write a critical essay on socialism

Socialism: A short primer

Subscribe to governance weekly, e.j. dionne, jr. and e.j. dionne, jr. w. averell harriman chair and senior fellow - governance studies @ejdionne william a. galston william a. galston ezra k. zilkha chair and senior fellow - governance studies.

May 13, 2019

• 21 min read

In this essay, E.J. Dionne, Jr. and Bill Galston give a primer on socialism in three parts: its definition, the age gap in perceptions of socialism among Americans, and how socialism evolved to social-democratic systems in the U.K. and Germany.

Something new is happening in American politics. Although most Americans continue to oppose socialism, it has reentered electoral politics and is enjoying an upsurge in public support unseen since the days of Eugene V. Debs . The three questions we will be focusing on are: Why has this happened? What does today’s “democratic socialism” mean in contrast with past versions? And what are the political implications?

It’s worth recalling how important socialism once was at the ballot box to understand that this tradition has deeper roots in our history than many imagine. In the 1912 presidential election, Debs secured six percent of the popular vote, and Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, their ranks including 79 mayors. Socialism declined after this peak and faced repression during World War I because of the party’s opposition to the war. (Debs secured almost a million votes in the 1920 presidential election, running from a jail cell). After the war ended, the Communist seizure of power in what became the Soviet Union contributed to a “red scare” that further weakened America’s indigenous socialist tradition.

Socialism never lost its intellectual influence, however. The New Deal drew on proposals pioneered by socialists, and it was a young socialist named Michael Harrington whose book The Other America helped launch the war on poverty. But when it came to electoral politics, socialism was largely shunned or irrelevant.

Until now. The crash of 2008, rising inequality, and an intensifying critique of how contemporary capitalism works has brought socialism back into the mainstream—in some ways even more powerfully than in Debs’ time, since those who use the label have become an influential force in the Democratic Party. Running as a democratic socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders received 45 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2016, and in the 2018 mid-term elections, members of Democratic Socialists of America were among the prominent Democratic victors. Their ranks included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who quickly became one of the country’s best-known politicians. One measure of her influence: As of early May, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer had 1.7 million Twitter followers; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had 2.5 million; Ocasio-Cortez had 4 million.

The generational divide

Although President Donald Trump declared war on socialism in his 2019 State of the Union address, its champions felt no pressure to back down. It is not hard to see why.

During the heyday of the industrial era, growth was rapid, its fruits were broadly shared across income and wage classes, and upward mobility was widespread. Capitalism was popular. Socialism was not. In recent decades, however, growth has been episodic and slow, wages have stagnated for working-class and many middle-class families, mobility has slowed, and inequality has soared. The economic and financial collapse of 2008-2009 undermined the claim that the economy had entered a new era of stability and moderation. Experts who had preached the virtues of self-regulation were forced to recant. The slow recovery from the Great Recession left many Americans wondering whether they would ever regain the income and wealth they had lost.

The Great Recession especially shaped the outlook of young adults. The younger working class entered a job market that provided far fewer stable opportunities than their parents had enjoyed. And as revenues fell, many state governments slashed public support for higher education, forcing public colleges and universities to raise tuition sharply. Students had to abandon college hopes or take out larger loans that that consumed a substantial portion of their incomes. And particularly in the years immediately after the crash, many of them had trouble finding the jobs their degrees once promised. As the profits and share prices of large corporations recovered from their recessionary lows, enriching executives and investors, many young adults began wondering whether they would ever share the fruits of 21 st century capitalism. They became increasingly open to the idea that the system was rigged against them and that incremental reform was not enough. Only transformational systemic change could get the job done, many concluded, and socialism was the available alternative to the failed “neo-liberal” model of contemporary capitalism.

The generational effect is dramatic. A 2018 YouGov survey found that 35 percent of young adults under 30 were very or somewhat favorably inclined toward socialism, while just 26 percent registered unfavorable sentiments. (40 percent were not sure.) By contrast, only 25 percent of voters 65 and older had favorable views of socialism, while 56 percent were unfavorable.

Table 1: The impact of age on attitudes toward socialism

(Source: YouGov, August 2018)

Competing definitions of socialism

The growing popularity of socialism reflects a change in its image. Viewed in the past under the dark shadow of the Soviet system, it is now seen in light of the achievements of social democratic governments in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe.

In 2018, the Public Religion Research Institute offered respondents two definitions of socialism. One described it as “a system of government that provides citizens with health insurance, retirement support, and access to free higher education.” The other characterized it as “a system where the government controls key parts of the economy, such as utilities, transportation and communications industries.” The first definition effectively refers to the Scandinavian model—and the ideas popularized by Sanders. Most proponents of social democracy see it as a way of smoothing capitalism’s rough edges, making it more humane, egalitarian, and protective, rather than replacing the market outright. The second definition corresponds to the classic understanding of socialism that dominated public consciousness after World War II, when the challenge from the Soviet Union was at its peak.

As one might expect, young adults, for whom Cold War memories are dim to non-existent, were strongly inclined to define socialism as social democracy rather than public ownership of key industries. Fifty-eight percent of them picked the social-democratic option, and just 38 percent the dominant post-war understanding. By contrast, Americans 65 and older, whose views of socialism reflected the post-war conflict with communism, were somewhat more inclined to focus on government control of the economy, although even the oldest Americans now tilt toward the social-democratic definition, too.

Other survey research confirms this shift. In 1949, the Gallup Organization probed Americans’ understanding of the term “socialism.” More Americans picked government ownership or control as socialism’s defining feature than all the other options combined. Almost seven decades later in 2018, Gallup posed the same question, with very different results. The share of respondents who focused on government control fell by half, to just 17 percent. By contrast, the share who emphasized egalitarianism and generous public services rose from 14 percent in 1949 to 33 percent in 2018.

Table 2: Changes over time in Americans’ understanding of socialism

(Source: Gallup organization, 1949, 2018. Because of rounding, the items total to more than 100%.)

In the post-war period, Americans viewed socialism through the prism of Soviet communism. Today, they view it through the prism of the welfare state.

In the post-war period, Americans viewed socialism through the prism of Soviet communism. Today, they view it through the prism of the welfare state, the system that Western democracies developed to make market economies more broadly acceptable and to blunt the appeal of communism, which had powerful support throughout Europe in the post-war decades. The Soviet Union threatened liberty. Norway, Sweden and Denmark do not.

There was an important distinction, however, between Soviet-style communism and the system that socialist parties advocated after World War II. The Soviet system was undemocratic and totalitarian. The state (that is, the Communist party) controlled not only the entire economy but also civil society. As a “vanguard” party, the CPSU claimed to represent, infallibly, the “real interests” of the working class, even though average citizens of the Soviet Union might well disagree with the party’s “line” at any given moment.

By contrast, the program of Western socialist parties was both democratic and non-totalitarian. Western socialists acknowledged the importance of the individual liberties that Communists dismissed as “bourgeois.” These parties distinguished between the parts of the economy that needed to be brought under public control and those that did not. In the main, they did not seek government control of civil society, and they were willing to submit to the electorate’s democratic verdict on an ongoing basis.

From socialism to social democracy

The post-war British Labour Party offers a vivid example of democratic socialism in action—and also of the transition from state ownership to greater equality as socialism’s core goal. As World War II neared its end in the summer of 1945, the United Kingdom held its first general election in nearly a decade. The Labour Party campaigned on a bold program of economic and social change. “The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it,” declared its election manifesto. “Its ultimate purpose . . . is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain.”

The manifesto was serious, even literal, in its choice of the noun “commonwealth.” The key assumption was that everything in the U.K.—not just land and natural resources, but also productive facilities and wealth—should be seen as jointly owned by the people as a whole and could be directed to purposes determined by the people through democratic processes.

Not content with ringing generalities, the manifesto spelled out its socialist program in considerable detail. It called for public ownership of the fuel and power industries, the iron and steel industries, and all modes of domestic transportation (rail, road, air, and canal). Other key provisions included the nationalization of the Bank of England, eventual nationalization of land holdings, a National Investment Board to plan and shape public and private investment, and a government-funded and operated National Health Service.

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One other theme suffuses the manifesto—the proposition that building socialism is akin to the wartime mobilization that directed all the nation’s energies toward a single overriding goal. “The nation and its post-war Governments will be called upon to put the nation above any sectional interest, above any free enterprise,” the manifesto asserts. “The problems and pressures of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as sure as—though less dramatically than—the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years.”

This said, the Labour Party’s version of socialism was entirely consistent with the British system of individual liberty and parliamentary democracy. The manifesto goes out of its way to underscore Labour’s commitment to freedom of worship, speech, and the press. It rejected the proposition that wartime restrictions on individual liberties should carry over into peacetime. The Labour Party won power peacefully and democratically in the 1945 parliamentary election and when Labour lost the subsequent election, it yielded power to the victorious conservatives.

In many respects, the Labour Party’s postwar program represented a high-water mark for democratic socialism.

In many respects, the Labour Party’s postwar program represented a high-water mark for democratic socialism. Beginning in the 1950s, after they lost power, Labour leaders deemphasized, without formally repudiating, the aspects of their program that focused on nationalization of key industries. The 13 years of Conservative government between 1951 and 1964 saw the rise of Labor’s “revisionists,” who moved the party away from the nationalization of industry as a central goal. In his seminal book, “The Future of Socialism,” Anthony Crosland, a major figure in the party, argued that a focus on nationalization confused means and ends and that the purpose of socialism was greater equality, not government ownership of industry. The party’s leader in the period, Hugh Gaitskell, was a revisionist who regularly battled with the party’s left. And when Harold Wilson led Labor back to power in 1964, he stressed the power of technological change to transform society and the promise of the “white heat” of the “scientific revolution.” It was a long way from taking over the coal mines.

In Germany, the transformation of democratic socialism was formal and explicit. As late as the mid-1950s, Germany’s Socialist Party (the SPD) continued to espouse classic socialist ideology. A key SPD leader declared that the crucial point of the party’s agenda was “the abolition of capitalist exploitation and the transfer of the means of production from the control of the big proprietors to social ownership.” But after a series of electoral defeats at the hands of a center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) that itself supported a significant welfare state, the SPD came to understand that its post-war program had been outrun by events. Rapid economic growth based on private property and regulated markets during the 1950s had sparked the emergence of a new middle class and rendered obsolete an economic program centered on nationalization of key industries. The Soviet Union was a threat to social and political freedom, not an economic model to be emulated.

The SPD’s famous Bad Godesberg Program, adopted in November 1959, represented a fundamental change of course. It castigated Soviet Communism and repudiated Marxism. The proletariat was no longer the sole engine of progress; the SPD had changed from being a “party of the working class” to a “party of the people.” Henceforth, democracy, freedom, equality, and the fullest possible development of each individual would be the guiding principles.

The Program defined the social function of the state as “provid[ing] social security for its citizens to enable everyone to be responsible for shaping his own life freely and to further the development of a free society.” While achieving this aim would require substantial government regulation, it would not necessitate government ownership except in the rare cases in which “sound economic power relationships” could not be guaranteed by any other means.

The new economic vision rested on freedom—“free choice of consumer goods, free choice of working place, freedom for employers to exercise their initiative as well as free competition.” Where excessive concentration restricted competition, government must intervene to restore competition. The task of a freedom-based economic policy was to contain the power of big business, not to replace the private sector. In some instances, they suggested that what we would now call a “public option” could be used to broaden choices for consumers and diminish corporate power. But in a remarkable break with socialist orthodoxy, the Program stressed that “every concentration of economic power, even in the hands of the state, harbors dangers.” Widespread government ownership of the means of production is not always the solution; it may be part of the problem.

The Program focused, not on government taking control of the economy, but on using government to improve the lives of all citizens.

The Program focused, not on government taking control of the economy, but on using government to improve the lives of all citizens. Key planks included full employment, generous wages and shorter working days, a redistributive system of taxation, secure retirement with a state-guaranteed minimum pension, universal access to health care, and decent and affordable housing. These are among the building blocks of the system of “social democracy” that developed and spread throughout the West as the alternative to both socialism and unregulated capitalism. As scholar Sheri Berman puts it, “Capitalism remained, but it was a capitalism of a very different type—one tempered and limited by political power and often made subservient to the needs of society rather than the other way around.”

From social democracy to the Third Way

Although social democracy came to represent the dominant political program in most democracies, its triumph was short-lived. Starting in the late 1970s, conservative leaders who challenged key tenets of social democracy scored electoral victories in the U.K., U.S., Germany, and elsewhere. They argued that excessive government intervention and spending had slowed economic growth, impeded innovation, and promoted inflation. Moreover, excessive deference to organized labor had reduced private sector profits and investments, while the pursuit of equal outcomes had deprived the “job creators” of needed incentives to take risks. Government was not the solution for the problems of capitalism, the new conservative wisdom held, but rather the principal obstacle to the success of a market economy. Industries had to be deregulated; spending on programs of social protections had to be curtailed; taxes had to be slashed; and unions needed to be brought to heel.

The political success of conservative policies persuaded many center-left leaders that their social democratic programs needed to adjust to new circumstances. As this movement gathered strength, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the political situation. It seemed that every alternative to capitalism had faded. The future lay in a dynamic and increasingly global market economy with the fewest possible fetters on the free flow of capital, goods, services, workers, and information. Appropriate fiscal, trade, investment, immigration, and education policies would enable Western democracies to seize the commanding heights of the new economy. The future for workers lay in lifetime education and training, not in organized labor’s efforts to thwart needed change. Regulations that impeded efficiency in key sectors such as banking needed to be swept away. Competition would promote “self-regulation” as an alternative to the heavy hand of the state. Programs to promote economic and retirement security were acceptable—as long as they did not break the bank, raise interest rates, and squeeze out private investment.

Led by key figures such as Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in the U.K., and Gerhardt Schroeder in Germany, this new economic vision—dubbed the Third Way by its friends and neo-liberalism by its foes—guided changes in center-left parties. As long as the new economy delivered ample jobs and broad-based income gains, center-left parties enjoyed political success. But the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing severe global recession undermined public confidence in the institutions and policies that permitted the disaster. On the Right, populist forces began to stir. (In retrospect, the Tea Party was a harbinger of things to come.) On the Left, the failure of post-Cold War globalized capitalism opened the door to critics of the status quo. Occupy Wall Street targeted the “1 percent”—the wealthy elites whose greed and myopia, they said, triggered the crisis and left those of lesser means to suffer the losses and pay the costs.

By 2016, right-wing populism had taken over the previously center-right Republican Party in the U.S., while Sanders gave Hillary Clinton, the establishment center-left candidate, a surprisingly tough race. Throughout Europe, traditional center-left and center-right parties suffered heavy losses while both right-wing populists and far-left parties gained support. In the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere, insurgents have rejected what they see as the Third Way’s objectionable and ineffective compromises with conservative principles and programs. It is against this historical backdrop that young adults in America embraced programs that promised more than incremental change—and that they were not afraid to call themselves socialists.

What’s in a word?

Medicare and Social Security are, in a sense, socialist, and so are our public schools and universities, our community colleges, our water supplies and sewers, and our mass transit systems.

There has always been a gap between rhetoric and reality in discussions of (and, especially, attacks on) socialism. Not one economically advanced society can be described as purely capitalist; every one of them is a mixed economy that includes some elements of socialism. Medicare and Social Security are, in a sense, socialist, and so are our public schools and universities, our community colleges, our water supplies and sewers, and our mass transit systems. Municipally owned and built sports stadiums are forms of socialism. North Dakota still has a publicly-owned bank, created during the years when agrarian populism and socialism overlapped. The Tennessee Valley Authority is a form of socialism, as conservatives never tire of pointing out.

Ideas rooted in socialism have often been deployed to save capitalism from its excesses—usually in the face of opposition from capitalists themselves. The political scientist Mason Williams points to a comment from New Deal lawyer Jerome Frank as capturing this history nicely. “We socialists are trying to save capitalism,” Frank said, “and the damned capitalists won’t let us.”

And from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, conservatives have made it a point to charge their Democratic foes with being socialists, no matter how many speeches they made in praise of the market. In attacking the program of his erstwhile friend FDR, Al Smith declared: “There can be only one national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner or the Internationale.” In the 1950 mid-term elections, Republicans briefly used the slogan “Liberty versus socialism.” (It turned out not to test very well.) Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater that made The Gipper a hero to conservatives argued that Goldwater’s victory over Lyndon Johnson was necessary to stop the advance of socialism. And, of course, Barack Obama’s health care plan, which was a very long way from a single payer system, was regularly denounced as socialist.

For the most part, Democratic politicians have regularly denied they were socialists—and even in this campaign cycle, marked by socialism’s resurgence, most Democrats earnestly pronounce themselves capitalists. The ranks of proud capitalists include Elizabeth Warren, who is by most measures as progressive as Sanders and has issued even more comprehensive proposals than he has to restructure contemporary capitalism. The fact that Sanders calls himself a socialist and Warren does not suggests that socialist/capitalist divide tells us less about policy than we might think and more about the valence assigned to the labels by different parts of the electorate.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the term socialism has lost its once-automatic linkage to the United States’ mortal enemy. The embrace of socialism no longer incurs the taint of treason, and proposals advanced by avowed socialists have expanded the perimeter of acceptable debate. As recent comments on the imperiled future of capitalism by Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates suggest, the sharper critiques of capitalism are gaining attention from capitalists themselves. In the past—from the New Deal years through the 1960s—fears for the system’s future have led important voices within the business world to embrace social reform as necessary to saving the system. Socialists might once again be the forerunners of capitalist reform.

