democratic socialism

Democratic socialism is a political ideology that supports the establishment of a democratically run and decentralized form of socialist economy. Modern democratic socialists vary widely in their views of how a proper socialist economy should function, but all share the goal of abolishing capitalism rather than improving it through state regulation (as preferred by social democrats). They also prioritize democracy as an end over democracy as a means, and some democratic socialists see revolution as an acceptable method of achieving the democracy they desire.

(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)

Characteristics of democratic socialist thought

Democratic socialists reject Marxism-Leninism (i.e., communism) as a legitimate form of socialism, arguing that command economies effectively belong to a small bureaucracy that treats the means of production as its own private property. Democratic socialists also disagree with social democrats’ attempts to harness capitalism to a strong welfare state, since such mixed economies still leave the ownership of many businesses under private (and therefore undemocratic) control. Instead, all employees should enjoy either democratic control or self-management in the workplace.

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Some democratic socialists believe that markets have a place in a socialist economy, so long as the competing businesses are publicly, cooperatively, or otherwise socially owned. And, like social democrats, many democratic socialists advocate for the enactment of state regulation and state welfare programs, both as temporary means of ameliorating the harm of capitalism and as methods of transforming the system piecemeal.

For decades, the meaning of the terms social democrat and democratic socialist were reversed, a fact that might cause confusion for the 21st-century reader of 20th-century socialist thought. In all cases, a completely socialist economy was the objective. But those who called themselves social democrats might have supported either revolution or reform, while democratic socialists were incrementalists.

History of democratic socialism

The conceptual union of democratic and socialist thought began early in the latter’s development. Karl Marx hinted at an openness to democratic government in The Civil War in France (1871), his fawning account of the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. Marx, whose sketch of that aborted government includes a pyramid-like structure of elected delegates, continued to refer to the Paris Commune in later works as a model for socialism. Two decades later, Marx’s partner Friedrich Engels seemingly made Marx’s suggestion explicit, writing that the democratic republic is “the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat.” And Engels’s own successor Karl Kautsky established a clear continuity of thought on the matter by declaring socialism to be the ownership of industry by the democratic state.

A thread of insistence on democratic decision-making in government continued to weave through socialist discourse in the West through the first half of the 20th century. But democratic socialism as it is now defined, with its emphasis on decentralized decision-making, did not arise as a discrete political current until after 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” on Joseph Stalin’s abuses resulted in widespread disenchantment with communism among leftists in the Western world.

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Some members of other socialist groups—such as anarchists, disaffected communists, and issue-based activists in the United States and Europe—subsequently rechristened themselves as members of the “New Left” to distance themselves from the social democratic establishments in both the Soviet Union and Europe. Many of the disparate groups that emerged under this banner, such as the emblematic Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) with its dedication to participatory democracy, either called themselves democratic socialists or met the criteria by which future democratic socialists would be known. They never coalesced into a lasting political party (and many did not want to), yet the overlap in their concerns and their tactics—mass protests, strikes, and civil disobedience, among others—made them a powerful movement into the 1970s.

Cross-pollination among New Left groups led to the broadening of democratic socialist concerns to include social disparities that were previously ignored, accommodating such issues as gay rights, anti-colonialism, and environmentalism. Democratic socialist organizations that followed, such as the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM) in the United States, inherited this interest in multiple causes, a stance later described as multi-tendency or intersectional.

As interest in social democracy declined from the 1980s to the 2010s in favor of neoliberalism, the membership of democratic socialist organizations also dwindled. However, the Great Recession (2007–09) reignited interest in left-wing economics, resulting in unexpected success for self-described socialists at the ballot box in local, state, and federal elections. In the United States, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders won more than two-fifths of the total votes cast in the 2016 Democratic primary elections and more than one-fourth in the more-crowded 2020 primary elections. The growing popularity of democratic socialism has also been reflected in the election of two DSA-endorsed candidates to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in Congress—and the election of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, as mayor of New York City in June 2025.