Socialism provides for basic needs far better than the aff can. Basic income commodifies the social; the alternative democratizes it while preserving the benefits of markets.

But there is another, less familiar idea that should also guide the process. Call it "pay as you go." Eschewing all forms of free riding and so-called primitive accumulation, twenty-first century socialism must ensure the sustainability of all those conditions of production that capitalism has so callously trashed. In other words: a socialist society must undertake to replenish, repair, or replace all the wealth it uses up in production and reproduction. First, it must replenish work that produces use values (including the carework that sustains people), as well as work that produces commodities. In addition, it must replace all the wealth it takes from "the outside"--from peripheral peoples and societies as well as from nonhuman nature. Finally, it must replenish the political capacities and public goods on which it draws in the course of meeting other needs. In other words: there must be no free riding of the sort that capitalism simultaneously incentivizes and disavows. This proviso is a sine qua non for overcoming the intergenerational injustice endemic to capitalist society. Only by observing it can a socialism for the twenty-first century dismantle capitalism's multiple crisis tendencies and irrationalities.

This brings me to a second set of reflections, concerning the classical socialist question of surplus. Surplus is the fund of wealth, if any, that society collectively generates in excess of what it requires to reproduce itself at its current level and in its current form. In capitalist societies, as I have already noted, surplus is treated as the private property of the capitalist class and disposed of by its owners, whom the system compels to reinvest it in hopes of producing yet more of it, on and on, without limit. This, as we saw before, is both unjust and self destabilizing.

A socialist society must democratize control over social surplus. It must allocate surplus democratically, deciding via collective decision-making exactly what to do with existing excess capacities and resources--as well as how much excess capacity it wants to produce in the future, and indeed whether, faced with global heating, it wants to produce any surplus at all. Socialism, then, must deinstitutionalize the growth imperative hardwired into capitalist society. This does not mean, as some ecologists now argue, that we must institutionalize degrowth as a hardwired counter-imperative. It means, rather, that we must make the question of growth (how much, if any; what kind, how, and where) a political question, to be decided via multi-dimensional reflection informed by climate science. In fact, a socialism for the twenty-first century must treat all such questions as political questions, subject to democratic resolution.

Surplus can also be thought of as time: time left over after the necessary work of meeting our needs and replenishing what we've used up; hence, time that could be free time. The prospect of free time has been a central pivot of all the classical accounts of socialist freedom, including that of Marx. In the early stages of socialism, however, it's unlikely that free time would loom very large. The reason lies in the enormous unpaid bill that socialist society would inherit from capitalism. Although capitalism prides itself on its productivity, and although Marx himself considered it a veritable engine for producing surplus, I have my doubts. The trouble is, Marx reckoned surplus pretty much exclusively in the uncompensated labor time that capital takes from waged workers after they produce sufficient value to cover their own costs of living. He paid much less attention, by contrast, to the various free gifts and cheaps that capital expropriates and appropriates, and still less to its failure to cover their reproduction costs. What if we included those costs in our reckoning? What if capital had had to pay for free reproductive work, for eco logical repair and replenishment, for wealth expropriated from racialized people, for public goods? How much surplus would it have really produced? That is, of course, a rhetorical question. It is unclear how exactly one would go about trying to answer it. But it is clear that a socialist society would inherit a hefty bill for centuries of unpaid costs.

It would also inherit a hefty bill for massive unmet human needs across the globe: needs for health care, housing, nutritious (and delicious) food, education, transportation, and so on. These too should not be counted as surplus investment, but rather as matters of absolute necessity. The same holds for the pressing and enormous job of decarbonizing the world economy--a task that is in no way optional. In general, the question of what is necessary and what is surplus assumes a different guise in light of our expanded conceptions of capitalism and of socialism. The same is true for a third major topos of social theorizing: the role of markets in a socialist society. On this issue, the implications of the cannibal capitalism conception can be con densed in a simple formula: no markets at the top, no markets at the bottom, but possibly some markets in the in-between. Let me explain.

What I mean by "the top" is the allocation of social surplus. Assuming there is a social surplus to be allocated, it must be considered the collective wealth of the society as a whole. No private person, firm, or state can own it or have the right to dispose of it unilaterally. Truly collective property, surplus must be allocated via collective processes of decision making and planning--planning that can and must be organized democratically. Market mechanisms should play no role at this level. The rule here is neither markets nor private property at the top.

The same,holds for "the bottom," by which I mean the level of basic needs: shelter, clothing, food, education, health care, transportation, communication, energy, leisure, clean water, and breathable air. It is true, of course, that we cannot specify once and for all exactly what counts as a basic need and exactly what is required to satisfy it. That too must be a subject for democratic discussion, contestation, and decision making. But whatever is decided must be provided as a matter of right, and not on the basis of ability to pay. This means that the use values we produce to meet these needs cannot be commodities. They must instead be public goods. And that points, incidentally, to a key drawback to proposals for a universal (or unconditional) basic income (UBI), which involves paying people cash to buy stuff to meet their basic needs, thereby treating basic need satisfactions as commodities. A socialist society should treat them rather as public goods. It should have no markets at the bottom.

So, no markets at the bottom or the top. But what about the in-between? Socialists should imagine the in-between as a space for experimentation with a mix of different possibilities: a space where markets could find a place, along with cooperatives, commons, self-organized associations, and self managed projects. Many traditional socialist objections to markets would dissolve or diminish in the context I am envi sioning here, as their operation would neither feed into nor be distorted by the dynamics of capital accumulation and private appropriation of social surplus. Once the top and the bottom are socialized and decommodified, the function and role of markets in the middle would be transformed. That proposi tion seems clear enough, even if we cannot specify now exactly how.