SOCIALISM

a system of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control, rather than to determination by individuals pursuing their own interests or by the market forces of capitalism. The term is also applied to political movements whose aim is to put such a system into practice. There are many different forms of socialism, depending on what is meant by social control and on the extent to which, as well as by whom, this control is exercised over civil society. In some socialist doctrines all industries are to be nationalized, while in others only the largest or most important, such as banks or natural resources, should be owned by the state. Some socialist doctrines involve strictly centralized state control, while others allow for more decentralization, with a large measure of planning allocated to local government bodies; some call for an authoritarian command economy, while others envision a merely guided market economy. Often the word socialism is applied pejoratively to any policy by which the state would accrue more regulatory power. As a result, the different forms that socialism actually has taken vary dramatically. Socialism can be statist or libertarian, Marxist or liberal, revolutionary or gradualist, cosmopolitan or internationalist. The word socialism was first used about 1830 to describe doctrines developed by F.-M.-C. Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon in France and of Robert Owen in England. Once the term was established, however, several earlier philosophers were found to have anticipated socialist ideas. These included Plato among the ancients (The Republic), Sir Thomas More (1516; Utopia) and T. Campanella (1623; City of the Sun) among Renaissance writers, as well as a number of 17th- and 18th-century social critics and some figures of the French Revolution. Fourier was the theorist of a type of small cooperative settlement called a phalanstre, which was at once an economic unit and a community of persons joined together noncoercively in both productive labour and joyful living. Saint-Simon's great contribution to socialist thought was his insistence on the duty of the state to plan and organize the use of the means of production so as to keep continually abreast of scientific discovery, and his insistence on the master function of industrial experts and organizers, as against politicians and mere men of business. Neither Fourier nor Saint-Simon was a strict egalitarian, but their followers radicalized their doctrines. Owen, generally regarded as the father of British socialism, was a highly successful and model industrialist who advocated a cooperative and competition-free system devoted to the spiritual and physical well-being of all. Owen's views attracted a large working-class following, and several Owenite communities sprang up in the United States (notably at New Harmony, Ind.) and in Great Britain. Up to the 1840s, socialism developed almost exclusively as a French and British movement. There were good reasons for this: industrial evolution was much more advanced in Great Britain than elsewhere, and France had been, from the 18th century, the principal seedbed of revolutionary political ideas. Soon, however, the tide began to shift to Germany, a country that was politically divided and economically backward. German socialism began with certain radical followers of G.W.F. Hegel, such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Moses Hess, and Karl Grn. The year 1848 was the high-water mark of socialist mass movements and marked the beginning of a new type of socialist theory and practice. In the beginning of that year the Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx and Engels appropriated what they found valid in previous socialist movements, but they contrasted the romantic idealism of utopian socialism, with their own scientific socialism, which claimed to demonstrate that the victory of the working class (the proletariat) over the capitalist class, and thus the appropriation by society as a whole of the means of production, was historically inevitable. The coercive structures of the bourgeois state, they claimed, would eventually wither away. Marx and Engels used the word communist to describe this classless society and generally reserved the word socialist to refer to transitional phases and movements in which the proletariat had indeed acquired the means of production but in which the state had not yet vanished. The party they founded in 1847 was called the Communist League to distinguish it from the many socialist parties then in existence. The Communist Manifesto was so named, explained Engels in a footnote to the 1890 edition, only because the term socialist had come to be identified with multifarious social quacks. Even during Marx's lifetime and more markedly after his death, many different interpretations of Marxism began to develop. The German social democrats, for instance, under the leadership of Eduard Bernstein, doubted the imminent collapse of capitalism. They favoured a moderate socialism that was more liberal and reformist than revolutionary. Bernstein was bitterly opposed by Karl Kautsky, who represented a more orthodox interpretation of Marxism. Other forms of 19th-century socialism included Christian socialism, founded on Christian principles, and guild socialism, which stressed worker control. Twentieth-century socialist practices were just as diverse, ranging from avowedly communist nations with the strictly centralized socialism of the Soviet Union (up until the era of perestroika, or restructuring, which began in 1987) to the more decentralized Yugoslavian model, in which factory workers participated not only in the governing of the factory but also in profit sharing. Some, such as Hungary, even restored a measure of private control to agricultural workers. Noncommunist socialism found its chief expression in the welfare state exemplified by Sweden, Denmark, and Great Britain, where socialist parties won power by parliamentary means and constructed systems of taxation-based social services intended to guarantee certain minimal standards of living to all. The adoption of some national welfare ideas by strenuously nonsocialist systems such as the United States testified to both the strength of many socialist ideals and the protean adaptability of many socialist practices that made socialism itself so difficult to define. system of social organization in which property and the distribution of income are subject to social control rather than individual determination or market forces. Socialism refers to both a set of doctrines and the political movements that aspire to put these doctrines into practice. Although doctrinal aspects loomed largest in the early history of socialism, in its later history the movements have predominated over doctrine, so much so that there is no precise canon on which the