 What do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn all have in common? They are all democratic socialists. But what does that mean? Democratic socialists today argue for healthcare and housing for all. Workplace democracy, bringing power to the people, a green new deal, and so on. To those who grew up on Cold War propaganda, the very connection between democracy and socialism sounds odd. To understand why it's not, we need to look at the role of democracy in the socialist tradition and the very meaning of democracy itself. Let's take a look. Part one. What is democracy? Imagine you're back in the early to mid 19th century. There is no single parliamentary estate with universal suffrage or what we would consider to be a decent set of political rights for everyone. Not a single one. But what they do have is a knowledge of history, especially of ancient Athens and a bunch of other democratic Greek cities. One of the main questions confronting ancient Greeks was how should we structure the independent city-states we live in? They came up with three main alternatives, either one person rules and it's a monarchy or a minority of citizens rule and it's an oligarchy or the citizenry as a whole rules and it's a democracy. Note that these excluded women, slaves and resident foreigners as well as other non-citizens. The important thing here is who holds and exercises the power to rule, not whether people vote or not. This is important because voting doesn't necessarily give you any power. If the rich control which two or three candidates stand for election and they agree on almost everything, you can vote, but you don't really have any power to rule. Remember this for later. If you think about it, this concept of democracy is a lot less confusing than the often disjointed and contradictory ways that the capitalist media and intellectuals talk about democracy today. For capitalist intellectuals, media, politicians and what have you, democracy is still partly associated with general vague ideas of collective self-rule, a very different idea of being able to vote for your overlords, recognizing some basic political freedoms and it's associated with values like freedom and equality. The ancient concept of democracy was taken up by the radical enlightenment tradition that much of early socialism grew out of. People like Spinoza, Condorcet, Dennis Diderot, Mary Wilsoncraft, Olymp de Gouges, Thomas Paine and others. But they focused not on what ancient city-states needed, but on how to change societies on a much bigger scale. They also began to focus much more broadly than the ancient Greeks had on questions of feminism and women's emancipation, anti-racism and anti-slavery and the power of private property, the power that the capitalist class uses to oppress the vast majority of people and control the politics of capitalist society. Part two, democracy and the capitalist state. It was to prevent democracy in this sense that the American Founding Fathers designed their new republic based on the mixed political structure of the British Empire and also to some extent classical Rome. Mixed here refers to a mix of democratic, oligarchical and monarchical elements. They did so explicitly aiming to prevent democracy and the Athenian type debt cancellations they worried it would lead to. As David Graber has pointed out, to this day, there's nothing that scares the rulers of America more than the prospect of democracy breaking out. Fortunately for the rich, there's nothing like democracy in the classical sense, anywhere in the United States or as far as we know, in Europe either. As a recent study by Martin Gaillans and Benjamin Page concludes, when the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. Who do they find does have power? Essentially, the richest, the ruling capitalist class. On the ancient Greek concept of democracy, we don't live in a democracy at all, but an oligarchy. That's one of the rather obvious reasons why liberals have had to tie themselves in knots about redefining democracy so they can use this positive label for the manifestly undemocratic institutions they want to idealize. So, understanding democracy as a broad idea of the collective self-rule of all people, many radical Democrats evolved into early socialists. The most famous example of this is of course, Daddy Marx, I mean Karl Marx. Part 3, From Democracy to Socialism The early Marx is often described as a liberal, but that's nonsense. For all of the 19th century, almost all liberalism wanted to exclude working-class people and women entirely from politics. They enthusiastically support imperialism and colonialism, and they're often extremely racist as well. The early, radically democratic Marx, by contrast, thought that all human beings had a power for conscious individual and collective self-rule. And he saw that they were prevented from being their own masters in all monarchical or dictatorial and oligarchical states, as well as under any form of capitalism. Instead, he argued for society collectively self-ruled by all of its participants in both its politics and its economics. This involved absolute freedoms of speech, press, conviction and association, and overcoming the split that capitalism has created between politics and economics. Unlike the liberals and Republicans of his day, he never excluded women, people of color, slaves or the working-class. When he became a socialist, all of this was retained, but he added a bunch of things he thought would be needed for a truly democratic economy. Basically, he adds that a truly democratic socialist society also needs to have a kind of democratic planning, to replace the impersonal domination of markets, eliminate capitalism's hierarchical division of labor, and distribute goods and services according to need. When the first socialist parties formed at the end of the 19th century, they called themselves social democratic parties for a reason, because they wanted to extend democracy, true democracy, to all of society. Traditionally, socialism was about making society more democratic in two ways. First, it was about extending people's real power to rule. All people who live in a society, regardless of class, gender, race and so on, should rule it together. Only that way can they really be free. And this should not stop at the state. It should extend to all major social institutions, including the economy. So socialism insisted that not only should we self-govern our political institutions, but our economic institutions as well, so that over time the split between them would wither away. Socialism was also about deepening the power of the people as a whole. It's not simply about extending the vote to all people, or to economic institutions as well. It's about fundamentally reshaping the power relations around us. By having workers democratically self-ruling the economy, and all people jointly self-governing society, they wanted to do away with the divisions between rulers and ruled, bosses and workers, capitalists and proletarians. This is why the rich always oppose socialism so much. They know that socialism is all about the people taking