The socialist movement, though stronger than at any time in the last 40 years, lacks centralized direction. To build power, socialists must decide which fights offer us the chance to challenge capitalism in an economic and political way right now.
One area of struggle is housing. Rising rent combined with overdevelopment in the suburbs has triggered a unique crisis. Suburbs are fundamentally unsustainable, and many cities have zoning laws against higher density housing in areas that need it the most, while landlords and suburban homeowners resist changes to rent and zoning laws. The socialist solution is a combination of rent control, large scale construction of high quality, high density public housing and investment in public transportation to make cities livable.
The second major sphere of class conflict in the United States is the fight for police demilitarization and prison abolition. The police, infiltrated on a large scale by self-conscious white supremacists, kill, brutalize, search and imprison people, particularly black people, with no accountability. The FBI, NSA and other agencies that Tufts students will go on to work for are part of this unaccountable armed state. Cops who are armed like soldiers and taught to torture are toxic to democracy. The police, from the local to the federal level, are an armed reactionary political force. In many places, police serve simply to fill prisons, where slave labor is rampant and people are treated like animals in the hundreds of thousands. It is impossible to be a democracy and have the largest carceral state in the world. Socialists should push for government to commute hundreds of thousands of non-violent sentences, spend lavishly to reintegrate people stolen from their communities, ban private prisons and keep the few remaining incarcerated people in facilities focused on rehabilitation.
The effective and rapid abolition of prisons as well as mass investment in quality public housing stock would challenge the power of white supremacy and the military state at its root. These are issues we can fight for on the local level as we continue to build the base necessary for mass revolutionary change.
The third area of strategic importance is climate policy. While the Green New Deal is gaining popularity among Democrats and socialists alike, it has yet to take concrete shape. Any change that comes from Washington will be hamstrung by America's reactionary Constitution. We simply don’t have time to fight it out in election cycles. We have about 12 years to stop this capitalist apocalypse. We need to make available huge sums for direct state investment in renewable energy, sustainable agricultural practices and industrial processes. This fight looks an awful lot like the housing fight on a local level, where sustainability will have to start with infrastructure and local ownership of the grid. Paying corporations to pollute slightly less won’t work, and a carbon tax is only part of the solution.
These areas are vital struggles, but we shouldn’t forget two other fights, which I will discuss next week: the struggle for socialized medicine and the fight against imperialism.
Red Star: Building socialism, Part 1 of 2
