Henry Arthur Jones and the Modern Drama

The late Victorian artist William Morris wrote a short novel about a man waking up one morning into a socialist world. He was transported instantaneously into a new cultural and economic world where coins and money were artifacts suitable only for display in a museum. Robin Hahnel's book is a counterpart to this utopic dream, but unlike fantasy, it is a thorough struggle and wrestling with the idea of how to transition from a competitive and profit-oriented economic system to a system based on need and cooperation and human sensitivity. He deals with history of socialist movements, past and present, small and large, with reforms in taxation, labor standards, labor bargaining power, global imbalances, living wages; and he covers the anticorporate and environmental and consumer-producer cooperatives and poverty movements. It is thorough. Admittedly it would be better just to wake up one morning into that utopia, but this book is about the next best thing. I am grateful he wrote it.

This book fully deserves to become a key text in college courses on issues of economic justice and democratic political theory. Based firmly in the important, although historically neglected, libertarian socialist tradition, this text is an exceptionally comprehensive critical appraisal of late capitalism and the various attempts to create alternatives to it. Robin Hahnel's principled, committed, non-dogmatic and thoroughly people-oriented approach to political economy is a refreshing and much-needed reboot on issues of democracy and justice that are still suffering the after-shocks of Cold-War era entrenched positions. Hahnel's socialism is of the thoroughly democratic variety that rejects both the compromise of essential principles for the sake of power that has often characterised social democracy, as well as the rigid, dogmatic positions of the authoritarian Left. The result is a powerful and convincing argument for a radically democratic model of society governed more fully "by the people and for the people", born of a flexible, pluralistic and principled approach to political-economy. Readers of this book would also benefit from reading Michael Albert's "Parecon".