God’s Children Can Govern

I joined the Democratic Socialists of America when I was seventeen years old. I don’t need to tell you what DSA was in New York back in 2007. Some of you here remember it. I made so many good friends, but we were lucky if a dozen people showed up to a meeting.

We made progress through the patient, steady work and commitment of those people and the many more who joined later. We were marathon runners for socialism.

This, though, is a moment for sprinting. This is the biggest opening our movement has had in decades. The time we devote to political work in the next few months and years will have an outsize impact in our city and country — for now and for posterity.

But what exactly should we be doing, and how should we relate to both the new mayor’s administration and our other comrades in elected office? In my mind, our tasks as organized socialists outside of government are both different and largely compatible with theirs.

The key demands of our moment are around the affordability agenda. Our mayor-elect will be leading an effort to raise revenue to fund social programs and empower the city’s working class. If Zohran [Mamdani], our other electeds, and the grassroots movement around them deliver positive change in people’s lives, we’ll build a deeper social base for the Left.

Right now, our electoral strength has far outpaced our base. But people are ready for our message and ready for results.

But fundamentally, there are constraints to any sort of social democratic governance. Just as under capitalism, workers are dependent on having profitable firms for jobs. Cities are dependent on big corporations and wealthy people for tax revenue.

Zohran needs to navigate these constraints. He can’t undermine the old regime of accumulation and redistribution without having a replacement for it, and certainly there can’t be a total replacement in one city.

These concerns aren’t new. This is the dilemma of social democracy. This is the tension between our near-term and long-term goals that has existed in the socialist movement for 150 years.

Our elected officials in the near term need to manage capitalism in the interest of workers, while our movement also has a long-term goal of constructing a new system through the self-emancipation of those workers.

We need to see the constraints that Zohran will be under in these structural terms, rather than moral ones. But having patience and being supportive of him doesn’t answer how we reconcile the near and the long — social democracy and socialism.

At the very least, it’s important that we remember the end goal. The great theorist of reformism, Eduard Bernstein, once said that “the goal is nothing, the movement everything.” I think that’s not quite right. If we don’t talk about socialism after capitalism, no one else will. The historic dream of our movement, a world without exploitation or oppression, will be lost.

But we shouldn’t just avoid reformism because we want to feel pure as “true socialists” or as an intellectual pursuit. We should avoid reformism and remember the goal of rupture with capitalism because it can offer a compelling vision of the world to those we’re trying to reach.

Socialism isn’t “Sweden” like Bernie [Sanders] sometimes says. Socialism isn’t even just, as Martin Luther King Jr said and Zohran has beautifully invoked, “a better distribution of wealth for all of God’s children.”

Socialism means a better distribution but also democratic control over the things we all depend on — workers holding the levers of production and investment, and the state guaranteeing the basics of life as social rights.

Socialism means no longer begging corporations to invest in our communities or the rich to stay and pay their taxes.

Socialism means overcoming the labor-capital dialectic through the triumph of labor itself, not a more favorable class compromise.

Socialism means that the people who’ve kept this world alive — the caregivers, the drivers, the machinists, the farmworkers, the cleaners — stop being an invisible backdrop and become the authors of their futures.

Socialism means a society where those who have always given without having any say finally show their true capabilities. Where, as C. L. R. James said, every cook can govern.

Socialism means replacing an economy built on hierarchy and exclusion with one built on the intelligence and creativity of working people themselves.

That is the goal we keep alive. Not because it’s utopian, but because it is the only horizon equal to the dignity and potential of ordinary people.

And because, it’s compelling. This isn’t just offering workers some of their surplus value back in exchange for their votes. It’s offering them the future, a society that they can own, a chance to assume their rightful place as agents of history.

Something like this is real socialism. It isn’t an interest group or a label to distinguish ourselves from other progressives. It’s a fundamentally more radical goal than those of our allies. It’s premised on a different analysis of the world around us and the world that can be built.

Perhaps we can think of ways to bridge some of the gap between near and long through a set of demands that at least raise the concept of socialization immediately. Ideas that offer not just more badly needed social welfare but a taste of ownership and control. A hint at a different political economy.

Just one example: when a business closes down or its owners are retiring, workers supported by a public fund could get the first crack at saving it by converting it into a labor-managed firm. At the city level, we can have a municipal office to help workers turn shuttered shops into cooperatives by providing the backbone of legal and accounting support and fast-tracking permits.

We’ve already been talking about city-owned grocery stores and the need for public housing. We need more ideas like these. Reforms that fit within social democracy but gesture beyond it.

Socialism in Our Time

I meant to open with this but, before I end, I just want to say that it’s been thrilling to meet people who’ve just joined DSA. It’s been nice to see old friends too. I’ve been complaining about missing the first half of the Knicks game, but even Jalen Brunson can’t keep me away from here.

I’m really enthusiastic about what we can do in the next couple of years. We will improve the lives of millions of people. And we will grow our movement.

But in addition to enthusiasm, we need honesty about how far we still have to go to root ourselves in working-class communities. We need more power not just at the ballot box but at the points of production and exchange. And we need to be honest about the battles and constraints that Zohran will face, and be ready to support him when times get tough.

Zohran’s mayoralty will be a fight for what’s winnable right now. Our job is to let that fight expand, not narrow, our horizon — and to keep alive the goal of socialism in our time.