Imagine Living in a Socialist USA

The polar ice caps are melting, hurricanes and droughts ravish the planet, and the earth's population is threatened by catastrophic climate change. Millions of American jobs have been sent overseas and aren't coming back. Young African-American men make up the majority of America's prison population. Half of the American population are poor or near poor, living precariously on the brink, while the top one percent own as much as the bottom eighty. Government police-state spying on its citizens is pervasive. Consequently, as former President Jimmy Carter has said, "we have no functioning democracy."

Imagine: Living In a Socialist U.S.A., edited by Francis Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith, is at once an indictment of American capitalism as the root cause of our spreading dystopia and a cri de coeur for what life could be like in the United States if we had economic as well as a real political democracy. This anthology features essays by revolutionary thinkers, activists, and artists—including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, civil rights activist Angela Davis, incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu Jamal, and economist Rick Wolff— addressing various aspects of a new society and, crucially, how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, living in a society that is truly fair and just.

This collection from leading voices on the left offers a bold vision for what comes next:

• A Critique of Capitalism: Essays from Paul Street, Rick Wolff, and others explore how the profit-driven system is the true enemy, leading to ecological crisis, social breakdown, and the erosion of democracy.


• Economic Democracy: Move beyond the 1 percent. Discover concrete proposals for a democratically run economy based on worker-owned and community-controlled enterprises, not Wall Street oligarchs.


• Social Justice in Practice: Angela Davis and Mumia Abu-Jamal imagine alternatives to the prison-industrial complex, while others explore what housing, healthcare, and education would look like when treated as fundamental human rights.


• A Roadmap to a New America: Beyond the critique, this anthology offers practical strategies for how to get there, with contributions from activists and thinkers like Michael Moore on how to build a truly fair and just society.