Seth Ackerman’s piece, “The Red and the Black” is refreshing and imaginative. It sympathizes with Marx’s scorn for concocting recipes for the cookbooks of the future while, at the same time, offering a kind of inspiration that can only be drawn from envisioning radical alternatives. My hope is that it generates a wide variety of critical responses, but here I only want to explore one theme: democracy.

Let me be clear: by “democracy” I have in mind something altogether different from the electoral institutions that exist in contemporary capitalist societies such as the United States. These institutions give the vast majority of the population little real control over the basic structure of society. Whenever I speak of democracy in what follows, I have in mind something simpler and more radical — an association in which persons consciously govern their common affairs on a footing of genuine equality through public reasoning and discussion.

Ackerman says a lot about markets and the experience of bureaucratic central planning, but he says a lot less about the traditional socialist demand for working-class control over economic life. Although he tells us that his primary topic is “the conflict between the pursuit of private profit and the satisfaction of human needs,” I couldn’t help but wonder how radical democratic energies fit into the picture.