Programmatic Solutions: Getting to the Cooperative Society We Need

The government’s latest round of budget cuts strikes at the heart of working families’ survival. Food assistance programs face devastating reductions, pushing millions deeper into hunger. Medicaid cuts threaten healthcare access for our most vulnerable neighbors. Meanwhile, ICE accelerates deportations, tearing apart immigrant communities and sending people back to dangerous conditions. Corporate giants like Amazon deploy AI to eliminate more jobs while their profits soar. The climate crisis brings deadly heat waves and storms, hitting working-class communities hardest.

Yet workers are fighting back. The UAW’s historic strike victory against the Big Three automakers showed our power to win. Teachers unions lead the fight against budget cuts. Immigrant rights activists block deportation buses. Tech workers at Microsoft and Google organize against job-threatening AI deployment. The continuing wave of unionization at Starbucks, Amazon, and other workplaces proves workers won’t accept poverty and powerlessness. These struggles point toward the possibility of fundamental transformation – but to succeed, we need to understand what we’re really fighting against and what we’re fighting for.

Understanding Our Enemy and Our Power

The heart of our problem is private ownership of society’s wealth and resources. While new technology could provide abundance for everyone, under corporate control it’s creating unprecedented inequality. During the pandemic, billionaires increased their wealth by $1.3 trillion while working people lost jobs, homes, and lives. This wasn’t just a temporary crisis – it exposed how $50 trillion has moved from workers to the richest 10% of Americans since 1974.

A new class is emerging from this transformation – workers displaced by technology who can’t survive without challenging the entire system. This includes part-time and temporary workers, the unemployed and underemployed, service workers facing automation, climate refugees, and even tech workers threatened by AI. The ruling class calls these workers “disposable,” but like the abolitionists who fought to end slavery, this new class has the potential to lead a movement to abolish all forms of exploitation and oppression.

The old ways of controlling workers are breaking down. For generations, the ruling class used racism and other divisions to keep workers fighting each other instead of their real enemies. They gave some workers privileges while super-exploiting others, especially Black workers, immigrants, and women. But today’s technology is eliminating jobs across all sectors, creating an equality of poverty that builds the basis for real unity.

Programmatic Solutions: The Bridge to a New Society

To move from today’s defensive struggles to winning real change, we need programmatic solutions – concrete proposals that connect immediate needs to the bigger structural changes we’re fighting for. These solutions show how meeting basic human needs requires challenging private ownership and corporate control.

When we fight for housing, we don’t just demand rent control – we fight for public ownership of housing and democratic community control of development. When we fight against AI taking our jobs, we demand public ownership and worker control of technology so automation serves human needs instead of profits. When we fight for clean energy, we push for public ownership of utilities and community-controlled renewable energy.

Other key programmatic solutions include:

• Converting private healthcare into a universal public system
• Transforming private banks into public institutions serving community needs
• Making education at all levels a free public service
• Creating a public jobs program focused on green energy and infrastructure
• Guaranteeing basic income and services to all

These aren’t just good ideas – they’re practical necessities. They show how meeting human needs requires taking resources out of corporate hands and putting them under democratic public control. They help workers see how their immediate struggles connect to the bigger fight for a cooperative society.

The ruling class appears strong when they use police violence, anti-immigrant hatred, and culture war tactics to divide us. But these aggressive moves actually show their weakness. They know they can’t keep running things the old way – technology has made their system of private ownership obsolete. They’re desperately trying to prevent workers from uniting around their common interests.

Victory requires building unity across old divisions, unity based on workers’ common needs and interests. The massive multiracial protests after George Floyd’s murder, the growing climate justice movement, and new waves of union organizing show this unity is possible. 

The role of revolutionaries is to unite with other revolutionaries around the demands of the working class, especially the emerging class of displaced workers, to develop political consciousness that helps workers understand their historic mission. One way to do this is by supporting programmatic solutions in the practical movement of our class, solutions that help transform scattered economic struggles into united political struggles against the State. That’s a necessary step in moving from reform to revolution. Class consciousness doesn’t develop automatically – it must be built deliberately through intellectual struggle linked to daily experience. 

Every struggle of the class must be used to explain the meaning of their activity, to show them a vision of the cooperative society that is possible and a strategy to get there. Our strategic focus must be on the political unity of the new class, working toward the abolition of private property and the creation of a cooperative, communist society where social wealth is owned in common and distributed according to need. Without a vision, the people perish, but with clear understanding of their historic mission, the workers can secure the imperiled future of humanity and the planet.

The choice is increasingly clear: either transform our society into one based on cooperation and democratic planning, or face growing poverty, fascism, and environmental catastrophe. The ruling class is organized to protect their wealth and power. We must be organized to create the future we deserve – a cooperative society where technology serves human needs, where our planet is protected, where every person has what they need to thrive, and where cooperation replaces competition as the basis of society. The future is in our hands.

Published on March 21, 2025
This article originated in Rally!
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