Socialism: Growth of the Doctrine

The word begins in obscurity. Though various origins have been suggested, the
first use in French has commonly been ascribed to the Globe of February 13, 1832,
where the word socialistes was chosen to describe the followers of Saint-Simon.
(However, a recondite reference to socialism a year earlier, in the religious journal
Le semeur, has been uncovered.) Englishmen have claimed the honor of its
coinage, since the word “socialist” did appear in the London Cooperative
Magazine in 1826, although it was not until several years later that followers of
Robert Owen began describing themselves as socialists. Clearly, however, the term
was in the air, for it described a converging mood; and the first article on
“socialism” as an idea in opposition to “individualism” was written by Pierre
Leroux and appeared in 1835 in the Encyclopédic nouvelle, edited by Leroux and
Reynaud. The word recurred thereafter in various writings by Leroux.

By 1840 the term “socialism” was commonly used throughout Europe to connote
the doctrine that the ownership and control of the means of production–capital,
land, or property–should be held by the community as a whole and administered in
the interests of all. Within 120 years after the term became known in Europe, the
doctrine had spread so widely that one could find regimes in Sweden, Great
Britain, the Soviet Union, China, eastern Europe, Cuba, Algeria, Egypt, Syria,
Israel, Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Burma, and Ceylon calling themselves
socialist, and the labels Arab socialism, African socialism, and Asian socialism
used to describe the grafting of indigenous traditions onto ideological doctrine.
Rarely in the history of the world has an idea taken hold so deeply and dispersed so
quickly. One would have to go back to the spread of Islam, in the century and a
half following the death of Muhammad, to find a comparable phenomenon. And
the analogy is not without relevance, for one finds in both instances the promise of
a perfect community, the effort to create a solidarity larger than that of tribe or
class, a reaction to the meaninglessness of existing religious beliefs, a militant
proselytizing spirit, and leadership by new elites. In fact, the comparison with
Islam is meant to suggest that the spread of socialism cannot be wholly accounted
for in economic or class terms. The socialist movement has (or had) the character
of a secular religion, and only from this view can one explain its development and
internal vicissitudes.

This article will discuss the formulation of early socialist doctrine, the
differentiation of the socialist movement and the spread of socialism, the role of
socialist parties, and varieties of socialist belief since Marx.
Beginnings

The meaning of socialism, both logically and sociologically, can only be

understood as a contrast to individualism. The Enlightenment, English political
economy, the French Revolution, and the nascent industrialism had all combined to
produce what in 1826 a disciple of Saint-Simon called individualism. In this
doctrine, society existed to serve the individual and the pursuit of his own
satisfactions; natural rights inhered in each individual, and government was not to
regulate the economic life of society. Even the French Revolution, with all its
passion for virtue and its defense of popular sovereignty, fostered the idea of
economic individualism.

The attack on individualism drew its strength from a Catholic and a socialist point
of view. Bon aid and de Maistre, both theocrats, were militantly against “political
Protestantism” and asserted that man exists only for society. Particularly after the
revolution of 1830, many French writers of a conservative bent–Lamartine, Balzac,
Sainte- Beuve, Lammenais, and Tocqueville–expressed their alarm about I’odieux
individualisme and held it responsible for the disintegration that they felt was
occurring in their society. While the conservatives attacked the political philosophy
which they linked to the French Revolution, the socialists were appalled by the
economic doctrine of laissez-faire: this, Louis Blanc declared, was responsible for
man’s ruthless exploitation of man in modern industry. Under industrialization, the
socialists alleged, the individual had been torn from old moorings and had no
anchorage. Friedrich Engels, writing about London in The Condition of the
Working Class in England, described “the brutal indifference, the unfeeling
isolation of each in his private interest,” which people experienced in the British
capital, and stated that “the dissolution of mankind into monads of which each one
has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost
extreme.”

Against the atomization and “egoism” of society, as Saint-Simon called it, the
social critics proposed a new order based on association, harmony, altruism, and,
finally, the word that superseded all of these --- socialism. The idea of socialism
has a long history in the Utopian tradition; one can trace its roots back to the dream
of returning to a golden age of social harmony or to the radical theological creed
--- expressed most vividly by the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and the
Levellers and Diggers of the seventeenth --- of the equality of all men. But equality
alone is not the essence of socialism. The heart of socialism is to be found in the
idea of community and in the doctrine that men can realize their full potential and
achieve human emancipation in community. By this touchstone, the seeds of
modern socialism are to be found in Rousseau.

The theme of community is also the central theme of Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon,
and Marx. The first three sought to achieve it through the a priori elaboration of the
theoretical elements of community. Marx, on the other hand, sought to realize it
through the sphere of philosophy and what he held to be its material embodiment,
the proletariat. It is in the phrase “the realization of philosophy,” the end point of a
process of history, and not in any alleged distinction between Utopian and
scientific descriptions of socialism, that the difference between Marx and the
others lies.

Both Owen and Fourier sketched socialist Utopias that were enormously attractive
to individuals whose sensibility was repelled by the evils of industrialism. Each
wanted to establish a small agrarian community that science could make practical–
in effect, a withdrawal from society. Neither man had a sense of history or any
realistic awareness of the politics of his time.

Saint-Simon (“the last gentleman and the first socialist” of France) was a very
different sort, and the customary inclusion of him with Fourier and Owen as a
“Utopian” is actually a disservice to a formidable intellectual, a disservice initially
performed by Marx, who, although he derived many ideas from Saint-Simon,
failed to see the implications of much of the French writer’s thought. John Stuart
Mill, however, clearly recognized Saint-Simon’s contribution, remarking, in
Principles of Political Economy (1848), that in the few years of its public
promulgation, Saint-Simon’s thought had sowed the seeds of nearly all the socialist
tendencies. Durkheim considered Saint-Simon to be the father of socialism, as well
as of positivism, and devoted a book to his theories. Although in the Communist
Manifesto Marx cavalierly dismissed Saint-Simon as a Utopian, Engels in his later
years remarked that Saint-Simon’s “breadth of view” and “genius” contained in
embryo “all the ideas of later socialists which are not strictly economic.” For what
Saint-Simon presented is what we know today as the theory of industrial society,
and his discussion of the nature of solidarity outlines the theory of occupational
community which Durkheim later elaborated.

It is not too much to say, following Markham (1952), that the Saint-Simonians
were the most important single force behind the great economic expansion of the
Second Empire, particularly in the development of banks and railways. Enfantin,
the most bizarre of the Saint-Simonians, formed the society for planning the Suez
Canal. The brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire, who promoted the first French
railway from Paris to Saint-Germain, also founded the Credit Mobilier, the first
industrial investment bank in France, and the Compagnie Generate
Transatlantique, whose first ships were named after Saint-Simon and his followers.
In the hands of some of his more zealous followers, Saint-Simon’s doctrines were
made to seem ludicrous. Yet his own insight was considerable, and it was the
Saint-Simonians’ more diffuse (but no less intense) belief in Marxism which gave
that doctrine its command over so large a part of the world.

Marxism

The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels 1848) and the writing done in the thirty
years following it make up the corpus of work that later socialists drew upon and
associated with Marx. Relying on the political activities of Marx as well as on his
judgments, the diverse socialist factions sought to justify their own policies. Thus
Lenin and the Bolsheviks found in the address to the Communist League of March
1850, and in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx Engels 1875-1891),
the justification of their revolutionary and insurrectionary tactics. From Marx’s
activity in Cologne in the early part of 1849 and from his inaugural speech to the
Grand Council of the International Workingmen’s Association (the First
International), democratic socialists have argued that peaceful electoral change is
possible in the achievement of socialism.

Marx envisaged a two-stage development in industrial countries that presaged the

victory of socialism. The first was the democratic revolution; the second, the social
revolution. By the “democratic revolution” Marx meant the victory of the middle
classes over the remnants of the aristocracy and the clearing away of feudal
remains to achieve the successful development of capitalist production and of
political rights for all in the society. By the “social revolution” Marx meant the
economic victory of the proletariat, who will take over the ownership of the means
of production. From this point of view, England was the most advanced country
and, therefore, presumably the one most ripe for socialism. Measured on the same
yardstick, Germany, while developing industrially, was still lagging behind
because the middle classes had failed to complete the democratic revolution;
Russia was the least advanced, since the middle classes had failed to act at all,
whereas the German middle classes had at least done something in 1848. In the
socialist perspective, therefore, Russia was the country where a revolution was
most imminent, since it had lagged so far behind and was only beginning to catch
up economically. But before 1914 all orthodox Marxists expected this to be a
bourgeois, rather than a socialist, revolution, since the working class in Russia was
too small to sustain a socialist revolution and the economy was too “immature” for
socialism. Against the populists and the anarchists in Russia who argued that the
country could skip a social stage and usher in a socialism based in part on the old
village miry, or communal holdings, the early Russian Marxists --- Axelrod,
Plekhanov, and Lenin --- argued that socialism in Russia would have to await the
development of capitalism and the creation of a sizable working class. Only at the
beginning of the twentieth century did the thought occur to some Russian Marxists,
notably “Parvus” and Trotsky --- and later Lenin himself, when he was converted
to the idea --- that they could use the impending Russian revolution to wrest power
from the bourgeoisie and thus spark revolution in the advanced industrial
countries. Before 1917, no Marxists thought that socialism would be possible in
preindustrial or underdeveloped countries. The West was expected to lead the way.
What kind of socialism was supposed to emerge? What would society be like the
day after the revolution? And what were Marxists supposed to do while waiting for
the revolution? No political party can exist without a program that holds out the
promise of immediate benefits. But as Schumpeter has pointed out, anything
positive done or to be done in the vitiated atmosphere of capitalism was ipso facto
tainted. Marx and Engels discouraged programs that involved constructive policy
within the capitalist order because they smacked of bourgeois radicalism.
However, when they faced the problem in 1847, they resolutely cut the Gordian
knot. As Schumpeter put it: “The Communist Manifesto quite illogically lists a
number of immediate objects of socialist policy, simply laying the socialist barge
alongside the liberal liner”.

The problem was to recur constantly throughout the political history of most of the
European socialist parties. Should one make immediate demands or not? This issue
was fought out, for example, within the American Socialist party at the turn of the
century; and it resulted in such factions as the Reformists, and the Impossibilists,
who declared themselves against any such program on the ground that it would
dilute the revolutionary ardor of the masses. More important, the problem of
reforms, and of what kind of reforms, had to be confronted by the various socialist
parties of Europe in the 1930s --- such as the British Labour party, the German
Social Democratic party, and the French Socialist party --- when they entered the
government and even took over sole responsibility for running it in a capitalist
society. As we shall see, many of these governments and countries foundered when
the socialist governments discovered, for example, that they had no solution for the
problem of unemployment under capitalism. The slogan “Socialism or Capitalism”
had left them unprepared for the exigencies of the intermediate period. This is
always the dilemma of social movements that live in a world but are not of it.
Gotha and Erfurt

Marx did, of course, distinguish between socialism and communism, in the sense
that the first is a transitional period and the second the undefined realm of man’s
freedom. For this aspect of the idea of socialism, two documents are crucial --- the
Gotha Programme and the Erfurt Program, two doctrinal statements of the German
Social Democratic party.

In 1875, two German socialist parties, one dominated by followers of Ferdinand

Lassalle, the other by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, nominal followers of
Marx, met in Gotha to create a unified socialist party. The program they adopted
there was in the main a product of Lassallean doctrine, and in a private
communication Marx wrote a searing critique of it. In 1891, the German Social
Democratic party adopted the so-called Erfurt Program (named for the city where
the party congress was held), which was written principally by Karl Kautsky,
under the direct supervision of Engels; Engels then published the Critique for its
historic interest, feeling that the Erfurt Program went beyond the criticism Marx
had made of the Gotha document. But the Critique, in its tone and implications,
was more revolutionary and radical than the Erfurt Program, and, predictably, the
left-wingers in the socialist movement, beginning with Lenin, formulated their
program from the Critique. It was in the Critique that Marx used the phrase
“revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” which after 1917 provoked far more
recriminatory debates between communists and socialists than any other words he
wrote. The communists took it as a justification of the suppression of all political
parties other than the true proletarian party under Soviet rule. The socialists
insisted that the phrase applied only to temporary and special situations until a
truly democratic state could be organized, and was nugatory in those situations
where a peaceful transition to socialism, through the electoral process, was
possible.

The inflammatory phrase does not appear in the Erfurt Program, nor does any
statement of immediate aims or political demands. The program was intended as a
full-fledged analysis of the tendencies of capitalism, from a Marxian point of view,
and as a general discussion of the “cooperative commonwealth” of the future. The
program assumes the recurrent Marxist theme: “Few things are . . . more childish
than to demand of the socialist that he draw a picture of the commonwealth which
he strives for. . . . Never yet in the history of mankind has it happened that a
revolutionary party was able to foresee, let alone determine, the forms of the new
social order which it strove to usher in”.
On the forms of organization, the managerial problems of a socialist regime ---
how orders are to be given, who will give them, which industries are to be
managed by workers directly, which by state enterprises; in short, the practical
problems that the Soviet state faced after the communists had assumed power ---
the program is completely silent.

Kautsky, who inherited Engels’ mantle as the leading Marxist theoretician, was
prompted only once to deal with the problem of the organization of production in a
socialist society (but not with the structure of authority with in an enterprise). In
some lectures delivered and published in 1902 as The Social Revolution, he
declared simply that the organization of production would follow the scope of the
market.

