Socialism

For other uses, see Socialism (disambiguation).

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Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.[3][4][5] It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems.[6] Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative,[7][8][9] or employee.[10][11] As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is considered as the standard left-wing ideology in most countries.[12] Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.[13][14]

Socialist systems divide into non-market and market forms.[15][16] A non-market socialist system seeks to eliminate the perceived inefficiencies, irrationalities, unpredictability, and crises that socialists traditionally associate with capital accumulation and the profit system.[17] Market socialism retains the use of monetary prices, factor markets and sometimes the profit motive.[18][19][20] As a political force, socialist parties and ideas exercise varying degrees of power and influence, heading national governments in several countries. Socialist politics have been internationalist and nationalist; organised through political parties and opposed to party politics; at times overlapping with trade unions and other times independent and critical of them, and present in industrialised and developing nations.[21] Social democracy originated within the socialist movement,[22] supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice.[23][24] While retaining socialism as a long-term goal,[25] in the post-war period social democracy embraced a mixed economy based on Keynesianism within a predominantly developed capitalist market economy and liberal democratic polity that expands state intervention to include income redistribution, regulation, and a welfare state.[26][27]

The socialist political movement includes political philosophies that originated in the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 18th century and out of concern for the social problems that socialists associated with capitalism.[28] By the late 19th century, after the work of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, socialism had come to signify anti-capitalism and advocacy for a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production.[29][30] By the early 1920s, communism and social democracy had become the two dominant political tendencies within the international socialist movement,[31] with socialism itself becoming the most influential secular movement of the 20th century.[32] Many socialists also adopted the causes of other social movements, such as feminism, environmentalism, and progressivism.[33]

While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally socialist state led to socialism's widespread association with the Soviet economic model, academics have noted that some Western European countries have been governed by socialist parties or have mixed economies that are sometimes called "democratic socialist".[34][35] Following the revolutions of 1989, many of these countries moved away from socialism as a neoliberal consensus replaced the social democratic consensus in the advanced capitalist world,[36] while many former socialist politicians and political parties embraced "Third Way" politics, remaining committed to equality and welfare while abandoning public ownership and class-based politics.[37] Socialism experienced a resurgence in popularity in the 2010s, most prominently in the form of democratic socialism.[38][39]

  1. ^ Busky (2000), p. 2: "Socialism may be defined as movements for social ownership and control of the economy. It is this idea that is the common element found in the many forms of socialism."
  2. ^
    • Busky (2000), p. 2: "Socialism may be defined as movements for social ownership and control of the economy. It is this idea that is the common element found in the many forms of socialism."
    • Arnold (1994), pp. 7–8: "What else does a socialist economic system involve? Those who favor socialism generally speak of social ownership, social control, or socialization of the means of production as the distinctive positive feature of a socialist economic system."
    • Horvat (2000), pp. 1515–1516: "Just as private ownership defines capitalism, social ownership defines socialism. The essential characteristic of socialism in theory is that it destroys social hierarchies, and therefore leads to a politically and economically egalitarian society. Two closely related consequences follow. First, every individual is entitled to an equal ownership share that earns an aliquot part of the total social dividend... Second, in order to eliminate social hierarchy in the workplace, enterprises are run by those employed, and not by the representatives of private or state capital. Thus, the well-known historical tendency of the divorce between ownership and management is brought to an end. The society—i.e. every individual equally—owns capital and those who work are entitled to manage their own economic affairs."
    • Rosser & Barkley (2003), p. 53: "Socialism is an economic system characterised by state or collective ownership of the means of production, land, and capital.";
    • Badie, Berg-Schlosser & Morlino (2011), p. 2456: "Socialist systems are those regimes based on the economic and political theory of socialism, which advocates public ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources."
    • Zimbalist, Sherman & Brown (1988), p. 7: "Pure socialism is defined as a system wherein all of the means of production are owned and run by the government and/or cooperative, nonprofit groups."
    • Brus (2015), p. 87: "This alteration in the relationship between economy and politics is evident in the very definition of a socialist economic system. The basic characteristic of such a system is generally reckoned to be the predominance of the social ownership of the means of production."
    • Hastings, Adrian; Mason, Alistair; Pyper, Hugh (2000). The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. Oxford University Press. p. 677. ISBN 978-0198600244. Socialists have always recognized that there are many possible forms of social ownership of which co-operative ownership is one...Nevertheless, socialism has throughout its history been inseparable from some form of common ownership. By its very nature it involves the abolition of private ownership of capital; bringing the means of production, distribution, and exchange into public ownership and control is central to its philosophy. It is difficult to see how it can survive, in theory or practice, without this central idea.
  3. ^ Horvat (2000), pp. 1515–1516.
  4. ^ Arnold (1994), pp. 7–8.
  5. ^ Hastings, Adrian; Mason, Alistair; Pyper, Hugh (2000). The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought. Oxford University Press. p. 677. ISBN 978-0198600244. Socialists have always recognized that there are many possible forms of social ownership of which co-operative ownership is one...Nevertheless, socialism has throughout its history been inseparable from some form of common ownership. By its very nature it involves the abolition of private ownership of capital; bringing the means of production, distribution, and exchange into public ownership and control is central to its philosophy. It is difficult to see how it can survive, in theory or practice, without this central idea.
  6. ^ "Socialism". The Free Dictionary. Retrieved 27 January 2020. 2. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) any of various social or political theories or movements in which the common welfare is to be achieved through the establishment of a socialist economic system.
  7. ^ Sherman, Howard J.; Zimbalist, Andrew (1988). Comparing Economic Systems: A Political-Economic Approach. Harcourt College Pub. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-15-512403-5. Pure socialism is defined as a system wherein all of the means of production are owned and run by the government and/or cooperative, nonprofit groups.
  8. ^ Rosser, Mariana V.; Rosser, J. Barkley (2003). Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy. MIT Press. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-262-18234-8. Socialism is an economic system characterised by state or collective ownership of the means of production, land, and capital.
  9. ^ Badie, Berg-Schlosser & Morlino (2011), p. 2456: "Socialist systems are those regimes based on the economic and political theory of socialism, which advocates public ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources."
  10. ^ Horvat (2000), pp. 1515–1516: "Just as private ownership defines capitalism, social ownership defines socialism. The essential characteristic of socialism in theory is that it destroys social hierarchies, and therefore leads to a politically and economically egalitarian society. Two closely related consequences follow. First, every individual is entitled to an equal ownership share that earns an aliquot part of the total social dividend...Second, in order to eliminate social hierarchy in the workplace, enterprises are run by those employed, and not by the representatives of private or state capital. Thus, the well-known historical tendency of the divorce between ownership and management is brought to an end. The society—i.e. every individual equally—owns capital and those who work are entitled to manage their own economic affairs."
  11. ^ O'Hara, Phillip (2003). Encyclopedia of Political Economy. Vol. 2. Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 978-0415241878. In order of increasing decentralisation (at least) three forms of socialised ownership can be distinguished: state-owned firms, employee-owned (or socially) owned firms, and citizen ownership of equity.
  12. ^ "Left". Encyclopædia Britannica. 15 April 2009. Retrieved 22 May 2022. Socialism is the standard leftist ideology in most countries of the world; ... .
  13. ^ Nove, Alec (2008). "Socialism". New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Second ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. A society may be defined as socialist if the major part of the means of production of goods and services is in some sense socially owned and operated, by state, socialised or cooperative enterprises. The practical issues of socialism comprise the relationships between management and workforce within the enterprise, the interrelationships between production units (plan versus markets), and, if the state owns and operates any part of the economy, who controls it and how.
  14. ^ Docherty, James C.; Lamb, Peter, eds. (2006). Historical Dictionary of Socialism. Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements. Vol. 73 (2nd ed.). Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. pp. 1–3. ISBN 978-0810855601.
  15. ^ Kolb, Robert (2007). Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society (1st ed.). Sage Publications, Inc. p. 1345. ISBN 978-1412916523. There are many forms of socialism, all of which eliminate private ownership of capital and replace it with collective ownership. These many forms, all focused on advancing distributive justice for long-term social welfare, can be divided into two broad types of socialism: nonmarket and market.
  16. ^ Bockman (2011), p. 20: "socialism would function without capitalist economic categories—such as money, prices, interest, profits and rent—and thus would function according to laws other than those described by current economic science. While some socialists recognised the need for money and prices at least during the transition from capitalism to socialism, socialists more commonly believed that the socialist economy would soon administratively mobilise the economy in physical units without the use of prices or money."; Steele (1999), pp. 175–177: "Especially before the 1930s, many socialists and anti-socialists implicitly accepted some form of the following for the incompatibility of state-owned industry and factor markets. A market transaction is an exchange of property titles between two independent transactors. Thus internal market exchanges cease when all of industry is brought into the ownership of a single entity, whether the state or some other organization, ... the discussion applies equally to any form of social or community ownership, where the owning entity is conceived as a single organization or administration."; Arneson (1992): "Marxian socialism is often identified with the call to organize economic activity on a nonmarket basis."; Schweickart et al. (1998), pp. 61–63: "More fundamentally, a socialist society must be one in which the economy is run on the principle of the direct satisfaction of human needs. ... Exchange-value, prices and so money are goals in themselves in a capitalist society or in any market. There is no necessary connection between the accumulation of capital or sums of money and human welfare. Under conditions of backwardness, the spur of money and the accumulation of wealth has led to a massive growth in industry and technology ... . It seems an odd argument to say that a capitalist will only be efficient in producing use-value of a good quality when trying to make more money than the next capitalist. It would seem easier to rely on the planning of use-values in a rational way, which because there is no duplication, would be produced more cheaply and be of a higher quality."
  17. ^ Nove (1991), p. 13: "Under socialism, by definition, it (private property and factor markets) would be eliminated. There would then be something like 'scientific management', 'the science of socially organized production', but it would not be economics."; Kotz (2006): "This understanding of socialism was held not just by revolutionary Marxist socialists but also by evolutionary socialists, Christian socialists, and even anarchists. At that time, there was also wide agreement about the basic institutions of the future socialist system: public ownership instead of private ownership of the means of production, economic planning instead of market forces, production for use instead of for profit."; Weisskopf (1992): "Socialism has historically been committed to the improvement of people's material standards of living. Indeed, in earlier days many socialists saw the promotion of improving material living standards as the primary basis for socialism's claim to superiority over capitalism, for socialism was to overcome the irrationality and inefficiency seen as endemic to a capitalist system of economic organization."; Prychitko (2002), p. 12: "Socialism is a system based upon de facto public or social ownership of the means of production, the abolition of a hierarchical division of labor in the enterprise, a consciously organized social division of labor. Under socialism, money, competitive pricing, and profit-loss accounting would be destroyed."
  18. ^ Marangos, John (2004). "Social Dividend versus Basic Income Guarantee in Market Socialism". International Journal of Political Economy. 34 (3). Taylor & Francis: 20–40. doi:10.1080/08911916.2004.11042930. ISSN 0891-1916. JSTOR 40470892. S2CID 153267388.
  19. ^ O'Hara, Phillip (2000). Encyclopedia of Political Economy. Vol. 2. Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 978-0415241878. Market socialism is the general designation for a number of models of economic systems. On the one hand, the market mechanism is utilized to distribute economic output, to organize production and to allocate factor inputs. On the other hand, the economic surplus accrues to society at large rather than to a class of private (capitalist) owners, through some form of collective, public or social ownership of capital.
  20. ^ Pierson, Christopher (1995). Socialism After Communism: The New Market Socialism. Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 96. ISBN 978-0271-014784. At the heart of the market socialist model is the abolition of the large-scale private ownership of capital and its replacement by some form of 'social ownership'. Even the most conservative accounts of market socialism insist that this abolition of large-scale holdings of private capital is essential. This requirement is fully consistent with the market socialists' general claim that the vices of market capitalism lie not with the institutions of the market but with (the consequences of) the private ownership of capital ... .
  21. ^ Newman (2005), p. 2: "In fact, socialism has been both centralist and local; organized from above and built from below; visionary and pragmatic; revolutionary and reformist; anti-state and statist; internationalist and nationalist; harnessed to political parties and shunning them; an outgrowth of trade unionism and independent of it; a feature of rich industrialized countries and poor peasant-based communities."
  22. ^ Ely, Richard T. (1883). French and German Socialism in Modern Times. New York: Harper and Brothers. pp. 204–205. Social democrats forms the extreme wing of the socialists ... inclined to lay so much stress on equality of enjoyment, regardless of the value of one's labor, that they might, perhaps, more properly be called communists. ... They have two distinguishing characteristics. The vast majority of them are laborers, and, as a rule, they expect the violent overthrow of existing institutions by revolution to precede the introduction of the socialistic state. I would not, by any means, say that they are all revolutionists, but the most of them undoubtedly are. ... The most general demands of the social democrats are the following: The state should exist exclusively for the laborers; land and capital must become collective property, and production be carried on unitedly. Private competition, in the ordinary sense of the term, is to cease.
  23. ^ Merkel, Wolfgang; Petring, Alexander; Henkes, Christian; Egle, Christoph (2008). Social Democracy in Power: The Capacity to Reform. Routledge Research in Comparative Politics. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415438209.
  24. ^ Heywood, Andrew (2012). Political Ideologies: An Introduction (5th ed.). Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 128. ISBN 978-0230367258. Social democracy is an ideological stance that supports a broad balance between market capitalism, on the one hand, and state intervention, on the other hand. Being based on a compromise between the market and the state, social democracy lacks a systematic underlying theory and is, arguably, inherently vague. It is nevertheless associated with the following views: (1) capitalism is the only reliable means of generating wealth, but it is a morally defective means of distributing wealth because of its tendency towards poverty and inequality; (2) the defects of the capitalist system can be rectified through economic and social intervention, the state being the custodian of the public interest ... .
  25. ^ Roemer (1994), pp. 25–27: "The long term and the short term."; Berman (1998), p. 57: "Over the long term, however, democratizing Sweden's political system was seen to be important not merely as a means but also as an end in itself. Achieving democracy was crucial not only because it would increase the power of the SAP in the Swedish political system but also because it was the form socialism would take once it arrived. Political, economic, and social equality went hand in hand, according to the SAP, and were all equally important characteristics of the future socialist society."; Busky (2000), pp. 7–8; Bailey (2009), p. 77: "... Giorgio Napolitano launched a medium-term programme, 'which tended to justify the governmental deflationary policies, and asked for the understanding of the workers, since any economic recovery would be linked with the long-term goal of an advance towards democratic socialism'"; Lamb (2015), p. 415
  26. ^ Badie, Berg-Schlosser & Morlino (2011), p. 2423: "Social democracy refers to a political tendency resting on three fundamental features: (1) democracy (e.g., equal rights to vote and form parties), (2) an economy partly regulated by the state (e.g., through Keynesianism), and (3) a welfare state offering social support to those in need (e.g., equal rights to education, health service, employment and pensions)."
  27. ^ Smith, J. W. (2005). Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle for the 21st century. Radford: Institute for Economic Democracy Press. ISBN 1933567015.
  28. ^ Lamb & Docherty (2006), p. 1.
  29. ^ Gasper, Phillip (2005). The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document. Haymarket Books. p. 24. ISBN 978-1931859257. As the nineteenth century progressed, 'socialist' came to signify not only concern with the social question, but opposition to capitalism and support for some form of social ownership.
  30. ^ Giddens, Anthony (1998) [1994]. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (1998 ed.). Cambridge, England, UK: Polity Press. p. 71.
  31. ^ Newman (2005), p. 5: "Chapter 1 looks at the foundations of the doctrine by examining the contribution made by various traditions of socialism in the period between the early 19th century and the aftermath of the First World War. The two forms that emerged as dominant by the early 1920s were social democracy and communism."
  32. ^ Kurian, George Thomas, ed. (2011). The Encyclopedia of Political Science. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press. p. 1554.
  33. ^ Sheldon, Garrett Ward (2001). Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Facts on File. Inc. p. 280.
  34. ^ Barrett (1978): "If we were to extend the definition of socialism to include Labor Britain or socialist Sweden, there would be no difficulty in refuting the connection between capitalism and democracy."; Heilbroner (1991), pp. 96–110; Kendall (2011), pp. 125–127: "Sweden, Great Britain, and France have mixed economies, sometimes referred to as democratic socialism—an economic and political system that combines private ownership of some of the means of production, governmental distribution of some essential goods and services, and free elections. For example, government ownership in Sweden is limited primarily to railroads, mineral resources, a public bank, and liquor and tobacco operations."; Li (2015), pp. 60–69: "The scholars in camp of democratic socialism believe that China should draw on the Sweden experience, which is suitable not only for the West but also for China. In the post-Mao China, the Chinese intellectuals are confronted with a variety of models. The liberals favor the American model and share the view that the Soviet model has become archaic and should be totally abandoned. Meanwhile, democratic socialism in Sweden provided an alternative model. Its sustained economic development and extensive welfare programs fascinated many. Numerous scholars within the democratic socialist camp argue that China should model itself politically and economically on Sweden, which is viewed as more genuinely socialist than China. There is a growing consensus among them that in the Nordic countries the welfare state has been extraordinarily successful in eliminating poverty."
  35. ^ Sanandaji (2021): "Nordic nations—and especially Sweden—did embrace socialism between around 1970 and 1990. During the past 30 years, however, both conservative and social democratic-led governments have moved toward the center."
  36. ^ Sanandaji (2021); Caulcutt (2022); Krause-Jackson (2019); Best et al. (2011), p. xviii
  37. ^ "socialism". Encyclopedia Britannica. 29 May 2023.
  38. ^ Judis, John B. (20 November 2019). "The Socialist Revival". American Affairs Journal. Retrieved 26 June 2023.
  39. ^ Cassidy, John (18 June 2019). "Why Socialism Is Back". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved 26 June 2023.