There are three bottom lines here. The first is that attitudes toward socialism now divide the two parties. In a 2018 YouGov survey, 46 percent of Democrats had a somewhat or very favorable view of socialism, while only 25 percent held an unfavorable view. Among Republicans, only 11 percent viewed socialism favorably, while 71 percent viewed it unfavorably—including 61 percent who had a “very” unfavorable view. Tellingly, the breakdown among Independents was 19 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable. Among Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton, 53 percent of had a favorable opinion of socialism, a view held by just 7 percent of Trump voters.

Second, sympathy for socialism is still a minority view. In the YouGov survey, overall, socialism was viewed favorably by only 26 percent of American adults and unfavorably by 46 percent. Among registered voters, the breakdown was 30 percent favorable, 50 percent unfavorable. As Warren’s self-labeling shows, most politicians trying to win national elections will continue to resist the S-word. If socialism is more popular than ever, it is still, on net, a troublesome word for a large share of the electorate. But whatever it is called, the impulse to use public power to smooth the market economy’s rough edges and to enhance opportunity and security for all Americans is a powerful current in today’s post-Great Recession politics.

Table 3: Partisanship and attitudes toward socialism

Third, decades of rising inequality and the shock of the 2008 crash have led large numbers of Americans —whether they call themselves socialists or not— to call the fundamentals of our economic system into question. The resurgence of socialism is a warning sign for those who want to preserve this system and an opportunity for those who would reform it. And, as has happened before, their two causes may come to overlap.

The authors want to thank Amber Herrle for her contributions to this piece.

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Socialism: Foundations and Key Concepts

What is the political, philosophic, and economic system known as socialism? Some starting points for further study.

Depending on whom you ask, socialism might be described as historically inevitable, evil incarnate, a utopian fantasy, or a scientific method. Most fundamentally, socialism is a political, philosophic, and economic system in which the means of production—that is, everything that goes into making goods for use—are collectively controlled, rather than owned by private corporations as they are under capitalism, or by aristocrats under feudalism.

In seeking to make the case for socialism—and to understand impediments to a world governed by people’s needs rather than corporate profits—thinkers in the socialist tradition have grappled with topics as varied as colonialism, gender, race, art, sex, psychology, economics, medicine, ecology, and countless other issues. As such, this Reading List makes no claim of being exhaustive; rather, it seeks to achieve two modest goals: to acquaint readers with a handful of key socialist preoccupations, and to demonstrate how the core concepts of socialist thought have been articulated at different historical moments and taken up by women and people of color.

Eugene W. Schulkind, “ The Activity of Popular Organizations during the Paris Commune of 1871. ” French Historical Studies , (1960)

What kind of society do socialists want? Many unfamiliar with the socialist tradition assume the Soviet Union or other putatively communist states represent socialist ideals come to fruition. But for many socialists throughout history, the most generative and compelling model is the seventy-two-day social experiment known as the Paris Commune. During their brief time ruling Paris, the communards eliminated the army, secularized education, equalized pay, and implemented numerous feminist initiatives, including establishing child care centers and abolishing the distinction between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children.

Rosa Luxemburg,  “Reform or Revolution” (1900) Socialists uniformly believe that different social arrangements are needed to address social problems, but how might those transformations most effectively come to fruition? One of the major questions that has animated socialist debates throughout the centuries is whether it is possible to achieve socialism through progressive reforms, or whether reforms would only serve to strengthen capitalism. Here the revolutionary presents her thoughts.

Clara Zetkin,  1914 Preface to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) in Utopian Studies , 2016 Karl Marx was famously opposed to rigidly outlining what future socialist societies should look like, claiming that this would be like writing “recipes for the kitchens of the future.” Despite his reticence, many artists, frustrated by the constraints of capitalism and captivated by the promises of socialist futures, have contributed to imagining alternative worlds. Edward Bellamy’s early science fiction novel Looking Backward presents one attempt at envisioning a socialist society of the future—free from war, poverty, advertisements, and other unpleasantries. Here, Clara Zetkin, a prominent socialist and feminist activist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (best known for her efforts to establish International Women’s Day ), introduces the novel.

Eric Foner,  “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop , 1984 One of the country’s best living historians examines questions that have preoccupied generations: How does the political and economic exceptionalism of the United States shape its historical relationship to socialism? Why does the U.S. working class appear less inclined toward socialist class consciousness than in other “advanced” capitalist countries?

Cedric Robinson,  “C.L.R. James and the Black Radical Tradition.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center ), 1983 Telling the story of C.L.R. James, one of the most important socialist intellectuals of the twentieth century, Cedric Robinson (an intellectual giant in his own right) traces the history of socialism as it crosses continents and oceans. Centering Black radicals, not as a homogenous group but as members of a multifaceted tradition who write as seamlessly about cricket, anticolonial struggles, and class formation, Robinson takes the reader through issues at the heart of socialism.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1978) in Women’s Studies Quarterly , 2014  “Identity politics” has become a controversial and often derided topic in recent years. In this groundbreaking text, the Combahee River Collective—a group of Black feminist socialists named for the location from which Harriet Tubman launched one of her major military missions—underscores the necessity of rooting anti-capitalist projects in people’s lived experiences: “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.”

Sarah Leonard,  “What is Socialist Feminism?” Teen Vogue , 2020 Teen Vogue may have once evoked adolescent frivolity, but in recent years the magazine has repositioned itself as a serious contributor to the rising popularity of leftist politics among bright young people, thanks to its rigorous and accessible political analysis. Here, socialist feminist writer Sarah Leonard draws from bell hooks , Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the 1970s feminist collective Wages for Housework to outline a few key socialist feminist insights . For those interested in pursuing the topic further, Leonard encourages readers to connect with the extensive resources generated by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s Socialist Feminist working group.

Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster,  “Marx’s Ecology in the 21st Century.” World Review of Political Economy , 2010 Marx may have written in the nineteenth century, but his insights are still used by contemporary thinkers to understand many of today’s most pressing issues. Here Clark and Foster draw from central concepts in Marx’s oeuvre to understand how capitalism has led to climate catastrophe and, eventually, might inspire ecosocialism. In their words, “The power of Marx’s ecology is that it provides a rigorous approach for studying the interchange between society and nature, while taking into consideration the specific ecological conditions of an ecosystem (and the larger web of nature), as well as the particular social interactions as shaped by the capitalist mode of production.”

Michael Lowy and Penelope Duggan,  “Marxism and Romanticism in the Work of Jose Carlos Mariategui.” Latin American Perspectives , 1998 A compelling introduction to Mariategui, the Peruvian socialist philosopher who merged precolonial history, romanticism, and a trenchant analysis of capitalism. In contrast to the austere world many antisocialists imagine, “[s]ocialism according to Mariategui lay at the heart of an attempt at the reenchantment of the world through revolutionary action.”

Red Nation,  “Communism Is the Horizon”  (2020) In their recent pamphlet, the Indigenous collective Red Nation expounds upon the centrality of queer, Indigenous feminism to their understanding of socialism and their struggle toward a communist horizon.

Editor’s Note: This list has been updated to include journal titles.

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People line up as they wait to enter a soup kitchen in Athens, Greece, 15 February 2017. Photo by Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

Liberal socialism now

As the crisis of democracy deepens, we must return to liberalism’s revolutionary and egalitarian roots.

by Matthew McManus   + BIO

Very few of us expected liberalism to have such a rocky 21st century. At the turn of the 20th, liberal ideology and liberal democratic political institutions seemed more legitimate and secure than ever before. Liberals had defeated their great geopolitical rivals on the fascist Right and the communist Left. How things change.

Over the past few decades, discontent and disdain for liberalism have spread across huge swathes of the globe, led by a resurgent Right-wing populism that denounced its materialism, universalism and libertine decadence. Wannabe strongmen like Victor Orban declared they were constructing new kinds of ‘illiberal democracy’ – a half truth, since the regimes would be illiberal, but not particularly democratic. Books flooded the market with alarmist or triumphalist titles such as Why Liberalism Failed (2018) or A World After Liberalism (2021), all of which diagnosed its failures with relish or fear. Theories about what had gone wrong multiplied. Liberalism was too atomistic, too alienating, too antidemocratic, too democratic for its own good, too beholden to the ignorant masses, too elitist, even too boring and politically correct for its own good.

What was often lost in the discourse around liberalism in the 21st century was whether it could simultaneously be worth saving while also having deserved the ignominy into which it was falling. From the 1970s onwards, many liberal politicians and theorists had backed away from the more progressive and transformative propensities of the tradition. The era of big liberal dreams about establishing a ‘great’ or ‘just’ society was over.

Internalising a host of conservative arguments, liberals like Isaiah Berlin or Friedrich Hayek argued that big dreams were dangerous and contrary to liberalism, its revolutionary past aside. The best one could hope for was a competitive and highly inequitable neoliberal society defined by ordered liberty and at most a minimal welfare state. That such a consciously deflated vision became associated with technocratic aloofness, a lack of principled conviction and a wariness of democratic accountability came as a surprise only to neoliberals c 2016. More thoughtful commentators followed Samuel Moyn’s claim in Liberalism Against Itself (2023) that if liberals couldn’t rediscover how to not just fearmonger, but inspire, they were unlikely to see their doctrine survive much longer and, ‘anyway, survival is not good enough.’

Moyn is right that, if liberals trade off presenting an inspiring vision of the future for mere survival, they are unlikely to get either. The existential woes of 21st-century liberalism require we do more than return to the forms of neoliberal governance that generated discontent in the first place. It requires retrieving the revolutionary emancipatory and egalitarian ethos that defined liberalism at its revolutionary best to offer a new deal to citizens of liberal states. The strand of liberal political theory that offers the richest guidance on what form this new deal should take is liberal socialism.

T he idea of ‘liberal socialism’ might appear odd and even oxymoronic. This is especially true for those on the Right and the Left who regard liberalism as the philosophy of market capitalism. Of course, there are many classical and neoliberal thinkers for whom that is true. From John Locke ’s emphatic defence of life, liberty and property to Hayek’s declaration that state planning in the economy was the road to serfdom, liberal defences of the ethics of capitalism are easy to find. The economist Ludwig von Mises no doubt spoke for many (including plenty on the Left) when, in his polemical tract Liberalism (1927), he proudly declared that:

[The] programme of liberalism … if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property , that is, private ownership of the means of production … All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand.

Adam Smith , artist unknown, painted posthumously c 1795. Courtesy the National Gallery of Scotland

But this would be to ignore the reality that many great liberal thinkers have historically been wary (to downright critical) of capitalism. This goes far back. Adam Smith may have been an enthusiast for free trade and market liberties, but in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) he also decried how:

This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.

This was reiterated in Smith’s polemics against monopolisation and the alienating effects of the division of labour in The Wealth of Nations (1776) . By the industrial era, some of the greatest liberal thinkers expressed sympathy and even came to align themselves with socialism. John Stuart Mill , the greatest liberal philosopher of the 19th century, openly declared himself a socialist in his Autobiography (1873) and stressed in Socialism (1879) how ‘great poverty, and that poverty very little connected with desert – are the first grand failure of the existing arrangements of society.’

Mill was hardly alone in sympathising with such a fusion of liberalism and socialism. In his essay collection Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973), the political theorist C B Macpherson coined the term ‘retrieval’ to refer to getting ‘clear of the disabling central defect of current liberal-democratic theory, while holding on to, or recovering, the humanistic values which liberal democracy has always claimed.’ We must now make an effort to retrieve the political theory of liberal socialism and make the case for its salience in the 21st century (a project I continue in my forthcoming book The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism ).

L iberal socialism is a political ideology that combines support for many liberal political institutions and rights with a socialist desire to establish far more equitable and democratic economic arrangements. The latter point is put plainly by Michael Walzer in his book The Struggle for a Decent Politics (2023), in which he writes that, while ‘liberal socialists are not “egalitarianist”, they are serious about equality – more so, generally, than liberal democrats.’ This deeper concern for equality relative to classical liberals becomes apparent when we look at when liberal socialism emerged and how its major figures defended its core arguments.

There is extensive debate over periodising classical liberal theory. Many date its origins to the 17th century and the writings of Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Hugo Grotius among others. Whether or not these thinkers can be correctly labelled ‘liberals’ full stop, they undoubtedly developed or systematised a lot of the theoretical architecture that later liberals would rely on. By contrast, in Liberalism (2nd ed, 2014) Edmund Fawcett insists that mature liberal political philosophy only really appeared on the scene in the 19th century, when the term itself became popularised, and self-described ‘liberal’ parties and movements began to appear.

Whoever you agree with, there’s no doubt that liberal socialism emerged later than classical liberalism, extending the latter’s antipathy to the hierarchical ancien régimes of Europe to demand more radical changes still. While mature forms of liberal socialist political theory didn’t appear until the mid-19th century, there were important precursor figures. Two of the most influential predecessors to liberal socialism were Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft .

Thomas Paine insists that property is an eminently social phenomenon

Paine remains most famous for his stirring rhetorical defences of the American and French revolutions and his acidic polemics against Edmund Burke and conservatism in the Rights of Man (1791) . Until recently, Paine was largely viewed as an extraordinary pamphleteer for the classical liberal and republican viewpoint, while not being an especially original thinker or theorist. That appraisal has since undergone a major shift, with Robert Lamb in 2015 stressing Paine’s importance as a theorist whose ‘every instinct’ was egalitarian.

Thomas Paine ( c 1806-07) by John Wesley Jarvis. Courtesy the NGA, Washington

Paine is an important precursor to liberal socialism because he embraced the importance of individual flourishing and rights, while becoming increasingly sceptical that this could be achieved without a major redistribution of wealth and privilege. In the pamphlet ‘Agrarian Justice’ (1797), he rejects the methodological individualism of classical liberal approaches to property rights, and insists that property is an eminently social phenomenon:

Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society, as it is for him to make land originally. Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property.

He goes on to suggest that, since many wealthy people monopolise productive land and capital without giving anything back, they owe a major debt to the poor as a matter of right. In the second part of the Rights of Man and in ‘Agrarian Justice’, Paine develops these arguments into a call for redistribution, sketching out an early scheme for the welfare state. This includes providing money for education, guaranteed employment for those who want it, a stipend for every child born, and a prototype of an old-age pension.

Mary Wollstonecraft ( c 1797) by John Opie. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

Wollstonecraft was less policy-minded than her contemporary Paine, but even more scathing in her contempt for the corrosive effect of the inequities of property that defined aristocratic and early capitalist societies. In her classic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft insisted that:

From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens into virtue. One class presses on another; for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property: and property, once gained, will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue.

In her later Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she lambasts the nouveaux riches as a ‘fungus’ with the criticism that:

An ostentatious display of wealth without elegance, and a greedy enjoyment of pleasure without sentiment, embrutes them till they term all virtue of a heroic cast, romantic attempts at something above our nature, and anxiety about the welfare of others, a search after misery in which we have no concern.

Wollstonecraft believed in private property, arguing it was a just reward for labour. But even this had a radical connotation, as she was critical of those who lived in luxury or defended privilege while ignoring the ‘women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had had any advantages of education…’ Her critique of the idle or undeserving rich both echoes Locke’s condemnation of aristocracy and anticipates later Ricardian socialist and Marxist condemnations of the parasitic wealthy.

Much like Paine, Wollstonecraft had an unfailingly egalitarian instinct (including, of course, on gender relations) insisting there ‘must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground…’ In her ideal society there would be neither rich nor poor, and the competitive race to accumulate private property would be a far less significant social priority than the relatively equal development of human intellectual, artistic and moral powers. It’s this solidaristic emphasis on the development of human powers in a society of equals that makes Wollstonecraft such an important figure in the movement towards liberal socialism.

L iberal socialism reached its maturity in the 19th century with John Stuart Mill, its most articulate and well-known spokesman. Early in his career, Mill had been a more conventional supporter of the free market. But, later in life, mostly under the influence of the utopian socialist St Simonians, he shifted his views markedly. In his Autobiography , Mill declared that his ‘ideal of ultimate improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would class us decidedly under the general designation of Socialists.’ While being critical of statist forms of socialism and expressing a wariness of the threat they posed to liberty, he claimed to look ‘forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious; when the rule that they who do not work shall not eat, will be applied not to paupers only, but impartially to all.’

This shift towards socialism was reflected in later editions of the Principles of Political Economy (1848) . Mill defended extensive experiments with workplace democracy and cooperatives, arguing that they would potentially be less domineering, more economically efficient, and more conducive to the flourishing of workers. As Helen McCabe traces in her excellent book John Stuart Mill: Socialist (2021), he also came to advocate for wealth redistribution through:

state ownership of railways and roads, and municipal ownership (and provision) of utilities such as gas and water. He also at least suggested it would be permissible for the government to provide public hospitals; national banks; a postal service; ‘manufactories’; and a corps of civil engineers, so long as the government did not maintain a monopoly on these professions or services.

Mill’s flavour of liberal socialism based around cooperatives and a generous welfare state anticipated many contemporary forms of market socialism, as well as being a direct inspiration to important ethical and Christian socialists such as R H Tawney.

‘Socialism … is liberalism in action; it means that liberty comes into the life of poor people’

In the early to mid-20th century, an impressive array of authors came to endorse liberal socialism. In a 1939 interview with The New Statesman and Nation , John Maynard Keynes proposed:

[A move out of the] 19th-century laissez-faire state into an era of liberal socialism … where we can act as an organised community for common purposes and to promote economic and social justice, whilst respecting and protecting the individual – his freedom of choice, his faith, his mind and its expression, his enterprise and his property.

A variety of European democratic socialists such as Eduard Bernstein and Carlo Rosselli worked to theorise closer connections between liberalism and socialism, echoing Mill’s claim that socialists were the more ‘far-sighted successors’ of liberalism. Bernstein’s classic The Preconditions of Socialism (1899) offered a sustained critique of orthodox Marxist revolutionary theory and proposed a conciliation with liberalism. He insisted that ‘with respect to liberalism as a historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only chronologically, but also intellectually’, and stressed that there is ‘no liberal thought that is not also part of the intellectual equipment of socialism.’ Rosselli made similar claims in his book Liberal Socialism (1930), holding that:

Socialism is nothing more than the logical development, taken to its extreme consequences, of the principle of liberty. Socialism, when understood in its fundamental sense and judged by its results – as the concrete movement for the emancipation of the proletariat – is liberalism in action; it means that liberty comes into the life of poor people.

While he never identified with the label, I’d argue that Macpherson can also be correctly characterised as a liberal socialist, given his lifelong effort to ‘retrieve’ a radical democratic and egalitarian core to the liberal tradition.

Finally, in the United States John Dewey worked hard to extend American conceptions of democracy beyond the horizon of the state. His most famous contributions were of course in education, where Dewey insisted on the pedagogical superiority a more egalitarian classroom where students actively participated in their learning, rather than being regarded as passive recipients of knowledge delivered by an intellectual superior. But Dewey was also keen to extend democratic principles to the workplace, becoming president of the League for Industrial Democracy in 1939 and advocating for the labour movement.

I n the postwar era, there have been several prominent figures aligned with liberal socialism, including Irving Howe, Michael Walzer and Chantal Mouffe. But by far the most significant figure to express sympathy for liberal socialism was John Rawls . For a long time, Rawls’s brick-like Theory of Justice (1971) was taken as an apologia for the welfare state system that, tragically, began to decline right about when the book was published. But this understates Rawls’s radicalism. In his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (2000), Rawls described Karl Marx as ‘heroic’ and praised his ‘marvellous’ intellectual gifts. By the time of his swan song Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001), Rawls insisted that welfarism did not do a good enough job of realising liberal principles of justice. Only a property-owning democracy or ‘liberal socialism’ would be sufficient. While Rawls himself wrote more about property-owning democracy, Edmundson’s book John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (2017) makes a powerful case for why the most rigorous interpretation of justice as fairness would require liberal socialism instead.

As history shows, liberal socialists are not a monolith. They disagree on many core points. Some of these are theoretical: is the strongest basis for liberal socialism some kind of utilitarianism, deontology or pragmatism? Other divides are over practical questions such as the relationship between statist welfarism and bottom-up democratisation of the economy; Mill famously vested his hopes in worker co-ops where many modern liberal socialists focus on social programmes. Nevertheless, all liberal socialists are committed to three central principles, which I’ve arranged from the more abstract to the more concrete.

First, liberal socialists are committed to methodological collectivism and normative individualism. They believe that the wellbeing and free development of individual persons (and, for a growing number, nonhuman animals) is the highest moral priority. However, they disagree with many classical liberals’ insular and competitive conception of human nature and their individualist approach to conceiving social relations. Liberal socialists hold that, to properly think through how individuals will best thrive, one must recognise their embeddedness in society, and how it can improve or disrupt their capacity to lead a good life.

Taking seriously commitments to liberty, equality and solidarity requires going beyond the social hierarchies established under capitalism

Secondly, liberal socialists are committed to each person having as equal an opportunity to lead as good a life as possible through the provision of shared resources for the development and expression of their human powers. To put it another way, liberal socialists focus on the free development of human powers or capabilities along a wide array of metrics. What Macpherson calls this developmental ethic can be contrasted with the extractive and possessive ethic characteristic of classical liberalism and hedonistic forms of utilitarianism. Where the extractive/possessive ethic holds that the good life comes from production and consumption, the developmental ethic of liberal socialism emphasises the equal development and application of each individual’s powers as a condition for their flourishing.

Thirdly, liberal socialists are committed to instituting a basic social structure characterised by highly participatory liberal-democratic political institutions and protections for liberal rights concurrent with the extension of liberal democratic principles into the economy and family to establish more egalitarian economic arrangements free of domination and exploitation. This also means that liberal socialists do not ascribe the same weight of private property rights to the means of production that many classical liberals do. While all liberal socialists believe in rights to personal property, this doesn’t extend to rights to acquire forms of property that would enable forms of workplace domination or political plutocracy to develop. In these instances, what impacts all should, in part, be decided upon by all.

Liberal socialist authors will defend and articulate these principles in various idioms, and emphasise one or another to various degrees. This testifies to the internal diversity of the tradition, if nothing else. Macpherson was very critical of atomistic ‘possessive individualism’ but supported a liberal humanist ethic of developing people’s capacities or powers. Nevertheless, he had comparatively little to say about what kind of social structure could realise this ethic. In The Socialist Decision (1933), Paul Tillich offers a theological defence of liberal democratic socialism, which obviously runs counter to the secular approaches of Mill and Rawls. Mouffe’s agonistic liberal socialism foregrounds the importance of political contestation far more than Rawls’s temperate insistence that a pluralistic society needs to unite around an ‘overlapping consensus’. Charles Mill’s ‘black radical liberalism’ rightly takes many Left-liberals to task for ignoring, or even supporting, imperialism and racism. But behind this variety is a core conviction that taking seriously commitments to liberty, equality and solidarity requires going beyond the social hierarchies established under capitalism.

Given the eminence of many of the figures attracted to liberal socialism, it is somewhat perplexing that the term can seem oxymoronic. The explanation probably has more to do with politics than philosophy, especially in the US. As Moyn points out in Liberalism Against Itself , throughout the mid-20th century, many prominent ‘Cold War’ liberals turned against the more progressive and egalitarian elements in the tradition. This led to the banishing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G W F Hegel and Marx to the fringes, and the dilution of the more radical arguments of prominent liberals like Mill. By the time liberal egalitarians began to marshal formidable theoretical arguments for welfarism and social democracy in the 1970s, the time to realise such an agenda had passed. Neoliberalism had taken hold across much of the world, further squeezing out progressive forms of liberalism and liberal socialism.

Nevertheless, the future for liberal socialist political theory is bright. While not everyone listed below would identify with the label (and some might reject it), a considerable number of prominent and up-and-coming theorists have been working to bring out the affinities between the two traditions and canonise (or re-canonise) the major figures. These include Helen McCabe, Michael Walzer, James Crotty, Chantal Mouffe, Igor Shoikhedbrod, Lillian Cicerchia, Samuel Moyn, Daniel Chandler, William Edmundson, Elizabeth Anderson, Tony Smith, Rodney Peffer and many more.

It isn’t hard to see why the prospect of liberal socialism would be appealing today. Liberalism remains in or near crisis, and vast numbers express discontent with the neoliberal status quo. At the same time, there are very good reasons to reject revisiting forms of authoritarian ‘real existing socialism’ and communism. Liberal socialism offers the prospect of combining respect for liberal rights, checks and balances on state power, and participatory democracy with socialist concerns for the equal flourishing of all in a sustainable environment, the extension of democratic concerns into the workplace and ‘private government’, and pushing back on plutocratic rule. It also philosophically aligns well with concrete democratic socialist and radical movements appearing in the US, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere that want radical economic change but align with liberal values. Whether liberal socialism can transition from being a theoretical tradition and become a popular political ideology is a hard question. But, in a world defined by growing anger at inequality and plutocracy, liberal socialism is worthy of our loyalty.

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Mark Fisher

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Could civil disobedience be morally obligatory in a society on a collision course with climate catastrophe?

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Return of the descendants

I migrated to my ancestral homeland in a search for identity. It proved to be a humbling experience in (un)belonging

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Economic history

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What is ‘lived experience’?

The term is ubiquitous and double-edged. It is both a key source of authentic knowledge and a danger to true solidarity

Patrick J Casey

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(page 1) p. 1 Introduction

• Published: September 2020
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What is socialism? The Introduction outlines the beliefs socialists have in common, including their opposition to gaps in wealth and equality and commitment to the creation of an egalitarian society. Socialism, capitalism, and liberalism are products of a post-19th-century age in which people see themselves as having the agency to effect change. Socialism’s detractors focus on its negative manifestations, such as Stalinism. Socialism has been interpreted differently around the world, inspiring distinct types of communism in Russia and China. Cuba has one of the best-known socialist political systems. Smaller socialist experiments include the kibbutz movement and post-colonial Arab and African efforts to combine socialism with existing traditions.

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10 Things You Should Know About Socialism

Over the last 200 years, socialism has spread across the world. In every country, it carries the lessons and scars of its particular history there. Conversely, each country’s socialism is shaped by the global history, rich tradition, and diverse interpretations of a movement that has been the world’s major critical response to capitalism as a system.

We need to understand socialism because it has shaped our history and will shape our future. It is an immense resource: the accumulated thoughts, experiences, and experiments accomplished by those yearning to do better than capitalism.

In my latest book, Understanding Socialism (Democracy at Work, 2019) , I gather and present the basic theories and practices of socialism. I examine its successes, explore its challenges, and confront its failures. The point is to offer a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy. Here are 10 things from this book that you should know.

1. Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism

Socialism represents the awareness of employees that their sufferings and limitations come less from their employers than from the capitalist system. That system prescribes incentives and options for both sides, and rewards and punishments for their behavioral “choices.” It generates their endless struggles and the employees’ realization that system change is the way out. In Capital, Volume 1 , Karl Marx defined a fundamental injustice—exploitation—located in capitalism’s core relationship between employer and employee. Exploitation, in Marx’s terms, describes the situation in which employees produce more value for employers than the value of wages paid to them. Capitalist exploitation shapes everything in capitalist societies. Yearning for a better society, socialists increasingly demand the end of exploitation and an alternative in which employees function as their own employer. Socialists want to be able to explore and develop their full potentials as individuals and members of society while contributing to its welfare and growth.

Socialism is an economic system very different from capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Each of the latter divided society into a dominant minority class (masters, lords, and employers) and a dominated majority (slaves, serfs, employees). When the majority recognized slavery and feudal systems as injustices, they eventually fell.

The majorities of the past fought hard to build a better system. Capitalism replaced slaves and serfs with employees, masters and lords with employers. It is no historical surprise that employees would end up yearning and fighting for something better. That something better is socialism, a system that doesn’t divide people, but rather makes work a democratic process where all employees have an equal say and together are their own employer.

2. Socialism is not a single, unified theory

People spread socialism across the world, interpreting and implementing it in many different ways based on context. Socialists found capitalism to be a system that produced ever-deepening inequalities, recurring cycles of unemployment and depression, and the undermining of human efforts to build democratic politics and inclusive cultures. Socialists developed and debated solutions that varied from government regulations of capitalist economies to government itself owning and operating enterprises, to a transformation of enterprises (both private and government) from top-down hierarchies to democratic cooperatives.

Sometimes those debates produced splits among socialists. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, socialists supporting the post-revolutionary Soviet Union underscored their commitment to socialism that entailed the government owning and operating industries by adopting the new name “communist.” Those skeptical of Soviet-style socialism tended increasingly to favor state regulation of private capitalists. They kept the name “socialist” and often called themselves social democrats or democratic socialists. For the last century, the two groups debated the merits and flaws of the two alternative notions of socialism as embodied in examples of each (e.g. Soviet versus Scandinavian socialisms).

Early in the 21st century, an old strain of socialism resurfaced and surged. It focuses on transforming the inside of enterprises: from top-down hierarchies, where a capitalist or a state board of directors makes all the key enterprise decisions, to a worker cooperative, where all employees have equal, democratic rights to make those decisions, thereby becoming—collectively—their own employer. 

3. The Soviet Union and China achieved state capitalism, not socialism

As leader of the Soviet Union, Lenin once said that socialism was a goal, not yet an achieved reality. The Soviet had, instead, achieved “state capitalism.” A socialist party had state power, and the state had become the industrial capitalist displacing the former private capitalists. The Soviet revolution had changed who the employer was; it had not ended the employer/employee relationship. Thus, it was—to a certain extent—capitalist.

Lenin’s successor, Stalin, declared that the Soviet Union had achieved socialism. In effect, he offered Soviet state capitalism as if it were the model for socialism worldwide. Socialism’s enemies have used this identification ever since to equate socialism with political dictatorship. Of course, this required obscuring or denying that (1) dictatorships have often existed in capitalist societies and (2) socialisms have often existed without dictatorships.

After initially copying the Soviet model, China changed its development strategy to embrace instead a state-supervised mix of state and private capitalism focused on exports. China’s powerful government would organize a basic deal with global capitalists, providing cheap labor, government support, and a growing domestic market. In exchange, foreign capitalists would partner with Chinese state or private capitalists, share technology, and integrate Chinese output into global wholesale and retail trade systems. China’s brand of socialism—a hybrid state capitalism that included both communist and social-democratic streams—proved it could grow faster over more years than any capitalist economy had ever done.

4. The U.S., Soviet Union, and China have more in common than you think 

As capitalism emerged from feudalism in Europe in the 19th century, it advocated liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. When those promises failed to materialize, many became anti-capitalist and found their way to socialism.

Experiments in constructing post-capitalist, socialist systems in the 20th century (especially in the Soviet Union and China) eventually incurred similar criticisms. Those systems, critics held, had more in common with capitalism than partisans of either system understood. 

Self-critical socialists produced a different narrative based on the failures common to both systems. The U.S. and Soviet Union, such socialists argue, represented private and state capitalisms. Their Cold War enmity was misconstrued on both sides as part of the century’s great struggle between capitalism and socialism. Thus, what collapsed in 1989 was Soviet State capitalism, not socialism. Moreover, what soared after 1989 was another kind of state capitalism in China.

5. Thank American socialists, communists, and unionists for the 1930s New Deal

FDR’s government raised the revenue necessary for Washington to fund massive, expensive increases in public services during the Depression of the 1930s. These included the Social Security system, the first federal unemployment compensation system, the first federal minimum wage, and a mass federal jobs program. FDR’s revenues came from taxing corporations and the rich more than ever before.

In response to this radical program, FDR was reelected three times. His radical programs were conceived and pushed politically from below by a coalition of communists, socialists, and labor unionists. He had not been a radical Democrat before his election. 

Socialists obtained a new degree of social acceptance, stature, and support from FDR’s government. The wartime alliance of the U.S. with the Soviet Union strengthened that social acceptance and socialist influences.

6. If 5 was news to you, that’s due to the massive U.S.-led global purge of socialists and communists after WWII

After its 1929 economic crash, capitalism was badly discredited. The unprecedented political power of a surging U.S. left enabled government intervention to redistribute wealth from corporations and the rich to average citizens. Private capitalists and the Republican Party responded with a commitment to undo the New Deal. The end of World War II and FDR’s death in 1945 provided the opportunity to destroy the New Deal coalition. 

The strategy hinged on demonizing the coalition’s component groups, above all the communists and socialists. Anti-communism quickly became the strategic battering ram. Overnight, the Soviet Union went from wartime ally to an enemy whose agents aimed “to control the world.” That threat had to be contained, repelled, and eliminated. 

U.S. domestic policy focused on anti-communism, reaching hysterical dimensions and the public campaigns of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Communist Party leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and deported in a wave of anti-communism that quickly spread to socialist parties and to socialism in general. Hollywood actors, directors, screenwriters, musicians, and more were blacklisted and barred from working in the industry. McCarthy’s witch hunt ruined thousands of careers while ensuring that mass media, politicians, and academics would be unsympathetic, at least publicly, to socialism.

In other countries revolts from peasants and/or workers against oligarchs in business and/or politics often led the latter to seek U.S. assistance by labeling their challengers as “socialists” or “communists.” Examples include U.S. actions in Guatemala and Iran (1954), Cuba (1959-1961), Vietnam (1954-1975), South Africa (1945-1994), and Venezuela (since 1999). Sometimes the global anti-communism project took the form of regime change. In 1965-6 the mass killings of Indonesian communists cost the lives of between 500,000 to 3 million people.

Once the U.S.—as the world’s largest economy, most dominant political power, and most powerful military—committed itself to total anti-communism, its allies and most of the rest of the world followed suit.

7. Since socialism was capitalism’s critical shadow, it spread to those subjected by and opposed to capitalist colonialism 

In the first half of the 20th century, socialism spread through the rise of local movements against European colonialism in Asia and Africa, and the United States’ informal colonialism in Latin America. Colonized people seeking independence were inspired by and saw the possibility of alliances with workers fighting exploitation in the colonizing countries. These latter workers glimpsed similar possibilities from their side.

This helped create a global socialist tradition. The multiple interpretations of socialism that had evolved in capitalism’s centers thus spawned yet more and further-differentiated interpretations. Diverse streams within the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist tradition interacted with and enriched socialism.

8. Fascism is a capitalist response to socialism

A fascist economic system is capitalist, but with a mixture of very heavy government influence. In fascism, the government reinforces, supports, and sustains private capitalist workplaces. It rigidly enforces the employer/employee dichotomy central to capitalist enterprises. Private capitalists support fascism when they fear losing their position as capitalist employers, especially during social upheavals. 

Under fascism, there is a kind of mutually supportive merging of government and private workplaces. Fascist governments tend to “deregulate,” gutting worker protections won earlier by unions or socialist governments. They help private capitalists by destroying trade unions or replacing them with their own organizations which support, rather than challenge, private capitalists.

Frequently, fascism embraces nationalism to rally people to fascist economic objectives, often by using enhanced military expenditures and hostility toward immigrants or foreigners. Fascist governments influence foreign trade to help domestic capitalists sell goods abroad and block imports to help them sell their goods inside national boundaries. 

Usually, fascists repress socialism. In Europe’s major fascist systems—Spain under Franco, Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini—socialists and communists were arrested, imprisoned, and often tortured and killed.

A similarity between fascism and socialism seems to arise because both seek to strengthen government and its interventions in society. However, they do so in different ways and toward very different ends. Fascism seeks to use government to secure capitalism and national unity, defined often in terms of ethnic or religious purity. Socialism seeks to use government to end capitalism and substitute an alternative socialist economic system, defined traditionally in terms of state-owned and -operated workplaces, state economic planning, employment of dispossessed capitalists, workers’ political control, and internationalism.

9. Socialism has been, and still is, evolving

During the second half of the 20th century, socialism’s diversity of interpretations and proposals for change shrank to two alternative notions: 1.) moving from private to state-owned-and -operated workplaces and from market to centrally planned distributions of resources and products like the Soviet Union, or 2.) “welfare-state” governments regulating markets still comprised mostly of private capitalist firms, as in Scandinavia, and providing tax-funded socialized health care, higher education, and so on. As socialism returns to public discussion in the wake of capitalism’s crash in 2008, the first kind of socialism to gain mass attention has been that defined in terms of government-led social programs and wealth redistributions benefitting middle and lower income social groups.

The evolution and diversity of socialism were obscured. Socialists themselves struggled with the mixed results of the experiments in constructing socialist societies (in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.). To be sure, these socialist experiments achieved extraordinary economic growth. In the Global South, socialism arose virtually everywhere as the alternative development model to a capitalism weighed down by its colonialist history and its contemporary inequality, instability, relatively slower economic growth, and injustice.

Socialists also struggled with the emergence of central governments that used excessively concentrated economic power to achieve political dominance in undemocratic ways. They were affected by criticisms from other, emerging left-wing social movements, such as anti-racism, feminism, and environmentalism, and began to rethink how a socialist position should integrate the demands of such movements and make alliances.

10. Worker co-ops are a key to socialism’s future

The focus of the capitalism-versus-socialism debate is now challenged by the changes within socialism. Who the employers are (private citizens or state officials) now matters less than what kind of relationship exists between employers and employees in the workplace. The role of the state is no longer the central issue in dispute.

A growing number of socialists stress that previous socialist experiments inadequately recognized and institutionalized democracy. These self-critical socialists focus on worker cooperatives as a means to institutionalize economic democracy within workplaces as the basis for political democracy. They reject master/slave, lord/serf, and employer/employee relationships because these all preclude real democracy and equality.

For the most part, 19th and 20th century socialisms downplayed democratized workplaces. But an emerging, 21st century socialism advocates for a change in the internal structure and organization of workplaces. The microeconomic transformation from the employer/employee organization to worker co-ops can ground a bottom-up economic democracy.

The new socialism’s difference from capitalism becomes less a matter of state versus private workplaces, or state planning versus private markets, and more a matter of democratic versus autocratic workplace organization. A new economy based on worker co-ops will find its own democratic way of structuring relationships among co-ops and society as a whole. 

Worker co-ops are key to a new socialism’s goals. They criticize socialisms inherited from the past and add a concrete vision of what a more just and humane society would look like. With the new focus on workplace democratization, socialists are in a good position to contest the 21st century’s struggle of economic systems.

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Main ideas of Socialism

The term 'socialist' comes from the Latin word sociare, which means to combine or share. It was first used in 1827 in the UK in the Co-operative Magazine. By the early 1830s, followers of Robert Owen in the UK and Henri de Saint-Simon in France began to call their beliefs 'socialism'. By the 1840s, the term was widely known in various industrialized countries such as France, Belgium, and the German states. Socialism is an ideology that is characterized by its opposition to capitalism and its aim to offer a more humane and socially beneficial alternative. At the heart of socialism is a view of humans as social beings connected by their shared humanity. Socialists prioritize cooperation over competition and value equality, especially social equality, as the central tenet of socialism. They believe that social equality is crucial for societal stability, cohesion, and freedom, as it addresses material needs and forms the basis for personal growth. However, socialism encompasses a wide range of divisions and competing traditions centered on differing views regarding the 'means' (how socialism should be achieved) and 'ends' (the vision of the future socialist society). For instance, communists or Marxists typically advocate revolution to eliminate capitalism and establish a classless society with communal ownership of resources. On the other hand, democratic socialists or social democrats favor a gradual approach, seeking to reform or humanize the capitalist system by reducing material disparities and eradicating poverty.

Human nature

Liberalism and socialism both have an optimistic view of human nature, making them 'progressive' ideologies. However, they differ in their reasons for this optimism. Liberals believe individuals are naturally self-reliant, while socialists see people as naturally cooperative and altruistic. Socialists argue that humans seek solidarity and comradeship, in contrast to liberals who emphasize autonomy and independence. Socialism acknowledges that external factors have diluted mankind's true nature, believing that human nature is malleable and can be improved. The key question is: what influences human nature and how can it be enhanced to unlock humanity's full potential?

Collectivism

Collectivism is the belief that cooperative human efforts have more practical and moral importance than individual pursuits. It suggests that human nature is inherently social and emphasizes the significance of social groups, such as classes or nations, as political entities. However, the term is used inconsistently. For instance, Mikhail Bakunin and other anarchists used 'collectivism' to describe self-governing associations of individuals. In contrast, some view collectivism as the opposite of individualism, asserting that it prioritizes collective over individual interests. Additionally, collectivism is sometimes associated with the state as the means through which collective interests are protected, implying that an increase in state responsibilities signifies the spread of collectivist ideals.  

Socialists endorse collectivism for two fundamental reasons .

· From a moral perspective, the interests of the group - such as a society or a community - should take priority over individual self-interest. Collective effort encourages social unity and a sense of social responsibility towards others.

· In practical economic terms, collectivism utilises the capabilities of the whole of society efficiently, avoiding the wastefulness and limited impact of competitive individual effort inherent in the capitalist economy.

Labour Broadcast: For the many not the few

Collectivism, therefore, reflects the socialist view that it is more important to pursue the interests of a society or a community rather than individual self-interest.

This emphasis on collectivism is rooted in the socialist view of human nature, which argues that humans are social animals; as such, they prefer to live in social groups rather than alone. It follows that humans have the capacity for collective action and can work together in order to achieve their goals. In this sense, they are tied together by the bonds of fraternity.

Socialists also argue that human nature is moulded by social conditions - the experiences and circumstances of a person's life. According to the socialist view, people can only be defined or understood in terms of the social groups they belong to. This line of argument leads socialists to conclude that membership of a community or society offers humans true freedom and fulfilment.

Most socialists call for some form of state intervention and state planning to promote collectivist goals and ensure that the distribution of goods and services is not left to free-market forces. The pursuit of collectivism is commonly seen to involve the growth of the state, the expansion of state services and responsibilities, and an increase in state spending.

As well as its primary aim, of redistributing a society’s wealth and resources, socialism believes that economic collectivism has two other benefits. First, progressive taxation, increased public spending, extensive public services and sometimes public ownership are seen as expressions of a more fraternal, more cooperative society with greater social justice. Second, such collectivist policies are thought to make the economy more efficient. As Marx and Engels were the first to point out, capitalism and market forces are inherently volatile and unpredictable — causing, for instance, periodic mass unemployment. A more collectivist economy, it is argued, will be more stable and manageable, and therefore more likely to provide the material resources society needs.

However, in practice, different strands of socialism vary in their commitment to collectivism.

Socialism seeks to rectify the problems caused by capitalism by championing an economy that provides for greater workers’ control in employment, and a significant redistribution of wealth and resources within the economy generally. Indeed, socialism is routinely described by its proponents as a ‘redistributionist’ doctrine, practising what Tony Benn (1925–2014) wryly described as ‘the politics of Robin Hood — taking from the rich and then giving to the poor’. For socialists, the ‘redistributionist’ economy will usually involve two broad principles.

First, there will be an emphatic rejection of the laissez-faire capitalism advocated by classical and neo-liberalism, whereby market forces are given free rein by a state that is disengaged and minimalist in relation to a society’s economy. According to socialism, an economy where there is low taxation and little state interference will be one where unfairness and social injustice become exacerbated.

Marxists and state socialists advocate collective action through a centralised state that organises all (or nearly all) production and distribution. For example, in the USSR after 1929, most industries were nationalised and all agricultural land was collectivised in order to transform a backward state into a modern industrial society, using complete state control of the economy to bring about change. After the Second World War, communist regimes in China and eastern Europe pursued similar policies of state-controlled collectivism.

Moderate socialists who accept some degree of free-market capitalism in the economy have pursued collectivism in a more limited way. For instance, the 1945-51 Labour government in the UK nationalised key industries - such as coal, electricity, and iron and steel - but left much of the economy in private hands.

All Socialists believe that without a strong state, it will be impossible to bring about a fairer and more equal society. In the short to medium term at least, it would certainly be difficult to bring about a redistribution of wealth and greater social justice without a state that was expansive and dirigiste (actively seeking to direct a society’s economy). Some socialists (such as Marxists and orthodox communists  argue that, eventually, the state will ‘wither away’ —a blissful moment in human evolution, which Marx described as ‘the end of history’. However, all socialists agree that for the foreseeable future, a strong state is essential. They also agree it must be a certain type of state, and certainly not the sort that preceded the Enlightenment.

In many ways, collectivism is a difficult concept to pin down precisely. This is partly because it is often used to describe very different things. The term has been applied to small self-governing communities (such as those based on the ideas of the 19th-century socialists Robert Owen and Charles Fourier), general opposition to individualism, and a system of centralised state control that directs the economy and society.

There are two basic criticisms of collectivism.

· Because collectivism emphasises group action and common interests, it suppresses human individuality and diversity.

· As collectivist objectives can only really be advanced through the agency of the state, it leads to the growth of arbitrary state power and the erosion of individual freedoms

Since the 1970s, socialists generally have attached less importance to collectivism. This is due to a growing perception that collectivism in developed countries such as the UK (mainly in the form of state welfare, trade union power and government intervention in the economy) was producing a dependency culture and a sluggish, uncompetitive economic sector. The end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 reinforced this view as collectivism suffered a significant ideological defeat.

Socialist belief in a common humanity is also based on assumptions about human nature. Socialists see humans as social creatures with a tendency towards co-operation, sociability and humans naturally prefer to co-operate with, rather than compete against, each other. In fact the individual cannot be understood without reference to society, because human behaviour is socially determined.

Socialists advocate co-operation based on their positive view of human nature. They argue that humans are naturally inclined to work together for the common good and that co-operative effort produces the best results for society. Co-operation also reinforces and reflects the socialist idea of a common humanity, in both moral and economic terms. People who co-operate rather than compete with each other form connections based on understanding, respect and mutual support. They also channel the capabilities of the whole group or community, rather than just the potential of a single individual. 

By contrast, according to the socialist view, competition (particularly within a capitalist economy) is wasteful, promotes social divisions and generates conflict, hostility and resentment. Socialists maintain that capitalist economic competition sets one person against another, a process that encourages people to reject or disregard their common humanity (and social nature) rather than accept it. It encourages humans to be self-centred and belligerent. 

This emphasis on a common humanity has led socialists to conclude that human motivation can be driven not just by material considerations but also by a moral view of people's role in society. 

People should work hard in order to improve their society or community because they have a sense of responsibility for other humans, particularly the least fortunate. The moral incentive to improve society rests on the acceptance of a common humanity. 

For the economy to function properly, most contemporary socialists accept the need for at least some material rewards to motivate people, but they also stress that these should be linked to moral incentives. For example, co-operative effort to boost economic growth not only increases living standards for the working population but also provides the funds (through taxation) to finance welfare measures to help the vulnerable and the poor.

Finally the belief in a common humanity has led socialists to support an interventionist role for the state. Marxists and state socialists argue that the agency of the state can be used to control production and distribution for the benefit of everyone. Social democrats also advocate state intervention in a more limited form of welfare and redistribution programmes, to help those in the greatest need.

T he socialist approach to human nature is a stress on equality. This does not mean that socialists believe that all people are born identical, possessing precisely the same capabilities and skills. An egalitarian society would not, for instance, be one in which all students gained the same mark in their mathematics examinations. Rather, socialist egalitarianism is underpinned by the belief that the most significant forms of human inequality are a result of unequal treatment by society, instead of unequal endowment by nature. Justice, from a socialist perspective, therefore demands that people are treated equally (or at least more equally) by society in terms of their rewards and material circumstances. This implies a commitment to social equality, or equality of outcome, the liberal idea of equality of opportunity usually being dismissed by socialists on the grounds that it legitimises inequality by perpet-uating the myth of innate inequality. Nevertheless, although socialists agree about the virtue of social equality, they disagree about the extent to which it can and should be brought about. Marxists and communists believe in absolute social equality, brought about by the abolition of private property and col-lectivisation of productive wealth. Perhaps the most famous experiment in such radical egalitarianism took place in China under the ‘Cultural Revolution’. Social democrats, however, believe in relative social equality, achieved by the redistribution of wealth through the welfare state and a system of progressive taxation. The social-democratic desire to tame capitalism rather than abolish it, reflects an acceptance of a continuing role for material incentives, with egalitarianism being refocused on the task of eradicating poverty. This, in turn, has sometimes blurred the distinction between social equality and equality of opportunity.  

Social equality ensures fairness

Economic inequality (differences in wealth), according to the socialist view, is due to the structura inequalities in a capitalist society, rather than innate differences of ability among people. For this reason, some socialists tend to reject equality of opportunity because, in their view, such a concel justifies the unequal treatment of people on the grounds of innate ability. This argument reflects view of human nature that emphasises people are born with the potential to be equal.

Other socialists maintain that, since it is part of human nature to have different abilities and attributes, inequality in the form of differential rewards is inevitable to some extent. These socialists tend to endorse an egalitarian approach to ensure that people are treated less unequally, in terms of material rewards and living conditions. Without this commitment to sociali5, egalitarianism, formal political and legal equality is compromised because, on its own, the latter does nothing to tackle the structural inequalities (such as social class) inherent in capitalism.

Social equality reinforces collectivism

A second argument is that social equality reinforces collectivism, co-operation and solidarity with' society and the economy. Put simply, human beings are more likely to co-exist harmoniously

in society and work together for the common economic good if they share the same social and economic conditions. For example, modern Sweden has high levels of social equality based on extensive wealth redistribution and social welfare. Socialists argue that such measures have mad€ a major contribution to the stability, cohesion and economic output of Swedish society.

Social inequality, on the other hand, encourages conflict and instability. Societies with great econom and social inequalities are unstable because they are sharply divided into the 'haves' and 'have-not Eventually, if the situation is not addressed, the disadvantaged sections of society will revolt in protest against their conditions, as happened in Russia in 1917 and Mexico in 1910-20. In a similar way socialists also condemn equality of opportunity for fostering a competitive 'dog-eat-dog' outlook.

Social equality is a means of satisfying basic human needs

A third view is that social equality is a means of satisfying basic human needs that are part of human nature and essential to a sense of human fulfilment. Given that all people's basic needs are the same (such as food, friendship and shelter), socialists call for the equal, or more equal, distribution of wealth and resources to promote human fulfilment and realise human potential. In terms of the economy, most socialists agree that the free market, driven by the profit motive, cannot allocate wealth and resources fairly to all members of society. In their view, only the redistributive mechanism of the state can provide for everyone, irrespective of social position, and combat the divisive effects of the free market.

Common ownership

Socialists endorse common ownership because, in their view, private property (productive wealth or capital, rather than personal belongings) has several important drawbacks.

. As wealth is created by the communal endeavour of humans, it should be owned collectively, not by individuals.

Private ty encourages materialism and fosters the false belief that the achievement of personal wealth will bring fulfilment.

· Private property generates social conflict between 'have' and 'have-not' groups, such as owners and workers.

