What would Socialism look like? All too often, when the Left tries to define “socialism,” they stumble into the weeds with seven pairs of trousers tied to their ankles as they hop helplessly with socks stuffed in their mouths, attempting to hit a golf ball with their neighbor’s dildo—all done in order to get that hole-in-one, even though they had already swung three times, which had lead them to the weeds in the first place. Sounds daft & confusing? It doesn’t have to be. For this episode, Jesse & Matt talk about what socialism is, what it should be, and how we might best achieve this vaunted fantasia, making it so fully felt that it sounds like your loved one’s heartbeat. Socialism should be straight-forward, obvious, and undeniable. Moving toward the full decommodification of The Golden Square – the universal and unconditional rights to Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education – is a poetic starting point. Clearly, capitalism isn’t working and its core myths are failing to persuade much of anyone anymore, especially the young. Capitalist mythology wants you to believe that we live in an unrivaled utopia of boundless consumer plenty; but what it won’t tell you is that capitalism is a creepy, gyrating homogenization machine that ruins the beautiful, natural diversities of Earth and humanity in a drab, boring, tedious, and repetitive circle-jerk of dangerous rituals that lead to bio-collapse. It's over-run with all kinds of sick and sweaty M&Ms: Militarized, Monopolized, Market-Worshiping Malls, Mini-Marts, Megaplexes, McMansions, and Miles & Miles of Milquetoast Suburbs, Stacked with Super-Sized SUVs. Now more than ever, it is clear that we must cancel this dick-in-the-box ideology. At this moment, we must choose between socialism or more of neoliberalism’s DeathCult barbarism. The former leads to utopia, while the latter leads to certain oblivion. The choice should be so dumbfoundingly obvious that it’s akin to dropping your backpack to catch a falling baby from a window above. The Golden Square offers a No-Bullshit Blueprint for a socialist tomorrow that we can begin building today. It is a clear path to a world that is inclusive, accessible, sustainable, vibrant, colorful, diverse, dynamic, enriching, expansive, exciting, innovative, joyful, fun, restful, and yes: queer as fuck. It’s the launchpad to a flourishing, utopian future. Let's right the wrongs and start building socialism now.
Mentioned In This Episode:
Mixtape for Starting a Discussion:
(1) – "How the Civil-Rights Movement Aimed to End Poverty – “A Freedom Budget for All Americans” proposed spending billions of federal dollars to provide jobs and basic welfare to all citizens." – a story by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin - in The Atlantic - Feb. 2018
(2) – "Until Black Women Are Free, None of Us Will Be Free: Barbara Smith and the Black feminist visionaries of the Combahee River Collective." – by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor - in The New Yorker - July 20, 2020
(3) – "Socialist Feminism: What Is It and How Can It Replace Corporate ‘Girl Boss’ Feminism?" – by Sarah Loenard - in Teen Vogue - May 5, 2020
(4) – "Capitalism Isn’t Working. But What Would a Viable Socialist System Look Like?" - by Ben Burgis - in Jacobin - May 21, 2020
(5) – "We Need to Say What Socialism Will Look Like" by Sam Gindin - in Jacobin - March 6, 2019
(6) – "Socialism as a Set of Principles" by Nathan J. Robinson - in Current Affairs - March 12, 2018
A "freedom budget" for all Americans; budgeting our resources, 1966-1975, to achieve "freedom from want." by A. Philip Randolph Institute.
The Poor People's Campaign: A Wikipedia History
From The National Museum of African-American History: “1968 Poor People’s Campaign – Challenges & Successes”
Anna Diamond in Smithsonian Magazine: “Remembering Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968”William J. Barber II in The Atlantic: “America’s Moral Malady”
The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival
Two Key Organizers for the March on Washington & Other Civil Rights Campaigns:
Asa Philip Randolph:
Bayard Rustin:
I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters. Published in 2012 by City Lights Books.
John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. Published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press.
The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)
A Wikipedia Description on Harriet Tubman’s Raid on Combahee Ferry (AKA Combahee River Raid)Alexis Clark for the History Channel: “After the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman Led a Brazen Civil War Raid”
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Published in 2017 by Haymarket Books.
Keisha N. Blain in The Atlantic: “The Black Women Who Paved the Way for This Moment”
Not Surprisingly, the Combahee River Collective’s Statement Is Reflected in the Fact that the Key Black Lives Matter Founders Are All Black Women: Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi
Viral Video #1 of a Black Woman Speaking Truth to Power: Tamika Mallory on George Floyd Protests
Viral Video #2 of a Black Woman Speaking Truth to Power: “How Can We Win?” Featuring Kimberly Jones, Co-Author of I’m Not Dying with You Tonight.Lara Putnam, Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman in The Washington Post: “The Floyd Protests Are the Broadest in U.S. history — and Are Spreading to White, Small-Town America”
Sady Doyle in Quartz: “The True Story of How Teen Vogue Got Mad, Got Woke, and Began Terrifying Men Like Donald Trump”
Samhita Mukhopadhay in Jacobin: “Teen Vogue Is Good”
Justin Fox in Bloomberg: “Why German Corporate Boards Include Workers”
A Clip from Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (2009): “Workplace Democracy and Cooperatives”
The Anarchist Library: Elliott Liu’s Bloom and Contend: A Critique of Maoism (2013)
Crimethinc: “Restless Specters of Anarchist Dead: A Few Words from the Undead of 1917”The Values of Equality, Democracy, Community as Seen in Erik Olin Wright’s Article for Jacobin Magazine: “How to Be an Anticapitalist Today,” parts of which became adapted on a longer nonfiction work, published posthumously: How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century. The book was released in 2019 by Verso Books.
