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Your Socialist Grandfather Wants You to Fight for Economic Democracy
"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.
Sep 14, 2025
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.
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Why It Matters That Male and Female Economists See the Economy Differently
In a significant new study published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Canadian economist Mohsen Javdani reveals that gender shapes views on power, equality, and inclusion in ways politics alone can’t explain.
Sep 14, 2025
Men and women might check the same box on election day, but they see the economy through different lenses. Just ask professional economists.
That’s the striking implication of a new study by Mohsen Javdani, associate professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, who surveyed over 2,400 economists across 19 countries. His research reveals that gender shapes how they understand economic issues in ways politics alone can’t explain—and warrants attention from policymakers and campaigns alike.
Javdani wasn’t just chasing numbers; he was looking for patterns in what economists believe and focus on. What he found: Women in the field (still underrepresented) are more likely to challenge traditional theories, promote equality and social justice, and push for a more inclusive economics. They tend to lean further left than their male colleagues, who are more often centrists or right leaning.
Probably no surprise there.
But here’s the twist: Even when the men and women shared the same political beliefs, they still interpreted economics differently. Right-leaning female economists, for example, were more likely than their male peers to question orthodox ideas and emphasize equality and inclusion. Javdani’s data suggests that as economists shift right politically, men abandon progressive views more quickly than women do.
Simply put, political labels often try to explain it all, but they miss a big piece: Gender is at work behind the scenes.
If right-leaning women are more receptive to progressive economic ideas than their male counterparts, then campaigns that speak directly to these women could unlock a powerful, untapped base for fairness and inclusion.
So, just pack the room with more women and expect the conversation to shift? Not so fast.
Javdani points to earlier research by Giulia Zacchia and others, showing that numbers alone don’t cut it, especially if the loudest voices still echo the same old male-dominated, market-centered dogma. Without structural changes and real efforts to open the field to new ideas, the issues women tend to bring to the table, like labor protections, inequality, and a more hands-on role for government, keep getting sidelined. New faces, same soundtrack. Female economists are out there pushing for redistribution, calling out bias, and demanding better, but if no one’s listening, the system stays stuck.
This isn’t just academic—what’s at stake is a real understanding of how the economy hits women, what they contribute, and why their labor keeps getting undervalued.
Javdani’s study breaks new ground by showing how politics can blur—but never erase—the gender gap in economic thinking. As he writes:
While moving rightward on the political spectrum is consistently associated with weaker support for progressive and equity-oriented positions, the decline is less steep among women. In several cases—particularly among right- and far-right-leaning economists—women remained more supportive of positions emphasizing inequality, structural disadvantage, and concern about corporate power.
For anyone trying to grasp how voters think about the economy, this research is very suggestive.
Javdani study samples only economists, but it is difficult to believe that the differences he documents do not extend far more broadly, and that if we want to understand economic opinions at the ballot box, we have to look beyond party lines and pay attention to gender.
A recent NBC News poll, for example, shows a wide gap between conservative young male voters and their liberal female counterparts on issues like financial independence, debt, and home ownership. And a new Gallup survey reveals meaningful differences in how male and female respondents view capitalism and socialism—with men viewing capitalism more positively than women, and the reverse for socialism.
But significantly, there are also large gaps among men and women in the same political categories. A March 2025 Pew analysis found Republican women were more than twice as likely as Republican men to see employer bias as a major cause of the gender wage gap (43% vs. 18%). Meanwhile, polling by Navigator Research shows American women are consistently more pessimistic about the economy than men, across race, income, and party lines. This stems from how women experience the economy day-to-day—focusing on costs like groceries, rent, and healthcare rather than abstract numbers like GDP or the stock market.
As a result, women tend to strongly support policies that directly ease these burdens, from paid family leave and the Child Tax Credit to cracking down on corporate price gouging.
Yet much economic messaging still treats the economy as gender-neutral—a costly oversight for anyone hoping to connect with voters. Javdani’s research points to a missed opportunity: If right-leaning women are more receptive to progressive economic ideas than their male counterparts, then campaigns that speak directly to these women could unlock a powerful, untapped base for fairness and inclusion.
