Socialist Reconstruction: The Comprehensive Flashcards

What are the rather undemocratic elements of the current U.S. government?

• No socioeconomic obligations within the three-branch system: the three-branch system upholds private property rights for capital owners, gives the right for Congress to tax people and to raise an army, but the Fed doesn’t direct, guide or manage the economy, making fundamental matters like food and housing up to the market, or in the hands of the owning class

• The federal system creates a patchwork of rights: the state you live has a huge impact on the # of rights you have

• Unequal representation in the Electoral College

What are the general problems with capitalism outlined in the book?

1. Excessive consumption and waste: firms encourage consumers to buy what we don’t want/need and often end up destroying unsold goods

2. Little pay: owners pay workers as little as possible, using wage theft and reducing hours to avoid paying benefits / overtime

3. Companies invest in technology rather than people

4. Companies buying their own shares: some companies stop making things altogether, instead preferring to buy its own shares from the market, reducing the number of available shares and increasing the value of the remaining shares for all shareholders

What does the alternative system to US capitalism proposed in this book consist of?

• Democratic decision-making with regards to production and distribution: involves placing production into the hands of the collective people — decisions about production and distribution are made democratically in accordance with a common plan

• From consuming commodities to UBS: a shift from consumption-oriented commodity production to a focus on UBS (universal basic services, like free public transportation, guaranteed housing, conceptions of health and education expanded to encompass mental, social and cultural flourishing)

• Unitary centralism + grassroots democracy (fueled by voluntary mass organizations

• The universalization of the gains that capitalism reserves for the few.

What are the two main legislative branches of the proposed socialist government, and what will participation in government look like under the proposed socialist model?

• The National People’s Assembly: like the House of Representatives — consists of delegates elected from local election districts and from mass organizations; will be much larger than the current 435-member HoR; guidelines are established guaranteeing the working-class character of the NPA and ensuring that women make up at least ½ of those elected delegates

• The Assembly of Oppressed Nations: will consist of elected delegates from marginalized nationalities/peoples; intended to correct the injustices that the US capitalist class imposed on Indigenous and African American peoples

• Participation:

  • Authoritative positions based on the elective principle and subject to recall — thus, there are NO more lifetime judicial appointments, for example

  • Equalizing of salaries between government officials and skilled workers; legislators will earn their main income from regular jobs

  • Further integration: the citizenry will be further integrated into managing society through voluntary mass organizations (like unions, tenant organizations, cooperatives, youth groups)

Name the purposes of the People’s Development Bank, the Central Economic Agency, and the People’s Health Administration

1. PDH: to assess financial resources needed for national level projects, including directing credit/investment into socialist reconstruction

2. CEA:

   1. To oversee the newly nationalized enterprises for economic planning

   2. An authority to help establish plans: To establish an Executive Authority responsible for establishing five-year, ten-year and twenty-year national economic plans to meet society’s needs while ending fossil fuel usage

3. PHA: will operate medical related facilities in accordance with the requirement that all people are provided free health care

What will workplaces look like under the proposed model?

1. Public ownership — owned by government, managed by workers: All enterprises are publicly owned, belonging to the working class; although the government holds title to the enterprise, the employees will be directly involved in all the relevant decisions

2. Mass unionization: Each workplace is unionized so that workers have a direct say in how work is organized

3. Automatic protection: Protection provided for worker’s rights if mismanagement or abuse on the job happens

4. Decisions depending on unions’ consent: Core decisions dealing with how work is organized can only be made after consent from the union; as a result unions will become mass organizations representing and including workers from every workplace in the country

What are the “three D’s” of how to deal with energy that the authors propose?

1. Decommodification: energy cannot be treated as a mere commodity but as something to be collectively managed for the common good

2. Decolonization: energy must no longer be used as a way to keep wealthy countries wealthy off the backs of poor countries, or off the backs of poor and marginalized populations at home

3. Decarbonization: ending reliance on fossil fuels while increasing reliance on renewable sources (solar, wind, water)

What does the “Cap and Adapt” plan involve? What agencies will play a large role in fulfilling that plan, and how will they do that?

1. A limit or “cap” on fossil fuel extraction and imports: The cap (limit) grows tighter, and the amount of fossil fuels produced and imported decreases. This plan is favored over the carbon-budget approach, which is inequitable because the US reduces its emissions by off-loading production onto other countries

2. Transition to renewable energy: People will be trained to clean up the sites of former fossil fuels; they will retrofit buildings and build a continent-wide electrical grid which feeds on community-managed microgrids

3. Plan to respond to energy shortages arising during the transition: Involves developing an "energy inventory" -- this includes learning about energy usage patterns and developing more responsible habits of energy consumption through assessing energy needs and spending

   1. The role of the Fair Response Agency: its members will come from fields like logistics, social services, energy, information science; they will develop the plan for responding to energy shortages by creating an energy-consumption information network with the help of communities and workplaces

   2. The role of the Climate Mobilization Agency: will work with unions to make the transition to renewable energy, through expanding wind/solar/hydro power, developing ecologically sustainable batteries and energy storage capacities, and building a continent-wide electric grid

Explain the problem with finance capital and debt in capitalism. What does ending financial capital in most manifestations involve?

• Finance capital is like a planned economy, but for capitalist investors: it is about planning, deciding which activities and enterprises should be supported, how risks should be managed; these decisions are made in and by institutions according to institutional priorities. These priorities involve capitalist investors and wealth managers, NOT working people

• Debt keeps us poor and makes others rich: debt provides a low-wage labor force willing to work long hours which is necessary for capitalism’s survival; meanwhile, financial institutions treat debt as a commodity, with the rich buying and selling debt to make themselves even wealthier

  • Finance also maintains the wealth of the capitalist class by using debt to control people’s future income; ordinary people often need loans for basic needs; this traps them in debt they can barely repay because of high interest rates

• Ending financial capital involves:

  • Abolishing most current debts and the institutions that create, sell and profit from debt

  • Rebuilding the credit system to fund social priorities from local to international levels

  • Replacing finance capital with a common credit union and planning to allocate resources in accordance with needs and values

Explain more about how the socialist system will deal with debt.

• It will deal with credit card debt and auto loans through:

  • High-quality public transportation (ending people’s dependence on private cars), better wages (lessening people’s dependence on credit cards), and abolishing fees and interest rates card companies charge to users — this will transform credit cards into how they were initially imagined.

    • Credit cards will be ways people spend their portion of the collectively produced social surplus, rather than ways for the capitalist class to make claims on workers’ future earnings

• It will deal with markets in stocks and bonds by:

  • Dissolving them, and demolishing the paper wealth (wealth represented by the selling price of assets rather than actual physical assets); fixed capital (of buildings, plants and machinery), people, knowledge and land will be the real sources of wealth which will remain

• Use the Bureau of Wages, Prices and Rents, with plans administered by the working class to establish the range for fair wages, prices and rents

  • The BWPR synthesizes information from across the country to establish the range for fair wages, prices and rents; it will use that range as a way to set priorities and coordinate production and redistribution. Through the bureau, [the working class will generate and administer the plans that help us collectively account for what we have, what we need, and what we create together]

• Guarantee the right to attractive, clean, and safe housing by:

  • Abolishing landlords (no one will ever live in fear of being kicked out on the street because they can’t pay for housing) and abolishing the housing market and mortgages; your house is your house — when you don’t need the hous anymore, the house or apartment will return to the community who will find its next set of residents

How will the BPWR deal with people who have different needs and desires?

• Paying a small extra cost: Everyone would be guaranteed a basic home, but if someone wanted a bigger or more desirable place, they would pay a small extra cost called rent (which is NOT charged to make money for a landlord)

• Rent for improvement, not for landlords: This rent would instead be a mechanism for distributing housing and generating funds for maintenance, building, and improvements

• More residents in a community → lower rent: communities seeking more residents will likely make larger houses or houses with more amenities available below the rent typical for those houses in other places.

How will work be socialized under this proposed system? What is the main advantage of this approach?

• Freeing up 6-7 million: 6 or 7 million people in financial services, health insurance, and advertising will be freed up and engaged in more meaningful / productive work (rebuilding material infrastructure, engaging in energy-efficient and sustainable manufacturing, regenerating forests, providing essential public services) AND we will all gain more free time

• The allocation of work: Socialist society will allocate work according to three often-overlapping criteria —

  • Professional expertise (neurosurgery, climate science, AI, astrophysics)

  • Socially necessary tasks (teaching, construction, electricity, therapy, graphic design)

  • Shared responsibilities (cooking, cleaning, laundry, tending to children)

• Social needs and flourishing > labor market distribution: by approaching labor distribution in terms of social needs and recognizing these three kinds of work, we will be able to do away with capitalism's preoccupation with the distribution of careers in a labor market and rather focus on the tasks and services our society needs to flourish

What are the mechanisms behind the proposed socialization of work?

