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Nathan Bailey

3 Socialism
3
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2 INTRODUCTION
→ The term ‘socialist’ derives from the Latin sociare meaning to combine or share
→ Its earliest recorded use comes from an issue of the Co-operative Magazine in 1827
→ By the early 1830s, followers of Robert Owen in the UK and Saint-Simon in France were referring to
their beliefs as socialism

Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

→ Socialism has traditionally been defined by its opposition to capitalism and its attempt to provide a
more humane alternative – some argue this should be done by reforming capitalism; others think it
should be replaced entirely
→ At the core of socialism is a view of humans as social creatures united by their common humanity
→ Individual identity is fashioned by social interaction and membership of social groups; individualism
is really ultimately dependent upon community
→ Cooperation is considered to be better than competition and so equality – especially social equality –
are viewed as central values
→ Social equality is the essential guarantee of social equality; it generates cohesion and promotes
freedom (in the positive sense of the term, as Isaiah Berlin refers to it1)
→ Within socialism there are a number of divisions and rival traditions:
▪ Marxists have usually supported revolutionary means to achieve the end of abolishing
capitalism and creating a classless society with common ownership of wealth
▪ Social democrats and democratic socialists have embraced gradualist means with the end of
reforming or ‘humanizing’ the capitalist system through narrowing inequality and abolishing
poverty

3
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3
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3
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, 1969
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In: I
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Four Essays on Liberty
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122-123
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e
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3
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4 CORE THEMES – NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
→ One of the issues with analysing socialism is that the term is understood in at least three distinctive
and different ways:
▪ Socialism as an economic model
▪ Socialism as an instrument of the labour movement
▪ A political creed or ideology
→ Socialism as an economic model often links with some idea of collectivisation or central planning,
providing an alternative to capitalism – thus we arrive at a choice between two distinct models,
capitalism and socialism; yet this is an illusion, as neither ‘pure’ capitalism nor ‘pure’ socialism are
commonly advocated
→ Socialism as an instrument of the labour movement portrays socialism as a form of ‘labourism’, a
vehicle for advancing the cause of organised labour – as a result, the significance of socialism
fluctuates based on the fate of the labour movement; however, socialism has been associated with
skilled craftsmen, the peasantry, and even political and bureaucratic elites, so this ‘labourism’
interpretation is inadequate

Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

→ For this reason socialism should be treated as a political creed or ideology; a cluster of ideas, values
and theories, the most significant of which are the following:
▪ Community
▪ Cooperation
▪ Equality
▪ Class politics
▪ Common ownership

3
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1 Community
→ Socialism offers a unifying vision of human beings as social beings, more capable of overcoming
social and economic problems by drawing on the power of the community rather than that of the
individual
→ This is a collectivist vision, stressing the capacity of human beings for collective actions
→ This is perhaps best exemplified in the work of English metaphysical poet John Donne (1571-1631)2:
“No man is an Island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the
main…” – John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
→ Human beings are therefore ‘comrades’, ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’, tied to one another by their common
humanity, expressed in the principle of fraternity
→ Socialists are far less willing than liberals or conservatives to concede that human nature is fixed or
unchanging; instead, they believe that human nature is ‘plastic’ and is moulded by the experiences
of social life
→ In the long standing debate regarding whether human behaviour is determined by ‘nature’ or
‘nurture’, socialists side strongly with ‘nurture’
→ Whereas liberals draw a clear divide between the ‘individual’ and ‘society’, socialists see the two as
interconnected and inseparable
→ Human beings are neither self-sufficient nor self-contained; to think of them as separate or atomised
‘individuals’ is nonsensical
→ The radical edge of socialism derives not from its concern with what people are like, but rather with
what they have the capacity to become – socialists have developed utopian visions of a better
society in which human beings can achieve genuine emancipation and fulfilment as members of a
community
→ African and Asian socialists have often stressed that their traditional, preindustrial societies already
emphasise the importance of social life and the value of community
→ In these circumstances, socialism has sought to preserve traditional social values in the face of
western individualism – Julius Nyerere, president of Tanzania between 1964 and 1985, described his
own beliefs as ‘tribal socialism’, with the claim that3:
“We, in Africa, have no more real need to be “converted” to socialism, than we have of
being “taught” democracy
...
, 2015
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In: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
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Nyerere, J
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, 1962
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Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

however the communal emphasis of the kibbutz system has diminished since the 1960s, with, for
example, the abandonment of communal child-rearing

3
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2 Cooperation
→ If human beings are social animals, socialists believe that the natural relationship among them is one
of cooperation rather than competition
→ Socialists believe that competition pits one individual against another, encouraging each of them to
deny or ignore their social nature rather than embrace it
→ As a result, competition fosters only a limited range of social attributes and, instead, promotes
selfishness and aggression
→ Cooperation, on the other hand, makes moral and economic sense
→ The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin suggested that the principle reason why the human race had
survived and prospered was because of its capacity for ‘mutual aid’ (1902)4
→ Socialists believe that people can be motivated by moral incentives and not merely material
incentives, and socialists hold moral incentives to be far more important than they are considered by
conservatives or liberals
→ Moral incentives are clearly present for public sector workers, who are paid less than private sector
workers in return for the moral benefit they gain from their fulfilling work
→ However, moral incentives are also present in private sector that doesn’t directly involve helping
others because simply by improving economic growth an individual will be paying more tax and will
therefore be provided with the moral incentive of having helped individuals on welfare on in receipt
of state-provided public services
→ The socialist commitment to cooperation has stimulated the growth of cooperative enterprises,
designed to replace the competitive and hierarchic businesses that have proliferated under
capitalism
→ Both producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives have attempted to harness the energy of groups of
people working for mutual benefit
→ In the UK, these cooperatives sprang up in the early nineteenth century, buying goods in bulk and
selling them cheaply to their working-class members, e
...
the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’
→ Producer cooperatives are common in parts of northern Spain and the former Yugoslavia, where
industry is organised according to the principle of workers’ self-management; collective farms in the
Soviet Union were also designed to be cooperative and self-managing, although in practice they
were subject to rigid planning and were usually controlled by local party bosses

3
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3 Equality
→ A commitment to equality is in many ways the defining feature of socialist ideology
→ Socialist egalitarianism is characterised by a belief in social equality, or equality of outcome
→ Socialists have advanced three main arguments in favour of this form of social equality:
▪ Firstly, social equality upholds justice or fairness
▪ Secondly, social equality underpins community and cooperation
▪ Thirdly, social equality satisfies needs which is the basis for human fulfilment and selfrealisation
→ Although socialists agree about the virtue of social and economic equality, they disagree about the
extent to which this can and should be brought about:
▪ Marxists and communists believe in absolute social equality, brought about by the abolition
of private property and collectivisation of productive wealth
4

