These include such entities as “Social democratic statist economic regulation” and “Participatory socialism: statist socialism with empowered participation.”
By page 150, Wright finally turns, almost, to “real utopias.” More theoretical brush clearing is required. He will look at real utopias with three criteria: desirability, viability, and social empowerment. A hundred and twenty pages earlier he had posited desirability, viability, and achievability as the foundation of an emancipatory social science. Now he has dropped the last term and added another. Who cares? Still he is not quite ready to plunge into his subject. First he must consider types of democracy that will allow an evaluation of real utopias under the rubric of social empowerment. He posits three types—direct, representative, and associational—each of which has two forms, “thin” and “deep.” He provides a table of “The Degree of Democraticness” to visualize the six possibilities. Associational Democracy exists as a Thin “Bureaucratic corporativism” and a Deep “Democratic associational corporativism.” He offers no examples of such entities—what is deep democratic associational corporativism?—but he does introduce an acronym, without which a sociologist dies a miserable death in the profession. EPG refers to “empowered participatory governance.” Now we are methodologically armed to address real utopias.
In the next two chapters Wright takes up four examples of “real Utopias,” the budget process of Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil; the “social economy” of Quebec; Wikipedia; and Mondragon, the Basque cooperative corporation.
In Quebec, labour-sponsored "Solidarity Funds" are generating jobs. MONTREAL - The Solidarity Fund is a financial innovation in North America, and is one of few similar institutions in the world (Note 1). Created in 1983 by the Quebec Federation of Labour, the Fund was born into a period of deep recession in Quebec and Canada. "Full employment was a highly attractive prospect at the time," affirms Daoust. New ideas were needed, and the Quebec Federation of Labour had a solution: A new investment fund, sponsored by workers themselves, and with attractive tax rates for investors. From the start, realities had to be tackled. "Firstly, there has to be a starting point, a trade-union open to such a project.
Secondly, you need the will of the authorities and the government. The Fund seeks profitability, but it is considered first and foremost a "capital for development" fund, financial output representing only one part of the equation. In 2003, the Solidarity Fund had over half a million shareholders. Participatory Budgeting in New York City | REAL MONEY. REAL PROJECTS. REAL POWER.
Wikipedia. MONDRAGON Corporation. Basic income. An unconditional basic income (also called basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant,[1] or citizen’s income) is a proposed system[2] of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.
A basic income is typically intended to be only enough for a person to survive on, so as to encourage people to engage in economic activity. A basic income of any amount less than the social minimum is sometimes referred to as a 'partial basic income'. On the other hand, it should be high enough so as to facilitate any socially useful activity someone could not afford to engage in if dependent on working for money to earn a living. [citation needed] Basic income systems financed on returns to publicly owned enterprises are major components in many proposals for market socialism. Properties[edit]