power over their society and their own lives. And that requires taking away the power that the rich hold over them. It's common to say that when you remove the privilege and power over others that someone has enjoyed for a long time, it feels to them like they're being oppressed. They're not actually being oppressed, of course. They just can't stand dealing with the people they've always looked upon as their inferiors as actual human beings and being forced to treat them as truly free and equal people. A liberal or conservative critic of socialism might respond to this point as follows. We all know that socialism in the USSR was undemocratic and authoritarian. Aren't we just redefining what socialism means now to make it more appealing? The answer to this question is of course no. The only reason that anyone could think that this is redefining socialism is because they just don't know the history of it. Socialism was always essentially about democracy. That's why the builders of the USSR like Lenin repeatedly stressed the argument that it was really democratic in some sense, even if his critics found that implausible. And it's also why the socialist critics of the USSR kept criticizing it for its lack of democracy, which they saw as essential to socialism because it always had been. Part 4 Democratic Socialism Today These disagreements were less about the goal of socialism, a truly free, equal and democratic society. They were about the means you use to get there. This is where what we today call democratic socialism really comes center stage. What we call democratic socialism today is those try not only to introduce a democratic socialist society, but those who try to do so via winning local and national elections and using state power to drive the transition to socialism. In practice, this comes down to a combination of mass movements, especially unions and community organizations, combined with a political party to take and use state power. The democratic socialists of today say they want a free, equal and democratic socialism. They're a bit hazy about what that will look like, but we have some suggestions. One suggestion is market socialism, for example the model that David Schweikart developed called economic democracy. This combines cooperatives with elected managers and major decisions being made by one person, one vote, by all who work there. Local democratic control over investment, funded by a flat capital assets tax, and a parliamentary state with extensive public services that plays the role of employer of last resort. Another model is participatory economics, developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hanell. Here, societies run from the bottom up by a combination of workers councils and community councils, where local communities are governed by community councils and workplaces are governed by workers' councils. These form federations up to the national or even international level. All delegates to higher level councils are mandated, subject to immediate recall and frequently rotated. To eliminate the impersonal domination of market forces or control by an elite of central planners, they propose a bottom up form of planning called participatory planning. To prevent a small managerial elite from de facto running everything, they propose replacing the hierarchical division of labour with a system of balanced jobs. More information about both of these models can be found in the links in the description. The policies of modern democratic socialists are much more modest, but are things that really everyone who cares about democracy and a decent life for all should want to see. They include basic rights to the things you need for a life of dignity and a bit more freedom, like universal health care, a living wage for all, better rights in the workplace, securing you from being unjustly fired, and ensuring that you have the right to join a union. It includes making the state more democratic by getting corporate money, essentially the rich legally bribing politicians out of politics and banning undemocratic corporate lobbying. And it includes plans to bring more of the economy under democratic control. That includes the control of national and local governments and under the control of workers themselves in different ways. We see this aim of workers control in, for example, Jeremy Corbyn and the British Labour Party's proposal for wage earners funds to transfer ownership to workers, and in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposal for a green new deal, stressing new workplaces that should be controlled democratically by workers and local communities, though the details of the latter are admittedly hazy. In response to this parliamentary strategy, left Marxists, anarchists and others argue the following. Can you expect a fundamentally hierarchical institution like the state to create a non-hierarchical society like a free, equal and democratic socialism? If you put new rulers at the top of an institution like that, won't the new social relations they are placed in, with the new interests inherent in them, change these people? Becoming society's new rulers, won't they come to not want to give up their new fan positions of power, wealth and privilege? Won't they come to see these things that are inevitable and even desirable, and as a result come to a post-transitioning to a truly bottom-up democratic socialism that would threaten their new fan positions? All of this is in turn based on the traditional Marxist idea that human beings develop through the social relations and practices they are part of, and nobody has the power, through sheer voluntary force of will, to lift themselves out of the social reality they belong to. Although these and other critiques are old, they can appeal to the history of basically all of social democracy. A whole bunch of parties who started off committed to abolishing capitalism in favor of democratic socialism ended up becoming merely the new administrators of capitalism. An important question that all democratic socialists today need to face is, how can we do better than this? How can we transition not to a slightly better capitalism, but to a truly democratic socialist society? We don't have anything like a full answer to this, but at least one thing seems certain. To counter the extra parliamentary power of capital, we need to secure the independent power of the working class in their unions and other social movements. Virtually all major reforms of the last few decades are the result of social movement outside of the state driving through change and politicians responding to that. We see this recently as well, with the Green New Deal only becoming a party political proposal, whether in the US or the UK, after the ecological movement had been fighting to bring global warming to public attention for decades. And it will only go through if movements are able to keep pushing for it opposed by and against the power of capital. If democratic socialism is to win, it will not be by just voting for the right party, it will be by ordinary people's grassroots organizing fighting for a better world.