essay on evolutionary socialism

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Evolutionary Socialism

Last updated 2 Jun 2020

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Each strand of socialist thought seeks a transformation in the economic structure of society. However, there is considerable disagreement amongst socialists over the means towards building a better alternative to capitalism.

According to revolutionary socialists, the transformation of society lies in the hands of the proletariat. As a result of class consciousness, the gravediggers of capitalism will finally realise their shared common interest in the overhaul of an economic system built upon exploitation. After the short-lived creation of a dictatorship of the proletariat and the collapse of capitalism, class conflict will come to an end. As the state is an instrument of class control, it too will also collapse as predicted by Friedrich Engels (“when freedom exists there will be no state”).

Democratic socialists however endorse the parliamentary route towards a socialist system. By gaining an electoral mandate from the people, a socialist government could utilise a system based upon parliamentary sovereignty to implement a programme of nationalisation, centralisation, protectionism and co-operatives run by the workers. Such measures can be achieved on an evolutionary basis. In doing so, there is no need for the bloody revolution prescribed by Marxists. The democratic process therefore offers the most preferable route towards a socialist economic system.

In contrast to their more left-wing brethren, social democrats endorse a far less radical approach. Those on the centre-left of the political spectrum advocate gradual and piecemeal tactics towards lasting social change. On a related point, it is perhaps worth noting that the division between reformists and radicals/revolutionaries is a feature of all those ideologies committed to substantial change. Such measures help to humanise the existing economic system rather than scrapping it altogether in hope of some ‘New Jerusalem.’

Social democracy is at heart a moderate form of socialism that seeks to persuade people as to the merits of incremental steps. For instance, social democrats argue that paying workers a decent wage helps to raise productivity and reduce the number of hours lost due to staff absences. Indeed, there are many organisations who actively promote opportunities for their workforce. Even with the recent trend towards globalisation, the concept of corporate social responsibility and conscious capitalism has become an increasingly important business strategy.

The Labour Party has long been associated with a gradual approach to change, particularly when in government. Successive Labour governments have attempted to advance their cause on an incremental basis. The gradualist position is also reflected in organisations such as the Fabian Society, which gains its name from the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus whose motto was “for the right moment you must wait.” Fabians such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb believe there is an “inevitability of gradualness.” Fabianism therefore places prominence upon strategies such as comprehensive education and municipal socialism within local government.

The gradualist stance has been subject to considerable criticism from those further to the left of the political spectrum. Incremental change inevitably entails compromise with capitalists and a watered-down version of the socialist vision. During the Labour governments of the 60s and 70s, left-wingers within the Labour Party and the trade unions often put forward this argument. They claimed that the Labour leadership had betrayed their principles in the pursuit of power. However, such criticism reached their zenith during the era of New Labour. Many within the labour movement felt that the leadership abandoned socialism altogether in the pursuit of a Thatcherite agenda of foundation hospitals, academy schools, de-regulation and the marketisation of the welfare state.

From the opposing angle, the Blair/Brown era actually achieved a number of left-wing objectives such as the introduction of a minimum wage, a significant reduction in the level of child poverty, an increase in the level of universal benefits, an expansion in the rights of workers and an extensive welfare-to-work system. New Labour also doubled the level of expenditure on state education and trebled the level of resources allocated to the NHS. Those who defend the New Labour project claim that none of this could have ever been achieved without a realistic commitment to the necessity of gradual rather than radical change.

• Evolutionary socialism
• Revolutionary Socialism

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MIA   >  Bernstein   >  Evolutionary Socialism

Eduard Bernstein

Evolutionary socialism, chapter iii the tasks and possibilities of social democracy, (c) democracy and socialism.

“On February 24th, 1848, broke the first dawn of a new period of history.” “Who speaks of universal suffrage utters a cry of reconciliation.”

LASSALLE, Workers’ Programme .

The trade unions concern themselves with the profit rate in production as the co-operative stores concern themselves with the profit rate on the sale of goods. The fight of the workmen organised in trade unions for the improvement of their standard of life is from the standpoint of the capitalist a fight between wage rate and profit rate. It is certainly too great an exaggeration to say that the changes in the rates of wages and the hours of labour have no influence at all on prices. If the wages of workers in a certain industry rise, the value of the corresponding products rises in a corresponding ratio as against the value of the product of all industries which experience no such rise in wages, and if the class of employers concerned do not succeed in meeting this rise by an improvement of machinery, they must either raise the price of the product concerned or suffer a loss in the profit rate. In this respect the different industries are very differently placed. There are industries which, on account of the nature of their products or of their monopolistic organisation, are fairly independent of the world market, and then a rise in wages is mostly accompanied by a rise in prices also, so that the profit rate does not need to fall but can even rise. [20]

In industries for the world market, as in all other industries where commodities produced under various conditions compete with one another, and only the cheapest command the market, the rise in wages almost always results in a lowering of profit rate. The same result occurs when, by the resistance of organised workers, an attempt fails to neutralise by a proportional lowering of wages, the lowering of prices rendered necessary by the struggle to sell. After all, a fight of the workers for wages can, in fact, be but a fight against the rise in the profit-rate at the cost of the wage-rate, however little the fighters are conscious of it at the moment.

There is no need to prove here that the fight regarding hours of labour is similarly a fight over the profit-rate. If the shorter day of labour does not directly cause a diminution in the amount of work done for the wage given hitherto – in many cases it is known the reverse happens – yet it leads by a side way to an increase in the workers’ demands for better conditions of life, and so makes a rise in wages necessary.

A rise in wages leading to an increase in prices does not, under certain circumstances, need to be an injury to the whole community; but is, however, more often harmful than useful in its effect. To the community, for instance, it makes no particular difference whether an industry exacts monopolist prices exclusively for a handful of employers, or whether the workers of that industry receive a certain share in such booty squeezed out of the public in general. The monopoly price is just as much worth fighting against as the cheapness of products which can only be achieved by the lowering of wages below the average minimum rate. But a rise in wages which only touches profit-rate must, under the conditions of the present day, be advantageous for the community in general. I say in general expressly, because there are also cases when the contrary is the case.

Fortunately, such extreme cases are very rare. Usually the workers know quite well how far they can go in their demands. The profit-rate, indeed, will bear a fairly strong pressure. Before the capitalist gives up his undertaking he will rather try every possible means to get a greater output for wages in other ways. The actual great differences of profit-rates in different spheres of production show that the general average profit-rate is constructed more easily in theory than even approximately realised. Instances are also not rare where even new capital that enters the market needing to be utilised does not seek the spot to which the highest profit-rate points, but, like a man in choosing his calling, allows itself to be guided by considerations in which the amount of profit takes a secondary place. Thus, even this most mighty factor for levelling profit-rates works irregularly. But the capital already invested, which greatly preponderates in each case, cannot for purely material reasons follow the movement of the profit-rate from one field of production to another. In short, the result of a rise in the price of human labour is, in by far the largest majority of cases, partly the greater perfection of machinery and the better organisation of industry, partly the more equable division of the surplus product. Both are advantageous to the general well-being. With certain limitations one can for capitalist countries modify Destutt de Tracy’s well-known saying to: “Low profit-rates indicate a high degree of well-being among the mass of the people.”

The trade unions are the democratic element in industry. Their tendency is to destroy the absolutism of capital, and to procure for the worker a direct influence in the management of an industry. It is only natural that great differences of opinion should exist on the degree of influence to be desired. To a certain mode of thought it may appear a breach of principle to claim less for the union than an unconditional right of decision in the trade. The knowledge that such a right under present circumstances is just as Utopian as it would be contrary to the nature of a socialist community, has led others to deny trade unions any lasting part in economic life, and to recognise them only temporarily as the lesser of various unavoidable evils. There are socialists in whose eyes the union is only an object lesson to prove the uselessness of any other than political revolutionary action. As a matter of fact, the union to-day-and in the near future -has very important social tasks to fulfil for the trades, which, however, do not demand, nor are even consistent with, its omnipotence in any way.

The merit of having first grasped the fact that trade unions are indispensable organs of the democracy, and not only passing coalitions, belongs to a group of English writers. This is not wonderful if one considers that trade unions attained importance in England earlier than anywhere else, and that England in the last third of the nineteenth century passed through a change from an oligarchic to an almost democratic state of government. The latest and most thorough work on this subject, the book on the theory and the practice of the British Trade Unions, by Sydney and Beatrice Webb, has been rightly described by the authors as a treatment of Industrial Democracy . Before them the late Thorold Rogers, in his lectures on the Economic Interpretation of History (which, in the passing, has little in common with the materialist conception of history, but only touches it in single points), called the trade union, Labour Partnership – which comes to the same thing in principle, but at the same time points out the limits to which the function of a trade union can extend in a democracy, and beyond which it has no place in a democratic community. Independently of whether the state, the community, or capitalists are employers, the trade union as an organisation of all persons occupied in certain trades can only further simultaneously the interests of its members and the general good as long as it is content to remain a partner. Beyond that it would run into danger of degenerating into a close corporation with all the worst qualities of a monopoly. It is the same as with the co-operative society. The trade union, as mistress of a whole branch of production, the ideal of various older socialists, would really be only a monopolist productive association, and as soon as it relied on its monopoly or worked upon it, it would be antagonistic to socialism and democracy, let its inner constitution be what it may. Why it is contrary to socialism needs no further explanation. Associations against the community are as little socialism as is the oligarchic government of the state. But why should such a trade union not be in keeping with the principles of a democracy?

This question necessitates another. What is the principle of democracy?

The answer to this appears very simple. At first one would think it settled by the definition “government by the people “ But even a little consideration tells us that by that only quite a superficial, purely formal definition is given, whilst nearly all who use the word democracy to-day understand by it more than a mere form of government. We shall come much nearer to the definition if we express ourselves negatively, and define democracy as an absence of class government, as the indication of a social condition where a political privilege belongs to no one class as opposed to the whole community. By that the explanation is already given as to why a monopolist corporation is in principle anti-democratic. This negative definition has, besides, the advantage that it gives less room than the phrase “government by the people” to the idea of the oppression of the individual by the majority which is absolutely repugnant to the modern mind. To-day we find the oppression of the minority by the majority “ undemocratic,” although it was originally held to be quite consistent with government by the people. [21] The idea of democracy includes, in the conception of the present day, a notion of justice – an equality of rights for all members of the community, and in that principle the rule of the majority, to which in every concrete case the rule of the people extends, finds its limits. The more it is adopted and governs the general consciousness, the more will democracy be equal in meaning to the highest possible degree of freedom for all.

Democracy is in principle the suppression of class government, though it is not yet the actual suppression of classes. They speak of the conservative character of the democracy, and to a certain degree rightly. Absolutism, or semi-absolutism, deceives its supporters as well as its opponents as to the extent of their power. Therefore in countries where it obtains, or where its traditions still exist, we have flitting plans, exaggerated language, zigzag politics, fear of revolution, hope in oppression. In a democracy the parties, and the classes standing behind them, soon learn to know the limits of their power, and to undertake each time only as much as they can reasonably hope to carry through under the existing circumstances. Even if they make their demands rather higher than they seriously mean in order to give way in the unavoidable compromise – and democracy is the high school of compromise – they must still be moderate. The right to vote in a democracy makes its members virtually partners in the community, and this virtual partnership must in the end lead to real partnership. With a working class undeveloped in numbers and culture the general right to vote may long appear as the right to choose “the butcher”; with the growing number and knowledge of the workers it is changed, however, into the implement by which to transform the representatives of the people from masters into real servants of the people.

Universal suffrage in Germany could serve Bismarck temporarily as a tool, but finally it compelled Bismarck to serve it as a tool. It could be of use for a time to the squires of the East Elbe district, but it has long been the terror of these same squires. In 1878 it could bring Bismarck into a position to forge the weapon of socialistic law, but through it this weapon became blunt and broken, until by the help of it Bismarck was thoroughly beaten. Had Bismarck in 1878, with his then majority, created a politically exceptional law, instead of a police one, a law which would have placed the worker outside the franchise, he would for a time have hit social democracy more sharply than with the former. It is true, he would then have hit other people also. Universal franchise is, from two sides, the alternative to a violent revolution. But universal suffrage is only a part of democracy, although a part which in time must draw the other parts after it as the magnet attracts to itself the scattered portions of iron. It certainly proceeds more slowly than many would wish, but in spite of that it is at work. And social democracy cannot further this work better than by taking its stand unreservedly on the theory of democracy – on the ground of universal suffrage with all the consequences resulting therefrom to its tactics.

In practice – that is, in its actions – it has in Germany always done so. But in their explanations its literary advocates have often acted otherwise, and still often do so to-day. Phrases which were composed in a time when the political privilege of property ruled all over Europe, and which under these circumstances were explanatory, and to a certain degree also justified, but which to-day are only a dead weight, are treated with such reverence as though the progress of the movement depended on them and not on the understanding of what can be done, and what should be done. Is there any sense, for examples in maintaining the phrase of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” at a time when in all possible places representatives of social democracy have placed themselves practically in the arena of Parliamentary work, have declared for the proportional representation of the people, and for direct legislation – all of which is inconsistent with a dictatorship.

The phrase is to-day so antiquated that it is only to be reconciled with reality by stripping the word dictatorship of its actual meaning and attaching to it some kind of weakened interpretation. The whole practical activity of social democracy is directed towards creating circumstances and conditions which shall render possible and secure a transition (free from convulsive outbursts) of the modern social order into a higher one. From the consciousness of being the pioneers of a higher civilisation, its adherents are ever creating fresh inspiration and zeal. In this rests also, finally, the moral justification of the socialist expropriation towards which they aspire. But the “dictatorship of the classes” belongs to a lower civilisation, and apart from the question of the expediency and practicability of the thing, it is only to be looked upon as a reversion, as political atavism. If the thought is aroused that the transition from a capitalist to a socialist society must necessarily be accomplished by means of the development of forms of an age which did not know at all, or only in quite an imperfect form, the present methods of the initiating and carrying of laws, and which was without the organs fit for the purpose, reaction will set in.

I say expressly transition from a capitalist to a socialist society, and not from a “civic society,” as is so frequently the expression used to-day. This application of the word “civic” is also much more an atavism, or in any case an ambiguous way of speaking, which must be considered an inconvenience in the phraseology of German social democracy, and which forms an excellent bridge for mistakes with friend and foe. The fault lies partly in the German language, which has no special word for the idea of the citizen with equal civic rights separate from the idea of privileged citizens.

