The Historical Roots and Development of Socialism

The definition of socialism in Webster’s Third International Dictionary is: any of various theories or social and political movements advocating or aiming at collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and control of the distribution of goods.

In today’s vernacular, “socialism” is an epithet used both by conservatives and American pro-capitalist libertarians as part of spin to paint government as a “nanny state” for lazy and/or poor people “who want the government to give them stuff or take care of them”. The fact that crony capitalists control government and use lobbyists to write pro-crony-capitalist regulations rarely gets to reply to this spin. Over time words are used in different ways by different groups of people with certain political or ideological motives to recruit people to join their movements. This basic fact worsens any potential “objective” or non-partisan grasp of history. This is not saying that a total grasp or knowledge of real history is possible, but rather, the flagrant distortion of history by way of a few ideologically motivated cherry-picked historical highlights amounts to “anti-history”, if I’m permitted to coin that as a term.

The fickle changing of words’ meanings means that whoever is defining a given word gets to define history from their point of view. It is easy to use an essentially empty historical canvass to paint one’s historically revised cartoon version which one uses to market one’s partisan political worldview to one’s target audience.

Historian Albert S. Lindemann gives a broad historical view of socialism. Even though the word, socialism, is only about 180 years old and significant social movements only about 130, it is possible to trace an enduring quest for community and cooperation, and, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a growing belief in the possibility of constructing a rational and natural social order. Socialists have always exhibited a fundamental concern for cooperation and social justice, with particular emphasis on the needs and rights of the community over the egotistical urges of the individual. Its straightforward etymology bears out its first wide usage as the opposite to individualism, to stress humans’ social nature, their socialism, at a time when the individualistic strivings unleashed by the nascent capitalistic system seemed to be destroying much of what was humane and beautiful in European civilization.

Thus, socialists have tended to stress that human beings are properly gregarious rather than self-sufficient, that they should concern themselves with the welfare of the fellow human beings, especially those weaker or less fortunate. On a loftier level, socialists have stressed that men and women achieve their most highly developed humanity only in society in cooperative rather than competitive effort with others. This commitment to cooperation rather than competition, to fellowship, solidarity, and sympathy, rather than self-seeking, is the most fundamental and abiding characteristic of the socialistic tradition.

Such attitudes were obviously not completely new in the early 19th century. The socialist impulse has deep roots in history. Since antiquity social inequality and heedless individualism have found eloquent critics. Christ himself was a poor carpenter whose utterances were full of condemnation of the rich and the proud; he could be termed a “proletarian” revolutionary (from a Marxist viewpoint). The Christian tradition has unmistakable socialistic elements, and throughout the history of Christianity various sects have tried to live with “all things common”.

By contrast, modern socialism differs from the ancient socialistic tendencies. Modern socialists have usually been secular, basing their theories on human rationality, on specifically human feelings of solidarity, and on natural law, as distinguished from such mystical concepts as divine inspiration, brotherhood in Christ, or divine law. This is not to ignore that many socialists, even those who became militantly anti-Christian, emerged from a Christian background, retained certain Christian habits and sentiments, and even praised the corporatist habits of premodern Christian society. A number of socialists argued that socialism socialism was kind of a “true” religion, abandoned by the official churches, and indeed many socialists remained Christians. Yet on balance modern socialism has been an enemy of organized religion and of theological approaches to social problems.

A second important difference is socialism’s relationship to modernization or the so-called Dual Revolution, the industrial revolution and the wave of political revolutions that swept Europe in the latter part of the 18th century, transforming European life. These revolutions stimulated hopes for a fundamentally different world, based on rational human design rather than on tradition or inscrutable forces, and on material plenty rather than want. However, the initial impact of the Dual Revolution appeared remote from these hopes. The growing conservatism of the French Revolution as well as the shocking social conditions of early industrialization outraged those with a vision of a new, ideal order.

