The 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was held on Wednesday, April 22nd at Toronto Metropolitan University with support from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – New York Office. A special thanks to TMU Faculty of Arts Dean Amy Peng, and RLS-NYC Director Stefan Liebich for hosting this Broadbent Institute event.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the left’s foremost theorists on democracy and history, and often promoted the idea that democracy always has to be fought for and secured from below, never benevolently conferred from above. The Broadbent Institute founded the annual Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize & Lecture to honour Professor Wood’s legacy as an internationally renowned scholar and to bring her work to new generations of Canadians.
The Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is given annually to an academic, labour activist or writer and recognizes outstanding contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, or sociology. Each year’s recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture.
The 2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was delivered by Jacobin Magazine founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara. He is awarded the 2026 Prize in recognition of his role in laying the intellectual foundations for this generation’s socialist movements.
2026 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture
This lecture has been edited for clarity from delivery.
Accepting this award, I recall an early culture war in the United States at the beginning of my career — maybe ten years ago — around youth sports participation trophies.
I don’t know if that made it to Canada, but it was a very big issue in the US, where the right was concerned that young children were getting trophies just for participating in sports. I did a radio interview, where I admitted that I don’t think I received any prizes or awards other than participation awards. But I thought that, in fact, I deserved those participation awards because it signified what sports is really about: fair play, competition, and being, at least in my case, gracious in defeat over and over and over again.
So I would like to, once again, thank the Broadbent Institute. Thank you also to the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung for this honor. You probably still don’t want me on your Little League baseball team, but at least now I have something that’s not a participation trophy.
I first read Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origins of Capitalism while procrastinating for my actual coursework in my very first month of college.
I read the first edition of the book. The longer view edition, which came out a few years later from Verso Books, was a bridge too far for a lazy undergraduate. But the first edition’s 138 pages were enough to do what the very best Marxist scholarship does.
It was accessible. It was written in clear prose for ordinary people, not buried in jargon for just academics. It was intuitively graspable, but it had depth. It had a material mechanism at its core.
It wasn’t just a moral complaint about capitalism’s rawness, but an account of how the system actually emerged: the particular relations of market dependence; the particular historical break in the English countryside that made those relations possible; the particular pressures that spread them from there across the world. And it gave you a scope and a history that stretched across centuries and continents while remaining politically alive in the present.
Most of all, it insisted on capitalism as a system. Not one system, I should say—but the system. Not one social arrangement among many. Not the economy, not modernity, but the underlying key to understanding the world we live in. It’s what Ellen would later call in Democracy Against Capitalism a system of social relations and political power. A system that arose contingently and therefore a system that is not permanent.
As Ellen pointed out in The Origins of Capitalism, markets existed before capitalism. What capitalism introduced was market dependence: a system in which basic survival was contingent on engagement with the market, where all of human activity was subservient to the market.
This was one of Ellen’s gifts to us. She refused to let us naturalize capitalism even backward into history. If it had a beginning, therefore it could have an end. And she asked the question that this lecture is really about. In Democracy Against Capitalism, she wanted to know how democracy might be pushed past the limits that capitalism imposed on it; how it could be pushed from just the political realm where we’ve won some real democracy, to economic ones as well. And this is a question that we still face.
I had the chance to personally engage with Ellen’s work, later on as an editor in 2014 when she wrote for Jacobin. And I had the chance to exchange a few ideas with her then. And in these small interactions and from studying her work, I know enough to say that I suspect that Ellen would disagree with some of what I’m about to say tonight.
Because what follows is a case for socialism. A case for socialism after capitalism that incorporates markets, in a pretty important and substantial way. And as I was writing this lecture and as I was co-writing a forthcoming book, The Blueprint, with my co-writers Mike Beggs and Ben Burgis, elaborates on these ideas, I thought often about how I would defend these arguments to Ellen and to another great critic of market socialism, our comrade, Leo Panitch.
So I would defend it this way. As Ellen pointed out in The Origins of Capitalism, markets existed before capitalism. What capitalism introduced was market dependence: a system in which basic survival was contingent on engagement with the market, where all of human activity was subservient to the market.
