What Socialism Actually Means: From the Lowell Mill Girls to Chomsky to Your Paycheck
Let me ask you a question, and I want you to answer it honestly in your head before you read another word. Do you think the people who actually do the work at a company should have any say in how that company is run? A vote, a board seat, a share of the profits, anything at all? Most people, when you put it that plainly, say yes. Then somebody calls that idea "socialism" and the same people lose their minds. That's the gap I want to walk you through today.
I've been thinking a lot about Noam Chomsky's work on this, and about a group of nineteenth-century New England factory workers called the Lowell Mill Girls who said it better than almost anyone since. By the time we're done here, you'll see that what most Americans actually believe is closer to socialism than to the cartoon they've been sold. The word has been hijacked. The idea has not.
What Socialism Actually Means (Not What Cable News Told You)
At its root, socialism is one specific claim: the people who do the work should own, or at least meaningfully control, the means by which that work happens. Factories, offices, farms, shipping fleets, software platforms, hospitals, whatever the workplace is. The workers have a real stake in how it runs and where the profits go. That's the entire idea, stripped of a century of fog.
Notice what that definition does not say. It doesn't say the government has to own everything. It doesn't say there can't be markets, entrepreneurs, or private property in homes, cars, and personal goods. It doesn't say a dictator runs the country. None of that is in the original meaning. Those are caricatures bolted on by people who had a strong financial interest in making sure you never asked the underlying question.
The original socialist tradition, going back to thinkers like Robert Owen in the 1820s, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1840s, and yes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, was a worker's movement before it was anything else. It grew up in the smoke and grime of the early Industrial Revolution because workers were getting destroyed by a system that took everything they produced and gave them back just enough to keep showing up tomorrow. They wanted ownership of their own labor. That's it.
Chomsky's Definition: Workers Controlling the Workplace
Noam Chomsky has been hammering on this for sixty years, and I think he gets the heart of it. In countless interviews and lectures, he describes real socialism as a system in which working people control the institutions of production, distribution, and exchange. Not the state. Not a party. The workers themselves, in democratic structures inside their own workplaces and communities.
Chomsky calls this tradition libertarian socialism or anarcho-syndicalism, and he traces it directly through movements like the Spanish anarchists of 1936, the early American labor movement, the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the very Lowell Mill Girls we'll get to in a minute. He has pointed out, correctly, that for most of the nineteenth century in the United States, the labor movement openly used the language of "wage slavery" to describe what we now consider a normal job. They believed selling your labor by the hour to a boss who pocketed the surplus was a form of bondage incompatible with a free society.
That sounds extreme to modern ears. It shouldn't. It was the mainstream American working-class position before the propaganda apparatus caught up. The Republican Party of the 1860s, the one that fought to end chattel slavery, was openly hostile to wage labor and saw it as a temporary stage on the road to genuine economic independence. Abraham Lincoln himself said in 1861 that labor is prior to and independent of capital, and that capital is only the fruit of labor.
That used to be common sense in America. We have just forgotten it.
The Lowell Mill Girls Said It in 1845
This is where the story gets concrete, and where I want you to really pay attention. The Lowell Mill Girls were young women, mostly between 15 and 35, who worked in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s. By 1840 there were about 8,000 of them, mostly daughters of New England farmers, working 12 to 14 hour days, six days a week, for roughly three to four dollars a week.
They were not passive victims. In February 1834, when the mill owners cut their wages by 12.5 percent, hundreds of them walked off the job in what they called a "turn-out." Two years later, in October 1836, when the owners hiked their boarding-house rent, they did it again, this time with over 1,500 workers, and they actually won that one, forcing the rent hike to be rescinded. In 1845 they founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, the first union of working women in the United States, led by Sarah Bagley.
And here is the part that should knock you sideways. In their own newspaper, The Voice of Industry, the Lowell Mill Girls wrote this in the 1840s, in language Chomsky has quoted directly:
When you sell your product, you retain your person. But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress. Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil.
Those who work in the mills ought to own them. Read that one more time. That was written by working-class women in Massachusetts in the 1840s, framed in the language of the American Revolution, calling out their bosses as despots and an aristocracy. That is the socialist tradition, in its native American form, in language any patriot from 1776 would have recognized as their own.
The Lowell Mill Girls didn't get their philosophy from European theorists. They got it from their own daily experience, and they explained it using the political vocabulary of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine. They thought, correctly, that selling yourself by the hour to a boss was incompatible with the freedom their grandfathers fought a revolution for. That is a deeply American argument, and it has been buried so deep most of us have never heard it.
