Note: You can preorder the book at any of the usual book places. Or if you want to order from worker-owned bookstore Red Emmas, you can do that here. The book officially comes out day after tomorrow (Tuesday, September 29th). That night, we’ll be doing a launch event in LA (RSVP here). And you can find comprehensive information on book events coming up in other cities here.
Bhaskar Sunkara called me in February 2020 to pitch the basic idea for the book that became The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World. Shortly afterward, we brought on economics professor (and Jacobin Contributing Editor) Mike Beggs as the third co-author.
The world shut down a few weeks into the process, and Bhaskar and Mike and I spent a lot of the first year of COVID essentially doing a Zoom reading group about previous books on feasible socialism by John Roemer, Alec Nove, and David Schweickart. (The last of these was by far the biggest influence on our own work.) We signed the contract with Verso to write the book on May Day 2021.
Over the course of the next four and a half years, until—many overly optimistic deadlines later—we finally turned in a complete draft in fall 2025, whatever else I was doing, “working on The Blueprint” was always somewhere in the mix. Part of the reason it took so long has to do with the complexity of the material. It’s a 400-page-book about laying out a detailed economic model of how a post-capitalist society could work, making a normative case for the superiority of the proposed system, and responding to various objections that could be made from a number of different directions. Another part of the reason is simply that three busy people working on different parts of the same project and reading and revising each other’s work just have to do a lot of schedule-juggling. Every solo book I’ve ever written has been, at least to some extent, written in manic spurts where I get through huge chunks of the writing done in short periods of time. That’s really not possible in the same way for a book written by three people.
But it was absolutely worth the wait. Friends and comrades, this is by far the best book I’ve ever had a hand in writing. And now that it exists in the three-dimensional physical world (which feels astonishing in itself after all this time), I’m blown away by how good it looks.
I also think that all the delays were fortuitous because this is absolutely the best possible time for it to come out. As I mentioned here, in recent months I’ve sometimes started to play a little game first thing in the morning. Here’s how it works: I make my coffee, I toast my bagel, I open up my New York Times…and I start flipping around until I can find the first mention of words like “socialist” or “socialism” or “Democratic Socialists of America.” It says everything about the difference between this year and any previous year of my life that this gamenever takes me very long to play.
If we as a society are talking more about something called “socialism” in 2026 than ever before, though, what exactly are we talking about?
Contemporary socialists talk all the time about our short-term goals—“socialist policies” like nationalizing the health insurance industry (i.e. “Medicare for All”) that can optimistically be seen as down-payments on a fully socialist future. But what about the thing itself? Actual socialism, understood as a new mode of production that could replace capitalism?
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is probably the single man most responsible for the general sense in the last year that the fortunes of the socialist Left have finally reversed. In an interview with Fox News last year when he was running for office, the interviewer asked him if he “liked” capitalism. His answer was, “No, I have many critiques.”
Immediately after saying this, though, the future mayor pivoted to talking about “income inequality” and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the need for “a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children.”
Now, I’m a very big fan of Mayor Mamdani (and obviously of Martin Luther King). And I certainly agree that the distribution of wealth typically produced by capitalist relations of production is morally obscene. But “a better distribution of wealth” is not socialism, as that term has been traditionally understood. Past generations of socialists understood the difference between capitalism and socialism not primarily in terms of the distribution of consumption, but the ownership of the means of production, like factories and farms (or package warehouses and data centers).
Capitalism is a mode of production where the means of production are bought and sold by private individuals, and the working class has no realistic choice except to sell their working hours to those private capitalists to make a living. Socialism, in the traditional sense, is about abolishing the class distinction between workers and capitalists through some form of collective ownership of the means of production.
Socialists have of course thought that socialism would lead to a vastly more sane and egalitarian distribution of consumption, and emphatically counted that as one of the ways in which socialism would be better than capitalism. But this difference is downstream of the basic distinction between the systems.
