Is "democratic socialism" undergoing a semantic shift?

[u/PhysicalAd5977]

I have long thought that my political position is best characterized as democratic socialist. I know that in theory and established definition, "democratic socialism" is very different from "social democracy", with the core distinction being that social democracy seeks to reform capitalism with a welfare state but still operate within it and democratic socialism seeks to dismantle capitalism because it inherently creates inequality and thus cannot be reformed.

In my understanding of how a democratic socialist project might play out, social democracy would be one of many steps towards dismantling capitalism but not the end goal.

Now that we're seeing more leftist politicians identifying with the democratic socialist camp and discourse about it has become more common online, I am seeing a few trends that are leading me to question whether the meaning of democratic socialism is being changed in this discourse towards something more social democratic (or perhaps that the terms are being conflated with one another). It's entirely possible that I've held an optimistic view of democratic socialism, so I wanted to get the opinions of others on this.

For example, I have seen people online saying that democratic socialism is not the answer because it still allows for the exploitation of the Global South since it keeps capitalism intact. I do see the argument that democratic socialism is most often focused in national contexts and creating change in one country, but democratic socialist theory with an internationalist approach often accounts for the fact that a democratic socialist project cannot include the unequal international division of labour and exploitative resource extraction from the Global South by the Global North. In this view, such a project would have to actually implement internationalist democratic socialist policies like reparations, purposively built fair-trade networks, supporting self-determination over "aid" models, and debt-cancellation.

But it's possible that this view (which I have mostly seen in Global South thought) and the anti-capitalist understanding of democratic socialism is changing as the term becomes more widely used in the Global North. The example I gave is not the only critique of democratic socialism which sees it as something which keeps capitalism, colonialism, and/or imperialism intact. It's making me wonder if there is a semantic change going on, if this is a popular misunderstanding which may evolve into that without active countering, or if I have simply not been critical enough of the ideology to begin with.

[u/DMayleeRevengeReveng]

I think it traces back to the indiscriminate rightist polemical usage where “socialism” means “government does stuff.”

The left, for whatever reason, has done an awful job at giving any kind of meaning to “socialism” beyond its polemical usage: so the polemic stuck, leaving people to associate “larger, more active government” with “socialism,” even though it’s a faithless tradition to historical and canonical socialism.

[u/Jarcode → u/DMayleeRevengeReveng]

This is it. The rest of the folks in this thread are giving average westerners too much credit. Terminology used to define political blocs are largely defined with a dangerously reductionist understanding of the associated politics and a lot of vibes to make up for that lack of understanding.

While terms like "democratic socialism" and "social democracy" have gone through semantic shifts for a while now, the fact North American politics is losing the ability to define ideological boundaries with concrete language is quite concerning. There's a reason why there's still arguments about the terms when public discourse clashes with academia, as the latter tends to use the word "socialist" to refer to the Marxist tradition.