Democratic socialism
[26] However, many democratic socialists also advocate for state regulations and welfare programs in order to reduce the perceived harms of capitalism and slowly transform the economic system.
[26] While having socialism as a long-term goal,[27] some moderate democratic socialists are more concerned about curbing capitalism's excesses and are supportive of progressive reforms to humanise it in the present day.
[49] Although these characteristics are usually reserved to describe a communist society,[50] this is consistent with the usage of Marx, Friedrich Engels and others, who referred to communism and socialism interchangeably.
For Crosland, a more meaningful form of equality could be achieved if the growth dividend derived from effective management of the economy was invested in "pro-poor" public services rather than through fiscal redistribution.
[64] This tendency is captured in the statement of Labour revisionist Anthony Crosland, who argued that the socialism of the pre-war world was now becoming increasingly irrelevant.
[71] More radical democratic socialists want to go beyond mere meliorist reforms and advocate the systemic transformation of the mode of production from capitalism to socialism.
[93] In contrast, the latter asserts that the only acceptable constitutional form of government is representative democracy under the rule of law, which is to implement social change via reformism.
Social democratic is used for centre-left political parties,[104] "whose aim is the gradual amelioration of poverty and exploitation within a liberal capitalist society.
[109] According to Andrew Mathers, Hilary Wainwright's 1987 work Labour: A Tale of Two Parties provided "a different reading which contrasted the 'ameliorative, pragmatic' social democratic tradition expressed principally in the Parliamentary Labour Party with a 'transformative, visionary' democratic socialist tradition associated mainly with the grassroots members engaged closely with extra-parliamentary struggles.
[113] All types of democratic socialists, including those in favor of central planning, often cite the lack of democracy in the political and economic systems of Marxist–Leninist regimes as a reason for their historical or contemporary shortcomings or failures.
[117][118] On the other hand, democratic socialist proponents of centralised planning argue that it is better equipped to carry out economy-wide coordination and strengthen the collective power of the working class.
[122][123][124] In 1993, computer scientist Paul Cockshott and economics professor Allin Cottrell proposed in Towards a New Socialism a computerised central planning model based on direct democracy and modern technological advances.
[125] Democratic socialist advocates of market socialism often support the development of worker cooperatives, and sometimes market-based sovereign wealth funds.
Vaněk contends that the class differences and unequal distribution of income and economic power that result from private ownership of industry enable the interests of the dominant class to skew the market in their favour, either in the form of monopoly and market power or by utilising their wealth and resources to legislate government policies that benefit their specific business interests.
[132] This tradition has been recently associated with contemporary scholars such as Kevin Carson,[133] Gary Chartier,[134] Charles W. Johnson,[135] Samuel Edward Konkin III,[136] Roderick T. Long,[137] Chris Matthew Sciabarra[138] and Brad Spangler,[139] who stress the value of radically free markets, termed freed markets to distinguish them from the common conception which these left-libertarians believe to be riddled with statism and bourgeois privileges.
[140] Sometimes referred to as left-wing market anarchists,[141] proponents of this approach strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets while maintaining that taken to their logical conclusions, these ideas support anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical and pro-labour positions in economics, anti-imperialism in foreign policy and radically progressive views regarding sociocultural issues such as gender, sexuality and race.
[148] Other examples include the kibbutz communities in modern-day Israel,[149] Marinaleda in Spain,[150] the Zapatistas of EZLN in the region of Chiapas,[151] and to some extent, the workers' self-management policies within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Cuba.
[161] Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew stated that he had been influenced by the democratic socialist factions of the British Labour Party.
"[165] Socialist thinkers such as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg[166] wrote that democracy is indispensable to realising socialism.
Honneth has put forward the view that political and economic ideologies have a social basis, meaning they originate from intersubjective communication between members of society.
Honneth criticises the liberal state and ideology because it assumes that principles of individual liberty and private property are ahistorical and abstract when they evolved from a specific social discourse on human activity.
For Harrington, the primary reason for this was the perspective that viewed the Stalinist-era Soviet Union as having succeeded in usurping the legacy of Marxism and distorting it in propaganda to justify its politics.
[195] Social democracy underwent various major forms throughout its history and is distinguished between the early trend[196] that supported revolutionary socialism,[197] mainly related to Marx and Engels,[198] as well as other notable social-democratic politicians and orthodox Marxist thinkers such as Bernstein,[191] Kautsky,[189] Luxemburg[190] and Lenin,[199] including more democratic and libertarian interpretations of Leninism;[200] the revisionist trend adopted by Bernstein and other reformist socialist leaders between the 1890s and 1940s;[201] the post-war trend[196] that adopted or endorsed Keynesian welfare capitalism[202] as part of a compromise between capitalism and socialism;[203] and those opposed to the Third Way.
'"[32] Journalist William Pfaff wrote: "It might be argued that socialism ineluctably breeds state bureaucracy, which then imposes its own kinds of restrictions upon individual liberties.
"[32] Economic anthropologist Jason Hickel and his colleague Dylan Sullivan argue that in order to transcend the problems associated with the persistent underdevelopment in the contemporary "imperialist world economy", where "continued capital accumulation may create pressures for cheapening labour" which "works against the goals of human development," and also the top-down authoritarian socialism as experienced in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, which they argue is "at odds with the socialist goals of workers’ self-management and democratic control over production," it will be necessary to adopt a "socialist strategy in the twenty-first century that is radically democratic, extending democracy to production itself.
[209] In the Transitional Program, which was drafted in 1938 during the founding congress of the Fourth International, Trotsky called for the legalization of the Soviet parties and worker's control of production.
[32] Chicago School economist Milton Friedman argued that a "society which is socialist cannot also be democratic" in the sense of "guaranteeing individual freedom.
"[32] Sociologist Robert Nisbet, a philosophical conservative who began his career as a leftist, argued in 1978 that there is "not a single free socialism to be found anywhere in the world.
"[32] Similarly, anti-communist academic Richard Pipes argued: "The merger of political and economic power implicit in socialism greatly strengthens the ability of the state and its bureaucracy to control the population.
For one thing, the socialization of the economy must lead to a numerical growth of the bureaucracy required to administer it, and this process cannot fail to augment the power of the state.
