Reclaiming The Future: A Beginners Guide to Planning the Economy – on sale in November 2024

Everything you see in our town, greenhouses, livestock, all shared. Collective ownership … This is a commune. We’re communists.

—Maria, The Last of Us

My next book is out in November 2024! Let’s reclaim the future from the oppressive forces of the far right and the death cult ecocide of the capitalists. Let’s build a world based on collective ownership, social planning and participatory democracy to establish radical abundance for us all.

This book has been around three years in the research and writing. It is based on a passionately held belief of mine that a core part of the radical left project has to be inspiring people for a better world, one free of exploitation and oppression. The reluctance to even really engage in a creative debate of what post-captialist might look like is a serious weakness of ours. Marx might have been reluctant to write ‘cook books for the future’ but we have the experience of the 20th century, and the apparent catastrophic failure of ‘communism’. Unless we can explain what will be different and how we can build it – or at least open a discussion about that – then we will not win. And with the climate crisis accelerating beyond control – we cannot afford to fail again.

You can pre-order online here

Some endorsements to get the blood flowing

‘A convincing case for socialist democratic planning as the only way to meet the needs of billions of humans without destroying the planet and other species. And it offers a political strategy for how you can fight for such a world.’- Michael Roberts, economist and author of Capitalism in the 21st Century

‘A sober and engaging assessment of the most urgent problem of our generation: how to transcend capitalism in order to build a real democracy, peace, environmental sustainability, and social justice in an ecosocialist society based on the principle of solidarity, rather than inequality and exploitation. Hannah dissects on the drawbacks of capitalism, and outlines how to build an actual, functioning socialist society on that basis. An excellent book that deserves to be read widely.’- Alfredo Saad-Filho, University of Johannesburg

‘Simon Hannah emphasises the urgent need for a vision of a Utopia that reclaims ecosocialist and democratic futures, through critical analysis of past socialist experiences that failed to achieve this. Drawing on real struggles for environmental and social justice, Reclaiming the Future is a radical theoretical and concrete criticism of the capitalist short-term profit-oriented logics, offering a major contribution to the growing debates on post-capitalism.’- Catherine Samary, researcher in political economy, co-editor of Decolonial Communism, Democracy and the Commons