There was a tremendous response to my piece last week about what a viable socialist system could look like, so I wanted to follow up. Obviously, we shouldn’t go too far in the direction of what Karl Marx called “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future.” Trying to provide a complete list of which sectors would be nationalized and which would be cooperatized in a socialist system would be a fool’s errand.

If we’re lucky enough to make it past capitalism, those decisions will result from messy and contingent historical processes and not from the citizens of future socialist societies consulting old Jacobin articles to see what they should do. But we can make some straightforward predictions. And I want to explain some of those predictions in the context of a question I got about whether a socialist system, along the lines of the one I outlined in Jacobin, would have handled the coronavirus pandemic better.

Part of the advantage of expropriating the capitalist class, and thus eliminating the constant pressure from that class to extend markets to all spheres of life, is that it would free up the citizens of socialist societies to make collective decisions about where they’re willing to put up with a little market chaos for the sake of efficiently coordinating production with consumer needs and what sectors need to be taken out of the market entirely. It would be surprising if any such process didn’t lead to the nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry.