Democrats Should Embrace the Fire Your Boss Agenda

Many political prognosticators may think we know what voters vote on, but given that we are now living in a world that Donald Trump’s own pollsters couldn’t have dreamed of, I think one of the most important lessons to take from this election is humility about what we don’t know. It’s very clearly not as easy as just pointing to poll-tested issues and finding the biggest numbers and saying “do that” because if that was the case, Trump would not have won due to the vast unpopularity of many of his positions. This is a tough nut to crack that clearly is about messaging as much or more than it is about policy (and as Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect excellently detailed, it’s about the death of local news too).

But I do know that if the Democrats don’t change, and this realignment endures, the math simply does not make them a national party anymore. They must find a new direction, so why not adopt my own personal politics that are manifestly correct and obviously flawless and perfect? I am a market socialist, and I believe deep down in my bones that this is the only kind of socialism that America would ever jump on board with, but we cannot call it socialism, so I have rebranded it as the Fire Your Boss agenda.

While the United States has proven that the word “socialism” is not electorally effective because Joseph McCarthy won the war, its inherent anti-billionaire populism has proven to be very helpful to billionaire Donald Trump (it also helped author the Democrats’ largest electoral victory in a half-century). People are and have been rightfully pissed off at an unfair set of conditions created by the capitalist economy and our aristocratic government designed to support it, and they are willing to vote for a billionaire who says he will burn the status quo down over the party explicitly defending it.

So Why Not Grow a Spine for Once?

Mikhail Gorbachev once correctly said that “the market came with the dawn of civilization and is not the invention of capitalism. If the market leads to the improvement of peoples’ daily lives, then there is no contradiction with socialism.” I think the biggest mistake that lefties make is accepting capitalism’s distortion that it is synonymous with markets. It’s not and it is ahistorical to say so. Markets existed long before a group of wealthy elites discovered the profligate magic of cheap labor and free trade.

Capitalism is bad because it allows a small cabal of capitalists to control markets and their economic interests are opposed to basically everyone else’s. Everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Mitt Romney to Donald Trump say they want to see markets act more fairly to varying degrees, and they are all sniffing around the point, while entirely missing it as market socialism just sits right there for the taking.

The classic joke is that true socialism has never been tried, and this is true to a degree in large part because the United States spent much of the 20th century snuffing out any socialist government within shooting range of the Monroe Doctrine. This fact makes arguments in favor of socialism a bit amusing in that they are somewhat unfalsifiable (to the people who have more complex thoughts than “but Venezuela”). I could point to Vietnam or Gorbachev’s late Soviet Union as examples of market socialism, but they have many flaws as comparisons to the United States, and constructing a socialist system in the U.S. is largely a theoretical exercise, so let’s do it.

Profit maximization is bad.

Profit maximization is the base construct of capitalism, and it creates an amoral economy filled with immoral actors. Any system centered around an endless stream of more profits than the day before will inevitably trend towards exploitation, as evidenced by **gestures everywhere**

The cost of living crisis, driven in large part by extreme fossil fuel prices, resulted in huge profits for the 1% and next to nothing for Americans who hold the highest energy burden.

Big oil profits fuel inequality, not shared economic prosperity. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications…

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— Roosevelt Institute (@rooseveltinstitute.bsky.social) December 13, 2024 at 11:45 AM

Profit is good.

Profit is growth. Profit means you can afford more things to help more people. Markets are really good at creating profits, and socialists should celebrate this feature that is not unique to capitalism and say that is how we will pay for our ambitious agenda. Lefties will never take real power in this country filled with temporarily embarrassed millionaires by arguing that markets are bad and the government should just control everything. The United States can support a market economy and a robust social safety net that ensures no child goes hungry, and the fact that we are behind many peers on basic human measures is proof of how damaging profit maximization is to a society.

Market socialism can bridge this gap between creating a robust social safety net and letting markets do their thing. Obviously, major reforms are needed to how markets conduct themselves as far as their treatment of labor, the environment, and other humanity-based issues that economists label as pesky “externalities” of capitalism, but I believe that you can take a major step towards market socialism while maintaining confidence in the markets through one neat trick.

You simply fire all the capitalists from controlling companies’ boards.

How?

Pass a constitutional amendment stating that every company now has a labor union with 75 percent of voting control on the board of any company. Elizabeth Warren was on the right track in 2019 saying that unions should be 40 percent of boards, but like many of her work-around-the-edges of capitalism reforms, it doesn’t go far enough. It should be no less than 51 percent control, but given that capitalists will inevitably try to claw back power, I prefer to put the starting point much higher knowing it’ll come down at some point.

