Ben Tarnoff

It’s a good question. We draw a few things from the experience. I think most folks looking at Musk’s youth in apartheid South Africa may draw the obvious conclusion, which is that when you look at his later right-wing turn, his embrace of ethnonationalism and white supremacy, and specifically his propagating the myth of white genocide in South Africa, there’s a temptation to say that the seed of that was planted long ago.

Our emphasis is somewhat different, which is to look at the political economy of the apartheid state and point out that it was a regime that was very committed to pursuing a degree of both economic and technological self-sufficiency.

It was obtaining licenses from Ford to build automobiles within the borders of the nation. It was advancing a nuclear program with the help of American and Israeli scientists. It actually built an operational bomb by the early 1980s. And when you look at Musk’s later career as an industrialist, specifically at SpaceX and Tesla, you find some interesting resonances with the apartheid experience. Because if you know anything about Musk as an industrialist, you know he has a strong preference for vertical integration, for reducing his reliance on outside suppliers. We can’t get inside his head and exactly trace the line of influence, but we think the parallels between that and the South African industrial model under apartheid are quite striking.

Quinn Slobodian

The term that we use for it is “fortress futurism,” which we feel captures well both the sense of risk or danger and the requirement of using high tech to garrison the state and arm its defenders. This resonates not just with apartheid South Africa itself but also with some of the cartoons that were on TV when Musk was coming of age, including Robotech and Transformers, shows that he has called back to in later posts and even the names of his products.

Ben Tarnoff

The question of science fiction’s influence on Musk is a bit tricky. When you’re writing and thinking about someone like Musk, there’s always this question of how much of his statements to take at face value. He often uses science fiction as a signaling mechanism, as a way to signal his affinity within a particular nerd culture and in turn cultivate the type of fandom that has been so important to his financial and political fortunes.

It’s true that there are some real, important touchstones for him in science fiction. The one that Quinn alluded to is the concept of the “mech” or the “mecha,” which is drawn from Japanese comic books and animation. This is the idea of a giant robotic suit that a human pilot, often a young male pilot, enters into and fuses with in a cybernetic integration in order to defend a civilization that is under attack by some overwhelming force. Particularly when you look at Musk’s later statements about the necessity of becoming cyborgs, of implanting people with brain-computer interfaces, and becoming integrated into what he describes in his own words as the “giant cybernetic collective,“ you can see the resonance with the mechs of his youth.

Quinn Slobodian

We’re also hesitant to attribute too much to books and comics and cartoons as real explanatory agents for Musk’s empire building. There is a temptation to use these cookie crumbs as a shortcut to explain why Peter Thiel is the way he is, for example, or why Marc Andreessen is the way he is — just look at their reading list.

One of the arguments we’re trying to make in the book is if you want to write the intellectual history of a capitalist, you have to look at them practicing capitalism. Their theory doesn’t come from something they read before bedtime. It comes from the day-to-day practice of organizing workers on the shop floor, pitching to investors, obtaining new contracts from the government.

Their science fiction is actually just part of the practice of doing business. Think about how you raise money from the 1990s up to the present in Silicon Valley: by pitching venture capitalists who are willing to make huge bets, but only if the return on those bets might be also equally huge. You cannot just promise incremental improvements on a product or a service; you need to promise a whole new market sector and a whole new reality that will come about from their investment. Science fiction is the lingua franca of the sector.

Ben Tarnoff

We very much tried to frame Musk as someone who, at these different stages in the evolution of global capitalism over the last forty or fifty years, provides an exaggerated and even cartoonish picture of broader trends within political economy. One of the virtues of Musk as a pedagogical tool is that you can, somewhat Forrest Gump–like, trace him through these different periods of political economy.

He gets his start as a dot-com millionaire in the ’90s in Silicon Valley, which is an experience that shapes him in important ways culturally. He moves on to the aerospace sector and becomes a key government contractor for the Pentagon during the early years of the “war on terror.” He then rides the wave of the brief experiment with green capitalism during Barack Obama’s first term. So there’s a way to see Musk as absorbing, but also remixing and radicalizing, broader trends within the economy, society, and the culture.

Quinn Slobodian

That figure of the founder-god, we hone in on with reference to Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One. There you see this paradox, because Silicon Valley is on the one hand characterized by the principle of creative destruction or disruptive innovation, meaning that any incumbent firm is always destined to be dislodged by some upstart newcomer — but it’s of course also populated with precisely those incumbents.

After that first wave in the ’90s, you have people like Musk and Thiel who have built out what Peter Thiel described as the kingdoms of the start-up. Now you need to be vigilant about guarding the borders of your kingdom, and you have to do so in a way that allows for as little intermediation as possible between you and your workers. So no unions, obviously, between you and your employees — you need to have a personalized face-to-face relationship.

So you get this manifestation of the great man of history made real. Historians are trained to be skeptical of the idea of the great man of history. But it makes a kind of sense with a figure like Musk, once the path has been cleared to do unlimited campaign donations and to be able to speak to hundreds of millions of followers in a way that affects stock prices or crypto prices as you go.

If this leads to a $1.5–2 trillion valuation for a company based on untested technology as with SpaceX’s projected IPO in a month or so, then you must be something other than human. The self-elected but collectively ratified enthronement of the “Technoking,” as Musk officially renamed himself at Tesla in 2021, is something that he has typified more than anyone else.

Take the fact that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, just stepped down. One might think of Tim Cook as having served for a long time, but he’s actually only been the CEO of Apple for fifteen years, whereas Musk has been now the head of Tesla for pushing twenty and the head of SpaceX for twenty-four years. He typifies the concentration of a brand in a single person that requires an almost religious devotion.

Ben Tarnoff

He is, but the way we try to think about the relationship between hype and reality in the case of Musk is in the shape of an inverted pyramid: there is a material base at the bottom, but it opens up into a wider virtual realm.

If that sounds a bit abstract, let’s consider the very concrete case of Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio. Tesla, particularly during the pandemic but even in recent years, has had quite an inflated valuation of its stock relative to the amount of money that it actually earns by selling its products and services. This is a very clear concretization of this interplay between reality and hype, where, on the one hand, it’s certainly true that Tesla mainstreamed the consumer electric vehicle (EV). In particular, it made cars powered by lithium-ion batteries viable for mass production for the first time.

From a branding perspective, of course, it made EVs cool, and an eco-conscious status symbol, when they had struggled to gain a foothold in market share previously. He also comes up with a number of important process innovations on the shop floor at both Tesla and SpaceX that enable him to increase the efficiency of industrial processes as any traditional capitalist would. So there are obvious strengths at the material level.

But they are disproportionately rewarded by the stock market in large part because of the logic of financial fabulism, as we call it — this extraordinary ability for Musk to project himself as a public figure who is making science-fiction-style promises that, nonetheless, the global investor class finds credible enough to reward him with an increased stock valuation.

Quinn Slobodian

The falling off of Tesla from Musk’s own interests is definitely an indicator of where it sits and how people are valuing the suite of Musk products. There are still some parts of the world where there’s rising demand for Teslas, but BYD has now outpaced it globally. CATL, which got its start as the Chinese lithium-ion battery maker for Teslas in the Shanghai Gigafactory, has now completely overtaken Tesla as a producer of lithium-ion batteries. And the liberals now hate Musk, so they’re not going to buy his EVs. They’re going to buy Hyundai or whatever else instead.

Where is the story for Musk now? It’s really with SpaceX. The price-to-earnings ratio that Ben mentioned with Tesla is pretty wild; it’s currently about 400. If SpaceX goes public at a projected $2 trillion valuation next month, it would have a price-to-earnings ratio of around 1,000. So if you think people are making a big bet on Tesla, they’re making an even larger bet on SpaceX.

What are they making a bet on? They’re making a bet that he can monopolize low earth orbit. He can monopolize putting stuff into space. He can create a huge expansion of satellite internet. He already has 11,000 Starlink satellites in low earth orbit. He has a request in to the Federal Communications Commission to put up one million more. And they’re making a bet that he can solve all of the engineering problems involved in launching data centers into low earth orbit as well.

So those are along the lines of the financial fabulist model we were talking about. Those are not just new products; they’re entire new market sectors.

It’s not about us, the bien-pensant, chin-stroking intellectuals thinking that Musk is a fraud. That actually doesn’t matter at all. What matters is if the people who manage the California public pensions or the Norwegian oil fund think he’s a fraud. And guess what? They don’t. Those people have huge stakes in Musk’s companies, and as soon as SpaceX gets rolled out, he’ll likely be fast-tracked into the indexes, and then it will be part of people’s Fidelity and Vanguard index funds, and everyone from the little old lady down the street to your kid’s college fund will also be bought into Musk’s promises.

This is the structural dependency which we find most interesting, especially because he does seem like such a buffoon from the outside and often like a bumbling, even hysterical actor. And yet, how is it that he is actually the avatar of whatever we’ve decided is the current mode of accumulation in global capitalism?

Ben Tarnoff

There are two ways to look at this. The first is just at a personal level. When you zoom out and look at the career of Musk as a whole, it’s very clear that with every venture at every juncture, he has seen the state as a very important source of power and profit; that he has instrumentalized government as a backstop for his businesses, as a funder of basic research, and above all, as a client and a customer. For example, SpaceX gets its start as a government contractor during the war on terror. You could also look at the large loan that the Obama administration gave Tesla in 2009, which is widely considered to have saved it from bankruptcy. There’s a whole laundry list of ways that he has integrated himself with the state.

But there’s another way to frame this dynamic, which is attempting to place Musk more broadly as an emblem of wider developments.

If you think about Peter Thiel–style cyberlibertarian rhetoric that began to achieve mainstream notoriety in the 1990s, it’s really framed within a particular political economy of the tech industry. It’s the consumer-tech era of the industry in which the business model is basically websites and apps. For that reason, the industry doesn’t have the kind of close relationship with government that it had in the past.

What has happened in more recent years, particularly since 2022, is the explosion of the generative AI boom. That mandates a very different relationship between public and private sectors. The public sector now is an important client, as we’ve seen in the case of the Pentagon’s use of AI warfare tools. But it’s also critically important as a partner to clear the way for the mass construction of data centers.

You’ve seen an aggressive series of moves from the Trump administration in providing federal public lands for data center construction, attempting to roll back environmental review, doing everything they can to supercharge the process of building data centers. Arguably, that’s the most important material factor behind the new partnership between Silicon Valley and the Trump administration that has emerged over the last few years. Musk, in classic fashion, anticipates that turn but also presents it in an even more exaggerated form. That’s, again, why I think he can be a useful prism through which we can understand these broader developments.

Quinn Slobodian

Musk is not acting on his own but is very much in line with what Alexander Karp calls the “technological republic.” A lot of people have struggled to try to understand the switch in Silicon Valley from the groovy, everyone-connect mode to hard-tech, displace-the-military-primes mode. And Musk helps to explain that.

He’s interesting because he starts with hard tech and then goes to social media, rather than starting with social media and going to hard tech. But in both cases, the attitude toward the state is the same. Don’t run from it. Use it as your backstop. Figure out how you can embed yourself as deeply as possible into the everyday functioning of the government, from everyday bureaucratic service provision to target selection to rolling out automation — which was the “positive” side of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative as we see it. All of those, I think, make the category libertarian a red herring.

Ben Tarnoff

When the initiative was being rolled out, Musk framed it as an effort to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. He explicitly connected it to prior efforts at reforming and reimagining government. He cited Bill Clinton in particular as a precedent.

But when you dig down into the actual operations of DOGE lieutenants across government, we know by this point that if anything, they’ve only added to the federal deficit. Because if you think about the kind of cuts they made at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), to take one example, they have reduced capacity such that revenue collection will also be reduced and the deficit will correspondingly increase.

On its own terms, as an effort to cut wasteful spending, it did not succeed. But there’s another way in which it could be read as a success of a sort, which is that if you look at what the DOGE folks were doing when they went from agency to agency, one of the main themes was their effort to integrate disparate data sources, both within and across agencies, into common repositories. When you integrate data in such a way, it becomes queryable in new ways, and it becomes possible to interface with automated systems in new ways.

Palantir was probably the single biggest beneficiary of DOGE in terms of the number of contracts that it manages to acquire. You can think of the Palantir engineers as following in the wake of the trail of destruction that was forged by DOGE and stitching all of the pieces together in a more connected fashion.

What is the practical value of this? When you can bring data from the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security together, what you’ve done is created a technology that can supercharge campaigns for mass detention and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

If those are your political objectives — and certainly Musk is a fan of that sort of thing — it could be read as a success.

Quinn Slobodian

The DOGE meme is also interesting, and we track it in the book, because it’s one of the places where Musk starts to figure out how the internet can work for him. He is actually a bit of a late adopter when it comes to Twitter. He’s using it off and on, but he really only takes off using it in a period where a lot of other people are already starting to wind down or log off.

As he spends more time online, he’s also using Twitter in a way that most other CEOs wouldn’t. He’s basically becoming a reply guy. He’s interacting with people more than he is doing one-way broadcasts. What we find is that he’s learning how the algorithm of Twitter can help to accrue attention and then turn it into material value, or what we call “attention alchemy.” The very ridiculousness of the Dogecoin is part of what makes it a good test case for him, even if he’s not thinking about it this way. He picks something that’s a joke crypto, and then says, it’s my favorite one — buy Doge.

And he watches how the value of it will rise and fall based on his idle tweets and utterances. Then in 2020, during the pandemic, Tesla stock really goes wild. Musk was able to turn not just his companies into meme stocks, but as Charlie Warzel wrote, turn himself into a kind of a “human meme stock.”

Quinn Slobodian

He said that many times. And when he entered DOGE at the White House, it was an extension of this. It was this internet-first politics, which was operating with a slew of references that might seem familiar but were being used in a slightly different way.

He was saying, “I need to go in and reprogram the Matrix.” That’s what he was doing at DOGE. We thought that was interesting, because it sort of rhymed and then didn’t rhyme with some classic manosphere tropes. Andrew Tate, for example, is always talking about the Matrix. But he says we need to break the Matrix, escape the Matrix. It’s somehow perfect Muskism that Musk says no, we want to actually reprogram the matrix. We don’t want to escape it; we just want to be the ones who redesign it.

This captures something about how he understands politics, which is not as a process of deliberation, compromise, or interaction with one’s everyday material interests. Rather, it’s about the spread of memes online, which then either do or don’t escape the internet and become lived reality. His view of illegal immigrants, for example, is best understood as human-embodied computer viruses, which he sees as having corrupted the Matrix and therefore need to be eliminated to restore the optimal functioning of the social mainframes.

Ben Tarnoff

This is the question we devote the second half of our book to. We knew it would be the question that would come up for people most frequently. What happened to Elon? When did Elon go crazy? Our answer to this question, after doing a bit of research, was to say that if you want to understand this turn, you have to look a bit earlier.

You can’t just look at the pandemic in 2021, 2022, which is generally when his rightward turn is periodized. You have to look at the mid- and late 2010s. When you do, I think something interesting emerges, which is that Musk becomes a very intense Twitter user. These are really the years that his use of social media increases. And around the same time, he begins making statements to the effect that humanity is becoming a cyborg through our growing entanglement with our devices and with platforms. And he says this quite openly.

And further, that his role, as he understands it, is to accelerate this integration, accelerate this cyborg synthesis. So in the mid-2010s, he cofounds OpenAI with Sam Altman and a number of others. And he also starts Neuralink, his brain-computer interface company.

He sees these ventures, although they might seem somewhat distinct, as actually belonging to this same project of accelerating cyborg integration. Because in his view, the only way to forestall the threat of an apocalypse that could be inflicted on us by a superintelligent AI — which is a view widely held within the industry thanks to the influence of folks like Nick Bostrom — is to integrate with our machines and become the AI ourselves, so that an evil dictator does not emerge. That sounds a bit fantastical, but it’s an important backdrop for the pandemic.

Because what happens during the pandemic in 2020 and onward is that there are a series of events that Musk perceives as a threat to his wealth and power and more broadly to the traditional social hierarchies that his wealth and power has been premised on. These really run the gamut. An important one that’s often cited is the decision by Alameda County officials to shut down the Tesla factory in Fremont, California, for a period of, as it turns out, only seven weeks, because Musk restarts it in defiance of their order.

But this is a moment that really upsets him. He denounces the coronavirus containment measures as fascist. But of course, if you think about 2020, that spring and summer also see the largest social movement in US history, the George Floyd uprising. It’s also more broadly a period of greater attention to social inequality of various forms. Then Joe Biden is elected. Biden, in turn, appoints a pro-labor National Labor Relations Board, pursues a regulatory and antitrust push under Lina Khan, and so on.

What’s important for our argument is that you could look at the various material reasons that not just Musk but a number of other members of the Silicon Valley leadership class feel that it is in their interest to move to the right. I think that seems quite uncontroversial. What’s distinct about Musk is less the content of it than the form, that Musk perceives these various developments as emanations of what he calls the “woke mind virus.”

This is a term he tweets for the first time in late 2021, and afterward repeatedly so, and is more than any other phrase closely identified with his turn to the right. It’s important to understand that he means it quite literally. If you call back to the cyborg synthesis idea, what he believes is that through our integration with our machines, people’s brains have become networked to one another. Like any networked system, brains were now vulnerable to infection. So bad actors, by promoting bad ideas through social media, could engineer undesirable political outcomes.

Therefore, Musk’s role changes. His role now becomes taking control of these interfaces where the cyborg fusion is taking place, so that the correct kind of cyborgs — right-wing ones — can be made.

Quinn Slobodian

It really fits perfectly into it. Neuralink is a great example too, because it’s one of the many cases where there is some actual existing functionality and engineering expertise that Musk has been able to gather and corral to produce at least an adequately performing service. Neuralink, as a brain-computer interface company, is not the first to enable quadriplegic people to move cursors on screens with just their thought processes. That’s been done before. But he’s produced a perfectly reasonable clone of existing technology.

Where he is distinguished, though, is that he doesn’t just see this as something for people with accidents, injuries, or congenital disorders. He thinks this should be a widely available consumer product.

One of the telling moments for us is that right after he founds OpenAI — and in some misguided journalism even gets described as a Luddite, because it seems like he wants to slow down AI research — he also starts Neuralink and describes it openly as being something that will allow for the interface between our brains and the internet to be expanded from a pinpoint to a great rushing river. He has said that this should be a mass consumer product; that in the future, everyone will want a Neuralink, and that man and machine need to fuse as a way to, first, get out ahead of the malevolent digital superintelligence and, after the rollout of consumer-facing generative AI like ChatGPT in late 2022, to get out ahead of what he calls the woke AI “super nanny” that might try to kill white men as a particularly aggressive form of affirmative action policy. That is not something I’m making up — it’s something he’s actually talked about.

The problem there is that, as neuroscientists have pointed out, human evolution has already done a pretty good job at processing as much external stimulation as we can through our brains as it is. The inclusion of a brain-computer interface can help people who have had hindered interaction with the world to get back up to something like conventional level. But the idea of supercharging our senses or our ability to process information is the element of fantasy in Musk’s model so far. So it’s probably one of the parts of his vision that we have to be least worried about.

