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Socialism

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Criticisms of socialism History of socialism Socialist economics Mixed Economy Socialist state Types of socialism

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Anarchism Autogestion Class struggle Democracy Dictatorship of the proletariat Egalitarianism Equality of outcome Impossibilism Internationalism New Left Left wing politics Marxism Proletarian revolution Socialism in one country Trade union Utilitarianism Nationalization

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Socialism is the politico-economic theory of social organization advocating that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be regulated or owned by the community. ^[1] Modern socialism originated in the late nineteenth-century working class political movement. Karl Marx posited that socialism would be achieved via class struggle and a proletarian revolution, it being the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.^[2][3]

Socialism is not a discrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and programme; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic interventionism, sometimes opposing each other — especially the reformists and the revolutionaries. Some require complete nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; social democrats propose selective nationalization of key national industries in mixed economies; libertarian socialists advocate co-operative worker ownership of the means of production; Most Marxists (some inspired by the Soviet economic model), advocate State-controlled, centrally-planned economies; By contrast left wing Anarchists, Luxemburgists, the U.S. New Left favour decentralised ownership via co-operative workers' councils.

In the 1970s and the 1980s, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, and Chinese Communists proposed market socialism combining co-operative State ownership and the free market exchange. ^[4]

Historical precedents

Socialist thought and organisation predate Socialism as ideology, which emerged in the first-half of the nineteenth century. In fifth-century Persia, the Mazdak proto-socialists challenged Noble and Clerical privilege, criticized private property to achieve an egalitarian society.^[5] The Inca Empire, of the thirteenth century, is an early socialist empire — planned, large-scale economy; grain-house system; mandatory work schedules, et cetera. (Baudin, 1928)

In sixteenth-century literature, Utopia (1519), by Thomas More, posits a socialist utopia. ^[6] In the nineteenth century, as socialist thought coalesced to formal ideology and programme, William Morris denoted the priest John Ball (1331–1381) as the first socialist in England, for having been a leader of the Peasants' Revolt (1381); moreover, Ball is credited the saying: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was, then, the gentleman? ^{[7] [8]} In the mid-seventeenth century English Civil War, the contemporary political socialists include the Levellers, and the Diggers, advocating common tenancy of land. In eighteenth-century France, Enlightenment criticism of enforced socio-economic inequality is Jean Jacques Rousseau's gist in the Social Contract, that begins: Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains. ^[9] After the the French Revolution, François Noël Babeuf advocated common land-ownership and politico-economic equality of Citizens.

Origins of socialism

Etymologically, the English coinage socialism (1839) derives from the French socialisme (1832), the mainstream introduction of which usage is attributed, in France, to Pierre Leroux ^[10] and to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud; and in Britain to Robert Owen in 1827, father of the cooperative movement.^[11][12]

Western European social critics were the first, modern socialists — Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Saint-Simon, who criticised the excessive poverty and inequality consequence of the Industrial Revolution, and advocated reform via the egalitarian distribution of wealth and the transformation of society to small communities without private property. Saint-Simon delineated collectivist principles reorganising society to so build socialism upon planned, utopian communities.

Linguistically, the contemporary connotation of the words socialism and communism accorded with the adherents' and opponents' cultural attitude towards Religion. In Christian Europe, of the two, communism was believed the atheist way of life. In Protestant England, communism was too-culturally and -aurally close to the Papist Roman Catholic communion rite, hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists.^[13]

The French Father of Socialism: Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon.

In 1847, Frederick Engels said Socialism was respectable on the Continent, while Communism was not; the Owenites, in England, and the Fourierists, in France, were considered Socialists, while working-class movements that "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" denoted themselves Communists. This, latter branch of Socialism, was "powerful enough" to produce the communisms of Étienne Cabet, in France, and Wilhelm Weitling, in Germany.^[14]

International Workingmen's Association — First International

In 1864, the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) — the First International — was founded in London. Londoner Victor le Lubez, a French radical republican, invited Karl Marx to participate as a representative of German workers. ^[15] In 1865, the IWA had its preliminary conference, and its first congress, at Geneva, in 1866. Karl Marx was member of the committee; he and Johann Georg Eccarius, a London tailor, were the two mainstays of the International, from its inception to its end; the First International was the premiere international forum promulgating socialism.