This is a real quick and dirty summation of market socialism (if you’re interested in more detailed discussions of it, there are plenty out there), and to truly accomplish it would require more reforms than just this one neat trick, but a world where every company is driven by the interests of its labor and not its capital is what the Democratic Party should work towards. “Vote for us and we’ll fire your bosses and make you the bosses” is a lot better than “fuck you people, why don’t you like Liz Cheney?”

Capitalists argue that markets cannot work without private property included in the means of production, and under this simple vision, it still would be (just majority-controlled by labor unions), so that classic critique does not apply, and I appreciate all the capitalists who are now realizing how manifestly correct and obviously flawless and perfect my political opinions are. I do believe that there is still a place for capital in a more just world, because ideas need someone to take a risk on them before they can make money, and if it pays off, you should be rewarded. But people shouldn’t get to be a demigod just because they made the right bet. I believe that there is a number we can reach where investors can be properly compensated for taking risk, while labor still runs the show.

Critics from the left assert that market socialism tries to find a theoretical middle ground that does not exist between capitalism and socialism, but I would again contend that those arguments give far too much credit to capitalism and far too little to markets, which naturally occur in a world where people want to sell their labor so they can buy things to live. Ideology aside, the goal is to build a social safety net that can help create the equitable society we want to live in.

The core message of the Fire Your Boss agenda is that your labor is valuable, and you should be compensated properly for it, while under the current model, your labor is seen as a cost that cuts into your boss’s profits. Fuck your boss, you’re the boss now. We can keep markets intact while reorganizing them around priorities that don’t incentivize mining executives to dump poison into the water supply because they make more money that way, all while taking the profits that markets naturally create to help improve the lives of those who need it most. Not to mention, there are countless economic studies which show that money is far more efficient and productive in the hands of the middle class than the hands of the wealthy elite who just stuff it away in some money market account.

Just think of it as the greatest deal that capital has ever got out of a revolution.

How to Convince People to Vote for This

Obviously passing a constitutional amendment is no simple task, and it is virtually impossible to even imagine in a world filled with gerontocrats who spend their days losing and telling us that a better world is not possible. It would require immense popular support, and there is absolutely zero indication that socialism could inspire that level of rabid fandom to pressure two-thirds of America’s legislatures to exercise their ultimate power.

But you know what might be able to?

Sports.

Sports teams have owners, and a lot of fans really do not like those owners. James Dolan has been the most unpopular man in New York City every single day of this century. Jerry Jones, famed segregation enthusiast in his youth and man who has never hired a black head coach, has turned America’s Team into his bizarre little fiefdom dedicated to inventing new ways to lose. John Fisher murdered the Oakland A’s in broad daylight with the help of every other MLB owner. Arte Moreno turned the Los Angeles Angels into a non-descript small market team. I could go on and on and on. Fire all these greedy bastards.

I would be willing to bet that if you advanced this Fire Your Boss agenda by saying the government will also nationalize professional sports teams, give ownership to the cities that house them, and let fans vote on general managers and other major decision-makers in municipal elections, not only would that increase voter turnout overall, but a bunch of MAGA Knicks fans would even be willing to sign a DEI pledge and put he/him in their profiles if it meant they never had to hear James Dolan’s name again.

Sports is an inroad that socialists can make with a lot of people who otherwise would not listen to a socialist message, especially since there is so much socialism in sports (the NFL is basically full-blown communist in its desire to see New York have the same opportunities as Cincinnati). A lot of the socialist themes we touch on in politics have similarities with salary caps and luxury taxes and the like, and there is something of a shared language here where we could point to professional sports leveling the playing field for other teams as resembling a model for society.

Sports are one of the few shared cultural spaces that America still has left. There is a lot of talk about how Democrats can reach younger voters who have completely tuned them out, and sports is one obvious arena to meet them where they’re at. Telling a Cowboys fan how orange man is bad or how Marxism is good is probably a lot less effective than saying “hey, want to get rid of Jerry Jones forever and have real power at work? Check this box.”

America is disillusioned with our society’s economic arrangement and has been for some time. Market socialism could be salient in this anti-establishment moment, as everyone at every workplace would have the opportunity to literally rip their business out of their owners’ hands, while still leaving room for those helping to fund the operation to be a part of it. A message of empowering everyday workers everywhere is good, but actually empowering workers is better (just so long as we don’t call it socialism). Sports would be a great avenue to market this message, as getting rid of the owners destroying and moving teams communicates the socialist message in a direct way that no ideological appeal ever could.

Democrats lose because they fail to acknowledge the pain caused by capitalism while defending the system, while Republicans succeed because they at least understand that there is real harm caused by the system, and they redirect the rage it creates towards their nativist and fascist causes while they further advance capital’s interests. Socialists can take markets back from capitalists and reform the Democratic Party into something much more competitive at the same time. All it takes is a vision of a labor union in every boardroom.