A specter is haunting America: the specter of socialism. All of the rulers of America have entered a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Trump and his fascists, Chuck Schumer and the neoliberals, billionaire ideologues and FBI hacks.
In the 2.5 years since Bernie Sanders’ candidacy reintroduced socialism to the American media, the socialist movement has grown dramatically. Socialists have ousted machine Democrats, the Democratic Socialists of America boasts 50,000 members, thousands of antifascists have fought the alt-right in dozens of cities and large strikes and radical unions have breathed some life back into the labor movement.
What do the socialists want? To hear the electoral wing tell it, what we want is national health care, a Green New Deal, housing relief, increased benefits and protections for workers and reduced military expenditure.
But we want what lies beyond these reforms too: We want economic democracy, we want a systematic program to destroy inequalities based on race and gender. The left wing of American socialism is a revolutionary wing, not content with social democracy and redistribution of wealth through taxation. We want worker ownership of factories, warehouses, dockyards, restaurants, business parks, hospitals and stores. We want popular control of urban planning, publicly directed investment in renewable energy, the closure of oil companies, big banks and health insurance and pharmaceutical companies. We want massive investment in public education and the end of both charter schools and union busting. We want school and residential desegregation. We want human needs and human pain to not be sources of profit. There are other demands, too, more immediate than the transformation of our entire economy: shorter work weeks, higher wages, family leave, rent control, mass public housing, voting rights for prisoners and ex-prisoners and the abolition of prisons.
Democracy requires the abolition of the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College, the end of the two-party system and a new constitution. We aim for workers' control through legitimate democracy, not rule by the rich — on this the electoral socialists, revolutionaries and trade unionists agree.
Socialists want the creation of international institutions to regulate trade and development in a way that doesn’t privilege the developed economies. We also want peace, the withdrawal of American troops from combat theaters, the end of U.S. support for the Saudi siege of Yemen and the Israeli colonization of Palestine. We want a party and government that supports the struggles of workers from Colombia and Brazil to India and the Philippines. Solidarity, not profit, is the heart of socialist foreign policy.
It is impossible to build a new world in 500 words. But this list of demands announces the goals of socialism and clarifies that, though we may fight alongside the Democrats, we shall in time outstrip them and bring to birth a just world. I will discuss the socialist view of history and the transformative vision of socialism in my remaining columns. Reality is Marxist, even if you are not. A better world is possible if you’re willing to build it.
Red Star: What socialists want
