This is what American socialism looks like today:
“Multinational corporations must be brought under democratic controls…In the short term we can’t eliminate private corporations, but we can bring them under greater democratic control. The government could use regulations and tax incentives to encourage companies to act in the public interest and outlaw destructive activities such as exporting jobs to low-wage countries and polluting our environment.
Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.
Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods.”
— Democratic Socialists of America: “What is Democratic Socialism?”
Bernie Sanders Plan for “Corporate Accountability and Democracy” is a good example of what a socialist policy agenda might look like. Under this Plan:
Forty-five percent of the board of directors of all publicly traded companies will be directly elected by the firm’s workers
All publicly traded companies will be required to provide at least 2 percent of stock to their workers every year until the company is at least 20 percent owned by employees.
All publicly traded companies would have to obtain a federal charter, which will require corporate boards to consider the interests of all of the stakeholders in a company – including workers, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which the corporation operates.
Owners of firms that automate or outsource American jobs to take advantage of robots or cheap labor overseas will be required to share the gains that they make through such practices with their workers.
Rules will be developed to diversify corporate boards by ensuring a significant portion of every board be comprised of people from historically underrepresented groups (e.g. marginalized by gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability or sexuality).
To quote The Economist, the new American socialist “is not a cuddly Scandinavian social democrat who would let companies do their thing and then tax them to build a better world. Instead, he believes American capitalism is rapacious and needs to be radically weakened.” But what’s wrong with opting for the cuddly way of market-friendly welfare states?
Of course, the socialists have an answer, one that is rooted in a Manichean world of good and evil. In brief: prosperity in the developed world is based on exploitation of poorer countries, because well, that’s what capitalism does. So the ultimate goal of American socialism must be an international socialist order.
Great: a new world order of cooperatives, committees, and coercion.
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