To Listen to Our Discussion of Wright’s Book in Episode 026: How to Erode Capitalism in the 21st Century
THE HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS OF THE GOLDEN SQUARE:
The Golden Rule: "Treat others as you would like to be treated." The idea can be traced back to as early as Confucian times from 551-479 BC and appears in most ethical traditions as either positive or negative injunctions.
The Socialist Slogan Popularized by Marx: "From Each According to Ability, To Each According to Needs."
The Freedom From Want – From Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address: “The Four Freedoms”
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
The Golden Square – A New Social Contract For Society.
We demand that the core necessities of life:
Food.
Shelter.
Healthcare.
Education.
...must be enshrined as essential human rights, guaranteed to every human being on the planet.
These are essential human rights.
They must be decommodified.
They must be provided to all.
The Golden Square is an Acknowledgement of a Simple Moral Truth:
We Have a Collective Responsibility to Provide All People with the Material Means to Live a Dignified Life.
The Ethos of The Golden Square:
The Golden Square uses the terms Food, Shelter, Healthcare and Education in an Expansive way, as opposed to a Reductive way.
FOOD = The Means to Sustain
SHELTER = The Means to Protect
HEALTHCARE = The Means to Heal
EDUCATION = The Means to Grow
Remember – We DON'T Mean Merely Opportunity, Access, or Affordability. We Mean Guaranteed Provisions.
We Mean Abolishing The Idea That There Should be a "Cost of Living"
We Mean That the Material Necessities for a Dignified Life Must Always be FREE.
Conditions for The Golden Square:
(1) Unconditional, Universal, Lifelong Provisions
(2) Produced at the Highest Quality Possible
(3) Produced with the Goal of Net-Positive Impact on The Biosphere
After the shocking upset by Donald Trump in the 2016 election, beating the assumed winner, Hillary Clinton, many thought that Obamacare would be quickly and utterly gutted. In February, 2017: CNN had Ted Cruz Debate Bernie Sanders on Obamacare, but Sanders, not surprisingly, made the case that we should go much farther and pass Medicare for All, so that healthcare could be a human right to all. At one point, Sanders said that Ted Cruz’s notion of access doesn’t mean anything if you can’t afford it. Here is the full YouTube video of that televised debate on CNN.
Dieter Rams - A Wikipedia Biography
Dieter Rams - Ten principles for good design
“Less and Better” – a short teaser for the documentary RAMS (A film by Gary Hustwit), about legendary German designer Dieter Rams.
How Dieter Rams’ philosophy of “Less, but better” was co-opted by Apple and many others as an aesthetic rather than as an ethic – from Alexandra Lange in The New Yorker: “What We’ve Learned from Dieter Rams, and What We’ve Ignored”
Less But Better by Dieter Rams, Published by gestalten.
Helen Briggs in BBC News: “Organic Farming ‘Benefits Biodiversity’”
David Graeber’s Most Famous Work: Debt: The First 5000 Years. Published in 2011 by Melville House Books.
Sandra Kollen Ghizoni in Federal Reserve History: “Nixon Ends Convertibility of US Dollars to Gold and Announces Wage/Price Controls” (August 1971)
Money Is Just Digits on Screen: As Seen from Robert Anton Wilson’s Perspective that Money Is Nothing More Than a “Semantic Hallucination”:
“Of course, my position is based on the denial that money does store wealth. I think it’s a semantic hallucination, the verbal equivalent of an optical illusion, to speak at all of money containing or storing wealth. Such thinking should have gone out with phlogiston theory. The symbol is not the referent; the map is not the territory. Money symbolizes wealth, as words symbolize things, and that’s all. The delusions that money contains wealth is the mechanism by which the credit monopoly has gained a stranglehold on the entire economy. As Colonel Greene pointed out in Mutual Banking, all the money could disappear tomorrow morning and the wealth of the planet would remain the same. However, if the wealth disappeared—if squinks from the Pink Dimension dragged it off to null-space or something—the money would be worth nothing. You don’t need to plow through the dialects of the debate between the Austrians and the free credit people like Tucker and Gesell to see this; any textbook of semantics will make it clear in a few hours of study. Wealth is nature’s abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase an an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution—either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel. As you realize, a cashless society could exist merely by keeping bookkeeping entries or computer tapes. Money is a primitive form of such computer tapes, serving a feedback function. If we are not to replace the present banking oligopoly with a programmer’s oligopoly, in which the interest will be paid to computer technicians, we must realize that this is all a matter of abstract symbolism—that it exists by social agreement and nobody owns it, anymore than Webster owns the language. Why is it, incidentally, that the Austrians don’t follow their logic to its natural conclusion and demand that we pay interest to the dictionary publishers every time we speak or write?
