As an Albanian man, I am usually struck by the ease with which so-called “democratic socialists” in America dismiss any criticism of their beloved socio-economic system. When I point out the fact that “real socialism” has been tried, and it has failed miserably everywhere it has been tried including in my country of origin, Albania, I am usually hit with some meta-Marxian paradigm of how communism is not socialism, and how the dictatorship of the proletariat is not communism.
I get it, there are theoretical differences between Marxism, socialism, and communism. Marxism is the idea that class relations are at the center of human conflict. Socialism is the socio-economic model by which workers control the means of production. Communism is the end goal envisioned by Marxism: A society that’s both classless and stateless.
Despite the nitty-gritty details of those differences, the reality is that socialism is no different from communism in practice. Communist regimes practiced socialism as their baseline socio-economic model, and the promises of equality, alongside Marx’s promise “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” were quickly substituted by the harsh reality of equal misery, poverty, universal shortages, and political repression.
In many respects, the new promises of socialism, masked under the auspices of “democratic socialism,” are as false as the promises of the regimes which brought the scourge of socialism to their nations. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) would bring that very same socialist misery to America, if they were to ever grab the reins of power.
First, centralized production creates scarcity, not prosperity, making the promise of uplifting the working people a false one. It’s worth pointing that out not just as economic theory, but as practical reality as well, at a time when the official platform of the DSA promises public ownership of major corporations, universal healthcare, and dismantling capitalism in the name of some form of state-run economy. DSA cites worker happiness and satisfaction as the reasons behind the promises, but by enacting those policies they might achieve just the opposite.
If the government were to rein in and nationalize major corporations, while at the same time taxing them out of existence, it would lead to the eventual bankruptcy of these corporations. Such an outcome would lead to centralized production with the government being the only or one of the few actors in the market, which would almost certainly lead to shortages and a declining standard of living for everyone involved.
I don’t need to tell my dad’s stories of having to wake up at 4 AM to pick up milk in the communist Albania of the ’80s due to the shortages of milk and other basic products, to explain that the government cannot coordinate and produce the economic activity of millions of actors in a free market while maintaining the same level of productivity as the market does.
When you look at North Korea and Cuba of today, or the Soviet Union or Albania yesterday, you see the failures of state-run companies and the empty shelves that follow suit. Venezuela, under the leadership of Nicolas Maduro is another perfect example, where the average Venezuelan lost around 9 kgs or 19 pounds, not by choice, but due to the shortages in goods and services, brought upon by Maduro’s socialist policies. Government control of the economy does not help working people. It impoverishes them and everyone around them. Therefore, the democratic socialist promise of “worker empowerment” is a false one.
Second, majoritarianism will make America less democratic, not more. DSA proposes expanding the House of Representatives even further, while calling for the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Presidency. The Founding Fathers believed in constitutional republics because they saw such a system as a safeguard for protecting minorities from the threat of “mob rule.”
Communist regimes legitimized confiscations of private property, nationalization of businesses, and persecution of landowners and the clergy under the auspices of “the will of the people,” a form of direct democracy which very much resembles the one proposed in the DSA platform. DSA’s majoritarian democracy goes as far as calling for the abolition of the electoral college, to replace it with the popular vote.
Such democracy is antithetical to liberal democracy, which attempts to balance the will of the majority with minority rights, constitutional checks on power and co-equal branches of government. Direct democracy on the other hand is mob rule.
When institutional checks disappear, a government can impose violent cultural revolutions like it did in Communist China, persecute landowners like the Soviet Union did with the so-called “gulags,” or forcibly take away people’s religious freedom just like the Communist Albanian government did by persecuting the clergy and declaring Albania the world’s only atheist country.
Lenin himself called for the violent overthrow of capitalism through imposing the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Such violent overthrow is not democratic in any liberal sense of the word, thus making the idea of so-called “democratic” socialism a false promise rather than practical reality.
Lastly, the false promises of socialism like equality, worker empowerment, economic security, and liberation from concentrated wealth, are the same ones that have led to the disasters in Eastern Europe, Cuba, and North Korea.
It is indeed true that socialist regimes brought equality for the masses, but such equality was not shared prosperity, like America’s socially-democratic capitalism of the ’50s or ’60s, but widespread misery, with those socialist countries consistently ranking lower on the Human Development Index than their capitalist counterparts.
One might need to take a look at the stark differences in equality, human prosperity and standards of living between North Korea and South Korea today or between West and East Germany once upon a time, to take note of the fact that for socialist’s “equality” goes hand-in-hand with poverty. In 1989, communist Albania ranked as the second-poorest country in the world and the poorest in Europe. Today, under an imperfect capitalist system, it is doing much better.
If so-called “economic liberation,” equality and worker empowerment are prerequisites for upcoming poverty, one would rather not have such attributes in a society. These socialist promises are false.
Needless to say, the socialist elites in these communist countries lived lavishly while the rest of the people suffered. Albania literally had a neighborhood called “The Block,” in downtown Tirana, Albania’s capital, where communist dictator Enver Hoxha and his political accomplices lived in mansions with access to top-tier Western capitalist education and healthcare and with virtually endless product options.
DSA supporters would counter my criticism of their ideology by claiming that “Democratic Socialism is not Albanian communism” and that their socialism is “democratic” which is why it will not resemble the previous failures. More unhinged versions of such support, such as that of self-proclaimed communist and longtime DSA supporter Hasan Piker, include actual apologism for the evils of socialist regimes all around the world.
To those DSA supporters that confound intentionally or otherwise, socialism with Nordic style social democracy or German ordoliberal welfare-state capitalism, I’d point out that democratic socialism and social democracy are distinct and different concepts.
Social democrats believe that capitalism can and must be saved and that robust social safety nets funded by generous taxpayer-funded government programs are the way to achieve just that. Democratic socialists on the other hand seek the abolition of capitalism through “democratic” means. They do not seek to improve capitalism; they seek to replace it with what history has proven to be a clearly inferior socio-economic system.
The welfare state, whether we agree with it or not, is funded by a healthy tax base, which is the case only in capitalism. Under socialism those programs would not be able to exist as the amount of capital and money in the economy to redistribute from is significantly lower than it otherwise would be under capitalism. Democratic socialism is not the way to a welfare state, capitalism is. The welfare state is part of capitalism. Democratic socialism essentially is Albanian or Soviet communism.
Ronald Reagan’s “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” quote comes in handy at a time when American socialists want to take away that freedom in the name of so-called equality, empowerment, and liberation. But history tells us that socialism’s false promises have always ended up the same way: poverty, equality in misery and repression. “Democratic” socialism will not be any different—an ideology of lies and false promises.
