Socialism

• 1. Introduction

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  Socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries, and yet no single definition encloses all of it. In his Dictionary of Socialism from 1924, Angelo S. Rappoport sifted through forty separate definitions before settling on the threads they shared. Forty definitions. That tells you something about the difficulty ahead. At its core sits one idea: social ownership of the means of production, set against private ownership. But social ownership can take the form of public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee control. Each variation opens a different argument.

  This is an ideology that has headed national governments, expelled its own members, splintered into rival internationals, and meant opposite things to people who used the same word. Pierre Leroux claimed he coined the term in a Parisian journal in 1832. Within a century, socialism would be called the most influential secular movement of the 20th century. How did a word rooted in the Latin sociare, meaning to combine or to share, come to encompass anarchists who reject the state and central planners who own everything through it? And why, after the revolutions of 1989 seemed to bury it, did socialism return to popularity in the 2010s?

• 2. A Word Takes Shape

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  Pierre Leroux, who claimed the first use of socialism, was a follower of Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the founders of what later got the label utopian socialism. Saint-Simon proposed economic planning, scientific administration, and the application of scientific understanding to the organisation of society. Robert Owen took a different route, organising production and ownership through cooperatives, and he became one of the fathers of the cooperative movement. In France the term is also attributed to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud.

  Andrew Vincent traced the word to the Latin sociare, to combine or to share. The related legal term, societas, could mean companionship and fellowship as well as a consensual contract between freemen. Those early utopian socialists condemned the liberal doctrine of individualism, which stressed the moral worth of the individual while treating people as if they act in isolation. They argued this doctrine failed to address the poverty, oppression, and wealth inequality of the Industrial Revolution. Building society on competition, they said, harmed community life.

  By the 1860s the usage settled. The word socialist replaced associationist, co-operative, mutualist, and collectivist, terms that had served as synonyms. The word communism, meanwhile, fell out of use during this period, soon to return with a sharper edge.

• 3. Socialism Versus Communism

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  An early distinction held that socialism aimed only to socialise production, while communism aimed to socialise both production and consumption, in the form of free access to final goods. By 1888 Marxists used socialism in place of communism, the latter having come to seem an old-fashioned synonym. The terms also carried religious baggage. In Protestant England, communism sat too close to the Roman Catholic communion rite, so socialist became the preferred term, and communists were believed to have adopted atheism.

  Engels wrote that when The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, socialism was respectable in Europe while communism was not. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France counted as respectable socialists. Working-class movements that proclaimed the necessity of total social change called themselves communists. This branch produced the work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.

  The sharp split came later, through Russia. It was not until after the Bolshevik Revolution that Vladimir Lenin appropriated socialism to mean a stage between capitalism and communism. He used it to defend the Bolshevik program against the Marxist criticism that Russia's productive forces were not developed enough for communism. The distinction became salient in 1918, when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself the All-Russian Communist Party. According to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, Marx himself used many terms for a post-capitalist society interchangeably, and the notion of socialism and communism as distinct historical stages entered the Marxist lexicon only after his death.

• 4. The Quarrel Over The State

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  Hal Draper drew a line through the entire movement, splitting it into socialism from above and socialism from below. Socialism from above employs an elite administration to run the socialist state. Socialism from below rests on a mass working-class movement fighting from below for the extension of democracy and human freedom. Draper viewed the latter as the purer, more Marxist version, and argued that Marx and Engels were devoutly opposed to any socialist institution conducive to superstitious authoritarianism. He identified six varieties of socialism from above, among them Philanthropism, Elitism, and Communism.

  Ferdinand Lassalle, the German political philosopher, first explicitly expounded state socialism in the 19th century. Against Marx, Lassalle rejected the idea of the state as a class-based power structure, and he rejected the Marxist view that the state was destined to wither away. He considered the state an instrument of justice, essential for achieving socialism. After the victory of Leninism in Russia, the idea of state socialism spread rapidly and eventually became identified with the Soviet economic model.

  Not everyone accepted that the Soviet system delivered socialism at all. Joseph Schumpeter rejected the association of socialism with state ownership, arguing the state was a product of capitalist society and could not be transplanted to a different institutional framework. Several scholars have stated that in practice the Soviet model functioned as a form of state capitalism. That charge would haunt the movement through the 20th century.

• 5. The Authoritarian Currents

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  Blanquism, named for Louis Auguste Blanqui, holds that socialist revolution should be carried out by a small group of highly organised and secretive conspirators who introduce socialism upon seizing power. Rosa Luxemburg and Eduard Bernstein both criticised Lenin, calling his conception of revolution elitist and Blanquist. Marxism-Leninism combined Marx's scientific socialist concepts with Lenin's anti-imperialism, democratic centralism, vanguardism, and the principle of, he who does not work, neither shall he eat.

  Leon Trotsky considered himself an adherent of Leninism but opposed the bureaucratic and authoritarian methods of Stalin. A number of scholars have regarded him as a democratic alternative rather than a forerunner to Stalin, pointing to his work as leader of the Left Opposition. Trotsky advocated decentralised economic planning, mass soviet democratization, workers' control of production, a united front against far-right parties, cultural autonomy for artistic movements, and socialist internationalism. Arthur Lipow named Bellamyism and Stalinism as two prominent authoritarian socialist currents within the history of the movement.

  Trotsky carried his quarrel with Stalin into the realm of culture. In Literature and Revolution, he examined aesthetic issues in relation to class and the Russian revolution, a work that Soviet scholar Robert Bird called the first systematic treatment of art by a Communist leader. Trotsky argued that cultural development was a prerequisite for socialist reconstruction and would accentuate industrial and technical progress. In 1938 he co-authored the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art with the endorsement of Andre Breton and Diego Rivera. Under Stalin, by contrast, socialist realism was imposed and creative industries were subject to extreme political control.

• 6. The Libertarian And Anarchist Wing

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  The expulsion in 1872 of the anarchists from the First International set the authoritarian-libertarian struggle in motion. The anarchists went on to lead the Anti-authoritarian International and then founded their own libertarian international, the Anarchist St. Imier International. In 1888 the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who called himself an anarchistic socialist and libertarian socialist, included the full text of a Socialistic Letter by Ernest Lesigne in his essay on State Socialism and Anarchism. According to Lesigne, there were two types of socialism, one dictatorial and the other libertarian.

  Libertarian socialism rejects centralised state ownership and control, criticises wage labour as wage slavery, and rejects the state itself. It emphasises workers' self-management and decentralised structures. Anarcho-syndicalist Gaston Leval foresaw a society in which all activities would be coordinated through parallel federations, vertically united at the highest levels, with enough flexibility to permit the greatest possible autonomy. Libertarian socialists generally prefer direct democracy and federal or confederal associations such as libertarian municipalism, citizens' assemblies, trade unions, and workers' councils.

  Within anarchism the variations multiply. Mutualists support market socialism. Collectivist anarchists favour workers' cooperatives and salaries based on time contributed to production. Anarcho-communists advocate a direct transition from capitalism to libertarian communism and a gift economy. Anarcho-syndicalists prefer direct action and the general strike. Peter Marshall observed that in general anarchism is closer to socialism than liberalism, finding itself largely in the socialist camp while remaining a separate and distinctive doctrine.

• 7. How An Economy Would Work

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  Socialist economics starts from the premise that individuals do not live or work in isolation but in cooperation, and that everything people produce is in some sense a social product. The original conception organised production to directly produce goods and services for their use-value, allocating resources in physical units rather than through financial calculation. This often entailed the end of capitalistic categories such as rent, interest, profit, and money. In a fully developed socialist economy, balancing factor inputs with outputs becomes a technical process undertaken by engineers.

  Market socialism keeps the market mechanism but channels the economic surplus to society as a social dividend, rather than to private capital owners. Its variations include libertarian proposals such as mutualism and neoclassical models such as the Lange model. John Roemer and Nicholas Vrousalis developed further market socialist models, after economists including Joseph Stiglitz and Mancur Olson showed logical flaws in the prevailing economic models such proposals might rest upon.

  Money divides socialist thinkers sharply. Nineteenth century figures including Karl Marx, Robert Owen, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and John Stuart Mill advocated labour vouchers, which unlike money could not become capital. Leon Trotsky argued money could not be arbitrarily abolished after a revolution. It had to exhaust its historic mission, eventually transformed into bookkeeping receipts for statisticians. On planning, Enrico Barone provided a theoretical framework using simultaneous equations to balance supply and demand. Yet studies of the actual Soviet economy found that conscious planning largely did not occur, the original plans went largely unfulfilled, and a better description might be an administered or managed economy.

• 8. Collapse And Return

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  For one week in December 1899, the Australian Labor Party formed the first socialist government in the world, elected in the Colony of Queensland under Premier Anderson Dawson. From that brief beginning the movement reached governments across continents. The establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 introduced socialism through a state-led, self-reliant economy focused on rapid industrialization, alongside land redistribution, the Anti-Rightist Movement, and the disastrous Great Leap Forward. In the United Kingdom, Herbert Morrison said that socialism is what the Labour government does, while Aneurin Bevan argued it required bringing the main streams of economic activity under public direction.

  Then came the unravelling. In 1989 the Revolutions of 1989 swept Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union saw the end of communism, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union followed in 1991. A neoliberal consensus replaced the social democratic one in the advanced capitalist world. Many former socialist parties embraced Third Way politics, abandoning public ownership and class-based politics while keeping a commitment to equality and welfare. The electoral decline carried a name, Pasokification, after the Greek party PASOK, whose vote share fell from 43.9 percent in 2009 to 13.2 percent in May 2012, then 12.3 percent in June 2012, and 4.7 percent in 2015. The Israeli Labor Party fell to 4.43 percent of the vote in the April 2019 legislative election.

  The 2008 global financial crisis reopened the door. Socialism experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 2010s. New parties rose, including Spain's Podemos, Greece's Syriza, Germany's Die Linke, and France's La France Insoumise. Revivals took place within mainstream parties around Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States. Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of the magazine Jacobin, argued the appeal persists due to inequality, the exploitation of wage labor, and ecological crises such as climate change. Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute countered that socialism remains a flawed system that promised prosperity, equality, and security but delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. The argument that started with forty definitions has not run out of room.