4
There is a moral and a political takeaway from the preceding chapters. The moral one is that capitalism is, at its very core, an unjust economic system. It consigns the vast majority of the population to economic insecurity, to low or stagnating wages, compels them to surrender their autonomy, pits them against one another—and all this is built into the system. The political takeaway is that the distribution of power in capitalism serves to maintain and support the injustices. The system has survived for centuries, not because working classes have failed to notice its unfairness, or because they’re somehow happy with it. It has survived because both at the workplace and within the state, the odds are stacked against them if they try to change it. This was the thrust of chapters 2 and 3.
It is for this reason that the call for socialism has been so popular for more than a century. If the basic structure of a capitalist economy stands in the way of social justice, then it calls for deep and fundamental structural change, perhaps to a new social system altogether, so that the vast majority can have a chance at decent lives. But how might we effectuate this change, and what would a new system look like?
For much of the twentieth century, many anti-capitalists thought that the Russian Revolution showed the way. Today, this is no longer the case. Among younger socialists especially, the Bolshevik political model is no longer the one to emulate, nor is the state that they built. Socialists look instead to the Nordic countries’ commitment to social democracy, or perhaps to the brief but interesting experiments with workers’ control in some Soviet satellites. I will argue in this chapter that even while the Russian experience can’t serve as a model, there are aspects of it that still have a lot to offer. Indeed, its legacy looms even over the social democratic successes, such that some of its innovations are essential to any successful progressive movements. It is important to generate an inventory of the Revolution’s lessons before we turn to the social democratic countries and examine what they have to offer.
Organizational Lessons
There are two broad legacies of the Russian Revolution—an organizational and an institutional one. By organizational, I mean issues pertaining to building vehicles for collective action in capitalism—unions, parties, and the like. By institutional, I mean the basic structures that will comprise a post-capitalist society—the political system, economic organization, the structure of rights. The organizational dimension pertains to how you build power inside capitalism, and the institutional to what you will build after capitalism.
Let’s start with a few key organizational elements: a working-class party’s internal structure, the relationship of that party to its base, and its socialist strategic vision.
Party structure
The Left is of two minds when it comes to Leninist party organization. One is to see the model as a disaster, or at least as something of a negative experience. The accusation is that Leninism has always and everywhere ended up in authoritarianism. Others have responded by saying, “Well that’s true, but you are confusing Stalinism with Leninism.” In other words, it is really with the advent of Stalin that you see the shutting down of debate. But if you look at the Bolsheviks in the decade leading up to the revolution, the party was remarkably open and democratic—indeed more so than many other Second International parties.
The defenders of the Leninist party are right that in its early history it was remarkable open and dynamic. But at the same time, its global experience starting in the 1930s veered much closer to its later, undemocratic form. So while Lenin’s party was very democratic, the Leninist party has not been. And we can’t lay the blame solely on Stalin, Zinoviev, or whoever your favorite villain is. A party model with strong and resilient democratic structures should have generated a more diverse set of experiences, not a uniform history of ossification.
That being the case, it’s easy to come to the conclusion, as most progressives do today, that the next Left has to reject the Leninist party model. The problem with that view is that no other model has come anywhere as close to being politically effective. All the putative alternatives coming out of the Left since the 1960s—the multi-tendency organizations, the horizontalists, the anarchists and their affinity groups, the movement of movements, etc.—have been able to mobilize for a time, but they have had little success sustaining movements, much less achieving real gains in material terms. Indeed, the Second International’s cadre-based model has been so successful that every major mobilizational party of the twentieth century replicated it to some extent, even on the Right.
Given that history, it’s hard to imagine a way for the Left to organize itself as a real force without some variant of the party structure the early socialists hit upon—a mass cadre-based party with a centralized leadership and internal coherence. Parties of the Left are not just vote-gathering machines. They are fundamentally instruments to organize and mobilize working people around their interests. This requires the parties to also be ideologically coherent, to have the ability to reach into working-class communities and workplaces, to have an organic connection to the latter, and to transmit workers’ demands and needs to the party so that they might be articulated into a coherent program. That program then is constantly reviewed, revised, and streamlined so that it is an evolving expression of class interests. Running candidates on a platform consistent with those interests is of course important; but the electoral campaigns are just one element of the tasks undertaken by these parties. How do they establish the connections with their base? What are the conduits through which they dig deep roots into the working class? In most every case, it has been by implanting the party physically in the workplaces and neighborhoods of the working class, having full-time, paid functionaries who are ideologically committed to the party program, and then recruiting members of the working class who have a proven ability to organize around the program and contribute to its development. These cadre have been a key component of these parties’ success, as has some degree of centralization of functions, which of course are enlivened by democratic accountability.