Talking about economics like gender doesn’t matter is like playing checkers in a chess game. When you meet people where they actually are, not where your ideological playbook says they should be, you stop talking past each other, and start building something real, like an economy that works for everybody.
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Trump and Netanyahu Are Uniting the World Against the US and Israel
Political scientist, political economist, author and journalist C. J. Polychroniou offers a sobering account of the state of democracy and US foreign policy under the Trump administration in an interview with Alexandra Boutri.
Sep 04, 2025
We live in troubled and tumultuous times. Political divisions are at a boiling point in many parts of the world; representative democracy in the neoliberal age has become oligarchic; a neofascist specter is haunting Europe while US President Donald Trump has already destroyed much of whatever was left of American democracy; the climate crisis is intensifying; Russia and Ukraine are still locked in battle since Russia launched an invasion more than three years; and we are witnessing an unfolding genocide in Gaza in real time. Moreover, Trump’s America is in open conflict with the world while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has succeeded in confirming Israel’s status as a rogue state and alienating it from the rest of the world.
What happened to democracy, to the rule of law, and to international law? Have Trump and Netanyahu united the world against the United States and Israel? Political scientist, political economist, author and journalist C. J. Polychroniou offers a sobering account of the state of democracy and US foreign policy under the Trump administration in the interview that follows with the French-Greek independent journalist and writer Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: I want to start this interview by asking you a rather blunt question about the current state of politics in the advanced capitalist world. Are we witnessing the end of democracy?
C. J. Polychroniou: Democracy and capitalism are not comparable, as your question seems to imply. Real democracy starts with the premise that all people are equal and that they can control how they are governed, while capitalism is a socioeconomic system where a society’s means of production are owned and controlled by private actors for profit. Capitalism creates wealth but is also an engine of inequality and makes the rich richer and the poor poorer in a relative sense. Capitalism needs rules that serve first and foremost the needs of the capitalist class, and not of the people in general. Indeed, capitalism is inherently undemocratic and can coexist with different forms of political authoritarianism, including dictatorship.
However, over time, thanks to struggles from below with the aim of building non-exploitative societies, the worst effects of capitalism were tamed in developed countries and democratic rights and freedoms flourished and even expanded. In a few cases, of course, revolutionary struggles even led to the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by state socialism, an economic system in which the state owns and controls the means of production and determines societal needs and wants. But while the revolutions in Russia (1917), China (1949), and Cuba (1959) succeeded in eliminating private ownership of the means of production and the creation of goods and services for profit, thereby giving rise to more equal societies and successfully improving living standards, the governments that came into being were anything but democratic. So you had greater equality but very few freedoms. Under capitalism, at least in the developed world, you had greater inequality but a trend of flourishing democratic rights on account of political, social, and economic pressures and demands from below. Instrumental in the shifting relationship between postwar capitalism and democracy was the role of trade unions as agents of social solidarity and the radicalization of the broad public, particularly among workers, due to the immensely important political work carried out by socialist and communist parties in most Western countries.
It is due to these factors that social democracy emerged as a countervailing force to the power of capital. However, social democracy enters a period of severe electoral crisis from the 1990s onwards as it not only failed to provide a meaningful alternative to neoliberal capitalism but social democratic and socialist parties across Europe, including of course the Democratic Party in the United States, accepted many of the basic principles of the neoliberal doctrine, such as privatizations, cuts in welfare state programs, and orthodox fiscal policies. As things now stand, we are living in a period of massive erosion of economic and political rights coupled of course with the resurgence of authoritarian capitalism. In addition, we live in a world of growing inter-imperialist rivalries, the resurgence of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and the complete collapse of international law. I don’t know if it is the 1930s all over again, but humanity is once again living not only in dangerous but dark times.
The Trump phenomenon has exposed the systemic and frightening weaknesses in US institutions and democratic norms.