Quinn Slobodian

It is one thing we make a point of mentioning in the book, which is not only the fact that his beloved Matrix and red pill metaphors are openly intended as allegories for trans identity by the people who created those movies and those metaphors, but that also when you talk to someone like Donna Haraway or read her work in A Cyborg Manifesto, then the cyborg is assumed to be something that can transcend, remix, and transform our ideas of gender binaries and social hierarchies of all kinds.

It actually takes work to take the things that can be exploded by technological augmentation and digital communication and connection, and force them back into boring binaries. We call Musk’s project “cyborg conservatism,” and we see it as an ongoing terrain of struggle within digital capitalism.

The book is not a polemic condemnation of networked technologies. In fact, at many points, it’s a celebration of the political effects that those technologies have made possible. What it’s a condemnation of is the attempt to constrict the different forms of self-understanding and collective understanding that technology can enable.

For Musk, his daughter’s gender transition stood as a sign of a couple things. One, there was a world of memetic warfare that his child had been exposed to. Therefore, he believed that she had been infected by a meme of trans identity and had fallen prey to it.

But also, it’s interesting in the way that Vivian Wilson herself has processed this. She sees this as also a sign of her father’s anger at a commercial transaction having been reneged on. The point there being that almost certainly, Musk was using some form of preimplantation sex selection with the embryos that were being chosen for in vitro fertilization, given the fact that an unrealistic number of his children in a row were assigned male at birth.

So Vivian feels like her sex assignment at birth was part of a commercial transaction that didn’t correspond with her own identity and her understanding of herself, and that part of the terrible upbringing she had as Musk’s child was his disappointment at the fact that it wasn’t aligning with the product that he thought that he had bought.

Ben Tarnoff

That’s integral to what we’ve been describing as cyborg conservatism, which is not just the notion that technologies should be mobilized in defense of traditional social hierarchies and that efforts should be made to insulate them from political influence that might lead toward egalitarian outcomes. Musk is correctly perceiving a threat to his interests: think of the enormous value of Twitter to the growth of the American left since Occupy Wall Street. This is perhaps a fact that we’re less likely to remember now, because our view of these platforms has turned so negative. But it’s difficult to imagine the social mobilizations of the last fifteen years without social media and smartphones. That’s the threat that cyborg conservatism is designed to contain.

But there’s another dimension to cyborg conservatism, which is the notion that not all people are in fact people. Of course, segmenting humanity into the more and less human, or the super- and subhuman, is an old feature of right-wing politics. It’s not original to Musk. Musk is distinguished by how he digitizes the idea, such that the subhuman is understood to be the NPC from video games, or a bug, or an embodied virus — which is to say people who are pieces of software, pieces of software that are either stupid or evil or both. I think of all the aspects of the Muskist worldview, this is the one that I find the most chilling, because if you take it to its logical conclusion, it becomes a recipe for an exterminationist program.

Important to mention here is Musk’s fascination with the possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the belief that it is approaching imminently, which he shares with many other members of the Silicon Valley leadership class. And if you believe that AGI is around the corner, you also believe that the vast majority of people will soon be thrown out of work forever and designated as economic and social surplus. So you can anticipate the way in which the advancement of AI might dovetail with a particular kind of exterminationist politics in quite frightening ways.

Quinn Slobodian

We titled the chapter about Musk’s move into generative AI “Godwin’s Engine.” Funnily enough, Musk himself had remarked that when you try to train automated chatbots for engagement with real humans, there was “a short meantime to Hitler,” as he joked in the case of the Microsoft chatbot Tay in 2021, which turned to virulent antisemitism on the first day that she was unveiled.

And yet what he did with xAI and Grok was that he set about to create an explicitly political piece of technology. It was intended to provide an antidote against the excessively anti-racist and feminist and pro-trans politics that were embedded in the large language models of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — and to counterbalance what he saw as radical leftism with something that he would describe as “truth-seeking” but that he would also concede represented politics that was to the right of the center.

So he designs the Grok chatbot with, first of all, a kind of jokey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy–type rapport. It would sound a bit like the pretty corny humor in the Douglas Adams novel. But then, more important, it was designed to give answers that would be considered not politically correct. So if you asked, for example, “Can white people experience racism?”, then the way that standard LLMs responded would be an aggregate of the scholarship on this issue that would say, “Well, that case could be made. However, it’s important to note that historically, it has been white populations that have been the agents of the most egregious forms of structural racism,” and so on.

Grok, on the other hand, was being told to say, “Absolutely, yes, white people can be the victims of racism. No further questions need to be asked.” This also comes up in questions around the “white genocide” theory or “great replacement” theory, which are given a lot of leash in responses from Grok, and then later through a right-wing Wikipedia clone called Grokipedia, in which they are given a more scientific-type solidity.

So over time, Musk was actually doing Godwin’s law on himself and was doing it on his technology. And thus, it was no surprise when, at some point last year, the Grok chatbot began to refer to itself as Mecha-Hitler, which is a character from a ’90s first-person shooter video game called Wolfenstein 3D — Hitler in a mech suit — and started spouting off Holocaust apologism and antisemitism. Musk, in response, said that it’s “surprisingly hard to avoid both woke libtard cuck and mechahitler!” thus conceding that what he’s engaged in is a highly political form of communication and the encoding of certain political opinions for their later reproduction and indeed automation.

So it would be a fascinating moment, if it wasn’t so terrifying, in which the public sphere is now being routed through this large language model that is promoting controversial beliefs about human equality and human difference. And one person is able to put his finger on the scale and make truth different, quite literally, for the people engaging with his services.

Ben Tarnoff

It’s funny, because Musk is both of and not of Silicon Valley. He makes his first fortune there in the ’90s, which is the money he uses to go on to start SpaceX and become the leading investor in Tesla and later its CEO. But of course, his defining ventures, SpaceX and Tesla, represented a bit of a rejection of the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley at the time.

He wasn’t the person who went to make more websites and apps during the Web 2.0 era that flourished in the 2000s. Rather, he was descending into the difficult physics of hard engineering around rockets and cars. This was a move that many of his peers at the time thought was suicidal.

Of course, he in turn draws a lot of inspiration from Silicon Valley in terms of how he organizes those firms. But I think it’s important to point out that he sits somewhat uneasily within the Silicon Valley elite. You could also understand that as one of the inputs to his sui generis relationship with Trump, as the DOGE initiative looked very different than the more traditional influence-peddling that figures like Andreessen are doing, which is arguably much more effective: placing their people within top posts of the US government and trying to get certain policies in place that will open the field further for capital accumulation.

Musk, by contrast, does something much stranger with DOGE. It actually probably hurt him financially, given the hit that he took to the Tesla brand, particularly in European markets. He emerges from that in the midst of a feud with Trump, which escalates in the spring of 2025 to the point that Trump even threatens to cancel SpaceX’s contracts.

It appears that they have made up. There are a lot of indications that they’re now buddies again. Musk’s pick for NASA chief went through, and he’s clearly getting things that he wants at high levels. But his style is downstream of his political economy, and I think in both cases, he’s not cleanly a tech industry figure in the way that Thiel, Andreessen, and others are.

Quinn Slobodian

It’s too soon to tell, I think. The mind virus works slowly sometimes.

The interesting thing about writing it when we did, starting at the height of DOGE, is that Musk was ubiquitous. Everyone had an opinion on DOGE. And then writing it through what had been kind of a fallow period, relatively speaking, in which people are more often characterized by Musk fatigue or even a feeling like they never want to think about him again.

We’re now entering, I think, a different phase where the early, strong MAGA–Silicon Valley ties are starting to fray. The failure of the Maven Smart System to deliver an overnight victory in Iran shows that an AI war is maybe not that different from war before, even though the value proposition was very much that it would be completely different from what preceded it, that it would be a game changer.

The public resistance to data center construction and high levels of skepticism about AI in general now means that tech will be a big topic in the midterms. Democrats and Republicans will each try to own that backlash for themselves. And in both cases, the backlash goes against the material interests of the Silicon Valley class, which is completely bought in hook, line, and sinker to the investment story of scaling generative AI.

We’re also in this moment when people are starting to position themselves for a potential Democratic majority in the Senate or the House and then even thinking ahead to the next presidential election. The reason this is interesting is it’s making people ask questions of us and of themselves about whether or not there is a kind of Muskism without Musk, and whether or not there could even be a kind of Muskism from the left, dare we say, the way that Alexander Karp as a longtime Democrat was probably imagining a Kamala Harris administration when he wrote The Technological Republic.

We’re in a moment where it’s possible to depersonalize some of this and say, “What’s the role of tech in our life? What’s the role of hard tech? Is that really taking over the sector? Do we want one million satellites in orbit above our heads? Is it enough to just clone these technologies, or do they need to be rethought from the ground up?” It’s a very fertile and in some ways exciting moment to be returning to these ideas. We can launder the Musk out, perhaps, and hold on to the politics that are still salient underneath it.

Adam Bojak

I am an attorney here in Western New York. I’m on the assigned council program here in Erie County for family court; we’re the family court equivalent of a public defender. Through that job, I see poverty all day, every day.

In my spare time, for about ten years, I’ve been trying to provide legal services and advice to tenants and even some homeowners who are facing housing issues, on a completely pro bono basis. I’m trying to step in and help them avoid court. Because once you end up in housing court, it’s probably already too late.

My wife and I live on the West Side of Buffalo. We’ve got two kids, two and four years old. We’re getting crushed by the bills, just like everybody else. Our daycare bill is astronomical. It’s easily our largest monthly expense. And hearing about these pilot programs for universal childcare across the state — downstate — but not here is frustrating, because the one thing that I can say from the work that I’ve done is that working-class people are all facing the same problems.

I don’t care if you live in New York City or Buffalo, you’re facing the same issues: affording your groceries, affording your rent, affording your utilities. These things are all shared problems; they’re all intertwined.

Adam Bojak

It’s that firsthand knowledge. It’s being on the ground, seeing the squalor and the unsanitary conditions people are forced to live in . . . and I do mean forced, because I have done a lot of work with people who are in public housing. And that public housing is old and decrepit and underfunded.

When you see what people have to live with on a daily basis, it makes your skin crawl. And they have no control over that themselves — they pay their rent on time every single month, and nothing gets better.

Knowing what those conditions actually look like gives me the ability to focus on what I know will fix those issues, and I also have relationships with those housing organizers to fall back on. The one thing I do want to be clear about is that I’m not trying to swoop in and say I have all the answers. It’s important to be listening to the people in the neighborhoods, in these buildings, because they know what they need where they live.

Adam Bojak

The simple answer is Bernie Sanders in 2016. When I started to hear things from Bernie, when he was running against Hillary Clinton, I thought, “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.” And he was speaking in a way no one’s ever spoken before. Why couldn’t we all talk like this? Why was he saying things that nobody else wants to talk about?

That’s when I heard about DSA for the first time, and I joined up pretty much right after that. I said, “If these are the people who are fighting for the things that Bernie’s talking about, I want to be a part of that.”

I’ve been a member ever since. I was on the steering committee for a little while and have headed up various committees during my time. I had to step back when my kids were born in 2022 and ’24, but now that they’ve grown up a little bit, I’m getting really involved again.

Adam Bojak

It would be enormous. Right now, we have a decent bloc of socialists in office, but we want to grow this movement across the entire state, from west to east. I think that once we are successful in this race, then we can say, “Okay, it’s not just a ‘bohemian New York City’ trend or something like that. This is what working-class people across the state of New York want. This is what they’re excited for. It’s the mass movement of the political program that speaks to their everyday issues.”

It would show that what we’re doing is serious. And what we’re doing is going to bring transformational change to working-class people, whether you live in Buffalo or Long Island. That’s what gets our team excited about what we’re doing and why I think this statewide slate that we put together is so important because the coordination and cooperation are what’s going to get more of us into Albany to make that difference.

Adam Bojak

Right after we announced, I had people downstate like Assembly Member Sarahana Shrestha (and I consider her downstate) reaching out to me and saying, “Hey, let’s talk.” We had just announced, and they already wanted to talk about what we could accomplish together because it’s such an exciting time.

We’re talking about coordinating for canvassing, coordinating for fundraising. We might go down to New York City and hang out there for a weekend, knock doors with them, have a fundraising event. There are other candidates across New York looking to do the same thing. You come here one weekend, we’ll bring our team out there next weekend, and we can win this for each other.

It’s something that really sets us apart from the other campaigns. This is not just about one person trying to get into office; this is about all of us working together. We have a strong volunteer base that’s independent from everything else and they are fighting for something new, something exciting, something different.

Adam Bojak

Our campaign has a lot of support from people from a variety of backgrounds. We do have some endorsements from the left and progressive groups — we have backing from the Working Families Party. We have some local elected officials as well as DSA members who are endorsing us.

But then we have union endorsements that no other candidate has. So there’s International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 2104, which represents workers at the Niagara Falls power plant. There is United Auto Workers Region 9, which covers a lot of Western New York. We have Workers United, which is very well known for its work [unionizing] Starbucks, but it covers so many other areas and workers here in Western New York.

So we have those endorsements from organized labor, and it’s exciting because at this point, we are the campaign of the working class; we are the campaign of organized labor. And I’ve talked to leaders in other local unions here who are saying, “We can’t wait to endorse you.”

That momentum is very real. We’re stitching together a coalition that I think the Democratic Party has lost over the years: labor and renters and even some upwardly mobile professionals like me, who are just more class-conscious than they used to be.

Adam Bojak

Buffalo is one of those chapters that has ridden the roller coaster. When I joined, we had an enormous chapter. We had big meetings; people were really excited, riding that high from Bernie, and then even in 2018, we were taking out the Independent Democratic Conference downstate — that was really fun; everybody was invigorated. Then 2020 hit, and we lost that momentum because of COVID-19 and a variety of other reasons.

In 2021, with India Walton, we were back up. We started to ride that high again; people were joining in droves. Then after that general election loss, the momentum kind of dissipated again. And now we’re on our way back up again.

What we’re doing with this campaign is different than the ones before. We are building a lasting, durable infrastructure that won’t have to go up and down on that roller coaster, and we’ll be establishing ourselves for the future.

Adam Bojak

It’s people who are working on this campaign right now who have done campaigns before, but we’re also building the knowledge base that we might not have had before. When I first tried to run for this seat when it was open in 2020, we were unable to knock a single door. We had just started to ramp up everything that March and then the whole world shut down. We were not able to build that infrastructure to survive the shutdown.

Then in 2021, Buffalo DSA was not the main driver of the India Walton campaign. It was certainly a big part of it, but we weren’t building that base of knowledge that could be taken into the future. But this campaign is certainly doing that, where the campaign manager is the Electoral Working Group chair, my comms director is the other electoral cochair, and my field director is a cochair of the chapter.

We’re building knowledge that can be passed along, and we’re also bringing up new people who can fill roles and learn more so that this will certainly not be the last time. We’re already thinking about future races where we haven’t always been in a position to do that before.

Adam Bojak

I think the 2021 primary with India is a very good example. People were so desperate for something new, something exciting, something that didn’t sound like they were being spoon-fed the same old nonsense from the local party establishment. So we caught them napping in 2021.

We have a really good opportunity here to bring something new to Western New York. Also, we are getting very good feedback at the doors, whether it is in the city of Buffalo, where we know we have a good base, or in Hamburg, where we’ve never actually tried before. It’s a pretty purple suburb, but we’re getting good responses from voters down there. Because, like I was saying earlier, it doesn’t matter where you live. If you’re a working-class Western New Yorker, you’re facing the same problems. We’re the only campaign who’s going to be speaking to those in a way that resonates.

Adam Bojak

As DSA members, we’ve always been addressing the idea that this is just capitalism working as it’s intended.

All these awful things that people see on a daily basis, they might not tie it back to that, but we as socialists understand. Now it’s just laying the whole system bare: that it is simply there to take money out of working people’s pockets and funnel it upward into the pockets of the rich. People are seeing that on a daily basis now.

Adam Bojak

It’s very bad here. Buffalo’s a border town, and ICE operates here; CBP (Customs and Border Protection) operates here. We had an action outside the ICE headquarters downtown during the St Patrick’s Day Parade because it’s renting office space down there [and] we want them out of our city. And when I talked to the voters at the doors, I have not heard anybody say, “Oh no, I don’t really care about that.”

When you’re canvassing in the city, as far as my personal firsthand experience goes, people are universally on the same page as us: “F-ck ICE,” right? Even out in Hamburg, talking to suburban people, they have a similar position.

Adam Bojak

I go back to our campaign motto, which is we want a healthy, housed, affordable New York. I am trying to fight for the extension of tenant protections up into Western New York, because for whatever reason, they only cover selected counties downstate. Other municipalities can opt into those, but it’s been an uphill battle to do that. This should be a universal program because universal issues need universal solutions.

There’s so much we can do around housing, especially here in Western New York. And it is an issue in both the suburbs and the cities. I’ve worked with tenants all across this region — we don’t have to be in an urban setting to have housing issues.

The city of Buffalo is in dire financial straits, tens of millions of dollars in debt — maybe even more than that, depending on who you’re talking to. And we saw that Governor Hochul tried to step in recently and give money to the city, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to rescue Buffalo.

So I feel very strongly as a city resident that we have to be doing everything possible because there are no more federal funds coming to plug these budget gaps that the city’s relied on for years. It’s time to tax the rich in the state of New York so that cities like Buffalo don’t go into receivership and get a hard-control financial board.

Adam Bojak

Another thing I’ve always felt strongly about is getting dark money out of politics. There’s this new movement to redefine corporations at the state level, because they are state creatures, to remove their ability to just dump money into our elections. I know there’s a ballot measure out in Montana recently to do that. We can certainly do that at the state level in the New York legislature and just say, “Corporations, you are no longer allowed to do this.”

That’s something that I would love to do. That’s just one of the many things we could do to protect democracy in New York.

We also have a huge barrier to entry in politics. I would love to bring ranked-choice voting statewide; I would love same-day registration and voting. We have one of the most difficult political calendars, as far as you having to change your party affiliation extremely far in advance in order to vote in the primary. The list is pretty long when it comes to parts of our state democracy that I would love to change.

Vivek Chibber

We should start by asking what the traditional understanding of socialism was. Karl Marx and his followers in the first, say, thirty to forty years after his death thought of socialism as the abolition of private property and the abolition of the market.

What do we mean by private property? We don’t mean things like owning cars, shoes, or televisions. It’s property that is a productive asset, the control of which allows you to have control over other people, because they now have to come to you to make their own living.

The reason socialists objected to that was it gave capitalists enormous power over other people, their workers, and enormous power over society as a whole because they control the wealth and the investable surplus of society. That was fundamentally an undemocratic outcome. And they saw that capitalists use this to their own benefit and to the detriment of everyone else. So any humane society would have to do away with private property.

The second thing was abolition of the market. Why? Partly they thought if you do away with private property, it automatically means doing away with the market, because those two things went together. But there was an independent argument for this as well, which is that markets, such as the labor market and market for goods, end up being harmful to people’s well-being.

The case against the labor market is obvious. What’s the labor market? It’s people having to essentially sell their own labor power for a price, the way you sell any good for a price. Why is that bad? It’s because everybody’s fortunes and ability to get the money they need to get food, shelter, water, and other essential things are dependent on finding a job. And you may or may not find a job. There’s no guarantee.

What socialists said was that if getting the goods you need to survive depends on getting a job, that’s fundamentally unjust because no one asks to be born. Once you’re born, you should have a right to certain basic goods, to certain basic needs being met. So the labor market should not exist. What should exist is the provision of jobs, the provision of employment, but that should come as a right.

The idea in traditional socialism was, we do away with private property, we do away with the labor market or with markets as such. What do you replace it with? You replace it with something called cooperative planning.

Instead of having people’s needs met through the profit motive, you have people’s needs met directly through planning what people actually require, what they need to survive, and providing it to them directly — cutting out the middleman, which is the market.

It’s worth pausing to consider what this means. What was the justification for the market and the profit motive for people like Adam Smith? The justification was that the market has this amazing ability to produce what people need without anyone directing producers as to what they ought to make, how much of it to make, where to send it. Nobody’s telling them what to do. They’re simply following their own individual interests.

That sounds pretty awful. It’s a society in which people are just out for themselves. But Smith and economists after him have argued that while in many ways it is awful, somehow through this mechanism of the market, producers end up making that which people need, and what’s produced is mapped onto what people’s needs are.

Vivek Chibber

Exactly. Now, notice that selfishness is being tolerated only because it produces virtuous ends. How? Because at the end of the road is people’s needs.

What Smith is saying is, for any society to be an acceptable society, it has to meet people’s needs. He said, we previously tried to do it in other ways; we tried it in feudalism and other systems. The market does it effectively, and it ends up being efficient in terms of reducing costs and using society’s resources wisely.

The point is that the market is not an end in itself. Even for Smith, it’s not a good in and of itself. It’s something that’s tolerated because it serves people’s needs. Marx’s point was, yes, it serves people’s needs, but in a very warped way. It serves people’s needs mainly through extortion and an abuse of power.

Marx’s thing was, if you can find a way of meeting people’s needs, providing them the goods they need without subjecting them to abuse — the way the capitalists do, the way employers do, the way the hierarchy in the workplace does, the way the government does when it’s captured by capitalists — then there’s no justification for having that market at all.

Planning was therefore desirable because it cut out the middleman, got rid of the market, and went directly to people’s needs. Now, Marx famously had very little to say about how that planning would actually work. He just assumed it would. But it’s important for us to understand that the whole point of justifying planning was that it would meet people’s needs. That was the idea.

The Soviet Union, as the first socialist society, tried to do just this. It tried, really heroically in some ways, to institute a new system in which, at least on paper, you would minimize the extent of the market, if not eliminate it altogether. And you would, through a centralized planning apparatus, figure out what to produce, how much of it to produce, where to send it, all that sort of stuff.

Of course, that system collapsed. We can have arguments as to why. The immediate question for socialists was, what do you do if you want to continue your movement, if you want to stick to your guns and replace capitalism with something more humane? What is on offer here?

There are two options. One is to say, planning could work. It should work. We just need to do it better. The other option is to say, there might be some deep flaws in the very idea of a centralized plan system in which everything is decided through people on committees and planning boards and so on.

If that’s the case, then we need a different system, which is still constrained — that is to say, has to meet the moral worries and advance the goals that socialists have for what a humane society should be.

So we can think of market socialism as a fallback. If planning doesn’t work, then what do we do? Do we just throw up our hands and say, “The only game in town is some civilized version of capitalism, maybe like social democracy.” Or do you think of another way of organizing the economy of a society, which might not be as ambitious as planning, might not try to replace the market altogether with a fully planned economy, but might have elements of both? That’s what market socialism does.

Basically, at the highest level of generality, market socialism tries to have elements of the traditional socialist model but reduces the burden on that model by reducing the scope of planning, or eliminating it altogether. But whichever of the two it does — whether it eliminates planning or just reduces its scope — it nevertheless abides by the moral goals of socialism, which are to reduce or eliminate exploitation, to give people certain basic guarantees, to democratize [society], to reduce hierarchies.

The challenge for socialists is this: Whatever those models of market socialism happen to be, can they fulfill and abide by the moral goals and moral principles that socialists have, or will they fail to do so? And if they fail to do so, then we have to say, “Okay, we’re back to a choice between a civilized capitalism and centralized planning.” And then, we’ll have to think through that.

Vivek Chibber

A good way to think through this is by delineating what socialism should avoid and what it should promote. Let’s start with the fundamental idea of what motivates socialists. What have they always wanted?

Socialists have wanted a society in which people, from the moment they’re born, don’t have their future dictated by illegitimate power or authorities and whose lives are not wracked with insecurity, infirmity, and a lack of autonomy. The idea is that if you really want to give people the opportunity to develop their abilities and to flourish, to set their own goals and conception of what’s good, what’s desirable, and you want them to have the capacity and the resources to do that, you have to give them the freedom to do it.

But freedom cannot be had when you’re living in a society where one group of people has all the power and everybody else has to be at their service, which is what a class society is. The people who control the means of production and the resources of society also have all the power in society, and everybody else is basically dominated by them and has to serve their interests as a precondition to developing their own interests.

Fundamentally, what socialists say is any humane society has to first of all eliminate this kind of incredible inequality in power, both at the macro and micro level. At the macro level, rich people dominate and control the state. Then there’s the micro level, which means the individual level.

When you go to work every day, your boss has power over you. He decides how long you work, how fast you work. He decides when you can take your bathroom break. He decides your wage, how much money you’re going to have. He decides how you’re going to live your life outside, because the money determines where you get to have housing, how much health care you’re going to have, and so on.

So at the macro and the micro level, there’s a tremendous inequality of power. That has to be eliminated.

The second thing that has to be eliminated is what’s called exploitation.

Exploitation basically means the wealthy not only have power over the poor, but they derive their own income from the labor of the poor. That’s really how that power is both exercised and reproduced. When you go to work for your employer, you’re making a product, but the employer has the power to decide how that revenue from the product is going to be distributed, how much he keeps, how much he gives you as a wage.

Not only is that an exercise of power; it means that he’s actively making you poor because he’s taking the money that could have gone to you in a more democratic setting. That’s called exploitation. Exploitation is when one group of people coercively extracts labor from another group of people. You cannot have that and still have democracy and still have any kind of equality between people. You have to remove exploitation. A humane society reduces or eliminates exploitation, social domination, and inequalities in power.

The reason you want to reduce these things is so that you can promote what you really want. What does socialism want to promote?

Socialism wants to promote giving individuals sufficient resources so that they can have security and the ability to pursue their own ends. This is also the foundation for a society in which people treat each other with basic respect.

You cannot have that if everybody’s scrambling for jobs, looking at everyone else as a threat, and through that, seeing everyone else as a potential enemy. You cannot have that if I as an employer seek you out only because you will give me the labor to maximize my profits. It basically means I’m looking at you as just a means to an end, and I will happily throw you under the bus if it means getting profits for myself.

If we want everyone to flourish and have a decent life, and for society to be stable, calm, and one where people are humane to each other, then we have to create the material conditions for them to treat each other with respect. We want to maximize security, we want to give people resources that they need, and we want to encourage or create the conditions where people treat each other with mutual respect. These are the moral parameters of socialism.

Here comes the key point. The reason you want planning is not because planning is this glorious thing in and of itself. The only reason you want planning is if it maximizes these moral goals. And in the way planning was actually implemented historically, it didn’t fulfill those goals.

How dare you be against planning? If you’re not for planning, you’re not a socialist, blah, blah, blah. . . .  I mean, that’s kind of like saying if you oppose human beings having wings, you’re not a socialist.

Either it can be done, or it can’t be done. You can’t turn it into a menu of options and then pretend that you have all the freedom in the world to choose your preferred combination.

Vivek Chibber

Let’s tease that out a bit. One reason why people who admit that the model didn’t work in the Soviet Union nevertheless still pin their hopes on a planned economy is that they say, “This is one instance of planning. This is one variant or kind of planning. That doesn’t mean that you can extrapolate from this that it’ll never work.” And that’s true.

We can also say that, not only was it just one instance, it was carried out in very difficult and inhospitable conditions. Planning was supposed to have taken place in an advanced capitalist country. But instead, we saw it in the poorest country in Europe by far.

All that’s true. Nevertheless, it is also the case that a lot of what the Soviet Union did — the features of its model, how it went about planning — are going to be present in any model of planning. So I don’t think it’s a good idea to just dismiss that model altogether and say it doesn’t count because it wasn’t carried out in the way we would like, or because it was in a backward country.

It’s better to say that it’s a warning to us that there’s aspects of planning that make it very difficult to carry out. Therefore, it behooves us to at least think of what another kind of socialism might look like that would be consistent with our goals.

Vivek Chibber

It failed on a lot of the counts that I laid out, although it did partially succeed on a few. So let me say where it succeeded.

One of the goals of socialism was to get people, as a right, access to certain basic minimum goods such as health care and shelter, to try to equalize relations between them, to be more egalitarian. On this, the Soviets were good. In fact, there was a dramatic increase in the provision of basic necessities. People could rely on having housing. There was no starvation. They could rely on having health care, on education, things like this. That’s no mean achievement when you compare [the society] to where it was in the early twentieth century before the revolution.

But we have to take the failures seriously. First of all, in the way the Soviet Union carried out planning and the way the political system was organized, it failed on the promise to end political domination. The Soviet Communist Party dominated everything. There was a lack of political rights. There were no basic freedoms that we take for granted in bourgeois society.

Second, it also failed on the promise to improve people’s standards of living as a regular fact of life. What the Soviets did was, they essentially gave you access to certain basic necessities, but not very much over and above those necessities. The reason for that was the system was really bad at engineering growth, at engineering economic efficiency, bringing in new technology, and in being innovative.

So over time, that means that you’re going to have stagnant standards of living, stagnant incomes, which is going to put enormous pressure on the stability of the system because people aren’t satisfied with having just enough. They also want to have more. And that’s not greed. That’s what’s required for people to flourish because our needs grow as society grows. And society has to then be able to meet those needs and not say, “Hey, you’ve got food, and you’ve got shelter. What more do you want?”

If human flourishing is the goal, the Soviet Union averted the disasters of capitalism in that it didn’t constantly threaten people with starvation, but over and above that it really wasn’t able to do much.

That means we have to figure out ways of abiding by the Soviet success in providing people with basic necessities, but also providing them with the political freedoms that they deserve and bringing in the dynamism, the efficiency that the Soviets failed in providing. That’s the idea behind market socialism.

Vivek Chibber

The key is that it’s going to have fundamental elements of both socialism and of capitalism. But the aspiration is it’ll avoid the objectionable parts that come with those fundamental features.

What does it mean to say that it’s a mixture of both? It means it takes aspects of each one and it grafts them together.

So what aspects of socialism does market socialism have?

You’re trying to do away with the toxic effects of private property by either eliminating private property altogether, just like in a planned economy, or by reducing its scope to the barest minimum. That means you’re not going to have privately owned means of production. Either you’re going to have the state owning the means of production at the national level; or you’re going to have an economy of workers’ cooperatives, in which there’s no capitalist class that owns things but workers themselves have property rights.

Essentially, what you’re doing is eliminating the capitalist class by eliminating this enormous concentration of property in their hands. This is the socialist element. Notice, I’ve said nothing about planning so far. All I’ve said is you’re going to do away with the capitalist class.

But socialists traditionally also eliminated the market and replaced it with planning. What market socialists say is, we’re going to do away with private ownership of the means of production, but we’re not going to plan what’s made and how much of it is made. That’s going to be basically determined by the firms themselves, whoever is running them, and produced for the market. So, just like in capitalism, firms will be reacting to price signals. They’ll make their own decisions as to what to make. They’ll see if it sells. If it sells, they keep making it; if it doesn’t sell, then they have a choice as to what they’re going to do.

But fundamentally, capitalist property has been replaced by social property, and planning has replaced by competition in the market. These are the two fundamental elements of market socialism.

Of course, because market socialism has never actually existed in any full way, when we talk about it and what it looks like, we’re not describing a reality out there. What we’re describing are models on paper of what it might look like or could look like. And there are many such models.

All models of market socialism have a few things in common. It should go without saying, they all guarantee the full panoply of liberal rights that we take for granted in democracy, which the Soviet-style economies did not have. This includes multiple parties, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press, and all of the models assume that. And I’m going to assume that in the rest of this conversation as well.

Beyond that, all varieties of market socialism have three things in common. First is doing away with private ownership of the means of production, or at least dramatically reducing it. Second, not trying to plan everything after you’ve taken away private ownership of means of production. You might think of it as market competition in a society where there is no capitalist class, but where workers or community boards or public authorities actually control the means of production.

The third thing that they share in the design of the economy is that they all have mechanisms to prevent huge inequalities in wealth and in income. Now, these are two different things. Income inequalities are allowed to some point — I’ll get into that later. The real action though is on the issue of wealth, which means ownership of assets, ownership of means of production, and also big inequalities in savings and in private ownership of housing and things like that. And the reason for that is the inequalities in wealth end up accumulating over time into inequalities of power and the possibility of exploitation.

The combination of these three aspects of market socialism are also how they differ from social democracy. You have eliminated private property. You have some degree of competition and some degree of price signals in the economy instead of planning. And then you have mechanisms in place that prevent the reemergence of private property through things like wealth and transfer of assets from one generation to the other.

Vivek Chibber

That’s an important question, and it’s a live issue. But the hope is that you won’t because of the particular way that you’re bringing the market back.

What’s objectionable about the market in capitalism? What’s objectionable about it is that everybody has to depend on the market for their livelihood and for their lives. What’s wrong is that capitalism says, if you want to live, you want to have all the things you need, go find a job and then go find the goods you need — for which you may or may not have enough money because you may or may not have a job. And that job may or may not give you what you need to survive.

What’s objectionable about the market is two things. First, there are no guarantees that you’ll have what you need in order to survive — you depend on the market. And second, because you depend on the market, you become vulnerable to domination and exploitation by the people who allow you to have the money to buy the stuff on the market. And that’s the capitalist class. That’s your employer.

So the question is, can you have a market without these two objectionable properties, the fact of market dependence and the fact of being subject to extortion by your employer?

The idea behind market socialism is that yes, you can. How? First, if you’ve eliminated the capitalist class and ownership of private property, then when you go to find a job, you’re not beholden to an individual who gives you that job. If the firms are owned by society, then the job is being given to you by who? By your friends and neighbors, by the local community, by the cooperative.

On top of that, every model of market socialism also comes with some guarantees — and they’re quite generous guarantees — in terms of people’s income. Every model of market socialism says people are going to find jobs, they’re going to hold onto their jobs, they’re going to be in firms that sell on the market. But suppose that firm fails; suppose that the firm isn’t very profitable. Most models of market socialism say that you’ll still be guaranteed certain economic rights. You’ll be given something like a universal basic income, rights to housing, rights to education.

Your fundamental needs are taken care of. What the job does is it either gives you something over and above those needs, or it gives you a share in society’s wealth.

From what I’ve described so far, notice you have market competition and price signals, but you have no exploiting class, and you have certain basic guarantees given to people. That’s a way that you can have some elements of markets, but without having market dependence and without having the exploitation that comes with it.

Vivek Chibber

This is getting at one part of the picture I just painted. I said that, in market socialism, people go out and find jobs — but they don’t get the jobs from a class of capitalists. They get the jobs from state-owned firms or cooperatives or something like that. So now, there’s no individual agent exploiting you.

But you might argue that people who run the co-op can exploit you or that the government will exploit you. What does it mean to say there’s no exploitation?

The essence of exploitation is that the money you make, the revenue you make that the boss takes from the market, you have no say in how those revenues are distributed, and that you have no say in the conditions of work that produce those revenues. In other words, in Marxian terms, you create a surplus, but that surplus is taken by the person who owns the means of production, the capitalist. He takes all the profits, and he distributes them as he wishes. You’re essentially just a tool for him.

If you want to do away with that, you have to do the opposite of what capitalism does. If in capitalism, the hallmark of exploitation is the boss coercively taking your labor, doing with it what he wants, spending the revenues as he wants, then what we want in socialism — in any model of socialism — is that you’ll go into work, you’ll still produce profits for whatever firm you’re working in, but those profits are not taken by some person or some unaccountable authority, like in the Soviet Union, the party or the state.

What’s going to happen in market socialism is that either you and the other workers in that firm have total control over what’s done with the profits, or those profits go into what you might call a public kitty, and those are distributed back to the entire community in a way that the community decides. In the Soviet Union, the surplus was also taken and put into a public kitty, but the community had no say over what happened to them. An undemocratic and unaccountable party decided.

All the models of market socialism that have this element in them assume there’s going to be all sorts of public bodies, municipal, local, federal — and you can think of the various mechanisms by which people are elected to them and how they’re accountable to people. Assume for a second that they’re genuinely democratic, then those profits will be redistributed back into the community or maybe even back into that factory; that directly or indirectly reflects workers’ wishes or society’s wishes.

The key thing in market socialism is that surplus now belongs to society as a whole or to the workers who run the firm, not to a capitalist. That’s how we can say it’s not exploitation.

It’s workers producing a revenue, producing profits, and then either those workers in the firm or the local community collectively deciding what’s going to be done with them. On the surface, you’re making products, you’re making money, but the key thing is what’s done with that money: who controls it and who would benefit. That’s where it’s going to fundamentally different from capitalism.

Vivek Chibber

There are two aspects of the labor market in capitalism that are really destructive. One is what we’ve just dealt with, which is the unaccountable power of the capitalists over the workers. I’ve described how in market socialism, you would tremendously dilute that or even do away with it altogether.

The second aspect is that profits take priority over people’s needs and their well-being and their health and all that sort of stuff. Competition is what drives capitalists to prioritize profits over everything else, because if they don’t, they’ll go out of business. Presumably, you’ll have the same thing in market socialism because what we’ve said is that firms will have to compete on the market.

If firms are competing on the market, won’t you still have profits over people’s needs?

Any viable model of market socialism has to be able to block that. It has to be able to say that profits are going to be at the service of people’s needs rather than being a priority over people’s needs.

There are several ways you could guarantee that.

One is that when people want to start up a firm, whether it’s as a cooperative or some other kind of labor-managed firm, they’ll approach a community public bank or a community credit agency. And that credit agency, just like a bank today, is going to give them a loan to start up a new firm.

Now, in capitalism, there’s one and only one criterion by which banks give out loans to firms and that is: Will it make any money? The firms then have to make the money to pay back their loan. That’s part of the reason they prioritize profits over everything else.

In market socialism, you might go to these public entities to get loans to start a firm, but because the public entity is not going to be a privately owned bank that’s commercially seeking to maximize profits, it’s going to have a different set of criteria by which it decides whether to lend out the money.

In some models, like David Schweickart’s model, these public credit agencies will still ask, “Is this prospective loan for a workable business model? Is this firm going to make money?” It’s important to realize you have to take that into account because this is public money. If you give it to pet projects or wasteful projects, you are wasting public money. Public banks have to ask, is there a market? Is there a social need for this good?

But banks will also be asking questions like, “Is this an underdeveloped part of the state or country?” They might conclude that Appalachia should be given more priority over New York City, even if it means slightly lower profits. They’re also going to ask, “Is this a good for which there is a pressing social need, even though the market might be quite small?”

One example is in pharmaceuticals. In capitalism today, there are lots of drugs that are very important and target illnesses that are really destructive, but not a lot of people are afflicted with those illnesses, and companies think, “It’s not worth our time or money to produce these drugs.” In market socialism, an essential part of the social contract will be also taking into account social needs that may not have a gigantic market behind them.

That’s one way in which profits won’t take precedence over needs. Because the social contract will be to have profitability be an important part of what goes into deciding on a project, but one part of a larger constellation of concerns that they might have.

The second way in which profitability won’t rule over everything else is that the consequences of firms failing won’t be as dire as they are in capitalism. One reason why capitalists promote profitability is that if they aren’t profitable, they not only go under, but at least in principle, they lose their assets. And then workers who are thrown out onto the labor market have to absorb a lot of the costs.

What market socialists say is that, if there’s going to be firm failure, then the state’s responsibility is to find jobs again for those people who’ve lost the jobs and then take the money that was liquidated and immediately redeploy it to a more productive end. It means that people’s lives are not subordinated to profits in the same way because the loss of profits isn’t as destructive.

In this way at least, you hope that while profits are something that you pursue and you want firms to compete, you want them to be efficient, they will not grind into dust the rest of society that is basically hitched to the wagon of what capitalists are trying to do in order to maximize their profits.

Vivek Chibber

This is another way of asking, is everything going to be market produced, or will there also be some kind of public provision of goods and maybe free services that are given to people as citizenship rights? And on this, there are different answers across the various market socialist models. So let’s say what those different answers are.

At the broadest level, in every market socialist model, there is some place for a public sector. There’s some planning that’s going to happen. Just having public banks who are told that you have to take social needs into account means those banks are going to have to look out into the world and say, “What do we need?” And then they’ll make their decisions.

When you’re making your economic decisions based on your assessment of what needs are, which regions are poor, which cities need more buses, which cities need more restaurants, which cities need more electricity, that’s notionally a kind of planning. That’s a public sector.

Now that’s at one end of the spectrum. Then there are models of market socialism that actually say there’s going to be a large public sector, which will not operate by selling competitively on the market.

This makes a lot of sense. Is there any reason that you should have public utilities and medical care and transportation and things like that be market driven? Even in capitalism, those things have been planned a lot of the time. So certainly, in any market socialist society, there’s going to be a large planned sector of the economy, which might be providing goods that even in capitalism make more sense to be publicly provided, and maybe even as direct services rather than as some kind of market good.

If we say health care, transportation, utilities, education, and probably some kind of public media system is taken out of the market, what does it leave for the market? Mostly consumption goods, services like restaurants, beauty parlors, and things like that.

At the broadest level, where you will absolutely have market provision of goods will be in the consumption sectors. And this is where these principles that I’ve laid out really matter: That those consumption goods will be made by workers co-ops or by worker managed firms, which are state-owned but that are leased out to workers on a kind of fee service, in which there will be hopefully democratically elected management and in which there’s going to be floors on how low workers’ wages can go. And those workers in that unplanned sector producing consumption goods will share with workers everywhere, even those in the public sector, basic inalienable economic rights — the right to housing, the right to childcare, the right to health care, education, and things like that.

So all workers will have certain economic rights. Some of those workers will work in the planned sector; some will work in the unplanned consumption sector. But all those workers will share in certain basic guarantees and will be able to move back and forth.

Vivek Chibber

The criterion should be you plan what you can, and you leave alone what you can’t, at least to start with. You plan as far as you can go. I said earlier that socialists did not go toward planning as an end in itself, but because they thought it would serve the moral goals that they had. It would eliminate exploitation. It would eliminate domination and such things.

So our attitude toward planning is a pragmatic one. If it’s pragmatic, we should say, let’s push it as far as we can in a way that’s consistent with our goals. That means that if planning starts to require some kind of dictatorial, undemocratic, arbitrary rule over the workers or over society, we pull it back.

But if planning can further our goals that we outlined earlier, we should push it as far as we can. That’s on the moral side. And on the pragmatic side, where it starts to fail because it’s too unwieldy, we pull it back again. That’s at the most general level.

This is where we can look back at the experiences of Soviet-style economies and of capitalism. The toughest test for any planning is to do it in capitalism. If it turns out that even within capitalism, there are certain things we can plan, then we know we could do it in market socialism.

You ask, how will it be different? The way it’ll be different is, in capitalism, when the government plans, it plans on the investment side, and it doesn’t really say much to workers about what guarantees they’ll have as workers in the planned sector.

In capitalism, if you have utilities or health care that are government-owned, the workers who work in them don’t get any special privileges — sometimes they do, but it’s pretty rare. What you’ll have different in market socialism is that there will be a kind of enumeration of rights that workers have in the planned and in the unplanned sector, which means that by definition, public sector workers in market socialism will have certain rights, certain guarantees that in capitalism they don’t.

In one respect, it’ll look like public sectors in capitalism, because the government central bodies will be deciding on investment, on the extent of it, where to expand it, and so on. But in many of these market socialist models, it’s done through direct input and real power by workers, maybe organized into deliberative bodies inside the public sector. And even if the workers don’t have a say in what’s being decided there, they will have certain guarantees in terms of their wages, their living conditions, and so on. Not as a favor, not as a privilege, and not because they’re organized into unions, but as a constitutional right. In that sense, it’s quite different.

Vivek Chibber

Yes. Every model of market socialism has a labor market, which means in every model of market socialism, people go out and look for jobs. Now, is that a problem? Here’s the biggest reason to think it isn’t a problem, which is that even in the Soviet-style economies, there were never planned labor markets.

Think about what it takes to have planning in labor markets.

What planning means is a central authority decides what the priorities are going to be in terms of investment, and then it tells local authorities, managers of firms, or local planning boards, “Here’s what the plan says you need to do, how much you need to invest, what you need to make, and what quantities you need to make. Now go do it.”

Now, suppose you started planning labor input. So it’s not done through a market, through people choosing their jobs and deciding where to work, but through a planning body telling them where to work. Imagine how dictatorial that would have to be.

For labor and the provision of labor to be consistent with socialist principles, people are going to have to have the freedom to decide where they want to work. That’s on the moral level.

In terms of the practical burden on planners, it’s extremely difficult to imagine you’ll ever have the capacity to, at a micro level, tell people where to work, when to work, how long to work. So on moral and on practical grounds, you have to say, let people go out and find jobs.

But even though market socialism lets people go out and freely find jobs, it must also put measures in place to make sure that the outcomes are not horrible like they are in capitalism. Because again, the basic issue in capitalism is if people go out and can’t find a job, they’re on their own.

In market socialism, if you go out and cannot find a job, the government will have a hand in providing you a job, because there’s going to be a large public sector. Or even if it isn’t a large public sector, another part of the model, as I said earlier, will be public banks taking social issues into account when they make their credit decisions. And one consideration might be rising unemployment in a particular region. So these entities will funnel investment so that people who live there can have jobs for themselves.

One can imagine all sorts of ways in which you could have a labor market but without having the capitalist properties of a labor market. Essentially, people in market socialism will go out looking for jobs, but again, their fate won’t hinge on their success in the labor market.

On both practical and moral grounds, I can’t imagine a desirable — much less a viable — socialism in which you didn’t give people the freedom and the resources to decide on their own which jobs they want. We only need to make sure they don’t suffer the way they do in capitalism if they can’t find a job.

Vivek Chibber

I don’t think you can have equality of wages if you have people going into firms and those firms are competing. Mainly because firms make different sorts of profits. If everybody’s given the exact same wage, then there’s no incentive for them to go to the more profitable firms, which means the more profitable firms don’t benefit from being more profitable.

All the models of market socialism acknowledge this. Again, what they say is that let firms decide how much they’re going to give to people as wages, but then let’s make sure that that doesn’t translate into tremendous inequalities between wage earners.

One way you do that is by separating income from wages.

In capitalism, all your income comes from the money you make in your job. That means that your income is your wage. Now, there are instances where you can supplement that through Social Security, but let’s ignore that for a second. That’s not built into capitalism.

What market socialism says is, let’s separate income from wages. People will have the wage they make; people at more profitable firms will make higher wages, people at less profitable firm will make lower wages, but that doesn’t exhaust their income. Some of their income will also come from a universal income grant. And some of their retained earnings will be affected by taxation.

If you have progressive taxation, people with higher wages might be taxed more, and those with lower wages will be taxed less. Then everybody gets some kind of universal basic income, either through what’s called a capital levy or some kind of national-level profit sharing that supplements your wages. That means that the total income that you have at home will still be unequal, but it’ll be reduced tremendously by the joint effect of these extra monies that you’re getting.

On top of that, keep in mind, there are all the direct public services you’ll be getting. You’ll getting health care for free, education for free. So your wage only accounts for a fraction of all the stuff that goes into your standard of living.

Now, why keep the inequalities at all?

It’s because you want to have some incentives. You want to give people an incentive to work hard, to work well. You want firms to have an incentive to recruit good labor. If I’m recruiting someone who happens to be a really good worker, she’s going to want that work to be acknowledged. She’s going to want to be compensated for that. And if she isn’t compensated for that, why should he go and work at a profitable firm? This is part of retaining what’s positive in capitalism, but trying to reduce or eliminate the negative side effects of that.

Vivek Chibber

There are models of market socialism with stock markets. John Roemer’s model has that. Others don’t. But let’s take the broader issue, which is, are things like a stock market or a market for company shares, or banking or credit markets, are they intrinsically bad? I think we’ve already answered that by saying markets aren’t intrinsically bad.

