This page is here to aid you in educating yourself upon current political issues and helping you to form your own solutions.
Contextual Definitions
Socialism:
Socialism is a model of society with the purpose of benefiting the common people, it entails the ownership of industry by workers, the availability of resources to all, and the democratization of power whether it be economical, social, or ideological.
Communism
Communism is the desired outcome of Socialism; a stateless, classless, moneyless society.
Capitalism
Capitalism is a model of society in which there is private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods by a market economy.
Marxism
Marxism is an ideology focused on analyzing Capitalism and its effects on society. It advocates for a workers revolution to overthrow Capitalism in order to establish Socialism.
Popular Models of Socialism
Marxist Leninism
A synthesis of Marx and Lenin’s ideology formed by Joseph Stalin.
Put into practice in the Soviet Union, it advocates for a vanguard party and socialism in one country.
Historically it has been more centralized and authoritarian than other methods of achieving socialism.
Anarcho Communism
Anarcho Communism and other anarchisms seek to establish communism or some other system without a transitory state.
The ideology advocates for all things that communism does, only that it differs in method from Marxism.
Anarchist Communism’s axiomatic motivations are democracy and the maximisation of individual freedom rather than worker’s rights or dialectical materialism.
Market Socialism
Market Socialism is the worker ownership of the means of production/industry within a market economy.
Oftentimes it is a synthesis of policies presented in the Golden Age of Capitalism (1945 - 1970s) and more socialist policies such as cooperative firms and mutual credit banks.
Market Socialism is a vast identifier for multiple different ideologies and thus cannot be generalized as one ideology.
Democratic Socialism
A fusion of Market Socialism and the policies of Libertarian Socialism
Desires cooperative management of firms in a socially owned society (meaning that all surplus goods are distributed to the people)
Historically it was developed as an ideologically leftist opposition to the Soviet Union and Marxist-Leninism.
Master Docs
Initially made for debates against conservatives and capitalists, master docs became an excellent medium of distributing empirical evidence to those new to the left.
What does the Party for Socialism and Liberation stand for?
The Party for Socialism and Liberation believes that the only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society. Driven by an insatiable appetite for ever greater profits regardless of social cost, capitalism is on a collision course with the people of the world and the planet itself. Imperialist war; deepening unemployment and poverty; deteriorating health care, housing and education; racism; discrimination and violence based on gender and sexual orientation; environmental destruction—all are inevitable products of the capitalist system itself.
For the great majority of people in the world, including tens of millions of workers in the United States, conditions of life and work are worsening. There is no prospect that this situation can or will be turned around under the existing system.
The idea that the capitalists’ grip on society and their increasingly repressive state can be abolished through any means other than a revolutionary overturn is an illusion. Equally unrealistic are reformist hopes for a “kinder, gentler” capitalism, or solutions based on economic decentralization or small group autonomy. Meeting the needs of the more than 6.5 billion people who inhabit the planet today is impossible without large-scale agriculture and industry and economic planning.
The fundamental problems confronting humanity today flow from the reality that most of the world’s productive wealth—the product of socialized labor and nature—is privately owned and controlled by a tiny minority. This minority decides what will be produced and what will not. Its decisions are based on making profits rather than meeting human needs.
There are really only two choices for humanity today—an increasingly destructive capitalism, or socialism.
Democratic Socialists of America: What is Democratic Socialism?
Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.
We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.
We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.
We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control.
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change...I’m changing the things I cannot accept.”
- Angela Davis, political activist, academic, and author
“What we would like to do is change the world...by crying unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that it’s ever widening circle will reach around the world.”
- Dorothy Day, journalist and social activist
"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."
- Eugene V. Debs, labor leader
“For us, there is no valid definition of socialism other than the abolition of the exploitation of one human being by another.”
- Che Guevara, Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader
“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.”
- Dolores Huerta, labor organizer and leader of the Farm Worker’s Union during the 1960s
“Solidarity is what we want. We do not want to find fault with each other, but to solidify our forces and say to each other: We must be together; our masters are joined together and we must do the same thing.”
- Mother Jones, Irish-American labor union activist, and leader, schoolteacher
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes, economist
“Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children.”
- Martin Luther King Jr., Baptist minister, and civil rights activist
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
- Christopher Hitchens, Anti-Theist, Marxist