More Leftist Stuff

Four books up for review today – with the second being my favourite

The Socialist Challenge Today Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2018)
A very short essay (only 52 pages) by two US authorsSearching for Socialism – the project of the labour new left from Benn to Corbyn Leo Panitch and Colin Hay (2020) 

Each of the three great economic crises of the last century – the 1930s, the 1970s and the decade after 2008 – precipitated a crisis in the Labour Party.

Each time, the crisis posed fundamental questions of ideology, organisation and unity, and ended up by propelling into the leadership a radical socialist MP from the party’s left wing. In each instance this produced a sharp reaction aimed at blocking whatever potential the crisis had for taking the party in a new democratic-socialist direction. And in each case Britain’s relationship with Europe played an important role.

Would Democratic Socialism be Better? Lane Kenworthy (2022)
A curious book from someone with a rather jaundiced look at the subject 
– with a US focusSocialism for Today – escaping the cruelties of capitalism David Kotz (2025) 

A rather right-wing treatment by a US author

Chapter 2 examines the system known as capitalism. It will show that, despite 
the undeniable economic and social advances that have occurred in the capitalist 
era since its inception centuries ago, today capitalism is the underlying source of 
the severe problems encountered by the majority. 

Chapter 3 considers whether the reform of capitalism can adequately address 
the problems it generates. It argues that a reformed capitalism can indeed be 
more benign than its raw and unmodified form, but it makes a case that reform 
can at best bring an amelioration of the problems that is both limited in extent 
and cannot last. 

Chapter 4 reviews the lessons of twentieth-century efforts to move beyond 
capitalism to build a socialist system that gave rise to the Soviet system and 
some cases of market socialism. Those developments did bring some economic 
and social advances, but they also had significant negative features, in particular 
an authoritarian and repressive state. All of those post-capitalist systems proved 
to be unsustainable in the long run. Both the successes and the failures of those 
moves beyond capitalism provide important lessons for a future socialism.

Chapter 5 proposes a socialism for the United States and other high-income 
industrialized countries. It provides an account of the main institutions of an 
alternative socialist system, taking account of the twentieth-century efforts to 
construct a socialist alternative to capitalism. It argues that a future socialism 
can eliminate the severe problems that capitalism inevitably generates, while 
building a society that promotes human development, solidarity, democracy, 
liberty, and environmental sustainability. 
Finally, chapter 6 considers how to get from here to there.

The analysis in this book does not indicate that socialism will be a utopia, automatically banishing all human problems. Rather, it will be one more advance for humanity, one that provides the only socioeconomic framework for addressing, and over time resolving, the most pressing problems we face in common.

Since the 1980s a number of books and articles have appeared proposing models of a future democratic socialism based on economic planning and public ownership. The authors of such works include Pat Devine, Robin Hahnel, Michael Albert, David Laibman, and W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell. Those works offer relatively detailed speci­fications of the institutions of a future democratic socialist economy. Those authors present a variety of proposals for the design of a system of economic planning that would align production and distribution decisions with popular needs and wants. This chapter will mainly draw on the version of democratic socialism proposed by Devine. Devine’s model most directly relies on active participation by the population in making allocation decisions.

This chapter takes up the following topics: (1) democratic participatory planning as the central economic institution of a future socialism; (2) forms of property ownership to go along with DPP; (3) workers’ rights; (4) introduction of new small businesses, new products, and new technologies; (5) the role of the state; (6) overcoming non-class forms of oppression; (7) cultural and political freedoms; (8) environmental sustainability; and (9) advances and problems in a democratic socialist society.

It is not possible to know the detailed structure of a future democratic socialist system in advance. However, in light of the pervasive mainstream insistence that there is no viable alternative to capitalism, socialists must make a case that there is a plausible socialist alternative. An article by Sam Gindin states it well:

For socialists, establishing popular confidence in the feasi­bility of a socialist society is now an existential challenge. . . . This, it needs emphasis, isn’t a matter of proving that socialism is possible (the future can’t be verified) nor of laying out a thorough blueprint (as with projecting capitalism before its arrival, such details can’t be known), but of presenting a framework that contributes to making the case for socialism’s plausibility