W E B - O N LY | P O L I T I C S

( H T T P S : / / T H E P O I N T M A G . C O M / C AT E G O R Y / P O L I T I C S ) | A P R I L 6 ,
2020

Socialism or Democracy?
by Justin Evans
(https://thepointmag.com/author/justinevans/)

For a few weeks, while I was writing the !rst dra" of this review, the
leading candidate in the Democratic presidential primary was an avowed
socialist. #is was unprecedented, and revealing in terms of the changing
attitudes of Americans. Huge numbers of Americans now see socialism
as superior to capitalism—particularly among the young and among
Democrats (https://!vethirtyeight.com/features/is-socialism-still-an-
e$ective-political-bogeyman/). Regardless of the ultimate fate of Bernie
Sanders’s campaign, socialism has reentered democratic politics in the
United States.

But socialism’s appeal is as clear as its de!nition is hazy. Some of those

who support Sanders think that he wants to turn the U.S. into social-
democratic Denmark. Others believe in a true democratic socialist state.
Still others imagine a socialist utopia. What unites all these notions of
socialism is the conviction that contemporary socialism would not
mean, as Chris Matthews seems to think, executions in Central Park
(https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/chris-matthews-
bernie-sanders-public-executions-949802/). #e reason is that, in
contrast to the twentieth century’s authoritarian socialist regimes, the
new socialism will be “democratic.” Indeed, for all serious socialist
thinkers today, socialism goes hand in hand with democracy.

Two of these thinkers have recently written books attempting to de!ne

socialism’s substance and pinpoint its appeal. Among other things, this
gives us a valuable opportunity to examine the case for the connection
between socialism and democracy.

#e two books are Bhaskar Sunkara’s #e Socialist Manifesto and

Nathan J. Robinson’s Why You Should Be a Socialist. Both Sunkara and
Robinson edit socialist magazines—Jacobin and Current A$airs
respectively—that are as thoughtful as but far more entertaining than
socialist standards like #e Monthly Review. Both authors have likewise
contributed to the public’s rediscovery of socialism as a viable and
exciting force in democratic politics. Both o$er intellectually rigorous,
stylish explanations for socialism’s new standing, and equally impressive
de!nitions of what socialism actually is. And yet neither book really
grapples with the question of why, if socialism and democracy are so
compatible, there are so few examples, in history or the present, of
socialists being democratically elected, and then governing as socialists.

●
Why is socialism becoming so popular in democratic states? #is is the
question that Robinson starts with. In attempting to answer it, he
emphasizes our horror at the exploitation of other people. Socialists, he
argues, are the ones who are properly responding to the horrors of
climate change, nuclear weapons and “the de!ning feature of our age …
inequality.” According to a well-known study
(http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/09/americans_have_no_
Americans are uncomfortable with inequality, even though they also
vastly underestimate how bad it is. #e richest one percent of
households own over half of America’s equities, by value. #e bottom 50
percent own almost none.

Whether or not this kind of inequality is in any way justi!able,

Robinson documents how it has a$ected the attitudes of young people.
Millennials have postponed or forgone children because “childcare is too
expensive”; thanks to economic inequality, “people are missing out on
one of the most incredible human experiences, that of being a mom or
dad.” Even if you somehow succeed in being born, you’re still likely to
lose out at the other end. Life expectancy for Americans has fallen over
the last few years, despite great increases in life expectancy for the
wealthy. In other words: as of 2010, your income and wealth “determine
not only your level of comfort, but literally how much time you will
spend on Earth.”

On Robinson’s view, socialism is a moral “orienting principle,” which

emerges in response to these phenomena. #e socialist is committed to a
“set of values,” derived from “the solidarity ethic” expressed by Eugene
Debs. When he was sentenced to prison for sedition, Debs addressed the
judge: “Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living
beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the
meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower
class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and
while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

#e socialist notes the kinship of all beings, and because of that is aware
of the moral demand that we eliminate inequalities. And this thought
brings Robinson to democracy. Because of their principles, he says,
socialists are committed to “expanding democracy.” In fact, “socialism is
a term for economic democracy,” because to democratize the economy is
to change “who owns capital,” and so to give people “ownership over
their work.” #en we will be able to “cooperate for the common good.”
Only that society could be truly democratic, because democracy just
means people having a meaningful voice in the direction of their lives.
Socialism o$ers us an alternative moral and political foundation to the
principles and the system that gave us economic inequality and
dysfunctional democracy. Anyone who wants a more democratic, more
decent world, in which others are less exploited, will be interested in
socialism.

Sunkara, on the other hand, says relatively little about “what’s wrong
with the world today.” Instead, he spends much of the book writing
about what went wrong with socialism in the twentieth century—the
disasters of Russia, and China, and so on; the failed bargain of social
democracy in Europe; the long history of the United States’ resistance to
socialism in any form. He also details the great triumphs of socialists
around the world, and how they have helped to make our lives far better
than they would otherwise have been. But the real focus of his book is a
story about how revolution might take place today, and what “a di$erent
social system could look like.”

#e main character in this story is “you.” You’re not very involved in

revolutionary events, but you do bene!t from them. At the end, workers
control their !rms and get a share of the pro!ts based on their
education, experience, authority and how unpleasant their working
conditions are. Universal Basic Income is available, so people can choose
to change jobs without being threatened by poverty. Racial disparities
persist. So does misogyny. But thanks to increased worker control of the
workplace, and various other reforms, you live “in the world’s !rst truly
democratic society.” You get to make choices about your life based on
your interests and desires, not based on how the markets will respond to
your interests and desires.

#is story is compelling, but importantly di$erent from Robinson’s. For

Sunkara, socialism draws converts by o$ering them something, rather
than asking for their moral allegiance. Sunkara says
(https://twitter.com/sunraysunray/status/1227321995165143041) that “to
be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who
they are, where they’re from, or what they did.” But the stress here is on
the thought that you have moral worth, not that you should respect
everyone else’s moral worth. You should be a socialist because socialism
would bene!t you more than any other social development. #e rational,
self-interested thing to want, for almost everyone, is socialism.

While Robinson sees the socialist surge as rooted in moral revulsion,

Sunkara argues that the strength of Sanders’s campaign is his insight
that the rich are not “morally confused”: they just have “a vested interest
in the exploitation of others.” Sanders’s voters are “ready for a politics
oriented around their needs.” Both Sanders’s success, and socialism’s, are
products of socialism’s return “to its roots: class stru&le and a class
base.” Sanders will defend your class interest against the class interest of
the capitalists. #is is what democracy means, for Sunkara: a political
system that works in the interests of the majority. “To be a socialist
today is to believe that more, not less, democracy will help solve social
ills—and to believe that ordinary people can shape the systems that
shape their lives.”

●
Robinson and Sunkara disagree, then, over why socialism is popular
now, because they disagree about how people are motivated to become
socialists. And yet, despite these di$erences, they both see socialism and
democracy as going hand in hand. In one way, this is a familiar thought.
Socialists have been arguing for some time that socialists and socialism
are not necessarily Stalinist (https://jacobinmag.com/2016/03/socialism-
cold-war-tyranny-democracy-authoritarianism). We have disputed the
claims of neoliberal theorists like Friedrich Hayek that socialism and
democracy are incompatible; that claim is ridiculous, because even if you
can !nd each of them without the other, socialism and democracy are
perfectly compatible.

But Sunkara and Robinson go much further. #eir claim is the very
strong one that socialism, alone among social systems, is democracy.
And they are not alone (https://thepointmag.com/politics/the-
dictatorship-of-the-present/) in arguing that case. As a simple
theoretical statement, it makes sense: socialism means removing
economic force from people’s lives, so we can make decisions for
ourselves based on our interests and desires. It is democratic in the same
way that liberalism was democratic, because liberalism removed state
interference from people’s lives. Socialism could be called democracy
carried to its logical conclusion: as liberals and republicans see, giving
people power over the political system is good and democratic. Giving
people power over the economic system, as well, is even better. #at
would be echt democratic.

But Sunkara and Robinson’s claim that socialism is uniquely enabling of

democracy is far more complicated than either author seems to realize.
To see why, consider that exactly the same claim used to be made about
capitalism. Hayek thought the free market was the only way to allow
people to make decisions without coercion or the arbitrary exercise of
authority by the state. Milton Friedman saw the market as “a system of
proportional representation.” In both buying and voting, he argued,
individuals register their desires in ways that lead others to alter their
behavior (by producing more or less of a good, or by instituting this or
that policy).

Of course, as Quinn Slobodian has recently shown, neoliberal thinkers

(including Hayek) always knew it didn’t work that way. Democratic
procedures would o"en lead to anti-capitalist demands. So, throughout
the postwar period, global institutions were used to restrain the
nationalist and protectionist voices of democracy. #e neoliberal world,
Slobodian writes (https://books.google.com/books?
id=l7pTDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT15&dq=not+a+borderless+market+without+states+bu
is “not a borderless market without states but a doubled world kept safe
from mass demands for social justice and redistributive equality by the
guardians of the economic constitution.” Capitalism and democracy
might be identical, but they are also deeply incompatible, because we
cannot be trusted to act in the interests of a global capitalist economy
that fundamentally restricts our choices—which is to say, capitalism is
not even remotely responsive to people’s interests and desires. Every
populist movement is grounded in that fundamental fact.