You have to watch people playing Monopoly, and see them begin to “identify” the paper markers with real value, to understand how the mass hypnosis of Capitalism works. Fortunately, the Head Revolution is still proceeding and more and more people are waking up to the difference between our economic game-rules and the real existential situation of humanity.”
Mark Fisher’s Most Important Work: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Published in 2009 by Zero Books.
Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Published in 1986 by James Currey.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi in Lithub: “What Decolonizing the Mind Means Today”
Scott Holter in University of Washington Magazine: “Earth Is Doomed (Eventually), UW Scientists Say” (Long Story Short, in 5 Billion Years, the Sun Will Expand, Bake Our Oceans and Envelop the Earth.)As Monty Python Reminds Us: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” — Eric Betz in the Astronomy Magazine: “The Sun's Death Could Mean New Life in the Outer Solar System”
Against The Work Ethic: Transcript of This Is Hell Podcast Interview with James Livingstone, author of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. Published in 2016 by the University of North Carolina Press.
Science Fiction Author, Cory Doctorow, Explains His Origin Story with “Whuffie” (Which Originally Appeared in His Debut Book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) in His Regular Column at Locus Magazine: “Wealth Inequality Is Even Worse in Reputation Economies”
Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All Plan Would Cost $3 Trillion a Year Over Ten Years. Our Current System Costs $3.6 Trillion a Year: “Bernie Sanders Just Cemented His Frontrunner Status with a Huge Victory in Nevada. Here's How His Medicare for All Plan Would Remake the $3.6 Trillion US Healthcare Industry.”
Doug Henwood from Behind the News Interviews Author Tom Philpott (August 13, 2020) About the Catastrophic Centralization of Food Production in America - Too Much Water Being Used in Central Valley of California, While Too Much Meat, Corn, Soy Is Being Produced in Iowa Causes Historic Soil Depletion and Erosion: The Choices of Which Are Devastating Their Native Ecologies & Futures.
Tom Philpott’s Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It. Published in 2020 by Bloomsbury.
Tracy Connor in The Daily Beast: “North Carolina Smithfield Pork Plant Hit by Coronavirus Outbreak”
Walnuts, Walnuts & More Walnuts: “More than 99% of the walnuts in U.S. are grown in the fertile soils of California’s Central Valley. And this is made possible by the efforts of the 4,800+ family farms that have been growing walnuts of the highest quality for over a century.”
Ahmed White in Jacobin: “100 Years Ago, the First Red Scare Tried to Destroy the Left”
Rutger Bregman’s Utopia For Realists: And How We Can Get There. Published in 2017 by Bloomsbury.
Rutger Bregman’s TED Talk: “Poverty Isn’t a Lack of Character; It’s a Lack of Cash”
Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History. Published in 2020 by Little, Brown and Company
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): A Wikipedia Exploration. Leviathan is his most famous work, and has inspired the short-hand word “Hobbesian” to describe humans as selfish, cruel and brutal, and who can only be controlled and made moral by the cage of the state.
STEPS TO DECOMMODIFY:
STEP 0: Abolish The Police / Prison / Military Industrial Complex
STEP 1: Tell The Truth.
STEP 2: Tax The Rich.
STEP 3: Expand of The Welfare State.
STEP 4: Jobs Guarantee.
STEP 5: Remove The Profit Motive.
STEP 6: Re-Claim, Re-Tool, Re-Distribute, & Re-Purpose.
STEP 7: Establish Democracy.
STEP 8: Demolish Bureaucracy.
“Understanding SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program”
Cooperative Development Institute: “How Cooperative Grocery Stores Are Bringing Food Access to Low-Income Neighborhoods”
Lucy Rennick in SBS: “Take a Bite of a Karl Marx Sandwich at This Unique Communist-Anarchist Bakery”
Paris Marx in Passage: “We Can Do Better Than Soulless Ghost Kitchens and Delivery Apps”
Vernonika Duma and Hanna Lichtenberger in Jacobin: “Remembering Red Vienna”
Meagan Day in Jacobin: “We Can Have Beautiful Public Housing”
Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper in The People’s Policy Project: “A Plan to Solve the Housing Crisis Through Social Housing”
A Planet to Win (Published in 2019 by Verso Books) Proposes Building 10 Million Low-Carbon Homes in 10 Years
Oksana Mironova in Jacobin: “How Community Land Trusts Can Help Address the Affordable Housing Crisis”
The Official Website for the Inland Equity Community Land Trust
The Gold Standard to Model From: Bernie Sanders’ Bold Proposal: Medicare For All
Deborah Burger in the San Diego Tribune: “California Needs SB 562 to Guarantee Health Care for All”
SB-562: Medicare for All in California
The Gold Standard to Model From: Bernie Sanders’ “College for All, Cancel All Student Debt”