What is the future of progressive politics? What is the world that we are trying to build? In some ways these are the wrong questions. There’s so much in terms of low-hanging fruit that needs to be accomplished. From mass unemployment, to climate change, to immigration reform, to slowing the power of the military-industrial complex, to shepherding and building on complicated financial and health care packages, there’s no lack of things that need to get accomplished.

But, as Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism notes, the means of politics by which left-liberal reform happens is breaking down, and it can only be rebuilt by changing the long-horizon vision of what justice will look like on the left.