Socialism

SOCIALIST IDEAS IN VARIOUS forms have accompanied human development from time immemorial. First attempts to put it in practice are connected with medieval religious movements, but the roots of the ideology reach much deeper. The basic thought connecting all the incarnations of socialism is the elimination of private property. People are good, according to the socialist theoreticians, but the institution of private property corrupts them and is thus responsible for the evil existing in the real world.

This is the message linking the Brethren of the Free Spirit in the 13th century, Taborites of the 15th century, French utopian socialists in the 18th and 19th centuries, together with 20th-century political regimes of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. Human history, in their view, is but a suffering that is made worthy only by the final establishment of socialism, which will put an end to history and bring about a state of unheard-of affluence and eternal peace.

The word socialism is much newer than the idea itself. It appeared in the first half of the 19th century. Socialism is known as a system challenging capitalism, pointing to its alleged injustices, and offering an alternative that promises to relieve the burden of the poor. It found its theoretical background mainly in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They incorporated into their system all the traditional utopian ideas but added a bit of originality—mainly the class struggle and the dialectical method of reasoning that was supposed to deliver it a scientific status. The core—critique of private property and individual freedom—remained untouched, however.

Marx, using his dialectical method, attempted to formulate the laws of history. On the one hand he praised capitalism for liberating the working class from serfdom that prevailed before the Industrial Revolution; on the other, he criticized it since exploitation survived though it assumed a different form. In capitalism, said Marx, the class of capitalists, the factory owners, exploits workers. His explanation goes as follows. Capitalists [Page 1003]buy the working power of a worker (his full capacity to work) and pay him what this power is worth—subsistence wage, the costs of creating and maintaining the worker, in other words, his costs of living. However, the worker is able to produce more value than he is paid for; he is able to generate more than is required to feed and dress him. This is called a surplus value and is appropriated by the capitalist, though it should, Marxists insist, belong to the workers, hence the exploitation.

Even without any further exploration this inference is questionable for at least two reasons: first, capitalists do not buy the working power of workers (only the slave owners do) but rather the hours of their work, so they cannot appropriate any surplus value. Moreover the competition among capitalists for labor drives the wages high above the subsistence level, as is witnessed by the enormous rise in the standard of living in capitalist societies from Marx's time on.

Marxists considered socialism a superior stage to capitalism not only because it puts an end to exploitation of workers, but also because of its allegedly rational production system. The superiority does not, however, entail that people will recognize it and intentionally opt for socialism. Marx insisted that it is not a matter of choice; socialism is bound to come with the inexorability of the law of nature.

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