What is the struggle against, or the abolition of, a civic society? What does it mean specially in Germany, in whose greatest and leading state, Prussia, we are still constantly concerned with first getting rid of a great part of feudalism which stands in the path of civic development? No man thinks of destroying civic society as a civilised ordered system of society. On the contrary, social democracy does not wish to break up this society and make all its members proletarians together; it labours rather incessantly at raising the worker from the social position of a proletarian to that of a citizen, and thus to make citizenship universal. It does not want to set up a proletarian society instead of a civic society, but a socialist order of society instead of a capitalist one. It would be well if one, instead of availing himself of the former ambiguous expression, kept to the latter quite clear declaration. Then one would be quite free of a good portion of other contradictions which opponents, not quite without reason, assert do exist between the phraseology and the practice of social democracy. A few socialist newspapers find a pleasure to-day in forced anti-civic language, which at the most would be in place if we lived in a sectarian fashion as anchorites, but which is absurd in an age which declares it to be no offence to the socialist sentiment to order one’s private life throughout in a “bourgeois fashion.” [22]

Finally, it is to be recommended that some moderation should be kept in the declaration of war against “liberalism.” It is true that the great liberal movement of modern times arose for the advantage of the capitalist bourgeoisie first of all, and the parties which assumed the names of liberals were, or became in due course, simple guardians of capitalism. Naturally, only opposition can reign between these parties and social democracy. But with respect to liberalism as a great historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only in chronological sequence, but also in its spiritual qualities, as is shown moreover in every question of principle in which social democracy has had to take up an attitude.

Wherever an economic advance of the socialist programme had to be carried out in a manner, or under circumstances, that appeared seriously to imperil the development of freedom, social democracy has never shunned taking up a position against it. The security of civil freedom has always seemed to it to stand higher than the fulfilment of some economic progress.

The aim of all socialist measures, even of those which appear outwardly as coercive measures, is the development and the securing of a free personality. Their more exact examination always shows that the coercion included will raise the sum total of liberty in society, and will give more freedom over a more extended area than it takes away. The legal day of a maximum number of hours’ work, for example, is actually a fixing of a minimum of freedom, a prohibition to sell freedom longer than for a certain number of hours daily, and, in principle, therefore, stands on the same ground as the prohibition agreed to by all liberals against selling oneself into personal slavery. It is thus no accident that the first country where a maximum hours’ day was carried out was Switzerland, the most democratically progressive country in Europe, and democracy is only the political form of liberalism. Being in its origin a counter-movement to the oppression of nations under institutions imposed from without or having a justification only in tradition, liberalism first sought its realisation as the principle of the sovereignty of the age and of the people, both of which principles formed the everlasting discussion of the philosophers of the rights of the state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until Rousseau set them up in his Contrat Social as the fundamental conditions of the legitimacy of every constitution, and the French Revolution proclaimed them – in the Democratic Constitution of 1793 permeated with Rousseau’s spirit [23] – as inalienable rights of men.

The Constitution of 1793 was the logical expression of the liberal ideas of the epoch, and a cursory glance over its contents shows how little it was, or is, an obstacle to socialism. Baboeuf, and the believers in absolute equality, saw in it an excellent starting point for the realisation of their communistic strivings, and accordingly wrote “The Restoration of the Constitution of 1793” at the head of their demands.

There is actually no really liberal thought which does not also belong to the elements of the ideas of socialism. Even the principle of economic personal responsibility which belongs apparently so entirely to the Manchester School cannot, in my judgment, be denied in theory by socialism nor be made inoperative under any conceivable circumstances. Without responsibility there is no freedom; we may think as we like theoretically, about man’s freedom of action, we must practically start from it as the foundation of the moral law, for only under this condition is social morality possible. And similarly, in our states which reckon with millions, a healthy social life is, in the age of traffic, impossible if the economic personal responsibility of all those capable of work is not assumed. The recognition of individual responsibility is the return of the individual to society for services rendered or offered him by society.

Perhaps I may be allowed to quote some passages from my article on The Social-Political Meaning of Space and Numbers .

“Changes in the economic personal responsibility of those capable of work can, then, as far as we can see, only be made relatively. Labour statistics can be developed very much more, the exchange or adjustment of labour be very much perfected, the change of work be made easier and a right of the workers developed which renders possible an infinitely greater security of existence and facility for the choice of a calling than are given to-day. The most advanced organs of economic self help – the great trade unions – already point out in this respect the way which evolution will presumably take .... If already strong trade unions secure to those of their members fit to work a certain right of occupation, when they impress the employers that it is very inadvisable to dismiss a member of the union without very valid reasons recognised also by the union, if they in giving information to members seeking occupation supply their wants in order of application, there is in all this an indication of the development of a democratic right to work.” [24] Other beginnings of it are found to-day in the form of industrial courts, trades councils, and similar creations in which democratic self-government has taken shape, though still often imperfectly. On the other side, doubtless, the extension of the public services, particularly of the system of education and of reciprocal arrangements (insurances, etc.) helps very much towards divesting economic personal responsibility of its hardness. But a right to work, in the sense that the state guarantees to everyone occupation in his calling, is quite improbable in a visible time, and also not even desirable. What its pleaders want can only be attained with advantage to the community in the way described by the combination of various organs, and likewise the common duty to work can only be realised in this way without a deadening bureaucracy. In such great and complicated organisms as our modern civilised states and their industrial centres an absolute right to work would simply result in disorganisation; it is “only conceivable as a source of the most odious arbitrariness and everlasting quarrelling.” [25]

Liberalism had historically the task of breaking the chains which the fettered economy and the corresponding organisations of law of the middle ages had imposed on the further development of society. That it at first strictly maintained the form of bourgeois liberalism did not stop it from actually expressing a very much wider-reaching general principle of society whose completion will be socialism.

Socialism will create no new bondage of any kind whatever. The individual is to be free, not in the metaphysical sense, as the anarchists dreamed – i.e., free from all duties towards the community – but free from every economic compulsion in his action and choice of a calling. Such freedom is only possible for all by means of organisation. In this sense one might call socialism “organising liberalism,” for when one examines more closely the organisations that socialism wants and how it wants them, he will find that what distinguishes them above all from the feudalistic organisations, outwardly like them, is just their liberalism, their democratic constitution, their accessibility. Therefore the trade union, striving after an arrangement similar to a guild, is, in the eyes of the socialist, the product of self-defence against the tendency of capitalism to overstock the labour market; but, at the same time, just on account of its tendency towards a guild, and to the degree in which that obtains, is it an unsocialistic corporate body.

The work here indicated is no very simple problem; it rather conceals within itself a whole series of dangers. Political equality alone has never hitherto sufficed to secure the healthy development of communities whose centre of gravity was in the giant towns. It is, as France and the United States show, no unfailing remedy against the rank growth of all kinds of social parasitism and corruption. If solidity did not reach so far down in the constitution of the French nation, and if the country were not so well favoured geographically, France would have long since been ruined by the land plague of the official class which has gained a footing there. In any case this plague forms one of the causes why, in spite of the great keenness of the French mind, the industrial development of France remains more backward than that of the neighbouring countries. If democracy is not to excel centralised absolutism in the breeding of bureaucracies, it must be built up on an elaborately organised self-government with a corresponding economic, personal responsibility of all the units of administration as well as of the adult citizens of the state. Nothing is more injurious to its healthy development than enforced uniformity and a too abundant amount of protectionism or subventionism.

To create the organisations described – or, so far as they are already begun, to develop them further – is the indispensable preliminary to what we call socialism of production. Without them the so-called social appropriation of the means of production would only result presumably in reckless devastation of productive forces, insane experimentalising and aimless violence, and the political sovereignty of the working class would, in fact, only be carried out in the form of a dictatorial, revolutionary, central power, supported by the terrorist dictatorship of revolutionary clubs. As such it hovered before the Blanquists, and as such it is still represented in the Communist Manifesto and in the publications for which its authors were responsible at that time. But “in presence of the practical experiences of the February revolution and much more of those of the Paris Commune when the proletariat retained political power for two months,” the revolutionary programme given in the Manifesto has “here and there become out of date”. “The Commune notably offers a proof that the working class cannot simply take possession of the state machinery and set it in motion for their own ends.”

So wrote Marx and Engels in 1872 in the preface to the new edition of the Manifesto . And they refer to the work, The Civil War in France , where this is developed more fully. But if we open the work in question and read the part referred to (it is the third), we find a programme developed which, according to its political contents, shows in all material features the greatest similarity to the federalism of Proudhon.

“The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but on the contrary it was to be organised by the destruction of that power of the state which pretended to be the personification of that unity but wanted to be independent of, and superior to, the nation on whose body it was after all only a parasitic growth. Whilst they were occupied in cutting off the merely oppressive organs of the old governing power its rightful functions as a power which claimed to stand above the community were to be taken away and given over to the responsible servants of the community. Instead of deciding once in three or six years what member of the ruling class should trample on and crush the people in Parliament, universal suffrage should serve the people constituted in communities, as individual suffrage serves every other employer to select for his business workers, inspectors, and clerks.

“The antagonism between the commune and the power of the state has been looked on as an exaggerated form of the old fight against over-centralisation ... The constitution of the commune, on the contrary, would have restored to the community all the powers which until now the parasitic growth, the state, which lives on the community and hinders its free action, has absorbed.”

Thus Marx wrote in the Civil War in France .

Let us now listen to Proudhon. As I have not his work on Federalism at hand, a few sentences may follow here from his essay on the Political Capacity of the Working Classes in which he incidentally preaches the forming of the workers into a party of their own.

“In a democracy organised according to the true ideas of the sovereignty of the people, i.e. , according to the fundamental principles of the right of representation, every oppressive and corrupting action of the central authority on the nation is rendered impossible. The mere supposition of such a thing is absurd.

“And why?

“Because in a truly free democracy the central authority is not separated from the assembly of delegates, the natural organs of local interests called together for agreement. Because every deputy is, first of all, the man of the locality which named him its representative, its emissary, one of its fellow-citizens, its special agent to defend its special interests, or to bring them as much as possible into union with the interests of the whole community before the great jury (the nation); because the combined delegates, if they choose from their midst a central executive committee of management, do not separate it from themselves or make it their commander who can carry on a conflict with them.”

“There is no middle course; the commune must be sovereign or only a branch [of the state] – everything or nothing. Give it, however pleasant a part to play, from the moment when it does not create its rights out of itself, when it must recognise a higher law, when the great group to which it belongs is declared to be superior to it and is not the expression of its federated relations, they will unavoidably find themselves one day in opposition to each other and war will break out.” But then logic and power will be on the side of the central authority. “The idea of a limitation of the power of the state by means of groups, when the principle of subordination and centralisation rules in regard to these groups themselves, is inconsistent, not to say contradictory.” It is the municipal principle of bourgeois liberalism. A “federated France” on the other hand, “a regime which represents the ideal of independence and whose first act would consist in restoring to the municipalities their full independence and to the Provinces their self-government” – that is the municipal freedom which the working class must write on its flag. [26] And if in the Civil War we find that “the political sovereignty of the producers cannot exist with the perpetuation of their social slavery,” we read in the Capacité Politique : “When political equality is once given by means of universal suffrage, the tendency of the nation will be towards economic equality. That is just how the workmen’s candidates understood the thing. But this is what their bourgeois rivals did not want. [27] In short, with all the other differences between Marx and the “petit bourgeois”, Proudhon, on this point, their way of thinking is as nearly as possible the same.

There is not the least doubt (and it has since then been proved many times practically) that the general development of modern society is along the line of a constant increase of the duties of municipalities and the extension of municipal freedom, that the municipality will be an ever more important lever of social emancipation. It appears to one doubtful if it was necessary for the first work of democracy to be such a dissolution of the modern state system and complete transformation of its organisation as Marx and Proudhon pictured (the formation of the national assembly out of delegates from provincial or district assemblies, which in their turn were composed of delegates from municipalities) so that the form the national assemblies had hitherto taken had to be abolished. Evolution has given life to too many institutions and bodies corporate, whose sphere has outgrown the control of municipalities and even of provinces and districts for it to be able to do without the control of the central governments unless or before their organisation is transformed. The absolute sovereignty of the municipality, etc., is besides no ideal for me. The parish or commune is a component part of the nation, and hence has duties towards it and rights in it. We can as little grant the district, for example, an unconditional and exclusive right to the soil as we can to the individual. Valuable royalties, rights of forest and river, etc., belong, in the last instance, not to the parishes or the districts, which indeed only are their usufructuaries, but to the nation. Hence an assembly in which the national, and not the provincial or local, interest stands in the forefront or is the first duty of the representatives, appears to be indispensable, especially in an epoch of transition. But beside it, those other assemblies and representative bodies will attain an ever greater importance, so that Revolution or not, the functions of the central assemblies become constantly narrowed, and therewith the danger of these assemblies or authorities to the democracy is also narrowed. It is already very little in advanced countries to-day.

But we are less concerned here with a criticism of separate items in the quoted programme than with bringing into prominence the energy with which it emphasises autonomy the preliminary condition of social emancipation, and with showing how the democratic organisation from the bottom upwards is depicted as the way to the realisation of socialism, and how the antagonists Proudhon and Marx meet again in – liberalism.

The future municipalities itself will reveal how far the and other self-governing bodies will discharge their duties under a complete democracy, and how far they will make use of these duties. But so much is clear: the more suddenly they come in possession of their freedom, the more experiments they will make in number and in violence and therefore be liable to greater mistakes, and the more experience the working class democracy has had in the school of self-government, the more cautiously and practically will it proceed.

Simple as democracy appears to be at the first glance, its problems in such a complicated society as ours are in no way easy to solve. Read only in the volumes of Industrial Democracy by Mr. and Mrs. Webb how many experiments the English trade unions had to make and are still making in order to find out the most serviceable forms of government and administration, and of what importance this question of constitution is to trade unions. The English trade unions have been able to develop in this respect for over seventy years in perfect freedom. They began with the most elementary form of self-government and have been forced to convince themselves that this form is only suited to the most elementary organisms, for quite small, local unions. As they grew they gradually learned to renounce as injurious to their successful development certain cherished ideas of doctrinaire democracy (the imperative mandate, the unpaid official, the powerless central representation), and to form instead of it a democracy capable of governing with representative assemblies, paid officials, and central government with full powers. This section of the history of the development of “trade union democracy” is extremely instructive. If all that concerns trade unions does not quite fit the units of national administration, yet much of it does. The chapter referred to in Industrial Democracy belongs to the theory of democratic government. In the history of the development of trade unions is shown how the executive central management – their state government – can arise simply from division of labour which becomes necessary through the extension in area of the society and through the number of its members. It is possible that with the socialist development of society this centralisation may also later on become superfluous. But for the present it cannot be dispensed with in democracy. As was demonstrated at the end of the first division of this chapter it is an impossibility for the municipalities of great towns or industrial centres to take over under their own management all local productive and commercial undertakings. It is also, on practical grounds, improbable – not to mention grounds of equity which are against it – that they should “expropriate” those undertakings each and all offhand in a revolutionary upheaval. But even if they did (whereby in the majority of cases would only empty husks come into their hands) they would be obliged to lease the mass of the businesses to associations, whether individual or trade union, for associated management. [28]

In every one of these cases, as also in the municipal and national undertakings, certain interests of the different trades would have to be protected, and so there would always remain a need for active supervision on the part of trade unions. In the transition period particularly, the multiplicity of organs will be of great value.

Meantime we are not yet so far on, and it is not my intention to unfold pictures of the future. I am not concerned with what will happen in the more distant future, but with what can and ought to happen in the present, for the present and the nearest future. And so the conclusion of this exposition is the very banal statement that the conquest of the democracy, the formation of political and social organs of the democracy, is the indispensable preliminary condition to the realisation of socialism.

Feudalism, with its unbending organisations and corporations, had to be destroyed nearly everywhere by violence. The liberal organisations of modern society are distinguished from those exactly because they are flexible, and capable of change and development. They do not need to be destroyed, but only to be further developed. For that we need organisation and energetic action, but not necessarily a revolutionary dictatorship. “As the object of the class war is especially to destroy distinctions of class,” wrote some time since (October, 1897) a social democratic Swiss organ, the Vorwärts of Basle, “a period must logically be agreed upon in which the realisation of this object, of this ideal, must be begun. This beginning, these periods following on one another, are already founded in our democratic development; they come to our help, to serve gradually as a substitute for the class war, to absorb it into themselves by the building up of the social democracy.” “The bourgeoisie, of whatever shade of opinion it may be,” declared lately the Spanish socialist, Pablo Iglesias, “must be convinced of this, that we do not wish to take possession of the Government by the same means that were once employed, by violence and bloodshed, but by lawful means which are suited to civilisation” ( Vorwärts, October 16th, 1898). From a similar point of view the Labour Leader, the leading organ of the English Independent Labour Party, agreed unreservedly with the remarks of Vollmar on the Paris Commune. But no one will accuse this paper of timidity in fighting capitalism and the capitalist parties. And another organ of the English socialist working class democracy the Clarion , accompanied an extract from my article on the theory of catastrophic evolution with the following commentary:

“The formation of a true democracy – I am quite convinced that that is the most pressing and most important duty which lies before us. This is the lesson which the socialist campaign of the last ten years has taught us. That is the doctrine which emerges out of all my knowledge and experiences of politics. We must build up a nation of democrats before socialism is possible.”

Chapter 3 (cont’d)

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20. Amongst others Carey relies on this partial truth in his Doctrine of Harmony . Certain extractive industries – mines, etc. – afford examples of it.

21. The consistent advocates of Blanquism also always conceived of democracy as at first an oppressive force. Thus Hippolyt Castille publishes a preliminary introduction to his History of the Second Republic which culminates in a veritable glorification of the Reign of Terror. “The most perfect community,” he says, “would be where tyranny was an affair of the whole community. That proves fundamentally that the most perfect society would be one where there is least freedom in the satanic ( i.e. , individualistic) meaning of this word ... What is called political freedom is only a beautiful name to adorn the justifiable tyranny of the many. Political freedom is only the sacrifice of the freedom of a number of individuals to the despotic God of human societies, to social reason, to the social contract.” “From this epoch (the time from October, 1793, to April, 1794, when Girondists, Hebertists, Dantonists, were beheaded one after the other) dates in truth the re-incarnation of the principle of authority, of this eternal defensive warfare of human societies. Freed from the moderates and the ultras, secured against every conflict of authority, the committee of public safety acquires the form of government necessitated by the given circumstances, the necessary force arid unity to maintain its position and to protect France from a threatening anarchy ... No, it is not the government that killed the first French Republic, but the Parliamentarians, the traitors of Thermidor. The anarchist and liberal republicans whose swarming hordes covered France, continue in vain the old calumny. Robespierre remains a remarkable man, not on account of his talents and virtues, which are here incidental, but on account of his genius for authority, on account of his strong political instinct.”

This worship of Robespierre was not to outlast the second Empire. To the younger generation of the Blanquist socialist revolutionaries who stepped on the stage in the middle of the ‘sixties and who were above all anti-clerical, Robespierre was too philistine on account of his Deism. They swore by Hebert and Anacharsis Cloots. But for the rest they reasoned like Castille – i.e. they carried out to extremes, like him, the just idea of the subordination of individual interests to the general interests of the community.

22. In this point Lassalle was much more logical than we are to-day, granted that it was one-sidedness to derive the idea of the bourgeois simply from political privilege instead of at least from his economic position of power also. But for the rest he was sufficient realist to blunt beforehand the point of the above contradiction when he declared in the Workers’ Programme : “In the German language the word ‘bourgeoisie’ had to be translated by ‘Bürgerthum’ (citizendom). But it has not this meaning with me. We are all citizens (‘Bürger’) – the workman, the poor citizen, the rich citizen, and so forth. In the course of history the word ‘bourgeoisie’ has rather acquired a meaning by which to denote a well defined, political line of thought” ( Collected Works , II, p.27). What Lassalle further says there of the distorted logic of Sansculottism is especially to be recommended to writers in the belles lettres style who study the middle class “naturalistically” in the café and then judge the whole class according to their dried fruits, as the philistine thinks he sees the type of the modern workman in his fellow tippler. I feel no hesitation in declaring that I consider the middle class – not excepting the German – in their bulk to be still fairly healthy, not only economically, but also morally.

23. Sovereignty “rests with the people. It is indivisible, imprescriptible, inalienable.” (Article 25). “A people has at any time the right to revise, reform and alter its constitution. No generation can bind the next to its laws.” (Article 28).

24. Neue Zeit XV. 2, p.141.

26. Capacité Politique des Classes Ouvrières, pp. 224, 225, 231, 235.

27. Ibid . p.214

28. This would certainly bring about complicated problems. Think of the many joint undertakings of modern times which employ members of all possible trades.

Last updated on 16.3.2003

Differing Views and Tensions Within Socialism

Revolutionary socialism.

Many early socialists were worried that they were far away from power and that they would be prevented achieving their aims by a capitalist conservative establishment.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels discussed a ‘proletarian revolution’ whereby the class-conscious working class would rise up against capitalism and overthrow it.

The first actual example of this was in Russia in 1917 , although this was more of a coup (overthrow of the government) by an armed group- Lenin and the Bolsheviks- rather than a mass class revolt. It was, however, an example to other revolutionary socialists of what could be achieved.

Revolutionary tactics were attractive to socialists for two reasons. Firstly, industrialism and capitalism in the 19th century were producing mass poverty and social inequality, so the working classes wanted a chance to change their circumstances. Secondly, the working classes had very few alternatives to revolution- there was no real representation or way of engaging in political life. In monarchies, the country was dominated by royalty and privilege. In constitutional democracies, the vote was restricted. A revolution was the only viable way of achieving socialist goals.

Revolutionary socialists also believe that the state is a device of class oppression, acting for ‘capital’ against ‘labour’.This means that the political state will always reflect and preach the interests of the property-owning classes. Therefore, in order to build socialism, the ‘bourgeois’ state must be overthrown, resulting in a total transformation of society. This would be the only way of ensuring the revolution would succeed.

Revolutionary socialism has been seen through the establishment of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In each case, the existing order was overthrown and replaced with a one-party state which controlled the economy. Opposition was removed and totalitarian methods were used to remove dissent. The credibility of revolutionary socialism was damaged by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s/early 1990s .

Social democracy

Social democracy developed during the early twentieth century and really began to become accepted in the years after 1945 .It uses socialist principles but has different aims and methods to that of revolutionary socialism. After Britain and other Western nations recovered from the traumas of World War Two the poorer parts of society, supported by many who were better off, demanded more from their state. Many people felt that not only should they be better supported by the nation for the work and services they provided but also that society as a whole would benefit from a raise in living standards created by the state.

The foundations for social democracy are based upon moral thinking- the idea that socialism is the ethically right thing to do in a civilised world. Social democracy theorists claim that as humans want to be good then a socialist way of acting is the only moral solution in how society should be developed. People such as William Morris used humanist ideas to support social democracy (humanism is an idea that says that the satisfaction of all peoples needs should be a priority of society).

Christians have also supported social democracy because they claim that all people are created by God equal and should therefore be supported by each other and society. People such as Tawney supported social democracy because he claimed that it supported people against the problems of unregulated capitalism.

Social democrats supported their ideas with the principle of social justice ; the idea that people should have a greater equality of wealth and therefore opportunity as this is the only fair way to run a society.

The goals of revolutionary socialism were seen by social democrats as too extreme because they wanted to completely reorder society and remove capitalism, which was viewed as irredeemable (cannot be made good).However, by the twentieth century some socialists had come to believe that these views were inaccurate. People such as Eduard Bernstein advocated evolutionary socialism which argued that Marxism needed revising or adapting ( revisionism ).

Revisionists argued several main ideas. They claimed that capitalism had not been shown to be collapsing and was not necessarily doomed (as predicted by Marx), but it needed to be used for the whole of society.

They also argued that the divisions between class outlined by Marx (bourgeoisie and proletariat) were too simplistic, as business ownership was widening as a result of the ability to buy and sell stocks and shares and a growing class of technical and professionally skilled workers. Therefore, the divide and the need for revolution was not so straightforward.

Bernstein argued that capitalism could be reformed and made to work for the good of society through state intervention such as the nationalisation of industry and the creation of legal protections for people, welfare and pensions.This process would create wealth and create a happy and more equal society. The theories of Keynesian economics developed as a result (regulating the economy and attempting to achieve full employment). A more equal society could they believed be created though using the state to redistribute wealth so that the creation of profit benefitted all involved.

As a result, socialists such as Crosland in The Future of Socialism argued that socialism should focus on several values. It should be achieved through a democratic process because it did not need to overthrow capitalism. He claimed that the state should follow ‘managerial socialism’. This meant that private property was permissible, but the state would manage the economy to ensure fairness for all using powers of economic intervention such as progressive taxation and nationalisation.

After __1945 __social democracy seemed to have triumphed because it combined the economic drive of capitalism with fairness and equality without extremism. However, this success did not last. Many thought that the compromise between socialism and capitalism was always unstable and unworkable and therefore would quickly fall apart.

When capitalist economies were doing well it was possible to use redistribution to create a more equal society. However, when economies started to do badly in the 1970s __there was a direct link between the principle of wealth redistribution was criticised. If the state struggled for money the argument over who should get what caused a problem for social democrats. Another problem was that as economies began to deindustrialise many people did not see themselves as working class. This causes socialist political parties such as the UK Labour Party to have to move away from socialism to get elected in the __mid-1990s .

In addition, in the early __1990s __the main communist nations of Europe collapsed and despite the social democrats having moved away from Marxism this meant that the ideas of socialism were discredited (seem as unrealistic).

In response to the crisis faced by social democracy in the 1980s __and __90s , socialist parties began to move towards ‘neo-revisionism’, also known as the ‘third way’.

The third way attempted to navigate a path between traditional social democracy and free-market neoliberalism.

Key ideas of the third way include:

• Primacy of the market : neo-revisionists reject top-down state intervention and support a dynamic market economy as the best way of generating wealth. A globalised, capitalist economy is therefore accepted
• Value of community and moral responsibility: emphasising that people have moral links and responsibilities to their community, attempting to balance rights with responsibilities
• Society bases on consensus and harmony: to move away from traditional class divisions. Values such as fairness and self-reliance should be promoted
• Social inclusion: emphasis on equality of opportunity to create a meritocracy. Tony Blair, a key figure associated with the third way, suggested that welfare should be a ‘hand up, not a handout’. Welfare should therefore be more specifically targeted at getting people into work, for instance
• Competition/market state: the state should focus on social investment, for instance in education, employment and training, in order to boost economic growth and improve a nation’s standing in the world economy

The third way was electorally successful during the New Labour years and has influences many left-of-centre parties. In the UK however it has been criticised as not containing many socialist ideas, and just being an attempt to win more votes from ‘centre-ground’ voters. The UK Labour Party has since moved away from the third way and back towards more social democratic thinking.

How is Scientific Socialism Possible?

• First Online: 09 January 2021

Cite this chapter

• Marius S. Ostrowski 2  

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The lecture that forms the content of the present work was held by me on 17 May this year to the Social-Scientific Student Association in Berlin [ Sozialwissenschaftlicher Studentenverein zu Berlin ]. Insofar as written preparatory work and my memory made it possible for me, I have made the effort to reproduce it here exactly as it was delivered in the aforementioned meeting itself. Up to the end of page 20, my arguments were based on a manuscript that was worked out in detail, which I read out verbatim along with a couple of merely illustrative additions, and which I have also repeated here unchanged, apart from minor stylistic corrections. The second part, by contrast, I had in front of me in the lecture only in the form of a plan, albeit a fairly extensive one, and so I can perhaps vouch that, as far as it is concerned, it is a faithful preservation of my arguments’ line of thought, but not the exact reproduction of these arguments themselves. Where supplementary comments seemed appropriate for the lecture’s publication in pamphlet form, I have inserted these in the form of footnotes and short addendums.

The immediate object of all art is either pleasure or utility: the immediate object of all science is solely truth. As art and science have different objects, so also have they different faculties. The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are predicted by science. The more complete a science is, the greater its power of prediction; the more complete an art is, the greater its power of control —Henry Thomas Buckle, The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge Like all social reform parties, socialism too has its living wellspring in the glaring imperfections of the present societal order. So long as this spring flows, the struggling party of socialism, Social Democracy , has nothing to fear in self-critique of its theory. —Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, The Scientific and Philosophical Crisis within Modern Marxism

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Present volume, pp. 345–54.

Ibid., pp. 513–42.

Adolph Wagner (1835–1917), German financial economist and pro-monarchist advocate of state socialism, representative of the “socialism of the chair” tendency, formulator of “Wagner’s law” of the increase of state spending in line with income growth, influenced figures as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois, Wolfgang Heine, Gustav Stresemann, Werner Sombart, and Ferdinand Tönnies.

Eduard Bernstein, ‘Masaryks Kritik des Marxismus’, Zeit 250 (15 July 1899), p. 38.

Friedrich Engels, ‘Anti-Dühring’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 25: Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1987), pp. 5–309; Friedrich Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24: Marx and Engels 1874–1883 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), pp. 281–325.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 35: Marx—Capital, Volume I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996), p. 79.

Paul Brousse (1844–1912), French doctor and socialist activist, ally of Peter Kropotkin before the split in the International Workingmen’s Association, later a reformist and possibilist voice in favour of unification between Jules Guesde’s and Jean Jaurès’ strands of French socialism into the SFIO.

Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, p. 305.

Friedrich Engels, ‘Marx and Rodbertus: Preface to the First German Edition of The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 26: Engels 1882–1889 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), p. 281.

Ibid., pp. 281–2.

[Ed. B.—This is the following bit from the work Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy : “If the exchange value of a product equals the labour time contained in the product, then the exchange value of a working day is equal to the product it yields, in other words, wages must be equal to the product of labour. But in fact the opposite is true.” And the following note on this: “This objection, which was advanced against Ricardo by bourgeois economists, was later taken up by socialists. Assuming that the formula was theoretically sound, they alleged that practice stood in conflict with the theory and demanded that bourgeois society should draw the practical conclusions supposedly arising from its theoretical principles. In this way at least English socialists turned Ricardo’s formula of exchange value against political economy.”] MECW 29, p. 301.