A variety of people were repelled by the effects of revolutionary change. Particularly numerous at first were those who considered political upheaval and industrialization to be unmitigated disasters, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The socialists by and large held a more positive view. Believing in the feasibility of using new industrial techniques and political institutions for a richer, more harmonious life, they rejected the notion of a return to a traditional, agrarian past—although most of them hoped somehow to retain the noncompetitive qualities of the past.

Liberalism (classical liberalism) was another ideology to emerge with modern times, and in a number of ways its concerns and character were similar to, or overlapped, those of socialism. It could easily be argued that socialism, while sharply opposing itself to liberalism, evolved out of liberal tenets and remained marked throughout its history by that origin. Yet it is important for our concerns to make as clear as possible the underlying concerns of liberals that distinguished them from socialists. (Note that Lindemann is striving to be historically objective here).

As their name suggests, liberals were characteristically concerned with the concept of liberty or liberation (liber is Latin for “free”). They saw liberty as an all-embracing force for good in the world, a force that would ensure progress, happiness, and an almost unlimited perfection of the human personality. In more concrete terms, they looked to a free market (as opposed to one rigidly controlled or directed by the state); freedom of assembly, speech, and press; freely elected representative institutions—all in the context of a popularly established rule of law. The free competition of individuals was desirable to them. It represented the best way of unleashing human potential, and they accepted that such competition would lead to a degree of social and economic inequality. When they praised “equality” what they meant was equality of opportunity and equality before the law—lack of special legal privilege—not social inequality, particularly not if such equality had collectivist implications, or somehow limited individual freedom.

Liberals were committed to the institution of private property, to them a fundamental guarantee of freedom and a reward for superior individual achievement. One of the main functions that liberals saw for the state—whose power, they believed, should be carefully limited in most respects because of the dangers it posed to liberty—was the protection of property. Liberals tended to consider the failure to accumulate property as a personal inadequacy, and they viewed poverty in general as due to personal laziness or incompetence, rather than to lowly origin or overpowering impersonal forces.

Socialists too were fascinated by the notion of liberation, believing as they did in a freely developing human perfectibility, and most of them favored free institutions and freedom of speech and assembly. The key difference came in the socialists’ rejection rejection of individual competitiveness. To them it appeared destructive, and they similarly considered that private property preserved unfair and harmful social distinctions.

To understand the ways that socialism and liberalism overlapped it is further useful to distinguish the two main tendencies in the latter; that is, between what we can call the “whig” and the “democratic radical”. The whig-liberal tendency was to be hostile to popular rule, which the whig feared would degenerate into rule by the mob. The whig was attracted to elitist oligarchic rule and was devoted to the preservation of powerful institutions (law courts, representative bodies, professional organizations) as well as large property holdings, which he believed would protect liberty by standing in the way of a centralization or usurpation of power, either by a despot or the masses. Obviously the whig conception of liberty had much to do with the idea of privilege.

The democratic-radical tendency within liberalism (in France “jacobin” and in England simply “radical”), on the other hand, accepted popular rule with liberty—indeed as its most reliable guarantee—and was concerned to fashion political institutions that would reflect the direct will of the masses (and not of privileged elites, as the whigs would have it). But the democratic radical still retained a belief in competitive individualism, did not oppose moderate holdings of private property and rejected collectivism. He was sympathetic to the plight of the working poor and generally opposed great differences in social status or wealth, but his remedy for poverty remained hard work and individual enterprise. He was willing to see that state intervene to preserve what he deemed to be fair competition, but he was reticent to see that state take up the task of enforcing social solidarity and fellowship or socializing wealth. Still, it was at the democratic-radical pole of liberalism that it began in important ways to merge into socialism, and many socialists began as democratic radicals.

It is axiomatic for students of European history to know that ideologies do not exist as purely abstract statements; they are linked to or express interests. It is further plausible that class background tends to influence political persuasion, that the poor tend to be attracted to ideologies that in some way favor them, and the rich look to ideologies that defend their wealth and justify their position in society. But these correlations are anything but simple, and much recent scholarship—particularly that devoted to history from the bottom up—has been concerned to question easy assumptions about social class and political preference.