various adherents of contemporary socialist movements agree. The most that can be said is that socialism is, in the words of Anthony Crosland, a British socialist, a set of values, or aspirations, which socialists wish to see embodied in the organization of society. Although it is possible to trace adumbrations of modern socialist ideas as far back as Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, and the profuse Utopian literature of the 18th-century Enlightenment, realistically, modern socialism had its roots in the reflections of various writers who opposed the social and economic relations and dislocations brought by the Industrial Revolution. They criticized what they conceived to be the injustice, the inequalities, the suffering brought about by the capitalist mode of production and the free and uncontrolled market on which it rested. To the acquisitive individualism of their age they opposed a vision of a new community of producers bound to each other through fraternal solidarity. They conceived of a future in which the masses would wrest control of the means of production and the levers of government from the capitalists. Although the great majority of men calling themselves socialists in the 19th and 20th centuries have shared this vision, they have disagreed about its more specific ideas. Some of them have argued that only the complete nationalization of the means of production would suffice to implement their aims. Others have proposed selective nationalization of key industries, with controlled private ownership of the remainder. Some socialists insist that only strong centralized state direction and a command economy will suffice. Others advocate a market socialism in which the market economy would be directed and guided by socialist planners. Socialists have also disagreed as to the best way of running the good society. Some envisage direction by the government. Others advocate as much dispersion and decentralization as possible through the delegation of decision-making authority to public boards, quasi-public trusts, municipalities, or self-governing communities of producers. Some advocate workers' control; others would rely on governmental planning boards. Although all socialists want to bring about a more equal distribution of national income, some hope for an absolute equality of income, whereas others aim only at ensuring an adequate income for all, while allowing different occupations to be paid at different rates. To each according to his need has been a frequent battle cry of socialists, but many of them would in fact settle for a society in which each would be paid in accordance with his contribution to the commonwealth, provided that society would first assure all citizens minimum levels of housing, clothing, and nourishment as well as free access to essential services such as education, health, transportation, and recreation. Socialists also proclaim the need for more equal political rights for all citizens, and for a levelling of status differences. They disagree, however, on whether difference of status ought to be eradicated entirely, or whether, in practice, some inequality in decision-making powers might not be permitted to persist in a socialist commonwealth. The uses and abuses of the word socialism are legion. As early as 1845, Friedrich Engels complained that the socialism of many Germans was vague, undefined, and undefinable. Since Engels' day the term socialism has been the property of anyone who wished to use it. The same Bismarck who as German chancellor in the late 1870s outlawed any organization that advocated socialism in Germany declared a few years later that the state must introduce even more socialism in our Reich. Modern sophisticated conservatives, as well as Fascists and various totalitarian dictators, have often claimed that they were engaged in building socialism. by George Bernard Shaw Shaw claimed to have read, in his childhood, the whole of the Ninth Edition, except for the scientific articles. In the early 1920s he was invited to contribute to a two-volume collection of articles of commentary on current events to be published by Encyclopdia Britannica. He declined, telling the editor that "I do not believe that anything I could do for you would be worth what it would cost you to induce me to do it." He subsequently agreed to produce this article for the Thirteenth Edition (1926), and it was carried over essentially intact into the Fourteenth (1929). socialism Additional reading Daniel Bell, Socialism, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 14:506534 (1968), is one of the best short surveys of socialism from its origins to the mid-1950s. G.D.H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, 5 vol. in 7 (195360), provides a detailed general study. Two histories written from a social democratic perspective are Harry W. Laidler, History of Socialism, updated and expanded ed. (1968); and Carl Landauer, Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, and Hilde Stein Landauer, European Socialism, 2 vol. (1959, reprinted 1976). Fritz U. Scharpf, Crisis and Choice in European Social Democracy (1991; originally published in German, 1987), analyzes the status of social democracy in Europe to the mid-1980s. Radoslav Seluck, Marxism, Socialism, Freedom (1979), is also useful. Gordon White, Robin Murray, and Christine White (eds.), Revolutionary Socialist Development in the Third World (1983); and Melanie A. Sully, Continuity and Change in Austrian Socialism (1982), are two good resources on socialism as distinct from social democracy. Irving Howe (ed.), Essential Works of Socialism, 3rd ed. (1986), collects readings in many varieties of Marxist thought. Michael Harrington, Why We Need Socialism in America (1970), is a defense of the relevance of socialism in the United States by a prominent American socialist. James Joll, The Second International, 18891914, rev. and extended ed. (1974), offers a standard but very readable history of 19th-century social democracy. George Lichtheim, Marxism, 2nd ed. rev. (1964, reprinted 1982), a sophisticated and searching work, deals with the transformation of Marxism from the time of its founders to that of Lenin and Stalin, while his A Short History of Socialism (1970, reissued 1983), and The Origins of Socialism (1969), are idiosyncratic but stimulating reading. Adolf Sturmthal, The Tragedy of European Labor (1943), is a study of the failures of social democratic policies during the depression of the 1930s, by a sympathetic observer. Additional studies include Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (1982); Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 2 vol. (198285); Tom Bottomore, Sociology and Socialism (1984); and Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning, 2nd ed. (1989). Lewis A. Coser The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica