After the electoral success of Kshama Sawant in Seattle and the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, interest in socialism has been at an all time high. It was Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2015 and anecdotally, there have been people who I know, once typical liberal Democrats, that have asked me about socialism or have posted links on social media about the subject. After its endless and hollow use as insult by Republicans and earnest denial by Democrats, there's a lot of people who's curiosity is sparked when it's used as proud point of identity. Especially in these times where both partisans of the ruling class and their sympathizers appear so incapable and/or unwilling to solve the urgent problems of our day.
So far, Bernie and his campaign has used the label to mean an unapologetic belief in the welfare state and has stressed that socialism and capitalism can exist side-by-side, both tenets of social democracy. Some socialists, such as all of us in anti-capitalist meetup, tend to disagree that capitalism and socialism can live harmoniously. While modern social democrats believe in doing reparative reforms of the capitalist political economy under a program filled with socialist values, other socialists, ones skeptical of social democracy, believe in a transformative reconstruction of the political economy that obliterates capitalism. And if Bernie and his agenda is emblematic of social democracy, that begs the question for those hungry for knowledge on socialism, what might an anti-capitalist socialist program look like?
Now, let's suspend our disbelief and imagine that despite the context of 2016 America being the same as it is now, things went differently and that the Democratic Party instead of becoming the neoliberal party that it is now, turned out to become a full-throated, anti-capitalist, democratic socialist party with an increasing commitment to an evermore radical policy agenda — the Democratic Socialist Party. Its convention just ended and they've adopted a program with ten themes filled with policy proposals and pledges.
Keep in mind that, obviously, this is filled with my subjective beliefs of what socialism is. Also that this isn't an agenda crafted first and foremost with electability or other factors in mind. It's to offer a vision and a contrast to the prominent socialist visions we have now and to inspire emerging socialists to think about how far the movement could go and to expand the parameters of imaginable and desired systemic change. At it's heart, this is a thinkpiece. With this said, here is the Democratic Socialist Party's Ten Themes for 2016.
Ending Inequity & Poverty for Good
Over the past decade wealth inequality has risen to levels unseen since the emergence of the welfare state and poverty is as stubbornly high as ever. Rather than a nation buoyed by a middle class, we've become two nations. In addressing the chronic crises that are increasing in severity, it's important to learn from the mistakes of the past century. A middle class economics is not a sustainable solution. The social oppression and economic exploitation of the poor combined with the superior power and access of the rich to craft the world is the seedling of ruin for the middle class. To address this problem in a way that will structurally last, rather than fixate on a strong middle class, there should be a refocusing on a transformative, irreversible redistribution of wealth and the dissolution of class. To accomplish the goal of redistribution, the Democratic Socialist Party proposes, strictly in tandem with the other redistributive policies of the agenda, a universal basic income set at $38,400 per annum for adults and $8,500 for minors, funded through a progressively curved payroll tax, taxes on activity within the financial sector, a land value tax, excess luxury consumption taxes, and profit from publicly owned enterprises. It would replace pre-existing cash transfer welfare programs.
Health for One & All
Calamity has been at the heart of the market-driven American healthcare system, untold hundreds of thousands — potentially over a million — over the past decades have died due to the negligence of our system. Even more have been victims of bankruptcy and extreme debt duress. Systemic discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, ability, and weight complicate issues for those that do receive treatment. Pharmaceutical companies develop products based on profit, not social need, the antithesis of Jonas Salk. There is a budding tread of back-alley abortions and illiteracy of sexual health is infamously widespread. The reputation of nursing homes is notorious. To cure what makes us sick as a nation the Democratic Socialist Party proposes the National Care Service, a universal public, decommodified, free at point of use healthcare system. Acquisitions of health institutions, nursing homes, and pharmaceutical companies would be done legally through expropriation procedures established under the legislation establishing the NCS. The system would be a decentralized, integrated network of local councils that collaborate horizontally and scale up vertically. It would be operated democratically in a demos of workers and patients, with an outside agency with legally binding power to ensure anti-discrimination and anti-abuse measures are enforced. The Hyde Amendment would be overturned within the legislation, and institutions would be required to offer sexual education lectures during annual check-ups starting at the age of twelve, with an option to opt out, with protection under doctor-patient confidentially. Funding would come from general taxation. All private, secondary, supplemental, or otherwise healthcare providers would be prohibited.
