organizations literature, but the latter, insulation degeneration, have received less systematic attention. Thus, the first contribution of this paper is the classification of these degeneration risks and the specification of their dialogical relationship. In a second step, the paper draws upon the critical realist morphogenetic approach to understand social change strategies and degeneration risks in terms of structurally conditioned agency in cycles of simultaneous structural reproduction and elaboration. Thus understood, structural reproduction through exposure or insulation degeneration does not necessarily preclude structural elaboration. The second contribution of the paper is therefore a framework for engaging alternative organizations with genuine but constructive critique that accounts for the twin risks they face as well as the promise nevertheless inherent in their diverging strategies.