Socialists have traditionally had both “minimum” and “maximum” programs. The minimum program is a series of reforms that can be implemented in the here and now. The maximum program is the end goal of socialism itself.
One way of thinking about this is that the minimum program involves bits and pieces of “socialism within capitalism,” socialist policies like Medicare for All or a massive expansion of public housing that could be implemented even within the framework of a fundamentally capitalist economy. The maximum program would be “socialism after capitalism,” a new economic system based on collective ownership and workplace democracy.
Clarity could have been added to the “Workers Deserve More” document by making this distinction. Once or twice, the document seems to gesture in the direction of a socialism beyond capitalism, most obviously in a line about “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.” Surely, though, socialists don’t just want to socialize the largest companies. Only about half the American workforce works for large firms (defined as those with five hundred or more employees), never mind the largest corporations that might have tens or hundreds of thousands of workers. A world where the largest corporations and whatever industries are deemed the most “essential” were under some form of social ownership would be a great improvement on the one we live in, but it would hardly be a postcapitalist society.
The triumph of capitalism has often seemed so total that even those of us who most badly want to end capitalism often have a hard time vividly imagining what could replace it.
Interestingly, while “Workers Deserve More” includes a couple references to “capitalism” as a system that deserves to be ended, it never names, much less describes, what could come next. The word “socialist” appears many times, but the word “socialism” never does.
The criticism shouldn’t be exaggerated. The platform is full of bold proposals that would make our society far more decent, humane, and democratic and bring us closer to socialism. And there are certainly several indications that its authors understand the capitalist system itself as the core obstacle that needs to be overcome as we fight for a better world. But the failure to say much about what could come next is revealing about the general state of the Left in the decades since the collapse of the twentieth century’s deeply flawed experiments in state socialism.
The Communists who often played heroic roles in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and other struggles for social progress believed that a viable and desirable “socialism after capitalism” was actually being built in societies like the Soviet Union. Even democratic socialists who were always critical of Soviet authoritarianism, and may also have had some idea of the deep dysfunctionality of that economic model, found it easier to imagine a fully postcapitalist world as long as the Cold War struggle over economic systems defined so much of global politics. But the triumph of capitalism has often seemed so total in the decades since then that even those of us who most badly want to end capitalism often have a hard time vividly imagining what could replace it.
Shameless plug: Bhaskar Sunkara, Mike Beggs, and I wrote a book coming out this fall, The Blueprint: How Socialism Could Work in the Real World, where we attempt to think through the mechanics of an economically viable and politically desirable postcapitalist future. In our model, which Beggs previewed here in Jacobin, the “commanding heights” of the economy would be under full public ownership. Investment, crucially, would be socialized through the nationalization of the banking sector. Where we grant that market signals still have a role to play in coordinating production with consumer needs, allocating capital goods, and so on, we think that capitalist exploitation of the working class can be ended in all firms, large and small, by having the remaining market sector be composed of worker-owned and internally democratic firms operating in partnership with public banks.
Perhaps you think that this vision is too extreme, and that a more-or-less socialist society should allow more small-scale capitalist entrepreneurship around the edges of the socialized economy than Sunkara, Beggs, and I envision. Conversely, perhaps you think we don’t go nearly far enough, and that a democratic form of planning could make all markets unnecessary. These are worthwhile debates, and it would be foolish to think that a future socialist society will replicate any particular proposal from 2026 point by point rather than shaping its institutions according to all sorts of historical contingencies that could never be fully predicted in advance.
But the reason it’s worth spelling out how socialism could work is that we badly need to restore the Left’s confidence that socialism — not just social democracy, not just Medicare for All and a thirty-two-hour week, as valuable as these near-term accomplishments would be, but socialism — is still possible. Without a dedicated core of militant workers and organizers animated by that confidence, we’re unlikely to mobilize the kind of socialist movement we’d need to accomplish even a socialist minimum program. And as long as capitalists hold onto their economic power, whatever reformist gains we do manage to achieve will be vulnerable to being rolled back in the future.
Workers do indeed deserve more than they have in America in 2026. Putting aside a quibble here or there, they deserve everything the “Workers Deserve More” platform envisions. But they don’t just deserve a better deal within an economy whose levers they don’t control. They deserve the whole thing.