Lessons for Life
Education is at the forefront of our collective insecurities as a nation, we've developed a culture of looking across the world in admiration and wonder at varying and often contradictory approaches, all while implementing counterproductive measures such as militantly callous standardized tests, the incentivizing of inefficient, unaccountable charter schools, and cruel budget cuts. As a result, young children face stress completely inappropriate for such an age and current and former students past the K-12, into the university system bare the unthinkable weight of $1.3 trillion in student loan debt. Education should be a human right that is fun, nourishing, and enriching to participate in. To this end, the Democratic Socialist Party proposes the National Education Service, a universal, public, decommodified, free at point of use education system. Starting from childcare and ending at doctoral programs with a wide array of trade schools in the middle, the NES would ensure that anyone could learn anything at anytime anywhere on American soil. The system would be a decentralized, integrated network and democratically operated in a demos of teachers and students past the age of fourteen, with the classrooms ran pedagogically under a broad interpretation of the Sudbury model. Students the age of thirteen and younger would have a right to a union with a sliding scale of consultation and bargaining power depending on age. Acquisitions of private schools, non-public charter schools, for-profit institutions would be done legally under expropriation procedures established under the legislation establishing the NES. The Democratic Socialist Party also proposes an Incentive Grant for all trade school and university students, with payments ranging depending on societal need and a jubilee of student loan debt, to be completely forgiven within two decades. All private, non-NES, or otherwise educational institutions would be prohibited.
Liberation from Landlords & Mortgages
America is a nation with an abundance of peopleless homes and homeless people. Further, there's rapidly dropping home ownership figures and a new generation without the credit or generalized economic ability to get out of the rental circuit. Shortages plague major cities like San Francisco with lines at apartment openings that could rival any queue in the world. With apps such as AirBnB egging on the landlord class to push out leased residents for the lucrative, unregulated market, prospects for the 21st century American home are out on the streets. To provide shelter for our greatest ambitions, the Democratic Socialist Party proposes the National Housing Service, a universal, public, decommodified, free at point of use housing system. Acquisitions of foreclosed homes, landlord-owned property, multiple estates and properties with expired titles would be done legally through expropriation procedures established under the legislation establishing the NHS. Current personal home owners would keep their home until such time the title on it is relinquished willfully by moving to another property or in the case of death; direct inheritance is not legally permitted. All housing would be in the ownership of the local housing council, the NHS would be an decentralized, integrated network and democratically operated by a demos of residents, with an outside agency to ensure anti-discrimination measures are enforced. All potential residents would be given the choice between a fixed lease or an indefinite lease, in either giving them full stewardship rights to the property and full democratic rights within the council. Construction of new housing stock would be an effort undertaken by cooperative enterprises, regional housing councils, regional development planning councils, and local and state governments. All private, non-NHS, or otherwise housing property is only permitted if it is grandfathered in and fitting the criteria of being, exclusively, singular and personal property.
An Economy Beyond Profit, Oligopoly, & Extraction
Our grossly unequal economy is defined by increasing centralization and concentration of corporate power, titans of the business world are vying for each other as represented by recent mergers such as that of Comcast and NBC. Our global economy has been overcome by an unhealthy fetish for privatization as water, electricity, and other essential utilities are conquered by the market, with profit motives decaying good service. Consumption, extraction, and infinite growth are bedrocks of our economy's logic, as tendencies and strategies like GDP navel-gazing and planned obsolescence of consumer goods dominate the marketplace, exacerbating our climate crisis. There is an urgent need for an economics that is people-centric and decouples unecological growth from the health status of the economy. To this end, the Democratic Socialist Party proposes the nationalization and municipalization of natural monopolies such as utilities and minerals and of oligopolies such as media and banks, establishing a rich ecosystem of self-managed public enterprise, cooperative enterprises, and social credit. Acquisitions of relevant enterprises would be done legally through expropriation procedures established under legislation. Investment by social credit institutions would be made by calculating social need and further efficiency of economic activities rather than by profitability or potential market success. Further, the Social Democratic Party pledges to end the extraction of all fossil fuel and decline opportunities for extraction of other minerals where extremely unecological practices like strip mining must be undertaken. The DSP also pledges to make all economic planning decisions with the intention to establish a near steady state economy and develop other statistical indicators of economic health that discourage needless growth.
Democratizing a New Labor
Excepting freedom or bravery, democracy above all else is what we as a nation pride ourselves in. Yet in the realm of employment where the majority of us spend the most of our conscious hours, with no other choice, the relations we hold within enterprise and labor unions are autocratic. The economic activity around our communities is for the most part beyond our control, symbolized most disconcertingly by food deserts. Daring advances in worker's rights have been dead on arrival since the dawn of the neoliberal era of capitalism and the implementation of 21st century automative technologies hasn't been in the interest of liberation from needless work, nor rationally laid out for the fullest optimization of the economy. It's time to reconstruct what it means to work and to be a worker by democratizing the labor force, reconstructing worker's rights, and taking full advantage of our technological advances. To this end, the Democratic Socialist Party proposes several measures. First, legislation to reconstruct and empower labor unions by removing card checks, prohibiting unions with undemocratic internal structures that estrange rank-and-file from meaningful political power, formalizing wildcat-like strikes, and replacing collective bargaining power with collective ownership power. Second, after the nationalization, municipalization, and/or mutualization of banking institutions is accomplished, creating legislation to ensure that exclusively worker co-operatives are financed and to create a service similar to the NHS to ensure these social enterprises have the real estate that makes operation possible, and to establish new legal structures for enterprises that replace current existing entities like corporations, LLCs, etc. Third, implementing a worker's bill of rights that establishes full time employment status at 20 hours per work and guarantees a living wage starting at $30 dollars per hour, ten weeks of paid vacation, a full two years of paid parental leave, and a pension through a National Pension Service. Fourth, legislation that would devote at least $50 billion per year to the research and development of automative technologies, computer-based economic planning technologies like cybersyn, and real implementation strategies of the aforementioned with the express intent to eliminate menial, unnecessary employment and increase efficiency of production in hopes to breakthrough to a post-scarcity situation that will liberate conditions for the cooperative, non-automatable economy.
Empowering Communities
No matter the election, in recent times the national vote has included a massive portion of non-voters, with amounts ranging from roughly 40% to 60% of the potential electorate. Despite the feigning otherwise from the political classes, they enjoy this phenomenon. Disenfranchised communities of the marginalized translates to an uninterrupted hegemony of the middle and wealthy classes over the political discourse, where working class concerns are a footnote. The control over poor people's lifes thrills progressive conservatives as they bloviate about the political illiterates and sigh in bad faith at the lack of turnout, an ego trip all around. However, similar to the 60s with the Black Panther Party, through direct action, depressed communities are finding spirit again. The Democratic Socialist Party wishes nurture and formalize this revolutionary spirit into truly franchising forms of democratic structures and put an end to marginalization and dispossession. To this end, we propose several measures. First, we pledge to strive for a constitutional convention to implement a decentralized confederal government that starts on the neighborhood level and scales up, adopting lessons from Rojava and Stephen Shalom's parpolity. Local councils would be a nexus point for other integrated network councils and services from the NCS to the NHS and beyond, implementing participatory planning and budgeting while state, regional, and national council would set agendas and problem solve on a macro-level. Within direct democratic structures, the DSP supports the progressive stack as employed in some Occupy protests across the nation to ensure the political power of the marginalized is felt. We believe and would make it so that all elections should be publicly funded with no outside money and that all should be proportionally representative. Second, we are also heartened by Bolivia's plurinationalism which seeks to give sovereignty to its indigenous people, regardless of a constitutional convention, we pledge to work with Native American communities to dissolve the singular nation-state and foster a compromise that gives real, meaningful sovereignty and political power to the many nations within the current United States borders. Third, we pledge to launch inquiries and field cases into radical land reform to dissolve corporate control of land and return it to everyday people.
