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Leo Panitch Erik Olin Wright’s Optimism of the Intellect

‘But ultimately, the most central debates within can only be advanced by studying actual struggles attempting to transform social structures either in the present or the past. To state the issue in somewhat overly-positivistic terms, practice provides the “experimental conditions” for evaluating the adequacy of propositions within Marxist theory, and thus for reconstructing that theory in light of its inadequacies.’ - Erik Olin Wright , ‘Intellectuals and the ’ The Insurgent Sociologist, 8:1, Winter 1978 p. 14

‘The political conditions for progressive tinkering with social arrangements… may depend in significant ways on the presence of more radical visions of possible transformations. This does not mean, of course, that false beliefs are to be supported simply because they are thought to have desirable consequences, but it does suggest that it is important to seek firm foundations for plausible visions of radical alternatives. - Erik Olin Wright, Preface to Associations and Democracy: The Real Utopias Project Volume I, Verso 1995, p. xi

‘When radical critics of become desperate for empirical models that embody their aspirations, wishful thinking can triumph over sober assessments. The complementary danger is cynicism; there is great cachet among intellectuals in debunking naïve enthusiasm. What is needed, then, are accounts of empirical cases that are neither gullible nor cynical, but try to fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment.’ - Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, Verso 2010, p. 151

‘Gramsci is famous for saying that we need pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will. But we also need a little optimism of the intellect to sustain optimism of the will.’ - Erik Olin Wright, How to be an Anticapitalist, Verso 2019, p. 105

It was both salutary and moving to see Erik Olin Wright reasserting a certain optimism of the intellect towards the end of his life. For most of the last three decades, he had dedicated himself - as in fact had Gramsci in his own time1 - to actually transcending the stated dichotomy between pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. Indeed, this was the impulse

1 The phrase ‘pessimism of the will, optimism of the intellect’ has been wrongly assumed to have originated with Gramsci, who in fact borrowed it from Romain Rolland in the course of challenging, in a 1920 L’Ordine Novo article, those ‘anarchists ideologues’ who expected that a proletarian class ‘at present scattered at random through the cities and the countryside… [and] reduced to such conditions of spiritual and bodily slavery… should spontaneously initiate and sustain the creation of a revolution’. Gramsci’s defense of ‘the socialist conception of the revolutionary process’ in the face of this may indeed be seen as what motivated him, as I have recently argued, to show how the fragmentation and subordination of the proletariat might be overcome through the further development of socialist party political organization and ideology so as to better serve the project of broad class formation and hegemonic capacity development. See Leo Panitch, ‘On Revolutionary Optimism of the Intellect,’ in Rethinking Revolution: Socialist Register 2017, : Merlin, 2016, pp. 356-7. 2 behind the Real Utopias Project, as Erik conceived it in the early 1990s. This was directed at overcoming the naiveté, on the one hand, and cynicism, on the other, of liberal proclamations of ‘the end of history’ at the time, as well as postmodernist rejections of Marxist ‘grand narratives’. Instead, Erik set out to lay the intellectual grounds for an open-ended politics that was still inspired by the goal of replacing capitalist systems by socialist ones: ‘What we need, then, are utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions which can inform our practical tasks of muddling through in a world of imperfect conditions for social change.’2 Most of us coming out of the 1960s as young intellectuals attracted to Marxism were already concerned with ridding of any trace of futuristic teleology. This was part and parcel of defining our intellectual tasks in terms of identifying rather than ignoring the weaknesses of Marxist theory and practice, and trying to develop contemporary Marxism so as to overcome those weaknesses. As what had been intellectually fashionable in the 1970s became intellectually unfashionable by the 1990s, this was also what led (at least some of) us to undertake the task of ‘transcending pessimism’ in face of the despondency that enveloped the intellectual left in that decade. What was required in the context of the triumph of neoliberal capitalist was, we believed, a recommitment to revising and developing Marxist theory and practice, not least by ‘rekindling socialist imagination’.3 The Real Utopias Project, conceived as it was when ‘civil society’ was still all the fashion, was running with the grain of the zeitgeist in left intellectual circles. It was also open to the neo- anarchist spirit that infused the new politics of alter-globalization protest on the streets of Seattle, Quebec City and Genoa as well as at the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre at the turn of the millennium. Indeed, as the debilitating pessimism on the Left was succeeded by a starry-eyed optimism about the will of ‘the multitude’, the relevance of the Real Utopias Project only increased. In this respect, Erik’s focus on the need to concentrate on institution-building in civil society was a testament to his own ‘patience allied with perseverance’, as also with Gramsci.4 Indeed, Erik’s carefully considered critique of ruptural strategies of transformation