Nevertheless, history notes that socialism’s following came primarily from the lower ranks of society, where it was gradually perceived that strength lay in numbers, in solidarity, and that only through cooperative or collective action could economic and social oppression be remedied. Perhaps more important, most people who became wage-earning workers came from pre-industrial backgrounds, where individualism was not a virtue. Thus they were inclined to reject competitive individualism and its associated liberal ideology and to embrace ideologies that emphasized cooperation and economic control.

This is not to imply that all wage earners, or even a majority of them, became socialists at any time in any country, since they obviously did not, nor is it meant to ignore the role of wealthy and leisured individuals of the bourgeosie, or middle class, were attracted more to liberalism that to socialism. They were normally employers rather than employees, exploiters rather than exploited, and they tended to benefit most from political liberalization and a free-market economy.

Throughout the 19th century democratic radicalism, as defined above, attracted a larger number of workers than did socialism. That statement would seem to contradict what has just been said. But democratic radicalism can be considered traditionally, to be the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, lower middle class, or small property owner (to use terms that are loosely synonymous and that can include the small business person, shopkeeper, peasant proprietor, white-collar worker, and independent artisan). The attractions of this ideology for workers in the 19th century can then be attributed to the petty-bourgeois nature of much of the working class at that time. A majority of workers for most of the 19th century in Europe owned, or aspired to own, small amounts of property—their own shops, machinery, and tools. They were not yet proletarianized, were not yet completely without ownership of the means of production, and still believed it possible to prevent the domination of wage-labor and factory production.

Anarchism also often attracted the petty-bourgeois worker. This ideology is even more difficult that the others to categorize with any precision, since it has many branches and since anarchists have taken a certain pleasure in defying attempts to impose on them the tyranny of a definition. Our first resort, as before, must be to look at the etymology of the word: an-archos in Greek means “no leader,” or, more loosely, “without authority.” The heart of the anarchists’ concern has been to oppose authority, again out of a longing for liberation.

In practice, the authority of the state, although only one of the many varieties of authority repugnant to anarchists, has been the object of their most concentrated hatred. This has been the case because they have seen in the state the origin and bulwark of a panorama of social ills, mostly related to the existence of a society of exploitation and social inequality. The state protects large accumulations of private property and the unjustly acquired goods of the exploiting classes. Anarchists therefore maintain that only with the abolition of the state and its means of repression (police, army, bureaucracy, law courts) will an end come to exploitation and to gross inequality in the distribution of wealth and property.

Anarchists have been frequent opponents of socialists, particularly of those authoritarian collectivists who believe in the central and necessary role of the state in building socialism. But their quarrels have been more like family quarrels, whereas their hostility to the ruling orders, in particular to wealthy bourgeois liberals, has been more fundamental and intense. For this reason anarchism is considered by the author, Lindemann, a variety of socialism, generically defined. This is consistent with the preference of most anarchists, many of whom call themselves “libertarian socialists” or “communists”.

The term “communism” was coined somewhat earlier than “socialism”, but in the course of the 19th century it was used, first and foremost, to describe a thoroughgoing egalitarianism and collectivism (and thus was ostensibly embraced by the most desperately poor and exploited workers). Secondly—with much less consistency and consensus—it implied a taste for violence. Marx chose to call himself a communist in the late 1840’s in order to differentiate his hard-headed, “scientific”, theories from the pipe dreams of what he called “utopian socialism”. This term fell into relative disuse in the late 19th century, when it was used mostly by certain anarchists, but during the 1st World War Lenin revived it in order to distinguish his brand of elitist Marxism from what he considered the sell-out Marxism of the leaders of the main socialist parties of the time. Both Marx and Lenin also used the term “communist” on a more speculative level to describe the ultimate society, which would come after an initial imperfect “socialist” society.

Aside from nationalism, which did not concern itself directly with the social question, socialism, liberalism, and conservatism may be considered the main ideologies of the 19th century. They are best understood not in isolation but in relationship to one another. