It’s time to say something that a lot of people in leftist spaces already know, but don’t always feel safe enough to say out loud: a lot of socialists aren’t actually progressive. That might sound strange at first. After all, socialism is supposed to be about justice, equality, and liberation. But in practice, many self-identified socialists are only focused on economic systems—who owns what, how wealth is distributed, how labor is organized—while ignoring or minimizing other forms of oppression like racism, sexism, fatphobia, ableism, queerphobia, and colonialism.

You see it in how some people talk about class as if it’s the only thing that matters. If you bring up police violence, they’ll redirect the conversation to wages. If you talk about anti-Blackness or gender-based violence, they’ll say, “That’s just a distraction from the real fight.” That mindset is not only dismissive—it’s harmful. People’s lives don’t fit into neat little categories. Someone can be exploited as a worker and oppressed because of their race, body, gender, or background. Ignoring that intersection is not radical—it’s regressive.

Being a socialist doesn’t mean you automatically understand what liberation looks like for people outside your own experience. And if your activism ends at economic policy but never confronts the ways you’ve been conditioned to see some people as less deserving of respect or safety, then your version of socialism isn’t justice—it’s just another hierarchy with a new name. We’ve seen this historically, too—leftist movements that erased Indigenous sovereignty, that treated women and queer people as secondary, or that were openly hostile to disabled and fat bodies. Those legacies still show up today, often in how certain voices are dismissed, silenced, or never included in the first place.

We can’t build the future we want through ideology alone. We need to look at the habits, assumptions, and behaviors we carry with us. Oppression doesn’t disappear just because we criticize capitalism. If we replicate the same dynamics—silencing, exclusion, dehumanization—then we’re not building a better world. We’re just changing the labels. If you really want to change the world, you have to change yourself too. Not in some performative way, but in the real, hard, uncomfortable work of unlearning and growing.