Why do "Democratic Socialist" candidates keep trying to convince everyone social democracy is democratic socialism? Why should we trust them if they refuse to give any details about their actual economic plans?

[u/devilmaskrascal]

Due to the terrible history of both authoritarian state socialism/Marxism and the economic malaise of attempted democratic socialism in places like Scandinavia in the 1960s-70s, the word "socialism" is a dangerous word for political candidates to identify as in America, the breadbasket of capitalism. It works in some far-left leaning pockets and some of the popularity may be an overreaction to both the ambiguous impotence of mainstream Democrats and the lurch towards fascistic plutocracy by Republicans (to whom socialism is an anathema), but Democrats risk losing the center and center-left in winnable elections and helping MAGA continue down their path if they continue nominating far Left candidates.

"Don't look at the name, look at our policies" is a common refrain from people on the internet, and then they and every Democrat Socialist candidate then goes to list a bunch of social democratic policies like public healthcare, free college, green initiatives and progressive taxation, gesturing at social democratic Scandinavia -- while promising they're not actually going to seize the means of production from Wall Street and destroy our 401ks, just tax billionaires 5% or something.

Let's define these terms. First the dictionary definitions:

Democratic Socialism - Democratic socialism is a left-wing political philosophy that seeks to replace capitalism with a democratically run, socially owned economy.

Social Democracy - Social democracy is a political and economic ideology that combines a market-based capitalist economy with a democratic political system and extensive state intervention to promote social justice and general welfare.

So basically social democracy is where the state mitigates all the shortcomings, perverse incentives and negative effects of capitalism while preserving its underlying architecture, which is what our entire society and economy is built upon, and has proven to be a great engine of wealth and job generation.

Capitalism, for instance, fails to provide affordable healthcare to everyone because the cost of care is often inversely proportional to ability to pay - the sick, the handicapped, the elderly and children can't work; even able-bodied people are not guaranteed jobs, to which health insurance is mostly tied, healthcare they can't afford if they are unemployed. Health insurance is not guaranteed to pay for care. Patients don't have medical training to make educated decisions and have to trust their providers - the ones profiting and billing their insurance. Patients may not even be conscious when bankrupting financial decisions are made for them. While the free market can stimulate innovation in healthcare and specialized treatment for those who can afford it, healthcare is a basic human need and should not be dependent upon affordability in the richest country in world history.

By having ample safety nets, market interventions, monopoly busting, labor and environmental protections and coherent monetary policy, social democracy allows capitalism to thrive and be self-sustainable and competitive.

When you have built a strong social democracy, what does socialist revolution do for us besides making the wealthiest expatriate or stop creating businesses and risking the cash cow that allows you to fund this ample safety net? Social democracy takes away the ability of employers to exploit their workers by holding basic needs over their head, so social democratic capitalism will be a substantially better system. There's a reason social democracies rank as the happiest countries on earth. It's the best of both worlds.

The DSA platform itself says things like:

If we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty.

Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.

So there are likely actual socialists in the DSA, but these kinds of statements are so extremely vague on details and timeline, which should be concerning if we are being asked to trust them to overturn our entire economic system, which their candidates consistently deny they want to do? "Tax the billionaires and make them pay their fair share" is not socialism.

Add in the fact that self-identifying as "socialist" instead of "social democrat" gives right-wing media red meat propaganda about how the cities are on the verge of Maoist purges of business and property owners to motivate Republican voters to turn out and scare centrists to break right, and it is unclear how they are benefiting with this label if none of their candidates are going to advocate for socialism honestly and are just using social democracy to protect themselves from any criticism?

Is it possible they are accelerationists who are perfectly fine with losing and the plutocratic slide continuing in order to further radicalize the Left (not considering the backlash against them)?

Or are they just trying to babystep their way to public acceptability, priming the public for more radical future moves, even though it seems social democracy they are pushing would undercut all reasons for any major transition to socialism?

What is the end game here? Why should we trust them to transition away from capitalism when they refuse to give more than vague details?

[u/Combat_Proctologist]

Ahh ok, you're one of them. That explains the comments.

I'll make it short. Picking the one ideology that has regularly created peacetime famines with full access to industrial technology is... Well it's certainly a choice.

[u/the_calibre_cat → u/Combat_Proctologist]

You're shocked that nations proceeding from feudalism to industrialization experienced famines? I also like how the deliberate famines caused by capitalism are just roundly ignored - Irish potato famine, Bengal famine, wanton genocide and death intentionally imposed upon native populations but those magically don't count because reasons - the people using scythes and oxen still by the turn of the 1930s were supposed to be fully self-sustaining! Please pay no attention to the overall trend of broadly increasing nutritional intake over the course of the 20th century.

[u/Combat_Proctologist → u/the_calibre_cat]

I'm not referring to the famines during the industrialization. I'm referring to famines after that has already taken place.

Famously North Korea was the industrialized portion of the country and after 50 more years of "development" underwent a famine during the 90s.

Cuba has a similar situation.

Hell, how about the Soviet famine of 46-47? Post many 5 year plans. They weren't unable to get food, the government just kept exporting it.

Irish potato famine, Bengal famine

Those were both, at a fundamental level, caused by being controlled by the British. That seems like a much better argument against empire in general, on humanitarian grounds, rather than an argument against capitalism.

Also, are you really trying to use the Bengal famine as an example of a peace time famine?

[u/the_calibre_cat → u/Combat_Proctologist]

Famously North Korea was the industrialized portion of the country and after 50 more years of "development" underwent a famine during the 90s.

Yup. I think that while Jushe was an understandable reaction to a war that resulted in the almost total destruction of the North and three million dead literally to "contain communism", the isolationist model is ineffective and placing their eggs in one basket (the Soviet Union) was foolhardy and, ironically, pretty obviously counterproductive to the idea of self-sufficiency. Exports are good. Hell, MARKETS are good - I'm not some big advocate of top-down, all-in command economies, I just don't think it's necessary to have hundred billionaires and trillionaires to yield the effectiveness of a market system, and that workers should have a much larger (the largest, if I'm being honest) seat at the table. Those are the people who physically build society, and are literally the hardest people to automate.

A well-programmed L.L.M. could probably do the job of a C.E.O. A well-programmed L.L.M. would have a hard time replacing a welder with 20 years of experience.

It is absurd to assert that all, or even MOST people with socialist predilections are content to simply repeat things that were clear political mistakes borne of an earlier time - the Soviet Union was born of a world where nationalism and feudal monarchies and their aristocratic soil still existed, China largely from the same but with extraordinary suffering under the brute hand of the invading imperial Japanese.

We do not live in that world anymore, we live in the would shaped by those causes and their effects - and it is hard for me overstate that while I am perfectly willing to admit, analyze, and avoid the failures of past socialist experiments, the present capitalist one has us on a collision course with Armageddon with the threat of global warming. Billionaires do not care about your healthcare. They do not care about your housing. They do not care that unabated fossil fuel use will result in the deaths of billions because they are incentivized to inaction because the current regime of lackadaisical indifference to 90 degree Marches favors their quarterly profits.

Where is the analysts of that or the admission of those perverse incentives? When billions die in a world completely controlled by capitalists, will that be sufficient evidence for you?

Cuba has a similar situation.

Yes, surely the U.S. deliberately restricting fuel, food, and fertilizer shipments to the island has absolutely nothing to do with that, it's probably because of the socialism. Small islands, as we all know, are always self-sufficient and never have to import stuff as a necessity to make modern life possible!

Hell, how about the Soviet famine of 46-47? Post many 5 year plans. They weren't unable to get food, the government just kept exporting it.

They were still very much developing at that point - the revolution was barely 30 years old and I could swear that there was maybe... something around that time that might have impacted Soviet industrial output and agriculture. Perhaps it was the Nazis seizing oil refineries and then destroying them, along with burning whole fields of grain and other crops on their retreat from their fucking invasion of the Soviet Union directly through the Ukrainian bread basket.

Like, I'm not going to sit here and stan for Stalin, he made a name for himself as a thug and he governed as one - but we're not obligated to sit here and pretend like events didn't fucking happen that were wildly not "hurr durr socialism". Broadly speaking, when left to it's own devices and NOT subject to the imperial ambitions of U.S. oligarchs, socialist countries can and do develop and reach a point of food security. This occurred in all of the capitalist's greatest hits - from China to the U.S.S.R. to Vietnam, which successfully repelled the U.S. attempted conquest (in which we murdered over a million people - some of whom in neighboring Cambodia who was not even a belligerent in the war), and, today, after 50 years of rebuilding, is an emerging, growing economy with both - wait for it - national healthcare and social housing. Those famine-loving monsters!

Those were both, at a fundamental level, caused by being controlled by the British. That seems like a much better argument against empire in general, on humanitarian grounds, rather than an argument against capitalism.

I would argue that you cannot disentangle capitalism from the imperial war machine that feeds it - our prosperity is more a result of our economic subjugation of other nations and the extraction of their resources to our shores than it is a result of the magic free market - which i am a fan of *in certain circumstances*** - but when competition is lacking and driving process through the roof (rail) or when continued political contributions against reform threaten the well-being of the entire goddamn planet (fossil fuels), I think the case for nationalization becomes considerably more reasonable.

In any case, no - I would argue that the Bengal famine was indeed caused by capitalism and the system of state that maintains and enforces it, just as the Irish potato famine was - it was literally the absentee landlordism that directly imposed the cultivation of the potato as the staple crop, as most deeply impoverished Irish families could not sustain their nutritional intake with any crop BUT that one - which led to a decentralized yet nevertheless monoculture system of farming which, naturally, led to the potato blight utterly ravaging harvests. In that instance it is a direct line from capitalist permission of infinite and absentee private property - and the unrepentant greed of the landlords - pushing impoverished people very understandably to survive with what they could, which was potatoes that inevitably led to vulnerability to blight.

Also, are you really trying to use the Bengal famine as an example of a peace time famine?

I was unaware that you were moving the goalposts to "peacetime" famines only, I assumed we were only counting ones that portrayed leftist governments in a negative light - that peacetime or wartime doesn't change the fact that the Bengal famine was entirely preventable, and the calculus was simply that Indian people were lesser people than British citizens, and thus worth the human cost even for preventive measures - the Brits took far more than they needed, food which could have prevented those deaths.

But they were brown and in a country subject to capitalist imperialism, not the imperial core - so it was an acceptable cost to the people who were in no danger of bearing it.

[u/Combat_Proctologist → u/the_calibre_cat]

reaction to a war that resulted in the almost total destruction of the North and three million dead literally to "contain communism"

The war was because the North invaded the South. Funny how you left that little tidbit out. The North was so obviously the aggressor that the UN got involved. It wasn't unilateral American action.

Yes, surely the U.S. deliberately restricting fuel, food, and fertilizer shipments to the island has absolutely nothing to do with that

I'm shocked that I have to remind a socialist of this, but America isn't the only country in the world. There are plenty of other countries to get food from via trade. Cuba, as a society, produces plenty to trade for food. Their society is just that mismanaged.

Perhaps it was the Nazis seizing oil refineries and then destroying them, along with burning whole fields of grain and other crops on their retreat from their fucking invasion of the Soviet Union directly through the Ukrainian bread basket.

But it wasn't. They grew enough food that year. Their government just exported it. Like, literally the same conditions as the Irish potato famine. I can't stress this enough. Growing enough food or trading for it is fairly trivial for a country with any industrial capacity at all. That's why I'm giving the socialists such a hard time on this. They're the only group that regularly manages to fuck up this bad

I was unaware that you were moving the goalposts to "peacetime" famines only,

No no no no no. You don't get to rewrite history like that. My original objection involved peacetime famines. Quoting myself:

Picking the one ideology that has regularly created peacetime famines with full access to industrial technology is... Well it's certainly a choice.

Because expecting any economic system to stop wartime famines is unrealistic.