SOCIALISM

Socialism has been one of the most popular political ideas in history, rivaling in some ways even the great religions. By the late 1970s, a mere 150 years from the time the term socialism was coined, roughly 60 percent of the world population was living under governments that called themselves "socialist," although these varied widely in their institutions and were often violently at odds with one another.

Socialism drew impetus from the rise of industry in Europe in the nineteenth century. The new wealth generated by new methods of production encouraged the belief that now it would be possible to assure a comfortable standard of living for every member of society. The uneven distribution of this new wealth was seen to pose ethical questions that were less often asked about long-entrenched class disparities prevalent in the countryside. Socialism was seen by many of its advocates as not only an ethical but also a scientific response to these new circumstances. Drawing on the Enlightenment critique of religion, socialism offered an image of the ideal life as something to be achieved in the here and now rather than in the great beyond.

Five Types of Socialism

The myriad forms of socialism that were actually put into practice might be grouped into five broad categories: communism, social democracy, Third World socialism, fascism, and communal socialism. (There were others, such as anarcho-syndicalism, that remained forever in the realm of speculative thought.) Each of these five requires a note of explication.

In the early decades of socialist thought the terms socialism and communism were often used interchangeably, and while some writers attempted to define the distinction between the two, no such distinction ever achieved widespread acceptance. When Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870–1924) led his group of Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917, he announced that they would henceforth call themselves communists. Until then, they had been merely the bolshevik (meaning majority) segment of Russia's Social-Democratic movement. (This had been a single party, at least formally, until 1912, when Lenin's faction announced it was a party in itself. Still they were all social democrats.)

In the years following 1917, as parties modeled after Lenin's appeared in dozens of countries, a clear distinction emerged between social democracy and communism. There were countless points of dispute and differences, but probably the most profound was that social democrats sought parliamentary means to power and adhered to the principle that political systems should have multiple parties, whereas communists envisioned a revolutionary path to power and believed that communist parties, as the only true representatives of the working class, were the only legitimate ones. This made for such a wide gulf that thereafter social democrats never called themselves communists, and communists never called themselves social democrats. The distinction, however, continued to be clouded by the fact that both sides claimed the term socialism for themselves. Thus the country Lenin created was called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and at the same time the international federation that brought together the world's social democratic parties (the British Labour Party, the German Social Democrats, etc.) called itself the Socialist International.

Third World socialism is a loose category comprising "African socialism," "Arab socialism," and various cognate forms that appeared elsewhere in poorer countries after World War II. These were usually dictatorial in their political practice (although not in all cases: India offers a dramatic counterexample), but rarely was the state as all controlling as in communist systems. Some of these states (for example, Tanzania under Julius Nyerere [1922–1999]) elaborated complex blueprints of economic development, whereas in others "socialism" probably served as little more than a popular label for a hodgepodge of policies of a military dictator or a rationalization for strengthening the power of the central government (for example, Somalia under Mohammed Siad Barre [c. 1919–1995]).

To include fascism as a subset of socialism invites controversy because fascist movements often made their appeal on the promise to protect society from socialists or communists, because they were almost always part of the Right (whatever that may mean) rather than the Left, and because their inclusion may be taken as a polemical device to tar socialism with the odium attached to fascism. Yet the historical basis for their inclusion is strong. Adolf Hitler's party called itself National Socialist (as did some similar groupings in other countries, such as Hungary, some of which thought up the name independently of, and even prior to, Hitler). In Italy, Benito Mussolini formed his fascist movement as a leftist pro-war breakaway from the Socialist Party, of which he was a top leader. Each of these movements attempted to retain some of the elements of socialism while substituting the nation (or in Hitler's case the German volk) for the working class that had been seen as the main engine and beneficiary of socialism in traditional theory. Once in power, both Mussolini's party and Hitler's continued to preserve some of the accouterments of their socialist heritage. Mussolini himself probably captured best the relationship between these isms when he declared that fascism was a "heresy" of socialism, suggesting something that had sprung from the same premise but turned to challenge some of socialism's integral tenets.