Socialism, if it means anything, must abolish that condition. No one’s ability to eat, access care, to educate their children or secure housing should hinge on their position within the market. That’s the heart of the socialist promise and we shouldn’t let it go. But incentives for participating in markets, for participating in the economy’s complex network of production, could help generate the surplus that makes the elimination of market dependence possible in the first place.
Our goal as egalitarians is not to abolish, after all, production or exchange across a complex division of labour, but to abolish the system of market dependence and exploitation that currently governs them. That, at any rate, is how I would defend my argument to people who are sadly no longer with us.
But I should get on to actually making the argument.
Contrary to the image of the left in the United States, and the left in Canada, of us as a bunch of hapless or noble losers, the history of the modern left has been one of astounding success, if uneven and sometimes tragic. Success, at least, at taking state power. There was nothing like it in history, since the early Islamic conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. From their common origins among small bands of workers and artisans, and later the parties of the Second International, within 100 years, communism won a third of the world. And social democracy, in one form or the other, took over a fifth of it. Hal Draper, a critic of the contending socialisms of his time from the left, could remark in 1966 that for the first time in the history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves socialist in one sense or another. I don’t think it was true then, but it certainly is not true now.
Socialists more than ever need what we can call “world historic confidence”. Confidence that made miners in Wales and farmers in Vietnam think of themselves not as history’s victims, but as its great protagonists.
Even before they won power, the workers movement of that era won a culture. Miners in Wales asked to be buried with their copies of The Communist Manifesto the way an earlier generation had asked to be buried with the Bible. It was a secular culture with working people at its center. In homes across Europe, portraits of working-class leaders were hung where the icons of saints once had. And in union halls, the feasts of the church were merged in with a new calendar.
Eric Hobsbawn recounted a 1891 International Workers Day announcement In the Po Valley. It read, “The priests have their festivals. The 1st of May is the festival of workers of the entire world.”
Workers soon had more than symbols of identity and pride. Socialism within capitalism (social democracy) and socialism outside of capitalism (Soviet communism and its analogs) seemed to offer living examples of a different world. But they collapsed almost as suddenly as they emerged. And what they never achieved anywhere, and what was never achieved anywhere, was a socialism after capitalism. Even today, as the anglophone left, through figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani, through the growth of new organizations on the left, it’s hard to tell how much progress we’re making, even just reviving a form of socialism within capitalism.
Socialists more than ever need what we can call “world historic confidence.” Confidence that made miners in Wales and farmers in Vietnam think of themselves not as history’s victims, but as its great protagonists. Both historic models of 20th century socialism, Soviet style central planning and social democracy, however, were not just besieged from the outside and defeated. They failed.
Everyone has a joke about the Soviet economy. Or at least that just shows you the type of people I hang out with. So let me rephrase that. Some people have jokes about the Soviet economy. The one I like is about the nail factory that, when incentivized by planners to produce according to numerical output, first produced a lot of tiny nails, then when incentivized according to output by weight, produced useless giant nails.
In the real world, beyond their obvious political failings, two interconnected problems undermined Soviet style economic systems. The first was calculation. Administrative planning of an entire economy was not just a difficult technical challenge to overcome. It was impossible. Gosplan oversaw nearly 400 individual bureaucracies. And these bureaucracies combined oversaw 43,000 factories, 26,000 construction enterprises, 47,000 farming units, 260,000 service establishments, and over 1 million retail trade shops.
The factories alone produced around 12 million distinct products. And each of those products required the right inputs for the right suppliers at the right locations on the right timelines, all tangled together in supply chains that stretched across eleven time zones.
Planners were dealing with tens of billions of variables at a minimum. And that rises into the trillions once you extend these variables across time. And even to plan that all rationally, you need to know in advance what every firm could produce, what every household wanted, and how every input connected to every output.
No one could know that. No one. So what you got was rule of thumb guesswork for the most brilliant planners in the world. Last year’s numbers, plus a little more propped up by a vast secret economy of barter, hoarding, and backchannel deals that managers ran on the side — not out of corruption, but just to keep production limping forward.
