AOC

The Fearless Rise and Powerful Resonance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Edited by Lynda Lopez

… she told Vogue magazine.

“When I saw these actions, it was like, Okay, this is clearly an extension of our own community. And the thing about DSA is that it’s a very large tent organization. When we talk about the word socialism, I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity, and our economic, social, and racial dignity … To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live. It’s to say that no individual’s civil rights are to be violated. And it’s also to say that we need to really examine the historical inequities that have created much of the inequalities—both in terms of economics and social and racial justice-because they are intertwined. This idea of, like, race or class is a false choice.”

(Lopez 2020, 89)

AOC calls herself black and Puerto Rican, which is refreshing and important. When it comes to identity, black Latinos tend to choose nation over race, not least because blackness in the United States isn’t exactly advantageous.If you’re a political or public figure, being black automatically puts you in the crosshairs of conservatives, who are always triggered by race (Obama, anyone?). Puerto Ricans are American and are often black, though they tend not to identify as either; AOC brings Puerto Rican, black, and American together in the same space, where they rightly belong. Her embrace of color is doubtless a big reason why the right resents her so deeply, why there are MAGA shirts (Make Alexandria a Bartender Again, featuring AOC with a pinched, unappealing face) to augment the ugly racial resentment first put forth and still sustained by MAGA. AOC goes straight into that maw needs, but the feelings of people of color a central part of her agenda, as well as an integral part of truth, justice, and the American way. For her, color is not something to strategically market or constantly modify, as Obama was forced to do. It is not anti-American, but the opposite. In a larger sense she knows (as I hope we all do by now) that staying in the center, or “neutral,” racially or otherwise, is not the answer to anything, certainly not to the problem of emotional paralysis that has truly unmade the Democratic Party.

(Lopez 2020, 90-91)

AOC was not a child of privilege who read Marx andQu had a revelation about economic theory, though she does have a degree in economics. Instead, she was someone who became outraged as she saw a small class of people becoming ever more rich while working people in Queens and the Bronx could not afford housing or health care. AOC has been quite explicit that by “socialism” she means “worker power,” not “government ownership”:

Socialism does not mean government owns everything. I disagree with that notion as well because I think it is undemocratic. I think that it is very easily corrupted and I don’t think that that’s a good thing. But I do think that having more democracy in our economy, aka worker power, worker accountability, is a very positive thing.

(Lopez 2020, 150)

Socialists have always paid close attention to the relative amounts of power possessed by ordinary workers and business owners. Support for labor unions is an important part of democratic socialist politics not just because labor unions secure workers higher pay and better benefits, but because they reduce the power of employers to arbitrarily employees. This is the reasoning behind proposals like Bernie Sanders’s “workplace democracy” and “corporate accountability and democracy” plans. The workplace democracy plan bans firing for any reason other than “just cause,” makes it easier to form a union, and eliminates “right-to-work” laws that ban mandatory union membership.

The corporate democracy plan would distribute shares of large corporations to employees and mandate that 45 percent of corporate board members be directly elected by employees. (This kind of scheme, called “codetermination,” already exists in Germany and is considered successful.) None of these things turns the United socialist conviction that bosses and owners should have less power relative to ordinary workers.

Importantly, this shows why critics are wrong to claim control, even though socialists do often advocate a role for government. In fact, government is simply used as a means to an end: as an institution owned by all, with accountability through elections, government is the vehicle through which we can enact our collective aspirations. For an issue like climate change, government is the only institution with both the power and the level of popular control necessary to address the problem at sufficient scale AOC’s goal is not state power but worker power, some of which might come through nationalizing industries, but some that might come by redistributing corporate ownership to ordinary laborers instead of rich shareholders. In that case, the government’s job is to create laws that restructure companies, but the ultimate power is being given to working people rather than the state.