Democratic socialism generally encompasses various things, many of which are hostile to business:
Minimum wage, child labor laws, environmental laws, investments in infrastructure, social justice, progressive taxation, pensions for the elderly, labor unions, a living wage, universal health care, equal pay laws, etc. etc. The public investment helps business, and social justice is mostly neutral to business (or slightly to their benefits), but most of the economic policies supported by democratic socialists makes life harder for businesses.
Is there a version of democratic socialism that believes these things, but also believes in making life easy for businesses while still putting these priorities first? I see a lot of hostility towards business from democratic socialists, are there pro-big business democratic socialists? Is that an ideology?
Like you say you want new environmental laws (maybe to stop climate change). You enact them, but instead of telling big business to suck it, you provide them with various incentives and slowly institute the changes so life isn’t made hard on them. Basically democratic socialism that tries to mitigate the harm that comes to business by instituting necessary democratic socialist policies?
Socialism is where business is “owned” either by the workers or by the democratically elected state. So in theory it is “business friendly”, just not “business owner friendly.” They would want their organisations to succeed, but for the profits of that success to be shared, or at least for the decision of where to reinvest those profits to be democratic.
‘Socialism’, as used by people of a certain political meaning, means Marxist-Leninist Socialism, and this set of people tend to use ‘Socialism’ and ‘Democratic Socialism’ interchangeably. Other people use ‘Democratic Socialism’ and ‘Social Democracy’ interchangeably. None of these are the same thing.
My understanding was one was the actual ownership of the means of production by the state, while the other had the means of production under private hands, but had various regulations and welfare programs to take the cruel edge off capitalism (basically one rejects capitalism and private ownership, the other supports these concepts but tries to use the power of the state to make the economy kinder and more fair).
I’m asking about the latter. I didn’t know that social democracy and democratic socialism were different concepts. I thought they were both the latter while Socialism was the former.
Are these people justified in doing so? Why call anything that doesn’t involve social ownership of the means of production socialism? My limited understanding of the use of the term in the USA is that “government regulation” gets called “socialism” in order to associate anyone that wants to implement regulation with boogeymen like Marx and Communism. That is, it’s a deliberate misuse of the term for emotive political point scoring.
I’m also aware of the lefts amazing ability to splinter itself into a million different powerless factions, so no doubt there are some key differences between Socialism and Democratic Socialism, the end result of which will ensure neither get implemented anywhere. So I guess I don’t mean to say they’re exactly the same, just that my first reply applies to both.
To me that’s social democracy. I thought the kind of negotiation and balancing of interests you mention in your OP is just part of the overall ideology of a functioning democracy. Lets accept that we have conflicting interests and resolve them in a way that doesn’t break things or hurt too many people. A social democracy requires the success of business to fund social programs, so a government that just says “suck it business” is just harming itself. I know it doesn’t work that way in practice, but if you’re asking about the ideology, I think that’s it.
I’m a Sanders supporter, and I noticed some of his supporters (well many) were hostile to businesses, especially large businesses.
I think this was more because large business bribes our government officials than anything and because of a hatred of crony capitalism. So maybe that wasn’t a hatred of big business and the rich, it was a hatred of corporatism and plutocracy.
However, I also got the impression from quite a few I met that they almost enjoyed making life harder for the rich or big businesses. Which to me is a recipe for economic failure. We need democratic socialist policies, but we need businesses to succeed too.
You could make all sorts of arguments about reasonable regulations that make life harder for business, so there has to be a balance, but I agree with you that they need to succeed.
Marx would agree too, he thought capitalism was amazing:
Capitalism in it’s raw form is a race to the bottom. Globalism means that if your country doesn’t race to the bottom as hard as your competitors, you risk your economy going broke. In a world without China, Greece might actually have a competitive economy.
So this is contradictory. All the things socialists generally want are an added load on businesses. That added load means that if they have a choice, they leave to somewhere it’s cheaper.
I mean, it doesn’t have to be. California is an example of a state that has a fairly high tax, high cost society (putting large load on businesses) but somehow they have it paying off. High tech and Hollywood are apparently worth so much - or maybe they prosper *because *of the conditions there - to overwhelm the burden. Shenzhen, a city that is the logical outcome of a race to the bottom, doesn’t make nearly as much money as LA or San Francisco do.
Eh, what does it matter. Even if there were clear answers to all this, the recent political election seems to show it doesn’t make a difference. Somehow many millions of people voted for a con man…after every credible news outlet made it completely clear what they were voting for…and they also voted for enough assholes wearing the R jersey that they are about to screw everyone in the country on healthcare.
So talking about optimal policy - some kind of hybrid where socialism makes it a nice place to live, but the regulations and taxes are carefully assessed in a way that doesn’t stop businesses from raking in the dough to fund all this (presumably it would be a tax system where the owners of these businesses only pay heavy tax if they take the money out of the business and don’t reinvest it in another business, but use it on themselves) - is pointless if we can’t even solve basic problems like access to decades old medicines and medical procedures. I can understand the latest stuff costing a fortune, but if you need 50 year old drugs or a surgery developed a century ago, the sticker price for it in America will be astronomical.
