socialism

socialism An economic and political system based on collective or state ownership of the means of production and distribution–although, like capitalism, the system takes many and diverse forms.

After almost two hundred years of socialist thought the collapse of Soviet communism has broken the grip of the Marxist-Leninist imprimatur on the provenance of this concept. However, the concerns that have been addressed by those who espoused or eschewed the cause still remain. The dichotomies of freedom and equality, individual and collective rights, and even the nature of the historical process (with its voluntaristic and deterministic connotations) all remain very much to the fore. To some extent these problems are now raised afresh since the system of ‘actually existing socialism’ or real socialism as it was called tended to put into suspended animation many of the processes which addressed these questions. Capitalism resurgent in Eastern Europe once again raises the questions of the limit to individual rights, the nature of the common good, and liberalism versus communitarianism (see COLLECTIVISM). Ethnic and national minorities, with their historically defined differences and animosities for so long cryogenically preserved, have starkly raised the question of collective rights and seeming historical inevitability.

Socialism as a doctrine, or some would say a utopia, is generally agreed to have been spawned as a reaction to capitalism. The Durkheimian version was rooted in the desire simply to bring the state closer to the economy, society closer to the realm of individual activity, and sentient parts to each other: in this way the pathologies of capitalism (including anomie) would be mitigated and eventually relieved. Socialism was a cry of pain which did not demand equality of condition but simply a genuine equality of opportunity. The imposition of the former, Durkheim argued, would destroy the very conditions for a healthy society, and society could not demand that which was against its interests for survival.

Max Weber, on the other hand, saw in socialism an accentuation of the process of rationalization commenced under capitalism. He derided the intellectuals who wanted to marry formal to substantive rationality in the socialist state, or as he put it ‘bureaucracy in the state and in the economy’, which would simply create the ‘cage of future bondage’.

The English tradition of so-called ethical socialism argues for forceful government intervention in market processes, state control of the conditions of labour, a collectivist social policy and strong welfare state, as represented in the non-revolutionary and pragmatic gradualism of the Fabians. This vision of socialism emphasizes the values of liberty, fraternity (particularly the importance of citizenship as a counter to the inequalities of social class), and equality, and is most explicitly spelled out in A. H. Halsey and Norman Dennis's English Ethical Socialism (1988). It is opposed to historicism and places moral motivation at the centre of human conduct and social organization. It is also opposed to Marxism-Leninism. The writings of T. H. Marshall and R. H. Tawney are typical of the tradition.

This particular philosophy of socialism has had a strong influence on British empirical sociology, obvious for example in the ‘political arithmetic’ approach to the sociology of education, which has been concerned with comparing the chances of children from different social backgrounds reaching successive stages in the education process. The work of Halsey himself is typical. Halsey's early studies of inequalities in access to education and educational attainment set much of the research agenda of the sociology of education in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, and were influential in formulating the social policies of comprehensive and compensatory education, while his later work has continued to draw attention to the importance of schools (rather than academic ability) as a determinant of educational achievements (see Social Class and Educational Opportunity, 1961, and Origins and Destinations, 1980
).

However, Karl Marx's views on the socialist future and the advent of communism have been the most pervasive in their influence on the definition of the letter, if not the spirit, of socialism. For Marx, socialism implied the abolition of markets, capital, and labour as a commodity. In fact, second economies, black markets, and other forms of private activity were never eradicated in state socialist societies, even under Stalinism. Very soon, ‘market socialism’ came to the rescue of the distributive as well as production shortcomings of the planned, command economy. Free labour was in fact dragooned and disciplined by subservient trade unions, and self-management only surfaced at times of crisis or in managerial forms, as in Poland and Yugoslavia. Shortage, rather than the surplus promised by the abolition of the anarchy of capitalist production, was testified to by food queues and price riots. Accumulation within the heavy industrial sector continued, as the bureaucratic state maintained its power by any means, including importing foreign technology rather than provide autonomy to any segment of society. If socialism meant anything it was the creation of social justice and the transition from the labour standard to the needs standard. In fact, socialism did not even create a working meritocracy, but only a political class of the nomenklatura, and despite its commitment to a leading role for the working class, it rewarded workers simply by promoting them into political and white-collar positions in an obvious process of inclusion.

The absence of key civil rights (freedom of speech, person, conscience, movement, property ownership) and political rights (assembly and franchise)–obviated, it was claimed, by the victory of the vanguard Party–was in no way compensated for by the socialist ‘welfare state’ or the satisfaction of need away from the realm of exchange value. Environmental despoliation characteristic of socialist industrialization, mortality and morbidity rates so bad as not to be publishable, gender divisions disguised by the common impoverishment, subsidies to housing and food consumption which provided an extra dimension to the cumulative inequality generated by the socialist system of redistribution–all of these factors and more provided a sorry summary of the achievements of actually existing socialism. Until the very end, ideologists within the Party clung to their socialist rhetoric and slogans, despite the fact that any generation which might have believed in them was by now in a minority.

The overnight collapse of the mass parties in Eastern Europe, and their almost total rejection even in the face of massive impoverishment, is perhaps the major indictment of socialism as it was practised in the Soviet bloc. How it affects the credibility of the doctrine, and what emerges to fill the value vacuum left by its demise, remains to be seen. Nationalism, populism, and varieties of neocorporatist solutions have already sought to take over the constituency of the political left as socialism still dares not to speak its name. See also ANARCHISM; BERNSTEIN, EDUARD; PLURALISM; SAINT-SIMON; SOREL, GEORGES.