Why Not Socialism?

A short book by the analytical Marxist G. A. Cohen, published in 2009 and developed from an earlier essay. It opens with a camping trip: friends on holiday share equipment and food and cooperate without markets or haggling, and it would seem repugnant if one camper demanded payment for sharing a skill. Cohen argues that this ideal is attractive because it realises two principles. The first is socialist equality of opportunity, which removes inequalities due to social circumstance and to unchosen natural talent, leaving only differences that reflect people's choices. The second is a principle of community, under which people serve one another because they care about one another, not for reward. Markets, by contrast, run largely on motives of greed and fear. Cohen then asks whether the camping ideal could work for a whole society and admits that nobody yet knows how to design the institutions it would require. Critics reply that a camping trip is too small and voluntary to model a society.

It makes the moral case for socialism in under a hundred pages, in plain language, and is an easy way into debates about luck, equality and community.