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A spate of recent candidates running against establishment politicians, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Cynthia Nixon, has breathed new life into an old idea, democratic socialism. But when someone proclaims themselves to be a democratic socialist, what do they mean? What should they mean? And once armed with an alternative vision to capitalism, what should they do? As socialists run for office or consider endorsing progressives, they face potential pitfalls — most importantly that as electoral work deepens, the vision of socialism risks being watered down or even falling from view. Electoral work is important, but our political independence as socialists depends on our fidelity to this vision.

Capitalism Against Socialism To talk about why, we need to first talk about what’s wrong with capitalism — and what a socialist alternative would look like. Capitalism is the chief source of human suffering today and a system that promotes the worst of human behaviors. Socialists believe that when a society’s main resources are produced and distributed by private business, exploitation, inequalities in opportunity, and egoistic behavior result. First, exploitative relations between workers and employers are the core feature of capitalism. Because a small number of people own the productive assets of society, most people have to seek out these businesses for work. The wealth produced from this work flows to the owners of capital even though workers produced it. This is true of every employer-employee relation, even those with union representation and nice benefit packages. Second, within capitalism, how well people do in life is hugely impacted by birth. Children born into wealthy families have a leg up on staying wealthy as adults. Children born working class and poor have a steeper hill to climb and are much more likely to be working class and poor later in life. In other words, capitalism is a system that is built on inequalities of opportunities. And these inequalities are its life blood. A huge number of people that need to be hired by the wealthy are reproduced every generation. Without them, firms would have nobody to exploit. While some employees might be able to climb job ladders, to become a manager, or maybe one day run their own business, as a whole the working class can’t ever achieve collective mobility under capitalism. Workers are collectively and permanently unfree within capitalism. Finally, capitalism produces conflict rather than cooperation, competition rather than solidarity. We compete over jobs. We compete at work for promotions, and those of us that are best rewarded are the ones that are concerned above all with ourselves. We compete with workers in faraway countries and workers desperate to get into ours. And we compete as classes, as races, and as genders. This conflict plays out on a totally unequal playing field; those that win rarely do so because of merit. That people continue to find solidarity in their communities, their relationships, their families, and their associations speaks more to people’s basic decency than anything about capitalism.

The Socialist Horizon What is our alternative? Neal Meyer recently defined democratic socialism succinctly in a recent piece for Jacobin, saying “we want to build a world where everyone has a right to food, healthcare, a good home, an enriching education, and a union job that pays well. We think this kind of economic security is necessary for people to live rich and creative lives — and to be truly free.” This definition echoes one recently given by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on The Late Show: What [democratic socialism] means to me is health care as a human right, it means that every child no matter where you are born should have access to a college or trade-school education if they so choose it. I think that no person should be homeless if we have public structures or public policy to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States. While these reforms are crucial to countering the misery we face under capitalism, it runs the risk of equating socialism with welfare liberalism or social democracy. But these things are not the same. To get a better sense of what socialism is, we need to consider two separate questions. First, what are the principles and values that any good society should promote? And second, what are the kinds of institutions and social arrangements that are best suited for the promotion of those values? First is the principle of equality of opportunity. Chances in life and the ability to flourish should be equally available to everyone. Within capitalism circumstances of birth, luck, or some other inborn quality tends to determine how well people do in life — not one’s sole efforts. The distribution of most things — even the most basic necessities like food, shelter, health, and old-age security — is dependent on people’s ability to pay. But socialists believe that everyone, regardless of those circumstances, deserves to flourish. Goods should be distributed on the basis of need, not ability to pay. Second, the principle of solidarity. Socialists believe that people should care about and care for each other. Capitalist markets, on the other hand, divide. We think the principle of solidarity should be at the core of any good society. A socialist vision of emancipation is one where our institutions help us care about and for each other. These are the basic principles that should guide society more broadly — people should have an equal shot in realizing their goals and dreams, and we should care for each other. In this sense, socialism is about outcomes. Capitalism not only fails to produce these outcomes — it is their chief barrier. In capitalism, economic power appears separated from political power. The economic power derived from owning productive assets allows capitalists to get rich while keeping workers’ wages as low as possible, decide what is produced without any democratic input from the rest of society, hide harmful aspects of their products, and foist the harmful costs of doing business (“negative externalities”) onto the rest of us. Capitalists say all of this is justified because it’s “their property.” Socialism aims to socialize that power. Capitalists shouldn’t be able to hold all that power and impact all of society — it’s undemocratic and unjust. But socialists don’t just want to replace private ownership with state ownership. In the same way we don’t believe that capitalists should be able to have disproportionate control over economic resources, we don’t think unaccountable state officials and bureaucrats should have the power to control investment and production through “socialism from above.” In some cases, like the former Soviet Union, the failings of such a system are as clear as those of capitalism itself. The core aim of socialism is not just the state gaining control of industry, but empowering the broad masses of people — in their workplaces, in their communities, in their homes, in their schools, in their politics — to be in the driver’s seat of society. Even in the Nordic countries, where high levels of state ownership are combined with political democracy and a high standard of living, socialism is a long ways off. Making people’s lives materially better isn’t enough. Neither is it enough to install union representation for workers. These changes would be welcome, but socialism moves well beyond them.

What Is Socialism, Then? So if social-democratic countries like Norway aren’t socialist, what is socialism? Moving towards socialism involves subordinating the economic power of capitalists to the social power of the people. But fully realizing it does away with capitalists entirely. Only when the private decisions that have massive public implications are subjected to popular control will we have a democratic society. This democratization could be achieved through a number of concrete institutions: grassroots state planning agencies, workers’ cooperatives, participatory boards. But what is essential is that the people have real, not just formal, democratic control over society’s wealth. Our vision of socialism has no room for the following: production for the purpose of accumulating profit, private ownership of the main productive assets, markets for labor where most people need to sell their work to survive, and states that are unresponsive to the will of the people. Only under these conditions can we begin to construct the concrete socialist institutions that will promote and reproduce equality of opportunity and solidarity.

To Be a Socialist The socialist perspective is defined by this long-term vision. But how should this vision relate to the practical demands of politics? How should it inform our practice? We are in a moment of new opportunity, but being a socialist requires walking a fine line between being too opportunistic and forgetting our principles, and being so rigid that we don’t let experience open new paths. A crude rendering of socialist history divides the movement into reformist and revolutionary tendencies. Whereas reformists supposedly advocated revising socialist doctrine to better fit the day-to-day practice of politics, revolutionaries pushed socialist practice to line up with its radical alternative vision to capitalism, refusing to water down socialist theory and practice. But the democratic socialist tradition has always rejected this dualism. Reform and revolution go hand in hand. Socialist leadership in popular fights like Medicare for All can transform people’s consciousness and change perceptions of what’s politically possible, eventually leading to support for socialist goals. Moreover, reforms can build the working class’s fighting capacity, expose the limits of capitalism’s ability to satisfy our sense of justice, equality, and solidarity, and pave the way for more radical demands. Reforms can do more than just improve people’s lives — they can lead to revolution. The fight for socialism requires both contesting elections and building a mass movement. Electing socialists will popularize socialist ideas, push a pro-worker legislative agenda, and provide invaluable experience for socialist governance. But a grassroots movement is also necessary, both to hold socialist politicians accountable and to mobilize against capitalist reaction to even the most modest reform agenda. A refusal to engage with electoral politics condemns socialists to marginality. But neglecting grassroots mobilization has often meant that socialist governments were powerless to overcome anti-democratic capitalist subversion. Democratic socialists today, as in the past, have to avoid both pitfalls — of becoming revolutionaries without revolution and reformists without reforms. In pursuing reforms and in electoral efforts, socialists will work in broad alliance with other progressive forces. But it is one thing to recognize the need for such alliances and another to consider the particular form that socialist participation within them should take. At issue is how we think about our place within the broader resurgence of progressive politics since 2016. Socialists, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in particular, have not been the only players in this resurgence. Organizations like Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress have capitalized on the energy of the Sanders campaign to push the Democratic Party to the left. Indeed, though she is a member of DSA, Ocasio-Cortez recently gave more credit to Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress for her success, as they were the first groups to seriously encourage her to run. Socialists should welcome the vital role that these organizations have played in a left electoral revival. But what distinguishes socialists from other forces on the progressive left? The answer, of course, is our vision of socialism. This vision gives coherence and purpose to socialist strategy. We not only want to introduce a bit of humanity where we can in a cruel and unforgiving world, but also to transform the relations of class power that govern society. Socialists should be good-faith partners in campaigns for progressive change. But our role is also to push them beyond their limits and make the case for more fundamental social transformation. The question is how we effectively engage in coalitions while maintaining our independent political identity. After all, without this identity and the vision behind it, why bother being a socialist? Historically, as socialism’s political profile grew, so too did the risk of its assimilation into an amorphous “progressivism” over which its influence gradually waned. Socialists should thus beware the temptation to mistake the opportunity presented by the recent leftward political shift for a validation of socialist politics per se. Our primary goal as socialists is not to push this or that progressive reform or candidate, but to build a movement for socialism. What makes us socialists is not just our support for such reforms and candidates. Rather, it is because we are socialists that we support them. Our strength is therefore not measured by legislative or electoral victories, important as they are, but by our ability to infuse these with a socialist significance by connecting them to our vision of the future. Pushing the political needle to the left is not enough; the point is to use this to forcefully make the case for transcending capitalism.