3 December 2015
By Will Chaney
The Monitor (Truman State University, MO)
As capitalism continues to deteriorate, more Americans are becoming
interested in alternatives. This is especially true of young people, who
are seeing poor job prospects alongside rising rates of student, credit
card, and housing debt. Our conditions allow us to experiment with more
radical ideas and attempt to break out of the current dominant
capitalist ideology, which discourages critical thought and challenges
to the system. According to the Pew Research Center in 2011, 43% of
young people now have a positive reaction to the word “socialism.” In
Seattle, over 93,000 people voted for a city council candidate Kshama
Savant in 2013, who is a part of the Socialist Alternative party. And of
course there’s Bernie Sanders, a self-admitted socialist, running for
president of the United States. The Left in America seems to be
garnering momentum, something we haven’t seen since the 1960s.
One of America’s foundational Leftist political parties is the
Socialist Party USA, which is known by many as the party of Eugene V.
Debs. Debs, who ran for president throughout the early 1900s, sometimes
from inside a prison cell, was very popular among the American working
class, receiving votes of over 915,000 people at his peak.
The SP-USA currently has about 900 members, and has been growing
since the 2008 financial crash. At the SP’s 2015 Convention, I was
fortunate enough to meet presidential nominee, Mimi Soltysik, who has
been in the party for five years and is currently the male co-chair (the
SP tries to balance gender differences as much as possible, including
proportional representation in most of its leadership positions. His
running mate is Angela Walker, who ran for sheriff of Milwaukee County
as a socialist, receiving votes of over 40,000 people.
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