You want change? Now is an incredibly exciting time.

In 2010, about 50% of people who considered themselves Democrats had a favorable view of “capitalism.” That percentage has fallen to 40%, meaning now, 60% of Democrats (and 50% of those who consider themselves independent) have an *un*favorable view of capitalism. Add in the few Republicans who also hold the view, and you get something more than 50% of Americans thinking capitalism is not the best option.

This is the highest-ever percentage of U.S. residents expressing discontent with the system that rules our lives. So we are at a moment of promise like never before. And yet: this is the first idea in a string of them that would be required to transition out of the system.

1. The first idea: Capitalism is an obstacle to public wellbeing.

And as a reminder, by “capitalism” I don’t mean “markets,” or even “large business concerns.” I mean “a way of structuring society so the means of production are controlled by a relatively small group of owners and excess value from production is not distributed to workers but rather into ever-more-concentrated hands.”

It’s wild that there’s a link between what’s happening in Palestine and the fact you can’t afford a home. A link between migrants/refugees coming to rich nations, why sea level rise will flood coastal cities this century, and why your monthly budgets are harder than ever to manage. The link is capitalism. And a clear majority is starting to “get it.” If you doubt the poll on opposition to capitalism, perhaps heed Malcolm X when he said, “Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are.”

But again: if anything is to change, the simple numbered ideas in this writing also need to be understood, believed, and acted upon, by some real portion of the masses. Crucially, not everyone who backs the revolution needs to read a 1,000 page book. These ideas are all you need, and they can fit on less than ten pages. We will outline here the most simple set of beliefs that will work to end capitalism, and keep it from coming back. Nothing short of this will work, according to hundreds of years of western and eastern theorists and practice.

A couple notes of explanation first. We should strive for a “big tent.” Inviting all to the coalition to replace capitalism. But as someone wise once said—I’m paraphrasing—if you need to form a coalition, you first need to define basic boundaries outside of which the coalition will reject members. Without those boundaries being well-considered, agreed-to by all, and enforced against all, any supposed coalition is a false one. (False coalitions don’t have the solidarity needed to succeed.) This writing attempts to be such a set of basic boundaries. It seeks to distill the collective wisdom of the struggle for liberation from capitalism, apply it to the present-day political climate in the U.S. Without this stuff, a coalition would get bogged down in more than a century of rhetorical trickery meant to muddle and fragment an anti-capitalist coalition.

If your thinking is that “first we need to beat (back) fascism, then we can talk about actually making things better,” I’m sorry to say that that’s not how the human psyche works. What history has shown us—and what I think you know deep down—is that most people won’t be motivated by just witnessing fascism. After WWII, when workaday Germans were interviewed, they said that a third of them fought the Nazi regime, a third supported it, but the third that didn’t care enough to fight (after seeing it firsthand!) were instrumental in it occurring. We’re seeing this now in the U.S.

What *does* motivate people is a vision of a better future for themselves and others. That’s part of the reason for the saying “the only way to beat fascism is socialism.” It presents a positive alternative. And, because of how true socialism works, it keeps the fascism from coming back.

Before we get into the key ideas, we need to address the Democratic Party, the political organization claiming to fight… well I don’t know actually. All that they’ve *demonstrated* they will fight is “bad things” in an esoteric sense. Aesthetically bad things. If you’re not convinced this party is part of the problem—a co-architect of, and aid to, growing fascism—then you have not been convinced after seeing the party arm and otherwise support a bone fide genocide. The party would not draw a line stopping before genocide, and as Ta-Nehisi Coates said, giving up democracy occurs somewhere before that. 

If you are not convinced that both major parties are part and parcel to the problem, then perhaps you don’t know that top Democratic Party leadership, in three successive presidential primaries now, have thwarted democracy by ensuring the objectively most popular candidate(s) could not succeed. You have seen them oust those, like David Hogg, who would try to quell corruption in their ranks and present more popular platforms. You’ve seen them refuse to release the study showing why they lost the 2024 election and how not to repeat it—presumably because they want to use the same strategies again.

The Democratic Party has ensured that its left wing has no power, by all measures devoting more effort to this than to fighting Donald Trump. And the so-called left wing of the Democrats isn’t leagues better than the larger party. We’ve seen its de facto Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (and others) vote to break pending strikes; vote to send arms to Israel’s Iron Dome during its genocide; and vote to redefine antisemitism to mean opposition to Israel generally. This again was done during the genocide and has been used as the legal rationale to prosecute U.S. protestors of genocide.

Ocasio-Cortez also lied to the world from the DNC stage about Harris “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire.” This statement was soon proven false by leaked cables showing the opposite in private, where it matters. Biden’s administration also lied about advocating for a “two state solution,” when leaked cables show they were advocating against it.

As president, Joe Biden proposed military budgets higher than Trump’s; broke ICE budget records every year he was in office; and built more concentration camps at our borders. Biden began the modern purge of academic freedom at Universities (centered on speech about Palestine); Trump just continued it. Biden continued the decades-long gamut of sanctions that, The Lancet reported, kills more than 560,000 people per year. Biden and Harris—likely Harris, given Biden’s mental state the last half of his tenure—chose to keep a swath of brutal policies from Trump’s first term, from immigration to climate change; from unemployment austerity to reduced safety of meat and baby food. And all evidence points to Biden’s Covid policy being directed by the CEO of Delta Airlines.

Republicans and Democrats are but two faces of the same political machine, captured by the wealth-holding class and thus doing its bidding. In a word: corrupt.

Back to the main event. What follows are the tenets—the ideological boundaries—required for a coalition that could end capitalism. Make more extensive ones and you’ll alienate people you need. Make less extensive ones and your effort will likely fail. You know the first one already.

