First published at /spichka.
There will be no Gulag under the new socialism — an article by Boris Kagarlitsky
Preface by /spichka
Building socialism requires two things: taking people’s fears seriously and carrying out expropriations.
Boris Kagarlitsky wrote this article from a Russian penal colony, where he is currently serving his sentence. Here is the new socialism he is proposing (no utopias included).
Why should you read this letter?
You most likely talk to people who do not share your political views — or who perhaps have none at all. You explain that the global economy has reached a dead end, that declining birth rates across the world are the result of neoliberal policies. Your listeners nod in agreement. But sooner or later, the question arises:
“So what are you proposing?”
It is a reasonable yet disarming question. How would you answer?
Up until 2022, there was a sense of political timelessness. Marxists were preoccupied with the old “Stalin or Trotsky?” disputes. The outbreak of the “special military operation” brought many back to reality. It became clear that we do not have decades to spend arguing over long-dead leaders. It is time to learn how to communicate our ideas to people beyond Marxist communities.
Without a positive program, we can only agitate among other Marxists.
Of course, even before 2022, there were those writing about a socialist project — Boris Kagarlitsky or Andrey Kolganov, for example. However, these discussions failed to resonate among Marxists, as they never addressed the question that seemed to matter most: why “Stalin is better than Trotsky”.
Alexey Safronov is one of the authors whose work brings us closer to understanding socialism as a project. In 2025, he published a book titled The Great Soviet Economy, where, in his concluding remarks, he posed the question: what comes next? Later that year, he released a video on the channel Prostye Chisla (“Prime numbers”) about democratic planning — “Direct Economic Democracy: The Technology Is Ready, Now It’s Up to People”.
It is time to arrive at a shared understanding of what kind of socialism we want to build — and how. A discussion is needed.
The time has come for Marxists to clarify their positions and bring the debate to a higher level.
To initiate this discussion among Marxists, we asked Boris Kagarlitsky to share his vision of socialism. He agreed and wrote:
I’ll send the text in batches of three or four pages so the mail and the censors don’t get overwhelmed — experience shows shorter messages get through faster, and it’s easier for me too (5 October 2025).
Boris Kagarlitsky sent us the article over the course of several months, a few pages at a time. We then continued discussing the text with him and refining the wording — ordinary editorial routine, though slow when conducted through the prison mail system. During this correspondence, he decided to add a postscript:
After reading your comments, I decided to add a postscript to the text, where I respond to the questions that you raised (15 December 2025).
We think this text deserves to be a starting point for a discussion that can engage different communities.
What is this letter about?
Boris Kagarlitsky wrote an extensive text on socialism as a future prospect. To be precise, it is not about how everybody will get a decent life under socialism, but about the first steps towards transforming society.
He did not intend to explain how socialism should be built, since that will depend on the starting conditions. If you’d like to read more about this, take a look at our article “The theory of the transitional period” and its follow-up. In those articles, we reflect on the experience of the USSR and other socialist countries to determine whether socialism was built there.
Kagarlitsky outlines possible starting points for transforming society. These are just the first steps, and we shouldn’t stop there.
To anticipate what follows, let us be clear: Kagarlitsky’s ideal is not simply a mixed economy with democratic institutions.
For the moment, we are not ready to articulate our position on every aspect discussed in the text. Our detailed view of socialism as a project will follow in a separate article later on.
But we stand firmly with Boris Kagarlitsky on one point: we need to develop a system of principles on the basis of which we want to transform society.
What we need are principles for transforming society, not stories about a beautiful life under socialism.
In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels outlined ten measures, “which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production”.
This is how we should think about it as well. In the article “Marx, Engels and the transitional program”, we have already explained the logic behind the proposals of the classical Marxists — why they formulated particular points, and how we can formulate our own positive program on that foundation.
Which brings us back to the central question: “So what are you proposing?”
We now turn to Boris Kagarlitsky, writing from Penal Colony No. 4 in Torzhok.
