My roommate has been really getting into Democratic Socialism, and talking it up among our friends, so I’ve been trying to learn more about it. She sent out this article, and it answers some questions and raises others.
I think there are many issues with capitalism, but I also don’t know if abolition of capitalism is realistic or would be a good thing. I do like that it supports unions, and advocates for positions I do agree with like single-payer health care. The article says that some DSA members call for abolition of prisons and police, which while I do want lots of reforms for prisons and police I don’t know how abolition of prisons and police would work.
Overall it seems like there are a lot of ideas that sound good in theory, but I have a harder time finding specifics of how they’d work, or how we get from our current reality to the ideal democratic socialist reality. And then when I was trying to find more info about democratic socialism, I found this article about why minority voters find it lacking.
Also the Chapo Trap House seems to be one of the leading promoters of democratic socialism, and from what little I’ve listened to of that podcast, it just seems cynical.
Anyway, I’m open to learning more about democratic socialism and how it could work going forward in the US, or any info people have regarding it.
Per your first link, that kind of DS is not even viable in Western Europe, much less the US. Sounds like something that would be embraced enthusiastically by college students discussing politics in their dorm rooms.
I would never assume that democratic socialism would exist according to everything it proposes in its platform. I don’t think most people would support the abolition of capitalism, but I absolutely do believe that there will be a crisis of capitalism the likes of which we haven’t seen in almost 100 years, and it may happen sooner than we expect. While everyone has been talking about the effects of globalization and the repositioning of the workforce, most discussions do not talk about automation and its inevitably sudden and profound displacement of the workforce. Moreover, the growth of the elite investor class will eventually reveal itself to all to be a corrupt plutocracy that, out of sheer paranoia, seeks to enslave the underclass and what’s left of an evaporating middle class. Democratic socialism right now is probably not much more than just a hypothetical form of government, but a 21st Century New Deal will be required for democracy to survive in the United States and the rest of the industrialized world. We’ll either have a 21st Century New Deal, or we’ll all be slaves and servants of plutocrats.
We are already “democratic socialist” in that we have:
Progressive Taxation System (Loopholes notwithstanding)
Social Security for the elderly and disabled
Universal Healthcare for the poor and elderly
Food Stamp assistance for the poor
If we are broadening “democratic socialism” to mean anti-capitalist anarchy, then the answer is clearly no and I would argue that’s not what the vast majority mean when they refer to democratic socialism.
After reading the article, it’s clearly referring to Marxist Socialism - where the state owns the means of production. Nobody identifies that with the “democratic socialism” of Western Europe and I would argue that conflating these two ideas is dangerously misleading for this type of discussion.
If I was going to guess what countries might jettison capitalism in the next couple decades, I’d start with Russia, possibly China if they have an economic crisis and the government falls, maybe one or two other Eastern European countries, possibly Bolivia or Nicaragua. French public opinion is unusually disfavourable to capitalism, but I can’t see them actually going socialist or communist in the near to mediuem future.
The US, not until and unless our economy and society really collapses. Americans like capitalism, at least the theory of it.
I’m not going to ask ‘can you name any socialist or communist country that was run this way’ because maybe you can (Mao’s China, which was generally reckoned one of the most extremist communist state maybe after Cambodia, had some bizarre experiments with communal living, so who knows), but do you actually think this was the norm in the more stable / developed communist states?
People in the post-WWII Warsaw Pact states had their own food, apartments, toothpaste, etc. (although these along with other consumer goods were usually either rationed or not available up to western European standards of quality). The economic model that they were operating under (which isn’t the only model of ‘socialism’ anyway) involved nationalization of productive property, not personal property. (Not even all productive property in every instance, some countries had quite a number of small scale private farms for example, but certainly most of it).
I think you have socialism confused with anarchy. Property is owned in socialist systems; it’s just not owned by private individuals. Property is owned by either the state or the workers as a whole; they then assign property to people to use based on need. So if you started eating your roommate’s food and using their toothbrush, you’d have some government agent showing up to ask you why you were using property that you hadn’t been given permission to use.
Personally, I can’t imagine any economic system functioning in the long run without a large element of capitalism. It doesn’t have to be universal; there are plenty of areas in the economy where socialism would work and some where it would work better than capitalism. But there are also a lot of areas where capitalism works better than socialism.
Democratic socialism believes in the abolition of capitalism. That means state control of everything in order to enforce abolition of capitalism. But good luck with that since they don’t believe in hierarchy either. No police or prisons simply means anarchy controlled criminal gangs.
This system may be viable in Cloud Cuckoo Land, but not in America or any other country in the real world, inhabited by real human beings. It’s an immature kind of hippy, feel-good fantasy.
Yes, and that’s why whatever group the OP is referring to is just mucking up the works. Note they are self-proclaimed to NOT be a political party. That would be, like, icky and stuff. They do, however, explicitly call for the elimination of capitalism, even if some of them concede enough to reality to say that it will have to be done in phases.
Right. Like the idea of switching the direction of flow of traffic in the UK to be the same as the rest of Europe. Take the phased approach by starting with the commercial transport tractor trailers.
Have to define your terms, or nothing will make sense. We don’t have Capitalism, and that was a Marxist terminology to begin with. We currently have a host of nicklefuckers both inside and outside of government that have a license to steal.
Free market economics does the most good, for the most people, which is one reason why rent seekers oppose it. A key element is that failed businesses must be allowed to fail. There’s no way “too big to fail” will last, it just kicks the can down the road and sets the stage for an even larger collapse. What we have now is a system where profits are capitalized, and losses are socialized. Regulatory capture. It’s not capitalism nor free market based.