The Case for Democratic Socialism

“Capitalism has done much to develop the economic machinery of the modern world to the point where all of this is possible. But it is long since time to move past the capitalist phase of our history and institute something better.”

In a recent article at MSNBC, I wanted to give readers a quick sense of my worldview, so I wrote:

“I’m a democratic socialist. That means the core of my politics is about seeking to overcome the domination of society by wealthy interests. I want to empower the working class.”

That is about as much depth as I felt like I could go into for a short article on an unrelated topic. But the editors of Merion West have been kind enough to ask me to expand on that here.

Much like “liberalism,” “libertarianism,” “conservatism,” “feminism,” “democracy,” and damn near every other political label that is important to large numbers of people, the precise meaning of “socialism” is contested. Broadly speaking, though, it has two meanings. When Senator Bernie Sanders or certain politicians in Western Europe use the s-word, they are primarily talking about what is sometimes called “socialism within capitalism,” or more commonly “social democracy.” They are talking, in other words, about policies that would make parts of our society “more socialist” while leaving the fundamentals of capitalist property relations in place. I am certainly a socialist in this sense. I believe, for example, that it should be a deep source of national shame that the United States is, as Senator Sanders often points out, “the only major country in the world” that does not provide all of its citizens in one way or another with basic health services “as a right” outside of capitalist market structures. As I mentioned in my last article here, that is a reason why cash-strapped diabetics sometimes die in the United States when they try to ration their insulin, while, as far as I know, this is not something that happens in, for example, Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, or Sweden.