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Democratic socialism is a description used by various socialist movements and organizations, to emphasize the democratic character of their political orientation. The term is sometimes used synonymously with 'social democracy', but many self-identified democratic socialists oppose social democracy, seeing it as capitalist.[1]
[edit] History[edit] Forerunners and formative influencesFenner Brockway, a leading British democratic socialist of the Independent Labour Party, wrote in his book Britain's First Socialists:
The tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers was continued in the period described by EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class by Jacobin groups like the London Corresponding Society and by polemicists such as Thomas Paine. Their concern for both democracy and social justice marks them out as key precursors of democratic socialism.[3] The term "socialist" was first used in English in the British Cooperative Magazine in 1827[4] and came to be associated with the followers of Robert Owen, such as the Rochdale Pioneers who founded the co-operative movement. Owen's followers again stressed both participatory democracy and economic socialisation, in the form of consumer co-operatives, credit unions and mutual aid societies. The Chartists similarly combined a working class politics with a call for greater democracy. Many countries have this. The British moral philosopher John Stuart Mill also came to advocate a form of economic socialism within a liberal context. In later editions of his Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill would argue that "as far as economic theory was concerned, there is nothing in principle in economic theory that precludes an economic order based on socialist policies".[5][6] In North America, Henry George promoted the Single Tax Movement, which sought a form of democratic socialism via progressive taxation, with tax only on natural resources. George remained an advocate of the free market for the allocation of all other goods and services.[7] [edit] Modern democratic socialism Democratic socialism became a prominent movement at the end of the 19th century. In the US, Eugene V. Debs, one of the most famous American socialists, led a movement centered around democratic socialism and made five bids for President, once in 1900 as candidate of the Social Democratic Party and then four more times on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America.[8] The socialist industrial unionism of Daniel DeLeon in the United States represented another strain of early democratic socialism in this period. It favored a form of government based on industrial unions, but which also sought to establish this government after winning at the ballot box.[9] In Britain, the democratic socialist tradition was represented in particular by the William Morris' Socialist League in the 1880s and by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) founded by Keir Hardie in the 1890s, of which George Orwell would later be a prominent member.[10] In other parts of Europe, many democratic socialist parties were united in the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (the "Two and a Half International") in the early 1920s and in the London Bureau (the "Three and a Half International") in the 1930s. These internationals sought to steer a course between the social democrats of the Second International, who were seen as insufficiently socialist (and had been compromised by their support for World War I), and the perceived anti-democratic Third International. The key movements within the Two and a Half International were the ILP and the Austromarxists, and the main forces in the Three and a Half International were the ILP and the POUM of Spain.[11][12] In America, a similar tradition continued to flourish in Debs' Socialist Party of America, especially under the leadership of Norman Thomas.[13] Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont is a self-described democratic socialist, and is the only socialist to ever be elected to the United States Senate.[14] In the early 1920s, the guild socialism of G. D. H. Cole attempted to envision a socialist alternative to Soviet-style authoritarianism, while council communism articulated democratic socialist positions in several respects, notably through renouncing the vanguard role of the revolutionary party and holding that the system of the Soviet Union was not authentically socialist.[15] During India's freedom movement, many figures on the left of the Indian National Congress organized themselves as the Congress Socialist Party. Their politics, and those of the early and intermediate periods of JP Narayan's career, combined a commitment to the socialist transformation of society with a principled opposition to the one-party authoritarianism they perceived in the Stalinist revolutionary model. This political current continued in the Praja Socialist Party, the later Janata Party and the current Samajwadi Party.[16][17] In the Middle East, the biggest democratic socialist party is the Organization of Iranian People's Fedaian (Majority). The folkesocialisme or people's socialism that emerged as a vital current of the left in Scandinavia beginning in the 1950s could be characterized as a democratic socialism in the same vein. [edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] External links
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