How to address the understandable critique re: “socialism failed”

My campaign platform is here:

https://welzerforcongress.com/issues

. . . and one of the programmatic points says: “Take the energy industry and all railroad systems into public ownership using a democratic federated structure, with municipal and regional utilities.”

In a debate, a competing candidate might challenge me: “This has been tried, many times. Great Britain is a good example. Public ownership of banks, aviation, railways, mines, and some industries proved unsatisfactory in many ways. There was a clamor to privatize the enterprises.”

My response would be:

In the wake of the British attempts to socialize industries (circa 1946–1951 under Clement Attlee) there actually was not all so much of a “clamor to privatize.” Rather, the ruling capitalist elites got very concerned, not only about Britain’s impetus in a socialist direction, but also about the prospect of “contagion.” They feared that successful nationalizations would galvanize movements in other countries for emulation of what the British working class was achieving. So what happened during the early 1950s was that the wealth and power elites moved to defund the nationalization experiments, provoke failure, and motivate as much clamor for reversal as possible.

Nonetheless, leftists do need to confront the reality that attempts at socialist implementation in a variety of countries during the twentieth century proved to be less than satisfactory.

The socialist movement dates back 200 years now. It’s notable that the debate about public vs. private ownership remains unresolved. You might think that after all the theoretical debate and the many attempts to actualize socialism a consensus would have developed by now about the “better system.” But that’s not the case. The capitalist system remains dominant and yet the sense of its inadequacy remains prevalent. There clearly was widespread resonance when Bernie Sanders advocated “democratic socialism” during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.

On the left the post-capitalist vision continues to be discussed. A contribution of the Green Party is called eco-socialism. It takes into account how the over-centralized and bureaucratic implementations of socialism in the Soviet Union, the UK, etc. need to be avoided going forward. Public ownership should be selective and as grassroots-democratic as possible.

My own conception of eco-socialism has elements of an ultimately communitarian orientation. It, first of all, asserts that a political-economic transition is needed as soon as possible in order to defang the ruinous capitalist system and to open pathways toward what I call “the greening of society.” During an emergency period of eco-socialism some of the mega-corporations could be semi-socialized via intensive regulation, while some should be brought under (democratic) public ownership and control. But at the same time a downscaling process should gradually be implemented in order to begin regionalizing the economy as much as practicable. The participatory form of democracy and cooperative form of economics advocated by the Greens is only possible at smaller scales of government and enterprise. In that light, a bioregionalist reorganization of society ought to be our ultimate vision.

In a future world of diverse regionalized economies, a logical assumption is that they would not all be socialist or eco-socialist. Limited private enterprise at small scale is not necessarily problematic. In a bioregional future we could expect to see local populations opt for or gravitate toward various forms of property relations.