Ethics and emancipation in action: concrete utopias

ABSTRACT

This is an edited transcript of a keynote paper given at IACR's 2021 Annual Conference. The paper outlines a critical realist approach to critique and illustrates its application to the contemporary economy. It argues that responsible, constructive critique depends on ethics, on causal explanation, and on the development of utopian visions. Utopias are tools, and concrete utopias are not visions of whole alternative ready-made societies, but rather partial models that can be built in practice as elements of the larger social world. The argument is illustrated with three cases of digital utopianism, which help to demonstrate the practical challenges facing utopian schemes. Concrete utopias are a vehicle for combining our theoretical understandings of possibilities with an ethical analysis of needs in order to offer practical schemes for improving human flourishing.

KEYWORDS:

• Critique
• economic diversity
• utopianism

Although the word ‘critical’ in critical realism didn't originally refer to political critique, it was always part of Roy Bhaskar's intention to provide support for radical politics: ‘to underlabour  … for the … human sciences, in so far as they might illuminate and empower the project of human self-emancipation’ (Bhaskar 1989, vii). This desire to underlabour for emancipatory change remains central for many, if not most, critical realists. Yet critical realism is an academic pursuit, so what can it mean for it to support or empower political change?

Answers to this question tend to revolve around the concept of critique, which will also be the central term in this paper. Too often, however, critique merely consists of actualist criticism of the status quo with little reflection on the ethical underpinnings of those criticisms nor on what could plausibly be done to remedy contemporary problems. I will argue, by contrast, that responsible critique has both a negative moment and also a positive, utopian moment. The positive moment of critique depends on ethical commitments and employs both concrete utopias and causal explanation. As a tradition that explicitly considers all three of these, critical realism is well placed to contribute to the development of critique.

There's a philosophical part of my argument, which I will start with, looking at relatively abstract questions about what we need to do in order to build constructive, coherent and responsible political critique. In this part I will look, in turn, at the ways in which critique depends on utopianism, on ethical commitments, and on causal explanation. Then I will move on, in steps, becoming gradually more concrete at each point, to look at the development of critical work in the social sciences. I’ll introduce this by turning first to the work of Erik Olin Wright on real utopias, which I’ll suggest is quite similar to Bhaskar's concept of concrete utopias, then use that to suggest that we can see practical utopianism in terms of an analytical cycle.

Then I will get more concrete again by focusing in on the context of political economy and more particularly on the digital economy (although I believe the general principles introduced in the more philosophical discussion would apply equally well to other potential foci of critique such as gender, racism or the legacy of colonialism). Here I will draw on the argument of my book Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy (Elder-Vass 2016), both in terms of the nature of the contemporary economy and the role of concrete or real utopias. I will also, finally, look at some specific examples that could loosely be thought of as digital utopian experiments, partly in order to illustrate some of the challenges of practical utopianism. Once we begin to look at real examples, it becomes clear just how much messier and more challenging utopianism is in practice than a purely philosophical consideration of the principles might suggest.

Responsible critique

Let me begin with the concept of responsible critique. What do I mean by responsibility in critique? First, the purpose of critique is to influence political practice by providing reasons and justifications for social change. So critique, if it becomes effective, has consequences for people. Now perhaps often our critique isn't effective. But because of the possibility that it will be and the possibility that our positive proposals will be influential, we must take responsibility for what is likely to happen if they are. That means attending to causes, to alternatives, and to consequences: taking care to make arguments that have the best prospect of supporting flourishing and not creating further harm.

Responsible critique, I argue, has both negative and positive moments. The negative moments include negative evaluations of the status quo: we need to be able to recognize when the status quo prevents flourishing and when it creates harms for people, and that requires that we explain the nature of those harms, why we should reject those harms and the things that cause them, and how the status quo contributes to creating them. But that negative moment, on its own, is merely criticism. To argue that something should be removed is implicitly to argue that it should also be replaced: absenting absence necessarily creates a new presence. Given that there is always a risk that what fills that vacuum could itself be harmful, and maybe even worse than what is being removed, any completed responsible critique must also move beyond the negative moment to the positive moment, which is provided by the examination and proposal of alternatives: concrete utopias. Concrete utopias themselves need to be understood in both explanatory and ethical terms. In other words, responsible critique requires that we explain and justify the likely consequences of our proposed alternatives to the status quo.

