Dictionary Definition
socialism
Noun
1 a political theory advocating state ownership
of industry
2 an economic system based on state ownership of
capital [syn: socialist
economy] [ant: capitalism]
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Noun
- Any of various political philosophies that support social and economic equality, collective decision-making and public control of productive capital and natural resources, as advocated by socialists.
- The socialist political philosophies as a group, including Marxism, libertarian socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy.
- In the context of "Leninism": The intermediate phase of social development between capitalism and full communism. This is a strategy whereby the State has control of all key resource-producing industries and manages most aspects of the market, in contrast to laissez faire capitalism.
- In the context of "Classical Marxism": The international communist society where classes and the state no longer exist.
Derived terms
Related terms
Translations
political philosophy of social and economic
equality
- Croatian: socijalizam
- Czech: socialismus, socializmus
- Danish: socialisme
- Dutch: socialisme
- Finnish: sosialismi
- German: Sozialismus
- Hungarian: szocializmus
- Italian: socialismo
- Japanese: 社会主義
- Korean: 사회주의
- Norwegian: sosialisme
- Polish: socjalizm
- Portuguese: socialismo
- Russian: социализм
- Swedish: socialism
group of socialist political philosophies
- Croatian: socijalizam
- Danish: socialisme
- Dutch: socialisme
- Finnish: sosialismi
- German: Sozialismus
- Hungarian: szocializmus
- Italian: socialismo
- Japanese: 社会主義
- Norwegian: sosialisme
- Polish: socjalizm
- Portuguese: socialismo
- Russian: социализм
- Swedish: socialism
intermediate phase of social development
- Croatian: socijalizam
- Danish: socialisme
- Dutch: socialisme
- Finnish: sosialismi
- German: Sozialismus
- Hungarian: szocializmus
- Italian: socialismo
- Japanese: 社会主義
- Norwegian: sosialisme
- Polish: socjalizm
- Portuguese: socialismo
- Russian: социализм
- Swedish: socialism
- ttbc Arabic: (išterakíya)
- ttbc Breton: sokialouriezh
- ttbc Chinese: 社會主義, 社会主义 (shèhuìzhǔyì)
- ttbc Estonian: sotsialism
- ttbc French: socialisme
- ttbc Korean: 사회주의 (sahoeju-ui)
- ttbc Spanish: socialismo
- ttbc Telugu: సామ్యవాదం (saamyavaadaM)
- ttbc Turkish: sosyalizm
- ttbc Vietnamese xã hội chủ nghĩa, XHCN, chủ nghĩa xã hội
See also
Extensive Definition
Socialism is a socio-economic
system in which essential industries, social services, property and
the distribution of wealth are publicly and cooperatively owned and
democratically controlled with a view to equal opportunity and
equal benefit for all. Since the ownership and distribution of
wealth is controlled by the whole community as a collective, and
not individually or by groups of individuals that do not comprise a
whole community, socialism has been identified with communism. In a practical
ideology, members of the community would contribute as much as
reasonably possible, yet they would be capable of consuming as much
as reasonably necessary.
The modern socialist movement largely originated
in the late-19th century working
class movement. During this period, the term "socialism" was
first used by European social
critics, who spoke against capitalism and private
property. Karl Marx, who
helped establish and define the modern socialist movement, wrote
that socialism would be the socioeconomic system that arises after
the proletarian
revolution.
Since the 19th century, socialism has coalesced
into several movements with differing and sometimes conflicting
ideas, such as those focused on reform and revolution. Some
revolutionary socialists, influenced by the Soviet model of
economic development, have championed complete nationalization (state
ownership) of the means of production. Reformist socialists, on the
other hand, have proposed selective nationalization of key
industries within the framework of mixed
economies.
Market
socialism is another major strand of socialism which arose
following the
great economic calculation debate. During the 1970s and 1980's,
Communists in
Yugoslavia and
Hungary proposed market
socialism. Chinese
Communists since the reform
era, as well as some Western socialist economists, continue to
propose various forms of market
socialism. In socialist market economies, consumer demand has a
greater influence over which items will be produced by the
centrally controlled means of production., rather than central
planners, guide production
and exchange. Social
Anarchists, Luxemburgists
(such as those in the Socialist
Party USA) and some elements of the United
States New Left favor
decentralized collective ownership in the form of cooperatives or workers'
councils over government ownership of the means of
production.