Capitalism in its raw, idealized form has never existed, any more than Communism has ever existed in its pure theoretical form. There’s always been regulation of markets, for literally as long as markets have existed, and there’s always been informal economies (called black markets when they’re illegal) in Socialist states supposedly “working towards” Communism. End result? The purists, the ideologues, can always say “But it’s never been tried!” whenever their system is criticized. Very convenient, and they never notice how that works against them.
So we have a way forwards: Markets are always regulated, so it behooves us to make the regulations as good as possible for everyone, and incorporation of ideas Socialists came up with is part of that. The end result is still called Capitalism, though, and it’s damned well not accepted as being any variety of Socialism by the Burn The World Revolutionary Socialists.
The point is, the current climate by many state and federal governments in the United States is “bend over backwards to help businesses with incentives”. The very idea is, if you lure a business in with special incentives, they will stay and create jobs. And those jobs will contribute more money back to the local economy than the incentives cost you. You read all the time about this basically failing - rural counties offering amazing incentives to companies to put in data centers, creating all of a dozen jobs in return for millions of dollars in tax incentives.
This is what I mean by “race to the bottom” - the perception by government policymakers that if they don’t beat out the next county over with money losing incentives, they’ll fail.
And on a broad scale, that’s what cheap outsourced manufacturing is. Businesses are taking activities that were moderately regulated and moderately “socialistic” in the United States (OSHA, workers want health insurance, etc) and going to China/India/etc and paying a fraction of the wages in an environment with much fewer regulations.
The current climate is, the correct response to this activity is to race China/India to the bottom. That’s what Trump’s “repeal 2 regulations” creed is about, and so on.
So yeah, I wasn’t trying to start a debate over purity with you. When I said raw capitalism, I meant “less regulated capitalism”.
I must respectfully disagree with some of your basic assumptions here.
First off, I don’t think any country here in Scandinavia have minimum wage laws for adults. The rate of unionization is very high, and the unions would be heavily against any such move.
Beyond that, things like child labour laws, environmental laws, investments in infrastructure, social justice, progressive taxation, pensions for the elderly, labour unions, a living wage, universal health care, equal pay laws, etc. tend to heavily favour business. Besides things which move financial burdens from the businesses to the individual such as health care, even as far back as Henry Ford, it was realized that you need the workers wealthy enough to be able to afford the products.
From my point of view there seems to be an idea in the US that being friendly to business means being friendly to big business and hostile to the small fry. See the healthcare setup, which has elements of economic feudalism. See also “too big to fail”, where businesses that grow large enough can be protected from the consequences of economic failure. While this socialization of risk and privatization of profit affect only a small number of businesses, by its very nature it affects a large slice of the business ecology.
And failing businesses going under and being replaced by new and functional ones is actually a fairly fundamental part of a capitalist market economy.
In contrast, democratic socialist nations tend to let failing businesses fail. See the 90s banking crisis for examples.
So in total, I would say that democratic socialist nations tend to generate an environment that is friendly to the entire range of business sizes, whereas the anglosphere generally favour the bigger businesses at the expense of their smaller competitors. Coincidentally, the businesses which have the most political influence and spend the most money on politicians election campaigns.
To my ears, this pretty much describes the British Labour Government under Tony Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown. They rebranded the Labour Party as ‘New Labour’, and were probably the most business friendly socialist government we’ve ever had.
There’s a good argument to be made that many of those economic policies actually benefit business. Increase the minimum wage, people have more money to spend. People have more money to spend, you make more money. Universal Health Care is another one - you mitigate productivity losses due to employee illness, and it might actually save both the business and your employee some money. Progressive taxation encourages them to spend more of their profits improving their businesses, rather than doling them out to executives as bonuses.
Socialism and Capitalism are two ends of a spectrum, and I don’t think any country in the world falls at the extreme ends of that spectrum - because a society on the extreme ends would tend to break down. Some things are best governed by free market principles, others are extremely ill-served, and it’s a testament to GOP lie-mongering in this country just how much people have swallowed the myth that companies need to be given carte blanche to be successful.
this is nonsense, the Greek trade and economy have suffered in the competition internal to the EU. The chinese have nothing to do with the failures of the Greek economy, its corruption and bad regulation and bad management.
You can’t say that. If there weren’t all the cheap imports from China, the internal EU market would be different. The value of what Greece produces might be higher.
The Greek economy is not competing with the Chinese principally, the Greek export economy of the goods and the services was and is competing principally with the fellow southern mediterranean EU members and little of what the Greeks produce is in any way impacted by the Chinese.
The Greek economy became uncompetitive due to its internal barriers, its corruption, and the price pressure from being in the Euro Zone, and the Greek state borrowing heavily not to engage in investment but to finance the current consumption.