Thank you for this clear explanation! It's great to see some "here's where socialisms differ" analysis without the piece reading like some "here's why these people aren't real socialists, unlike my infallible political project!"
I like the piece but I’d say your note 4 is the most important part, which is not addressed in full. Too many on the left are dreaming about a future and (hopefully) classless society focused on common welfare, but they overlook the fact that an existing ruling/owning/capitalist class must be defeated by some means in order to get there. And that class isn’t going quietly. Nor are they going without first employing massive state violence, which they have at the ready, no matter how peaceful, slow, or democratic the takeover is. They know it’s coming, because they have class consciousness already, and they will fight tooth and claw to keep or increase(!) their power.
We are all guilty at some point of focusing too much on the end goal and not the steps required to achieve it, but some of us are not growing out of that.
I would argue that type 1 is not socialism. The core objective in socialism, whether using the democratic or insurrectionary road is to transform the economic structure of society to put in under the control of the working-class. The idea of that the economic structure is left unchanged would make a form of capitalism...perhaps welfare capitalism or what formed as 'social democratic capitalism'.
yea social democracy can be compared to giving slaves better conditions but still upholding slavery. that’s why the left or socialism can’t include social democracy.
Thank you for this, I’ve been sorting out potential strategy and approach in my mind and this perfectly explains/lays it out.
Help me make sure I’m understanding/getting this right — so social democrats are Type I and they basically want to provide and conserve an abundant social safety net but not ultimately socialize the entire economy (seize the means of production)?
If that’s so, I would say I’m kind of in between Type I and Type II (lol) in that I think most of life is privy to that quote from Back to the Future - “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet; but your kids are gonna love it.”
By which I mean: I think people are so ensconced by capitalist realism and the neoliberal status quo (especially in America, my GOD) that even the suggestion of, say, free buses is “radical communist.” Perhaps we first work to get these basic fundamentals (and build more labor power inside firms) like they have in some social democratic countries/cities with the ultimate goal of socializing the economy.
I know it sucks because we want to change everything all at once, but Americans are babies and sometimes we need to take baby steps, idk. Again - not like this is ideal, but if we can get back to like FDR new deal basics as groundwork and start pushing from there AND to also learn from history/our mistakes that we need to have a strategy to preserve that, like you correctly mentioned about building and maintaining popular power. It kind of feels like post FDR people either got lazy or complacent or ignorant and the neolibs were able to come in and ratchet everything back.
And I know I know, FDR wasn’t a socialist, but you know what I mean.
Ya your summary is right! And I think that's a reasonable position to have. I didn't get into it in this piece but I think there are some important differences in how "Type II" socialists think about the transition. Some would come closer to what you're describing because they would be for a more gradual process of transitioning to a society founded on social ownership. Here's what I wrote to another person along those lines: "After the election of a socialist government, does the democratic road continue by means of abiding by constitutional norms and forging class compromises along the way to socialism? Or does it take a more "hard" approach to expropriation and a big rupture with the capitalist system? If your concept of a democratic road looks more like the former, then in theory it will also involve some kind of protracted period of social democracy along the way to socialism."
Hope to see more like this and go into more detail
"Does a socialist project respect private ownership rights, or is it trying to socialize (take under public or cooperative control) most productive assets?"
Even the Soviet Union still had private ownership rights. They had self-employed people. So that is a misnomer.
As for me, the only private ownership of the means of production should be small local businesses and maybe some small real estate investors that own duplexes. Everything else (except the HR coops below) should be socialized and owned by the public with the exclusive rights to the profits. These businesses can be owned at different levels of government. Production would be contracted out to private management-labor coops/staffing firms. These human capital firms may be quite large and nation-wide. In addition, the overall income distribution nation-wide would be democratically determined and based on principles of equity.
I don’t know what label to use, but I do know that the state must control any and all natural monopolies, chief among them healthcare and the banking system, and that the state must act as an employer of last resort at a socially inclusive wage as a buffer stock maintaining full employment. Private enterprise is welcome to whatever is left over — employee ownership may or may not matter in a system where the state meets the conditions outlined in my first sentence.