Karl Marx, ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 24: Marx and Engels 1874–1883 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), p. 84.

Engels, ‘Marx and Rodbertus’, p. 282.

[Ed. B.—For these, surplus value falls into the category of rent , specifically, it constitutes in its various subdivisions every time one of the various special forms of the aggregate concept of rent, which encompasses all income that flows from property, exclusive rights, preferential positions, etc. It is obvious that one can, in principle, reach exactly the same stance in challenging the appropriation of surplus value by capitalists and monopolists via this way of looking at things, as on the basis of the Marxian theory of surplus value. It is not so much the question of whether it is right and the other is wrong—since at their core they are only two different ways of developing the same fundamental idea—but rather which of them has the benefit of greater unity and conceptual acuity. A question that itself again is only of practical importance once social development has reached an advanced stage.]

[Ed. B.—See Addendum I.] Antonio Graziadei (1873–1953), Italian economist and “maximalist” socialist politician, co-founder of the Communist Party of Italy [ Partito Comunista d’Italia ], accused of revisionism for seeking to correct perceived mistakes in the Marxianlabour theory of value.

[Ed. B.—Kant’s answer to the second question is, as is well known, that metaphysics as a science is only possible precisely as a critique of pure reason—i.e., reason that precedes experience and first enables it—as we put it today, as critique of knowledge [ Erkenntniskritik ]. “So critique contains, and it alone, the entire well-examined and proven plan, indeed even all the means of completion within itself, by which metaphysics as a science can be brought about; it is not possible to do so by other means and ways.” Now, as much as Kant has been corrected in the individual details of his critique of reason by modern evolutionary theory, his principled discussion about its foundations and significant still remains unshaken.] Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science , Gary Hatfield (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[Ed. B.—See Addendum II.]

[Ed. B.—In the essay from which I took a passage as an epigraph for this work, the English cultural historian Thomas Buckle enumerates a series of epoch-making discoveries that were made substantially deductively, through the imaginative power of poetically-disposed minds. He writes, inter alia : “The discovery—the metamorphosis of plants—was made by Göthe, the greatest poet Germany has produced, and one of the greatest the world has ever seen. And he made it, not in spite of being a poet, but because he was a poet.” And: “I submit that there is a spiritual, a poetic, and for aught we know a spontaneous and uncaused element in the human mind, which ever and anon, suddenly and without warning, gives us a glimpse and a forecast of the future, and urges us to seize truth as it were by anticipation.” He hopes “that I have not altogether raised my voice in vain before this great assembly, and that I have done at least something towards vindicating the use in physical science of that deductive method which, during the last two centuries, Englishmen have unwisely despised”. Naturally he in no way thereby repudiates the inductive method, but only what Engels calls in his preface to the second edition of Anti-Dühring the “blinkered way of thinking” inherited from English empiricism. But here too there is a limit. And so let the old master Kant be a warning counsellor to us. “The imagination may perhaps be forgiven for occasional vagaries, and for not keeping carefully within the limits of experience, since it gains life and vigour by such flights, and since it is always easier to moderate its boldness, than to stimulate its languor. But the understanding which ought to think can never be forgiven for indulging in vagaries ; for we depend upon it alone for assistance to set bounds, when necessary, to the vagaries of the imagination.” ( Prolegomena , §35.)] Henry Thomas Buckle, ‘The Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge’, in Henry Thomas Buckle, Essays(Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1867).

[Ed. B.—If one takes into consideration, e.g., the low intellectual and moral level of the English working class, and the nature of the political parties in England at the time into which Owen’s primary activity falls, then one will also grasp why Owen avoided party politics and the political action relating to it, and called upon the well-minded elements of all classes and parties to participate in the work of societal reform. But the withdrawal from party politics in no way meant for Owen a fundamental aversion to political reforms and legislative measures to benefit the working class. He was, as Marx and Engels have already emphasised, one of the first and most assiduous agitators for workers’ protection laws, and took part in many agitations and demonstrations for the workers’ latest demands.]

[Ed. B.— Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System . Owen writes there: “Hitherto, legislators have appeared to regard manufactures only in one point of view, as a source of national wealth. The other mighty consequences, which proceed from extended manufactures, when left to their natural progress , have never yet engaged the attention of any legislature. Yet the political and moral effects to which we allude, well deserve to occupy the best faculties of the greatest and the wisest statesmen. The general diffusion of manufactures throughout a country generates a new character in its inhabitants.”] Robert Owen, Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1817).

[Ed. B.—Thompson, Bray, Hodgskin, etc.] Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869), English political economist, socialist critic of capitalism influenced by neoclassical economics, defender of free trade as well as trade unionism.

[Ed. B.—Compare Addendum III.]

Auguste Comte (1798–1857), French positivist philosopher, pioneering advocate of applying scientific methods to address social questions, early evolutionary sociologist who influenced thinkers as diverse as Émile Durkheim, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer.

[Ed. B.—In agreement with this, the Saint-Simonians already unfurled a lively propaganda among the workers early on. This inter alia in the strongly-industrialised Lyon. The great weavers’ uprising there in November 1831 had been almost immediately preceded by a Saint-Simonian agitation, and representatives of this tendency sat on the workers’ committee. The first attempts to found workers’ cooperatives also came from students of Saint-Simon.]

Engels, ‘Anti-Dühring’, p. 255.

[Ed. B.—One could say of Owen, Fourier, and if not of Saint-Simon himself then still of several of his students that, as already indicated above with respect to Owen, what brands them above all as utopians in the worse sense of the word was the inexpediency of their means, which aimed to bring about the socialist society they aspired to, the incongruity that exists on this point with them between purpose , or rather goal , and means . Engels also explains this in Anti-Dühring . And at the same time in their defence he sets out in a trenchant way that the inadequacy of their means was conditioned by the insufficient level of the societal development that these men saw before them. But I cannot agree with him if on page 4 of Anti-Dühring he says about them that they regarded it as a coincidence, independent of historical development, when and where the truths were found that they revealed to the world. In such a generalised form, this gives an erroneous picture of their conception of history.]

[Ed. B.—Bacon himself uses the expression civil affairs , which encompasses state and society, since in his day after all there was no societal science [ Gesellschaftswissenschaft ] that was separate from political science [ Staatswissenschaft ] whatsoever.]

[Ed. B.—It is self-evident that in practice this norm can be interpreted in very different ways. But a party that does not want to sink to the level of a sect, or—since parties often start out as sects—remain stuck at the standpoint of one, will not fundamentally make too narrow-minded a use of this concept; a party that does not want to be a mere agglomeration of elements that think differently on most points will not restrict it to pure formalities. Est modus in rebus —I presuppose, in speaking of political parties, an understanding for their nature and normal conditions of existence.]

[Ed. B.—A societal doctrine formulated from a politically-conservative standpoint can, e.g., be a very uniformly thought-through, strictly logically-constructed theoretical edifice, yet with that it will still not yet become a sociological science, but behaves towards this as perhaps does a vegetarian recipe book towards the physiology of taste and nutrition. This, self-evidently, is not to condemn outright the existence of such doctrines and recipe books.]

[Ed. B.—Compare Addendum IV.]

[Ed. B.—To the objection, raised in the meeting by a speaker, which I have also encountered elsewhere, that this could not be true, since after all, e.g., medicine, which is surely a science, has the purpose of healing, I had and have to answer that healing is the task of an art [ Kunst ], of practised medicine, which certainly has as its precondition a thorough mastery of medical science. But this itself does not have healing, but rather the insight into the conditions and means of healing as its task . If one takes this conceptual distinction as a typical model, then one will be able to establish even with more complicated examples without difficulty where science ends and art or doctrine begins.]

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ‘A M. Marx, 17 mai’, in Amédée-Jérôme Langlois (ed.), Correspondance de P.-J. Proudhon, vol. 2 (Paris: Lacroix, 1875), pp. 198–202.

[Ed. B.—Compare Addendum V.]

[Ed. B.—“ Critical communism —that is its true name, and there is none more fitting for this doctrine.” In memoriam for the Communist Manifesto: Essays on the Materialist Conception of History . I. Rome 1896. Labriola is, as his philosophical treatises show, as a philosopher more a Hegelian than a Kantian.]

Antonio Graziadei, La Produzione Capitalistica (Turin: Bocca, 1899), pp. 6–7.

Ibid., p. 245.

Eduard Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism , Henry Tudor (tr.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 52.

Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, Der Wertgedanke, ein verhülltes Dogma der Nationalökonomie (Jena: G. Fischer, 1899).

John Dalton (1766–1844), English naturalist and educator, seminal theorist in meterology, colour-blindness, and the laws of gases, acknowledged as the founder of atomic theory and modern chemistry.

[Ed. B.—Compare also Addendum V.]

Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1926), English lawyer, journalist, philosopher, and historian, central member of both the Social Democratic Federation alongside Henry Mayers Hyndman and the Socialist League with William Morris, editor of Justice (1887–1891), early theorist of BritishMarxism who supported Karl Kautsky in his debates with Bernstein, vitriolic anti-feminist and men’s rights advocate.

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Ostrowski, M.S. (2021). How is Scientific Socialism Possible?. In: Eduard Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50484-7_14

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How to answer an Edexcel exam question on socialism

You could get asked two questions on socialism in Paper 1. There is no guarantee that the two questions will be on more than one idea. All questions start with ‘To what extent…?’, so they are looking for you to evaluate the extent of agreement or disagreement.

Question topics

Questions will focus on the agreement and disagreement within the various strands. In socialism this is more complex, as you have three strands: revolutionary (Marxist), social democracy and the Third Way. Within these strands you also have division over the means (how to achieve goals) and ends (what kind of society you are trying to create). Do not worry about the strands within social democracy — you do not need to explore the difference between democratic socialism and social democracy. Questions may ask generally about agreement or disagreement between strands or will focus on specific areas such as the state. Make sure you are clear which type of question you are answering.

Divisions in socialism

·          Human nature: How collectivist is human nature? How important is the concept of common humanity ? To what extent are we the product of our environment? Marxists examine how human nature is damaged by capitalist society, but supporters of the Third Way believe that individuals can flourish within the globalised free market.

·         Society : Revolution or evolution as a means to achieve goals? Are socialists aiming for a completely equal society (in economic terms) or a more equal society? Socialists do not agree on what is meant by equality: while revolutionaries want social equality, social democrats wish to narrow the gap and Third Way supporters favour equal opportunities and reducing poverty.

·         State : Should the state — as a tool of the bourgeoisie, according to revolutionary socialists — be abolished by revolutionary means? Or, as social democrats believe, can you use the neutral state to achieve equality of outcome using intervention, such as nationalisation and progressive taxation?

·          Economy: Should capitalism be abolished via revolution or other means? Or can it be tamed and regulated, and economic growth used to help the many and not the few? Third Way supporters go even further and pragmatically support the free market.

Introduction

These essays are quite short (Edexcel 24 marks so about 25-30 minutes) So a one or two-line introduction will do. E xplain the debate, e.g.:

Although all socialists agree that society should be much more equal, there is significant disagreement over how to achieve it and what exactly it would mean.

Then add your line of argument, e.g.:

The divisions within socialism over the role of the state far outweigh the areas of agreement.

Socialists used to disagree significantly over the means of achieving their goals — revolution or evolution — but there is now much less disagreement, as revolutionary socialism has been discredited.

This is AO3, and must not be left to your conclusion — the examiner will expect to see it throughout the essay.

Main body of essay

The danger here is that you focus on the areas of division, as there are so many within socialism. Another hazard is that you simply describe the three strands in separate paragraphs and lose focus on the question until your conclusion. As all questions ask ‘To what extent…?’ you must look at agreement as well as disagreement (AO2). If your line of argument is that there is more disagreement than agreement, then start with a paragraph highlighting all the areas socialists agree on, in relation to the topic.

Use an agree disagree sandwich. This means three paragraphs in the main body of your essay with agree/disagree/agree or disagree/ agree/ disagree- depending on your line of argument. Your middle paragraph i.e. the line you are not arguing should be qualified - e.g distance yourself with phrases like 'It can be argued....' and end the middle paragraph with a restatement of your line. e.g 'Granted there are some differences/agreements  over ........however more fundamental differences/ agreements are 

 Add in a key thinker.

Areas of agreement:

·        A critique of capitalism as fundamentally damaging to human nature and society.

·        Common humanity and cooperation are natural.

·        A belief that inequality is not due to differing ability or effort but is the result of the fundamentally unfair structure of a society based on inherited privilege.

·        The plasticity, sociability and malleability of human nature — a positive and optimistic view of the possibility of improvement and the role of our surroundings in creating our personalities.

·        Equality of outcome — the need to eradicate or narrow the gap between rich and poor to ensure fairness, freedom and justice for all.

Finish your paragraph with a clear judgement (AO3) and link back to the exact wording of the question, such as:

Although there are significant areas of agreement over capitalism, the areas of disagreement between the strands are much more significant.

Then move onto the areas of division and pick out 2–3 significant aspects to write on. Use key thinkers to show contrast, e.g.:

Marx argued that capitalism created two classes, whose interests were utterly in conflict and irreconcilable. However, Crosland, writing in the mid-twentieth century, updated this view to argue that there was now a large and growing managerial class in the middle, and that instead of focusing on capitalism, socialists should focus on how to create a more equal society using progressive taxation and a generous welfare state.

Differences within socialism

Make sure you use the Edexcel specification terminology. For example, ‘bourgeoisie and proletariat’ is much more accurate than ‘rich and poor’ or ‘upper and lower class’.

Integrating the thinkers

You need to cite at least two thinkers or your mark will be capped. Three would be wiser. Use them to support and explain your ideas, rather than adding them to the end of a paragraph as an afterthought. For example, you can use Marx’s analysis of capitalism to explain the revolutionary socialist approach to the economy. Beatrice Webb is useful, as she bridges the gap between revolutionary and evolutionary socialism, rejecting violence and revolution but seeking radical alternatives to capitalism. She could be used to show how socialists agree in terms of their analysis of capitalism, even if they don’t agree on methods.

Do I need examples?

It is not necessary to include recent examples in socialism, such as Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. There is probably no time, although you could include them in a conclusion if linked to the question, for example mentioning Sanders to show how Third Way ideas have not necessarily triumphed. Examples can be used to develop your AO2 evaluation and analysis points, such as showing how the creation of the welfare state by the postwar Labour government demonstrates how social democrats used the mixed economy and state intervention in order to create a more equal society. That said, you are very limited for time and it is much more important to include the key thinkers.

Do not sit on the fence. To get those AO3 marks you cannot argue that there is both disagreement and agreement. For example:

Socialists do agree that capitalism is deeply flawed and damaging to human nature and society. Therefore the agreement is more significant than the disagreement, which focuses on the alternatives.

clearly comes down on the side of agreement. You will have already mentioned your viewpoint in the introduction and in each paragraph, so it should not come as any surprise to the examiner.

How to write an essay on socialism and common humanity