Historical precedents
Certain elements of socialist thought long
predate the socialist ideology that emerged in the
first half of the 19th century. Thomas More's
Utopia has
been cited as including socialist ideas. The fifth century Mazdak movement in
what is now Iran has been
described as "communistic" for challenging the enormous privileges
of the noble classes and the clergy, criticizing the institution of
private property and for striving for an egalitarian society.
William
Morris argued that John Ball, one
of the leaders of the 1381 Peasants'
Revolt in England, was the first socialist. John Ball is
credited with saying: "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then
the gentleman?" During the English
Civil War in the mid 17th century, movements identified with
the socialist tradition include the Levellers and the
Diggers;
the latter believing that land should be held in common.
During the 18th-century Enlightenment,
criticism of inequality appeared in the work of political theorists
such as Jean
Jacques Rousseau in France, whose
Social
Contract began, "Man is born free, and he is everywhere in
chains." Following the
French Revolution of 1789,
François Noël Babeuf espoused the goals of common ownership of
land and total economic and political equality among
citizens.
Origins of socialism
The appearance of the term "socialism" is
variously attributed to Pierre
Leroux in 1834, or to Marie
Roch Louis Reybaud in France, or else in Britain to Robert Owen,
who is considered the father of the cooperative
movement.
The first modern socialists were early 19th
century Western European social critics. In this period, socialism
emerged from a diverse array of doctrines and social experiments
associated primarily with British and French thinkers—especially
Robert
Owen, Charles
Fourier, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, Louis Blanc,
and
Saint-Simon. These social critics criticised the excesses of
poverty and inequality of the Industrial
Revolution, and advocated reforms such as the egalitarian
distribution of wealth and the transformation of society into small
communities in which private property was to be abolished.
Outlining principles for the reorganization of society along
collectivist lines, Saint-Simon and Owen sought to build socialism
on the foundations of planned, utopian communities.
According to some accounts, the use of the words
"socialism" or "communism" was related to the perceived attitude
toward religion in a given culture. In Europe, "communism" was
considered to be the more atheistic of the two. In
England, however, that sounded too close to
communion with Catholic overtones; hence atheists preferred to
call themselves socialists. By 1847, according to Frederick Engels,
"Socialism" was "respectable" on the continent of Europe, while
"Communism" was the opposite; the Owenites in
England and the Fourierists in
France were considered Socialists, while working class movements
which "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" termed
themselves "Communists". This latter was "powerful enough" to
produce the communism of Étienne
Cabet in France and Wilhelm
Weitling in Germany.
The International Workingmen's Association — the First International
In 1864, the
International Workingmen's Association (IWA) or First
International, was founded in London. Victor Le Lubez, a French
radical republican living in London, invited Marx to come, "as a
representative of German workers", according to Saul Padover. The
IWA held a preliminary conference in 1865 and its first congress at
Geneva in
1866. Marx was appointed a member of the committee and, according
to Padover, Marx and Johann Georg Eccarius, a tailor living in
London, were to become, "the two mainstays of the International
from its inception to its end". The First International became the
first major international forum for the promulgation of socialist
ideas.
The
Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany was founded in 1869
under the influence of Marx and Engels. In 1875, it merged with the
General German Workers' Association of Ferdinand
Lassalle to become what is known today as the
German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Socialism became
increasingly associated with newly formed trade
unions. In Germany, the SPD built trade unions and in Austria,
France and other European countries, socialist parties and
anarchists played a prominent role in forming and building up trade
unions, especially from the 1870s onwards. This stood in contrast
to the British experience, where moderate New Model
Unions dominated the union movement from the mid-nineteenth
century and where trade unionism was stronger than the political
labour movement until the formation and growth of the Labour
Party in the early years of the twentieth century. In the
United States, the first socialist party was founded in 1876 and
was organized as a Marxist party in 1890; the Socialist
Labor Party exists to the present day. An early leader of the
Socialist Labor Party was Daniel De
Leon who had considerable influence beyond the United States as
well.
Socialist groups supported diverse views of
socialism, from the gradualism of many trade unionists to the
radical, revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels. Anarchists and
proponents of other alternative visions of socialism, who
emphasized the potential of small-scale communities and agrarianism, coexisted with
the more influential currents of Marxism and social democracy. The
anarchists, led by the Russian Mikhail
Bakunin, believed that capitalism and the state were
inseparable and that one could not be abolished without the
other.
