Socialism
Socialism, social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. According to the socialist view, individuals do not live or work
in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. Furthermore,
everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and
everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a
share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least
control property for the benefit of all its members.
This conviction puts socialism in opposition to capitalism, which is based on private ownership of the means of production and allows individual choices in a free market
to determine how goods and services are distributed. Socialists
complain that capitalism necessarily leads to unfair and exploitative
concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of the relative few who
emerge victorious from free-market competition—people who then use their
wealth and power to reinforce their dominance in society. Because such
people are rich, they may choose where and how to live, and their
choices in turn limit the options of the poor. As a result, terms such
as individual freedom and equality of opportunity may
be meaningful for capitalists but can only ring hollow for working
people, who must do the capitalists’ bidding if they are to survive. As
socialists see it, true freedom and true equality require social control
of the resources that provide the basis for prosperity in any society. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made this point in Manifesto of the Communist Party
(1848) when they proclaimed that in a socialist society “the condition
for the free development of each is the free development of all.”
This
fundamental conviction nevertheless leaves room for socialists to
disagree among themselves with regard to two key points. The first
concerns the extent and the kind of property that society should own or
control. Some socialists have thought that almost everything except
personal items such as clothing should be public property; this is true,
for example, of the society envisioned by the English humanist Sir Thomas More in his Utopia
(1516). Other socialists, however, have been willing to accept or even
welcome private ownership of farms, shops, and other small or
medium-sized businesses.
The second disagreement
concerns the way in which society is to exercise its control of
property and other resources. In this case the main camps consist of
loosely defined groups of centralists and decentralists. On the
centralist side are socialists who want to invest public control of
property in some central authority, such as the state—or the state under the guidance of a political party,
as was the case in the Soviet Union. Those in the decentralist camp
believe that decisions about the use of public property and resources
should be made at the local, or lowest-possible, level by the people who
will be most directly affected by those decisions. This conflict has
persisted throughout the history of socialism as a political movement.
Origins
The origins of socialism as a political movement lie in the Industrial Revolution. Its intellectual
roots, however, reach back almost as far as recorded thought—even as
far as Moses, according to one history of the subject. Socialist or
communist ideas certainly play an important part in the ideas of the
ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose Republic depicts an austere
society in which men and women of the “guardian” class share with each
other not only their few material goods but also their spouses and
children. Early Christian communities also practiced the sharing of goods and labour, a simple form of socialism subsequently followed in certain forms of monasticism. Several monastic orders continue these practices today.
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Christianity and Platonism were combined in More’s Utopia,
which apparently recommends communal ownership as a way of controlling
the sins of pride, envy, and greed. Land and houses are common property
on More’s imaginary island of Utopia,
where everyone works for at least two years on the communal farms and
people change houses every 10 years so that no one develops pride of
possession. Money has been abolished, and people are free to take what
they need from common storehouses. All the Utopians live simply,
moreover, so that they are able to meet their needs with only a few
hours of work a day, leaving the rest for leisure.
More’s Utopia
is not so much a blueprint for a socialist society as it is a commentary
on the failings he perceived in the supposedly Christian societies of
his day. Religious and political turmoil, however, soon inspired others
to try to put utopian ideas into practice. Common ownership was one of
the aims of the brief Anabaptist regime in the Westphalian city of Münster during the Protestant Reformation, and several communist or socialist sects sprang up in England in the wake of the Civil Wars (1642–51). Chief among them was the Diggers, whose members claimed that God had created the world for people to share, not to divide and exploit for private profit. When they acted on this belief by digging and planting on land that was not legally theirs, they ran afoul of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, which forcibly disbanded them.
Whether utopian or practical, these early visions of socialism were largely agrarian. This remained true as late as the French Revolution, when the journalist François-Noël Babeuf and other radicals complained that the Revolution had failed to fulfill the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Adherence to “the precious
principle of equality,” Babeuf argued, requires the abolition of
private property and common enjoyment of the land and its fruits. Such
beliefs led to his execution for conspiring to overthrow the government.
The publicity that followed his trial and death, however, made him a
hero to many in the 19th century who reacted against the emergence of
industrial capitalism.
