Collective Liberation or Bust

How deepening desperation in the U.S. provides an opening for democratic socialism

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of interviewing Grace Blakely, a Left Wing intellectual in the Marxist tradition.

Her excellent book, Vulture Capitalism, looks at the inhuman depravity of late-stage or final stage neoliberal capitalism. She proposes we replace it with a systemic socialist alternative. Here is a quote from her book that deeply resonates with me:

If capitalism is not defined by the presence or absence of markets, but by the domination of society by capital, then socialism is not defined by the presence or absence of planning, but by the democratization of society. Rather than a system of top-down control, true democratic socialism would be a project of collective liberation, which would allow workers to take control over production and citizens to take control over government. This shift will not, however, happen on its own. Working people must organize to fight for it.

There are many ways we can try to understand what is happening in the U.S. right now. One idea is to see “Trumpism” as not about one man or one movement, but as a collective temper tantrum thrown by the country as we lose our power and prestige in the world. Our deeply corrupt political and financial elites can’t accept this. Trump is a symptom of America’s decline, not the cause of it — although he is accelerating our downfall to an extreme degree.

A series of disasters over the last decades revealed how America protects its parasitic and predatory financial elite while ordinary people get fleeced and ruined. During the 2007 housing-market implosion — the result of complex financial instruments built on fraudulent calculations — as many as ten million families were forced to abandon their homes due to foreclosures. People saw their life savings and equity erased. President-elect Obama excoriated Wall Street for awarding itself “$20 billion worth of bonuses … at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse.” Despite Obama’s words, his administration jailed exactly none of the bankers and financiers responsible for the subprime fiasco.

While wealth inequality and inflation skyrocket, the federal minimum wage — $7.25 an hour — remains unchanged since 2009. A recent survey found that “60 % of United States adults … live paycheck to paycheck.” Corporate earnings keep increasing, but often due to practices that exploit resources or endanger the population. One egregious example is Boeing. Internal company emails of Boeing executives boasted that the 737 MAX was “designed by clowns.” Boeing’s culture of cost-cutting and concealment led to a series of mechanical failures and crashes that have killed hundreds.

According to the Federal Reserve, the “top 1 percenters held more wealth than our entire middle 60 percent” last year. Inequality has reached Gilded-Age proportions. All of Trump’s devastating economic policies are designed to increase inequality further, remove consumer protections and regulations, concentrating capital in fewer hands.

Trump’s latest interview in Time Magazine provides an extraordinary testament to human stupidity, egotism, and short-sighted arrogance. It is funny on one level, but also terrible and chilling. However we arrived here, it is tragic that our country has given such a damaged individual so much power, including power over nuclear weapons, power over our economic and ecological future, and power over a vast military and security apparatus.

As someone who wrote a book on indigenous prophecies, I sense a prophetic dimension to this cul de sac. I’m also intrigued by the Jungian interpretation of the Apocalypse as a psychological event in the collective Psyche where we are forced to confront and fully integrate the Shadow. With Trumpism, Technofeudalism, and Christian extremism, we are staring at the imminent end of this system. The gap between the level of complexity in our world and the ignorance and idiocy of our leadership is not sustainable. Something has to break.

When Time asked Trump if he planned to call Chinese President Xi to make a trade deal with him, he responded: “If people want to–well, we all want to make deals. But I am this giant store. It's a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I'll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.”

When the reporter asked him if he was aware that thousands of small businesses will be forced to close within a few months if he continues his current tariff policy, he responded anti-factually:

“No, I’m treating small businesses—small businesses will be a bigger beneficiary of what I'm doing than the large businesses. But everybody's going to benefit.” He refused to agree that the country should be “100%” ruled by law.

We’ve obviously entered an extremely dangerous period in America. It is quite possible we will slide all of the way down to total Fascism in the U.S., with our morally evacuated institutions and media organizations kowtowing to this despicable regime as it seeks to deport and imprison millions of people in foreign concentration camps. However, such periods of instability and peril can also provide opportunities for mass awakenings. New collective movements and previously unimaginable alternatives can suddenly appear and flourish when things fall apart. Support for Trumpism may be more shallow than the regime, in its hubris, realizes, although there is no doubt they have tens of millions of committed adherents (The New Apostolic Movement, the manosphere, and so on).

The kind of mass awakening we need would recognize the “unfreedom” forced upon humanity by this Capitalist regime. Blakely writes:

Capitalist democracies provide the electorate with limited freedom to shape the operation of state power and zero freedom to shape economic institutions. This is no coincidence. Without democracy in the realm of production, large corporations and financial institutions are able to wield unaccountable power of the kind that would be the envy of even the most authoritarian state. This creates a curious kind of “unfreedom” that pervades even nominally democratic societies. While citizens are assumed to be capable of voting in democratic elections, when they arrive at work they become the “subjects of a despotic corporate government”—and the only alternative to obedience is destitution.

At moments through history, mass organizing drives a shift toward more democratic and socialistic arrangements. In the early 20th century United States, militant labor movements won major gains. Waves of strikes and union activism forced the implementation of progressive reforms during the New Deal era — from the right to unionize and the eight-hour workday to Social Security and other public programs. For example, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, in which auto workers occupied GM factories, led to a landmark victory with the union’s official recognition and better wages. This showed how collective action can wrest power from capital and push the state to grant economic rights.

Another example is the Mondragón cooperative movement in Spain. Founded in 1956 in the Basque region, Mondragón has grown into a federation of 80+ worker cooperatives with around 70,000 worker-owners today. It is the world’s largest industrial co-op, covering industries from manufacturing to retail. Mondragón’s companies operate on one-worker-one-vote principles and share profits broadly. This shows that large-scale enterprises can be run democratically and competitively – a glimpse of how an economy might function when ownership is shared by workers.

More recently, Rojava in northern Syria (the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria) offers an experiment in radical democracy. Since 2012, Kurdish and allied communities have organized a society based on decentralized self-government. Power is exercised through local communes and councils in which citizens directly participate. The communes manage everything from security to social services and even coordinate distribution of necessities like bread and fuel.

Despite war and brutal hardship, Rojava’s residents have shown that it’s possible to build a multiethnic, feminist, and cooperative form of society from the ground up. Their “direct democracy” approach is essentially socialism in action — people collectively governing their own communities without capitalists or authoritarians in charge. These instances — American labor’s victories in the 1930s, the Mondragón co-ops, and Rojava’s democratic councils — show us that society can be made more democratic and equal through mass participation. When the people organize and not only resist but build new organizations, domination by elites can be overturned.

We need to start thinking and acting more creatively, quickly, and cooperatively in response to Trumpism. One model we can implement comes from Taiwan. Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang, working with the g0v civic-hacker community, pioneered radical transparency through platforms like vTaiwan and Join, where thousands of citizens help to shape legislation before it's drafted. Proposals with more than 5,000 signatures receive official responses. Tang’s social network innovations have impelled much greater trust in government across Taiwan, changing Taiwanese society for the better. During COVID-19, Tang's team released real-time mask inventory data that volunteers quickly transformed into useful applications, while combating Chinese disinformation with rapid rebuttals and memes—approaches that drove public trust in government data to over 80%.

Obviously, Trump is not going to support such an initiative, but we could launch a similar model in the United States through a civic-tech for-profit or nonprofit organization offering an open-source "digital commons stack" to local entities. This could include deliberation portals, data dashboards, and third-party APIs with fact-checking supported by academic and journalistic partners. Such an initiative could foster the same trust-building, crowd-sourced policymaking that has restored democratic trust in Taiwan.

Democratic socialism is not a utopian luxury; I suspect it is going to be a precondition for basic survival on a planet whose life-support systems are buckling under profit-driven extraction and excess private wealth. By reorganizing production and politics around shared stewardship rather than private accumulation, we can give ourselves a realistic chance to confront ecological catastrophe, transform the politics of working class resentment, and build better lives even under worsening conditions. If we want our children and their children to be able to live and flourish, there really is no alternative.