Democratic Socialism Gets Serious

Marx once famously quipped that he wasn’t in the business of writing recipe books for the cookshops of the future. History being the complicated thing that it was, it wasn’t for socialist intellectuals to imagine what socialism was to be from the comfort of their armchairs. Instead, working-class movements struggling against exploitation and domination would birth the new society with which old society was pregnant and stamp it with their features. 

As a consequence of this attitude, Marx and many Marxists have had surprisingly little to say about what socialism ought to look like, let alone how it might be viable. And that has left everyone from Lev Trotsky to Donald Trump feeling free to project their most fantastic dreams and ghoulish nightmares onto the hypothetical socialist future. It’s also led to frequent accusations that however well-meaning socialists might be, they’re more about big feelings than real ideas. For critics like Dan Williams, the left may truck in “noble intentions and lofty rhetoric about justice and equality” but these “aren’t enough” to constitute a realistic alternative to the status quo. 

The authors of The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World are deeply sensitive to these critiques. Co-written by economist Mike Beggs, philosopher Ben Burgis, and The Nation president and Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara, the book rejects what analytical Marxist G. A. Cohen called the “obstetric” view of history. This orthodox Marxist position held that the birth of a new world was inexorable, with the only question being whether its midwives could push the birthday up a few generations. Instead, Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara feel it’s the responsibility of democratic socialists to explain what their new society will look like and how it will be an improvement on the status quo.

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 the 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. What’s more, a blueprint can help galvanize us to fight for a better world. If working people don’t think there is an alternative to capitalism, they’ll limit their political expectations accordingly. Conversely, it’s easy to retreat into the comforting vagueness of reasonable worries about how socialism could work.

Over 400 dense—dare I say even wonkish—pages, Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara construct a distinct vision of democratic socialism. Their vision includes a large role for markets but by and large not for capitalists, remains committed to retaining and even expanding political liberalism, and acknowledges that even major social reforms are not a panacea for all problems. There would still be plenty of the tragedy characteristic of the human condition, as critics like Thomas Sowell love to foreground as our fated lot whenever they want to argue against taxing the wealthy to pay for everyone’s healthcare. 

Quoting Freud’s famous quip, the authors of The Blueprint state their aim as turning preventable hysterical misery into ordinary human unhappiness. Theirs is a book of noble intentions that’s a lot more than lofty rhetoric. Paired with other increasingly granular and careful defenses of democratic socialism, books like The Blueprint are starting to make the critics look like they’re limited to trucking in reheated red-scare bromides rather than dealing with socialism’s modern proposals.

On market socialism and workplace democracy 

In the United States much of intellectual discourse around socialism—pro and con—remains narrowly framed and dated by the parameters of the Cold War. Critics tend to think that socialism can only ever mean one thing—a command economy with an authoritarian state—while granting that liberalism and capitalism can assume many diverse forms and combinations. For critics and even some extremely online tankies, socialism only ever was and will be the Soviet Union, or, in a pinch, Mao’s China. To this day many orthodox Marxists also remain limited by their commitment to a mechanical version of the obstetric thesis. A parallel kind of mystical zeal perfumes the libertarian insistence that any and all “collectivism” lays bricks on the road to serfdom, the extraordinary success of social democracy be damned. 

This is a highly skewed perspective to take on a tradition that includes Stalin’s Soviet Union but also Olof Palme’s Sweden and Lula’s Brazil, Lenin alongside Helen Keller, George Orwell, and Martin Luther King. One consequence of this has been a profound marginalization of the complex socialist debates around the merits and demerits of the market. Of course all socialists by and large have been critical of the capitalist class’s domination. But from J. S. Mill onward there have been plenty of self-described socialists who recognized that markets have their place. That includes the authors of The Blueprint. 

Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara draw inspiration from Oskar Lange, the famed socialist economist who responded systematically to the calculation problems posed by critics like Ludwig von Mises. Lange acknowledged that calculation was a real problem for central planners, and advocated for adapting market features like price mechanisms to socialist purposes. Commentators like Joseph Heath have characterized these kinds of efforts as resulting in socialists winning a “technical” but pyrrhic victory in the calculation debate. Even though they showed that central planners could in principle solve the problem, the insoluble practical difficulties of updating information day by day and hour by hour made capitalism the far more pragmatic choice to comprehensive planning. 

Following in the footsteps of self-described “Nordic” socialists the Blueprint authors respond by arguing for a pluralistic model. There is to be a “market sector in which democratic firms produce commodities for sale and a non-commodity sector operating with budgets allocated by the state. Commodity production is mainly suited to unambiguously private goods, while the non-commodity sector produces public goods.” 

The argument for democratic firms is likely to be one of the most cited in the book, cresting as it does on a recent wave of interest in the idea of economic and workplace democracy. Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara describe a firm as democratic insofar as “the ‘management and administrative structure are chosen by the firm’s labor force using a democratic political process.’ Those who work in the firm are also members, each receiving a share of the firm’s residual income.” They make a number of moral and economic arguments for why getting rid of capitalists and implementing democracy in firms would be the right thing to do. As the authors note, “liberal philosophy typically excludes the workplace from its arguments for democracy on grounds that it is part of a zone of voluntary exchange in which individuals are best able to freely pursue their own interests.” 

But this is an abstract and unrealistic view, since wealth and power disparities mean unemployment is far riskier for workers than employees quitting is for bosses. Especially in contexts with sufficient numbers of un or under-employed people, bosses can often quickly replace any individual worker, while the worker takes a big risk in quitting and trying to find a better job. This is one of the reasons post-pandemic some capitalists even recommended workers needed to feel “pain” to remind them who was the boss, since very low unemployment had given labor a bit more clout. The result is that right now the only leverage workers have against authoritarian mistreatment and exploitation by owners is to threaten to leave, and for many that is an often ineffective and bad option unless exercised collectively or through unions. 

As Elizabeth Anderson notes in Private Government, even “quitting often imposes even greater costs on workers than being fired does, for it makes them ineligible for unemployment insurance. It is an odd kind of countervailing power that workers supposedly have to check their bosses’ power, when they typically suffer more from imposing it than they would suffer from the worse sanction bosses can impose on them” (p. 56). In Free and Equal, liberal economist Daniel Chandler echoes Anderson’s point and globalizes it through a similar argument for workplace democracy. He notes how “in the UK, fewer than half [of workers] feel satisfied with the amount of involvement they have in decision-making in their company; while a recent survey in America found that, across a whole range of issues from benefits and pay to the impact of new technology, a majority want more influence than they currently have” (p. 244). Working conditions are also degrading. Chandler reports that a third or UK employees report being afraid of work, while one in five American workers report instances of “verbal abuse, humiliation, bullying, unwanted sexual attention, or harassment." 

Chandler goes on to emphasize that this lack of empowerment at work doesn’t just lead to feelings of worker alienation and danger. Many workers “live in a state of personal insecurity leading to chronic anxiety and stress—even more so with the fracturing of traditional employment relationships and the rise of the gig economy” (p. 244). All this is made worse in America by the fact that quality and constant work is tied to having health insurance, meaning that according to a Brookings Institute study millions do not have employer sponsored insurance. This is all the more frightening in Trump’s America where the already skimpy public health system is facing funding cuts.

Moreover there isn’t an easy out by just switching jobs. For millions the choice is between getting overworked and underpaid at Walmart or being overworked and underpaid at Amazon. The only thing worse than being exploited by capital can often be not being exploited by capital. We can and ought to do better.  

One might respond to this moral difficulty by pointing to consequentialist benefits. Yes, it may be the case that capitalist domination of firms results in moral problems. But it might be the only realistic option available in terms of producing the goods. But Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara reject the claim that capitalist domination is the only realistic option even from the standpoint of economic efficiency.

Empirical evidence offers little support for the idea that democratic workplaces are inherently inefficient. Cooperative firms perform at least as well as conventional ones in productivity and survival, and often better. As Gregory Dow notes, real labor-managed firms do not conform to the familiar caricature of chaos: Their members generally do not shirk work, fight over wages, or rebel against supervisors, nor do such firms quickly collapse back into capitalist control. They manage to coordinate production and maintain discipline without replicating the coercion of capitalist management.

Democratic firms would give workers far more of a say in how the workplace is run. Management and administrative structures would be chosen directly by employees through democratic processes, making both responsive to workers’ interests. This could be supplemented by referenda and committees where issues were especially pressing. Workers would receive both wages and a share in the firm’s profits, which means they would likely be better off than they are under capitalism. In the event that workers wanted to quit or were fired, there would also be a robust welfare state to fall back on. So in addition to having more voice in the workplace, “exit” would also be easier. This would also put workers generally in a more competitive position, since the threat of being thrown into unemployment would be considerably slackened. 

The authors acknowledge that there are some tradeoffs and exceptions; for instance in “industries where work is seasonal or otherwise periodic, there may be a good case for fluctuating members [in their firms]. In such cases, however, the worker would need to be compensated for the unsteadiness through higher wages.” There are also questions to be raised about workers who don’t wish to be actively involved in the governance of firms, though this is of course as much a problem for political democracy as it is for economic democracy.  

Taken together, the authors think there are few good arguments against transitioning to workplace democracy, and many good ones for such a transition. Plenty of proven avenues exist, from facilitating the formation of workplace cooperatives to implementing co-determination laws requiring workers have major representation on corporate boards as they do in Western European countries. I think Beggs, Burgis and Sunkara are right to call for these reforms. Indeed, they’re very long overdue. 

The socialist state

The distinction between a market sector dominated by democratic firms and a non-commodity sector defined by more direct state provision of public goods is somewhat fluid. This is where the “democratic” bit of democratic socialism comes in. 

Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara think that markets play a useful role in production for private consumption, and point to the failure of the Soviet model in producing quality consumer goods as an example of where state planning clearly fell short. Democratic firms incentivized to produce high-quality consumer goods by the pursuit of profit, with preferences either way signaled by prices, are useful in this sphere. On the other hand, they suspect that a “socialist electorate” will want to maintain a “larger non-commodity sector than is typical in capitalism and certainly one that is substantially bigger than exists in the United States, where the ‘atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor’ as John Kenneth Galbraith put it decades ago, persists to this day.” 

This will include the comprehensive provision of many intellectual and cultural products, education and health to a generous level, care for children, the elderly, and those with disabilities, along with natural monopolies like energy and communications networks. The state would also play a significant role in securing welfare for all, right down to a relatively high social minimum. Responding to Rawls’ argument that egalitarian policies aren’t intended to finance surfers who want to do nothing but cash a cheque before hitting the beach, the authors make clear socialism needs to retain incentive structures to work. Higher incomes can be justified where talent and effort merit it. But they admit that no democratic socialist state worthy of the name would let even the laziest starve. They suggest that if surfers refuse to clock in on the grounds that it's too beautiful a day not to be on the water, they can get the money they need to cohabit with a few roommates and live on lentils and beans. A democratic socialist utopia may not be a surfer’s paradise, but it’s a pretty good place to be a surfer nonetheless. 

There is very little here that liberal egalitarians ought to contend against. From John Stuart Mill in the 19th century onwards to contemporary calls for Medicare for all, there is a longstanding strand of liberal thought that recommends the state provide generous benefits to citizens. The Blueprint seems to lean into that connection by invoking liberal luminaries like Rawls and Galbraith to justify their claims.

The authors are also clear that their suggestions are not determinative. For “citizens of a democratic socialist country, a vote for higher public spending is also a vote for lower disposable income, one way or another.” The tradeoff is real and unlikely to be settled once and for all. Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara are optimistic that over the long run democratic socialism will induce a culture of community that will make people more likely to want to contribute to their fellow man. But their view is hardly perfectionist; ordinary human beings will remain their usual self-interested selves. It's very possible that people may decide to keep more disposable income for themselves while funding less generous public services. The danger this would pose to the socialist commitment to equality would be offset by ensuring a reasonably high floor of wellbeing even for the lazy, and that anyone with a job works at a democratic firm and shares in its profits. 

Twenty-first century socialism matures

One of the most laudatory things about The Blueprint is how thoroughly and seriously it responds to objections—and not just any objections, but those offered by the best critics of socialism ranging from Ludwig von Mises to F. A. Hayek to Robert Nozick. The contrast to contemporary critics like Gad Saad, who can’t seem to write even a few pages of swipes at Marxists without complaining about how he has to pay taxes just like everyone else, is striking. Where socialists have by now accepted mistakes and criticisms, learned from them, and grown, their critics today seem set on insisting that every Zohran Mamdani must secretly be Joseph Stalin, or at least Ellsworth Toohey. 

Those kinds of insinuations have little purchase against a democratic socialism that insists:

Citizens of a socialist democracy will have to be just as vigilant as their capitalist equivalents in defense of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other crucial civil liberties—but they won’t start out at any sort of disadvantage because of the socialization of the means of production. In fact, given that a socialist society would plausibly be one in which average citizens have more free time and financial security and thus more people would have the bandwidth for involvement in the political process, the socialist citizens would have a comparative advantage.

There are problems with the book. Some are of a technical nature. Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara appeal to Rawls as a major source of inspiration. But at times they seem wary about following his views all the way. They agree with his characterization of the division of natural talents as morally arbitrary, but bring back in meritocratic ideas by stressing how even natural talents require effort and drive to develop. From a strictly Rawlsian standpoint this is a problematic assumption, since it doesn’t recognize that even an innate tendency to make an effort may be distributed in a morally arbitrary way. 

I also think the book tries a little hard to avoid overheated leftist moralism. The Blueprint puts ostensible wonks like Noah Smith to shame in how careful it is to qualify, unpack, and look to examples. This is all very well and good on its own merits. But in a moment where authoritarianism is on the rise, war is once more becoming a commonplace, and oligarchy’s grip is tightening a little, more fire and fury might be warranted. The book ends by arguing only a powerful workers’ movement can build a better economic system and modestly proclaiming that “participants in such a movement must believe that something better is possible, and it’s here that we hope to have made a contribution.” This is a far cry from “workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” or even “we have it in our power to begin the world again.” Wanting to avoid grandiose assertions like ‘socialism will be the radical transformation our present to bring about a radical democracy through radicals using radical means’ is all well and good. But some more well-timed injections of socialist fire would seem not only rhetorically appropriate but morally justified given the troubled moment.

I think The Blueprint is an excellent book that—given its pedigree and waxing support for socialist politicians in America and elsewhere—ought to shape the conversation going forward. It should be the final nail in the coffin of the cliché that 21st-century socialists are just repackaging 19th-century ideas. If nothing else, The Blueprint is proof positive of the intellectual energy on today’s left. It’s brimming with imagination tempered by realism, and vision partnered with practicality. In other words: it’s just the kind of book we need right now. 

Featured image is Introduction of the Workplace Democracy Act, by AFGE