Contrary to the image of the Left — especially in Canada and the United States — as hapless losers, the history of the modern left has been one of astounding, if uneven, success. Success, at least, at taking state power.

There was nothing like it in history since early Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. From their common origins among small bands of workers and artisans and later the parties of the Second International, within a hundred years, Communism won a third of the world and social democracy, in one form or another, took over another fifth of it.

Hal Draper, a critic of the contending socialisms of his time, could remark in 1966 that “for the first time in the history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves 'socialist' in one sense or another.”

Even before they won power, the workers’ movement of that era won a culture. Miners in Wales asked to be buried with their copies of The Communist Manifesto, the way an earlier generation had asked to be buried with their Bibles. It was a secular culture with working people at its center: in homes across Europe, portraits of working-class leaders were hung where icons of saints once had been, and in union halls, the feasts of the church were merged in with a new calendar.

Eric Hobsbawm recounted an 1891 International Workers’ Day announcement in the Po Valley: “The priests have their festivals. . . .  The First of May is the festival of the workers of the entire world.”

Workers soon had more than symbols of identity and pride. Socialism within capitalism (social democracy) and socialism outside capitalism (Soviet communism and its analogues) seemed to offer living examples of a different world. But they collapsed almost as suddenly as they emerged. And what was never achieved anywhere was a socialism after capitalism.

Even today as the anglophone left, through figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani and organizations like Democratic Socialists of America, gains steam, it is hard to tell how much progress we’re making even just reviving a form of socialism within capitalism.

Socialists, more than ever, need what we can call world-historic confidence. The confidence that made miners in Wales and farmers in Vietnam think of themselves not as history's victims but as its great protagonists.

Both historic models of twentieth-century socialism — Soviet-style central planning and social democracy — were not just besieged and defeated . . . they failed.

Everyone has a Soviet economy joke. I like the one about the nail factory that, when incentivized by planners to produce according to numerical output, first produced a lot of tiny nails and then, when incentivized according to output by weight, produced useless giant nails.

In the real world, beyond their obvious political failings, two interconnected problems undermined Soviet-style systems.

The first was calculation. Administrative planning of an entire economy was not just a difficult technical challenge to overcome; it was impossible.

Gosplan oversaw nearly 400 bureaucracies, 43,000 factories, 26,000 construction enterprises, 47,000 farming units, 260,000 service establishments, and over one million retail trade shops. The factories alone produced around twelve million distinct products — and every one of those products required the right inputs, from the right suppliers, at the right locations, on the right timelines, all tangled together in supply chains that stretched across eleven time zones. Planners were dealing with tens of billions of variables at a minimum — rising into the trillions once extended across time.

And to even try to plan that rationally, you would need to know in advance what every firm could produce, what every household wanted, and how every input connected to every output. Nobody could know that. Nobody.

So what you actually got was rule-of-thumb guesswork from the most brilliant planners in the world — last year's numbers plus a little more — propped up by a vast secret economy of barter, hoarding, and back-channel deals that managers ran on the side just to keep production limping forward.

This brings us to the second problem of incentives. Every manager understood perfectly well that the resources they got next year depended on the numbers they turned in this year. They lowballed their projected output compared to their real capacity. And then they overreported their resulting output. They hoarded labor and they hoarded materials, because the penalty for missing an output target was far graver than the penalty for inefficiency.

Similarly, the workers working for them figured out quickly that overfulfilling a quota only meant a higher quota next quarter, so they didn't. Weak firms were never allowed to fail, because letting them fail meant unemployment and broken supply chains — so inefficiency was never consistently punished. The whole hierarchy, from the Politburo down to the guy pretending to work on the factory floor, had an incentive to lie about what it was doing.

These weren’t bugs you could fix with a better algorithm or faster computer. They were coded into the structure of administrative planning itself.

If socialism outside of capitalism failed because it tried to abolish markets, socialism within capitalism, social democracy, failed for the opposite reason — it tried to tame capitalism without transcending it.

For a while, it worked beautifully. Postwar Sweden was probably the most livable society in the world: full employment, centralized unions that negotiated on equal footing with employers, and a universal welfare state supported by a growing economy. Workers had dignity, security, and real power on the shop floor and at the ballot box. And as they got more secure, they practiced more and more solidarity. Not just with each other, but with those in the Third World. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’s final public speech, days before his death, was delivered alongside ANC (African National Congress) President Oliver Tambo. In it, he said that “a system like apartheid cannot be reformed; it can only be abolished.” Palme might have been killed for it.

But there was a contradiction at the core of Palme’s project that derailed it long before his death. Social democracy empowered workers politically while leaving ownership of production and investment power in the hands of capitalists. It produced a standoff between a mighty workers’ movement and these traditional sources of business power.

As long as the economy was growing, the standoff held. There was enough surplus to give labor raises, provide capital profits, and fund the welfare state on top. But the moment growth slowed in the 1970s, the whole arrangement started to buckle.

The left wing of social democracy saw the problem clearly and tried to solve it. The Meidner Plan of 1976 proposed gradually transferring ownership of large firms to worker-controlled funds — a real path from social democracy to socialism, funded by the profits workers were generating through years of wage restraint. It was a brilliant solution to both Sweden’s economic difficulties and its political impasse.

It was also something that could not have been won without a mass mobilization of workers from below that the Swedish social democratic leadership could not abide.

Even with lukewarm support from the Social Democratic Party, Swedish capital treated the Meidner Plan as an existential threat. The scheme was gutted.

The real lesson from this history is very different from the one today’s social democrats draw from it. They say, Social democracy is as far as you can go and was itself a radically egalitarian achievement, so settle for it. BE REALISTIC and keep making slow and steady progress. But capital is a constantly moving target, not a static one, and it doesn’t accept a draw or allow you to slowly besiege it. At some point, a war of position must become a war of maneuver.

But it was indeed years of steady organizing and patient reform that opened the door to structural transformation to begin with. [Rudolf] Meidner and generations of social democratic workers understood that. We need to finish what they started.

As a result of not just capitalist propaganda but the real failures of both forms of twentieth-century “real socialism,” a skepticism has grown about socialism’s future. Wouldn’t taking democratic control over a complex economy eventually boomerang into crisis, collapse into inefficiency, or harden into authoritarianism? To shake the grip of capitalist realism, what we need is to recover an alternative.

Karl Marx spent enough of his life clashing with fanciful utopian socialists that he warned against “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future.” But today it is no longer enough to argue that an alternative to capitalism is politically desirable. We must also argue that it is technically possible.

This doesn’t require pretending that there is a single, settled model of socialism waiting to be implemented. It does require confronting a set of unavoidable questions that any credible alternative must answer. Could a socialist economy use prices, profits, and competition to coordinate complex production without reproducing domination or significant inequality? What incentives encourage efficiency and innovation in an economy of democratically governed firms? How can productivity growth be sustained so that living standards continue to rise, shortages are avoided, and technological change does not produce mass insecurity? And what role must the state play in stabilizing the macroeconomy, guiding investment, and enforcing democratic priorities without suffocating initiative?

In a version of socialism that could plausibly be realized in our lifetimes, large areas of social life would be outside the logic of commodification. Health care, education, transportation, energy, and telecommunication are not consumer goods but social infrastructures on which participation in modern life depends. Organizing them through profit-seeking intermediaries that ration by price rather than need introduces predictable distortions. The result is a system that undermines both equality and efficiency. Decades of comparative experience suggest that public provision in these sectors can deliver better outcomes at lower social cost, precisely because it aligns provision with social need rather than purchasing power.

Beyond these domains lies the broader economy of goods and services, where coordination problems are more varied and where markets remain important. In the market sector of an economy composed of democratically governed firms, price signals would still convey information about supply and demand, helping to coordinate production and consumption. But the surplus generated by economic activity would be controlled by those who produce it, and investment would be allocated through public financial institutions rather than by capitalists. In this way, markets can function as tools of coordination without reproducing the power relations of capitalism.

In this socialist framework, productive enterprises in the commodity-producing sector are controlled by their workers rather than by external shareholders or private capitalists. Governance rights attach to participation, rather than to a financial stake. Membership in a firm resembles membership in a political community: it confers voice, imposes obligations, and cannot be traded like a commodity.