Critique hasn't always followed that path. Marxist politics in particular has often neglected the positive moment of critique – as Ernst Bloch, who first coined the term concrete utopias, argued (Levitas 1990). The consequence was a kind of revolutionism that failed to prioritize or often even to consider whether and how the alternatives to capitalism could be made better for human flourishing. Radical politics, I argue, needs to steer a path between, on the one hand, this revolutionism with no thought for the potentially devastating consequences of purely negative critique and, on the other hand, marginalist reformism which doesn't make much difference to the underlying causes of social problems. The role of concrete utopias is to help us steer that path.

Critique requires concrete utopias

Let me turn, then, to the three requirements for responsible critique that I listed in my introduction. Critique, first of all, requires concrete utopias. It should be obvious, I think, that the positive moment of critique is necessarily utopian: it requires us to envision alternatives to the status quo, possibilities that do not currently exist. Utopian thought, however, has often been dismissed for coming up with wildly implausible alternatives. Maybe those can be useful in the negative moment of critique, in helping people to see the flaws in the present, but they are not useful in the positive moment, the moment in which we produce alternatives that have some meaningful purpose to them. Indeed, unrealistic utopias can destroy support for change because change comes to be seen as be unrealistic, or they can divert the attention of movements away from achievable goals to impossible goals.

Useful utopian visions, by contrast, are what Ernst Bloch and Roy Bhaskar both called concrete utopias. Bhaskar's argument echoes the earlier work of Bloch (which he mentions: Bhaskar 1993, 164), who argued that the future is open though also constrained, and thus ‘full of objective real possibilities’ (Bloch, cited in Levitas 1989, 28). Bloch distinguished between abstract utopias – unrealizable visions and thus little more than wishful thinking – and concrete utopias, which are potentially realisable alternatives. As Bhaskar puts it:

Concrete utopianism involves a differentiation within the domain of possibilities of those that are real from those that are not. ‘Real’ here means ‘realisable’, and designates which possibilities may be actualized given a particular constraint. (Bhaskar 2016, 125)

Concrete utopianism, Bhaskar argues,

involves thinking how a situation or the world could be otherwise, with a change in the use of a given set of resources or with a different way of acting subject to certain constraints. This mode of thinking forms the basis of an ethics oriented to change, in which we think alternatives to what is actualized on the basis of given possibilities, possibilities which were actualized in one way but could be (or might have been) redeployed or actualized in another. (Bhaskar et al. 2010, 22–23)

This fits neatly into Bhaskar's critical realist ontology: utopias are real possibilities, hitherto unactualized possibilities which therefore belong in the domain of the real but not actual. Hence, they are alternatives that are worth striving for in the sense that they are potentially achievable.

Useful concrete utopias, though, are not visions of whole alternative ready-made societies, but rather partial models that can be built in practice as elements of the larger social world – so that building a better future may involve fitting together a number of concrete utopias that relate to different aspects of social practice. Utopian visions are also fallible in a variety of ways: we cannot know for certain what potential they have or how they will work out in any given context. Furthermore, because we live in a complex, dynamic, open social world, even if any given concrete utopia was to come about and to succeed in improving human flourishing, it would only take us one step along the road: social development will necessarily continue further into new forms in the future. Concrete utopias, as Erik Olin Wright puts it, are therefore ‘waystations … that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change’ (Wright 2010, 6) rather than final destinations.

Critique requires ethics

My second requirement is that responsible critique requires ethics. All too often, leftist critics of capitalism have denied that their argument rests on ethical premises. That has been characteristic of the Marxist tradition, in particular. Unfortunately, Bhaskar's early work on what he called explanatory critique seems to have been influenced by this tradition. He seems to have felt that his objective of underlabouring for emancipation required him to provide a justification for the Marxist denial that critique was built on ethical foundations. I don't plan to discuss this aspect of Bhaskar's work in detail here, but both Andrew Sayer and myself have criticized this argument of Bhaskar's at length elsewhere (Sayer 1997; Elder-Vass 2010). Similarly, a number of Marxists, including Ernst Bloch, Norman Geras and Erik Olin Wright have argued that that tradition too is ultimately based on ethical commitments (Geras 1985). Indeed, any form of critique, I suggest, inherently depends on an ethical evaluation of some aspect of the present as a wrong that needs to be righted, and thus both on a negative ethical evaluation of the present and a positive ethical evaluation of some proposed, or at least implicit, utopian alternative. As Sayer puts it, ‘Critical social science needs to acknowledge its often hidden or repressed premise – that its evaluations of practices imply a conception of human flourishing’ (Sayer 2011, 245).

Effacing or denying the ethical basis of critique is not only problematic internally (because it denies something on which critique necessarily depends), it also undermines the persuasive task of critique. Critique is not concerned just with envisioning alternatives, but also persuading others of their importance. If we are to persuade people of the importance of reforms, we must be able to show that there is a wrong to be righted and how people could flourish under the different scenario we are proposing. So explicit ethical commitments are essential both to the production of critique and its expression.

But we cannot take ethical commitments and the values upon which they rest for granted. There is not a set of values that are objectively, eternally and necessarily right, as Bhaskar's moral realism seems to imply. Rather, they are social products that evolve through the very same processes of social discourse that we must use to persuade people of our arguments (Elder-Vass 2010). In the context of critique that means that to persuade people of our arguments we must be ready and willing to explain what ethical commitments they are based on, and indeed to explain and justify the underlying values. Nor will any practical, complex utopian intervention be justifiable in terms of any single value. Utopian proposals always depend on multiple different interacting values, and potentially contentious trade-offs between them, and so we must always remain open to the need for continuing ethical discourse.

Critique requires explanation

The third requirement for responsible critique is that it depends on causal explanation. There is always an implicit causal/explanatory assumption in any demand for change: an assumption that the thing to be changed is causally responsible for the harms to be repaired. That of course was central to Bhaskar's notion of explanatory critique (Bhaskar 1986, 177–180). For the negative moment of critique to be responsible and persuasive we need to make that assumption explicit – we need to be able to explain HOW the target of critique causes the harms that we are demanding to be removed.

Equally, the constructive element of critique, its concrete utopian moment, must also be explanatory: we must be able to say HOW a utopian alternative will cause flourishing in place of the harms caused by the status quo. As Bhaskar puts it, ‘Radical intellectuals need to show in detail how alternative futures can be coherently grounded in the deep structures of what already exists’ (Bhaskar et al. 2010, 23). That means attention to the mechanisms involved, but also attention to, and evaluation of, possible outcomes. Those evaluations are necessarily speculative – unlike the negative critique, in the positive moment we are always analysing something that does not yet exist and so there is more scope for error. Hence, we must be open to constructive discussion of both the causal and the evaluative elements of critique.

But it is not only how the concrete utopia would deliver benefits that we will have to explain: because it does not exist yet, we must also be ready to consider whether it is genuinely realisable, and that also requires a causal analysis. Here I particularly like Dorothea Schoppek's recent paper (Schoppek 2021). As she argues, we need to retroduce the mechanisms involved, which is necessarily based on our experience of previous events and structures, while considering how they would be likely to play out in a hypothetical future context – a kind of retrodiction of possible future events. This takes us one step towards addressing a fundamental epistemological challenge posed by the concept of concrete utopias: if concrete utopias are distinguished from abstract utopias by being realisable, how can we know whether any given utopian vision is realisable or not, and thus whether it is concrete or abstract (Levitas 1989, 28)? I’ll return to this challenge later.

Wright's real utopias

Let's move on from philosophical questions about the nature of critique to more practical questions about how we might go about developing critiques: questions that are just as important to critical social science. This takes us from the more philosophical part of the paper to the part that is more oriented to work in critical social science.

Let me introduce that by looking at the work of one of the most important recent exponents of critical utopian thinking, the American Marxist Erik Olin Wright. Wright spent the last twenty years of his career developing his Real Utopias project, a project that I consider to be highly compatible with Bhaskar's understanding of concrete utopias, and extremely valuable to the practice of radical critique, Marxist or otherwise.

Wright defined real utopias as ‘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 navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change’ (Wright 2010, 6). This definition has a great deal in common with Bhaskar's understanding of concrete utopias – both involve ideals or visions of the future but both stress that useful utopias are grounded in real possibility and serve to guide practical change.

