Nik M., writing in Geese magazine, objects to The Blueprint by invoking what’s long been one of my very least favorite passages anywhere in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s voluminous writings. In one of the unpublished manuscripts later grouped together and published as The German Ideology, a very young Marx and Engels wrote that “communism” is “not a state of affairs to be established” or an “ideal” to which reality will have to “adjust itself.” Rather, they say, communism is the “real movement against the present order of things.”
Nik says that The Blueprint has many virtues. In fact, it represents “the high-water mark of the effort to articulate the state of affairs to be established, the ideal to which reality might adjust.” Nevertheless, Nik writes, “ten years after Bernie Sanders and the authors of The Blueprint politicized our generation into identifying as socialists, I ultimately side with Marx.”
Before going any further, it’s worth awkwardly acknowledging that there are real limits to how much I can complain about a review that says things like:
The book is impressive in its scope and rigor. The research is extensive—the discussion of the Soviet experience is historically grounded, and the engagement with the Mises-Lange debate is thorough. The authors explain it clearly for readers with no familiarity with the vast literature on these topics. The proposals themselves are well thought out, and any future socialist project will likely incorporate many of them.
…and:
The Blueprint systematizes decades of socialist thought and debate into a framework that is coherent, rigorous, and remarkably readable. Its proposals need a place in any serious socialist program.
…and:
The authors’ rational defense of socialism is ironclad.
…and:
Anyone interested in being an educated socialist in the modern day should pick up and read this book.
In fact, it feels more than a little ridiculous to complain about it all. The reason that I’m nonetheless engaging with the critical part of the review is that the author’s objection is interesting, and it gives me a chance to clarify something important about what my co-authors and I were (and weren’t) trying to accomplish.
A “state of affairs” is just a way that the world is, in whole or in part. If socialism were achieved, a given state of affairs would hold—one in which the means of production were collectively owned.
At some times in the history of the socialist movement, “socialism” and “communism” have been used more or less indistinguishably. Sometimes, the latter has been used to describe the authoritarian state socialism of societies like the USSR. But in the usage most likely to speak to the Geese magazine crowd, “communism” signifies a particularly ambitious vision of what an advanced socialist society might look like, in which not only class divisions but even the need for any sort of coercive state machinery have withered away in the face of amicably shared universal material abundance. Well, at the risk of beating a dead horse: If you describe “communism” as a “classless, stateless society,” you have just described a state of affairs.
You can, if you’d like, use the word “communism” both to describe the state of affairs you seek to bring about (or that you think the unfolding dialectic of history will produce, or whatever) and also the forces that will bring it about. That’s fine. But I can’t see how cause of clarity is served by saying that communism “is not” the first thing “but” the second thing. Especially when by the end of the sentence you’ve said that the point of the “real movement” is to “abolish the present state of things”—in other words, to bring about a state of affairs in which important aspects of the “present” state of affairs no longer exist.
Again, it’s worth remembering that this passage is plucked from some very early manuscripts which Marx and Engels may not have even thought of as a book, and which they lost interest in trying to publish not long after finishing them.1 (Later, Marx famously joked that, having accomplished their primary purpose of helping him and Engels clarify their thoughts, the pair were just as happy to leave these writings to “the gnawing criticism of the mice.”) You can see lots of what’s good about their later work there. Even this passage manages the neat trick of being simultaneously pretty abstract and genuinely stirring. But it doesn’t have anything like the clarity or rigor that characterizes the best of the later work (most of Capital Vol. 1, for example).
Ultimately, evena if you’re a world-historic genius, that doesn’t mean that every passage you produce is going to be gold.
Before moving on from what I see as a wildly over-praised couple of lines that some of my favorite thinkers wrote when they were in their 20s, it’s worth taking a moment to think about the distinction being gestured at it in the turn of phrase about how communism isn’t an ideal to which reality has to “adjust itself.” What does that part mean?
Roughly, I think, that socialism/communism isn’t something people of good conscience could have come up with at any time in history and made happen by sheer willpower. Instead, it’s (ahem) a state of affairs that will emerge from people being motivated by particular material interests in a particular historical context and succeed because the material preconditions for that success were already in place.
More pithily: The possibility of a world after capitalism emerges in and because of particular historical circumstances.
So, in the next sentence, Marx and Engels say that the “conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
And what I want to emphasize here is that there’s just no contradiction whatsoever between that sentiment and anything Bhaskar and Mike and I are trying to do in The Blueprint.