Broadly speaking, socialists-have argued either that private property should be abolished entirely and replaced with common ownership or that the latter should be applied in a more limited way. In the USSR from the 1930s, the Stalinist regime implemented an all-encompassing form of common ownership by bringing the entire economy under state control. More moderate socialists, including the Attlee Labour government in the UK (1945-51), have opted for limited common ownership by nationalising only key strategic industries, including the coal mines, the railways and steel-making, leaving much of the economy in private hands. However, in recent decades, western socialist parties have placed less emphasis on common ownership in favour of other objectives.

All socialists are concerned about the negative impact on society and individuals of private property, which they see as leading to inequality and exploitation. Some socialists believe that capitalism should be abolished and the workers should participate in the economic management of their place of work and share in the profits. This theory is an alternative to top-down state central planning and nationalisation, as used by twentieth-century communist states such as the USSR and China, and is therefore much more democratic. Syndicalists argue for workers’ control via trade unions. A major movement in early twentieth-century France and Italy, syndicalism aimed to overthrow governments through the use of general strikes and radical trade union action. As mentioned briefly earlier, the cooperative movement is a good example of a nonMarxist approach to workers’ control and an alternative form of economics. Developed in the nineteenth century by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, it originally consisted of groups of small retailers coming together to combine their buying power. Cooperatives are democratic organisations controlled by their members, and profits are shared. The Co-operative Group is the largest mutual business in the UK, owned by its 7 million customers and members. There are also workers’ cooperatives, for example Suma, a very successful wholesale business. 

The term 'workers' control' refers to the complete or partial ownership of an economic enterprise (such as a business or factory) by those employed there. It can also be used in a wider and more political sense to mean workers` control of the state. The concept has influenced different strands of socialist thought, including Marxism and syndicalism. Workers' control covers a range of schemes that aim to provide workers with full democratic control over their places of employment.

These schemes go beyond the right to be consulted and participate by seeking to establish real decision-making powers for workers in their particular industries or occupations.

Such a system is often justified in terms of core socialist ideas and principles. First, workers' control is clearly based on socialist views about human nature, as it promotes collective effort and the pursuit of group (rather than individual) interests. Furthermore, some socialists have argued that workers' control, with its emphasis on fully involving employees in all aspects of the production process, can maximise human potential by combating alienation at the workplace and undermining the capitalist view of labour as a mere commodity.

Second, workers' control has significant implications for the economy. Some socialists maintain that, as the workers are the key factor in the production process, they should have the right to control the means of production. Workers' control aims either to dilute or replace capitalist control of the economy. For example, French Syndicalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries called for the overthrow of capitalism and the introduction of workers' control of the economy based on the trade unions and proletarian political institutions.

Third, those endorsing workers' control hold contrasting views regarding the role played by the state in the socialist transformation. Syndicalists are hostile towards the state, regarding it as an instrument of capitalist oppression and an inefficient bureaucratic structure incapable of initiating meaningful reform. Consequently, they call for the state to be forcibly replaced with a form of workers' control based on a federation of trade union bodies. British guild socialism a pro-workers' control movement that emerged in the early 20th century, was internally divided over the role of the state. Although all guild socialists argued for state ownership of industry in the pursuit of workers' control, some called for the state to remain essentially in its existing form, whereas others called for the state to be turned into a federal body composed of workers' guilds, consumers' organisations and local government bodies.

Finally, workers' control can be seen as an important step towards a socialist society. At one end of the spectrum, 'moderate' workers' control in a capitalist society (such as increased trade union and shopfloor influence over manager's decisions) provides a method of introducing limited reforms to the social and economic structure. At the other end, industrial self-management by workers living under state socialism (such as the workers' councils operating in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s) reinforces the idea that a socialist society should raise the condition and status of the working class.

Critics reject such schemes on the grounds that they are utopian and fail to acknowledge that business needs risk-takers and investors as well as workers. According to this view, workers often lack the entrepreneurial attributes necessary for success. In taking over the management functions of appointments, promotions and dismissals, manual employees may adversely affect the economic viability of their workplace.

Rhetorical Analysis of Socialism vs. Capitalism by Thompson Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction.

The focus of the article offered for reading is an examination of the two social paradigms, socialism, and capitalism, as strategies for achieving moral well-being. The main conclusion, which Thompson does not postulate explicitly but hints at, is that the capitalist economic system is more morally progressive because it promotes a spirit of enterprise, cooperation, and independence. In order to convey this message, the author uses several rhetorical devices, the discussion of which is part of this analysis.

Turning to Pathos to show that modern America has moved away from capitalist ideology and toward a mixed form of economic systems, Thompson resorts to emotional expressions that unequivocally show his attitude toward what is happening. In paragraph 14, the author uses the word “Unfortunately,” which is not academic but instead expresses the author’s bias. The reader should understand from this choice of words that America’s departure from a purely capitalist system is indeed a problem. The same is observed when the author, in describing socialist morality, uses terms such as “theft,” “envy,” and “Nazism,” initially colored with negative connotations.

References to specific historical figures, such as Mussolini and Goering, are part of Logos as a system of increasing the persuasiveness of the reading. From this perspective, placing such historical names, who were nonetheless decision-makers in the fascist practices of Italy and Germany of the last century, in the text does not seem surprising (Thompson para. 3). Instead of using the names of the founders of this ideology, including Marx and Engels, the author deliberately uses negatively colored names to show the moral nothingness of socialism in comparison to capitalism. The reader has a natural association between socialist morality, which in itself is not the worst, and the Nazis.

Thus, the rhetorical analysis performed has shown that the author used at least two rhetorical devices in order to convey the primary meaning of his article more. These include Logos as a tool for referring to figures, historical facts, and names, and Pathos as a means of increasing the emotional power of the text. The author does not refer to his biography in the article, but the structure of his tone and the opposition he operates with make it possible to accurately convey the key idea of the entire text.

Thompson, Bradley. Socialism vs. Capitalism: Which is the Moral System? Ashbrook Ashland University, 1993.

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Positive and Negative Liberty

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant, and was examined and defended in depth by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and ’60s. Discussions about positive and negative liberty normally take place within the context of political and social philosophy. They are distinct from, though sometimes related to, philosophical discussions about free will . Work on the nature of positive liberty often overlaps, however, with work on the nature of autonomy .

As Berlin showed, negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal. Since few people claim to be against liberty, the way this term is interpreted and defined can have important political implications. Political liberalism tends to presuppose a negative definition of liberty: liberals generally claim that if one favors individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. Critics of liberalism often contest this implication by contesting the negative definition of liberty: they argue that the pursuit of liberty understood as self-realization or as self-determination (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed by liberals.

Many authors prefer to talk of positive and negative freedom . This is only a difference of style, and the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are normally used interchangeably by political and social philosophers. Although some attempts have been made to distinguish between liberty and freedom (Pitkin 1988; Williams 2001; Dworkin 2011), generally speaking these have not caught on. Neither can they be translated into other European languages, which contain only the one term, of either Latin or Germanic origin (e.g. liberté, Freiheit), where English contains both.

1. Two Concepts of Liberty

2. the paradox of positive liberty, 3.1 positive liberty as content-neutral, 3.2 republican liberty, 4. one concept of liberty: freedom as a triadic relation, 5. the analysis of constraints: their types and their sources, 6. the concept of overall freedom, 7. is the distinction still useful, introductory works, other works, other internet resources, related entries.

Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that you’re addicted to cigarettes and you’re desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving , you feel you are being driven , as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you’re perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means you’ll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing.

This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be unfree: you are not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from realizing what you recognize to be your true interests. One might say that while on the first view liberty is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the second view it is more about going through the right doors for the right reasons.

In a famous essay first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin called these two concepts of liberty negative and positive respectively (Berlin 1969). [ 1 ] The reason for using these labels is that in the first case liberty seems to be a mere absence of something (i.e. of obstacles, barriers, constraints or interference from others), whereas in the second case it seems to require the presence of something (i.e. of control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization). In Berlin’s words, we use the negative concept of liberty in attempting to answer the question “What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”, whereas we use the positive concept in attempting to answer the question “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (1969, pp. 121–22).

It is useful to think of the difference between the two concepts in terms of the difference between factors that are external and factors that are internal to the agent. While theorists of negative freedom are primarily interested in the degree to which individuals or groups suffer interference from external bodies, theorists of positive freedom are more attentive to the internal factors affecting the degree to which individuals or groups act autonomously. Given this difference, one might be tempted to think that a political philosopher should concentrate exclusively on negative freedom, a concern with positive freedom being more relevant to psychology or individual morality than to political and social institutions. This, however, would be premature, for among the most hotly debated issues in political philosophy are the following: Is the positive concept of freedom a political concept? Can individuals or groups achieve positive freedom through political action? Is it possible for the state to promote the positive freedom of citizens on their behalf? And if so, is it desirable for the state to do so? The classic texts in the history of western political thought are divided over how these questions should be answered: theorists in the classical liberal tradition, like Benjamin Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herbert Spencer, and J.S. Mill, are typically classed as answering ‘no’ and therefore as defending a negative concept of political freedom; theorists that are critical of this tradition, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and T.H. Green, are typically classed as answering ‘yes’ and as defending a positive concept of political freedom.

In its political form, positive freedom has often been thought of as necessarily achieved through a collectivity. Perhaps the clearest case is that of Rousseau’s theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one’s community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the ‘general will’. Put in the simplest terms, one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it is a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he or she participates in its democratic process. But there are also individualist applications of the concept of positive freedom. For example, it is sometimes said that a government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization. The welfare state has sometimes been defended on this basis, as has the idea of a universal basic income. The negative concept of freedom, on the other hand, is most commonly assumed in liberal defences of the constitutional liberties typical of liberal-democratic societies, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, and in arguments against paternalist or moralist state intervention. It is also often invoked in defences of the right to private property. This said, some philosophers have contested the claim that private property necessarily enhances negative liberty (Cohen 1995, 2006), and still others have tried to show that negative liberty can ground a form of egalitarianism (Steiner 1994).

After Berlin, the most widely cited and best developed analyses of the negative concept of liberty include Hayek (1960), Day (1971), Oppenheim (1981), Miller (1983) and Steiner (1994). Among the most prominent contemporary analyses of the positive concept of liberty are Milne (1968), Gibbs (1976), C. Taylor (1979) and Christman (1991, 2005).

Many liberals, including Berlin, have suggested that the positive concept of liberty carries with it a danger of authoritarianism. Consider the fate of a permanent and oppressed minority. Because the members of this minority participate in a democratic process characterized by majority rule, they might be said to be free on the grounds that they are members of a society exercising self-control over its own affairs. But they are oppressed, and so are surely unfree. Moreover, it is not necessary to see a society as democratic in order to see it as self-controlled; one might instead adopt an organic conception of society, according to which the collectivity is to be thought of as a living organism, and one might believe that this organism will only act rationally, will only be in control of itself, when its various parts are brought into line with some rational plan devised by its wise governors (who, to extend the metaphor, might be thought of as the organism’s brain). In this case, even the majority might be oppressed in the name of liberty.

Such justifications of oppression in the name of liberty are no mere products of the liberal imagination, for there are notorious historical examples of their endorsement by authoritarian political leaders. Berlin, himself a liberal and writing during the cold war, was clearly moved by the way in which the apparently noble ideal of freedom as self-mastery or self-realization had been twisted and distorted by the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century — most notably those of the Soviet Union — so as to claim that they, rather than the liberal West, were the true champions of freedom. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical conclusion begins, according to Berlin, with the idea of a divided self. To illustrate: the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a divided self, for she is both a self that desires to get to an appointment and a self that desires to get to the tobacconists, and these two desires are in conflict. We can now enrich this story in a plausible way by adding that one of these selves — the keeper of appointments — is superior to the other: the self that is a keeper of appointments is thus a ‘higher’ self, and the self that is a smoker is a ‘lower’ self. The higher self is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the true self, for rational reflection and moral responsibility are the features of humans that mark them off from other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting desires and irrational impulses. One is free, then, when one’s higher, rational self is in control and one is not a slave to one’s passions or to one’s merely empirical self. The next step down the slippery slope consists in pointing out that some individuals are more rational than others, and can therefore know best what is in their and others’ rational interests. This allows them to say that by forcing people less rational than themselves to do the rational thing and thus to realize their true selves, they are in fact liberating them from their merely empirical desires. Occasionally, Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole — “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers. “Once I take this view”, Berlin says, “I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ... must be identical with his freedom” (Berlin 1969, pp. 132–33).

Those in the negative camp try to cut off this line of reasoning at the first step, by denying that there is any necessary relation between one’s freedom and one’s desires. Since one is free to the extent that one is externally unprevented from doing things, they say, one can be free to do what one does not desire to do. If being free meant being unprevented from realizing one’s desires, then one could, again paradoxically, reduce one’s unfreedom by coming to desire fewer of the things one is unfree to do. One could become free simply by contenting oneself with one’s situation. A perfectly contented slave is perfectly free to realize all of her desires. Nevertheless, we tend to think of slavery as the opposite of freedom. More generally, freedom is not to be confused with happiness, for in logical terms there is nothing to stop a free person from being unhappy or an unfree person from being happy. The happy person might feel free, but whether they are free is another matter (Day, 1970). Negative theorists of freedom therefore tend to say not that having freedom means being unprevented from doing as one desires, but that it means being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do (Steiner 1994. Cf. Van Parijs 1995; Sugden 2006).

Some theorists of positive freedom bite the bullet and say that the contented slave is indeed free — that in order to be free the individual must learn, not so much to dominate certain merely empirical desires, but to rid herself of them. She must, in other words, remove as many of her desires as possible. As Berlin puts it, if I have a wounded leg ‘there are two methods of freeing myself from pain. One is to heal the wound. But if the cure is too difficult or uncertain, there is another method. I can get rid of the wound by cutting off my leg’ (1969, pp. 135–36). This is the strategy of liberation adopted by ascetics, stoics and Buddhist sages. It involves a ‘retreat into an inner citadel’ — a soul or a purely noumenal self — in which the individual is immune to any outside forces. But this state, even if it can be achieved, is not one that liberals would want to call one of freedom, for it again risks masking important forms of oppression. It is, after all, often in coming to terms with excessive external limitations in society that individuals retreat into themselves, pretending to themselves that they do not really desire the worldly goods or pleasures they have been denied. Moreover, the removal of desires may also be an effect of outside forces, such as brainwashing, which we should hardly want to call a realization of freedom.

Because the concept of negative freedom concentrates on the external sphere in which individuals interact, it seems to provide a better guarantee against the dangers of paternalism and authoritarianism perceived by Berlin. To promote negative freedom is to promote the existence of a sphere of action within which the individual is sovereign, and within which she can pursue her own projects subject only to the constraint that she respect the spheres of others. Humboldt and Mill, both advocates of negative freedom, compared the development of an individual to that of a plant: individuals, like plants, must be allowed to grow, in the sense of developing their own faculties to the full and according to their own inner logic. Personal growth is something that cannot be imposed from without, but must come from within the individual.

3. Two Attempts to Create a Third Way

Critics, however, have objected that the ideal described by Humboldt and Mill looks much more like a positive concept of liberty than a negative one. Positive liberty consists, they say, in exactly this growth of the individual: the free individual is one that develops, determines and changes her own desires and interests autonomously and from within. This is not liberty as the mere absence of obstacles, but liberty as autonomy or self-realization. Why should the mere absence of state interference be thought to guarantee such growth? Is there not some third way between the extremes of totalitarianism and the minimal state of the classical liberals — some non-paternalist, non-authoritarian means by which positive liberty in the above sense can be actively promoted?

Much of the more recent work on positive liberty has been motivated by a dissatisfaction with the ideal of negative liberty combined with an awareness of the possible abuses of the positive concept so forcefully exposed by Berlin. John Christman (1991, 2005, 2009, 2013), for example, has argued that positive liberty concerns the ways in which desires are formed — whether as a result of rational reflection on all the options available, or as a result of pressure, manipulation or ignorance. What it does not regard, he says, is the content of an individual’s desires. The promotion of positive freedom need not therefore involve the claim that there is only one right answer to the question of how a person should live, nor need it allow, or even be compatible with, a society forcing its members into given patterns of behavior. Take the example of a Muslim woman who claims to espouse the fundamentalist doctrines generally followed by her family and the community in which she lives. On Christman’s account, this person is positively unfree if her desire to conform was somehow oppressively imposed upon her through indoctrination, manipulation or deceit. She is positively free, on the other hand, if she arrived at her desire to conform while aware of other reasonable options and she weighed and assessed these other options rationally. Even if this woman seems to have a preference for subservient behavior, there is nothing necessarily freedom-enhancing or freedom-restricting about her having the desires she has, since freedom regards not the content of these desires but their mode of formation. On this view, forcing her to do certain things rather than others can never make her more free, and Berlin’s paradox of positive freedom would seem to have been avoided.