For example, gas lighting is clearly a municipal business. The development of

electric lighting and the transformation of power in mountainous regions makes the
nationalization of water power necessary. This operates also to transform
illumination from a municipal to a national business. Again the business of the
shoemaker was formerly confined to the local market. The shoe factory does not
supply simply the community, but the whole nation, with its production, and is ripe
not for communalization, but for nationalization. The same is true of sugar
factories, breweries, etc.

In fact, when Kautsky had finished with his itemization (transportation, railroads,
steamships, mines, forests, iron foundries, machine manufactures), it was clear that
almost all industries would be nationalized in the “proletarian regime.”

If one goes beyond these pedestrian problems, however, it is interesting that the
Erfurt Program ends, curiously enough, on a note reminiscent of the young Marx
and of that strain in German romanticism which looked back to the glory of
Greece.

The blessed harmonious culture, which appeared only once in the history of
mankind and was then the privilege of a small body of select aristocrats, will
become the common property of all civilized nations. What slaves were to the
ancient Athenians, machinery will be to modern man. Man will feel all the
elevating influences that flow from freedom from productive toil, without being
poisoned by the evil influences which, through chattel slavery, finally undermined
the Athenian aristocracy. And as the modern means of science and art are vastly
superior to those of two thousand years ago, and the civilization of today
overshadows that of the little land of Greece, so will the socialist commonwealth in
moral greatness and material well-being the most glorious society that history has
thus far known.

Differentiation of the Movement

The period from 1870 onward in western Europe saw the swift growth of
industrialization and urbanization, the two crucial elements of modern society.
This expansion of industrial power and of economic growth and wealth, which was
due largely to two technological innovations --- the improvement of steel
metallurgy and the application of electrical energy to factory, city, and home ---
seemed to confirm a number of Marx’s predictions regarding the development of
capitalism.

Capitalism was undergoing remarkable changes. The expansion of the joint stock
company (the prototype of the modern corporation) was forcing a separation of
ownership and management, which in many areas resulted in the industrial
manager’s taking the place of the capitalist as the central person of the
organization, and the large-scale enterprise began employing hundreds and even
thousands of workers under a single roof. More important, the “amalgamation”
movements of the 1880s and 1890s --- the rise of trusts, cartels, and monopolies ---
and the consequent elimination of hundreds of smaller businesses seemed to bear
out Marx’s predictions about the centralization of capital and the socializing of the
processes of production.

Volume 1 of Capital was published in 1867, and the subsequent expansion of the
volume, along with its rapid translation into many languages, gave Marx, hither to
a neglected and cantankerous emigre in London, an authority in the international
socialist movement, particularly in its German branch, which he had never had
before. With the assiduous publication and spread of Marx’s works by the growing
socialist movements, Marxism suddenly became a vogue as no other socialist
doctrine had ever been; and with the proliferation of followers and propagandists
who in newspapers, pamphlets, and street meetings proselytized the simplified
works of Marx, the doctrine itself assumed a canonical status that was
unprecedented in the history of secular writing.

The Second International

In 1889 almost four hundred delegates from twenty different countries (three-
fourths of them from Germany and France)met in Paris to create a new
International, the Second International of socialist parties. The so-called First
International, the International Working-men’s Association, was a loose
confederation of small political and trade union groups, rather than parties, that had
been organized in 1864. Although Marx was not the initiator of the First
International, he quickly became its dominant intellectual figure, supplanting
Mazzini, who had been asked to write its first draft program. The International
broke up in 1872, when Marx and the anarchist leader Bakunin quarreled; though
the anarchists were expelled, Marx had the International’s center moved to New
York, preferring to bury it rather than allow some other group to capture it. The
First International was formally dissolved in Philadelphia in 1876.

More than any other step, the founding of the Second International symbolized the
swift rise of Marxist socialism in Europe. It was only 14 years earlier, in 1875, that
the German Social Democratic party, the first socialist party in Europe, had been
formed. In the next dozen years or so, socialist parties were organized in France,
Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden. In Russia in 1883, the year
of Marx’s death, Georgii Plekhanov organized the first political group of Russian
Marxists. About the same time, in England, M. H. Hyndman, the son of an
aristocrat, organized the Social Democratic Federation, which, while calling itself
Marxist, never acquired more than a small sectarian following; and a quixotic band
of reformers organized the Fabian Society (the name alluded to the Roman general
Fabius Cunctater --- Fabius the Delayer --- who was known for his patient, waiting
tactics against Hannibal). In 1889, the year the Second International was founded,
the historic Fabian Essays in Socialism was issued, with chapters by George
Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Annie Besant. The book eventually sold two
million copies, and laid the intellectual foundations of the British Labour Party and
of Labour governments for the next sixty years.

Socialist Parties

By 1914, socialism had become the single most important political force on the
Continent. In the 1912 Reichstag elections, the German Social Democrats amassed
4. 5 million votes (over 30 per cent of the total) and 110 seats in the parliament,
making it the largest single party in Germany. In France one of the socialist
groups, the SFIO, garnered 1. 4 million votes and 103 seats in the Chamber of
Deputies. In Italy the socialists held over seventy seats in the parliament, and
efforts were made to invite the party, or at least its right wing, into the government.
But the rise of the socialist parties was not only a simple matter of winning large
numbers of votes, primarily among the working class. Within a new and growing
system of universal political suffrage, it transformed the nature of the party system
and the political structure of each country.
The political party of the first half of the nineteenth century was usually a loose
association of “notables,” in Max Weber’s terminology, invariably based on
individual constituencies or districts, and often with little responsibility to an
electorate. With the growing democratization of the franchise in England,
associations were formed in each district; and the caucus system, developed in
1868, enabled the Liberals to begin building local machines with full-time election
workers. Yet mass membership was infrequent, and the parties of England, as well
as the United States, depended for their finances on wealthy contributors. What the
socialists did, particularly in Germany, was to introduce the disciplined and
centralized mass party, with formal machinery for enrollment, regular payment of
dues, a system of subscription to party newspapers and magazines, and, often,
specified requirements of party activity. At its pre-war peak, the German Social
Democratic party had a million members and an annual budget of nearly two
million marks.

But the socialist movement did more than build the first mass political party. It
tried, in most of the European countries and to a lesser extent in England, to build a
complete working-class culture, a social world of its own, independent of the
official culture of the society. The German socialist movement, the model for all
other socialist parties, built large consumer cooperatives (with a large wholesale
organization and its own processing plants) as well as housing developments. By
the 1890s there were national organizations of workers’ athletic societies, workers’
bicycling clubs, and workers’ hiking clubs. In time, the workers’ recreational and
cultural movement extended into all fields from chess to the theater, where a strong
Volksbuhne (people’s stage) was created. A working-class child could begin life in
a socialist creche, join a socialist youth movement, go to a socialist summer camp,
hike with the socialist Wandervögel, sing in a workers’ chorus, and be buried by a
socialist burial society in a socialist cemetery.

If the idea of proletarian mountain climbing or socialist chess playing invites

ridicule, one must see, as Carl Landauer (1959) points out, that the workers had
been “excluded” from almost all accepted society, and they responded by creating
their own.

Revisionism and Reformism

The socialist movements at the turn of the century may have felt sure about
inheriting the future, but there was considerable uncertainty as to when and how
that inheritance would be realized. Marx, in all his writings, had never been
specific about the road to power. After 1850 he felt that the day of the barricades
was finished, not only for military reasons but also because bourgeois society
would stabilize itself for a long time to come. Against this view, apocalyptic hopes
occasionally flared up, as during the Paris Commune. Yet Marx never took a
dogmatic view as to any single course which the socialist movement would
necessarily have to follow. In several instances, he felt that socialism might be
achieved peacefully in the Western countries, where democratic institutions were
being established. But he never ruled out the possibility of, and even the need for,
violence, should the occasion demand it. Marx and Engels, throughout their
lifetimes, insisted simply on the necessity of a revolution, by which they, as well as
Kautsky, who became the leading spokesman for orthodox Marxism after the
1890s, meant a complete overturn of society once the socialists were in power—
the abolition of private property, the end of social privilege, the breaking of The
political and police power of the old ruling classes.

But the question whether this aim could be achieved by peaceful means was never
settled. And this ambiguity was responsible for the major doctrinal conflicts that
preoccupied the socialist movements from 1890 to 1914.

The major issues had to do with the themes of revisionism and reformism.
Although their belief in socialism was never shaken, some individuals were
skeptical that capitalist society was actually heading in the direction Marx had
predicted. The standard of living was evidently rising rather than falling, and
though some of the old middle class was disappearing, an emerging class of white-
collar workers was taking its place. In many countries this new class did not
wholly identify itself with the manual workers (with whom socialism was
identified) or with the socialist parties. Most of all, the socialists’ increasing
success in parliament posed practical problems, such as entering the cabinets in
coalition with other parties (and trying to put through social legislation rather than
just waiting for capitalism to fall) and making alliances with nonworking-class
parties such as the Liberals in England, the Catholic Center in Germany, or the
Radical party in France. As James Joll has neatly put it: “By the end of the
nineteenth century, no Socialist party could escape the difficulties presented by its
own existence as a mass party, forced, for the moment at least, to function with in a
political system which at the same time it was seeking to destroy”.

Germany. The problem was especially great in Germany, whose Social Democratic
party was the most theoretically intransigent, and it was first posed by Eduard
Bernstein, who was the editor of the party journal and was chosen by Engels to be
one of his literary executors. In 1899, Bernstein wrote Die Voraussetzungen des
Sozialismus unddie Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Presuppositions of
Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy), which triggered the debate. He
argued, in effect, that the party should recognize the new changes in industrial
society and declare itself to be what it was actually becoming --- a party principally
concerned with social reform. [See the biography ofBernstein. ]