Socialism (whether of the form we envision or any other) couldn’t have been achieved at any old point in history. If we are lucky enough to achieve it, it’s going to because of a historically specific process ultimately driven by clashing economic interests. And if it flourishes, that’s going to be (in part) because it was achieved under circumstances where the level of material development was high enough to make it possible. True, true, and true! But none of that adds up to a convincing excuse for not being able to explain basci things about how it might work.
Enthusing about communism-as-the-real-movement, Nik writes:
The institutions emerge from the struggle, but so does the language that signifies it. In 2016, after Bernie Sanders reintroduced it into the political mainstream, “socialism” worked as a banner precisely because it was empty. It signaled a side—the people against the oligarchy—without demanding agreement on a program. Movements generate demands, and good theory gives those demands a name, pathos, and a horizon. A sketch of the horizon is useful for clarifying the movement’s directional purpose without restricting socialism’s power as a broad signifier. But The Blueprint fills the signifier with a completed system. Cooperatives, public banks, market socialism—this is socialism, and only this. The risk is that the more precisely you define socialism in advance, the less it functions as a mobilizing political signifier in the present.
That sounds like a reasonable concern—until you read what we actually say in the book. We certainly don’t say of the particular model of how a socialist economy might work we develop in the book that “this is socialism, and only this.” In fact, we go out of our way to say that this isn’t what we think.
We write:
Many socialists have thought we don’t need to worry about what Marx once called “writing recipes” for “the cook-shops of the future” because, once the working class has vanquished the old order, they’ll confront and solve the problems of constructing a new world through mass, democratic problem-solving. It would be foolish and inappropriate, the thinking goes, to attempt to anticipate the results of this process in advance.
We don’t deny that there’s something to this line of thought. It’s true enough that no model dreamed up today will fully reflect the complexities of the real world tomorrow. And as a matter of practical politics, new social institutions are often odd and messy hodgepodges—combining bits and pieces that end up surviving from older institutions; new elements shaped by historical accidents; and any number of compromises and improvisations, which would be impossible to predict. Even in our most optimistic moments, we don’t expect the citizens of a future socialist society to feel bound by a speculative model devised in the mid-2020s.
Nevertheless, we argue, the experience of the dysfunctionality of the form of socialism that held sway over much of the planet in the late twentieth century has rendered continued caginess about cookshop recipes indefensible. If we want to convince people to take another shot at going beyond capitalism, we need a better answer to how this form of socialism will avoid empty grocery store shelves and rampant reliance on the black market that characterized the previous one than “I’m sure we’ll figure something out when we get there.”
In the book, we write:
The history of socialism in the twentieth century provides clear evidence against the idea that a viable model will dialectically emerge at the appropriate historical moment. We need to think carefully about these issues in advance. Moreover, you can acknowledge that a particular blueprint might not perfectly match the one shaped by a messy collective process at some future point, and still think it’s a good idea to draw one up, for the sake of establishing that there are desirable ways of constructing the kind of structure you’re asking people to commit their energy to building.
We wrote the book because we worry that even much of the socialist left has lost any real confidence in the possibility of fully transcending capitalism, and we want to do our part to restore it.
Bluntly, a lot of people in 2026 are “socialists” in about the same they’re “prison abolitionists.” In both cases, the label can function as little more than a way of expressing normative disapproval of the (economic or carceral) status quo and a vague wistful hope that sooner or later we’ll figure out how to do things differently.
Everyone understands that the political obstacles to achieving socialism are tremendous. But the point of thinking seriously about the engineering obstacles is that, if we have nothing plausible to say about them, then it’s harder to take socialism seriously as a live possibility even if the political obstacles were overcome. It’s harder to get people to climb a very tall mountain if they have good reasons to doubt that there’s anything waiting for them at the top.
If you make it to the very end of the final chapter of The Blueprint, here’s how we recap the point of the preceding four hundred pages:
Books about economic models of the future can’t dislodge economic systems. Only a powerful workers’ movement can do that. But the participants in such a movement must believe that something better is possible, and it’s here that we hope to have made a contribution.
Over the course of those hundreds of pages, we do sometimes level criticisms of models of how socialism might work that we find implausible (e.g. “parecon”). Nevertheless, there’s a deep sense in which we view books putting forward other models less as competing with what we’re doing in The Blueprint than complementing it. If our model can convince some people that a viable and desirable post-capitalist economy is possible, and other models can convince other people of the same thing, so much the better*.*
The point is absolutely not to say that our particular proposal “is socialism, and only this.” It’s to put forward a plausible model of how a viable and desirable fully socialist economy might work in order to show that a viable and desirable fully socialist economy is possible at all.
One of the parts of the Blueprint model that’s inevitably the most controversial within the socialist left is that, while the model assumes the full expropriation of the capitalist class—we envision an economy where there’s no such thing as individual ownership of a firm (in whole or in part) nor private investment or accumulation—we do still retain a role for markets. Workers’ collectives essentially rent the physical means of production from the socialist state, but they still use them to competitively produce commodities.
Retaining some role for markets is a pervasive feature of serious models of how a fully socialist economy might work that have produced in the last several decades. Nevertheless, many socialists instinctively push back against it, partly for bad reasons (a conceptual slippage where markets in general are conflated with capitalism) and partly for good ones (an awareness that markets are a double-edged sword, solving information and coordination problems but bearing all sorts of pathologies). We acknowledge that there are real tradeoffs built into any use of market mechanisms, even in an economic environment without capitalist property relations or deep inequality, and we spend quite a bit of the book thinking about how a socialist society could navigate those tradeoffs.
In the Geese review, Nik M. objects to this feature of our model for two reasons. The first and less serious is an invocation of Amazon’s internal supply-chain cybernetic “planning apparatus” as proof of concept that we’re at least inching in the direction of figuring out how to do without markets entirely. For reasons discussed in the book (and which my co-author Mike has been particularly sharp in explaining), this argument gets us nowhere near the heart of the matter.
Very briefly:
Firms have always done plenty of “internal” planning. But, an elaborately structured apparatus entirely geared toward producing for the market, which thus has to be attuned to price signals (and which, even when it achieves a massive size, is still vulnerable to losing market share and ultimately failing if it does a bad enough job responding to them) is simply a very different beast from something like the Soviet economy (only a small fraction of which was ever geared toward production for the world market).
Just as, in past generations, accounting and programming tools innovated by Soviet technocrats who dreamed of “red plenty” were so useful that they were adopted by capitalist corporations in the West—but these innovations did nothing to negate the fundamental coordination problems with economy-wide planning—the fact that capitalist corporations now innovate new and technically impressive techniques for “internal” planning does nothing much to show that we now know how to decide how much to produce of what across the economy and how to allocate it to consumers without markets.
To be fair, Nik does acknowledge (in a couple of lines buried, I have to say, in paragraphs of kinda sorta implying otherwise) that his point about Amazon does not prove that we can plan the entire economy” and that “Amazon cannot be a model for coordinating an entire economy.”
Ultimately, the appeal to Amazon is a rhetorical flourish to set up Nik’s second and more serious argument. Even though, he acknowledges, Mike and Bhaskar and I “are still correct about the necessity of markets in the short to medium term,” he thinks we should acknowledge that the retention of markets is merely “transitional.”
I’m not going to dismiss this line of thought. Any regular reader here knows that the Canadian analytical Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen is something like the patron saint of this Substack, and this is more or less the line that Cohen takes in “Back to Socialist Basics” and Why Not Socialism?—that if market socialism is the best we know how to do right now, then great, let’s do it, but we should always keep our eyes on the prize of a marketless socialism down the line.
I don’t rule out the possibility that the fondest hopes of Cohen and the Geese crowd might become reality at some point in the sufficiently long-term future. Nevertheless, in the specific context of what Mike and Bhaskar and I are up to in The Blueprint, the objection misses the point. We’re trying to show that some sort of viable and desirable socialism is possible. We want a more serious answer to skeptics than “I’m sure we’ll figure it out sooner or later.” Labeling what we’re presenting as transitional means that the thing being transitioned to remains a “I’m sure we’ll figure it out sooner or later” black box.
Happily, though, we don’t have to choose between saying “what we’re talking about is merely transitional to what we really want (which we can’t tell you much of anything about)” or saying “we’re certain that this is the endpoint of all human progress and we’ll never ever be able to go beyond it.”
In fact, in the book we go out our way to emphasize that we’re not saying the second thing.
We write:
Perhaps a path toward an even more deeply egalitarian reorganization of the basic structure of society, without unacceptable losses with respect to other values like economic efficiency, would become visible once we have gotten [to the Blueprint model]. Just as the degree of social progress that’s been achieved in many advanced capitalist democracies would have been unimaginable to a Chartist fighting for universal male suffrage in early nineteenth-century.
However, our purpose in proposing a model isn’t to pronounce the last word on all future progress and close off other possibilities. It’s to demonstrate that it’s possible and desirable to go much further than even most of the people alive right now who have broadly socialist inclinations can imagine going.
I genuinely don’t see how we could have been any clearer than that.
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On p. xiii of Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Bruno Leipold says that “recent consensus” holds that they were “intended as articles for a quarterly journal project rather than a single coherent book.”
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