PANEL DISCUSSION WITH BEN BURGIS, OLIVER EAGLETON AND AMELIA HORGAN

Housmans and Verso are happy to present a panel discussion to help celebrate the publication The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World by Ben Burgis, Bhaskar Sunkara and Mike Beggs. The panel takes up the books the books central premise: exactly how can socialism work in the real world? What constitutes ‘real’ here? What does it mean for ‘socialism’ to ‘work’ exactly, and whom does it work for? We can be sure all these questions and more will be answered.

On our panel we have:

Ben Burgis, one of the books authors and a Jacobin columnist. He is also an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.

Oliver Eagleton, the editor of Tribune magazine and author of The Starmer Project (2022) and the forthcoming The Future Regained (2027).

Amelia Horgan, the author of Lost in Work (2021) and Principal Editor at the Common Wealth think tank. Her work has appeared in Tribune, Jacobin, The Guardian and other places.

On The Blue Print:

Neither capitalism nor central planning, this is the future for socialism.

Capitalism isn’t working. But is there a plausible alternative? The Blueprint lays one out: a system where workers control every lever of production, and competitive markets and state planning coexist side by side. Drawing on the history of socialist experiments and the economic debate over planning and markets, The Blueprint confronts the hardest questions about what went wrong in the past—and why it can go right in the future. The result is a socialism worthy of the twenty-first century.

‘It is rare indeed to find a book that so keenly matches the elegance of its arguments with the passion of its politics. Here we have an alternative economic blueprint for our time, a shining antidote to the crude bestiality of a fading and failing Trumpian regime. The aim is to build a socialism of and for the people, a socialism that meets all our reasonable wants needs and desires with the minimum of effort. We can, the authors claim, for the first time in our history, “combine egalitarianism in distribution and democracy in production with the abundance of high-tech modernity.” This is a book to “pry open our imaginations and put the biggest questions of politics back on the table.” Let the counterattack to all that is obnoxious in our present circumstances begin.’

David Harvey, author of The Story of Capital

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book + entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.