Although Bernstein’s arguments had some immediate political implications, the

debate was conducted largely on a theoretical level. There were important doctrinal
and historical reasons for this. The German movement had always set great store in
theory as the guide to the future; and the discussion of theory–especially in a party
isolated from the academic world—was in Germany a matter of status and prestige.
But the debate on theory had important psychological roots as well. Although
Marx had alway stried to shape the course of the German socialist movement, his
influence during most of his life was virtually nil. The first German Workers party
was organized in 1863 by Lassalle, whose dandified manners andaristocratic
pretensions infuriated Marx. The constitutional struggle between Bismarck and the
liberal opposition dominated The political life of Prussia at the time; and to Marx
and Engels, observing the situation from England, this struggle was an outward
expression of the conflict between the historic forces of aristocratic feudalism and
bourgeois capitalism. They therefore urged the new German Workers party “to
drivethe ’revolutionary’ Liberals forward against the government, preparing at the
same time to lead the proletariat in its turn against the victorious forces of the
bourgeoisie once the feudal system had succumbed to theironslaught” (Morgan
1965, p. 8). But Lassalle and his followers wereconvinced that Prussian liberalism
had no such revolutionary propensitiesand that the quickest way for the workers to
increase their influence wasto join Bismarck’s campaign against his liberal
opponents, hoping to win in return certain socialist demands–freedom of the press
and associationand, above all, manhood suffrage, which Lassalle and his followers
felt was necessary to any further advance. Lassalle, under the influence of Louis
Blanc, also hoped that the state would finance cooperative factories so that the
workers could become their own employees and overcome the"iron law of wages”
which kept them impoverished under capitalism. Lassalle, a Hegelian, believed
that the state should rule society; and socialism, with state ownership of factories,
was the embodiment of the ideal of the state. Against Lassalle (and his successor J.
B. Schweitzer), the socialists Liebknecht and Bebel organized a rival socialist
party, known as theEisenachers. Nominally Marxist, the Eisenachers were
primarily ananti-Prussian party, and though they adopted the program of the
International Workingmen’s Association, they did so largely for tactical reasons
against the Lassalleans. In practice they operated as a broad"people’s party.” The
war of 1870 and the subsequent unification ofGermany dissolved most of the
issues between the two factions.
The debate remained on a theoretical plane for good practical reasons. Reformism–
which assumed that effective parliamentary power could beobtained–was
impossible in Germany; for while imperial Germany had a parliamentary system,
decisive power was actually in the hands of the emperor. Any chancellor needed
the Reichstag’s approval for legislationand for the budget, but a chancellor could
be replaced only if he lost the confidence of the emperor. The chancellor, in fact,
was responsible not to the Reichstag but to the crown. The government, though
constitutional in form, was in fact autocratic. And while social democracy was
growing inparliamentary strength, there was no corresponding growth in the
powers of parliament.
Thus The political system barred the Social Democrats from any legitimatehopes
of winning power through parliamentary means and reinforced the rhetoric of
revolutionary intransigence. The “fatal mistake,” as Schumpeter called it, was
Bismarck’s. In a Machiavellian stratagem, he introduced universal suffrage in the
federal empire after 1871, in thehope of winning the peasant votes, and to some
extent those of the workers, against the urban middle classes. When the socialist
vote began to increase, Bismarck introduced restrictive legislation against the
socialists as a party, while introducing a comprehensive set of social welfare
measures in order to win the loyalty of the workers. The maneuverfailed. When the
antisocialist laws lapsed in 1890, the socialists emerged stronger than ever, and
their experiences reinforced their antagonistic temper and revolutionary rhetoric.
By the turn of the century, and the reafter, the party controlled largemunicipal
administrations, was supported by a powerful trade union movement, and had a
vast bureaucracy of its own. The party’s ideology nolonger corresponded to its
sociological reality (Michels 1911), but, because The political system did not allow
the party to discard it srevolutionary rhetoric, the ideology remained intact.
Thus, when Kautsky came to answer Bernstein, he couched his polemic in the
language of Marxist scholasticism. In practical fact, the situation confronting the
Social Democratic party of Germany —as well as the socialist parties of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and czarist Russia—was the failure of the bourgeoisie,
as far back as 1848, to complete their middleclass political revolution and
eliminate the structures of monarchy and aristocratic rule. But Kaut sky offered no
program to deal with this problem other than the rhetorical formula of revolution
and the relentless march of history which would sharpen the crises of capitalism.
When in 1918 all three empires—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia—
collapsed, the socialist parties in these and other countries alladopted widely
varying courses. Although capitalism by the turn of the century had become the
predominant economic form of Western society, political structures and cultural
traditions varied widely from one country to another. Paradoxical as it seems in
Marxist terms, the culturalelements, more than the economic conditions in each
country, account forthe varying forms the socialist movement took. As Schumpeter
remarked, every country had its own socialism.
England. In Germany a rigid class structure, reinforced by a militaristiccode of
honor, excluded the workers from society and led to a counterstiffness of doctrinal
Marxist orthodoxy. In Great Britain, by contrast, the intelligence of an old gentry
class, a deep tradition of liberty andof political rights, the lack of a militaristic
tradition and even of a standing army, the long-established supremacy of
Parliament over the monarchy, and the deep-rooted empirical conception of
politics, which rendered ideological “all-or-none” terms distasteful—all made for a
civil polity, one that accepted the existence of the socialist movement as a
legitimate part of British society.
The British Labour party came in to being in order to realize the rights of the
working class in the society. The exemplar of peaceful–and piecemeal—social
change, it was never Marxist, though it was based on strong class feeling and class
loyalty. The sources of this position are three fold: There was, first, the deep and
persistent strain of nonconformist Christian evangelism, which saw equality as a
moralim perative. (The writings of R. H. Tawney, principally his books Equality
[1931] and The Acquisitive Society [1920], which helped to shape the English
socialist outlook, reflect this evangelism. ) There was, second, the influence of the
Fabians, principally Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who, representing one aspect of
the Benthamite tradition, were social engineers for whom socialism was a tidy
answer to the waste and disorder of the capitalist world. And third, there was the
large trade union movement, which saw in the Labour party a means of influencing
the course of favorable legislation.
Where as the Continental socialist parties participated actively in the affairs of the
Second International, the British Labour party, before World War i, remained
insular and rarely tried to impose its influence, asthe Germans did, on other
socialist parties. Much of this was due to the general isolation of the British from
Continental social thought (on erarely encounters a discussion of “the state” in
English political theory), which in turn has to do with the British temperament. As
G. D. H. Cole, who knew Webb well, wrote:
Sidney Webb’s first thought in dealing with any question he took up was to find an
administratively workable solution; and apart from a very fewessentially simple
ideas–he did not trouble himself much about underlying philosophy. He was fully
convinced that the trend of events in the modern world was towards Socialism, and
that this trend would continue: so tha the saw no need to put himself into
revolutionary opposition to the main course of development. . . . He had what is
some times called a “civilservice” mind–that is, a habit of translating every idea
into terms of them achinery needed to give it effect. . . . He was, however,
impatient of dreamers, and uninterested in theories which he could not turn into
practical schemes. (Cole 1953-1960, vol. 3, part 1, p. 210)
H. G. Wells summed up still another side of British socialism when he left the
Fabian Society after a personal falling-out with Shaw and the Webbs. He
caricatured all of them savagely in his novel The New Machiavelli. “Hersoul was
bony,” he wrote of the character named Altiora Bailey (Beatrice Webb). “If they
[Altiora and her husband] had the universe in hand I know they would take down
all the trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.
Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and seacliffs a great mistake.” The root
image of their world, Wells wrote, was"an organized state as confident and
powerful as modern science. . . . Individualism meant muddle, meant a crowd of
separate undisciplined little people all obstinately doing things jarringly each one
in his own way. . . . The organized state would end muddle forever” (Wells [1910]
1927, p. 193).
The Webbs spent most of their lives making detailed empirical inquiriesinto
problems of social welfare and administration. While Marxism isusually associated
with the idea of planning, Marx, as we have seen, never drew any specific blue
print of a planned society. Nor did the German Social Democrats, despite their
large parliamentary represervation, even study industrial organization and indicate
what theymight do if they came into power. The Webbs and the Fabians, however,
issued several hundred tracts providing detailed expositions of Labour thinking on
both the local and the national levels. One can appreciate the thorough going detail
of Fabian research from a series of studies(conducted between 1898 and 1901)
about the municipalization of different services—alcohol traffic, milk supply,
pawnshops, slaughter houses, bakeries, hospitals, and fire insurance (see Cole
1953-1960, vol. 3, part1, pp. 215-216). In 1909, the Webbs’s minority report on
the operation ofthe poor laws set out in comprehensive detail the conception and
policy ofthe welfare state (Great Britain . . . 1909). Later studies dealt with the
general problems of the organization and control of industry. [See thebiography
ofWebb, Sidney and Beatrice. ]
The Fabians operated primarily as an elite group and never sought a large
membership. Their influence was felt through their published ideas, their research,
and their propaganda. Before World War i, the Fabians were aconstituent group in
the Labour party; but in keeping with their avowed tactic of permeating all
institutions of society that had the power toinfluence policy the civil service, the
professions, business groups, and local government–they drew upon all groups,
non socialist as well associalist, for help. After 1918, when the British Labour
party adopted a new constitution and accepted as its basic program a Fabian policy
statement drafted by Sidney Webb, relations between the Fabian Society and the
Labour party became closer.
The Labour party has been unique among socialist parties, not only because of its
open emphas is on “gradualism” but also because of its structure. Unlike the
Continental socialist parties, based on individual membership, the British Labour
party originated as a federation of unions and constituent socialist societies, and its
funds were raised principally through levies on the union members. Until 1918
individuals could notbecome members directly. They became affiliated with the
Labour part yeither through membership in the Independent Labour party, the
Fabian Society, or the trade unions, and policy was worked out in negotiations
between these organizations. Candidates were nominated by agreement between
the unions and affiliates, on a roughly proportional basis. Theindividuals elected to
Parliament then formed the parliamentary Labour party.
After 1918 the membership system was changed in order to organize local Labour
parties directly in each constituency, but the federated structure remained. The
formulation of policy has the refore been a complicated affair. Since the trade
unions have traditionally constituted the largest group in the party and vote en bloc
in the Labour party conventions, the annual Trades Union Congress is an important
arena for adopting resolutions. The annual Labourparty conference of unions,
affiliates (such as the consumer-cooperative movement), and local constituency
parties sets policy. But this policy is only morally binding on the parliamentary
Labour party. In office, the Labour party is responsible only to the parliamentary
party, not to the Labour party as a whole. In this crucial respect, once again, the
BritishLabour party is shaped by the structure of British politics and not by
theconventional theories of socialist organization.
France. In England, the transition to a modern industrial society wasaccomplished
peacefully by the economic, and to some extent social, blending of the rising
plutocratic groups with the gentry, while a set ofpolitical compromises brought all
sections of the country, including theworking class, into the society. In Germany,
the older feudal elements, using the state, had created powerful industries and
maintained apolitical hegemony over the subordinated middle class. The working
class, excluded socially, had built its own institutions, but paradoxically thesevery
institutions had facilitated the integration of the workers into the society.
France lacked any such unifying features. Economically, it was atwo-sector society
with a large peasant and artisan class alongside amodern industrial economy.
Politically the feudal structure had beenbroken, but the bourgeois parties were
never able to establish theirunambiguous control; the unstable balance of forces
periodically openedthe way to an adventurer attempting to seize power. The
working classitself was split.
In Germany and England, the trade unions were part of the organized socialist
movement because they hoped to achieve most of their a imsthrough political
concessions by the government rather than through direct economic bargaining.
But in France, the trade unions were completely independent of the socialist
parties. One wing, the syndicalists, basedtheir gospel on Proudhon’s anti-
authoritarian and antipolitical ideas, and their anti-parliamentary bias on the
betrayals of the 1848 revolution and the Commune. The French form of union
organization, the Bourses deTravail, which stressed the local community of all
trades rather than the nation wide organization of one industry or craft, expressed
the tendency to create a new society of labor rather than to concentrate on wages
and working conditions. The other wing was that of “politicalsocialism,” but here,
too, many of the temperamental weaknesses of Frenchpolitics–its tendentiousness,
its hyperbolic rhetoric, and itsinstability–were apparent in the French socialist
movement.
In 1896, there were no fewer than six national socialist parties inFrance, each
usually more interested in fighting the others than infighting the opposition. By
1905, the six had been reduced to two nationalparties, one led by Jules Guesde,
who was the spokesman for orthodox Marxism and whose following was chiefly in
the industrial north, and the other by Jean Jaures, a former professor of philosophy
and a renownedorator–a humanist repelled by the aridities of Marxist dogma–
whosefollowing was among teachers, skilled workers, and intellectuals attractedto
the idea of ethical socialism.
Under the pressure of the Socialist International, the two parties made anuneasy
union, but the factions were still unable to agree on whether toenter coalition
governments headed by bourgeois parties. The Frenchparliamentary system, with
its emphasis on multiparties, made it difficult for any single party to assume power.
The art of government was the art ofcoalition. As socialist parliamentary strength
rapidly increased, the socialists faced the problem of silently abstaining, thereby
allowing rightist cabinets to govern, or entering center-left coalitions. Those
whoopposed coalitions argued that the assumption of governmental responsibility
would weaken the militancy of the workers and would forcethe party to agree to
non-socialist programs. Those who favored coalition, originally named the
Possibilists, argued that in government, socialistscould more easily defend the
republic against reactionary forces–and atthe same time help pave the way to
socialism.
Syndicalism. If the British Labour party and Fabian gradualism to gether represent
one end of the socialist continuum, revolutionary syndicalism, with its faith in
direct action and the general strike, represents the other. The word “syndicalism”
simply meant “unionism,” but in the period preceding World War i it connoted an
antiparliamen-tary, antire formist tendency deeply rooted in the Proudhon a
narchist, antipolitical, antiauthoritarian tradition.
Revolutionary syndicalism was primarily a pheno men on of the Latin countries–
France, Italy, and Spain–though syndicalist elements made astrong showing in the
British labor movement among the seamen and the transport workers, and in the
United States among the western miners and loggers of the Industrial Workers of
the World ( “Wobblies” ). Syndicalism never took hold in central Europe, the
heartland of orthodox Marxism.
Marx and Engels had taught their followers to regard syndicalist tendencies as an
expression of backwardness and immaturity, as a passing phase in the development
of industrialism which would disappear after the emergence of the largescale
factory system and a modern industrial proletariat. What ever the validity of that
appraisal, syndicalism as itemerged in France was not only a despairing rebellion
against industrial capitalism but, in its vision of the future, a protest against the
destruction of free trade unionism under an authoritarian state socialism.
This aspect of syndicalism was formulated by Fernand Pelloutier, a journalist who
had been active in the various Marxist movements in France. Disillusioned with
The political parties, which were preoccupied withobtaining office and power,
Pelloutier felt that the only protection workers could have against arbitrary
managerial power–either innationalized industries or in capitalist enterprises—
would be workers’control of industry.
Syndicalism was important less as a doctrine for reorganizing society than as an
attitude. It was hostile to parliamentary methods—and in 1905 the French trade
union movement, in the famous Charter of Amiens, laid down the principle of
strict independence from all political party involvement. Its in junction has been so
strong that, unlike every other European trade union official, no French union
secretary was allowed to take a parliamentary seat. The charter proclaimed the
general strike as the instrument of revolution, a single collective action where by
the entire working class, by laying down its tools, could halt the operations of
industry and in that “transforming moment” take power. Further, the charter
glorified spontaneity rather than organization; and it emphasized the role of a
conscious minority, an elite of revolutionary proletarians whose task it would be to
lead an aroused working class into revolution aryaction. [SeeSyndicalismand the
biography ofSorel. ]
Guild socialism
The syndicalist emphasis on workers’ control has hadre current appeal in
workingclass and radical movements. In Great Britain, where the “medievalist
socialism” of William Morris and John Ruskin, firmly against industrialism and
statism, caught on for a time, syndicalist ideas had a strange efflorescence before
World War i in the"guild socialism” of A. R. Orage and G. D. H. Cole. [See the
biography ofCole, G. D. H. ]
The guild socialists, reacting against the administrative socialism of theFabians,
blueprinted a decentralized socialist society in greater detail than any other
socialist movement had. Politically, the guild state was to be a bicameral body–the
one a geographical parliament based on local constituencies, the other a
“functional” body made up of representatives of each trade or industry. The
consumer, through Parliament, was to set the goals of production(e. g. , the
division between consumption and investment, the priorities of development); the
Council of Guild Representatives, the producers, was to be responsible for the
efficient management of industry. Each guild was tobe a self-governing body,
based on local councils, and was to set its ownconditions of work. Each guild
would receive money in proportion to its membership, but would pay wages in
accordance with its own rules–either inequal shares or in differentials according to
skill. Thus a national political and economic planning system was combined with
the idea of cooperative workshops.
Russian populism
The course of world politics since 1917 has been dominated by the long shadow
and the doctrinal pronouncements of VladimirIl’ich Ul’ianov. Before 1914,
however, Lenin played only a small role in the affairs of international socialism.
He was a member, after 1905, of the bureau (executive committee) of the Second
International, one of 69 persons representing 23 member countries. He was known
personally to the leading figures of the socialist movement, but his works, not
yettranslated, were little known; and as an exile representing one of several fiercely
quarrelsome sects, he carried little weight in the International.
Moreover, none of the prominent the oreticians of Marxism expected a socialist
revolution in Russia: there was only a small industrial proletariat, and the country
was still backward and feudal. In accordance with the theory of “necessary” stages
of social development which Georgii Plekhanov (1883) had posited in founding the
Marxist movement in Russia, this vast country still had to pass through the stage of
capitalism, and the bourgeois middleclass democratic revolution was still to come.
Once Russia could be led along the lines of Western social development, then
political freedom, trade union freedom, and legal socialist activity wouldbe
achieved; after the democratic revolution, which was the role of the middle classes,
would come the social revolution, in the more distantfuture. In effect, Russia was
still “before 1848.”
Yet the revolution did occur and was shaped by certain peculiar features of Russian