Socialism: a prospect, not a utopia
A vision of the future or a project? Or how I stopped building castles in the air
Politicians and publicists keep asking, with a kind of obsessive persistence, about the “vision of the future”, addressing allies, like-minded supporters, and opponents alike, and not only within the political left. I remember attending an official event in the early 2000s where yet another expensive report on Russia’s future was presented — outlining what the country was supposed to look like by 2020. Needless to say, the reality of 2020 bore no resemblance to that presentation.
The problem with such reports is rarely in what the authors made up. It lies in the ridiculously short time frame between creating a project and putting it into practice. Had they pushed their predictions out to 2050 — or better, 2100 — they could have avoided the embarrassment. By the time the target date arrived, no one would be left alive who remembered the report’s contents, or even that it had existed at all.
Utopian writers of the early modern period were more farsighted. They would place their ideal society on some distant, imaginary island — or even on the Moon. This is where the word “utopia”, coined by Thomas More, comes from — that is, a place that does not exist. And, I would add, never will.
Thinking about the future instead of utopias
Does this mean we should stop thinking about the future? Certainly not. The ability to act with the future in mind, planning years and sometimes decades ahead, is fundamental to the existence of human civilization. But the question is how we think — and what goals we set for ourselves.
“So what is your alternative?”
This reproach is constantly directed at the political left: “Your critique of modern capitalism is quite convincing, but what is your alternative?” It is a fair question. Yet the answer most of our comrades offer is methodologically flawed. An alternative should not be a description of a beautiful life in some non-capitalist paradise, but a set of concrete, interconnected solutions to the problems of the present.
An alternative is not a description of a beautiful life under socialism, but concrete proposals for addressing the problems of capitalism.
This is particularly important for two reasons.
First, the real future will emerge from practical transformations carried out here and now. And if, for example, we decide to introduce strict censorship in the name of freedom for all, the outcome will bear little resemblance to what we promise.
Second, if there is no clear and direct link between the “now” and the “later”, then dreams of a wonderful future do nothing to stop us from behaving as completely unprincipled opportunists in the present. After all, this does not contradict our convictions: one set of principles for the dream, another for sinful reality.
This is precisely why Marx and Engels were right in their critique of utopian thinking.
What we need is not a vision of the future, but a set of principles on which to base solutions to current problems.
We must therefore begin with a critique of the existing socio-economic order, identifying its main contradictions and problems — by overcoming them, we will in fact create a new society. First of all, it is important to understand why the solutions currently offered within capitalism either do not work or fail to work as expected.
What we are witnessing today is not just a series of crises, but a crisis of the entire economic system.
What we are facing is not just a series of crises, but above all a set of interconnected crises that together take on a systemic character. The numerous moderate reform initiatives intended to address these growing problems have only made the situation more complex and confused.
No one denies the ecological crisis, the financial turmoil, the widening social disparities often reduced to the issue of inequality, or the alarming rise in conflicts. But it is crucial to recognize that all these phenomena are interconnected, and that any solution can only be found through a comprehensive transformation of the economy and society.
Two initial conclusions follow from this:
- Structural changes affecting relations of power and ownership are necessary;
- The development of democratic planning institutions is essential.
Institutions of democratic planning will make it possible to transform and shape the economic structure in a coordinated and purposeful way, not only in the interests of the majority but for the development of humanity.
Democratic planning will make it possible to organize the economy in the interests of humanity’s development.
This last point is, unfortunately, crucial, since short-term interests often run counter to long-term prospects. This is evident not only in ecological crises but also in market cycles, where rapid stock price growth sets the stage for inevitable economic collapse. Here, however, we encounter the central problem — one that can only be resolved in practice: how to move beyond the narrowly understood immediate interests of the masses without sacrificing their democratic freedoms or calling into question their right to oppose even fundamentally correct and objectively overdue policies. In a sense, this is the main contradiction of socialism.
Economic democracy
Ota Šik, in his classic work Plan and Market under Socialism pointed out that abolishing private property does not eliminate differences in interests between individuals and social groups. The capitalist market allows these differences to be regulated, but not in accordance with any social optimum; instead, outcomes are determined by the balance of forces — power, income, and property. This is precisely why modern society, torn apart by sharp contradictions, not only social and class ones, is in urgent need of a different mechanism. Even worse, the classical market mechanism no longer functions. This is not, as libertarians would claim, the result of irresponsible leftists or greedy corporate elites interfering with its “normal” functioning, but of the concentration of capital and the rising cost of research, which have made free and equal competition a utopia.
