In a capitalist society, there is always a good explanation for your poverty, your meaningless job (if you have a job), your difficulties and your general unhappiness. You are to blame. It is your failure. After all, look at other people who do succeed. If only you had worked a little harder, studied a little more, made those sacrifices.
Our dominant system for providing electricity to homes and businesses in the United States—through investor-owned energy utilities—is deeply problematic. By prioritizing shareholder profits over people’s needs, these utilities repeatedly exacerbate climate disasters through their insistence on fossil-fuel use and force millions of families to choose between keeping their homes from either freezing or overheating and feeding their children or seeing a doctor. Increasingly, the consequences can be deadly.
Dawson’s People’s Power argues for localised renewable infrastructure, but central, collective and democratic planning is what is needed, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh.
Just to spell it out, which the article seems reluctant to do, this is the United Electrical Workers or, more fully, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, a very left-leaning union since its founding in the '30s.
Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.
Editor: This is an interesting interview on the subject of how democratic socialism might be advanced.
May 2, 2021
Azadeh Reisdana interviews Sam Gindin on the recent growth of democratic socialism in developing countries and as an ideology which attracts a new younger generation of socialists. They also discuss the expansion of democratic socialism to not only a political theory but also as an economic application. This was recorded online during the Covid lockdown, March 2021.