That brings us to the second problem of incentives. Every manager understood perfectly well that the resources they got next year dependent on the numbers they turn in this year. They lowballed their projected output compared to real capacity and then over-reported the resulting output. They hoarded labour and they hoarded materials because the penalty for missing an output target was far greater than the penalty for inefficiency.
I had a similar experience when I was a secretary all of thirteen years ago at Brooklyn College, where I fulfilled our requirement on paper by spending less money. And then our budget was cut the next year. I learned a valuable lesson.
Similarly, the workers working for these managers figured out quickly that overfilling a quota only meant a higher quota next quarter. Weak firms were never allowed to fail because letting them fail meant unemployment and broken supply chains. So inefficiency was never consistently punished. The whole hierarchy, from the Politburo down to the guy pretending to work on the factory floor, had an incentive to lie about what it was doing.
These weren’t bugs you could fix with a better algorithm or a faster computer. They were coded into the structure of administrative planning itself. Now, if socialism outside of capitalism failed because it tried to abolish markets, socialism within capitalism, social democracy, failed for the opposite reason. It tried to tame capitalism without transcending it.
Social democracy empowered workers politically while leaving the ownership of production and investment in the hands of capitalists. It produced a standoff between a mighty workers movement and these traditional sources of business power. As long as the economy was growing, the standoff held.
For a while it did work quite well. Post-war Sweden was probably the most livable society in the world at the time. It had full employment. It had centralized unions that negotiated on equal footing with employers. It had, eventually, a universal welfare state supported by a growing economy. Workers there had dignity, security and real power on the shop floor and at the ballot box. And as they got more secure, they practiced more and more solidarity, not just with each other, but with those across the world, especially in the third world. Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme his final public speech, days before his death, before his assassination, was delivered alongside African National Congress President Oliver Tambo.
In it, he said that a system like apartheid cannot be reformed; it can only be abolished. Palme, by some accounts, might have been killed for that speech and for his advocacy for the people of South Africa.
But there was a contradiction at the core of Palme’s project that derailed it far before his death. Social democracy empowered workers politically while leaving the ownership of production and investment in the hands of capitalists. It produced a standoff between a mighty workers movement and these traditional sources of business power. As long as the economy was growing, the standoff held. There was enough surplus to give labour raises, provide capital with profits, and fund the welfare state on top of it.
But the moment that growth slowed in the 1970s, the whole arrangement started to buckle. The left wing of social democracy saw the problem clearly and tried to solve it. The Meidner Plan of 1976 proposed gradually transferring ownership of large firms to worker-controlled funds — a real path from social democracy to democratic socialism, funded by the profits the workers were generating themselves through years of wage restraint. It was a brilliant solution in both a technocratic sense to Sweden’s economic difficulties, but also its political impasse.
It was also something that couldn’t have been won without a mass mobilization of workers from below that Swedish Social Democratic leadership could not abide by. Even with the lukewarm support of the SAP, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Swedish capital treated the Meidner Plan as an existential threat. The scheme was gutted.
But the real lesson from this history is very different from the one that today’s social democrats draw from it. They say that social democracy is as far as you can go, and in and of itself it was a radically egalitarian achievement. So settle for it. Be realistic and keep making slow and steady progress on the path to building a better world. But capital is a constantly moving target, it isn’t a static one. And it doesn’t accept the draw or allow you to slowly besiege it.
Today, it’s no longer enough to argue that the alternative to capitalism, or an alternative to capitalism, is politically feasible. We must argue and convince people that it’s technically possible as well.
At some point, a war of position must become a war of maneuver. But it was indeed years of steady organizing and patient reform that opened the door to structural transformation to begin with. Meidner and generations of social democratic workers understood that. Our task now is to finish what they started.
As a result of not just capitalist propaganda, but the real failures of both forms of 20th century socialism, a skepticism has grown about socialism’s future. Wouldn’t taking democratic control over a complex economy eventually boomerang into crisis, collapse into inefficiency, or harden into authoritarianism?
