Democratic Socialism, Cooperation & Grassroots Revolution

By Ronald James (R. J.) Ingalsbe

We are all sick and tired of the inequality and corruption caused by the combination of Big Gov and Big Biz: Paid-off politicians and their corporate partners protecting the status quo, keeping wages and unions down, continuing to allow unnecessary poverty and struggle for many, while enacting policies that transfer wealth from our pockets

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Media Reviews
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781958091159

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Democratic Socialism, Cooperation & Grassroots Revolution

Ronald James Ingalsbe

Copyright © 2022 Ronald James Ingalsbe.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author and publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN: 978-1-958091-16-6 (Paperback Edition)

ISBN: 978-1-958091-17-3 (Hardcover Edition)

ISBN: 978-1-958091-15-9 (E-book Edition)

Book Ordering Information

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Contents

Chapter Outline

A Simple Plea to Responsible Americans

Chapter 1: What is socialism and why is it needed?

Chapter 2: Participatory Democracy is the Key

Chapter 3: Peaceful Grassroots Revolution

Chapter 4: Today’s America: a Social-Capitalist Republic

Chapter 5: A Vision of a Socialist Evolutionary Revolution

Chapter 6: Guiding Principles for Revolutionary Actions

Chapter 7: Our Activism, Our Revolution

Appendix 1: Needs-valued, Labor-based Currency

Appendix 2: Philosophical Framework for 21st Century Socialism

Appendix 3: The Capitalists’ Divide-and-Conquer Strategy

Appendix 4: Equality of Opportunity Argument for Socialism

Appendix 5: Steps to Forming a Worker Cooperative

Appendix 6: Resources & Kindred Organizations

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Chapter Outline

Introduction: A Simple Plea to Responsible Americans

Democratic Socialism: What it is and Why it is Needed

A. Socialism versus Capitalism

B. Master-Slave Relations, Class Warfare, Relations of Production

C. Socialistic Distributions of Current Wealth Productions

D. MLK’s Three Evils, Climate Change, Recurring Crises

Participatory Democracy is the Key

A. American Values, as Served in Democracy and in Capitalism

B. Democracy vis a vis Capitalism

C. Democracy - Theory vs Practice

Peaceful Grassroots Revolution

A. Research and Estimates

B. Getting to Where We Want to Go: Weighing Means & Ends

C. Lessons from the SLP

Today’s America: a Social-Capitalist Republic

A. Massive Taxpayer Subsidization of Business

B. Upward Transfers of Wealth

A Vision of a Socialist Evolutionary Revolution

A. Intermediate Stage - Social Cooperative Democracy

B. Ultimate Stage - Democratic Socialism

C. The Non-Negotiable Skeletal Framework of Democratic Socialism

D. Principles of Participatory Industrial Democracy

E. A New Economy based on Workers as Assets, not Liabilities

F. Free Self-Determination within Mutual Wealth

G. Other Considerations in the Stage of Democratic Socialism

Guiding Principles for Revolutionary Actions

Our Activism, Our Revolution

A. Quick Strikes

B. On-going Efforts

C. Local Progressive Projects

Appendices & Acknowledgments

A. Needs-valued, Labor-based Currency

B. Philosophical Framework for 21st Century Socialism

C. The Capitalists’ Divide-and-Conquer Strategy (aka the Two-Party System)

D. The Equality of Opportunity Argument for Socialism

E. Steps to Forming a Worker Cooperative

F. Resources and Kindred Organizations

A Simple Plea to Responsible Americans

What does it mean to be an American? Upon what great things do our pride and glory stand? What is the real example that we wish to set for the rest of the world? The answer found within these pages is clear - Empowerment, Liberty and Equality.

Above all, we are empowered by the rights that our predecessors have fought and won for us, through our Revolutionary War, our Civil War, our Emancipation Proclamation, our Labor Movement and all of its battles, our soldiers who defended us from fascism and allowed us to become the most powerful nation on earth, and our civilian heroes who marched in our streets and who continue to petition our representatives through the many means within our grasp.

Above all, we pride ourselves on equal opportunity and self-governance. We are empowered by a Constitution to make decisions for ourselves, without having to be subjected to monarchs, dictators or aristocrats. We pride ourselves in working together with the tools afforded us by our democratic republic: Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition, and freedom to vote. These are the basic liberties that make us truly great.

So in this perilous day, we must acknowledge that these great things - these blessed rights and liberties - are, in fact, endangered. From on high we are being bombarded by the rhetoric-packed arsenal of plutocrats, who are using their obscene wealth to subjugate us in the most insidious of ways, and on below we are being ambushed by lawless mobs and demagogues, who are using blind force to instate their own brand of fascism.

To save our republic, we must now be our own heroes. We must arm ourselves with our democratic rights and engage peacefully but boldly in this battle.

A Choice We Are Now All Making

As we proceed, we must also ask ourselves: Do we want a social (political + economic) system that is owned and controlled by one person, a few people, or by all of us? If we say we want the third option, are we really acting like it? With the freedom to own something comes responsibility.

We all want the freedom to determine for ourselves our own prosperity, happiness and wellbeing. This necessarily entails having freedom from the powerful few that illegitimately own and control both our government and our economy.

With the democratization of our economy, while working for equal ownership and control over our means of production, we will thereby have the means to distribute wealth much more fairly. We in America have everything that it takes - abundant natural resources, efficient machines, leading technologies, educated people and a massive workforce. So, as we take collective ownership and control of our economy, and integrate economic with political democracy, no one shall live in poverty, and all shall prosper!

1

What is socialism and why is it needed?

To begin with, historically, there has been a tendency to try and make a distinction between the economic and the political aspects within our overall system, or establishment. In that light, socialism is generally regarded as an economic system, or at least an economic theory, and capitalism is similarly regarded, as something economic in nature. Nevertheless, the economic and political aspects within any system are intricately inter-related, making them, in practice, difficult to clearly distinguish.

Making matters even more confusing is the fact that what is practiced is not nearly identical to what is stated in theory about these complex constructs. For instance, socialism in Marx’s Communist Manifesto is decidedly different than the socialism practiced by the U.S.S.R. for over seventy years. Likewise, the capitalism that we have today in America contrasts significantly with some critical aspects of its theory. This would include massive bailouts handed from taxpayers to corporations when they are on the brink of failure, or the hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money that is fed through the system each year to uphold major capitalist companies, in the form of subsidies of various sorts. Ironically, government subsidization of major industries is a practice most of us would have thought to be more akin to the U.S.S.R. in the height of its glory, rather than something essential to the American establishment of today; however, it is so, and it highlights the kind of confusion we contend with in today’s world.

There are many distinct elements making up any economic system. Chief among them are the answers to the following three questions:

Who owns the productive assets (e.g., the plants, the stores, the equipment, the machinery, raw materials, etc.)?

Who controls the assets, or, who gets to make the decisions on how goods and services are produced and distributed?

Who benefits from owning and controlling the means of producing and distributing goods and/or services?

It is appropriate that each of these leading questions begins with the word who, for we are referring to a human-made system, supposedly for the benefit of all humankind. Therefore, identifying who - which people - the system is owned and controlled by, and also most benefitted from, is of primary importance. To be sure, there are other important aspects of an economic system, such as how decisions are made, the role of currency, the extent of freedom in the markets, and the relativity between cooperation and competition within the system. These and others will be considered as we evolve our definition of socialism. Along the way we will attempt to envision a new socialism, one that best serves our greatest American values.

The three questions above may guide us in starting to get a clear conception of socialism. We will begin, here, with what cognitive scientists call an uncontested core concept:

Socialism is social ownership of, and control over, the means of production and distribution of goods and services in a society, for the equitable benefit of all in that society.

Now, as we attempt to clarify the more ambiguous terms within this simple definition, we move into what the cognitive scientists refer to as a contested concept, as terms become more defined. The above definition, as stated, is a good starting point. However, it generates more questions than answers, once we wish to elaborate.

Perhaps the first thing to point out is that the basic definition of any economic system is embedded within this basic definition of socialism. This core concept assumes, as a given, that any economic system involves producing and distributing goods and services. As simple as this sounds, it already covers a lot of ground. It seems reasonable to assume that any economic system may easily be regarded as such.

