At 3:00 AM on May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines shut off the lights and cancelled every flight. A few hours later, former Mr. Beast employee Hunter Peterson sat down in front of his camera with what he called a genius idea. There are 250 million adults in the US, he said, if even a fifth of them chipped in what a Spirit ticket used to cost, that would be enough to buy the airline back. “We nationalize Spirit Airlines. Owned by the people. Let’s buy an airline. I should make a venmo for this.”

Within hours he’d built a website, “vibecoded… in like an hour”, and pledges came in faster than the site could handle. By that first evening, 4,800 people had made pledges totaling $2.3 million. Within weeks, 371,000 people had pledged $337 million toward a $1.7 billion target. The rule he proposed was one pledge, one vote, no matter how much you put in. “It shouldn’t be about how much money you have. Everyone’s vote should be equal.”

Spirit 2.0 never cleared the threshold from viral marketing to an actual airline. When Peterson moved to collect real money rather than pledges, SEC rules required contributors to be accredited investors – earning over $200,000 a year or holding over $1 million in net worth. Peterson quietly dropped the one-pledge-one-vote promise for proportional voting rights for wealthy investors. By the June 26 bid deadline, the campaign had raised $2.2 million from 443 people, less than half the $5 million floor it needed. When Peterson finally faced the legal facts, he said the money had to come from “high net worth individuals,” then detailed the purely advisory role the community would play. A project that began with a Mr. Beast employee screaming “Fuck private equity! Fuck you Elon Musk!” ended with him recruiting former airline executives and private investors to buy Spirit and turn it into the “Costco of airlines.”

What those people were reaching for, the idea that changing who holds the stock changes what the airline is, hits a harder fact. An airline is not a stock certificate. It’s the relationships between workers, airports, manufacturers, creditors, and capital. Change the shareholder to “the people” and those relationships stay exactly as they were. The SEC rules that Peterson ran into are not just an obstacle to cooperatives or public ownership. They are how financial capital controls airlines, a sign of how deep a socialist transformation of society will have to go.

The 371,000 people who pledged were not wrong. But even if they’d raised the money, it wouldn’t have worked.

A Target Too Small

A member-owned Spirit would step right back into the market that just drove Spirit bankrupt twice. That is not bad luck. Marx called this the centralization of capital, not just growth but the absorption of weaker firms by stronger ones, a process that accelerates as markets mature. The “big four” airlines – American, Delta, United, and Southwest – control roughly three quarters of domestic flights and have since roughly the early 2010s. The fortress hub model is a product of this process, each round of bankruptcy and merger since 1978 handed the surviving firms more gates, more routes, and more cash reserves to outlast the next crisis. Spirit carried $8.1 billion in debt and held 3 percent of the domestic market. The big four control three quarters of it. A cooperative airline would have inherited Spirit’s debt, weak routes, and Spirit’s exposure to predatory pricing.

Marx, addressing the First International, called cooperative factories “great social experiments,” then noted that cooperative labor “kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly.” Luxemburg was more blunt in her criticism. She wrote in Reform or Revolution that a production cooperative inside capitalism faces “the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism,” obliged to take on “the role of capitalist entrepreneur” or dissolve.

A cooperative airline facing fuel shocks, monopoly pricing at congested airports, and four carriers who have spent a decade absorbing their weakest competitors has no third option. When margins shrink, investors will demand wage cuts or will withdraw their capital. When routes stop paying, it will abandon them. The Big Four don’t care who owns the stock of their weakest competitor. They’ll undercut it until it fails anyway. Peterson compares the project to the Green Bay Packers, also community-owned, with no single controlling shareholder. That comparison doesn’t hold. The Packers play under NFL rules built to keep every franchise solvent, a salary cap, shared revenue, no competitors to undercut them on price. They took in over $432 million in shared revenue in 2025, roughly sixty percent of their total revenue.

We’ve Been Here Before

Spirit 2.0 is not the first time an economic crisis has made public ownership feel like common sense rather than radical. A century ago, millions of American rail workers looked at a system built on public need and private profit and fought to keep it in public hands.

During the First World War, the private companies couldn’t coordinate the railroad system fast enough to move troops and supplies, so the federal government created the United States Railroad Administration to control the system. The USRA’s first act gave the lowest paid rail workers, long excluded from unions, the eight-hour day and their first real wage increases in years. Skilled rail workers had enjoyed those wages and hours for decades as members of the exclusive craft unions known as the rail brotherhoods.

Under the USRA, rail workers had won real gains and the rail unions had gained immense leverage, and when the war ended neither wanted to give them up. With the backing of all 16 rail unions, the brotherhoods proposed the Plumb Plan, a bill to make public control permanent through a government buyout at fair price. In a union-sponsored vote of rail workers from all crafts, the result was 306,720 to 1,466 in favor of the plan. The UMWA and IBEW demanded the same model in their industries. By 1919, the demand of public ownership had moved from socialist newspapers into the mainstream demands of organized labor.

