Feasible (2026)

Book Review from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Make Capitalism History. A Practical Framework for Utopia and the Transformation of Society. By Simon Sutterlütti and Stefan Meretz. Palgrave McMillan.

The authors state that one reason for writing their book (which first appeared in German in 2023) was to get those engaged in various struggles to try to make things better under capitalism to seriously consider (rather than just in ‘late night pub talks,’ as they put it) what a feasible, rationally justified alternative society might look like.

Starting from the basic position that humans naturally want to satisfy their needs as they themselves define them, they argue that a free society can only be one where people are no longer forced to work by economic necessity and where people have secure, open access to what they require to satisfy their needs (they mention ‘places resembling modern-day supermarkets but without checkout’); work has to be freely chosen and people must be free to use productive resources to both produce and consume what they need; private ownership has to be replaced by ‘collective disposition’ (they prefer ‘disposition’ as ‘ownership’ has connotations of exclusion whereas productive resources and their products will belong to nobody but just be there to be used ). They call the new society ‘commonism’, but it is obviously socialism.

They are opposed to any form of central planning, on the grounds that it wouldn’t work and that attempting it would give power over people to the central planners. In fact, they are opposed to any central administrative body, even if unarmed and selected democratically. What they envisage is production and distribution taking place through ‘stigmergy’ (communication by signs) which apparently is how termites communicate to build their constructions. Capitalism does this without central planning with prices as the signs; ‘commonism’ would do it through (non-monetary) signals about needs.

They describe well that under capitalism the aim of production is that ‘money must be invested as capital in order to multiply itself’ (‘valorisation’)    and that this is ‘not the result of the greed of managers or shareholders’ but ‘derives from a structural compulsion to valorise that is built into the system’ and enforced through competition: ‘if producers display inferior valorisation, therefore less profit than their competitors, they will be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis advertising, the development or acquisition of new machines, the design of new products and so on. That is why, in the short or long-term, they will be defeated in competition and disappear from the market.’ The state has some autonomy to resist this as it acquires money not by exchange but through taxation; this autonomy, however, ‘remains relative, as state taxes in turn depend on a functioning economy … Therefore, the economy is the dominant sphere encompassing the state’.

They don’t regard state-dominated economies, such as the former USSR, as capitalist — in fact they follow the annoying practice of Continental academics of referring to them as ‘Real Socialism’ in the sense of a ‘socialism’ that really existed— but as being subject, through participation in the world market, to the same economic compulsions; also that state ownership is still a property form, excluding the majority.

The second part of the book is devoted to discussing how to get to ‘commonism’. Here, they insist, a free society can only be established by people who want it and freely choose to establish it; people cannot be forced to be free; a free society cannot be introduced from above by the state, as envisaged by gradualist reformists as well as by violent insurrectionists. Beyond not taking this route, the authors are fairly agnostic, though they also rule out the idea that worker cooperatives could outcompete capitalist corporations on the market or that voluntary communes (‘commons’, they call them) could spread by-passing the market. They seem to envisage as most likely the ‘transvolution’ (their alternative word for revolution) being set off by some catastrophe such as an economic collapse of capitalism or an ecological collapse.

In the last chapter they relent a bit on their opposition to political action and concede that it is conceivable that the state could support the spread of ‘commonist forms’ before dissolving itself — they write of a ‘suicide state’ — giving the movement for a free society a leg-up, or as they put it ‘a stirrup holder, an accomplice to emancipation’.

Adam Buick