This shift in governance requires a corresponding shift in how investment is organized. Any feasible socialism must avoid soft budget constraints and allow inefficient firms to fail while more productive ones expand.

But workers in democratic firms should not be expected to supply capital themselves or to tie their personal savings to the fortunes of a single workplace.

Leaving investment decisions at the level of individual firms would generate systemic distortions that would destroy a socialist system. Disparities in capital intensity would encourage workers to cluster in capital-rich sectors, while labor-intensive production and the public sector were left understaffed. Organizing ownership and investment as a social function rather than a firm-level one is therefore essential.

Public banks serve this role by holding productive assets in common and allocating capital on behalf of society as a whole. In this way, firms operate with real autonomy while remaining stewards rather than owners of social wealth, and the state is able to use a vast array of macroeconomic tools to influence the direction of development.

One additional mechanism is essential if such an economy is to remain both efficient and egalitarian over time: the creation of minimum wages, differentiated by occupation, to shape development itself. Rather than allowing labor markets to sort worker-managers purely through localized bargaining power or sectoral rents, benchmark wages establish a floor that reflects collective priorities about dignity, skill, and social contribution.

Firms and sectors that rely on low pay and labor discipline are pressured to innovate, reorganize, or contract, while those that raise productivity through new techniques, training, and technological improvement are rewarded through increased dividends. In this way, the economy is directed along a "high road" of development that rewards innovation rather than sweating out labor.

Of course, the point of increasing productivity in a socialist economy is not growth for its own sake but the expansion of leisure, security, and time outside production.

A socialism that merely redistributes income without changing how time is organized would fall short of its promise. But a socialism that combines redistribution with social ownership, democratically guided investment, and wage structures that reward efficiency can translate a dynamic economy into shorter hours, longer lives, and greater freedom over how those lives are lived.

None of this vision promises an end to political conflict, or even to some types of inequality. Differences in skill, effort, and social valuation would persist, and some degree of income differentiation would remain. What is eliminated is the translation of those differences into persistent inequalities of power.

I’ve been trying to deliberately undersell this vision of socialism, in part to make it seem more realistic. But the implications of such a society are enormous. In many parts of the world, it would be the first society since the Neolithic Revolution not divided into a class of producers and a class of exploiters.

That, I would argue to my socialist friends critical of market socialism, is a lofty enough task for one generation.

But, of course, this is a sketch of just one model of organization for a postcapitalist society — or, as Marx might less generously call it, one untested recipe for a future cookshop. But I strongly believe the exercise is worth pursuing. In its reluctance to engage with questions of economic design, the Left has ceded ground to those who insist there is no alternative to capitalism.

Providing such an account of postcapitalist economics does not foreclose experimentation and debate. On the contrary, it opens them. A realistic picture of what a socialist future could look like, and how we might get there, allows movements to situate immediate demands within a longer-term project.

In a sense, the technical challenge to socialism is inseparable from the political one. A Left that cannot describe how a democratic economy might operate will struggle to sustain confidence when faced with inevitable resistance. We need a third choice between (1) just administering the capitalist state or (2) just protesting its failings.

Let me return to where I started — not my sub–Mendoza Line seventh-grade batting average but to Ellen and her work. Ellen refused to naturalize capitalism. She refused to let us say, as the defenders of every ruling class before the bourgeoisie had said, that this is just how things are, how they’ve always been, and how they will always be.

Of course, making a socialist future is harder than naming it. Moving toward a socialist future requires reviving the connection of the Left to a working-class agent, organizing that class, winning power in workplaces and governments and pursuing a transitional program that can help bring about a truly democratic economy.

If we can’t win what remains of the Left to the belief that, as C. L. R. James said, “every cook can govern,” and to the belief that a system built on hierarchy and exploitation can be replaced by one built on democracy and shared prosperity, then we have little hope of winning back workers to that vision either.

Those who participated in almost any wing — even the most reformist — of the workers’ movement from the First International through the 1980s thought that they were at the vanguard of History itself.

In an age that has taught us to mistrust every grand narrative, to settle for lesser evils, to treat the existing order as the furthest horizon our imagination is permitted to reach — we can look to these workers for the confidence that we have to recover, which is the confidence in a socialism that no longer just speaks in terms of election campaigns and small protests but again in the language of centuries and continents.