This arti­cle first appeared in Jacobin.

To chart a different course, we would need a militant labor movement and a mass socialist presence strengthened by accumulated victories, looking to not merely tame but overcome capitalism.

John Jud­is has all the right inten­tions. He’s look­ing at the resur­gence of open­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist cur­rents in the Unit­ed States with a mix of excite­ment and trep­i­da­tion. Excite­ment, because he knows how des­per­ate­ly the country’s work­ers need social reforms. Trep­i­da­tion, because he wor­ries that the new left might fall into the famil­iar traps of insu­lar­i­ty and sectarianism.

But while Jud­is wants us to change soci­ety for the bet­ter, his response to the fail­ures of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry state social­ism would lead us into the dead end of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry social democracy.

In his New Repub­lic essay ​“The Social­ism Amer­i­ca Needs Now,” Jud­is makes a pas­sion­ate plea for the rebuild­ing of a social-demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ment — or what he calls ​“lib­er­al social­ism.” He con­tends that the wel­fare state and demo­c­ra­t­ic reg­u­la­tion of a cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my should be the end goal for social­ists, as past efforts at top-down nation­al­iza­tion and plan­ning yield­ed the repres­sive soci­eties and stag­nant economies of the Sovi­et bloc. In con­trast, Jud­is argues, the Scan­di­na­vian states are dynam­ic cap­i­tal­ist economies that are still far more equi­table and humane than the Unit­ed States.

For him, social­ism — demo­c­ra­t­ic con­trol over work­places and the econ­o­my — con­sists of ​“old nos­trums” whose days have past.

Of course, we urgent­ly need the reforms that Jud­is and the move­ment around Bernie Sanders advo­cate for. No demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist could oppose efforts to guar­an­tee pub­lic pro­vi­sion of basic needs and take key aspects of eco­nom­ic and social life like edu­ca­tion, health care, and hous­ing out of the mar­ket. It would, as Jud­is writes, ​“bring immea­sur­able ben­e­fit to ordi­nary Americans.”

But we have moral rea­sons to demand some­thing more. After all, we can’t have real polit­i­cal democ­ra­cy with­out eco­nom­ic democ­ra­cy. Cor­po­ra­tions are ​“pri­vate gov­ern­ments” that exer­cise tyran­ni­cal pow­er over work­ers and soci­ety writ large. The cor­po­rate hier­ar­chy decides how we pro­duce, what we pro­duce, and what we do with the prof­its that work­ers col­lec­tive­ly make.

To embrace rad­i­cal democ­ra­cy is to believe that any deci­sion that has a bind­ing effect on its mem­bers — say, the pow­er to hire or fire or con­trol over one’s work hours — should be made by all those affect­ed by it. What touch­es all, should be deter­mined by all.

At min­i­mum, we should demand an econ­o­my in which var­i­ous forms of own­er­ship (work­er-owned firms, as well as state-owned nat­ur­al monop­o­lies and finan­cial insti­tu­tions) are coor­di­nat­ed by a reg­u­lat­ed mar­ket — an econ­o­my that enables soci­ety to be gov­erned demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly. In an unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my, man­agers hire and fire work­ers; in a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist econ­o­my, work­ers would hire those man­agers deemed nec­es­sary to build a con­tent and pro­duc­tive firm.

They won’t let us keep nice things.

This, how­ev­er, isn’t a debate about the con­tours of the world we would like to see. While Jud­is rejects the desire of social­ists (and the his­toric goal of social democ­ra­cy itself) to cre­ate a rad­i­cal democ­ra­cy after cap­i­tal­ism, he does so large­ly on prag­mat­ic grounds. The old vision, for him, is ​“not remote­ly viable.”