How a Word Got Stolen From the People Who Needed It
So how did we go from "those who work in the mills ought to own them" being mainstream American labor opinion to "socialism" being an insult most Americans flinch at? The short answer is: a very expensive, very deliberate, hundred-year propaganda campaign by the people who own the mills.
It started in earnest after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and went into overdrive during the Red Scares of 1919-1920 and again after World War II. The Cold War conflated every form of worker ownership with Stalinist totalitarianism, even though Stalin's USSR was a brutal state-capitalist system that murdered the actual socialists, the anarchists, and the worker councils as fast as it could find them. Real socialists like Emma Goldman were among the first people Lenin and Stalin's regimes persecuted.
But the conflation worked. By the 1950s, American schools were teaching that socialism equals the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union equals tyranny, therefore socialism equals tyranny. Q.E.D. Don't even ask the question. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the McCarthy hearings, the FBI's COINTELPRO program in the 1960s, all of it worked to crush the American labor left and make even mild worker-empowerment proposals sound like a path to gulags.
Today, if you say the word socialism in a swing district, half the room hears "Venezuela, bread lines, secret police." If you describe the actual policy, namely, workers having a voice in their companies, your healthcare not being tied to your boss, your kids being able to afford college, most of the same people nod and say that sounds reasonable. The label has been weaponized against the substance.
Europe Already Does This (And It Works)
If this sounds utopian and impossible, I want to point you to a place where it is not a thought experiment. Germany has a system called Mitbestimmung, often translated as codetermination, that has been the law of the land in various forms since 1951 and was strengthened by the Codetermination Act of 1976. Under that law, in companies with more than 2,000 employees, workers elect roughly half of the seats on the company's supervisory board. They can vote on major corporate decisions, including, in some cases, the appointment and removal of executives.
Germany also has the strongest manufacturing economy in Europe, one of the highest standards of living in the world, and powerhouse companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Siemens, and Bosch that have thrived under this system for decades. Workers on the board did not destroy German capitalism. They made it more accountable and, arguably, more durable.
The Nordic countries take this further with strong unions, sectoral bargaining, robust welfare states, and high union density. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland routinely top the global rankings for happiness, education, healthcare, and economic mobility. They are not the Soviet Union. They are mixed economies that combine private enterprise with serious worker power and serious social guarantees, and they are doing better than we are on almost every metric that matters.
Austria, the Netherlands, France, and even parts of Italy and Spain have versions of works councils, sectoral bargaining, or board-level worker representation. None of these countries are gulags. All of them are democracies with capitalist markets and meaningful worker voice. That is what "some socialism" actually looks like in the real world.
CEOs Don't Want Accountability, and Neither Do Narcissists
Here is a question worth sitting with. If codetermination works, if it makes companies more durable and societies happier, why don't American CEOs want it here? The answer is the same answer to most uncomfortable questions about who has power: because they would rather not be accountable to anyone but themselves.
This is the same psychological pattern you see in narcissistic personalities at the individual level. A narcissist's deepest aversion is to oversight, criticism, and any check on their will. They hate boards that push back, partners who disagree, employees who speak up. They want loyal subordinates, not equal stakeholders. Corporate America has been steadily restructured for decades to give CEOs exactly that environment: stock-based pay packages, weakened unions, stacked boards full of friendly directors, and a regulatory state defanged by lobbying.
The average American CEO in 2024 made roughly 290 times what the median worker at their company made, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In 1965, that ratio was about 20 to 1. The work itself has not changed by a factor of fifteen. The accountability has just been demolished. When you destroy accountability, you don't get better leaders. You get bigger paydays for the leaders you have and worse outcomes for everyone underneath them.
This is why CEOs and their lobbyists fight so hard against worker representation, against unions, against shareholder democracy, and even against transparent pay disclosure. It isn't about efficiency. It's about wanting to operate in a system where no one with skin in the game can tell them no.
All Wealth Is Crystallized Labor
Here is a piece of economic truth that you almost never hear stated plainly anywhere in mainstream American media, and I want you to hold onto it. Every single dollar of wealth that exists on this planet started its life as somebody's labor. There is no other source. Capital does not grow on trees. Money is not minted by the gods of the market. Every brick of every building, every line of code, every meal in every restaurant, every barrel of oil in every refinery represents human hours of physical or mental effort.
