Introduction

Since its inception, socialism has been inextricably tied to the labour movement and its critique of capitalist economic relations. Under the latter's guise, socialism is expected to offer an alternative to an oppressive, alienating, and exploitative economic life. But exactly what form this alternative ought to assume has been and continues to be debated within the labour movement. This includes questions regarding the nature and role of work, what constitutes genuinely socialist property relations or a form of allocation of resources capable of upholding pluriversal emancipation. In this chapter, I tackle those debates head on. But I do so by opening up the scope of those debates to discussions found outside of the labour movement. For, as Manning Marable put it ‘the central questions confronting the Left aren't located within the Left itself but in the broader, deeper currents of social protest and struggle among nonsocialist, democratic constituencies – in the activities of trade unionists, gays and lesbians, feminists, environmentalists, people of color, and the poor’ (Marable, 1996: 278).

The task set out in this chapter shall therefore consist in bringing those ‘deeper currents of social protest’ into dialogue with socialist thought, in order to understand what they can offer the conceptualization of socialist economic relations. I begin the discussion by addressing the future of work – a debate figuring prominently within socialist thought. Here I deploy the intersectional lens to envision a counter-culture of capitalist work. This is followed by the conceptualization of a system of allocation of resources deriving from the latter counter-cultural vision and capable of institutionalizing radical interdependence. Finally, an alternative to the capitalist system of property is explored.

Collectivized emancipatory work

A central aspiration of the labour movement has been to give workers the chance to identify with their work and treat it as an outlet for selfactualization. Drawing on a critique of work akin to Karl Marx's own critique of alienation in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (2000a), this particular aspiration treats work as an essential component of human life and potential source of autonomy and pleasure. Emancipation is here achieved through ‘free labour’. Over the past few decades, however, many on the Left came to favour a vision of emancipation in which work would no longer play the leading role.