Everything about Democratic Socialism totally explained
Democratic socialism advocates
socialism as a basis for the
economy and
democracy as a governing principle. In its broadest sense, democratic socialism could refer to attempts to bring about socialism through peaceful democratic means as opposed to violent insurrection. This can sometimes include
social democracy.
Basic concept
Socialism is based on the idea that the economy and
means of production should be in the hands of ordinary working people, or in older terminology the "
working class". Democratic socialism involves the entire population controlling the economy through some type of
democratic system.
Directly contrasting this is what some theorists call
State socialism or
state capitalism in which a non-democratic state controls the means of production instead of the workers (as in, for example, the
Soviet Union during and after
Stalin's era). Some authors see democratic socialism as sharing many political ideas with
social democracy, while others see them as radically opposed. Nevertheless, democratic socialists often share political parties with social democrats, such as the
British Labour Party in the
1980s. Democratic socialism is the second-strongest current of socialism in terms of political success in free elections, immediately following social democracy.
Common ideas
Definition
Democratic socialism is difficult to define, and groups of scholars have radically different definitions for the term. Some equate it to other socioeconomic systems such as
libertarian socialism,
state socialism or
social democracy. While others claim that it's fundamentally different from those ideologies.
Among those definitions of democratic socialism which sharply distinguish it from
social democracy,
Peter Hain, for example, classes democratic socialism, along with
libertarian socialism, as a form of
anti-authoritarian “
socialism from below” (using the term popularised by
Hal Draper), in contrast to
Stalinism and social democracy, variants of
authoritarian state socialism. For him, this democratic/authoritarian divide is more important than the
revolutionary/
reformist divide. In this definition, it's the active participation of the population as a whole, and workers in particular, in the management of economy that characterises democratic socialism, while
nationalisation and
economic planning (whether controlled by an elected government or not) are characteristic of state socialism. A similar, but more complex, argument is made by
Nicos Poulantzas.
In contrast, in other definitions, democratic socialism simply refers to all forms of socialism that follow an electoral, reformist or
evolutionary path to socialism, rather than a revolutionary one.
However, for those who use the term in this way, the scope of the term
socialism itself can be very vague, and include forms of socialism compatible with capitalism. For example, Robert M. Page, a Reader in Democratic Socialism and Social Policy at the University of Birmingham, writes about "transformative democratic socialism" to refer to the politics of the
Clement Atlee government (a strong
welfare state, fiscal redistribution, some nationalisation) and "revisionist democratic socialism", as developed by
Anthony Crosland and
Harold Wilson:
”The most influential revisionist Labour thinker, Anthony Crosland..., contended that a more ‘benevolent’ form of capitalism had emerged since the [SecondWorld War]... According to Crosland, it was now possible to achieve greater equality in society without the need for ‘fundamental’ economic transformation. For Crosland, a more meaningful form of equality could be achieved if the growth dividend derived from effective management of the economy was invested in 'pro-poor' public services rather than through fiscal redistribution.”
Indeed, some proponents of
market socialism see the latter as a form of democratic socialism.
A variant of this second set of definitions is
Joseph Schumpeter’s argument, set out in
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1941) that
liberal democracies were evolving from “liberal capitalism” into democratic socialism, with the growth of workers’ self-management,
industrial democracy and regulatory instutions.
Other definitions fall somewhere between the first and second set, seeing democratic socialism as a specific political tradition closely related to and overlapping with social democracy. For example, Bogdan Denitch, in
Democratic Socialism defines it as proposing a radical reorganization of the socio-economic order through public ownership,
workers’ control of the
labour process and redistributive tax policies. Robert G. Picard similarly describes a democratic socialist tradition of thought including
Eduard Bernstein,
Karl Kautsky,
Evan Durbin and
Michael Harrington
The term democratic socialism can be used to refer to a version of the
Soviet model that was reformed in a democratic way. For example,
Mikhail Gorbachev described
perestroika as building a “new, humane and democratic socialism” Consequently, some former
Communist parties have rebranded themselves as democratic socialist, as with the
Party of Democratic Socialism in Germany.
Justification of democratic socialism can be found in the works of social philosophers like
Charles Taylor and
Axel Honneth, among others. Honneth has put forward the view that political and economic ideologies have a social basis, that is, they originate from intersubjective communication between members of a society. Honneth criticises the liberal state because it assumes that principles of individual liberty and private property are ahistorical and abstract, when in fact they evolved from a specific social discourse on human activity. This suggests that both people's ideas and their well-being may depend on interaction with others, which is undermined by neoliberal policies that emphasise individual rights and private over public property. Democratic socialism, with its emphasis on collectivism and cooperation between members of a society, could be seen as a way of safeguarding people's integrity.
History
Forerunners and formative influences
Fenner Brockway, a leading British democratic socialist of the
Independent Labour Party, wrote in his book
Britain's First Socialists:
The Levellers were pioneers of political democracy and the sovereignty of the people; the Agitators were the pioneers of participatory control by the ranks at their workplace; and the Diggers were pioneers of communal ownership, cooperation and egalitarianism. All three equate to democratic socialism.
The tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers was continued in the period described by
EP Thompson in
The Making of the English Working Class by
Jacobin groups like the
London Corresponding Society and by polemicists such as
Thomas Paine. Their concern for both democracy and
social justice marks them out as key precursors of democratic socialism.
In North America,
Henry George promoted the
Single Tax Movement, which sought a form of democratic socialism via progressive taxation, with tax only on natural resources. George remained an advocate of the free market for the allocation of all other goods and services.
The British
moral philosopher John Stuart Mill also came to advocate a form of economic socialism within a
liberal context. In later editions of his
Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill would argue that "as far as economic theory was concerned, there's nothing in principle in economic theory that precludes an economic order based on socialist policies."
The term "socialist" was first used in English in the British
Cooperative Magazine in 1827 and came to be associated with the followers of
Robert Owen, such as the
Rochdale Pioneers who founded the
co-operative movement. Owen's followers again stressed both
participatory democracy and economic socialisation, in the form of consumer co-operatives,
credit unions and
mutual aid societies. The
Chartists similarly combined a
working class politics with a call for greater democracy.
Modern democratic socialism
Democratic socialism became a prominent movement at the end of the nineteenth century. In the US,
Eugene Debs, one of the most famous American socialists, led a movement centered around democratic socialism and made five bids for President, once in 1900 under the
Social Democratic Party and then four more times under the
Socialist Party of America. The socialist industrial unionism of
Daniel DeLeon in the
United States represented another strain of early democratic socialism in this period. It favored a form of government based on industrial unions, but which also sought to establish this government after winning at the ballot box.
In Britain, the democratic socialist tradition was represented in particular by the
William Morris'
Socialist League (UK) in the 1880s and by the
Independent Labour Party (ILP) founded by
Keir Hardie in the 1890s, of which
George Orwell would later be a prominent member.
In other parts of Europe, many democratic socialist parties were united in the
International Working Union of Socialist Parties (the "Two and a Half International") in the early 1920s and in the
London Bureau (the "Three and a Half International") in the 1930s. These internationals sought to steer a course between the social democrats of the
Second International, who were seen as insufficiently socialist (and had been compromised by their support for
World War I), and the perceived anti-democratic
Third International. The key movements within the Two and a Half International were the ILP and the
Austromarxists, and the main forces in the Three and a Half International were the ILP and the
POUM.
In America, a similar tradition continued to flourish in Debs'
Socialist Party of America, especially under the leadership of
Norman Thomas.
In the same period, the
guild socialism of
G. D. H. Cole in the early 1920s was a conscious attempt to envision a socialist alternative to Soviet-style
authoritarianism, while
council communism articulated democratic socialist positions in several respects, notably through renouncing the
vanguard role of the revolutionary party and holding that the system of the
Soviet Union wasn't authentically socialist.
During
India's
freedom movement, many figures on the left of the
Indian National Congress organized themselves as the
Congress Socialist Party. Their politics, and those of the early and intermediate periods of
JP Narayan's career, combined a commitment to the socialist transformation of society with a principled opposition to the one-party authoritarianism they perceived in the
Stalinist revolutionary model.
The
folkesocialisme or
people's socialism that emerged as a vital current of the left in
Scandinavia beginning in the 1950s could be characterized as a democratic socialism in the same vein.
Democratic socialism today
There was a strong current of democratic socialism in the politics of the
New Left in much of
Europe and
North America during the 1960s. The classic
Port Huron Statement of the
Students for a Democratic Society combined a stringent critique of the Stalinist model with calls for a democratic socialist reconstruction of society. In
1973,
Michael Harrington and
Irving Howe formed the
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which articulated a democratic socialist message, while a smaller faction associated with peace activist
David McReynolds formed the
Socialist Party USA. In the early
1980s, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged with the
New American Movement, an organization of New Left veterans, forming
Democratic Socialists of America. In 2006,
Bernie Sanders of Vermont became the first self-described democratic socialist to be elected to the
United States Senate.
In the
British Labour Party, the term democratic socialist was used historically by those who identified with the tradition represented by the ILP: the "
soft left" of non-Marxist socialists around
Tribune magazine (for example
Michael Foot) and some of the "
hard left" in the
Campaign Group around
Tony Benn. The Campaign Group, along with the extra-Labour Party
Socialist Society (led by
Raymond Williams and others) formed the
Socialist Movement in
1987, which now produces the magazine
Red Pepper.
Today in
Germany there's a more left wing party called the "
Party of Democratic Socialism" which takes the label of democratic socialism, while another more centrist party called the "
Social Democratic Party of Germany" is the leading left wing German party that has held government. The British
Labour party is a "democratic socialist party" according to its constitution. Both the German SPD and British Labour party belong to the
Party of European Socialists grouping in the
European Parliament.
In
Latin America there has been a dramatic rise in support for democratic socialism since the
1998 election of
Hugo Chavez as president of
Venezuela. In Venezuela the
Bolivarian Revolution was launched with the goal of redistributing wealth from rich to poor and improve living standards for the nation's impoverished via the government's numerous widespread
Bolivarian Missions. There have been noticeable improvements in areas such as housing, wage levels, literacy,
education opportunities and healthcare availability; however, like the rest of Latin America a large gap between a rich minority and an extremely poor majority continues to exist.
Bolivians elected their nation's first indigenous president,
Evo Morales, another
democratic socialist and a close ally of Venezuela, in
2005. Morales ran for office on an agenda centered around nationalization of the oil industry and protection of the nation's coca industry. In
Nicaragua the
Sandinistas made an electoral come back in
2006, this being the second time their leader,
Daniel Ortega has been elected
president of Nicaragua. The Sandinistas have also promised a greater redistribution of wealth to those in poverty. Also in
Ecuador in 2007
Rafael Correa won the election and openly declared that he wishes to build socialism for the 21st century.
Further Information
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