In 1869, under the influence of Marx and Engels, the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany was founded. In 1875, the SDW Party merged with the General German Workers' Association, of Ferdinand Lassalle, metamorphosing to the contemporary German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Since the 1870s, in Germany, Socialism was associated with trade unions, as the SPD constituted trade unions, while, in Austria, France, and other countries, socialist parties and anarchists did like-wise. That ideologic development greatly contrasts with the British experience of Socialism, wherein politically-moderate New Model Unions dominated unionised labour from the mid–nineteenth century, and trade-unionism was stronger than the political labour movement, until appearance of the Labour Party in the early twentieth century. The first U.S. socialist party was founded in 1876, then metamorphosed to a Marxist party in 1890; the Socialist Labor Party exists today. An early leader of the Socialist Labor Party, Daniel De Leon still lives; his influence extended beyond the U.S.^{citation needed}

Socialists supported and advocated many branches of Socialism — from the Gradualism of trade unions to the radical Revolution of Marx and Engels to the Anarchists emphasising small-scale communities and agrarianism; all co-existing with the most influential Marxism and Social Democracy. The Anarchists, led by the Mikhail Bakunin, believed Capitalism and State inseparable, neither can be abolished without abolishing the other.

The Second International

As the ideas of Marx and Engels became encarnate, especially in Central Europe, Socialists united into an international organisation, and founded the Second International in 1889, the centennial of the French Revolution; from 20 countries, 300 socialist and labour union organisations sent 384 delegates. ^[16] The Second International was denominated the Socialist International with Friedrich Engels its honourary thord-congress president in 1893.

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In 1895, Engels said there now is a single, generally recognized, crystal clear theory of Marx and a single, great international army of socialists.

Despite being outlawed in Germany by the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, the Social Democratic Party of Germany masterfully used the limited, universal, male suffrage available to exercise the electoral strength necessary to compel rescindment of the Anti-Socialist laws in 1890. ^[17] In 1893, the SPD received 1,787,000 votes, a quarter of the votes cast. Before the SPD published Engels's 1895 introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France 1848–1850, they deleted phrases felt too-revolutionary for mainstream readers. ^[18]

Karl Marx believed possible a peaceful, socialist transformation of England, despite the British Aristocracy and Ruling Class revolting against such a popular victory. ^[19] Whereas the United States and Holland might also effect peaceful transformations, not France; Marx thought it had perfected . . . an enormous, bureaucratic and military organisation, with its ingenious State machinery that required forcible deposition; nevertheless, with Karl Marx only eight years dead, Engels said it was possible to achieve a peaceful, socialist revolution in France. ^[20]

World War I

When World War I began in 1914, most European socialists supported the bellicose aim's of their national governments. The British, French, Belgian, and German social democratic parties discarded their political commitments to proletarian internationalism and worker solidarity to co-operate with their imperial governments.

In Russia, N. Lenin, denounced the Europeans' Great War war as an imperialist conflict, and urged workers, world-wide, to use the war as occasion for proletarian revolution. The Second International dissolved during the war; Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg, and other anti-war Marxists conferred in the Zimmerwald Conference in September of 1915.

