Why do we need socialism?

There is a moment I keep noticing, early in the morning, when the city hasn't decided yet what kind of day it will be. The cleaners are finishing the offices before anyone arrives. A delivery rider waits at a red light with a box on his back, checking the time on a cracked phone. The bakery on the corner has been open for an hour. By the time I sit down at my desk with a coffee, the world has already been put back together for me by people I will never meet. If one of them didn't show up tomorrow, nobody would ask why. The food would just be late.

None of them earns what I earn. Most of them work longer hours, in worse conditions, with less security, and nobody asks what they think. If one of them gets sick for a month, their life can fall apart. If I get sick for a month, I get better. Many of them will reach old age with a broken back and nothing saved. Some won't reach it at all.

I didn't do anything to deserve that difference. And a society that accepts it as normal isn't just unfair. It's quietly killing people, and calling it the economy.

the word that scares people

Say "socialism" at a dinner table and watch what happens. Someone thinks of gray buildings and empty shelves. Someone else thinks of a party card, a secret police, a neighbor who reports on you. The conversation is over before it starts.

The fear has its reasons. Regimes that called themselves socialist imprisoned writers, silenced workers, and turned the promise of equality into the equality of being afraid. That lesson was paid for in blood, and no socialist today has the right to forget it.

So when I say socialism, I don't mean a state that owns everything and everyone. I don't mean one party, one truth, one newspaper. I mean a society where nobody owns somebody else's time, and where freedom isn't something you have to be able to afford.

what I actually mean

A doctor who treats you without asking for your card first. A school that teaches the child of a cleaner as well as the child of a banker. A roof that doesn't eat half your salary. A pension that lets you grow old without being afraid. A job where the people who do the work have a say in how it's done, and a share in what it produces. Public things that belong to everyone and are run for everyone: water, trains, energy, the air we breathe.

None of this is utopia. It's the boring infrastructure of a decent life, and every piece of it was won, not given. Someone went on strike for the weekend. Someone was shot for the eight-hour day. Someone spent years in prison so that a worker could organize and a child wouldn't spend twelve hours in a mine. We live inside their victories and call them normal, while they're sold off, one privatization at a time, by people who were born after the fight was over.

the lottery

I'd like to believe I earned where I am, and I did my part. But the most important things happened before I could do anything about them. I was born in a place with free schools and free hospitals. I had parents who could afford to let me study instead of work. I happened to be good at something the market happens to pay well for. Swap any of those and I'm someone else. Maybe the rider at the red light.

So let's be honest: the story about merit is a fairy tale. Effort is the last ingredient, added on top of everything you were handed before you could choose anything. Nobody picks their parents, their country, their health or the school at the end of their street. The merit story survives because it's comfortable for the winners: it turns luck into virtue and everyone else's bad luck into a personal failure. Socialism begins exactly there: not in envy of those who have more, but in honesty about why they have it.

And luck compounds: money makes money faster than work ever can. The richest people on earth own more than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes, while people who work full time can't afford rent in the city where they work. That isn't the market failing. That's the market working exactly as designed.

what the market can't see

In my job we assume the worst about everyone. When you design a secure system, you treat every party as a potential adversary, someone who will cheat the moment cheating pays, and you build it so that the system holds anyway. It's the right approach for protecting a channel. It's a terrible philosophy for building a society.

A society built only on that assumption gets exactly what it designs for: people who are very good at competing and very bad at caring. It prices what it can count and ignores everything else: the parent who stays home with a sick child, the friend who listens at two in the morning, the neighbor who checks on the old man downstairs. None of that shows up in any statistic. All of it is what keeps us alive, and when it disappears, nobody notices until the old man downstairs stops answering the door.

Most people never get enough breathing room to live instead of merely existing. They work, they pay, they sleep, they start again. They'd love to read more, make art of any kind, spend time with their kids, one day, when there's time. One day is the most expensive luxury there is. For most people it never comes: they run out of life before they run out of bills. Socialism exists to give that day back.

the structures above us

The way a society produces and owns things is only the foundation. On top of it grows everything else: the laws, the schools, the newspapers, the films, even the jokes we tell. Those upper floors are the superstructure, and their quiet job is to make the foundation look like nature.

We say "the market decided", as if the market were the weather and not a set of rules written by people. We learn that hard work always pays, from a society that pays a nurse a fraction of what it pays someone who moves money around. Nobody needs to plan any of it. Whoever owns the ground floor can afford to furnish the rest of the building.

In my field we call the component you rely on without being able to inspect it the root of trust. Every layer above it inherits its guarantees, and no layer above it can verify them: you just trust it, because nobody ever showed you what's inside. Most of us live our whole lives like that, defending rules we never chose. The first step is to stop. "That's just how things are" is a sentence someone profits from.

but it failed

The planned economies of the last century failed because they concentrated power in the hands of a few, and concentrated power gets abused, whether it sits in a party committee or a boardroom. They confused owning the factories with freeing the people who worked in them. They feared disagreement, and a society that fears disagreement stops learning.

None of that is an argument against fair wages, public healthcare or workers having a voice. It's an argument against authoritarianism. The places with universal healthcare, free university, strong unions and shorter working weeks didn't get there by trusting the market. They got there by fighting it, for decades.

As for human nature: people are selfish and generous, and which side comes out depends on the world around them. Put them in a race where losing means losing your home, and they'll run over each other. Give them a floor they can't fall through, and they start looking for who else needs a hand.

why we need it

Some nights I audit my own life the way I would audit a system. Which parts did I build, and which was I given? The schools, the hospitals, the safe streets, the stable job: almost every layer I rely on was paid for by people I'll never thank. I'm not self-made. Nobody is. We're all running on infrastructure we didn't write, and we're letting it rot, while the cracks open first under the people who can least afford to fall.

So we need socialism. Not because the market is evil, or because everyone should earn the same. Because a life shouldn't depend on the lottery of birth. Because health, education, a home and an old age without fear aren't products: they're the conditions for being free at all. Because freedom that only exists for those who can pay for it is a privilege, not freedom.

And it isn't charity. It's a better deal for almost everyone, including people like me. Nobody is as safe as they think: an illness, a layoff, a parent who needs care can take a comfortable life apart in months. Sharing that risk costs far less than leaving each of us to carry it alone, and illness never stays on one side of town. People who know they can't fall all the way down are also the ones who find the courage to try something new.

In security we say that a system is only as strong as its weakest link. A society is no different: you can't buy your way out of the world everyone else lives in.

Call it whatever you like. What matters is a world where the rider at the red light and I aren't living in two different countries while standing at the same crossing.

I don't know if I'll see it. I know which side I want to be on while we try.