The Second International
As the ideas of Marx and Engels took on flesh,
particularly in central Europe, socialists sought to unite in an
international organization. In 1889, on the centennial of the
French Revolution of 1789, the
Second International was founded, with 384 delegates from 20
countries representing about 300 labour and socialist
organizations. It was termed the "Socialist International" and
Engels was elected honorary president at the third congress in
1893. Just before his death in 1895, Engels argued that there was
now a "single generally recognized, crystal clear theory of Marx"
and a "single great international army of socialists". Despite its
illegality due to the Anti-Socialist
Laws of 1878, the
Social Democratic Party of Germany's use of the limited
universal male suffrage were "potent" new methods of struggle which
demonstrated their growing strength and forced the dropping of the
Anti-Socialist legislation in 1890, Engels argued. In 1893, the
German SPD obtained 1,787,000 votes, a quarter of votes cast.
However, before the leadership of the SPD published Engels' 1895
Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, they
removed certain phrases they felt were too revolutionary.
Marx believed that it was possible to have a
peaceful socialist transformation in England, although the British
ruling class would then revolt against such a victory. America and
Holland might also have a peaceful transformation, but not in
France, where Marx believed there had been "perfected... an
enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious
state machinery" which must be forcibly overthrown. However, eight
years after Marx's death, Engels argued that it was possible to
achieve a peaceful socialist revolution in France, too.
World War I
When World War I
began in 1914, many European socialist leaders supported their
respective governments' war aims. The social democratic parties in
the UK, France, Belgium and Germany supported their respective
state's wartime military and economic planning, discarding their
commitment to internationalism
and solidarity.
Lenin, however, denounced the war as an imperialist conflict, and
urged workers worldwide to use it as an occasion for proletarian revolution. The
Second International dissolved during the war, while Lenin,
Trotsky, Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists
opposed to the war, came together in the Zimmerwald
Conference in September 1915.
The Revolutions of 1917-23
By 1917, the atmosphere of enthusiastic patriotism which had greeted the start of the First World War had evaporated and was replaced by an upsurge of radicalism in most of Europe and as far afield as the United States (see Socialism in the United States) and Australia. In February 1917, revolution broke out in Russia and the workers, soldiers and peasants set up workers', soldiers' and peasants' councils (in Russian, soviets), while power was placed into the hands of a Provisional government prior to the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. Lenin arrived in Russia in April 1917 and called for "All power to the Soviets". The Bolsheviks won a majority in the Soviets in October 1917 and at the same time the October Revolution was led by Lenin and Trotsky. At the Petrograd Soviet on the 25 October 1917, Lenin declared, "Long live the world socialist revolution!"On 26 October
1917, the day
after seizing power, Lenin drew up a Draft Regulations on Workers'
Control, granting workers' control in enterprises with not less
than five workers and office employees, who were to be granted
access to all books, documents and stocks, and whose decisions were
to be "binding upon the owners of the enterprises." The new Soviet
government immediately nationalised the banks and major industry,
and repudiated, or refused to acknowledge and pay, the former
Romanov
regime's national debts. It implemented a system of government
through the elected workers' councils or soviets. It sued for peace
and withdrew from the First World War. The elections to the
Constituent
Assembly were held in November 1917 and were won by the
non-Marxist, peasant-based
Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party with almost twice as many
votes as the Bolsheviks. The Constituent Assembly was convened for
13 hours between 4 p.m. and 4:40 a.m., January 5-6, 1918. The SR
leader Victor
Chernov was elected President of the fledgling republic. The
following day the Bolsheviks dissolved the assembly.
The Russian revolution of October 1917 gave rise
to the formation of Communist Parties around the world, and the
revolutions
of 1917-23 which followed. In this period, few Communists —
least of all Lenin and Trotsky — doubted that the success of
socialism in Soviet Russia depended on successful socialist
revolutions carried out by the working classes of the most
developed capitalist countries. For this reason, in 1919, Lenin and
Trotsky drew together the Communist Parties from around the world
into a new 'International', the Communist
International (also termed the Third International or
Comintern).
The German
Revolution of 1918 overthrew the old absolutism and, as in
Russia, Workers' and Soldiers' Councils almost entirely made up of
SPD and
Independent Social Democrats (USPD) members were set up. The
Weimar
republic was established and placed the SPD in power, under the
leadership of Friedrich
Ebert. The Workers' and Soldiers' Councils were put down by the
army and the Freikorps. In
1919 the Spartacist
uprising challenged the power of the SPD government, but it was
put down in blood and the German Communist leaders Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg were discovered and brutally murdered. A Communist
regime under Kurt Eisner
in Bavaria
in 1919 was also put down in blood. A Communist regime briefly held
power under Béla Kun in
Hungary.
There were revolutionary movements in Vienna, the
industrial centres of northern Italy, and
revolutionary movements in the Ruhr area in Germany in 1920 and in
Saxony in 1923.
However, these revolutionary movements failed to
spread the socialist revolution into the advanced capitalist
countries of Europe. In Soviet Russia things were desperate. In
August 1918, Lenin was shot in the head and wounded by Fanya
Kaplan. Under siege from a trade boycott and invasion by
Germany, UK, USA, France and other forces, facing civil war and
starvation, the Soviet regime implemented War
Communism in June, 1918. All private enterprise was made
illegal, strikers could be shot, "non-working classes" were forced
to work and the Soviet regime could requisition grain from the
peasants for the workers in the cities.
By 1920, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, had
largely defeated the White Armies. In 1921, War Communism was
ended, and under the New
Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership was restored to small
and medium enterprises, and especially to the peasants. The
peasants had resented and hindered the requisitions of grain so
that the situation in the cities remained desperate or was getting
worse. Lenin declared that the "commanding heights" of industry
would still be under state control, but that the NEP was a
capitalist measure in a country that was still largely unripe for
socialism. Businessmen and women, called 'NEPmen', began to
flourish, and the rich peasant (or 'Kulak', meaning
'fist') gained more power.
Lenin, now half-paralyzed from several strokes,
castigated the powers the state had assumed in the Soviet Union by
1923. It had reverted to "a bourgeois czarist machine... barely
varnished with socialism." After Lenin's death in January 1924, the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, falling steadily under the
control of Stalin, rejected the theory that socialism could not be
built in the Soviet Union on its own. Stalin declared a policy of
"socialism
in one country", namely the Soviet Union. Despite demands by
the increasingly marginalized Left
Opposition for the restoration of soviet democracy, the Soviet
Union continued to develop a bureaucratic and authoritarian model of
social development, which was condemned by Democratic Socialists,
Anarchists, Trotskyists and
others for undermining the initial socialist ideals of the Russian
Revolution.
The inter-war era and World War II
The Russian
Revolution of October 1917 brought about the definitive
ideological division between Communists as denoted with a capital
"C" on the one hand and other communist and socialist trends such
as anarcho-communists and social democrats, on the other. The
Left
Opposition in the Soviet Union gave rise to Trotskyism which
was to remain isolated and insignificant for another fifty years,
except in Sri Lanka where Trotskyism gained the majority and the
pro-Moscow wing was expelled from the Communist Party.
In 1922, the fourth congress of the Communist
International took up the policy of the United
Front, urging Communists to work with rank and file Social
Democrats while remaining critical of their leaders, who they
criticized for "betraying" the working class by supporting the war
efforts of their respective capitalist classes. For their part, the
social democrats pointed to the dislocation caused by revolution,
and later, the growing authoritarianism of the Communist Parties.
When the Communist Party of Great Britain applied to affiliate to
the Labour Party in 1920 it was turned down.
Socialism after World War II
In 1945, the world’s three great powers met at
the Yalta Conference to divide the world between them. UK Prime
Minister Winston
Churchill joined USA President Franklin
D. Roosevelt and Joseph
Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union's Central Committee. With the relative decline of Britain
compared to the two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union,
however, many viewed the world as "bi-polar" — a world with two
irreconcilable and antagonistic political and economic systems.
Many termed the Soviet Union "socialist", not least the Soviet
Union itself, but also commonly in the USA, China, Eastern Europe,
and many parts of the world where Communist Parties had gained a
mass base. In addition, scholarly critics of the Soviet Union, such
as economist Friedrich
Hayek were commonly cited as critics of socialism.