The Revolutions of 1917–23

By the year 1917, the third year of a ninety-day war, the patriotism propelling the First World War metamorphosed to political radicalism in most of Europe, the United States (cf. Socialism in the United States), and Australia. In February, popular revolution exploded in Russia when workers, soldiers, and peasants established soviets (councils) wielding executive power in a Provisional Government valid ’til convocation of a Constituent Assembly. In April, Lenin arrived in Russia from Germany, calling for All power to the soviets. In October, his party, the Bolsheviks, won support of most soviets, and, simultaneously, he and Trotsky led the October Revolution. On 25 October 1917, at the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin declared, Long live the world socialist revolution! ^[21]

On 26 October, the day after assuming executive power, Lenin wrote Draft Regulations on Workers' Control, granting workers control of businesses with more than five workers and office employees, and access to all books, documents, and stocks, and whose decisions were to be binding upon the owners of the enterprises. ^[22] Immediately, the Bolshevik Government nationalised banks, most industry, and disavowed the national debts of the deposed Romanov royal régime; it governed via elected soviets; and it sued for peace and withdrew from the the First World War.

Despite that, the peasant Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) Party won the Constituent Assembly against the Bolshevik Party, who then acted resolutely the next day.^[23] The Constituent Assembly convened for thirteen hours (16.00 hrs 5 Jan – 4.40 hrs 6 Jan 1918). Socialist-Revolutionary Leader Victor Chernov was elected President of a Russian republic; next day, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly. ^[24] The Bolshevik Russian Revolution of October 1917 engendred Communist parties world-wide, and their concomitant revolutions of 1917-23. Few Communists, then, doubted that the Russian success of Socialism depended upon successful, working-class socialist revolutions effected in developed capitalist-economy countries; ^[25][26] thus, in 1919, Lenin and Trotsky organised the world's Communist parties into a new international association of workers — the Communist International, the Comintern, also denominated the Third International.

In November of 1918, the German Revolution deposed the monarchy; as in Russia, the councils of workers and soldiers were comprised mostly of SPD and USPD (Independent Social Democrats) revolutionaries installed to office as the Weimar republic; the SPD were in power, led by Friedrich Ebert. In January of 1919. the left-wing Spartacist Putsch challenged the SPD government, and President Ebert ordered the Army and Freikorps mercenaries to violently suppress the Workers' and Soldiers' councils. In the event, Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were captured and summarilly executed. Also that year, in Bavaria, the Communist régime of Kurt Eisner in Bavaria was so suppressed. In Hungary, Béla Kun briefly headed a Hungarian Communist government. Throughout, popular socialist revolutions in Vienna, Italy's northern industrial cities, the German Ruhr (1920) and Saxony (1923); all failed in spreading revolutionary socialism to Europe's advanced, capitalist countries.

In Russia, Socialist circumstances were desperate; in August of 1918, assassin Fanya Kaplan shot and wounded Lenin in the head, rendering him moribund. Earlier, in June, the Soviet Government had implemented War Communism to manage the foreign economic boycott of Russia, and invasions by Imperial Germany, Imperial Britain, the U.S., and France, interfering in the Russian Civil War beside royalist White Russians; to control starvation, private business was outlawed, strikers could be shot, the white collar classes were forced to work manually, and, from the peasantry, they required grain for workers in cities.

By 1920, as Red Army commander, Trotsky had mostly defeated the royalist White Armies. In 1921, War Communism was ended, and, under the New Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership was allowed for small and medium peasant enterprises; industry remained State-controlled, Lenin acknowledged that the NEP was a necessary capitalist measure for a country mostly unripe for Socialism, thus, the existence of NEP businessmen and NEP women (NEP Men) flourished, ^[27] and the Kulaks gained capitalist power as rich peasants.

In 1923, on seeing the Soviet State's greatly coercive power, the moribund Lenin said Russia had reverted to a bourgeois tsarist machine . . . barely varnished with socialism. ^[28] After his death (January 1924), the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — then controlled by Joseph Stalin — rejected the theory that socialism could not be built solely in the U.S.S.R., and declared the Socialism in One Country policy. Despite the marginal Left Opposition's demanding restoration of Soviet Democracy, ^[29] Stalin developed a bureaucratic, authoritarian government, that was condemned by Democratic Socialists, Anarchists, Trotskyists, et alles, for undermining the initial Socialist ideals of the Bolshevik Russian Revolution.^[30]

Bellic interregnum and World War II

In 1917, the Russian Revolution established the definitive ideologic demarcation among Communists (with capital "C") and other communist and socialist branches of Socialism, such as anarcho-communists and social democrats, et cetera. In the U.S.S.R., the Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union engendred Trotskyism, a socialism branch rarely sprouting in some fifty years, except in the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, where Trotskyites gained the majority and expelled the pro-Moscow communists from the Communist Party.

