Democratic Socialism

The relationship between democracy and socialism is a curious one. Both traditions are rooted philosophically in the concept of equality, but different aspects of equality are emphasized. Democracy appeals to political equality, the right of all individuals to participate in setting the rules to which all will be subject. Socialism emphasizes material equality—not strict equality, but an end to the vast disparities of income and wealth traceable to the inequalities of ownership of means of production.

Of course there can be material equality without democracy, as well as democracy without material equality. Plato advocated a material equality for the “guardians”of his ideal state. (Those entrusted with ruling would live modestly, take their meals in common, and, to forestall the temptation to enrich themselves, keep their storehouses open for inspection and never handle gold or silver.) Many religious orders have practiced a material egalitarianism while emphasizing strict obedience to one's superiors. Conversely, in most contemporary democratic societies, material inequalities are vast and growing. (The upper 1% of U.S. households now own nearly 40% of all the privately held wealth of the nation.)

From the beginning it has been recognized that political equality is likely to produce demands for material equality. If people are truly equal, why [Page 446]should a few be so rich and so many so poor? If the majority can make the laws, what is to prevent them from redistributing the wealth? Political theorists from Plato through the Founding Fathers of the United States, from John Stuart Mill to the present, have warned of this tendency.

Plato saw democracy as inevitably degenerating into tyranny, for the demos would try to redistribute wealth, the wealthy would rebel, and the people would call on a strongman to aid their cause, but he would not relinquish power once installed. Alexander Hamilton urged that first-class people, the rich and well born, be given a permanent share of the government, so as to check the imprudence of democracy. Mill worried that the majority would compel the wealthy to bear the burden of taxation, so he proposed that the more intelligent and knowledgeable be allowed multiple votes and that mode of employment serve as a marker for intelligence. He took it to be self-evident that the employer of labor is on average more intelligent than a laborer.

More recently, the Trilateral Commission, a gathering of elites from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan (the brainchild of David Rockefeller and forerunner of the World Economic Forum) issued a widely read report warning that the democratic distemper of the 1960s and early 1970s threatened to render capitalist countries ungovernable.

Unlike the pre-eminent political theorists from antiquity, until quite recently, virtually all the early self-described socialists (a term that seems to have been first used as a self-ascription by Robert Owen in 1827) were ardent democrats. Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto proclaimed that the first step in replacing capitalism with a new and better economic system is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class. Marx and Engels and virtually all of their socialist contemporaries saw the political empowerment of society's disenfranchised as a necessary step in the transformation of capitalism into a more humane social order.

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