Socialism produces better innovation within months.

Imagine what would be possible if workers ran the major industries. In the context of minimizing climate catastrophe, workers can cooperate to ensure cleaner, more efficient production and global trade, and oversee a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy while guaranteeing safe well-paid jobs and rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. In the context of a pandemic, workers could rapidly retool industrial plants to build much-needed medical and personal protective gear, and freely distribute vaccine formulas and disease research. Rather than suffering under the mismanagement of privatized, for-profit healthcare, instead doctors, nurses, and hospital workers could coordinate the distribution of equipment and information, while ensuring safe, adequate staffing and quality care to all patients.

Capitalism also results in the unnecessary proliferation of similar products. Companies fiercely compete to produce the first and seemingly best goods for the highest possible price, and then spend over half a trillion dollars every year to convince consumers to buy them. As a result, half of an aisle at the local pharmacy is devoted to thirty brands of toothpaste. Socialism would instead aim to produce the necessary amount of the best-quality products based on general need, and thereby save a huge amount of resources that could otherwise improve and innovate new goods and services. This is far from unrealistic: much of the information required to achieve such a feat of planning is currently under the control of Amazon’s corporate executives! Instead of giant corporations using online tracking to bombard us with tailored ads to convince us to buy products, these tools could enormously aid in democratic planning.

This also does not mean, as is commonly claimed, that socialism would result in a lack of choice or poor-quality goods: a society where everyone dresses in a gray uniform. Instead, it would mean a genuine choice of diverse products, rather than the illusion of variety fabricated by competitive corporations. Further still, instead of the wasteful planned obsolescence of technology or fast fashion clothing, workers can take the time to make high-quality long-lasting products according to actual demand, and under safe and equitable conditions far from today’s hellish sweatshops.

Capitalists also organize supply chains around securing the cheapest possible raw materials, component parts, and labor to maximize their profit. Unfettered by the irrationality and anarchy of this system, under socialism workers would cooperate to organize distribution and labor on the basis of need and collective benefit. Today millions seek full employment as millions more work inhumanly long shifts. While millions face homelessness and housing insecurity, millions of housing units remain vacant. Many commute long distances to work, when they could be employed closer to home; and the pandemic has demonstrated how some could even work from home without impacting productivity.

A planned socialist economy can make huge strides towards solving these contradictions within months. It would require a centralized inventory of workers and their skills, which can be used to connect them to the nearest opportunities for work. Those who are overworked can share their hours with those who are underemployed, allowing for a maximum 35-hour work week and extended vacation with no loss of pay. New automated technology would not have to result in layoffs, when workers can simply be allowed to work less. This would give working class people more time to participate in running society.

A democratically planned economy would be able to reorganize work in such a way that it provides everyone with a well-paid job requiring the least commuting time, and to direct work to the most essential projects needed for society and the environment to thrive. This would of course extend to science and technology. No longer would ground-breaking research hit a wall because investors saw no short-term profits to be made. Engineers previously working on destructive military technology could instead work on constructive solutions to stabilize the planet’s ecosystems and develop technology to bring carbon emissions to zero. There will no doubt be new inventions and discoveries, from renewable energy and medicine to artificial intelligence and space flight.

Some will argue that such a transformation is utopian, and that people would not be bothered to participate in such economic planning. But such pessimism pales before a history that has offered numerous examples of workers stepping up to run cities, devising democratic structures like those described during mass struggles. This includes the Russian soviets of 1917, and in the U.S., the Seattle general strike of 1919, the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike, and the wave of sit-down strikes of the 1930s. Today thousands of working-class people attend tenant councils, school board meetings, and local community and faith-based groups. Organizations in a worker-led state would be completely different to the toothless bodies that working-class people are currently allowed to take part in—the committees would actually have the power to say how the economy and society is organized.