A short case for democratic socialism

I keep needing this explainer.

What democratic socialism means

As Hobbes teaches, government emerges from the need for an explicit agent maintaining the social order. Public institutions ensure people’s security through military defense and criminal justice, resolve conflicts through law and courts, and adjudicate standards like weights & measures, among other things.

Socialism means including capital in that sphere of public institutional responsibility & authority: the factories, organizations, and other means by which we produce the goods & services which provide the material supports for people’s survival, dignity, and joy. Socialist institutions may take many forms, like worker-owned firms or state-controlled capital investments.

Capitalism in which public institutions instead enforce private individuals’ ownership of capital, empowering them to direct society’s resources, inviting them to extract as much wealth for themselves as possible.

Democracy asserts that public institutions must serve everyone in society, for both moral and instrumental reasons. Democratic instruments creating that accountability to all include elections, transparency to journalism, and juries chosen by sortition.

Democracy contrasts with authoritarianism, in which the exercise of institutional power lacks accountability to the people it affects.

Democratic socialism — “demsoc” — thus means public institutions accountable to the people in control of capital.

The absence of democratic socialist examples

We have examples of democracy & capitalism, authoritarianism & capitalism, and authoritarianism & socialism, but no clear lasting examples of democracy & socialism. Though this missing quadrant should give us pause, we should not conclude that democratic socialism must be impossible.

Historical contingency does much to account for the gap. Modern democracy, industrialization, and capitalism all developed together in the 19^th century. That does not make the three tightly linked: there are cases of industrialization producing democratic capitalism or authoritarian capitalism or authoritarian socialism.

Authoritarian socialism has only defeated a democratic socialist movement in the scramble after overthrowing an authoritarian predecessor. Democracy emerges slowly. Once established, it has never fallen to authoritarian socialism, but has been overthrown many times by authoritarian capitalism.

Leftists commonly argue that democratic capitalism has never developed into democratic socialism because democracies defuse socialist movements with social insurance concessions — pensions, education, healthcare, unemployment benefits, et cetera. This makes democratic socialist challenges to democratic capitalism a good bet.

The dynamics of socialist failures

The catastrophic results of 20^th century authoritarian socialism should give us pause. But most of the causes of 20^th century authoritarian socialist failure do not apply to 21^st century democratic socialism.

Many of the failings of 20^th century authoritarian socialism sprang from the authoritarianism, because they also manifested in 20^th century authoritarian capitalism. Many of the failings as 20^th century authoritarian socialism sprang from the transition from pre-industrial conditions to industrialization, since they also appeared when industrial capitalism emerged from pre-industrial conditions.

These account for the most horrific failings on the ledger of 20^th century authoritarian socialism. Lesser problems emerged from the distributed sensing & computation challenges of a national-scale industrial economy.

Partly this too is attributable to authoritarianism rather than socialism: authoritarianism creates strong incentives to deliver comforting lies to higher-ups which also bedevil authoritarian capitalist societies.

And 20^th century socialists did make a huge mistake in overestimating what central planning could accomplish. The early Soviet Union actually performed better than capitalist economies by many measures, by coördinating efforts and eliminating redundancies in a way capitalist economies could not. But after picking the low-hanging fruit, it turned out that you can never have enough guys with pencils and green eyeshades in Moscow to optimize the zillion little coördination and quality control problems of a complex industrial economy as well as the highly motivated local experts at firms under capitalism could. While the Soviets clung to central planning, the capitalist West had far better and far more abundant consumer goods. Score one point for Hayek.

But socialist public authority does not necessarily mean central control. (Plus central planning seems to have a bright future: Walmart, Amazon, and other massive privately-held markets demonstrate that computing tech gives central planning an edge over constellations of small actors in the 21^st century.)

Democratic capitalism’s burden of proof

We should not accept the democratic capitalist status quo by default because we have uncertainty about the potential for democratic socialism. Democratic captialism must make a positive case for itself, addressing both its real strengths and its demostrated problems.

Democratically-accountable institutions enforcing private control of capital inherently compromises the egalitarian ideals of democracy. Capital owners’ wealth is …

• inequality in and of itself
• an instrument of authoritarian control over employees who depend on them for wages
• authoritarian control over people’s material conditions across society
• insulation from experiencing those material conditions
• disproportionate influence over the democratic process setting policy in other domains

Ascendent democratic capitalism animates our national & global condition during this moment, the greatest social / political crisis since the Second World War. In this crisis …

• fascism has returned from the grave
• the postwar geopolitical order is broken beyond repair
• day-to-day material conditions for most people in the US and the industrialized world at large have long followed a worsening trajectory, with no end in sight
• the material sustainability of human civilization is in jeopardy

Democratic socialism does not require revolution

A democratic capitalist order can evolve toward democratic socialism through a series of policy experiments, like …

• Adding democratically-accountable members to corporate boards
• National sovereign wealth funds taking shares in private firms
• Democratically-accountable public banks as an alternative to private investors
• Public provision of goods & services entering markets without displacing private solutions: public housing, postal banking, familiar & novel utilities, key consumer goods, …