Revising Democratic Socialism: C. A. R. Crosland and Pluralistic Economic Democracy

Abstract

Revising Democratic Socialism: C. A. R. Crosland and Pluralistic Economic Democracy Gary Dorrien Democratic socialism, an idea boasting a rich European history and a slight American history, is making a remarkable resurgence in the United States. No democracy can perpetually survive gross disparities in economic and social condition, so the United States is witnessing a surge of democratic socialism, despite lacking much of a tradition of it. Social Democracy has created the world’s most humane societies, where health care and the rights of liberty are universal for all citizens, elections and higher education are publicly financed, and grotesque levels of inequality are not tolerated. The United States never achieved more than a modicum of social democratic decency, and now even the modicum is endangered. The surge for democratic socialism reflects a widespread recognition that neo‐liberal capitalism works only for a minority and that liberals do not fight for social justice. “Democratic socialism” summarizes what is lacking. But no movement for democratic socialism can afford to ignore the ambiguous history of the struggle for it. Social Democracy is battered and reeling almost everywhere that it exists. Social Democratic and worker parties are consumed by the battle to save the welfare states they created, no European socialist party has dismantled the culture of white supremacy in which it developed, and every Social Democratic party has been absorbed into the global capitalist system. Europe’s only national scale attempt to democratize major business enterprises, the Meidner Plan in Sweden, was abandoned in 1992, just as economic globalization threw Social Democratic parties on the defensive. Since then the historic Social Democratic commitment to economic democracy has been put aside. But economic democracy is precisely what the American surge for democratic socialism is demanding, in this case on elementary issues: universal health care, a $15 minimum wage, higher taxes on high incomes, expanding the cooperative sector, and turning the big banks into public utilities. Here, the European experience is instructive. Charles Fourier, in France, and Robert Owen, in England, propounded the original idea of socialism in the 1820s. It was to achieve the unrealized demands of the French Revolution, which never reached the working class. Instead of pitting workers against each other, a cooperative mode of production and exchange would allow them to work for each other. Socialism was about organizing society as a cooperative community. Soon there were many kinds of socialism conceived by Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, Georgi Plekhanov, William Morris, Karl Kautsky, Sidney Webb, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, V. I. Lenin, and G. D. H. Cole. The founders blamed capitalism for all of society’s ills, but religious socialists did not, so there were Christian and Jewish versions of socialism. Every kind of socialism retains the original idea of organizing society as a cooperative community, yet there is no core that unites the many schools of socialism or democratic socialism, and democracy is as complex and variable as socialism. I believe that the best candidate for an essential “something” in democratic socialism is the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community. This ethical impulse retains the original socialist idea in multiple forms, inspiring struggles for freedom, equality, recognition, and democratic commonwealth. Democratic socialism, though linked historically to revisionism, is not another name for it. “Revisionism” names the periodic necessity of adjusting the socialist idea to real‐world circumstances. Eduard Bernstein, the quintessential revisionist, rocked the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in 1898–1899 by contending that Marx got many things wrong and the party’s Marxist ideology was less credible and democratic than its reformist practices. In Sweden, a similar watershed occurred in 1928 under Per Albin Hansson, who committed the Social Democratic Party to the Bernstein approach and built a political powerhouse. In Britain, the parallel benchmark came in 1955 when Hugh Gaitskell’s revisionist faction won control of the Labour Party, seeking to replace Fabian Collectivism with pluralistic economic democracy.1 Each of these revisionist episodes was a creative response to a stagnant orthodoxy and a blow to the conviction that “socialism” names something definite and credible. The British experience is especially relevant to the U.S. context because Britain has...