I think that'd be a pretty consistent social democratic ("type I") position, though it might depend on the extent of control over the banking system you expect the government to have. If it's pretty total, given the central role of finance to all business's operations, you're coming closer to government control over the whole economy.
One extra wrinkle in this typology is that some "Type 2" democratic socialists see "Type 1" social democracy as a viable "stopgap" goal, if not the desired final outcome. It may be fair to describe the current DSA consensus as "build towards socialism, but stop along the road of social democracy on our way there".
This is a good point, and I think it gets to some ambiguity in what the "democratic road" I describe entails. After the election of a socialist government, does the democratic road continue by means of abiding by constitutional norms and forging class compromises along the way to socialism? Or does it take a more "hard" approach to expropriation and a big rupture with the capitalist system? If your concept of a democratic road looks more like the former, then in theory it will also involve some kind of protracted period of social democracy along the way to socialism.
Um. I think you may have overlooked non-state socialism (Libertarian Socialism, Council Communism, Anarcho-Communism, Syndicalism, Mutualism etc.).
A Type IIII socialist project is one that is also committed to socializing the economy but sets as one of its key objectives the removal of all government through an insurrection (or prefiguration, transition, or collapse).
Fair point. I guess I define socialism as a society with social ownership of the means of production and a state. So I've always thought of anarchists as not being socialists but instead as a distinct political project trying to build an egalitarian society without a state (communism?).
It is fair to say that Anarchists are 'trying to build an egalitarian society without a state' & in this sense most Anarchists are definitely Communists (as well as being Socialists too).
I've wondered when the association of Socialism with a state began. I presume with The First International's split in 1872. But I don't think that those on the state side thought of the stateless ones as non-Socialists despite their other criticisms.
For a while we see even Marx corresponding and even working with Anarchists (a couple early translations of Capital were made by Anarchists), but by the time of Lenin the Anarchists are seen as enemies. Yet even Lenin gave some grudging respect to Kropotkin and Tolstoy.
I would go further and call type 1 Democratic Socialists, type 2 Socialists and type 3 Communists
Communism in practice has meant governments controlled by the Communist Party. These governments came to power by overthrowing a prior regime through revolution or coup, making them type III.
Socialism could involve something as simple as limiting limited liability only to worker-owned and controlled corporations combined with a vigorous tort system. Big worker-owned firms would benefit from limited liability. The owners of private firms would be personally responsible for anything the firm did. An employee accidently releases some toxic chemicals that leads to several deaths. The firm owners are accomplices and tried and sentenced along with the employee. Under today's system, shareholders are not responsible for anything the firm they own shares in does. Executives can only be convicted is there is evidence they knew about it and did not act. Socialism would remove this protection over a period of time, during which firms would engage in LBOs transferring ownership from shareholders to employees.
In such a world there would still be a lot of private enterprise. It would just be on a smaller scale. An entrepreneur who grows his company to a too-big-to-manage-personally size would file for incorporation as an employee-owned firm and sell his interest to is employees. He would then use the money either to start his new business or to buy an annuity and retire. The advantage of socialism over communism is it retains the dynamism of capitalist economies, while the communist countries become sclerotic and hidebound.
Democratic socialism would mean creating socialist structures within capitalist economies like you see in the Nordic countries or "Rhine capitalism" in Germany. This system provides a good deal for workers under both stakeholder and shareholder capitalism, but at some cost in dynamism.
Finally, there would be social democrats. These would be like the New Dealers, who imposed environmental constraints on a capitalist economy such a ban on stock buybacks, tax dividends as ordinary income, and high marginal tax rates. The first two remove a direct method of maximizing shareholder value (buyback boosting share price while dividends give money to shareholders). The latter makes high levels of monetary compensation for executives uneconomic for the firm, so they resort to non-monetary compensation (in-kind and status-based). Stock options do not make sense in such a world and their use is greatly diminished. This creates a situation in which executives are not incented to focus on shareholder value above all else and have a harder time doing so anyway since they can't do buybacks and paying dividends means most of it goes to the tax man, so they don't do that. This forces them to invest for growth rather than higher stock price.
