Envisioning Real Utopias
WCPC Seminar Series on Poverty and Policy: Spring 2010
Presented by Erik Olin Wright
Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
April 26, 2010
University of Washington
Co-sponsored with the UW Department of Sociology
TALK ABSTRACT
Rising inequality of income and power, along with the recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet there has been a global retreat by the Left: on the assumption that liberal capitalism is the only game in town, political theorists tend to dismiss as utopian any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations. As Fredric Jameson first argued, it is now easier for us to imagine the end of the world than an alternative to capitalism.
Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. Building on a lifetime’s work analyzing the class system in the developed world, as well as exploring the problem of the transition to a socialist alternative, Wright has now completed a systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors.
Envisioning Real Utopias aims to put the social back into socialism, laying the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.
TALK SLIDES
See the slides from this presentation here
Erik Olin Wright
Envisioning Real Utopias
Verso
2010
Présentation de l'éditeur
Rising inequality of income and power, along with recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet few are attempting this task—most analysts argue that any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations is utopian. Erik Olin Wright’s major new work is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. A systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors, Envisioning Real Utopias lays the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.
Table of Contents
Selected Chapters from the pre-publication typescript
Introduction
Part I. Diagnosis and Critique
Chapter 3. What’s so bad about Capitalism?
Part II. Alternatives
Chapter 4. Thinking about Alternatives to Capitalism
Part III. Transformation
Chapter 9. Ruptural Transformation
Chapter 11. Symbiotic Transformation
Conclusion
Erik Olin Wright is Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the editor of the Real Utopias series, which includes his Deepening Democracy (cowritten with Archon Fung), and is the author of many other books, including Class Counts, Interrogating Inequality, The Debate on Classes and Classes.
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