By the late 1960s, even figures like Martin Luther King Jr were describing a kind of socialist vision of the future. In a 1966 presentation to a gathering of his organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King commented:

We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society.

There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy …

“Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?” These are questions that must be asked.

While some socialists aspire to a superabundance of everything for everyone, environmentalists tend to point to over-consumption as a primary culprit of environmental degradation. But not all consumption is equivalent. Capitalism relies on cheap inputs in the form of labor and nature to make its cheap goods. As a result, the system consistently drives down both environmental and labor costs and standards. Inexpensive goods aren’t necessarily bad, but they shouldn’t come at the cost of working people and ecosystems. The goal of a socialist society is not to clamp down on popular consumption, but to create a society that emphasizes quality of life over quantity of things.

[...] A socialist society would make decisions about producing and implementing new technologies based on democratically chosen aims, rather than producing and consuming wastefully in order to keep various industries profitable. We could make sure everyone had access to clean, cheap electricity, for instance, before devoting resources to making electronic toys for the wealthy.

Why should workers in other countries ally themselves with those in the United States, in whose name they are bombed and occupied? To the extent that Americans buy into the nationalism that inevitably goes along with their government’s machinations abroad, they make the emergence of a class-based movement against oppression and exploitation impossible.

More fundamentally, it is important to be clear that our support for groups fighting against their oppression, at the hands of the US government or anyone else, does not mean that we’re always uncritical of these forces. One need only look at the growing levels of inequality and the increasing penetration of global capitalism in South Africa since the fall of apartheid, or in Vietnam since its liberation, to see that even victorious struggles need not produce a truly just outcome. Indeed, while expressing solidarity with movements challenging oppression, socialists must be willing to criticize those waging these struggles, whenever necessary—whether that criticism is made on political, strategic, or even moral grounds.

But neither do we treat all sides in a particular conflict as if they were the same. Above all, we oppose our own government’s role in propagating wars, or expanding its military and political influence, at the expense of the working classes of the world. As the German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht put it in a speech during World War I, we understand that “the main enemy is at home.”

Yet there is more to the focus on class than just the moral argument. The reason socialists believe that class organizing has to be at the center of a viable political strategy also has to do with two other practical factors: a diagnosis of what the sources of injustice are in modern society, and a prognosis of what are the best levers for change in a more progressive direction.

Workers are therefore not only a social group that is systematically oppressed and exploited in modern society, they are also the group that is best positioned to enact real change and extract concessions from the major center of power—the bankers and industrialists who run the system. They are the group that comes into contact with capitalists every day and are tied in a perennial conflict with them as a part of their very existence. They are the only group that has to take on capital if they want to improve their lives. There is no more logical force to organize a political movement around.

The possibilities of socialism that the world glimpsed in Russia for a few years were not a sterile experiment controlled by a handful of theorists but a messy and thrilling creation of tens of millions of people groping toward a different way of running society and treating one another, with all the skills, impediments, and neuroses they had acquired through living under capitalism, in the horrible circumstances of a poor, war-torn country. They screwed up in all sorts of ways, but they also showed that socialism is a real possibility, not a utopian dream that doesn’t fit the needs of real human beings.