Democracy Needs Socialism
A Niebuhrian Assessment of Socialism and Democracy
Much uninformed criticism of socialism has been making a speeding way through social media. It seems timely to apply some studied clarity to the subject as a corrective to the impulse to reject it out-of-hand, and this more due to criticizing political fear-mongering than careful, informed thought. The thinking of Reinhold Niebuhr is once again currently meaningful, even though he wrote in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Niebuhr was one of the great Christian social ethicists of the twentieth century. According to him, there are two primary forms of social power: economic and political. If a society intends to be free and vital, it is crucial that it not put both forms of social power into the hands of only a few people (an oligarchy). This is at the heart of Niebuhr’s objection to communism, which must be distinguished from socialism. Niebuhr called the latter “evil” because it puts both forms of social power structurally into the hands of a few. It theorizes an oligarchy of limited duration for the purpose of stewarding a society on its way to a communal utopia. However, communism leaves no distribution of power (political or economic) outside of the oligarchy for the purpose of challenging it. Since people cling to power at the expense of others in order to preserve their own (illusion of?) security, the so-called “limited oligarchy” is oppressive in the service of its own self-preservation.
The strength of democracy is in the distribution of political power, as Niebuhr asserted. This power is structurally shared through the right of all citizens to vote; hence, we may say that, constitutionally, USAmerica is a free society, and its freedoms bear the fruit of vitality in so many forms, including the arts, cultural diversity and the free exchange of ideas.
Sadly, since people are bent toward self-securing behavior at others’ expense, (Niebuhr wrote al lot about structural “sin”) whatever the social system may be, people will try to accumulate and sustain power for themselves and their group. We may do this politically through intimidation; we may do this economically through the accumulation and/or coordination of wealth.
It is crucial for this moment in US American history that this distinction be bade clear: Socialism is not communism. Though there are varied theories of socialism, Democratic socialism, as proposed by current candidatures for president, for example, establishes economic policies that preserve the rewards for creativity and effort that are hallmarks of free markets and private ownership, while at the same time guaranteeing basic provisions for health, housing and safety. Socialist Democrats recognize that societies and economies are more stable when both political and economic opportunities are genuinely, widely available to all. Indeed, Democracy thrives best in an environment that places checks on greed, in order to preserve a broader, more stable economics.
Political power attracts money; and money attracts political power. (More at another time on the unholy triad of sex, money and power.) The diabolical problem of unbridled, or laissez-faire, capitalism is that it grows an economic elite with the resources to manipulate votes, to accrue the political power of an oligarchy. It permits economic and political power effectively to be gathered into the hands of the few – an unstructured oligarchy – but an oligarchy nonetheless. Hence, Niebuhr considered the task of controlling greed to be one of the chief purposes of government, and this for the sake of a robust democracy.
It is ironic that so many conservative Christians are deeply committed to capitalism, since unbridled capitalism undermines freedom and vitality as surely as does the so-called limited oligarchy of communism’s stewards. Again the irony is that this form of capitalism is a very Darwinist economic system. Note how it perpetuates the acceptance of casualties in the name of the survival of the fittest, i.e., the myth of the self-made [person], and the libel that the poor are just insufficiently industrious. Not incidentally, the values evident in Jesus’ parables are better expressed through social policies that ameliorate the anxieties of basic existence in order to actualize the gifts and talents people have been given.
Something for Christians to chew on is that the earliest church was communal. Based on their example, we may say that socialism is closer to the first century church at Jerusalem than laissez-faire capitalism possibly can be.
"...Neither is this Thou" (- C. Williams) 