Socialism is a political theory the central tenets of which are that the means of production should be taken into collective or common ownership and that, as far as possible, market exchange should be replaced by other forms of distribution based on social needs. Socialism was brought into existence by the industrial revolution and it was designed to appeal to the mass working class of the new factory towns created by machine production. Before the development of modern industry, radical conceptions of the reorganization of society were predominantly egalitarian and democratic republican, committed to empowering artisans and peasants. Socialism aimed to solve the problems of modern industry and a competitive market society and was thus a new departure in political ideas.
Socialist ideas and political movements began to develop in the early nineteenth century in England and France. The period between the 1820s and the 1850s was marked by a plethora of diverse socialist systems proposed by Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Blanc, Proudhon, Marx and Engels, and many lesser thinkers. Most of these systems were Utopian and many of their advocates were middle-class philanthropists committed to improving the lot of the workers. Most socialists sought a more organized society that would replace the anarchy of the market place and the mass poverty of the urban masses.
Socialist solutions varied enormously: some were strongly in favour of state ownership while others favoured co-operative and mutual ownership, some favoured a decentralized and mutualist economy while others supported centralized economic planning. Socialism in this period did not develop strong political movements; rather it relied on the formation of model communities by wealthy patrons like Robert Owen, on winning established elites to reform, as with the Saint-Simonians in France, or with proposing projects for state action, as with Louis Blanc’s National Warshops after the 1848 revolution in France.
The radical and revolutionary mass movements in this period were not socialist. Rather they were nationalist in countries like Hungary or Poland or Italy under foreign domination; in England and France they were popular-radical, committed to democratic republican reform. Between 1848 and 1871 the popular democratic and revolutionary traditions exhausted themselves in the European countries in a series of political defeats, at the barricades in countries like France, or through less violent political containment by the established parties and classes, as was the case with the Chartists in England.
In the period between 1848 and 1871 Marx and Engels in particular attempted radically to recast socialist theory. They attacked the utopianism of their predecessors, refusing to promulgate schemes of social reform. In essence they argued that the class struggle arising from the system of capitalist production is the objective basis of socialist victory, socialism is to be identified with the cause of the proletariat, and its aim is to overthrow the ruling class and create a new society without economic exploitation or state domination. Marx and Engels consistently advocated revolution and the seizure of power by the working class, but they did recognize that universal suffrage might facilitate the downfall of capitalism.
Actually, it did nothing of the sort. Between 1870 and 1914 the institutional foundations of modern socialism were developed in Britain and Germany. Universal suffrage created the modern political party—a permanent machine with paid officials whose task was to mobilize the mass electorate. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) became the dominant force in German socialism, not primarily because it adopted Marxism party orthodoxy, but because it started early and was effectively competing for votes in national elections. In Britain and Germany large-scale industrialism was accompanied by the growth of trade unionism, The British Labour Party was created to facilitate the parliamentary representation of the trade unions, and the links between the SPD and the unions were similarly close.
As a mass electoral party and the political representative of unionized labour, any socialist movement in an advanced industrial country had to relegate to virtual impotence the popular insurrectionary politics of the old European ‘left’. Even ‘Engels conceded as much, and one of Marx’s disciples, Eduard Bernstein, did no more than carry the conclusion to its logical extreme. Bernstein’s (1993 [1899]) Preconditions of Socialism represented the first articulate advocacy of ‘social democracy’ as against revolutionary socialism. It displaced the goal of ‘revolution’ in favour of a never-ending struggle for attainable reforms. Others, like Karl Kautsky, orthodox but politically cautious, argued that by parliamentary and acceptable political means the workers could engineer a revolutionary change in the social system.
To the mass party and the labour union must be added as a key institutional support of modern socialist movements the rise of big government. In the period 1870–1914 in Britain and Germany, governments came to provide, administer and organize an increasing range of activities, mass schooling, social insurance, public health, public utilities, etc. This provided another base for socialist advocacy and practice. British Fabian socialism sought to intervene in shaping central and local government’s provision, aiming to provide an organizing core of the practical intellectuals. The success of Fabianism stands in stark contrast to the failure of its competitors, such as the anti-statist and decentralist doctrines of the Guild Socialists. For all the forceful advocacy by able thinkers like G.D.H.Cole (1953–61), the Guild Socialist movement was dead by the early 1920s. Likewise, British labour syndicalism (strong in the run-up to 1914 and during the First World War) perished in at same time, while conventional institutional trade unionism survived and continued to flourish.
Western European socialism was exported to the periphery, and to rapidly industrializing Russia in particular. Russian socialists adopted Marxism. Some like the Mensheviks remained faithful to German social democratic models, emphasizing an evolutionary strategy and co-operation with capitalistic modernization. Lenin and the Bolshevik faction came to favour an immediate revolutionary overthrow of tsarism and capitalism, and aimed to build a socialist society rapidly without long intermediary stages. Lenin’s seizure of power in the Russian Revolution was a victory over social democrats and agrarian socialists as much as anything else. It was condemned by many western socialists, notably both the parliamentarist Kautsky and the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, as leading to authoritarian rule that would betray the interests of the workers.
These criticisms proved prescient. Before 1914 the socialist movement was essentially, despite differences, one enterprise. The First World War produced a split in socialism and a communist regime implacably opposed to European democratic socialism. European communist parties created after 1918 were under Soviet tutelage. Communist parties in the 1920s and early 1930s emphasized insurrectionary politics, going so far as to stigmatize democratic socialist parties like the SPD as ‘social fascist’. The aftermath of the Second World War, with the consolidation of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Western Europe, led to a radical change in communist parties. In France and Germany they became mass electoral parties and sought to participate in government. The split between communism and socialism in Europe, bitter into the 1950s, ceased to have much meaning with the rise of Eurocommunism in the 1970s.
After 1945 social democratic parties in Europe participated in government to a hitherto unprecedented degree. The post-1945 boom was a period of intensification of big government and welfarism. In Scandinavia, the UK and Germany, socialist parties became accepted parties of government. Radical socialist ideas declined in favour of social democratic objectives of redistribution and welfare in a state-managed full-employment capitalist system. For example, Anthony Grosland’s Future of Socialism (1956) advocated a basic change in Labour Party doctrine.
In the 1970s Western European social democracy entered a period of profound crisis from which it has failed to emerge. Socialists had become dependent on Keynesian national economic management to deliver the growth and full-employment necessary to make their welfare and redistribution strategies possible. With the oil crisis of 1973 and the collapse of the long postwar boom, western economies entered into a period of economic turbulence, uncertain growth, and the internationalization of major markets that made social democrats little more than crisis managers. For a period the fashionable monetarist and free-market doctrines seemed to threaten to wipe out socialism or social democracy completely. These new doctrines have failed in large measure too and their destructive social consequences have provoked a renewed concern for social justice. Nevertheless the socialist parties in western societies still have no coherent strategies. This is not only due to the absence of an alternative economic programme, but also because social changes have fatally undermined the constituency to which reformist and revolutionary socialists alike appeal, a large and relatively homogenous manual working class. The occupational structure had diversified, and with it the socialist claim to represent the majority has lost its force.
The spectacular collapse of communism after 1989 has further undermined western socialism. Even if most socialists in Europe rejected the Soviet model, it always remained the one ‘actually existing’ socialism which had replaced the market by planning and it was repellent to most free people. Its collapse makes the idea of a fundamental social change to a non-market system seem unsustainable. The future of socialism is thus uncertain.
Paul Hirst
University of London
References
Bernstein, E. (1993 [1899]) The Preconditions of Socialism, ed. H.Tudor, Cambridge, UK.
Cole, G.D.H. (1953–61) A History of Socialist Thought, 5 vols, London.
Crosland, A. (1956) The Future of Socialism, London.
Further reading
Lichtheim, G. (1970) A Short History of Socialism, London.
Wright, A.W. (1986) Socialisms: Theories and Practices, Oxford.