Kropotkin, P
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Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution
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New York: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
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4
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1 Social equality, justice and fairness
→ Socialists are reluctant to explain inequality in terms of innate and absolute differences of ability
between individuals, since individual nature is ‘plastic’ and so it makes little sense to talk about a
fixed level of individual ability
→ Socialists believe that just as capitalism has fostered selfish and competitive behaviour, human
inequality is just a reflection of the unequal structure of society rather than an innate difference
→ They do not hold the naïve belief that people are born identical, with precisely the same capabilities
and skills, yet they do hold that most inequality is a result of unequal social treatment
→ A socialist society is not one in which everybody would receive the same mark in their maths paper,
but a socialist society would understand that the if a rich student, who has had the advantage of
private schooling, tutoring and a wealth of resources at home, get the same mark as a poor student
without the associated advantages, it may be that the poorer student is actually better at maths,
given the injustices they have had to overcome
→ Formal equality (in the legal and political sense) is inadequate because it disregards the structural
inequalities of the capitalist system, whereby richer people are necessarily more powerful and
privileged than their poorer counterparts
→ Equality of opportunity is also problematic because it legitimises the idea that inequality comes as a
result of innate human inequality, rather than being a product of the capitalist system
3
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3
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4
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3 Social equality, human fulfilment and self-realisation
→ A ‘need’ is a necessity; it demands satisfaction and is not simply a frivolous wish or a passing fancy
→ Basic needs, such as the need for food, water, shelter, companionship and so on, are fundamental to
the human condition and so their satisfaction is the fundamental basis for freedom
→ Marx expressed this in his communist theory of distribution (1848)6:
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
...
H
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Equality
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London: Unwin Books
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& Engels, F
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The Communist Manifesto
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London: Penguin Classics
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4
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4
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1 Social class as an analytical tool
→ In pre-socialist societies at least, socialists have believed that human beings tends to think and act
together with those who share commonalities
→ These commonalities most prominently take the form of a common economic position or interest,
also referred to as ‘social class’
→ As a result, the best way to understand history is not to understand the behaviour of groups, but
rather the actions, motives, ideas and values of these social classes
→ These is most clearly demonstrated in the dialectical materialism of Marxism, where history is seen
as the product of a class struggle between two groups: the bourgeoise and the proletariat
3
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4
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4
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3 The importance and nature of social class
→ The Marxist tradition links class to economic power, as defined by the individual’s relation to the
means of production – the bourgeoise, who control and own the means of production, have more
economic power than the proletariat, who lack control over the means of production
→ Class divisions are therefore divisions between ‘capital’ and ‘labour’; this Marxist two-class model is
characterised by irreconcilable conflict between the bourgeoise and the proletariat, leading,
inevitably, to the overthrow of the capitalist system through a proletarian revolution
→ Social democrats have tended to define class in terms of income and status differences between
‘white collar’ or non-manual workers (the middle class) and ‘blue collar’ or manual workers (the
working class)

Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

→ In this sense, the advance of socialism is associated with the narrowing of divisions between the
middle class and the working class through economic and social intervention; social democrats have
believed in social amelioration and class harmony rather than social polarisation and class war
→ However, the link between socialism and class politics has decline since the mid-twentieth century,
largely as a result of declining class solidarity, the growth of the middle class and the decline of the
former working class
→ There has been a movement out of the working class and into the middle class, meaning that
tensions between the two groups have decreased as the distinction between the two polar
opposites become far more blurred
→ Not only has this forced traditional socialist parties to appeal to middle-class voters, it has also
forced them to move away from the narrative of class emancipation and instead develop their
socialism in relation to ‘new left’ issues such as feminism, environmentalism, peace and
international development

3
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5 Common ownership
→ Socialists have often traced the origins of competition and inequality to the institution of private
property, by which they usually mean productive property or wealth, referred to in economic terms
as ‘capital’ (as opposed to personal belongings such as clothes or furniture)
→ This attitude to property sets socialism apart from liberalism and conservatism
→ There are a number of criticisms of private productive property:
▪ It is unjust – wealth is produced by the collective effort of a community (i
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the wealth
created by making a t-shirt is the result of a collective effort by cotton farmers, delivery
drivers, sewing machine operators, sewing machine producers, etc
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5 ROADS TO SOCIALISM
→ Two major issues have divided competing traditions and tendencies within socialism
→ Firstly, there is disagreement over the goals, or ‘ends’; socialists have held very different views of
what a socialist society should look like, and the principal difference here is between fundamentalist
socialism and revisionist socialism, represented, respectively, by the communist and social
democratic traditions – this is discussed in more detail in section 3
...
7
‘Social democracy’
→ Secondly, there is disagreement over the ‘means’ or methods that should be used to achieve
socialist ends – there is disagreement over the ‘road to socialism’, although two broad schools of
thought emerge:
▪ Revolutionary socialism
▪ Evolutionary socialism
→ The concern with means follows from the fact that socialism is by nature an oppositional ideology,
defined by its contrariness to capitalist or colonial institutions
→ The ‘road’ that socialists follow is not merely a matter of strategic importance; it affects the entire
nature of the socialist movement and influences the form of socialism that is eventually achieved

3
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1 Revolutionary socialism
→ Many early socialists believed that socialism could only be introduced by the revolutionary
overthrow of the existing political system, and accepted that violence would be an inevitable feature
of such a revolution
→ One of the earliest advocates of revolution was the French socialist Auguste Blanqui (1805-81) who
proposed the formation of a small band of dedicated conspirators to carry out a revolutionary
seizure of power
→ Marx and Engels, meanwhile, envisaged a ‘proletarian revolution’, in which the class-conscious
working masses would rise up to overthrow capitalism – the first successful socialist revolution,
however, did not occur until 1917, in what was more a coup d’état rather than a popular
insurrection
→ During the nineteenth century, revolutionary tactics were attractive to socialists for two reason:
▪ Poverty among the proletariat – this was a time of severe poverty and widespread
unemployment, meaning both that the socialist cause was urgent and could not afford the
slow and cumbersome reform process, and also that revolutionary causes were more likely
to be successful with the angry and desperate working mass on their side
▪ Limited enfranchisement – many countries still operated under autocratic regimes, and
where democracy existed it was limited to the middle classes, so the working class had no
real means through which to voice their political opinions
→ Revolution has not merely been a tactical consideration for socialists, it also reflects their analysis of
the state and the nature of state power
→ Whereas liberals believe the state to be a neutral body, responding equally to the interests of al
citizens, socialists instead hold the state to be a puppet of the bourgeoise, acting in the interests of
‘capital’ and against ‘labour’
→ In the Marxist analysis, universal suffrage and regular elections are at best a façade, concealing the
reality that the working class would never be able to achieve their political aims through the
‘bourgeoise state’ that is rigged against them

Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

→ A class-conscious proletariat has no alternative: in order to build socialism, it has to first overthrow
the bourgeoise state through political revolution
→ In the second half of the twentieth century, faith in revolution was most obvious in the developing
world – in the post-1945 period, many national liberation movements turned to revolution on the
basis that colonialism could not be ‘voted out’:
▪ The Chinese Revolution of 1949, led by Mao Zedong, was the culmination of a long military
campaign against both Japan and the Chinese Nationalists (the Kuomintang)
▪ Vietnamese national unity was achieved under a socialist government in 1975 after a
prolonged war fought first against France and then the USA
▪ Until his death in 1967, Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary, led guerrilla forces in
various parts of South America and commanded troops in the 1959 Cuban revolution that
brought Fidel Castro to power
▪ Similar revolutionary struggles took place in Africa, i
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Algerian independence in 1962 after
a long war against France
→ The choice of revolutionary or insurrectionary socialism has profound political consequences for
socialism
→ The use of revolution tends towards fundamentalist ends – revolution requires the old system to be
torn down in entirety, and so it is easier to build a more radically different system on the ruins of the
old, e
...
when the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, seized power in Cambodia in 1975, they declared
‘Year Zero’
→ The revolutionary ‘road to socialism’ is also associated with a drift towards dictatorship, and this is
the case for a number of reasons:
▪ The use of force accustomed new rulers to regard violence as a legitimate instrument of
policy; Mao stated that “power resides in the barrel of a gun” (1927)7
▪ Revolutionary parties typically adopted military-style structures, based on strong leadership
and strict discipline, that were merely consolidated once all power was achieved
▪ In rooting out the vestiges of the old order, all oppositional forces were removed, effectively
preparing the way for the establishment of dictatorships
→ The revolutionary socialist tradition, nevertheless, was fatally undermined by the collapse of
communism in the counter-revolutions of 1989-91
→ This finally ended the divide that had opened up in socialist politics after 1917, completing the
conversion of socialism to democratic and constitutional politics; revolutionary socialism remains
only in isolated pockets in Peru and Nepal

3
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2 Evolutionary socialism
→ Although early socialists adopted the idea of revolution, throughout the 19th-century desire for
revolt declined, at least in the capitalist states of central and western Europe
→ Furthermore, capitalism itself had matured, with wages and living standards rising for the urban
working class, so they began to take on less of a revolutionary character
→ The gradual advance of the franchise meant that the proletariat now had a democratic voice and a
sense of belonging in industrial societies
→ By the end of the First World War, a majority of industrialised states had extended the vote to all
men, and an increasing number were accepting female suffrage – this led to the cultivation of an
alternative evolutionary, ‘democratic’ or ‘parliamentary’ road to socialism
→ The Fabian Society, formed in 1884, took up the cause of parliamentary socialism in the UK
7

Zedong, M
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Problems on War and Strategy
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Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung,
Vol
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s
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:Maoist Documentation Project, pp
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Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

→ The Fabians, led by Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) and Sidney Webb (1859-1947), and including
intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw and H
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Wells, took their name from Fabius Maximus,
who was noted for his patient and defensive tactics employed when fighting Hannibal
→ In their view, socialism would develop naturally and peacefully out of liberal capitalism, which would
occur through political action in a democratic system and education
→ They accepted the liberal view of the state as a neutral arbiter, rather than the Marxist view of the
state as an agent of class oppression
→ The Webbs were involved in the formation of the UK Labour Party, and authored its constitution in
1918
→ The Webbs argued that elite groups, like civil servants, scientists and academics, could be
‘permeated’ by socialism as they realise it is morally superior, more efficient and rational
→ Fabian ideas influenced the Socialist Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, formed in 1875, who in
1912 became the largest party in the German Reichstag
→ The SDP were influenced by the ideas of Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) who argued that the extension
of the franchise allowed the state to represent working class interests, and therefore envisaged a
form of gradualism akin to that of Fabianism
→ These ideas were developed more thoroughly in Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1898),
asserting that the development of the democratic state made the Marxist call for revolution
redundant, since the working class could use the ballot box to adopt socialism8
→ These principles dominated the new working-class parties that sprung up around the turn of the
century:
▪ The Australian Labour Party was founded in 1891
▪ The Italian Socialist Party was formed in 1892
▪ The UK Labour Party was set up in 1900
▪ The French Socialist Party formed in 1905
→ In the 1970s, these democratic principles were also adopted by western communist parties in Spain,
Italy and France, which came to be referred to as Eurocommunism, committed to offering a
democratic pathway to communism, maintaining an open, competitive political system

3
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3 The inevitability of gradualism?
→ The advent of political democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led to a wave
of optimism, which gave rise to the Fabian proclamation of ‘the inevitability of gradualism’
→ The idea of the inevitability of socialism was not new; Marx has predicted the inevitable overthrow
of the capitalist system in a proletarian revolution
→ However, whereas Marx believed that history was drawn forward by class conflict, evolutionary
socialists highlighted the logic of the democratic process in itself
→ Their optimism was based on a number of assumptions:
▪ The progressive extension of the vote would eventually lead to the establishment of
universal adult suffrage, and therefore political equality
▪ Political equality would work in the advantage of the majority, who could determine the
outcome of an election – the Fabians asserted that the majority would be the working class,
who clearly had a numerical advantage
▪ Socialism was felt to be the natural ‘home’ of the working class, and so the working classes
would naturally vote for socialist parties, who were guaranteed electoral success due to
their numerical advantage

8

Bernstein, E
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Evolutionary Socialism
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Berlin: Schocken Books
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K
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K
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The Culture of Contentment
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Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company
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, Hoare, Q
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, 2005
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1st ed
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11
Kautsky, K
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The Social Revolution and On the Day After the Social Revolution
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London: Twentieth
Century Press
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” – Karl Kautsky, The Social Revolution

3
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6
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6
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1 Philosophy
→ The core of classical Marxism is a philosophy of history that outlines why capitalism is doomed and
why socialism is destined to replace it, based on supposedly scientific analysis
→ Marx criticised earlier socialists such as Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Owen and Fourier as ‘utopians’ on
the basis that their socialism was grounded on the desire for total social transformation,
unconnected from a need for class struggle and revolution
→ Marx meanwhile understood the need for rigorous and laborious empirical analyses of history and
society in order to understand future developments
→ He subscribed to the ‘materialist conception of history’, or historical materialism, where material
circumstances affect the historical and social context, rather than vice versa
→ In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote that the ‘base’
economic system was what gave rise to the ‘superstructure’ of culture, politics, art, ideology, religion
and so on12
→ Marx embraced the Hegelian idea of dialectics, regarding all of history as a struggle between two
opposite class groups: the bourgeois and the proletariat
→ As a result, he saw capitalism as doomed, since it requires a large proletariat in order to support
industrialisation, and the conditions of industrialisation are such that the give the proletariat both
motive and the ability to stage a revolution, since populations are now concentrated in urban cities
→ In 1846, Marx argued in The German Ideology that society would undergo four stages before the
communist society could be realised13:
▪ Primitive communism or tribal society, in which material scarcity provided the principal
source of conflict
▪ Slavery, covering classical or ancient societies and characterised by conflict between master
and slave
▪ Feudalism, marked by antagonism between landowners and serfs
▪ Capitalism, dominated by the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat

12
13

Marx, K
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I
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A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
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Charleston: BiblioLife
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, Engels, F
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, 2011
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1st ed
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Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

→ Marx felt that once a communist society had been established, it would have no internal
contradictions (unlike capitalism which depended upon, but would ultimately be killed by, the
proletariat)
→ As a result, with the establishment of communism, the ‘pre-history of mankind’ would come to an
end – there would be no more revolutions, since society had reached its end-point
3
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1
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6
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3 Politics
→ Marx claimed that the bourgeois would not be overthrown in a political revolution, but rather in a
social revolution, establishing a new mode of production and a new social hierarchy
→ He argued that the likelihood of revolution would be determined both by objective and subjective
factors
→ The main objective factor he noted was the level of economic development – he anticipated a
revolution in the most mature capitalism countries, like Germany, Belgium, France and the UK,
where the forces of production has expanded to their limit within capitalism
→ The principal subjective factor was what he termed ‘class-consciousness’ – only a ‘class-conscious’
proletariat who were aware of their own oppression and were acting in their own self-interest would
be capable of acting as a revolutionary force
→ The initial target of any social revolution would be the bourgeois state14:
“The executive of the modern state is the committee for managing the common affairs of
the bourgeoisie” – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
→ However, Marx recognised that there could be no immediate transition from capitalism to
communism; instead, a transitionary ‘socialist’ stage would be necessary, characterised by the
dictatorship of the proletariat
→ The purpose of this proletarian state would be to protect the gains of the revolution against the
inevitable counter-revolution from the bourgeoise

14

Marx, K
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, 2015
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1st ed
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SOCIALISM

→ As class antagonisms began to fade away with the emergence of full communism, the state would
‘wither away’ – once the class system had been abolished, the state would lose its reason for
existence, i
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reinforcing class hierarchies
→ The resulting communist state would be stateless and classless, allowing for a system of commodity
production geared to the satisfaction of human needs

3
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2 Orthodox communism
→ The Russian Revolution and the following Soviet regime dominated the image of communism in the
twentieth century
→ Twentieth-century communism differed significantly from the writings of Marx and Engels:
▪ Orthodox communism was forced to adopt its theories in order to make it possible to win
and retain power, and so greater attention had to be paid to leadership, political
organisation and economic management than had been by Marx
▪ The communist regimes were shaped by the historical circumstances in which they
developed, in Russia and China where the urban proletariat was relatively small and
unsophisticated – orthodox communism therefore relied upon a communist elite, and
communist leaders, like Lenin and Stalin
→ Leninism reflected Lenin’s overriding concern with winning and retaining power, and so its central
feature was the belief in the need for a revolutionary party or a vanguard party to raise ‘classconsciousness’ in order to facilitate the revolution
→ Lenin argued this vanguard of the proletariat should be organised along the lines of democratic
centralism, where free speech and discussion was permitted, but absolute unity of action was
expected
→ By 1920, Soviet Russia had become a one-party state
→ Stalin’s greatest contribution to communism was the doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’,
announced in 1924, which proclaimed that the Soviet Union could succeed in ‘building socialism’
without the need for international revolution
→ However, his doctrine of economic Stalinism involved forcing Soviet peasants to give up their land,
removing the capitalist market and replacing it with the State Planning Committee, known as
‘Gosplan’
→ Furthermore, throughout the 1930s, Stalin used the secret police, the NKVD, to carry out a series of
brutal purges – the membership of the Communist Party was halved, and over one million people
lost their lives, including all surviving members of Lenin’s Politburo

3
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3 Modern Marxism
→ Marxism-Leninism was adopted as a secular religion in the Soviet Union, yet meanwhile a more
subtle, complex form was developing in western Europe: neo-Marxism, modern Marxism, or western
Marxism
→ Two principal factors shaped the character of neo-Marxism:
▪ Firstly, when Marx’s prediction about the imminent collapse of capitalism failed to
materialise, modern Marxists were forced to reject much of their earlier thought about
determinism – instead, they placed greater emphasis on Hegelian ideas and the stress of
‘Marx the creator’ in the earlier work of Marx
▪ Secondly, many western Marxists wished to differentiate themselves from the brutal
Leninism and Stalinism of the USSR and this necessitated a different brand of Marxism
→ The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (1885-1971) was one of the first to present Marxism as
humanistic, emphasising the process of reification whereby capitalism dehumanises workers to
commodities, and the relief from this which Marxism offers

Nathan Bailey

SOCIALISM

→ Antonio Gramsci drew attention to the idea that bourgeois ‘hegemony’ is upheld not just by political
or economic power, but also an element of social or cultural supremacy, upheld through the spread
of bourgeois values via civil society

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H
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H
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The Acquisitive Society
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Charleston: BiblioLife
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, 1971
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1st ed
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SOCIALISM

3
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2 Revisionist socialism
→ By the end of the nineteenth-century, some socialists had come to reject the fundamentalist
interpretation of capitalism as irredeemable; the clearest illustration of this comes from Eduard
Bernstein’s 1898 work Evolutionary Socialism which is the first attempt at Marxist revisionism17
→ Bernstein’s analysis was empirical, and rejected the wild theorising of Marxist historical materialism,
resulting in the following observations about capitalism:
▪ Rather than class conflict intensifying, dividing society into ‘two great classes’ – the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie – capitalism was more complex and created a middle class
between the two
▪ Capitalism was no longer a system of unbridled class oppression, since it was possible for
living standards to be improved through capitalism
▪ Therefore, peaceful and democratic reforms of capitalism, such as the nationalisation of
major industry and the extension of legal protection and welfare benefits to the working
class, could ‘tame’ capitalism, making its abolition redundant
→ These attitude was adopted by the Labour Party in their 1918 constitution, Clause IV of which
referred to a belief in ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and
exchange”
→ Yet as the twentieth-century progressed, social democrats dropped their commitments to central
economic planning:
▪ The Swedish Social Democratic Labour Party abandoned planning in the 1930s
▪ The West German Social Democrats abandoned planning at the Bad Godesberg Congress of
1959, which accepted the principle of ‘competition when possible; planning when necessary’
▪ However, in the late 1950s Hugh Gaitskell attempted to abolish Clause IV at the Labour Party
Conference, and this attempt was rejected
→ The abandonment of economic planning was followed by the assumption of three more modest
objectives:
▪ The 1945-51 Attlee-led Labour government nationalised the major utilities – electricity, gas,
coal, steel, the railways, telecommunications and so on – yet most of UK industry was left in
private hands; only the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy would be nationalised
▪ Social democrats sought to regulate the capitalist economy to maintain growth and
minimise unemployment, using Keynesian economics as laid out in his 1936 The General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, where government spending can stimulate
consumption in the capitalist economy through transfer payments, promoting growth and
securing employment18
▪ Socialists were attracted to the welfare state as the principal means of reforming or
humanising capitalism; the welfare state could act as a redistributive tool, and so capitalism
did not need to be abolished
→ An update to this thinking was brought forward by Anthony Crosland (1918-77) in The Future of
Socialism (1956)
→ He claimed that managerialism had altered modern capitalism; CEOs who ran companies had
different objectives than the board of directors they were salaried by, termed the principal-agent
problem, and therefore it could no longer be the case that capitalism was a tool of class oppression19

17

Bernstein, E
...
Evolutionary Socialism
...
Berlin: Schocken Books
...
M
...
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
...
l
...
n
...
& Brown, G
...
The Future of Socialism: The Book That Changed British Politics
...
London:
Constable
...
7
...
K
...
7
...
K
...
The Culture of Contentment
...
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company
...
, 1986
...
1st ed
...




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