But it lost. The House voted with a 100 seat majority to return the railroads to private owners in 1920, it got even less support in the Senate, and the labor movement couldn’t do anything about it. The rail brotherhoods were craft unions, organized by trade, not by industry. While train engineers, conductors, firemen, and brakemen had over 90 percent union density, Black and Hispanic workers, women workers, recent immigrants, and “unskilled” workers like shopmen, trackmen, freight clerks, and handlers were all excluded. In 1922 the new private owners cut wages for non-brotherhood trades by 12 percent. In response, 400,000 shopmen went on strike, but the brotherhoods refused to join them and helped management break the strike. By 1926, the brotherhoods were lobbying for the Railway Labor Act, one of the most restrictive labor laws in US history, still in effect for all interstate transportation workers.

The Plumb Plan didn’t fail because public ownership was impractical. It failed because American labor was organized by craft rather than industry, and thus refused to organize the workers it would have needed to win. A decade later the CIO built a multiracial working-class coalition pioneered by socialist union organizers, and the gains of the 1940s followed.

Today’s aviation labor can keep fragmenting by carrier, trade, and contractor, or rebuild on an industrial model that can win. That is why the fight to organize Delta today and repeal the Railway Labor Act comes first.

Who Governs the Sky

Aviation was never a free market. The industry was born from military technology and was only profitable in the 1920s and 1930s through federal airmail contracts. Public money capitalized Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed mass producing bombers and passenger jets at the same plants. Pentagon contracts underwrote their commercial R&D throughout the Cold War. From the New Deal until 1978 a federal agency called the Civil Aeronautics Board set fares, assigned routes, negotiated mergers, and decided who could enter the industry. The major airlines backed its creation in exchange for protection from competition. The CAB’s fixed prices and protected routes suited them, as did later subsidies for airport modernization and the publicly run airspace safety system the FAA provided.

The CAB was a managed cartel, not a public utility, and flying stayed expensive and out of reach for working people throughout its whole existence. But even this rested on the correct premise that the sky cannot be a private market. Every flight depends on public infrastructure, and when crisis hits, public money. During the pandemic the Treasury bailed out the aviation industry with $59 billion. The real question was never market versus state. The capitalist state and market have always planned aviation together. The question is which class aviation is planned on behalf of.

The 1978 Airline Deregulation Act is usually remembered as a consumer-friendly reform backed by an unlikely bi-partisan coalition, Gerald Ford and Robert Bork on the right, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Nader, and George McGovern on the left. But the breadth of that coalition was not a sign of agreement on ideas, it was a sign of ruling class consciousness pressuring the state. The 1970s were a period of falling profit rates across the US economy, the end of the post-war boom, the era of oil shocks.

Deregulation was capital’s response to the falling rate of profit. Eliminating regulated price floors meant airlines could restore profits with layoffs, abandoning routes, and tactical uses of bankruptcy. Since 1978, airlines have filed for bankruptcy more than 150 times. Between 2002 and 2011 alone, nearly every US carrier went through Chapter 11, which let them tear up union contracts, shed debt, and merge their way into the Big Four that dominate domestic air travel. Exactly as air travel became more essential than ever, airlines gained a free hand over fares, routes, staffing, fees, and mergers, while the public’s role in paying for air travel only increased through Essential Air Service and ever-increasing airport subsidies.

The state did not merely step back. In 1981 Ronald Reagan fired eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers and replaced them with military scabs. What began as a routine labor dispute became a state intervention against public sector workers which shifted the balance of class forces nationally, a sign to every private employer that the post-war labor settlement was over. It resonated nowhere more loudly in aviation. A financier named Frank Lorenzo heard it. He acquired middle-tier airlines Continental, Eastern, Frontier, and New York Air through leveraged buyouts, used Chapter 11 bankruptcy to void union contracts, and rehired workers at half the pay for double the hours. By the time his airline empire collapsed in the early 1990s the Department of Transportation declared him unfit to work in aviation. The tactics that made him the most despised men in the industry are now its standard procedure.

This isn’t just history. In 2022, after years of brutal scheduling, understaffing, and no paid sick leave for freight rail workers, four of the twelve rail unions rejected the tentative agreement and threatened to go on strike. Then the Biden administration, Congress, and large majorities in both parties used the Railway Labor Act discussed earlier to force the contract on workers and block the strike. The House passed a separate bill for sick days, but the Senate rejected it, and Biden signed the strikebreaking agreement into law.

That is what it means for transportation to be governed by capital. The state does not merely subsidize the system and step aside, it builds the market, rescues it in crisis, disciplines its workers, and leaves working people to bear the costs.

Who Pays for Deregulation

Airlines that survived increasingly chase the most profitable passengers, frequent business travelers and affluent households going on vacation. Everyone else becomes expendable. In Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a post-industrial town forty miles from Pittsburgh, Spirit had been the only airline serving Arnold Palmer Regional Airport since 2011. When Spirit shut down, Latrobe lost all air service overnight. The town had been building a second gate to support growth. Now it’s planning layoffs while searching for a carrier that may never come. Deregulation has produced hundreds of Latrobes. In most of them the airline was already the replacement for the passenger rail that disappeared in the 1970s and never returned.