So, apart from this general notion of what an economic system is, the rest of the above uncontested core concept merely begins to answer the who questions - who owns and controls the economic system, and who benefits. As stated - social ownership and control over the means of production/distribution of goods or services - only begins to narrow it down. The same can be said for the equitable benefit of all.

From a historical point of view, one rather lamentable development, at least for avowed socialists, is the manner by which the social in socialism came to mean the state, or government. Mainly because it took root in countries where democracy was not practiced (where the government and the people had no significant overlap), the meaning of socialism was co-opted from the very start. Unfortunately, this development through most of the twentieth century has tainted the views of most Americans; until recent years, that is. Fortunately, since the economic collapse (the Great Recession) of 2008, the resultant Occupy Movements, and the relatively successful presidential bids by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, socialism is being perceived more positively, especially among young adults, people of color, the more educated, and even the poorest among us, as reported recently by the Pew Research Center.

In a more democratic society, it would seem incumbent upon We the People to take the social in socialism to mean US! Social ownership quite simply points to the need for all of us to, in some way, have ownership of the means for producing goods and services. And this ought to entail equal co-ownership, in most cases, or near-equal co-ownership, in others, as we will see.

In part, our local and national governments may serve as vehicles for our co-owning the economy, as long as true democracy is practiced, where the system is actually of the people, by the people, and for the people. This would entail we citizens doing more, via the specific vehicles of participatory democracy, to voice and demand fairer policies from our representatives on the way our tax monies are used. We need to consider our representatives as our money managers - we give them our money (by paying taxes), and we should be demanding more on how our money is being spent - consentingly, for what is often called the common good, or the greater good of our whole nation, and, at the same time, for each individual, in most respects.

There are other vehicles for equal or near-equal social (co-) ownership of our economy, especially cooperative businesses, where either the workers or consumers own the business. In this sense, we would be operating from the bottom up, from the grassroots, co-owning one business at a time. We would be doing this while we do more to influence how our taxes are used, from the top down.

Elaborating on these key points will be critical as we develop our vision of socialism in America. This will necessarily include how we will more neatly integrate democracy in our economic system with democracy in our political system. Indeed, democratic operations play a key role in the second contested element of the core concept of socialism - who controls the means of production and distribution of goods or services, and how. The people who own the means of production - in this case, us - are the ones who control the operations. Therefore, rational, long-term planning for meeting our collective demands (needs and wants) and how we will supply those demands is needed more than ever, as the world population increases closer and closer to an unsustainable threshold, and global warming severely threatens stable supplies of natural resources.

Within our democratic operations professional pollsters may also be employed to assist census workers in order to be more exact in how we ascertain needs and wants within our populations. This does not necessarily mean that free markets wouldn’t have a role in the future of an American socialist economy, with their invisible hand operations (e.g., for more luxury and leisure-oriented goods and services, provided by cooperatives) but it does mean that centralized and democratic planning will become increasingly necessary, at least in terms of how all of our needs are met within the overall system.

Again, this will call for a combination of citizen-coworkers voting on decisions at the bottom (business) level, while citizens of every kind are involved with the top level, doing everything within our democratic means to influence the votes of our representatives in each level of government. At the same time, we need to make room in our representative governing bodies to have the voices heard of authorities in each major industry, without serving as the sneaky, bribing lobbyists they are now. Similarly, scientific experts in more specialized fields may also serve as term-limited representatives, to be heard more clearly and regularly, with their targeted appeals to the common good. All this goes to say that, as we re-evaluate how well our system is doing, for all citizens, we will need to re-envision who our representatives are, from which sectors of society, and how they represent us.

The third, more contestable term in our core concept of socialism is around the idea of benefit. As full-time workers within the current system, we invest more time and energy in our jobs than we do in any other aspect of our lives. That is asking a lot from us. So asking for, in return for our dedicated labor, more equitable (i.e., less unequal / more proportionately equal) returns is not, by any means, unreasonable. Conversely, it is quite reasonable to assert that we do not benefit very well from the current system of producing and distributing goods/services, and the resultant wealth distribution, especially if we are at or below the 50th percentile of incomes.

We will elaborate a bit more on this soon, but for now we should emphasize that income and wealth inequality have never been greater in our country: One in every 4 workers is currently either unemployed or earns a wage of less than $20,000 a year - that’s the current plight of 25% of all American workers. Meanwhile, the 3 richest Americans (Bezos, Gates and Buffet) own more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of all Americans. We really need to pause and reflect hard on this - merely 3 people in America, the three richest billionaires, possess more wealth than 165,000,000 other people in our country! Even if we limited this to actual working people instead of half of the entire U.S. population, we’re still referring to approximately 78,000,000 working adults who, collectively, possess less wealth than the 3 richest Americans.

The last time wealth inequality was this high we soon slipped into the Great Depression.

How capitalism compares - in theory and in practice

The private, for-profit business paradigm that still serves as the model for our society forces most of us into a situation where one or a relative few people own and control the business, and benefit far more than the wage-earners within that same business. This paradigm only allows a small minority of people in society to be owners of businesses, and they are usually the ones who already have a substantial amount of wealth, while the rest of us are forced to rent ourselves (our time, energy, labor) for a price that is kept as low as possible. This is because within the private for-profit business model, labor is regarded as a liability to the company, as an expense. These businesses are expected to minimize expenses, including labor, for the sake of efficiency - maximizing revenue while minimizing expenses, so as to produce as much profit for the owner(s) as possible.

It does not have to be this way. Business can be designed in better ways so that everyone benefits significantly, including and especially the workers. In an era of mass production, with efficient machines and technologies and a highly skilled and well-educated workforce, the prosperity that we help to create can and should be shared more equitably, by all.

Master-Slave Relations & Class Warfare

At a moment when Abraham Lincoln was speaking to a joint session of Congress in 1861, he addressed the Civil War, the institution of slavery, and the relations of capital to labor all in the same instance, for many criticized the plight of the hired worker in the northern factories and mines as being equally deplorable to that of the southern plantation slave. An actual quote from Lincoln, who was never officially a socialist or communist but who knew Karl Marx and often corresponded with him, highlights the difference between how a socialist system and a capitalist system regards workers, with this pro-social statement:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

In this speech, Lincoln also emphatically stated that capital should not be placed above labor in the structure of government, as it is, sadly, today. Indeed, he clearly regarded labor as superior to capital and deserving of much more in terms of reward. Unfortunately, through the decades since, Lincoln’s wisdom and affinity with the common worker has been largely lost. Hence, we often hear today, even from some of the poorest workers among us, such cliches as the owners take all the risk so they should get all the reward. The unthinking, automated manner by which they mouth such colloquialisms reflects the conditioning that has been done, unbeknownst to them. They would do well to read Lincoln’s statements and heed the correction of their thoughts from one of the greatest minds in American history.

We should make no mistake about this. The same elitists who’ve created and perpetuated a system with class conflict at its center, where wealth is deliberately maximized for owners and minimized for workers, have also taken this central conflict to the extent of waging class warfare. It is a curious thing that the word wage has as its meaning not only the payment given to workers for their work, but also the act of initiating and continuing on of something, especially a war! In its earlier battles this warfare was quite literal, when strikes would easily devolve into shootouts between the unionized workers and the company owners’ armed guards, with actual casualties of this war.

In more recent decades this war has become more insidious, mainly through the use of stealthy mass media weapons, designed to do no less than brainwash We the People. Especially since the conclusion of WWII and then accelerated more so with Reaganomics in the 1980s, capitalist propaganda gradually eroded the socialist mindset and put in its place the opposite of what Lincoln admonished; that is, the notion that capital is superior to labor, that capital or the company comes first, and business owners are considered superior to their employees. It’s a hierarchal structure where, essentially, owners are masters of rented slaves, and they - at least ones at the highest levels but reinforced below by common business owners - have manipulated not only the minds of the general public but also government representatives at every level, to heavily favor their supply side of economic activity, as opposed to nurturing and bolstering the demand side, where