It’s hard to look at today’s war-torn world and come away with any confidence in the system that brought us to this point. Under global capitalism today, poverty abounds, while banks post record profits and the rich get richer. Climate change facilitates the spread of apocalyptic wildfires. Capitalist nations wage bloody wars, and workers and the poor always pay. Trump’s anti-worker, chauvinistic agenda creates a useful smokescreen for capitalism, scapegoating immigrants and trans people for many of our problems that capitalism can’t solve. The corporate Democrats put up little resistance because they’ve got no solutions either. In reality, Trump’s second term is the latest symptom of the decay of capitalism, a system claiming that, powered by its engine of competition and profit-seeking, it can provide us the best of possible worlds. It certainly cannot. To overcome both Trump and the conditions that created him, we need a strategy that roots our struggle today in the ambitious fight for an entirely new system. We need to fight for socialism.
What Is Socialism?
Karl Marx famously summed up the ultimate aim of socialist society with the slogan “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” This condition is clearly incompatible with capitalism, under which billions of people live with basic needs unmet. For a society to even be capable of guaranteeing a high standard of living for all people, it needs an advanced level of productive capacity from which it can supply an abundance of high quality goods and services. The truth is, capitalism has this potential—especially in the most developed countries. So what’s stopping capitalism from providing “to each according to their needs”? The answer is simple: the reins of production are held firmly by a tiny ruling class of capitalists, and as a general rule, they operate to maximize their own profits.
Socialism is a system built on completely different foundations. Most critically, the ownership and direction of all the major companies are wrested from the grip of the capitalists and taken into the hands of the working class as a whole—that is, all of us who under capitalism must make a wage to survive. Profit as a motive becomes obsolete: when industry is owned by all of society, there is simply no space for a small room of shareholders to make decisions that line their pockets. In place of free market competition, we organize a planned economy, making decisions democratically about how to use our resources to fully address the needs of working people.
In this way, the full potential of humanity will be unleashed to do things it never could because it simply wasn’t profitable: medical research would reach new heights and sustainable energy production and distribution would be accelerated. High-quality healthcare, education, housing, clean water, and healthy food would be available to all. The waste of military production, planned obsolescence, and inefficient supply chains would be eliminated. By sharing out the work in society with the unemployed and implementing automation for the benefit of workers, the work week would be easily reduced for everyone with no loss in pay. Freed up to live better, we’d have more time for creative endeavors, developing more fulfilling relationships, and participating actively in the running of society.
We’re told that our society is a democracy. But the workplace under capitalism is absolutely a dictatorship, run by bosses and managers whose specialties are cutting corners, keeping workers in line, and making money. The real experts in each workplace are the workers themselves, who know how the job could be improved if money was no object. In the rest of our lives, too, democracy is intentionally limited by the ruling capitalist class—this is plainest to see in electoral politics, where racist voter suppression is rampant while corporations and the rich can spend near-unlimited sums on politicians to do their bidding instead of ours. Socialism would institute genuine democracy in the workplace and in all of society, where elected committees would make decisions about day-to-day operations and how our communities run. To maintain accountability, anyone elected to such a body would make no more than their coworkers, and would be subject to recall by majority vote.
All forms of oppression—racism, sexism, xenophobia, and more—have their root in class society. Each has a different history, but each was introduced by the ruling class to strengthen their control of the unequal system they presided over. All oppressions infuse division within the working class, which the capitalists rely on to hamstring united fightback by the workers. By doing away with class rule, socialism eliminates the basis for oppression to exist. To be clear, prejudice will not vanish instantly upon the dawn of socialism. But as want, inequality, and desperation are eliminated from society, the groundwork is laid for oppression to melt away. In the movement to fight the right today, we must constantly struggle to overcome prejudice among the working class, because without doing so, we’ll fail to forge maximum possible unity. But if capitalism remains intact, so too will oppression.
The Best Fight Against Trump Is The Fight For Socialism
The next several years in the U.S. could prove devastating for working people, unless we organize and push back against Trump’s agenda. His right populist ideas, however, do undeniably appeal to some layers of workers. But fundamentally, right populism torpedoes solidarity and keeps workers divided. It decries the billionaires, but ultimately keeps them in the driver’s seat.
The fight against Trump must at the same time undermine the basis for his appeal. While some workers have hope that Trump will deliver the improvements to working-class life that he promised, in the longer run he will not succeed—he is a capitalist after all. While remaining steadfast in our opposition to right-wing ideas, socialists offer an alternative political pathway for the class anger that Trump cynically tapped into, based on the collective power of the working class.
Our struggle for socialism cannot be confined to the borders of this country. Capitalism is desperate and decaying worldwide, and the rise of the far right is a global phenomenon. In France, Germany, and many other countries, support for the status quo political “center” has collapsed, and without a strong socialist movement to draw a class line, layers of workers have rallied to far-right parties. The growth of the right is a threat to the potential for unity and the hard-earned gains of the working class everywhere, and we need an international socialist movement to fight it.
Fighting For Socialism Today
As Trump bombards us with a nonstop barrage of attacks, it may appear futile to fight for socialism today. On what timeline can we even conceive of winning socialism? And shouldn’t we focus on defending against the worst of Trump’s attacks? Regardless of how far away socialism seems, socialists have the strategy needed to win working-class victories. In fact, socialists make the best fighters against Trump and the right wing specifically because we hold constant the goal of socialism as our north star.
To win socialism, we’ll need a united, mass working-class movement conscious of its ability to stop production, shut down the system, and force the capitalist class to its knees. Every struggle socialists wage—whether it’s against the deportation of undocumented immigrants or attacks on trans rights—we wage with this in mind. We raise demands that draw the connection between each specific fight and the interests of the working class as a whole, and that trace the inextricable root of the problem to capitalism. We call for methods of struggle, like strikes and walkouts, that imbue the movement with an understanding of its own power and that require it to get organized. We advocate for independent working-class leadership, because history tells us that the capitalist class, often through the Democratic Party, will try to blunt the struggle and run it into the ground.
Liberals don’t think like this, because they don’t want system change. Democrats, when they’re not busy bending the knee to Trump, will pick their battles and confine them to the courts and the Capitol. If they do hold rallies, they’ll largely be for show and will never raise a call to action. Democrats fear an empowered mass movement that they can’t control, and that’s exactly why their methods fall short. It’s up to socialists to stoke the flames of struggle to their full potential.