“Capitalism has done much to develop the economic machinery of the modern world to the point where all of this is possible. But it is long since time to move past the capitalist phase of our history and institute something better.”
In a recent article at MSNBC, I wanted to give readers a quick sense of my worldview, so I wrote:
“I’m a democratic socialist. That means the core of my politics is about seeking to overcome the domination of society by wealthy interests. I want to empower the working class.”
That is about as much depth as I felt like I could go into for a short article on an unrelated topic. But the editors of Merion West have been kind enough to ask me to expand on that here.
Much like “liberalism,” “libertarianism,” “conservatism,” “feminism,” “democracy,” and damn near every other political label that is important to large numbers of people, the precise meaning of “socialism” is contested. Broadly speaking, though, it has two meanings. When Senator Bernie Sanders or certain politicians in Western Europe use the s-word, they are primarily talking about what is sometimes called “socialism within capitalism,” or more commonly “social democracy.” They are talking, in other words, about policies that would make parts of our society “more socialist” while leaving the fundamentals of capitalist property relations in place. I am certainly a socialist in this sense. I believe, for example, that it should be a deep source of national shame that the United States is, as Senator Sanders often points out, “the only major country in the world” that does not provide all of its citizens in one way or another with basic health services “as a right” outside of capitalist market structures. As I mentioned in my last article here, that is a reason why cash-strapped diabetics sometimes die in the United States when they try to ration their insulin, while, as far as I know, this is not something that happens in, for example, Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, or Sweden.
So, I am in favor of Medicare for All, free daycare for parents who want it, a massive increase in the construction of public housing (not “the projects” as we know them in this country but high-quality social housing available to all prospective tenants at all income levels), tuition-free public education from pre-school to graduate school, and more. These are all programs that would make our society that much more civilized, and, in all cases, they would accomplish this by contracting the scope of capitalist private rights—whether by nationalizing the private insurance industry, for example, or just redistributing resources through progressive taxation. Similarly, various programs that are already in place, ranging from public schools to public fire departments that have to put out burning hovels no less than burning mansions, make our society that much more humane and livable, and they too do it by contracting the scope of capitalist property rights. But neither public fire departments nor public healthcare amount to socialism in the second major sense in which that term is used—what is sometimes called “socialism after capitalism.” This would involve bringing the bulk of the economy into some form of collective ownership. And I am a socialist in this sense too. I think baby steps like organizing bigger and stronger labor unions, socializing the health insurance industry, and so on matter a great deal, but tackling the most basic sources of injustice in our society requires going further and addressing the economic foundations of the current system.
I know that many people who would agree with me about some or all of the “socialist” policies I just mentioned get off the train at the point of imagining a substantially post-capitalist economic order. They might feel this way for one or more of several reasons. For one thing, societies that called themselves “socialist” in the 20th century had many features that they would not want to recreate. (On this point, by the way, I strongly agree.) For another, there are in-principle reasons to worry that the logistical problems that beset economic planners in those societies would afflict any future socialist experiments. (This is what was hashed out at an abstract level in the “socialist calculation debate” among 20th-century economists.) There may also be readers who are willing to contract the scope of capitalist property rights for purposes ranging from building public roads to providing public healthcare (and who would perhaps justify this as a matter of carefully weighing competing values) but who would still assign too much importance to the property rights of existing business owners to be willing to contemplate any future transition to a fully socialist economy.
I take all of these concerns seriously, and, in what follows, I will try to at least sketch out the main lines of the responses I have given elsewhere. What I want to emphasize, though, is the case for socialism I find most compelling. There are pragmatic reasons to suspect that the halfway house of a robustly social-democratic (but still capitalist) society like, for example, Sweden in the 1970s is ultimately unstable. Such societies will sooner or later have to either give up on some of the ground that has already been achieved, accepting some degree of privatizations and austerity (as has happened to a point even in the Nordic strongholds of social democracy) or break in the other direction and move toward a genuinely socialist future. This is what my friend Bhaskar Sunkara, for example, argues in his excellent 2020 book The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. But what I will emphasize here is not this strategic point but the normative case for socialism. I will base myself here not on some special socialist set of values that non-socialist readers cannot be expected to share but, rather, on the same values that motivated the pro-capitalist revolutionaries who rose up against the semi-feudal ancien régime at the end of the 18th century—liberté, égalité, and fraternité. (Freedom, equality, and solidarity.) I think that, at this stage in history, we need to socialize the means of production in order more meaningfully to act on all three.
