Imagine Living in a socialist USA: : A conversation with Michael Steven Smith and Bhaskar Sunkara
Is a Bill of Rights Socialism possible in the USA? Join us in a convention discussion on May Day! Click here:
https://plus.google.com/events/cnc19qk46noe3kpbs7pcgnq9utg
Some 48 percent of young people have a favorable view of socialism according to a recent poll. What might this new society look like? How will U.S. history, culture and traditions shape it? What are the dos and don'ts learned from previous efforts? What do socialists and communists think? Communist Party secretary-treasurer Roberta Wood will host a conversation on the subject with Michael Steven Smith, co-author of Imagine Living in a Socialist USA and Bhaskar Sunkara, publisher of Jacobin, a magazine of culture and polemic.
https://www.facebook.com/events/472247596241624/
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I live in the Peninsula. 
I'm answering your question from below up here. I know there's a fight for 15 coalition in Oakland, but I haven't heard anything really substantial around this in SF or SMC. I just read an article that says you'd have to make around $29 bucks an hour to afford a 1bd place around these two areas. So maybe we should be talking Fight for 30? Ouch.
Unless something has changed recently, you're probably thinking about Kshama Sawant, who won an election as a city councilor. She identifies with Socialist Alternative, nominally a Trotskyist group who's pretty centrist (vacillating between reform and revolution). Although she does take some pretty radical stands lately, so they're probably taking a left turn.
That said the rest of it is pretty spot on. And most of the politicians in Seattle, even the left reformist ones, now support that $15 minimum wage thing which was Ms Sawant's main campaign pledge. IOW, she started it and the rest of them jumped on board with it. She's also doing something else that's a great example for politicians in general. She's only taking the average wage of her constituents as her salary and donating the rest to left causes. I'm sure SAlt gets the lion's share of that excess, 
but it's still a GREAT example of what we need politicians to do and it hasn't gotten a lot of press.
As I've said before, $15 per hour as a minimum wage is better than a sharp stick in the eye, but we really should be talking and promoting a LIVING wage tied to cost of living in each area. In some areas of course, $15 per hour probably would be a living wage, but in most areas it wouldn't be. We also need a job-sharing program AT FULL TIME PAY until everybody that wants a job has one. If we advocate for this, even as a reformist demand, we will come closer to getting $15 or more as a minimum.
PBS News Hour featured a segment on the Seattle $15 min. wage movement yesterday, I thought they said Ms Sawant was the mayor, but none the less, a demonstration with people were out in the streets carrying signs and chanting, joined by Ms Sawant who was interviewed. Somehow the notion that imposing a $15 min.wage as "Socialist" was asserted in a question I no longer remember how it was put exactly but it seemed that the narration was that she campaigned on being a Socialist and won that election. I recall hearing the story before but forgotten about it, but seemed to me like some sort of weird anomaly, like wow, how did THAT happen?!!
All that to say, if it can happen there, why not similar movements elsewhere, like here in the San Francisco Bay area? We've got high tech companies offering high paying jobs to people with that background, but everyone else is struggling at $10 hr (more or less) jobs if they're lucky to have a job, and that isn't a living wage here.
I remember the job sharing movement several years ago, but I don't hear much about it these days, except on rare occasions. Don't know why, maybe just not getting much attention in the media.
I'd like to see a vigorous revitalization of the Co-op movement that goes beyond organic food markets/farmers markets, like small manufacturing businesses for instance. I'd like to see co-operative living communities which is accessible to working class people, who cannot afford or don't have the means to buy in homes in the conventional sense. The "intentional living" co-ops seemed to be only accessible to people who have the financial means to outright purchase new homes or access to traditional homeowners loans etc.
Morning stream of consciousness.. as it were. 