I take the view that the concepts of concrete utopias and real utopias are entirely compatible and refer to essentially the same thing, but that Bhaskar and Wright focus on different aspects: Bhaskar is a philosopher, focused on the abstract character and role of utopian thinking, and Wright is a critical social scientist who is focused on how to apply it to our present political conjuncture. If there is a distinction, it is that for Bhaskar utopias are typically seen only as models – as proposals – whereas for Wright the concept includes both theoretical proposals ‘attentive to realistic problems of institutional design and social feasibility’ and also actual innovations ‘that embody in one way or another emancipatory alternatives to the dominant forms’ (Wright 2010, 1). So perhaps the concepts have slightly different extensions, but they overlap heavily, and the point of utopianism, its requirements and the purpose it serves, is the same for both thinkers.

Wright, however, didn't just write about utopias at the abstract philosophical level. He assembled a team of collaborators who produced a series of books advocating specific real utopian proposals, organized around an ethical commitment to radical, democratic, egalitarian social justice (Wright 2010, 12). In the introduction to his wonderful book Envisioning Real Utopias he gives some basic examples of such real utopias: participatory city budgeting, which was a considerable extension of the democratic process, particularly popular in a number of Latin American cities; Wikipedia; the Mondragon co-operatives which have been running in Spain for over sixty years; and unconditional basic income (Wright 2010, 2–5). The first three of these are actualized in the sense that they are existing experiments, in some cases having existed for quite a long time, whereas universal basic income, at the time Wright and his collaborators were writing, was still a vision without any practical actualizations – a largely theoretical proposal. It is already apparent from this list of experiments that for him (and again I think this is thoroughly compatible with Bhaskar's view) real utopias are not designs for complete finished societies, but rather multiple, incomplete, provisional, and designed at a variety of scales.

The utopian cycle

Once we make this step into practical utopianism, it becomes clear that utopias are not designed once and for all times, but that we can think of them as iterating cyclically. The three elements of ethics, explanation and utopias are now joined, to the extent possible under the circumstances, by the moment of enacting an experimental version of the proposed utopia, learning from the process, and returning to re-evaluate where we have got to, how successful the experiment has been, what the opportunities are now, and how we might be able to move on and improve. I don't want to set too much store by the precise order of the steps in this cycle (see Figure 1). It's possible, for example, that evaluative and explanatory work will occur together or iterate before we can move on to the later stages. But these activities are all necessary steps in the process of practical utopianism.

Figure 1. The utopian cycle.

You might see hints here of Bhaskar's TMSA or Archer's morphogenetic cycle, and indeed this approach is compatible with those, although the diagram here focuses on the agential process and of course every step of the process is also influenced by structural factors, as we’ll see when I come to discuss digital utopianism towards the end of my talk.

But this cycle also takes a step (complementing Schoppek's) towards helping with the epistemological problem that plagues the concept of concrete utopias: how can we tell which utopian designs are realizable? This is a gap that Levitas identifies in Bloch's work (Levitas 1990, 20, 24), that de Sousa Santos identifies in Wright's work (de Sousa Santos 2020), and which is equally applicable to Bhaskar's version of the argument. We can never give a final answer to this question of whether a utopian proposal is concrete, whether it is realisable, unless we implement it and it does indeed deliver what we wanted from it. Even attempts that fail prove nothing conclusively, since in principle they might have succeeded in other circumstances. But we can reason about the likelihood of a vision being realizable, and practical experience helps with this reasoning by providing evidence of how the forces concerned have interacted in past cases.

Our diverse economy

Let me move on again down the path of ever-increasing concreteness by looking at the possibilities for concrete utopianism in a particular field, the field of political economy today. One part of the role of explanatory work is to establish the structural context that constrains and enables possibilities for change. Here I want to introduce one part of the argument from my book Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy to give a flavour of my view of the structural context in the contemporary economy, which will frame my discussion of the possibilities for concrete utopianism (Elder-Vass 2016).

My starting point is JK Gibson-Graham's argument that we live in a far more diverse economy than is generally recognized (Gibson-Graham 1996). Prevailing discourses on both the left and the right encourage us to believe that we live in a thoroughly capitalist market economy. But this is partly an illusion fostered by defining and measuring the economy only in terms of market activity. If you think that only market activities, only activities in which things are bought and sold, count as economic, then inevitably the economy is purely a market economy. But if instead we think of the economy as provisioning – as those activities directed at fulfilling our material needs – then it becomes clear that vast amounts of economic activity are conducted outside the market, outside capitalism, through other economic forms.

That means that we need an ontology of economic forms. Mainstream economics sees no need for that because it assumes that only the market is important. Marxism is a bit better in this respect because it has the concept of modes of production, but it tends to think of modes of production as a single mode that dominates an entire society. What we need is a way of thinking about economic forms that recognizes that multiple forms coexist and interact. In the book I analyse economic forms using the concept of complexes of appropriative practices. Each economic form is an intersection of certain practices. Canonical capitalism, for example, is a complex of wage labour, commodity production, and capital accumulation. But there are many other forms, including many other varieties of capitalist forms and sub-varieties even of the canonical form. These capitalist forms dominate markets and they accumulate enormous financial power, but that doesn't make them universal in today's economy.

Other forms include the state, most obviously, and also non-capitalist actors in the market such as cooperatives and small family businesses for example, but my focus in the book is on gift forms of economy. These are central to economic activity within the family or household, but we also have the voluntary sector, and new digital forms of gift economy which I’ll discuss shortly. The digital economy has been a particularly fertile ground for the growth of new varieties, including capitalist forms, non-capitalist forms and hybrid economic forms.

Evaluating a diverse economy

Now this understanding of the economy leads in rather a different political direction than the Marxist assumption that we live in a monolithic capitalist economy. If economies were monolithic modes of production, then the only way forward would be to replace one mode of production with another: to sweep everything away and start again. The only choices are to change everything at once, or nothing important. For me, the traditional Marxist tendency to combine this view with a disregard for the ethical drivers of our politics and a refusal to theorize concrete utopias leads to irresponsible calls for massive disruption that would harm a vast number of people with no clear sense of how a replacement mode of production would work or improve the situation. Of course, that's a stereotype, and people like Wright prove that there are Marxists who think differently, but to create space to think more openly about economic change we must first learn to think differently about the economy we already have.

Once we recognize that we live in an economy that is already a diverse mix of economic forms, some more desirable than others, there is a more productive way of thinking about economic change: we can change our economy by shifting the mix of forms away from those that generate more harms towards those that support human flourishing. We need to evaluate the different forms and recognize the various harms and benefits they deliver (and any honest evaluation can see plenty of both in our contemporary economy). Then we can adopt different strategies for different parts of the mix. We can grow those that most help us to flourish (cooperatives and the gift sector, for example), shrink or abolish those that deliver the most significant harms, regulate those that aren't ideal but still have something useful to contribute, and innovate new utopian forms to experiment with. All of these actions contribute to changing the continually evolving mix of economic forms, without seeking to replace an entire economy overnight.

This kind of politics requires exactly the sort of critical foundation I have been talking about. We need to evaluate existing economic forms, identify their harms and benefits, analyse whether or not they are worth keeping and if so how they could be improved, and do just the same for possible economic forms: potential concrete utopias.

Digital utopias

In this last section let me examine some very concrete examples of utopian projects that have emerged in the digital space. I’m afraid that this won't neatly tie up my argument with evidence of the wonderful successes of digital utopianism, though. Practical utopianism is a lot messier than that. The projects I’ll be talking about developed in a context where they are constantly pushed by the structural power and innovations of capitalist business, and they all face limitations and internal tensions. I’m discussing them at least as much to illustrate the challenges and difficulties of practical utopianism as to illustrate its potential, but there is potential here as well, and elements of future economic forms that create more space for human flourishing and autonomy.

In some ways it should not surprise us that utopian projects have appeared in the digital space. The World Wide Web itself began as a non-commercial space designed for co-operation. Its very architecture is oriented to the free sharing of information, and it took many years for capitalist businesses to find ways to insert themselves into the web and create opportunities for making profit from it. Still, they have gradually been taking over, so it is important to recognize that this is still a space where utopian projects can thrive. The projects I’ll discuss are rather a mixed bunch: Wikipedia; open-source software; and cryptocurrencies, in particular Bitcoin.