This view was not universally shared,
particularly in Europe, and especially in Britain, where the
Communist Party was very weak. In 1951, British Health Minister
Aneurin
Bevan expressed the view that, "It is probably true that
Western Europe would have gone socialist after the war if Soviet
behaviour had not given it too grim a visage. Soviet Communism and
Socialism are not yet sufficiently distinguished in many
minds."
In 1949, the Chinese
Revolution established a Communist state in China. Criticizing
the invasion and trade embargo of the young Soviet state, Bevan
wrote "At the moment it looks as though the United States is going
to repeat the same folly in China... You cannot starve a national
revolution into submission. You can starve it into a repressive
dictatorship; you can starve it to the point where the hellish
logic of the police state takes charge."
In 1951, the Socialist
International was refounded by the European social democratic
parties. It declared: "Communism has split the International Labour
Movement and has set back the realisation of Socialism in many
countries for decades... Communism falsely claims a share in the
Socialist tradition. In fact it has distorted that tradition beyond
recognition. It has built up a rigid theology which is incompatible
with the critical spirit of Marxism."
In the postwar years, socialism became
increasingly influential throughout the so-called Third World.
Countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America frequently adopted
socialist economic programs. In many instances, these nations
nationalized industries held by foreign owners. The Soviet Union
had become a superpower through its adoption of a planned economy,
albeit at enormous human cost. This achievement seemed hugely
impressive from the outside, and convinced many nationalists in the
former colonies, not necessarily communists or even socialists, of
the virtues of state planning and state-guided models of social
development. This was later to have important consequences in
countries like China, India and Egypt, which tried to
import some aspects of the Soviet model.
The last quarter of the twentieth century marked
a period of major crisis for Communists in the Soviet Union and the
Eastern
bloc, where the growing shortages of housing and consumer
goods, combined with the lack of individual rights to assembly and
speech, began to disillusion more and more Communist party members.
With the rapid collapse of Communist party rule in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991, the Soviet version of
socialism has effectively disappeared as a worldwide political
force.
Social democracy in power
In 1945, the British Labour
Party led by Clement
Attlee was swept to power on a radical programme. Socialist
(and in some places Communist) parties also dominated postwar
governments in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia,
Belgium,
Norway and
other European countries. The
Social Democratic Party had been in power in Sweden since 1932,
and Labour parties also held power in Australia and
New
Zealand. In Germany, on the
other hand, the Social Democrats were defeated in Germany's first
democratic elections in 1949. The unity of the democrats and the
Communist parties which had been established in the wartime
resistance movements continued in the immediate postwar years. The
democratic socialist parties of Eastern Europe, however, were
destroyed when Stalin imposed "Communist" regimes in these
countries.
Social democracy at first took the view that they
had begun a "serious assault" on the five "Giant Evils" afflicting
the working class, identified for instance by the British social
reformer William
Beveridge: "Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness."
However on the left wing of the Labour Party, Aneurin
Bevan, who had been responsible for introducing the Labour
Party’s National Health Service in 1945, criticised the government
for not going further. Bevan demanded that the "main streams of
economic activity are brought under public direction" with economic
planning, and criticised the Labour Party's implementation of
nationalisation for not empowering the workers in the nationalised
industries with democratic control over their operation. In his In
Place of Fear, which Crosland called the "the most widely read
socialist book" of the period, Bevan begins: "A young miner in a
South Wales colliery, my concern was with one practical question:
Where does the power lie in this particular state of Great Britain,
and how can it be attained by the workers?"
The Frankfurt Declaration of the refounded
Socialist International stated:
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
Fabian socialism, Fabianism, Marxian socialism,
Marxism, Nazism, Saint-Simonism, centralism, collective farm,
collective ownership, collectivism, collectivity, collegiality, common
ownership, communal effort, communion, communism, community, constitutionalism,
cooperation,
cooperative society, democracy, democratism, fascism, federalism, feudalism, feudality, governmentalism, guild
socialism, imperialism, kibbutz, kolkhoz, monarchism, national
socialism, nationalization,
neofascism, parliamentarianism,
parliamentarism,
phalansterism,
pluralism, political
principles, profit sharing, public ownership, republicanism, royalism, sharecropping, state
ownership, state socialism, statism, town meeting, utopian
socialism