Socialism is very much in the news, especially in the U.S., as yesterday’s elections make clear. Self-identified democratic socialists—Melat Kiros in Colorado, Donavan McKinney in Michigan, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania — won in five closely-watched Congressional races (a sixth, Angelina Gonzalez in California, appears to be leading with votes still being counted). A socialist, Janeese Lewis George, was elected Mayor of Washington, D.C., joining Seattle’s Katie Wilson and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani as recently elected socialist mayors (Nithya Raman, a socialist, is also leading in the Los Angeles mayoral election).
These victories, building upon the accomplishments of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns and the striking political ascendancy of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have thrust socialism in general, and the Democratic Socialists of America in particular, into the public eye. Many on the U.S. left have celebrated these developments, some viewing them as necessary jolts to a sclerotic Democratic party, and some as harbingers of a socialist future. Establishment Democrats have bemoaned them, and MAGA Republicans—and there are no other kinds—have deplorably rushed to vilify them, raising the specter of “Communism” if not the ascension of the Anti-Christ himself.
Back in 2019, when I reviewed Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto, I noted that the book gave voice to “a rather extraordinary surge of interest in socialism among young people, who have played a central role in fueling the Bernie Sanders ‘political revolution’ and in transforming the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) into an important political force whose membership, now at over 50,000, has increased sevenfold in recent years.” DSA now boasts a membership of 120,000. And Sunkara has played an outsized role in promoting the organization and its ideas, as a public intellectual and as founding editor and publisher of Jacobin, which since 2010 has grown to 75,000 print subscribers and over 3 million web viewings a month, and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, launched by Jacobin in 2017 (In February 2022, Sunkara was also named President of The Nation magazine).
The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, co-authored by Mike Beggs, Ben Burgis, and Sunkara, is a substantial book, over four hundred pages long, that seeks to boost the prospects of American socialism by very directly advancing two bold claims: that capitalism is a very bad political-economic system, and that socialism ought to be embraced as a wholesale alternative, a “North Star” of justice and freedom that extends beyond the kinds of redistributive and regulatory policies long favored by welfare liberals and social democrats, i.e., most people on the left. Eschewing polemics and grandiose ideological pronouncements, its authors outline an elaborate model of market socialism that is serious about the 20th century “plans that failed” and the microeconomic critiques of socialist planning developed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and also serious about avoiding the frankly authoritarian features of what we used to call “really existing socialism.”
It is a serious book that merits attention, especially given the role of its authors, especially Sunkara, in both influencing and publicly projecting the discourse of socialism in the U.S. In what follows, I will summarize and contextualize its arguments on behalf of a “feasible socialism,” and then raise some serious questions about both the practical and normative appeal of the “blueprint” the book offers. In short, while in many ways the authors are extremely judicious in their argumentation, in other ways they remain wedded to a metanarrative of class struggle, rooted in Marxism, that cuts against this judiciousness and gives the book what can only be described as a regrettably sectarian feel.
The Blueprint
The book’s eleven chapters can be divided into four parts. Chapter one introduces the overall purpose of the book and outlines the general argument to follow. Chapters two through four engage the historical experiences of socialist planning, the theoretical critiques of such efforts, and macroeconomic theories centering on the role of markets in setting prices and efficiently allocating economic resources. This section of the book culminates in an argument about how and why a properly conceived socialism can harness markets in labor and commodities to advance egalitarian ends.
In chapters five through eight, the authors outline in detail their socialist blueprint, which centers on the abolition of private property and the “socialization” of wealth, and envisions an alternative political economy based on two sectors: (1) a market sector in which worker-managed, democratically organized firms, financed by public banks, compete to hire labor; sell products via consumer markets; practice a form of profit-sharing; and are, theoretically, bound by “hard budget constraints” that limit inefficiency; and (2) a robust public sector that regulates wages and distributes welfare benefits in ways that sustain a high-wage economy while also providing core public goods, like education, health care, and housing, while also developing macroeconomic policy. The “blueprint” is complicated, and its exposition is equally complicated, and will be difficult for most readers to follow, because it proceeds at a high level of abstraction and often engages in fairly intensive microeconomic debates. It basically combines features of Nordic social democratic welfare states with the logic of a market socialism centered on worker-controlled firms. Such a system, the authors aver, would not eliminate inefficiencies, bottlenecks, or inequalities. But it would minimize them, would promote both egalitarian redistribution and the democratization of production, finance, and macroeconomic public policy, and would represent a dramatic improvement over capitalism.
