👋 We’re all doing our best to figure it out, right?
Socialism is a contested word that has meant a lot of different things to different people over the world and across time.
Socialism doesn’t exist divorced from institutions and politics, as pure theory or ideology. The idea of socialism is intertwined with the activity of socialism, dialectically you might say.
A necessary and maybe sufficient condition for the existence of socialism is the [control and ownership of economic activity] by the people. The people here can be defined broadly as all the people collectively, or more narrowly as the working class, which comprise the vast majority of the people, but not all of them, but about 99% of them.
We can use a traveling metaphor to help us think through socialist organizations, theories of change, and models for the future.
The [vehicle] has traditionally been called “the party”, but is really just the organizational form the socialist movement takes and shouldn’t be confused with what we think of today as political parties like the Republicans or the Democrats. We may recognize that the vehicle we’re currently in has no chance of getting us where we need to go, so while we still ride in it and do our best to move along, we spend part of our time dreaming up the design of new vehicles with better technology.
There’s also not just one vehicle on our journey, but a fleet. Some may not be explicitly socialist vehicles, but play essential roles nonetheless, like labor unions.
What powers the vehicle? Our mobilizing and organizing is the [fuel]. People power is the corny way of saying it. We don’t move without moving people. The fuel we use for the socialist vehicle is the same fuel used for a lot of other vehicles to get them to different destinations, so we can both learn from and capture energy from other movements to use for our own.
An important consideration here is how many people are needed. Do we need a small number of people with a lot of energy, or a lot of people that each contribute a bit less to the overall fuel. Getting the fuel mixture right is key to success.
Our itinerary is the strategy and tactics we use in the short and medium term. How far can we go in a given amount of time? How much time do we need to rest along the way? How do we build up enough power at the right times to overcome a substantial obstacle in our path? What if we find ourselves stuck in a rut or with some portion of the vehicle not working? Campaigning would fall here: medicare for all, electoral campaigns, the fight for the green new deal, prison abolition, etc.
The road we’re on is broad: it encompasses all of society. We need great cartographers that can study and document the roads, paths, obstacles of the [[terrain]] so the turns we take lead us to the expected places and the times it takes to get there are reasonably accurate. Which actors on our journey will try to stop us? Are they stronger or weaker than we are? Do we have a good chance of defeating them and moving closer to our goals?
Roads were constructed by people and can be removed, re-routed, etc. The objective conditions we find along our path and scout out ahead of us are not static. We also need earthmovers construction crews to pave the way for our movement. We cannot take as given the terrain we find. History is a juggernaut, but not immovable and it course is impermanent.
The [destination] is socialism. We have to know where it is so we can head towards it and we need to be able to recognize it when we arrive.
But since the idea and movement of socialism is historically and culturally contingent, it is up for all of us to decide what it is and when to declare we have arrived.
Alternately we can think of a horizon that can never be reached, that always appears to evade our grasp the further we go, but gives us a target and a vision on where to go.
We could think of destinations as [models] of the socialist future.
I like to read about socialism, but haven’t kept track of all I read or want to read, so doing so here!
My favorite slogan for socialism is “Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness”
It won’t solve all your problems, but it should make things less worse.
If writing is thinking, then this is a forum for me to think. Publishing it to the world wide web forces me to be more careful and clear than I would be if I were writing only for myself.
This site aligns with the digital garden concept as explained by Maggie Appleton:
Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis. A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.
Taking this exploratory rather than explanatory approach is likely to bring up more questions than it answers!
The site is written using Foam and published via GitHub pages.
I’ve been a [DSA] member since 2014. I coordinated a [Jacobin reading group] (2014-15), attended two DSA national conventions (2015, 2017) and served on the executive committee of a DSA chapter (2018 and 2020). I helped scan back issues of [Democratic Left] and [New American Movement] publications to create the digital archive that you can find on the DL website.
A related side project of mine is left.guide, which tried to answer this question in a more quantitative and taxonomical way.