There are lots of ways to talk about democratic socialism. Some focus on fairness and equality. Others stress the need to fix the “irrationalities” of capitalism. Still others speak of “convert[ing] hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.”
有很多谈论民主社会主义的方式。 一些人关注公平和平等。 其他人则强调需要解决资本主义的“非理性”问题。 还有一些人谈论“将歇斯底里的痛苦转化为普通的不幸”。
The democratic socialist du jour, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently gave her own definition on Stephen Colbert’s show:
民主社会主义者Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez最近在Stephen Colbert’的节目上给出了她自己的定义：
I believe that in a modern, moral, and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live. So what that means is health care as a human right. It means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade school education if they so choose it. And, you know, I think that no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policies to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.
我相信，在一个现代的，道德的，富裕的社会中，美国的任何人都不应该太穷以致不能生活。 那么这意味着医疗保障是一项人权。这意味着，无论你出生在哪里，每个孩子如果愿意，都应该有机会接受大学或商业学校的教育。 而且，你知道，我认为如果我们能够拥有让人们拥有家园和食物，并在美国过上有尊严的生活的公共结构和公共政策，那么任何人都不会无家可归。
Not bad at all.
一点也没错。
But here’s what I’d emphasize: democratic socialism, at its core, is about deepening democracy where it exists and introducing democracy where it is absent. In countries like the US, that means increasing the scope of popular control in the political arena and broadening it out to include the social and economic spheres.
但这是我要强调的：民主社会主义的核心是在民主存在的地方增强民主，在缺少民主的地方引入民主。在像美国这样的国家，这意味着要扩大政治领域的民众控制范围，并将民主扩大到包括社会和经济领域中。
This may sound fairly innocuous — who isn’t for democracy these days? But democratic socialists have something more far-reaching in mind. To us, democracy is not simply a banal amalgamation of procedures, an uncontroversial set of norms and rules that everyone can get behind. It is the quite radical idea that ordinary people — not experts, not elites, not their “betters” — can rule themselves. It is the word we use to describe the flattening of steep hierarchies, the shattering of structures that confer undue wealth and power and privilege.
这可能听起来相当无害—这些天谁不是为了民主？ 但民主社会主义者的想法更为深远。 对我们来说，民主不仅仅是程序的平庸合并，或每个人都可以抛弃的无争议的规范和规则。 这是一个非常激进的想法，普通人—不是专家，不是精英，不是他们中间的“更好的人”—可以自我统治。这是我们用来描述将陡峭等级制度扁平化，破坏赋予了过度的财富，权力和特权的结构的词。
When democracy is on the march, it lays in its path state despots and private autocrats. It rips decision-making power away from the corporate titan, wrests the billy club out of the beat cop’s hands, divests the domineering husband of his authority. It brings the imperial power to its knees and lifts up the colonial subject, the slave, the worker.
当民主在行军时，它就会进入政府暴君和私人独裁者们（也就是私人老板）的领地。它将决策权从公司巨头手中夺走，将棍棒从殴打人民的警察手中夺走，剥夺了霸权的丈夫的权威。 它使帝国屈服，抬起殖民主体（被殖民者），奴隶，工人。
Democratic socialists draw their lineage to this long history of bottom-up struggles. In previous eras, kings and churches reigned over their subjects. With the advent of capitalism, the chains of feudalism were broken. But new forms of domination emerged. Those who owned the means of economic activity — the factories, the mines, the railroads — enjoyed extraordinary power over those who only had their labor to sell.
民主社会主义者们将自己的起源归结为自下而上斗争的悠久历史。 在以前的时代，国王们和教会们统治着他们的臣民。随着资本主义的出现，封建主义的锁链被打破了。 但是出现了新的奴役形式。 拥有经济活动资料（生产资料）的人—工厂，矿山，铁路—对那些只有劳动力可供出售的人享有特别巨大的权力。
The socialist movement — organized through labor parties, radical trade unions, and other working-class associations — arose in response. Socialists took the Enlightenment ideals of autonomy and self-determination to their logical conclusion and asked, if all humans are equal, what gives one the right to arbitrarily rule over another? Why should capital be king?
社会主义运动—通过工人政党，激进的工会和其他工人阶级组织—作出回应。 社会主义者把自治和自决的启蒙理想带到了他们的逻辑结论中，并且问，如果所有人都是平等的，那么是什么赋予了一个人任意统治另一个人的权利？ 资本为什么应当成为国王？
That basic idea animated democratic socialists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
这个基础思想在整个十九世纪和二十世纪激励了民主社会主义者。
Early European socialist parties fought class-based voting restrictions and controls on press freedoms. Eugene Debs, the tribune of American socialism, denounced World War I as an anti-democratic escapade and called for the toppling of the “Junkers of Wall Street.” Socialists organized militant labor movements that replaced workplace despotism with the rudiments of democratic rights (Ford Motor Company, to take just one example, had employed spies and goons to keep workers in line). Bayard Rustin, the socialist civil rights leader, contributed essential tactical know-how to bring down a racial caste system that smothered American democracy. Socialist feminists ripped down the walls between the public and the private and asserted the need to place romantic partners on equal footing. More recently, democratic socialists have spearheaded the resistance to colonialism in Jamaica, corporate rule in Bolivia, and anti-abortion laws in Argentina.
