“It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”. A well-known quote, given even more significance today with the climate crisis. Simon Hannah’s book is about imagining an alternative to capitalism, that a different kind of society is both necessary and feasible, whether you call it socialist, ecosocialist or simply post-capitalist. The book is aimed at a wide audience. Written in an accessible style with many examples, it covers an enormous amount of material in a little over 200 pages. A primer for an important subject that doesn’t get the attention it deserves on the revolutionary left or within contemporary Marxism. What will socialism look like, and can it work?

Part I starts with How Does Capitalism Work? A critique of capitalism solidly within the Marxist framework, and perhaps a tricky chapter for those unfamiliar with it. It introduces categories such as value (use, exchange, and surplus) and the law of value (labour theory of value), and the latter is used throughout the book as a shorthand for capitalism as generalised commodity production and exchange.

Ending capitalism means replacing the ‘hidden hand’ of the law of value with democratic planning. Two interesting ideas to note. Firstly, working time has a long history. It dominates our lives in capitalism (and the concerns of those maximising their profits), whereas pre-capitalist societies may have had lower average working hours. Socialism should be able to combine the historically high productivity of today with greatly reduced working hours. Secondly, capitalism can be viewed as enforced scarcity that leads to fear and reactionary ideologies.

Prefiguring

The second chapter covers how movements against capitalism and its effects have developed, along with questions of strategy, tactics and organisation. People as workers is clearly central to this, but it must also encompass the fight against all forms of oppression. Pushing beyond parliamentary reforms has often seen the creation of new bodies such as workers’ councils. These may prefigure how a post-capitalist society could be organised, but more importantly they show how people can start to escape from the restrictive and stultifying ideas of capitalism.

This is followed by “The Post-capitalist Society”, the heart of Part I of the book. Capitalism is essentially an unplanned system, so getting to a post-capitalist society will inevitably be messy. Smaller capitalists, markets and money will not cease overnight, and global capital and states will fightback. Nevertheless, the first moves will be the expropriation of bigger capitalist enterprises and banks and, critically, the democratisation of society to allow for the planning of the economy, and much else.

Without new forms of democracy and the bonds of solidarity between people, the post-capitalist society will not last. Different scenarios for socialist democracy have been proposed. Not only for producers in workplaces (self-management), as the consumption requirements of communities and individuals must also be addressed. The idea of subsidiarity would apply, with decision making being at the lowest possible level of those affected. As the new society develops, more of the economy will be socialised, more consumption will be public / communal / shared, and more basic needs will be provided for free.

People will, of course, still have personal preferences, and the time worked could be used to distribute additional goods and services to individuals. The need for markets and money will fall away. Abundance will replace necessity, alongside new ways of thinking about what makes us happy. There will be experiments and mistakes, but they will be ours, made consciously and collectively.

The shorter Part II covers the debates and arguments against the possibility of a post-capitalist society. The oldest argument is that human nature is a barrier. A quote from Marx puts the socialist case perfectly: “…this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”

A more significant argument, known as the socialist calculation debate, started after World War I and echoes of it continue today. Essentially, advocates of capitalism say that an economy, as the allocation of resources, can only work efficiently if there are market prices to act as signals for what needs to be produced, regulating the economy via billions of money transactions every day. Furthermore, knowledge about how to produce things is not centralised but spread throughout the economy. In other words, it is too big, complex and diffuse to be replaced by economic planning.

New technology

Firstly, this is one area where advances in technology have made a difference. The enormous improvement in computing power and algorithms (and now AI) have greatly reduced the scale of the problem, and on a much smaller scale the planning of complex supply chains is already commonplace in capitalist enterprises. The role of new technology vs human decision making in a post-capitalist society and how to strike a balance will be important. A vision of technology and its further development to support humans rather than ‘full automation’.

Second, it does not have to be a heavily centralised system, and everyone is aware of the negative experience of the Soviet Union where the complete absence of democracy (amongst other things) destroyed attempts at command planning. If decision making can be multi-level, something similar must be done for the planning of investment and production. Politics and economics will not be divorced in the way they are in capitalism.

Market socialism, in its many variants, has been proposed as a third way between the market and a planned economy. It has a long history, and since the failed model of the Soviet Union, a mix of social ownership and limited markets has become the dominant idea on the left. Market socialism is argued against on several levels. Briefly, markets only exist because of competition between independent owners of capital, not vice-versa.

If we want to replace private capital with socialisation, it follows that we are ending the dominance of markets. This would extend to workers’ cooperatives. They are a positive development of course, but if they exist within a market economy, there will still be pressures that limit and undermine the self-management they want to promote.

Selective degrowth?

The final chapter on ecosocialism continues the thread running through the book: we need to think beyond capitalism and its failure to genuinely confront climate change, environmental destruction and limited natural resources. A crisis greater than the acknowledged inherent crises of capitalism. The old productivist idea of socialism, abundance as the expansion of the forces of production, looks increasingly dated. This leads to the current debate on degrowth and that the world must reduce economic activity.

The position taken in the book could be called selective degrowth – zero growth in some sectors as they will no longer exist, reduced in others, and increased consumption in some parts of a highly unequal world. Degrowth is a relatively new idea and there are still difficulties, such as how to address consumption levels of people in the ‘rich world’, and not just of the rich within it.

This relates to the other theme of the book, that post-capitalism is about reconceptualising what it means to “live a meaningful life”. Surely there must be more to it than accruing more stuff. We can have new and better relations, solidarity between humans and solidarity with nature.

I have only scratched the surface of the book and there are topics I have not had space to mention. Perhaps too many, and there could have been a more in-depth discussion in a few places. Nevertheless, as an introduction to post-capitalism it really does excel and fills a gap. I hope it is widely read – discussing the future should be an integral part of fighting to overthrow capitalism. The “philosophy of hope”, as the Marxist Ernst Bloch put it.