Democratic socialism seeks social ownership of the commanding heights of the economy through democratic and constitutional means, holding that socialism without political democracy is not socialism at all — and that the Soviet model was therefore a betrayal rather than a form of it.
It differs from social democracy in aim rather than method. Both reject revolution and work through elections, but where social democracy accepts a market economy and seeks to civilize it, democratic socialism treats the transformation of ownership — public utilities, worker cooperatives, democratic control of investment — as the actual goal, and the welfare state as a step toward it rather than a destination.
Its case is moral before it is economic. Tawney's Equality (1931) argued that gross inequality corrodes the fellowship on which a common life depends, and that private power over the economy makes political democracy hollow; later writers press the point that if a handful of owners decide what gets produced and who is employed, the vote governs only a shrunken sphere.
It runs through the British Labour left, the parties of the Second International's democratic wing, and, more recently, a revival in the United States — the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and the organization around Democratic Socialists of America — though 'democratic socialism' there often names an ambitious social-democratic programme rather than the wholesale transformation of ownership.
Its critics on the right doubt that deep social ownership is compatible with the liberties it promises to keep, pointing to the difficulty of combining planning with pluralism; its critics on the revolutionary left doubt that owners will ever permit their expropriation by ballot, so the gradual road stalls short of its goal.
It is frequently confused with both communism and ordinary welfare-state liberalism, when its distinctive wager is precisely the combination the twentieth century treated as impossible: full political democracy and the social ownership of the economy at the same time.
Substantially collective on ownership while firmly liberty-side, since democratic guarantees are treated as non-negotiable.
Equality-first, with the state as principal guarantor though subject to democratic control from below.
Far-reaching change pursued strictly through gradual, electoral means — the commitment that separates it from the revolutionary currents.
Universalist in principle, with a thicker community than liberalism because solidarity and mutual obligation are central to the argument.
Collective-leaning with strongly positive duties, though individual freedom is defended as the point of the collective provision.
- R. H. Tawney, Equality, 1931
- Michael Harrington, Socialism, 1972