Visions of a Better Future?

In times like these, we all need HOPE – and few expressed this more forcibly than the totally forgotten pre-war German author Ernst Bloch remembered in this 2018 article. We are probably more familiar with Rebecca Solnit’s uplifting Hope in the Dark, first published in 2004 in reaction to the Iraq War and updated in 2016. Or, the lesser known We – reviving social hope Ronald Aronson in 2017

I have been tremendously encouraged by a recent book Alternative Societies 

for a Pluralist Socialism by Luke Martell (2023) who introduces it memorably thus -

We often evaluate and criticize existing society. This book is less about criticism of how things are and more about alternatives. In times of terrible global problems and great gloom, it examines how things could be better. It is an exercise in idealism, but rooted in reality, in the now as much as the future. It is about realistic ways of getting to a better future, also how that future might be organized. It is about alternative societies, how to get to them and what they can be. I do not believe clear oppositions or dichotomies work intellectually or politically. So, I make no apologies that the book argues for pluralism and complexity. However, it does not advocate just a mix- and- match approach. I have genuinely not started with a predetermined perspective, but I think many of the alternatives I look at imply socialism.

Martell continues

At the same time, I have tried to write this book in an accessible way, and on alternatives being practised as well as theories about them. I hope readers outside academia and institutional education, including those who have never been to university, will find it readable. I have deliberately not written the book in a polemical or rhetorical way.

My aim is not to inspire the sympathetic, but to talk to the unsure. I think the latter are more open to logical and analytical argument, which sometimes has to go into detail.

For me, the most defining aspect of socialism is democratic and collective ownership in the economy, which has come back more into mainstream politics in recent years. Chapter 5 looks more closely at this, focusing especially on proposals for, and practices of, local, decentralized, and democratized social ownership, about which there have been new thinking and experiments, often localized but relevant also at levels above the local. I sympathize with such proposals and trials of the democratic economy but see dangers in localism and in optimism about winning support for them.

Good overviews of alternative forms of social organization can be found in The Dictionary of Alternatives Martin Parker 2007 an accessible introduction to relevant ideas, and in more depth in The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization Parker et al (2013) .

Other Books on Socialism

Twenty- First Socialism Jeremy Gilbert (2020)

UPDATE

Luke Martell's blog is worth a look https://lukesnotes.mataroa.blog/