“Spilling Over” into Socialism: Interstitial Transformation and Worker Cooperatives

Activists and academics are increasingly investing in “real utopias,” in projects that exist in the “here and now” that can push beyond capitalism. While there is a vast and growing related literature, a key voice in this debate remains the late Erik Olin Wright, whose “Real Utopias” project brought together scholars to explore the transformative potential of such alternatives. As outlined in his book, Envisioning Real Utopias , Wright contends that workers’ cooperative firms hold particular transformative potential as they sit as ideal typical vehicles for enabling “interstitial transformation.” Such an “interstitial” approach speaks to the development of political-economic organizations within the “cracks” of the capitalist system. While Wright’s work offers important sketches of how such a transformative project may occur, many questions remained unaddressed, while new questions arise with emergent technologies. This article develops Wright’s theory by bringing it into dialogue with wider literature from cooperative studies and recent works on platform cooperatives.