Why We need Democratic Socialism

I prepared the following for the Wilmington chapter of the DSA. We are planning on following this up with a series of articles to be used by the chapter to connect the anti-capitalist movements in our neck of the woods to the broader movement for socialism.

What do Democratic Socialist believe?

In the US today, we live in a society where a small group of people (the capitalist class) control both our economic system and our political system. They use that control to exploit the rest of us (the working class), taking the largest share of the products of our labor (profits) and paying us (wages) only enough for survival, although occasionally we can temporarily wrest a little more through collective action (unions and political struggle). These two classes, the capitalists and the working class, have totally different interests and are constantly engaged in struggle (class warfare). Unfortunately, for the past 40 years, it’s been a very one-sided war.

 

Capitalism is the source of the class division and of its consequences. Look around the world and you can see the results: from poverty and hunger to the failure to address to existential crisis of global warming; from wars fought to control resources to the failure to contain the current pandemic; from systemic racism to blatant misogyny.  In every case we can see the needs of the capitalists to maintain their power and wealth are the basis of our discontent.

 

But you might ask, “Isn’t possible to reform capitalism?” The answer is no. We have a two-hundred-year history which clearly demonstrates that, while temporary reforms can be achieved (and should be fought for), the capitalist class will find work-arounds to keep and increase their wealth and power. To understand this, we only need to recognize that wealth and political power are inexorably tied together. Even when we have free elections and the trappings of democracy, the capitalists can and do use their wealth to control the political system and ensure that their interests are protected.

 

We propose a different system – one that deals with the economic contradictions of capitalism (socialism) and the lack of political power of the working class (genuine democracy). Hence our name, Democratic Socialists. It is clear that, as the old song goes, “you can’t have one without the other.”

 

Why do we think that socialism must replace capitalism?

 

The ideas behind socialism didn’t arise out of thin air. Socialists came to understand why socialism must replace capitalism by studying capitalism itself. So, a little bit of economic and political history.

 

Capitalism hasn’t always existed! In fact, it arose in a few countries in Western Europe in the late 1700s, around the same time as the ideas of the French Revolution were challenging the political systems in existence there. The two revolutions, economic and political, seemed to reinforce each other. Capitalism required the breakup of serfdom and the end of chattel slavery to free a large work force and the Enlightenment ideas that every individual should be “free” to pursue their own destiny (extreme individualism) fit that need nicely.

 

The breakdown of the old order, both economically and politically unleashed the massive productive forces that created our modern world. But the new system, which we might call capitalist democracy also created two major contradictions. One was the contradiction between those who came to own these wonderful means of production and those whose only way of surviving was to work for the owners, the 1% and the 99%. As a result, while all wealth in capitalism is socially created (we work together to make things and provide services), it is not distributed socially. Capital (money invested in production) has first claim on that wealth; labor only gets what it can wrest from the capitalists.

 

The other major contradiction is that the capitalists need to constantly expand their system, to find new places and people to exploit.  When the capitalists in Europe and the US exhausted the easily available possibilities of exploitation in their own nations (as evidenced by a declining rate of profit and worsening economic contractions, aka depressions), they launched imperial empires to exploit other areas of the world. And the competition between capitalists of different nations who were expanding their empires resulted in the most horrendous wars the world has ever seen – WWI and WWII, the Cold War and the War on Terrorism, all in the last 100 years.

 

It’s not that individual capitalists are bad people, although some of them definitely are. It’s that the needs of the system drive what has happened over the past 200 years. That’s why capitalism must go.

 

We can say that capitalism solved the question of how we can produce enough to meet the needs of every human being on this planet without destroying the only world we have. But under their system, which is driven solely by the profit motive, we will never achieve either of those two goals.

 

The challenge of how to utilize this incredible productive capacity to meet those needs and save our planet at the same time is why we need democratic socialism.