• Large database for what we need: basically, the BWPR will compile a huge database of the kinds of expertise we need for achieving goals.

  • They do this by coordinating with education/training institutions to set and reach output targets (10K advanced accountants, 20K optometrists, etc.)

  • Interests, skills and need > money: So rather than making choices for the money, people will make choices based on their interests, skills, and general social need

• Developing systems for task distribution: local offices of the BWPR; along with communities, enterprises and unions; will develop systems for the distribution of necessary collectivized tasks (attending to young children, trash removal, maintaining green spaces, etc.)

  • People can choose whether to do a few hours each week or work for longer periods in exchange for bigger blocks of free time later.

• Sharing delivery apps: food deliveries and similar tasks would be shared through apps, with people signing up for a set number of tasks instead of making it their full-time job.

  • For harder or less desirable jobs, communities could offer extra incentives (higher pay, better housing, more free time, or chances to do more interesting work)

How will banks under the proposed socialist model work?

• Useful tasks rather than extortionate practices: banks under socialism will concentrate on the useful tasks of:

  • Maintaining accounts and facilitating payments

  • Organizing saving, lending and borrowing

  • Pooling people's savings

  • Directing state-provided funds to long-term projects

• Postal banks as a non-predatory approach to finance: in contrast to extortionate banking practices that prey on poor people, charging insane interest rates on payday loans and overwhelm people with multiple fees, postal banking services are typically low cost. Under socialism they will be free.

• Postal banks → people’s development banks:

  • The new system will expand postal banks into a network of people's development banks.

  • They will play a large role in the allocation of social wealth to specific projects, and help communities determine how to prioritize and what to support

What is the main problem with monocropping (concentrating on single crops for exports)?

• Purchasing previously grown food + soil degradation: this forces farmers to purchase food on the market that they had previously grown themselves, but also quickly degrades the soil.

• Stripping the soil of nutrients and increasing greenhouse gases: while previous farming methods nourished the soil by growing different plants at the same time, monocropping strips the soil of nutrients.

  • As a result, growers are then compelled to undertake more intensive irrigation and use more fertilizers and pesticides. This makes agriculture a major polluter and emitter of greenhouse gases.

• Contributes to increase of carbon and global heating: because forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere and are a critical part of the Earth’s water cycle, diminishing the world’s forests contributes to the increase of carbon and to global heating

What does agroecology consist of?

• Incorporating sustainable farming techniques into agricultural systems, defined loosely. This includes:

  • Implementing cover crops, wildflower borders, grazing systems, field rotations, organic fertilizers, etc.

  • Also — perennial crop production, intercropping, silvopasture, and natural pest management systems

• Also includes political and social prescriptions incompatible with capitalist social relations and the profit motive. For example:

  • Significant decreases in off-farm inputs (chemical pesticides, fertilizers, diesel fuel) BUT NOT the complete elimination of machinery

• Working for fairness: agroecological systems also involve working with local communities to ensure that food is produced in fair and sustainable ways that tend to be more labor-intensive than industrialized labor-saving systems

• Empowering local food producers and working with, rather than against, natural nutrient cycles, ecosystems, and cultures

How will planning of agriculture work?

• Central Land Bureau: umbrella agency for coordinating food production, among other things. Each department will establish a network of local and regional councils charged with monitoring, assessing and communicating needs and capacities

• Department of Food Production: Ensures the production of nutritious food in environmentally responsible ways

  • Rather than dividing up food production along the lines of types (thinking of food first as commodities), it will recognize the interrelation between food sources

  • It will organize growers and producers regionally, guiding farm collectives in determining what they can produce within a given season and guiding community cooperatives in estimating their food needs

    • This department will integrate these expectations into a central plan capable of accounting for climate, soil, and water differences across the country

  • Will work with growers and communities to coordinate the participation and training of more people in farming

How does local / urban planning work in the US and how is the current planning process undemocratic?

• Large federal agencies like the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (DHA) set policy

• Direct funding streams from Congress to local agencies to carry out planning

• Communities have development offices with business bureaus that work to attract companies to their areas

• It is undemocratic because of:

  • Lobbying from corporate interests

  • Large donations to political campaigns

  • Pre-written legislation

    • Banks and investors direct the flow of money locally and determine which projects get a share of society’s resources

    • The development offices that many communities have with business bureaus that intend to attract companies to their areas ACTUALLY means helping create deals that let companies avoid paying taxes

What is the role of the National Housing Association under the proposed socialist model?

