I have heard about a kind of Socialism that I haven’t heard of much and that is called Democratic Socialism. I have read a bit about it but the varying sources by various writers offers no kind of real consistent information on it, some of it is clearly biased in one way or another and there is a lot of conflicting information. Can you tell me how it differs from other forms of socialism such as the most infamous: National Socialism, amongst the other forms of socialism? Thank you.
I belong to Democratic Socialists of America, which is one organization of democratic socialists here in the USA.
I have to admit that different DSA members sometimes bring different definitions to bear on what "democratic socialism" is supposed to be. To get a sense of what the group as a whole believes in, you might want to look here:
http://www.dsausa.org/dsa.html
http://www.dsausa.org/pdf/widemsoc.pdf
http://www.progressive.org/node/130774
How Democratic Socialism differs from other forms of socialism:
1/ Democratic socialism vs. Leninism / "communism" — generally, democratic socialists believe that socialists should take power not through a revolutionary upheaval, or through — say – a general strike (an old anarchist idea), but through free elections under a parliamentary or US-style democratic system.
Unlike Leninists, who have a "cadre" or "revolutionary vanguard" theory of politics, in which a small dedicated elite presumes to act as the leader for the entire working class, democratic socialists generally favor broad democratic participation in political affairs, and within the socialist movement itself.
Unlike most revolutionary Communist parties that have taken power, democratic socialists generally support what Trotsky or Lenin might have called "bourgeois civil liberties" — e.g. , freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, regularly scheduled elections, freedom of religion, etc.
Along with Rosa Luxemburg, a German revolutionary leader who would not have called herself a democratic socialist, we think that the freedom of the "working class" ultimately requires legal freedoms that some other socialists might scorn as supposedly helping only the capitalists.
We believe that no, these "bourgeois" freedoms and "bourgeois" rights are at least as important to socialist working people as they are to anyone else.
It’s only when there is true democracy, we think, that society can be run by the "working class." We don’t think a Lenininst vanguard party of professional revolutionaries can substitute for the workers doing it themselves.
4) Many American democratic socialists believe — not in the total takeover of the economy by the State, but it what’s sometimes called "economic democracy," sometimes called "workers’ control."
That is, we think people should have democratic rights of free expression and the democratic right to self-government in the workplace, not just in the voting booth in November. We think you should have the right to vote for your mayor, your governor — and your boss, maybe even for the CEO of your company. We don’t think the owner of your company should act like a dictator or a king who gets to control everyone in the company. We think you, the person actually doing the work, should get a say in how the company operates, too.
5) Unlike Germany’s "national" socialists in the 1920s and 1930s, democratic socialists don’t scapegoat particular races or particular religions for all the problems of capitalist society. We don’t hope to build "socialism" or any kind of good society by mobilizing a majority of working people to hate & victimize some small racial or religious majority – like the Jews, obviously, but really we don’t believe in scapegoating anybody.
Democratic socialists also mostly don’t believe in national progress through endless war, which was pretty much the ideal that Hitler and Mussolini both promoted.
I’ll run out of space if I write much more, but that’s a brief explanation for starters.
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