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Michael Harrington
Born
The Other America (1962) documented the poverty hidden from affluent postwar America and helped inspire Johnson's War on Poverty. Harrington then spent decades arguing, against both the New Left and the old sectarians, that American socialists should work inside the Democratic Party as its "left wing of the possible". He founded what became the Democratic Socialists of America, the organisation behind much of today's US socialist revival.
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G. A. Cohen
Born
Cohen rebuilt Marxism with the tools of analytic philosophy, then moved on to defend socialism as a matter of justice rather than historical necessity. Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality took on Robert Nozick's libertarianism directly, and Why Not Socialism? uses a camping trip, where friends share gear without keeping accounts, to ask why we accept selfishness everywhere else. It is the shortest serious case for socialism in print.
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Erik Olin Wright
Born
Wright spent his career on two questions: how to map class in a society full of managers and professionals, and what socialism could look like short of revolution. Envisioning Real Utopias (2010) collected working examples, from Mondragon's cooperatives to participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and Wikipedia itself, and argued for "eroding" capitalism by growing such institutions inside it. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century is the readable summary.
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