To state the obvious: vastly more people will live in the future than are alive today. Of course, there’s always the chance we’ll destroy ourselves within a matter of decades. But if we survive as long as the typical mammalian species, humans have around 700,000 years left, and the earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions of years more.

As socialists we want to build a society that distributes power and resources from the ruling class to the masses of working people. But there’s another dimension of politics we sometimes overlook, the power over a different many: those not yet born.

These future people matter, a fact that we acknowledge readily, perhaps most often when discussing climate change. To borrow a metaphor from the late philosopher Derek Parfit, if I break a bottle in the woods and the glass cuts a young girl living one hundred years from now, am I blameless simply because she doesn’t exist yet? We should not discount future lives because they are separated from us in time — any more than we would discount people living on the other side of the world. This is a key insight of longtermism, called by Vox “effective altruism’s most controversial idea.” To me it jives perfectly with socialist common sense.