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"Democratic socialists" redirects here. For a list of parties named as such, see Democratic Socialist Party.

Not to be confused with Social democracy.

Democratic socialism is a political philosophy supporting political democracy within a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on workers' self-management and democratic control of economic institutions within a market socialist economy or some form of a decentralised planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support either revolutionary or reformist politics as means to establish socialism. As a term, it was popularised by social democrats who were opposed to the authoritarian socialist development in Russia and elsewhere during the 20th century.

The origins of democratic socialism can be traced to 19th-century utopian socialist thinkers and the British Chartist movement that somewhat differed in their goals yet all shared the essence of democratic decision making and public ownership of the means of production as positive characteristics of the society they advocated for. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, democratic socialism was also influenced by social democracy. The gradualist form of socialism promoted by the British Fabian Society and Eduard Bernstein's evolutionary socialism in Germany influenced the development of democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is what most socialists understand by the concept of socialism. It may be a very broad or more limited concept, referring to all forms of socialism that are democratic and reject an authoritarian Marxist–Leninist state. Democratic socialism can include libertarian socialism, market socialism, reformist socialism and revolutionary socialism as well as ethical socialism, liberal socialism, social democracy and some forms of state socialism and utopian socialism.

Democratic socialism is contrasted to Marxism–Leninism which is viewed as being authoritarian or undemocratic in practice. Democratic socialists oppose the Stalinist political system and the Soviet-type economic system, rejecting the perceived authoritarian form of governance and the centralised administrative command economy that took form in the Soviet Union and other Marxist–Leninist states during the 20th century. Democratic socialism is also distinguished from Third Way social democracy on the basis that democratic socialists are committed to systemic transformation of the economy from capitalism to socialism whereas social democratic supporters of the Third Way were more concerned about challenging the New Right and win social democracy back to power. This has resulted in analysts and critics alike arguing that in effect it endorsed capitalism, even if it was due to recognising that outspoken opposition to capitalism in these circumstances was politically nonviable; and that it was not only anti-socialist and neoliberal, but anti-social democratic in practice. Some maintain this was the result of their type of reformism that caused them to administer the system according to capitalist logic while others saw it as a modern form of democratic liberal socialism theoretically fitting within market socialism, distinguishing it from classical socialism, especially in the United Kingdom.

While having socialism as a long-term goal, some democratic socialists who follow social democracy are more concerned to curb capitalism's excesses and are supportive of progressive reforms to humanise it in the present day. In contrast, other democratic socialists believe that economic interventionism and similar policy reforms aimed at addressing social inequalities and suppressing the economic contradictions of capitalism would only exacerbate the contradictions, causing them to emerge elsewhere under a different guise. These democratic socialists believe that the fundamental issues with capitalism are systemic in nature and can only be resolved by replacing the capitalist mode of production with socialism, i.e. by replacing private ownership with collective ownership of the means of production and extending democracy to the economic sphere.

Overview

Definition

Democratic socialism is defined as having a socialist economy in which the means of production are socially and collectively owned or controlled, alongside a democratic political system of government. Democratic socialism rejects self-described socialist states just as it rejects Marxism–Leninism. As a result, Peter Hain classifies democratic socialism along with libertarian socialism as a form of anti-authoritarian socialism from below (using the concept popularised by Hal Draper) in contrast to authoritarian socialism and state socialism. For Hain, this authoritarian/democratic divide is more important than the reformist/revolutionary divide. In democratic socialism, it is the active participation of the population as a whole and workers in particular in the self-management of the economy that characterises socialism while centralised economic planning (whether coordinated by an elected government or not) and nationalisation do not represent socialism in itself. A similar, more complex argument is made by Nicos Poulantzas. Draper himself used the term revolutionary-democratic socialism as a type of socialism from below in The Two Souls of Socialism, writing that "the leading spokesman in the Second International of a revolutionary-democratic Socialism-from-Below [...] was Rosa Luxemburg, who so emphatically put her faith and hope in the spontaneous struggle of a free working class that the myth-makers invented for her a "theory of spontaneity". Similarly, he wrote about Eugene V. Debs that "Debsian socialism" evoked a tremendous response from the heart of the people, but Debs had no successor as a tribune of revolutionary-democratic socialism".

