DUANE PAUL MURPHY, San Clemente
Imagine sometime in the future, a coastal city, a village by the sea, if you will, where its own society and community—not hierarchical authoritarian and totalitarian businesses, as well as any sort of institution that puts profit and greed before people and planet—collectively and democratically own and manage the means of production and distribution of goods, services, and resources.
A medium-sized suburban city along the Pacific Oceanic shores where workers or members owned, managed, and controlled the businesses they are employed at in the form of cooperatives, ESOPs, credit unions, or codetermination.
A community where inland and coastal areas have universal basic services such as a humane and inclusive universal health care system that truly covers everyone and is both affordable, accessible, and cost-effective; high-quality public education that is actually integrated and student input would begin to matter; complementary mass public transit; municipalized Internet, and adequate green social housing.
A city of more than 64,000 people that often feels like a small town, where all the natural land is under control by the people and not the banks; residential apartments are cooperatively controlled by its tenants and not landlords; and manufactured communities such as mobile homes are managed and operated by the residents and not private entities or individuals.
After living in a city where the affluent bourgeois with their golf courses, country clubs, and gated communities have done nothing but to stifle human decency and progress, San Clemente needs a Democratic socialist society where our democratic institutions are governed for, by, and of the working people—not upper-middle class, millionaire, or even billionaire individuals.
The cost of doing nothing to end poverty, homelessness, higher costs of living, and human-made environmental crises is far more expensive than doing something. The time for liberation and revolutionary reform is now or at least in the near future, before it is too late. It’s either Democratic socialism or barbarism.
Humanity or barbarity. Radical popular democracy or plutocratic and aristocratic oligarchy.
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