Karl Marx once wrote dismissively of “those that write recipes for the cookshops of the future.” He emphasized that we can’t come up with a premade plan for what our future socialist society will look like — it wouldn’t take into account the specific conditions that such a society would be created in.

But Sam Gindin argues that we can’t use that quote to excuse ourselves from providing credible answers about what a future socialism might look like. Mass numbers of people aren’t going to get on board with the socialist movement if we don’t.

Sam set out to provide some of these answers in “Socialism for Realists,” in Catalyst. Sam Gindin was for many years the research director and assistant to the president of the Canadian Auto Workers (now UNIFOR). He’s the author of several books, including The Making of Global Capitalism as well as The Socialist Challenge Today, both coauthored with Leo Panitch, and a regular contributor to Jacobin.