Wikipedia & open-source software

Let me begin with Wikipedia (this discussion draws on Elder-Vass 2016, 144–170). In one sense Wikipedia doesn't fit my model particularly well, since it was not initially the product of a utopian design but an unintended consequence of using cooperative technologies (wiki) in what was intended to be a commercial project. But it has evolved into the poster case of a gift economy project in the digital economy. It is built on a complex of three gift practices: the product it produces is free information; it is produced through voluntary gifts of labour by editors; and it is funded by donations. These three gift practices have underpinned a project that has not only been sustainable but indeed has grown to become the largest and most used encyclopaedia the world has ever seen. And partly because of its dependence on free labour it has had to evolve in a way that keeps its editors on board. That means it has low levels of hierarchy in a system where editors choose their own tasks, and it has had to ban advertising and other commercial exploitation of its pages because they have been proven to alienate the editors the project depends on. There are many very positive aspects of Wikipedia, but it's by no means perfect – problems include edit wars, domination of some pages by sectional interest groups, and relatively low participation of women in the editing community. But it does provide a working model for unalienated labour delivering a free product – a model that surely has its place in the kind of diverse economy that would support human flourishing.

Open-source software has some similarities with the Wikipedia model (here I draw on Elder-Vass 2014). This is software that is written by freely donated labour, by programmers choosing their own tasks, that cannot be copyrighted by private actors, and is free to use. Outsiders sometimes think of it as a niche sector but in fact some of the most widely used software in the world is open source, mostly notably the Linux operating system which is used heavily on web servers and is the basis of the Android operating system used on the majority of the world's smartphones, the Apache web server software, and the Firefox browser. Even if you don't use Firefox or Android, if you’ve visited 3 or more web sites today you have probably used open-source software that served up the pages you viewed.

Open source does differ from Wikipedia, though, in some important ways. One is that it requires a centralized decision-making process to determine which new code goes into new releases of the software. Often there is a somewhat democratic process to determine this, but inevitably there is more hierarchy than we see in Wikipedia. That perhaps points to a limitation of Wikipedia, though, rather than a weakness of open-source software, since it is only because of the highly modular nature of Wikipedia's product that hierarchy can be so thoroughly dispensed with. Once you have a product, like a piece of software or most material products, that depends on pulling together a set of components in a structured way then the different parts must be compatible with each other. That requires a level of coordination that creates different organizational requirements. So we have to recognize that different models might be required for producing different kinds of thing.

A more striking difference, though, is that in some open-source communities many of the leading participants are not private individuals but commercial software companies, who donate some of the labour of their employees to the project. The labour is still donated (though now by the companies that pay for it rather than the software engineers themselves), the product is still free, and the copyright of the code remains in the digital commons, so you might ask why do these companies do it? The answer is that they make money by providing services linked to their participation in the project. IBM, for example, partly through its subsidiary Red Hat, provides a lot of the code for Linux for free, but it also provides paid support services to companies who use Linux. It is an attractive service provider precisely because its programmers are experts in the internals of Linux since they work on it all the time and because they can make changes to it to fix their customers’ problems.

In other words, open-source software has become a hybrid: a hybrid complex of gift and capitalist appropriative practices. We could take different perspectives on this. We could criticize it as colonization of the gift economy, an injection of capitalist logic into an unsullied space, but it is not clear that it is an entirely unhealthy development. One difficulty with the free labour model is that it doesn't provide economic rewards to the people who provide the labour. In a world where those who provide the labour must still buy things to live that's not a sustainable model for the whole economy. So a model which enables the provision of a free product by voluntary labour and still finds a way to pay the people who provide it is something we need. Programmers and editors need an income, and we will need economic models that provide them and other contributors with one. I’m not suggesting that the existing hybrid we see in the open-source world is the only way forward, but it addresses a challenge for some other utopian solutions. Perhaps the ideal model will not involve capitalist companies at all, but the current mix makes open-source software and the gift economy practices related to it sustainable at scale.

Cryptocurrencies

For my final example, let me consider the case of cryptocurrencies (here I draw on Elder-Vass 2022). I’ll focus on Bitcoin as the best-established and best-known example although the issues are similar for many others. In one sense, Bitcoin is the best fit of these three cases to Bhaskar's model. Both the design and a clear ethically based rationale for the benefits it was intended to produce were published in advance in Satoshi Nakamoto's famous white paper of 2008, a few months before he, she or they went on to create the Bitcoin infrastructure (Nakamoto 2008). There are even aspects of Nakamoto's critical vision that many of us might be happy with, such as an antagonism to the large financial institutions, and other cryptocurrency enthusiasts have seen it, for example, as a way of widening access to basic financial services. It was also clearly a realisable possibility as Bitcoin exists today and seems to be going from strength to strength. So at one level, Bitcoin fits the concrete utopian model.