Democratic socialism has been described as the form of social democracy prior to the displacement of Keynesianism by neoliberalism and monetarism which caused many social democratic parties to adopt the Third Way ideology, accepting capitalism as the current status quo and powers that be, redefining socialism in a way that it maintained the capitalist structure intact. As an example, the new version of Clause IV of the New Labour constitution uses the term democratic socialism to describe a modernised form of social democracy. While affirming a commitment to democratic socialism, it no longer definitely commits the party to public ownership of industry and in its place advocates "the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition" along with "high quality public services [...] either owned by the public or accountable to them". Much like modern social democracy, democratic socialism tends to follow a gradual, reformist or evolutionary path to socialism rather than a revolutionary one, a tendency that is captured in the statement of Labour Party revisionist Anthony Crosland, who argued that the socialism of the pre-war world was now becoming increasingly irrelevant. This tendency is also often invoked in an attempt to distinguish democratic socialism from Marxist–Leninist socialism as in Norman Thomas' Democratic Socialism: A New Appraisal, Roy Hattersley's Choose Freedom: The Future of Democratic Socialism, Jim Tomlinson's Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy: The Attlee Years, 1945–1951 and Donald F. Busky's Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey. A variant of this set of definitions is Joseph Schumpeter's argument set out in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) that liberal democracies were evolving from liberal capitalism into some form of democratic socialism with the growth of industrial democracy, regulatory institutions and organisational self-management.

Democratic socialism has some degree of significant overlaps on practical policy positions with social democracy, although they are often distinguished from each other. Policies commonly supported by democratic socialists are Keynesian in nature, including significant economic regulation alongside a mixed economy, extensive social insurance schemes, generous public pension programs and a gradual expansion of public ownership over strategic industries. Policies such as free universal healthcare and education are described as "pure Socialism" because they are opposed to "the hedonism of capitalist society". Partly because of this overlap, some political commentators occasionally use the terms interchangeably. One difference is that modern social democrats tend to reject revolutionary means accepted by the more radical socialists. Another difference is that they are mainly concerned with practical reforms within capitalism, with socialism relegated to the indefinite future, whereas democratic socialists ultimately want to go beyond mere meliorist reforms and advocate systemic transformation of the mode of production from capitalism to socialism.

The section of social democracy that remained committed to the gradual abolition of capitalism as well as social democrats opposed to the centrist Third Way merged into democratic socialism. During the late 20th century, these labels were embraced, contested and rejected due to the development within the European left of Eurocommunism between the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of neoliberalism in the mid- to late 1970s, the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and of Marxist–Leninist governments between 1989 and 1992, the rise and fall of the Third Way in the 1990s and 2000s and the rise of anti-austerity and Occupy movements in the late 2000s and early 2010s due to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the Great Recession, the causes of which were widely attributed to the neoliberal shift and deregulation economic policies. This latest development contributed to the rise of politicians that represent a return to the post-war consensus social democracy such as Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States, who assumed the label democratic socialist to describe their rejection of Third Way politicians that supported triangulation within the Labour and Democratic parties such as with New Labour and the New Democrats, respectively.

Some Marxist socialists emphasise Karl Marx's belief in democracy and call themselves democratic socialists. The Socialist Party of Great Britain and the World Socialist Movement define socialism in its classical formulation as a "system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the community". Additionally, they include classlessness, statelessness and the abolition of wage labour as characteristics of a socialist society, characterising it as a stateless, propertyless, post-monetary economy based on calculation in kind, a free association of producers, workplace democracy and free access to goods and services produced solely for use and not for exchange. Although these characteristics are usually reserved to describe a communist society, this is consistent with the usage of Marx, Friedrich Engels and others, who referred to the terms socialism and communism interchangeably.

As a democratic socialist definition, the political scientist Lyman Tower Sargent proposes the following:

Democratic socialism can be characterised as follows:

• Much property held by the public through a democratically elected government, including most major industries, utilities, and transportation systems
• A limit on the accumulation of private property
• Governmental regulation of the economy
• Extensive publicly financed assistance and pension programs
• Social costs and the provision of services added to purely financial considerations as the measure of efficiency

Publicly held property is limited to productive property and significant infrastructure; it does not extend to personal property, homes, and small businesses. And in practice in many democratic socialist countries, it has not extended to many large corporations.

Another example is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), with the organisation defining socialism as a decentralised socially-owned economy and rejecting centralised, Soviet-type economic planning, stating:

Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favour as much decentralisation as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives. Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods.

