Imagine: Living in a Socialist U.S.A.

by Frances Goldin

the top fifth owned 85 percent, leaving the bottom four-fifths to fight it out for just one-sixth of the nation’s wealth.

some socialists to say that the economies of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were not really socialist, but rather a kind of state capitalism.

Within a few years, however, the system thought buried by war was exhumed and given new life under the program of leasing convicts as labor.

Worker-run companies do not outsource their own jobs.

Imagine a sexual life where people prefer the experience of intimate connection with an equal human being over profit-driven, degrading pornographic images.

They launched the American Union Against Militarism, which spawned the American Civil Liberties Union

She was aware that “men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle” and that they actually “cultivated ignorance about household matters.”

the 1919–1933 Prohibition laws would be considered “decriminalization” today, as possessing alcohol remained legal.

Wall Street’s currency speculators and investment bankers have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to wreck entire economies halfway around the globe in a matter of hours—a power far greater than the Roman or Ottoman rulers ever wielded.

Over forty million foreigners settled here between 1960 and 2008, more than in any fifty-year span in the country’s history, and half of those newcomers were from Latin America.

The next economic crisis is inevitable. That crisis will likely spawn a much stronger neofascist movement than most of us imagine.

Most countries, however, measure poverty in relative terms, generally counting people as poor if they make less than half the median income—thus comparing the circumstances of those at the bottom with the society’s overall living standards.

The law also gave the states a remarkable incentive to limit assistance, since they received the full amount of federal funding regardless of how many people were on the rolls or the benefits they received.

The motor of capitalism is to turn the stuff of life—bread, water, housing, medicine, education—into market commodities.

Why, for example, is education thought of as only kindergarten through twelfth grade, or even kindergarten through university? Why does education occur only early in life? Why is there a point in our lives when we no longer think we need education?

lie at the very heart of art-making. There can

marvel at. But such gifts and talents can be celebrated

Because Big Pharma’s primary concern is profit, it would rather develop drugs for relatively minor conditions that affluent people must take regularly for years than work on medicines to treat diseases that mainly afflict poor people, such as malaria.

Twenty years ago, thirty corporations controlled 90 percent of US media. Today, it is a grand total of six mega-corporations—Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, and Comcast.

In a society where racism and sexism are as widespread as they are in the United States, they will not evaporate simply because revolutionaries nail a “closed” sign to the door of the New York Stock Exchange.

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Of the 2011 drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, a federal judge recently said that the president could be subject to prosecution under a US statute prohibiting “foreign murder of US nationals.”

we in the twenty-first century are drawing from a deep well of Black radical tradition in defining our democratic institutions and who we are as a people.

John Brown expressed socialist sentiments before his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. “All captured or confiscated property and all property the product of the labor of those belonging to this organization and of their families, shall be held as the property of the whole, equally, without distinction, and may be used for the common benefit,” he wrote.

is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely,” King said.

In New York City, a family with a doctor and a newspaper editor might make more than half a million dollars a year. That family is not our enemy.

The Reverend Martin Luther King pointed out long ago that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. What we have to do is go out and bend that arc. It does not bend by itself. That is our responsibility.

When I worked at Ford in the 1970s, more than a million autoworkers produced thirteen million vehicles for the US market. Today, while production is approximately the same, two-thirds of those jobs are gone.

“He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life,” Marx wrote in Wage-Labor and Capital.

Even as Orr sues to take the city into bankruptcy, more than $300 million in state funding will be made available to build a hockey stadium near the baseball and football arenas.

Despite these possibilities, there is no pathway to socialism if a majority of the people do not want it.