The Future We Want

Socialism could have a future in America, argue Bhaskar Sunkara and Sarah Leonard, if we just think about it differently. Sunkara and Leonard, co-editors of of the essay collection The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century say that people aren’t scared of socialism taking their money, they’re scared of Wall Street taking their money. In fact, in a socialist future, money might actually go where it’s supposed to: back to the people. Taking on intersections of class and race, class and gender, they explain the logistics of moving towards a socialist future.

Sarah Leonard is a senior editor at The Nation, contributor to famous left-wing publication Dissent, and lecturer at NYU Gallatin. Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor and publisher of Jacobin magazine, a left-wing quarterly magazine recognized for offering socialist perspectives on contemporary issues.

Avoid The Unimaginable

Tom Hayden

December 11th, 1939 - October 23rd, 2016

"Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change... Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity -- but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today."

Quote excerpted from The Port Huron Statement, 1962

Always Fight With Love

"There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism. Call it what you may, call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country."

Quote excepted from a speech to the Negro American Labor Council, May 1965.

This Is A Working System!

"There’s this misguided myth that unions and management don’t get along. It’s a business bottom-line issue. Right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my competitiveness. The unions are my partner. They’re almost like a screening agency. This is a working system. I have never understood this right-to-work agenda." -Bill Kennedy, Rock Road Companies

From Fate Of The Union (NY Times, June 2015)

Rocking The System

"At a time when 99 percent of all new income is going to the top one percent, and when the top one-tenth of the one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, maybe its time for a political shakeup in this country and to go beyond establishment politics."

Quote from an interview with Bernie Sanders for ABC This Week, May 2015

Embrace The Alternative

"We must convince people that we need an alternative and we must convince them about what that alternative is. We need to stand up for the hundreds of millions of lives devastated by global capitalism. The abuses we saw in 2008 will happen over and over again as long as capitalism survives. And it is our job to break the cycle of capitalist exploitation of people and the ecosystem and save ourselves. This will only come about if we organize mass movements, if we build a radical political party and if we refuse to accept a system designed to subject the immense majority to misery so that a minority can pile up untold wealth." -Kshama Sawant

From The Most Dangerous Woman In America (TruthDig, March 2015)

A Vision That Speaks To Working People

"What I’m saying is that I do not want to see the US significantly dominated by a handful of billionaire families controlling the economic and political life of the country. That I do believe that in a democratic, civilized society, all people are entitled to health care as a right, all people are entitled to quality education as a right, all people are entitled to decent jobs and a decent income, and that we need a government which represents ordinary Americans and not just the wealthy and the powerful... The corporate media ignores some of the huge accomplishments that have taken place in countries like Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway. These countries, which have a long history of democratic socialist or labor governments, have excellent and universal health care systems, excellent educational systems and they have gone a long way toward eliminating poverty and creating a far more egalitarian society than we have. I think that there are economic and social models out there that we can learn a heck of a lot from." -Bernie Sanders

From John Nichols' interview with Sanders for The Nation, March 2014.

Life Is Lived In Common

"It was as a socialist, and because I was a socialist, that I fell in love with America. In saying that I am not indulging in romantic nostalgia about youthful days on the road but rather underlining a crucial political truth. If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right. To be a socialist — to be a Marxist — is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land. It is to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies." -Michael Harrington

From Fragments Of The Century: A Social Autobiography, 1973.

The Gifted Hunter... One Aim, One Destiny

Chokwe Lumumba

1947 - 2014

"Capitalism, at its rankest form, is not a humanistic economic system. It allows the most powerful to tear into the economic fabric of the least powerful. It allows people with big money to control people with no money, low money and small money in many ways including politically because the people with the money the determinant of who runs for office." -from Jackson Free Press interview

The Moral Choice?

"I'm utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument's over. But the idea that it's not going to be married to a social compact, that how you distribute the benefits of capitalism isn't going to include everyone in the society to a reasonable extent, that's astonishing to me. And so capitalism is about to seize defeat from the jaws of victory all by its own hand. That's the astonishing end of this story, unless we reverse course. Unless we take into consideration, if not the remedies of Marx then the diagnosis, because he saw what would happen if capital triumphed unequivocally, if it got everything it wanted. And one of the things that capital would want unequivocally and for certain is the diminishment of labor. They would want labor to be diminished because labor's a cost. And if labor is diminished, let's translate that: in human terms, it means human beings are worth less. From this moment forward unless we reverse course, the average human being is worth less on planet Earth. Unless we take stock of the fact that maybe socialism and the socialist impulse has to be addressed again; it has to be married as it was married in the 1930s, the 1940s and even into the 1950s, to the engine that is capitalism. The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?" -David Simon

Excerpt from a speech at the Festival Of Dangerous Ideas, December 2013