To shake the grip of capitalist realism I think we need to answer these questions seriously and we need to recover an alternative. Karl Marx spent enough of his life clashing with eccentric and fanciful utopian socialists that he warned against writing recipes for the cook shops of the future. Actually, I have no idea if these people were eccentric or fanciful. This is my orthodox Marxist bias coming out. They might have been very tough-minded.
But today it’s no longer enough to argue that the alternative to capitalism, or an alternative to capitalism, is politically feasible. We must argue and convince people that it’s technically possible as well. This doesn’t require pretending that there’s a single settled model of socialism just waiting to be implemented. It does require confronting a set of unavoidable questions that any credible alternative must answer.
Could a socialist economy use prices, profits and competition to coordinate complex production without reproducing domination or significant inequality? What incentives encourage efficiency and innovation in an economy of democratically governed firms? How can productivity growth be sustained so that living standards continue to rise, shortages are avoided, and technological change continues, without the sort of mass insecurity that workers experience today? And what role must the state play in stabilizing the macro economy, guiding investment, and enforcing democratic priorities without suffocating initiative?
In a vision of socialism that could be plausibly realized in our lifetimes, large areas of social life would be outside the logic of commodification: healthcare, education, transportation, energy, telecommunications. These aren’t consumer goods, but social infrastructures on which participation in modern life depends. Organizing them through profit seeking intermediaries that ration by price rather than need introduces predictable distortions. The result is a system that undermines both equality and efficiency. Decades of comparative experience suggests that public provisions in these sectors can deliver better outcomes at a lower cost, precisely because it aligns provision with social need rather than purchasing power.
Beyond these domains lie the broader economy of goods and services, where coordination problems are more varied, and where markets remain important. In the market sector of an economy composed of democratically governed firms, price signals would still convey information about supply and demand, helping to coordinate production and consumption.
In a vision of socialism that could be plausibly realized in our lifetimes, large areas of social life would be outside the logic of commodification: healthcare, education, transportation, energy, telecommunications. These aren’t consumer goods, but social infrastructures on which participation in modern life depends.
But the surplus generated by economic activity would be controlled by those who produce it. And investment would be allocated through public financial institutions rather than by capitalists. In this way, markets can function as tools of coordination without reproducing the power relations of capitalism. In this socialist framework, productive enterprises in the commodity-producing sector are controlled by workers rather than external shareholders or private capitalists. Governance rights attach to participation rather than to a financial stake. Membership in a firm, then, resembles membership in a political community. It confers voice, imposes obligations, but can’t be traded like a commodity.
This shift in governance requires a corresponding shift in how investment is organized. Any feasible socialism must avoid soft budget constraints, and allow inefficient firms to fail while more productive ones expand. And from an egalitarian standpoint, this should be common sense. Why should we waste the most valuable thing in the world, human labour, in inefficiency?
But workers in democratic firms should not be expected to supply capital themselves, or to tie their personal savings to the fortune of a single workplace. Leaving investment decisions at the level of individual firms would generate systematic distortions that would destroy a socialist system. Disparities in capital intensity, for example, would encourage workers to cluster in capital-rich sectors, while labour intensive production and the public sector are left unstaffed. Imagine everyone wanting to work on oil rigs, or some other very capital-intensive sector where your dividends would be massive, instead of working at a childcare clinic.
Organizing ownership and investment as a social function, rather than a firm-level one, is therefore essential. Public banks serve this role by holding productive assets in common, allocating capital on behalf of society as a whole. In this way, firms operate with real autonomy, while remaining stewards rather than owners of social wealth. And the state can use a vast array of macroeconomic tools to influence the direction of development.
A socialism that combines redistribution with social ownership, democratically-guided investment and wage structures that reward efficiency, can translate a dynamic economy into shorter hours, longer lives, and greater freedom over how those lives are lived.
One additional mechanism is essential for such an economy to remain both efficient and egalitarian over time: the creation of minimum wages, differentiated by occupation, to shape development itself. Rather than allowing labour markets to sort worker managers purely through localized bargaining power or sectoral rents, benchmark wages establish a floor that reflect collective priorities about dignity, skill, and social contribution.