How Socialism Could Work, and Why We Should Want It
Under slavery, those with means own not only the non-human “means of production” (e.g., cotton fields) but also the human beings doing the producing. Under feudalism, those immediate producers have some rights to both their labor and their means of production, but both are heavily conditioned by the rights of the aristocracy. A serf might be allowed to spend most of the weeks of the year growing his own food on his own little plot of land within a larger feudal estate, but he is legally required to spend a certain number of weeks of the year doing his corvée duty to work the lord’s fields. If one is unlucky enough to be born into either of these modes of production, which sets of rights and duties he has explicitly depends on which part of society he was born into.
Compared to these earlier systems, capitalism represents a significant step forward in both freedom and (certain forms of) equality. No one is legally required to work for anyone else, and everyone has a legally equal status.
Nevertheless, in any system where both firms themselves and the factories, farms, and so on that they own are bought and sold by those with money, the great majority of the working-age population will not be in a position to own their own means of production. This means that this great majority has no realistic choice except to submit to the petty despotism of those who do own the factories, farms, grocery stores, Amazon procurement warehouses, and so on.
This was less true when family farming was common and a large percentage of the urban population—though it was never anything like a majority—was able to subsist as small-scale craftsmen. Thus, President Abraham Lincoln could grant in 1861 that there is no “such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer.” That line makes him sound like a socialist, but he was not. His political vision was limited to replacing slave labor in the South with capitalist wage labor. He acknowledged that the capitalist system would not be a system of deep and genuine freedom if workers had to spend their whole lives as workers, but he insisted that this would not happen. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world” would work as a hired laborer for “awhile.” Then he could save up “a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself,” work “on his own account another while,” and eventually hire “another new beginner to help him.”
As much as I revere President Lincoln, if we are honest about this, the idea that everyone who is sufficiently hard-working and “prudent” can be upwardly mobile through the class hierarchy was already wishful thinking in 1861. Even then, there were only so many lifeboats out of the working class. In 2024, I hope that it is obvious to everyone that things do not—cannot—work out the way President Lincoln hoped for the majority of the population. The arithmetic simply does not work.
In any technologically advanced modern economy, most labor is done by groups of people working together. The world of small farmers and independent craftsmen is not coming back. And while class mobility has not ceased to exist in the 163 years since President Lincoln’s speech, it is just not structurally possible for most of us to be capitalists any more than the laws of gravity would allow the majority of cheerleaders forming themselves into a pyramid to be at the top. Our choices are that most people will work communally but be ruled by capitalists (i.e., private business-owners) who rule their little economic fiefdoms like kings and queens, or that we will continue to work communally but extend democracy to the half of our waking lives most adults spend at work through some form of collective ownership.
What could that look like?
As I have said, the countries that called themselves socialist in the 20th century are not a good model. Those western Marxist intellectuals who made excuses for those regimes were making a grievous moral and political error, much as, for example, the leading lights of libertarianism (like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman) were making a similar mistake when they engaged in apologetics for former President Augusto Pinochet’s reign of terror in Chile. Nor am I terribly interested in the semantic question of whether to call what existed in the Soviet Union and the countries that later copied the Soviet economic and political model a form of non-socialism or just an undesirable form of socialism. (The case against calling it socialism was made, years before the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly. He wrote that state ownership of the means of production only counts as a form of social ownership if society as a whole democratically “owns” the state.) Either way, if the traditional socialist objection to capitalism is that it is not democratic enough, the authoritarianism of these 20th-century regimes disqualified them from being the kind of socialism we need.
Drawing that moral and political line is the easy part. But a deeper problem, as I have already alluded to, is the cluster of worries about how to coordinate efficiently production with fine-grained consumer needs, allocate capital goods, and so on in the absence of market mechanisms. This was the subject of the speculative “socialist calculation debate” that was happening at the same time as the Soviet model was proving to be dysfunctional empirically. Simply adding free speech and political democracy to the Soviet Union’s basic economic set-up would not solve that problem.
