Jacobin interviews economic historian Aaron Benanav (Endnotes collective, New Left Review’s “Beyond Capitalism” series) about the question Marx’s “cookshops of the future” line has let the Left dodge for a century: what would a postcapitalist economy actually look like? His answer is a concrete design, not a slogan.
- Markets survive capitalism — exchange and currencies predate profit-driven accumulation by millennia. What goes is the power of private profitability to direct investment
- The Soviet five-year plan (a Menshevik invention, purged along with its authors) proved investment can be coordinated; East Asia later paired coordinated investment with markets, though still capitalist
- Neurath’s lesson: values like sustainability, care, and good work can’t be ranked on one scale, so choosing among futures is a democratic problem — no equation can say which sacrifices are worth making
- Keynes radicalized: investment needs neither prior saving nor profit. Beveridge’s 75 percent public control becomes Benanav’s 100 percent — decided democratically, not technocratically
- Split currencies: non-convertible Points for production, Credits for consumption — stops metric-gaming (teaching to the test) and keeps consumption inequality from becoming productive power
- Democratic sectoral boards (health care: mental health vs. preventive vs. end-of-life) plus mission committees for cross-sectoral shifts like greening the economy
Benanav’s closing distinction is the sharpest part: the recipes — how health care, housing, or family life are organized — stay contested political ground. But the cookshop — institutions that let incompatible visions of the good life contend without reproducing capitalism — is exactly what the Left must build. A postcapitalist society’s achievement is giving its conflicts durable democratic form, not settling them in advance.
A rare example of a rigorous Marxist economist doing the “utopian” work the Left keeps deferring — and defending markets as part of the answer.