Every Friday I’m going to be posting a short note like this highlighting something I’ve read in the last week that I’d recommend. You can read the last one here.
A few days ago, my friend Bhaskar Sunkara was awarded the 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize by the Broadbent Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. His comments at that ceremony so perfectly complement last week’s pick that, breaking previous practice, I’m directing readers to articles by the same guy two weeks in a row.
In the article I highlighted last week, he wrote about a baby step that would get us a little bit closer to a socialist economy. In this one, he describes the long-term goal, connecting it to the book he and I and Mike Beggs wrote (coming out this fall!), to the twin failures of Soviet-style planning and European social democracy in the twentieth century, and to the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood, whose work helped teach a young Bhaskar to think in terms of “continents and centuries” and not just the next election.
Most of all, [that work] insisted on capitalism as the system. Not one social arrangement among many. Not the “economy.” Not “modernity.” But the underlying key to understanding the world we live in — what Ellen would later call, in Democracy Against Capitalism, “a system of social relations and political power.” A system that arose contingently — and therefore a system that is not permanent. Ellen refused to let us naturalize capitalism, even backward into history. If it had a beginning, it could have an end.
Numerous progressives in 2026 who insist on their own common sense and groundedness point to the high water mark of twentieth century social democracy as a way of insisting that we can be good egalitarians without indulging in wildly utopian dreams of transcending captialism entirely. Bhaskar argues persuasively that these progressives miss the point.
If socialism outside of capitalism failed because it tried to abolish markets, socialism within capitalism, social democracy, failed for the opposite reason — it tried to tame capitalism without transcending it.
For a while, it worked beautifully. Postwar Sweden was probably the most livable society in the world: full employment, centralized unions that negotiated on equal footing with employers, and a universal welfare state supported by a growing economy. Workers had dignity, security, and real power on the shop floor and at the ballot box. And as they got more secure, they practiced more and more solidarity. Not just with each other, but with those in the Third World. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’s final public speech, days before his death, was delivered alongside ANC (African National Congress) President Oliver Tambo. In it, he said that “a system like apartheid cannot be reformed; it can only be abolished.” Palme might have been killed for it.
But there was a contradiction at the core of Palme’s project that derailed it long before his death. Social democracy empowered workers politically while leaving ownership of production and investment power in the hands of capitalists. It produced a standoff between a mighty workers’ movement and these traditional sources of business power.
As long as the economy was growing, the standoff held. There was enough surplus to give labor raises, provide capital profits, and fund the welfare state on top. But the moment growth slowed in the 1970s, the whole arrangement started to buckle.
The left wing of social democracy saw the problem clearly and tried to solve it. The Meidner Plan of 1976 proposed gradually transferring ownership of large firms to worker-controlled funds — a real path from social democracy to socialism, funded by the profits workers were generating through years of wage restraint. It was a brilliant solution to both Sweden’s economic difficulties and its political impasse.
It was also something that could not have been won without a mass mobilization of workers from below that the Swedish social democratic leadership could not abide.
Even with lukewarm support from the Social Democratic Party, Swedish capital treated the Meidner Plan as an existential threat. The scheme was gutted.
The real lesson from this history is very different from the one today’s social democrats draw from it. They say, Social democracy is as far as you can go and was itself a radically egalitarian achievement, so settle for it. BE REALISTIC and keep making slow and steady progress. But capital is a constantly moving target, not a static one, and it doesn’t accept a draw or allow you to slowly besiege it. At some point, a war of position must become a war of maneuver.
What would long-term victory in that war of maneuver look like, such that it didn’t just replicate the pathologies of Soviet-style economies?
Read the full article to find out!
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No new writing from me since last Sunday’s Substack, sorry! I’m in the process of moving apartments and racing to do some work for longer-term writing deadlines.
While I’ve got your attention, though, J. Andrew World is a crazily talented graphic artist who makes all the images for both this Substack and my show. He’s also made art for other shows, and very often makes album covers and posters for bands (in other words, like me, like a lot of us, he’s stringing together a bunch of part-time gigs), and outside of that paying work he does a lot of artwork for his local DSA. His computer broke recently, and he’s been doing what he can without it, but there’s a lot he can’t do until he gets this taken care of, and he’s been having to turn down gigs. He started a GoFundMe to help him buy a new one so he can fully get back into the swing of doing what he does best, and last I checked he’s just under two thirds of the way there. Consider chipping in!
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