Alexandra Boutri: Allow me to focus on the United States. How is it possible that Trump is getting away with his extreme agenda of rolling back civil and human rights, destroying the rule of law and undermining the Constitution, launching an unprecedented assault upon the environment, and behaving as “imperial president at home, emperor abroad.”
C. J. Polychroniou: Let me start by saying that there have been massive protests against the Trump administration since returning to the White House. However, it’s obvious that protests are not sufficient on their own to halt Trump’s attacks on civil society and the environment. Many American institutions have failed to meet the moment. They folded under pressure from Trump instead of challenging his anti-democracy project. As for his formal political opponents, the Democratic Party, the situation is ever worse. The Democratic Party has no vision for the future, and its leadership is really for the birds. Hakeem Jeffries, House Minority Leader, and Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, are the sort of weak and ineffective politicians who are good only for catering to special interests, which is precisely why working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party or why polls show that Democrats are deeply pessimistic about the future of their party. Indeed, the Trump phenomenon has exposed the systemic and frightening weaknesses in US institutions and democratic norms. The two-party system is also a complete failure.
Trump has always had a thing for authoritarian thugs, and he plays that role himself to perfection. Except that unlike some other authoritarian thugs out there, Trump is erratic, incompetent, and dangerous. Yet, 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s overall job performance, with 93% of Republicans giving Trump the thumps up. Do these presidential job approval ratings explain in themselves the so-called democratic backsliding in the United States? Unfortunately, I think they do.
Alexandra Boutri: There is a growing consensus that the US-Israel empire, thanks to President Donald Trump acting like an emperor and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide and “greater Israel” vision, is uniting the world against it and that its collapse may not be far away. Do you share such a view?
C. J. Polychroniou: There is of course an element of truth in the statement that Netanyahu and Trump are uniting the world against Israel and the United States. Israel is now a global pariah, viewed as a lawless and criminal state by majorities in many countries, while Trump has succeeded in the amazing feat of pushing friends and enemies of the United States closer to China at a time when Beijing is pushing for a new global order. Indeed, I think it’s accurate to say that Trump is creating an anti-US global coalition, which includes not only China, Russia, and India, but also Turkey, Brazil, and scores of smaller and middle powers who may still be on the sidelines for diplomatic reasons. Trump has suddenly turned against India, and not necessarily for purely economic reasons, or as part of some broader strategy, but mainly because India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi refused to cave to the emperor’s whims, which included his demand of playing the role of peacemaker between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir dispute, and embarked on a collision course with Brazil by launching an unprecedented attack on the country’s government and judicial system and hitting the country with a 50% tariffs over Jair Bolsonaro’s coup-plot trial.
When it comes to US foreign policy under the Trump administration, it seems that only Israel can still have things its own way.
This is what US foreign policy has become under the Trump administration, i.e., an extension of his ego and guided by personal relationships and whims. Trump’s erratic foreign policy moves have even alienated key allies in Europe, although European leaders are too spineless to challenge Trump and many European states continue to find themselves in a vassal position.
When it comes to US foreign policy under the Trump administration, it seems that only Israel can still have things its own way. True enough, US public support for Israel has significantly declined over the years, especially now with genocide unfolding in Gaza and a plan to annex the occupied West Bank. Nonetheless, it is most unlikely that the US will stop giving military aid to Israel even though continuing to do so is illegal under its own laws. Israel is the Middle East’s superpower, and the US would not do anything hasty to punish such a reliable ally over minor inconveniences like genocide and ethnic cleansing.
As far as the part of the statement about the US-Israel empire being not far from collapse is concerned, all I can say is that all empires eventually fall, and the reasons they do seem to be military and economic. But climate change and plagues seem to have played a key role in the collapse of the Roman empire and may very well be the forces that will bring about the total collapse of human civilization, not merely the collapse of the US empire. Of course, you still have the scenario of an all-out, strategic nuclear war erupting between US and its major rivals, Russia and China. And it’s obviously impossible to predict whether it will be nuclear weapons or the climate crisis that will destroy civilization as we know it. Noam Chomsky, though, told me on quite a few occasions that he personally assigned even odds to each catastrophe. Hard agree.
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