"We can say that we want radically democratic and decentralized planning rather than top-down planning, but consideration of what this would look like can make socialism sound even less attractive to ordinary people. Few of us want to spend hours of our free time in meetings. We can hold out hope that technological developments will allow us to outsource some of the heavy lifting to computers, but do we really want to delay the transition to socialism until the singularity is upon us? Or just reassure ourselves that calculation problems will sort themselves out by the time we’re ready to move beyond capitalism?

A much more grounded approach starts from the recognition that we need to at least start with what’s often called “market socialism.” This doesn’t mean a form of socialism where markets dominate every sector of the economy, but one in which at least a big chunk of economic transactions still involve market transactions between worker-controlled firms. The “commanding heights” of the economy — think, for example, about the finance sector or the power companies — can be moved out of the market entirely. So can vital services like health care and education. The remaining “private” sector can be made up of cooperative firms."