Free competition no longer exists. A new mechanism is needed to reconcile the interests of different groups in society.
The Singaporean economist Martin Khor demonstrated that the ideal model of competition described by Adam Smith works only when hundreds of independent producers operate within a single market, responding solely to prices determined by effective demand. As the number of producers declines to a few dozen, the mechanism begins to fail. If there are fewer than ten, they tend to orient themselves toward one another rather than the consumer, and, even without direct coordination, effectively form a cartel-like arrangement. This is sometimes referred to as “Khor’s theorem” or the “oligopolistic market rule”.
Libertarian critics of monopolies will, of course, call for breaking up large corporations as a solution to the problem. But this would mean reversing the process of capital and technological concentration that underpins economic progress, as well as reducing resources for research and development. The only way to compensate for this would be to increase the role of the state in research and investment, which is equally unacceptable to libertarians and liberals.
There is only one way out of the current situation — economic democracy based on the socialization of the largest corporations.
The real response to such challenges lies in creating a mechanism of economic democracy based on the socialization of the largest corporations, informational transparency, and the integration of the efforts of different economic actors. This does not imply the abolition of the market, but it does require, as John Keynes pointed out, the socialization of investment under the control of democratic representative bodies accountable to society.
This task can only be resolved in practice: conflicts and disagreements are inevitable, which is precisely why democracy is essential as a mechanism for the dynamic resolution of contradictions. Will this democracy retain the features of parliamentarism? Most likely, only partially. Traditional procedures will have to be supplemented by new forms of stakeholder participation in decision-making. One example is the involvement of city residents in urban planning through participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Examples of direct economic democracy already exist. One of them is Porto Alegre in Brazil.
One way or another, there will be a need to develop mechanisms of multi-level coordination without abolishing existing political institutions — parties, trade unions, and civic organizations. Another point is that, over time, bodies of sectoral or local self-government, integrated into systems of economic, social, and environmental coordination, may come to play a more important role than parliament.
Will such a system turn out to be too complex? Only practice will tell, but there are already reasons to assume that it will be no more complex than the Soviet system of administrative planning or the market-corporate-bureaucratic coordination typical of today’s advanced capitalist economies.
The scope of property socialization may vary considerably depending on conditions.
Given differences in capital concentration, global integration, democratic traditions, and, not least, the balance of political and class forces across societies, the scale, forms, and depth of property socialization will vary considerably depending on local conditions. For this reason, the following discussion will focus on what can be done in the Russian context. And yet, some general trends can be identified globally.
General principles:
- Socialize research, production, as well as online platforms;
- Develop not only the state sector, but also forms of cooperation with private initiative;
- Ensure the collective use of the benefits of socialized property.
First, this concerns the socialization of research and production currently controlled by large corporations, as well as the socialization of the platforms through which a significant share of economic activity is carried out — as convincingly argued by Nick Srnicek and Yanis Varoufakis. The forms of socialization may also vary: they may include buyouts, asset redistribution, bankruptcy procedures, and expropriation — depending on the political, economic, and social context.
Second, this does not imply the total nationalization of all production and exchange, as in the Soviet Union. Even the Soviet Union’s allies in the Eastern Bloc allowed a certain degree of freedom for private entrepreneurship, which developed with some success, helping to compensate for the bottlenecks of bureaucratic planning. The economy will be “mixed”, but what exactly is combined, and in what proportions, is a matter of practical politics.
The economy will be “mixed”, but the composition of that “mix” is a matter of practical politics.
Third, the development of socialized production under current conditions is inseparable from collective consumption. Energy networks integrating large numbers of users, public transport, and accessible platforms for obtaining goods and information — all of this already exists today. These practices — now largely dominant thanks to the internet — are exactly what we must rely on as we integrate and develop collective infrastructure, in which these systems are closely and efficiently interconnected. The internet is perfectly compatible with private business and individual consumption, but is already at odds with the corporate market.
