DSA Co-Chair: Bread-and-Butter Is the Road to Ending Capitalism!
Rent Control and Medicare for All are the "bread and butter" demands for "overthrowing capitalism itself" in the end.
Ashik Siddique, a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, told a panel with fellow co-chair Megan Romer, program committee chair Michaela Brangan, and moderator Hasan Piker that the choice between “bread-and-butter” issues and “the bigger horizon of everything, overthrowing capitalism itself” is not a real split inside DSA.
Ending capitalism, he said, “is not going to happen in one election cycle.” The organization instead believes in “a democratic road to socialism,” with members already debating the mid- and long-term path “beyond bills.”
The immediate job, in his account, is narrower and more tactical: use housing, wages, health care, and other everyday demands to “motivate a lot of people,” “get millions of people to even believe that bigger things are possible,” and “raise our expectations and organize to fight for more.” That is the warning for November.
The rent freeze, the public option, and the wage hike are not the destination. On this telling they are the on-ramp, meant to normalize a longer project whose stated end is the replacement of capitalism. DSA’s own platform says the same thing in plainer language: capitalism is a system “designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us” and “must” be replaced with democratic socialism.
Americans who want a market economy, private property, and electoral politics that stop at reform rather than system change should treat these candidacies accordingly and defeat the socialists in November.