As with communism, socialism can mean a variety of different things, not because of ambiguity or vagueness, but because it is a concept that operates in several different ideological vocabularies. Within Marxism, socialism has a very technical meaning, referring to a phase before the establishment of true communism. Outside that debate, socialism does become extremely vague, and is best differentiated into a number of versions, such as Christian socialism, social democracy and so on. At its simplest, the core meaning of socialism is that it is a politico-economic system where the state controls, either through planning or more directly, and may legally own, the basic means of production. In so controlling industrial, and sometimes agricultural, assets the aim is to produce what is needed by the society without regard to what may be most profitable to produce.
At the same time all versions of socialism expect to produce an egalitarian society, one in which all are cared for by society, with no need either for poverty, or the relief of poverty by private charity. The famous words ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, first used by the French socialist Louis Blanc (1811–82) in The Organization of Work (1840), may summarize socialism at its best.
Socialism has gone through many variations, and dating its origin is next to impossible. Certainly it stems most seriously from the industrial revolution, and many who are not Marxists would probably agree that socialism arose as a reaction to capitalism, and could not become a popular theory until the development of extensive industrial private property with a society based on contractual relations rather than semi-feudal status relations. Nevertheless, the essential ideas of equality and the effective abolition of private property, combined with the need for social protection against the chances of fate, can be found much earlier in political theory, not least notably in early Christianity. The basic varieties of socialism today can be arranged fairly easily on a spectrum according to just how much control of the economy, and just how much equality, are seen as necessary or desirable. To some extent this coincides with the more broadly used left/right spectrum, on which, for example, the British Labour Party used to be seen as only mildly left or socialist, and the Parti Communiste Français very far to the left, and very socialist. An alternative principle for differentiation would be the extent to which a basically Marxist ‘economic determinist’ view is taken, as opposed simply to a fairly untheoretical demand for a more just and equal society, with more state impact on the economy. In this sense, for example, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the earliest socialist party in Europe, started far to the left, and became less socialist, more right wing, in the late 1950s when it officially gave up Marxism and became a ‘reformist’ party acceptable even to the conservative CDU/CSU in the grand coalition government of 1966–69.
With the collapse of a genuine revolutionary left after the democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and the dominance in the West of monetarist economic theory, even in nominally socialist and social democrat parties, there seems no way for a European socialist party to be more than reformist, nor for it to have a theoretically sharply distinguishable position.
This is the complete article, containing 554 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