On the other hand, even most pro-capitalist economists will admit that there are few (if any) genuinely a priori truths in economics. The extent to which state planning runs into calculation problems cannot be entirely settled from the theoretician’s armchair. We need to base our conclusions on empirical evidence. And if that evidence includes the failures of the Eastern bloc economies, it also includes, for example, the successes of the Nordic countries. Many countries around the developed world (but especially these social-democratic strongholds) have proven that it is entirely possible for a democratic state to administer whole sectors like healthcare and education outside of the market and actually get better results. Finland, where private schools are more or less banned, is a country that is often pointed to even by right-of-center charter school advocates as having a particularly successful educational system. (The American Right tends to be selective about which aspects of that system they notice.) Countries with public health insurance or even fully nationalized healthcare systems tend to get far better results than those of the United States. And nations around the world have proven that, for example, oil continues (for better or worse) to be drilled quickly enough to terrify environmentalists when the oil industry is state-owned. State planning is manifestly adequate to these particular tasks, even if it was terrible at coordinating Soviet production with fine-grained consumer preferences so people could get what they needed at the grocery store.
So where does all that leave us? If we take the historical high-water mark of social democracy not as the outer limit of possibility but as the jumping-off point for more ambitiously utopian proposals to make President Lincoln’s dream of a society where no one had to spend their whole working life as a “hired laborer” a reality, what could the socialism we want look like in practice?
Left-wing economics professor Mike Beggs digs into the technical details of one possible version of “full” democratic socialism in a 2023 essay at Jacobin. (Full disclosure: Mike is a friend and collaborator of mine.) I would recommend that anyone curious about the wonky details check it out.
In broad strokes, though, Beggs’s line of thought goes like this:
Beyond obvious cases like healthcare, education, and energy production, there is reason for optimism that the “commanding heights” of the economy—crucially including finance—could be brought under some form of direct public ownership without crashing the economy. If there are many other sectors where we still need competing private or quasi-private firms, responsive to price signals and subject to firm failure, they can at least be worker-owned firms seeded by grants from state banks.
Beggs has smart and thoughtful things to say in response to standard worries about proposals for workers’ control of the means of production like the “horizon problem” and the “common-property problem.” One should read his article.
What can easily get lost in these technical details, though, is that as grounded as this vision is (and even as boring as it might seem compared to some of the most utopian speculations of prior generations of socialists), it would represent something humanity has not seen since the agricultural revolution: a way of organizing the economy without dividing society into a subservient workforce and a ruling class living off their labor.
Freedom, Equality, and Solidarity
As I have argued elsewhere, the most important kind of freedom is the small-r republican notion of freedom from domination. The standard hardcore libertarian objection to socialism—that nationalizing even Fortune 500 companies, for example, would represent a form of “theft”—prioritizes freedom from interference. But this is unpersuasive for two reasons.
First and most importantly, freedom from interference is always a red herring in discussions of the ethics of economic redistribution. All possible schemes for allocating scarce resources, from communist to anarcho-capitalist, involve coercion. A “No Trespassing” sign is no less an implicit threat of force against whoever does not comply than a letter from the Internal Revenue Service about back taxes or a government decree nationalizing Amazon and transferring it to the control of the company’s workforce. The real issue is never coercion vs. no coercion. It is always which allocation of resources should be coercively enforced.
One can argue, if one would like, that expropriating Amazon would be wrong because the government and the workers would be “stealing” the company from Jeff Bezos, but this is just arguing in a circle, like saying “abortion is wrong because it’s murder.” The concept of “murder” has the concept of wrongness built into it. That is why we do not talk about “justifiable murder” or “murder in self-defense.” Similarly, the concept of “theft” only applies when we think the current owner of some piece of property has a right to that property. That is why recovering stolen property is not theft from the thief. Well, if the government passes a law to take Amazon from Bezos, he has no legal right to it. So, if one thinks it is “theft” in any sense, it must be because he thinks that Bezos has a moral right to it. But “taking Amazon from Bezos is morally wrong because Bezos has a moral right to it” is blatantly circular.