2. Capitalism is, indeed, the biggest of all problems, the problem from which all others stem, and the other tenets here help explain why. Capitalism doesn’t add anything to society. It’s basically just rent-seeking; toll booths all the way down.
3. Climate change is completely solvable, if and only if we take away the power of the people who don’t want to solve it. And we’re in serious trouble. As author Seth Harp said, humanity (as directed by the capitalists) is emitting carbon dioxide ten times faster than the volcanic Siberian Traps, the cause of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, which asphyxiated the oceans, turned the continents into howling deserts, and killed the vast majority of biological life on Earth. Thus demonstrates the dire necessity of removing from power those who put us on this course and insist we stay.
4. Much of the suffering in the world is due to a purposefully-manufactured scarcity. The world currently produces everything it needs for all its people to live fulfilling, dignified lives. The problem, then, is in the *distribution* of this materiel. Both within the U.S. and across the globe.
5. Capitalism creates, and has created, a wealth-holding class that cannot be out-competed. It also cannot be reigned in by government, media, or social media as they now exist, because the wealth-holding class captured those institutions. (Yes, that means your favorite political party, and politician, is captured, aside from *perhaps* Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, at the national level anyway.) What this means is that, since the wealth-holding class effectively controls the decisions of those who make decisions in companies and government, there is no democracy in America and no hope to get it by traversing the traditional channels available to us, such as voting.
6. Voting for the “lesser evil” brought us to where we are today. While voting for harm reduction has its value, there comes a point where a party is so obviously suffused with conflict-of-interest, so obviously pitted against workers, that voting for them would not, in fact, be harm reduction. It would be granting them additional moral authority to do what they’re doing. In the case of what I described, the only moral choice is abstention from voting (or voting for a third party, if worthy) and work to build a new paradigm. In any future government, all jurisdictions need to have ranked choice voting to prevent similar situations, and also all-paper, all-hand-counted balloting to prevent interference.
7. The very structure of the U.S. government, like many western governments, was set up from its beginning to advantage the capitalist and the imperialist, so the structure of this government needs to change. See the following ways in which the U.S. is far from a democracy: the unrepresentative U.S. Senate; the two-party duopoly (preventing third parties) and parties’ ability to stop or toss out their primaries; the electoral college; the filibuster and its role in facilitating the “rotating villain” strategy; legal bribes via “lobbying” and the Citizens United decision; partisan redistricting AKA gerrymandering; an appointed Supreme Court with no ethics policy or term limits; giant “omnibus” bills that combine different subject matter and might contain so-called “poison pills”; and a defense/war department with a potentially infinite money supply, given the laughable state of their accounting and reporting.
8. Think of “imperialism” as just capitalism on the world stage, as enacted by nations with power against those without. The United States was founded as an imperial project, to evacuate the tens of millions living here already and steal their land and resources. This is the same concept the imperial state of Israel is using today, by it’s own admission. This should be opposed with force.
9. Residents of the United States live under minority rule. This minority rule is by the wealth-holding class and its ideas. This needs to end and be replaced by true democracy, which the U.S. has never had. Workers—that is, those who pay their bills from wages rather than profits, speculation, “investment gains,” or rents—have no representation in this country.
10. The wealth-holding class has changed the rules of the game in their favor, so it seems they will always win, and will continually have the opportunity to siphon wealth—almost entirely created by the rest of us—upward to themselves.
11. The rules of this game even attempt to prohibit the masses from changing the rules. But as Ursula Le Guin said, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” And as David Graeber said, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
12. A policy either benefits the working class or it benefits the wealth-holding (sometimes called “ruling”) class. The interests of the two are so diametrically opposed that almost nothing, maybe actually nothing, is able to benefit both at once. To speak of wanting to create “win-win” scenarios for both groups is absurd and a harmful distraction. This is Dialectical Materialism 101, and dialectical materialism has not been shown incorrect in 150+ years.
13. A primary tool of capitalists is to “divide and conquer” the masses, to keep us fighting one another instead of fighting them. What are now known as “culture wars” serve this purpose. 
14. Racism—far from an illusion since it’s enshrined in policy—also serves the purpose of dividing the working classes against one another. The great black leaders of the 20th century all said that racial equity will only be realized within a larger economic equity, because they understood this.
15. Racial, gender, and other forms of “representation” politics matters little upon a simple consideration of John Brown, a white man who worked to dismantle white supremacy, over against people like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, whose neoliberal policies uphold the primacy of white supremacy. Obama’s neoliberal administration expanded fascism and further entrenched the wealth-holding class. What matters more than representation is whether your policies would create true justice.
16. You’re welcome to look up what “neoliberal” means, but suffice it to say that every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has carried its mantle. In sum, it is government for the wealth-holding class.
17. Capitalism and fascism are permanently linked to one another. Capitalism implements fascism when it needs to bolster itself. Fascism is by and for capitalism. In fascism, the idea is to assign blame not to the system that victimizes but rather to the victims of the system. It enforces this blame with increased surveillance, policing, and police impunity; increased militarism generally; and increased imprisonment. (To give one example, “law enforcement” in this country generally treat feeding poor people as a greater crime than starving them.) The U.S. government has increased each of these markers of fascism over the last 20 years, to a point rarely—if ever—seen in human history. Since 2023 we have seen an increase in the *rate* of increase, so, acceleration. We know that policing is not for “public safety” because science has shown crime decreases when poor people are given a little money—more than if we increase a police budget with the same pot of money. But this is never on the table. There are other reasons we know policing is not for public safety (e.g. a SCOTUS ruling that they don’t have to be), but this is a big one.
18. Capitalism cannot be reformed; it must be replaced. (“Reform” is just insider-speak for “keep doing what you’re doing, but try to present differently to outsiders.”) If you don’t dismantle a system and ensure those who built it never hold power again, then a long succession of those who built that system will end up running powerful organizations, like has happened before with NATO, NASA, the CIA, and multinational corporations. The only way to prevent another Henry Kissinger (i.e. his tenure in power) is to ensure anyone with power who behaves like him cannot have a long happy life with vacation homes and visits to fancy restaurants. For those whose actions do not meet the threshold for prosecution, we should hold “long memories” of what people have done with their power, and prevent them from holding it again. Experience as a political or business operator in the current system “is not the flex you think it is,” as the kids say.
19. What capitalism is replaced with can contain lots of industry, which seems plenty capitalistic. But take China as an example. China has a modicum of central planning directing capital to be of best use for its population. China has been successful on almost every metric, and most of what you’ve heard about them (pollution, poverty, inability for redress of grievances) is unfounded propaganda.
20. Because the capitalist-caused climate crisis is upon us, if humanity is to survive, we need an economy akin to “degrowth/ecosocialism,” outlined at length by Jason Hickel. Its key features are:
    1. Cutting the purchasing power of the rich
    2. Scaling down damaging and unnecessary production/consumption
    3. Establishing universal public services and a public job guarantee to reorganize production around needs
    4. Democratizing control over finance and the means of production
    5. Ending imperialist appropriation from the global South through unequal exchange
21. Anarchism, or anarchic society free from large government, would be great but, given today’s immense power imbalance between the wealth-holding class and everyone else, an anarchic society cannot be achieved without the working classes banding together to dismantle the present system. The *collective power* of the working classes (or one Working Class, as we may wish to call it) is needed to mount an effective opposition. And once we take the reins of our power, some sort of enforcement mechanisms will need maintained, to ensure the equity achieved by this revolution persists. Enforcement requires a central power of some kind remain in place. 
22. Remember who was an “essential worker” in the early days of Covid? The people who couldn’t stay home. These people are the true backbone of society, and thus the backbone of any true worker’s party. They, not umpteen layers of management, make the world run and we should look up to them. The decision-makers of the movement should come from among them, randomly if necessary.
23. The masses have tried to implement incremental efforts for the last 100 years in the U.S. This hasn’t worked. It’s time to abandon incrementalism. Incrementalism has brought us to the point where the accepted term for our present state is “housing crisis,” while for every unhoused person, 18 vacant units of housing exist as vacation homes and places to park investments. (This means about 36 vacant units of housing for every family without a place to live.) This is not just a housing crisis but a far wider one of value distribution, which will need rectified, a decidedly non-incremental path. As Assata Shakur said, no one has ever liberated themselves by appealing to the moral compass of their oppressors.
24. Political violence has been perpetrated on the majority by the minority. Examples of violence include starving people when there is enough food for all to eat; denying healthcare so people die of preventable illness; denying people shelter; increasing police budgets across the country. As one poster (@HoodCommunist) said, “People will (say) ‘revolution is too violent’ while materially benefiting from the day-to-day, all-encompassing violence of capitalism and imperialism. … You accept violence to keep this going but you can’t accept violence to stop it? You’re telling on yourself.”
25. Most power lies with workers (since labor creates the world’s value). The *second* biggest locus of power is the “means of production”: often this refers to machinery, but sometimes more esoteric technology. Workers put to use this stuff, to turn their work into salable products. So to seize power, the most essential move—after acknowledging the power in withholding work itself—is to seize the means of production. This would also mean seizing the presidency (as they can bend the Department of Justice), and the Department of Justice. The DOJ would then issue an order to local prosecutors that *they* will be federally prosecuted if they try to prosecute workers who have taken control of their workplaces. What if a prosecutor challenges this case, and a judge sides with them? Well, the Supreme Court needs seized, to ensure appeals by local prosecutors will never succeed. Last but not least, the workers’ movement needs to seize the monetary value held by billionaires and hundred-millionaires, who would otherwise use it to re-acquire the means of production. Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street should never have existed, and as such, should be nationalized for the good of all people.
26. None of what’s described above is stealing; it is taking back for working labor what working labor produced and others misappropriated (some would say stole) from us. Nearly all value is produced by labor: people who must work for their “livings.” In comparison, those who needn’t sell their labor to survive produce next to no value. That’s not because few among us are “smart enough” to have amassed such value that they don’t need to work. On the contrary: relatively few people are dumb enough to not see the obvious ethical issues with amassing wealth at this scale, while being just barely smart enough (in certain ways) to achieve it. One might posit this as a definition of “sociopath.”
27. Established members of the capital class are often, perhaps usually, sociopathic. At best, members of this class have inflicted upon everyone else the present wage-slavery world, through bad faith political arguments and refusal, over decades, to do what they knew would benefit the broader public. At worst, they joked, laughed, maybe even salivated, watching it play out. So, removing these folks’ immense power is one of the more helpful, humane things we could do for them, their inner lives and their peace. To say nothing of what else it does.
28. Taking away the power of those who’ve been provably corrupt or who set out to do (or happily support) fascism will not be enough to prevent it from happening again. If anyone at all remains imprisoned, then people like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Congress members who did insider trading, those who caused the 2008 recession, those who armed Israel, those who served in Israeli military or intelligence, and more will need to be prosecuted and imprisoned. Societies used to segregate out their clear sociopaths—because not doing so harmed all of society. This must happen again, including for those down the chain of command. “Law enforcement” officers who work for (or with) agencies that brutalize people, even if they were “following orders,” need to be socially ostracized and—if individual action can be proven—face legal consequences.
29. You should know the difference between personal property and private property. Personal property is your toothbrush, and your house. Private property is the factory and the office building that shareholders own and the capitalist class uses to turn labor into profit. A socialist government might seek to repossess, for the greater good, certain *private* property. It would generally not seek to repossess personal property. Exceptions would be made only for billionaires’ and hundred-millionaires’ grossly excess property, nearly all of which, by definition, was achieved through grift or exploitation.
30. The wealth-holding class can indeed be taxed. Perhaps 20 years ago the concept was a little tough to define, but since then, several experts (Thomas Piketty, Gabriel Zucman, et al) have published guides on how to find and appropriate, for the greater good, the holdings of these ne’er-do-wells. The people from whom re-appropriation would be done do not need to work for their livings. Even after re-appropriation, if each were left with $10 million in investments and one home, they will still not need to work, since if their investments grow by only 2% per year (a more natural growth rate in a rejiggered economy), those people could spend $200,000 a year, enough for a very good life given no housing cost, and not lose a dime of their principal. A fair and just society would also need a robust tax scheme on inheritance, likely around 90%, to ensure these newly-less-wealthy can’t pass to their kids the ability to never work.
31. Studies show the period of greatest business production and greatest social mobility in the U.S. was the 1950s and early ‘60s. This was also the period of highest-in-history business and personal taxes—as high as 90% for top earners. So, we’ve done this before, to wild good effect. Last but not least, during this period, inflation was not a policy goal, and in fact not especially possible due to the reserve currency system. These correlations are not a coincidence, and should be relied upon to craft policy.
32. U.S. residents have historically funded a host of services from their own pockets that other wealthy nations expect their taxes to fund. These are things like healthcare, education through college, child/elder care, and safety nets for housing, food, and un/underemployment. (Also assuming the minimum wage is a living wage, because otherwise these services are handouts to companies.) If we were to account for these costs as “taxes” like they are in other comparable nations, then U.S. residents are currently paying a tax rate between 75-80%. That’s the percentage of our income that it costs us to provide these things for ourselves. Other nations are paying rates of between 40-55% for the same services, usually at better quality than U.S. residents see. It’s clear we are not getting our money’s worth. Where is the excess going? Defense contractors, insurance companies, and other unnecessary middlemen of American life. These all have to go the way of the dodo. Even a conservative, military-veteran president said that the war industry is a supreme waste of our sweat and treasure when we could be investing in things that pay dividends to our society. Examples of other areas where capitalists have siphoned value from us include: nursing homes so expensive they bankrupt the elderly but their workers are destitute; supermarket chains whose prices consumers can now barely afford, but who pay their workers so little that the chains are a primary cause of the need for food banks; child care so expensive it eats one parent’s entire income, but those who actually provide the care make $10/hour and need second jobs; college costs so astronomical that attending puts someone into debt for life, and yet thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of professors live as functionally homeless.
33. Our gauge of who to listen to, and why, has been broken for some time. One thing is for certain: we should not trust anyone’s stated intentions, reasons, or goals—only their results, and/or the quality of the evidence a policy they propose is based on. The purpose of a system is what it does; not what someone says it does or says is the reason for it.
34. Once the present power structures are rendered moot, whatever structures come next will seek to redistribute value toward those who made it and were cheated out of it. This is a basic tenet of socialism. A lot of folks have misunderstandings about socialism. Have you heard that socialism takes wealth from those who work hard, and gives it to those who don’t? If so, congratulations: you’ve heard a crucial piece of ruling-class propaganda. Taking wealth from those who work hard and giving it to those who don’t is actually the primary purpose of capitalism. Socialism, for its part, wants to ensure those who work get the wealth they create.
35. Communism? Also not a boogeyman. It’s the label for a setup one step further, once a nation has embraced socialism and sees that it works. Maybe you’ve heard of communism in the context of the last few years of the USSR, where grift—like in today’s capitalism—ruled the day. Those years weren’t really communism. True communism is basically socialism and *less government.* It’s where the masses hold such shared values around what is acceptable distribution that there can be a smaller central government pulling the strings. In communism, no one is price gouging because, first, no one with power would want to; but also because small local councils ensure it doesn’t happen. In communism, local councils ensure workplaces are cooperatively owned and governed by their entire body of workers, and value is distributed equitably within them. A communist central government is as small as possible, acting as the final arbiter of civil rights; weighing in when there’s a dispute about what lower councils decide, or between councils; and helping direct capital in the few cases where only one or two organizations produce something necessary to the whole country.
36. It is safe to assume that most who read this oppose Donald Trump and what he is doing. We must understand that as people who work for our living, we have more in common with the average Trump voter than with a hundred-millionaire who allegedly has liberal values. For us and the Trump voter, given two or three bad months, we will be homeless (which is to say arrest-able, given a recent SCOTUS decision). No multimillionare, let alone billionaire, will be near homelessness given a really bad *several years*. Therefore, let us have empathy for our fellow worker no matter the politics we think they believe. Let us seek to identify the things we have in common with them, and seek to create community with them.
37. According to research by Vincent Bevins, previous attempted liberation efforts have failed because they tend to do the following (which we will take care to avoid):
    1. default to electoralism as the sole means of change
    2. assume that “the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house” AKA that we must play by the rules set by the current power structure
    3. refuse to seek power and/or to wield power when it is in hand
    4. lack a sound (i.e. class-conscious, dialectical materialist) philosophy
    5. refuse to organize for *action*, which is to say, having hierarchy of authority, delegating tasks on deadlines and managing responsibilities, all in support of a set of core shared goals.
38. A common tactic of centrists (often Democrats) is to use procedural esoterica; norms of the body; or a vague sense of decorum or collegiality, as to why things can’t get done. Democrats have famously relegated authority to the parliamentarian, while Republicans simply threaten to fire them until they fall in line. We know that religiously following such rules has gotten us to this point. So, of what use were the rules? Since the purpose of a system is what it does (not the precise mechanisms of its inner workings), we should change how government works until it does what needs done.
39. Along similar lines, a member of this coalition in politics should hold “live to fight another day” to a lesser standard than “possibly getting the thing done.” The public deserves us risking our silly little political careers for the chance at accomplishing things for the struggling masses. Politics is not a game; politicians hold people’s lives in their hands with every decision. We need to afford the work of bettering lives and eliminating suffering the gravity it deserves. That means putting it above our own experiences in this work. You must risk yourself and your standing for the cause of bettering lives.
40. Intolerance is the only thing that should not, and cannot, be tolerated, a precept known as the “paradox of tolerance.” (You’re welcome to look this up.) This is the foundation of anti-fascism. We will always vigorously, by any means necessary, oppose intolerance—and only intolerance—in its many forms. While we don’t “vigorously oppose” folks who simply don’t hold the views herein… a person needs to hold these views to be a part of the coalition that would change this country.