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The Blueprint:How Socialism Can Work in the Real World
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Ebook
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Neither capitalism nor central planning, this is the future for socialism.
Capitalism isn’t working. But is there a plausible alternative? The Blueprint lays one out: a system where workers control every lever of production, and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side. Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past—and why it can go right in the future. The result is a socialism worthy of the twenty-first century.
Reviews
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Democratic socialism is gaining popularity and credibility as the failures of capitalism become harder to ignore. But what would it mean to actually live under democratic socialism? This visionary book takes this critical and too-often-ignored question seriously. The result is thought-provoking, informative, and surprisingly entertaining. The future is anything but preordained, and wrestling with the ideas and proposals in this book can help us create a more just and enjoyable world.
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It is rare indeed to find a book that so keenly matches the elegance of its arguments with the passion of its politics. Here we have an alternative economic blueprint for our time, a shining antidote to the crude bestiality of a fading and failing Trumpian regime. The aim is to build a socialism of and for the people, a socialism that meets all our reasonable wants needs and desires with the minimum of effort. We can, the authors claim, for the first time in our history, “combine egalitarianism in distribution and democracy in production with the abundance of high-tech modernity.” This is a book to “pry open our imaginations and put the biggest questions of politics back on the table.” Let the counterattack to all that is obnoxious in our present circumstances begin.
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The Blueprint does something rare in left political writing: it takes the question of how socialism might actually work seriously enough to venture an answer. Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara move past critique and gesture to sketch a workable blueprint — including worker-governed firms, democratic macroeconomic management, and fully funded, non-commodified health care, education, housing, care work, banking, and pensions — that could function at scale in a recognizable economy. The argument is rigorous but not airless and is honest about the tradeoffs involved – and how difficult it will be to reach even this near horizon. A genuinely useful book for how to exit the current labyrinth.
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Nothing is more urgently needed in our troubled world than a blueprint for socializing capital, democratizing workplaces, restoring the commons, decommodifying basic goods and harnessing markets to society's needs. This book has arrived with perfect timing.
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Burgis, Sunkara and Beggs do what no Leftist that I know dared to try. What makes the book unique is that it should be read in all naivety, with no irony: it is what it claims to be, a feasible realist blueprint for radical change, written in the clear style of a manual for “how to do…” In short, it is a book for everyone who is aware that we are in a deep mess and need a plan to get out of it, which means that it is simply a book for everyone.
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Market socialism, however paradoxical it might sound, is the only kind of socialism which can work in my lifetime, or yours. The Blueprint is the clearest, most forceful, and most detailed case for market socialism that anyone has made for a generation, or more. It should be read, and debated, by all of us who want to build something better than capitalism, as well as the skeptics.
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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.
, Liberal Currents