What the hell is an "avowed Democratic Socialist," anyway?

[Cheese Sandwich]

45. Yeah I don't disagree with anything you've said.

There are just different variations that can be called democratic socialism. It's not like one exact idea.

I like DSA too.

Here's an excerpt from the first thing on the DSA intro reading list: Toward Freedom: Democratic Socialist Theory and Practice
http://www.dsausa.org/toward_freedom

While the freedoms that exist under democratic capitalism are gains of popular struggle to be cherished, democratic socialists argue that the values of liberal democracy can only be fulfilled when the economy as well as the government is democratically controlled.

We cannot accept capitalism’s conception of economic relations as “free and private,” because contracts are not made among economic equals and because they give rise to social structures which undemocratically confer power upon some over others. Such relationships are undemocratic in that the citizens involved have not freely deliberated upon the structure of those institutions and how social roles should be distributed within them (e.g., the relationship between capital and labor in the workplace or men and women in child rearing). We do not imagine that all institutional relations would wither away under socialism, but we do believe that the basic contours of society must be democratically constructed by the free deliberation of its members.
...

While the exact details of a socialist economy are open to debate, it will most likely be a mixture of democratic planning of major investments (e.g., expenditure on infrastructure, investment in natural monopolies such as telecommunications, utilities, transport) and market exchange of consumer goods. Large, concentrated industries such as energy and steel would be publicly owned and managed by worker and consumer representatives. Many consumer-goods industries would be run as cooperatives. Workers would design the division of labor within their workplaces and thus overcome the authoritarianism of the traditional capitalist firm. Economic planning would set a guiding strategy by means of fiscal and monetary policy, with the daily coordination of supply and demand left to the market. But this market would be socialized by rendering it transparent. Enterprises would be obliged to divulge information about the design, production processes, price formation, wage conditions, and environmental consequences of the goods that they make. Publicly supported collectives—consumers’ unions—would analyze this data and propose norms to govern various aspects of these practices. Information about actual production processes and proposed norms would then be disseminated via universal, publicly supported communication networks such as the Internet. This would encourage dialogue between producers and consumers over what is socially needed.

Again, there is no final blueprint for socialism. But only under socialism will fully democratic debate over the use of society’s wealth be possible and the satisfaction of people’s basic needs assured. Productive activity will become not merely a way to acquire money, but a means to develop the whole creative potential of all working women and men.

That's democratic socialism. Good stuff.


Here is their intro reading list

https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/dsausa/pages/440/attachments/original/1372712435/Introductory_Readings_on_Democratic_Socialist_Theory_and_Practice.pdf