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democratic socialism
Reimagining Socialism: An Interview With David Kotz
"The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run," said the economist.
Dec 24, 2024
In the 1990s, all the talk was about the end of socialism and the unchallenged military and economic superiority of the United States. Nonetheless, two decades later, socialism was revived as a possible political alternative as the Great Recession of 2008 and the intensification of neoliberalism’s cruelties tore a huge hole in people’s faith in capitalism, especially among young people in the United States whose hearts had been captured by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fiery calls for universal healthcare, free public college, and economic and climate justice. Socialism remains a political alternative taken seriously by many across the United States although its vision is still far away from becoming a hegemonic political project.
However, there are different kinds of socialism, and some of them, such as social democracy and market socialism, seek reform rather than the actual replacement of capitalism. On the other hand, the Soviet model, which is the only version of socialism that gave birth to an alternative socioeconomic system to that of capitalism, had many undesirable features and proved unsustainable.
So what would be the ideal system of socialism in the 21st century? In the interview that follows, radical economist David Kotz dissects the lessons drawn from the experience of the Soviet model, explains why reforming capitalism does not solve the problems built into the system of capitalism, and makes a case in defense of democratic socialism as the only sustainable alternative to capitalism. David Kotz is the author of The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism and of the soon-to-be-published book Socialism for Today: Escaping the Cruelties of Capitalism. He is professor emeritus of economics and senior research fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2010-19, Kotz also served as distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the department of political economy at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
C.J. Polychroniou: David, in a soon-to-be-published book titled Socialism for Today, you make the case that democratic socialism is the only alternative to the long list of severe problems (massive social inequalities and economic disparities, environmental degradation, racism, poverty, homelessness, and so on) that plague the United States under capitalism. Now, you acknowledge that a shift to a radically different economic system would be a difficult and costly process but also maintain that the problems mentioned above cannot be solved by reforming capitalism. What do you understand by the term “reform of capitalism,” and do you think all struggles to reform capitalism have ultimately failed?
David Kotz: By reform of capitalism, we generally mean the introduction of institutions and policies that modify the way the system works but without replacing its core features—private ownership of the means of production, the wage-labor relation, and the pursuit of profit by the capitalist class as the basic logic of the system. Since the end of World War II, we have seen two types of reform of capitalism. First, the type of reform that emerged in the industrialized countries after the Second World War and came to be called regulated capitalism or social democratic capitalism and, second, the unrestrained version of capitalism that emerged in the 1980s and has been nothing short of a disaster.
Social democratic capitalism included a more active role for government in the economy, a major role for unions in the capital-labor relation, and changes in the way corporations conduct their businesses. Reforming capitalism along a social democratic line was a process that had started before World War II, thanks to the rise of working-class politics and the fact that socialist parties, in some cases, rose to power. But big business and its political representatives also went along out of fear that capitalism might not survive the political pressures from below without reforms. Sweden led the way to social democratic capitalism in the 1930s, but reform capitalism also spread to other parts of Western Europe after the end of the Second World War. In the United States, reform capitalism took place with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies on account of the Great Depression and had many common features with European social democracy.
"Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers."
Regulated capitalism in the United States produced many benefits for working people. Starting in the early 1950s, labor productivity went up, wages increased, and income inequality remained relatively stable. By the late 1960s, regulated capitalism also led to major improvements in air and water quality and in occupational safety and health. Those regulations were passed under pressure from a broad coalition of environmental activists, consumer product safety activists, and labor unions. People of color also advanced in economic opportunities. Nonetheless, while regulated capitalism created favorable conditions for making progress toward social, economic, and racial equality, full equality remained a chimera. The empirical evidence suggests that racial/ethnic equality and gender equality can be reduced through political and economic struggle but cannot be eliminated. Full equality is antithetical to the logic and functioning of capitalism. A capitalist economy cannot work without exploiting workers. The improvements made by regulated capitalism were indeed limited and did not resolve all the problems generated by capitalism. Unions had to make major concessions to secure agreements for the reforms from the powerful business interests. The official poverty rate declined over the period of the duration of regulated capitalism, but deep pockets of poverty remained in many parts of the country. The imperialist drive of capitalism also was not tamed in postwar regulated capitalism, and capitalist democracies remained only partially democratic as wealthy individuals and large corporations remained politically powerful.