These general principles of party organization have been essential to the success of working-class parties, whether in the Communist guise or the reformist, social democratic one. Now, maybe that will change. Maybe we will come up with organizational forms that are thoroughly decentralized, more diffuse, and ideologically plural, yet which also manage to get things done. But we haven’t yet seen one. And given the experience we have, we don’t really have a basis to reject the most successful model of the past hundred years.
What we need to do is look back to the party’s early years—prior to 1918, when everybody agrees that it was pretty open and democratic—and study it closely. We need to have a sharp understanding of how the Bolshevik Party maintained the dynamism that made it the most successful organization of its time—where criticizing the leadership was taken as a right, a basic part of what it meant to be a party member. Were there institutional mechanisms that created the culture of debate and accountability, beyond the usual ones of elections, newsletters, etc.? Or was it simply dependent, in the end, on a leadership committed to those values?
If there were institutional mechanisms in place that ensure democracy, then we could just copy them, put them in place. But if it is a matter of there having been a contingent internal culture, it means that democratic practices have to depend, in the end, on a kind of moral commitment—which will be harder to replicate, because leaders tend to want to close down democracy, not uphold it. But that’s why it’s important to study the history and study the actual practice to see where that democracy came from.
The party base
The second organizational issue is that of the party’s relationship to its base. Here the Russian Revolution really teaches us something. In Cold War historiography of the revolution, the Bolsheviks are depicted as having taken power through something like a coup. The idea is that they really didn’t have a mass base, that they were a small group of fanatically committed ideologues who grabbed power and then imposed a dictatorship. But what recent historical work has shown, in dramatic detail, is that the main reason the Bolsheviks were able to take and hold on to power was that of all the parties in Russia, they had the deepest, strongest, and firmest links to the working class in the country’s major industrial centers. Consequently, with every shift in working-class political mood—particularly in Petrograd but also in Moscow—in the months leading up to the capture of power, it was the Bolsheviks who were the most keenly aware of those shifts, able to understand the situation, and therefore able to generate slogans and programs that captured the popular consciousness.
The Bolsheviks weren’t alone in this outlook. It was taken for granted by all socialist parties in the interwar years that the foundation of their political strategy was to be anchored in the everyday life of their base. And not just in the West. This was the sine qua non of socialism across the world. And it worked. The great era of left expansion—from the early 1900s to the early 1950s—happened because the parties were parties in, of, and for the laboring poor.
The strategy and the success went hand in hand for several reasons. First and most importantly, it enabled those organizations to generate programs that represented their base’s real interests, since the parties were in constant communication with it—since they fought alongside the base every day, in the workplace and in the neighborhood. Second, it gave the party cadre enormous legitimacy at the mass level, again because they were there through thick and thin. This legitimacy was the essential condition for promoting political struggle, since when cadre encouraged their base to undertake any kind of action, they had the trust and support needed to succeed. Third, this deep and organic connection also supported a vibrant internal culture—of democracy and accountability. A party immersed in everyday working-class life and struggle not only could sustain a democratic culture but also benefited from it. After all, a democratic culture was one of the essential preconditions for gaining the trust and support of the working class. Having a deep and secure base didn’t guarantee success, but not having one guaranteed failure and marginalization.
This is of course what most differentiates the early socialist parties from left groups in the West today. The socialist Left is only tenuously connected to working-class communities, if at all. Its presence in trade unions is a fraction of what it once was, and unions themselves are in rapid decline; self-styled socialists are largely confined to small groups on college campuses or online study sessions; the language of socialism has moved out of trade unions and into nonprofits and tiny sectarian groupings. In electoral politics, Thomas Piketty and his coauthors have shown that the electoral base of social democratic parties has shifted across the world from workers to college-educated professionals.1 This has several very important consequences. First, in contrast to the traditional labor Left, today’s socialists cannot actually organize and lead working-class struggles, because they are physically separated from the class. The overwhelming bulk of the Left’s political engagement is supportive and reactive—showing up for a spell at a picket line, spreading the word, trying to drum up sympathy, etc. But this means that it is entirely dependent on other people’s organizing, since it is not in a position to initiate struggle itself. It is dependent on openings created by others, rather than being a force unto itself.
Second, its confinement to these settings means that for it to maintain its socialist commitments, it has to socialize its members into sympathizing with another class’s interests and another class’s oppression. This is very different from traditional left parties, which operated in a working-class setting, were able to recruit from within that class, and hence trained their members to fight for their own material interests. Struggle was a necessity for these earlier groups, because they were fighting for their members’ own livelihoods and their own well-being. Today’s groups have to largely imagine what those interests are, since they cannot learn about them through direct engagement. They mostly do so by reading about past events and then trying to find parallels to the current scene. But this makes it very hard to develop strategy. It is almost impossible to be innovative, since most members are not directly experiencing changes in the workplace, nor are they in a position to try new initiatives. This naturally leads to a kind of dogmatism, since the only thing they really know is what worked in the past.
The long-term result of being isolated from working-class settings is that these organizations become a haven for a kind of lifestyle politics for morally committed students and professionals. They provide members with a means to feel like they’re involved in change, but, because of its setting, the involvement is highly individualistic and confined largely to acts of symbolic solidarity. Since real organizing is typically off the table, energy tends to be directed inward, toward the culture and characteristics of the group itself. Anyone who comes to the United States from a country with a political tradition can’t help but be struck by how shrill, moralistic, but ultimately apolitical debates are within the Left. They tend to be about language, individual identity, body language, consumption habits, and the like. This is a natural consequence of a “Left” that in fact exists as small groups of people in middle-class settings who have no organic way of getting trained in class politics. It has been this way for so long that even the idea of being based in the working class is seen as either quaint or unnecessary.
If the Left is going to get anywhere, if it’s going to recapture the role it once had, as the engine of social justice, it will only do so by replanting itself within laboring communities. So far, nobody has shown any evidence that changes of the scale we need—to put people over profits, to save the environment, to eradicate social oppressions—can be achieved without taking on capital. And how do you do that if you don’t harness the capacity of the one social force that can bring capital to heel—the class that generates its profits?
It isn’t just the Russian case, but an entire tradition of socialism stretching a century and a half that demonstrates this basic truth. A Left isolated from labor is a showpiece, not a political force.
Strategy
On the question of strategy, the October Revolution is perhaps less instructive. The Bolshevik seizure of power was not a coup, but it did embody a violent and sudden overthrow of a regime, in a context of state breakdown and military disintegration. One might describe this as a strategy of a ruptural break with capitalism.
Now there’s no doubt that the decades from the early twentieth century all the way to the Spanish Civil War—especially in Europe but also beyond—could be described as a revolutionary period. It was an era in which the possibility of rupture could be seriously contemplated and a strategy could be built around it. There were lots of socialists who advocated for a more gradualist approach, but the revolutionaries who criticized them weren’t living in a dream world. The Russian road, as it were, was for many parties a viable one. But starting in the 1950s, it was clear that openings for this kind of strategy were becoming much narrower. And today, it seems entirely hallucinatory to think about socialism through this lens. This is indubitably true in the advanced capitalist world, but it also holds for much of the South.
The capitalist state still has a deep and abiding class bias, as I argued in chapter 2. It shares this characteristic with the states that were vulnerable to revolution a century ago. But in most every other way, it is very different. Today, the state has infinitely greater legitimacy with the population than European states did a century ago. It is important to remember that the revolutionary upheavals that took place in early twentieth-century Europe or in the colonial world were either deeply oligarchic or only just becoming democratic, thus the bulk of the population was politically excluded. The state was a naked expression of class rule, a kind of class dictatorship. It had very little legitimacy with the population. The advent of democracy has changed that fact fundamentally. Even though most people see the contemporary state as unfair, they also view it as reformable, as open to change. This is in large measure why there has never been a revolution in a democratic setting—there are too many ways to absorb popular discontent so that it doesn’t boil over into revolutionary fervor.
Second, the state’s coercive capacity is orders of magnitude more developed than it was in 1900. This is so obvious that it should not even require emphasis. It is not just the guns and other means of violence that are greater now. More fundamentally, it is the means of surveillance, the monitoring of daily life on a routine basis. It is simply much easier to rely on a selective use of violence, to pick up organizers where they become potent, ensnare them in years of litigation or just to incarcerate them. This fact and the development of democracy work as complements—while the former has made it more costly and difficult to overthrow the government, the latter has made it seem unnecessary. Hence, even as greater numbers of people seek to work within the system, the few who might have sought to overthrow it are either neutralized, or they see the prohibitive costs and decide to back off from it.
