Authors: Kuper & Kuper
Summary: This entry presents the historical evolution of socialism as an ideology and as a movement, paying particular attention to the difference between revolutionary and the democratic socialism. Socialism is defined as a political theory with two main propositions: the collective ownership of the means of production, and an emphasis upon nonmarket forms of distribution.
Socialist ideas and political movements began to develop in the early nineteenth century in England and France, through the thought of such thinkers as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Blanc, Proudhon, Marx, and Engels. In the period between 1848 and 1871 Marx and Engels attempted to recast socialist theory: they attacked the supposed utopianism of their predecessors, and refused to promulgate schemes of social reform. They argued that the class struggle arising from capitalist production is the objective basis of socialist victory. Socialism in Marx's view is to be identified with the cause of the proletariat, and its aim is to overthrow the ruling class and create a new society without economic exploitation or state domination.
Nevertheless, in Western Europe between 1870 and 1914 the struggle for reforms prevailed over the goal of revolution. Some thinkers saw reform as a means to revolution. According to the theories of Bernstein and Kautsky, for example, by parliamentary and acceptable political means the workers could engineer a revolutionary change in the social system. In sharp contrast, Russian socialists adopted Marxism and its emphasis on conflict. Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to favor an immediate revolutionary overthrow of tsarism and capitalism, and aimed to build a socialist society rapidly and without long intermediate stages. Thus, the First World War produced a split in socialism, and a communist regime in the Soviet Union implacably opposed to European democratic socialism.
The entry concludes by noting the contemporary difficulties of socialism, after the crisis of Western European social democracy and the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s.