Yet, however important and commendable the recent efforts to rehabilitate socialism in the US, it is not unreasonable to reject the use of the concept and term “socialism” for many of the proposals, models, policies and so on that have been posited in recent years as examples of socialism. First, many of the (positive) definitions and defenses of socialism are addressed not to academic audiences or the converted, but to the general public and secondly, they specifically consider the prospect of socialism in the United States, a country which has historically been, for the most part, uncongenial to socialist ideas. Socialists and communists should, without question, welcome the recent rehabilitation of socialism in the United States, and they should do so for at least two reasons, both of which I have already evoked above. Macpherson, Frank Cunningham, Andrew Levine and Henry Shue will immediately come to mind-but my aim in the present essay is to consider the popular literature on democratic socialism on, so to speak, its own terms. There is a wealth of valuable work by political theorists, philosophers, economists and others on the topics discussed in this essay-the work of such figures as Ellen Meiksins Wood, Ted Honderich, Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, C.B. I should perhaps underscore at the outset that this essay examines popular-that is to say, non-scholarly, non-academic-expositions and defenses of “democratic socialism” and, in keeping with the kind of content under consideration, my critical remarks are not meant to take the form of an academic or scholarly critique. This is, in any event, what I will argue in the following pages. In other words, socialists’ rejection of liberal democracy should be much more far-reaching than what we find in most of the recent articles and books in defense of socialism, and they can reject it precisely by appealing to democracy, albeit a notion of democracy quite unlike the one routinely celebrated in capitalist societies. To avoid this outcome, socialists must bear in mind that true socialism will be “democratic” in ways that constitute major departures from the liberal democracy of contemporary liberal-democratic capitalist societies. As a result of this equivocal use of the concept of democracy, as well as the failure to come to terms with the likelihood of violent resistance to a socialist political program (itself due partly to the lack of clarity concerning democracy), much of the new advocacy for socialism-and nearly all of the socialist advocacy coming from the self-styled “democratic socialists”-proves contradictory, and ultimately self-defeating. As for those works that do defend distinctively socialist models for the future, one invariably finds the same basic flaw: these writings’ arguments for socialism rest on an equivocal notion of democracy, as they appeal both to a distinctively socialist, post-liberal notion of democracy and to a standard liberal-democratic notion of democracy.

Unfortunately, many of the articles and books making up this literature do not really advocate socialism at all, but offer instead a defense of social democracy, or else revitalized and refurbished versions of left-liberalism. The contributors to this burgeoning literature have all considered, to one degree or another, at least some of the basic programmatic questions, ranging from political strategy to institutional design, that need to be addressed if some form of socialism is to be a realistic possibility in the United States (and elsewhere) in a not-too-distant future. The renewed interest in socialism in the United States has generated a lively theoretical debate in many articles and books addressed to the general reader, as a broad array of activists, intellectuals and academics have sought to rethink the contours of what we might call, to borrow a phrase associated with the work of Alec Nove, 2 a feasible socialism. All ruling classes fought to the end, with tenacious energy, to preserve their privileges. It is sheer insanity to believe that capitalists would good-humoredly obey the socialist verdict of a parliament or of a national assembly, that they would calmly renounce property, profit, the right to exploit. ‘Either death to capitalism, or death under the heel of capitalism’ (1919 Soviet poster) Renzo Llorente engages with contemporary advocates of Democratic Socialism and argues that they ultimately fail to demarcate between liberal and socialist visions of democracy, resulting in capitulation to the liberal status quo.

Democracy 3 innate socialism