Your Socialist Grandfather Wants You to Fight for Economic Democracy

What’s the best way to pass on what you learned from more than a half century of left-wing doing, reading, writing, talking, and thinking?

Write a book. This was especially obvious to a retired union-activist-journalist-novelist grandfather. So, I did. Started writing a book tentatively titled Economic Democracy or No Democracy—An Anti Oligarchy Manifesto.

But then I actually listened to my grandchildren and learned they don’t read much. Instead, their pipeline to understanding the world is social media, mostly memes and videos, few of which exceed five minutes of attention span. At first, I argued with them. “You should read. Much more. Opens your mind to places, experiences, ideas …”

They try to be polite to grandpa, but there’s no mistaking the disinterest as cellphone-induced zombie (perhaps Zen-like?) eyes stare at a screen on the table instead of me.

How to respond? What to do? Decades of union organizing has taught me the importance of listening. Meeting people where they are at. Following their lead rather than trying to impose an "organizing template" on them. The most successful organizing drives are ones in which the "organizer" is a resource, an assistant in a process where the unorganized transform themselves into the organized. “The union is U”—an old slogan expressing a fundamental truth.

So, how to meet my grandchildren and other young people where they are at? How to say something they might consider listening to?

To achieve our goals, we must get rid of capitalist dictatorship in our economy and workplaces as well as oligarchy and authoritarianism in our political systems.

Perhaps these are questions someone two generations removed can never really answer. Certainly, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when I was the ages of my two oldest grandchildren, there was no way most "old people" were deemed worthy of even asking their opinion about war, politics, and life in general, let alone the really important issues of the day like sex, relationships, and feminism.

Still, it is important for a socialist and union elder to try passing on at least a few things that might help young people today learn from our experiences—successes and, most of all, failures. According to a TV documentary about elephants, the oldest females are the ones able to lead the herd to faraway, lifesaving watering holes in times of drought.

Surely this era of climate-change-ignoring-billionaire-emperor CEOs, "free-world"-supported-live-streamed genocide, Donald Trump and all the other authoritarian, about-to-turn-fascistic "world leaders" is at least the human political equivalent of a savanna drought.

We are in a crisis almost certainly about to get worse, and the young ones need our working-class socialism, union-movement elderly-elephant-like accumulated knowledge to survive. It is up to us whose tusks are falling out to do what we can to save the herd.

So, I taught myself how to make videos, created the Your Socialist Grandfather YouTube channel, and turned my book manuscript into 43 five-minute-or-so-long videos. I call it a video book, and the first few episodes are already live on YouTube with a new one added every second day.

Mostly the free videos are about creating a new inclusive language of economic democracy to replace the old socialist-Marxist-anarchist jargon that divided us and to understand capitalism as another in a long line of tiny minorities attempting to rule over the vast majority.

As Your Socialist Grandfather sees it, "the left" must get back to what was its original reason for existence—to fight for one-person, one vote democracy in the economic as well as political systems that govern our lives. To achieve our goals, we must get rid of capitalist dictatorship in our economy and workplaces as well as oligarchy and authoritarianism in our political systems. We must challenge capitalists’ claim to “own” our economies.