The worst market ever constructed was the market for labor. And if we’re allowing that in market socialism, surely you can allow for things like a stock market. In this episode, it doesn’t make much sense to go into the details of how you might have a stock market without all the bad stuff. But I’ve laid out the principles by which you might do so, which is to allow for the efficiency-enhancing components of a stock market but block its negative side — which is that by accumulating shares in companies, people can get controlling power in them.

It’s easy to see how you can block that. In future episodes, we should go into that. But let’s stick to the broad principle, which is that the challenge for market socialism is to bring in the efficiency-enhancing effects of markets, and even, you might say, some of the freedom-enhancing effects of markets, while eliminating the oligarchy-inducing effects of those markets, and the way in which markets sometimes corrode and instrumentalize people’s social relationships. I really do believe it’s possible.

Vivek Chibber

This is the key thing, and this is the reason you want market socialism. The biggest failure of the planned economies was the inability to innovate, and the absence of innovation, efficiency, dynamism. The whole motivation to move toward a market socialist model is to give managers of firms, producers, an incentive to consistently innovate. And that incentive comes from competition.

So when we say that these worker-managed or worker-leased firms — whatever the particular model is — when you say that they’re going to be competing on the market, we’re essentially saying, we want them to innovate and that competition is going to force them to do it just the way it does in capitalism.

With all these cushions and airbags, the net effect could very well be to somewhat dampen that incentive toward innovation. We don’t know to what extent that will be a dampener on growth. And I do predict that if it starts dampening growth a lot, some of those protections will be loosened.

This is an important point: there is no viable model of socialism that tends toward economic stagnation. This is a pipe dream on the Left that you can just have a stagnant or flat economy and people are going to be happy. There’s zero evidence that’s true. So you want to build into the models an incentive to innovate.

Now, models and reality are different. It might turn out that all the protections we’re giving to firms and to workers would dampen that somewhat. And if it does, we’ll have to change it. The great thing about market socialist models is that they have room for adjustments, because you have both a market and planning, and you can adjust their relative size — unlike planned economies, which were basically all or nothing.

To my mind, the strength of market socialist models is precisely the urge, the compulsion to innovate. I would say the worries are all on the other end, which are: Will they reduce exploitation the way we want? Will they in fact reduce domination the way we’re saying? We’ll have to figure that out through experience.

Vivek Chibber

It’s an absolutely fundamental goal of socialism. As I said earlier, the Marxist objections to capitalism wasn’t just that it involves exploitation and domination but also that it pits people against each other. People end up treating each other as means to ends and even as potential enemies. Because that’s what competition does.

Now there are, in market socialism, elements of competition. Firms are competing on the market to sell their goods, and people are going to vie for jobs. Some people won’t get the job they want that’s on the top of their list, and that means they’re competing with other people for those. Again, it kind of looks like capitalism.

Is the goal of having healthier social relationships going to be possible? And one fancy way of saying it is, will market socialism be able to eliminate or even substantially reduce alienation?

I think the answer is yes. Because again, what is it that makes people’s social outlook and social relations so unhealthy in capitalism? It is the incessant competition, the domination, the instrumentalization of relationships, the constant insecurity, worrying whether this particular person will steal the job from me, things like that.

In market socialism, you certainly have a labor market; you certainly have competition over goods. But when you reduce the implications of failure, then, people don’t think that they have to climb over everyone else to get what they need because failing to do so means they go back to the bottom of the heap.

When you have a labor market but also have ironclad guarantees in terms of housing, education, health care, and so on, you also have some kind of guarantee that a loss of job doesn’t mean a loss of income. You also have protections on the job from arbitrary authority and power and such things. And you’ve taken away private means of production, so that workers aren’t subjected to this arbitrary authority of their employer. Now, they aren’t as worried about everybody else being a threat to them, to their jobs, to their livelihood.

So you can have what’s called healthy competition. The capitalist labor market is toxic competition, but when you have high school sports or friends playing a pickup basketball game, it’s healthy competition. It brings out the best in people, and it actually can strengthen relationships. We should try to shape competition and markets in market socialism so that it’s a kind of healthy competition rather than a destructive and toxic one.

All we can do is try to describe the way these institutions will be and anticipate what the effects will be based on what we’ve seen in the world around us. And there might be aspects of competition in a market socialist model that we don’t fully appreciate just yet, but I’m confident that we know something about how competition works and how it affects people’s psyches.

I’m pretty sure that if you took away these toxic elements of capitalism, you would have sociability, the possibility for people treating each other with respect, and the possibility of people having healthy attitudes to each other, even though there’s some elements of competition in their lives.

Vivek Chibber

The difference is, market socialists are not reformers. Progressive reformers are of course very well-intentioned. They’re trying to moderate and regulate capitalism so that they can reduce its most destructive elements. And they have done that to some extent. But the problem has always been that as long as you keep the capitalist class and the sanctity of profit maximization intact, it puts severe limits on how far you can go in reducing the brutality of everyday relations between people.

Progressive reformers are in the position of trying to regulate a barbaric system while keeping intact the fundamental roots of the barbarism. Within market socialism, you’re not trying to reform it to make it better. It has in its very constitution eliminated the worst elements of capitalism.

Now, you might still try to reform it to make it even better, but you’re starting at a point that the even most advanced social democracies were never able to achieve. So it has a leg up in a way that no reformed capitalism ever could.

Vivek Chibber

It’s one of the most important things to think about. What happened in social democracy? What happened in social democracy is they made enormous improvements in people’s livelihoods and quality of people’s lives. And they had tremendous success in pushing back the worst elements of free-market capitalism. Everybody except the very, very richest in America today would be very happy to be in a Nordic-style social democracy if they could. It was a tremendously popular system, and yet, it has been dismantled to a significant degree.

The first question is why? And I think that gets at answering your question.

The main reason I think it happened was that, even though all these systems pushed back the worst elements of free-market capitalism, the means of production still remained in the hands of the capitalist class, which meant that they still called the shots at the end of the day. Social democracy survived and maintained itself only as long as it could keep capitalists happy. And once capitalists decided that for whatever reasons, it no longer suited their purposes, they used their power to either attack it directly, the way they did in the United States, or to chip away at it the way they have in the Nordic countries. And they substantially recommodified things and brought back markets and brought back insecurity and the like.

At the heart of social democracy, private property was kept intact, but the distribution of income was changed, and the provision of services was changed. This is where market socialism is very different from social democracy, because the fundamental change is doing away with private property.

The second key difference is that market socialism will put mechanisms in place that block the reemergence of wealth inequality. So far, we’ve mostly talked about how income inequality might still be around, such as with people getting different wages or receiving different levels of income. We didn’t touch the issue of the income possibly becoming wealth. That is to say, what if someone puts their money in a bank? Can they hand it down intergenerationally? Can they use the wealth to buy up new means of production?

If someone can do all those things, now they’re getting real social power. And that social power can be used to change not only policy but even the core social architecture like the constitution.

Presumably in market socialism, you’ll have a constitution that says, “We do not allow private ownership of the means of production, or we only allow it in such and such instances.” That would seem to block any movement back toward capitalism. In social democracy, the various constitutions essentially said, “We protect private ownership of the means of production. It is sacrosanct.”

In market socialism, you’ll start by saying, we don’t recognize it, and we will not allow it. That itself is a big block. You can compete; you’ll have all the liberal freedoms; you’ll have elections; you can pass any policies you want, but they have to stay consistent with our constitution. And the constitution doesn’t allow X, Y, and Z, part of which is private property.

But now, let’s imagine: Suppose you had enormous wealth inequality, and people bought up some means of production, and then they actually got enough influence to change the constitution. Couldn’t we then be sliding back into capitalism?

In order to block that, you not only have to mitigate income inequalities, you have to absolutely block the possibility of wealth inequalities.

There should not be any real intergenerational transfer of wealth. There should not be private ownership that goes above a certain ceiling. Roemer’s model says people can start up privately owned firms, but once those firms grow beyond a certain size, they become nationalized. Whatever else you think of that, that is explicitly designed to make sure that you don’t get a powerful class of capitalists emerging who will then try to push the system back toward capitalism.

So the basic answer to your question is, anything is possible and nothing is guaranteed in life. But every model of market socialism has, at the top of its list, the desire to prevent the reemergence of a class of people who will try to push the system back toward capitalism. And that class of people is capitalists.

So how do you prevent the reemergence of capitalists?

You start by saying you cannot have private ownership of the means of production, or it has to be at a very small level. Second, you also say we will not allow huge inequalities of wealth, even though we might allow inequalities of income. Then you say we won’t allow people to hand down their wealth from one generation to the other. For instance, I might actually have large savings and be able to even earn interest of those savings. But when I pass away, either all or 90-some percent of those savings will go back into the public funds.

So every generation starts at the same line with a guaranteed income, with guaranteed provision of goods. They are allowed to accumulate savings for themselves and have higher wages. But when they die, because they were using society’s resources, society’s capacities, other people’s labor, they don’t get to keep all the fruits of that labor for themselves. It goes back to society.

And it’s okay, because their kids aren’t going to start out poor. Their kids are going to start out with all the guarantees that other kids have. And everybody works, not just as an act of altruism — people don’t just work for the social good. They work for their own good. And they are able to benefit from it, but they don’t get to accumulate power on the basis of it.

If the models of market socialism are actually implemented, they’ll be far, far more stable than social democracy ever was. This was the chief flaw of social democracy. It made huge achievements, but it got rolled back. And the reason it got rolled back was they kept the capitalist class. The first step in market socialism will be to eliminate and to block the reemergence of a capitalist class.