Wealth is, in the most literal sense, congealed labor. When a billionaire has ten billion dollars sitting in a portfolio, what that fortune represents is millions and millions of hours of other people's work that got skimmed off the top and accumulated upward. The billionaire did not personally produce ten billion dollars of value. Their workers did. The wealth coalesced in their name because of how we have chosen to write the rules of property and contract.
This is the core insight of the labor theory of value, developed not by Marx but by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the founding fathers of classical economics. Smith wrote in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations that labor is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. Marx took that idea further, but the foundation is in capitalism's own founding texts. The people who wrote modern economics knew where wealth came from. The people who wrote modern economics textbooks have done their best to make you forget.
Once you internalize this, the political picture changes. The question is no longer "should we redistribute wealth?" The question is "why was wealth distributed this way in the first place?" Workers did not get fair value for their labor, and the difference, what Marx called surplus value, is what we now call profit, dividends, executive pay, and stock buybacks. Asking workers to have a say in that distribution is not radical. It is just asking to see your own paycheck for what it is.
So What Do We Actually Want?
I'm going to be clear about what I actually think we should push for, because vague gestures don't move the world. We want strong unions, the most powerful tool ordinary workers have ever had, restored to the legal and cultural strength they had in 1955 when about a third of American workers were unionized. We want sectoral bargaining so wage standards are set across industries, not negotiated company-by-company in a race to the bottom.
We want some form of codetermination, so that workers in larger companies have actual seats on actual boards with actual votes. We want worker cooperatives encouraged through tax policy, public banking, and procurement preferences, so that owner-operated businesses become a normal option instead of an exotic experiment. We want healthcare, retirement, and childcare untied from your employer, because tying them to your job is one of the most powerful coercion tools your boss has over you.
We want robust antitrust enforcement, so that monopolies and oligopolies cannot crush worker bargaining power by being the only employer in town. We want a tax code that treats wages and capital gains the same, because right now the people who do the work are taxed at higher rates than the people who simply own things. And we want financial literacy, civics, and labor history taught in schools, because none of this works if the next generation doesn't know any of it.
None of those policies are radical. Most of them are already law somewhere in the developed world. They are only "socialist" in the sense that they put workers, you and me, on more equal footing with the people who currently own everything. If that's socialism, then yes, I am one. And if you ever told someone the people who do the work should get a fair share, so are you.
The Word Doesn't Matter. The Substance Does.
If the word socialism still bothers you, fine, throw it out. Use whatever word you want. Call it economic democracy, call it shared ownership, call it workplace fairness, call it the Lowell Mill Girls' dream finally coming true. The label is not the point. The substance is the point.
The substance is this: you spend most of your waking life at work. The institution that takes those hours, that shapes your body and your mind, that decides when you eat lunch and how much your time is worth, is the single most important political institution in your life. Right now, that institution is run as a small dictatorship in which you have almost no vote. You can quit, that's it. That is not freedom in any meaningful sense.
A free society is one in which the institutions that shape your life answer to you. We have a version of that in our politics, however imperfect, through voting and the right to organize. We do not have it at work, and that absence is what most of the political and economic anger of the last fifty years is really about, whether the people feeling it have the words for it or not.
Your Move
If this post made you rethink the stories you've been told about work, power, ownership, and freedom, don't stop here. The deeper problem is bigger than socialism, capitalism, or any single political label. We are living inside an economic and psychological system that increasingly treats human beings less like citizens and more like extractable resources. Workers are burned out, isolated, indebted, algorithmically manipulated, and kept too exhausted to step back and ask who benefits from all of it.
That larger system is what I explore in my book, Farming Humans.
At FarmingHumans.com, I break down the hidden machinery behind modern life: propaganda, consumer conditioning, billionaire influence, psychological manipulation, corporate power, social fragmentation, and the ways modern systems quietly train people to consume, obey, compete, and self-police instead of truly live. The book connects economics, sociology, psychology, media analysis, and philosophy into one framework for understanding why so many people feel trapped in a society that keeps producing more wealth while ordinary people become more anxious, alienated, and disposable.
This is not about left versus right. It is about understanding the environment shaping all of us. Once you see the system clearly, you start recognizing how much of modern life has been engineered around profit extraction instead of human flourishing.
If you want to go deeper into the ideas behind this article, read Farming Humans at FarmingHumans.com. The first step toward changing a system is learning how it actually works.
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