The Real Utopias Project
"Real Utopia" seems like a contradiction in terms. Utopias are fantasies, morally inspired designs for social life unconstrained by realistic considerations of human psychology and social feasibility. Realists eschew such fantasies. What is needed are hard-nosed proposals for pragmatically improving our institutions. Instead of indulging in utopian dreams we must accommodate to practical realities.
The Real Utopia Project embraces this tension between dreams and practice. It is founded on the belief that what is pragmatically possible is not fixed independently of our imaginations, but is itself shaped by our visions. We need "real utopias": utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of muddling through in a world of imperfect conditions for social change.
The Real Utopias Project is an attempt at countering this cynicism by sustaining and deepening serious discussion of radical alternatives to existing institutions. The objective is to focus on specific proposals for the fundamental redesign of basic social institutions rather than on either general, abstract formulations of grand designs, or on small reforms of existing practices.
In practical terms, the Real Utopias Project is built around a series of workshop conferences sponsored by the A. E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin. The general format of these conferences consists of selecting a provocative manuscript that lays out the basic outlines of a radical institutional proposal and then inviting 15-20 scholars to write essays that in one way or another address this document. These essays have ranged from short, point-by-point critiques of specific arguments to longer papers developing one or more of the themes of the focal manuscript. The essays are then circulated to all participants in the conference well in advance of the gathering so that the discussions of each paper at the conference are informed by the arguments raised by the entire set. After the workshop is over, participants have an opportunity to revise their essays before they appear as a collection in the Real Utopias Project series published by Verso. All royalties from the The Real Utopia Project books go into a fund to support future conferences and books.
As of 2010, eight conferences have been organized on this format:
This conference was organized around a manuscript by Philippe van Parijs which explored the philosophical and economic foundations of the proposal to replace the income transfer programs of existing welfare states by a simple, universal unconditional income grant. The papers from this conference were not published as a collection in the Real Utopias Project series, although the themes are presented in the volume edited by van Parijs under the title Arguing for Basic Income (Verso, 1993)
2. Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance (1992)
This conference engaged a complex and important manuscript by Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers on the problem of democratic governance in capitalist societies. The central issue of discussion was the potential for enhancing both the effectiveness and the democracy of democratic capitalism by institutionalizing a pervasive governance role for nonstate, quasi-voluntary secondary associations. Some of the papers from this conference appeared in a special issue of Politics & Society (December, 1992). The entire set of papers appears as the first volume of the Real Utopias Project Verso series, Associations & Democracy (1995).
3. A model for Market Socialism (1994)
This was the first conference organized around a book rather than a paper: John Roemer's, A Future for Socialism (Harvard University Press, 1994). The conference explored Roemer's proposal to create a form of market socialism in which there were two kinds of money -- dollars for the purchase of commodities and coupons for the purchase of shares in firms. The core of the proposal is that (a) these coupons are initially equally distributed to all adults and then used to buy shares which are subsequently traded on a coupon-share market; (b) coupons cannot be sold for dollars, so that dollar wealth cannot be converted into coupon wealth and coupon wealth cannot be directly converted into dollar wealth; (c) share ownership, denominated in coupon values, gives people property rights in the dollar profits of firms in the form of dividends. A subset of the papers appears in Politics & Society (December, 1994), and the entire set as the second volume in the Verso series, Equal Shares (1996).
4. Efficient Redistribution in Advanced Capitalism (1995)
This conference was anchored in an essay written by the two economists, Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis. This essay argues that in order to revitalizehttp://wiki.dickinson.edu/skins/common/images/button_extlink.png an economic strategy on the Left, the Left needs to focus on the redistribution of a wide variety of assets rather than on state provision of services and redistribution of income. Properly designed systems of asset redistribution can both accomplish egalitarian goals and promote increased productivity. These arguments are elaborated for three main cases: a redistribution of assets in enterprises to the employees increases efficiency by reducing monitoring costs and improving incentives to work hard; a redistribution of assets in schooling in the form of a radically egalitarian systems of vouchers makes schools more accountable to parents and thus likely to more efficiently meet educational needs; and a redistribution of public housing assets by giving residents ownership rights in their housing will lead to improved maintenance of the housing stock. Such an approach, they argue, requires dropping the traditional leftwing aversion to using the market and institutions of private property in the service of democracy. A set of the papers from the conference appeared in Politics & Society, December 1996, and then entire set, with a new concluding essay by Bowles and Gintis, was published as the third volume in the Verso Real Utopias Project series, Recasting Egalitarianism (1999)
This conference was a follow-up on the second Real Utopias Project conference on "Associations and Democratic Governance" held in 1992. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright wrote an introductory essay for the conference, which elaborates a particular conception of participatory democracy called "empowered participatory governance" and then lays out an inventory of problems and questions which can be used to analyze real world cases of institutional innovation in terms of this model. The conference itself was built around a number of on-going real-world experiments in participatory democracy that have been in place long enough for a serious discussion of their dilemmas and potentials. The core papers from the conference were published in Politics & Society in 2001, and the complete set of papers published in volume 4 of the Real Utopias Project Series, Deepening Democracy: institutional innovations in empowered participatory governance (2003)
6. Rethinking Redistribution (2003)
This conference in the Real Utopias Project examined two provocative proposals for radical redesigns of redistributive institutions: Universal Basic Income, as elaborated by Philippe van Parijs, and Stakeholder Grants, as elaborated by Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott. While both of these proposals contain a range of complex details, they are both based on very simple ideas: In the proposal for Basic Income, every citizen receive a monthly stipend from the state which guarantees them a standard of living at a respectable, no-frills level. In a stakeholder grants proposal, all citizens upon reaching adulthood are given a sizable capital grant sufficient to have a significant asset stake in the society. A set of the papers from this conference appeared as a special issue of the journal Politics & Society in 2003. The entire set constitutes the fifth volume in the Real Utopias project series, Redesigning Distribution (2005)
7. Pensions and the Control of Capital Accumulation (2004)
This conference explored the question of whether or not large pools of capital that have a public or quasi-public character, especially pension funds, could be used as a mechanism for enhancing the social accountability of capital accumulation. The opening paper in the conference by Robin Blackburn, “Pension Provision: The Crisis and Outline of an Alternative,” explores alternatives models of pension provision – both public and private -- and their prospects for adequately contending with the impending crisis of pension systems in the 21st century, and then proposes a specific kind of strategy for both dealing with this crisis and using pensions as an instrument for enhanced democratic control of accumulation. Two of the papers from the conference were published in the journal Politics & Soicety.
This conference examined the problem of how design of public institutions could facilitate egalitarian gender relations within the family over both caregiving and employment. The conference was anchored by Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers’ essay “Institutions that Support Gender Egalitarianism in Parenthood and Employment.” They argue that in order to reconcile in an egalitarian manner the interests of men, women and children within the emerging dualearner/ dual-caregiver model of the family, three clusters of institutional innovations are needed: 1) a generous mechanism of paid parental leaves for caregiving activities which is allocated to mothers and fathers individually, thus requiring fathers to “use or lose” their paid leave time; 2) effective working-time regulations that limit full-time work hours and raise the quality and availability of reduced-hour work; and 3) an expansive, universal program of early childhood education and care. The papers from the conference were published in the sixth volume in the Real Utopias Project series, Gender Equality: transforming family divisions of labor (2009).
