I address this letter to my fellow millennials, especially those who have decided to support Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary. My only hope in writing this letter is to try to plant the seed of doubt surrounding the direction in which our society, our politics, and our planet are heading. You’ll notice that the arguments I make are broad in scope and that my explanations of economic concepts are introductory at best, and this is purposeful. With any luck, this will prove as inspiration for you to perform further independent research and to start to consider that it isn’t a personal defect or sign of intellectual weakness to hold political views out of the current mainstream, but rather that it is a symptom of courage and mental resilience in the face of the constant inculcation that is inflicted upon us by the predominant culture in which we live.

By this point in the presidential race, I am certain that you have heard a vast array of the critiques surrounding Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and his platform of “political revolution”: his proposals, ranging from free public college tuition to single-payer healthcare to reform of the campaign finance system, is overly idealistic; he’s too old; his career and experience in Congress is no match to that of his rival, former New York Senator and previous Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; his campaign is detracting from what would otherwise be a cakewalk for Secretary Clinton to become the first female presidential candidate for a major American political party. The list goes on, and one could easily spend significant time and effort unpacking these complaints about Sanders’ attempt at the Democratic nomination. However, my concern and the topic of this letter lie elsewhere.

Senator Sanders has a penchant for describing himself as a “democratic socialist.” The media-at-large has an even more irksome tendency to omit the qualifier that Sanders utilizes, oftentimes preferring to label him as a “socialist” plain and simple (Republican candidates are almost always guilty of this). Who’s right?

None of them are.

The trap into which many Sanders supporters and detractors alike have fallen is the line of thinking that equates increased governmental control with socialism. It shouldn’t go unnoted that it’s a significant accomplishment for a politician in the United States who embraces the label of “democratic socialist” to not only gain the support of a significant part of the Democratic electorate, but to also win the New Hampshire Democratic primary by the largest margin since John F. Kennedy. The fact of the matter, however, is that the Vermont senator and his ideas are far from socialist.

Sanders’ philosophy can be more aptly described as “social democracy,” a political model that promotes social justice via government regulations on industry and a strong welfare system, all while operating within a capitalist economy. Social democracy is the foundation of many European governments (Sanders prefers to nominate Sweden as an example of a properly-run state when describing his ideas). It is also similar to the New Deal initiatives championed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — one of Sanders’ political heroes — prior to World War II.

This brand of politics is starkly different from “democratic socialism,” which is characterized by a democratic political system that functions side-by-side with a socialist economic structure.

In other words, Sanders is in support of maintaining the currently-existing global capitalist system, albeit in a more socially conscious fashion, and is not advocating for its dismantling and a transition to a socialist economy. His ideas, despite the protests of rightists, aren’t radical in the slightest, and the claim that any sort of revolution can be achieved within the confines the Democratic Party is a contradiction in terms, as the party has a vested interest in maintaining the economic status quo. His campaign’s refrain of “political revolution” is an ingenious co-opting of the desires that are beginning to manifest in people our age now that we are realizing just how poor the cards we’ve been dealt are.

Our generation, which is the first to live and come to adulthood primarily outside of the politically repressive Cold War era, has been spoon-fed the narrative that the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Communist Bloc signified the inevitable and resounding triumph of capitalism over socialism. But to write off socialism in favor of capitalism, simply because that is what we have been told is best, would be an intellectual failure of our generation as a whole. In order to completely and properly explain why you should by no means be afraid to further delve into the world of socialist and Marxist thought, but rather that you ought to, I’d like to present some economic and historical perspective.

Capitalism is the current law of the land. It is characterized by private owners of industry, aka “capitalists,” controlling the means of production with the goal of growing their profit. In order to produce the goods to amass profit, the following process is put into use:

1. The capitalist acquires raw materials.

2. The capitalist hires workers for their labor value.

3. The workers provide labor and the capitalist provides raw materials to be transformed into goods to be sold on the market.

4. The workers produce the goods for sale.

5. The capitalist sells the goods at a price that: covers the cost of the raw materials; provides the base level of payment to reimburse the workers for their labor; and, most importantly, is inflated in a way that enables the capitalist to pocket extra earnings, ie, “profit.”

