Vancouver BC trains, by Nick Sayers

We need to change how they talk about socialism in the United States. As it stands, socialists string together rhetoric about all the things people will get from socialism, but these remain abstract to the American mind. Things like a living wage, social health care, no college tuition, or housing for all are hard to connect with your daily life because they lack a specific value that is shared. They have no vision together. It’s not that these aren’t valuable policies or targets; in fact, they are the means that people will feel the real effect of socialism with. They lack a unifying vision of the ends that the methods are set out to achieve. A story without a point. Yes, these priorities have purposes, but these are not sufficient stories to tell for most Americans. The foundation on how we talk about socialism in popular culture is all based on the redistribution of wealth. This is hinging our entire philosophy and economic ideals on playing a capitalist game, because for there to be a new distribution of wealth, we need the growth of capitalism. We are like a Christian missionary walking into a Mosque and telling worshiping Muslims about the Gospel. It’s an uphill battle that ends up turning into capitalists telling the masses they are going to pay for handouts, hippies to get educations, lazy people to sit at home to smoke pot, and pay for heart transplants for illegal immigrants. This is why socialism, as it is represented, has failed. Take a living wage, probably the easiest one for most people to get behind or understand.

What is a living wage? A living wage gives people more value for the time they sell to capitalists and bosses. People want more wealth for the work they sell. They like to buy shit, save some coin, and pay off debt. This seems pretty concrete, right? Maybe. We are selling the idea that the measure of their human value is still selling away their time, but just for more money. There is nothing concrete to hold onto for people here. What if we talked about a living wage as something that directly gives them more freedom. A person making a living wage in an abusive relationship has more freedom to leave her partner. A person who can pay for prepared meals at home gets more time to do what they want. A person who can save money more efficiently will be able to leave toxic jobs. You might say, you are just buying more options, so that’s still an abstract capitalist idea.

Man Playing Guitar at Ferry Bridge, by Nick Sayers

This is partly true and why socialists need to focus their messaging on free time. Free time has two components. The first one is easy. Time is measurable and always at the heart of how we approach our lives. We are trading priorities because of the time they take to pursue. Time is the metric that controls our lives. Everything we hear from people on their death bed about regrets revolves around how they spent their time or the lack of time they had for something. Being that we are finite, time is the intimate commodity people have to trade.

The next value we have to look at is freedom. Time is only meaningful if we are free to use it. Socialists need to take hold of freedom and apply it to time. Right now, capitalists have a firm grasp of freedom as a brand. Freedom is the ability to own a pistol, our general purchasing power, the ability to acquire more wealth, or speak your mind. These definitions are enslaving, and foolhardy but telling people who believe in this definition of freedom won’t go anywhere. Reason being, the same PR machines that pump capitalist messaging into the public turn socialism into something that destroys and limits our options. Socialism becomes a liberal agenda to take away guns, your hard-earned money (because your time spent on wage labor should let you buy more), shrink medical care options, and give free stuff to lazy people.

Socialists need to stay above these arguments and prove that their policies actually give people freedom in the form of options for how they spend and use their time. Capitalists can’t argue against something like this because the foundation of capitalism is valuing humans as productivity for the means of growth, not for the means of their own creativity and free time. Socialism takes the debate to a place that turns the whole argument on its head, by asking people a straightforward thing, would you rather have more time to work for someone else or more time to do what you like?

Man walking with his home in LA, by Nick Sayers

Socialists need to sell their ideas not as redistribution of wealth but as something that gives people back more of their time and frees them up to use it as they please. This is real freedom to us, finite humans. If you like philosophical works, Martin Hägglund’s, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, delves into these ideas at depth. Read it if you’d like a massive shift in perspective. Most of the ideas here are small compared to what Hägglund dives into.

Imagine a message that tells people they can spend more time with their family if they make more money because they are free from the tax on time that financial stress causes. They can wake up Monday thinking about their children rather than their heat bill or if they should drive all night for Uber or Postmates to survive. Let’s rebrand social medicare as something that can give you the safety cushion to quit your fulltime job and pursue an interest or business you are passionate about and not die. We can shift the conversation about public education from “free” to providing you with options on what you’d like to pursue with your time for most of your life. These become very reasonable things that are hard to question based on “how do we pay for this?”

Socialism needs to become the free time party. This is a philosophy that can hit at the heart of every person who works and isn’t a millionaire, most of us. Whether you are a Trump supporter or Democrat, we are all finite humans who all understand the nuances of free time. We all work to get to the weekend, want more vacation time, would love to see our family and friends more, need to save money to escape the cycle of working every day, and we all have hobbies we wished we spent more time on. Capitalism is lying to all of us when it tells us it lets us choose what to do with our time. If we don’t believe it abstractly, we feel it in our daily lives, no matter what labor we contribute to the capitalists’ dream. Socialism can reach us because it promises a future where the value of our lives isn’t what we sell to our bosses. It gives us a new value, which is our free time to pursue whatever the fuck we want to. Making free time our ultimate worth as a human will outmaneuver the idea that we’re all productive wage laborers.

Insane Market, by Nick Sayers

Shifting our language out of the realm of redistribution and honing in on the focal point of giving people more free time, will take the discussion out of the bowels of political mudslinging and elevate it to the level of human rights, positive reinforcement, and inspiration. Socialists need people to fight for something that is concrete. The ability to spend more time and be freed up to pursue what interests them, rather than focus solely on selling their time to buy their way out of capitalism through retirement or sabbaticals.

Americans are stuck and want more time. Socialists can give that to them, we just need to let them know.