“What is socialism?” the young teenager asked me as I stood outside the GPO selling the Socialist Voice. I explained that socialism is when capitalism failed with their disaster economics, like what we had in 2010. Socialism stepped in and socialised their debt, which became our debt. That’s socialism.
Capitalism is when we had the coronavirus and the world panicked and stopped. When our loved ones died, one by one, then hundreds, thousands, and now millions. what we needed was socialism. How those who were looked down upon were the same people that we needed to survive: the cleaners, the care workers, our beautiful nurses and doctors and all those precarious workers. We needed them, and capitalism failed us, when all else failed.
Socialism is when people globally worked together to find a cure, a vaccine, to maintain support in our lives. Socialism is when we come together to work as a commune for the benefit of all of us. The teenager nodded her head and whispered to her mammy, “Mammy, I like the sound of that socialism.”
Long live socialism!
