The Pitfalls in the DSA’s Socialist Plans for America

After this November’s midterm elections, a large number of newly elected progressive liberals will take office in city councils, state legislatures, and even Congress, carrying a label that a generation ago seemed to belong only to the history books: socialist.

The Democrat Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the United States, has grown from a few thousand members a decade ago to tens of thousands today, most of them living in deep-blue Democrat-voting states and urban areas where they have become the young-activist base of the local Democrat party. Understanding why requires going back much further than the last election cycle — back, in fact, more than two centuries, to the origins of the French Revolution, where the underlying ideas of what became known as socialism were first proposed, tried, and finally failed repeatedly many times since.

Enlightenment Origins

The intellectual seeds of socialism were planted in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. As the old French aristocratic order collapsed, and the leaders of the Revolution were forcibly freed from the notorious Bastille prison, Enlightenment thinkers of that era began asking not just how political power should be applied, but also questioned the legitimacy of the concept of personal property ownership versus the concept of shared communal property.

But the idealistic principles of the French Revolution — liberty, equality, and fraternity — were eventually allowed to go too far, as the mob took over the power of the government and imposed a years-long reign of terror in France. As a result, the original revolutionary quest for justice for the people ultimately led to the indiscriminate use of the guillotine, even against some of the original leaders of the Revolution themselves.

Early utopian socialists like Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier imagined societies organized around cooperation rather than private ownership and competition. The word “socialism” itself entered common use in the 1830s, describing a group of ideas based upon the core conviction that privately owned and operated industrial capitalism, for all its of its productive power, concentrates wealth unfairly in the hands of a privileged few, and leaves most ordinary workers with little control over their own lives.

Marx And The Theory Of Class Struggle

That critique was developed into a systematic economic and political theory by Karl Marx, a secular German-Jewish philosopher and economist writing in London in the mid-1800s. In his works titled The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital, Marx argued that history was driven by class conflict, and that capitalism based upon private ownership would eventually collapse under its own contradictions, giving way to a classless, stateless society in which workers collectively owned the means of production and were therefore in greater control over their own lives. Marx’s writings gave socialism a new vocabulary and a revolutionary outlook that older utopian theories and proposals had lacked, and Marx’s communist/socialist ideas would shape liberal political movements on every continent for the next century and a half.

Revolution In Russia

Marx’s theories remained largely academic until 1917, when Russia’s Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in November 1917, overthrowing the provisional Russian government which was formed after the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. At that point, popular support for Russia’s Czarist monarchy and aristocratic ruling class had collapsed, and the Russian military had been soundly defeated on the battlefields of Eastern Europe by the German army.

Upon seizing power, Lenin quickly withdrew Russia as a combatant in World War I. He also adapted Marx’s ideas into a doctrine now known as Marxism-Leninism that justified rule by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” on behalf of the working class. The result was the Soviet Union, the world’s first avowedly communist state, which would become the template that later socialist and communist-inspired revolutionary movements would study, imitate, or react against.

The Soviet Economy’s Structural Failures

Under the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy, free markets and private property were abolished. Industrial production targets for state-owned industries were set from government offices in Moscow rather than permitting prices and production targets to be set naturally by consumer demand in a free marketplace.

Over decades, the centrally planned Soviet system proved chronically unable to match supply with demand: shortages of consumer goods, chronic agricultural underperformance leading to food shortages, and a lack of incentives for innovation became defining features of Soviet life.

Economists generally agree that the absence of price signals and competition in the Soviet economic system made it extraordinarily difficult for the government’s central planners to know what to produce and how much to produce. In addition, most factory-made goods produced in the Soviet Union quickly gained a reputation for poor quality.

The chronic mismatch between the forces of supply and demand and the absence of free market incentives for good performance and maintaining high quality standards were serious problems for the centrally planned economic system from its inception in the 1920s until the Soviet system’s internal collapse in 1991.

Joseph Stalin’s Government-By-Terror

Economic dysfunction in the Soviet Union was compounded by political brutality. Under Joseph Stalin, who consolidated power after Lenin’s death in 1924, the Soviet state carried out the forced collectivization of agriculture that contributed to deliberately orchestrated famines that killed millions of Russian peasants, most notoriously in Ukraine.

The Great Purge of the late 1930s saw show trials, mass executions, and the expansion of the Gulag forced-labor camp system, in which millions of Russians were imprisoned mostly for political reasons. While historians have been unable to agree on a precise death toll for that period, there is a broad consensus that Stalin’s rule was one of the deadliest periods of state violence in modern history.

Western Intellectuals And The Communist Romance

However, none of these internal problems with the Soviet system were fully visible to observers in the West during the 1930s. From the low points during the Great Depression, when the American free market capitalist economic system appeared to be failing catastrophically, communism attracted a widespread admiration from intellectuals, artists, and academics in the United States and Great Britain. Many liberal writers, professors, and government officials joined the American Communist Party or ideologically sympathetic “fellow-traveler” organizations. They were attracted by the claims of the supporters of the Soviet system that it was providing full employment, personal equality, and meeting the growth targets set by the government’s five-year economic plans at a time when Western economies were mired in widespread unemployment and grinding poverty. The reputation of the USSR in liberal circles of the United States also benefited from the accounts of visitors who returned with glowing reports due to carefully managed guided tours designed to show off only the most positive aspects of the Soviet system.

The Disillusionment Of Communism’s True Believers

However, the enthusiasm of many American liberals for communism did not survive the decade. Two events in particular shattered the utopian illusions of many Western communist sympathizers. The Moscow show trials of 1936–1938, in which Soviet officials confessed to hard-to-believe conspiracy theories before being executed, which convinced many liberals that the USSR was not the workers’ paradise that it claimed to be but rather a brutal totalitarian police state.

Then, in August 1939, Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that briefly allied the world’s leading communist power with its most notorious fascist one, forcing many well-meaning American and British Communist Party members to realize that the leader of their movement had just betrayed everything they had believed they were fighting for. Membership in Western Communist parties fell sharply, and a generation of disillusioned former true believers in communism, including prominent writers such as Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon, and George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, became some of communism’s most effective critics.

Communism’s 20th Century Of Failure

The Soviet experience was not an isolated case. Communist governments that came to power elsewhere in the 20th century tended to repeat, and sometimes intensify, its patterns of economic dysfunction, political violence, and a deliberate disregard for human rights.

In China, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) was a crude attempt at the creation of a rapid, centrally directed, and forced industrialization and collectivized farms imposed on a mostly backward rural society. It produced a famine that killed tens of millions of Chinese people. The Cultural Revolution that was then imposed by Mao’s followers unleashed further chaos and repression before China began, in the late 1970s, to reintroduce Western-inspired free market economic policies that fueled its later economic growth.

After communist revolutionary Fidel Castro and his followers seized control of Cuba’s government in 1959, he nationalized the country’s industries and agriculture, and achieved notable gains in literacy and healthcare access. But like other centrally planned economies, Castro’s socialist policies produced chronic shortages, rationing, and a stagnant economy that has been struggling ever since.

North Korea’s system of total central planning and near-total isolation produced a severe famine and starvation during the 1990s, which were estimated to have killed over a million people, alongside one of the most repressive political systems in the modern world.

Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979) pursued an extreme version of agrarian communism, forcibly emptying cities and executing or working to death an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people in one of the 20th century’s worst genocides.

Despite their differences, the economies of these communist regimes shared recurring failed socialist economic policies: the replacement of market prices with central directives, the concentration of political power in a single party or leader, and the suppression of public dissent and freedom of speech needed to correct policy mistakes before they became catastrophic.

What Lessons Apply Today?

It is against this long, grim history of the most prominent of the 20th century’s communist and socialist regimes that today’s Democrat Socialists of America position themselves — and its leaders have tried to carefully separate themselves and their political movement from those failures.

Instead, the DSA describes itself as democrat socialist rather than as Marxist-Leninist. Its policy platform focuses on winning elections and enacting liberal changes through the normal legislative process rather than following the 20th-century Communist pattern of attempting to seize control of the state by force through revolution.

The DSA’s newly adopted national policy program titled “Workers Deserve More” pushes a wide-ranging progressive/liberal agenda in four main areas.

Doing Away With The Essential Elements Of The U.S. Constitution

The radical changes it proposes to make to the three branches of the federal government with an elaborate system of checks and balances, as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution, include a call for abolishing the U.S. Senate entirely and replacing the current House of Representatives with a single legislative chamber whose members are selected by proportional representation.

To reform the process for the selection of a president, the DSA platform calls for replacing the institution of the Electoral College with the president being the winner of a national popular vote.

The DSA also wants to curb the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review of legislation and executive actions. It would also give non-citizens, illegal immigrants, and criminals with past felonies full voting rights.

On labor and economic policies, the DSA proposes a 32-hour workweek with no cut in pay, a confiscatory wealth tax on individuals with large fortunes and inheritances, and public ownership of major energy, transportation, and natural-resource industries, alongside new laws strengthening unions.

The Path To Socialized Medicine

The DSA would expand the social safety net by instituting Medicare for All, turning the current American public-private medical care system into a totally government-controlled form of socialized medicine, similar to the current, widely criticized medical systems in Great Britain and Canada.

Among the most prominent freebies featured in the DSA platform are tuition-free public colleges, and the imposition of universal rent controls paired with a major expansion of public housing. The DSA would end the detention and deportation of any immigrant, regardless of their legal status. It wants to abolish the requirement for cash bail, even for violent criminals, and “demilitarize” local police departments, seriously inhibiting their ability to enforce the laws and protect members of the public.

On foreign policy, the DSA calls for sharply reducing the U.S. military budget and ending the stationing of American troops overseas. It would impose an arms embargo on Israel, eliminating its ability to defend its citizens against October 7th-type terrorist attacks, and it would lift the current U.S. economic sanctions on notorious rogue countries including Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela.

Can The Dsa Protect The Guardrails Of Democracy?

The DSA also claims that its members hold a range of political views, ranging from those who would limit their effort to effective incremental government policy reforms through the current two-party legislative process, and others who call for achieving their desired policy changes through explicitly Marxist and revolutionary actions.

Critics of the DSA’s policy goals cite the dismal 20th-century history of the failed socialist/communist governments described above. They predict that the imposition of public ownership and central planning on the “major industries” of the national economy will reproduce the chronic problems that severely hampered the Soviet and Mao-era Chinese economies.

The DSA’s critics also warn against the proposed concentration of all government power in a legislature completely unfettered by appropriate checks and powers, including politically independent judicial review, a serious deliberative body, like the U.S. Senate, or a capable and suitably empowered leader of the executive branch of the government.

A Debate Over Government Safeguards

By eliminating the safeguards that the Founding Fathers of this country thoroughly debated before incorporating them into the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the DSA would make it more difficult to catch and correct the most egregious policy failures or mistakes they compounded and eventually led to a crisis and loss of confidence in socialist governments as they did in Beijing, Moscow, and Phnom Penh (the capital city of Cambodia).

Liberal and progressive members and supporters of the DSA argue that comparisons to the failed Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and Cambodian government models are unfair. They say that the DSA plans to maintain free, fair, and competitive elections, an independent press, and the rule of law.

The DSA’s critics respond that the fundamental changes that the DSA hopes to impose on the federal government will make it much harder to assure the survival of the safeguards for democracy mentioned above. But the advocates for the DSA claim those safeguards will survive to protect the reformed federal government system from the pitfalls that led the 20th-century socialist/communist governments to failure and disaster.