The DSA has been critical of self-described socialist states, arguing that "[j]ust because their bureaucratic elites called them "socialist" did not make it so; they also called their regimes "democratic". While ultimately committed to instituting socialism, the DSA focuses the bulk of its political activities on reforms within capitalism, arguing: "As we are unlikely to see an immediate end to capitalism tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people".

Labour Party politician Peter Hain, who identify with libertarian socialism, gives the following definition:

Democratic socialism should mean an active, democratically accountable state to underpin individual freedom and deliver the conditions for everyone to be empowered regardless of who they are or what their income is. It should be complemented by decentralisation and empowerment to achieve increased democracy and social justice. [...] Today democratic socialism's task is to recover the high ground on democracy and freedom through maximum decentralisation of control, ownership and decision making. For socialism can only be achieved if it springs from below by popular demand. The task of socialist government should be an enabling one, not an enforcing one. Its mission is to disperse rather than to concentrate power, with a pluralist notion of democracy at its heart.

Tony Benn, another prominent left-wing Labour Party politician, described democratic socialism as a socialism that is "open, libertarian, pluralistic, humane and democratic; nothing whatever in common with the harsh, centralised, dictatorial and mechanistic images which are purposely presented by our opponents and a tiny group of people who control the mass media in Britain".

Democratic socialism is sometimes used to refer to policies within capitalism as opposed to an ideology that aims to transcend and replace capitalism, although this is not always the case. Robert M. Page, a reader in Democratic Socialism and Social Policy at the University of Birmingham, wrote about transformative democratic socialism to refer to the politics of Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee and its government (a strong welfare state, fiscal redistribution and some degree of public ownership) and revisionist democratic socialism as developed by Labour Party politician Anthony Crosland and Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson, arguing:

The most influential revisionist Labour thinker, Anthony Crosland, contended that a more "benevolent" form of capitalism had emerged since the Second World War. [...] According to Crosland, it was now possible to achieve greater equality in society without the need for "fundamental" economic transformation. For Crosland, a more meaningful form of equality could be achieved if the growth dividend derived from effective management of the economy was invested in "pro-poor" public services rather than through fiscal redistribution.

Some tendencies of democratic socialism advocate for revolution in order to transition to socialism, distinguishing it from some forms of social democracy. Democratic socialism can also refer to a version of the Soviet Union model that was reformed in a democratic way. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev described perestroika as building a "new, humane and democratic socialism". Consequently, some former communist parties have rebranded themselves as being democratic socialists. This include parties such as The Left in Germany, a party succeeding the Party of Democratic Socialism which was itself the legal successor of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.

Economics

See also: Socialist economics

Democratic socialists have promoted a variety of different models of socialism, ranging from market socialism where socially-owned enterprises operate in competitive markets and are self-managed by their workforce to non-market participatory socialism based on decentralised economic planning.

Democratic socialism is also committed to a decentralised form of economic planning where productive units are integrated into a single organisation and organised on the basis of self-management. Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, both of whom were United States presidential candidates for the Socialist Party of America, understood socialism to be an economic system structured upon production for use and social ownership in place of the for-profit system and private ownership of the means of production.

Democratic socialists, especially contemporary proponents of market socialism, have argued that rather than socialism itself, the major reason for the economic shortcomings of Soviet-type economies was their failure to create rules and operational criteria for the efficient operation of state enterprises in their hierarchical administrative allocation of resources and commodities and the lack of democracy in the political systems that the Soviet-type economies were combined with.

Philosophy

See also: Types of socialism

Democratic socialism involves the entire population controlling the economy through some type of democratic system, with the idea that the means of production are owned and managed by the working class as a whole. The interrelationship between democracy and socialism extends far back into the socialist movement to The Communist Manifesto's emphasis on winning as a first step the "battle of democracy", with Karl Marx writing that democracy is "the road to socialism". Socialist thinkers as diverse as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg also wrote that democracy is indispensable to the realisation of socialism. Philosophical support for democratic socialism can be found in the works of political philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth. Honneth has put forward the view that political and economic ideologies have a social basis, meaning they originate from intersubjective communication between members of a society. Honneth criticises the liberal state and ideology because it assumes that principles of individual liberty and private property are ahistorical and abstract when in fact they evolved from a specific social discourse on human activity. In contrast to liberal individualism, Honneth has emphasised the intersubjective dependence between humans, namely that human well-being depends on recognising others and being recognised by them. With an emphasis on community and solidarity, democratic socialism can be seen as a way of safeguarding this dependency.