Chapters nine through eleven make the general normative argument for the blueprint, first by anticipating and addressing some of the objections of non-socialist critics who will object that the model goes too far (“Will Socialism Fail Again?), then by doing the same with socialist critics who will object that the model does not go far enough (“Is This Even Socialism?), and finally by offering a more general argument about the possibility and desirability of “Civilizational Progress.”
The book elaborates on a range of discussions and debates that have been featured in recent years in the pages of both Jacobin and Catalyst. The blueprint itself is largely based on “We Can Craft a Workable Workplace Democracy for a Socialist Future,” a 2023 Jacobin essay by economist Mike Beggs that lays out the entire architecture elaborated in the book. And the book itself is largely anticipated, and outlined, by “Mike Beggs on How a Viable Socialism Might Work,” a 2024 blog post by co-author Ben Burgis, a philosopher, which draws out the implications of Beggs’s economic account for broader thinking about the moral arguments for socialism. Sunkara, who brings to the project his longstanding engagement with the history of socialism in general and Marxism in particular, has further amplified on the theme of “viable socialism” in a number of addresses recently published in Jacobin, including “We Need a Socialism After Capitalism” (April 24, 2026), and “Rebuilding the Socialist Horizon” (May 2026).
Given the currency of the book’s overall theme, and the vetting of its arguments in venues with real cache among millennial socialists, The Blueprint is likely to receive substantial attention. Writing in Liberal Currents, Matthew McManus, also a contributor to Jacobin, has praised the book for the way it seriously engages the critics of socialism, concluding that “The Blueprint is proof positive of the intellectual energy on today’s left. It is 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.”
The book is surely something of a tour de force, and its authors are to be praised for their careful engagement with debates about the practical feasibility or unfeasibility of a socialist economy, and their ingenuity in meeting many conventional objections. It culminates, on pages 361-77, by appealing to the framework outlined by the late Erik Olin Wright in his Envisioning Real Utopias, which centers on three criteria: desirability, feasibility, and achievability.
Is their elaborate blueprint of a socialist alternative feasible in a technical sense? Perhaps. In the book’s penultimate chapter, the authors aver that “our goal isn’t to try to demarcate the outer limits of what might be possible as socialism develops but only to convince skeptics that there’s a form of socialism that would represent both a feasible and a desirable shift from the status quo (336-7).” But there is a broader and more important question of feasibility that is not technical but political and normative. Here is where I think the book comes up very short, and where I will focus my critical comments.
The Political Limit
It is surely possible to imagine an economy organized in the way the authors envision. But feasibility in a technical sense is not the same thing as feasible in a political sense. It is possible, for example, to outline a feasible plan for the construction of socialist communities on Mars. We can’t now travel the distance efficiently, nor live in the planet’s atmosphere given what is true about that atmosphere and the biological requirements of human living. But given what is known about physics and biology, a vision centered on future travel to Mars and construction of such communities there can surely be regarded as feasible. Does that make the blueprint for such an enterprise feasible in a meaningful political sense? Surely not. The authors of The Blueprint would of course insist that their feasible future is much closer within our grasp, and their blueprint is capable of generating much more traction, than a Blueprint for Socialism on Mars. But are these things really true?
Obviously, the answer to this question will center not only the intellectual qualities of the blueprint, but on its suitability to the world for which it is being proposed. And while the historical obstacles to the realization of The Blueprint in the U.S., for example, are surely less invariant than the physical obstacles to realizing it on Mars, anyone serious about social science, however understood, must acknowledge that the historical obstacles are no less substantial, and the historical record a source of enormous skepticism.
