We understand socialism as a process that supports the national liberation of oppressed people, seeks to end gender oppression, builds collective control over key resources such as transportation, water, communications, and ensures that those who labor benefit from the work. Socialism is rooted in sociality, in a healthy relationship to the land, water, air, and one another. However, this is a process, and we use the best that humanity has to offer, in the context of the time, place, and conditions that we are in, to help determine what we need to do to take another step down a socialist path and, ultimately, end the scourge that is the settler-capital class.

We also acknowledge that the word “socialism” reflects a tradition that began in 19th-century Europe, which is also the source of the MAAFA, or “great tragedy” that has been the 500-year Columbus era. African and Indigenous liberation movements pre-dated socialism by hundreds of years and, in many cases, had already collectively organized themselves and centered matriarchy. So, the word “socialism” itself contains contradictions. We choose it because defeating capitalism will require a worldwide movement, and “socialism” is a term that has been or is currently being used by the Soviet Union, China, Guinea-Bissau, Vietnam, Cuba, Grenada, Venezuela, Laos, and Nicaragua, each giving the term its own flavor in practice. Thus, it seems more important at this moment to join the historical movement of socialism than to create a term with seemingly fewer contradictions, because focusing on the term as the critical intervention would be a greater contradiction.

Finally, at the moment in the U.S. , socialism encompasses practices critical of racial capitalism, rather than a system of governance, and so being anti-racial capitalist and figuring out what that means is really the focus.