Utopian socialism
Conservatives who saw the settled life of agricultural society disrupted by the insistent demands of industrialism were as likely as their radical
counterparts to be outraged by the self-interested competition of
capitalists and the squalor of industrial cities. The radicals
distinguished themselves, however, by their commitment to equality and
their willingness to envision a future in which industrial power and capitalism were divorced. To their moral
outrage at the conditions that were reducing many workers to pauperism,
the radical critics of industrial capitalism added a faith in the power
of people to put science and an understanding of history to work in the creation of a new and glorious society. The term socialist
came into use about 1830 to describe these radicals, some of the most
important of whom subsequently acquired the title of “utopian”
socialists.
One of the first utopian socialists was the French aristocrat Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon.
Saint-Simon did not call for public ownership of productive property,
but he did advocate public control of property through central planning,
in which scientists, industrialists, and engineers would anticipate
social needs and direct the energies of society to meet them. Such a
system would be more efficient than capitalism, according to
Saint-Simon, and it even has the endorsement of history itself.
Saint-Simon believed that history moves through a series of stages, each
of which is marked by a particular arrangement of social classes and a
set of dominant beliefs. Thus, feudalism,
with its landed nobility and monotheistic religion, was giving way to
industrialism, a complex form of society characterized by its reliance
on science, reason, and the division of labour.
In such circumstances, Saint-Simon argued, it makes sense to put the
economic arrangements of society in the hands of its most knowledgeable
and productive members, so that they may direct economic production for
the benefit of all.
Henri de Saint-Simon, lithograph by L. Deymaru, 19th centuryBBC Hulton Picture Library
Another early socialist, Robert Owen,
was himself an industrialist. Owen first attracted attention by
operating textile mills in New Lanark, Scot., that were both highly
profitable and, by the standards of the day, remarkably humane: no
children under age 10 were employed. Owen’s fundamental belief was that
human nature is not fixed but formed. If people are selfish, depraved,
or vicious, it is because social conditions have made them so. Change
the conditions, he argued, and people will
change; teach them to live and work together in harmony, and they will
do so. Thus, Owen set out in 1825 to establish a model of social
organization, New Harmony, on land he had purchased in the U.S. state of Indiana. This was to be a self-sufficient, cooperative community
in which property was commonly owned. New Harmony failed within a few
years, taking most of Owen’s fortune with it, but he soon turned his
attention to other efforts to promote social cooperation—trade unions and cooperative businesses, in particular.
Similar themes mark the writings of François-Marie-Charles Fourier,
a French clerk whose imagination, if not his fortune, was as
extravagant as Owen’s. Modern society breeds selfishness, deception, and
other evils, Fourier charged, because institutions such as marriage,
the male-dominated family, and the competitive market confine people to
repetitive labour or a limited role in life and thus frustrate the need
for variety. By setting people at odds with each other in the
competition for profits, moreover, the market in particular frustrates
the desire for harmony. Accordingly, Fourier envisioned a form of
society that would be more in keeping with human needs and desires. Such
a “phalanstery,”
as he called it, would be a largely self-sufficient community of about
1,600 people organized according to the principle of “attractive
labour,” which holds that people will work voluntarily and happily if
their work engages their talents and interests. All tasks become
tiresome at some point, however, so each member of the phalanstery would
have several occupations, moving from one to another as his interest
waned and waxed. Fourier left room for private investment
in his utopian community, but every member was to share in ownership,
and inequality of wealth, though permitted, was to be limited.
The ideas of common ownership, equality, and a simple life were taken up in the visionary novel Voyage en Icarie (1840; Travels in Icaria), by the French socialist Étienne Cabet. Icaria was to be a self-sufficient community, combining industry
with farming, of about one million people. In practice, however, the
Icaria that Cabet founded in Illinois in the 1850s was about the size of
a Fourierist phalanstery, and dissension among the Icarians prompted
Cabet to depart in 1856.
Other early socialists
Other socialists in France began to agitate and organize in the 1830s and ’40s; they included Louis Blanc, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Blanc, the author of L’Organisation du travail (1839; The Organization of Labour),
promoted a scheme of state-financed but worker-controlled “social
workshops” that would guarantee work for everyone and lead gradually to a
socialist society. Blanqui, by contrast, was a revolutionary who spent
more than 33 years in prison for his insurrectionary activities.
