The Fourth Party Congress discussion revolved around some of the particular ideological challenges facing a revolutionary process in the United States, where anti-communism has long been the unofficial religion, and in the world generally in the post-Cold War era. There is no absence of militant struggle in the United States, but without a simultaneous ideological struggle to revive socialism as the legitimate alternative to capitalism, this will not happen on its own. Socialists cannot expect to make a revolution by being the best and most dedicated organizers in the mass struggles and then hope that one of these mass struggles simply gives way to socialist leadership in a time of great crisis. Neither is it sufficient, given the urgency of the times, to win people over to socialism in ones and twos. A larger cultural shift and acceptance of socialism must be effected and a mass pro-socialist consciousness has to be deliberately cultivated, now and in advance of a revolutionary crisis, if socialists are to successfully seize such an opportunity.

For all these reasons and more, we resolved to write a book that we understood would be unorthodox for Marxists. Among the Marxist left, it has long been a principle that no one can sketch out a blueprint for what a socialist society or government will look like. But that’s what the assembled writers have done here–not because we have located a crystal ball, but because it has become politically necessary for our current time.

Previously, we might have argued that sketching out such a blueprint would be an exercise in utopian dreaming. It would be more useful to spend our time organizing and writing around a burning issue of the moment. After all, no revolutionary process follows along ready-made paths. Anything can be written on paper, but in practice, all political processes encounter new variables, twists, and turns that cannot be anticipated. When the working class comes to power, involving millions in the reorganization of society on a practical level, this will produce and generate so many new ideas and solutions; the new power will not be bound by or follow the script of any one book or pamphlet that has been written years earlier under capitalism.

Karl Marx himself declined to describe the details of future socialism, insisting instead that he and the rest of humanity were “uncivilized” compared to the future human beings of highly developed socialism and communism. Future societies would look back at our world and be astonished at how limited our understanding was. The important thing for revolutionaries, Marx and Friedrich Engels established, was to identify the contradictions within capitalism that would spell its downfall, and organize that class that has every interest in such a revolutionary transformation–the working class. Once the working class became conscious of itself as a class, understanding its distinct interests and developing its own yearning for political power, this would set the stage for a socialist revolution. To that end, Marx consciously broke with utopian socialists and focused his intellectual work on a critique and analysis of capitalist development.

A few pages are devoted to a broad sketch of socialism and communism in The Grundrisse, Critique of the Gotha Program, and in Engel’s The Housing Question. His most important work, Capital, says very little about these matters. Even The Communist Manifesto limits its forward-looking program to a general picture of the rise and ultimate fall of capitalism, forecasting that the working class would overthrow the rule of private property. It includes a series of immediate changes for the first stage of socialism in advanced capitalist countries: the abolition of private land ownership and inheritances, state control of banking and industry, the shared responsibility of all to labor, free education for all, a gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, and so on. The Manifesto provides no further details on what all this looks like and even these measures “…will, of course, be different in different countries.”

Since the publication of the Manifesto in 1848, socialist and communist parties have mostly limited their publications and presentations in a similar fashion to Marx and Engels. Their programs describe their overall vision, what they are fighting for, and emphasize what immediate changes they would declare right away to remedy the central problems of capitalism. It would be inappropriate for a party program to go beyond this. For political parties, the program represents the essential basis of unity for someone who is considering joining. One can be in the same party, in other words, without agreeing to all the ins and outs of what future socialist living and governance would look like. In the future, such questions may in fact become dividing lines, but for now, the primary task is for the working class to conquer power, and a socialist party must devise strategies and tactics to that end.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which published this book, also has a program which is keeping with that Marxist tradition and serves as the essential basis of unity for our organization. So why did we also produce this book, which in some ways, breaks with the Marxist tradition of declining to provide a blueprint for socialism?

This book does not substitute for a party program but serves another purpose entirely: to demonstrate, rather than just declare, that there is an alternative to capitalism in the United States, and to start a dialogue with all of society about what such a socialist society will look like. In this project, we have enlisted as writers individual members, and some non-members, who have experience and expertise in particular fields and areas of struggle, and posed to them a singular question: if the working class already had power in the United States, how would it reorganize society? Of course, we do not pretend that any of the responses represent the final word or final answer to any of these questions. That can only be shaped in real life. Nor is every major question about what socialism would look like answered. Each chapter demonstrates that another world is not just possible, but quickly achievable once private profit is removed as the engine of society and the existing technology, resources, and power structures are reorganized to meet the needs of the people and the planet.

Our mission with this book is not to convince everyone of every detail, but rather to raise the socialist and communist horizon, to reintroduce that into our day-to-day organizing work, to make socialism vivid and real; to give people a taste so they order a full helping. Much of popular culture today is rightfully understood as a form of escapism, allowing a reprieve from the depressing reality of capitalism. Many contemporary postapocalyptic films and novels attest to the truth that it is now easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision a new system. This book is an attempt to puncture that. It too is escapism, but of a different type: to escape for a moment from the narrow and horrible boundaries of what appears politically possible at this exact moment; to let our minds jump forward one historical stage and conceive of how much we could achieve under socialism. There is a considerable history of political science fiction, some of it quite sophisticated, which speculates on how future high-tech societies could be reorganized and, in turn, impact social relations. But typically, socialist organizers have only indulged in such conversations over a meal or a drink, perhaps after a meeting or a long day of marching. Here we bring greater systematic thinking and concreteness to these discussions.