Yes, Democratic Socialists Want Soviet-Style Control of Capital
There is no doubt that people who identify as democratic socialists are making large gains in the Democratic Party. They control mayoral offices in major cities like New York and Seattle and are going to be a force in the next Congress, having seen enormous success in the Democratic Party congressional primaries.
However, there is much disagreement over the extent of how far this current batch of socialists want to push social, political, and economic changes. Most claim that they just want to turn the US into Denmark or Sweden, and that they are democratic, not autocratic. Yet, despite their claims, there is good reason to believe that this latest movement of “democratic” socialists is far from benign, and if they gain the kind of power they want, the US will be permanently changed—and not for the better.
Socialist Bernie Sanders—who effusively praised the Soviet Union when he visited it in 1988—famously claimed in a 2015 presidential primary debate that he wanted the US to be like Denmark, and that his version of socialism was more oriented to healthcare and other services provided by the country’s welfare policies. Since then, the standard line from the socialist camp has been that the DSA and other socialist groups simply want the US to have “free” medical care, “free” childcare, and other such state-sponsored services, all paid with tax dollars.
Bhaskar Sunkara—editor of the socialist publication Jacobin and a self-proclaimed democratic socialist—said in a New York Times interview that he and others simply are trying to address issues of inequality around important services:
Programmatically, I think it’s overwhelmingly about these economic issues. If you look at a figure like Bernie, if you look at Zohran (Mamdani), he’s talking about the cost of housing, he’s talking about health care, he’s talking about all these other bread-and-butter demands.
Sunkara goes on to claim that his movement is little more than making capitalism more “humane” by using taxes and regulations to direct more resources toward people who are poor or who lack health insurance and the like:
There’s an immediate set of demands that you could call us attempting to bring about doses of socialism within capitalism.
This comes in the realm of decommodification of certain goods, providing them as social rights instead of them being dependent on your ability to pay.
Health care in America is partially decommodified. If you’re elderly, if you’re very poor, if you’re a child, you’re going to have guaranteed access to health care. We want to see that extended.
Same thing with things like Social Security and certain other benefits, or an expansion of the welfare state — not unlike Norway.
However, he adds:
I also would go further and say that even within capitalism in the here and now, there are sectors of the economy that I would like to see greater state control of. In the old language of the left, we would call it the commanding heights of the economy, but even things like rail — there are benefits to selective nationalization, particularly of natural monopolies.
That vision right there of socialism within capitalism, could be true of a lot of social democrats.
So beyond that, the question is: Why would you go about calling yourself a democratic socialist? For me, I call myself a democratic socialist because I actually believe in a socialism beyond capitalism.
I actually do believe in an economy built on the idea that workers should control their workplaces and on this more radical vision of a society without capitalism, even if it still has a motor needed for investment and for efficiency gains and growth and so on.
One can assume safely that the “vision” of people like Sanders, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, and other self-proclaimed democratic socialists would share Sunkara’s views, which really do go to the heart of the socialist narrative: control of what is now private capital. For all of the talk about providing free healthcare—and who doesn’t want “free” healthcare, right?—and other social and housing services, the goal of these supposedly benign “social democrats” is very much in line with what we saw in the former USSR, not Denmark or Norway. (After all, both countries haveprivate capital markets and privately-owned capital).
There are two terms that come up regularly in the democratic socialist jargon, one being “decommodification” and the other being “social control” of capital. While a decade ago Sanders and others simply claimed to be calling for more interventionism, or some government regulatory control of capital, we are likely to see more calls for outright nationalization or its equivalent of capital, housing, healthcare, and more.
What do we mean by “decommodification”?
The term “decommodification” has become commonplace in the socialist jargon in recent times, and is described as:
In current theories of consumption, consumer practices are often described as processes of decommodification or decommoditization. The notion of decommodification indicates the active work—symbolic and practical—that people as consumers do on goods to make them effective, meaningful, and usable in everyday relations, thus partially removing them from the cash nexus. It denotes the fact that consumer practices amount to a relatively autonomous sphere of action and cannot be directly reduced to production or exchange relations.
In late capitalist societies, consumption is seen as related to the purchase, use, and disposal of commodities. Commodities are goods that are sold on the market at a price; they have often been produced for sale, but they may exit the circuits of monetary exchange, for example, through gift-giving relations. Commodities are thus goods that undergo what in Marxist terms is a commodification process.
In a market setting, scarce goods are bought and sold, and referring to them as “commodities” does not make them any less scarce. All the usual rules of exchange and production apply here, as they always have. It is important to note that whatever is bought and sold in a market setting can be done because these goods are scarce.
Socialists, however, want us to believe that these goods are scarce because they are bought and sold, and that they would be abundant if they were not monopolized by the capitalists. The authors of the neo-Calvinist book Responsible Technology, for example, blame capitalism for scarcity and hold that, if it were abolished, the result would be an era of abundance:
. . .scarcity will not necessarily be vanquished, although its painful consequences may be reduced. In addition, certain present forms of contrived scarcity—developed through persuasive efforts to increase desire or through monopolistic efforts to restrict supply—may be eliminated. The finiteness of the creation remains a reality under all circumstances, but to the Christian, economics is simply the care for a garden of limited size.
The book goes on to say that prices themselves play a vital role into turning abundance into scarcity:
Economics—strongly affected by a mechanical rationalism borrowed from Cartesian influences and Newtonian mechanics—sought both a precise measuring rod for economic value and. . .a deterministic view of how economic value comes into being. The result was a price theory of value that today pervades both the halls of academia and everyday consciousness. Price theory holds that economically valuable things are those with prices, that economic value is proportional to price, and that nonpriced entities are economically valueless.
Thus, to ensure an abundance of the things we need, such as housing, food, and medical care, these goods must be taken out of the market and distributed administratively by the state. The democratic socialists of America website declares:
You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.
OK, enough about bills. What do you do on your day off? Maybe in the morning, you walk your kids to school, run errands, or go to a doctor’s appointment. In the afternoon, you might play a sport, practice a new skill, read, plan a trip. In the evening, you could meet up with friends or family and eat together, maybe go to the movies or down to the park.
According to the socialists running for office this fall, this wonderful, limitless future can belong to everyone (and especially the workers) if people can see past their capitalist upbringings and do the one thing necessary to create all this abundance: seize private capital. If private ownership of capital goods creates inequality and scarcity, then “social” (that is, state) ownership of those things will enable us to live the good life described above.
While people like John Fea of Messiah University claim that democratic socialists are benign in their plans, simply wanting to make life better for everyone, Jonathan Chait sees a much darker side to the DSA. Although the organization claims to support democratic values and claims to be willing to accept electoral outcomes that don’t always go their way, the rank-and-file of the DSA is moving in another direction. Chait writes:
(The) left-wing factions (of the DSA) have realigned the organization in firm opposition to liberal democracy. In 2021, the DSA joined the SΓ£o Paulo Forum, a communist-led international network—a move that would, one DSA member protested at the time, “support authoritarian governments who systematically violate the basic tenets of democratic socialism.” It proclaimed its solidarity with Venezuela under the dictatorship of NicolΓ‘s Maduro, and with Cuba under that of the Castro brothers. The DSA now locates its vision of the ideal society in the world’s most despotic regimes.
Over the past several years, the communist faction of the DSA has become the party’s strongest element, and that should not be surprising. Communists, historically speaking, have always been highly motivated and have become experts at political organizing. Furthermore, history shows that while communists have adopted the language of “democracy,” they have much different aims than most people who think of themselves as “democrats.” Writes Chait:
The organization is still called democratic socialists, of course, but the term does not necessarily mean “liberal democracy” as Americans have traditionally defined it. Many socialist thinkers define what they call “true democracy” as a system in which capitalism has been overturned and the proletarian classes have seized political power through their representative vanguard (that is, them). Totalitarian states such as the Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) accordingly labeled themselves “democratic.”
The key to establishing power is and always has been the seizure of private property and private capital. The socialists have claimed that “true” socialism will always result in abundance for the workers. The history of socialism has always been different, but that seems to discourage no one from believing that, this time, they can make the system work.
Socialists and the Democratic Party
Many Democrats are looking at the infiltration of the DSA into their party with alarm. Democratic stalwart Van Jones—a veteran of the Barack Obama presidency—has been vocal in his opposition to the DSA and seems to have a following within his party.
However, the crony capitalism that successfully defined the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations seems to have run its course. The billionaires that once provided much of the campaign cash for Democratic politicians are now the targets of new tax and regulatory initiatives designed to plunder their bank accounts and property. Furthermore, the most successful campaigns for Democratic campaigns seem to be built upon confiscating property of the very wealthy and cutting off aid to Israel, not creating conditions for the development of private capital.
It is almost certain that future Democratic Party electoral successes will be based upon the seizure of private capital, socializing the housing markets, and forcing up minimum wages. None of these things are commensurate with increasing economic prosperity, and none of this bodes well for our future. With Republicans like President Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance pushing their own versions of collectivism, we are likely facing some hard times ahead.
