Socialism is back on the agenda, and nobody would have predicted it, even, say, ten years ago. We are not on the brink of a wave of revolutionary upheavals rippling throughout the world. But in the last decade or so, candidates openly advocating socialist reforms have gained significant popular support in advanced countries and have actually won power in many countries in the Global South.

Thirty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the s-word is no longer a taboo, and perhaps the prospects of a socialist transformation are not so dim. But if the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the replacement of bourgeois democratic procedures with party control of political life are not sufficient to lead us to socialism — as the Soviet experience has bitterly taught us — then what kind of socialist society should we aspire to? Which political and economic institutions would characterize a well-functioning socialist society? What kind of rules should dictate the allocation of economic goods and services?