Democratic Socialism

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation stands for the broad political current known as democratic socialism, as is stipulated in our statutes. We work towards concrete improvements in people’s everyday lives, aware that things cannot stay as they are. We work for an end to capitalism, for the kind of society that Bernie Sanders elegantly describes as “socialism”. This includes things that should be taken for granted, such as free health care and education and affordable housing for all, free public services from libraries to public transport, meaningful democratic participation, the ecological transformation of cities, transport, energy supply and agriculture, and much more time for each other and for life. Here, the unrequited promises of past futures shine through, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution, 1968 or 1989. It’s a question of finding ways forward within capitalism that simultaneously lead beyond it.

We should not fall short of calling our ideas of a solidarity-based, democratic, feminist, anti-racist, post-growth alternative by a new and yet old, an unsettled name, and arguing together for what it should mean in the twenty-first century. Socialism: a good society, a society of solidarity, a just society, that simple thing that seems so hard to do. Not everyone will sign up to such an agenda, but it should be self-evident that a transformational Left has to champion it.