Socialism cannot be achieved without the conquest of state power, he
argued, and this conquest must be the work of a small group of
conspirators. Once in power, the revolutionaries would form a temporary
dictatorship that would confiscate the property of the wealthy and
establish state control of major industries.
Detail from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and His Children in 1853, oil on …© DeA Picture Library
In Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?),
Proudhon memorably declared, “Property is theft!” This assertion was
not quite as bold as it appears, however, since Proudhon had in mind not
property in general but property that is worked by anyone other than
its owner. In contrast to a society dominated by capitalists and
absentee landlords, Proudhon’s ideal was a society in which everyone had
an equal claim, either alone or as part of a small cooperative, to
possess and use land and other resources as needed to make a living.
Such a society would operate on the principle of mutualism,
according to which individuals and groups would exchange products with
one another on the basis of mutually satisfactory contracts. All this
would be accomplished, ideally, without the interference of the state,
for Proudhon was an anarchist who regarded the state as an essentially
coercive institution. Yet his anarchism did not prevent him from urging Napoleon III to make free bank credit available to workers for the establishment of mutualist cooperatives—a proposal the emperor declined to adopt.
Marxian socialism
Despite
their imagination and dedication to the cause of the workers, none of
the early socialists met with the full approval of Karl Marx, who is unquestionably the most important theorist of socialism. In fact, Marx and his longtime friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels were largely responsible for attaching the label “utopian,” which they intended to be derogatory,
to Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, whose “fantastic pictures of future
society” they contrasted to their own “scientific” approach to
socialism. The path to socialism proceeds not through the establishment
of model communities that set examples of harmonious cooperation to the
world, according to Marx and Engels, but through the clash of social
classes. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles,” they proclaimed in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
A scientific understanding of history shows that these struggles will
culminate in the triumph of the working class and the establishment of
socialism.
According to Engels, the basic elements of Marx’s theory are to be found in German philosophy, French socialism, and British economics.
Of these, German philosophy was surely the formative influence on
Marx’s thinking. Born in Trier in the German Rhineland, Marx was a
philosophy student at the University of Berlin when the idealism of G.W.F. Hegel
dominated German philosophy. Hegel maintained that history is the story
of the unfolding or realization of “spirit”—a process that requires
struggle, agony, and the overcoming of obstacles to the attainment of
self-knowledge. Just as individual persons cannot realize their
potential—especially the potential for freedom—if they remain forever in
a childish or adolescent condition, so spirit must develop throughout
history in a dialectical fashion. That is, individuals and even nations
are characters in a drama that proceeds through the clash of opposing
ideas and interests to a greater self-awareness and appreciation of
freedom. Slavery,
for example, was long taken for granted as a natural and acceptable
practice, but the slave’s struggle to be recognized as a person was
bringing an end to slavery as master and slave came to recognize their
common humanity—and thus to liberate themselves, and spirit, from a
false sense of the master’s superiority.
Like
Hegel, Marx understood history as the story of human labour and
struggle. However, whereas for Hegel history was the story of spirit’s
self-realization through human conflict, for Marx it was the story of
struggles between classes over material or economic interests and
resources. In place of Hegel’s philosophical idealism, in other words,
Marx developed a materialist or economic theory of history. Before
people can do anything else, he held, they must first produce what they
need to survive, which is to say that they are subject to necessity. Freedom
for Marx is largely a matter of overcoming necessity. Necessity compels
people to labour so that they may survive, and only those who are free
from this compulsion will be free to develop their talents and
potential. This is why, throughout history, freedom has usually been
restricted to members of the ruling class, who use their control of the
land and other means of production to exploit the labour of the poor and
subservient. The masters in slaveholding societies, the landowning aristocracy in feudal times, and the bourgeoisie
who control the wealth in capitalist societies have all enjoyed various
degrees of freedom, but they have done so at the expense of the slaves,
serfs, and industrial workers, or proletarians, who have provided the necessary labour.
For
Marx, capitalism is both a progressive force in history and an
exploitative system that alienates capitalists and workers alike from
their true humanity. It is progressive because it has made possible the
industrial transformation of the world, thereby unleashing the
productive power to free everyone from necessity. Yet it is exploitative
in that capitalism condemns the proletarians, who own nothing but their
labour power, to lives of grinding labour while enabling the
capitalists to reap the profits. This is a volatile situation, according
to Marx, and its inevitable result will be a war
that will end all class divisions. Under the pressure of depressions,
recessions, and competition for jobs, the workers will become conscious
that they form a class, the proletariat, that is oppressed and exploited by their class enemy, the bourgeoisie.