social history. Before socialism, the dominant radical tradition in Russia had been
populism, a doctrine associated in large measure withthat remarkable exile
Alexander Herzen. Herzen saw in the peasant communes the seeds of a future
cooperative society that could by pass the harsh and disruptive effects of
capitalism. From London, Herzen kept alive the liberal spirit of the Russian in
telligentsia through his magazine Kolokol (The Bell), and in his home were to be
found the major exiles from Russia.
The populism preached by Herzen idealized the peasantry and asserted, in almost
mystic fashion, that the peasant was the source of wisdom and virtue. In the
summer of 1873, roused by the appeal of Mikhail Bakunin, hundreds of students
went to the countryside to “go to the people” androuse them to action. Students
disguised as workmen wandered the country side, preaching revolution, but the
peasantry, suspicious of their would—be saviors, simply turned them over to the
police.
The episode was important in the history of populism, and its lesson was drawn
most starkly by Peter Tkachev, one of the theorists of Russian populism. Insisting
that the peasants as a mass the people—were incapable of revolutionary
creativeness and that only a “conscious minority” the intelligentsia—could make
the revolution, Tkachev sketched the kind of organization that would be necessary.
It would have to be, he argued, aconspiratorial one, based on the principles of
centralization of power and decentralization of functions. And it would have to be
led by the intelligent sia. These two the mesthe need for compact organization and
the role of a revolutionary elite—were to bear fruit some twenty years later in the
thinking of Lenin [see the biography ofLenin].
Socialism between the world wars
The war that had begun in the summer of 1914 not only brought revolution to
Russia; it signaled the collapse of international socialism. For several years the
heat and lightning of war had flashed in Europe, and each time the international
socialist movement had proclaimed itsreadiness to strike in order to prevent
international conflagration. It sgrowing power seemed to assure a new foundation
for the maintenance of peace. Yet in 1914, with very little dissent, the socialist
parties of Germany, Austria, and France all voted to support their governments in
the war. The German Social Democrats, the most powerful socialist party in the
world, had in the past publicly dissociated them selves from the German state. And
the Kaiser, in turn, had once called them “fellows without acountry.” Now, with
only one dissenting vote, the parliamentary party gave full support to the budgetary
war credits the government requested. There were tiresome quotations from Marx
in supportof the action: Marx had supported the principle of nationality; Marx
hadonce proposed support of Germany in a war against Russia; and in 1891 Engels
had said that in such a war Germany would be fighting for itsnational existence.
Once scripture was being cited, the French party hadits own rationalizations,
heavily laden with quotations from Marx. So did the Austrians. The fact remained
that when the crisis finally came, nationalism as an emotional idea proved to be
stronger than class, and international solidarity proved to be a myth. The
International was at anend.
Polarization of belief
The period between the two world wars saw Europetorn apart by the conflicting
ideologies of communism and fascism. In theprocess, democracy and the socialist
movement were the losers. Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain came under fascist
or authoritarianleadership. Even earlier, right-wing dictatorships took over
Portugal, Hungary, and Rumania. Belgium and France were threatened by strong
fascistmovements. Only Great Britain and the Scandinavian countries
wererelatively free of these storms, though a small fascist group arose inEngland.
The sociological reasons for these variations in fortune will bediscussed in this
section.
The October Revolution in Russia had brought before the European
socialistmovement the insurrectionary idea of the seizure of power. For more
thanforty years the idea had been an abstraction to the socialist movement. Lulled
by the “inevit-ablism” preached by Engels and by the steady growthof electoral
success, the socialist movements had assumed that at somedistant time it might yet
be necessary to seize, or at least to maintain, power that had been established
legally; but no one took the ideaseriously. Even inside Russia the idea, while
fiercely debated, had an airof mimetic combat. Plekhanov had argued that men
could act only insofar associal conditions allowed them to do so, i. e. , only within
the limits ofthe “laws” of history. But Lenin had apparently demonstrated the
primacyof “will,” at least within disorganized situations wherein a small groupof
determined men, acting skillfully and in disciplined fashion, could seize power.
Within Marxian theory there were actually three successive versions of thetheory
of taking power. The first, later presented in Lenin’s “What Is toBe Done?” (1902),
conceived of the proletariat as directed by a smallgroup of professional
revolutionaries drawn from the middle-classintelligent- sia; the working class
would support the middle-class revolution in thefaith that there would be a second
round wherein the proletariat–supportedin Germany by a peasant revolt–could take
over. But this conception passedwith the end of the revolutionary wave of 1848-
1850; and asindustrialization and a new appraisal of the nature of factory life and
the role of the proletariat emerged, a second version appeared. Now theemphasis
was placed on the building of mass political parties led byworkers who had
achieved theoretical competence–typified in Germany byBebel, who had been a
carpenter, and in England by Keir Hardie, who was aminer. It was now felt that
socialism need not come throughinsurrectionary tactics or coups led by small
bands of professionalrevolutionaries, but peacefully, through parliamentary means
or evensimply in a show of strength.
After 1905 a few socialist theorists had argued that a new stage wasemerging.
These included Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish-Jewish intellectual withdoctorates in
philosophy and jurisprudence; Herman Gorter; AntonPannekoek, a Dutch
astronomer; and A. L. Helfand, a Russian-born economistwho wrote under the
name Parvus. Each of these socialists was influencedby developments in the
Western labor movements rather than by events inRussia. In her book The
Accumulation of Capital (1913), Luxemburg tried toextend Marx’s economic
doctrines by arguing that after a phase ofimperialism, in which capitalists would
seek to export capital surpluses, the capitalist system must inevitably break down
and create a crisis. [See the biography ofLuxemburg. ] Gorter and Pannekoek had
been close toanarcho-syndicalism, and Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus (in his early
years)had been active in the left wing of the German social democratic movement.
In one way or another, they all insisted that with the growing educationof the
working class, there would develop, during a crisis, arevolutionary spontaneity in
the masses, and that to insist on partyhierarchy and professional leadership would
only lead to a dictatorship bythe leaders.
The Third International
It was only after the Bolshevik victory in 1917, and the creation of the Third
(Communist) International, that Lenin’searlier text was canonized in order to claim
for the Bolsheviks a uniquerevolutionary knowledge and thus to enforce the
hegemony of the Russianparty over all other Communist parties.
Lenin summoned the revolutionary working-class groups to a conference, which
met in Moscow on March 2, 1919, for the purpose of organizing thenew
International. Its main objectives were the immediate seizure of power by working-
class parties in Europe, the abandonment of false bourgeois democracy, and the
establishment of adictatorship of the working class for the systematic suppression
andexpropriation of the exploiting classes.
There was an apocalyptic fervor in the air. World revolution seemedpalpably near.
Shortly after the first congress of the CommunistInternational, a Soviet republic
was proclaimed by B61a Kun in Hungary, and another in Bavaria by left-wing
socialists. It seemed as if the onlything needed to carry out a successful revolution
was steely revolutionarywill. A second world congress of the Comintern (the
shorthand name for Communist International) was convoked in Moscow in July
1920. It was nolonger a small gathering; delegations came from parties in a dozen
countries.
The chief feature of the meeting, which gave organizational shape to
theinternational communist movement, was the drafting of 21 points asconditions
for membership in the Comintern. The purpose of these pointswas to create in each
country a disciplined, conspiratorial party whosechief purpose would be to combat
the old socialist leaderships and toassert the binding, from-the-top-down, authority
of the Comintern overeach national party. Throughout Europe and in the United
States, suchsocialist leaders as Ramsay Mac-Donald in England, Kautsky and
RudolfHilferding in Germany, Morris Hillquit in the United States, and
JeanLonguet in France had opposed participation in the war and had taken a
“middle” position against the reformists. But in the opinion of the newComintern,
these leaders had to be rejected and exposed as much as thoseof the right wing, and
had to be fought just as bitterly. The 21 pointscommanded communists to split
every socialist party and trade union in the world, to organize an underground
machine in addition to the publicactivities of the party, to disorganize as much as
possible the army ofeach country, and to reject any cooperation with “social
patriots andmiddle-group people.”
By 1923 the revolutionary tide had receded all over Europe. The communistshad
completely misread both the character of the labor movements ofwestern Europe
and the social structure of those societies. For a shortperiod the communists
engaged in adventurism and even in putschism: theRed Army marched into Poland
to advance the revolution, only to bedefeated by Pilsudski, once a nationalistic
socialist, who a few yearslater set up an authoritarian regime; insurrections were
planned, in 1923, in Saxony and Thuringia; and an abortive uprising inHamburg
failed. But after 1923 it was clear that, for the time being atleast, Europe had
achieved some measure of political and economicstabilization. The Soviet Union
itself turned, under Lenin, to the problemof what to do with power in a single
country. The large Norwegian Laborparty, as well as such syndicalist leaders as
Jack Tanner in England andAlfred Ros-mer and Pierre Monatte in France,
withdrew from the Cominternbecause of the centralization of party structure. What
was left in Europewas the wreckage of the socialist movement in half a dozen
countries and the fear of revolution that drove the middle classes to support right-
winggroups. Within the Comintern, the hegemony of the Russian party
wascomplete, and within a short time the International itself becameprincipally an
arm of Soviet foreign policy, rather than an independentinstrument of revolution.
[SeeCommunism, article onthe international movement. ]
The sharp turn to the left in the Soviet Union in 1929, and Stalin’seffort to
consolidate his rule by turning on his erstwhile right-wingpolitical allies, coincided
with a world-wide economic depression and therise of fascism in Germany and
other countries. For the communists theseevents heralded the final crisis of
capitalism, and they awaited a freshwave of revolutionary activity. After an
analysis of fascism in Italy, communist theorists argued that fascism was the last
stage of monopolycapitalism; and since it could not solve the inherent
contradictions ofthe capitalist crisis, inevitably the revolution was again at hand.
Fromthis analysis the communists concluded that the chief obstacle to theirvictory
was not the capitalists but the socialists, who still “misled” themajority of the
working class. In several instances, the communists evenworked with the Nazis in
order to diminish socialist influence. They votedwith the Nazis in the Prussian
Landtag to bring down the Social Democraticgovernment. They cooperated with
the Nazis in the Berlin street-car strikein 1932 in order to increase disorder in
Germany.
Socialists in government and opposition
The communists thus became theimplacable enemies of the democratic regimes in
central and westernEurope; and the middle classes in many countries, principally
Italy andGermany, out of fear of the left and because of economic crises,
oftenvoted for the extreme right. However, an important element contributing tothe
weakness of the democratic regimes was the inability of the socialists, owing to the
contradictory attitude toward capitalism and democracy inspired in them by
Marxian dogmatics, to provide anyeffective leadership or support for democratic
societies.
In 1931 the reconstructed Socialist International consisted of partieswith more than
six million dues-paying members. The total parliamentary vote for socialist
candidates was almost 26 million. More than 1, 300 socialist deputies sat in the
parliaments of their countries. Some 360daily newspapers spoke for the labor
movement. Yet, remarkably, this largeforce was almost completely paralyzed
when the crises occurred.
The root problem was an old one. The socialist movement, true to itsMarxist
heritage, did not believe that capitalist society could bereformed. When the
socialists, particularly of the right wing, were thrustinto office because of the
failure or the unwillingness of any other partyto rule, they followed the most
orthodox of economic policies, because"the crisis has to run its course.” Believing,
from a Marxist point ofview, that the reason for the depression was a disproportion
in growthbetween the producer goods sector and consumer goods sector, they tried
touse up the resultant “overproduction” so that a better proportion
betweenproducers’ and consumers’ purchasing power would emerge, leading to an
upswing.
As Adolf Sturmthal has pointed out in The Tragedy of European Labor(1943), the
socialist movement, with all its strength, was basically apressure group seeking
social concessions from the state for the immediatebenefit of the working class.
But it had neither an economic program norany clear idea of planning. State
intervention arose out of unorthodoxeconomic theories, such as John May-nard
Keynes’s in England and GunnarMyrdal’s in Sweden, or the unorthodox financial
policies of HjalmarSchacht, who had been made president of the Reichsbank by
the Germansocialists when Hitler began the rearmament that revived the
Germaneconomy. Nowhere except in Sweden, and later in the planning ideas
ofHendrik de Man, did the socialists have any idea of what to do about
thedepression [see the biography ofMan].
Italy. The socialists, in a different way from the communists, alsomisread the
nature of fascism. For example, fascism was barely mentionedin the major report
of the 1928 International Socialist Congress on thepolitical situation in Europe. It
was seen as an idiosyncrasy of theItalians; and its ideology, emotional roots, and
irrational quality werenot understood. Yet Italy did foreshadow quite clearly the
fate of the other nations in central Europe.
Shortly after the war, Italy seemed on the verge of a proletarianrevolution. In the
general election of 1919 the socialists won two millionout of a total of 5. 5 million
votes, and the leadership of the party hadpassed into the hands of the left wing,
which openly asserted that thenext step would be the “creation of a Socialist
Republic and theestablishment of a proletarian dictatorship.” Workers had
spontaneouslybegun to seize factories, and the peasants of Sicily and the south
hadappropriated the uncultivated holdings of absentee landlords. As Sturmthalput
it: “Continuous unrest, strikes, factory occupations, expropriation ofland–all this
convinced the middle class that a revolution was impendingand that the democratic
middle-class state was powerless to stave off thedanger. Public opinion became
more and more convinced that a strong manwas needed to establish law and order”
([1943] 1951, p. 182).
The decisive, dramatic incident occurred in August 1920, when a wagedispute in
the metal industries led to sudden “stay-in” strikes in which500, 000 workers
occupied the factories, kept the machinery going, andassembled arms to resist
evacuation. Workers in other industries called on their leaders to order the taking
over of other factories. But the socialist leadership, divided and uncertain,
hesitated; and finally a pact was reached with the industrialists whereby the
employers agreed inprinciple to the union’s demand for workers’ control of
production. This was the high point of the revolutionary tide, and the n a new
forceappeared, the Fascisti.
Organized by Benito Mussolini, a former leader of the left wing of the Italian
Socialist party, the Fascisti preached anticapitalism, nationalism, and the necessity
of violence. With his squadristi, Mussoliniwent into the streets to break up
working-class meetings and to beat upworking-class leaders. In 1921 an effort was
made to form a socialist-liberal coalition government and save the country from
the threatened civil war. The right-wing socialists made the proposal, but the idea
was vetoed by the left wing. By 1922 a form of civil war had spreadin Italy. In the
large urban industrial centers of the north, strongholdsof the socialist movement,
the city administrations passed into the handsof Mussolini’s squadristi through
terror and intimidation. Bologna, Genoa, Livorno, Milan, and finally Naples were
taken over by the fascists. Ageneral strike called by the trade unions on August 31,
1922, failedignominiously, despite the united support of the labor movement;
andmiddle-class opinion swung even more strongly to the fascists. At the invitation
of the king, and with the support of the army, bureaucracy, and big business,
Mussolini was invited to become premier. For two years he ruled by parliamentary
means, but after the assassinationof Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924 and left-wing
withdrawal from the Chamber of Deputies as a moral protest, Mussolini became
more openlydictatorial: trade unions, political parties, and cultural
organizationswere either disbanded or placed under fascist control, and local
autonomy was abolished. By 1926 parliamentary government had vanished.
[SeeFascism. ]
Germany. In November 1918, the Germany of Wilhelm was no more. The
Kaiserhad abdicated, and Friedrich Ebert, a former saddlemaker who was now the
head of the Social Democratic party, installed himself as head of the newrepublic.
But the socialists themselves were split into three factions. The “majority
socialists” represented the right wing of the party. The"independent socialists,” led
by Kautsky and Bernstein (together for the first time in twenty years), had opposed
the war and now favored a radical program of economic reform. The extreme left,
led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, knew that the German republic was going to be
a middle-classstate and wanted to organize a proletarian party prepared for an
eventualrevolutionary opportunity. But younger socialists took over the left wingen
masse, overruled Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and began to prepare the “Spartacus
group,” as the left wing called itself, for immediaterevolution.
In this situation the attitude of the majority socialists was decisive. The Workmen’s
and Soldiers’ Councils, which had sprung up spontaneously onthe Soviet model,
elected the majority socialists to the leadership of the new Council of People’s
Commissars. But the majority socialists feared arepetition of the Russian chaos and
sought first to achieve stability withthe cooperation of some of the military.
When the Spartacus group initiated a rebellion in early 1919, it was putdown by
Gustav Noske– the majority socialist appointed ascommander-in-chief of the
army–with the help of the Free Corps, createdand led by former imperial officers.
After the uprising was quashed, FreeCorps officers cold-bloodedly murdered
Liebknecht and Luxemburg, who hadloyally supported their comrades despite their
opposition to the venture. When, in the spring of 1919, left-wing socialists–and
later the communists–took over the newly proclaimed Bavarian republic, the
FreeCorps was used to take Munich and to murder hundreds of the insurgents, thus
seriously reducing the authority and prestige of the socialists. InMarch 1920,
Reichswehr troops led by a little-known nationalist namedWolfgang Kapp
mutinied and marched into Berlin. The republican governmentcould not muster
enough loyal troops to defend the capital, and fled toStuttgart. A powerful general
strike, joined by all the factions, defeatedthe putsch in four days. When Kapp was
routed from Berlin, communist-ledworkers in the Ruhr tried to continue the
general strike. The newly formedWeimar coalition– majority socialists, the
Catholic Center, andConservative Democrats–sent the Reichswehr into the Ruhr to
crush the revolt.
In the end the majority socialists, as well as the republic, were thelosers. In the
general elections of June 1920, the majority socialists and the middle-class parties
of the Weimar coalition lost heavily, and the nationalist parties gained. A new
cabinet consisting of the Catholic Center and the right-wing German People’s party
took office. It was clear that on the right as well as on the left the republic itself
had onlyshaky support among the German people.
The socialists were given one more chance. In May 1928 the GermanSocialist
party, now reunited because the independents refused to acceptthe Diktat of the
Comintern, emerged as the strongest party in the Reichstag. Although they lacked
an absolute majority, the socialists tookoffice, with Herman Miiller as chancellor
and Hilferding, the famedsocialist theoretician, as minister of finance. But a year
later Germany, along with the rest of the Western world, was plunged into the
depression, and the socialists had no economic policy to meet the crisis. Hilferding,
mindful of the ruinous inflation of the early 1920s, followed an
orthodoxdeflationary policy which reduced purchasing power and
increasedunemployment. The strength of the labor movement defeated the
employers’efforts to reduce wages and salaries; the fault, however, lay not with the
employers, who had to reduce production costs or get out of business, but with the
state, which had failed to work out any active policy. Instead oftapping idle capital
funds, the government worked above all to balance the budget, or at least to reduce
budget deficits, even if this meant reducingunemployment insurance benefits.
Several German socialist economistsfavored devaluation or the abandonment of
the gold standard, a monetarypolicy later associated with Keynes. But they were
opposed, on the groundthat this would lead to economic and political nationalism.
In allessentials the socialists followed a policy of laissez-faire: the depression had
to “run its natural course.” After all, as any Marxist knew, capitalism could not be
reformed.
England. A similar dilemma confronted the British Labour party. In 1918 ithad
adopted a socialist program for the first time; the new social system was described
as a thing that would emerge gradually out of capitalism, bya series of piecemeal
changes. The Labour party was then still weak, thirdin size after the Conservatives
and the Liberals. Five years later, following a prolonged period of unemployment
which the Conservatives hadbeen unable to cope with, the Labour party emerged
as the strongestEnglish party and, supported by the Liberals, in January 1924
formed thefirst Labour government in British history. The government carried
outsome modest social reforms, but its tenure was short. When the BritishForeign
Office published the so-called Zinoviev letter, a set ofinstructions from the head of
the Comintern to British communists onantimilitarist tactics–a letter now conceded
to be a forgery–the electorate voted strongly Tory, and the Labour government was
ousted.
The trade unions, disappointed by their failure in politics, turned tomore militant
economic action. The coal miners, always the most militant, had a genuine
grievance–their wages had recently been cut. (The problem was one of government
monetary policy; in 1925 England returned to the gold standard at the prewar
pound-dollar exchange rate, and the prices ofBritish exports were above the world
market level. ) The miners, refusingto accept the wage cut and demanding the
nationalization of industry, wenton strike in May 1926. With the support of the
entire trade unionmovement, this strike soon widened into a general strike, the first
inEnglish history. Railwaymen, local transport workers, builders, printers, iron and
steel workers, all walked out, almost completely paralyzingLondon and other parts
of Great Britain. The strike had had norevolutionary aim– its only purpose had
been to support the miners– butwhen the government stood firm, the unions,
uncertain of their next step, retreated. After nine days the general strike was called
off, and its mainresult was that the left wing lost influence and the right wing
gainedcomplete control of the labor movement.
In June 1929 the British Labour party had its second chance. In the general election
of that year, the party won 287 of the 615 seats in theHouse of Commons and, with
the support of the Liberals, formed the secondLabour government, with Ram- say
MacDonald as prime minister. But the problem that soon confronted the German
socialists was already bedeviling England. Though other countriesat the time were
still enjoying prosperity, England, because it could notcompete in world markets,
had a great deal of unemployment. The Labourgovernment was pledged to make
far-reaching social reforms; the businesscommunity demanded reduced taxes and a
retrenchment in social policy. Acollision was inevitable. One way out would have
been devaluation orstrict exchange controls to keep gold from leaving England.
Either coursewould have been an acknowledgment of the end of Britain’s
domination ofthe international economy–which she had maintained for almost a
hundredyears–and a new policy of economic nationalism. This the Labour
government refused to do.
When the depression hit England full force, the Labour government had itsback to
the wall. The flight of capital from London had become a flood, and the Bank of
England warned that unless the budget was balanced, the pound would fall. In
orthodox fashion, the Labour government was committedto free trade and to
defense of the gold parity of the pound. MacDonaldproposed, as an economy
measure, to cut unemployment benefits; and whenthe trade union elements in the
party rejected such a cut, or anyreduction in social services, MacDonald split the
Labour government and, taking 14 colleagues with him, formed a national
coalition with theConservatives and the Liberals. The national government itself
failed tostem the tide, and in September 1931 Britain went off the gold standard,
introduced protectionism and a tariff, and began, under a Tory government, to set
up economic dikes in an effort to save itself from the floods ofworld-wide
depression. The Labour party, though it still retained somestrength among the
electorate, suffered a great loss of parliamentarystrength–from 287 to 52. For nine
years it sat in opposition until itjoined the Churchill government of national unity
in 1940. In 1945, forthe first time in its history, the Labour party won a clear
electoral majority.
Austria. In February 1934, after four days of bloody fighting, the reactionary
regime of Engel-bert Dollfuss destroyed the Austrian socialdemocracy. This was a
blow that struck the international socialistmovement especially hard, for Austrian
social democracy had been the modelfor all proud socialists. It was a disciplined
party and had the supportof almost all of the working class. Its leaders and
theoreticians, particularly Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer, had been respected for
their courage and their contributionsto socialist thought. The party, while
revolutionary in its aims, maintained a sanity and realism in political affairs which
had preventedit from imitating the adventurism of the Hungarian communists in
1919 orthe feckless policy of the German Social Democrats. In 1927, at the peakof
its strength, the Austrian Socialist party polled 42 per cent of thetotal electoral
vote, and in Vienna the socialists won a majority ofalmost two-thirds. Half a
million of Vienna’s two million inhabitants weredues-paying party members, and
the city was a showcase of municipalachievement. In 1919 the socialists had joined
with the Christian Socialparty in a coalition that gave the country stability and
permittedsections of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire to achieve their
independence. The first president of the Austrian republic, Karl Seitz, was a
socialist, as was its first chancellor, the noted legal scholar Karl Renner.
The problem of the Austrian socialists was twofold: their strength wasentirely in
the urban areas, while the surrounding countryside and the middle classes
supported the Christian Social party; and Austria was underdirect and steady
pressure from Italy to crush the socialist movement andestablish a fascist regime.
When the Nazi vote began to increase inAustria, as a result of Hitler’s prestige and
his direct aid to the newNazi party of Austria, Dollfuss, a Catholic, was faced with
the choice ofcoming to terms either with the Nazis or with the socialists. With the
support of Mussolini (who wanted an independent Austria as a bufferagainst
Germany), Dollfuss suppressed both the Nazis and the socialists. But the defeat of
the socialists meant that the Austrian government hadlost its main hope of
independence. Four years later Kurt von Schuschnigg, who succeeded Dollfuss
when the latter was assassinated by the Nazis, invited the underground socialists
and the trade unions to support himagainst the Nazis. However, while negotiations
were going on, Nazi troopsinvaded Austria and the country was annexed by
Germany.
France. Only in France, among the major countries of western Europe, was
afascist threat —that of Colonel de la Rocque and the Cagoulards, the right-wing
group supported by the army— beaten back. In June 1936, asocialist government
headed by Leon Blum took office. It was the firsttime that the party officially
entered a coalition government, but it did so—also for the first time —with the
support of the communists, who hadabandoned their cry of “social fascism” and
now proclaimed the need for apopular front to resist fascism. Within a year a
French New Deal had been inaugurated. The tradeunions, never before recognized
by French employers, now were grantedcollective bargaining rights. A social
insurance system was establishedfor the first time. Through public works and wage
increases, Blum tried toincrease the purchasing power of the workers and, thus, to
restoreprosperity. But, curiously, Blum resisted the idea of economic planning,
fearing that it was essentially “statist” and fascist in character. Caughtbetween the
rejection of capital exchange controls by its politicalallies; the Radicals, and the
communist opposition to devaluing the franc, the first Popular Front government
fell.
Sweden. Only in Sweden did the socialists have any real success, and the
yachieved it by abandoning the orthodox economic policies that the GermanSocial
Democratic and British Labour governments had followed. In 1932 aSwedish labor
government was formed for the first time. It decided thatbalancing the budget on a
year-to-year basis made little sense and thatthe government itself had to intervene
in the economy. The governmentembarked on a set of extensive public works and
financed these endeavorsnot by taxes, which simply would have shifted the
existing purchasingpower, but by borrowing money from idle capital funds. Public
investmentduring a depression had to be expanded to compensate for reduced
privatespending. By following a steady policy of economic expansion, the
Swedishgovernment managed to eliminate unemployment by 1938. Five years
earlierit had been as high as 164, 000. These “Swedish stepping stones to
fullemployment,” as A. P. Lerner described the process (1944), whollyunorthodox
at the time, have become commonplace economic practice inalmost all Western
countries.
The rest of the melancholy story of European socialism before 1939–the Spanish
Civil War, the Soviet purge trials and the Hitler-Stalin pact–while crucial to the
history of Europe, is less relevant to the discussionof socialist theory and doctrine.
Socialism since World War II
Revisionism and peasant revolution
In the the ory and practice of socialism after 1945 there were two
completelyunexpected developments. One was the rise of “revisionism” in the
communist countries and movements of Europe. That is, the highlycentralized
command economies were modified by the trend toward a marketand profit
system, dogmatic ideology was eroded and tended to be replacedby pragmatic and
instrumental policies, and force and violence were discouraged as a means of
fosteringrevolutionary change in non-communist countries. In fact, with
theextension of planning and public control in the noncommu-nist countries
ofEurope as a parallel to the growing decentralization of planning incommunist
countries, some the orists have argued that a “convergence” wastaking place
between the communist social systems and those of the West.
The second development was the rise of the peasantry as a revolutionary force—or
at least as a presumed revolutionary force—in colonial countries, bolstered by a
new the ory that the revolutions in the last third of the twentieth century would be
made not by the proletariat, which had lost itselan through embourgeoisement, but
by the peasantry. For the peasants werenow, in the words of the “Internationale,”
the wretched of the earth. Marx, in many of his writings, had scorned the peasantry
as intrinsicallyreactionary and small-minded because of its preoccupation with
privateproperty; he used the phrase “rural idiocy” more than once. But
modernmethods of communication and a network of trained political cadres
havesince the 1920s been able to weld the peasantry into an active politicalforce.
The Chinese Communist party under Mao Tse-tung, following thedestruction of its
urban base of support when Chiang Kai-shek smashed the Shanghai commune in
1927, had reorganized itself as a peasant party andhad won power by enlisting
peasant support. Fidel Castro, though amiddle-class intellectual, made his
revolutionary appeal through the peasantry, while the Cuban working class,
including the communist-dominated trade unions, “coexisted” tacitly with the
dictatorBatista. In Algeria, in South America, in Vietnam, the peasantry, not
theurban working class, became the focus of revolutionary appeal.
The spread of socialism as word and doctrine, especially in the yearsafter World
War n, presented itself as a paradox, particularly in terms ofthe original intention
and predictions of Marx. It was assumed by Marxiststhat the triumph of socialism
would occur first in the industrializedcountries, as a result of the contradictions and
crises of the capitalisteconomic system; but this triumph has taken place primarily
in backwardcountries and in agrarian societies. Marxism was an ideology of
protestagainst the course of industrialization, but it has become, instead,
theideology of industrialization; not a creed of social justice, welfare, and the
equitable distribution of products, but a rationale for centralizedcontrols,
postponement of consumption, and rapid economic growth.
Since the Soviet Union embodied these developments, it became an
importantmodel for many of the new states that were seeking to embark on the
difficult road of industrialization. The Stalinist regime had apparentlysucceeded in
transforming Russia from an agrarian country into anindustrial one. Despite
enormous waste during collectivization, it hadachieved high rates of economic
growth, and its successes were mostdramatically symbolized by the technological
achievement of being the first nation successfully to launch man-made vehicles
into outer space.
Socialism in western Europe
In the West, the socialist movement saw the complete triumph of what, in classical
doctrine, would be calledreformism. During the war against fascism, almost all the
socialistparties had joined the governments of national unity, either at home or
inexile. The sense of the nation and democracy took priority over the ideasof class
and capitalism. In the Western countries, the labor and socialistparties had become
completely of their societies, as well as in them.
One can identify five features, common to almost all the socialist partiesof western
Europe, which marked this new practice and doctrine:
(1) The complete abandonment of the idea of revolutionary methods and violence
as a means to power; the complete acceptance of parliamentary means; and the
complete readiness to participate in nonsocialist coalition governments. The an-
guished theoretical debates which had earlier split the French, Belgian, Austrian,
and other parties on the question of entering “bourgeois govern-ments” had
vanished.
(2) The transformation of the socialist and labor parties from class parties,
speaking only for working-class interests, to people’s parties seeking a more
inclusive concept of general welfare. In some instances, as in Germany, there was
the realization that as a working-class party the Social Democrats would be
consigned to being a permanent minority; in other instances, as in England, there
was the recognition that the changing class structure of society, particularly the rise
of a technical and salaried middle class, made it imperative for the Labour party to
speak for these social groups as well as for the working class.
(3) The recognition that the definition of socialism as a social and economic ideal
was inseparable from the idea of democracy, both as a means and as an end. The
Marxist concept that lingered through the 1930s–that democracy was a
“bourgeois” concept and only a mask for class rule– was rejected. By democracy
as a means, the social-ist parties meant the full guarantee of the rights of free
speech and free assembly, and the maintenance of political rightsfor the opposition.
As an end, democracy was defined as the free consentof the governed.
(4) The surrender of the idea of nationalization or state ownership of the means of
production as a “first principle” of socialism, and the substitution of public control
of enterprise and planning as the means of achieving economic growth and equita-
ble incomes. The sectarian orthodoxy that within a capitalist state one could not
plan for social ends was replaced by the theory that governmental powers could be
used for the gradual transforma-tion of the economy and that a “mixed economy"
of public and private enterprise was the most de-sirable solution.
(5) A complete opposition to totalitarianism. While the socialist movements had
long been in ideological opposition to communism, what the new attitude meant, in
practice, was support of the military and political aspects of the Atlantic Alliance
against the Soviet bloc and an identifica-tion with the national interests of each
Western country, through NATO, against Russian expan-sionism. Nothing,
perhaps, more strongly revealed the degree of change than the choice of Paul-Henri
Spaak, once the firebrand leader of the Belgian left, as secretary-general of NATO.
Germany’s Social Democrats. Most of the transformed socialist attitudeswere
expressed at the Frankfurt Congress of 1951, which symbolized therevival of the
Socialist International. Although no longer the powerfulvoice of a confident
movement or the platform for thunderous internationalpronouncements, the
Socialist International still provided some doctrinalidentification for those who still
called themselves socialists. ItsDeclaration of Principles, unanimously adopted,
stated the new commonconceptions of socialism almost a hundred years after the
initialstatements of the First International, as formulated in Marx’s
inauguraladdress of 1864.
“Socialism,” the declaration reads, “aims to liberate the people fromdependence on
a minority which owns or controls the means of production. . . . It aims to put
economic power in the hands of the people as a wholeand to create a community in
which free men work together as equals”(Lowenthal 1951, p. 113).
Private versus public control remains the decisive contrast, but privatecontrol is not
identified with private ownership, nor public control withstate ownership; and the
phrase “exploited classes” has been superseded by “the people.” Democratic
planning becomes the basic means for the creation of socialism, and public
ownership is regarded as only one of a number ofdifferent means, to be used where
necessary. “Democratic socialism,” saysthe statement, “therefore stinds in sharp
contradiction both to capitalistplanning and to every form of totalitarian planning;
these exclude publiccontrol of production and a fair distribution of its results”
(ibid. ).
Democracy, in this revised credo, is not only a means to the achievement of
socialism—a “favorable battleground for the class struggle,” as theolder view had
it—but an integral aspect of socialism itself. “Accordingly,” as Richard Lowenthal
put it, “the conflict betweendemocratic socialism and communism no longer
appears as a disagreementabout means to a common end, but as a conflict of
fundamental ends betweenthe adherents of a democratically controlled economy
and the defenders ofthe despotism of a managerial bureaucracy” (ibid. ).
Nowhere is the change more striking than in the new program of principlesadopted
in 1959 by the German Social Democratic party in Bad Godesberg. The German
SPD had long been a reformist party, but its very adherence tooutworn dogmas, as
we have seen in its attitude toward the possibility of reforming capitalism in the
1920s and 1930s, crippled its ability to actrealistically in economic and political
affairs. But the Bad Godesbergprogram rejects the very idea of Marxism. The
name of Karl Marx and the concept of Marxism are missing from the declaration
of principles, andterms like “class” and “class struggle” are carefully avoided.
In modern political analysis, party programs are rarely taken seriously. Usually
they are formal documents, paying lip service to expected pietiesthat historically
made the parties’ activities legitimate. But, as F. R. Allemann points out:
The German social-democracy is a “programme party” of the first water: inits
history of nearly a hundred years it has always attached the greatestimportance to
basing its policy on a solid system of principles laid downin a fixed programme
rather than merely on the urgent issues of the moment. In this respect at least it has
remained true to its Marxisttradition: in its view any political action that is
intended to influenceand transform society must be based on an analysis of that
society. (1960, p. 67)
This was the view that guided the formulation of the Erfurt Program in1891; it is
the view behind the Bad Godesberg declaration of 1959.
The overriding idea in the Bad Godesberg program is that a modernindustrial
society cannot be ordered by a single uniform principle. Commonownership is
recognized as a legitimate form of public control, but the analysis centers not on
property but on economicpower, which must be subject to public control. For the
first time asocialist party states explicitly that private ownership of the means
ofproduction is entitled to “protection and promotion” so long as it doesnot hinder
the construction of an equitable social order. The idea ofsubjecting the entire
economy to central planning is rejected, and theparty accepts the free market,
wherever there is real competition. The Basic formula is “as much competition as
possible–as much planning asnecessary,” and the SPD not only describes free
consumer choice and the free choice of place of employment as “all-important
foundations” offreedom, but lauds free competition and entrepreneurial initiative
asimportant elements of Social Democratic economic policy. The economicpattern
envisaged is that of a “mixed economy” in which the private profitmotive has a
place and in which the control of great economic power is the central task of a
libertarian economic policy.
In line with the lessons of the previous twenty years, particularly thoseof the Soviet
experience, the party declared that the problem of economicpower cannot be
settled simply by transferring power from private handsinto that of the state. Being
dependent on an uncontrolled statebureaucracy is not necessarily better than being
subject to privatecapitalist power. The conclusions, however, are rather vague:
commonownership is to be “organized according to the principles ofself-
government and decentralization,” and in the managerial structures “the interests of
the workers and employees must be represented just asmuch as the public interest
and that of the consumers” (ibid. ).
The aim of the new socialist program is a plural society, and this ideaextends not
only into economics but into the cultural sphere as well. Thusthe party refrains
from proclaiming any “ultimate truths” and states thatneither a state nor a political
party should have any power in religiousand philosophical spheres. As Allemann
says, “Marxism set out both to’interpret’ and to ’change’ the world.” The German
Social Democrats, having rejected the myths behind the ideology of socialism, no
longer “claim to provide a universally valid philosophy nor do they believe
anylonger that their policy is in accord with the irrevocable laws of
socialdynamics” (ibid. ).
Britain’s Labour party. The British Labour party never had Germansocialism’s
attachment to world philosophy, and its sense of crisis wasless severe. The
wellsprings of evangelical feeling, ex- pressed in a strong commitment to equality
and social justice, stillprovide the emotional justification of socialism for the
EnglishLabourites; but a different problem has confronted the leadership.
Socialism, as it was accepted in the West, had been a singularlydistributivist
doctrine. It presumed that capitalism had solved all the problems of production and
that its failures had to do with socialinjustice and inequality. But the problem of
economic growth was found topersist in all social systems. How does one step up
the rate of output andincrease production without overt controls and coercion, and
withoutinflation?
In 1945 the British Labour party, for the first time in its history, won amajority in
Parliament and assumed sole charge of the government. For sixyears it ruled, and
during that time it laid down the permanentfoundations of a welfare state in
England. Social services were extended, and for the first time a comprehensive
system of medical care wasestablished. A number of basic industries, principally
coal, railways, transport, and steel, were nationalized; but, to the dismay of the
government, nationalization did not provide any automatic answers to the problem
of growth. Coal and railways had been sick industries, but the Labour policies,
although they helped maintain full employment, did notmaterially increase the
productivity of these industries. In 1951 Labour was voted out of office and
replaced by a Tory government. Its defeatcaused the British Labour party to ponder
its program. In office it hadexhausted the “intellectual capital” inherited from the
early Fabians. What would it do if it was voted into power again? The major task
ofintellectual renovation was attempted by C. A. R. Crosland in his book the
Future of Socialism (1956), which became the working text for HughGaitskell, the
new leader of the party. Crosland’s main argument was thatthe Labour party must
give up the shibboleth of nationalization and, ineconomic matters, promote the
modernization of industry in whatever socialform it could best be done, whether
private or public. The main content ofsocialism, Crosland said, is not economic but
social: to seek an equitabledivision of wealth by reducing the role of inherited
property as the meansof achieving a privileged place in the society; and to erase
social classdistinctions, by a major reform of the educational system. Only
byreleasing talents which remain unfulfilled, because of the social classsystem,
could Britain eventually find new vigor in its industry and itsculture.
For the traditionalists in the party, both left and right, the Crosland-Gaitskell vision
smacked of heresy. An effort on Gaitskell’s part to eliminate clause four–
whichpledges the party to nationalization of industry as a major doctrinaltenet–
from the British Labour party constitution, was rebuffed. Gaitskelldied before the
British Labour party was again voted into power in 1965, but the revisionism he
espoused had clearly taken hold in the party.
Italy’s Socialist party. The one socialist party in the West whichmaintained a
traditional left-wing line was the Italian. Forged in exileand deeply conscious of
the intense class heritage of Italian workers, the Italian Socialist party, led by
Pietro Nenni, maintained an electoralalliance with the communists for more than
ten years, and still vaguelypreached the class struggle. A small group of moderate
Socialists, led byGiuseppe Saragat, split away from the Italian Socialist party in
1947 tojoin the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats.
The Khrushchev disclosures in 1956 of Stalin’s misdeeds, the Sovietintervention in
Hungary in the same year, the general disillusionment withcommunism, and the
growing feeling in Italy that no effective role couldbe played without entering a
coalition government eventually led Nenni, in1963, to join a center–left coalition
and finally, in 1966, the two wingsof Italian socialism were reunited.
Whatever the socialists in Italy, or in any of the Western countries, could offer, it
was no longer the old certitudes of doctrinaire Marxism. Few of the parties had any
sure answers about how to build a new socialorder. All that remained was a
lingering vision–and hope.
Socialism in the “third world.”
To speak of the tiers monde as asociological entity is to group together
geographical areas that arevastly different in their historical and class structures
and similar onlyin their poverty, their instability, and, in most cases, their quest
formodernization.
The area encompassed by north Africa and the Middle East, from Morocco
toEgypt and Syria, was the cradle of ancient civilizations, an areaceaselessly
marauded by invading armies for thousands of years. Itspopulations have absorbed
a great jumble of genetic strains, and in the last several hundred years the mixture
of Arab, Turkish, and European(French, English, and Italian) cultures has blended
into a cosmopolitanmelange. It is a world with a small, westernized, intellectual
elite, astrong, traditional religious structure, and a vast mass of poor peasants.
Southeast Asia has an array of old societies and ancient empires which, inmost
instances, were held together after the departure of the former colonial rulers by a
thin administrative class, trained bythese rulers, while The political parties or
military regimes learned howto govern. Africa south of the Sahara is a motley
collection of tribalsocieties grouped in political areas that were carved out by the
oldimperial powers. These areas were almost never formed on a basis ofindigenous
unity, and there has been no educated or technical classavailable for the many
complex tasks of government and economic development.
The social structures of these areas are vastly different from those ofEurope, and it
is difficult to see where Marxist categories could beapplied. In south and southeast
Asia, primordial relations of blood, religion, language, or tribe are expressed as
communal attachments; andnations have been split by ancient ethnic, tribal, caste,
regional, andreligious differences. India has Muslim–Hindu divisions, caste lines,
secularist-traditionalist splits, and ten major linguistic divisions. Burma, since
gaining its independence, has been plagued by insurrectionsof the Shan, Karen,
and Kachin peoples, split by linguistic, religious, tribal, and regional differences.
Ceylon’s Sinhalese and Tamil communitiesdiffer in language, race, caste, and
religion. Indonesia has the classicdivision between the central island, Java, and the
outer islands, as wellas a secularist-Islamic controversy. The Malay states are split
betweenthe Chinese and the Malays, and the disunity is compounded by
indigenoustribal groups in Sarawak and Sabah.
In Africa, within the predominant tribal societies, there has been littleclass
differentiation, since most of the land has been held collectivelyand life has heen
led communally. But between tribes there has been grislyhostility, and the
rectification of borders between the new nationsprovides grist for conflict that will
go on for generations. In theIslamic world, in countries as divergent as Morocco
and Pakistan, theocratic structures are fused with The political and administrative
apparatus, and this fusion in turn shapes a distinctive social structure.
The major tasks which most of these countries have set for the mselves
aremodernization and industrialization. How far modernization necessarily must
upset the traditional and religious values of a society is a questionthat divides
sociologists. But it is clear that in many of these countriesthe new elites are seeking
to upset or supplant the traditional values, often because the source of their own
authority or of their routes topower rests on different criteria. In these countries
socialism is oftenseen as the means of creating new, modernized states. Since the
end of World War n, Arab socialism, Africansocialism, and Asian socialism have
emerged as new ideological flags andnew socioeconomic forms.
The socialism of these new elites is vastly different from the traditionalvisions of
the nineteenth-century socialist prophets, intellectuals whoseideologies were
universalistic and humanistic. The new ideologies areparochial, instrumental, and
largely the creation of political leaders. While the driving forces of the old
ideologies were social equality andpolitical freedom, economic development and
national power inspire the new ideologies.
Socialism appeals to the new elites in a number of ways: as a doctrine, itidentifies
them with a historical–progressive movement; as an ideology, itseeks to create an
identity that can transcend tribal and communalboundaries; and as a social system,
it concentrates power in the hands ofthe elites, providing for the nationalization of
the basic industries ofthe countries and their direction under some minsterial
control. Althoughthe socialism of the West has come to favor decentralization and
a mixedeconomy, the socialism of the new states focuses on central planning, state
ownership and direction of enterprises, and one-party regimes. Socialism, in effect,
serves as a means of mobilizing the society forindustrial and social transformation.
[SeeModernization. ]
The Middle East. No socialist movement of the Middle East calls itself, asthe
Western movements did, the representative of the working class. Thesemovements,
not only in fact but often in theory, are based on an allianceof the new middle class
(largely salaried state employees), the peasants, and the workers, with the middle
class openly taking the lead. To theextent that a theory of representation exists, it is
based on anundifferen-tiated general will. In practice, the effort is being made
togive nationalism a social content.
This is clearly the case with the socialism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the United
Arab Republic. Before he came to power in 1952, there had been nolarge-scale
socialist movement in Egypt. (The Egyptian Socialist party wasin fact fascist. )
Nor had Nasser and the army group he represented everespoused socialist ideas.
But once he was in power, his proclaimed “SixObjectives of the Revolution,” plus
his opposition to foreign business, led him increasingly to speak of his socialist
faith. In 1954 he declared: “We consider that the state has tutelage over both
private and publicproperty and the responsibility for the protection of the
individualagainst all economic and social exploi- tation” (Halpern 1963, p. 244). In
1956, after the abortiveAnglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, Nasser
appropriated the Suez Canaland foreign banks, insurance companies, and export
firms. By 1962 he hadnationalized all large Egyptian enterprises, expanded land
reform, andplaced all important sectors of the economy under the control of
socialistplanners. Democracy, the Egyptians were told, would come only
gradually.
Egyptian socialism is not based on any mass or cadre party. Rather, it isbeing
installed from the top down, through the initiative of a smalltechnocratic elite
whose support is largely military. Whether it cansurvive its first, charismatic leader
is a moot point, because, lacking asocial base, Egyptian socialism has not been
able to institutionalize its reforms.
The other major socialist movement in the Middle East is the ArabSocialist
Resurrectionist party, commonly called the Ba’ath party. Organized in Syria in
1953 as a merger of two smaller parties, it declaresitself “a national, populist,
revolutionary movement fighting for Arabunity, freedom and socialism.” Its
nationalism is not restricted to anyparticular Arab state, but to the Arab people as a
whole, and it isagainst “all other denominational, factional, parochial, tribal
orregional loyalties.” Its socialism, in the words of its programmaticstatement,
seeks the “guarantee [of] the continuous growth of the nationin its spiritual and
material development; and it will guarantee closebrother-liness among its
individual members” (ibid. , p. 240). Full ofrhetoric about revolution and struggle,
the Ba’ath party has said littleabout the concrete steps it would take to achieve
socialism. Like manysuch movements, it is seeking to develop a new faith to
supplant the traditional creeds. Islam is never mentioned by name; the implication,
asHalpern points out, is that it belongs to an earlier era. In practice, the Ba’ath
party, caught in the nationalist rivalries between Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, has split
accordingly.
North Africa. In north Africa the socialist creed has been fashionedlargely by
French-educated native intellectuals, and it assumed arevolutionary coloration,
particularly in the late 1950s, through the vigorous movements for independence
from France. In Algeria, where the struggle was most bitter, the FLN (National
Liberation Front) was composedmainly of Algerian trade unionists (most of whom
worked in France andcontributed money to the struggle), middle-class elements,
and Berbernomads. After Algeria became independent, Ahmed Ben Bella,
surrounded byvarious Marxist and Trotskyite advisers, sought to introduce
workers’ self-management in industry and to collectivize Algerian farms. But as a
result of the flight of French technicians and agronomists, Algeria Was soon in
severe economic trouble; and Ben Bella’s efforts tosolidify his personal power led
to a coup by his ally, Colonel HouariBoumedienne, who controlled the army.
Boumedienne pledged to continue “Algerian socialism,” but his program was the
typical drab mixture ofstatist enterprises and private landholdings characteristic of
so manyothe r new states. For the French left, ironically, Algeria had in the
meantime become the emotional symbol of a “new awakening” of the
underdeveloped world. Frantz Fanon, a Negro psychiatrist born in the French West
Indies and educated in France, renounced his Frenchcitizenship during the
Algerian civil war and wrote a new Communistmanifesto, The Wretched of the
Earth (1961), which preached the necessityof violence as purification. Fanon also
praised the noble qualities of the peasantry, still uncorrupted by bourgeois values–
unlike the European working class [see the biography ofFanon]. For Jean-Paul
Sartre and othe rleftist intellectuals, the Algerian war was a crisis of conscience
inwhich they declared their civil disobedience against the French state. Yetthe
revolution ended in tawdry factionalism and a gray, repressive regime.
A quieter path to socialism was taken in Tunisia in the 1960s by the Neo-Destour
party, later renamed the Socialist-Destour party. Led by HabibBourguiba, a
French-educated lawyer, Tunisia became independent in 1956, without the fierce
violence of Algeria. A one-party regime was installed, and it proceeded to
nationalize the major enterprises of Tunisia and todevelop a planned economy. The
Socialist-Destour movement is actually amiddle-class party, and the trade unions
are firmly subordinated to thestate. Bourguiba, as the charismatic leader, has
imposed a vigorous cultof personality on Tunisian society–numerous streets,
monuments, enterprises, and other public activities are named for him. It is still a
“first-generation” country, and it remains to be seen whether it caninstitutionalize
its new reforms and maintain a stable political structurewithout undue group
conflict when Bourguiba is succeeded.
Sub-Saharan Africa. The 1960s have seen the mushrooming of a new doctrine,
largely unknown even five years earlier, which African leaders call African
socialism. The meaning of the phrase, however, is very difficultto pin down
(Friedland Rosberg 1964). Few African socialists have anyidea what they mean
concretely by socialism. President Leopold-Sedar Senghor of Senegal, for
example, who has tried to provide a framework in his book African
socialism(1959), sees socialist humanism as a combination of Marx and Engels
withTeilhard de Chardin, in which the Jesuit paleontologist-philosopher’sideas of
“corpusculization” and “complexity” (the effects of outer andinner gravity in
creating an increasing complexity of matter) are joinedwith the dialectic to create
“the general law ofcomplexity-consciousness.” Whether it is the quasi mysticism
of Senghor, trying to create a new definition of man, or the tough-
soundingMarxism–Leninism of President Sékou Tour6 of Guinea, seeking to join
the idea of a cadre party with the “communaucratic” values of precolonial African
society, the idea of African socialism is one of pure rhetoric–alanguage to impress,
to inspire, to intimidate–rather than a set ofguidelines for specific action. Its
usefulness is hortatory rather than instrumental.
What “African socialism” means to these countries is the effort to bedistinctive and
modern, to assume some special character in thecontemporary world, and, in a
more prosaic way, to deal with the problemsof social identity, economic
development, and new class formations in theemerging societies.
The problem facing most of the new states in Africa–31 black Africannations
gained their independence in the decade between 1955 and 1965 –isto find some
unifying symbols beyond parochial and local identities inorder to instill a sense of
pride and action in their people. If manycitizens of these new states have little
feeling of nationality, they havenonetheless found some kinship through the idea of
being African. Africansocialism has been a new myth, something to take the place
of the anticolonial passions that fueled many of the independence movements.
Seeking a specific content for African socialism, its ideologists havestressed the
indigenous character of the communal ownership of land, the egalitarian character
of the society, and the extensive network of socialobligations which ties clans
together. Thus, it is argued, capitalism andprivate property are “unnatural” to
Africa.
But though the indigenous elements of traditional society have beenpresent in
Africa, there still remains the crucial question whether suchinstitutions can carry
over into the complex, modern industrial societythat these countries want to build.
By and large, most African countriescommitted to the idea of socialism see the
government as exercising theprimary responsibility for accumulating capital,
directing investment, andbuilding an infrastructure for the society. The immediate
practical difficulty is that Africa has had no largeentrepreneurial class of its own
from which modern talent can be drawn. The only large non-European commercial
and manufacturing class, particularly in east Africa, has consisted of Indians; and
because of their clannishness and their ties to the mother country, they are
regardedas unassimilable or as aliens. Nor do most African countries,
exceptperhaps Nigeria and a few others that were under British rule, have a
sufficiently large number of administrators, engineers, or managers. Another
dilemma is that the capital accumulation for most African countries is dependent
on earnings from agricultural and other primaryproducts, and these are subject to
sharp fluctuations on the world marketor are dependent on the good will of the
advanced industrial countries;and good will is a notoriously frail foundation on
which to build aneconomic policy.
Many countries seek a way out by industrialization. But rapidindustrialization, if at
all possible, involves a large-scaletransformation of the farming class (which in
most African countries isbetween 80 and 90 per cent of the population), new class
distinctions, andnew social group tensions, either between different interest groups
orbetween populations that have become urban and cosmopolitan and those
thathave remained local and parochial.
Senghor, when he turns to practical matters, says that Senegal mustproceed slowly.
As he wrote in African socialism: “We have rejectedprefabricated models . . . we
have observed that formulas like ’priority forheavy industry, ’ or ’agrarian reform’
have no magic power withinthemselves; applied dogmatically, they have produced
partial failures. That is why we established priorities as follows: ’infrastructure,
ruraleconomy, processing industry, heavy industry, ’ in line with
reasonablerequirements and our realities” (1959, p. 157). In keeping with
thisordering principle, Senegal has earmarked a substantial part of its budgetfor
“social development,” by which it means health and hygiene,
municipaladministration and housing, and education. The economy as a whole is
notsocialist, but mixed: communal in agriculture, a public-privatecombination in
utilities, and private in banks, commerce, and industry.
Under Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana set out vigorously to create a socialistorganization
of the economy. While private capital was invited, particularly for the construction
of the Volta Dam, state enterprisespredominated in banking, manufacturing,
construction, fishing, forestry, and electric power. But the ambitious schemes ran
far ahead of the reality. The trade unions protested the squeeze on wages. Capital
reservesand foreign exchange were squandered. Grandiose and costlyprojects–
presidential residences and palaces, as well as the large-scalePan-African political
headquarters–were built at enormous expense. One-party rule became more and
more authoritarian: opponents were jailedor murdered, the courts were reorganized
to stifle their independence, and the freedom of the university was abridged, while
Nkrumah’s decrees becameincreasingly personal. In 1966, while Nkrumah was
traveling abroad, arevolt by the army ended his regime.
Most African countries have found that their major problems are primarilypolitical:
to maintain that fundamental stability which will allow anyplanning, economic or
otherwise, to proceed. The initial glitteringpromises made by the first generation of
political leaders have not beenrealized. Within the first decade of independence,
military coups rackedhalf of the new nations, and in the others rigged elections and
strictbans on opposition have kept the initial regimes in power. For thesecountries
the tensions of social change, and the need to createinstitutional mechanisms to
deal with them, constitute the major problemconfronting the societies. A Kenya
White Paper of 1965 on Africansocialism and its application to planning in Kenya,
said soberly thatsocialism, even the socialism of a welfare state, would be a long
time incoming. The immediate need was to transform the economy from a
subsistenceto a market economy; to develop land and to introduce modern
agriculturalmethods. Nationalization, since it does not always lead to
additionalresources for the economy as a whole, would be used only when other
meansof control were ineffective. The commitment is to socialism as an ideal, not
as an ideology (Harris 1965).
South and southeast Asia. In January 1953, representatives of a dozenAsian
socialist parties met in Rangoon for the first Asian Socialist Conference. The
principal Asian figures—Jayaprakash Narayan and AsokaMehta of India, Ba Swe
and Kyaw Nien of Burma, Sutan Sjahrir of Indonesia—were internationally
renowned. Leading Western figures came as fraternaldelegates: Clement Att-lee,
the former Labour prime minister of England, headed the delegation from the
Socialist International, and Milovan Djilas the one from Yugoslavia.
At this time, the governments of half a dozen countries—India, Burma, Ceylon,
Indonesia, Cambodia, and Singapore—described themselves associalist, for
socialism was the predominant ideology of the area. Itseemed that socialism in
Asia was making a triumphal entrance on the world historical scene.

Some dozen years later, Narayan had joined the voluntary bhoodan movement of the Gandhian
Vinoba Bhave, and Asoka Mehta had left the Socialistparty; Ba Swe and Kyaw Nien were in jail;
and Sjahrir, having spent sixyears in prison, died shortly after his release in 1967. The Asian
Socialist Conference itself was no more. Of the socialist governments, India had increasing
economic and political trouble; Burma had come undera military dictatorship; Ceylon had swung
back to a nonsocialist government; Indonesia was racked by an abortive Communist-
inspiredrevolution in 1966, and by a military-led counterrevolution which massacred several
hundred thousand communists and finally stripped Sukarno, the first president of the regime, of
all his powers; Cambodia was perched precariously between East and West, struggling to
maintain itsindependence during the Vietnam war; Singapore, after first joining Malayato form
the new state of Malaysia, broke away and remained a small independent enclave still
proclaiming itself socialist. What had happenedto these Asian socialist parties, and what had
happened to the socialist governments?

One anomaly was that in these countries, which proclaimed themselvesofficially socialist, the
Socialist parties were rarely in full control ofthe governments. In Burma, the Burmese Socialist
party was for many yearspart of the ruling coalition of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom
League, and Ba Swe had at one time been premier of his country. In Indonesia, Sjahrir had been
its first prime minister, in 1945, heading a coalitiongovernment. But the Burmese Socialist party
was abolished in 1962, whenGeneral Ne Win seized power and proclaimed Burma a socialist
state; and the Indonesian Socialist party, wiped out at the polls in 1955, wasabolished by
presidential decree in 1960, when Sukarno proclaimed Resopim(Revolution, Indonesian
Socialism, and National Guidance) as the officialideology. Except for the period of the
independence movements and thestruggle against the colonial powers, and for a few short years
after eachcountry won its independence, the socialist parties of Asia have notplayed a major role
in their nations, despite the official adherence ofthe governments to a socialist ideology. The
regimes called themselves “socialist” but were not based on the socialist parties.

Unlike the socialist movements of the Middle East and Africa, whichscarcely existed before
World War n, the socialist parties of Asia had along history of involvement with the international
socialist movement and socialist thought. Jayapra-kash Narayan, who becamea revolutionary
Marxist at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1920s, founded the Bihar Socialist party in
1931, was acting general secretary ofthe Congress party during the civil disobedience movement
in 1932, andfounded the Congress Socialist party in 1933, first as a wing of the Congress party
and after 1939 as an independent party. The party organ inthe early 1930s, the Congress
Socialist, was edited by Asoka Mehta. Likethe socialist parties of Europe, the Congress Socialist
party had itsdifficulties with the communists, who stigmatized it as being “socialfascist” and a
“left maneuver of the bourgeoisie.” Its experiences withthe communists led the Indian Socialist
party in later years to take astrong anti-Soviet, antitotalitarian position. Sjahrir had been a
leaderof the Perihimpoenan Indonesia (PI), the student association ofIndonesians studying in
Holland in the 1920s, and on his return toIndonesia in 1932, he was interned by the Dutch and
kept in prison for tenyears; upon his release, he organized and directed underground
resistanceagainst the Japanese.

The Asian socialist and student movements had long had “tutelary” relations with the European
socialist parties, particularly since most ofthe countries were under imperial rule; and freedom
for the colonies hadbeen an important plank in the programs of the British Labour party,
theDutch Labor party, and others. Thus the leaders of the Asian socialistparties had gone through
the doctrinal viscissitudes of the Europeansocialist movements, and in most instances had
themselves adopteddemocratic socialist positions. The weakness of these parties, particularly the
Indonesian, was that they were primarily parties ofintellectuals, with some following among the
workers but no influence orbase among the peasantry in societies that were overwhelmingly
agrarian. Their orientation was largely urban, and as Marxists they regarded theindustrialization
of their countries as the normal path of development. Moreover, as parties of intellectuals, with
only a small hold on the tradeunions, they were peculiarly subject to the factionalism and
divisivenessof intellectual groups who lack an anchorage. Individual socialists, suchas
Jayaprakash Narayan, Asoka Mehta, or Sutan Sjahrir, were at timesenormously influential in
their countries–but only as individuals andbecause of their individual talents, not as party
leaders.

Most south Asian countries called themselves socialist even when the leading parties, such as the
Congress in India or the Nationalist in Indonesia, had no doctrinal faith, simply because they
assumed that statedirection of the economy and state planning were necessary for
economicgrowth. And the difficulty for most of these countries was that, lackingany experience
in planning, lacking the vital managerial talents, and, inmany cases, lacking the needed
resources, they wasted available resourcesand made mistakes that could not be absorbed by the
economies. Many of theAsian countries, mesmerized by the idea of industrialization, assumed,
inthe early 1950s, that, following the Russian model, this meant a priorityfor heavy industry.
Burma, for example, decided to build a steel mill, even though its main “natural resource” was
the huge amount of gun scrapleft behind by the invading Japanese and the defending British
troopsafter World War n. Other expensive showcases were also built, and preciouscapital and
foreign exchange were wasted on large airports and other “visible” features put up to impress
foreigners with the progress andmodernity of the new country.

It would be a simplification, of course, to attribute the failures andsetbacks primarily to defects

in economic planning. As was indicatedearlier, southeast Asia, more than almost any part of the
world, isplagued by communal conflicts, so that the regimes have been torn byinternal conflicts
and by threatened and actual insurrection. Also, the secountries have been caught in the crossfire
of Great Power rivalries, particularly the demand of the United States for participation in
SEATO(the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and the diplomatic and militarypressure of the
Chinese, who seek to extend their influence in southeastAsia. But apart from the real political
and sociological problems, acrucial fact was that each of these countries plunged ahead on a
coursecalled socialist which not only was failing in practice but also wasincreasingly
contradictory to the historic socialist ideals. The latterproblem was foremost in the thinking of
Jayaprakash Narayan, perhaps the outstanding figure of Asian socialism in the mid-twentieth
century. Speaking at the second– and last–conference of the Asian socialistparties, in 1956,
Narayan declared:

All our countries, except Japan, are backward economically and many aredesperately poor.
Naturally, therefore, our attention goes first of all tothe problem of economic growth. There is
nothing wrong in that, but themischief starts when we begin measuring “socialist achievements”
in termsof tons of steel and kilowatts of electricity. Economic growth, even rapideconomic
growth, is known to have occurred both under Capitalism andFascism. Mere economic
development is not a measure of socialism. I do notwish to suggest that it is not the business of
Socialists to see that morewealth is produced. What I wish to emphasize is the danger of
equatingsocialism with economic development, and of sacrificing the values ofsocialism at the
altar of that development. . . .

The main, if not the whole, emphasis is still being placed on the controland use of the power of
the State. Everywhere socialists are organized inpolitical parties which are attempting to seize
power and hopingthe reafter to build a new society. . . . But as I have said before theideals of
socialism remain far in the distance. The reason seems to me tobe a wrong approach to these
ideals. All of us agree that socialism is away of life, an attitude of mind, a certain ethical
behaviour. What is notso universally recognized is that such a way of life, attitude andbehaviour
cannot be imposed from above by dictates of the Government or bymerely nationalizing industry
and abolishing capitalism. Construction of asocialist society is fundamentally construction of a
new type of humanbeing . . . if human reconstruction is the key to socialist reconstruction, and if
that is beyond the scope of the State, the emphasis in the socialist movement must change from
political action to such work ofreconstruction. (Quoted in Rose 1959, pp. 258–259)

Contemporary sociology and mature Marxism share a bias against Utopianthought. What the
Marxists called objective conditions, sociologists callstructural constraints. The idea is the same:
that the range ofalternatives open to any society is limited by the starting point, the kind of
resources, the degree of differentiation, and the like. Certainchosen paths impose certain
imperatives: industrialization requires the creation of a technical class and a new kind of
educational system; the increasing structural differentiation of a complex society requires a
kindof social coordination different from a simple, top-down command system. Necessarily,
such a perspective tends after a while to bring out the morelimited choices of means of action,
and in the process the ends are oftenforgotten or become ritualized. Socialism as a belief has
been both asystem of means and a system of ends; and throughout its history the meanshave
invariably tended to diminish the ends.

In his youthful writings, Marx was most vividly concerned with the ends ofhuman action. In the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, a halfway house in the development of his
thought, Marx speculated on whatthe phase immediately following the socialist revolution might
be. Then egation of private property, he said, is not the aim of socialism, forwhat it does is to
usher in a period of what he called raw or crude communism. Crude communism does not
transcend private property but universalizes it; it does not over come greed but generalizes it; it
does not abolish labor but extends it to all men. The aim of socialism, as a fullydeveloped
naturalism, as humanism, is to go beyond communism, beyondnecessity, and therefore beyond
history–which itself is a form of determinism—to a world which resolves the “strife between
existence andessence, between objectification and self-confirmation . . . and betweenthe
individual and the species.” It is a world in which a human being nolonger feels “divided” or
alienated from what he believes his essence as asocial being, as a person free to make his own
future, can be (Marx 1844, pp. 104–114 in the 1919 edition).

This is the permanent Utopian–and even religious–component of socialism, aquest, as ancient as

man’s fall from grace, to unify himself with anultimate and to find a world of freedom. It
remains a world beyond.

Daniel Bell

[See alsoCommunism; Economic thought, article onsocialist thought; Marxism; Marxist

sociology. Related doctrines and ideas are discussed inAnarchism; Capitalism; Nationalism;
Pluralism; Syndicalism; Utopianism. Other relevant materialmay be found in IDeology;
Planning, economic; Planning, social; Social movements; Stratification, social; Welfare state. ]

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