Aviation workers pay the highest price. Airlines maintain profits through wage and benefit cuts, unpaid ground time, gutted pensions, and dangerous understaffing. TSA agents remain among the lowest-paid public employees in the country. Most regional flight attendants start at wages low enough to qualify for food assistance. The FAA has been unable or unwilling to address air traffic controller shortages for years. The Boeing 737 MAX failures were a direct result of Boeing’s capture of the FAA certification process.

The climate pays a cost the market has no mechanism to count. The market only asks whether a flight turns a profit this quarter. It cannot ask whether the trip is worth taking, whether a train could replace it, or how to plan intercity travel as one efficient system. Aviation accounts for roughly 2.5 percent of global energy-related carbon emissions, with the US responsible for a quarter of that. A market that cannot distinguish between socially necessary and profitable travel cannot bring that number down. Only democratic public planning can.

What Socialists Should Do

For DSA and YDSA members, don’t dismiss Spirit 2.0 for the failed crowdfunding stunt it became. Read it as a test of what our organization could make possible. Hundreds of thousands of people reached, without socialist prompting, for the idea that an airline should belong to the people and be “nationalized.” Imagine if we rallied as many students and workers behind public ownership on campuses, in local politics, and in the labor movement, with the democratic organization needed to fight for it.

Trotsky observed that without a guiding organization, the energy of the masses dissipates like steam not enclosed in a piston box. Spirit 2.0 was steam. The 371,000 pledges showed that consciousness has shifted enough for a public ownership campaign to emerge spontaneously. But shifts in consciousness alone cannot beat the financial system, airline monopolies, or the capitalist state that stands behind them. The missing pieces are organization and leadership. The task before socialists today is to help build both: a larger labor movement capable of organizing new layers of workers, and the Marxist pole within it capable of fighting for socialized transportation as part of the broader struggle for workers’ power.

Socialists are not starting from nothing. The first pieces of this fight exist. Over forty DSA chapters, the AFA-CWA, and immigrant rights groups turned Avelo Airline’s ICE deportation contract from a quiet business deal into a national scandal until the airline dropped it. Twin Cities DSA has already shown how it can make itself useful to aviation workers, hosting biweekly Solidarity Saturdays to help organize Delta workers by phonebanking for union cards. Airline nationalization is entering electoral politics too. Claire Valdez, a Brooklyn DSA member who just won the primary for a U.S. House seat by twenty points, called for nationalizing the airline industry on April 30. Since Spirit’s collapse, Congress has held hearings on airline competition and regulation in committees where DSA elected may soon serve. Together they show aviation is no longer just a consumer issue. It is terrain where socialists can make gains.

The next step is to widen these openings into an aviation strategy. Delta, the largest carrier in the country, remains well below 20 percent unionized while most carriers sit well above 80 percent. AFA-CWA, IAM, and the Teamsters are running active campaigns to organize Delta’s flight attendants, mechanics, and ground crews. DSA and YDSA chapters near major airports should build durable relationships with those workers, support card drives, make aviation struggles visible through political education, and show up at picket lines.

From that strategy, put organized power behind demands on the aviation industry. Aviation is public infrastructure, built with public money, and must be governed in the public interest. Restore the CAB to regulate fares and routes as public utilities. Fully repeal the Railway Labor Act and give transportation workers the same right to strike as other workers. Demand public equity and open books as conditions of any future bailout. End subsidies for private jets and impose massive fees on their owners. End the practice of contracting out to exploitative ground service subcontractors by creating publicly run ground service departments with stable union jobs. Each fight would expose how fiercely the carriers resist even modest accountability, and that exposure builds the case for what comes next.

The federal government should stop writing blank checks with public money and use those funds to take controlling stakes in the major passenger carriers, freight and passenger railroads, Boeing, FedEx, UPS, and the airport contractors. The precedent exists. When Penn Central and New York Central collapsed in the 1970s, Congress created Amtrak rather than let essential rail service disappear. But Amtrak has never been genuinely publicly-owned, it’s technically a private, for-profit corporation dependent on public subsidies, which is why it has been starved of investment for fifty years. An Amtrak for the skies would need to avoid that trap. It would have to be built as part of a public transportation system, with worker and passenger boards that make binding decisions on wages and safety, routes planned by social need, and aviation on equal terms with passenger and freight rail, intercity buses, and a public cargo fleet.

That transition must be ecosocialist. A democratically planned transportation system would need to reduce unnecessary air travel over time, but not by pricing working people out. It would build better alternatives. Federal money now used to subsidize the airline market should fund an electrified high-speed rail network, local transit, and a publicly owned freight rail network capable of shifting domestic freight away from trucking and inefficient air cargo. As rail replaces domestic flights between nearby cities, scarce airport gates and runway capacity would open up for flights rail cannot replace: coast-to-coast travel, island and remote service, emergency transport, and international routes. The goal is not a smaller world for working people, but a better connected one, planned by and for the working class.

The 371,000 people who pledged to Spirit 2.0 were not wrong about what aviation should be. They were handed too small a target. The task isn’t rescuing one airline. It is building the organized power capable of taking the whole system into public hands.