Armed with this awareness, they will overthrow the bourgeoisie in a
series of spontaneous uprisings, seizing control of factories, mines,
railroads, and other means of production, until they have gained control
of the government and converted it into a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. Under socialism or communism—Marx
and Engels drew no clear or consistent distinction between the
two—government itself will eventually wither away as people gradually
lose the selfish attitudes inculcated by private ownership of the means
of production. Freed from necessity and exploitation, people will
finally live in a true community that gives “each individual the means
of cultivating his gifts in all directions.”
Marx maintained that the revolution
by which socialism would be achieved was ordained by the logic of
capitalism itself, as the capitalists’ competition for profits led them
to create their own “grave diggers” in the proletariat. Even the role of
the revolutionary, such as Marx, was confined to that of “midwife,” for
revolutionaries could do no more than speed along the inevitable
revolution and ease its birth pangs.
This,
at least, was Marx’s more or less “official” doctrine. In his writings
and political activities, however, he added several qualifications. He
acknowledged, for example, that socialism might supplant capitalism
peacefully in England, the United States, and other countries where the
proletariat was gaining the franchise; he also said that it might be
possible for a semifeudal country such as Russia to become socialist
without first passing through capitalist industrialism. Moreover, Marx
played an important part in the International Working Men’s Association,
or First International,
formed in 1864 by a group of labour leaders who were neither
exclusively revolutionary nor even entirely committed to socialism. In
short, Marx was not the inflexible economic determinist he is sometimes
taken to be. But he was convinced that history was on the side of
socialism and that the equal development of all people to be achieved
under socialism would be the fulfillment of history.
A membership card of the International Working Men’s Association, bearing the signature of Karl …Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
Socialism after Marx
By
the time of Marx’s death in 1883, many socialists had begun to call
themselves “Marxists.” His influence was particularly strong within the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which was formed in 1875 by the merger of a Marxist party and a party created by Marx’s German rival, Ferdinand Lassalle. According to Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme
(1891), Lassalle had “conceived the workers’ movement from the
narrowest national standpoint”; that is, Lassalle had concentrated on
converting Germany to socialism, whereas Marx thought that socialism had
to be an international movement. Even worse, Lassalle and his followers
had sought to gain control of the state through elections in hopes of
using “state aid” to establish producers’ cooperatives. Marx’s belief in
the revolutionary transformation of society soon prevailed in the SPD,
but his controversy with Lassalle and the Lassalleans testifies to the
existence of other important currents in socialist thought in the late
19th century.
Christian socialism
Caught
up in these currents were men and women who seemed to agree on little
but their condemnation of capitalism. Many prominent socialists were
militant atheists, for example, but others expressly connected socialism
to religion. Even the rationalist Saint-Simon had called for a “new
Christianity” that would join Christian social teachings with modern
science and industry to create a society that would satisfy basic human
needs. His followers attempted to put this idea into practice, giving
rise to a Saint-Simonian sect sometimes called “the religion of the
engineers.” This combination of an appeal to universal brotherhood and a
faith in enlightened management also animated the best-selling utopian novel Looking Backward (1888), by the American journalist Edward Bellamy. In England the Anglican clergymen Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley initiated a Christian socialist movement at the end of the 1840s on the grounds that the competitive individualism of laissez-faire
capitalism was incompatible with the spirit of Christianity. Similar
concerns inspired socialists in other countries, including the Russian
novelist, anarchist, and pacifist Leo Tolstoy.
Although
neither Christianity nor any other religion was a dominant force within
socialist theory or politics, the connection between Christianity and
socialism persisted through the 20th century. One manifestation of this connection was liberation theology—sometimes characterized as an attempt to marry Marx and Jesus—which
emerged among Roman Catholic theologians in Latin America in the 1960s.
Another, perhaps more modest, manifestation is the Christian Socialist Movement in Britain, which affiliates itself with the British Labour Party. Several members of Parliament have belonged to the Christian Socialist Movement, including Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the son of a Methodist minister, and his predecessor, Tony Blair, an Anglican who converted to Catholicism not long after he left office.