The upshot is that the bourgeois state today has a formidable stability. Demands for change, where they occur, seek to reform it, not abolish it. What that means is, while we can allow for and perhaps hope for the emergence of revolutionary conditions where state breakdown is really in the cards, we can’t build a political strategy around it as an expectation—we can’t take it as the Left’s fundamental strategic perspective. For the foreseeable future, the political stability of the state is a reality that the Left has to acknowledge. What is in crisis right now is the neoliberal model of capitalism, not capitalism itself.
If this is so, then the lessons that the Russian experience has to offer—as a model of socialist transition—are limited. Our strategic perspective has to downplay the centrality of a revolutionary rupture and navigate a more gradualist approach. For the foreseeable future, left strategy has to revolve around building a movement to pressure the state, gain power within it, change the institutional structure of capitalism, and erode the structural power of capital—rather than vaulting over it. This entails a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics. You build a party based in labor, you strengthen the organizational capacity of the class, you take on employers in the workplace and create rings of power in civil society, and you use this social power to push through policy reforms by participating in electoral politics. The reforms should have the dual effect of making future organizing easier, and also constraining the power of capital to undermine them down the road. There are many names for a strategy of this kind—non-reformist reforms, revolutionary reforms, etc. But whatever you call it, it entails a more gradualist approach than the ones that were available to the Bolsheviks.
But that means we have to carefully study the experience of parties and countries that fell short of socialism, but achieved real organizational and political gains nonetheless. We need to study social democracy, particularly its more ambitious variants. First of all, to understand how they combined electoral and non-electoral dimensions in an overall strategic perspective. This also entails studying their legislation, the economic models they implemented, how they used the state, how they dealt with capital’s structural power and its hostility to labor’s advance. The gains made by the most advanced social democracies, like the Nordic countries, are quite extraordinary, and their ritual denigration by the Left as merely “reformist” is an instance of genuine stupidity. Those achievements came through real struggle and were fought against tooth and nail by ruling elites.
The most important reason to study the history of social democracy, however, is to understand its limitations. This is why it can’t be dismissed as “merely” reformist. If you don’t understand why social democratic advance lost steam, you will find it hard to avoid their mistakes. It’s important to appreciate that, whatever else happens, if the progressive left achieves real electoral success in the next few years, its political agenda will broadly hew to the template laid down by social democracy.
This is great in many ways, but social democracy was a spent force by the 1980s; its parties degenerated into a managerial ethos; their reformist agenda was halted and then reversed; and they have proven to be largely uninterested in revitalizing their own legacy. For this phenomenon to be so widespread and so pervasive means that it can’t have been because of individual failings and treachery. There was something structural behind it. And this means in turn that the Left needs to understand the structural roots of the failure, to at least have a fighting chance at avoiding the same fate. Hence, while we need to understand how something as ambitious as the Meidner Plan came about in Sweden in the late ’70s, we also need to see why it was defeated, and why the Social Democratic Party became increasingly conservative in the following years.
Institutional
Let’s turn to the institutional issue, which relates to how you build socialism. I won’t dwell on the obvious point, which is that the lesson from the October Revolution is in many ways a negative one—we have to reject wholesale the political model generated by the Bolsheviks of a one-party dictatorship and abrogation of basic liberties. It was a calamitous mistake to denigrate liberal rights as “bourgeois,” which many Marxists of the early twentieth century did, implying that those rights were illusory or fraudulent in some way. This rhetorical ploy made it far easier for those rights to be extinguished by Stalin and, before him, by Lenin himself. Liberal rights were all fought for and won by working-class movements, not by liberal capitalists. From the English Revolution of 1640, through the French Revolution, to the labor movement in the nineteenth century, all the way through the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century, democratic gains were all fought for, and won, by laboring classes, not elites. It was in fact over the resistance of elites that democratic rights were established at all. Any Left worth its salt has to protect and deepen those rights, not throw them aside.
What is more challenging is the issue of economic planning. We have to start with the observation that the idea of a centrally planned economy entirely replacing the market has no empirical foundation. We can want centralized planning to work, but we have no evidence that it can. Every attempt to put it in place for more than short durations has met with failure. The Russian experience is the most elaborate example of that. And the fact of its failure has to be acknowledged, not sidestepped. It won’t do to say, as many Marxists do, that “that wasn’t really socialism, so it doesn’t count.” It may not have been socialism—and maybe real socialism with real democracy and real workers’ councils and real computers will make it work. But the burden of proof is entirely on those socialists who say it will. The argument can’t be won with a wave of the hand and dismissal of the past century’s experience.