In their discussion of the three tests outlined by Erik Olin Wright—desirability, feasibility, achievability—the authors make a striking move:
“Let’s apply these tests to our model of socialism. Working backward, we do continue to think that socialism is achievable for the same reasons previous generations did. The collective action problems involved in mobilizing the working class to fight to end its exploitation are enormous, but it remains true that people who have to sell their lives to capitalists have both a collective interest in and a collective capacity to bring about socialist transformation. The bulk of this book has thus been devoted to questions of feasibility. But what about desirability?” (361-2, emphasis added).
The bolded sentence is extraordinary. The first part basically summarizes the entire history of social and political thought since Marx, one of whose central questions is, to put it simply, why has the working class as theorized by Marx not fought “to end its exploitation” in the manner envisioned by Marx and his followers? In the roughly 180 years since the 1848 publication of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party, a great many theories have been advanced to answer the question, answers focused on numerous “collective action problems” that are also problems of political identity. But nonetheless, the authors insist, “it remains true” that working people have both “a collective interest in and a collective capacity to bring about socialist transformation.” In other words, the almost two centuries of political failure can be written off in thinking about the future, because the essential truth of Marxism remains just as true as it was in 1848.
Among the developments in the most advanced capitalist societies that the book simply brackets out:
* The economic and political fragmentation of the working class as the result of new forms of flexible accumulation;
* The dramatic decline of trade unions and the labor movement move generally;
* The dramatic decline of working-class parties;
* The rise, since the 1960’s, of “new social movements” centered on race, gender, sexuality, and ecology that intersect with, transverse, and in many ways weaken class identity in complicated ways with enormous political and moral force;
* The development of new digital technologies of communication and forms of virtual reality that severely fragment public life.
* Most importantly, the rise of virulent forms of xenophobic, right-wing authoritarian populism with the support of substantial segments of the working class by any definition.
The authors entitle the The Blueprint’s introductory chapter “the return of politics,” insisting that large questions about the overall organization of society might again be on the political agenda. But it is one thing to point out that there is a revival of interest in socialism in some quarters. And it is quite another to imagine that we need a blueprint for a total socialist transformation because there exists a working class that is in some meaningful sense poised to embrace such a blueprint. The book furnishes no evidence for the latter claim, and indeed the authors well understand how counterfactual it is. But they seem to believe that “The Blueprint” can stand as a “North Star” regardless, without any attention at all to the enormous challenges associated with organizing against even the most basic current injustices. At the same time, what is arguably the most important question currently on the agenda—the relentless attack by a populist right on both social democracy and liberal democracy itself—goes unmentioned in the book. This is a very strange position for historical materialists to take, and it is also in awkward tension with the very idea of a “return to politics.”
The Normative or Moral Limit
The authors, noting that the entire book has centered on feasibility, and waving off the question of political achievability, end by citing Erik Olin Wright’s list of “eleven objections to the capitalist status quo,” and insisting that each of these “bads” is eliminated or improved upon by their feasible model of socialism. On this logic they conclude that their blueprint represents a desirable alternative to capitalism.
This argument counterposes an essentialized and totalizing list of capitalist bads against an idealized vision of an alternative that is designed to eliminate the bads by definition. There are many normative problems here that the authors do not sufficiently address, even if they do make an effort to do so. The first two they note are the most important.
They respond to the objection that their model would “require massive violations of the property rights of existing owners,” by noting that existing distributions of property are unjust, and insisting that while the expropriation of property might seem violent, the very existence of property rights rests on coercion. It is true, they admit, that the nationalization of all means of production and their conversion into worker-managed firms would exclude current owners from their property and be experienced by these owners as a violation. But “it’s equally true that a government that rejects” proposals for redistribution “and continues to recognize” private property rights “will be preventing the workers—by force!—from doing what they want with the property.” In both cases there is coercion, in both cases a violation.
This is true—abstractly speaking. But unless one believes that law is nothing but coercion, there is also a matter of legal due process. The authors recognize elsewhere that some forms of compensation might be justified. But their discussion of wholesale expropriation is very blunt, in ways that make it very questionable. Indeed, the power of the argument summarized above draws force from the intuition that it would be wrong to dispossess many workers from the property that they claim in order to defend the rights of few capitalists. But of course, in the actual world, it is not many “workers” who are clamoring everywhere and all at once to expropriate private property. It is the relatively small group of socialists for whom the authors speak who are advocating this. That the mass of actual workers would simply scoff at the upheaval required by a total replacement of capitalism begs credulity. This becomes even more important when you consider that The Blueprint envisions not simply the expropriation of all private property in the means of production, even small businesses. It also envisions the socialization of all housing, and the replacement of all forms of private home ownership by forms of leasing. In other words, it in effect proposes to turn all citizens into leasers, i.e., renters, of publicly owned and state-managed housing.
It is one thing to say that capitalism produces an unjust distribution of economic resources and that, if we were starting from scratch, we might wish to embrace more just distributive principles. It is quite something else to say that in the world we now inhabit most forms of private ownership, including home ownership, ought to be socialized via an entirely new regime of property. That is a pretty huge leap into the dark, and it is something that clearly runs contrary to the revealed preferences of most actual individuals living and working in every existing capitalist society.
The authors do not seem to see much of a problem here, because they rely on “ideal” theories of justice associated with John Rawls and G.A. Cohen, and imagine that egalitarian socialist norms are values that individuals would choose as if they were behind “a veil of ignorance” about their actual social location, and could reason, as it were, from scratch. But the idealism of this feature of Rawls’s argument has been criticized for decades, to the point where it was substantially abandoned by Rawls himself, whose most radical ideas were conceived as forms of immanent critique. We do not start from scratch as moral reasoners, and the authors are much too cavalier about the expropriation that lay at the heart of the blueprint they propose.
This is even clearer in their response to a second concern: “Even if expropriation were morally defensible, would the social upheaval required to carry it out really be worth the risk? Why not stop at social democracy?”
They offer three responses. The first is ideological—the social democracy is not sufficiently or completely just, because it does not abolish private property and allows both inequality and inequalities of power: “If a king or a dictator is relatively weak and can often be influenced to adopt particular policies by fear of unrest in the streets, that’s a good thing. But democracy is better. We don’t think this principle stops at the entrance to the workplace (302).” In other words, social democracy is more like “dictatorship” than it is like “democracy.” The third is historical: whatever the achievements of social democracy, “it’s far from clear that they could have been achieved if many of the people who fought for them hadn’t been guided by the North Star of socialism (302).” Most social democrats would take issue with both of those assertions, and rightly so.
But it is the third explanation that is most revealing. It is offered as a “pragmatic” rationale, but I think it carries enormous normative importance: “Social democratic gains made within a framework that keeps the existing ruling class in place are inherently unstable . . . when pressures mount, these gains will be vulnerable. Battles that seemed to have been won will have to be fought over and over.” To be fair, the argument here is not an argument against political democracy. It is an argument against “capitalist property relations.” But in the actual world capitalist property relations coexist with political democracy. And the overall thrust of the discussion here is to suggest that without the abolition of property relations, democracy is really pretty thin gruel. Further, it is to suggest that the goal of their socialism is to work towards a system where further contestation of their “blueprint” will be rendered either superfluous or impossible or both. A socialist version of an end of history?
It is worth noting that for a great many theorists of democracy who were or are on the left—from Norberto Bobbie and Guillermo O’Donnell and Claude Lefort to Adam Prezeworski and Etienne Balibar—the inherent instability and indeterminacy of outcomes is one of the virtues of democracy in every space where it might be practiced. There is something arresting—the pun is intended—about the very idea that it is a bad thing for battles to be fought over and over. This does not mean that everything ought always to be up for grabs. It does mean that it is hard to imagine a system that allows for a fairer and more just system of democratic justice than a system governed by the collection of political, social, and economic rights that has been achieved, where it has been achieved, by some form of social democracy broadly construed—the very thing that the authors seek to distance themselves from.
Indeed, while the authors repeatedly and credibly insist that their vision of socialism centers on the values of freedom and democracy, and represents something very different than the bureaucratic centralism of Soviet-style socialism, it is notable that their actual discussion of Soviet history (pp. 30-57), in connection with “the plans that failed,” treats the Soviet system almost exclusively from the vantage point of its economic irrationality and ultimate suppression of worker autonomy on the job, with no consideration of democracy more generally. Rejecting Stalinism, the authors present a rose-colored view of Bolshevism as a heroic form of emancipatory politics hampered by the practical challenges of organizing a post-revolutionary economy and then forced, by civil war and foreign intervention—very real to be sure—to institute “war communism” as an improvised response to a political emergency. They note that this policy was brutal (“hostage taking and collective punishment,” “armed requisition squads” seizing peasant produce, “strict labor discipline”). But they describe it without normative comment except to note that it rested on a “crude” class analysis and that it failed to accomplish its goals, giving way to Lenin’s famous shift to a New Economic Policy that relaxed “war communist” mobilization” and allowed for the restoration of social normality.
They write of this phase of the Russian Revolution: “By the time of Lenin’s death in January 1924, the young Soviet state was securely in power, by consent and not terror (35).” I wish they had not written this. But they did. And it represents a serious lapse that goes a long way to weaken their claim to be envisioning a democratic socialism.
It is common knowledge that shortly after seizing power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks, at Lenin’s direction, dissolved the democratically-elected Constituent Assembly and proceeded to marginalize and suppress not simply supporters of the old regime, but the Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary parties that had supported the revolution—though they had refused to anoint the Bolsheviks as The Party of the revolution. Lenin indeed very publicly instituted what he called a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that suppressed “bourgeois democracy” in the name of a supposedly higher form of proletarian empowerment.
Lenin’s announcement of the NEP at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, treated by the authors as an exemplary reform, was accompanied by a resolution “On Party Unity” that led to the banning of all factions within the Bolshevik party and the suppression of the Workers’ Opposition and all independent labor organization. The resolution was passed at the urging of Lenin, who insisted that action needed to be taken “On The Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in Our Party.” Lenin’s subsequent party report on the NEP in October 1921 declared that “our fight will be even fiercer” against “counterrevolution,” and targeted the other left parties as counterrevolutionary (“every landowner had at his headquarters Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, who talked loudly about government by the people, the Constituent Assembly, and about the Bolsheviks having violated all liberties.”)
Sunkara knows these things. He criticized some of them in his 2019 The Socialist Manifesto, and has criticized some of them in more recent speeches. I have no doubt that the authors of The Blueprint neither propose nor support such Bolshevik measures. But their text is nonetheless marred by its residual attachment to a heroic vision of the Bolshevik Revolution. This carries over as well into their discussion of the failures of planning in post-WWII Eastern Europe. They cite Miklos Haraszti’s 1977 A Worker in a Worker’s State on the inefficiencies of communist planning in Hungary, but you wouldn’t know from reading the book that Haraszti was the author of the much more influential 1987 book The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism, and one of the most important anti-Communist and radical liberal dissidents in Hungary. In the same way, while quite reasonably devoting extensive attention to the important ideas of socialist economist Oskar Lange, who indeed supported the Polish Communist regime, there is not even a mention of the Polish Solidarity movement, one of the most important mass working class movements of the twentieth century, responsible for bringing down “really existing socialism” not simply in Poland but throughout Eastern Europe. These are major omissions.
To be clear, the authors note in passing the 1950’s labor revolts in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary, and they are extremely critical of both Stalinism (“bloody terror and totalitarianism”) and Soviet-style central planning, which they consider both inefficient and repressive. But they do not offer a full-fledged critique of the politics behind the “plans that failed,” and even at their most critical, there is a residual nostalgia for Lenin, expressed in formulations like this: “Lenin proposed that a much smaller repressive apparatus would be necessary under socialism than capitalism since the former required the suppression of only a small minority by a greater majority. Yet by the 1980’s . . . the Stasi had nearly 175,000 informants, 90,000 agents, and kept files on over 5 million citizens (68-90).” Orlando Figes notes in his highly respected A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (1997) that: “It was under Lenin, not Stalin, that the Cheka grew into a vast police state within the state. By 1920, it employed more than a quarter of a million officials. Terror was an integral element of the Bolshevik regime from the start. Nobody will ever know the number of people repressed by the Cheka in these years, but it may have been as many of those killed in the battles of the civil war (p. 644).” Perhaps the actual figure is lower. Or higher. Either way, it is substantial. Lenin was no innocent. But the authors of The Blueprint, in over four hundred pages, cannot bring themselves to reckon, politically and morally, with the class reductionism, and teleological thinking, and confidence in a totalizing alternative to capitalism, that animated the politics of 20th century communism.
They insist, towards the book’s end, that “the challenges to socialism are formidable, and we won’t dismiss them. We’ve tried to strike a course between either taking refuge in these strategies of evasion or learning to live with a more humane capitalism. Our approach has, instead, been to take seriously the calculation and incentive problems pointed out by our ideological enemies, to learn the bitter lessons of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century, and to lay out a vision of a postcapitalist future that’s fully consistent with those lessons (361).” But while they do take seriously “calculation and incentive problems,” I am sorry to say they do not probe with sufficient depth “the bitter lessons of the socialist experiments of the twentieth century.” And they are thus much too dismissive of the broadly social democratic alternative, which does not consist in “learning to live with a more humane capitalism” but in working relentlessly through the imperfect but indispensable means of political democracy to contest inequalities and injustices and to remedy them through substantial reforms.
The Blueprint Evaluated as a “Real World” Proposal
I have focused my attention on the things the book does not discuss because this is not an ordinary book and it does not appear at an ordinary time. The book is an effort to advance a socialist politics at a time when this politics has achieved very real currency. The stakes, in other words, are extremely high, for those–in the U.S. primarily members of DSA–who are drawn to an emphatically socialist activism, but also for those liberals, progressives, and social democrats who are drawn to certain socialist values or who welcome a broad anti-authoritarian coalition in which figures like Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are valued allies and leaders.
The Blueprint is a highly theoretical work. But it is published by Verso, arguably the most important and respected socialist trade publisher in the English-speaking world; its avowed purpose is to inform and galvanize a socialist movement; and it is likely to influence socialist discussion, and to be treated in broader public settings as a statement, if not the statement, of the millennial socialist movement that has fueled DSA. It is for this reason that it is important to frankly discuss the book’s political and normative limits, and to frankly note that the source of these limits is the version of Marxism that has long animated Jacobin, one marked by the magazine’s deliberatively provocative name. I would not describe this Marxism as in any sense “communist,” and would hesitate to describe it as “revolutionary” for fear of being misunderstood or of fueling the despicable red-baiting that has recently kicked into high gear (and, just for the record, I have myself been the target of such red-baiting by U.S. Senator Jim Banks). But it is definitely a Marxism that evinces a nostalgia for past revolutions, is pretty anti-anti-Communist, and determined to sharply differentiate itself from both “liberalism” and “social democracy.”
The Blueprint accomplishes this differentiation in a way that is likely to feed some of the more dogmatic tendencies within DSA and to accentuate disagreements on the broad left at a time when it is especially important to accentuate points of agreement. This is especially unfortunate because its authors understand the danger. On August 21, for example, Ben Burgis published an excellent piece in Jacobin entitled “It’s Prime Time for Socialists. How We Make Our Case Matters,” focusing on the danger of sectarianism: “We have a chance to rally broad support behind our short-term social democratic agenda, and to slowly and steadily build support for a more radical socialist horizon. But we can only do that if we think seriously at every stage about exactly what we want, how to get it, and how to assemble a popular majority behind it. This is a completely different mindset than one where we spend our time trying to reassure one another of our radical commitment.”
Sunkara regularly develops similar arguments, with political nuance, in his regular columns for The Guardian, and in a fascinating recent New York Times interview with Ross Douthat, where he elaborates at length on “efforts to bring about doses of socialism within capitalism,” speaks positively about the independent campaign of Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, and comments sensibly on recreating a new version of the old “New Deal coalition.” Indeed, when asked to explain where he departs from conventional Democratic politicians like Amy Klobuchar, he replies, rather remarkably: “Well, for one thing — and I mean this earnestly — as far as I can tell, American socialists are way more liberal than they themselves think, in that they truly do believe in pluralism and multiparty democracy and in certain places the state should not go. . . I think we believe in a Bill of Rights socialism.”
This is the language of AOC, and the language of Zohran Mamdani, with whom Sunkara is very close. It is a language of socialism that is distinctive, and radical, and moral, but it is not totalizing, and it is not purist. And while Sunkara may think of socialism as a “North Star” beyond capitalism, what he publicly articulates here is simply a critical perspective on the current situation that is informed by socialist values, as part of a broader debate about how to improve the world about which he does not claim to have The Answer.
Unfortunately, this is not the language of The Blueprint which, in the end, consists not of linked arguments or proposals but a singular and totalizing plan for the future that does claim to represent The Answer, the only horizon against which it is possible to do more than make one’s peace with the status quo. Sunkara indeed speaks in exactly this way “Rebuilding the Socialist Horizon” a recent speech published this May in Jacobin: “I want to argue further that a leftism without a socialist destination is not a politics worth fighting for. Not just because of the moral power of our destination but because, without one, we become weaker reformers, not more practical ones. And we lose something that actually made us potent working-class fighters. We lose the grand story — the story that once told ordinary workers that they were not history’s victims in need of either private charity or state charity but history’s authors.”
The grand narrative to which he refers was surely grand. But if it told ordinary workers many things, they were mostly things that most ordinary workers never believed. And while that narrative fueled the activism of some, it also all too frequently fueled an arrogance and a tendency to overreach that severely weakened any future claims to veracity. To say that “a leftism without a socialist destination is not worth fighting for,” and to insist that an authentic left politics needs The Blueprint or at least some version of an equivalent blueprint, is to disparage most of what has been done under the broad banner of “the left.” For while socialists have surely played a progressive historical role—except when they haven’t, which is often–the kind of socialism that Sunkara and his colleagues are promoting has never been the only discourse of freedom and justice, and has never been hegemonic in any politically democratic setting. Unfortunately the importance of this is not registered at all in the book under review.
The Blueprint proceeds from a rejection of what the authors, following G.A. Cohen, call the “obstetric metaphor” according to which socialism is growing within the womb of capitalism, and remains only to be midwifed into existence, requiring little elaboration in advance. The classic statement of this idea appears in a famous letter by Marx to his sometime friend Arnold Ruge: “We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.”
It is to the authors’ credit that they repudiate this idea, and insist that political ideals do not simply come on the scene at the right moment, ready to be taken up by political agents, and that they need to be elaborated and defended if they are to fuel major social or political change. Yet while they reject the idea that socialism requires little elaboration, they do not reject the idea that there is a logic to history, and it is socialism that represents a higher form of society that will replace capitalism in toto, even if the designated agent of this mission—the working class—does not yet know it. That is why they begin the book with an epigram from Marx’s Capital, Volume III that forecasts that “from the standpoint of a higher form of society,” private property in objects will appear “as absurd as private ownership of one man by another.” Whatever the genuine insights furnished by Marx, and however appealing socialist ideas of worker control and greater distributive justice might be, that forecast is simply a form wishful thinking inherited from a vision of class struggle enunciated almost two hundred years ago. And it postulates a world so far removed from the world in which we live that it is not unfair to describe it as utopian in the literal sense of being nowhere in actuality.
People are of course free to embrace this vision, and to make it their “North Star,” if they choose. At the same time, the problems of The Blueprint pale in significance when compared to the dangerous MAGA vision of Christian nationalism and “American Greatness” that now dominates the U.S. political landscape. That this socialist vision is an easy target of these reactionaries is an important fact, but it is not a reason to wish it away or to tell its proponents to be quiet. This cannot be said clearly enough: the Trump administration’s red-baiting is deplorable. And the only appropriate way to treat the socialist discourse to which The Blueprint contributes is to engage it as an important part of a real debate about the future of a democratic politics that is very much under siege.
In my view, “a leftism without a socialist destination” is most definitely “a politics worth fighting for,” because greater justice, freedom, and democracy are always worth pursuing. While there are no ultimate destinations, there are better and worse roads to travel. Right now our society is on a most dangerous path. And all of those who care about justice, freedom, and democracy—whether liberals or social democrats or democratic socialists–need to work together, whatever their ultimate beliefs, if we are to have any hope of setting things straight.
The author would like to thank Bob Ivie, Jeff Goldfarb, Bob Orsi, and Rafael Khachaturian for their helpful comments on this review.
