Is socialism “back in fashion,” as the Economist recently observed? Senator Bernie Sanders, who has called himself a socialist throughout a long political career, is a leading contender for next year's Democratic presidential nomination after his surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a rock star, the most famous first-year member of the House of Representatives in living memory. The biggest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), now has 60,000 members, more than six times as many as in 2016. DSA has endorsed Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign, and Ocasio-Cortez is a member.
Jacobin magazine's founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara is also a DSA member and, like Ocasio-Cortez, was born in 1989. Undaunted by that year's most famous event, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sunkara wants to supplant the “vanquished Left” whose “commitment to a better world” was “bound up with illusions about the Soviet Union.” To that end, he has written The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. Its goal is to present “what a different social system could look like and how we can get there.”
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There is, however, the perennial difficulty of defining socialism. Sunkara starts by parsing the difference between “social democracy” and “democratic socialism.” Social democracy, as he uses the term, refers to generous, comprehensive welfare states, such as those in Scandinavia, made possible by aggressive income redistribution. Sunkara is an admirer: “Sweden in the 1970s,” he writes, was “the most livable society in history.” We could do far worse…and, he laments, we have. Like leftists of all stripes, he deplores the “neoliberal” rehabilitation of markets that began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and '80s, extending even to Nordic countries' policies that gave greater scope to private enterprise.
The necessary and possible way to improve on social democracy, then, is democratic socialism. For Sunkara, the latter term is redundant: socialism is democracy, the realization of “the world's first truly democratic society,” where “democracy has been radically extended to the social and economic realms.” Social democracy, for all its virtues, turned out to be nothing better than “the more humane face of neoliberalism,” a “tool to suppress class conflict in favor of tripartite arrangements among business, labor, and the state.”
Socialism has two advantages over social democracy. First, rather than rely on technocratic expertise, the hallmark of modern welfare and regulatory states, it requires “mass struggle from below and messy disruptions to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change.” Socialism engages, promising not just benefits but agency, the belief that “ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives.”
Second, the sort of engagement that secures socialism will also define its practice. It is not for intellectuals to say that life under socialism necessarily entails this or that policy. Intellectuals should inspire rather than instruct, in order to “win people over to the idea that things can be different, even if we can't precisely say what future generations will decide to construct.” Sunkara envisions a socialist America that decides, democratically, that enterprises selling goods and services compete with one another, as under capitalism, and the ones that do a bad job of it disappear. But the firms would be owned and managed by the people who work in them, determining compensation and making decisions about new products and business practices. If they wanted to expand their enterprise, they would turn to regional public investment banks (private ones having been nationalized) that judge investment applicants “on the basis of profitability, job creation, and other criteria including environmental impact.”
Even in the abstract, the inspiration on offer here is highly dubious. An “endless meeting” may have been the New Left's idea of freedom, but strikes most people as a convincing description of hell. Imposing more democracy on people than they'd prefer is, among other drawbacks, undemocratic.
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