早期的欧洲社会主义政党对基于阶级的投票限制和对新闻自由的控制进行了斗争。 美国社会主义护民官Eugene Debs谴责第一次世界大战是一种反民主的行为，并呼吁推翻“华尔街的容克贵族们”。社会主义者们组织了激进的劳工运动，用民主权利的雏形取代了工作场所的专制（ 举一个例子，福特汽车公司雇用间谍和暴徒来使工人们不越界）。社会主义民权领袖Bayard Rustin提供了必要的战术知识，以摧毁一个扼杀美国民主的种族等级制度。社会女权主义者摧毁了公众与私人之间的高墙，并宣称需要将浪漫的伴侣们置于平等地位。最近，民主社会主义者率先抵抗牙买加的殖民主义，玻利维亚的公司统治以及阿根廷的反堕胎法律。
But despite significant advances, we’re still living with many of the despotisms that early socialists abhorred.
但是，尽管取得了重大进展，我们仍然生活在许多被早期社会主义者们所厌恶的专制主义中。
The American workplace is one of the most glaring examples. The place where most people spend the bulk of their adult lives, it’s also a place where workers relinquish the most basic of democratic freedoms. Bosses can fire their subordinates for nearly any reason. They can tell workers what to say and what not to say. They can decide whether to keep the worksite where it is or move it abroad. They alone determine how to spend the company’s profits and invest the resources the enterprise has generated.
美国的工作场所是最明显的例子之一。 大多数人在大部分成年生活中度过的地方，也是工人放弃最基本的民主自由的地方。几乎使用任何理由，老板都可以解雇他们的下属。他们可以告诉工人能说什么和不能说什么。他们可以决定是将工作场所保留在何处或将其移至国外（也就是竟次）。他们独裁决定如何花费公司的利润并投资企业产生的资源。
Democracy says that people should have equal control over the decisions that affect their lives. Capitalism laughs in its face.
民主说人们应当平等地控制影响他们生活的决定。资本主义笑了起来。
Or consider a more democratic space, the political arena. Despite formal guarantees of one person one vote — itself a triumph of past democratic movements — the wealth inequalities that capitalism creates inevitably bleed over into the traditional political process. The rich bankroll politicians, fund think tanks, and dispatch lobbyists. They influence which would-be politicians rise and fall, which ideas circulate widely, and what kinds of policies elected officials prioritize.
或者考虑一个更民主的空间，即政治舞台。尽管正式保证一人一票—这本身就是过去民主运动的胜利—资本主义创造的财富不平等不可避免地渗透到传统政治进程中。资金丰富的政客，被资助的智囊团和派遣游说者。它们会影响政客们的兴衰，哪些思想得到广泛传播，以及民选官员优先考虑哪种政策。
On top of that, business interests have a crucial trump card: they control the levers of the economy. At certain moments in the history of capitalist democracy — particularly in the decades after World World II, in countries like Sweden — organized labor was strong enough and left parties powerful enough that the historically disenfranchised spoke with a relatively strong political voice. Yet because business leaders could effectively bring the economy to a standstill, their interests had to be heeded. “Business confidence” won out over “political equality.”
最重要的是，商业利益相关者们有一个关键的王牌：它们控制着经济的杠杆。在资本主义民主历史的某些时刻—特别是在二战之后的几十年里，在瑞典这样的国家—有组织的工人们足够强大，左派政党们足够强大，以至于历史上被剥夺权利者的政治声音相对强大。然而，由于商业领袖们可以有效地使经济陷入停滞，他们的利益必须得到关注。 “商业信心”盖过了“政治平等”。
To socialists, this is unacceptable. We simply can’t tolerate a social arrangement that systematically domesticates democracy — especially in areas so central to people’s daily lives.
对社会主义者们来说，这是无法接受的。我们根本无法容忍有系统地驯化民主的社会安排——特别是在人们的日常生活中如此重要的地方。
The radical reforms we advocate are all intended to increase the amount and degree of decisions, relationships, and structures in society that operate according to democratic principles. Capital’s control over investment gives it too much say over the direction of the political economy; we should socialize key industries and foster worker cooperatives. The immigration system makes people into pariahs; we should abolish ICE and allow everyone to vote, undocumented or not. Relying on private housing gives developers unjustifiable leverage over the means of people’s survival; we should build millions of units of social housing. US imperialism brutally undermines democratic movements in countries around the world; we should dismantle America’s empire. The existence of fossil-fuel companies threatens our ability to even make popular decisions in the future; we should put them out of business.
我们提倡的激进改革的目的是增加按照民主原则运作的社会决策，关系和结构的数量和程度。资本对投资的控制使其对政治经济的方向有太多的发言权了; 我们应该把关键行业社会化，并扶植工人合作企业。现在的移民制度使人们成为贱民; 我们应该废除ICE，允许每个人投票，无论有没有证件。对私人住房的依赖给开发商带来了对人们生存资料的不合理的杠杆作用; 我们应该建立数百万单位的社会住房。美国帝国主义残酷地破坏了世界各国的民主运动; 我们应该拆除这个在美洲的帝国。化石燃料公司的存在威胁着我们在未来做出大众决策的能力; 我们应该让他们关门。
Those with power don’t like to be stripped of it. Whether it’s kings or patriarchs, capitalists or cops, the threat of a shift toward greater equality of power can prompt a ferocious counter-attack. But to retreat in the face of elite opposition is to accept a social order still strewn with master-servant relationships. A better world, a more democratic world, is possible.
那些有权力的人不喜欢被剥夺权力。无论是国王还是家长，资本家还是警察，转向更大的权力平等的威胁都可能引发凶猛的反击。但是，面对精英们的反对而退却就是接受一个仍然充斥着主奴关系的社会秩序。一个更好的世界，一个更民主的世界，是可能实现的。
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/democratic-socialism-democracy-ocasio-cortez