In 1922, the fourth congress of the Communist International implemented a United Front policy, asking Communists to work with Social Democrats, yet remaining critical of their leaders, criticized for betraying the working class, in supporting the wars of their capitalist classes. For their part, the Social Democrats underscored the socio-political dislocation caused by revolution, and, later, the authoritarianism of most Communist parties. In 1920, the Labour Party rejected the Communist Party of Great Britain's application for affiliation.

Socialism after World War II

In 1945, in the Yalta Conference, Imperial British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, capitalist U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Communist Premier Joseph Stalin established and agreed to a newly-delineated political world-map and a military peace. In the event, Britain's post–WWII decline and retirement as a world power left the world politically bi-polar, between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. — two, ideologically-irreconcilable socio-economic and political systems, each deeming the antagonist as Other.

Linguistically, the Soviet Union politically classed itself as socialist; the U.S., China, Eastern Europe, and countries with established Communist parties, followed suit. Moreover, anti-Soviet economics critics, i.e. Friedrich Hayek, are popularly denoted and cited as critics of socialism. In Europe, the perception of the communist U.S.S.R. as a socialist country was limited, especially in Britain, where the Communist Party was politically very weak. In 1951, Health Minister Aneurin Bevan said, 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. ^[31]

In 1949, the Chinese Revolution established a Communist State in China. Criticizing the invasion of and trade embargo against 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 ^[32]

In 1951, the Social Democrat parties of Europe re-founded the Socialist International, declaring: 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. ^[33]

In the post-war years, Socialism became influential in the Third World; African, Asian, and Latin American countries adopted socialist economic programmes; often nationalising foreign-owned national industries. The U.S.S.R. achieved superpower status via State-planned economies, albeit costing many lives. This achievement greatly impressed poor, de-colonised countries with the virtues of state-planned economies and state-guided societal development; the Chinese, the Indian, and the Egyptian experiments with soviet socialism yielded important results.

The twentieth century's last quarter was a crisis for Russian and Eastern Bloc Communists. Chronic housing and consumer goods shortages aggravated the populace's lack of political rights to the degree of disillusioning the Communists, themselves. In the 1989–1991 period, the Russian branch of Socialism, known as Soviet Communism ended as a socio-politico force when the Berlin Wall was opened, then felled, and ending when the U.S.S.R metamorphosed to the Russian Federation.

Social Democracy in power

Clement Attlee, U.K. Prime Minister, Labour Party government, 1945–51

In 1945, the British Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, was elected to office based upon a radical, socialist programme. Socialist and Communist parties dominated the post-war French, Italian, Czehchoslovak, Belgian, Norwegian, and other, governments. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party had held power since 1932; Labour parties governed Australia and New Zealand. In Germany, the Social Democrats lost in 1949. In Eastern Europe, the war-resistance unity, between Social Democrats and Communists, continued in the immediate postwar years, until Stalin imposed "Communist" régimes.

At first, Social Democracy held the view of having begun a serious assault against Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness, the five Giant Evils afflicting the working class, identified by the the British social reformer William Beveridge; ^[34] however, from the Labour Party's left wing, Aneurin Bevan, who had introduced the Labour Party’s National Health Service in 1948, criticised the Attlee Government for not progressing further, demanding that the main streams of economic activity are brought under public direction with economic planning, criticising the implementation of nationalisation for not empowering the workers, in the nationalised industries, with democratic control of operations.

In Place of Fear, the most widely read socialist book of the period, ^[35] 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? ^[36]

The Frankfurt Declaration of the re-founded Socialist International stated:

The post-war social democrat governments introduced social reform and wealth redistribution via state welfare and taxation. The new U.K. Labour Government effected the nationalisations of major public utilities such as mines, gas, coal, electricity, rail, iron, steel, and the Bank of England. ^[37] To wit, France claimed to be the world's most State-controlled, capitalist country. ^[38]

In the U.K., the National Health Service provided free health care to all of the British population. Working-class housing was provided in council housing estates, and university education available via a school grant system. Ellen Wilkinson, Minister for Education, introduced free milk in schools, sayining, in a 1946 Labour Party conference: Free milk will be provided in Hoxton and Shoreditch, in Eton and Harrow. What more social equality can you have than that? To wit, Clement Attlee's biographer says this contributed enormously to the defeat of childhood illnesses resulting from bad diet. Generations of poor children grew up stronger and healthier, because of this one, small, and inexpensive act of generosity, by the Attlee government. ^[39]

In 1956, Anthony Crosland said that 25 per cent of British industry was nationalised, and that public employees, including those in nationalised industries, constituted a like percentage of the country's total employed population. ^[40] Yet the Social Democrats did not seek ending capitalism; national outlook and dedication to the “post-war order” prevented nationalisation of the industrial commanding heights, as Lenin put it. In 1945, they were denominated socialist, but, in the U.K., Social Democrats were the parliamentary majority, The government had not the smallest intention of bringing in the ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange’ as written in Clause 4 of the Labour Party Constitution; ^[41] nevertheless, Crosland said Capitalism had ended: To the question, ‘Is this still capitalism?’, I would answer ‘No’. ^[42] In 1959, the German Social Democratic Party adopted the Godesberg Program, rejecting class struggle and Marxism.

In 1980, with the reactionary rise of Ronald Reagan, in the U.S., Margaret Thatcher, in Britain, and Brian Mulroney, in Canada, the Western, socialist welfare state was attacked from within. As Education Secretary of the Conservative Government, 1970–1974, Margaret Thatcher abolished free milk for school children; thus, monetarists and neoliberals attacked social welfare systems as impediments to private entrepreneurship at public expense.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Western European Socialists were pressured to reconcile their collectivist economic programmes with a free-market-based communal European economy. In the U.K., the Labour Party struggled much; its epitome is Neil Kinnock’s passionate and public attack against the Party's Militant Tendency at a Labour Party conference, and his repudiation of the demands of the defeated striking miners after a year-long strike against pit closures. In the 1990s, released from the Left's progressive pressure, the Labour Party, under Tony Blair, posited policies based upon the free market economy to deliver public services via private contractors.

In 1989, at Stockholm, the 18th Congress of the Socialist International adopted a Declaration of Principles, saying that Democratic socialism is an international movement for freedom, social justice, and solidarity. Its goal is to achieve a peaceful world where these basic values can be enhanced and where each individual can live a meaningful life with the full development of his or her personality and talents, and with the guarantee of human and civil rights in a democratic framework of society. ^[43]

The objectives of the Party of European Socialists, the European Parliament's Socialist Bloc, are to pursue international aims in respect of the principles on which the European Union is based, namely principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, democracy, respect of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and respect for the Rule of Law. Today, the rallying cry of the French Revolution — Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity — now constitute essential socialist values. ^[44]

In 1995, the British Labour Party revised its political aims: The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that, by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create, for each of us, the means to realise our true potential, and, for all of us, a community in which power, wealth, and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few; ^[45] famously, Cabinet minister Herbert Morrison said, Socialism is what the Labour Government does. ^[41]

