Democratic Socialism Isn't Good Enough
The last few years have seen the word “Socialism” enter into respectable conversation and even gain a certain appeal to young voters in the USA, a place where, up until very recently, even a loose association to Socialism was a guarantee to be barred from the political apparatus of the American state.
While the surge of curiosity about ways of escaping the worsening Capitalist dystopia is a welcome change of pace, the results to which this new trend is leading can only be described as disheartening. It can be hard to argue against a movement for better working conditions, decent public services, and the separation of capital and state (if such a thing is possible). The fact is, however, that these attempts to ameliorate the wretched state of the vast labour reserves which constitute the majority of the American population can only delay the inevitable end results of Capitalism: The exhaustion of physical and human resources, the destruction of communities, the hoarding of wealth and, as a response to all of this, the rearing of Fascism's ugly head. In other words, you can't polish a turd.
The views of the Democratic Socialists of America should be alarming to anyone with a genuine interest in and knowledge of Socialism. They seem to be best summed up best with the old adage of “Socialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff it does, the Socialister it is.” This could be clearly demonstrated by DSA poster child and endorsee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez describing the US military as the number one example of Socialism on Twitter. The DSA's agenda seems to focus on providing accessible healthcare for workers, higher minimum wage across the states, and other demands for better treatment of workers by the Capitalist class. But there seems to be very little in the way of their agenda to promote actual Socialism – that is, the end of the economic exploitation of workers by the Capitalist class and the workers' ownership of their own labour, wherein they are entitled to the fruits of their own work. The demands of the DSA can only be described as welfare Capitalism, which is contradictory in name and in practice. Let's have a look why.
At the very basis for Capitalism is the drive for constant expansion of the collective capacity of humans to consume. We are all familiar with the insistence that GDP – the arbitrary measure of “goods and services,” must always be expanding. This means that we must be presented with an ever-expanding array of goods and services. In the post-war era, this expansion was sustained by the fact that much of the world was “undeveloped” for Capitalist economic expansion, and American capital could travel far and reap rewards at home and abroad – roads could be improved, factories could be built, resources could be extracted, and much of the world's poorer populations could be exploited for cheap. These all provided conditions in which the American Capitalists could invest their money in the economy of real goods and services, and reap high returns. For workers in the largely white and wealthy global North, there were jobs to be had, high wages to be earned, and the getting was, compared to what came before and after, very good. Capitalism in this stage of growth had not quite reached maturity. Out of these ideal conditions (as best as one could hope for a worker under Capitalism), arose “Democratic Socialism” or “Social Democracy” (which are only slightly different in theory and exactly the same in practice), the framework in which wealthy states could provide their worker-citizens with a package of public services and labour protections, reliant on the taxation of quickly growing economies with a Capitalist class that was begrudgingly willing to pay high wages and offer luxuries like regular hours and affordable goods.
But these conditions no longer exist, and will never exist again. The abundance of “investment outputs” and growth opportunities which marked the post-war era are long gone; Capital has been invested in roads, education and factories, natural resources are approaching exhaustion, humans in both rich and poor countries are overworked. Emerging markets such as the automobile and adjacent industries are now matured and ossified, with monopolies well established – the appearance of the world wide web failed to replicate the scale in job-creation like the auto industry did.
The idea of Democratic Socialism, then, contradicts one of the fundamental truths of Capitalism, pointed out by Smith and expanded upon by Marx: the tendency for the “rate of profit” to fall. As Capitalist economies mature, new investment opportunities become scarce, oligopolies form, competition becomes stiff and the market stagnates, which leaves the Capitalist class with less and less returns on their investment into the economy of goods and services. Capitalism is then burdened with two needs: To constantly expand its activity, but also to constantly make up for its losses. It does the latter by making “efficiency savings” and squeezing more and more labour out of every penny paid to workers – longer hours, less pay, lower standards of working conditions, and so on. Less and less money trickles downwards in the form of wages, and more of those wages go upwards as prices for consumers hike up and previously free or affordable services become commodified in the desperate search for profits, destroying the workers' savings and creating more and more debt.
It is a basic requirement for Capitalism to keep this contradiction going – the market must always be expanding outward for new opportunities to make money, while wages within the economy must be pushed ever downward. These two opposing trends combined have created the classic problem of a consumption-based economy where the consumers have no money with which to buy goods to consume. The classic Keynesian/Social Democratic solution here is to increase wages and encourage spending, which does work out in the medium term. But in the long term this simply can not do. In order to prevent those rates of profit from falling ever further, companies can not tolerate high wages with relatively little labour in return, and will either take their capital in the form of wages elsewhere to a poorer and more desperate nation of people (or import cheap labour to exploit), or else face extinction.
High taxation and the peculiar brand of “the government doing more stuff” has the same effect wherein the Capitalists will not long tolerate a reduction in their profits, and will constantly push for the privatisation of public services in order to convert them into lucrative investment opportunities.
This is the essential problem of Democratic Socialism. It is essentially trying to make the Capitalist system do something that it is incapable of doing, that is, provide a decent standard of living for workers in the long term. When the Capitalist push for lower wages, worse working conditions, and the privaitsation and commodification of public services and the commons, it's not just because those individuals at the top are greedy, rather it is because that is exactly what Capitalism requires. Expecting a Capitalist economy to indefinitely provide for all of society with high wages and public services is like driving a car off a cliff and expecting it to fly like a plane. It is simply not what it was meant to do. The conditions which made this briefly possible in the past are long gone, as was always going to happen. While we could and should push for higher wages, better working conditions and decent public services for now, we can not be satisfied with these – they won't be around for long, if ever. What we should be doing instead is pushing for alternative economic systems that are capable of providing for the needs of everyone without collapsing in on themselves.