If one wants to (non-question-beggingly) argue that it is morally wrong, he needs a substantive account of why some people are morally entitled to particular bits of property. The British philosopher John Locke, for example, thought that humans gain rights to bits and pieces of the natural world by mixing their labor with the land. (This is, by the way, why Locke approved of the dispossession of the native inhabitants of the Americas, whom he alleged had failed to do the right kind of labor-mixing to earn the right to continued use of their lands.) This has always struck me as a fundamentally unserious way of thinking about what counts as a just or unjust distribution of resources—the approximate human equivalent of the property theory of dogs who think they can acquire new territory by peeing on it. A far more plausible way of thinking about who is entitled to what comes from John Rawls, who thought that a just distribution of resources is one arising from basic institutions that rational agents would sign off on from behind a “veil of ignorance.” (They would know they would have to live in the society they were designing, and they would know all the relevant “third-person” facts, but they would not know if, for example, they would be born into the Bezos family or a family of warehouse workers.) At any rate, I find the latter more plausible. The point, though, is that even if one favors John Locke over John Rawls on the question of which theory of entitlements is correct, what he and I are disagreeing about has absolutely nothing to do with non-interference rights per se.
The second problem with prioritizing freedom from interference is that, when we are categorizing oppressive social realities, even truly objectionable forms of interference tend to be downstream of the more basic issue of domination. To use the classical example, a slave who is whipped every day is certainly worse off than one who is hardly ever whipped, but the first slave is not freer. The more basic problem is the underlying imbalance of power between masters and slaves.
The domination of workers by capitalists is not nearly as bad as the domination of slaves and serfs in earlier economic forms, but “not nearly as bad as being in chains” is not the gold standard of human freedom. Workers in Amazon warehouses are tracked by nonstop electronic surveillance to make sure their boss (a man so rich he literally owns his own spaceship) does not fall short on his expected profits for each hour of their shifts. They are even tracked as they go to the bathroom to make sure they are taking the most efficient route there and back and they do not spend too long on the toilet, lest they fall behind on the number of books they could be shipping in this time. That no one is forcing them to show up to work (and indeed that they submit to all this precisely because it is so much better than unemployment) might clear Bezos as an individual on the charge that he is violating the workers’ libertarian freedom from interference. But it hardly clears our society as a whole on the charge that we are not doing enough to guarantee the republican freedom from domination of all of our citizens.
There are all sorts of rhetorical techniques that pro-capitalist ideologues can use to reassure themselves and their listeners that warehouse workers, for example, are not suffering from any sort of objectionable unfreedom. But this all falls flat when we start asking very basic questions, like, “Why do people who spend their lives in such jobs spend so much time dreaming about retirement (or dream about starting a business so they can, as a thousand self-help books say, be their ‘own boss’)?” Or, “Why would, if we’re being real about this, any right-wing economics professor be horrified to his core if he found out he was losing his academic gig, and he would have to take such a job himself?” Note that some right-wing economics professors might fondly look back on years they spent at various menial occupations. None of them, however, would fondly look forward to going back, and the reason why is not just fear of a lower income or less interesting job tasks but, rather, a palpable dread at the loss of personal freedom.
Many commentators gloss over the difference between the worldviews of the Left and Right by saying that the former cares above all about equality while the latter cares more about freedom. However, recognizing the fundamental importance of freedom from domination should help us see that the two values cannot be fully separated. Sufficiently severe inequality leaves those holding the short end of the stick vulnerable to unacceptable forms of domination. This is what, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was getting at when he wrote that economic inequality should be kept within narrow enough bounds that “no citizen be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.”
A standard way of dismissing concerns about distributive inequality is to argue that the size of the gap between the economic floor and the ceiling is irrelevant so long as the floor is not set too low, as well as that all we need to do to “eliminate poverty” is to unleash sufficient levels of technological progress and economic growth. Does capitalism lead to dramatic inequalities? No matter. It “eliminates poverty” at the bottom end of those inequalities.
One can more or less convince himself of this story if he pretends that “poverty” has a singular meaning across space and time, such that if the absolute level of consumption at the bottom end of society is higher than it was 50 or 100 years ago, people living at that bottom end are no longer “living in poverty.” But this simply fails to track what anyone anywhere normally means by “poverty.” If one grows up in a bad neighborhood and dreams of climbing “out of poverty” through education or entrepreneurship, and someone explains to him that his ancestors in 14th-century Europe or China would not consider him to be poor at all, he will not typically respond by saying “Oh okay, I’m actually out of poverty already, so I’ll stop worrying about it.” There is no more a singular transhistorical standard of “poverty” than there is a singular standard of “speaking proper English” that would apply equally to the contemporaries of Geoffrey Chaucer and Philip Roth. To say that someone is “living in poverty” is simply to say that his standard of living is below what can reasonably be counted as a decent minimum in the particular society in which he lives at a particular moment in history.