Some proponents of market socialism see it as an economic system compatible with the political ideology of democratic socialism. Advocates of market socialism such as Jaroslav Vaněk argue that genuinely free markets are impossible under conditions of private ownership of productive property. Instead, he contends that the class differences and unequal distribution of income and economic power that result from private ownership of industry enable the interests of the dominant class to skew the market in their favour, either in the form of monopoly and market power, or by utilising their wealth and resources to legislate government policies that benefit their specific business interests. Additionally, Vaněk states that workers in a socialist economy based on cooperative and self-managed enterprises have stronger incentives to maximise productivity because they would receive a share of the profits based on the overall performance of their enterprise, in addition to receiving their fixed wage or salary. Many pre-Marxian and proto-socialists were fervent anti-capitalists just as they were supporters of the free market, including the British philosopher Thomas Hodgskin, the French mutualist thinker and anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the American philosophers Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, among others. Although capitalism has been commonly conflated with the free market, there is a similar laissez-faire economic theory and system associated with socialism called laissez-faire socialism to distinguish it from laissez-faire capitalism.

One example of this democratic market socialist tendency is mutualism, a democratic and libertarian socialist theory developed by Proudhon in the 18th century, from which individualist anarchism emerged. Benjamin Tucker is one eminent American individualist anarchist, who adopted a left-wing laissez-faire system he termed anarchistic socialism as opposed to state socialism. This tradition has been recently associated with contemporary scholars such as Kevin Carson, Gary Chartier, Charles W. Johnson, Samuel Edward Konkin III, Roderick T. Long, Sheldon Richman, Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Brad Spangler, who stress the value of radically free markets, termed freed markets to distinguish them from the common conception which these left-libertarians believe to be riddled with statism and bourgeois privileges.

Referred to as left-wing market anarchists or market-oriented left-libertarians, Proponents of this approach strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets while maintaining that taken to their logical conclusions these ideas support anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical and pro-labour positions in economics, anti-imperialism in foreign policy and radically progressive views regarding sociocultural issues such as gender, sexuality and race. Echoing the language of these market socialists, they maintain that radical market anarchism should be seen by its proponents and by others as part of the socialist tradition because of its heritage, emancipatory goals and potential and that market anarchists can and should call themselves socialists. Critics of the free market and laissez-faire as commonly understood argue that socialism is fully compatible with a market economy and that a truly free-market or laissez-faire system would be anti-capitalist and socialist in practice.

According to its supporters, this would result in the society as advocated by democratic socialists, when socialism is not understood as state socialism and conflated with self-described socialist states and the free market and laissez-faire are understood to mean as being free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. This is consistent with the classical economics view that economic rents, i.e. profits generated from a lack of perfect competition, must be reduced or eliminated as much as possible through free competition rather than free from regulation. David McNally, a professor at the University of Houston, has argued in the Marxist tradition that the logic of the market inherently produces inequitable outcomes and leads to unequal exchanges, writing that Adam Smith's moral intent and moral philosophy espousing equal exchange was undermined by the practice of the free market he championed as the development of the market economy involved coercion, exploitation and violence that Smith's moral philosophy could not counteract. McNally criticises market socialists for believing in the possibility of fair markets based on equal exchanges to be achieved by purging parasitical elements from the market economy such as private ownership of the means of production, arguing that market socialism is an oxymoron when socialism is defined as an end to wage labour.

Tendencies

While the term socialism is frequently used to describe socialist states and Soviet-style economies, especially in the United States due to the First and Second Red Scares, democratic socialists use the term socialism to refer to their own tendency that rejects the ideas of authoritarian socialism and state socialism as socialism, regarding them as a form of state capitalism in which the state undertakes commercial economic activity and where the means of production are organised and managed as state-owned enterprises, including the processes of capital accumulation, centralised management and wage labour. As a result, democratic socialism generally refers to socialists that are opposed to Marxism–Leninism and to social democracy committed to the abolishment of capitalism in favour of socialism and the institution of a post-capitalist economy.

Democratic socialism mainly refers to the anti-Leninist and anti-Stalinist left-wing, especially anti-authoritarian socialism from below, libertarian socialism, market socialism, Marxism and certain left communist and ultra-left tendencies such as councilism and communisation as well as classical and libertarian Marxism. It also includes the orthodox Marxism related to Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg. In addition, democratic socialism is related to Eurocommunism, a trend originating between the 1950s and 1980s referring to communist parties that adopted democratic socialism after Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation in 1956, but also that of most communist parties since the 1990s. Finally, social democracy is generally classified as a form of democratic socialism.