This more ‘procedural’ account of positive liberty allows us to point to kinds of internal constraint that seem too fall off the radar if we adopt only negative concept. For example, some radical political theorists believe it can help us to make sense of forms of oppression and structural injustice that cannot be traced to overt acts of prevention or coercion. On the one hand, in agreement with Berlin, we should recognize the dangers of that come with promoting the values or interests of a person’s ‘true self’ in opposition to what they manifestly desire. Thus, the procedural account avoids all reference to a ‘true self’. On the other, we should recognize that people’s actual selves are inevitably formed in a social context and that their values and senses of identity (for example, in terms of gender or race or nationality) are shaped by cultural influences. In this sense, the self is ‘socially constructed’, and this social construction can itself occur in oppressive ways. The challenge, then, is to show how a person’s values can be thus shaped but without the kind of oppressive imposition or manipulation that comes not only from political coercion but also, more subtly, from practices or institutions that stigmatize or marginalize certain identities or that attach costs to the endorsement of values deviating from acceptable norms, for these kinds of imposition or manipulation can be just another way of promoting a substantive ideal of the self. And this was exactly the danger against which Berlin was warning, except that the danger is less visible and can be created unintentionally (Christman 2013, 2015, 2021; Hirschmann 2003, 2013; Coole 2013).

While this theory of positive freedom undoubtedly provides a tool for criticizing the limiting effects of certain practices and institutions in contemporary liberal societies, it remains to be seen what kinds of political action can be pursued in order to promote content-neutral positive liberty without encroaching on any individual’s rightful sphere of negative liberty. Thus, the potential conflict between the two ideals of negative and positive freedom might survive Christman’s alternative analysis, albeit in a milder form. Even if we rule out coercing individuals into specific patterns of behavior, a state interested in promoting content-neutral positive liberty might still have considerable space for intervention aimed at ‘public enlightenment’, perhaps subsidizing some kinds of activities (in order to encourage a plurality of genuine options) and financing such intervention through taxation. Liberals might criticize this kind of intervention on anti-paternalist grounds, objecting that such measures will require the state to use resources in ways that the supposedly heteronomous individuals, if left to themselves, might have chosen to spend in other ways. In other words, even in its content-neutral form, the ideal of positive freedom might still conflict with the liberal idea of respect for persons, one interpretation of which involves viewing individuals from the outside and taking their choices at face value. From a liberal point of view, the blindness to internal constraints can be intentional (Carter 2011a). Some liberals will make an exception to this restriction on state intervention in the case of the education of children, in such a way as to provide for the active cultivation of open minds and rational reflection. Even here, however, other liberals will object that the right to negative liberty includes the right to decide how one’s children should be educated.

Is it necessary to refer to internal constraints in order to make sense of the phenomena of oppression and structural injustice? Some might contest this view, or say that it is true only up to a point, for there are at least two reasons for thinking that the oppressed are lacking in negative liberty. First, while Berlin himself equated economic and social disadvantages with natural disabilities, claiming that neither represented constraints on negative liberty but only on personal abilities, many theorists of negative liberty disagree: if I lack the money to buy a jacket from a clothes shop, then any attempt on my part to carry away the jacket is likely to meet with preventive actions or punishment on the part of the shop keeper or the agents of the state. This is a case of interpersonal interference, not merely of personal inability. In the normal circumstances of a market economy, purchasing power is indeed a very reliable indicator of how far other people will stop you from doing certain things if you try. It is therefore strongly correlated with degrees of negative freedom (Cohen 1995, 2011; Waldron 1993; Carter 2007; Grant 2013). Thus, while the promotion of content-neutral positive liberty might imply the transfer of certain kinds of resources to members of disadvantaged groups, the same might be true of the promotion of negative liberty. Second, the negative concept of freedom can be applied directly to disadvantaged groups as well as to their individual members. Some social structures may be such as to tolerate the liberation of only a limited number of members of a given group. G.A. Cohen famously focused on the case proletarians who can escape their condition by successfully setting up a business of their own though a mixture of hard work and luck. In such cases, while each individual member of the disadvantaged group might be negatively free in the sense of being unprevented from choosing the path of liberation, the freedom of the individual is conditional on the unfreedom of the majority of the rest of the group, since not all can escape in this way. Each individual member of the class therefore partakes in a form of collective negative unfreedom (Cohen 1988, 2006; for discussion see Mason 1996; Hindricks 2008; Grant 2013; Schmidt 2020).

Another increasingly influential group of philosophers has rejected both the negative and the positive conception, claiming that liberty is not merely the enjoyment of a sphere of non-interference but the enjoyment of certain conditions in which such non-interference is guaranteed (Pettit 1997, 2001, 2014; Skinner 1998, 2002; Weinstock and Nadeau 2004; Laborde and Maynor 2008; Lovett 2010, forthcoming; Breen and McBride 2015, List and Valentini 2016). These conditions may include the presence of a democratic constitution and a series of safeguards against a government wielding power arbitrarily, including popular control and the separation of powers. As Berlin admits, on the negative view, I am free even if I live in a dictatorship just as long as the dictator happens, on a whim, not to interfere with me (see also Hayek 1960). There is no necessary connection between negative liberty and any particular form of government. Is it not counterintuitive to say that I can in theory be free even if I live in a dictatorship, or that a slave can enjoy considerable liberty as long as the slave-owner is compassionate and generous? Would my subjection to the arbitrary power of a dictator or slave-owner not itself be sufficient to qualify me as unfree? If it would be, then we should say that I am free only if I live in a society with the kinds of political institutions that guarantee the independence of each citizen from such arbitrary power. Quentin Skinner has called this view of freedom ‘neo-Roman’, invoking ideas about freedom both of the ancient Romans and of a number of Renaissance and early modern writers. Philip Pettit has called the same view ‘republican’, and this label has generally prevailed in the recent literature.

Republican freedom can be thought of as a kind of status : to be a free person is to enjoy the rights and privileges attached to the status of republican citizenship, whereas the paradigm of the unfree person is the slave. Freedom is not simply a matter of non-interference, for a slave may enjoy a great deal of non-interference at the whim of her master. What makes her unfree is her status, such that she is permanently exposed to interference of any kind. Even if the slave enjoys non-interference, she is, as Pettit puts it, ‘dominated’, because she is permanently subject to the arbitrary power of her owner.

According to Pettit, then, republicans conceive of freedom not as non-interference, as on the standard negative view, but as ‘non-domination’. Non-domination is distinct from negative freedom, he says, for two reasons. First, as we have seen, one can enjoy non-interference without enjoying non-domination. Second, one can enjoy non-domination while nevertheless being interfered with, just as long as the interference in question is constrained to track one’s avowed interests thanks to republican power structures: only arbitrary power is inimical to freedom, not power as such.

On the other hand, republican freedom is also distinct from positive freedom as expounded and criticized by Berlin. First, republican freedom does not consist in the activity of virtuous political participation; rather, that participation is seen as instrumentally related to freedom as non-domination. Secondly, the republican concept of freedom cannot lead to anything like the oppressive consequences feared by Berlin, because it has a commitment to non-domination and to liberal-democratic institutions already built into it.

Pettit’s idea of freedom as non domination has caught the imagination of a great many political theorists over the last two decades. One source of its popularity lies in the fact that it seems to make sense of the phenomena of oppression and structural injustice referred to above, but without necessarily relying on references to internal constraints. It has been applied not only to relations of domination between governments and citizens, but also to relations of domination between employers and workers (Breen and McBride 2015), between husbands and wives (Lovett forthcoming), and between able-bodied and disabled people (De Wispelaere and Casassas 2014).

It remains to be seen, however, whether the republican concept of freedom is ultimately distinguishable from the negative concept, or whether republican writers on freedom have not simply provided good arguments to the effect that negative freedom is best promoted, on balance and over time , through certain kinds of political institutions rather than others. While there is no necessary connection between negative liberty and democratic government, there may nevertheless be a strong empirical correlation between the two. Ian Carter (1999, 2008), Matthew H. Kramer (2003, 2008), and Robert Goodin and Frank Jackson (2007) have argued, along these lines, that republican policies are best defended empirically on the basis of the standard negative ideal of freedom, rather than on the basis of a conceptual challenge to that ideal. An important premise in such an argument is that the extent of a person’s negative freedom is a function not simply of how many single actions are prevented, but of how many different act-combinations are prevented. On this basis, people who can achieve their goals only by bowing and scraping to their masters must be seen as less free, negatively, than people who can achieve those goals unconditionally. Another important premise is that the extent to which people are negatively free depends, in part, on the probability with which they will be constrained from performing future acts or act-combinations. People who are subject to arbitrary power can be seen as less free in the negative sense even if they do not actually suffer interference, because the probability of their suffering constraints is always greater ( ceteris paribus , as a matter of empirical fact) than it would be if they were not subject to that arbitrary power. Only this greater probability, they say, can adequately explain republican references to the ‘fear’, the ‘sense of exposure’, and the ‘precariousness’ of the dominated (for further discussion see Bruin 2009, Lang 2012, Shnayderman 2012, Kirby 2016, Carter and Shnayderman 2019).

In reply to the above point about the relevance of probabilities, republicans have insisted that freedom as non-domination is nevertheless distinct from negative liberty because what matters for an agent’s freedom is the impossibility of others interfering, not the mere improbability of their doing so. Consider the example of gender relations with the context of marriage. A husband might be kind and generous, or indeed have a strong sense of egalitarian justice, and therefore be extremely unlikely ever to deny his wife the same opportunities as he himself enjoys; but the wife is still dominated if the structure of norms in her society is such as to permit husbands to frustrate the choices of their wives in numerous ways. If she lives in such a society, she is still subject to the husband’s power whether he likes it or not. And whether the husband likes it or not, the wife’s subjection to his power will tend to influence how third parties treat her – for example, in terms of offering employment opportunities.

Taken at face value, however, the requirement of impossibility of interference seems over demanding, as it is never completely impossible for others to constrain me. It is not impossible that I be stabbed by someone as I walk down the street this afternoon. Indeed, the possible world in which this event occurs is very close to the actual world, even if the event is improbable in the actual world. If the mere possibility of the stabbing makes me unfree to walk down the street, then unfreedom is everywhere and the achievement of freedom is itself virtually impossible. To avoid this worry, republicans have qualified their impossibility requirement: for me to be free to walk down the street, it must be impossible for others to stab me with impunity (Pettit 2008a, 2008b; Skinner 2008). This qualification makes the impossibility requirement more realistic. Nevertheless, the qualification is open to objections. Is ‘impunity’ a purely formal requirement, or should we say that no one can carry out a street stabbing with impunity if, say, at least 70% of such stabbings lead to prosecution? Even if 100% of such stabbings lead to prosecution, there will still be some stabbings. Will they not be sources of unfreedom for the victims?

More recently some republicans have sidelined the notion of impunity of interference in favour of that of ‘ignorability’ of interference (Ingham and Lovett 2019). I am free to make certain choices if the structure of effective societal norms, whether legal or customary, is such as to constrain the ability of anyone else to frustrate those choices, to the point where the possibility of such frustration, despite existing, is remote enough to be something I can ignore. Once I can ignore that possibility, then the structure of effective norms makes me safe by removing any sense of exposure to interference. Defenders of the negative concept of liberty might respond to this move by saying that the criterion of ignorability looks very much like a criterion of trivially low probability: we consider ourselves free to do x to the extent that the system of enforced norms deters others’ prevention of x in such a way as to make that prevention improbable.

The jury is still out on whether republicans have successfully carved out a third concept of freedom that is really distinct from those of negative and positive liberty. This conceptual uncertainty need not itself cast doubt on the distinctness and attractiveness of republicanism as a set of political prescriptions. Rather, what it leaves open is the question of the ultimate normative bases of those prescriptions: is ‘non-domination’ something that supervenes on certain configurations of negative freedom and unfreedom, and therefore explainable in terms of such configurations, or is it something truly distinct from those configurations?

The two sides identified by Berlin disagree over which of two different concepts best captures the political ideal of ‘liberty’. Does this fact not denote the presence of some more basic agreement between the two sides? How, after all, could they see their disagreement as one about the nature of liberty if they did not think of themselves as in some sense talking about the same thing ? In an influential article, the American legal philosopher Gerald MacCallum (1967) put forward the following answer: there is in fact only one basic concept of freedom, on which both sides in the debate converge . What the so-called negative and positive theorists disagree about is how this single concept of freedom should be interpreted. Indeed, in MacCallum’s view, there are a great many different possible interpretations of freedom, and it is only Berlin’s artificial dichotomy that has led us to think in terms of there being two.

MacCallum defines the basic concept of freedom — the concept on which everyone agrees — as follows: a subject, or agent, is free from certain constraints, or preventing conditions, to do or become certain things. Freedom is therefore a triadic relation — that is, a relation between three things : an agent, certain preventing conditions, and certain doings or becomings of the agent. Any statement about freedom or unfreedom can be translated into a statement of the above form by specifying what is free or unfree, from what it is free or unfree, and what it is free or unfree to do or become . Any claim about the presence or absence of freedom in a given situation will therefore make certain assumptions about what counts as an agent, what counts as a constraint or limitation on freedom, and what counts as a purpose that the agent can be described as either free or unfree to carry out.

The definition of freedom as a triadic relation was first put forward in the seminal work of Felix Oppenheim in the 1950s and 60s. Oppenheim saw that an important meaning of ‘freedom’ in the context of political and social philosophy was as a relation between two agents and a particular (impeded or unimpeded) action. However, Oppenheim’s interpretation of freedom was an example of what Berlin would call a negative concept. What MacCallum did was to generalize this triadic structure so that it would cover all possible claims about freedom, whether of the negative or the positive variety. In MacCallum’s framework, unlike in Oppenheim’s, the interpretation of each of the three variables is left open. In other words, MacCallum’s position is a meta-theoretical one: his is a theory about the differences between theorists of freedom.

To illustrate MacCallum’s point, let us return to the example of the smoker driving to the tobacconists. In describing this person as either free or unfree, we shall be making assumptions about each of MacCallum’s three variables. If we say that the driver is free , what we shall probably mean is that an agent, consisting in the driver’s empirical self, is free from external (physical or legal) obstacles to do whatever he or she might want to do. If, on the other hand, we say that the driver is unfree , what we shall probably mean is that an agent, consisting in a higher or rational self, is made unfree by internal, psychological constraints to carry out some rational, authentic or virtuous plan. Notice that in both claims there is a negative element and a positive element: each claim about freedom assumes both that freedom is freedom from something (i.e., preventing conditions) and that it is freedom to do or become something. The dichotomy between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ is therefore a false one, and it is misleading to say that those who see the driver as free employ a negative concept and those who see the driver as unfree employ a positive one. What these two camps differ over is the way in which one should interpret each of the three variables in the triadic freedom-relation. More precisely, we can see that what they differ over is the extension to be assigned to each of the variables.

Thus, those whom Berlin places in the negative camp typically conceive of the agent as having the same extension as that which it is generally given in ordinary discourse: they tend to think of the agent as an individual human being and as including all of the empirical beliefs and desires of that individual. Those in the so-called positive camp, on the other hand, often depart from the ordinary notion, in one sense imagining the agent as more extensive than in the ordinary notion, and in another sense imagining it as less extensive: they think of the agent as having a greater extension than in ordinary discourse in cases where they identify the agent’s true desires and aims with those of some collectivity of which she is a member; and they think of the agent as having a lesser extension than in ordinary discourse in cases where they identify the true agent with only a subset of her empirical beliefs and desires — i.e., with those that are rational, authentic or virtuous. Secondly, those in Berlin’s positive camp tend to take a wider view of what counts as a constraint on freedom than those in his negative camp: the set of relevant obstacles is more extensive for the former than for the latter, since negative theorists tend to count only external obstacles as constraints on freedom, whereas positive theorists also allow that one may be constrained by internal factors, such as irrational desires, fears or ignorance. And thirdly, those in Berlin’s positive camp tend to take a narrower view of what counts as a purpose one can be free to fulfill. The set of relevant purposes is less extensive for them than for the negative theorists, for we have seen that they tend to restrict the relevant set of actions or states to those that are rational, authentic or virtuous, whereas those in the negative camp tend to extend this variable so as to cover any action or state the agent might desire.

On MacCallum’s analysis, then, there is no simple dichotomy between positive and negative liberty; rather, we should recognize that there is a whole range of possible interpretations or ‘conceptions’ of the single concept of liberty. Indeed, as MacCallum says and as Berlin seems implicitly to admit, a number of classic authors cannot be placed unequivocally in one or the other of the two camps. Locke, for example, is normally thought of as one of the fathers or classical liberalism and therefore as a staunch defender of the negative concept of freedom. He indeed states explicitly that ‘[to be at] liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others’. But he also says that liberty is not to be confused with ‘license’, and that “that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices” ( Second Treatise , parags. 6 and 57). While Locke gives an account of constraints on freedom that Berlin would call negative, he seems to endorse an account of MacCallum’s third freedom-variable that Berlin would call positive, restricting this variable to actions that are not immoral (liberty is not license) and to those that are in the agent’s own interests (I am not unfree if prevented from falling into a bog). A number of contemporary liberals or libertarians have provided or assumed definitions of freedom that are similarly morally loaded (e.g. Nozick 1974; Rothbard 1982; Bader 2018). This would seem to confirm MacCallum’s claim that it is conceptually and historically misleading to divide theorists into two camps — a negative liberal one and a positive non-liberal one.

To illustrate the range of interpretations of the concept of freedom made available by MacCallum’s analysis, let us now take a closer look at his second variable — that of constraints on freedom.

Advocates of negative conceptions of freedom typically restrict the range of obstacles that count as constraints on freedom to those that are brought about by other agents. For theorists who conceive of constraints on freedom in this way, I am unfree only to the extent that other people prevent me from doing certain things. If I am incapacitated by natural causes — by a genetic handicap, say, or by a virus or by certain climatic conditions — I may be rendered unable to do certain things, but I am not, for that reason, rendered unfree to do them. Thus, if you lock me in my house, I shall be both unable and unfree to leave. But if I am unable to leave because I suffer from a debilitating illness or because a snow drift has blocked my exit, I am nevertheless not unfree, to leave. The reason such theorists give, for restricting the set of relevant preventing conditions in this way, is that they see unfreedom as a social relation — a relation between persons (see Oppenheim 1961; Miller 1983; Steiner 1983; Kristjánsson 1996; Kramer 2003; Morriss 2012; Shnayderman 2013; Schmidt 2016). Unfreedom as mere inability is thought by such authors to be more the concern of engineers and medics than of political and social philosophers. (If I suffer from a natural or self-inflicted inability to do something, should we to say that I remain free to do it, or should we say that the inability removes my freedom to do it while nevertheless not implying that I am un free to do it? In the latter case, we shall be endorsing a ‘trivalent’ conception, according to which there are some things that a person is neither free nor unfree to do. Kramer 2003 endorses a trivalent conception according to which freedom is identified with ability and unfreedom is the prevention (by others) of outcomes that the agent would otherwise be able to bring about.)

In attempting to distinguish between natural and social obstacles we shall inevitably come across gray areas. An important example is that of obstacles created by impersonal economic forces. Do economic constraints like recession, poverty and unemployment merely incapacitate people, or do they also render them unfree? Libertarians and egalitarians have provided contrasting answers to this question by appealing to different conceptions of constraints. Thus, one way of answering the question is by taking an even more restrictive view of what counts as a constraint on freedom, so that only a subset of the set of obstacles brought about by other persons counts as a restriction of freedom: those brought about intentionally . In this case, impersonal economic forces, being brought about unintentionally, do not restrict people’s freedom , even though they undoubtedly make many people unable to do many things. This last view has been taken by a number of market-oriented libertarians, including, most famously, Friedrich von Hayek (1960, 1982), according to whom freedom is the absence of coercion, where to be coerced is to be subject to the arbitrary will of another. (Notice the somewhat surprising similarity between this conception of freedom and the republican conception discussed earlier, in section 3.2) Critics of libertarianism, on the other hand, typically endorse a broader conception of constraints on freedom that includes not only intentionally imposed obstacles but also unintended obstacles for which someone may nevertheless be held responsible (for Miller and Kristjánsson and Shnayderman this means morally responsible; for Oppenheim and Kramer it means causally responsible), or indeed obstacles created in any way whatsoever, so that unfreedom comes to be identical to inability (see Crocker 1980; Cohen 2011, pp. 193–97; Sen 1992; Van Parijs 1995; Garnett forthcoming).

This analysis of constraints helps to explain why socialists and egalitarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are as such unfree, or that they are less free than the rich, whereas libertarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are no less free than the rich. Egalitarians typically (though do not always) assume a broader notion than libertarians of what counts as a constraint on freedom. Although this view does not necessarily imply what Berlin would call a positive notion of freedom, egalitarians often call their own definition a positive one, in order to convey the sense that freedom requires not merely the absence of certain social relations of prevention but the presence of abilities, or what Amartya Sen has influentially called ‘capabilities’ (Sen 1985, 1988, 1992; Nussbaum 2006, 2011). (Important exceptions to this egalitarian tendency to broaden the relevant set of constraints include those who consider poverty to indicate a lack of social freedom (see sec. 3.1, above). Steiner (1994), grounds a left-libertarian theory of justice in the idea of an equal distribution of social freedom, which he takes to imply an equal distribution of resources.)

We have seen that advocates of a negative conception of freedom tend to count only obstacles that are external to the agent. Notice, however, that the term ‘external’ is ambiguous in this context, for it might be taken to refer either to the location of the causal source of an obstacle or to the location of the obstacle itself. Obstacles that count as ‘internal’ in terms of their own location include psychological phenomena such as ignorance, irrational desires, illusions and phobias. Such constraints can be caused in various ways: for example, they might have a genetic origin, or they might be brought about intentionally by others, as in the case of brainwashing or manipulation. In the first case we have an internal constraint brought about by natural causes, and in this sense ‘internally’; in the second, an internal constraint intentionally imposed by another human agent, and in this sense ‘externally’.

More generally, we can now see that there are in fact two different dimensions along which one’s notion of a constraint might be broader or narrower. A first dimension is that of the source of a constraint — in other words, what it is that brings about a constraint on freedom. We have seen, for example, that some theorists include as constraints on freedom only obstacles brought about by human action, whereas others also include obstacles with a natural origin. A second dimension is that of the type of constraint involved, where constraint-types include the types of internal constraint just mentioned, but also various types of constraint located outside the agent, such as physical barriers that render an action impossible, obstacles that render the performance of an action more or less difficult, and costs attached to the performance of a (more or less difficult) action. The two dimensions of type and source are logically independent of one another. Given this independence, it is theoretically possible to combine a narrow view of what counts as a source of a constraint with a broad view of what types of obstacle count as unfreedom-generating constraints, or vice versa . As a result, it is not clear that theorists who are normally placed in the ‘negative’ camp need deny the existence of internal constraints on freedom (see Kramer 2003; Garnett 2007).

To illustrate the independence of the two dimensions of type and source, consider the case of the unorthodox libertarian Hillel Steiner (1974–5, 1994). On the one hand, Steiner has a much broader view than Hayek of the possible sources of constraints on freedom: he does not limit the set of such sources to intentional human actions, but extends it to cover all kinds of human cause, whether or not any humans intend such causes and whether or not they can be held morally accountable for them, believing that any restriction of such non-natural sources can only be an arbitrary stipulation, usually arising from some more or less conscious ideological bias. On the other hand, Steiner has an even narrower view than Hayek about what type of obstacle counts as a constraint on freedom: for Steiner, an agent only counts as unfree to do something if it is physically impossible for her to do that thing. Any extension of the constraint variable to include other types of obstacle, such as the costs anticipated in coercive threats, would, in his view, necessarily involve a reference to the agent’s desires, and we have seen (in sec. 2) that for those liberals in the negative camp there is no necessary relation between an agent’s freedom and her desires. Consider the coercive threat ‘Your money or your life!’. This does not make it impossible for you to refuse to hand over your money, only much less desirable for you to do so. If you decide not to hand over the money, you will suffer the cost of being killed. That will count as a restriction of your freedom, because it will render physically impossible a great number of actions on your part. But it is not the issuing of the threat that creates this unfreedom, and you are not unfree until the sanction (described in the threat) is carried out. For this reason, Steiner excludes threats — and with them all other kinds of imposed costs — from the set of obstacles that count as freedom-restricting. This conception of freedom derives from Hobbes ( Leviathan , chs. 14 and 21), and its defenders often call it the ‘pure’ negative conception (M. Taylor 1982; Steiner 1994; Carter and Kramer 2008) to distinguish it from those ‘impure’ negative conceptions that make at least minimal references to the agent’s beliefs, desires or values.

Steiner’s account of the relation between freedom and coercive threats might be thought to have counterintuitive implications, even from the liberal point of view. Many laws that are normally thought to restrict negative freedom do not physically prevent people from doing what is prohibited, but deter them from doing so by threatening punishment. Are we to say, then, that these laws do not restrict the negative freedom of those who obey them? A solution to this problem may consist in saying that although a law against doing some action, x , does not remove the freedom to do x , it nevertheless renders physically impossible certain combinations of actions that include doing x and doing what would be precluded by the punishment. There is a restriction of the person’s overall negative freedom — i.e. a reduction in the overall number of act-combinations available to her — even though she does not lose the freedom to do any specific thing taken in isolation (Carter 1999).

The concept of overall freedom appears to play an important role both in everyday discourse and in contemporary political philosophy. It is only recently, however, that philosophers have stopped concentrating exclusively on the meaning of a particular freedom — the freedom to do or become this or that particular thing — and have started asking whether we can also make sense of descriptive claims to the effect that one person or society is freer than another, or of liberal normative claims to the effect that freedom should be maximized or that people should enjoy equal freedom or that they each have a right to a certain minimum level of freedom. The literal meaningfulness of such claims depends on the possibility of gauging degrees of overall freedom, sometimes comparatively, sometimes absolutely.

Theorists disagree, however, about the importance of the notion of overall freedom. For some libertarian and liberal egalitarian theorists, freedom is valuable as such. This suggests that more freedom is better than less (at least ceteris paribus ), and that freedom is one of those goods that a liberal society ought to distribute in a certain way among individuals. For other liberal theorists, like Ronald Dworkin (1977, 2011) and the later Rawls (1991), freedom is not valuable as such, and all claims about maximal or equal freedom ought to be interpreted not as literal references to a scalar good called ‘liberty’ but as elliptical references to the adequacy of lists of certain particular liberties, or types of liberties, selected on the basis of values other than liberty itself. Generally speaking, only the first group of theorists finds the notion of overall freedom interesting.

The theoretical problems involved in measuring overall freedom include that of how an agent’s available actions are to be individuated, counted and weighted, and that of comparing and weighting different types (but not necessarily different sources) of constraints on freedom (such as physical prevention, punishability, threats and manipulation). How are we to make sense of the claim that the number of options available to a person has increased? Should all options count for the same in terms of degrees of freedom, or should they be weighted according to their importance in terms of other values? If the latter, does the notion of overall freedom really add anything of substance to the idea that people should be granted those specific freedoms that are valuable? Should the degree of variety among options also count? And how are we to compare the unfreedom created by the physical impossibility of an action with, say, the unfreedom created by the difficulty or costliness or punishability of an action? It is only by comparing these different kinds of actions and constraints that we shall be in a position to compare individuals’ overall degrees of freedom. These problems have been addressed, with differing degrees of optimism, not only by political philosophers (Steiner 1983; Carter 1999; Kramer 2003; Garnett 2016; Côté 2020; Carter and Steiner 2021) but also by social choice theorists interested in finding a freedom-based alternative to the standard utilitarian or ‘welfarist’ framework that has tended to dominate their discipline (e.g. Pattanaik and Xu 1991, 1998; Hees 2000; Sen 2002; Sugden 1998, 2003, 2006; Bavetta 2004; Bavetta and Navarra 2012, 2014).

MacCallum’s framework is particularly well suited to the clarification of such issues. For this reason, theorists working on the measurement of freedom tend not to refer a great deal to the distinction between positive and negative freedom. This said, most of them are concerned with freedom understood as the availability of options. And the notion of freedom as the availability of options is unequivocally negative in Berlin’s sense at least where two conditions are met: first, the source of unfreedom is limited to the actions of other agents, so that natural or self-inflicted obstacles are not seen as decreasing an agent’s freedom; second, the actions one is free or unfree to perform are weighted in some value-neutral way, so that one is not seen as freer simply because the options available to one are more valuable or conducive to one’s self-realization. Of the above-mentioned authors, only Steiner embraces both conditions explicitly. Sen rejects both of them, despite not endorsing anything like positive freedom in Berlin’s sense.

We began with a simple distinction between two concepts of liberty, and have progressed from this to the recognition that liberty might be defined in any number of ways, depending on how one interprets the three variables of agent, constraints, and purposes. Despite the utility of MacCallum’s triadic formula and its strong influence on analytic philosophers, however, Berlin’s distinction remains an important point of reference for discussions about the meaning and value of political and social freedom. Are these continued references to positive and negative freedom philosophically well-founded?

It might be claimed that MacCallum’s framework is less than wholly inclusive of the various possible conceptions of freedom. In particular, it might be said, the concept of self-mastery or self-direction implies a presence of control that is not captured by MacCallum’s explication of freedom as a triadic relation. MacCallum’s triadic relation indicates mere possibilities . If one thinks of freedom as involving self-direction, on the other hand, one has in mind an exercise-concept of freedom as opposed to an opportunity-concept (this distinction comes from C. Taylor 1979). If interpreted as an exercise concept, freedom consists not merely in the possibility of doing certain things (i.e. in the lack of constraints on doing them), but in actually doing certain things in certain ways — for example, in realizing one’s true self or in acting on the basis of rational and well-informed decisions. The idea of freedom as the absence of constraints on the realization of given ends might be criticised as failing to capture this exercise concept of freedom, for the latter concept makes no reference to the absence of constraints.

However, this defence of the positive-negative distinction as coinciding with the distinction between exercise- and opportunity-concepts of freedom has been challenged by Eric Nelson (2005). As Nelson points out, most of the theorists that are traditionally located in the positive camp, such as Green or Bosanquet, do not distinguish between freedom as the absence of constraints and freedom as the doing or becoming of certain things. For these theorists, freedom is the absence of any kind of constraint whatsoever on the realization of one’s true self (they adopt a maximally extensive conception of constraints on freedom). The absence of all factors that could prevent the action x is, quite simply, equivalent to the realization of x . In other words, if there really is nothing stopping me from doing x — if I possess all the means to do x , and I have a desire to do x , and no desire, irrational or otherwise, not to do x — then I do x . An equivalent way to characterize the difference between such positive theorists and the so-called negative theorists of freedom lies in the degree of specificity with which they describe x . For those who adopt a narrow conception of constraints, x is described with a low degree of specificity ( x could be exemplified by the realization of any of a large array of options); for those who adopt a broad conception of constraints, x is described with a high degree of specificity ( x can only be exemplified by the realization of a specific option, or of one of a small group of options).

What perhaps remains of the distinction is a rough categorization of the various interpretations of freedom that serves to indicate their degree of fit with the classical liberal tradition. There is indeed a certain family resemblance between the conceptions that are normally seen as falling on one or the other side of Berlin’s divide, despite there being some uncertainty about which side to locate certain particular conceptions. One of the decisive factors in determining this family resemblance is the theorist’s degree of concern with the notion of the self. Those on the ‘positive’ side see questions about the nature and sources of a person’s beliefs, desires and values as relevant in determining that person’s freedom, whereas those on the ‘negative’ side, being more faithful to the classical liberal tradition, tend to consider the raising of such questions as in some way indicating a propensity to violate the agent’s dignity or integrity. One side takes a positive interest in the agent’s beliefs, desires and values, while the other recommends that we avoid doing so.

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Socialism : a critical analysis

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Socialism essay: essay on socialism and it’s main characteristics.

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Socialism Essay: Essay on Socialism and it’s Main Characteristics!

According to the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (1994), ‘an economic and political system based on collective or state ownership of the means of production and distribution is known as socialism’. This approach has its roots in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These thinkers were disturbed by the exploitation of the working class as it emerged during the industrial revolution. In their view, capitalism forced large numbers of people to exchange their labour for wages.

The owners of an industry pay workers less than the value of the goods they produced. They pocket the difference between the value of the labour and the value of the product—surplus value as Marx called it. Marx was struck by the inequalities the capitalist system creates.

A socialist economic system represents an attempt to eliminate such economic inequalities and exploitation. The goals of socialist system include destroying the class system and thereby ending the exploitation, oppression and alienation of workers, replacing greed and the profit motive with concern for collective well-being.

Socialism differs from capitalism in a sense that the means of production and distribution in a society are collectively rather than privately owned. The basic objective of the socialist system is to meet people’s needs rather than to maximize profits.

Socialism also differs from capitalism in that it is not controlled by the market—it has a planned economy. The government controls what will be produced and consumed. It sets prices for goods, decides what goods the society needs, and what would be the luxuries.

Thus, there is no free market. Socialists reject the laissez-faire philosophy that free competition benefits the general public. As a result, social life would be regulated democrati­cally in ways that put human needs first and make more efficient and effective use of human and other resources.

Socialist societies also differ from capitalist ones in their commitment to social service programmes. Contrary to capitalist societies, socialist societies typically offer government financed medical care, housing, education and other key services for all citizens.

In practice, however, like capitalism, the socialism takes many and diverse forms. It has worked quite differently. Authoritarianism rather than democracy has been the predominant form of political power, inefficient central planning has generally failed to meet the needs of the people, a privi­leged class of bureaucrats has perpetuated the class system, and chronic (until recently) conflict and competition with wealthier and more powerful capitalist nations have drained both attention and resources. In fact, no socialist society has met Marx’s main preconditions for successful socialism.

Main Characteristics of Socialism/Socialist Societies :

While there are various strands of socialist thought, most socialists identify the following as the important characteristics of socialist societies:

1. There is a common ownership of the means of production and distri­bution. It is collectively owned system of production.

2. Economic activities are planned by the state and the market plays little or no role in the allocation of resources.

3. There is no place for exploitation, oppression and alienation in a socialist society.

4. With the disappearance of private property, economic classes also disappear and hence the state has an administrative rather than repressive function.

5. The structural changes will also vanish the ideology, especially religious.

6. Socialism emphasizes the abolition of markets, capital, and labour as a commodity.

7. The socialist state or government of each nation will eventually ‘wither away’ as will inequality and class differentiation.

8. In a communistic state (a brand of socialistic state found in the erstwhile Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) most of the industry and agriculture was owned by the state—only a few businesses were in private sector.