Establishing a New American Freedom
When Edward Snowden courageously revealed the full extent of NSA abuses, he put a spotlight on the present state of American freedom. From the first Sedition Acts in the times of Madison to crackdowns on dissent in the World War 1 era to J. Edger Hoover's reign of terror, the bloody reality of our ruling class' relation with popular freedom has been estranged at best. Institutions like the NSA, a behemoth that the Stasi could only admire, are always present as a counter to the lovely lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner. Though an express concern, surveillance and secret policing isn't the only issue, it's merely the beating heart of a horrid constellation. We sing of freedom, but live in tyranny as ICE officers mercilessly hunt down innocent families for arbitrary geographic origin, credit agencies map out the potential of human life, people are arrested for controversial labor, and people are prohibited from having autonomy over their body. Sadly, in contradiction with our national anthem, we are firmly the land of control. The Democratic Socialist Party seeks to chart the course for liberty. To this end, we propose several measures. Firstly, we propose a broad wave of decriminalization with drugs and sex work being the two major pillars. Second, we pledge to legalize euthanasia. Third, we pledge to abolish credit agencies and prohibit the use of credit scores as relevant to employment, banking activity, and otherwise economic activity — we also pledge inquiries into the most feasible and immediate way to eliminate household debt. Fourth, we propose a full amnesty for all undocumented citizens and open borders, to establish an uncompromising freedom to America for all economic and war refugees and those who wish to live here. Fifth, we propose eliminating some legal benefits of marriage and extending others to an unlimited amount of people to give polyamorous, long-term single people, and non-traditional families equality under laws which currently are preferential to the nuclear model of family. Sixth and most importantly, we promise to repeal the PATRIOT Act, abolish the NSA, and take other measures to tear down the surveillance state.
Abolishing Prisons, Restoring Justice
The criminal justice system and its enforcement apparatus are not broken institutions in need of reform and repair. Quite contrary, it is fully functional and performing its anatomically innate purposes better than ever. Per the 13th amendment, our imprisonment system is the new legal and cultural slavery systemic after the fall of chattel slavery. Further, the history of law enforcement stems of runaway patrols and the protection of other forms of private property. From chain-gangs to assaulting and slaughtering those on strike to COINTELPRO to the extrajudicial murder of innocent black peoples to producing products on the cheap for prominent corporations with slave labor, the structural role police and prisons is self-evident and going from strength-to-strength. Police swarm like locust not in the safest communities, but in the most marginalized — their role is not one of safety. Recidivism rates for prison brings glee to stock markets and affluenza is a get out of jail free card — their role is not one of justice. In combatting crime, the foremost weapon is the development of strong, democratic communities free of poverty and competent health and educational sectors that fully develop emotional intelligence in all citizens. The Democratic Socialist Party pledges abolition of the police force, the adversarial court, and prisons. We propose in its place a system of law based on restorative justice, to be implemented on the community level with enforcement performed by intracommunity, unarmed mediation officers and a society with structural conditions hostile to the causes of crime.
A Doctrine of Mutual Prosperity
Foreign policy has hardly ever been a proud moment in American history, the only moment deserving of uncompromising pride being that of the destruction of early 20th century fascism in Europe with the allied forces. Beyond this triumph, there's a marked tradition of destroying cultures, ways of life, unruly assassinations, and the destruction of stability and basic civility in many regions across the world. We've plundered the work of others in the global south like our western European allies. It is, however, never too late to undo the grave sins of our past. As the 21st century pushes onward, we can use our hegemony to build a cooperative global political economy that enriches the world and deescalates the feedback loops of violence caused by imperialism. The Democratic Socialist Party promises to build a new American doctrine based on the principles of anti-imperialism, global justice, and mutual aid. To this end, we propose several measures. First, to eliminate in their entirety all free trade agreements made outside of GATT and to spearhead a reconstruction of GATT to reformat trade and globalization to be reparative and mutually beneficial by agreeing to certain measures such as global jubilee, reparations, and global levels of taxation and basic income — to make redundant the psychology behind capital flight and other discipline measures capitalists perform to cripple peripheral countries that go against the grain of our current global political economic hegemony, and to establish a global cooperative economy. We promise additionally that all innovations made by the American government relevant to automation and economic planning will be shared freely with the world. Second, we promise to close down all foreign bases and drastically reduce the scope of our military to a point it's only fully capable of self-defence instead of world policing and work to expand the scope of the United Nations to have full military operations beyond the scope of peacekeeping. Third, we pledge an immediate end to the Cuban embargo and sanctions on countries across the world and the creation of a permanent Marshall Plan given to countries who end human rights abuses and demonstratively take on the task of building a cooperative polity and economy. Fourth, we promise to make formal apologies to all countries that have been negatively impacted by American foreign policy in the past and for our diplomatic leaders to travel to each country to address them individually and uniquely — we also will work with the United Nations and The Hague to create a global Truth and Reconciliation Commission.