Goldin Frances - Imagine: living in a socialist USA

We go forward to preserve the air and land and water and sky and all the beasts that crawl and fly. We go forward to safeguard the right to speak and write, to join, to learn, to rest, safe at home, to be secure, fed, healthy, sheltered, loved and loving, to be at peace with our identity.

Lynne Stewart

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world...

You may say Im a dreamer

But Im not the only one

I hope someday youll join us

And the world will live as one

John Lennon, Imagine

CONTENTS

I have lived a very long and fruitful life, and I have very few regrets about the path I have walked. There are but two more things I am determined to achieve before I join my ancestors.

One is to join with others to free Mumia Abu-Jamal from the bars that constrain him. This innocent man has never allowed anyone or anything to silence his condemnation of our governments wrongdoings or of the powers that keep him imprisoned. Ever outspoken, his books speak truth to power in a way that most mortals have forsaken. This extraordinary, radical intellectual must be free to teach new generations how to build a better world.

The other is to create this book, which describes what socialism would look like in the United States of America. Imagine that!

The ignorance about what socialism really is and how it could be realized here in our own country is appalling. The mainstream media and the powers that be have made the word socialism frightening, foreign, unpatriotic, and menacing. It threatens their ill-gotten gains, so the idea of workers sharing in the wealth that their sweat and toil has generated has to be labeled un-American. Sharing the wealth scares the 1 percent and provokes them to quash, arrest, and jail thoselike the members of the Occupy movementwho dare to challenge their power.

But a better world is possible, and if we are to win any measure of justice in our country, we must all take responsibility for working toward it. As the drums beat for more wars, there is an alternative: give the power back to the working peopleor risk turning into a barbaric, fascist state.

Nowhere in the world would socialism be more feasible than in our United States. Imagine full employment, universal health care, and free advanced education for all. Imagine guaranteeing women full equalityincluding equal pay for equal work. Imagine an end to discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender men and women. Imagine the end of all wars of aggression and the demise of the military-industrial complex. Imagine doing away with the prison-industrial complex, the death penalty, racial profiling, and the mass incarceration of black youth. Imagine putting music and art back into refurbished schools, raising wages for all workers, building millions of affordable apartments in cities and providing affordable homes to all in need.

Its not a dream. It can be done if the people struggle to replace rapacious capitalism with life-enhancing socialism.

Frances Goldin

Introduction
IMAGINE: Living in a Socialist USA

T his book was Frances Goldins idea. She said to us, Im eighty-eight years old. I want to do two things before I die: get Mumia Abu-Jamal out of prison and edit a book about what America might be like if it were socialist.

It is one thing to criticize what is thats easy. But to imagine what might be is not. Even Karl Marx didnt attempt it. But things have changed since the mid-nineteenth centuryfor better and for worse.

We certainly know where things are heading. Rosa Luxemburg proposed two stark choices just after the imperialist slaughter that was World War I: socialism or barbarism. Given the catastrophe of climate change, the ongoing economic upheaval, and the risk of nuclear annihilation, itll be barbarismif were lucky.

We are running out of time. There must be a future for a radical mass movement, or there will be no future at all. This is a book of imagination, not utopian fantasy. What it envisionswhat it hopes foris eminently possible. And without hope, as our friend Ramsey Clark says, whats the use of doing anything? Indeed, it is ultimately hope that the authors write about. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, as Che Guevara once said, they imagine a world of love and solidarity.

The book is divided into three parts. The first is an indictment of American capitalism. The second part is intended to inspire hope: it imagines what life in America would be like if capitalism were overthrown. It covers multiple aspects of the new world: art, health care, housing, food, emotional life, sexuality, racism, criminal justice, poverty, immigration, religion, drugs, education, science and technology, women, ecology, and the democratic organization of a publicly owned economy. The third part discusses how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

This isnt utopian, either. Its been done beforeor more precisely, its been attempted. But the Russians discovered that you cant implement socialism in a poor, underdeveloped country ravaged by World War I, during which it was invaded by a number of European countries (plus a small US force) in an attempt to restore capitalist property relations. It was subsequently embargoed by those same countries. By 1991, the Soviets had been worn down.

It was attempted in China, a desperately poor country ravaged by years of Western imperial plunder, by the Japanese during World War II, and then, after their 1949 revolution, forsaken by the Soviet Union and embargoed by the West.

It was attempted in Vietnam after its eight-year war of independence from France. But then the United States invaded, dropping more than three times the tonnage of bombs that it dropped on Germany and Japan in World War II, defoliating the countryside with cancer-causing chemicals, and killing some three million Vietnamese.

It was attempted in Cuba. Just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, its development has been stunted by a hostile US embargo in spite of which it has made great advances in health care, putting the US health-care system to shame.

So why would it be different in the United States? Because the United States is the richest country the world has ever seen. Conditions are ripeindeed overripefor these resources to be utilized for the good of all, not for the profit of a few, for the 1 percent. But how do we get to where we want to be? The question will be answered by the masses of peopleand their dedicated and experienced leaderswho can put the lessons of past struggles to use in both their organizing and their goals.

There is plenty of wisdom in this book: in its authors understanding of capitalism and its depredations; in their proposals for how to replace it, and with whatin their vision of what might be. Read it and make the most of it.

Debby Smith

Michael Steven Smith

New York, New York

October 2012

Paul Street

I threw families onto the street in Iraq only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. We need to wake up and realize that our real enemies are not in some distant land, and not people whose names we dont know and cultures we dont understand. The enemy is people we know very well and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when its profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off from our jobs when its profitable. Its the insurance companies who deny us health care when its profitable. Its the banks who take away our homes when its profitable. Our enemies are not 5,000 miles away: they are right here at home.