This is how the New Deal economy worked. It is the premier example of social democracy in the scheme I am presenting. Its main advantage was it was actually put into place in the US, a place where Socialism simply never got traction due to what socialists called "American exceptionalism"
This is pretty good! I think people in the US need to abandon the label game. People like Bernie and now probably Mamdani are really type 1 socialists. They have no desire to socialize the entire economy which in the USA is what they need to get more mainstream acceptance . But people in the USA have a real phobia about socialism due to the Cold War. If socialists are to succeed they need to respect markets and private property. Any other attitude is a total non starter . And above all they need to govern well.
I understand this impulse but what happens when capital decides they don't want to play ball with the socialist in office, and prevents them from governing well? What happens if Trump, Hochul, etc. deprive Mamdani of the funding he needs to deliver on his platform? What happens if the capital flight that Mamdani said won't happen actually does happen? What would he be able to do in that scenario to "govern well" aside from pointing out to his base the ways capital is depriving them of the platform they voted for?
Your historical outline is very good, but I think it demonstrates that the social democracy/democratic socialism dichotomy is not really meaningful. Take the clause IV example: it would be hard to argue that the Labour Party is not a social democratic party, but historically they obviously held what we would now call democratic socialist ideals.
It makes more sense to see the distinction in historical terms: social democracy represents the vestiges of the 20th-century socialist movement which is now nearly dead. Its stated ideals represent the culmination of compromises that have brought it to this point. Democratic socialism represents a socialist movement that hasn't really even begun to exist. We're free to state whatever ideals we want, but we have no power to achieve any of them!
To the extent that anyone today calls themselves a social democrat, imo it's the same kind of cosplay as someone covering their walls in soviet kitsch (except even nerdier).
I've left a similar note under Nick's post, but I think a very important distinction among the western left, perhaps even more important that type II and type III in practice, is one's theory of change: does one see socialist transformation as coming from intransigent struggle from below or through compromise from above? You touched briefly on this point in your 5th note.
After most Communist parties adopted Stalin's popular front strategy during the second war, they didn't differ much strategically from mainstream Social-Democracy (even though they differed in their long-term aspirations, believing they were still working towards an insurrection). In fact, because these Communist Parties were ideologically homogeneous, the left-wing minority of the social-democratic parties were the only sections of the Left left advocating struggle from below. In his report-back on the 1943 UAW convention, Max Shachtman descriped the union being split between three factions: the 'Shactmanite' Workers Party cadre and non-socialist rank-and-file militants on the left (advocating an end to the no-strike pledge and the immediate formation of a Labor Party), the Communist Party cadre and labor-liberals on the right (advocating unconditional support behind Roosevelt and cessation of all labor unrest during the war) and Reuther and the labor bureaucrats in the middle (advocating conditional endorsement of Roosevelt and the right to strike under exceptional conditions). Though WP and CP cadres would’ve both considered themselves type III (insurrectionary) socialists, they found themselves on opposite ends of the convention, with the communists being further to the right than Walter Reuther and the labor bureaucracy. So let’s add a new modifier to your classification system: “A” for socialist from above and “B” for socialist from below. So, the WP would’ve been classified as III.B while the CP would’ve been classified as III.A.
Sometimes this distinction is more important than the distinction of what “road" one is following. For instance, during the split of the Socialist Party in the 30s, the Trotskyist entryists on the left temporarily allied with the Militant tendency on the center against the “Old Guard” on the right. The Militant tendency, though democratic socialist, had more in common with the insurrectionary Trotskyists than with the democratic-socialist Old Guard. Likewise, the Old Guard, which later formed the SDF, had more in common with the “insurrectionary” CPUSA in their support for Roosevelt than with the democratic socialist center in the SPA. Now bear with me for a second as this is going to sound like a LSAT logic game, but, during the 30s, the array of the forces on the left could be described as something like this: Trotskyist SWP (III.B), “Altmanite” SPA center (II.B), SDF (II.A) and CPUSA (III.A).
