On the Issues

Young Democratic Socialists is a multi-tendency organization.  In other words we have no party line that every member must espouse.  We welcome debate as it strengthens our positions and our ability to argue for them.  On the other hand, since we are all democratic socialists we do share some basic beliefs.  See below for our baseline positions on a the basic issues.   

 

Markets
"Socialism is, essentially, the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society."
- Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, 1944.

They say we live in a free market society.  Puh-leez!  You don't have to look hard to see that's not true. For example, take the latest bank bailouts.

There's disagreement about the extent to which markets should be part of our socialist vision, but we unanimously reject the laissez-faire in policy and free market theory in economics.  Here's one view of the issue of markets, based on the writings of Karl Polanyi:

The free market economic theory describes a world in which economics is fully disembedded from the rest of society, in which there is but one motive of behavior, economic self-interest, which everyone pursues rationally in omniscient cost-benefit calculations.  Supply adjusts to match demand, and prices are set perfectly by the equilibrium reached between the two.  The market is not only the best, but the most natural method with which we can distribute scarce commodities.  And everything's a commodity to be bought and sold - land, labor, money itself, everything.

You don't need to be a Nobel-laureate economist like Paul Krugman to realize that this theory hardly describes the reality of our social world.  Some call socialists Utopian, but what could possibly be more Utopian than this free market theory?  The free market is one of those things that sounds good on paper but could never work in the real world.  Where Capitalism functions, it does so because regulation and redistribution prevent the market's booms and busts from pulverizing nature and society. 

Capitalism, hardly resembling the theoretical free market system, is the brutal dominance of society by the capitalist class - a system in which nepotism, sexism, racism and xenophobia run rampant, and corruption, inefficiency and pauperism threaten the foundations of society and the humanity of our species.  Resistance to the so called free pulls us back from the brink of obliteration. The resistance can come in the form of democratic empowerment (i.e. unions and social welfare), right-wing authoritarianism (i.e. fascist corporatism, anti-immigrant laws) or deepened capitalist domination (i.e. bank bailouts, corporate welfare). 

It's up to us, through organizing and advocacy, to steer the anti-market resistance in the right (left) direction, bringing about long-term reforms to democratize the economy and shift power into the hands of the people.

The solution is of course to wrestle power from the hands of the capitalist class and subordinate the market to a democratic society.  Most democratic socialists, recognizing the market mechanism's usefulness for distribution, see a continued role for markets in a socialist economy.  But we are unanimous in our demand that the false commodities of land, labor and money be taken off the market, and that democratic regulation ensure the proper functioning of markets for true commodities (goods and services).  The system of self-regulating markets, which was deliberately constructed first in the United Kingdom and then globally through a series of deliberate political reforms by the capitalist class, must be deliberately deconstructed through political reforms and replaced with a more natural and healthy system of equity, stability and democratic collective decision making.

LGBT Issues
"Not so many years ago, to declare oneself a revolutionary and to confess to being homosexual were incompatible."
- Daniel Guérin in Etre homosexuel et révolutionnaire, 1975.

It's common knowledge among our generation that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals face descrimination, humilation, abuse and violence in our conservative society.  What might be less well known is that LGBT individuals have often been marginalized and ostricized by the Left itself!  Although early socialists were often strong advocates of real sexual liberty, Friedrich Engels claimed that the homosexual rights was "turning smut into theory".  It was only really in the 1960s that openly LGBT individuals were even allowed membership in socialist parties.  And even after that, the struggle for LGBT equality have been typically given less weight than the same struggle for women or ethnic minorities.

The immense progress toward LGBT equality has largely been a result of LGBT groups' organizing, isolated from should-be allies on the Left.  The fact that so much progress has been made without strong support from other Left organizations speaks to the dedication and intelligence of the LGBT movement.  However, just as we can't have socialism without having real LGBT equality, we can't have real LGBT equality without socialism.  If either movement falters in its commitment to destroy the social structures of oppression, it will ultimately fail.

Throughout history, LGBT individuals have often been scapegoats and innocent victims of angry, confused reactionaries.  It's never a capitalist himself who lynches a queer - it's always fellow poor people.  But it would be a grave mistake to think that structural forces of the capitalist system aren't creating, perpetuating or exacerbating the problem.  Socialism won't automatically bring an end to heterosexist bigotry, but it is necessary for the elimination of economic insecurity among the lower classes that inflames the problem.

Sexism
"Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation... none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men."
- Barbara Ehrenreich.

It seems like more and more, people think that sexism's a thing of the past, and women receive equal treatment to men - if separate, separate but equal.  Total BS.  Sexism and patriarchy are still deeply engrained in most aspects of life, from the pink/blue colorcoding of babies' paraphenalia to the considerable income gap between men and women filling the same roles in the workplace.  Oh, and Sarah Palin thinks she's a feminist.  That says it all. 

Our conception of socialism is deeply feminist.  We are committed to full equality for women in all spheres of life, in a world without prescribed sex roles that channel women into subordinate positions at home and at work.  We want a world that no longer oppresses women through under-valuation of their work, lack of political representation, the inability to control their own fertility, denial of their sexuality, or violence and abuse.  Gender equality requires great changes in social attitudes, in economic and social structures, and in relationships between men and women and adults and children.  The socialist society we seek to create will not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.  It will value sexuality and all sexual relationships—gay, lesbian, heterosexual—based on mutual respect and the enhancement of human dignity.

Socialism will not automatically end patriarchy, just as it will not automatically end racism and other forms of chauvinism.  But like racism, sexism is integrally tied to the economic system based on domination and exploitation we call capitalism, and replacing that system with another based on liberty, democracy and solidarity is a critical precondition for moving forward toward real equality.  We do not equate the struggles of socialism and feminism, but we recognize the common foe of patriarchy and integrally incorporate the feminist vision into our struggle for a truly just and free society.

Reproductive Freedom
"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.  No woman can call herself free until she can choose conscientiously whether she will or will not be a mother."
- Margaret Sanger in Women and the New Race, 1920.

In the U.S. today, women must often struggle to meet minimal standards of a fulfilling life, health and security.  The same people and institutions that push “family values” as an argument to end abortion and curtail sexual freedom often support the privatization of care in our society.  In other words, rather than support a universal child care system and universal health care, they call for increased reliance on the private, heterosexual family unit and more “personal responsibility.”

The right-wing often succeeds in blaming individuals for problems that many of us face, instead of our unjust economic and social systems that benefit a few rather than everyone.  Many people then believe that we need individual solutions to these problems.

Unfortunately, these individual solutions have turned out to create even more problems, such as low-quality health coverage for many women and an unfair distribution of that care, which often leave women of color, poor women and young women lower rates of health care access than white or middle class women.  Instead of working together as a group to find a solution, we allow ourselves to be divided.

To complicate things further, the legacy of colonization and slavery in the U.S. results in racist practices and institutions, not just individuals, that are resistant to change.  For example, while instances of widespread, involuntary sterilization of Native American, black and latina women are rare today, groups that target poor women of color for sterilization still operate.  Many poor women of color are still forced to choose between narrow “choices” about their fertility, like having access only to long-acting birth control methods that require a visit to the doctor to stop, whereas many middle class white women find it easier to get the pill or other birth control methods that they can control themselves, in the privacy of their own homes.  These intersecting forms of oppression, patriarchy, capitalism and racism require an integrated response from all of us.

Until we have won democratically controlled, publicly funded programs that provide fair and universal care, and those programs consciously work against unfair outcomes based on race and class as well as gender, we will be living in an unjust system.

Racism
"You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums… Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong…with capitalism… There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to his staff, 1966.

After more than 350 years, racism is deeply ingrained in our country’s institutions, social patterns, consciousness, and even social movements.  The postwar civil rights movement broke the back of segregation and renewed the struggle against its consequences, bringing to the left in America a new moral vision and a more developed understanding of the importance of community, institutional networks, and popular symbols in shaping a political movement.  To be genuinely multiracial, a socialist movement must respect the particular goals of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and other communities of color.  It must place a high priority on economic justice to eradicate the sources of inequality; on affirmative action and other compensatory programs to overcome ongoing discrimination and the legacy of inequality; and on social justice to change the behavior, attitudes, and ideas that foster racism.

A democratic socialist society will not necessarily eradicate racism.  Yet a democratic socialist society is the best hope for alleviating and minimizing racism, particularly institutional forms of racism.  This conclusion depends on a candid evaluation that guards against utopian self-deception.  But it also acknowledges the deep moral commitment on the part of democratic socialists of all races to the dignity of all individuals and peoples - a commitment that impels us to fight for a more libertarian and egalitarian society.  Therefore concrete antiracist struggle is both an ethical imperative and political necessity for democratic socialists.  It is even more urgent as once again racist policies become more acceptable to many Americans.

Labor
“Those who produce should have the most, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.”
                                                                   - Eugene Debs

The Right always accuses socialists of being lazy and not understanding hard work.  If you've ever met a socialist organizer, you'd know that we work our asses off.  The whole point of socialism is that hard work is very important but we should be able to control our work, and own what we produce.  Under capitalism, workers sell their labor to capitalists for a wage, the capitalist determines the wage, the hours and the conditions of the workplace, and the capitalists exclusively own everything the worker produces.  The point is, we're getting a raw deal - the common people are doing all the work in society, but it's the capitalists who are profiting from it, just by sitting on their asses and owning and controlling.

The free market theory behind capitalism relies on the idea that labor is a commodity - something that is freely bought and sold between individuals to the positive gain of all.  The price, the wage, rises and falls in response to changes in the supply of and demand for labor.  If an employer offers a wage that is too low, no one would take up the offer, forcing the wage higher until it has reached the equilibrium level.

Another case of something that sounds good on paper, but doesn't reflect the real world in any way.  Individually, workers are in no position to hold out for higher wages.  When losing your job would mean hunger and disaster, and plenty of unemployed workers are in line to take it, you don't have much leverage to bargain with your employer.  The result of the imbalance in this relationship is that bosses rule their workplaces like tyrants.  We work under conditions set by the capitalists, for wages the capitalists decide on, and then are forced to obey our bosses' whims out of sheer necessity. 

But how do you eliminate wage labor?  Democratic socialists don’t agree with the capitalist assumption that starvation or greed are the only reasons people work.  People enjoy their work if it is meaningful and enhances their lives.  They work out of a sense of responsibility to their community and society.  Although a long-term goal of socialism is to eliminate all but the most enjoyable kinds of labor, we recognize that unappealing jobs will remain.  These tasks would be spread among as many people as possible—rather than distributed on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, or gender, as they are under capitalism.  And this undesirable work should be among the best, not the least, rewarded work within the economy.  For now, the burden should be placed on the employer to make work desirable by raising wages, offering benefits and improving the work environment.

Capital
"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
- Karl Marx in Capital, 1867

To paraphrase Karl Marx, capital sucks.

We all dream of sticking it to the Man.  But do we really understand who this Man is, and how to stick it to him?  We know the Man controls everything, we know the Man keeps us down, we know the Man is our boss at work, our mayor in city hall, the guys in the top offices of the sky scrapers.  But who do we really mean?  The Man, the puppet master pulling society's strings, is capital.

In conventional economic terms, capital is one of the factors of production (the other main factors being labor and land).  Capital is the stuff... the building, the equipment, the machinery, the tools required to produce goods and services.  In our economic system, the capital in a workplace is owned by a capitalist or capitalists, who make their money simply by owning it, rather than doing work.  This is the difference between capital and labor.  Allegedly these have equal power, but even the name capitalism suggests an imbalance from the outset... it's not called Capital/Laborism.

The Right is always talking about the entrepreneurial spirit and the value of the tough decisions, risk-taking and sacrifice required of capitalists.  They say that's what makes America great.  Bull.  They're describing the hard work of the self-employed or small business owners, whose labor makes their company succeed.  Socialists applaud that - nothing's more fulfilling than working for yourself and producing.  Who are capitalists, then, if not the small-time hard-working entrepreneurs?  Capitalists are the investing class.  They're the class that doesn't need to work, the class who get their money simply by having money already and owning the capital used to produce goods and services through other people's labor.  Despite not working, they not only make as much money as laborers (which would be injustice enough), they make hundreds of times more.  They live in mansions and luxurious apartments and seaside villas.  They have enough money for chauffeurs and servants, yachts and private planes.  And they have control over the most powerful entities in the world, multi-national corporations, and therefore control what we see on TV, what sort of jobs we can get and the terms of that employment, what economic sectors our country will invest in.  The few parts of society they don't have direct control over, mainly government firms, they control indirectly by funding the campaigns of politicians in both parties.  The capitalists control pretty much everything.

But the power of the capitalist class is entirely contingent upon the continued cooperation of the rest of us.  In order to fight them, we need to organize ourselves and withdraw that cooperation.  The Constitution was written by a bunch of capitalists (Northern early industrialists and Southern slave-owning planters) but we the people forced them to include a bill of rights through threat of revolution against them.  We forced them to relinquish land ownership requirements for voting.  We forced them to abolish slavery.  We forced them to offer free universal K-12 education, fire departments and libraries.  We forced them to limit the work day to 8 hours, to limit the work week to 5 days, to enforce workplace safety standards, to ban child labor.  We forced them to extend the vote to women and minorities.  We forced them to recognize our unions and to legally enforce our contracts.  We've forced them to make concessions all throughout the history of capitalism.  Their power rests on us, we just need to stand up to them, and that's how we stick it to the Man.  Under democratic socialism, we the people will entirely overthrow the capitalist class, and the capital will be collectively owned and democratically run.

Environment
"Neoliberalism is a return to the pure logic of capital; it is no passing storm but the true condition of the capitalist world we inhabit. It has effectively swept away measures which had inhibited capital’s aggressivity, replacing them with naked exploitation of humanity and nature... This blitzkrieg or bombardment simply overwhelmed the feeble liberal reforms which the environmental movements of the 1970s had helped put in place in order to check ecological decay.  And as these movements have had little or no critique of capital, they drift helplessly in a time of accelerated breakdown."
- Joel Kovel in Why Eco-Socialism Today?, 2007.

Capitalism is brutally raping the Earth.  It's dynamiting the tops of our mountains to get at the coal within, it's knocking down our forests for industrial farmland to produce more food than we need, it's filling in wetlands to build strip malls, it's fueling our lamps and our cars while scarring the very atmosphere itself.  It's lead us to the greatest mass-extinction of all time - greater than the disaster that wiped out the dinosaurs - with between 20,000 and 2 million species going extinct over the past hundred years alone.

This environmental catastrophe has received a lot of attention in the media and in classrooms over the past 20 years.  In fact, the environmentalist movement has been so successful in swaying public opinion that almost everyone wants to present themselves as "green", or "going green".  Capitalists often talk about "sustainable growth" as the way forward - the way to reform capitalism so that profit and planet can coexist in harmony.  It's an absolute farce.

Of course environmental problems did not begin with Capitalism - our prehistoric ancestors hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction, and deforestation and the introduction of invasive species have always seemed to accompany human settlement - but abolishing capitalism is an absolute prerequisite for environmental sustainability.  Capitalism's requirement of permanent expansion precludes any meaningful possibility of sustainability; it is what has changed the nature of our species' presence on the planet from symbiotic to parasitic.  With the profit motive driving production, taking only what you need is not even a consideration.  Corporations will continue to rob the planet blind of its natural resources, leaving a putrid trail of ash, poison and death in their wake, until they can be brought under democratic control.  Replacing rule by the rich with democracy is the only way we can actually hope to put an end to the environmental catastrophe that Capitalism has unleashed on our planet.

Corporations seem to think that they can make a product out of 10% recycled material, slap a green label on it, and make a huge profit off of "going green".  The three tenets of reduce, reuse and recycle are all absolutely detrimental to Capitalism's reliance on mass consumption.  A company can figure out a way to dabble in recycling for the purpose of appearing "green", but they will never abide by people reducing or reusing.  And as long as corporations continue to dominate politics, the marketplace and the media, we'll never make meaningful progress towards these absolutely essential goals of sustainability.

Money & Finance
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of our currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that will grow up will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent that their fathers conquered"
- Thomas Jefferson, 1802

The supply of the U.S. dollar is largely in the hands of the Federal Reserve System, an institution rivaled in its lack of democracy and transparency only by the authoritarian bureaucracies of corporations themselves.  The money supply has huge consequences on the economy, intimately affecting every business and worker in the country.  Yet the people have almost no democratic control and ownership over the institutions that manage this supply.  The Fed is controlled by capitalists and government appointees; the system is 100% privately owned, i.e. in the hands of capitalists, and certain top leadership positions are government appointees, none of whom are elected.  Many economists love the private ownership of the Fed, since they feel this removes it from politics.  But socialists understand that the process of governing the country's supply of money is very political indeed, and the only thing the Fed is actually removed from is accountability to the public.  The current set-up ensures that the only group of society represented in the Fed's decision-making process is the capitalist class.  The Federal Reserve shouldn't be abolished - we need a central bank to control our money supply - but it must be brought under democratic control.

Not only are we at the mercy of the authoritarian Federal Reserve System, but also, to an ever increasing degree, of the banks themselves.  In response to the catastrophe which caused the Great Depression, the democratic process put a strong government hand into the financial sector, regulating and restricting private banks, keeping speculation in check and ensuring stability and access to credit.  However, in the past thirty years of neoliberal administrations, the publicly accountable federal regulation of capital and financial markets that the social movements of the Great Depression imposed upon a resistant capitalist elite have been steadily repealed. The disasters of 30 years of free-market mania—duplicitous accounting practices, corporate stripping of pension fund assets, predatory lending, and mega-bank marketing of nontransparent, speculative financial instruments—has brought the productive economy to its knees.  Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the national savings rate has steadily dropped to zero, the rate of debt - public and private - has soared, and the increasingly wild boom and bust cycle leaves us in a constant state of financial crisis.  And the capitalists, who are making out like bandits from all this, use the "sacrifice in tough times" excuse to cut their workers' hours, wages, benefits and even jobs while their allies in government cut vital social services like public education.

To rein in global capital’s scavenging for short-term speculative gain, democratic, public control of the financial system must be reasserted, rebuilt, and improved. Such democratic regulation would include:

  1. Restoring the 1938 Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of finance banks from commercial banks;
  2. Instituting vigorous federal and state regulation of financial “rating agencies,” so highly risky, speculative financial instruments are no longer certified as “investment grade” and “credit worthy”;
  3. Re-creating a federally regulated savings and loan industry whose sole purpose is to provide affordable mortgages to middle and working-class home buyers;
  4. Strengthening federal and state support for worker- and consumer-owned credit unions that provide affordable credit to working- and middle-class consumers.

Political Democracy
"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone. and remain as free as before."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract, 1762.

Unlike certain former presidents have suggested, the United States is not some shiny beacon of democracy.

The founding fathers sought to set up a country that ensured a good business environment for their class, the white Anglo-Saxon, protestant, slave-holding, land-owning capitalist class.  Because this goal is very much at odds with the interests of the majority of the country - farmers, workers and slaves - they were very wary of giving too much power to the people in the Constitution.  Throughout our country's history, the ruling class has been forced to make many concessions, starting with the Bill of Rights, that have deepened democracy for the American people.  That having been said, there are still appalling problems with the political system in our country - problems that insulate the private property of the capitalist class against the wrath of the public.  But these problems can be overcome through sustained popular organizing and the election of democratic socialists into positions of power, resulting in further amendments to the Constitution democratizing the United States political system.

In short, the following are a few of the most major barriers to proper democratic representation:  1) The states are arbitrarily drawn lines on a map, which conglomerate people into political entities with total disregard to current demographic and socioeconomic realities; 2) The Senate is an unfortunate "upper" house in Congress that, by assigning each State two representatives, gives each voter in California 1/68th the representation of each voter in Wyoming; 3) The various systems of forming representative districts encourage gerrymandering, which marginalizes many voters and undermines the democratic process; 4) The Electoral College disenfranchises Democrats in the "red states", Republicans in the "blue states" and makes it so that presidential candidates only bother campaigning in what they consider "swing states", which means some voters are arbitrarily favored over others; 5) The single-member district system rather than proportional representation eliminates 3rd parties from being significant players in politics above the local level, and thereby reduces voter options and allows the capitalist class to more easily control the parameters of debate and dominate both parties. 

But even with all of these flaws in our electoral process, without doubt the greatest barrier to real democracy is the present system of financing political campaigns with private contributions.  It is, in effect, a system of one-dollar/one-vote instead of one-person/one-vote, plutocracy instead of democracy.  Even with the netroots sparking wider interest in campaign funding, the bulk of contributions still come from less than 1 percent of the population.  This results in a system of legalized bribery where big contributors buy privileged access to public officials and where politicians favorable to wealth and privilege benefit, tilting the legislative playing field toward concentrated wealth on every issue.  Public financing of campaigns has been adopted by several states under the slogan “Clean Money, Clean Elections” and must be enacted nationally, as proposed by Minnesota’s late Senator Paul Wellstone and others.

Liberty
"Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."
                                                                                                - Rosa Luxemburg.

Ever heard somebody say, "Hey, it's a free country"?  Next time you hear that, say, "Sort of".

We all want to be free, obviously.  We don't want anybody to tell us what to do, or for anyone else to have more control over our lives than we ourselves do.  If that's what freedom is, then really the only free people in this country are the capitalists.  They don't have bosses.

When news reached the plantations of the South that slavery had been abolished, the slaves thought, "We're finally free".  They might have truly been free if the US government had done what it should have, and compensated them for building and feeding this country by granting them ownership over the land they worked.  But instead, the land remained in the hands of the very plantation owners who'd formerly been the slave masters, and, landless and unemployed, the freed slaves and their children wound up in chains again as serf-like sharecroppers.  Liberty is contingent on economic conditions: whether we're master or slave, manager or worker.

A democratic commitment to a vibrant pluralist life assumes the need for a democratic, responsive, and representative government to regulate the market, protect the environment, and ensure a basic level of equality and equity for each citizen.  In the 21st century, such regulation will increasingly occur through international, multilateral action.  But while a democratic state can protect individuals from domination by inordinately powerful, undemocratic transnational corporations, people develop the social bonds that render life meaningful only through cooperative, voluntary relationships.  Promoting such bonds is the responsibility of socialists and government alike.  Democratic socialism is committed both to a freedom of speech that does not recoil from dissent and to the freedom to organize independent trade unions, women’s groups, political parties, and other social movements.  We are committed to a freedom of religion and conscience that acknowledges the rights of those for whom spiritual concerns are central and the rights of those who reject organized religion.  Control of economic, social, and cultural life by either government or corporate elites is hostile to the vision of democratic pluralism embraced by democratic socialism.  The social welfare programs of government have been for the most part positive, if partial, responses to the genuine social needs of the great majority of Americans.  The dismantling of such programs by conservative and corporate elites in the absence of any alternatives will be disastrous.  Abandoning schools, health care, and housing, for example, to the control of an unregulated free market magnifies the existing harsh realities of inequality and injustice.  Until we have democratic socialism, we won't be able to truthfully say "it's a free country".

The Media
"The methods by which the 'Empire of Business' maintains its control over journalism are four: First, ownership of the papers; second, ownership of the owners; third, advertising subsidies; and fourth, direct bribery. By these methods there exists in America a control of news and of current comment more absolute than any monopoly in any other industry."
- Upton Sinclair in The Brass Check, 1919.

In the United States, almost all of our news media is controlled by 5 conglomerates: Time Warner (CNN), Disney (ABC), News Corporation (FOX), Comcast (NBC) and CBS.  Most music is controlled by 4 corporate record labels: Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI.  The radio is dominated by one: Clear Channel.  Our information and culture are increasingly being run by an oligopoly of huge capitalist corporations.  The effect is what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman call a "propaganda model".  The ownership by corporate investors, the reliance on advertising funding from other corporations, the idea that government sources are more reliable than other sources, the journalistic conformity forced by the watchdog groups, and the legacy of cold-war anticommunist ideology lead the mainstream media to present information in a way that does not challenge the status quo.

Challenging corporate control of the media is essential to restoring democratic discourse and resisting corporate power.  Although the American people collectively own the airwaves, with an estimated access value of $750 billion, the public receives virtually nothing in return for spectrum licenses the FCC grants for free to corporate broadcasters.  Regulatory palliatives—including the public interest doctrine—have been eviscerated, as public television and radio are co-opted and community voices are marginalized.  We need trust busting to break up media monopolies where one corporation can simultaneously control radio, television, newspaper, and cable service in a single media market.  Federal dollars in the form of grants or small business loans can go to nonprofits looking to start local newspapers, cable stations, low-watt radio stations, and even satellite radio connections.  The federal government should fulfill its commitment to expanding and modernizing the internet the way it did in funding the U.S. highway system and rural electrification by ensuring that any future rollouts of high speed connectivity be available in every community, regardless of income or population concentration.

Education
"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
- Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968.

Through the victories of popular struggle, we have won socialized provision of K-12 education in this country.  Despite the prevalence of market ideology in the United States, most Americans will agree that every child is entitled to free, high-quality public education.  However, the funding of public schools comes primarily from local property tax, which ensures the full-funding for suburban schools and leaves rural and urban schools abysmally underfunded. 

To truly leave no child behind, we need to equalize expenditure per pupil in public primary and secondary education and provide extra national funds to schools that serve disproportionately low-income and English-as-a-Second-Language students.  By providing funds for universal prekindergarten and kindergarten (many small school districts are so poorly funded that they can only serve children ages six and up) and boosting after-school programs, we could insure that all children grow up in an environment that provides nurturing care and educational enrichment.  A democratic educational policy would transform public school teaching into a well-paid and valued profession, attracting our brightest college graduates and retaining its best teachers.

Neither federal nor state higher education budgets have kept up with a growing student population and increasingly complex technology.  Public universities and colleges, created in response to demands by working people, are increasing tuition to the point where young working-class kids can no longer afford to attend even community colleges.  Worse, students have been made to finance their education with loans whose high interest profits private lenders.  Highly indebted graduates must choose lucrative jobs over socially useful ones when they even have a choice.  In contrast, numerous other advanced industrial nations offer higher education that is low-cost or free.  It is time for the federal and state governments to increase support to higher education, so that tuition can be  radically lowered while shifting financial aid from loans to grants.  In any case, loans to students should not be from banks or for-profit organizations.  Only when students from all income levels can graduate free of debt will higher education offer social mobility.

Health Care
"Our new Economic Bill of Rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race - everywhere in the United States.  We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation."
- Harry Truman to Congress supporting single-payer in 1945.

A single-payer national health insurance system—based on medical need and not on the ability to pay—is in the present political climate the only efficient and just means to provide health care for all.  Currently, the U.S. spends close to 17 percent of its GNP on health care (as compared to 12 percent or less in other advanced industrial nations).  Yet our health outcomes rank us near the bottom of these nations.  Private health insurers spend nearly one out of four of their medical dollars on marketing and administration, while Medicare’s administrative costs are only 3 percent of the program’s total expenditure.  With “single payer,” we could maintain private and non-profit provision of health care and consumer choice of primary-care physicians.  The government would not take over the administration and provision of health care, but it would eliminate the wasteful and redundant private insurance industry and replace it with one insurer—a system equivalent to “Medicare for all,” and not just for the poor or the currently uninsured.   The cost savings in such a program could extend coverage to all citizens; it would also make our labor markets more efficient, as workers would no longer worry that a change in employment might adversely affect their medical coverage.  In addition, the huge savings in administrative costs (and elimination of wasteful insurance advertising) could be used to improve the quality of health care.

Even a single-payer national health system is a compromise.  What socialists truly strive for is socialized medicine: the democratic, public provision of health care, with hospitals owned by the public rather than by capitalists, and operated through democratic rather than authoritarian means.  Single-payer insurance with continued private provision is an important half-way point toward equitable and democratic provision of the public good that is health care.

Social Security and Retirement
"What starts with F, ends in K, and means 'screw you'? 401(k)!"
- Dr. Joe Schwartz, DSA Vice-Chair.

Social Security was supposed to be one of the three pillars of retirement security, the other two being employer-provided pension plans and personal savings.  With the rise of the low-wage, service sector, non-union economy, pensions are becoming a thing of the past, and the personal savings rate barely hovers above 0%.  Social Security, providing only about 1/3 of what people need in retirement, is increasingly the only income left for retirees.  Consequently senior citizen poverty is on the rise, and actual retirement is on the decline.  Why do you think all the Wal-Mart greeters have taken that job instead of relaxing in their golden years?

Talk of “reforming” Social Security is code for privatizing the most valuable program to survive from the New Deal.  The Social Security system guarantees all citizens a stable income in old age but also insures against disability and the vulnerability dependent children face when they lose an income-earning parent or guardian.  This Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance system can readily be preserved, even expanded in scope, by raising the cap on income taxed (presently the super-rich are only taxed on the first roughly $100,000 of their income); taxing wealth and not only income; and including state and local employees in the system.  Such a program to expand social insurance would also grant citizenship to all those—such as immigrants of all status—who work in the formal economy, so they could both contribute taxes to Social Security (which they often do) and benefit from the social insurance system their taxes support.  Such measures might allow the government to raise the real value of public pensions at a time when the percentage of workers covered by adequate private pensions has declined precipitously.

 

Immigration
"'For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'"
- Matthew 25:35-40.

Massive migrations of exploited workers, refugees, displaced farmers, agricultural workers, and asylum seekers result from an unjust global political and economic system that works for the benefit of transnational corporations and at the expense of the world’s peoples. Immigration to the United States does not only result from the “pull” of greater economic opportunity. It is also caused by the “push” of growing economic inequality and exploitation in developing societies. Much of the current wave of migration to the United States from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean can be traced to NAFTA and other unjust “free trade” agreements that enabled subsidized U.S. agribusiness to flood these societies with cheap produce, destroying the livelihoods of millions of small farmers and other rural workers. The export oriented, often capital-intensive form of manufacturing imposed on them by the IMF, World Bank, and WTO also limits the number of good jobs in the urban economy of these developing nations.

The same story can be told about African migration to the nations of the European Union. We can stem the “push” for mass immigration from the developing world only if these economies are allowed to develop in equitable and internally integrated ways. Such development would require the national and international regulation of corporate power by free trade unions and democratic governments, as well as the democratization of international economic regulatory institutions.

But reducing or even eliminating the economic forces driving mass immigration is not enough. In the meantime, we must develop humane policies to respond to the migration of more than 12 million people already living in the United States. The presence of a vast number of highly exploitable workers—workers without legal status in this country—leads to the proliferation of low-wage, unsafe, and insecure jobs for all. Employers can more easily discriminate against young African Americans, particularly unskilled young men without high school diplomas, when there is vulnerable immigrant labor to exploit, and the availability of a reserve army of the barely employed endangers union wages and union contracts in many areas— notably among lower-skilled construction and factory workers. We need an immediate end to the deportations that keep immigrant workers living in fear and prevent them from exercising the few rights they do possess. We need to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation that grants immediate permanent resident status to undocumented workers currently in the United States and establishes an expeditious and nonpunitive road to citizenship for these workers and their families. Such an immigration bill must not include guest worker programs that further exploit these workers and undercut all workers’ rights to organize and to secure humane wages and working conditions.

In addition, we must not devote additional resources to militarizing the nation’s borders.  Since the passage of the restrictive 1994 Immigration Reform Act, the federal government has spent more than $30 billion on border enforcement. This has not deterred unauthorized border crossings. Instead, it has lined the pockets of “coyotes,” or smugglers who serve the needs of exploitative employers searching for cheap labor. The practice of human smuggling has already led to the cruel, painful deaths of some 4,000 people in the deserts of the Southwest and in the holds of ships.

Crime & Punishment
"Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems."
                                                            -- Angela Davis

The Young Democratic Socialists oppose the continued increase in prison construction on the State and Federal levels.  We reaffirm our commitment to the decriminalization of drug users and to reverse the trend of mass criminalization of people of color and youth.  Crime and criminality have political and economic causes, and cannot be solved by herding people into inhumane prisons while simultaneously destroying the welfare system and pushing wages down.  Jobs, education and decent, affordable housing will cut crime, not prisons or harsher sentencing.  Behind the expansion of the prison industry lies corporate power.  The spate of prison privatizations has had an adverse effects on prisoners rights and the justice system in general.  We identify the prison industry as a self-perpetuating defense industry, and, as a result, we will continue our work to build a coalition of progressive, anti-prison activists in communities and on campuses stop this destructive trend.

Nationalism
"I come to cleanse the American flag, not to burn it!"
- Norman Thomas, 1968.

The relationship between the Left and nationalism has been pretty love/hate.  We love it when it helps rally anti-colonial forces such as in Northern Ireland, Kurdistan, Tibet, etc., and we hate it when it serves as the basis of oppression and atrocities, such as in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco's Spain, etc. or the imperialism of the United States, Britain, France and the other colonial powers.  Essentially, if a nation is on top, we hate its nationalism, and if a nation is on the bottom, we love it.  You might say this isn't the most enlightened attitude.

A more enlightened attitude is socialist internationalism.  We see the all the people of the world as sharing common interests, as well as common scourges: oppression and capitalism.  In essence, we share solidarity with all the people of the world, recognizing that our fates are all bound together. 

Many of us envision a world without borders, with the diverse peoples of the world united together in one democratic socialist republic, with equal protection for all cultures, languages and societies.  Under global socialism, the nation would still exist as a cultural entity, but its meaning would be quite different.  Socialist nationalism means understanding and treasuring your nation's place in a world of equals, and rooting for the national soccer team in the World Cup.

While despising many of the policies of the United States government, American socialists value deeply our country's rich history of class struggle, and share a love of the common people - the workers, the farmers, the artists.  Rembering the Stars and Stripes flying over the slave plantations of the South, the massacre at Wounded Knee, the bloody hills of the Philippines, every overthrown Latin American capital, the empty villages of Vietnam, and the oil derricks of Iraq, many enlightened Americans cannot look upon the flag without feeling an awful shame and a furious anger.  However, many also believe that we can cleanse the flag by overthrowing the class that has soiled it, and fly it high as we take our place in the community of nations along with our socialist brothers and sisters around the globe.

Globalization
"Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity."
                                                                           - Karl Marx

In the emerging global capitalist economy, the controlling economic institutions—the transnational corporations—have integrated financing, production, distribution and consumption on a vast scale. They now have the capacity to function as “stateless” institutions, relatively independent of any particular national economy.  National governments, even in Western Europe and North America, have ever more difficulty controlling capital, currency flows, and investment while defending the living standards of working people. The result is that the majority of wage and income earners in the advanced capitalist nations are now experiencing a long-term leveling down of wages and living conditions tantamount to a gradual impoverishment of this vast working class. The extent of impoverishment is in dispute, but many economists now believe that only one-fifth of the population is rising in affluence, while the rest are suffering a gradual or abrupt erosion of their living standards.  Through globalization, capital eludes governmental regulation.  The movement of capital across borders, unlike the movement of labor, is all but unrestricted. Indeed, under the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement, laws protecting the rights of workers can be deemed a barrier to free trade.

The struggle for social justice at home is inextricably tied to the struggle for social justice abroad. Thus, an economic justice agenda would press the U.S. to support the creation of international trade and investment agreements that provided for sanctions against violators of basic human and labor rights. It would also press for the creation of international courts to address crimes committed by multinational corporations. While the world may indeed be flattening and greater economic and cultural global integration may be inevitable, it can only benefit the vast majority of the world’s people if democratic social movements, political parties, and trade unions regulate such processes. And unless the U.S. takes the lead in curtailing greenhouse emissions and substituting renewable energy for fossil fuels, there can be no future for the movement for social justice—or even for human existence.

The neo-liberal policies of the current IMF and WTO guarantee the ability of capital to invest in countries whose governments suppress basic labor and human rights. Absent democratic control of international institutions, the power of capital to pursue its parochial, short-term interests will remain unchecked. The U.S. must renegotiate “free trade” agreements such as NAFTA so that developing nations regain the ability to regulate the behavior of foreign investors and to control their economic destiny.

Restructuring the global economic system to enable developing countries to build more integrated and equitable economies would curtail the “push” factor behind global migration. Greater labor rights in the advanced industrial world would curtail the unquenchable thirst of corporate agriculture and food processing industries in the United States—as a raise in wages and benefits would compel these industries to increase labor productivity.

Neither protectionism nor neo-liberalism serve socialist aims. Trade and investment are incredibly important for the economic future of the developing world. But the ability for developing nations to invest soundly, and to take control over their own resources must be part of the deal. Otherwise, the rhetoric of free trade and globalization is just a new vocabulary for neocolonialism. Furthermore, workers in the first world must not be forced to compete with their counterparts in the "south" by sacrificing economic security and workplace rights. In the course of our labor support work and our campaigning for economic justice, we emphasize the need for cross-border labor organizing, and highlight the fact that globalization has made international solidarity into a bread and butter issue. For our part, we will continue our cooperation with socialists and trade unionists abroad. The interests of workers in the US and Canada are connected to those in Mexico and Brazil. Only democratic, grassroots organizing can affect long term change, backed up by strong national and international enforcement and respect of trade union rights, environmental standards and safe working conditions. We support continued cross-border labor organizing, and the addition of social clauses to NAFTA, GATT, ITO and other trade agreements.

War
"Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man."
                                                                                              -Bertrand Russell

Imagine if we redirected just 1/10 of the monies spent on war towards the sustainable development of the countries that foster the growth of extremism.  We find it absolutely obvious that war will never stifle but only foster the growth of extremism in impoverished countries.  Democracy cannot be implanted in a country/region but that it is instead something that follows from the erosion of poverty and extreme disparities of wealth both domestically and internationally. Reactionary calls for war and violence do not make us safer, but only serve to suppress useful discussions of long-lasting solutions to the phenonenon of "radical Islam" or extremism in the Middle East and other places.

Contrary to what popular voices like Christopher Hitchens or Thomas Friedman would lead us to believe, Islam and more importantly Religion in general is not the problem; unequal development, poverty and consequential insecurity is.  Religion is used as a means of recuiting poor and disenfranchized Muslims to Jihad by power-hungry leaders in the Middle East to further their ends in the same way as patriotism is used as a means of recruiting poor and disenfranchized youth into the military by power-hungry leaders in the West to further their ends; same shit, different terminology.  Until we come to understand this, global security will in fact continue to be threatened.

Unions
"The right to bargain collectively is at the bottom of social justice for the worker, as well as the sensible conduct of business affairs.  The denial or observance of this right means the difference between despotism and democracy."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Congress, 1937.

We must immediately restore the right of workers to organize democratic trade unions and to bargain collectively. In light of corporate America’s wide abuse of current labor laws to harass and fire pro-union employees, it is imperative that Congress pass the Employee Free Choice Act. Not only would this act enable workers to form a union after a majority signed union authorization cards but it would also ensure that employers bargain in good faith with their unionized workers. Despite Ronald Reagan’s ringing defense of the rights of workers to organize democratic trade unions in Communist nations, such a right has not truly existed in the U. S. for more than three decades.

Social transformation is impossible without a strong labor movement. We understand that many recent progressive victories in Congress and in politics in general were due primarily to strong activism by unions and union members. Our local work includes an emphasis on supporting strikes, organizing drives, and anti-sweatshop campaigns as well as bringing general information about the need for a strong labor movement to the public. In harmony with the DSA's general principles of coalition-building, we work to include labor activists in our chapters' political work on the local level. Furthermore, we oppose all efforts, in the name of campaign finance reform, to weaken the political influence of organized labor, and oppose all such state and local initiatives. We support and encourage the new progressive leadership of the AFL-CIO, and their efforts to bring youth, women and people of color into the labor movement.

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