• Sets broad housing policy; administers publicly owned housing; oversees creation & implementation of democratically decided housing plans.

• Forms a network of popular organizations in every city (e.g. tenant cooperatives, neighborhood assemblies, regional councils). These organizations will:

  • Represent local popular control and be responsive to individual residents and higher bodies

  • Participate in designing the national/regional/ local housing plans

  • Integrate different forms of knowledge while valuing local experiences

• Will initiate a regular and comprehensive inventory (!) of housing units and survey of people’s individual housing needs

• Will enlist neighborhood and building-level organizations to help gather this information and send data to local agencies and planning bodies

What will be done to abolish homelessness and housing insecurity under socialism?

• The NHA will be in charge of seizing and nationalizing vacant housing units.

  • Those units will be redeveloped and administered as public housing.

• Working with the BWPR, the NHA will reduce rents to a nominal cost and give renters the option to own their homes.

  • No one will be allowed to own more than two houses; those with vacation homes will ensure to make them available for others to enjoy

  • Those with substandard housing will be given opportunities to learn new skills so that they can participate in renovating and repairing houses

What will the new Department of Transportation do once it is created by the proposed government?

• Mobilize councils: the department will form and mobilize councils to table issues of local delivery and household travel

• Produce plans for schedules and routes that meet working class needs

• Work with the Department of Education to train operators, dispatchers, mechanics, etc

• Reduce transportation system emissions along with the Fossil Fuel Cap Agency while working with transportation unions to transform fuel consumption patterns

• Build plans for high speed electrified rail networks between major population aggregations

Discuss the main problems with healthcare in the US.

Healthcare is organized as a market.

• Healthcare is a commodity rather than a fundamental social responsibility and governmental obligation.

• Although there are forms of socialized medicine within this largely profit-oriented system, the US largely relies on insurance (whether it’s government-provided or private) rather than a national healthcare system

How will the healthcare system work under socialism?

• The People’s Health Administration will ensure that healthcare will be completely free. This reduces the overall cost of healthcare because of the high savings resulting from eliminating needless administration, like billing departments and bureaucrats denying coverage, or the devising of complex schemes for taking money from the sick and injured

• A nationalized pharmaceutical industry: in this proposed pharmaceutical industry, medicines will be free, and medical/scientific workers will work with communities to assess the need for various medications based on local data and develop a plan for producing them

• Preventive medicine: the new socialist government will focus on improving people’s quality of life and decreasing stress, increasing the availability of healthy food, shortening the work week

• The PHA using food as medicine: by teaching people how to cook nutritiously, making fresh food readily available and ridding stores of cheap, highly processed foods; having clinicians write prescriptions for healthy foods like fruits, nuts, beans etc.

Name some problems with the US public education system?

• Overcrowded: 60% of students are crammed into overcrowded classrooms, making it hard for overworked educators to reach every student

• Lack of renovations: ½ of public schools need major renovations to ensure student and worker safety

• White flight: wealthy, mostly White families continue to move to better-funded and often segregated suburban schools, while working-class students of many nationalities remain in city schools

• The hidden curriculum: the public school system, its infrastructure, and its ways to assess students academically teach young people to behave as workers and thus reinforce the unequal class system.

  • Specifically, students are rewarded when they comply with rules and do not question authority.

  • This reinforces the top-down managerial approach working-class young people will experience at their jobs

What will socialism do to education, according to the authors?

• Free education: ed will be free and accessible from cradle to grave

• Liberatory education practices: such as learning from each other through relevant materials; meaningful projects rooted in real-world issues; consensus-building, intentional communication, shared responsibility

• No budget shortfalls

• Full funding and staffing: public ed will be fully funded, staffed, and planned

  • Fully staffed guidance counselors will direct students into jobs which match people’s skills with socially important function while taking into account the student’s interests and community needs; this also involves promoting manual, trade and craft labor

• Full access to education for all: which requires attending to people’s diverse needs, responding to historic oppression with reparations, and aligning methods of instruction with specific learning needs

• Research for best models: the Department of Education will sponsor critical research in educational pedagogy to determine which models of learning empower students to learn relevant content and skills.

  • The importance of community input: Community input will be integral to this process, and outcomes will be responsive to the needs of young people in diverse environments

• Universal design: creating or modifying environments, devices and lessons in order to ensure the greatest number of people have access to them. Full funding for public education will ensure the implementation of universal design in schools.