Victorian Trades Hall is the oldest continuously operating trades hall in the world. And in 1856, even before it was constructed, the stonemasons and building workers of Melbourne put down their tools and marched for the eight-hour day: eight hours of labor, eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of rest. For a while, this city was the closest thing the nineteenth century had to a model of what an organized working class could wring out of capital. I mention this not to flatter the people of Melbourne but because that slogan — eight, eight, and eight — is still relevant today. Rather than a basic reformist demand, it was a revolutionary claim about what a human life is for. And I want to argue that the whole socialist project is, in the end, a fight over that question.

Historically, our socialist movement can be said to have done three things within a broader workers’ movement. First, it gave an agitational account of the crimes of capitalism and imperialism, to remind people about the daily realities of the system we were confronting. Second, it gave us a vision of a world after capitalism. And third — the part that set the socialist movement apart from anarchism — it provided a compelling account of how to get from here to there.

I want to focus on this third task, the question of socialist strategy and transition, and then touch on the need to have a compelling vision of what a socialism after capitalism could look like. I will make a few arguments: I want to explain why social democracy is at an impasse it can never fully recover from. I want to explain why, paradoxically, the collapse of reformist socialism has been a catastrophe, even and especially for the revolutionaries who have always stood to its left and predicted its impasse. And I want to explain what a viable third road would look like and why this third road cannot dodge the question of rupture, however much we’d like it to. Finally, I want to assert the technical viability of a socialism after capitalism and explain why sketching out “recipes for the cookshops of the future” is a necessity for all of us struggling for a world beyond capitalism today.¹