Socialist thought, emerged as a powerful and credible alternative to capitalism in USSR, Eastern Europe, Asia (China) and Africa, faded away with the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989. Some commentators believe European socialism is dead and buried.

Communist parties in West and East have given themselves new names and distanced themselves from the heavy-handed, state communism of the past. However, the concerns that have been addressed by those who espoused or eschewed the cause still remain.

The dichotomies of freedom and equality, individual and collective rights all remain very much to the fore. Liberal capitalism fails to see the uneven and unequal impact that globalized economy has. As written earlier that socialism emerged in response to and as a challenge to the inequalities of capitalism.

Since capitalism has now been globalized, there is always a potential for this challenge to re-emerge, but perhaps via a different sort of language and organization, perhaps based on ecology, gender, anti-consumerist movements, and so on.

Thus, capitalism and socialism serve as ideal types of economic systems. In reality, the economy of each industrial society (Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union including India) includes certain elements of both capitalism and socialism.

All industrial societies rely chiefly on mechanization in the production of goods and services. In almost all countries, some property is private and some is owned by the state. In India, before the introduction of liberal economy in 1990, there was mixed economy—railways, airways and many other industrial units like BHEL were owned by the state but now the wind is changing towards privatization of these units also. Before adopting the liberal model of development, Indian model, based on socialist ideology, was known as ‘democratic collectivistic model’.

Related Articles:

• Merits and Demerits of Socialism in India
• Socialism in India: 8 Important Characteristics of Socialism in India

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Oscar Wilde’s Art of Disobedience

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Revisiting his critical writing, we learn a valuable lesson about the critic’s role in refusing bad taste and bad politics.

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue,” Oscar Wilde declares in his 1891 essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

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The critical writings of oscar wilde: an annotated selection.

“Classic Wilde,” you might think. Isn’t it like him to argue that the betterment of civilization depends upon misbehavior? Since his death in 1900, at the age of 46, the writer’s popular image as a provocateur has only strengthened, and not without cause. In Wilde’s oeuvre, contradiction is not merely a rhetorical attitude, but an implicit intellectual challenge. Yet as a critic and essayist, his commitment to insubordination is also entangled with a lifelong philosophical inquiry into the conundrum of creating art on one’s own terms, unburdened by the demands of public opinion or by a milieu’s prevailing aesthetic conventions. If yielding to authority was tantamount to degradation, as Wilde believed, beauty and art could flourish only in conditions of freedom, which by his own definition constituted a utopia of socialist hedonism. “Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt,” he writes. Rather than brute, “unintellectual” labor, human life ought to be occupied by the sorts of activities likely to draw accusations of idleness: creative pastimes of one’s choosing or absolute contemplative leisure.

His body of criticism, newly collected in The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde , cultivates an aesthetic of disobedience. Its language—sly, limber, epigrammatic—models the same rebellious individualism that it so fiercely advocates. In this annotated volume, editor Nicholas Frankel assembles a selection of Wilde’s most famous nonfiction writing, largely devoted to the matters of how an artist creates art and how others should receive it. Frankel divides this collection into four chronologized groups: reviews, essays and dialogues, letters to the press, and epigrams and paradoxes. Together, they illuminate a swaggering intellectual career that spans not just the novel, the play, and the poem but also, to a prodigious degree, the periodical.

As Frankel suggests in his introduction, “Wilde approached the writing of criticism with wit, irony, and a consummate sense of style, so much so that his critical writing is often hardly recognizable as criticism .” This flouting of rhetorical custom may itself be understood as a subtle form of defiance: a commitment to submitting language to a laboratory experiment of Wilde’s own devising. Take, for example, the argument that human progress requires disobedience, in which he invokes the latter’s “virtue,” as if the point of his writing is to yoke opposites, arousing tension through their unexpected alliance.

Wilde was no stranger to tension, or to scandal. The chutzpah of his criticism issues from his enduring friction with the cultural habits and assumptions of late Victorian England, from his resistance to complacency within a context he found sorely wanting. Yet inside that raucous rebellion, one cannot but discern a yearning impulse: that to obey, or not, could finally diminish as relevant modes of sociality; that an individual—queer, Irish, aesthetically flamboyant—could commit himself to beauty amid the peril fomented by an anxious nation scouting out transgression on every page.

By the late 19th century, Great Britain’s literary ecosystem was populated by a roster of venerated critics: Thomas Carlyle loomed large in the field, his sway unhindered by his death in 1881. Matthew Arnold’s 1865 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”—which Wilde would take to task 25 years later—famously champions the work of critics as crucial to literature in the wake of much public disparagement. John Ruskin and Walter Pater played crucial roles in art history and aesthetics, and each was uniquely indispensable to Wilde’s own thinking. But whatever intellectual debts Wilde owed to his critical forebears, he would not compound them through stylistic mimicry. Even the most recreational readers of Wilde could not confuse him for the author of The Stones of Venice (written by Ruskin in 1851) or Studies in the History of the Renaissance (written by Pater in 1873, and often referred to by Wilde as “my golden book”). Nor did the figure of “the critic,” chiseled in the Victorian imagination as a Carlyle-like symbol of sober wisdom, appeal to Wilde’s puckishness.

While he delighted in the role of the critic, Wilde was the first to admit his own limits. A critic cannot confer truth to his readers, nor should he attempt to do so, Wilde argued. At most, a critic can propose the terms of conversation. He implies that the power of language is essentially dialogic; it draws significance through its summoning of oppositions. Frankel delineates this impulse in Wilde’s criticism, identifying it as a proto-Bakhtinian “dialectical understanding of the truth”—an understanding that renders proof and reliability as red herrings. “No artist desires to prove anything,” Wilde asserts in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray , for “even things that are true can be proved.”

To scout out the precise coordinates of Wilde’s critical inconsistencies would be to miss his greater rhetorical point. (“Who wants to be consistent?” asks Vivian in his 1889 dialogue, “The Decay of Lying: An Observation.”) Still, his mercurial tendencies were not always choreographed. Early in his career, Wilde argued that artistic self-sufficiency existed in autonomous relation to one’s milieu. “Such an expression as English art is a meaningless expression,” he told the Royal Academy’s art students in an 1883 lecture. “Nor is there any such thing as a school of art even. There are merely artists, that is all.” Like the Greek deities depicted in Wilde’s beloved Hellenistic sculpture, artistic sensibility is born unto the artist with inviolable sanctity; it is a tidy, closed system, he suggests, dependent only upon itself.

Yet within two years’ time, Wilde changed his mind and began to acknowledge, even to insist upon the significance of cultural context. “An artist is not an isolated fact,” he writes in “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” (1885), a withering review of the American painter’s lecture on aestheticism; “he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle.” Wilde had once counted James McNeil Whistler among his friends, but the affection between them soured as Wilde’s views shifted to an irreconcilably opposing position. One blistering point of contention regarded the critic’s role in artistic discourse. In his lecture, Whistler laments the scourge of criticism, condemning its practitioners as “the middleman in this matter on Art.” Criticism, in Whistler’s estimation, amounts to little more than static interference: “It has widened the gulf between the people and the painter, has brought about the most complete misunderstanding as to the aim of the picture.”

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Wilde saw the matter differently. He also knew that Whistler had long harbored a grudge against Victorian critics. In 1878, Whistler had filed a libel suit against Ruskin for a mean review. The artist won the case, although the jury conveyed its disdain for the proceedings by awarding him only a farthing in damages. Nonetheless, as Frankel writes in his introduction, the ruling in such a public case imperiled the critic’s “hitherto unquestioned authority.” The case implied the triumph of the artist over the critic, which is a constant conflict that still produces a thorny question: Why should critics possess the authority to critique art they did not create?

Wilde pokes at this question in “Mr. Whistler’s 10 O’Clock” and attempts to settle it through a shift in vocabulary: “I say that only an artist is a judge of art…. For there are not many arts, but one art merely: poem, picture and Parthenon, sonnet and statue…he who knows one knows all.” This statement foreshadows a more explicit moment of philosophical departure, in which Wilde demands criticism’s recognition as an aesthetic equivalent to other artistic forms. Even Matthew Arnold, one of criticism’s most famous defenders, had declined to make this leap: “The critical power is of lower rank than the inventive,” he admitted. Arnold’s critic does not create art but instead evaluates, assembles, organizes.

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Although an admirer of Arnold, Wilde could not abide what seemed to him a diminishing of the critic’s role. A critic was no mere lens by which to reflect a superior creation, nor a pale imitation of literary artistry. The cultural contributions made by critics warranted appreciation on their own terms. Wilde issued his own apologia in 1890 by way of his famous dialogue, “The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing.” Initially titled “The True Function and Value of Criticism,” it delivers a pointed refutation of Arnold’s thesis.

The conversation unfolds between Wilde’s slick, in-dialogue proxy, Gilbert, and his skeptical interlocutor, Ernest, who feeds Gilbert a handy supply of queries and protestations that incite his elaboration on the art of criticism. “You seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too far,” Ernest protests. “For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.” Gilbert, who shares the author’s love of sly contradiction, is prepared for this moment, epigrams loaded in his quiver: “Not at all. That is a gross popular error…. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it…. [Action] is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”

Here is a defense of criticism that refuses all prior terms and is shaped instead by Wilde’s own pleasure-centered metric. Loath to accommodate an industrializing empire’s fetish for productivity, he casts the writing of criticism in opposition to exertion of any sort. As Gilbert and Ernest debate, they gaze at the night sky, where “the moon…gleams like a lion’s eye”; Egyptian cigarettes dangle from their fingers. As Frankel notes in his introduction, “The critic is an artist, to be sure, but he is also a corporeal creature, whose thoughts and ideas are extensions of his physical life, not a repudiation of it.” In the domain of Wilde’s dialogues, his speakers are at liberty to enact the conditions that Wilde understands as central to creative work. If it is the critical instinct, not the creative one, that breeds innovation, then the critic requires the stillness afforded by “doing nothing”—by settling into one’s flesh and heeding one’s own impressions, wherever they meander.

Gilbert’s position in “The Critic as Artist” is seductive, but it courts disagreement. When I’ve read this dialogue in the past, my reactions have sometimes eked into Ernest territory. One could dispense with Arnold’s solemn distinction between critical and creative abilities without landing where Wilde does. But why would one read Wilde in pursuit of intellectual mitigations? Rather, one turns to him because the extravagance of his theories begets the most enthralling possibilities. Or as Gilbert concludes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes.”

There are a few peculiar lines at the conclusion of Wilde’s 1885 essay, “The Truth of Masks: A Note on Illusion,” in which he offers a sly disclaimer to the argument he would make five years later:

Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything.

The critic shoulders many artistic and intellectual responsibilities, but always saying precisely what one believes is not among them. As the essay’s title implies, a writerly posture—a linguistic mask—might signify more than any so-called authentic claim. Performance, Wilde knew, was a reliably tangible fact of existence; another person’s truth was a glint on the horizon, easily contested and endlessly deferred.

In April 1895, during Wilde’s failed libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, he was questioned about a line in his series of epigrams, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (1894): “A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes it.” Wilde explained that according to his “philosophical definition,” truth was “something so personal…that in fact the same truth can never be apprehended by two minds.” The court could not abide such vast ideological diversity, particularly when posited by a man who, soon after, would be convicted of gross indecency for homosexuality. Wilde’s truth—and his adherence to it—yielded criminal condemnation and punishment: It signified an illicit, unpardonable refusal.

In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde also invokes the matter of necessary disobedience, although he draws on more strident language than he does in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress,” Gilbert declares. But lest the reader misinterpret the remark as equivocal, he presses the point: “Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless…. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.” Perhaps these lines comprise a kind of beatitude, uttered for those who, like Wilde, resisted impossible assimilatory demands. Or perhaps they’re a nudge to the docile reader: The only route to Utopia is illuminated by disobedience.

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Guest Essay

Liz Truss Is Coming for America

By Tanya Gold

Ms. Gold is a British journalist who has written for Harper’s Magazine, The Spectator and UnHerd.

Liz Truss was the prime minister of Britain for 49 days in 2022, an interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak that was so short, it was outlasted by a lettuce . In the annals of British decline, she will be remembered for having been in office just three days when Queen Elizabeth II died and for her plan for an enormous and apparently unfunded tax cut, which she abruptly dropped after a run on the pound.

If this were the 19th century, Ms. Truss would have perhaps exiled herself to a country estate where peacocks roamed the grounds or fought her enemies with pistols. (In 1809 the foreign secretary, George Canning, was wounded in a duel with the war minister.) But this is not a time of penance or honor. Instead she has reinvented herself as a populist and has a new book, “ Ten Years to Save the West : Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment,” which is part memoir, part pitch to the American right: She has seen the deep state up close and knows what needs to be done.

This is not Ms. Truss’s first political transformation. She began her career as an anti-monarchy member of the centrist Liberal Democrats, before transmogrifying into an uneasy Margaret Thatcher tribute act. She voted to remain in the European Union and then remade herself as a champion of Brexit. She survived every government from 2012 until her own. As environment secretary, she got memorably angry about cheese — “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace” — but was never really considered a likely leader of the Conservative Party until her predecessor Mr. Johnson almost burned the party down .

When she did get her turn and tried to execute her vision of a low-tax, low-regulation, high-growth Britain, it did not go well. After she announced her economic program, the pound sank, interest rates shot up, and the Bank of England had to intervene . Abandoning a central plank of the plan was not enough to mollify her critics, and she resigned soon after. (Even Mr. Canning, who survived his wounds and eventually became prime minister, lasted longer. He died of pneumonia after 119 days.)

People deal with public failure in different ways. For Ms. Truss, the method seems to be twofold. First, to insist that she was and is right but was foiled by the deep state. Second, to see if America might buy what she’s selling.

Last April she gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., where she sketched out how she was foiled by the establishment. “I simply underestimated the scale and depth of this resistance and the scale and depth to which it reached into the media and into the broader establishment,” she said. The anti-growth movement — in which she seems to include President Biden, the I.M.F., the British Treasury and the Bank of England, among others — is “focused on redistributionism, on stagnation and on the imbuing of woke culture into our businesses.”

This year, in February, she told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland that “the West has been run by the left for too long, and we’ve seen that it’s been a complete disaster.” (The Conservatives have governed Britain for 14 years.) Real conservatives, she said, “are now operating in what is a hostile environment. We essentially need a bigger bazooka in order to be able to deliver.” While at CPAC, she also spoke to Steve Bannon, whom she invited to “come over to Britain and sort out Britain,” and told Nigel Farage that she “felt safer for the West” when Donald Trump was president.

And now here is “Ten Years to Save the West,” which in title seems squarely aimed at America but in content often feels oddly parochial. Ms. Truss writes of traveling to Balmoral to accept Elizabeth II’s invitation to form a government. Here, Elizabeth II is a soothsayer. “She warned me that being prime minister is incredibly aging. She also gave me two words of advice: ‘Pace yourself.’ Maybe I should have listened.”

She is not sure that the flat above Downing Street “would be rated well on Airbnb.” It felt “a bit soulless,” she writes. It was apparently infested with fleas. And she couldn’t sleep because of the noise, including the clock at nearby Horse Guards, which chimed every quarter-hour. Picturing her flea-bitten and exhausted made me think of a line from Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” — “Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied ?”

By the time she got to her resignation, she writes, it “seemed like just another dramatic moment in a very strange film in which I had somehow been cast,” which, to me, felt like truth.

It’s unclear whether Ms. Truss will be able to read an American room any better than a British one. In the book, she describes America as Britain’s “proudest creation, albeit an unintentional one,” and she is critical of Mr. Biden, who called her tax cuts for the wealthy a “ mistake .” “This was utter hypocrisy and ignorance,” she writes. She notes, on the other hand, that she was an early fan of “The Apprentice” and enjoyed Mr. Trump’s “catchphrases and sassy business advice.”

But Americans who fear the deep state aren’t necessarily the ones who want a small one, and Ms. Truss is a poor public speaker. I’d expect conservative Americans to see her as a curio and move on to more familiar and charismatic icons. But one never knows.

Who is to blame for Liz Truss? Maybe it was the winds of history. Or a political system that rewards risk takers and narcissism. Or it was 14 years of one party in power, at the end of which are the people who hung on long enough.

Or it was Mr. Johnson, who made her foreign secretary in his government. (He is now a tabloid columnist writing about his late-night chorizo binges and how much he loves his lawn mower , so he has nothing to laugh about, either.)

The Conservative Party is packing for the wilderness. Many lawmakers are not even standing in the forthcoming election, which must be held by January. And Ms. Truss herself may lose her seat, in Norfolk, to James Bagge, who is standing as an independent. Mr. Bagge is part of a local cohort concerned about issues like the National Health Service and the cost of living and unimpressed by Ms. Truss’s globe-trotting. “Truss says she has 10 years to save the West,” he recently told The London Times. “Well, we have six months to save Norfolk.”

I wonder whether Ms. Truss is coming for America because her enemies in Norfolk are coming for her. The Conservative endgame is here. The land of opportunity beckons.

Tanya Gold is a British journalist.

Photographs by Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press and RunPhoto, Issaraway Tattong, Cathering Fall Commerical, Flashpop, posteriori, and Carl Court/Getty Images.

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