Sometimes, one’s commitment to socialism from above or below survives longer than one’s stance on which road to follow. Many ISers in the 70s, following Hal Draper, were both insurrectionary socialists and socialists from below (III.B). Now most of these ex-IS veterans who are active in DSA would now say they support a democratic road to socialism, yet they still maintain their commitment to struggle from below (II.B).
Very nice historical overview! One question it leaves me with is to what extent it is possible to be agnostic about the question of the insurrectionary vs. democratic road. There are certainly examples of parties that unite type-II and type-III socialists (or type-I and type II for that matter), though I suspect any party will have a majority that gravitates towards one of the types.
I think what you're getting at reveals something unsatisfactory in my schema, which is that I'm not sure the critical difference is how a socialist government comes to power (election vs. insurrection). I think it might be more clarifying to distinguish Type II from Type III in terms of openness to making class compromises with the capitalist class and respect for some democratic norms after election of a socialist government (free elections, civil liberties, respecting defeat of a socialist government if it loses an election). I think a democratic road in a capitalist democracy still rules out an insurrection to install a government, but not sure that's all we should take into consideration when making the distinction. I want to think more about this though, questions for a future post! :)
Is it because of the American right-wing political party of the same (Libertarian) name which stole that name on purpose from Socialists just to annoy them?
The word Libertarian has a long non-state Socialist tradition, and still is commonly used in much of Europe in its proper context. Even in America it was used by some Socialist groups up until the 1990s until they got fed up with the misunderstanding.
Thank you for this clear explanation! It's great to see some "here's where socialisms differ" analysis without the piece reading like some "here's why these people aren't real socialists, unlike my infallible political project!"
I like the piece but I’d say your note 4 is the most important part, which is not addressed in full. Too many on the left are dreaming about a future and (hopefully) classless society focused on common welfare, but they overlook the fact that an existing ruling/owning/capitalist class must be defeated by some means in order to get there. And that class isn’t going quietly. Nor are they going without first employing massive state violence, which they have at the ready, no matter how peaceful, slow, or democratic the takeover is. They know it’s coming, because they have class consciousness already, and they will fight tooth and claw to keep or increase(!) their power.
We are all guilty at some point of focusing too much on the end goal and not the steps required to achieve it, but some of us are not growing out of that.
More coming on this question soon!
I would argue that type 1 is not socialism. The core objective in socialism, whether using the democratic or insurrectionary road is to transform the economic structure of society to put in under the control of the working-class. The idea of that the economic structure is left unchanged would make a form of capitalism...perhaps welfare capitalism or what formed as 'social democratic capitalism'.
yea social democracy can be compared to giving slaves better conditions but still upholding slavery. that’s why the left or socialism can’t include social democracy.
Well dude I guess America will be spared real socialism 😎
Thank you for this, I’ve been sorting out potential strategy and approach in my mind and this perfectly explains/lays it out.
Help me make sure I’m understanding/getting this right — so social democrats are Type I and they basically want to provide and conserve an abundant social safety net but not ultimately socialize the entire economy (seize the means of production)?
If that’s so, I would say I’m kind of in between Type I and Type II (lol) in that I think most of life is privy to that quote from Back to the Future - “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet; but your kids are gonna love it.”
By which I mean: I think people are so ensconced by capitalist realism and the neoliberal status quo (especially in America, my GOD) that even the suggestion of, say, free buses is “radical communist.” Perhaps we first work to get these basic fundamentals (and build more labor power inside firms) like they have in some social democratic countries/cities with the ultimate goal of socializing the economy.