In other words, we have to seriously consider the possibility that planning as envisioned by Marx might not be a real option. Any discussion has to proceed with a close examination of the Soviet experience, to try to assess if its failure owed to the particular way planning was instituted, or whether the lesson is that a modern industrial economy is just not amenable to planning. It’s quite astonishing how little attention this issue gets on the Left today, compared with, say, the energy poured into deconstructing Bollywood movies.
In any case, given the dubious record of central planning, we have to seriously consider that a post-capitalist economy might have to take the form of some sort of market socialism. There are many models on the Left of this kind of economy, and they all have different features. What’s important is that whatever the market socialism’s institutional structure, the principles underlying its design are faithful to what socialists seek—of putting people before profits. More elaborately, whatever the model turns out to be, it will differ from capitalism in that
•the market will be constrained so it isn’t the arbiter of people’s basic well-being,
•economic planners will be democratically accountable, and
•wealth inequalities will not be allowed to translate into political domination.
There will of course be other principles constraining the institutional design. But it is hard to imagine any acceptable model of socialism—market or planned—that eschews any of the ones listed. An economy that contravenes any one of these principles will probably not qualify as socialist, at least not in the sense that progressives have understood the concept.
Being clear about what we want out of an economy allows us to understand what is at stake. Planning is not desirable for its own sake. The reason socialists embraced it was for its expected results—mainly that it would reduce people’s dependence on the market, increase their control over their own lives, and help them relate to one another as equals. Planning itself was not the essence of the project—it has always been embraced as a means to an end, and the basic end socialists seek is a humane and just social order. To achieve the kinds of social relations we seek, it might turn out that full planning is not only unrealistic, but also unnecessary—maybe the fundamental goals that socialists seek are in fact achievable through a market socialism after all. It might even be the case that central planning is in tension with some dimensions of social justice. In the countries where the most ambitious versions of economic direction have been attempted, it resulted in a loss of freedom for most people, not an increase. We need to be cognizant of its pitfalls, since we have decades of experience with it. One of the worst legacies of the Second International era was to identify socialism with planning. That equation should never again be made. Economic models are not ends in themselves, but instruments for achieving what we’re really after—a society in which people are able to treat one another as ends, not as means.
Looking Forward
We know from the last century of socialist efforts that the path to a more egalitarian order goes through a confrontation with capital, not around it. And the only parties that have ever had any real success in this endeavor have been mass-based cadre parties with deep roots in the laboring classes. The biggest challenge right now for the Left is to cut the umbilical cord tying it to campuses and nonprofits and return to immersing itself in the milieu of labor. Any viable Left has to also embrace electoral politics as the other node of a two-pronged strategy, in which power at the base is combined with a parliamentary wing, each feeding the other. This is a critically important point—neither of the two dimensions can work on its own. At this moment, the parliamentary dimension seems to be opening up faster than the one at the base—the Left should jump in, capitalize on it, and then use its gains to build the base. But it will not work unless the electoral successes are used to deepen and expand the base in workplaces and neighborhoods, state by state, region by region. Without the organizational strength of the labor movement, electoral success will not yield the success the Left seeks.
At the same time, we need to deepen the discussion of what we’re fighting for. It is clear that a viable socialism will be a pluralistic, multi-party order with a significant rolling back of the market. How far we push it back depends in large measure on the practical question of what is feasible and what is not. But precisely because a ruptural strategy is not on the table, we must start down the road of social democracy and then to market socialism. We have a lot of experience about how to get to the former, not so much about the latter.
The task right now is to take the first step and find a way of challenging capital in our time.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
The literature on the issues touched in this book is immense. What I have tried to do in this essay is to recommend books and articles that made important contributions, and others that provide good overviews of debates, thus enabling readers to survey the field while also getting a good bibliographical source. The guide is mainly intended for study groups and the intrepid reader wishing to delve deeper, but it will not be anywhere near sufficient for readers with academic ambitions.
A terrific introduction to how capitalism originated, and what is at stake in understanding it, is Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2002). For introductions to how the capitalist economy works, a great place to start is the text written by Samuel Bowles, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosevelt, Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book has been through several editions, and readers will benefit from reading some of the earlier editions, too, since the book has changed its emphases as wider debates have evolved. For more advanced surveys, see Paul Sweezy’s classic The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (Monthly Review, 1942), and more recently, Deepankar Basu, The Logic of Capital: An Introduction to Marxian Economic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which covers all the major debates since Sweezy’s book and also provides some novel solutions to long-standing theoretical dilemmas. For the truly ambitious, there is Anwar Shaikh’s epoch-making book, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford University Press, 2016).
