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.

Indeed, the growing popularity of socialism may spring at least in part from the longer-term failures of this negative-branding campaign: tell enough people struggling to make ends meet that socialism will allow them to consult a doctor without fear of bankruptcy and perhaps to enjoy a restorative paid vacation now and then, and some are bound to t

Activism requires a kind of willed hopefulness, a readiness to bash your head against a wall so that it may crumble or crack, even if you know all the arguments about why what you’re doing is probably doomed and all the reasons the wall is unlikely to budge.

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.

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.

Work, we are often told, is becoming insecure. In reality, insecurity precedes work, or at least its waged variety. While some claim that insecurity is the inevitable consequence of innovation—the result of the fact that, as labor productivity rises, you need fewer workers to produce the same output— the fact is that people had to be made insecure,

people endure inadequate housing, wages, and health care while our culture encourages self-blame and shame for financial hardship, relentlessly exploiting our fears and vulnerabilities.

“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.”

Socialism would feel like having a future.