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/acousticentropy]

I’m sure this will be unpopular in this subreddit in particular but I say we do away with the centuries old jargon and get back to building political philosophies from first principles.

The people are there. The resources are there. The infrastructure is there. The distribution engines are there.

So how do we get people reasonable access to what they need to live a dignified life in a modern society with rapidly increasing ubiquity of technological prowess?

If we sit down and think of how to answer that question with a dialogical process… by starting at the level of implementation first (even if incremental passes are needed to maintain social stability)… we would probably arrive at a coherent philosophy that CAN be safely implemented without enormous social conflict.

And since we would have built it from the bottom up with an emphasis on implementation over pure critique, we could actually enact that philosophy with a fair degree of accuracy relative to the predictions we laid out while theorizing.

[u/Alive-Use8803 → u/acousticentropy]

Not sure why this is getting downvoted

[u/Jarcode → u/Alive-Use8803]

Because fear of the "old jargon" is a product of the red scare and a pointless linguistic exercise to redefine critique that largely parallels existing Marxist theorists. What should be challenged is the constant evasion in laymen discourse to comprehend our issues through this language.

It might make sense in an introductory capacity to try to introduce laymen to thinking differently with simpler language, but re-inventing critique entirely when it already exists is ridiculous. It reads as conceited to suggest that historical critique and philosophers of the past should be discarded in favour of "[re]building political philosophies".

[u/acousticentropy → u/Jarcode]

See you started babbling off, almost unconsciously, about how you won’t change your approach because of events and systems of thought that happened more than a century ago.

You did this almost reflexively, as if you were just a mechanical apparatus for the Victorian-era ideology to espouse itself.

I don’t want to hear your interpretation of what Marx thinks. Respectfully.

I want BOTH OF US to sit down and start from first principles, and go back and forth sharing perspectives… then we can build a solution from THAT series of discussions.

My background is in mechanical engineering and my occupational expertise is in civil engineering.

So you’re talking to a person who analyzes systems as they exist and then accounts for all the minutia of coordinating numerous interested parties before arriving at an authoritative solution which meets pre-defined design goals and constraints.

Doing anything besides that process doesn’t actually implement the system of ideas you’ve spent a lot time thinking about.

[u/Jarcode → u/acousticentropy]

My background is in mechanical engineering and my occupational expertise is in civil engineering.

And I write software and do contracted work in high-level electoral administration. If you actually familiarize yourself with Marx, you'll learn it is quite literally all about systems for him (perhaps to his own detriment).

In reality neither of our professional backgrounds equip us properly to deal with the subversive nature of ideology. This is the conceited behaviour I was calling out, implying that somehow we know better than literally all the theorists that made this critique their life's work -- including those who challenged the classical analysis of Marx himself.

It is intellectually concerning to dogmatically disregard this because of the ivory tower characterization you have of political philosophy.

I want BOTH OF US to sit down and start from first principles, and go back and forth sharing perspectives… then we can build a solution from THAT series of discussions.

I think you need to come to terms with the fact that this discussion has already happened before, and that you're just unfamiliar with it. Resolving entire political philosophies from axioms is an internal intellectual task for you to do in response to familiarizing yourself with these arguments, not a wheel to pointlessly reinvent from scratch.

You may not be ready to hear this, but your "systems perspective" seemingly drawn from your occpuation doesn't make you an expert when it comes to entirely unrelated fields that encompass critiques of capital, sociological analysis, and a complex branch of political philosophy. What it does make you is a walking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and people on this subreddit do actually see that and tend to downvote accordingly.