Portside

"While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change," said the Vermont Independent. "And they're right."

Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite.

The Vermont senator sits down with The Nation and discusses how we can transform America.

The opportunity for organizers is to parlay the widespread and deeply felt revulsion to Trump as a vile individual into a deeper structural analysis by building on-ramps to a movement to destroy the structures and systems behind him.

Progressive change can seem like one step forward, two steps back, but People's Action leader James Mumm shows how over time power has been steadily, doggedly gained by organizing out from the center -- amongst the marginalized -- and forward.

One lesson to draw from the GDR's history is that if socialist societies are to be run by, of and for the people, then the people have to be in charge and that includes within the economy. Democracies (both capitalist and socialist) will remain merely formal when the economy continues to be run by small self-selecting minorities. Those minorities will dominate until they are overthrown.

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Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd have blueprints for an `America beyond capitalism.' Both imagine a new America that would evolve through painstaking process in which the virtues of democratic socialism would be prefigured. They offer a component of the answer to what a new New Left must do. Democracy and egalitarianism animates both visions, but neither fully imagines how the Left might gain and use state power or how to change the national or global economic rules.