The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World
By Mike Beggs, Ben Burgis, and Bhaskar Sunkara
Verso, 432 pages, $29.95
The surprising electoral success of avowedly socialist candidates in big-city mayoral campaigns and some congressional races has raised the profile of the Democratic Socialists of America, forcing people to ponder what the term “democratic socialism” actually means. By some accounts, it means a system along the lines of Scandinavian social democracy: guaranteeing all citizens access to health care, child care, affordable housing, and support in old age, while leaving capitalists in charge of their firms. For President Trump and his allies, conversely, democratic socialism is a euphemism, and its advocates are communists and jihadists who hate capitalism and want to destroy economic and political freedom.
Neither answer is accurate. Most leading democratic socialists envision an eventual transition away from an economy dominated by profit-maximizing firms. They recognize that in the decades after World War II, the United States and other nations created a regulated capitalism that limited inequalities of income and wealth and assured a certain level of prosperity for working-class people. But the last five decades saw the dismantling of many of these regulations, allowing the return of vast inequalities of wealth, more economic insecurity for working people, and the accumulation of ever greater political power by billionaires.
Democratic socialists believe that radical changes are necessary to undo this economic and political damage. However, they invoke the aphorism that the definition of insanity is to repeat the same thing and expect different results. They insist that another experiment with regulated capitalism will end with capitalists again using their power to liberate themselves from higher taxes and new regulations. They believe that the only reliable path to a more egalitarian society is a series of reforms that eventually eliminate the control of capitalists over the economy’s productive resources. In short, they favor creating a socialist economy.
“The Soviet model of state socialism failed economically.”
But how would a socialist economy be organized? For all of its defects, capitalism has dramatically raised the standard of living in Europe, North America, and other places. Would a socialist economy be similarly dynamic, or would it bring about a significant decline in living standards? The Soviet model of state socialism failed economically. The revolt against Soviet communism began in East Germany, where it was obvious that living standards were far below those of its West German neighbor. But similar discontent ultimately doomed the Soviet model across Eastern Europe and Russia. Meanwhile, China and Vietnam responded to this failure by opening their economies to private profit-oriented firms.
A new book, The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, argues that an economically productive socialism is possible. The book is written by Mike Beggs, a political economist, Ben Burgis, a philosopher, and Bhaskar Sunkara, the founding editor of Jacobin—the leading socialist publication in the United States. The authors believe that the path to that productive socialist economy requires understanding why the Soviet planned economy proved a failure.