The fall after I graduated college, Donald Trump was elected president. Like many Americans, I was jolted into political action, asking myself what more could I have done to stop Trump and the far right from wielding power. This was my political reawakening as a young adult, spurring me to get involved with the Minnesota DFL Party and join DSA too.
For me, being a member of the DFL and DSA are two sides of the same coin: an imperfect political coalition that agrees on broad principles like social and racial justice, working class power and economic justice, bodily autonomy, and a basic sense of fairness in our society. In 2020, I was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and earlier this year, I was a delegate to the DSA National Convention.
It’s About Democracy
Democracy is the best way to make decisions that affect us all. It’s self-evidently the only moral way to structure society, which is why democracy is a cornerstone political value that unites much of humanity.
We all agree that we must have democracy in government, but why doesn’t this extend to our economy and workplaces which have just as much, if not more, control over our fortunes and wellbeing? But what would economic democracy look like?
Socialism is Economic Democracy
At its simplest, socialism is defined as social ownership of the means of production — land, capital goods like machinery, and systems of distribution and exchange. This stands in opposition to the economic autocracy of capitalism, where the ownership class ultimately decides how firms are run, how much workers are paid, if new investments are made or jobs are offshored, and who loses their job and livelihood in hard times.
Labor unions play a special role here, bringing workers together across differences of culture, politics, religion and race to ascertain and realize their shared interests in a spirit of solidarity. While not inherently socialist, unions are an expression of the democratic will of workers, constraining the worst excesses of capitalism.
The Everyday Socialism we Know and Love
Public schools, roads, water and sewer utilities, Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. Postal Service are all socialist initiatives that we know and love. Imagine if the USPS delivered mail only to households that it was profitable to deliver mail to, or if the federal government never invested in rural electrification because it wasn’t profitable. Huge swaths of our country would literally be in the dark.
So why should healthcare be organized around profit instead of human wellbeing? It certainly doesn’t deliver better outcomes. When it comes to basic life necessities — housing, healthcare, education, sanitation and nutrition — the profits of a few should never come before the wellbeing of society as a whole.
Some of the most successful forms of social ownership of the means of production are actually within a market system — not the centralized Soviet command economy model you may be thinking of.
For example, in the EmiliaRomagna region of Italy, one-third of all GDP is produced by workerowned cooperative enterprises. The worker-owners enjoy the full fruits of their labor while participating in business planning to consider factors beyond maximizing profits. You can think of it as unions on steroids. The entire community benefits too, giving this region the highest median income and lowest unemployment rate in Italy
Italy’s Marcora Law is behind this success.
When idled workers collect unemployment insurance, they can choose to take their entire annual benefits up front, pool them with other idled workers, and use those funds as the initial investment to start a worker-owned co-op. It’s a wildly successful model. It is democratic, and it is socialist.
DSA in Action
DSA is the United States's largest socialist organization today, with nearly 80,000 members. The ideologies of DSA members are incredibly diverse. Democratic deliberation and decision-making and a distributed power structure are central to the cohesion of the organization. While some political actors find it convenient to demagogue DSA because of a few ill-considered statements made recently, you should know the full picture.
DSA members are:
- Raising tens of thousands of dollars at a time to fund abortion services;
- Showing up in droves on picket lines, including the recent United Auto Workers strike;
- Organizing tenants to improve their living conditions in spite of negligent landlords;
- Educating and mobilizing the public to stop the Israeli government’s bombing and displacement of Palestinians;
- Advocating and lobbying on policy issues like Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, housing for all, and ending U.S. militarism;
- Hitting the doors and phones daily to elect candidates who share these priorities;
- And so much more.
The Cold War has been over for 30 years. Socialists aren't the boogeyman you grew up with. We are bringing innovative ideas to our political marketplace, expanding our conceptions of what is possible. I hope the rest of our community will see us for what we are instead of what the right wing would like you to think.