Nor, even once this point has been absorbed, is the only morally urgent question to ask about economic inequality whether the bottom end of that inequality has sunk to a level to which the word “poverty” can be reasonably applied. If the average CEO makes hundreds of times the salary of the average worker (never mind those members of the working class who are not lucky enough to have a job at all), and if that average CEO is a peasant compared to the likes of Bezos or the most worthless member of the Walton family, that is objectionable for a number of reasons. First, it makes a mockery of democracy in the political realm. There is simply no way for material inequality to metastasize to this degree without some citizens therefore exercising vastly more political influence than others. (If Bezos calls his senator’s office, does one doubt for a moment that, perhaps after a few delays and transfers, he will get to have a conversation with the senator himself? Try that as an ordinary citizen and let me know how it goes.) Second, as we have seen, extreme inequality leaves those holding the short end of the stick vulnerable to grotesque forms of economic domination. Finally, it is unjust in itself, and it would be even if neither of the first two points held. Who, seeking to advance their interests from behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance, would sign off on a setup whereby if they happened to be born into the upper reaches of society they could have regular family trips to Europe, and, if they were born in the lower orders, they would be lucky if their parents got a week or two off work each year to spend with them?
None of this means that a realistically viable form of socialism would involve perfect material inequality. No member of a worker cooperative, for example, earns hundreds of times the salary of any other worker-owner, but this does not mean that the pay scales at existing cooperatives are completely flat. Even in a far more egalitarian society, where various forms of worker or community ownership were the norm, workers might be democratically convinced that they had to offer higher salaries to entice applicants into jobs involving lots of stress and responsibility or, conversely, to take particularly dirty and dangerous jobs that no one wants—and who no one, in such a society, would take out of sheer desperation. All of this is true. But if one walked into the meeting of a worker-owned package delivery service and said, “Hey, I was thinking about it, and this whole company was Jeff’s idea, so he should be paid so much more than the rest of us that he can afford his own spaceship,” I doubt one would win that particular vote.
Capitalist economic patterns both rest on and perpetuate massive levels of inequality. People are only willing to submit to domination at the workplace because inequalities in wealth give some people far more access to ownership of the means of production than others, and ownership of the means of production, in turn, lets a capitalist simply take a massive share of the results of everyone’s collective labor without needing to engage in any sort of democratic persuasion. Material equality and republican freedom both point in the direction of some form of social ownership of economic resources.
And the last of the traditional trio of democratic values (fraternité, social solidarity) also gives us a powerful reason to reject capitalism. The only way people can be psychologically fitted to life in a society this unequal is by training themselves to think of vast categories of the population as simply excluded from their sphere of concern. Does one work as a manager at a meatpacking plant with poor safety practices, where keeping his job requires that he constantly fight with government regulators trying to get the company to clean up its act? One is going to go crazy if he takes the humanity of the ordinary workers he is leaving open to mutilation in workplace accidents too seriously. Isn’t he lucky enough to at least have a job at one of those meatpacking plants? Better not let oneself get too emotionally invested in the conditions of the homeless people one hurries past on his way to work. And on it goes.
In a decent society, we would not have to become this callous just to function in the world around us. And, at this stage of human history, we have the kind of economic engine that could absolutely provide the material basis for such a society. We could take care of everyone’s material needs and give everyone a reasonable say in the economic decisions that shape our collective lives. When new technology is introduced that makes some human labor redundant, instead of some people working as hard as ever while other people lose their jobs and fall into destitution, everyone could collectively and democratically decide to work fewer hours while keeping the same standard of living. We could make sleeping on the streets so rare that the normal and natural reaction to seeing anyone living in those conditions would be to treat it as an emergency requiring normal activities to grind to a halt while it was dealt with, like seeing someone having a heart attack at the next table at a restaurant.
Capitalism has done much to develop the economic machinery of the modern world to the point where all of this is possible. But it is long since time to move past the capitalist phase of our history and institute something better.
Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He is the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.