Communal socialists differ from all the others in that they do not focus on trying to gain power (whether by vote or violence) in order to establish a socialist system over an entire country. Rather they are groups of individuals whose primary goal is to live a socialist life themselves by organizing communities operating on socialist principles. (No doubt many commune members also hope that their example might inspire emulation.) Usually such communities have numbered a few hundred members, although some have measured only in the tens and others in the low thousands. In the United States, a few hundred such societies were founded over the course of the nineteenth century, some by people whose driving belief was socialism, per se, others by devotees of religious sects, such as Shakers, for whom sharing property was but a facet of their sense of spirituality. Israeli kibbutzim are another important example of this form.

Historical Origins

Except for the communal, all of these forms grew from the same acorn: the French Revolution of 1789, with its ethos of "liberty, equality, fraternity." Although the Revolution itself did not aim for socialism, and although the term socialism was not coined until decades later, it was in pursuit of this inspiring triad of goals that socialism came to be conceived and then popularized. How can there be equality, it was asked, with vast disparities between rich and poor? How can there be brotherhood in a context of heartless economic competition? How can there be liberty if most people are enslaved to material necessity?

These questions presented themselves with greater urgency as the Industrial Revolution took hold. Although the poor of the factories were not poorer than the poor of the farms, their poverty, concentrated in urban slums, was more visible. Moreover, the Industrial Revolution entailed new ills such as industrial accidents and work environments devastating to human health. The labor of young children in factories offered a spectacle more heartbreaking than work of children on farms, which seemed a natural part of rural life from time immemorial.

The solution, it was argued, was to be found in collective ownership of property and the egalitarian distribution of the goods of society. These twin principles were to remain at the heart of socialism, although each of them, as well as many lesser points of doctrine, were to be disputed, refined, and amended repeatedly. Collective ownership in an individual commune was easy to envision. Collective ownership of the economic assets of an entire society was more difficult to conceptualize. It might mean ownership by the central government, but in other versions it might mean something less centralized—for example, that individual enterprises would be owned by the people who worked in them or by local communities. Egalitarian distribution did not necessarily mean exactly equal shares. The most fetching socialist slogan was "from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs," which implied a measure of inequality but raised the question of how such needs would be determined. In Israeli kibbutzim, one place where an earnest effort was made to implement this principle, special committees existed to which kibbutz members could bring their special needs or abilities (a medical condition, an artistic calling, a family emergency abroad that required travel, and the like), and these committees were empowered to distribute resources accordingly.

Relation to Science and Technology

The connection between socialism and science originates in the claim of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the most influential of all socialist thinkers, to have discovered "scientific socialism." By this they meant to distinguish themselves from such early-nineteenth- (or in a few cases, late-eighteenth-) century visionaries as Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Robert Owen (1771–1858), Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and Étienne Cabet (1788–1856), who had inspired the founding of various communes. Marx and Engels ridiculed the idea that a group of individuals could move the world toward socialism by creating model communities to demonstrate socialism's benefits. They saw this as naive because they doubted that political forms or even political ideas emerged simply from the free play of the human mind. To believe this, they said, is to be "utopian."

This term utopian itself is misleading because Marx and Engels were not objecting to the fancifulness of some of the early socialist visions. (Fourier's socialism, for example, envisioned that lions and whales would be tamed so as to free humans from physical labor and that each citizen would be entitled not only to a "social minimum" of economic rewards but also a "sexual minimum" of carnal satisfaction.) The fleeting glimpses Marx and Engels offered of life under socialism were pretty idyllic in themselves: People would do only those activities that they find intrinsically gratifying, say, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, writing poetry in the evening. Rather, what Marx and Engels found unrealistic, hence "utopian," about the earlier thinkers were their ideas about how socialism could be brought about. "Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life," they wrote (The German Ideology part 1A,1845).

What they meant by this was that socialism could not come about until the objective conditions—which meant a certain level of wealth and technology—were right. Nor would it be brought about by individuals who happened upon the idea of socialism through reading or contemplation; rather its engineers would be people impelled to fight for socialism by the very conditions of their daily lives. Specifically, they held that socialism had not been possible in rural society but that the advent of industrialization laid open a new era. For one thing, the new technologies generated unprecedented abundance, making it possible for every member of society to enjoy a high standard of living. (Of course, what seemed a high standard in 1850 would be considered quite low by twenty-first-century standards, a wry comment perhaps on the elasticity of human need.) Moreover, the character of industrial production, depending on highly collective human effort, was conducive to collective ownership, making socialism a natural choice.

For the first time, because of this change, socialism had become a realistic possibility. Indeed its appearance had become likely, perhaps even inevitable. This was because industrialization brought the flowering of capitalism. Capitalist competition forced manufacturers to cut costs, including labor costs, thus driving down rates of pay. As a result, the very individuals whose sweat was providing the new abundance were left with too little income to share in it themselves. Eventually, driven in part by a sense of injustice but even more by the whip of destitution, they would rise up to abolish the system of private capitalism and replace it with socialism. This would not be because anyone had persuaded or taught them to do so but because bitter circumstances would impel them to do it.

In sum, Marx and Engels believed that they had discovered the processes that drive social and political change, and that these were rooted in the march of technology rather than in anything as arbitrary as individual will or cognition. They believed that this revelation of the laws of social evolution was analogous to the recent sensational revelation of the principle of the evolution of species. As Engels put it in his graveside eulogy to Marx in 1883: "Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history."

Relation to Science and Ethics

Science, itself, as it is now understood, was not as clearly demarcated in their time, and from the perspective of the early twenty-first century it is easy to see the flaws in Marx and Engels's claims to science. To start with, they did an injustice to those they invidiously compared to themselves as "utopian." Owen among others also considered himself a man of science. Like Marx and Engels, Owen sought to draw generalizations about human behavior from his observations. His most cherished belief was that persons' characters are formed by the circumstances of their lives rather than by inner moral convictions or any other factors that they can control themselves. This notion, that one's thoughts and actions are shaped by forces larger than oneself, is very akin to Marx and Engels's central scientific claim and anticipated them by a full generation.

Moreover, in their approach to socialism, a good case can be made that the "utopians" were more scientific than Marx and Engels. Having hit on the idea that socialism would furnish a cure for society's ills, they set out to demonstrate its efficacy by attempting socialist experiments. Insofar as experimentation lies at the heart of the scientific method, the "utopians" were more genuinely "scientific socialists" than Marx and Engels, who discounted any such attempt. The latter duo claimed they could see where history was heading, but it is hard to imagine how this counts as more scientific than any other exercise in prophecy.

Beyond the absence of experimental method, Marx and Engels never stated any testable proposition nor did they betray any doubts inspired by the failure of specific details of their prophesies. Tellingly, they never treated their own forecasts as if they did amount to "science," at least as the term has come to be understood. As the decades passed they poured forth an endless stream of commentary, much of it arresting, on unfolding political events. But they rarely displayed any sense of needing to examine whether and in what way these new events comported with their larger theories. That is, they conducted themselves as what today are sometimes called "public intellectuals" or as activists, not as people who thought of themselves as scientists.

Still, it is difficult to dismiss Marx and Engels's claim to "science" without conceding that their method of attempting to distill systematic generalizations from the study of contemporary history constitutes a main building block of contemporary social science. There may be room to debate about how "scientific" social science is, falling as short as it does from the methodological rigor of "hard science," but insofar as its scientific legitimacy is accepted, then Marx and Engels must be given credit as pioneers, however imperfect their methodology.

In terms of its relationship to ethics, socialism presents an ambiguous picture. By claiming that they were doing no more than divining historical laws that showed that socialism was due to triumph, Marx and Engels shifted the argument in favor of socialism from the realm of "ought" to "is" (or, more precisely, to "will be"). And they specifically denied the possibility of absolute or universal moral principles, as opposed to principles that merely served the interests of a particular class. "Law, morality, religion are to [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests," wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848).

At the same time, it would be hard to deny that the force of Marx and Engels's indictment of capitalism is the sense of moral indignation that flows through it. Despite their own militant atheism, they decried capitalism as a system under which "all that is holy is profaned." A similar ambiguity can be found in various non-Marxist socialists. To take Owen, his fervent assertions that people's characters were molded for them seemed to negate any sense of moral responsibility. Yet he was very interested in discovering methods to mold characters to some kind of proper moral standard. He was for this reason a pioneer in early childhood education, and the organization of his followers in the 1830s called itself the Society for the New Moral World.

Owen, like Marx and Engels, was a vituperative opponent of revealed religion. (They called it an "opiate"; he called it one of the "three great evils" afflicting humanity.) In contrast, however, there have always been some religious socialists. As already mentioned, various socialist communes rested on religious bases, and a broader movement of Christian socialism made a strong appearance during the twentieth century. These adherents saw socialism as an expression of the biblical precept to love thy neighbor as thyself and of the Christian emphasis on spiritual rather than material values.

This points toward another aspect of the ambiguity of the relationship between socialism and ethics. On the one hand, socialist ideas aim to create a society that will fulfill certain moral goals, such as liberty, equality, and brotherhood. On the other hand, the emphasis on politics and policy has meant that many socialists have made little use of traditional notions of individual moral agency. The socialists who have most fully avoided this dilemma are the communal socialists who aim to carry out socialism in their own lives rather than to engineer larger political changes.

Their great emphasis on improving the world through political and economic changes rather than uplifting individual behavior has also brought socialists into a fraught confrontation with the question of whether, or to what extent, ends justify means. In the main, communists (as well, of course, as fascists, if one counts them under the socialist umbrella) have been ruthless in their means and ruthless in justifying this. As Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) once put it: "Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist bestiality is moral, and nothing else. The welfare of the revolution—that is the supreme law!" ("The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism," essay in his Their Morals and Ours [1936])

Social democrats and other noncommunist socialists have ordinarily rejected such claims, and they have often chastised the communists on moral grounds for their deceptive or violent tactics. Yet the force of such condemnations in intrasocialist debates was often vitiated by the emphasis on social change as the preeminent path to improving the world. If social change bulks so much larger than individual behavior, then might not unsavory tactics be justified in pursuit of the necessary policies?

The Legacy of Socialism

By the twenty-first century, much of the body of socialism has wasted away. Fascism, if it ever deserved to be counted here, is little more than a grim memory—although the term continues to be applied to various violent authoritarian movements. Communism has disappeared from the large majority of once-communist states. The remaining communist states all seem either to be following China in gradually shedding their distinctly communist features or to be living on borrowed time, awaiting the demise of a powerful dictator. Communal socialist societies are few and far between. Even their most triumphant exemplars, the kibbutzim, have mostly transformed themselves into miniature market economies.

What remains strong, however, is the legacy of social democracy. Social democratic parties justly claim most of the credit for various forms of worker protection and a wide variety of services and benefits that every developed democratic society provides. And these parties continue as powerful forces throughout the democratic world. None of them aim any longer to displace capitalism; rather their program is to continue to tame or modify it. Although markets have, to most minds, proven their superiority over the socialist dream of "economic planning," there still are social values—protection of the weak or of the environment or the provision of certain public services, for example—that unfettered markets do not serve. Social democracy has found an enduring niche as the advocate of these values—which have been put into practice through such programs as social security and socialized medicine.

If this is a dilute residue of socialism, so, too, do the scientific and ethical issues that have long surrounded socialism endure in dilute form. Contemporary protests against "globalization" echo earlier ones against capitalism itself. While there are few remaining believers in "scientific socialism" or in Marx and Engels's economic determinism, the question of the degree to which individual behavior should be attributed to free will as opposed to external or biological influences continues to be hotly debated in such policy areas as criminal justice and the rights of homosexuals. And the deep discourse over whether it is more efficacious to improve society by uplifting individuals or to improve individuals by reforming the society seems certain to endure.

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

SEE ALSO Arendt, Hannah;Communism;Critical Social Theory;Fascism;Marxism;Marx, Karl;Mondragón Cooperative Corporation;Morris, William.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harrington, Michael. (1970). Socialism. New York: Bantam. A brief for socialism by the leading American socialist writer of the late twentieth century, who was both a social democrat and a Marxist.

Kolakowski, Leszek. (1978). Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P. S. Falla. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. A comprehensive account of the many varieties of thought flowing from socialism's most influential thinker. Includes also Marx's antecedents.

Lichtheim, George. (1970). A Short History of Socialism. New York: Praeger. A concise history of Western socialism by a leading European intellectual of socialist bent.

Muravchik, Joshua. (2002). Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. San Francisco: Encounter Books. An overview history of socialism in all its forms told through biographical sketches of its key figures.