“The Things We Need …

One historic point of divergence between socialists and many liberals is the former’s recognition that the profit mechanism at the core of the market is divorced from actual social need. There’s no profit in, say, providing health care for every person as a right — in fact, the market more or less incentivizes the opposite (the more there is of something, the less valuable it tends to be to capitalists). It’s this structural failure that allows millions to be without the necessities of life, even — especially — in societies like the modern United States where resources and wealth are abundant. And where basic needs are not met, socialists contend, freedom is a largely vacant construct.

This brings us to a second and intimately related reason: namely, that the capitalist market not only encourages, but guarantees inequality and exploitation.

Capitalist societies are by definition class societies, and those deprived of the basic necessities of life are more than simply the “less fortunate.” They are the victims of a materially unequal society in which the ownership of wealth, and the social and political power that comes with it, remains heavily concentrated. To the socialist, then, there is no distinction between the “deserving” or “undeserving” poor, just a deprived class of people whose needs have yet to be met. The solution is the redistribution of wealth and power from the few to the many.

“… to thrive …”

“The worker must have bread, but she must have roses too.”

So said American socialist-feminist Rose Schneiderman in the early twentieth century — words that have continued to animate and inspire socialists ever since.

Schneiderman’s slogan eloquently conveys that the socialist struggle, while undoubtedly concerned with securing the necessities of life for all people, is ultimately about something far more precious and hopeful: the flourishing of abundant life in all its complexities and potential. Human beings are not meaningfully free when they have only the basics of survival and the greatest joys and offerings of life — luxuries, music, education, travel — are restricted to a wealthy few.

Nor, for the socialist, are people free when the price of subsistence, let alone comfort, is degrading or alienating work into which they must involuntarily sink years of their lives. As the famous image from Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times so brilliantly depicts, capitalism relentlessly tries to mold us in its own image, into feverishly competitive, acquisitive agents of its market algorithms.

People “thrive” under capitalism when they reach (or are simply born into) the top of a class hierarchy that tends to equate wealth with both social utility and moral desert. People thrive under socialism when they are given maximum freedom and time to relax, inquire, nurture their own creativity, and pursue their own ends rather than being leveraged as means.

As Chris Maisano writes:

The one-sided focus of most Marxists and socialists on distributional questions has obscured the fact that the animating principle of the Left is not so much equality, but rather freedom—freedom from alienating work and freedom to use our time and creativity for our own self-directed ends. Socialism does not equal the roughly equal distribution of stuff; the martyrs of the labor movement didn’t give up their lives so that everyone could have the right to buy an iPhone or a plasma screen TV, or to waste their lives working at crap jobs.

For all but the very wealthy, freedom of this kind remains obscure or limited even for comparatively privileged middle-class people in industrialized societies. While social-democratic efforts like debt-free education and reduced workweeks have, albeit in partial and fleeting forms, successfully expanded it for a few, democratic socialism aims to win it, permanently, for the many.

“… we …”

Another feature that separates socialism from liberalism, at least of the contemporary kind, is its acknowledgment and embrace of antagonism. Whereas the idea of citizenship common to most liberal states implicitly posits that we are all equal as individuals participating in markets, political parties, and voluntary social networks (with any residual inequality either accidental, deserved, or functionally necessary), socialists seek a collective response built on the acknowledgement of inequality and injustice.

Against the astroturfed cohesion evinced by appeals to The National Interest or platitudes like “Billionaires are just as patriotic as laid-off southern farm hands on Social Security!” socialists look to create meaningful solidarities between oppressed individuals and groups wherever they are and turn them into political power for the common good. This means not only a recognition of current class divisions, but also of the deep and abiding injustices in every society and the exclusions and prejudices they foster — from the cardinal sins of slavery and colonialism to the subordination of women and the oppression of queer and trans people. While socialists necessarily dedicate themselves to many different struggles, some of them local and some of them global, their deep commitment is to internationalism and peace.

Put in the simplest terms, democratic socialism pursues a richer, more inclusive, and infinitely more textured definition of “we” as the foundation for political community — with democracy being both its means and its end.

In this disorienting moment of hope, despair, and opportunity, it is this vision that must continue to glow, incandescent, as our guiding light.