Socialisms Return

[Seedersandleechers]

After more than a half-century in the wilderness, the socialist left reemerges in America.



https://www.thenation.com/article/socialisms-return/

[JudyM]

1. Some of this is misunderstood here, and this is good clarification.

For Sanders, certain social goods—housing, education, and health care—deserve to be understood as rights rather than as commodities sold for profit. To achieve these ends, he sees the need to fight the power of concentrated wealth, which distorts both markets and politics in favor of the wealthy. But Sanders has another critique that is equally powerful and just as salient to our moment. His frequent invocation of the 1 percent and its undeserved share of the national wealth is not only an argument about economic inequality; it is also an argument about political inequality. One cannot be an equal member of a polity if those with wealth have far more say and far more power in the political system. A political democracy requires an economic democracy—or, as Sanders writes in Our Revolution, “today’s tyrannical aristocracy is no longer a foreign power. It’s an American billionaire class that has unprecedented economic and political influence over all of our lives.