Anarcho-communism
Neither Tolstoy’s religion nor his pacifism was shared by the earlier flamboyant Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin,
who held that religion, capitalism, and the state are forms of
oppression that must be smashed if people are ever to be free. As he
stated in an early essay, “
The Reaction in Germany” (1842), “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.” This belief led Bakunin into one uprising or conspiracy after another throughout his life. It also led him into a controversy with Marx that contributed to disintegration of the International Working Men’s Association in the 1870s. As a communist, Bakunin shared Marx’s vision of a classless, stateless community in which the means of production would be under community control; as an anarchist, however, he vehemently rejected Marx’s claim that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a necessary step on the way to communism. To the contrary, Bakunin argued, the dictatorship of the proletariat threatened to become even more oppressive than the bourgeois state, which at least had a militant and organized working class to check its growth.
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Anarcho-communism took less-extreme forms in the hands of two later Russian émigrés, Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. Kropotkin used science and history to try to demonstrate that anarchism is not foolishly optimistic. In Mutual Aid (1897) he drew on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to argue that, contrary to popular notions of social Darwinism,
the groups that prospered in evolutionary terms were those that
practiced cooperation. Goldman, who came to prominence as “Red Emma” in
the United States, campaigned against religion, capitalism, the state, and marriage, which she condemned in “
Marriage and Love” (1910) as an institution that “makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent.” She also served a prison term for advocating birth control.
Fabian socialism
As
the anarcho-communists argued for a form of socialism so decentralized
that it required the abolition of the state, a milder and markedly
centralist version of socialism, Fabianism, emerged in Britain. Fabian
Socialism was so called because the members of the Fabian Society admired the tactics of the Roman general Fabius Cunctator
(Fabius the Delayer), who avoided pitched battles and gradually wore
down Hannibal’s forces. Instead of revolution, the Fabians favoured
“gradualism” as the way to bring about socialism. Their notion of
socialism, like Saint-Simon’s, entailed social control of property
through an effectively and impartially administered state—a government
of enlightened experts. The Fabians themselves were mostly middle-class
intellectuals—including George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas, and H.G. Wells—who
thought that persuasion and education were more likely to lead to
socialism, however gradually, than violent class warfare. Rather than
form their own political party or work through trade unions, moreover,
the Fabians aimed at gaining influence within existing parties. They
eventually exercised considerable influence within Britain’s Labour Party, though they had little to do with its formation in the early 1900s.
Syndicalism
Near
the anarcho-communists on the decentralist side of socialism were the
syndicalists. Inspired in part by Proudhon’s ideas, syndicalism
developed at the end of the 19th century out of the French trade-union
movement—syndicat being the French word for trade union. It was
a significant force in Italy and Spain in the early 20th century until
it was crushed by the fascist regimes in those countries. In the United
States, syndicalism appeared in the guise of the Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies,” founded in 1905.
The hallmarks of syndicalism were workers’ control and “direct action.” Syndicalists such as Fernand Pelloutier
distrusted both the state, which they regarded as an agent of
capitalism, and political parties, which they thought were incapable of
achieving radical change. Their aim was to replace capitalism and the
state with a loose federation of local workers’ groups, which they meant
to bring about through direct action—especially a general strike of workers that would bring down the government as it brought the economy to a halt. Georges Sorel elaborated on this idea in his Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Reflections on Violence),
in which he treated the general strike not as the inevitable result of
social developments but as a “myth” that could lead to the overthrow of
capitalism if only enough people could be inspired to act on it.
Guild socialism
Related to syndicalism but nearer to Fabianism in its reformist tactics, Guild Socialism was an English movement that attracted a modest following in the first two decades of the 20th century. Inspired by the medieval guild,
an association of craftsmen who determined their own working conditions
and activities, theorists such as Samuel G. Hobson and G.D.H. Cole
advocated the public ownership of industries and their organization
into guilds, each of which would be under the democratic control of its
trade union. The role of the state was less clear: some guild socialists
envisioned it as a coordinator of the guilds’ activities, while others
held that its functions should be limited to protection or policing. In
general, however, the guild socialists were less inclined to invest
power in the state than were their Fabian compatriots.