Socialism in the 21st century

In some Latin American countries, socialism has re-emerged in recent years, with an anti-imperialist stance, the rejection of the policies of neo-liberalism and the nationalisation or part nationalisation of oil production, land and other assets. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, for instance, refer to their political programs as socialist. Chávez has coined the term "21st century socialism" (sometimes translated more literally as "Socialism of the 21st century"). After winning re-election in December 2006, President Chávez said, "Now more than ever, I am obliged to move Venezuela's path towards socialism."^[46]

In the developing world, some elected socialist parties and communist parties remain prominent, particularly in India and Nepal. The Communist Party of Nepal in particular calls for multi-party democracy, social equality, and economic prosperity.^[47] In China, the Chinese Communist Party has led a transition from the command economy of the Mao period to an economic program they term the socialist market economy or "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Under Deng Xiaoping, the leadership of China embarked upon a program of market-based reform that was more sweeping than had been Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika program of the late 1980s. Deng's program, however, maintained state ownership rights over land, state or cooperative ownership of much of the heavy industrial and manufacturing sectors and state influence in the banking and financial sectors. In South Africa the ANC abandoned its partial socialist allegiances on taking power and followed a standard neo-liberal route. But from 2005 through to 2007 the country was wracked by many thousands of protests from poor communities. One of these gave rise to a mass movement of shack dwellers, Abahlali baseMjondolo that, despite major police suppression, continues to advocate for popular people's planning and against the marketization of land and housing. Communist candidate Dimitris Christofias won a crucial presidential runoff in Cyprus, defeating his conservative rival with a majority of 53%.^[48] The Left Party in Germany has also grown in popularity.^[49]

Socialism as an economic system

See also: Socialist economics

Economically, socialism denotes an economic system of state ownership and / or worker ownership of the means of production and distribution. In the U.S.S.R., state ownership of the means of production was combined with central planning — what goods and services to make and provide, how they were to be produced, the quantities, and the sale prices (cf. Economy of the Soviet Union). Soviet economic planning was an alternative to allowing the market (supply and demand) to determine prices and production. During the Great Depression, socialists considered Soviet-style planned economies the remedy to Capitalism's inherent flaws — monopoly, business cycles, unemployment, unequally distributed wealth, and the economic exploitation of workers.

In the West, neoclassical liberal economists, e.g. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, said that socialist planned economies would fail, because planners could not have the business information inherent to a market economy (cf. economic calculation problem), nor would managers in Soviet-style socialist economies match the motivation of profit.

Consequent to Soviet economic stagnation in the 1970s and 1980s, socialists began to accept parts of their critique. Polish economist Oskar Lange, an early proponent of "market socialism", proposed a Central Planning Board establishing prices and controls of of investment. The prices of producer goods would be determined through trial and error. The prices of consumer goods would be determined by supply and demand, with the supply coming from state-owned firms that would set their prices equal to the marginal cost, as in perfectly competitive markets. The Central Planning Board would distribute a "social dividend" to ensure reasonable income equality.^[50]

In Western Europe, particularly in the period after World War II, many socialist parties in government implemented what became known as mixed economies.^[51] These governments nationalised major and economically vital industries while permitting a free market to continue in the rest. These were most often monopolistic or infrastructural industries like mail, railways, power and other utilities. In some instances a number of small, competing and often relatively poorly financed companies in the same sector were nationalised to form one government monopoly for the purpose of competent management, of economic rescue (in the UK, British Leyland, Rolls Royce), or of competing on the world market.^[52] Typically, this was achieved through compulsory purchase of the industry (i.e. with compensation). For example in the UK the nationalization of the coal mines in 1947 created a coal board charged with running the coal industry commercially so as to be able to meet the interest payable on the bonds which the former mine owners' shares had been converted into.^[53][54]

These nationalized industries would frequently be combined with Keynesian economics and incomes policies in order to guide the entire economy (see indicative planning and dirigisme).^[55] Nevertheless, most economists, and many socialists, consider that these economies were (or are) capitalist economies, and the aspirations of those who believed the mixed economy would abolish boom and slump, mass unemployment, and industrial unrest, were disappointed with the onset of the first world wide recession of 1973–4, the oil crisis of this period, and the monetary instability which followed. Some far left socialists, as well as some workers in the nationalised industries, also criticised the nationalisations for not establishing workers' control of the nationalised industries, through elected representatives, and the amount of compensation paid to the previous owners.

