446g_Envisioning Real Utopias repaginated (harry).indd

At the center of a socialist alternative to capitalism, in whatever way socialism is understood, is the problem of economic institutions, specifi cally the social organization of power over the allocation of resources and control of production and distribution. In statist conceptions of socialism such power and control operates primarily through the state, in the strongest version through the direct state ownership of the principal means of production and comprehensive central planning. In the social empowerment conception of socialism proposed here, the problem of controlling economic processes is less clear-cut. There are multiple, heterogeneous institutional forms along the various pathways through which social power can be exercised over the production and distribution of goods and services. In most of the specifi c proposals we will consider here, the institutional designs for social empowerment leave a substantial role for markets, and thus in one sense or another they tend to envision some sort of “market socialism.” This goes against the grain of traditional Marxian conceptions of socialism as the transcendence not only of capitalist class relations but also of the market itself. In traditional Marxism the harms generated by capitalism as a system of production are attributed both to the pernicious effects of the market and to power and exploitation linked to the class relation between capitalists and workers. The vision of a world beyond capitalism thus revolves around both the move towards the egalitarianism expressed in the anti-class aphorism “to each according to need, from each according to ability,” and the aspiration for a rationally ordered economy in which the production and distribution of goods and services is organized through some mechanism of collective planning. Few theorists today hold on to the belief that a complex, large-scale economy could be viable without some role for