Her point is not that women have, historically, performed reproductive labor outside the sphere of waged work, that their efforts are supplemental to the real action. Rather, she insists that reproductive labor is utterly central: in its absence, the entire system would collapse.

If we could create a world where Black students were free to learn at free universities, we would have created a world where everyone else was finally able to do so as well.

“For me, socialism is about the collective control of society by the majority of people,” she said. “Right now, the majority of people, the people who create society’s wealth, never get asked questions about how society should be run.”

A listener, when she realizes that she struggles to attend to only certain kinds of voices, apprehends the divisions in society. How we hear someone relates to that person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, age, physical ability, and wealth.

The students who called for open admissions at CUNY understood that rejecting meritocracy did not mean rejecting rigor or discipline, but rather acknowledging that traditional conceptions of merit veil class and race inequities.

Second, the central political and social challenges we now face stem not from the fabled “tyranny of the majority”—the wayward passions of the masses—but from the impunity of a greedy and blinkered minority.

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.

socialist arrangements would not only redistribute prosperity more broadly, but also freely apportion two intangible goods that are now in short supply: trust and time.

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.