BUILD THE PEOPLE'S ECONOMY • HEALTHCARE, HOUSING, AND AN AFFORDABLE CHICAGO • STOP POLICE & ICE TERROR • DEFEND OUR COMMUNITIES FROM CLIMATE DISASTER • BUILD A FUTURE FOR OUR YOUTH •
THE SOCIALIST PROGRAM FOR CHICAGO
SOCIALISM
Working people produce everything, and a tiny clique of billionaires hoards the vast majority of it for themselves. We are socialists, and we believe workers should run the world. Socialism is a society where political and economic power belongs to the working class and the oppressed, and where the basic needs of the population and the planet are planned for and guaranteed. Getting there means working people organizing to take power into our own hands and defeating the billionaires. This is our socialist program for the Chicagoland area, five demands that meet the needs of working class Chicagoans and move us toward our socialist horizon.
OUR
PROGRAM
The Chicago metro economy produced about $760 billion in 2025, more than enough to give everyone a decent life. That wealth was created by workers. But the billionaires siphon the vast majority for themselves. We demand to tax the rich so that we can build a Chicago for the people that create that wealth. We demand the defense of organized labor and the right of every worker to organize, and we stand with workers on the picket line, from teachers and nurses to hotel and transit workers. We demand a thirty dollar minimum wage, a wage that actually reflects what it costs to live in Chicago today. We demand the municipalization of ComEd and Peoples Gas, taking electricity and gas out of the hands of private companies and putting them under public control. Building public goods and putting our utilities into public hands will take a lot of work, and that work must be based on good, higher wage, union jobs.
Healthcare, housing, food, and a way to get to work are the foundations of a decent life, and we demand guarantees for every one of them. We demand guaranteed free healthcare for everyone, so that no one in this city is one diagnosis away from bankruptcy or turned away from care because of what they can afford. We demand a stop to hospital closures, so that no neighborhood loses its emergency room, its stroke care, or its labor and delivery unit to owners who run a hospital into the ground and walk away, and we demand an end to medical debt, wiping out what families were forced to take on for care they needed to survive. We demand that the city renovate and build 500,000 public housing units, because housing is a human right and not a commodity for private profit. We demand the city open city owned grocery stores in every neighborhood, treating food as a public necessity and ending the food deserts that leave whole communities without fresh, affordable groceries. We demand free transit and an expansion of the CTA to connect the south side, so that getting to work, to school, or to the doctor is never a barrier for anyone no matter where they live.
Working class communities in this city are being terrorized by the police and by federal immigration agents. CPD disproportionately terrorizes Black Chicagoans, alongside our immigrant neighbors, and the politicians and billionaires who profit from our division want us to believe these are separate fights. They are not. Black and immigrant Chicago face the same violence from the same system, and we answer it with the unity of all oppressed and working people in this city. We demand ICE out of Chicago, so that no family has to live in fear of agents who tear our neighbors away from their homes and loved ones. ICE agents and police officers who kill and brutalize must be prosecuted and brought to justice. We demand a cut in the police budget. The city currently gives CPD over $2 billion a year, money that the police then use to terrorize the very taxpayers who fund it. Instead, that money should fund community violence prevention and intervention programs that put people respected as leaders in their own neighborhoods at the heart of the work, backed by the supports that stop violence before it starts, like kids in schools and afterschool programming for our youth.
The climate crisis is already here and it is hitting working people the hardest. We demand a ban on private development of data centers, and we demand worker control over their development and the technology they run. We demand that every lead pipe be removed from our water system, because nobody in the city should be poisoned by the water coming out of their tap. We demand funds for green infrastructure, and we demand that we modernize our infrastructure grid, from our sewers to our stormwater systems, so that it can absorb bigger flood events and protect our neighborhoods from the flooding that follows every major storm. And when disaster does strike, we demand a publicly funded disaster response and recovery program in place, so that families are not left to rebuild alone after a storm.
Every young person in Chicago deserves a public school that has everything to provide a holistic and fulfilling education. We demand fully funded public schools and guarantee free pre-K and childcare for every family. No parent should have to choose between a paycheck and their child. We demand zero school closures, zero privatization, and zero charter expansion, because our schools belong to the communities they serve. We demand the city enact a jobs program for our youth, so that young people have real, paid work and a real stake in the city they are growing up in.