You can find the same kind of conceptual blurriness in many of the statements about capitalism and socialism you’ll see from Bernie Sanders and AOC. To some extent, it even shows up the DSA’s national platform. (I go through all of this in detail the first chunk of this lecture.) An unsympathetic left critic of these figures might draw the conclusion that, basically, “Aha, Zohran, Bernie, AOC, and even the DSA are all posers. They’re really just social democrats pretending to be real-deal socialists.”
I’d draw a different conclusion. I think that the mayor, for example, means what he says about having “many critiques” of capitalism. I just think he and the others just honestly aren’t sure what could come next.
The same basic dilemma that expresses itself in a certain conceptual blurriness in the statements of the most prominent American socialists shows up in a different way in the statements of many socialists who like to understand themselves as holding a position to the left of Zohran, Bernie, AOC, etc. Listen to the average hammer-and-sickle-in-Twitter-bio socialist for long enough—or read enough of the writings of the kind of Marxist who likes to talk a lot about “the value form”—and you’ll realize very quickly that they too have no idea what a plausible alternative to capitalism looks like in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
Some of the ones who think they do are denialists about the very real pathologies of Soviet-style economic planning (which Bhaskar and Mike and I wrote about here). Others, though, have at least some sense that the empty grocery store shelves (or, say, the reliance of enterprise managers on the black market to plug the holes in allocation of capital goods) reflected basic information and incentive problems at the heart of that system. All too often, though, what they say about what a better form of socialism would look like works out to a more or less convoluted way of saying “sooner or later we’ll figure it out.”
Again, I’m sympathetic. If defenders of capitalism are inclined to sneer at the vagueness and feel smugly superior, that’s because they themselves are in denial about the other half of the dilemma. There are many clear-as-day reasons to think capitalism is a monstrously unjust system. No one should be able to spend all day giving orders because they have money, or have to spend all day taking orders because they don’t. There are historically comprehensible reasons why capitalism came about (and why society couldn’t have just leapfrogged from feudalism to socialism). Something having once been a necessary evil doesn’t mean that it wasn’t always evil, though, and it’s long since stopped even being necessary. People who understand that have a far better grasp on the basic dynamics of the world around them, and a far better claim to be on the right side of history, than those who think that Jeff Bezos has a right to privately own his warehouses on par with your right to your personal possessions.
Nevertheless, it matters—a lot—that we have good answers to reasonable questions about how a better socialism could work.
Any effective mass movement for a more equal society is going to rely on a core of fanatically devoted organizers. And those organizers are going to be best sustained, not just by their belief in that movement’s short-term goals, but by the north star of their belief in a qualitatively better future. That’s why socialists and communists were often the best fighters for civil rights in the Jim Crow era, for example, or for trade unionism in the pre-NLRA era where union organizing was a hell of a lot more dangerous than it is now. If, as many on the Left worry, there’s a real danger of sliding into a much more reactionary and authoritarian form of government, who do you think are going to be the best fighters for the restoration of liberal democracy?
In the twentieth century, many of these cadres were motivated by a noble but misguided confidence that the future we want was being built in societies like the USSR. And even much of the anti-Stalinist Left took it for granted that, even if the undemocratic nature of that system contradicted socialist ideals, its economic core was basically functional. The loss of that confidence has real consequences.
If our commitment to socialism is like fashionable left “abolitionisms” about police and prisons, where the best we can say in response to reasonable questions about how our proposed future will actually work is to say that we don’t “center” those questions, then sooner or later anyone with enough intellectual curiosity to ask anyway is going to drift into a more moderate politics.
The book isn’t officially out until Tuesday, but I’ve done two events for it so far. One was an in-person lecture at a university (followed by a more academic talk at the Philosophy Department the next day). The other was a Zoom presentation to a chapter of the German leftist party Die Linke. I’ve also done a handful of interviews. All in all, a very small taste of what the next few months of promoting the book are probably going to be like, but enough to notice a pattern.
In almost all of these cases, people can’t seem to stop themselves from asking questions about socialist strategy. Like, “OK, but how are you going to get there?” “You haven’t told us yet how we can get there.”
Generally, I’ve gone along with the topic change and answered with my own views. But I’ve also tried to emphasize that Mike and Bhaskar and I didn’t write a book about socialist strategy, and that this was on purpose.
It’s not because we think that the strategy debates are unimportant or we’re somehow trying to dodge them. Bhaskar and I have both written extensively about those topics. It’s just that, in my lifetime experience on the socialist Left, approximately 99.9% of our internal debates are about socialist strategy. (For example: Should we run in Democratic primaries or try to start a third party or is all electoralism a dead end?) We almost never pause to argue about the shape of the socialist endpoint. And regardless of your views on strategy, the endpoint questions matter.
To pick a scenario very far from my own views, imagine that your vision of how to achieve socialism in an advanced liberal capitalist democracy in the twenty-first century is that we should be trying to organize a peasant army in, I don’t know, rural Nebraska, and then wage protracted people’s war against the cities like Chairman Mao. Fine. If you won, you’d still have to figure out how to organize the economy.
If you want a quick and dirty crash course in the different elements of our model of how a socialist economy could work and how they fit together, check out this awesome website that Bhaskar put together. And for a more complete picture there’s no substitute for (ahem) reading the book. But here are some of the core elements:
- Our model picks up where maximalist social democratic welfare state would leave off. Social democracies have proven through extensive real-world beta testing that sectors like healthcare and education (where consumer choice doesn’t play the same role it does in many other sectors) can be planned perfectly effectively outside of the market. We start with a standard suite of social democratic programs. We also add universal income guarantees, which would be one component of the income of every adult citizen.
- We bring what socialists call the “commanding heights” of the economy (e.g. energy, transportation, etc.) into direct public ownership.
- Crucially, this includes nationalizing the banking system and using it to socialize finance. In sectors of the economy where we don’t know how to do without market mechanisms, firms would still be financed through partnerships with public banks.
- There would be a plurality of constitutionally autonomous public banks, allowing for second opinions when grant proposals are turned down, or for firms to change financial partners. A core feature of the model is that the books of all of these institutions would be open to the public.
- While this arrangement would amount in practice to something like the physical means of production being rented out to firms by the socialist state, the firms themselves would be collectively owned and democratically managed by the workers themselves.
- This doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be managers. Some management tasks are a matter of cracking the whip in ways that will be less necessary when people are working to enrich themselves and not an external owner, but many managers also perform genuinely necessary coordination functions, often involving genuine technical expertise. Nor are we under any illusions that all labor discipline issues would magically wither away under a better system. We just think that the workers themselves should be the ultimate decision-makers about how it should work.
- In some small firms (think, a worker-owned coffee shop with a dozen or so members) the best procedure might be for any managers to be directly elected by the workforce as a whole. In other kinds of firms (think, a worker-owned car manufacturer with hundreds or even thousands of members), where management roles involve more technical expertise, a more traditional hiring process might make sense. But the hiring can still be done by a democratically elected workers’ committee.
- In all firms, worker members would regularly vote on operating agreements that basically look a lot like union contracts, except that they would be unilateral—no separate boss on the other end of a negotiating table.
- Unlike capitalism, where even those workers who can afford to go into business for themselves lose the security of a biweekly paycheck, firms would be required to pay their members regular wages. They are also the residual claimants for any profits left over after those wage obligations and other expenses have been met. Less reliable, but still a real incentive for better firm performance.
- The floor for wages and conditions would be set by public Labor Boards on the post-war Australian model to prevent a race to the bottom through what some socialists call “self-exploitation.” (We don’t agree that it would be a form of exploitation, but we do agree that it would be bad, and the model includes multiple safeguards against it.)
- Inefficient firms wouldn’t be propped up forever. Firm failure is the price of a flourishing economy, and we think it should be paid.
- As such, we don’t have “full employment” in the sense that no one ever experiences a day of unemployment. But a central task of state planning would be matchmaking between former members of firms that have gone out of business and new or existing firms they could join, whatever level of economic security we manage to achieve this way attaches to the individual, not the firm.
- Prices would, as under capitalism, be set by firms in response to market signals. We don’t accept the false dichotomy of markets or planning. We expect the role of state planning to dramatically increase in the transition from capitalism to even our kind of socialism. But we think the task of planners, in domains where planning make sense (e.g. guaranteeing “full employment” in the sense that we see as a realistic goal), is made easier by outsourcing many issues to markets in domains where markets make sense (e.g. deciding exactly how many toothbrushes are going to be produced over any given period of time).
- While many of the non-economic benefits of home ownership could be replicated by long-term (perhaps even life-long) leases from the public housing authority for family homes, the places where those families live would no longer be financial investments. Too many other forms of economic inequality are exacerbated by that core feature of the existing society. Private landlords would similarly be phased out for those of us who live in apartments.
- Most kinds of “intellectual property” that currently exist could simply be abolished. First movers would naturally gain short-term market advantages, and these could be supplemented if necessary by prize systems, but innovators would have to move on to their next innovation instead of expecting that they and their descendants would continue to reap the rewards of the first one.
- Payment for writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and so on could be arranged through a kind of public crowdfunding rather than through the extraction of intellectual property rents.
This wouldn’t be the socialism of “too many meetings” that Oscar Wilde supposedly worried about. In fact, the most apathetic citizens wouldn’t have to go to any meetings at all. Just as some members of even the best, most democratic and militant unions don’t bother voting on the union contract (or voting in elections for the union leadership), no doubt some members of even the best-organized firms wouldn’t bother voting on the operating agreement or for elections to the workers’ committee. So it goes. Some wealthy capitalists similarly rarely bother to look in on the activities of the employees they hire to manage their investments for them. The important thing, in both cases, is that they always have the option of starting to take an interest, and when they do, they’re the ones calling the shots.
Some socialists would say that this isn’t socialism at all, because they equate socialism with the abolition of all markets.1 Others grant that it would be a form of socialism, but an inferior one, and they are optimistic that we’ll at least very soon be able to plan an economy from wall to wall. I’d be thrilled if it turned out that this second group was right, for reasons I talked about here.
One version of this line of thought comes a left optimism about the possibilities of AI. There is, of course, ferocious empirical debate about how that technology is likely to develop in the future, what might become possible and what the stubborn limits might be. Much of the Left is convinced that it’s already more or less reached its limits, that the bubble will pop any minute now, and so on. Another faction thinks this is misguided, and that this degree of skepticism either blinds us to the positive possibilities of the technology or makes us too complacent about its dangers, or both. And of course there are subtle shades of opinion along this spectrum. We’ll have to wait and see who’s right.
On the specific subject of cybernetic economic planning, I’m not wildly optimistic. But the whole empirical debate can be fruitfully bracketed in this context. The key point is that we certainly don’t know how to construct an economically functional form of totally marketless socialism yet. Perhaps that will change in the future due to technological or logistical breakthroughs. While we’re at it, perhaps future cultural changes will reshape human psychology in a way that makes a lot of the hard questions about incentives go away. But rather than helping ourselves to the assumption that future technological or moral progress will make this all moot, Mike and Bhaskar and I wanted to show that, even operating within current limitations, we know how to make the wheels turn in a complex modern economy without a capitalist class.
We didn’t write the book to shut down anyone’s utopian imagination by insisting that this is the furthest that human progress will ever go. Just the opposite.
If, at some point after implementing this kind of socialism, it became clear that a better socialism was possible—even more egalitarian, and more distant from the capitalist starting point—that would be amazing news. If a time-traveler told me that my great-great grandchildren would living under totally moneyless marketless Fully Automated Luxury Communism, I would be thrilled to hear it.
Meanwhile, though, we desperately need to restore the Left’s confidence that a world beyond capitalism is possible. That’s why we wrote the book.
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This is often rooted in a reading of Marx with which I strongly disagree for reasons I’ve explored, for example, here.
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