To understand the principles behind the organization of work in capitalism, there is no substitute for Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (Monthly Review, 1974), which is proving to be just as relevant in the twenty-first century. Braverman’s book not only spawned a massive debate, but also a new field of study, “labor process studies,” the main results of which are surveyed in Paul Thompson, The Nature of Work: An Introduction to the Labour Process, 2nd ed. (Palgrave, 1989).
On the subject of the state, the most important work was written in the 1960s and 1970s. I would not recommend wading directly into it, since most of it is unnecessarily abstruse and often very pretentious. Two great introductions that can help the reader prepare for the endeavor are Clyde Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), and Paul Wetherly, Marxism and the State: An Analytical Approach (Palgrave, 2005). The work of Ralph Miliband set off the current generation of state theory, with The State in Capitalist Society (Basic Books, 1969). The other protagonist was Nicos Poulantzas, whose Political Power and Social Classes (Verso, 1973) was very influential and set off a debate between himself and Miliband, which is covered in the books by Barrow and Wetherly. These early debates were followed by some important shorter works in the 1970s, of which Fred Block’s interventions were particularly important. See in particular his essays “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” and “Beyond Relative Autonomy,” both of which are in his collection, Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Post-industrialism (Temple University Press, 1987). More ambitious readers might be interested in Claus Offe’s Contradictions of the Welfare State (MIT Press, 1984), which contains several very provocative essays, and Ian Gough’s The Political Economy of the Welfare State (Macmillan, 1979).
To understand the basic connection between class structure and class conflict, there is no better place to start than the work of Erik Olin Wright. I would recommend “Foundations of a Neo-Marxist Class Analysis,” comprising chapter 1 in Erik Olin Wright, ed., Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the earlier “Biography of a Concept: Contradictory Class Locations,” chapter 2 in Classes (Verso, 1985). The connection between class structure and class struggle is classically examined in Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, “The Two Logics of Collective Action,” in Claus Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (MIT Press, 1985), pp. 170–220. I have also tried to present the connection between class structure and the vicissitudes of class conflict in my own book The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Harvard University Press, 2022). These books and articles explain how workers can come together to collectively defend their interests. Then there is the more specific issue of how these unions, when they have organized, are constrained by the profit-maximizing strategies of firms. A brilliant, though somewhat demanding, examination of this is Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition (Princeton University Press, 1993). These rather abstract analyses ought to be read in conjunction with some labor history, so readers can relate the general principles to real events. For the United States, a great place to start is Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (W. W. Norton, 1998). Readers should also have a look at Jeremy Brecher’s lively book Strike! (South End Press, 1997) for how and when workers came together; and Daniel J. Clark’s Disruption in Detroit: Autoworkers and the Elusive Postwar Boom (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018) provides very good detail on how the wage gains of the postwar years could not resolve class antagonisms. A forgotten gem on the micro logic of union organizing is Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939: A Study in Class and Culture (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975). Friedlander’s book is especially rewarding if read in conjunction with the more abstract arguments in Offe and Wiesenthal’s “The Two Logics …” and The Class Matrix.
The literature on planning and socialism can be very heavy going. An important overview of the Soviet experience, which is then used to draw analytical conclusions, is Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (Unwin Hyman, 1983). Nove was a sympathetic critic of full planning and his book elicited a response from Ernest Mandel, “In Defence of Socialist Planning,” New Left Review, Sept.–Oct., 1986, pp. 5–37, with Nove responding in “Markets and Socialism,” New Left Review, Jan.–Feb. 1987, pp. 98–104. The 1990s witnessed the promulgation of two important new models of market socialism. One was David Schweickart’s Against Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1993), which promotes a version of workers’ control with a limited but non-trivial role for markets. That book is mainly written for philosophers and economists. A more accessible version of the argument, better for study groups and the lay reader, is his After Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). I would recommend starting with the second and utilizing the first when the need arises for deeper analysis. The other model developed in the 1990s was John Roemer’s A Future for Socialism (Harvard University Press, 1994), which is also short but requires some background in economics and contemporary political economy. A recent and very accessible debate is Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright, Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy (Verso, 2016), with Hahnel arguing for a planned economy and Wright for a less ambitious market socialism. For readers just coming to the subject, I would recommend starting with Nove, then move to the Hahnel-Wright debate, and then the more advanced ones.