The biggest problem with regulated capitalism is that it is simply not sustainable in the long run. Why? Because it generates a powerful drive on the part of capitalists to resist restriction in the pursuit of the maximization of profit, which is what capitalism is all about. Capitalism has always faced periodic economic crises. When such crises occur, capitalists will grab the opportunity to overthrow regulated capitalism. This is what happened in the 1970s, and regulated capitalism gave way to a decade of accelerating inflation and a severe business cycle. The neoliberal reforms of capitalism in the early 1980s were born out of the inability of regulated capitalism to persist and bring long-term stability.
C.J. Polychroniou: OK, but since the aim seems to be full equality and the absence of exploitation from human affairs, the argument can also be rather easily made that 20th-century efforts to build a full-fledged socialist alternative to capitalism also failed. Isn’t that so?
David Kotz: There were two types of post-capitalist systems that emerged from efforts to move beyond capitalism. One was the Soviet model that emerged after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. The second was market socialism that surfaced following the collapse of the Soviet model. Neither type succeeded in building a sustainable alternative system. But let me focus on the first type since it did abolish capitalism and build an alternative system. The Soviet model, which spread to many other countries around the world, though with some variations, relied initially on an institution called “soviets,” elected by workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors. It was supposed to be the supreme authority in the new social and political order. But soon after the revolution, the Bolshevik party established a repressive regime that did not tolerate dissent. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin became the top leader of the Soviet Union. He established a brutal dictatorship that went on to eliminate much of the leadership that had made the revolution.
Under the Soviet model, all enterprises were owned by the state and allocation decisions were made by a highly centralized and hierarchical form of economic planning. Five-year and one-year plans were formulated for the entire country. Enterprises were given target outputs and provided with the inputs and labor time needed to produce them. Enterprise decision-makers did not aim for maximum profit. There were markets in the Soviet model in the sense that people bought consumer goods in stores and workers decided on jobs in the labor market. However, buying and selling in the Soviet economy did not generate “market forces.” Market forces refers to a system in which relative profitability determines which products will get additional inputs and which will be cut back. Thus, market exchange took place, but the system was not guided by market forces.
Centralized economic planning transformed the Soviet economy from a backward agricultural economy to an industrialized economy in record time. In just a couple of decades, an industrial base was built that allowed the Soviet Union to produce military hardware that was key to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Between the 1950-70s, the Soviet economy was growing so fast that Western analysts were afraid that it would soon surpass the leading capitalist economies. The Soviet model transformed the lives of the Soviet people for the better in many measurable ways. Between 1950 and 1975, consumption per person in the Soviet Union grew faster than in the U.S. By the 1980s, Soviet production surpassed that of the U.S. in steel, cement, metal-cutting and metal-forming machines, wheat, milk, and cotton. It had more doctors and hospital beds per capita than the United States. There was continuous full employment, stable prices, and no ups and downs of the business cycle, while income was relatively equally distributed.
However, the system had serious economic problems. Many sectors of the economy were inefficient, many consumer goods were of low quality, and many consumer services were simply unavailable. Households often faced shortages of consumer goods.
C.J. Polychroniou: In thinking then about a sustainable alternative system to capitalism, what do we keep from the experience of the Soviet model?
David Kotz: As I sought to indicate earlier, the Soviet model brought significant economic and social progress for some 60 years. In my view, the problems of the Soviet model stemmed from its authoritarian and repressive political institutions and the highly centralized form of economic planning that was adopted. But while the Soviet model lacked popular democracy, it did include the key institutions that socialists have long supported: production for use rather than profit, public ownership of enterprises, and a planned economy. The entire experience of the Soviet model holds useful and important lessons for a future socialism.
C.J. Polychroniou: What about market socialism? What lessons should we draw from that experience?
David Kotz: The idea of combining market allocation with socialist planning has a long history. New models of market socialism were proposed following the collapse of the Soviet model in 1991. The hope was that markets would guarantee economic efficiency while a socialist state assured economic justice and material security. Market socialism did not emerge in Russia after the collapse of state socialism, but it did emerge in China after 1978 under the post-Mao leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In China, market forces were introduced gradually and with a high degree of state oversight to avoid economic chaos. The record shows that market socialism not only reproduced many of the problems of capitalism but has a tendency to promote a return to capitalism. That’s because market forces can do their job of allocating resources only by activating the profit motive as the primary force of productive activity.
C.J. Polychroniou: In your book, you argue that economic planning is the institution that can achieve the aim of creating just and sustainable societies—not market forces. But you also argue that an “effective and sustainable socialism” requires direct participatory planning and new forms of public ownership of the means of production. Can you briefly lay out the basic features of democratic socialism?
David Kotz: Here I can respond only briefly to this question, which I consider in detail in my forthcoming book. My view follows closely the model of socialism in Pat Devine’s book Democracy and Economic Planning. The following are some of the key features of a future democratic socialism in my view:
- Economic allocation decisions are made by all parties affected by the decision. That includes workers, consumers, and the local community.
- Differences are settled whenever possible by negotiation and compromise among the relevant parties. If necessary, majority voting can be used.
- The mass media are free to criticize the state and its officials.
- Individuals are free to criticize the state and its officials.
Democratic socialism will inevitably face a contradiction between wide participation in decision-making and the need to make allocation decisions in a timely manner, allocation decisions that are inter-dependent in an actual economy. It will not be perfect, but it promises the best possible future for the human species.
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A Democratic-Socialist Reflection on the 2024 Election
Bernie Sanders unforgettably demonstrated how much the right presidential primary candidate can alter the national political debate. We know the power and purpose of such a candidate, but can someone like him eventually win in this country?
Dec 06, 2024
Had Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic nomination and gone on to defeat Donald Trump — as most polls suggested he had a better chance of doing than Hillary Clinton, the actual nominee — he would be now entering his lame duck period, and perhaps Donald Trump might not figure in the current discussion much at all. (Alternately, had the party poobahs not closed ranks behind Biden with lightning speed to deny Sanders the nomination in 2020, he might have just completed his campaign for a second term — which he clearly would have been fit to serve.)
Eight years on
Sanders did not succeed in bringing democratic socialism to the White House, of course, but he did deliver the message to quite a number of other households during the Democratic nomination debates. As a result, two presidential cycles on, democratic socialists have now run and won races all the way up to the U.S. House, and democratic socialism has now become a “thing” in American politics. Not a big thing, really, but most definitely a thing. Between the Republicans, right wing Democrats and the corporate newsmedia, it’s a thing that certainly draws more negative mention than positive — but given that its critique of American society pointedly includes Republicans, right wing Democrats and the corporations that own the news media, we could hardly expect it to be otherwise.
During this time, self described democratic socialists have been elected and they’ve been unelected. They’ve exerted influence beyond their numbers; and they’ve also struggled with the hurly burly of political life. Some have been blown away by big money; some have contributed to their own downfall. In other words, they’ve run the gamut of the electoral political world — if still largely at the margins. Any thoughts of a socialist wave following the first Sanders campaign or the election of the “Squad” soon bent to the more grueling reality of trying to eke out a new congressional seat or two per term — or defend those currently held, with efforts on the other levels of government playing out in similar fashion. But at the least we can say that the U.S. has joined the mainstream of modern world politics to the point where the socialist viewpoint generally figures in the mix — albeit in a modest way.
Lesser of two evils?
The 2024 race stood out from the presidential election norm both for the return of one president, Trump’s return being the first since Grover Cleveland’s in 1892 — also the only other time a president reoccupied the White House after having been previously voted out; and for the withdrawal of another president, Joe Biden’s exit from the campaign being the first since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968. And, just like Hubert Humphrey in 68, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee — without running in any primaries. Both of them inherited, and endorsed the policies of the administration in which they occupied the number two office, which included support of a war effort opposed by a significant number of otherwise generally Democratic-leaning voters.
In Johnson’s case, the withdrawal of his candidacy had everything to do with that opposition, and the shock of Minnesota Senator Gene McCarthy drawing 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote running as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. But when Humphrey won the Democratic nomination and the equally hawkish Richard Nixon took the Republican slot, the substantial number of war opponents felt themselves facing the prospect of choosing the lesser of two evils. The dismal choice presented in that race soured untold numbers of voters on the left who came to consider a choice between two evils to be the norm for presidential elections. Over time, the hostility faded, with most coming to judge the choice offered less harshly, now more one of picking the less inadequate of two inadequate programs — until now. The intensity of opposition to the Biden-Harris support of Israel’s war on Palestine has certainly not approached that shown toward the Johnson-Humphrey conduct of the American war against Vietnam. But for a substantial number of people who considered it criminal to continue supplying 2000 pound bombs to Israel’s relentless ongoing disproportionate obliteration of Gaza in retaliation for an atrocity that occurred on a day more than a year past, this was a “lesser of two evils” choice, to a degree unmatched since the bad old Humphrey-Nixon days.
And yet, while we don’t know how many opted not to vote for president at all, we do know that those who did vote almost all did make that choice. Even with a Democratic nominee preferring the campaign companionship of former third-ranking House Republican Liz Cheney to that of Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian democratic socialist, third party votes did not prove to be a factor. There was no blaming Jill Stein this time.
Democratic Socialists of America
Organizationally, the greatest beneficiary of the Sanders campaigns has been the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Ironically, while Bernie has been the nation’s twenty-first century avatar of socialism — generally understood to be a philosophy of collective action — he himself is not a joiner, being a member neither of the Democratic Party, whose presidential nomination he has twice sought; nor DSA, an organization he has long worked with. With about 6,000 members, the pre-Sanders campaign DSA was the largest socialist organization in an undernourished American left. In the minds of some long time members, their maintenance of the socialist tradition bore a certain similarity to the work of the medieval Irish monks who copied ancient manuscripts whose true value would only be appreciated in the future. But when the post-Sanders surge came, there DSA was — popping up in the Google search of every newly minted or newly energized socialist looking to meet people of like mind. Membership mushroomed to 100,000. Organizational inflation on that order that does not come without growing pains — the sort of problems that any organization covets, but problems nonetheless.
DSA’s very name reflects the troubled history of the socialist movement. In the minds of early socialists the term “democratic socialist” would have been one for Monty Python’s Department of Redundancy Department. The whole point of socialism, after all, was to create a society that was more democratic than the status quo, extending democratic rights past the political realm into that of economics, and the difference between socialism and communism was pretty much a matter that only scholars concerned themselves with. But with the devolution of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism, “communism,” the word generally associated with the Soviet Union, came to mean the opposite of democratic to much of the world. And in the U.S. in particular, “socialism” too seemed tainted, to the point where socialists felt the need to tag “democratic” onto it.
DSA was an organization, then, where people most definitely did not call themselves communists. It was not the place to go to find people talking about the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “vanguard parties,” or other phrases reminiscent of the 1920s or 30s left. Among its members, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, while certainly considered interesting and significant — fascinating even, were not events to look to for guidance in contemporary American politics.
And then the expansion. A lot of previously unaffiliated socialists, pleasantly surprised — shocked even — to find the idea entering the public realm, decided it was time to join up and do something about it. The curious also came, eager to learn more of what the whole thing was all about, maybe suffering from imposter syndrome: “Do I really know enough to call myself a socialist?” And then there were the already socialists who would never have thought to join DSA in the pre-Sanders inflation era, some with politics that DSA’s name had been chosen to distinguish the organization from. The expanded DSA was a “big tent,” “multi-tendency” organization. Soon there was a Communist Caucus in DSA — along with a bunch of others. Whether the internal dissonance can be contained and managed long-run remains to be seen, but then what is politics but a continuous series of crises? It’s to the organization’s credit that it has held itself together thus far, but for the moment some hoping to grapple with the questions of twenty-first century socialism may encounter local chapter leadership still finding their guidance in reading the leaves in the tea room of the Russian Revolution. Initial stumbles in the organization’s immediate response to the Hamas attack in Israel prompted a spate of long-time member resignations — some with accompanying open letters — but the trickle did not turn into a torrent.
In the meantime, DSA, now slimmed down to 80-some-odd thousand members, has also struggled with the more immediate, public, and arguably more important question of working out a tenable relationship with those members holding elected political office. While the organization encourages members to seek office and benefits from their successes, it understandably does not want to be associated with public figures with markedly divergent politics. At the same time, office-holding members are answerable to their electorate, not DSA. In the light of some recent experiences on this front, Sanders’s non-joiner stance starts to look somewhat prescient. DSA’s long-term relevance will depend on its ability to carve out a meaningful role as a socialist organization that is not and does not aspire to being a political party.
2028 and beyond
Much of the post-election Democratic Party fretting has quite appropriately centered on the degree to which it has lost the presumption of being the party of the working class. One solution to the problem was succinctly, and improbably, formulated by the centrist New York Times columnist David Brooks: “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.” By Jove, you’ve got it, Mr. Brooks: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable! But Brooks goes on to fret, “Can the Democratic Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this?”
Can students, teachers, suburbanites and hipsters “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption?” Well sure, quite a few have already done so — twice now. The roadblock clearly does not lie there. The real problem is those uncomfortable with the idea of a Democratic Party no longer aspiring to the impossible status of being both the party of the working class and the party of billionaire financiers. For a look into the void at the core of the Democratic Party we need only think back to that moment in February, 2020 when it began to look like the “Bernie Sanders-style disruption” just might pull it off and the party closed ranks, with candidates Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer scurrying out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden in a matter of just six days. None of this underscored the party’s determination not to turn its back on the billionaires so clearly as the fact that at the time of his withdrawal Bloomberg was in the process of spending a billion bucks of his “own money” in pursuit of the nomination. Obama’s fingerprints were never found on these coordinated withdrawals but most observers draw the obvious conclusions. And we know that the prior nominee, executive whisperer Hillary Clinton, was certainly all in on the move. Herein lies our problem, Mr. Brooks.
But how? And who? The how is the easy question in the sense that Bernie Sanders unforgettably demonstrated how much the right presidential primary candidate can alter the national political debate — even when the Democratic Party establishment pulls out all the stops to block them; and even if succeeds in doing so. At the same time, the difficulty in winning and holding congressional seats shows that, while self evidently necessary in the long run, those campaigns do not have the same galvanizing potential. Who? At the moment, the only person whose career thus far suggests such potential is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. But then a lot can happen in four years. And Donald Trump’s reelection portends four years of American politics bizarre beyond anything we’ve seen before.Keep ReadingShow Less
A Note on the 'Lesser of Two Evils' Voting Argument in 2024
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind this argument is truly mind-boggling.
Sep 10, 2024
One of the most bewildering reactions on the part of certain segments of the U.S. left (whatever that means these days) is that every time there is a crucial election, and the voice of reason dictates casting a ballot in a direction which will help the most to keep out of public office the most extreme, and often enough the positively nuts, candidate in the race, is to scream that this is a case of “the lesser of two evils” thinking and to imply in turn that the one making such an argument is, somehow, a sellout.
Noam Chomsky, of all people, has been the recipient of such brainless reactions for much of his life as he has repeatedly made the argument that voting for a third-party or independent candidate in a swing state would accomplish nothing but increase the possibility of the most extreme and positively nuts candidate winning the election.
Why people, and radicals in particular, fail to grasp the reasoning behind such an argument is truly mind-boggling. Either they don’t understand the nature of U.S. politics, with its winner-take-all election system, or they are simply wrapped up in the “feel-good” factor in politics to even notice such subtleties. But since even a fairly bright elementary student would most likely be able to understand the difference between a winner-take-all election system and proportional representation, it would be logical to conclude that what we have here is nothing less than a display of the politics of feeling good, which basically translates to acting in whatever manner makes one feel good, politically speaking, regardless of the consequences of those actions.
Now, one might say that when the Comintern adopted Stalin’s thinking in the 1920s that “social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and proceeded later to lump together Hitler’s Nazi party and the German Social Democratic Party that it was doing so out of conviction that the capitalist world was teetering on the brink of collapse and that the communists would inevitably emerge as the victorious party.
But what is the excuse of the tiny segment of U.S. self-professed radicals who fail to see that in order to advance the program of socialism we must first defeat Trump at the ballot box? Incidentally, this also happens to be the official stance of the Communist Party USA. Yet, one can already hear the argument that U.S. communists must have also fallen victims of the picking a lesser of two evils mental attitude. However, in numerous conversations I've had with radicals (leftists, anarchists, and communists) across Europe, their own thinking was also in line with the reasoning of the Communist Party USA—namely, that priority number one of U.S. progressive voters should be to defeat wannabe dictator Donald Trump in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Can this be done by voting in a swing state for someone like Cornel West or Jill Stein when these candidates have zero chance of winning? My chances of being attacked and killed by a shark, which are estimated to be one in 3.75 million, are far greater than either of these two candidates making it to the White House in November 2024.
Oh, but I forgot! Such realizations hardly matter in comparison to how good it might make one feel by voting for a candidate outside of the two existing parties. Who cares if the candidate who would love to turn the U.S. into an autocracy wins the election? The other candidate is simply the lesser of two evils, which is like saying that it makes no difference to live under a political regime that is inadequate in realizing the ideals of a decent society and one that is bent on a process of societal fasticization.
Still, there is something even more bewildering with the lesser-of-two evils dictum that is thrown around by small segments of the left. Generally speaking, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, there have been two doctrines about voting: the official doctrine, “which holds that politics consists of showing up every few years, pushing a lever, then going back to one’s private pursuits,” and the “left doctrine.” For the latter, “politics consists in constant direct popular engagement in public affairs, including a wide variety of activism on many fronts. Occasionally an event comes up in the formal political arena called an ‘election….’ It’s at most a brief departure from political engagement.”
The third doctrine about voting, which is the “lesser of two evils” principle, has appeared on the political scene rather recently and, as Chomsky highlighted, is “now consuming much debate on the left.” The debate, he went to say, “also falls within the official doctrine, with its laser-like focus on elections.”
Most leftists, radicals and communists know fully well what the Democratic Party represents. Moreover, the recently held Democratic National Convention, with its pathetic effort to reclaim the mantle of "freedom” in a simultaneous display of militaristic jingoism, gave us ample warnings of what lies ahead. It takes no political genius to see that Kamala Harris is yet another centrist and wholly opportunistic Democrat who will change her tune as the circumstances dictate. Or, as the British political philosopher John Gray aptly put it, to recognize that she has “been abruptly transformed by compliant media from a vice-president commonly acknowledged to be barely competent into an uplifting national leader.”
Leftists, radicals and communists living in capitalist societies know that elections are hardly the stuff of political participation that will turn things around. Only grassroots activism can bring about meaningful change. But whenever elections come up, and proportional representation is not in the picture, we hold our nose and vote for the lesser-known threat to what is left of the democracy we have. And then we go back to real activism in order to change society and the world for the better.
It's not complicated.
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