So firms and sectors that rely on low pay and labour discipline would be pressured to innovate, to reorganize or contract. While those that raise productivity through new techniques, through additional training, through technological improvement, would be rewarded through increased dividends. In this way, the economy is directed along a high road of development that rewards innovation and investment rather than just sweating out labour. And actually, at its peak, Swedish social democracy had a very similar mechanism, in which the very high demands from labour that were produced through centralized bargaining weeded out inefficient firms. And then wage constraint allowed the most efficient firms to expand and absorb some of that laid-off labour.
It’s necessary then for these minimum wages to act in such a way that increases productivity. But of course, in a socialist economy, the goal of increasing productivity isn’t a goal for its own sake. The goal is the expansion of leisure, of security, and ultimately, of time outside production.
A socialism that merely redistributes income, without changing how time is organized, would fall short of its promise. But a socialism that combines redistribution with social ownership, democratically-guided investment and wage structures that reward efficiency, can translate a dynamic economy into shorter hours, longer lives, and greater freedom over how those lives are lived. I don’t know the stats in Canada, but in the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor and their life expectancies is growing at a massive rate, despite various other factors like overdose deaths leveling off since 2022. It’s deeply rooted and systematic.
But none of this vision of a socialism after capitalism promises an end to political conflict or even to some types of inequality. Differences in skill, in effort, and in social valuation would, I imagine, persist. And some degree of income differentiation would remain. What would be eliminated is the translation of those differences into persistent inequalities of power. I’ve been trying to deliberately undersell this vision of socialism, in part to make it seem more realistic. And we’re in such a beautiful room that I think it inspires a certain sobriety in me.
But the implications of such a socialism, the implication of such a society, are enormous. In many parts of the world it would be the first society since the Neolithic Revolution not divided into a class of producers and a class of exploiters or surplus appropriators, since it socializes production and erodes the existing divisional labour.
This, I would argue to my socialist friends critical of market socialism, is a lofty enough task for one generation. Perhaps we could leave some additional tasks for others in the future. But of course this is just one sketch of just one model of organization for a post-capitalist society. Or as Marx might less-generously call it, one untested recipe for a future cookshop. But I strongly believe this exercise is worth pursuing. In its reluctance to engage with questions of economic design, the left has ceded ground to those who insist there is no alternative to capitalism.
Providing such an account of post-capitalist economics does not, of course, foreclose experimentation or debate. On the contrary, it opens up those discussions. A realistic picture of what a socialist future could look like and how we might get there also allows movements to situate immediate demands within a longer term project.
In a sense, the technical challenges to socialism are inseparable from its political ones. A left that can’t describe how a democratic economy might operate will struggle to sustain a confidence when faced with inevitable resistance. We need a third choice beyond just administrating the capitalist state or just protesting its failings.
So let me return to where I started, my sub-‘Mendoza Line’ seventh-grade batting average.
No, I will return to Ellen and her work.
Ellen refused to naturalize capitalism. She refused to let us say, as the defenders of every ruling class before the bourgeoisie had said, that this is just the way things are, how they’ve always been, and how they will always be.
Of course, naming a socialist future is a lot easier than making one. Moving towards socialism requires reviving the connection of the left to a working class agent. It requires organizing that class. It requires winning power and workplaces and governance. And it requires pursuing a program that could be a bridge to help us bring about a truly democratic economy. If we can’t win what remains of the left — to the belief that, as C. L. R. James said, “every cook can govern,” and to the belief that a system built on hierarchy and exploitation can be replaced by one built on democracy and shared prosperity — then we have little hope of winning over workers to that vision either.
Those who participated in almost any wing, even the most reformist, of the workers’ movement, from the first international through the 1980s, thought that they were at the vanguard of history itself. In an age that has taught us to mistrust every grand narrative, to settle for lesser evils, to treat the existing order as the furthest horizon our imagination is permitted to even think of, we can look to these workers for confidence. We can look to them for the confidence that we have to recover: a confidence in a socialism that no longer speaks merely in terms of election campaigns and small protests, but in the language of centuries and continents.