Some socialists propose various decentralized, worker-managed economic systems. One such system is the "cooperative economy," a largely free market economy in which workers manage the firms and democratically determine remuneration levels and labor divisions. Productive resources would be legally owned by the cooperative and rented to the workers, who would enjoy usufruct rights.^[56] Another, more recent, variant is "participatory economics," wherein the economy is planned by decentralized councils of workers and consumers. Workers would be remunerated solely according to effort and sacrifice, so that those engaged in dangerous, uncomfortable, and strenuous work would receive the highest incomes and could thereby work less.^[57] Some Marxists and Anarcho-communists also propose a worker managed economy based on workers councils, however unlike participatory economics in Anarcho communism workers are remunerated according to their needs (which are largely self determined in an anarcho communist system). Recently socialists have also been working with the Technocracy movement to promote such concepts as Energy Accounting.^{citation needed}

Socialism and social and political theory

Doctrinally, Marxist and non-Marxist social theorists agree that Socialism developed in reaction to modern industrial capitalism, but disagree on the nature of their relationship. Émile Durkheim posits that socialism is rooted in the desire to bring the State closer to the realm of individual activity, in countering the anomie of a Capitalist society. In socialism, Max Weber saw acceleration of the rationalization started in Capitalism. As critic of Socialism, he warned that placing the economy entirely in the State's bureaucratic control would result in an iron cage of future bondage.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Socialist intellectuals retained much influence in European philosophy; Eros and Civilization (1955), by Herbert Marcuse, explicitly attempts merging Marxism with Freudianism; and the social science of Structuralism much influenced the socialist New Left in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Criticisms of socialism

Main article: Criticisms of socialism

Criticism of socialist economies and politics ranges from their inefficiency and incompatibility with civil liberties to condemnation of specific socialist states, much centred upon economic performance and respect for human rights in Communist states, despite socialists rejecting denomination of Communist states as socialist states.

In the economic calculation debate, classical liberal Friedrich Hayek said that a socialist command economy could inadequately transmit price and production data, for not having a price mechanism, resultantly, such an economy could not decide rationally. Furthermore, that Socialist State control of wealth distribution and of private property cannot be achieved without reducing general prosperity and loss of political and economic freedoms. ^[58][59] Moreover, Ludwig von Mises declared a socialist economy impossible, and Winston Churchill said that Socialism evolves to Totalitarianism, when people defect from supporting it; in the electoral campaign of 1945, he said:

. . . a socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Socialism is inseparably interwoven with totalitarianism and the object worship of the state. It will prescribe for every one where they are to work, what they are to work at, where they may go and what they may say. Socialism is an attack on the right to breathe freely. No socialist system can be established without a political police. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.^[60]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Socialism

• Alter-globalization
• To each according to his contribution
• Anti-capitalism
• Fabian Society
• History of socialism
• History of socialism in Great Britain
• Industrial revolution
• Information revolution
• Labour movement
• List of socialist songs
• List of socialist states
• Participatory economics
• Socialism in the United States
• Syndicalism

Notes

References and further reading

• Guy Ankerl, Beyond Monopoly Capitalism and Monopoly Socialism, Cambridge MA: Schenkman, 1978.
• Beckett, Francis, Clem Attlee, Politico's (2007) 978-1842751923
• G.D.H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, in 7 volumes, Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1965; Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 reprint; 7 volumes, hardcover, 3160 pages, ISBN 1-4039-0264-X.
• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Pathfinder; 2r.e. edition (December 1989) 978-0873485791
• Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Zurich, 1884. LCC HQ504 .E6
• Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders, eds., Socialist Thought: A Documentary History, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1964. LCCN 64-11312.
• Phil Gasper, The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document, Haymarket Books, paperback, 224 pages, 2005. ISBN 1-931859-25-6.
• Élie Halévy, Histoire du Socialisme Européen. Paris, Gallimard, 1948.
• Michael Harrington, Socialism, New York: Bantam, 1972. LCCN 76-154260.
• Jesús Huerta de Soto, Socialismo, cálculo económico y función empresarial (Socialism, Economic Calculation, and Entrepreneurship), Unión Editorial, 1992. ISBN 84-7209-420-0.
• Makoto Itoh, Political Economy of Socialism. London: Macmillan, 1995. ISBN 0333553373.
• Kitching, Gavin (1983). Rethinking Socialism. Meuthen. ISBN 0416358403. 
• Oskar Lange, On the Economic Theory of Socialism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1938. LCCN 38-12882.
• Michael Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century, Monthly Review Press, 2006. ISBN 1-58367-145-5.
• Marx, Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Classics (2002) 978-0140447576
• Marx, Engels, Selected works in one volume, Lawrence and Wishart (1968) 978-0853151814
• Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis [4], Liberty Fund, 1922. ISBN 0-913966-63-0.
• Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002. ISBN 1-893554-45-7.
• Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-280431-6.
• Bertell Ollman, ed., Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists, Routledge, 1998. ISBN 0-415-91967-3.
• Leo Panitch, Renewing Socialism: Democracy, Strategy, and Imagination. ISBN 0-8133-9821-5.
• Emile Perreau-Saussine, What remains of socialism ?, in Patrick Riordan (dir.), Values in Public life: aspects of common goods (Berlin, LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. 11–34
• Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, Vintage, 2000. ISBN 0-375-70447-7.
• John Barkley Rosser and Marina V. Rosser, Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ISBN 9780262182348.
• Maximilien Rubel and John Crump, Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. ISBN 0-312-00524-5.
• David Selbourne, Against Socialist Illusion, London, 1985. ISBN 0-333-37095-3.
• James Weinstein, Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left, Westview Press, 2003, hardcover, 272 pages. ISBN 0-8133-4104-3.
• Peter Wilberg, Deep Socialism: A New Manifesto of Marxist Ethics and Economics, 2003. ISBN 1-904519-02-4.
• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940. LCCN 4-34338.

External links

Resources on socialism

• In Defense of Marxism
• The Marxists Internet Archive (online library of Marxist writers)
• Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science By Alan Woods and Ted Grant
• Science, Marxism & the Big Bang: A Critical Review of Reason in Revolt by Peter Mason
• Marxist.net - a resource on socialist writers
• History of socialism at Spartacus Educational
• Modern History Sourcebook on socialism
• Socialist history at What Next?
• PBS' "Heaven on Earth: the Rise and Fall of Socialism"
• Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell
• "New Ideas of Socialism" by Luke Martell
• Katherine Verdery: Anthropology of Socialist Societies
• 21st Century Socialism web magazine

Introductory articles

• "Why Socialism?" by Albert Einstein
• "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" by Friedrich Engels
• "The Soul of Man under Socialism" by Oscar Wilde
• "What remains of Socialism" by Emile Perreau-Saussine
• "Socialism and Liberty" by George Bernard Shaw
• "The Two Souls of Socialsm" by Hal Draper
• "Approaching Socialism" by Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff
• Socialism website
• The Counterhegemonic Blogspot Socialism in Action

Critical appraisals

• "Socialism", by Robert Heilbroner
• "Socialism" Economic Policy 2nd Lecture, by Ludwig von Mises
• "The Intellectuals and Socialism", by Friedrich A. Hayek
• "A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism", by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
• Lecture XXXV "A Philosophy of Life" includes a critique of marxist socialism by Sigmund Freud
• "State socialism and anarchism" by Benjamin Tucker
• "Towards a New Socialism?" Review Essay by Len Brewster
• Socialism/Antisocialism A survey and a critical appraisal