the central quandary of democratic theory: Who counts as the people, and how can that definition be substantively revised and updated in view of shifting historical circumstances? Or to rephrase things in the language of iconography: Who is visible? Who is forced into the shadows?

Under a more economically egalitarian, explicitly socialist system, these democratic dilemmas will not disappear. The riddle would not be solved. Instead, our problems would become more interesting.

Debt bridges the personal and political, binding individuals to a broader set of economic circumstances, and as such presents a powerful opportunity to unite otherwise divided populations.

Socialism would feel like having a future.

The socialist feminist tradition is a powerful resource because it’s centrally concerned with what work is—and in particular how capitalism lives and grows by concealing certain kinds of work, refusing to pay for it, and pretending it’s not, in fact, work at all.

For years, wannabe prophets predicted that robots were “coming for our jobs.” That particular forecast, it turns out, has not come to pass. Instead, more and more people effectively have robots for bosses.

In 1843, a young Marx described security—what he called “the concept of police”—as the “supreme concept” of bourgeois society. Fearful of those they have dispossessed, ruling elites have long utilized state violence to safeguard private assets, criminalizing both poverty and protest in the process.

Denied the basic resources we need to live, we are forced to seek security through market means—investing in ourselves as “brands,” paying our insurance premiums, and praying that our retirement funds appreciate—while lining the pockets of those most responsible for making us insecure in the first place.

Attempting to create what the essayist Rebecca Solnit calls “a democracy of equal audibility” is a social enterprise— it’s one of the tasks of feminist, antiracist, and economic justice movements. What would such a democracy sound like? Certainly not like one booming bass note.