It’s helpful to learn about the moral ethic of socialism — but I think it’s also helpful to learn about the various institutional elements that make up socialism, too. These elements are never really unpacked in the campaign debates, leading to confusion. Here’s seven major ones:
1) UNIONS: workers, tenants, small producers, & consumers organizing to collectively bargain with employers, landlords, platforms, and corporations
2) COOPERATIVES: workers, tenants, small producers & consumers having legal mechanisms to collectively own businesses, housing, land, platforms, etc. [+ mixed versions of worker ownership, such as ESOPS and codetermination.]
3) WORKER/CONSUMER PROTECTION REGULATIONS: in lieu of direct power structures (unions/coops), government-enforced rules for protecting workers, consumers, tenants and small producers facing power imbalances in the market
4) ANTI-MONOPOLY POLICY: Efforts to tackle monopoly power, from breaking up monopolistic businesses, to banning anticompetitive practices
5) COMMONS STRUCTURES: Legal and other institutional structures for managing things — land, ideas, productive resources — in common, often outside of state and corporate bureaucratic management
6) MUNICIPALIZATION, NATIONALIZATION, & PUBLIC GOODS: Neighborhoods, Cities, States or the Federal Government managing and making available to all certain productive enterprises & infrastructure (ex. mail, security, internet, energy, transportation, finance, education, etc.)
7) ECONOMIC SECURITY INFRASTRUCTURE: Government guarantees to citizens to protect their individual economic security (UBI, jobs guarantee, Medicare for All, welfare benefits, etc.)
That’s a few—there’s others I missed. And these elements are not necessarily implemented in some specific, maximalist blueprint. They’re a set of tools that can be applied—and have been applied experimentally throughout American history—in various ways to various circumstances.
I list this all out to say: words like “socialism” and “capitalism” are giant, abstract words that describe clouds of ideas, ethics & institutions. Sometimes it’s useful to just talk about it as one giant spirit, but sometimes it’s also useful to look inside at the elements.
And it’s especially useful to look inside at the elements when a whole concept is flippantly dismissed by so many folks without them understanding what actually makes up the thing they are flippantly dismissing.
