The socialist tradition committed to achieving social ownership and economic democracy through constitutional and electoral means rather than revolutionary rupture, on the argument that socialism without democracy is a contradiction rather than a stage.
Its modern form begins with Eduard Bernstein's revisionism at the close of the nineteenth century. Observing that living standards were rising and capitalism showed no sign of the predicted collapse, Bernstein argued the movement should pursue its aims through the ballot and the union rather than await a crisis, and was denounced for it by orthodox Marxists including Luxemburg. The 1917 revolution forced the question into the open: the tradition's decisive moment was its refusal of the Leninist model, and the split between social democratic and communist parties across Europe dates from that refusal.
Its twentieth-century work was substantially technical — an attempt to answer the charge that a democratic socialism is economically incoherent. Lange's market socialism addressed the socialist calculation debate on its own terms; Yugoslav self-management and the theoretical work of Vanek and Horvat explored worker-controlled firms; Sweden's Meidner plan proposed a gradual transfer of ownership through wage-earner funds; Roemer and Schweickart later designed models combining markets with social ownership of capital.
The tradition's live internal argument is with social democracy, with which it is often confused. Social democrats accept a capitalist economy and seek to tax, regulate and civilize it; democratic socialists hold that the ownership of productive assets must itself change, and that a redistributive settlement left resting on private capital will be rolled back whenever capital finds it inconvenient. Critics of both point out that the ownership question has been deferred by every party that has actually held office, and disagree about whether that reflects a failure of nerve or a discovery about what is possible.