Socialism

Intellectually, socialism is a rejection of the ideas of men like Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and others of [Page 1301]their ilk who saw the pursuit of self-interest as natural. It therefore posits that only through a radical transformation of social relations can the social problems and miseries of capitalism be overcome. Socialism should be seen as a very strong political and social notion. In other words, it is politically loaded and at the same time aspires toward a popular recreation of society through the establishment of an organized working class and the building of a classless society. In recent times, socialism has tended toward the former objective and the perception of social evolution as the route to enthroning socialism. In this change of focus, socialism is often located in the introduction of radical social reforms within contemporary democracies.

Socialism is an ideology that puts forward the idea that society should be in the control of popular collectives that control both the means of power and production. Actually, the idea is that the control of means of power by the collective automatically guarantees the control of means of production. Often there is a misguided or rather superfluous attempt to see socialism in terms of two definitions, which on face value appear contradictory. In the first place, socialism implies the replacement of market regulation in capitalism with the social and economic planning of the state, especially by a centralized authority. Second, it also means the overwhelming belief in the ability of human beings to jointly cooperate with each other to determine their collective future or destiny. The basic point emerging from the above definitions is that the two can be married and conceptualized as the essence of socialism. In this sense, both notions should coalesce in a genuine socialist development because human cooperation and mobilization is essential to any meaningful social and economic planning that hopes to jettison the role of market forces.

Perhaps one of the most penetrating conceptualizations of socialism can be located in the intellectual and organizational efforts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Even though they elaborated a vision of socialism that contains the general socialist desire for the creation of a more egalitarian society, they believed that the solution to the alienation and exploitation of capitalism lay in the working-class overthrow of capitalism. They envisaged that overthrow of capitalism would lead to the control of production and distribution by workers and the eradication of alienation imbued in the capitalist use of work as both a mechanism for social control and exploitation. However, Marx took socialism a step further by a conviction in the possibility of a classless and stateless society.

However, in the conceptualization of socialism it may be pertinent to make a distinction between early and modern socialism. Early socialism may be seen as typified by all forms of reaction and resentments against the state and its agents even before formal capitalism deriving from dissatisfaction with the situation of the less privileged members of the society. In fact, a typical manifestation of this type of socialism may be seen in the biblical account in Acts 41:34–5:11 where the disciples advocated a model of communism. On the other hand, modern socialism has to do with all forms of reaction against capitalism starting from the early 19th century, which saw the collective as superior to the individual. These forms of reaction were geared toward providing an alternative model of development to capitalism.

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