Having outlined some general principles, we can now propose a number of measures to transform the Russian economy and society, which are clearly in need of change.
Public sector
Which companies should be socialized?
When Marx spoke of the contradiction between the social character of production and private appropriation, he drew the logical conclusion that production must develop under society’s direct control. Clearly, this contradiction cannot be resolved without challenging private property. However, it is already clear that building a public sector capable of addressing strategic development tasks does not require indiscriminate nationalization. It is reasonable to assume that the more a given sector, industry, or company serves common needs at the national and global level, the greater the need for its socialization.
The fundamental contradiction of capitalism cannot be resolved without challenging the system of private property.
In the Russian context, the following sectors stand out: transport infrastructure, defense enterprises, strategic civilian machine-building (primarily transport), the mining industry, energy, major banks, metallurgy, and forestry and water management.
An attentive reader will immediately notice that these are exactly the sectors in which Russia’s so-called state corporations operate. But that is precisely the point: in reality, these companies are not state-owned even in the bourgeois sense of the term. They are private joint-stock corporations with substantial state participation.
Russian state corporations are essentially ordinary joint-stock companies with state participation.
Meanwhile, Marx rightly emphasized that property is a social relation. The state’s acquisition of shares does nothing to change property relations or relations of production. However, it does create a precedent — not always a positive one — and opens up opportunities for the redistribution of resources, typically in favor of a privileged group within oligarchic business structures.
In modern society, resources are redistributed mainly by non-market means.
The redistribution of resources, inevitable in a developed modern economy, has long been carried out primarily through non-market mechanisms, yet it remains a highly complex, costly, and corruption-prone process. This is hardly surprising in a system dominated by private property and private interest. The widely promoted principles of public-private partnership, popularized in the late 20th century, are essentially mechanisms for legitimizing corruption — regardless of whether it occurs in Russia, the United States, India, or Western Europe.
If a company cannot operate without state support, it should be transferred to the public sector.
The public and private sectors should interact only through the market. Here, one might even shake hands with libertarians: the market it is. But if a company cannot operate without state support, or cannot fulfill a socially beneficial function without it, then it should be transferred to the public sector.
In practice, public interest, along with environmental, social, and other objective requirements, is indeed realized, but largely through penalties imposed on businesses. The public sector, however, should be oriented not towards profit maximization but towards addressing social problems. This does not mean it should operate at a loss, but profit-seeking and ensuring financial sustainability are by no means the same. Profit, therefore, cannot and should not be the primary, let alone the only, measure of success for public enterprises.
It is clear that in the digital era, there is a need to create open and transparent online platforms, and that decentralizing economic decision-making will enable the development of diverse forms and levels of public-sector activity. For instance, housing and utilities will most likely fall under the control of municipal authorities and local self-government.
Europe provides examples of state-owned companies that were not only profit-driven but also addressed social problems.
The Western European experience of recent decades is worth recalling here. In Austria, regional authorities set up construction companies in several federal states, whose operations — within the framework of market competition — led to falling housing prices. Another example is the well-known Finnish company Sitra, established in the 1990s. It functioned as a state-backed venture capital fund, tasked not only with generating profits but also with promoting job creation in the regions, raising the economy’s technological level, ensuring employment for women, and more. Sitra’s remarkable success in the late 20th century propelled Finland to the forefront of technological development in Europe.
Governance in the public sector
How will governance in the public sector differ from classical forms of capitalist management? One starting point is the existing experience within the modern economy of so-called “teal organizations”, characterized by minimal hierarchy and active employee participation in decision-making. Yet within the private sector, such organizations sooner or later encounter a conflict between the interests of shareholder-owners and workers. In the public sector, this contradiction would be removed. This does not mean that new contradictions will not emerge; rather, democratic procedures must be created to resolve them.
Sectoral congresses are one form of democratic governance.
At a higher level, one form of democratic governance could be sectoral congresses, where professionals collectively discuss existing problems and propose organizational and staffing solutions for the state to consider. Such congresses of teachers, agronomists, and engineers began to emerge in Russia after the February Revolution of 1917, but the practice did not develop any further: civil war is hardly a time for professional congresses. Today, it would be entirely feasible to return to this model at a new level.
Clearly, enterprises and sectors differ in their degree of readiness for self-management. Moreover, for obvious reasons, not all issues can be resolved at this level. Centralized planning and management bodies, operating under the control of representative, democratically elected authorities, must ensure the setting of development priorities, which are already discernible in broad outline today.
Priorities
For decades, international forums have issued eloquent documents on the need to protect the planet from ecological catastrophe, accompanied by speeches about the value of human life, the importance of culture and education, and the creation of more humane and comfortable living conditions. Yet, unfortunately, the reality around us clearly contradicts all this.
Environmental initiatives are alien to the market economy, as they do not lead to profit maximization.
The problem is that various environmental and humanistic demands are, so to speak, bolted onto the market-corporate economic system, appearing as external and alien factors. They are expected to operate from the outside — through incentives or penalties — without affecting the overall logic to which private companies are objectively subject: the logic of profit maximization and capital accumulation.
At the same time, what matters fundamentally is the initial purpose — what an organization is created for and according to what criteria it is structured. This is why, incidentally, universities, armies, and scientific academies, even within capitalism and with considerable resources at their disposal, have not become fully bourgeois institutions, although they have been partially bourgeoisified.
Democratic planning must develop its own priorities and create the structures needed to implement them.
Democratic planning must not only develop its own priorities, but also create the corresponding structures to support them. In Russia, the adoption of the new Forest Code in the 2000s had catastrophic consequences, turning forestry into an ordinary commercial sector — much like the commercialization and privatization of railways in Russia and the UK led to similarly damaging results. In the face of the global ecological crisis, reforestation and afforestation have become a central task. It is worth recalling the significant work carried out in this area during the early Soviet period.
Development priorities must be set based on social, environmental, and cultural needs.
Forestry, transport, energy, science, and education — all these sectors can become powerful drivers of economic growth, but their primary objectives must be set on the basis of social, environmental, and cultural needs. Even technologies themselves can develop in different directions depending on what developers prioritize. The story of airships is a classic example. As late as the 1970s, they were proposed as an ideal solution for cargo transport in Siberia and the Far East, but they did not fit the agenda of the machine-building sector and failed to attract military interest, despite the military being the most generous client. Notably, despite the clear potential of such projects, airship development in both the United States and Britain met the same fate.
The pursuit of state-defined, non-economic goals creates opportunities for economic growth.
By contrast, when non-economic goals were at the center of the state agenda and became institutionalized, they gradually shaped the economy and created new opportunities for its growth. Mass tourism, for example, emerged as an industry from the widespread introduction of paid holidays for workers — a policy that businesses fiercely resisted at the time.
By shaping new priorities, we inevitably shape a new economy, with structures and rules different from those of today.
New priorities — a new economy.
The humanization of life is an equally important issue around which socio-economic reconstruction can be organized. A glance at modern cities is enough to see how improvements in everyday comfort for the middle class coexist with the rising levels of psychological distress and alienation. The growing concentration of population and resources in megacities and urban agglomerations leads to the decline of small and medium-sized towns and to a crisis of social infrastructure in rural areas. It goes without saying that no one is advocating a return to the policies of Pol Pot, who, under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sought to abolish the capital city by expelling its population. Yet the over-urbanization of our time leads, in the long run, to a future that is no less dystopian.
The only possible response to this challenge is a policy of re-urbanization aimed at developing small and medium-sized towns, as well as agro-towns directly integrated into the rural environment and economy. This will require substantial investment in cultural, healthcare, transport, educational, and even informational infrastructure. In the long run, however, it will generate not only new sources of economic growth, but a new quality of growth — one that is far more balanced and, crucially, is not accompanied by destructive effects on people’s inner well-being.
Only society itself can determine development priorities.
The formation of new development priorities must be a task for society as a whole, engaging people not only in strategic discussions but also in implementing practical projects. There are no miracle solutions that can or should be imposed from above. The responsibility of the left lies in developing its proposals, advancing initiatives, and shaping its agenda in such a way that they gain traction among the broader public — turning them from party-political or ideological positions into something commonly shared. This is precisely what the difficult work of hegemony involves.