But the problems that the ideological capitalists faced ought to also
haunt those of us interested in democratic socialism. #ere are, I think,
at least three such problems. First, as with capitalism and democracy, it
is clear that democracy and socialism don’t necessarily go together.
Second, class-based socialism will almost certainly not win elections.
And, !nally, if a socialist party did win a national election, the result
would be economic chaos and the delegitimization of that government.
Sadly, few people writing about democratic socialism seem interested in
reckoning with these questions; those who do
(https://jacobinmag.com/2020/3/our-!rst-100-days-could-be-a-
nightmare) rarely have inspiring solutions. Nor do I. I don’t think that’s
our fault. Rather, these are problems that cannot be solved in theory.

#e !rst problem is that democracy is fundamentally about who is

making decisions. It is a procedure, and the results of democratic
procedure (in a parliament or in a workplace) cannot be predetermined.
By contrast, socialism (like capitalism) is a statement about
what decisions ought to be made. It is a substantive goal or principle.
#e question for democratic socialists is how we can balance a very
strong commitment to speci!c social transformations—workplace
democracy, restrictions on inequality and so on—with an equally strong
commitment to procedural methods of attaining that substantive
outcome.

Both Robinson and Sunkara seem to take it as a given that people would
want socialist policies, given the choice, and they give no answer to the
question: What does the socialist do, if the ordinary people turn out not
to want socialism? #e neoliberals had an answer to this problem, which
is why neoliberalism was successful (in its own way). For neoliberals, if
people don’t want capitalism, you erect a parallel set of institutions that
can make macroeconomic decisions without the people having any say in
them. #at is, neoliberal policymakers explicitly chose capitalism over
democracy. #at kind of decision is morally rebarbative. It is also the
kind of decision that you have to make if you really want to remake the
world. Socialists show no sign of being willing to make it.

Perhaps, though, they just refrain from doing so in public. #ere are very
good political reasons for democratic socialists to ignore the problem.
Democracy is such a shibboleth that it is politically impossible to say, in
public, that one would choose a socialist outcome—say, con!scatory
taxes—even if it could not be democratically legitimated. On the other
hand, it is simply inhuman to say the opposite: to say that, if we can’t
democratically decide to feed people and give them medicine and
housing and enable them to have children, well, tant pis for our moral
sense, because democracy has spoken. No democratic socialist could say
that and remain a socialist (nor, one hopes, retain their self-respect). We
value democracy, but we also value socialist outcomes. #ey don’t always
go together. #at is a problem that needs to be faced.

#e second problem is one of electoral politics. Sunkara cleverly su&ests

that “to be a ‘moderate’ in the United States … doesn’t mean you’re a fan
of Michael Bloomberg”; it means you’re “fed up with ‘liberalism’ … and
‘conservatism’ … and looking for something di$erent.” #at may well be
true in more cases than the pundits would have us believe: in a two-
party democracy that fetishizes moderation, anyone who cares enough to
see the glaring )aws in both parties has good reason to tell pollsters,
“Yes, of course I am a moderate, how could I be anything else?” And, if
Sunkara is right about how politics works, his new society will be easy to
put in place. #e working class—the 60 percent of the population who
“rely on wages to survive and possesses … little to no net wealth”—will
certainly accept an “independent working-class politics,” because it is in
our self-interest to do so. We will embrace workplace democracy,
because it is in our self-interest.

But this approach is more fraught than Sunkara admits. National

electoral victories require about 50 percent of the vote. In that case,
Sunkara’s “independent working-class politics” would require over !ve-
sixths of the working class to vote for a socialist candidate. Imagine the
best possible case for socialism—an incompetent and generally disliked
right-wing leader of the right-wing party. Survey data su&ests
(https://projects.!vethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/) that some
40 percent of Americans would be immovably attached to that
president. #is least socialist, least admirable of presidents would surely
retain at least 20 percent of the working-class vote (probably more), and
that 20 percent is easily enough to keep a hypothetical working-class
socialist party out of government. With a mediocre Republican
president, the realities of electoral politics would be even more
immovable (fools like Bush and Reagan, knaves like Nixon, nonentities
like Ford: all had approval ratings comparable to or higher than
Trump’s). #e election of a socialist government would require the
conversion of massive numbers of people who !nd socialism’s
substantive proposals abhorrent, because, despite socialist
mythologizing, the working class does not and never will vote as a bloc.
An independent, class-based party is doomed to electoral failure at the
national level, at least in a country that looks anything like the current
United States.

On the other hand, Sunkara rightly argues that class-based parties were
at the root of most socialist success. Working people organized for the
right to unionize, and for the eight-hour day, and for living wages. #ey
faced down government repression. And they did this, as Sunkara
su&ests, because of self-interest. #ey were not motivated by moral
outrage. Robinson’s principled socialism seems even less likely to lead to
the democratic institution of socialist policies than Sunkara’s class-based
politics.

