The principal role of the left is to lend its energy and ideas to the empowerment of much larger class and social constituencies. In doing so it gains in experience and understanding as well as earns its leadership credentials in this wider social-political complex. Any idea that the left on its own can effect major social transformations finds no historical confirmation.

That understanding should deeply inform the politics of the left in these tumultuous times, when racial and class inequalities are so evident and the opportunity to clear the way for a new era of progress is within reach, only a election away.

And yet more than a few conversations on the left are primarily focused on the building of its own power apart from broader and powerful forces of social change.

As the pandemic invisibly and remorselessly cuts its way across the country, it creates a low, sometimes high grade, feeling of helplessness and despair as well as fear. And these feelings are only heightened by the massive incompetence, willful ignorance, unbounded narcissism, and white nationalist authoritarian personality of Trump. November can’t come soon enough.

Reading Martin Luther King’s, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” and one thing I find striking is his insistence on the building of a majoritarian, multi-racial movement. Figuring prominently in this respect was, in his words, the Black, labor, liberal alliance. King had no truck for narrow, small circle politics, even when he understood the sentiment, even frustration, behind them. We would do well to take this approach to heart today, obviously adapting it to today’s terrain of struggle and particularities.

To make “working class power” the shorthand definition of 21st socialism reveals a bit of a tin ear, given the the democratic failures and authoritarian excesses of “working class power” in the socialist countries in the 20th century. A broader definition should include socialism’s vision, values, problem solving capacity, and, especially, its democratic character, while, at the same time, making abundantly clear that power in any form will be accountable to and checked by a robustly democratic polity, culture, media, and popular institutions.

Furthermore, power in a socialist society wouldn’t be the property, constitutionally or otherwise, of any one party. Socialism should diffuse power, not centralize it into the hands of any single entity.

Socialism if it is going to be attractive to millions can’t simply speak of economic planning, growth rates, and the provision of material goods. It also has to tell a story of a society that expands the boundaries of human freedom and equality, situates ordinary people in the center of the decision making process, gives life to the full, free, and many sided development of the individual, and paints in many colors the diverse array of collective and ecologically sustainable living and working arrangements.