Was Dewey a democratic socialist?

John Dewey (1859 – 1952) is one of the most influential American philosophers of the 20th century. He was a progressive, as he advocated the pursuit of common social goals and the solution of social problems through the scientific method. His progressive ideas had the greatest practical impact in the field of education, and with his works also influenced the development of new democratic ideas.

In his book “Liberalism and Social Action” (1935), he presented the thesis that there is a conflict in society between pre-scientific and pre-technological institutions and customs on the one hand, and modern institutions and customs on the other. People invented the first in the conditions of a society of scarcity, and modern society – thanks to science and technological development – is supposed to be a society of abundance. In a society of scarcity, people developed a culture of accumulation of material wealth, which was then logical and necessary for the survival of the individual and families or small communities. Excessive accumulation of material wealth in a society of abundance – when we have / produce enough wealth for the needs of all – did not make sense to Dewey, as it would lead to excessive accumulation (privatization) of wealth by certain individuals, leading to unfair distribution of goods, whereby some have significantly too much and others consequently suffer from (unnecessary) deprivation.

For Dewey, then, a just society would be one in which there are no citizens who have so much wealth that they do not know what to do with it, and at the same time one in which no one suffers from unnecessary deprivation. In a society of abundance, for Dewey, blind competition in the accumulation of wealth is a misguided and immoral culture. Consequently, he understands politics – in idealized form – as the collaboration of citizens in achieving community goals, that is, creating conditions for a happy life for all members of the community and for social development – a potential no longer achieved due to the prevailing culture of narcissism and competition. He emphasizes that social and technological development is not made possible by capitalism, which is one of the main arguments of the proponents of capitalism, but is made possible by science. Capitalism merely markets inventions made in scientific laboratories, usually funded by the state. Dewey consequently advocated the idea that liberals should abandon the dogma of the free market and use science and experimental intelligence to achieve agreed community goals.

At this point, the question arises: how should we set these community goals? With the help of democratic deliberation, Dewey would say, as he understood democracy as a shared communication experience of citizens, in which it is joint communication action that defines the political public instead of structure. Dewey describes this democratic political process as a discursive flow that encompasses the experience of a problem by individuals, sharing that experience with other community members through discourse, bringing these individuals together to find a solution to the problem, advocating different solutions, and evaluating the results that follow as logical consequence of the solutions. In the whole process it is necessary to rely on the findings obtained with the help of scientific methods. It is the ability of discursive communication and science that are two of the key characteristics of human beings that separate us from other animals on this planet.

Today we are facing a crisis of democratic deliberation – communicating with each other in order to set and achieve community goals. The first factor causing the crisis is tribalism. The problem of tribalism has already been addressed in the Federalist Papers by the founding fathers of the United States, and an additional theoretical basis was provided by Habermas, who says that in modern societies the public is constituted as a multitude of factions, competing for political power and social prestige. Each faction has its own ideology, its own goals, its own idea of ​​the ideal organization of society, and above all it wants to dominate the others. In doing so, members of different factions find it difficult to cooperate and communicate with members of other factions in a way to find compromises and common solutions, as this is often even impossible, especially when diametrically opposed (extreme) positions clash, between which no compromise can be reached. Politics, thus, tragically becomes a zero-sum game that creates an absolute winner and an absolute loser.

Another factor causing the crisis of democratic deliberation is the personalized realities of individuals, illustrated by the so called alternative facts. In the 20th century members of a political community (state) perceived reality in a similar way, they lived in the “same world”, the members of the community were structurally attuned, but with the emergence and development of digital media and social networks, society is becoming structurally out of tune, as algorithms show each individual a customized version of reality. To illustrate: if once all members of the community agreed that a banana was edible and the key question was whether to peel it properly from the bottom up or from the top down, today one side says that bananas are not edible at all and the other side he says it needs to be eaten along with the peel. The consequence of such structural decoupling of society’s members, promoted by political propaganda in the name of the struggle for a better tomorrow (election victory), is that intermediate, common sense opinion is excluded from the realm of public deliberation, and political competition becomes like war.

Different interpretations of the world and reality also result in different discourses, leading to different factions using completely different categories and completely different words to describe the same things. Thus, Western societies today face the problem that its members use a language with the same grammar, but with completely different meanings for words, as a result of which rational communication between members of different socio-political factions cannot take place. Due to the structural decoupling of members of Western societies, we are losing the deliberative potential that Dewey places at the heart of democracy, and as a result, political communication is more akin to street quarrels than to serious discussions about the future of society. The original sin of the problems listed above is individualism, which has been woven into the foundations of our culture since pre-scientific and pre-technological times, that is, from the time of a society of general scarcity. Dewey suggested overcoming such a culture through education, but offered yet another solution.

Individualism and capitalism are supposed to be driven by a sense of insecurity, which the individual addresses by trying to accumulate as much wealth as possible – for himself. But in a society of abundance, the feeling of insecurity no longer stems from nature, but is (artificially) created by institutions under complete human control, with Dewey identifying the still relevant class conflict between financial capital on the one hand and labor on the other. According to Dewey, the concentration of wealth and power and the corporate structure should be replaced by a community economy, i.e. cooperatives and similar alternative forms of economic relations. In this segment of alternative forms of organizational and production relations, the United States is today the world’s leading country, although in the wider collective consciousness it is considered the greatest opponent of a democratic community economy – another cultural remnant of a past world that no longer exists.

The text was made for the project “American political thought”, sponsored by the US Embassy in Slovenia.