Exploring Real Utopias: Transforming Class Analysis and Social Justice

okay very good so here we are again next well there's two more sessions after this one Rodriguez will be with us

next week and then we will have our concluding session we'll wrap everything up collectively and today we are very

lucky to have our global sociology live my friend Eric Olin Wright who teaches at University of wisconsin-madison

he is a world-renowned figure in the area of class analysis something we were talking about last week and he's written

many books in that area starting with that think collapse and the distribution of income another book called classes

another book called debates about classes and he's got a book the last and perhaps culminating book is called class

counts very interesting title class counts and and so he has actually been very prominent in defining all the

debates around class not just in the United States but globally talk to translated into many languages but

actually and he'll actually hasn't switched a cell phone off either terrible he actually here today because

he am have started pioneering of sociology you might say called real utopias starting about twenty years ago

he brought together people who are interested in trying to understand institutions within the world of

capitalism that in contained within them potential challenges to capitalism so some of the projects have been to do

with democracy associated to democracy deepening democracy then he had a early on I remember we have one session on

market socialism he had most recently one on gender equality looking for institutions that posed a challenge for

capitalism challenge to capitalism and it's very important in the context of this course I have a alternative way of

thinking about the counter movement you know so far we've thought about the counter movement to capitalism and the

sort palainian way as involving some sorts of well Evans called it counter hegemonic globalization but the idea was

to so build social movements across national boundaries at one form or another we heard about the labor

movement from Eddie Webster and last week humming - Varrick are talked about environmentalism and what was

interesting of course about amateur Bobby Scott analysis was the importance of class and the ways in which

environmentalist movement perhaps also not only challenged capitalism but also reproduce capitalism and interestingly

enough to the class analysis and so today what we have is an alternative way I think of looking at counter movements

to think of a counter movement as emerging from and generate generated by research for institutions that do in

fact pose some sort of possibilities there are apps in the case of Eric right I think of a socialist character and I

think that is really what I hope you will talk about in the next 15 minutes we'll see ok we will see full of

surprises this man okay so let me welcome Eric right it's it's always a special thing to do something completely

new and I have never given a talk in this kind of context Michels sociology global live is a whole new way of

thinking about presenting ideas and engaged in a global dialogue and indeed in a way this class is itself a real

utopia you know if you think about it what would be the way classes should be organized to make the experience not

merely one that the people who happen to be lucky enough privileged enough to be in a place like this can experience it

but where it can also be a point of departure a bridge for much broader discussion and this in a small way I

would argue embodies what I'm actually going to be talking about you know the point of entry

reason for this whole enterprise is a desire to bring concerns about social justice about dealing with the

oppressions that we see around the world into the heart of sociology many sociologists are motivated by social

justice concerns when I heard your statements about what you're interested in many of you come to this discipline

because you're driven by some moral commitment so that provides your own personal motivation but often what

happens when you actually do sociology is that provides a kind of weak motivation for picking topics but it

doesn't become the central interior focus of what you do real utopia is then is one way of building an agenda around

social justice I would say it's starting point is a very simple claim I would even call this the foundational claim of

a critical sociology so what's this what's the foundational claim very simple much of human suffering that we

observe in the world is the result of the way we organize our institutions and social structures a nice sort of phrase

to capture this is that poverty in the midst of Plenty is not a law of nature it's because of the way we organize our

society and implicit in such a claim is that we could organize it differently now if literally you could not organize

it differently if it is the case that these harms even if we could attribute them to society to the way we organize

things even if we could do that but you could not possibly organize it differently then it's getting rather

like a law of nature right the law of nature are things that given the way the powers of gravity and the speed of light

works you can't do it differently so the claim of a critical sociology then is not merely that poverty in the midst of

Plenty is the result of our institutions but that we could do it differently that these institutions are transformable a

lot of social justice research and thinking however mostly focused the diagnosis and critique of the way we

do things now of the way our institutions are organized at the structures of power and domination that

build these institutions this way they focus on the diagnosis and critique of those institutions and give much less

attention to the nature of viable alternatives that could transcend these problems that could do fundamental

transformations of how we live and what kinds of harms are eliminated or reduced as a result and that's also true of lots

of social struggles many social struggles have their sharpest and self understanding in terms of what they

oppose rather than what they want to build and that's not always true of course many social struggles embody

explicit and implicit visions of alternatives there are struggles to build not merely struggles to oppose but

often the build part the building not just opposing part of struggles remains implicit confused often contradictory

wishful thinking is a common fact of social movements perhaps a necessary condition for social movements perhaps

the nature of our cultures and our capacities for sacrifice means that we have to have some dreams that are

unrealizable as part of our struggle for what is realizable but the real utopia's agenda nevertheless is to try to really

think through this question of alternatives both as an interesting intellectual puzzle I mean I think it's

just incredibly interesting to study these things but also with some kind of hope that this could help inform

struggles in the present and in the future give them greater focus greater capacity to improvise because they know

more about the menu you know what the repertoire of possibilities are they know what the problems in the existing

experiments so that perhaps some of those problems can be either avoided or they can creatively experiment and find

new salut the idea of studying real utopias is not to give an array of blueprints it is

absolutely not to play the role of the know-it-all expert that goes to the benign it and

uninformed masses and tells them what to do that's not the purpose of the study of real utopias the purpose of the study

of real utopias is to expand the capacity for learning by the people who are really engaged in struggles and the

learning of the people who study those struggles it's reciprocal it's very much in the deep spirit of Michael call for a

public sociology that takes the idea of dialogue seriously not just as a kind of token view the things I've learned when

I've studied real utopias I learn through dialogue with the people who are doing it and they I think also learned

from that dialogue with me because I have fought for a long time about the abstract categories the kinds of

distinction that you need to make in order to not be confused about what you're doing my hope is that I can help

increase their capacity to experiment and learn and they surely increase my capacity to understand as well that's

the kind of dialogic aspect well you've read a couple of things you know I have big analytical frameworks I have

ways of parsing this world into different pathways of transformation different models of real utopias Michael

suggested that I not go through the analytical structure in this talk it's complicated and something better to read

I think than to get thrown at you again in a short time and rather what he wanted me to do was to run through a

couple of the examples flesh them out a little and you know just animate them with my enthusiasm about them say some

additional comments and some of these of course will bear on some of the things you've been studying I'm sure all

semester I have - about five after I've done about five minutes so far is that right okay I have therefore examples I

want to explore and we may or may not get through all four Michael will tell me

when I should close this off first I want to talk about Wikipedia and its relationship to public libraries that's

the first one Wikipedia and public libraries the second is solidarity finance this is an

example that is embedded in the labor movement and can be part of a labor movement struggles for alternatives and

the third is participatory budgeting an example of incredible innovation from the South that has been spreading to the

north rather than from the north to the south so first Wikipedia yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Wikimedia

Foundation in San Francisco brought there by a former sociology student undergraduate at Berkeley Andy Lin who

is working for the Wikimedia Foundation it was fantastic I mean it really is that's that the home of a real utopia in

my view when you think about Wikipedia you know it's something everybody uses most people don't quite realize what it

is it's the world's largest encyclopedia in history made freely available to everybody in the world now in 250

languages separate Wikipedia's those aren't translations of the English Wikipedia each language has its own

Wikipedia process with its own volunteer editors it's produced entirely by people who do it because they want to voluntary

cooperation it's a gala terian anybody can do it you can all be Wikipedians if you want to if you look at Wikipedia and

you see and you're looking for some sociology topic and you see a topic that's badly written

that's underdeveloped you can become an editor and improve it it's egalitarian in that way incredibly

interesting in terms of how its of all there's lots of angles around this so it's

phenomenal real utopia but it's not a complete real utopia even in its own terms because one of the conditions for

this fantastic resource to be made available to every person in the world is that every person in the world has to

have access to the Internet now in the u.s. I don't know it's probably 60% or 70% of households now do

but it's still not a hundred percent and in Rwanda it's probably 1% I have no idea what the coverage is in a very poor

country and that's where public libraries come in now public libraries are a very different kind of institution

public library is a state institution so it's a public institution it mobilizes resources by taxing part of the social

surplus and removing it from the sphere of capital accumulation and moving it into the sphere of social accumulation

to build resources for collective use the ideal public library you know the kind of best public libraries create

public space not just access to resources meeting rooms sometimes public libraries have small stages so that

amateur theater groups can have a public space that's inexpensive for them to get access to public libraries make books

available to people on the basis of two each according to need and it's rationed by time you have to wait on a waiting

list to get the books not rationed by your ability to pay libraries are a fundamentally anti-capitalist

institution they embody a different logic about how people should have their needs met everybody should have equal

access to the conditions to flourish with respect to the access to information and public libraries are a

remarkable way of accomplishing that it's a big irony that the United States this hyper capitalist country where you

know every person for themselves and the market should dictate the allocation of everything that we happen to have

probably the best public library system in the world I'm not a hundred percent sure of that but it's certainly better

than any that I've seen elsewhere every all town has a public library originally financed I don't know if you know the

history Andrew Carnegie financed with his fortune he basically used vast part of his fortune to build libraries all

over the country it's a nice irony of American history in these in this era of terrible budget cuts many communities

are not prepared to defend cuts to Medicaid or cuts to the police but they do defend the cuts to the librarian in

Philadelphia the one big mass mobilization that blocked an austerity plan was to keep the public libraries

open so this is an incredible resource well it's a resource that interfaces with Wikipedia because libraries are -

are a way to make the internet available to everyone free of charge and that's what libraries do and that's what

libraries do in poor countries as well so the vision of Wikipedia of free information to every single person on

the planet by proliferating the languages in which it's available and by expanding the editorial competence of

people who work on it is only possible because of its interconnection with a public institution okay that's Wikipedia

so okay I'll skip to participatory budgeting and then if I have time I'll sneak in solidarity finance

participatory budgeting very different kind of real utopia participatory budgeting is a way of reorganizing City

budgets this afternoon at 5 o'clock actually there is a symposium in Berkeley at worst Hall I believe werster

werster hole okay about the prospects and possibilities of participatory budgeting in the United States there's a

kind of national participatory budget project that has a kind of Roadshow and they bring it to different places and

it'll be in Berkeley this evening at 5 o'clock should be really good the people involved with it are excellent

participatory budgeting was started in porto alegre a city in southeastern brazil by brazilian standards a

relatively prosperous region of the country but still clearly in the global south

the idea of the participatory budgeting is that the budgets for a city need not be produced by a panel of experts in the

mayor's office beholdin to power centers that are trying to bargain for their particular

needs the budget could be decided it's basic priority sets of specific projects particularly for infrastructure

determined by direct popular participation in citizens assemblies it's essentially trying to figure out

how you can have a new england-style town meeting where anybody can participate in both the debates and the

vote on priorities a participatory Town Meeting how do you do that in a big city of city of one hundred and one and a

half million people well you do it by creating neighborhood assemblies having a process which became fairly elaborate

but still tractable over a three-month period where meetings occur people bring petitions they discuss priorities and

then they organize these priorities into a set of priorities how many of them will actually be accomplished depends

upon the budget constraint so you first set your priorities independent of the budget constraint and then you see how

many of those priorities you can actually do in a given budget cycle and the budget items that don't get dealt

with in one year then will tend to move up the list on subsequent years do you have these direct assembly meetings and

then you have a delegation --all people from these direct neighborhood meetings meet in a citywide budget Council to

bring all the budget priorities from around the city together to produce a coherent budget that's been going on in

porto alegre now for twenty years very successfully some years a lot of participation other years when there's

not much discretionary budget to deal with the participation flags but the basic robustness of this democratic

participation has been there throughout and it's produced a dramatic change in the way the city budget is actually used

what actually happens in it it's now a city budget in which the poorer the neighborhood the more gets spent on it

whereas it used to be as in most places in the world the poorer the neighborhood the more gets spent on it a complete

change in the slope the relationship between need and spending and certainly a change in the

in an egalitarian direction well how does this come to the United States the city of Chicago has a peculiar budgetary

device which is that every alder Manek district in the city gets a discretionary budget of a million plus

dollars a year in which the alder for that district and do whatever they want with it

I suppose they can't legally just pocket it but they can you know hold festivals they can pave the streets in front of

their prime support contributors they can use it for client holistic and patronage kinds of reasons however they

want they get this discretionary pot available well in the Rogers Park District the alderman Joe Moore who's

going to be at this symposium this afternoon he's one of the speakers the guy who decided us to be cool to do in

my district he went to the US Social Forum in Atlanta 2008 I believe it's seven or sometimes you know in the

recent past went to a workshop on participatory budget in Porto Alegre and he had this idea why don't I just do it

my own district he has complete discretion he can use this money however he wants I'll just let the people in the

district tell me how to use it so they organized neighborhood assemblies where people discuss

priorities they had a whole methodology for doing this and they came up with a list of priorities which included fixing

some sidewalks and part of the district improving some parks and having some festivals among other things they decide

about these lists they voted on them in a citizen's assembly a town hall meeting and that's how they spent the money in

this year's Chicago aldermen automatic elections city council elections held in January and then the second round or I

guess February in the second round I believe in April or late March another 12 alders ran on participatory budgeting

so that next year there's going to be I believe 13 different all dramatic districts in

the city which will have a participatory budget now it's a small budget it's in a big city like Chicago a million dollars

isn't a huge amount of money but it's not trivial and it's not trivial for the kinds of things which a bunch of people

in the neighborhood could see is really enhancing the quality of life in a kind of day-to-day way for certain things

that they care about well that's just the beginning though once you introduce an innovation like this people try it

they find that it's interesting it becomes a school for democracy people become better at it and there will be

undoubtedly proposals throughout the United States in the next three or four or five years to have participatory

budgets that go beyond just small fringe things in budgets I think this will be one of the you know the next big things

one of the things that becomes a fad of course it will be used and misused some cities it will be just a device for

existing city bosses to manipulate and control particular constituencies and others it will become a vibrant source

of new conflict the new ideas for new participation participatory budget is a extraordinary example I think of real

utopias created out of struggle the Workers Party won an election Brazil that's how they did it

innovated in Chicago not out of struggle alderman Joe Moore was not under any popular pressure to introduce a

participatory budget he did it because he thought it was interesting and cool but now it's in the menu now it's

something that local struggles in which you feel that the priorities set by the cities because of property interests are

out of whack with the needs of people where people can now mobilize around an alternative model not just mobilize

against the influence of real estate and business interests but mobilize for an alternative way of creating the budget

given that in American politics today the issue of the budget is such a big and powerful issue having a alternative

model for a people's budget and how to produce such a budget seems to me an important

aspect of possible futures okay all right good terrific so actually as you know there are other there are other we

lose hope as Americans written about so you shouldn't feel somehow inhibited about talking about the work that

cooperatives and we had of course quite a bit long discussion about unconditional basic income

he's totally happy to talk about those I'm sure and should also know that hit that Eric will be President of the

American Sociological Association next year and he's organizing the whole American sociology in Denver with the

theme of real utopias and I should also mention that a book of course has just come out well a year ago I guess

envisioning real utopia which combines both an account of real utopias but also it's very fancy pictures and diagrams

that indicate the different trajectories into the future okay well let us begin our discussion who would like to start

do that I think this in your article we've read an article in sunrise in the book I you

point out that this idea of the real utopia is or what you're presenting is a critique of capitalism if the theory of

alternatives under the theory of transformation and now I think what you've sort of given us

is maybe not a theory of alternative but how alternative right illustration of the alternatives that you are

envisioning or that we can move towards and I think that what we ended up in our discussion on Monday concluding with it

in some way the transformation part of how to get towards the Zootopia Heidi's really to these examples that you're

giving us now can be part of a transformation to an alternative to capitalism because we're living now

Wikipedia exists within the capitalism without it necessarily being a challenge to actually to where we are now so I was

wondering if you can maybe bring it up to a theoretical level of this transformation and and describe to us

how this can be seen also in a global perspective thing about it sharing all of it okay so I think let's break the

problem of transformation into two parts one part is the question of what kinds of changes that are achievable now will

contribute to some broader structure of changes in the long term because it's what if there's one thing that it's

clear a fundamental complete transformation of capitalism is not achievable now there's no it's not a

failure of our imagination the social forces and the institutional possibilities and the historical

openings just do not exist for some radical reconstruction of capitalism into an alternative in the immediate

achievable future so what might be achievable or various kinds of reforms new innovations new institutions which

constitute alternatives and are part of a process of transformation but which in and of themselves

destroy capitalism that's one part of the thing what are they waste day I refer to that

as the Waystation problem the intermediate steps the kinds of changes which it continued and cumulatively

developed would constitute more fundamental change even if they themselves don't and the second problem

is the question of agency what are the social forces capable of pushing forward opening up new spaces and occupying

those spaces right now these are separable problems but of course they're not separate in the world having good

clear ideas of waystations is one of the ways of eliciting more agency people are prepared I think to struggle for things

that are achievable especially when they see them as building some bigger vision my own focus has been more on the way

stations on these new institutions I have more intuitions about it my own theoretical understanding seems richer

about that I have more to say about that I have less to say about the agency question it seems to me highly

contingent upon the specificities of different situations exactly what coalition's and what opportunities occur

the Porto Alegre case is a nice one in that respect so here you had Brazil coming out of two decades of

dictatorship within a transition to democracy in Porto Alegre it happened to be the case that the Workers Party was a

kind of grassroots based labor based party with a very left-wing ideology animated by rather romantic

revolutionary notions of dual power a kind of trotskyist inspired wing to the Workers Party and they by accident won

the mayor's election they didn't have a majority they didn't win the City Council they won the mayor's election

because the opposition split the vote and it was a first-past-the-post election so they won the mayor's

election and they had to figure out what the hell are we going to do they figured they only had four years because they

didn't anticipate being able to win a second election you know they they anticipated a 1-1 cycle politics and

they wanted to figure out a way that they could actually have any packed on the city and they came up with

the participatory budget as an innovation well I don't think any theory of collective action of agency could

have it either predicted that or even really said you know under what circumstances more participatory you

know it just it's too complicated too many contingencies too much specificity I'm not saying that people on the ground

in porto alegre couldn't have thought yes there's some possibilities on the horizon but the important thing i think

we can do is say what to do when you get those opportunities and that's where I think this institutional focus really

has it's its payoff that combined with a very flexible view about the nature of the struggles that could actually take

seize the time take the opportunities okay Aaron okay so in the spirit of this class seeing utopia I'm going to ask you

if it's okay with you a first question and then you'll potentially respond and then I ask another second to just be

referred sure sure absolutely one directional and provide directional you know you have my permission for that

procedure your your benign your benign philosopher-king here can decide whether god by the cop of the capo so first

thank you for offering these visions of prefigurative utopias and makes me think about the Chomsky and Foucault debate of

1971 when Foucault refused to offer utopia is concerned about having to articulate what it means to be human or

articulate the human condition so I think you're very courageous to begin a conversation that some fool how they

great some great mind yeah just a little comment and I don't mean this to preempt your I don't experience this it is even

in the slightest bit courageous I just it's just not the dimension on which I find this exciting and interesting and

natural evolution of things I've thought about as part of a global sort of left puzzle and problem and I don't

feel like I'm doing something that makes me vulnerable in any way even if I get sharp opposition but you know of course

that's the same fact that I don't feel it's courageous is parsley statement of my privilege I'm a tenured professor at

a major university it protects me and makes it possible for me to do things without courage that may still

nevertheless be important and good so just we may continue aaron so you're working could be avoiding this

assumption or a sort of declaration of what it means to be human with one exception and that is human flourishing

so would it be possible for you to define what this means - for what what is human flourishing and in conjunction

with the answer that you gave to the first question is distortion a form of like his liberal agency to achieve ones

inherent qualities so maybe in talking about human flourishing maybe you could also speak and define what is agency for

you okay so I have a deliberately both expansive and underspecified concept of flourishing I don't want to suggest that

there's only one way to flourish there are many ways to flourish I don't want it to be a narrowly kind of American

individualistic understanding although that's a perfectly good one I think it's one of the ways of flourishing but I

don't want it to be an empty signifier either via now one aspect of flourishing I think is simpler and it kind of may

help set the term so we can think of flourishing in terms of bodily health as well a person flourishes in terms of

their health and their body not merely when they are not diseased it's not you know that's part of it

not not having the flu is part another disease is part of flourishing but there's also a notion of being kind of

bodily energetic and vital and feeling good positive in your bodily existence now I think that's a pretty Universal

feature it's it´ll there will be cross-cultural variations and exactly what aspects of

that are the most salient there are even some very special cases where there may be cultural validation you know valuing

of depression and misery and you know initiation and so on those are pretty rare outliers and you know if you're a

complete cultural relativist you would eat you would perhaps say well that's just another way of flourishing I'm

prepared to be more restrictive than that and take what most people in the world most of the time would consider

the difference between being sick and well and vibrantly healthy versus just not sick okay so for bodily functioning

it's not so hard I just extend that to other aspects of life that make for a rich and fulfilled

good life but don't restrict the content of it very much it does have something to do with realizing potential it

doesn't imply that every person has just some unique potential to be realized but it does have something to do with the

fact that we are capable of mastery of creativity and there's many ways to do that and a flourishing life is one in

which those potentials get nurtured and realized rather than blocked and thwarted okay so given this definition

of human flourishing as we're feeling that the body is healthy and then the feeling good about the body which seems

to have a psychological component the sort of utopia that you provide tend to solve or look at redistribution as the

sort of Center for human flourishing but there as Nancy Fraser has argued there are many other sort of in justices that

have so much to do with misrecognition right which which can have an impact let's say homophobia has an impact on

one psychological health that gender domination that doesn't allow for a transition

women live vena phobia doesn't allow produces the violence against the body because the person is miss recognized as

not part of the state so so you didn't yeah so you didn't read in the book there's a much more elaborate discussion

of this of these issues so if you're interested I would recommend you look at that it's in the it's in the first

substantive chapter it may be chapter two it's chapter two I guess so I define to add two dimensions of justice social

justice and political justice and my definition of social justice is the following adjust society is one in which

all people have equal access to both the social and material means necessary to live a flourishing life so I include the

social as well I mean in addition to material the social means to live a flourishing life and that's where the

recognitions dimension so equal access to the social means to live a flourishing life means equal access to

community of mutual recognition and support the absence of stigma and Status integration and so on so the social and

material are both they're not just the material conditions and that's where I include that I say equal access to those

means not equal opportunity equal opportunity is a similar formulation I'm not against equal opportunity I

think equal opportunity first of all it's consistent with a lottery right in a lottery everybody has an equal

opportunity to to win and if we had a lottery for the conditions to flourish that was a fair lottery everybody had an

equal chance it would satisfy an equal opportunity criterion it wouldn't satisfy an equal access to the

conditions of so I prefer access to opportunity also equal opportunity sometimes is interpreted as starting

gate opportunity you know as long as by the time you're an adult you have an equal opportunity if you squander your

opportunities if you blow it too bad you know you've had a fair shot what equal access is a more generous

understanding it says look people screw up all the time both for you know for all sorts of reasons what we want is a

world in which people throughout their life have equal access and of course it means we're going to have to compromise

on that you know that's the ideal there's limited resources you're not going to be able to literally give equal

access throughout a life to somebody who's continually squandering their the resources which they have available but

you do your the best possible with respect to that is the ideal and then the real utopian question is what

institutions facilitate or hinder that okay Peele thank you very much for coming here and talking to us and for

the text it was really interesting I was okay I asked your question which is a little bit more like theoretical or

related to just the things we read I agree about the new utopias and the great possibilities but I have some

problems with your theoretical viewpoint so the way you imagine transformation and I think the reason why it's also

important is what you write yourself that actually providing possibilities or view making people seem possibility is

also a way of changing them so I think it's very radical fundamental the way you imagine transformation is also a

really important thing to discuss basically I think I see the problem with the way you understand production and

the way you just do like it divide society into this model that we've been working with ourselves in this course

and my civil society production and then this state and I think it's problematic because in that way you also understand

the production of value as something which is happening very isolated in the economic sphere instead of seeing like a

process of value production is something that much more broad connection connected to what's happening outside

the economic sphere outside the labor market in like more material emotional and social production and I think the

big problem with with your viewpoint in seeing economy as a separates with severe from what we call like society is

that you in that sense I I feel you juice a capitalist discourse of understanding how value is created of

what what value is and I think that seeing the the civil society as detached from economy is is also not recognizing

the fundamental productive value that human license and the human ability to produce value and I think in your idea

what it ends up with our office now is if you see this these spheres as divided you will never be able actually to

transcend or to make it you create another society which is not a capitalist society what you will be able

to do is that you can you can definitely restrict capitalism very much you can do it like as we seen the social democracy

and from a social democracy myself we restrict capitalism a lot we do not transcend characters and that's not

possible because of our basic understanding of how what value is and how value is production okay so

important than difficult questions so let me that's even doing two minutes Godfather you know some things need

three alright very good so let me say a couple of things words like fear or domain or levels all

these metaphors we use in social theory all have traps when I talk about the state and civil society and the economy

I don't mean by by making those analytical distinctions that these are separate isolated spaces that only after

they are constituted interact with each other no I see these as a set of analytical distinctions as a way of

talking about dimensions of social interactions in which and the key for my analysis is that these are dimensions of

social interaction around which power gets formulated so there's a difference between the kind of power that I

associate with civil society that is bound up with our capacity for voluntary cooperative acts

collective action and which is rooted in our ability to persuade each other to work together versus the kind of power

that's rooted in what I'm calling the economy which is power based on your ownership and control over resources now

those aren't the same kinds of power if one thinks that all there is is amorphous power and it has no dimensions

there's no variation it's one thing capital P power then I think you're disabled from talking about

institutional changes if on the other hand you see different forms of power is completely unconnected with each other

that they don't interact that they don't mutually constitute each other you're also disabled you need analytical

distinctions so that you can have tractable ways of talking about variation state power is the capacity to

impose rules on territory and enforce those rules that's a distinctive kind of power it's

not the same as the power that comes from controlling a lot of capital and being able to buy things and tell and

get people to do things for you because you can bribe them so my little slogan but to distinguish these three forms of

power is if you want to get somebody to do something you can bribe them you can force them or you can persuade them my

real utopian transformations are an attempt at figuring out ways in which power that's based on the capacity for

voluntary cooperation becomes more and more central in the overall configuration of power to re

articulation of these different types of power in ways that increases the depth and importance of our collective action

and our capacity for voluntary cooperation as a source of power in the society and I don't see how to talk

about that without distinguishing it from these other sources of power which can fort the capacity for collective

action and that's all I'm doing by talking about these three spheres and their forms of power and there we are

and the configurations Andry articulations of them so the challenge for somebody who's uncomfortable with

that who thinks there's some thing inherently constraining about that language is to propose an alternative

that actually gives you more action if it actually tells you more about why Wikipedia is not the same as a

capitalist way of producing encyclopedias and why public libraries are a valuable

space to defend you know if there is an alternative set of analytical distinctions and language for talking

about power and transformation that would better demarcate these possibilities and show their tensions

with capitalism and the potential for transcendence I would abandon this instantly

I just haven't encountered anything that gives me more traction on these problems okay good okay

and we actually talked a lot on Monday about basic income basic income as one of your examples of really copious and a

question is emerged during the discussion is that for example in some countries like in Scandinavian countries

like to talk about tax system is very similar to your definition of basic income in global South maybe people

would like to engage in something similar but there are no capital and financial needs we know for example in

u.s. even though there are capital and financial needs people would not accept

something like that so would you say that the entire notion of basic income as real utopia is in the US it's kind of

American centric because in other parts of the world is view differently well in the US it's kind of unreal utopia in the

sense that it's unachievable not that it's unworkable if we had it no I don't think it's it's a particularly American

centric idea it's it originated outside of the US express myself wrong so that's each utopia it's specifically for the US

really under parts of the world is maybe more accepted and more well even in Scandinavia you don't have unconditional

basic income that is in Scandinavia you have a very complex patchwork of targeted programs means-tested programs

special purpose programs which taken all together come close to but still there are gaps in it the uncondition allottee

of basic income and its universality are key to what renders it something really different because what it does is it

enormous lis frees up people to do things other than engage in ordinary capitalist employment

as a way of reproducing their own lives basic meeting their basic needs so if you think of for example if you if you

accept the idea that a worker co-op constitutes a democratically run a gala tarrying worker coop constitutes an

alternative model for how a firm could be organized one of the problems that worker coops have is they have to eat

right so a worker co-op when the group of workers want to set up a co-op they have to generate a stream of income very

quickly because they can't wait two years for it to work they have to get a stream of income very quickly they go to

a bank to get credit to get to capitalize their firm the bank knows the workers have to eat and the bank is

hesitant to give alone because they will feel that the workers will eat their capital rather than use it productively

if workers had an unconditional basic income it would help them get loans from banks to start firms because the bank

would know the workers have a stream of income guaranteeing their basic necessities and therefore the bank's

concern is merely whether the business plan for what the worker Corp is going to do is credible not whether in

addition to that it's going to feed the members right so unconditional basic income opens up a space for worker coops

all right so is it feasible elsewhere like in your image rwanda well in namibia there's an experiment an

unconditional basic income in in a set of in one region of the country there I think for foundation funded it and it

had an enormous leap beneficial effect on all sorts of things in the lives of people poor countries are not

necessarily in a worse position for basic income because as we know the what counts as an adequate basic income to

live a culturally respectable life is also much lower in a country like place like Nvidia so for peanuts basically so

to speak from the point of view of global resources people can be guaranteed an unconditional basic income

in Namibia what they then do because they live in extended kin compounds it can pool their basic

incomes and they suddenly have a resource that they can use to buy all sorts of things that are that improved

the quality of life in the standard of life of people so health improvements were dramatic but also productivity

improvements were dramatic with the with this mana from heaven because it was not the basic income was not coming from

taxation internal to the society there's no redistribution it was coming from the global north so I think they and there's

this talk in South Africa there was some talk in Brazil about the possibilities of sort of basic income so I don't know

where the breakthrough will happen for this to occur my guess it's more likely in advance welfare states in Europe than

it is in the South that's there is a discussion of basic income in some European context because there it

represents a big administrative simplification of an overly complex system and it's even been argued that an

unconditional basic income in a place like Norway or Sweden or possibly Denmark would actually reduce the total

tax burden because you could provide everybody with basic subsistence and save a huge amount on the administrative

overhead of all these special programs very good Kevin looking at when I to the basic income

looking at places in the global south or we're still struggle to even to establish a minimum wage

what are you the prospect of a basic income developing in those areas and it's just generally going back to United

States what do you think it would take for the United States to be pressured into coming close to something or even

considering having the basic income become even a something to be considered and mainstream dialog or we're not even

close to basic health care so and they and the centerpiece of our political debate is whether or not to dismantle

Medicare you know we're and privatize Social Security so we can once again have impoverished and starving elderly

you know back to the 1920s so it we're so far behind the curve on any kind of progressive innovations on

these sorts of things it is worth noting however that one of the most conservative political economy type

commentators and writers charles Murray a real reactionary younam's he's going to global where we go and say that he

would knowledge that he probably wouldn't use the word reaction he would certainly acknowledge super conservative

he's in favor of an unconditional basic income what he wants to do is completely scrap every other welfare provision you

know get rid of everything and replace it with an unconditional basic income for everybody now you know his

motivations are that that would actually be cheaper than all these other things but also he sees it as less interference

in the market now there is a peculiar point if everybody just has this resource then you can just not regulate

the market at all and there's no minimum wage anymore employers can offer whatever somebody's willing to work for

why should a dollar an hour be illegal if I have my basic subsistence guaranteed independently of the labor

market so you get rid of the you know all these other rules so there are conservatives who like this idea a an

emancipatory basic income that creates the bottom the sort of foundations for what Phil Yvonne Parise calls real

freedom for all and enhances people's capacity to invent new ways of forming social socially productive activities

that kind of basic income of course isn't consistent with Charles Murray's view the u.s. is going to not be the

innovator on this we may become an innovator on other things so I think participatory budgeting because of our

long traditions of local democratic governance and the more distant traditions of the town hall meeting I

mean all these are part of our political history and cultural repertoire I think participatory budgeting could actually

take off in the US as a real new possibility and then feed back into other kinds of changes as well okay

thank you for creating an optimistic environment because that meant several pencils sorry if I read this I'm still

kind of getting over my fear on cameras okay I believe that the world of academia plays an important role in the

conceptualization of social realms in terms of shaping the way that social relations are played out and Wikipedia

is a wonderful phenomena that spreads a powerful tool knowledge yet the world of academia doesn't accept it as a viable

source for information and it's undermines its value supporting the idea that the public is not a reliable source

so will there have to be a change in the realm of academia to help transform and creating a public agency and do you see

a change in his viability in the academic realm in the future well first of all just on the claim about

professors attitudes towards Wikipedia it's changed a lot in the last couple of years five years ago there was nothing

but snotty disdain for it now it would be hard you be hard-pressed to find many professors who never themselves use

Wikipedia secretly and many of them you know I know lots of professors of course I'm would be a case but not just me who

in dealing with students say look it's an incredibly useful first place to go so the best articles have a fantastic

set of links to other places any fact or observation you get from Wikipedia you have to check against some other source

but it's a terrific place to begin an exploration of a topic also just you know as the incoming president of the

American Sociological Association one of my initiatives initiative is a big AAS a Wikipedia project that's one of the

reasons I was at the wikimedia foundation yesterday to create a portal on the AFA website which will both train

sociologists and encourage them to make contributions to wikipedia in order to upgrade the sociology entries so as a

community of scholars students interested in social real utopias very seriously you know

Wikipedia has been it until relatively recently a kind of helter skelter willy-nilly everybody does what the hell

they want without there being organized constituencies in communities who say no we care about this it's a wonderful

resource but let's try to improve it wicked the Wikimedia Foundation itself has launched a new utility on Wikipedia

called wiki projects where a group of people can get together on any theme that they might be interested you know

there's a probably a Star Trek wiki project in which they identify themselves and they become then the

curators of the whole array of entries connected with their theme and they rate them by quality and they indicate ones

that need improvement and do the things that you need to upgrade it to improve the standards there already is a

sociology wiki project that sociologists around the world have already spontaneously formed and the idea then

will be that the a essay will not take that over but that we will mobilize the resources of the American Sociological

Association and the community around it to interface with the wiki project sociology project already you can see

future classroom assignments that you know some of you will become sociology teachers of ten years from now a

standard Senior Seminar assignment will be to find some entry in sociology that you think is woefully under developed

and we write it expand it and participate in the contribution to this global resource alright good Billy I got

something I'll ask once what's going on Brian Nara okay well done with Billy thank you for your comment

for me I was caught up around the last section around here the transformation speak up I began speak up but for me

instead of being ruptured transformation is purely an accident we're like antagonism I see it as a

prescriptive method or something that tells us how we speak and how we should be understood so so I study recent race

riots in the US as a method of a population speaking instead of as a method of a population to play attacking

necessary so what I've been trying to grapple with is that you know the first few years of most of our result is we we

witness in our country kill million people between 2000 and 2006 right it'll warm and and for me that that tells me

that collapse for some people in this world comes very sudden it isn't something where we can sit here and say

well there's nothing no change suddenly it's not viable for you know for a lot of people things change right and I

think for me I wonder where the line is to draw between an alternative or real utopia and merely a refined kind of

capital or reclines kind of state and then beyond that I also you know for instance is the Free University

just like the Reading Room's within a prison or something and and how how did these techniques a how do these

alternative actually serve to silence or or distract us from real anger or real sort of forcing collapse dealing with

right so a lot of the collapses that happen in the world are catastrophes they intensify human suffering beyond

belief as opposed to being the point of entry to an emancipatory future so my concern with rupture role transformation

is not by any means a denial that ruptures happen all the time but the question and then is whether rupture 'el

strategies increase or decrease the prospects for emancipatory transformation for actually creating the

conditions for human flourishing right sometimes they do so I'm not opposed and this is clearer I think in the book

perhaps and in the article I'm not categorically opposed to rupture all transformation certainly not on the

basis of any foundational principle you know that is how it's not that I say rupture all transport transformations

are so inherently flawed that they can never be an important part of a transformative struggle and furthermore

I think that there are aspects of rupture all strategy the kind of confrontational aspect where the goal is

to defeat an opponent opponent not to work out a zone of compromise now that's the rupture elimi is a warfare where

there's a battle and a winner and a loser sometimes that's a necessary condition for the possibility of what I

call interstitial and symbiotic transformations to occur but rupture transformations in order for them to be

it amantha prey I think always have to be articulated interstitial and symbiotic as standalone strategies

they're much better at destroying than they are a building and it's basically easy you know fundamentally it's easier

to destroy them to build may be hard to destroy as well easier to confront than to imagine an alternative so it may

be a legitimate expression of anger and rage but not in a way that will then create not

I mean anger can be destructive it's not always even if it's understandable even if we understand why people are rageful

it's not necessarily contributing to human emancipation it can be this catharsis but not emancipation so my

concern is with how if there is rage if there is anger how to harness it in ways that productively produce better

conditions for human flourishing as opposed to just arenas for expressive action okay how do these techniques

actually sustain this yeah well we can the world's contradictory the you know there's wonderfully creative and humane

and just things that happen in the United States in the midst of the horrors we wreck on the rest of the

world but it's not the same we you know it's not there's not a unitary we that constitutes this reified entity the

United States we're a complex social structure with many institutions that are internally

fractured and contradictory as well as in opposition to each other and the Wiis of people building new urban agriculture

in Milwaukee and Detroit to deal with the food desert through very interesting innovations about both in the kind of

technological sense about how you do agriculture inside of a city but also social sense of how you integrate

communities into the production of food in this post-apocalyptic Detroit for example really good stuff going on that

is happening in the United States it's very advanced along with the destruction of that city and the destruction of

other parts of the old so I mean I those are incredibly contradictory but I don't think it

invalidates at all the real utopian emancipatory aspect of these new innovations when they occur okay we're

going to mine on you to just ask your questions briefly and then I'll give Eric 30 seconds to respond and I can oil

am stay afterwards too but I just want you at least have them on the record Nora hi thanks for keep being here today

with us my question is more of like a clarification in regards to your article and also a comment that it's made

earlier today you said that with for instance unconditional basic income that it will eliminate things like you know

welfare but there's this stigma against in a welfare and we think of like food stamps and a lot of a lot of those

things but also if we think of welfare as a some kind of state aid for certain people with that also include for

instance home owners on subsidies and also the kinds of tax breaks for the really rich particularly also laws that

privilege people with like real estate so when I say get rid of welfare what I mean is all the income transfer programs

that are used to support people's lives can be eliminated and replaced with an unconditional basic income which will

not have stigma attached to it because it's universal everybody gets it and everybody gets this every month so

doesn't there's no differentiation Bill Gates gets it and you know a homeless person gets it so it's unconditional and

universal so it gets rid of the stigma doesn't mean that all other programs other than income transfer programs

would disappear there might be good public policy reasons or bad ones to have subsidies for homeowners through

the mortgage interest deduction I think it's generally a very bad policy because it's so inegalitarian

but to have one that was an inverse progressive subsidy so that the the less expense of the house the bigger the

subsidy you know so it was graded that way that could be a good policy you know so good man right earlier today you

highlighted towards the u.s. discourses within the u.s. politics I think part of that one

aspect about that the discourse is like the rhetoric that's used and when you I leave I feel I interpreted that you kind

of redefined socialism from how we traditionally interpreted it understood it and within that process I feel you

kind of look liberated it in a way to kind of be able to take on a new form something that is kind of maybe more

viable at least but within the u.s. politics I feel the term socialism has been so

politicized that regardless of any distinctions we make between statism capitalism and socialism that it's not a

viable term all right and I was wondering if you've ever given any thoughts of him I've tried thinking

about this for years now like what term new term to define these like core principles could be used to I

suppose just would be more viable so you're if you're absolutely right my mother who's a academic just to the end

even after the book was published would scold me for insisting on using the word socialism for just exactly that reason

she is she supports the ideas of the book and its values but feels that in the American context it's a non-starter

well first of all the book wasn't written for an American context and the dialogue in which I've been engaged

which both nurtured the book as it was being written and which I hope the book contributes as a global one and in much

of the word the word socialism still signals the core stance against capitalism and no other word does it

does the work so that's part of the answer the word in the American political vocabulary that is best for

capturing a lot of this is democracy now that's a good American word it's one of our core values talking about deepening

democracy making democracy real having economic democracy that really is democratic rule by the people right so

if you democracy is ruled by of by and for the people and we talk about the economy should be democratic too it

should be ruled of by and for the people and the state should be really democratic not a perverse kind of

and democracy controlled by wealth well deepening democracy is really social empowerment and if you know it could be

an alternative rhetorical framing of the problem we want to democratize the economy and democratize the state nearly

everything that I'm talking about could be packaged in that way the part that isn't exactly in that is the are the

issues that are connected to ownership to exploitation you know to the property rights aspect which you know it's in

another discussion we haven't broached here socialism is a combination of democracy

you know democratic power and social ownership so this is getting a democratic power part of it and it's

kind of ignoring the social ownership part you know which is I think important from a theoretical point of view but it

may not be so important to worry about that from a kind of political discourse point of view very good so redefining

socialism is where we end very good thank you very much every that was my