No matter how many compelling ideas we put forward or how many appealing visions of the future we create, the real prospects for development will depend on the balance of forces and on our ability to unite people and social groups that still remain quite skeptical of our ideas.
To become the majority, we must first learn to be recognized as one of their own.
What matters most here is not utopias or promises of happiness in some distant future, but political solutions that work here and now.
A prospect, not a utopia
I hope that readers of this article will not be left with the impression that the limit of my ambitions is a mixed economy with a developed public sector and strong democratic institutions — even though, in the current circumstances, that alone would be a significant step forward. I have deliberately confined myself to a brief outline of changes that are sufficiently radical for the present moment, yet at the same time realistically achievable and entirely concrete.
The paradox is that even the implementation of such a program, which some may regard as limited, will encounter a whole range of issues and difficulties, obstacles and unforeseen developments. In addressing them, we will not only move closer to realizing our project but also transform it and, most likely, radicalize it.
During its implementation, the left project will change and become more radical.
The aim of transformation is not to remake everything at once in accordance with a pre-formulated plan and a rigid ideology. Rather, the first wave of changes should initiate a new logic of development — one that transforms the priorities, needs, and opportunities of society and thereby shapes subsequent transformations, until, as Marx put it, social evolutions cease to be political revolutions. This logic inevitably leads us beyond market relations and commodity exchange, the narrow limits of which are already being exceeded by new technologies that allow, for instance, near-infinite replication. In such cases, by sharing knowledge, software, images, or technologies, we do not lose them as we once would have lost a material object through sale. The knowledge economy, by definition, ceases to be a commodity economy.
The first wave of changes must initiate a new logic of development.
This, however, does not imply the possibility of a return to Soviet-type administrative-bureaucratic planning. Even if someone wished to bring such a system back, nothing worthwhile would come of it, simply because it was the transition to a new technological era that predetermined the inevitable demise of the Soviet centralized system to a far greater extent than any “betrayals” or economic inefficiencies — as dogmatic communists and dogmatic liberal anti-communists respectively tend to claim. A knowledge economy requires unrestricted exploration, flexible thinking, and people who are not constrained by bureaucratic and ideological restrictions.
The Soviet economy cannot be restored, no matter how much some might wish it.
Both the negative and the positive aspects of the Soviet experience must, however, be taken into account on the path to the future, through a critical analysis of its achievements — sometimes associated with an unprecedentedly effective concentration of resources in priority areas — and its failures, which produced an equally remarkable waste and misallocation of resources where such priorities were absent.
Even today, a key source of economic inspiration for us lies in the ideas and projects of the communist reformers of the 1960s — Ota Šik, Włodzimierz Brus, or Rezső Nyers — not to mention their predecessors, Oskar Lange and Michał Kalecki.
At the same time, we continue to draw new insights from examining the failures of the planned economy in the Soviet Union — for example, when reading Alexey Safronov’s important recent book The Great Soviet Economy. But the main historical lesson cannot be reduced to an understanding of the shortcomings of bureaucratic centralization. A technocratic utopia that assumes that “computers will calculate everything” would be no less of a dead end.
A technocratic utopia is also a dead end. Machines will not be able to formulate our interests for us.
Even the most intelligent machines will not be able to formulate our interests for us, which, as Ota Šik already showed, will in any case remain contradictory — and these contradictions often arise not only between people, but within one and the same individual. The constant, multi-level reconciliation of interests, the search for compromises based on available resources and general priorities — this is the task of democratic planning: the work of many people, with their needs, desires, tastes, and even fears, which must also be taken into account.
Machines make our labor easier and can even turn it into a source of pleasure, but they will free us neither from responsibility nor from the need for activity that transforms and improves the world around us. A future in which, as the old Soviet song has it, “the robots do the work, and man is happy”, would truly mark the end not only of history but of society itself. The transformations for which we struggle are not aimed at creating a republic of idlers, but at building a system that offers the greatest possible scope for the collective and individual self-realization of human beings through creative, free activity. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
Some may call this a utopia. We call it a prospect.
Stock image.
