As the pandemic invisibly and remorselessly cuts its way across the country, it creates a low, sometimes high grade, feeling of helplessness and despair as well as fear. And these feelings are only heightened by the massive incompetence, willful ignorance, unbounded narcissism, and white nationalist authoritarian personality of Trump. November can’t come soon enough.

Reading Martin Luther King’s, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” and one thing I find striking is his insistence on the building of a majoritarian, multi-racial movement. Figuring prominently in this respect was, in his words, the Black, labor, liberal alliance. King had no truck for narrow, small circle politics, even when he understood the sentiment, even frustration, behind them. We would do well to take this approach to heart today, obviously adapting it to today’s terrain of struggle and particularities.

To make “working class power” the shorthand definition of 21st socialism reveals a bit of a tin ear, given the the democratic failures and authoritarian excesses of “working class power” in the socialist countries in the 20th century. A broader definition should include socialism’s vision, values, problem solving capacity, and, especially, its democratic character, while, at the same time, making abundantly clear that power in any form will be accountable to and checked by a robustly democratic polity, culture, media, and popular institutions.

Furthermore, power in a socialist society wouldn’t be the property, constitutionally or otherwise, of any one party. Socialism should diffuse power, not centralize it into the hands of any single entity.