Towards a Democratic Socialism

You can make the Revolution today!

Socialism doesn’t work. By burdening the most productive organizations and individuals in an economy and removing any incentive for innovation or initiative and destroying the price signals that help efficiently allocate resources across a market of millions of producers and consumers it creates an immense amount of waste, environmental damage, and repression. EVERY country which has ever tried socialism has impoverished itself and 99% of them have abandoned the experiment, usually after completely crippling their economy and political culture. The ones which remain dedicated to socialism (North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela to some extent) rely on sales of natural resources to the capitalist world to survive (or counterfeiting, drugs & weapons smuggling, etc.). There has never been a political experiment which has so completely failed. Even the ‘mixed economies’ (India, Scandinavia, Great Britain) have liberalized their economies and sold most their state-owned assets. Sweden and Finland are now more capitalist than the United States (measured in terms of central government control over the economy and GDP), and they are flourishing. Even nominally ‘communist’ countries like Vietnam and China have massively privatized their economies and enjoyed the economic growth that invariably brings. Since abandoning the practice of socialism they have both become middle income countries and the numbers of people that have been lifted out of destitution on the back of capitalism in those countries (and India, and Bangladesh) is greater than was the total number of human beings on Earth in 1800. We can productively debate policy questions like the electoral college or single-payer healthcare or tariffs or industrial management but the model for a successful and progressive country has been firmly established: capitalist representative democracy. If students in the Western world were effectively taught history and basic economics they would generally understand this reality… but, alas, they are not.

Yet our wealth and safety and technology have introduced a paradox: people have no conception of repression or true poverty in the West, and so some blurry idea of socialism (public management, equality, free shit) seems vaguely appealing. Just as safe, rich, white people in the United States are by far the most likely to support defunding the police, rich young urban progressives (in college or not far removed) are the most likely to label themselves ‘socialists’ (or ‘democratic socialists’). You would think they might want to talk to the millions of people in the United States who have recently arrived from socialist countries to check their ideals against the ‘lived experience’ of far more worldly and realistic individuals than themselves… but you would also maybe think that upper middle class white students at private schools would want to speak to some actual working class black people before completely remaking society in their name (by adopting policies which the average black person abhors). Neither of those things seem to be case. They took two classes on colonialism as undergraduates and they know of a Howard Zinn book (although they have not actually read it) and they have seen the reels on Tik Tok. By their own account they have all the knowledge required to rebuild a civilization which has been evolving for 500 years, starting at the foundations. It’ll be great!

I actually have good news for these individuals: their dream is closer than they think. In fact… they can achieve socialism today.

Socialism on a national scale requires repression. It tends toward that anyway because the government is never amenable to their employees and resources being used to erode and oppose their own power. Since every printing press and computer and worker and college under socialism is very definitely government property there is never an effective political opposition. Socialism usually achieves power through violent and destructive revolutions, and once instantiated it works to make sure that another revolution will be required to unseat it and end the fabulous privileges of the political elite. There is always a political elite, too. People in power have trouble resisting the temptation of wealth and privilege, as it turns out. It would be as if Marxist activists in the United States bought luxury homes for themselves using the money which they promised for activism. That’s a hypothetical example, of course. There are different flavors of socialism (which can be placed along an axis, with state socialism on one end and anarcho-socialism, a radially decentralized reinvention of every company and town and workplace in the society, on the other) but they all rely upon a kind of vague utopianism: once we develop the system enough, political conflict will cease. Private property will fade away (in Marx’s oft-misunderstood vision of the era after the dictatorship of the proletariat). Human equality will become the default setting. No one is ever sure how we get from here to there but if we empower a small cadre of power-hungry ideologues, the thinking goes, it will just happen. Eventually. Or something. Socialism doesn’t just preclude and strangle any dissent or criticism-it literally requires daily repression to survive. Starting a business or making a loan or trading or claiming ownership of land are all crimes against the society under socialism. They are all punished, and they must be punished or socialism quickly fades away.

The good news is that capitalism is far more flexible… and here we come to the heart of my proposal. Socialism can exist within capitalism. You might have to participate in the market by buying land initially but even this is not necessarily required: you can incorporate a township in some chunk of territory within the U.S. (or most other capitalist democracies) and you can live socialist lives. You can share all property in common. You can produce your own food and goods. You can abstain from money transfers and buying and selling. Certainly it will be difficult to produce all of your own building materials and tools and consumer goods (especially since almost no one who actually builds things is a socialist, which might a clue that your worldview is flawed) but you’re only limited by the numbers of people you can attract (which is a limitation faced by all political and economic systems). You have millions of people who proclaim their socialist affiliations right now! Go be socialists! You won’t even have to sully yourself by participating in the capitalist system. You can extract all of your resources and mill all of your tools and build all of your buildings from the ground up. Talk about dismantling! You have the chance today to live your principles and begin your revolution!

The alternative is to continue to benefit handsomely from capitalism while criticizing it (hypocrisy) or to try to take over the capitalist society as a whole and repress that miserable minority (if they ever become a minority) who still want to choose their jobs and own their homes and buy stuff (repression). Surely you don’t want to repress anyone. Go be a socialist and I’ll stay here and be a capitalist.

You’re going to have to give up your iPhone though.

Every person in this photo is now mining ore and harvesting lumber in their socialist community in the Pacific Northwest. They have beliefs and they’re living them, goddamnit. I might disagree with their vision of society but I admire the integrity and work they’ve done to build their new society. Much respect!

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