6. Repeat steps 1–5.

According to German political philosopher and socialist thinker Karl Marx, this capitalist process of production is the cause and perpetuator of inequality and injustice in our society. Workers put in the effort to produce goods for sale but are precluded from sharing in the money made by selling those goods because the capitalist is incentivized to keep as much profit as possible. Furthermore the capitalist is encouraged to pay workers salaries that just enable them to subsist, but don’t enable them to amass any significant wealth of their own. This forces the workers to perpetually sell their labor in exchange for these meager earnings. This is tantamount to wage slavery. The majority of people are exploited in order to benefit the few. It is the reason for disparities in wealth and the inequality between economic classes.

Of course, capitalism hasn’t been history’s sole economic system, but rather is descended from a lineage of other economic models that are also marked by inequality. Prior to capitalism in the Western world, there was feudalism, which was characterized by land-owning lords allowing serfs to work a plot of their land. The serfs would be obliged to give a share of their crops to the lord in exchange for the lord’s military protection. Before feudalism, slavery — the economic system that permits the buying and selling of human beings as property — was the foundation of the economic goings-on of much of society. Of course, not every single civilization transitioned smoothly and distinctly from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, but that has been the basic gist of the course of much of the West’s economic evolution, and they are the predecessors of modern-day, worldwide capitalism. Slavery is to master and slave as feudalism is to lord and serf as capitalism is to capitalist and wage-worker. All of these economic systems are dependent upon the inequality and exploitation of human beings at the hands of others.

Just as with the ill-fated models of slavery and feudalism before it, almost as long as capitalism has existed there have been people and groups that have recognized the problems inherent in its machinations and have fought for governmental regulations to be put in place to protect workers as it advanced. This led to the institution of the 8-hour workday, minimum wages, child labor laws, workers’ unions, paid vacation and sick days, anti-monopoly laws, etc. These protective measures have reined in capitalism and have provided a basic level of comfort to the lives of many that had never been reached under prior unbridled iterations of capitalism.

However, capitalism contains many more iniquities that have modern-day consequences and are far from being set right. Capitalism was one of the root causes for the second great wave of imperialism unleashed from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s across much of Africa and Asia by several European powers, as well as the United States of America and the Empire of Japan. Local populations were subjugated by conquering outside forces that were in need of raw materials to further industrialization and to advance capitalist interests. Today we see the legacy of this era of imperialism in a underdeveloped countries, a multitude of which are characterized by endemic poverty due to the fact that the global capitalist system sees no value in operating beneficially within their borders. Exploitative forces, such as the aforementioned era of neo-imperialism and subsequent neocolonialist efforts by multinational corporations, have stripped much of the raw wealth of these areas of the world so there is nothing to be bought. The resulting level of poverty and lack of expendable income of local populations also means that there is nothing to be sold. Their misery is left to fester without a hope of being mitigated.

The capitalist system has also been the primary source of power behind the destructive human activities that have led us toward the unparalleled situation in which we now find ourselves: the global climate crisis. In Marxist thought, there is a distinction made between the motivation behind the production of goods: production based upon use-value (production of a good based on societal need) versus production based upon exchange-value (production of a good for sale on the market). Capitalism is rooted in the creation of goods for their exchange-value. This, in turn, leads to surplus production and callous inattention to environmental repercussions that arise as a result of constantly producing in the desire for greater profit. Capitalism is ceaselessly growing in its reach at any cost, and this has helped humankind to wreak havoc on nature and to exploit the Earth of its natural resources. It is not difficult to jump to the conclusion that humanity has a choice to make between continuing capitalism and destroying its only home.

Considering that Senator Sanders is advocating for a social democratic platform, his policy ideas can only prove to be palliative at best. So long as the capitalist system persists, the world’s poor, the world’s workers, and the world itself will continue to be exploited. It is without a doubt that moving to a single-payer healthcare system, reining in Wall Street’s recklessness, providing vast public works projects, and attempting to end the prison-industrial complex will, in the short-term, help to alleviate the economic strain on America’s working and middle classes, but at what cost?

Until capitalism is overcome on a planetary scale, hope for the survival of the Earth and its creatures may very well be in vain.

But what of an alternative? So-called socialist regimes that existed prior to the fall of Communism at the end of the last century and continue to live on in countries such as Cuba and the People’s Republic of China are marred by reputations of economic hardship, authoritarianism, and human rights violations. The truth of the matter is that these systems of governance cannot be labeled as socialist at all.

Many of us have been taught this biased narrative of socialist policy: socialism signifies that the means of production are controlled by the government as opposed to private industry; socialist states inevitably lead to authoritarian regimes; socialism goes against human nature and stifles innovation; etc, etc…

In reality, no state has ever functioned under true socialist principles. The government controlling the means of production is not socialism, but is rather a form of state-run capitalism. Whether the economic oppressors are the CEOs of a company or the ministers of state makes no difference. Party elites under state-run capitalism are analogous to the capitalist elites we see today, and workers in either situation are exploited and separated from the decision-making.

Socialism is the critical response to capitalism, one that precedes the writings of Marx and still has never truly died out (regardless of the claims to the contrary that capitalist apologists have been ceaselessly espousing since the fall of the Berlin Wall). Where capitalism focuses on the success of the individual and the concentration of capital at any cost, socialism focuses on the success of society as a whole and the democratization of the means of production at the hands of the workers. Far from the perversion of socialist and Marxist ideas that prevailed in the USSR, true socialism is the epitome of democracy. Rather than capitalist owners amassing huge profits while the workers are perpetually enslaved to wage-work, socialism would mean that workers in any given industry would have the ability to cooperatively decide on how raw materials would be utilized. Production would be based upon use-value rather than exchange-value, meaning that it would be performed in a sustainable and environmentally-conscious manner. Private property would be a thing of the past (it’s important to note that “private property” in this context doesn’t mean personal property, ie, your house, car, coffee pot, books, etc, but rather that capitalists would not be able to own the means of production so that they could exploit workers and profit as a result). The products of human labor would not be bought or sold in order to amass fortunes, but would be produced to meet society’s needs.

The greatest goal of a socialist society is the abolition of class distinctions and the end of societal inequality. Capitalism is predicated upon inequality, and as a result it has led to the continuing oppression of women, racial minorities, queer and trans people, the world’s poor, and the working class. Gender and race are social constructs that have been co-opted by capitalist interests in a way to reinforce the strength of the dominant system; heteronormative marriage, at its roots, is an economic transaction that abases genuine and unencumbered interpersonal relationships; the needs and humanity of the world’s poor are purposefully ignored; and the working class is exploited for profit. The true liberation of any of these groups cannot be achieved under capitalism, never mind separately. Rather, their liberation — and the liberation of all of humanity — must coincide with the dismantling of the global capitalist and imperialist systems. In a world where the oft-misinterpreted socialist slogan penned by Marx — “from each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] need” — were to be truly realized, every human being would be much more capable of living up to their aspirations.

There are those defenders of our current system who claim that innovation can only thrive under capitalism; that selfishness is human nature manifesting itself. It is the socialist point of view that human and individual nature is largely influenced by the social context in which it is operating and that at the core of human nature exists the desire for cooperation and to see others succeed in their pursuits. No one could possibly imagine the heights to which the human creative spirit would soar in a society founded upon the principle that no person should have to spend their days worrying about earning however much money they would need just to secure the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter. A socialist world would be a world in which it would be of the utmost importance for all of our sisters and brothers to be guaranteed a standard of living that would provide them comfort and the freedom to explore individual pursuits and desires. Human relationships would be able to flourish more fully in a society that wouldn’t place the institution of marriage and the economic benefits it brings with it as the pinnacle of success. Most importantly, a socialist world would be a world that could survive.

Now, I don’t expect you to go out tomorrow and begin waving a red flag and demanding revolution, but I hope that I have piqued your interest in a way that gives you the personal drive to question what you’ve been taught. For our generation, socialism and its principles don’t carry with them the taboo that they carried with our parents and grandparents, and Bernie Sanders’ recent political successes are a testament to our desire as a generation to skeptically and critically inspect capitalism and to search for a better way forward for our society and our home.

It’s high time that we give socialism the attention it deserves.