Neal Meyer is a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America. Article published July 20, 2018 in Jacobin.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory in New York City in June added fuel to the fire that Bernie Sanders started in 2016: a resurgence of interest in democratic socialism. And there is no strand of left politics that provokes more confusion than democratic socialism.
All of a sudden, it seems everybody wants to know what democratic socialism is. Here’s what you need to know.
Some commentators have tried to invent differences between the kind of society “democratic socialists” fight for and the kind envisioned by so-called “traditional socialists.” On MSNBC, Stephanie Ruhle confidently declared that democratic socialists make “no call for communal ownership of production.”
According to Ruhle, the excitement around the emerging socialist movement is much ado about nothing: democratic socialists want good things like free college and public libraries — and that’s pretty much it.
While we definitely support good library systems, democratic socialists’ vision of a better society and how to achieve it goes much further.
The world we live in now is called a democracy; the United States is the wealthiest country in all of human history, and we all learn about how important of an American value “freedom” is. But the United States today is defined not by freedom and abundance, but exploitation and oppression.
A tiny number of rich and powerful families lives off of the profits they make from trashing the environment and underpaying, overworking, and cheating the vast majority of society — the working class. They get richer precisely because the poor and working class get poorer.
This capitalist class turns workplaces into mini-authoritarian regimes, where bosses have the power to harass and abuse workers. And they protect their power in all corners of society by fanning the flames of racial, national, and gender conflict and prejudice in order to divide working people and stop us from organizing.
Democratic socialists want to end all of that.