Quotes from Gary J. Dorrien

Christian socialists were not even democrats, although they learned to say that socialism had to be democratic. They said socialism was a modern name for the unifying and cooperative divine order that already exists.

Marx stepped into history as the coauthor of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Capitalism, he said, stood for the rule of human products over human communities. It gained power, grew out of control, constrained human expectations, and blighted the lives of the overwhelming majority, the working-class proletariat. Communism was precisely the abolition of capitalist tyranny and liberation from it.

Socialism" became an English word in 1827, when Cooperative Magazine described Welsh reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858) as a socialist—an advocate of the view that industrial wealth should be owned in common, on a cooperative basis. Owen was the first Briton to grasp the meaning of the Industrial Revolution.

Socialism was about reorganizing society as a cooperative community.

I believe that the best candidate for an essential "something" in democratic socialism is the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community. This ethical impulse retains the original socialist idea in multiple forms, playing out in struggles for freedom, equality, recognition, and democratic commonwealth, conceiving democracy in terms of the character of relationships in a society, not mere voting rights.

Communism was precisely the abolition of and liberation from the rule of human products that gains power over human communities, grows out of control, constrains human expectations, and blights the lives of many.