But what would happen if a socialist government were elected in a

developed state, like the United States? “We ultimately have larger
ambitions than ‘socialism in one country,’ but if it’s possible anywhere,
it’s possible here,” Sunkara claims. But the condition is false: socialism in
one country is impossible. Democratic socialism’s third problem is more
or less what Dani Rodrik called
(https://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/06/the-
inescapable.html) the globalization trilemma. Rodrik pointed out that
we can have any two of the nation-state, globalization and democracy,
but never all three. Global economics only works if nation-states cannot
control their own economies; if nations break the rules, they will
destabilize the economic )ows that globalization relies on. But
democracy only works if nation-states can control their own economies,
because democracy just is people deciding what their government’s
policies should be. Now that the rewards of globalization have
disappeared into the sinkhole of the rich, meaningful growth has ceased
and democratic control eludes us, voters have rightly rejected the
bargain that globalization o$ered. But, it turns out, there’s little we can
do about it. When non-superpower states like Greece (or Turkey, and so
on) try to assert democratic control over their economies, they are
punished by capital )ight, capital strikes, political attacks, sanctions and
so on.

It may seem that the trilemma would not a$ect a le"ist government. A
socialist would happily junk the nation-state, rewire globalization in
favor of the people and keep democracy. But in practice, the le" faces its
own version of the paradox: it is impossible to have a democratically
legitimated le"ist government under global capitalism. People want
le"ist governments because they o$er some minimal security and
quality of life. Today, a government can be democratically legitimated,
but non-le" (as when Greece was forced to give up its le"ist policies);
and it can be le", but illegitimate (thus, perhaps, “le"ist” Venezuela
(https://www.currenta$airs.org/2018/05/what-venezuela-tells-us-about-
socialism)). But no state can escape global capitalism. And, thanks to
globalization, any attempt to institute socialism would have the same
e$ects as Greece’s attempt to escape debt peonage. Without the ability
to o$er security and quality of life, the socialist government would be
delegitimated, and almost certainly get voted out. Some le"ists are
considering nationalism (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/pop-
up-populism-the-failure-of-le"-wing-nationalism-in-germany) as an
alternative to le"ist globalism. #ey look on wistfully as right-wing
populist governments legitimate themselves through xenophobia and
knuckle-dra&ing varieties of religion. #is is even more appealing
during a time of global pandemic, when “they” come not just for our
jobs, but laden with disease that will take our very lives. Nonetheless,
socialism in one country has never worked, and cannot work, as long as
the rest of the world is capitalist.

●
In light of these problems, at least, Robinson’s approach to democratic
socialism seems more in tune than Sunkara’s with what socialists used to
call objective conditions. Robinson doesn’t make this argument
explicitly, but his focus on moral principles and generational di$erences
points the way to a form of socialism at home in the 21st century:
socialism as identity politics.

Socialism is usually thought of as the opposite of identity politics, which

Sunkara rightly worries has “become an agenda of inclusionary
neoliberalism,” contributing to a public sphere where racism “is
somehow the cause of, explanation for, and consequence of most social
phenomena.” At the same time, it is easy to be impressed by the late
nineteenth-century German Socialist Party, which, as Sunkara himself
explains, developed a parallel culture (or “identity”) for the working
class. #ey had to conjure class consciousness, just as feminists and gay
liberationists in the twentieth century did their own “consciousness-
raising” outside the mainstream. As an identity claim of this kind,
contemporary socialism could be just as successful as the identity
politics of the Sixties, which conjured a vast cultural shi" out of the
generation gap between those who fought in the Second World War and
those who came a"er them. #is is not necessarily a revolutionary
politics, nor a democratic one, but it is plausible, and has a long socialist
heritage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci#Hegemony).

#anks to the clashes between democracy, socialism and neoliberal

globalization, nobody can govern a nation-state as a socialist. But,
thankfully, politics isn’t just about national elections and grand social
systems. Socializing policies can be implemented without tri&ering the
le"ist’s trilemma, and socialists must keep pushing for those policies.
Medicare For All might even encourage more, rather than less,
investment in the U.S.; I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like for
businesses to deal with this health care system. Student debt forgiveness
would stimulate the economy far more e$ectively than quantitative
easing, without tri&ering large-scale capitalist paranoia or asset
bubbles. Socialist policies have already been put into place
(https://www.oxfordamerican.org/item/1296-the-socialist-experiment) at
the metropolitan level in exciting ways.

At a national level, it seems likely that we face a Trump/Biden election. I

would much have preferred a President Sanders. #at would have made
the United States, and the world, a better place. But if he had won, I
wouldn’t have been disappointed when he turned out to be a kinder,
gentler, less successful LBJ, because he could not have been a socialist
president.

Image credit: CC-BY-SA-4.0 (Σ)