Let us begin by dispensing with some persistent intellectual errors.

First, that there can ever be something called "democratic socialism" (as in the Democratic Socialist Party of America, DSA). The term is an oxymoron because the two elements — socialism and democracy — don't go together.

Socialism, properly defined, means state ownership of the means of production. And there has never been a state with ownership of the means of production that was also a democracy; nay, never been one with such control over economic life wherein political power wasn't consolidated in a single political entity (the "dictatorship of the proletariat" for Marx and Engels, the dictatorship of the party for Lenin and Stalin).

Since no regime that acquires complete control of societal resources is going to give it up at the ballot box, socialism pairs only with dictatorship (the totalitarian kind), never with democracy.

Second, while there was an organizational split between socialism and communism as movements during the Great War, as a practical matter the distinction between the two has become largely irrelevant.

Marx himself saw them as inextricably linked, with the socialist stage a necessary first step toward the communist after the overthrow of capitalism, pending beneficial changes in human consciousness. Socialism and communism were, accordingly, viewed as one and the same and the terms used........

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