Believe it or not, there are aspects of socialism, that is, democratic socialism, that conservatives might actually support and enjoy.

Socialism is the belief in worker (“social,” “democratic”) ownership of all businesses and citizen power to decide all public policy. Supporters of such an economic and political structure existed alongside, and fiercely opposed, State socialism (also called authoritarian socialism or Communism).

Democratic socialism is not about a totalitarian government owning all businesses as under Communism, nor the State determining your career, nor eliminating possessions, the private ownership of homes, or civil liberties; rather, it aims to bring democracy into the workplace and local and national government.    

True, if you are a conservative who understands democratic socialism, there are likely many things about it you oppose.

For example, socialistic organization of a firm is, obviously, anti-capitalist. This means that capitalistic ownership, where one person (or a small group) owns a business, holds all decision-making power, and enriches him- or herself with the wealth created by the workers who directly create the good or provide the service, will be obsolete. That is an authoritarian structure, closely resembling a dictatorship, and leads to severe economic inequality, as (predictably) owners often award themselves millions while paying workers abysmal wages. 

(Side note: no one here is advocating the State force business owners to restructure; successful worker cooperatives, where each worker is an owner, votes on company decisions, and takes an equal share of profits, already exist around the world because some people chose democracy. The transformation to a nation of democratic workplaces will take centuries, but it should be voluntary.)

Capitalism is the few growing rich off the labor of the many, and some conservatives support that, particularly if they envision themselves as future business owners.

Any why not view it positively? Business owners start from nothing. Don’t they deserve their millions?

Well, in the beginning the founder creates the good or provides the service (creating the wealth), but without workers he or she cannot produce on a scale larger than him- or herself. Would Bill Gates be where he is today without employees?

The founder must hire workers and become a manager, leaving the workers as the direct creators of wealth. The sale of each good or service then must cover the cost of production, the cost of labor (worker compensation), and a little extra: profit the owner uses as he or she chooses. Therefore workers are not paid the full value of what they produce, which socialists call “exploitation” and correct through democratic ownership: founders share ownership, control, and profit equally with each worker added.

Even though that’s more democratic, increases prosperity for more people, and eliminates exploitation, conservatives (and even moderate or liberal business owners) may not like it. They might prefer holding onto decision-making power and enriching themselves while paying workers far less.

Likewise, they may hate socialists’ anti-war sentiments, or desires to see tax dollars used for universal healthcare, higher education, and work for the unemployed. But there are three things conservatives may appreciate about socialism.

The End of Unions

When workers own their workplaces, will there be a need for unions?

Unions are organizations of workers that join together to push for better working conditions, higher pay, and so on. They engage in negotiation, or direct action like strikes or sit-downs, to force employers to make concessions that will improve their standard of living and working–and that of their descendants (winning for us the 8 hour work day and the weekend, for example).

This is a central conflict of capitalism. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “The workmen desire to get as much as possible, the masters to give as little as possible.”

But when workers own the businesses in which they work, this long conflict between workers and owners will come to a close. Decisions on hours, pay, schedule, and everything else will be made by discussion and vote. The workmen will become the masters, and unions will have no purpose.

The Abolition of Welfare

Worker ownership is not a cure-all. Cooperatives take on more workers because, although it further divides power and profits, more workers can expand production and increase profits. Yet there surely will be times when more people are looking for work than cooperatives are looking to hire, just like in our present economy.

So socialists envision using tax dollars to fund local public work projects. Taxes will cover a basic salary to workers to rebuild our inner cities and slums, clean streets, tutor struggling students, plant new trees, paint murals on buildings—any productive task that betters society. This has been accomplished successfully in the past, such as during the Great Depression. Some American and Canadian cities are already paying homeless men and women to do similar work, helping them crawl out of extreme poverty.

Such work need not be permanent (though governments could theoretically help workers organize into new, self-sustaining worker co-ops if there exists a consumer base for their mission), nor organized by the federal government. Federal tax dollars can be distributed to city councils based on annual unemployment levels, and cities can decide what projects they need to focus on to improve their communities.

Between worker cooperatives, guaranteed employment, and a strong minimum wage (which has been shown to actually increase employment and have only a marginal affect on prices), poverty will be abolished, alongside welfare.

Guarantee citizens a job with a decent wage, and food stamps, child tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other forms of welfare (except those for the elderly, sick, and disabled) can be eliminated. Unemployment compensation will disappear–paying someone for 99 weeks without work in return is extremely wasteful. Under socialism, men and women will be paid to work.

The Death of Bureaucracy

If you are a conservative, you are likely often concerned (rightly) about State power–big government encroaching on your personal life and civil liberties. You may also be concerned that the State is not curbing personal freedom enough–allowing things like gay marriage, flag burning, abortion. Or not going to war when you think America should.

Well, how would you like to have a say–a direct say–in public policy? How would you like decision-making power? Perhaps it’s time for pure democracy.

Socialism is the simple belief that the people, not the wealthy, the corporate owners, or politicians who can be bought, should control the government and write the laws, through direct democracy.

Instead of voting once every four or eight years, concerned citizens will vote many times a year…on national policy. The people will vote on education standards, the protection of the planet, whether to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, whether to go to war, everything.

Citizens would have initiative rights for municipal, state, and national policy, that is, the ability to petition for a law or law change and have it put to the people for a vote. Direct democracy already exists in Switzerland.

This is common at the local and state level already. How do you think Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012? It was put on the ballot, the people voted, and it was done. No corrupt politicians in the way, swayed this way and that by lobbyists and their bribes. No bureaucracy, no unelected officials making decisions for the common people.

Under socialism, politicians like congressmen would be elected only to carry out the policies approved by the (perhaps two-thirds) majority of Americans, with elected Supreme Court members and the president preserving a system of checks and balances. Power to the people, as the old radical leftist saying goes. The people would be the politicians.

Short term limits and the threat of immediate recall vote (even of the president) would keep officials in line with the desires of voters. If, say, 60% of Americans felt the president wrongly vetoed a measure passed by the people, he or she could be overruled by national vote. If the president (or any politician) refused to enforce laws, a 60% majority vote could remove him or her from office immediately.

Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, wrote that the common people must become the ruling class, to “win the battle of democracy.”

He wasn’t just talking about liberals and socialists.

“If we are to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”

A short African American minister with a black mustache penned these words in a Selma, Alabama jail cell in 1965 (see David Garrow, Bearing the Cross). He had just been arrested during a voting rights demonstration.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not just a brilliant orator and champion of black rights.

Though it has largely been erased from American memory, Dr. King was anti-war, anti-capitalism, and pro-socialism. He saw capitalism as exploitative by nature, an economic structure that bred poverty and injustice.

This should come as no surprise, as Dr. King studied Karl Marx’s works, wrote of Marxism in essays like “How Should a Christian View Communism?” and “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” and worked closely with radicals like his mentor, socialist A. Phillip Randolph, and his close advisor, communist Jack O’Dell.

He spoke of his desire to fundamentally change society several times, not into an authoritarian socialism or communism, in which the State owns and directs and profits from all business, but a democratic socialism, in which the workers collectively own and direct and profit from the businesses in which they work.

He saw capitalism as a method of organization that produced an extremely wealthy upper class, but left huge numbers in dire poverty. Coretta Scott King wrote that her husband believed “a kind of socialism has to be adopted” because “he looked at the poor…so many people were in ill health with no way for them to pay their medical expenses” (See The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism, John Nichols).

King condemned the minority poverty bred by centuries of white oppression. He said in 1966 to his staff:

You can’t talk about solving the economic problem of the Negro without talking about billions of dollars. You can’t talk about ending the slums without first saying profit must be taken out of slums. You’re really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then. You are messing with captains of industry. Now this means that we are treading in difficult water, because it really means that we are saying that something is wrong with capitalism. There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.

Socialist ownership would replace a system in which the few (the business owners, “captains of industry”) grow rich off the labor of the many (the workers). See this article to study democratic socialism further.

At the 1967 Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention in Atlanta, in his “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech, King spoke of how the ownership of business by the few led to wealth for the few:

The movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America?

And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy.

And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, Who owns the oil? You begin to ask the question, Who owns the iron ore?…

Similarly, Harry Belafonte writes in his memoir My Song that King said he wasn’t a capitalist, explaining:

The trouble is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level… That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we’re going to have to change the system.

He also spoke, in his “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech, of the need to use the massive tax wealth of the United States to end poverty, calling for a guaranteed income and hinting at dissatisfaction with the rich and powerful that determined domestic and foreign policy:

[A] guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year… If our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth…

In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, he wrote, “[T]he solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed matter: the guaranteed income… We must create full employment, or we must create incomes.”

King believed the government served the interests of the rich, saying: “This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

Likewise, capitalist ownership of private firms largely served the interests of the few who controlled the means of production, rather than the many who were paid dismal wages to operate the means of production, garnering profits that were used as desired by those in control.

He wrote to Coretta Scott on July 18, 1952, about a year before they married:

I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.

And yet I am not so opposed to capitalism that I have failed to see its relative merits. It started out with a noble and high motive, viz., to block the trade monopolies of nobles, but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against.

So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.

He repeated the same phrasing in his late 1950s speech “A Realistic Look at the Question of Progress in the Area of Race Relations,” in which he described a    

…new world in which men will be able to live together as brothers. This new world in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. This new world, in which men will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks. Yes, this new world in which men will no longer take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. (See King, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.)

He believed that the natural outcomes of capitalism, such as private property, fierce competition, the profit motive, consumerism, individualism, and materialism, shifted focus away from the needs of fellow human beings, encouraging complacency in the face of virulent racism or the deaths of millions during U.S. bombings and invasions. He said in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence” speech:

We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

He wrote in 1967:

We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power… this means a revolution of values… We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together… you can’t really get rid of one without getting rid of the others… the whole structure of American life must be changed.

Socialism, a philosophy and worldview claimed by many people before him and many after, was to Dr. King the way to create a better world. New, more democratic forms of ownership and political decision-making could do far better at abolishing poverty, racism, and war than a capitalistic society ruled by the rich few.

In “Beyond Vietnam,” Dr. King declared:           

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe, men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.

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