2 ‘Preface: The Real Utopias Project’ Associations and Democracy, London: Verso 1995, p. ix. 3 See esp. Leo Panitch and , ‘Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination’, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias: Socialist Register 2000, London: Merlin 1999. As Colin Leys and I put it in the Preface to that volume: “The theme of this volume of the Socialist Register was first conceived in 1995 with the following question in mind: as we approach the end of the millennium, what is to succeed the first great socialist project that was conceived in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, and variously implemented and frustrated by communism and social democracy in the twentieth?... We wanted to break with the legacy of a certain orthodox kind of Marxist thinking which rejected utopian thought as ‘unscientific’ just because it was utopian, ignoring the fact that sustained political struggle is impossible without the hope of a better society that we can, in principle, and in outline, imagine. And we particularly felt that in face of the collapse of communism, as well as the rejection by “third way” social democracy of any identification with the socialist project, there was now, especially in the context of the neoliberal restoration, an opening as well as a need for imaginative thought.’ 4 Gramsci described himself, in a 1929 letter to his brother from prison, in terms of trying to be a man who ‘never despairs and never falls of into those vulgar, banal moods, optimism and pessimism… I’ve always been armed with unlimited patience – not a passive, inert kind, but a patience allied with perseverance.’ Antonia Gramsci, Letters from Prison, New York: Harper and Row 1973, p. 159. 3 could be seen as a contemporary restatement of the case Gramsci had already made on the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies.5 If ‘Another World is Possible’ was to be more than a slogan it needed the kind of intellectual grounding that had always underpinned Erik’s vocation of developing better Marxist theory. The emphasis on institution-building could thus be seen as offering strategic ballast that was otherwise lacking on the left at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It was precisely this that made the fourth volume of the Real Utopias Project (the first by Erik himself, with Archon Fung), Deepening Democracy, with its analysis of Porto Alegre’s participatory budget (PB) experiment as its ‘centerpiece’, appear so relevant and timely when it appeared in 2003.6 And seven years later it would still remain the real-world centerpiece of Erik’s Envisioning Real Utopias, where ‘empowered participatory governance’ in Porto Alegre was not only presented as ‘the raw material for elaborating a set of general principles of institutional design for invigorating direct democracy’ but as ‘an enormous success’ in its own right.7 The goal set for the Real Utopias Project in 1995 of seeking ‘firm foundations for plausible visions of radical alternatives’ was admirably concretized in the methodological strategy for analyzing empirical cases that Erik articulated in Envisioning Real Utopias in 2010. He stressed the crucial task of revealing the ‘contradictions, limits and dilemmas faced by the real utopian design’, precisely in order to avoid a ‘critical danger in this kind of analysis [which] is that the study of such examples degenerates into propagandistic cheerleading.’ The call for ‘sober awareness’ rather than ‘wishful thinking’ was specified in terms of trying ‘to fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment.’8 Such sobriety was sorely missing at the three World Social Forums held in Porto Alegre in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Most of the many hundreds of delegates from abroad

5 See Envisioning Real Utopias, ch. 9. The debt to Gramsci is, however, addressed directly in only one footnote, at p. 332, n. 11. 6 This was not so much the case with the three volumes that appeared before it. The real-world empirical referent of Cohen and Rogers’ Associations and Democracy (1995) was still the tired old corporatist trade union-employer association ‘at the core of social democratic practice in Northern Europe’ (p. 34), while Roehmer’s Equal Shares: Making Market Work (1996) was a contribution to what was by then an almost decade old theoretical debate, begun amid the impending collapse of the old Soviet model in the 1980s, but whose contemporary real-world application by the mid-1990s was notoriously absent. This was indeed also the case with Recasting Egalitarianism by Bowles and Gintis (1999) whose model economy of worker-owned firms actually appeared most influenced by the 1980’s supply-side . As Sam Gindin and I noted shortly after when their book came out, Bowles and Gintis ‘set out to bridge the democratization of the economy, expressed through a radical redistribution of capital assets, with what they view as the real-world need for raising productivity. This is utopia under the unfluence of supply-side economics… It is never made clear how Bowles and Gintis imagine the redistribution of capital assets would come about – except that it would not be mandated universally by ‘government fiat’. It seems likely that the authors have some kind of notion of pension fund socialism in mind or that they expect that the banks would be induced to lend workers the money to buy their firms at non-prohibitive rates of interest. The main effect of this schema would be to ensure that competition rather than solidarity was the goal – indeed the primary structural characteristic – of the working class itself. For the discipline of competition to be effective, considerable inequalities in wealth and income among workers would necessarily have to be sustained… [T]he attempt to “get real” involves incorporating so much capitalist rationality that the results, while perhaps “feasible”, seem anything but utopian.’ Panitch and Gindin, Transcending Pessimism, pp. 8-9. 7 Envisioning Real Utopias, p. 158. 8 Envisioning Real Utopias, p. 151. 4 who attended the packed sessions where municipal staff described in minute detail the procedures of the participatory budget (PB) process were, quite simply, awe-struck. Hungry for hope against a neoliberalism which Perry Anderson called at the time ‘the most successful ideology in world history’, they behaved rather like Beatrice and Sydney Webb, who after a visit to Moscow during the Great Depression in 1935 famously came away saying ‘we have seen the future and it works’. There were all too few who were inclined to probe for the very complexities and dilemmas which had already led Sergio Baiérle - a key figure in the discussions among community militants, trade unionists and liberal professionals out of which the PB experiment was spawned in the late 1980s - to his sobering assessment of ‘The Porto Alegre Thermidor’ by the time the World Social Forums were being hosted there.9 Baiérle was justly proud of the PB’s development as ‘the backbone of the participatory system in Porto Alegre, where more than thirty-five sectoral councils exist, where periodic conferences evaluate and define the direction of municipal public policy, and where there are popular ‘City Congresses’ debating proposals for the future of the city.’ Yet the support for direct popular involvement in the budgetary process and the management of services, even in Porto Alegre, had already become increasingly bound up through the 1990s with ‘the new consensus of late neo-liberalism: free market, fiscal responsibility and community management of social policy… it is the private sector that is itself seeking – what a contradiction! - to reconstruct the state outside the state.’ And with the aid of ‘the state offering help but not guarantee rights’, it was precisely ‘at this point of expansion, both external and internal, due to escalating support for direct community management, that PB runs the risks of thermidorian reaction’.10 Baiérle actually saw this danger as pertaining as much due to bureaucratic logic as to market logic. The PB experiment was founded on the understanding that ‘the state management does not per se guarantee the public interest’, yet from the beginning it had required extensive state support. Notably, it was not so much the centralized power of the state that had got in the way of this in Porto Alegre as it was the ‘challenge of getting several city hall departments to work together…’.

It is as if “city planning” has been chasing reality without ever attaining it. It is understandable that PB participants have difficulty contemplating urban questions in a global sense, since for this public an inclusive vision of society must be learned and constructed (because it is a new development not yet written into their praxis). The same cannot be said about the Popular Front government. It is incomprehensible that today, after more than a decade of PB, the government still has no map detailing, region

9 Sergio Baiérle, ‘The Porto Alegre Thermidor: Brazil’s ‘Participatory Budget’ at the Crossroads’, in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds, Fighting Identities: Socialist Register 2003, London: Merlin, 2002. 10 Ibid, pp. 311-13. 5

by region, subject by subject, the failures and conquests of the PB experience; a tool that would facilitate both evaluation and planning for future possibilities in collectively- determined municipal public investment. The existence of participatory space does not itself eliminate the social division of labour, nor the split between technical knowledge and social and practical knowledge, even if the experience does point to ways these divisions may be overcome. Despite contrary claims by the government, it is only by focusing on these challenges that PB will take citizens beyond the attainment of their most basic demands.11

The consensual community identity, which had initially concentrated these basic demands around street paving and sanitation, had already by 1992 begun to fray in the face of challenges by the proprietors of unused private land where poor people had ‘illegally’ established favelas, which made it impossible to invest in street paving and sanitation under existing law. Yet as the city administration embarked on ‘land regularization’, involving long negotiations with the proprietors ‘with uncertain results’, none of the difficult strategic choices involved in how to conduct this class struggle were put before the delegates directly involved in the PB process. Rather than becoming the locus of the development of popular capacities in the class struggle, the top down strategic division of labour was reproduced. This reflected the actual evolution of the Workers Party (PT) after it entered government in 1989 in Port Alegre. What had originally distinguished the PT was its insistence that it was both a post-Leninist and post-Social Democratic political formation, whose cadre even after they entered the state would continue to be organizers of the unorganized and developers of popular strategic capacities to underpin engaged mobilization.12 But as Margaret Keck had already shown in her outsanding 1995 study of the PT, it could not maintain that commitment once inside the state, even at the local level.13 This was confirmed by Baiérle for Porto Alegre: ‘There were strong links between union and popular movements during the early 1980s when the struggle against military rule led to the building of a mass movement, through which the PT gained hegemony over the process of building the Urban Union of Neighborhood Organizations (UAMPA)’.14 But things looked very different after the PT’s first decades in office in Porto Alegre: With the exception of electoral campaigns, the PT in Porto Alegre is being reduced to a kind of ‘parliament of tendencies’, with internal party agencies for affiliation, planning

11 Ibid, pp. 319-20. 12 This was, of course, the central theme which Roberto Unger went on to sound throughout his illustrious academic career at Harvard, stressing the need for structural reforms in the state to make branches of government ‘friendly to the rise of popular engagement’, so as to actually facilitate the self-organization of the exploited, oppressed and disadvantaged even while keeping them ‘free from any taint of government or control or tutelage’. Politics: A Work in Constructive Social Theory, Volume I Cambridge, 1987, p. 438. 13 Margaret E. Keck, The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil, Chicago, 1995. 14 Baiérle, p. 314. 6

and social articulation transformed into ‘partisan collectives’ constituted around government departments or parliamentary representatives. As rivalries among party tendencies took the form of measuring how many departments, positions and elected parliamentarians each one controlled, a new logic of internal party life was created…’15

As former PT militants entered the state, the organized community sectors of Porto Alegre increasingly got involved mainly ‘as spectators, as the power of previously existing spaces, such as the municipal and state fora for urban reform, had become diluted inside the government.’ Indeed, with the funding for community management of public projects (day-care centres, cooperatives, etc.), this also led to ‘the emergence of the “professional citizen”, a kind of amateur politician acting individually but always available to represent the community or mediate relations between community and government’, with a clear tendency ‘to substitute for peoples’ participation’ rather than ‘empower people to participate on their own’.16 Yet when Deepening Democracy appeared in 2003, presenting Porto Alegre’s PB as one of the foremost examples of the successful practice of ‘empowered participatory governance’, one could find almost no trace of such a sobering assessment. Even its theoretical discussion of the potential pitfalls of their model addressed few of the acute contradictions, limits and dilemmas Baiérle had identified in Porto Alegre.17 And when Envisioning Real Utopias appeared seven years later, taking the Porto Alegre PB experiment as its leading real-world example of a new form of social empowerment in relation to the state, it admitted the process was ‘often messy, with many conflicts and glitches’ (without describing any of them), yet ‘taken as a whole’ it was ‘an enormous success’. There was still no trace of the accumulating contradictions identified by Baiérle seven years earlier, which were in fact by then not only seriously besetting the PT administrations at the national and state levels but actually led to the defeat of the PT in Porto Alegre itself in 2010, the same year Envisioning Real Utopias was published. Perhaps even more problematic was the prominence Envisoning Real Utopias now also gave to Quebec as its new real-world case-study of ‘social empowerment and the economy’. With the full implementation of neoliberalism through the neo-corporatist structures of Northern European states (and above all Germany18) having by then completely cut the

15 Baiérle, pp. 322-3 16 Baiérle, pp. 321-2. 17 Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, ’Thinking about Empowered Participatory Governance’, Deepening Democracy, Chapter 1, esp. pp. 10-12, 33-38. The second chapter, Gianpaolo Baoicchi’s ‘Participation, Activism and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment’, opening the case studies section of the book, actually thanked Baiérle’s Centro de Assessoria e Estudos Urbanos (CIDADE) for its ‘generosity’ without which ‘this study would have been impossible’. Yet there were few signals of Baiérle’s concerns. Rather, the successes of Porto Alegre were contrasted with the disappointments of PB initiatives elsewhere in Brazil, although ‘it was beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss in detail what background conditions perhaps made Porto Alegre different from some other of these cities.’ p. 64. 18 See the detailed account of this, alongside the devastating critique of the Varieties of Capitalism school as poor social science, in Wolfgang Streeck, Reforming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Formation, Oxford, 2009. Cf. the earlier critiques in David Coates, ed. Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches, Palgrave 2005, esp. by Albo (Ch. 3), Chibber (Ch. 7), Panitch and Gindin (Ch. 8) and Fast (Ch. 12). 7 intellectual ground from the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ school, let alone the Real Utopia Project’s first volume, it appeared that new life might yet be breathed into the model of ‘governance through associational democracy’ via Quebec’s Chantier de l’economie sociale. Launched in 1996 out of the fraying tripartism of government, trade union and employer associations, its centerpiece was the inclusion of cooperatives and community organizations in the direct provision of social services in the province. This so-called ‘social economy’ pertained only to a very small part of the Quebec economy, even insofar as this was conceived to include the capital investment pension Solidarity Fund of the Quebec Federation of Labour, which Envisioning Real Utopias also championed.19 Moreover, established as it was in the wake of a series of severe defeats imposed through coercive legislation on the very public sector trade unions who were the main social base of the social democratic Parti Quebecois,20 the Chantier exercise from the beginning was directly associated with the implementation of fiscal austerity and social service cuts, including through the downloading of service provision to the community level. The most positive outcome of the whole exercise was a province-wide day care program run by semi- autonomous community organizations with financial support from the state, alongside a myriad of small projects funded under the Chantier’s auspices. But this did not obviate the concerns of the many social movement activists who rejected participation in the Chantier process all along (even involving some rioting around the summit meeting venues), concerns which were expressed with impressive foresight in a book published in 1998 by Quebec intellectuals and activists, entitled ‘The Future of an Illusion’.21 Yet this was an illusion that Envisioning Real Utopias unfortunately still fostered twelve years later. The disillusionment of even most of those who had initially been attracted by the Chantier’s ‘social economy’ rhetoric and practice had led them by then to the new socialist party, Quebec Solidaire (QS). Created in 2006 out of the merger of the small left-wing party, Union des forces progressistes (UFP), with the large alter-globalization political movement, Option Citoyenne, over the following decade QS would secure upwards of 20 percent of the vote in the province. This was an instance of the realignment of political forces elsewhere that gave rise around the same time to Die Linke in Germany and Syriza in Greece, soon to be followed by Podemos in Spain. Insofar as the Porto Alegre PB experiment and the Quebec social economy were the primary ‘practices’ taken as providing the ‘experimental conditions’ for evaluating the adequacy

19 Envisioning Real Utopias, pp. 204-16, 225-34. 20 See Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, From Consent to Coercion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms, third edition, Garamond 2003, esp. pp. 197-99. 21 Louise Brown et Mark Fortier, L’Economie Sociale: L’Avenir d’une Illusion, Montreal: Fides, 1998. See also Jean-Marc Piotte, Du combat au parterariat, Montreal: Nota Bene, 1998. For an early critique of the Quebec Solidarity Fund as ‘a diversion of energy from addressing fundamental issues in our economy and our direction as a labour movement’, see Sam Gindin, ‘Playing a Capital Game: The Quebec Solidarity Fund’, Our Times magazine, March 1989, pp. 24-5. For a more general critique of labour solidarity funds, including Quebec’s, as ‘the human face of finance’, see Jim Stanford, Paper Boom, Lorimer, 1999, esp. ch. 15. 8 of the theory of ‘empowered participatory governance’ and thus for ‘reconstructing that theory in light of its inadequacies’, where does a more sober assessment of at least these two real world cases deployed in Envisioning Real Utopias leave us?22 Apart from indicating that it is by no means easy for engaged intellectuals to escape the ‘critical danger’ of ‘wishful thinking’ or even ‘cheerleading’ (as would soon also be seen at the time of Syriza’s election in 2015, quickly to be followed by outraged charges of betrayal less than six months later), it would certainly not sustain a reversion to supporting an insurrectionary strategy. The closely argued case made against a ruptural strategy of transformation in the final chapters of Envisioning Real Utopias read every bit as convincingly even in light of our more critical assessment of the limits and contradictions of the real-world examples advanced in that book. Rather, what was most problematic about Envisioning Real Utopias 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.23 Indeed, insofar it was justified for one critic to call what was presented in Envisioning Real Utopias as a ‘smorgasbord’ wherein ‘Wright analyzes alternatives in isolation from one another’,24 the lacuna regarding the role and institutional design of the political parties associated with its real world alternatives might well be seen as a major reason for this. Without dissenting at all from the insistence expressed in the final pages of Envisioning Real Utopias on ‘strategic indeterminacy: there is no one way’, one can only wonder how the question of the socialist party could have been entirely left aside, given its recognition that transformation can only happen through ‘the conscious actions of people acting collectively to bring it about’ and that ‘a theory of transformation needs to include a theory of conscious agency and strategy’.25 And what is especially notable in this respect is that in his final book Erik shifted his attention away from institution-building in the interstices of civil society to what he admittedly ‘had not dealt with in a systematic way before’, especially in relation to ‘the problem of strategy, how to get from here to there’. To this end, Eric turned not only to ‘the problem of the state’ but also to ‘the problem of forming collective actors capable of acting politically in an effective way to transform capitalism’.26 While he saw no extant political movement which ‘explicitly embraces this strategic complex of resisting, taming, dismantling, and escaping

22 It should be noted in this respect that Erik analysis of Mondragon, usually the subject of the most naïve cheerleading in the literature on cooperatives, does in fact concern itself far more with the contradictions, limits and dilemmas it increasingly faces, especially in the context of the process of economic globalization. See Envisioning Real Utopias, pp. 243-4. 23 Indeed none of the six Real Alternative Project volumes from 1995 to 2009 had devoted any substantive attention to political parties, even though the propagation and implementation of policies they advanced would necessarily be dependent on them. 24 Craig Borowiak, ‘Scaling Up Utopias: E.O. Wright and the Search for Economic Alternatives’, New Political Science, 34:1, September 2012, pp. 360, 362. 25 Envisioning Real Utopias, p. 370. To lay my cards on the table, my own concern with transcending pessimism and grounding optimism in patience and perseverance has remained centrally concerned with overcoming the defects in theories and practices of the socialist mass party, from Social Democracy and Industrial Militancy (1976) to Working Class Politics in Crisis (1985) to The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From to New Labour (1997) to Renewing Socialism: Transforming Democracy, Strategy and Imagination (2008) to The Socialist Challenge Today: Syriza, Sanders, Corbyn (2018). 26 Preface to How to be an Anticapitalist, Verso 2019, pp. XI, XIII. 9 capitalism in order to erode, over the long term, its dominance’, he drew inspiration from the ‘impulses in this direction’ that had appeared not only with Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain but also from ‘the youthful currents within some established center-left parties’ such as those that had emerged in support of Corbyn and Sanders. Indeed, the recent coming to the fore of socialists at the leadership levels of the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party, deploying a class-focused political discourse directed against the power of the capitalists, of the corporations, of the banks – and the state policies and actions which reflect and sustain this power – has galvanized tens of thousands of young people into groups like Momentum and the Democratic Socialists of America. Their affiliation thereby to the parties of the centre-left is not only directly concerned with mobilizing support for these socialist leaders and their political discourse, but also using this as a springboard for advancing class struggles in the workplace, the community, and the local state. Nothing like this has happened in the UK and USA for at least three generations. It has much to do with the frustrations of two decades of episodic mass protests, isolated local community practices, and the marginality of those small revolutionary parties which provided little strategic perspective beyond direct action, all of them leaving to the side the matter of how to enter the state to change what it does, let alone to change what it is. At the same time, the emergence of a twenty-first century socialism which neither defines itself by the Bolshevik model, nor abjectly shrinks from advancing a socialist project for fear of being tainted by it, is itself a historic development. This is not to say that the Soviet revolution is forgotten, but only that as young socialist activists mobilize against the timidity of career politicians and the machinations of the old centre-left party and media establishment that keeps them in place, they are today far more likely to be inspired by elements of its original revolutionary spirit than its specific revolutionary methods. There was always a distinct aura of unreality in the assumption of The Real Utopias Project that the foundation for transformative change might partly be based on the politics of class compromise undertaken under the auspices of social democratic parties. This was not only a matter of these parties having abandoned paying any lip service to the goal of transcending capitalism; it was even more because their institutional forms had long before this proved unsuited to overcoming the fragmentation of the working classes as well as developing the capacities of the working people, including their unions, as social and political agencies for socialist transformation.27 There were, of course, bitter struggles inside these parties over this, which surfaced especially poignantly at the height of the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state and the first clear signs of the emergence of today’s neoliberal globalized capitalism. They were initiated by democratic socialists within these parties both to secure radical policies designed as

27 See in this respect my critique of Adam Przeworkski’s adoption (while neglecting internal party practices) of Kautsky’s rigidly narrow class categories (missing all the theoretical nuance of Wright’s as well as Carchedi’s ‘contradictory class locations’) in Leo Panitch, ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution’, Socialist Register 1989, as well as in Renewing Socialism, Chapter One. Indeed, Erik’s apparent endorsement of Przeworski and Sprague’s analysis of electoral class logics in respect to ‘collective action opportunities’ was one of most surprising, and unfortunate, aspects of Envisioning Real Utopias (pp. 281-2). 10 a bridge to longer term socialist goals and to address how their institutional design needed to be changed so as to mobilize broad working class support to that end as well as to be able implement those policies once inside the state.28 It was in the wake of the defeat, expulsion or marginalization of the forces advancing this agenda that, as Eric put it in his last book, ‘the political parties traditionally linked to the working classes generally embraced, to varying degrees, the core ideas of neoliberalism’ by the 1990s.29 Indeed, Envisioning Real Utopias discussion of the Meidner Plan in Sweden would have been more insightful had it analyzed through this prism the intra-party conflict that attended it. Instead, after noting in passing Olaf Palme’s lukewarm attitude to it, the fate of the Meidner Plan was analyzed only from the perspective of the logics of workers and capitalists class interests, without any apparent awareness of the extensive discussion in union branches and opportunities for input from individual members that went into the initial preparation of the plan, and the strategic mistakes by both the SAP and the LO that allowed the biggest capitalist firms to mobilize the smaller ones in opposition to the plan.30 Similarly, had Envisioning Real Utopias discussion of the Workers Party in Porto Alegre addressed what aspects of its institutional design led it, even while fostering participatory budgeting and redistributive policies, to become entrapped inside bureaucratic and clientelistic structures, this might have helped us understand what has happened not only to the PT at the national level in Brazil but also what happened with Syriza in Greece five years later. Yet the fact that Eric had begun probing these questions – even if too briefly and abstractly in his posthumously published book in 2019 – only underlines how much his optimism of the intellect will be missed. His understanding that ‘the trick for socialist political forces is to exploit the states internal inconsistencies as well as the contradictions it faces in solving the problems that capitalism itself creates’; his admission that for the ‘various kind of civil society-based actors to have sustained efficacy… they need to somehow be connected to progressive political parties capable of acting directly within the state’; his recognition that ‘the biggest puzzle in this argument on strategy for eroding capitalism concerns the creation of robust collective actors capable of acting politically… [which was] traditionally the work of political parties’ – all this goes well beyond where Envisioning Real Utopias took us. It is now up to the rest of us to work on elaborating these insights and developing them strategically.31

28 For an overview of these struggles inside social democratic parties in the 1970s, see Panitch and Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism, Ch. 1. 29 How to be an Anticapitalist, p. 139. 30 Envisioning Real Utopias, pp. 232-4, 350-55. 31 See How to be an Anticapitalist, pp. 99-100, 104, 111, 121.