I know it sucks because we want to change everything all at once, but Americans are babies and sometimes we need to take baby steps, idk. Again - not like this is ideal, but if we can get back to like FDR new deal basics as groundwork and start pushing from there AND to also learn from history/our mistakes that we need to have a strategy to preserve that, like you correctly mentioned about building and maintaining popular power. It kind of feels like post FDR people either got lazy or complacent or ignorant and the neolibs were able to come in and ratchet everything back.
And I know I know, FDR wasn’t a socialist, but you know what I mean.
Ya your summary is right! And I think that's a reasonable position to have. I didn't get into it in this piece but I think there are some important differences in how "Type II" socialists think about the transition. Some would come closer to what you're describing because they would be for a more gradual process of transitioning to a society founded on social ownership. Here's what I wrote to another person along those lines: "After the election of a socialist government, does the democratic road continue by means of abiding by constitutional norms and forging class compromises along the way to socialism? Or does it take a more "hard" approach to expropriation and a big rupture with the capitalist system? If your concept of a democratic road looks more like the former, then in theory it will also involve some kind of protracted period of social democracy along the way to socialism."
Hope to see more like this and go into more detail
"Does a socialist project respect private ownership rights, or is it trying to socialize (take under public or cooperative control) most productive assets?"
Even the Soviet Union still had private ownership rights. They had self-employed people. So that is a misnomer.
As for me, the only private ownership of the means of production should be small local businesses and maybe some small real estate investors that own duplexes. Everything else (except the HR coops below) should be socialized and owned by the public with the exclusive rights to the profits. These businesses can be owned at different levels of government. Production would be contracted out to private management-labor coops/staffing firms. These human capital firms may be quite large and nation-wide. In addition, the overall income distribution nation-wide would be democratically determined and based on principles of equity.
I'm way ahead of you. :)
I don’t know what label to use, but I do know that the state must control any and all natural monopolies, chief among them healthcare and the banking system, and that the state must act as an employer of last resort at a socially inclusive wage as a buffer stock maintaining full employment. Private enterprise is welcome to whatever is left over — employee ownership may or may not matter in a system where the state meets the conditions outlined in my first sentence.
I think that'd be a pretty consistent social democratic ("type I") position, though it might depend on the extent of control over the banking system you expect the government to have. If it's pretty total, given the central role of finance to all business's operations, you're coming closer to government control over the whole economy.
One extra wrinkle in this typology is that some "Type 2" democratic socialists see "Type 1" social democracy as a viable "stopgap" goal, if not the desired final outcome. It may be fair to describe the current DSA consensus as "build towards socialism, but stop along the road of social democracy on our way there".
This is a good point, and I think it gets to some ambiguity in what the "democratic road" I describe entails. After the election of a socialist government, does the democratic road continue by means of abiding by constitutional norms and forging class compromises along the way to socialism? Or does it take a more "hard" approach to expropriation and a big rupture with the capitalist system? If your concept of a democratic road looks more like the former, then in theory it will also involve some kind of protracted period of social democracy along the way to socialism.
This is why people are voting for them because what’s wrong with that halfway point 😎
Um. I think you may have overlooked non-state socialism (Libertarian Socialism, Council Communism, Anarcho-Communism, Syndicalism, Mutualism etc.).
A Type IIII socialist project is one that is also committed to socializing the economy but sets as one of its key objectives the removal of all government through an insurrection (or prefiguration, transition, or collapse).
Fair point. I guess I define socialism as a society with social ownership of the means of production and a state. So I've always thought of anarchists as not being socialists but instead as a distinct political project trying to build an egalitarian society without a state (communism?).
It is fair to say that Anarchists are 'trying to build an egalitarian society without a state' & in this sense most Anarchists are definitely Communists (as well as being Socialists too).
I've wondered when the association of Socialism with a state began. I presume with The First International's split in 1872. But I don't think that those on the state side thought of the stateless ones as non-Socialists despite their other criticisms.
For a while we see even Marx corresponding and even working with Anarchists (a couple early translations of Capital were made by Anarchists), but by the time of Lenin the Anarchists are seen as enemies. Yet even Lenin gave some grudging respect to Kropotkin and Tolstoy.
Libertarian socialism. The greatest oxymoron of all history 😎
I would go further and call type 1 Democratic Socialists, type 2 Socialists and type 3 Communists
Communism in practice has meant governments controlled by the Communist Party. These governments came to power by overthrowing a prior regime through revolution or coup, making them type III.
Socialism could involve something as simple as limiting limited liability only to worker-owned and controlled corporations combined with a vigorous tort system. Big worker-owned firms would benefit from limited liability. The owners of private firms would be personally responsible for anything the firm did. An employee accidently releases some toxic chemicals that leads to several deaths. The firm owners are accomplices and tried and sentenced along with the employee. Under today's system, shareholders are not responsible for anything the firm they own shares in does. Executives can only be convicted is there is evidence they knew about it and did not act. Socialism would remove this protection over a period of time, during which firms would engage in LBOs transferring ownership from shareholders to employees.
In such a world there would still be a lot of private enterprise. It would just be on a smaller scale. An entrepreneur who grows his company to a too-big-to-manage-personally size would file for incorporation as an employee-owned firm and sell his interest to is employees. He would then use the money either to start his new business or to buy an annuity and retire. The advantage of socialism over communism is it retains the dynamism of capitalist economies, while the communist countries become sclerotic and hidebound.
Democratic socialism would mean creating socialist structures within capitalist economies like you see in the Nordic countries or "Rhine capitalism" in Germany. This system provides a good deal for workers under both stakeholder and shareholder capitalism, but at some cost in dynamism.
Finally, there would be social democrats. These would be like the New Dealers, who imposed environmental constraints on a capitalist economy such a ban on stock buybacks, tax dividends as ordinary income, and high marginal tax rates. The first two remove a direct method of maximizing shareholder value (buyback boosting share price while dividends give money to shareholders). The latter makes high levels of monetary compensation for executives uneconomic for the firm, so they resort to non-monetary compensation (in-kind and status-based). Stock options do not make sense in such a world and their use is greatly diminished. This creates a situation in which executives are not incented to focus on shareholder value above all else and have a harder time doing so anyway since they can't do buybacks and paying dividends means most of it goes to the tax man, so they don't do that. This forces them to invest for growth rather than higher stock price.
This is how the New Deal economy worked. It is the premier example of social democracy in the scheme I am presenting. Its main advantage was it was actually put into place in the US, a place where Socialism simply never got traction due to what socialists called "American exceptionalism"
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/what-is-neoliberalism-an-empirical
This is pretty good! I think people in the US need to abandon the label game. People like Bernie and now probably Mamdani are really type 1 socialists. They have no desire to socialize the entire economy which in the USA is what they need to get more mainstream acceptance . But people in the USA have a real phobia about socialism due to the Cold War. If socialists are to succeed they need to respect markets and private property. Any other attitude is a total non starter . And above all they need to govern well.
I understand this impulse but what happens when capital decides they don't want to play ball with the socialist in office, and prevents them from governing well? What happens if Trump, Hochul, etc. deprive Mamdani of the funding he needs to deliver on his platform? What happens if the capital flight that Mamdani said won't happen actually does happen? What would he be able to do in that scenario to "govern well" aside from pointing out to his base the ways capital is depriving them of the platform they voted for?
Your historical outline is very good, but I think it demonstrates that the social democracy/democratic socialism dichotomy is not really meaningful. Take the clause IV example: it would be hard to argue that the Labour Party is not a social democratic party, but historically they obviously held what we would now call democratic socialist ideals.
It makes more sense to see the distinction in historical terms: social democracy represents the vestiges of the 20th-century socialist movement which is now nearly dead. Its stated ideals represent the culmination of compromises that have brought it to this point. Democratic socialism represents a socialist movement that hasn't really even begun to exist. We're free to state whatever ideals we want, but we have no power to achieve any of them!
To the extent that anyone today calls themselves a social democrat, imo it's the same kind of cosplay as someone covering their walls in soviet kitsch (except even nerdier).
I've left a similar note under Nick's post, but I think a very important distinction among the western left, perhaps even more important that type II and type III in practice, is one's theory of change: does one see socialist transformation as coming from intransigent struggle from below or through compromise from above? You touched briefly on this point in your 5th note.
After most Communist parties adopted Stalin's popular front strategy during the second war, they didn't differ much strategically from mainstream Social-Democracy (even though they differed in their long-term aspirations, believing they were still working towards an insurrection). In fact, because these Communist Parties were ideologically homogeneous, the left-wing minority of the social-democratic parties were the only sections of the Left left advocating struggle from below. In his report-back on the 1943 UAW convention, Max Shachtman descriped the union being split between three factions: the 'Shactmanite' Workers Party cadre and non-socialist rank-and-file militants on the left (advocating an end to the no-strike pledge and the immediate formation of a Labor Party), the Communist Party cadre and labor-liberals on the right (advocating unconditional support behind Roosevelt and cessation of all labor unrest during the war) and Reuther and the labor bureaucrats in the middle (advocating conditional endorsement of Roosevelt and the right to strike under exceptional conditions). Though WP and CP cadres would’ve both considered themselves type III (insurrectionary) socialists, they found themselves on opposite ends of the convention, with the communists being further to the right than Walter Reuther and the labor bureaucracy. So let’s add a new modifier to your classification system: “A” for socialist from above and “B” for socialist from below. So, the WP would’ve been classified as III.B while the CP would’ve been classified as III.A.
Sometimes this distinction is more important than the distinction of what “road" one is following. For instance, during the split of the Socialist Party in the 30s, the Trotskyist entryists on the left temporarily allied with the Militant tendency on the center against the “Old Guard” on the right. The Militant tendency, though democratic socialist, had more in common with the insurrectionary Trotskyists than with the democratic-socialist Old Guard. Likewise, the Old Guard, which later formed the SDF, had more in common with the “insurrectionary” CPUSA in their support for Roosevelt than with the democratic socialist center in the SPA. Now bear with me for a second as this is going to sound like a LSAT logic game, but, during the 30s, the array of the forces on the left could be described as something like this: Trotskyist SWP (III.B), “Altmanite” SPA center (II.B), SDF (II.A) and CPUSA (III.A).
Sometimes, one’s commitment to socialism from above or below survives longer than one’s stance on which road to follow. Many ISers in the 70s, following Hal Draper, were both insurrectionary socialists and socialists from below (III.B). Now most of these ex-IS veterans who are active in DSA would now say they support a democratic road to socialism, yet they still maintain their commitment to struggle from below (II.B).
Type I socialists aren’t even socialists because they still support a capitalist economy.
Very nice historical overview! One question it leaves me with is to what extent it is possible to be agnostic about the question of the insurrectionary vs. democratic road. There are certainly examples of parties that unite type-II and type-III socialists (or type-I and type II for that matter), though I suspect any party will have a majority that gravitates towards one of the types.
I think what you're getting at reveals something unsatisfactory in my schema, which is that I'm not sure the critical difference is how a socialist government comes to power (election vs. insurrection). I think it might be more clarifying to distinguish Type II from Type III in terms of openness to making class compromises with the capitalist class and respect for some democratic norms after election of a socialist government (free elections, civil liberties, respecting defeat of a socialist government if it loses an election). I think a democratic road in a capitalist democracy still rules out an insurrection to install a government, but not sure that's all we should take into consideration when making the distinction. I want to think more about this though, questions for a future post! :)
How about social ecology and solidarity economy?
(Replying to comment about Libertarian Socialism)
Is it because of the American right-wing political party of the same (Libertarian) name which stole that name on purpose from Socialists just to annoy them?
The word Libertarian has a long non-state Socialist tradition, and still is commonly used in much of Europe in its proper context. Even in America it was used by some Socialist groups up until the 1990s until they got fed up with the misunderstanding.
https://peacefulrevolutionary.substack.com/p/taking-back-libertarianism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism