Socialism

Socialism is the theory and practice directed toward shared ownership and collective property holding of social [Page 770]goods and services. Socialism has been enormously influential in sociology and social theory, because it shares the root concern with the social. Socialism is often identified with Marxism, but this is misleading. Socialism precedes Marxism by 50 years. The word socialism came into use in the 1820s. It is also larger and more varied than Marxism, for its usages refer to a wider range of places than Western Europe, where classical Marxism emanates from Germany, and to a broader set of claims and practices than the idea of scientific socialism.

In its earliest usages, the term socialism was reactive, but less against the idea of capitalism than against the idea of individualism. Socialism in its earliest phases was understood less as an alternative social system to capitalism and more as an antidote to the corrosive effects of laissez-faire and its individualism. By the twentieth century, the success of the Russian Revolution saw the installation of orthodox Marxism as the most influential type of socialism, as movement and as theory. Alongside Marxism, there were always practical reforming socialisms of different kinds, best represented emblematically by Fabianism in England and progressivism in the United States. Wherever capitalism emerged, socialists responded, often in local and pragmatic terms rather than in those of Marxism as a social theory. Socialisms are thus characterised by diversity and often by internal conflict and contradiction. In some cases, as in England and Australia, socialisms could be characterised as the confluence of middle-class ideas and their intellectual bearers with working-class strategies and their bearers in union-based social involvements. There have always been middle-class and working-class socialisms, and there have always been socialist theories and movements that do not always meld. There have always been modernist and antimodernist streams within socialism, some expressing the utopian need or desire to return to precapitalist days, others arguing to the contrary that it was necessary to have more factories but no capitalists. There have always been substantial tensions between socialist arguments for efficiency in material provision and other claims for democracy and freedom. There have often been tensions between the idea that small cooperative organization is beautiful, and the increasingly influential twentieth-century demand that the state should run society. Often these contradictions or tensions are evident within the same thinkers, as evidenced in the work of Marx or Gramsci or G. D. H. Cole, or else they emerge across the historical paths of development of their thought.

The earliest uses of the word socialism in the English language occur in England, in connection with the emerging cooperative movement. Cooperation is a leading example of a kind of practical, rather than theoretical, socialism. Cooperation spread across the nineteenth century in two forms, as cooperatives of consumption and production. In the first case, working people would pool their resources, buy consumer goods collectively, distribute them socially and share profits as dividends. Such practices were directed against the so-called truck system or closed economies of company towns, where wages might be paid in kind, where wage-labour relations were not formally free, and consequently where workers were even more oppressed than elsewhere, having no alternative but to buy or receive adulterated or substandard goods in lieu of wages. The history of producers' cooperatives is more complicated, as producers' co-ops are often formed in moments of crisis—for example, as an alternative to the closure of firms, where workers buy their capitalists out and introduce the strategy of self-management. Both types of cooperation are open to the Marxist criticism that they seek capitalism without capitalists. They have nevertheless been viewed as exemplary by radicals, as they demonstrate the redundancy of capitalist domination. The knowledge and skill of production belong to the workers, not their bosses. The secondary issue, that capitalists often know how to trade even if they do not know how to produce, is lost in the equation. Both types of cooperation facilitate some degree of worker self-management, a theme that resurfaces into the 1960s, where workers take over the functions of capital and seek to run firms democratically. Here, the telling criticism comes rather from the syndicalists, for whom it is bad enough that workers have to work in factories—now you expect us to run them, as well?

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