Social democracy is distinguished between the early trend that supported revolutionary socialism, mainly related to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and other notable social democratic politicians and orthodox Marxist thinkers like Bernstein, Kautsky, Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, including more democratic and libertarian interpretations of Leninism, the revisionist trend adopted by Bernstein and other reformist socialist leaders between the 1890s and 1940s, the post-war trend that adopted or endorsed Keynesian welfare capitalism as part of a compromise between capitalism and socialism and those opposed to the Third Way.

Implementation

Although the term socialism is commonly used to describe Marxism–Leninism and affiliated states and governments, there have also been several anarchist and socialist societies that followed democratic socialist principles, encompassing anti-authoritarian, democratic anti-capitalism. The most notable historical examples are the Paris Commune, the various soviet republics established in the post-World War I period, early Soviet Russia before the abolition of soviet councils by the Bolsheviks, Revolutionary Catalonia as noted by George Orwell and more recently Rojava in northern Syria. Other examples include the kibbutzim in modern-day Israel, Marinaleda in Spain, the Zapatistas of EZLN in Chiapas and to some extent the workers' self-management policies within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Cuba. However, the best known example is that of Chile under President Salvador Allende, who was violently overthrown in a military coup funded and backed by the CIA in 1973.

When nationalisation of large industries was relatively widespread during the Keynesian post-war consensus, it was not uncommon for some commentators to describe several European countries as democratic socialist states seeking to move their countries toward a socialist economy. In 1956, leading British Labour Party politician and author Anthony Crosland claimed that capitalism had been abolished in Britain, although others such as Welshman Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health in the first post-war Labour government and the architect of the National Health Service, disputed the claim that Britain was a socialist state. For Crosland and others who supported his views, Britain was a socialist state. According to Bevan, Britain had a socialist National Health Service which stood in opposition to the hedonism of Britain's capitalist society, arguing:

The National Health service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so it is not difficult to understand, if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic competitive society. A free health service is pure Socialism and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.

When the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party were in power during the post-war period, some commentators claimed that Britain and France were socialist countries and the same claim is now applied to Nordic countries who apply the Nordic model, although the laws of capitalism still operated fully as in the rest of Europe and private enterprise dominated the economy. In the 1980s, the government of President François Mitterrand aimed to expand dirigisme by attempting to nationalise all French banks, but this attempt faced opposition from the European Economic Community which demanded a capitalist free-market economy among its members. Nevertheless, public ownership in France and the United Kingdom during the height of nationalisation in the 1960s and 1970s never accounted for more than 15–20% of capital formation.

The form of socialism practised by parties such as the Singaporean People's Action Party during its first few decades in power was of a pragmatic kind as it was characterised by its rejection of nationalisation. Despite this, the party still claimed to be a socialist party, pointing out its regulation of the private sector, activist intervention in the economy and its social policies as evidence of this claim. Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew stated that he has been influenced by the democratic socialist British Labour Party.

These confusions and disputes are caused not only by the socialist definition, but by the capitalist definition as well. Although Christian democrats, social liberals, national and social conservatives tend to support social democratic policies and generally see capitalism compatible with a mixed economy, classical liberals, conservative liberals, liberal conservatives, neoliberals and right-libertarians define capitalism as the free market, supporting a small government, laissez-faire capitalist market economy while opposing social democratic policies as well as government regulation and economic interventionism, claiming that actually existing capitalism is corporatism, corporatocracy or crony capitalism.

Socialism has often been erroneously conflated with an administrative command economy, authoritarian socialism, a big government, Marxist–Leninist states, Soviet-type economic planning, state interventionism and state socialism. Austrian School economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises continually used the term socialism as a synonym for central planning and state socialism, falsely conflating it with fascism, opposing social democratic policies and the welfare state. This is especially true in the United States, where socialism has become a pejorative used by conservatives and libertarians to taint liberal and progressive policies, proposals and public figures.

History

Main article: History of socialism

19th century

See also: Revolutions of 1848

Photograph of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London, 1848

Socialist models and ideas espousing common or public ownership have existed since antiquity, but the first self-conscious socialist movements developed in the 1820s and 1830s. Western European social critics, including Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Charles Hall and Henri de Saint-Simon were the first modern socialists who criticised the excessive poverty and inequality generated by the Industrial Revolution. The term was first used in English in the British Cooperative Magazine in 1827 and came to be associated with the followers of the Owen such as the Rochdale Pioneers, who founded the co-operative movement. Owen's followers stressed both participatory democracy and economic socialisation in the form of consumer co-operatives, credit unions and mutual aid societies. In the case of the Owenites, they also overlapped with a number of other working-class movements such as the Chartists in the United Kingdom.

Fenner Brockway identified three early democratic socialist groups during the English Civil War in his book Britain's First Socialists, namely the Levellers, who were pioneers of political democracy and the sovereignty of the people; the Agitators, who were the pioneers of participatory control by the ranks at their workplace; and the Diggers, who were pioneers of communal ownership, cooperation and egalitarianism. The philosophy and tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers was continued in the period described by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class by Jacobin groups like the London Corresponding Society and by polemicists such as Thomas Paine. Their concern for both democracy and social justice marked them out as key precursors of democratic socialism. Democratic socialism also has its origins in the Revolutions of 1848 and the French Democratic Socialists, although Karl Marx disliked the movement because he viewed it as a party dominated by the middle class and associated to them the word Sozialdemokrat, the first recorded use of the term social democracy.

The Chartists gathered significant numbers around the People's Charter of 1838 which demanded the extension of suffrage to all male adults. Leaders in the movement also called for a more equitable distribution of income and better living conditions for the working classes. The very first trade unions and consumers' cooperative societies also emerged in the hinterland of the Chartist movement as a way of bolstering the fight for these demands. The first advocates of socialism favoured social levelling in order to create a meritocratic or technocratic society based on individual talent as opposed to aristocratic privilege. Saint-Simon is regarded as the first individual to coin the term socialism. Saint-Simon was fascinated by the enormous potential of science and technology and advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of capitalism and would be based on equal opportunities. He advocated the creation of a society in which each person was ranked according to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work. The key focus of Saint-Simon's socialism was on administrative efficiency and industrialism and a belief that science was the key to the progress of human civilisation. This was accompanied by a desire to implement a rationally organised economy based on planning and geared towards large-scale scientific progress and material progress, embodying a desire for a more directed or planned economy. The British political philosopher John Stuart Mill also came to advocate a form of economic socialism within a liberal context. In later editions of Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill would argue that "as far as economic theory was concerned, there is nothing in principle in economic theory that precludes an economic order based on socialist policies". Likewise, the American social reformer Henry George and his geoist movement influenced the development of democratic socialism,{sfnm|1a1=Busky|1y=2000 |150 |2a1=Corfe |2y=2000 |2p=153}} especially in relation to British socialism and Fabianism, along with Mill and the German historical school of economics.

James Keir Hardie, an early democratic socialist who founded the British Independent Labour Party

In the United Kingdom, the democratic socialist tradition was represented by William Morris's Socialist League and in the 1880s by the Fabian Society and later the Independent Labour Party founded by Keir Hardie in the 1890s, of which writer George Orwell would later become a prominent member. In the early 1920s, the guild socialism of G. D. H. Cole attempted to envision a socialist alternative to Soviet-style authoritarianism while council communism articulated democratic socialist positions in several respects, notably through renouncing the vanguard role of the revolutionary party and holding that the system of the Soviet Union was not authentically socialist.

The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation which was established with the purpose of advancing the principles of socialism via gradualist and reformist means. The society laid many of the foundations of the Labour Party and subsequently affected the policies of states emerging from the decolonisation of the British Empire, most notably India and Singapore. Originally, the Fabian Society was committed to the establishment of a socialist economy, alongside a commitment to British imperialism and colonialism as a progressive and modernising force. Today, the society functions primarily as a think tank and is one of the fifteen socialist societies affiliated with the Labour Party. Similar societies exist in Australia (the Australian Fabian Society), in Canada (the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation and the now disbanded League for Social Reconstruction) and in New Zealand. In 1889 (the centennial of the French Revolution of 1789), the Second International was founded, with 384 delegates from twenty countries representing about 300 labour and socialist organisations. It was termed the Socialist International and Friedrich Engels was elected honorary president at the third congress in 1893. Anarchists were ejected and not allowed in mainly due to pressure from Marxists. It has been argued that at some point the Second International turned "into a battleground over the issue of libertarian versus authoritarian socialism. Not only did they effectively present themselves as champions of minority rights; they also provoked the German Marxists into demonstrating a dictatorial intolerance which was a factor in preventing the British labour movement from following the Marxist direction indicated by such leaders as H. M. Hyndman".