Friday, April 19, 2019

"I was on the executive committee of the Socialist Party"

 'Democratic socialists' Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib prefer socialism to democracy

By Joshua Muravchik

First Bernie Sanders and now also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and a bunch of other new office-holders proclaim themselves “democratic socialists.” What is that? I should know. I was on the executive committee of the Socialist Party and I was the leader of its youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League. The Party was the forerunner of the group Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib belong to today, and the YPSL was the organization Bernie Sanders joined as a college student.


Back then, we called ourselves “democratic socialists” to emphasize our difference from Communism and miscellaneous other dictatorial regimes in the Third World that proclaimed themselves “socialist.” We were not more moderate in terms of our opposition to capitalism. We sought, as our charter stated, “social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution.” But we insisted on getting there by persuasion, elections, and legislation, not violence and tyranny.

In this we were not unlike numerous parties in Western Europe, Australia, Israel and a few other places, variously named “socialist,” “social democratic,” or “labor,” who together made up the Socialist International. What was different, however, was that unlike our party, which was always marginal, those parties won lots of votes and had the experience of forming governments.

Once elected, they each embarked on a step-by-step march to socialism, and one after another they made the same discovery. They could expand social insurance or other benefits but when they started to nationalize industries or make it too difficult to do business, their economies began to sink. Then they either reversed course or were voted out. Private enterprise, they learned, remained the core of a prosperous economy, the goose that lays the golden eggs, and they ceased trying to kill it. As the British Labour Party, whose charter had once propounded a complete end to capitalism, crooned in the 1990s, Labour is the “party of business.”

First Bernie Sanders and now also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and a bunch of other new office-holders proclaim themselves “democratic socialists.” What is that? I should know. I was on the executive committee of the Socialist Party and I was the leader of its youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League. The Party was the forerunner of the group Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib belong to today, and the YPSL was the organization Bernie Sanders joined as a college student.

Back then, we called ourselves “democratic socialists” to emphasize our difference from Communism and miscellaneous other dictatorial regimes in the Third World that proclaimed themselves “socialist.” We were not more moderate in terms of our opposition to capitalism. We sought, as our charter stated, “social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution.” But we insisted on getting there by persuasion, elections, and legislation, not violence and tyranny.

In this we were not unlike numerous parties in Western Europe, Australia, Israel and a few other places, variously named “socialist,” “social democratic,” or “labor,” who together made up the Socialist International. What was different, however, was that unlike our party, which was always marginal, those parties won lots of votes and had the experience of forming governments.

Once elected, they each embarked on a step-by-step march to socialism, and one after another they made the same discovery. They could expand social insurance or other benefits but when they started to nationalize industries or make it too difficult to do business, their economies began to sink. Then they either reversed course or were voted out. Private enterprise, they learned, remained the core of a prosperous economy, the goose that lays the golden eggs, and they ceased trying to kill it. As the British Labour Party, whose charter had once propounded a complete end to capitalism, crooned in the 1990s, Labour is the “party of business.”

In short, “democratic socialism” turned out to be a chimera. We democratic socialists clung to the hope that this would change someday. But meanwhile what was a democratic socialist to do? In the here and now there were countries that were democratic but not socialist and other countries that were socialist but not democratic. Sometimes one had to chose between them. Which to prefer?

Read the rest here.

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