If you want to know how to get where you are going, you have to figure out where you really want to be.
That seems obvious, but there has been an unfortunate tradition within socialism that blueprints, or anything that could even resemble them, are bad and must be shunned.
We disagree: a reasonably deep and detailed sketch of the desired future society is required, is essential.
I should note that it would be an exaggeration to call this a blueprint in the strict sense of the word. We hope and expect that people following on from us will expand and improve our ideas, in the light of greater discussion and research, and eventually also in the light of practical results from revolutionary and radical reformist experiments. God forbid that our writings now later become some hidebound sacred text, which everyone hesitates to challenge even when it is obviously wrong, like what happened to Marx.
But it would not be a huge exaggeration.
There is a horrible warning for us from history. A hundred years ago, young idealists in Russia and then around the world dedicated their lives to overthrowing capitalism and replacing it with what we all now know to be perverse socialist regimes. They found their results rewarded with gradual disillusionment and eventual arrest, imprisonment, torture. All from the system they themselves had sacrificed so much to create. The Marxist-Leninist system was both tyrannical, that is a political failure, and at the same time an economic failure – delivering less material benefits than capitalism.
Another similar blind leap into the dark of revolution should not be considered. Next time, we want to know what we will get in advance. It's our duty as revolutionaries to lay this theoretical groundwork in advance. And secondly, people won't (thankfully) be trusting of socialist schemes without first seeing evidence, details, safeguards.
There may be some hard work required to draw up our vision of future society. There may be a risk of revealing otherwise hidden ideological differences with personal friends. But if we're serious about revolution, we have to be serious about what we want and how we propose to get there. There is no other way.
Robin Hahnel recently issued this as a challenge to us all:
Figure out What We Want
No more excuses. No more intellectual laziness. Critics of capitalism have got to think through and explain to others how we propose to do things differently, and why outcomes will be significantly better. Even when people lend an ear to our complaints about capitalism, we have zero credibility with the public when it comes to replacing capitalism with a wholly different economic system. And in the light of history, people have every reason to be sceptical that the left knows how to create a vastly superior economic system.
We have to give concrete answers to serious questions about precisely how choices will be made. If we are not capable of doing all this, if we are not up to this intellectual task, the movement to replace the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable cooperation will not succeed in earning people's trust and confidence.
[Robin Hahnel, Economic Justice and Democracy, 2005, p376]
And Jerry Cohen earlier enunciated it as the first question our attention should be focussed upon:
I think that three questions should command the attention of those of us who work within the Marxist tradition today. They are the questions of design, justification, and strategy, in relation to the project of opposing and overcoming capitalism. The first question is, What do we want? What, in general, and even not so general terms, is the form of the socialist society that we seek? The second question is, Why do we want it? What exactly is wrong with capitalism, and what is right about socialism? And the third question is, How can we achieve it?
[Gerald Allan Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx, 1987, p. xii.]
Here we make a start at laying out our vision of future society, in answering the question “In what may we hope?”