Nevertheless, Bitcoin is highly problematic at several other levels. Its objectives are informed by a libertarian philosophy that is oriented to maximizing freedom for businesspeople. True, Nakamoto claims to be concerned about the needs of small businesses rather than large businesses, but the objective is to free business from restrictions that protect consumers. Bitcoin transactions are designed to be irreversible, for example, so that customers cannot claim back payments for any reason. And they are designed to be pseudo-anonymous to make it hard for governments to stamp down on illegal trading, for example in drugs and guns. This is a philosophy that is oriented to the needs of business, not towards the flourishing of all.

It's also well known that Bitcoin has produced a variety of harmful consequences. It has created another mechanism generating inequality, it is massively unstable, there have been numerous thefts and scams which are particularly difficult to detect and punish, it enables money laundering, and it consumes as much energy as a medium sized country to process a relatively small volume of actual transactions. These outcomes are far from what I think we would evaluate as utopian. Ironically, it is also failing to meet many of its own stated objectives. Most strikingly, big finance is gradually inserting its tentacles into the Bitcoin ecosystem, and it is becoming less an outpost for technological rebels and more the producer of a new set of vested interests and systemic risks.

So we can see Bitcoin as utopian in one sense, but it also flags up a warning about the pitfalls of utopianism. Just because a utopian vision is realizable does not mean that it is ethically desirable, that it should be realized. Utopias embody particular ethical priorities and must be evaluated in ethical as well as practical terms. And utopias will often have unintended consequences that make them highly problematic. Ironically, Bitcoin points us towards some of the (relative) strengths of the existing monetary systems it sought to replace, by demonstrating that currencies need stability, regulation, and democratic oversight.

Conclusion: utopianism in practice

Let me close by returning to my opening question: How can critical realism support emancipatory change? I’ve offered answers to this question at several different levels.

At the philosophical level critical realism can help us to clarify what is required for productive responsible critique that can support emancipatory politics. Critique depends on ethics, it depends on explanation, and it depends on the construction and deployment of utopian visions: not utopian visions of whole alternative societies, but practical, workable partial proposals for developing human flourishing.

At the level of social science, the task is to develop those things! To develop ethically and causally informed critiques of existing society and to develop ethically and causally informed proposals for better ways of doing things: concrete utopias. Those utopias are necessarily provisional, experimental, evolving, and uncertain. Some utopias may work, some may not, most will require a cycle of evaluation, explanation, envisioning and enactment, and critical realism provides us with resources for at least the first three of those four stages.

At the level of political economy more specifically, I have illustrated these more abstract arguments with a discussion of the contemporary economy and digital utopianism. Once we understand the diversity of the economy and the space that already exists for more desirable complexes of appropriative practices, we can see that there are opportunities for pursuing transformative improvement by changing the mix of economic forms. Nevertheless, we should not expect practical utopianism to be unproblematic. Recent examples of digital utopianism demonstrate some of the many pitfalls, even once we have a coherent vision of the possibilities. Even when they are practical, utopian visions may fail to improve human flourishing, as in the case of Bitcoin. And even when they do make a positive contribution, they are always open to resistance and subversion from the economic power of large corporations, as in the hybridization of open-source software by commercial software companies.

Practical utopianism, then, may often fail, or only partially succeed, but it remains our only option for producing meaningful social change. If we begin with a coherent and internally feasible programme we have a better chance of achieving worthwhile change, and our responsibility as critical social scientists is not just to call for change but also to help map out feasible paths for it.

Let me end with a quote from Bhaskar that I think expresses the need for us to pursue this sort of vision. Not just any quote, but the closing sentences from the last book he wrote:

When it comes to detailed engagement in or with practices of emancipation … Much mediating work (and concrete utopianism) remains to be done if critical realism is to become a successful underlabourer for human emancipation, as it aspires to be. (Bhaskar 2016, 210)

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Notes on contributors

Dave Elder-Vass

Dave Elder-Vass is an Honorary Fellow at Loughborough University, UK. His forthcoming book Inventing Value (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines how financial entrepreneurs generate the belief that the financial instruments they create have value. Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2016) theorizes economic diversity and its implications for social theory and politics. He has also published extensively on social ontology and social theory from a critical realist perspective, including The Causal Power of Social Structures (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Reality of Social Construction (Cambridge University Press, 2012). For more information see his website: https://eldervass.com/