This is a great history written by a neighbor of my parents. He explains the history in a very easy to understand way and includes many excerpts of the original historical texts themselves.
- By socialism, I am referring to a set of related but often conflicting political and social movements that share a particular set of ideals. Instead of a society dominated by competition among individuals and groups, socialists emphasize the importance of planning, cooperation, workplace democracy, and mutual responsibility. To establish social equality, they strive to replace the capitalist economy, based on the ownership of private property, with one based on social or public ownership. Socalists also have aimed to build a world in which social solidarity is achieved through the realization of individual freedom and legal and social equality. As it matured into a mass movement, socialism propagated an ideal of universal human emancipation that would overcome all forms of exploitation and discrimination based on class, race, religion, or gender.
- They assume that history consisted of a series of progressive states in which people steadily improved their understanding of the world and possessed universal, natural rights based on their humanity rather than belonging to any particular religion or social caste.
- the only way to achieve true social justice was to abolish private property. “By its origins,” Babeuf argued to the court, “the land belongs to no one and its fruits are for everyone.” The introduction of private property was “a surprise foisted upon the mass of simple and honest souls. The laws of this institution must necessarily bring about the existence of the fortunate and the unfortunate, of masters and slaves.” Thus, Babeuf threw down the gauntlet to those who saw the legal equality proclaimed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as the French Revolution’s penultimate achievement. Without material equality, equality before the law meant little.
- Babeuf pointed out that the nobility had established its rule by force and maintained it by using law to legitimize the pillage of wealth that belonged to others. While agreeing with Rousseau’s contention that the first man to enclose a plot of land and declare “this is mine” was the initial author of all the evils that afflicted humanity.
- When he carried the ideological principle of equality from the political into the economic and social realms, the effort conflicted with a new order in which equality before the law rested on the basis of an economic system predicated on inequality.
- the use of machinery shifted the locus of production from the home or small shop to the factory, which transferred the workers’ ability to organize the work process and control its tempo to the capitalist.
- According to Fourier, commerce was mearly a “mode of exchange in which the seller has the right to defraud with impunity and to determine by himself… the profit which he ought to receive.” Commerce “Allowed deceit and plunder to triumph,” but manual labor as practiced in civilized society was no bette. He attacked the bourgeois work ethic and the capitalist division of labor, which forced workers to toil for long hours at the same acrivity day in and day out, as dehumanizing. Organized in a chaotic system of competition that impoverished producers and enriched dishonest, unproductive merchants, he concluded that “civilized industry is at the antipodes of reason; it is a world gone wrong, a faulty mechanism.”
To replace it, Fourier proposed reorganizing society into small cooperative communities called phalanxes, in which residents would strive to establish harmony. Life would be organizing according to what he called the Law of Passionate Attraction, or “the drive given to us by nature prior to any reflection; it is persistent despite the opposition of reason, duty, predjuice, etc.” Fourier identified twelve basic passions that shaped human relations: five of the senses (touch, hearing, sight, taste, and smell), four of the soul (friendship, love, ambition, and parenthood), and three that he labeled “disruptive.” When combined in various ways, they produced a total of810 different personality types. Optimally, a phalanx would have two of each type fora total of 1620 residents.
Fourier envisioned the phalanx as a largely self-sufficient community based on artisanal and agricultural production in which all, including children, would work, but would would become a form of play in which change and variety were a part of the daily experience and people could follow their own inclinations. Self-fulfillment was essential, for women as well as men, in love as well as in work. He was a radical feminist who believed that women should have an equal role in administering the community and sharing in its joys. He views marriage, patriarchy, and monogamy as means of subjugating women. The phalanx would tolerate all forms of sexual relations that were not coerced or violent, and it would exclude no one who wished to participate. Fourier did not believe that women were in all ways equal to men but saw in gender differences part of the symmetrical balance in nature. like his contemporaries Mary Wollstoncraft in England and Olympe de Gouges in France, he was in the forefront of those who saw women’s liberation as an essential element in the creation of a free society. - Babeuf basic doctrine summary: (posted on placards around paris)
- Nautre has given every man an equal right to the enjoyment of all its goods
- the goal of society is to defend this equality, often attached in the state of nature by there strong and the wicked, and to add to common happiness by the working together of all.
- nature has imposed on everyone the obligation to work; no one can, without committing a crime, shirk labor
- labor and pleasures should be in common
- oppression exists when there is one who wears himself out at work and lacks everything, while another swims in abundance while doing nothing
- no one can, wihtought committing a crime, exclusively expropriate the goods of the earth or of industry
- in a real society, there should be neither rich nor poor
- the rich who don’t renounce their excesses in favor of the indigent are enemies of the people
- no one can, through the accumulation of all means available, deprive another of the instruction necessary for his happiness. instruction must be for all.
- the goal of the revolution is to destroy inequality and restore the common welfare.
- private property was illegitimate because a few individuals had “seized upon the common earth by ruse or by violence… and established by laws that it is to be their property forever.” They used control over property to force others into various states of dependence as slaves, serfs, or wage-earning factory workers. The later had not freed “but that of choosing their masters”.
- under capitalism, man was divorced from himself and became the slave of things
- Marx: “It is not the consciousness of en that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
- People could act to effect change, but the social, economic, and cultural framework in which they lived conditioned their actions. They could, indeed, make revolution, but social rarities would always constrain their efforts.
- Social revolutions tended to occur, Marx and Engels belived, when the social relations of production hindered the further development of the material forces of production in society.
- Under capitalism, workers are mere commodities; they live by selling their ability to work to capitals. the latter exploits workers’ labor to earn profits, which they use to expand their capital.
- Competition drive the imperative to expand and makes capitalism unique in its power to transform the world. it “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.” The need for new markets drives the bourgeoisie to “nestle everwthere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Using cheap commodity prices as the “heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls,” the bourgeoise forces foreign nations to capitulate to its needs and creates a global economy after its own image. as a result, “during tis rules of scarce one hundred years, [it] has created more massive and more colossal productive forces tha have all preceding generations together.”
- “the means it used for racing productivity “distort thee worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage to a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labor by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportaition as science is incorporated in it as an independent power… they transform his lifetime into working time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital”
- No rights without duties, no duties without rights
- in some ways, the Commune was different from any previous kind of government. it was expected to be a working body in which the elected representatives, rather than highly paid burecrautic officials, implemented the laws the passed. in addition, members earned the same wages as average workers and were subject to immediate recall.
- The International’s real power was symbolic. as historians such as Kevin Callahan have demonstrated, it promoted a powerful “demonstration culture,” rooted in the activities of the national parties, linking them together, and building unity among them. The International skillfully used mass rallies, processions, marches, congresses, well-timed manifestoes, ritual, symbols such as flags and banners, and the mass-circulation press to shape public discourse and react to international events, especially the threat of war. These activities, coordinated via the International Socilaist Bureau, strengthened the bonds of the individual workers’ parties, even when they were often divided on ideological or practical matters. the Internatioanl hadf few means to pressure member parties to adhere to its decisions, but its prestige was substantial, and its meetings provided an important forum for debate. for millions of workers, it represented proof of their growing strength and buttressed their conviction that history was on their side: there were part of an international movement in which workers’ solidarity would lead to victory.
- this combination of immediate aims and a radical vision of the future made the Erfurt Program an effective means of winning support.
- it is import to recognize that, in some ways, their existence reflected the strength of social democracy’s democratic culture. Although acrimonious, no one was expelled for his ideas, and there was no serious talk about precipitating a split. These people had devloted their lives to creating a movement that aimed to build a new world, and dividing it would have betrayed everything they had worked to achieve.
- “Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so emmense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding its management so intelligent in the interested of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power.
- ”Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher pane of society to which experience, intelligence, and knowledge are steady trending
- The complete emancipation of woman, and her equality with man, is the final goal of our cultural development, the achievement of which no power on earth can prevent. But it is possible only on the basis of a transformation, that abolishes all domination of man by man and hence also that of the worker by the capitalist. only now will human development reach its peak. the “golden age” men have been dreaming of for millennia and for which they have yearned, will come at last. an end will be put to class domination once and for all, and with it to man’s domination of woman.
- The daily practical struggle for social reforms, for the amelioration of the conditions of the working people within the framework of current conditions, and for democratic institutions, represents for Social Democracy the only way of leading the proletarian class warfare and working towards the end goal: the seizing of political and power the abolition of the wage system.
- For Social Democracy, there is an inseparable link between social reforms and social revolution, in that the struggle for social reform is the means, but radical social changes is the goal.
- but since the final socialist goal is the only decisive aspect that distinguishes the social democratic movement from bourgeois democracy and brougeois radicalism, which transforms the entire workers’ movement from a futile effort to repair the capitalist order into class warfare against this order, for the abolition of this order, the question “Social reform or revolution?” poses for Social Democracy at the same time the question: “to be or not to be?”
- the opportunistic current in the party, whose theory has been formulated by Berstein, is nothing other than an unconscious effort to secure the upper hand for the petty bourgeois element that have joined the party, to reshape the practice and the goals of the party in their spirit. the question about social reform and revolution, about the final goal of the movement is, from a different perspective, the question about the petty bourgeois or proletarian character of the workers’ movement.
- WWI
- The impact [of not resisting WWI] was profound. the International effectively collapsed, and its leading force, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), lost its credibility. Europe’s ruling classes had expected resistance, but their concern proved unwarranted as worker’s parties patriotically rallied around their respective flags.
- “From today I cease to be a social democrat and have become a communist” For some like him, it was now imperative for socialists to distance themselves from the “chauvinists” supporting war and to build a movement committed ro revoluatiny action.
- Many German party and trade union leaders, for example, feared the state’s ability to crush their organizations and wipe out the accomplishments of the past twenty years. most of the new generation of social democratic leaders were used to working within the system and had risen through the movement’s institutions as administrators, journalists, organizers, and parlimanetarans. They regarded ideas such as a general strike, especially one that crossed nationals borders, as impractical and dangerous. To challenge the state head-on seemed foolhardy.
- Bolshevik Revolution
- Lenin’s “April Theses”: A political masterstroke, the program enabled the Bolsheviks to differentiate themselves from all other groups. it was unambiguously against an unpopular war, and its call for land t othe peasants co-opted the main blank of the SRs’ political platform. By demanding all power to the soviets, the Bolsheviks proclaimed their faith in the workers’ ability to master Russia’s problems. Finally, by presenting the Russian Revolution as part of a larger international movement, they inspired hope and the will to act among growing numbers of supporters.
- Russia’s workers were growing more radical as the divided government failed to address their needs.
- The Bolsheviks won control of the state because their leaders, lenin in particular, were prepared to fill the power vacuum that had developed as Russia’s elites lost legitimacy, class war intensified, and the country’s insiitutionts crumbled. Well organized and disciplined compared to their rivals, they grasped what the people wanted and promised to meet their needs. by the fall, they enjoyed genuine popularity in Russia’s main cities and, riding this wave of support, skillfully acquitted the means to challenge the Provisional Government directly and decisively. Unlike their comrades in the West, the Bolsheviks were willing to act.
- Following the congress of the Soviets, the Sovnarkom quickly introduced “workers control” into all factories with more than five employees, took over the state bank, nationalized the private banks, annulled Russia’s foreign debt, and assumed control over foreign trade.
- In the social sphere, the government abolished all civil and social ranks and privileges that had favored the nobility and the rich. it declared the equality of all ethnic groups and religions, proclaimed women’s equality, and implemented measures eliminating child “illegitimacy,” easing divorce, secularziing marriage, legalizing abortion, and improving women’s status in the workplace. Although the rather Victorian and overwhelmingly male Bolshevik leaders eschewed radical ideas regarding the abolition of the family and “free love,” they created a special department to address women’s issues and appointed the socialist feminist Alexandra Kollantai as people’s commissioner for social welfare. As Europe’s first female government minister, she put the creation of communal nurseries and clinics for children on the political agenda.
- To consolidate the revolutions’ authority, the Sovnarkorm merged municipal and regional governments into the soviets, abolished the old judicial system, and set up new revolutionary tribunals in which trained judges sat with lay representitatives to dispense justice. it spererated church and state and asserted its control over the often hostile bureaucracy by forbidding strikes and fixing salaries. in the army, i did away iwht all signs of rank and insitituaionsled soldier’s election of their officers.
- The key to the Bolsheviks’ victory was their ability to hold onto peasant support
- The Bolsheviks were victorious for several reasons. they were united and disciplined, while their enemies failed to coalesce around a single leadership or program. they controlled most industrial areas of the country and effectively used their interior lines of communiacaiotn and transport
- This “revolution from above” created a new kind of civilization that appropriated the language of socialism but in fact had little to do with that project. indeed, the regime effectively destroyed the capitalist order based on private property and the market but the new one it created, resting on state ownership and centrally planned bureaucratic management, had nothing in common with the socialist goals of individual freedom, social justice and equality, and workers’ power. Stalin established a brutal tyranny underpinned by a passive bureaucray in which ones’ position in the party-state hierarchy brought power and privldedge. the higher a persons rank, the greater his authority and access to “collective” wealth owned by the sate. neither capitalist nor socialist, this “burectautic collectivist” society, was something completely new.
- During this period, the revolutionary wave crested, but capitalism hung on everywhere. It survived by combining the use of force with the adroit co-optation of parts of the labor movement into the system, a process that succeeded because many socialists regarded it as the most promising way forward. Thus, as Charles Maier has argued, Europes’ bourgeoisie was able to “recast” its hegemony while leaving the labor movement with modest and largely ephemeral gains.
- In general, fascism drew its support disproportionately from the propertied classes, small and large, rural and urban, which had lost faith in parliamentary democracys ability to protect their interests
- They had expected to introduce progressive reforms in the context of capitalist economic growth using parliamentary majorities garnered within a stable polity. now, with the economic débâcle fully upon them, they responded with austerity, balanced budgets, and low taxes on capital, that is, economic solutions supported by conservative economists and big business.
- They were part of a long-serving oligarchy that had grown used to comfortable bureaucratic and parliamentary routine. Elected and reelected, sometimes for decades, the top leaders rarely encountered serious challenge from within and over time grew less receptive to new ideas or innovative approaches. beyond these failings, however, it was the Social Democrats’ basic human decency that made them unwilling to unleash a bloody civil war that they fear they could not win. it made them hesitante for too long and gave their much more ruthless opponents the decisive advantage.
- From State and Revolution by Lenin
- Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. the translation from caplitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat
- Forward development, i.e.,development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.
- And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result early in an expansion of democracy. simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time become democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the prolitarit imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. we must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.
- Engels expressed this splendidly in his letter to Bebel when he said, as the reader will remember, that “the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist”
- Democracy for the mvast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people – this is the change democracy undergoes during the transformation from capitalism to communism.
- Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then “the state… ceases to exist,” and “it becomes possible to speak of freedom.” only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. and only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from caplitsls salvery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of real in all copy-book maxims. they will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.
- Under capitalism, we have the state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of the majority by the minority. Naturally, to be successful, such an undertaking as the systemantic suppression of the exploited majority by the exploiting minority calluses for the utmost ferocity and savagery in the matter of suppressing, it calls for seas of blood, through which mankind is actually wasting its way in slavery, serfdom and wage labor.
- in repsonse to the electoral imperative after 1945 socialists gradually jettisoned the tents of orthodox Marxism, such as the centrality of class struggle, state ownership of the means of production, central planning, and internationalism, and replaced them with an emphasis on building cross-class support for reforms based on Keynesian approaches to economic management carried out within the framework of the nation-state.
- Having successfully managed shared wartime sacrifice, they were confident that the state could also create social justice in peacetime.
- By the late 1960’s, it was clear that the old ‘anti system’ parties in the West, Social Democract and Communist, had become creatures of the system. While they still advocated for reforma on behalf of workers, sometimes used populist rhetoric, and may have hoped for socialism in the long run, both movements accepted the bourgeois parliamentarry order.
- Radical slogans: “Be realistic: Demand the impossible”, “Commodities are the opium of the people”, “Don’t negotiate with the Bosses: Abolish them”, “Their nightmares are our dreams”, “Don’t negotiate dreams”
- But PCF and CGT leaders were not interested in revolution. Indeed, aiming to protect the interests of their organizations within the system, they later prevented students from joining labor rallies and crated the radicals
- Some founded small and mutually hostile Leninist, Trotskyist, and Maoist communist parties aiming to mobalize the working class for revolution. Others withdrew from politics and mainstream society to form their own separate utopian communities. A third, more numerous group attempted to change society by transforming its institutions from within.
- [enviromentalists] questioned the sustainability of an economic system based on endless accumulation and rising consumption and put forward ideas for a society based on different priorities. for the socialist movement, these ideas represented a serious challenge to their traditional support for economic growth, which translated into jobs and rising living standards for workers. at the same time, however, socialists had long recognized the dangers of industrial production for workers and surrounding communities. their emphases on controlling production and economic planning game them a degree of common ground with environmentalists, but it was difficult for them to envision an economy not centered on ever-increasing industrial production.
- The Greens emerged out of local grassroots movements that attracted well-educated young people concerned about the enrichment, but they also drew feminists and peace moment activists who rejected socialists’ support for NATO and its decision to deploy a new generation of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in the early 1980s.
- The social democratic project rested on the assumption that, when well regulated, capitalism would produce the surpluses necessary to support the needs of capital, the welfare state, and rising living standards for the general population. during the postwar boom, this assumption seemed reasonable, but the onset of stagflation, falling profits, and the failure of the Keynesian response undermined id and opened the doors to a newer capitalist offense aiming to roll back many of labors’ gains and restore profits. large segments of the transnational business elite and many middle-class critics of the welfare state adopted a neoliberal outlook centering on free trade, economic deregulation and privatizatiation, and a radical reduction of the social set.
- Much had changed since 1917. Form a largely underdeveloped peasant society, the Sovet Union had developed into a modern, industrial one, and under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the quality of live had gradually improved. by 1985, 65 percent of the people lived in cities, and only 15 percent remained on collective farms. millions had gained access to new (if often cramped) low-cost apartments; between 80 and 90 percent of households owned television, refrigerators, and radios; and most had washing and sewing machines. workers enjoyed full employment, and under Brezhnev their incomes rose faster than those of middle-class professionals. few people owned cars, but public transportation, along with basic consumer goods, were inexpensive. although often of modest quietly, public education and health care were free. by the mid-1980s, the USSR’s large university system had produced over 15 million graduates in all fields, and the country could boast of real achievements in space exploration, in certain sectors of industry, and in the development of advanced weaponry of all types. finally, the Soviet Union’s military strength and its economic model made it an attractive ally for poor counties seeking alternative roads to development and to distance themselves from U.S. power.
These achievements show that central planning cannot simply be described as a failure inevitably doomed to collapse. - Why Socialism – Albert Einstein
- Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
- technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all.
- Women: The longest revolution – Juliet Mitchell
- anysociety will require some instituanalized and social recognition of personal relationships. but there is absolutely no reason why there should be only one legitimized form – and a multitude of unlegitimized experience. socialism should properly mean not the abolition of the family, but the diversification of the socially acknowledged relationships which re tooday forcibly and rigidly compressed into it.
- Couples living together or not living together, long-term unions with children, single parents brining up children, children cocialisted by conventional rather than biological parents, extended kin groups, etc. All these could be encompassed in a rage of institution which matched the free invention and variety of men and women.
- It would be illusory to try and specify these institutions. circumstantial accounts of the future are idealist and worse, static. Socialism will be a process of change, of becoming. a fixed image of the future is in the worst sense ahistorical; the form that socialism takes will depend on the prior type of capitalism and the nature of its collapse. As Marx wrote: “What (is progress) if not the absolute elaboration of (man’s) creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which makes the totality of this evolution – i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick – an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce himself in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is the absolute movement of becoming?”
- The existence of the Soviet system after 1945 had forced capital to make substantial concessions to labor in the form of collective bargaining, economic regulation, wage increases tied to rising productivity, and a generous welfare state.
- pressure unemployed workers to reenter the labor market by reducing unemployment and welfare expenditures
- for many of those who experienced it, Stalinism perverted the language and substance of socialism to such an extent that it lost much of its legitimacy. meanwhile, in the west, anticommunist socialists adopted an openly reformist course in which the goal of taming capitalism replaced that of overthrowing it.
- rich but unequal societies, such as the United States and Britain, have far higher rates of violent crime, drug usage, imprisionment, teenage pregnancy, and obesity; lower life expectancy; widespread anxiety, fear, and mental illness; and poorer school performance than countries with more equitably distributed wealth.
- As previously, this “regulation” serves the interests of financial capital but not the interests of the majority. the prevailing political line knows only one answer to the crisis: plunder the public coffers and increase the exploitation of the workers. it participates in this class struggle from above and does not shy away from pitting low earners against people reliant on social welfare contributions and both against immigrants and refugees.