Democratic socialism (n.)

I keep needing a short 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.

Democracy asserts that public institutions must serve everyone in society, for both moral and instrumental reasons. Elections, transparency to journalism, juries chosen by sortition, and other instruments create public accountability. Democracy contrasts with authoritarianism, in which the exercise of institutional power lacks accountability to the people it affects.

Socialism and capitalism contrast in how they approach capital: 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. Socialism includes capital in the sphere of public institutional responsibility & authority which government addresses; that can mean a range of things from state control of capital or institutions outside the state like worker-owned firms. Under capitalism, public institutions enforce private individuals’ ownership of capital, empowering them to direct society’s resources, inviting them to extract as much wealth for themselves as possible, making the overwhelming majority of people dependent on capital owners to pay them wages.

Thus democratic socialism — “demsoc” — means capital controlled by public institutions accountable to the people.

The absence of democratic socialist examples

We can point to societies combining democracy & capitalism, authoritarianism & capitalism, and authoritarianism & socialism, but we lack clear lasting examples of democracy & socialism. At the risk of evoking the BS of the “political compass”:

This unpopulated quadrant should give us pause, but we must 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.

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

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 even when they fail.

The dynamics of socialist failures

What do the failings of 20^th century authoritarian socialism teach us about the nature of socialism? Dare we hope that 21^st century democratic socialism will not produce the same horrors as 20^th century authoritarian socialism?

Much of the worst has unmistakable parallels in 20^th century authoritarian capitalism, demonstrating that the authoritarianism was the culprit. The rest of the worst appeared in the transition from pre-industrial conditions to industrialization, and has unmistakable parallels in cases where that transition led to capitalism, demonstrating that industrialization was the culprit.

Lesser — but still significant — problems emerge from the distributed sensing & computation challenges of a national-scale industrial economy.

Partly this too reflects authoritarianism rather than socialism, in creating strong incentives to deliver comforting lies to higher-ups. Inability to see what the economy actually does bedevils authoritarian capitalist societies no less than their authoritarian socialist counterparts.

And 20^th century socialists made a huge mistake in overestimating what central planning could accomplish. The early Soviet Union actually performed better than capitalist economies by many measures, 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

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

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 demonstrated problems.

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, …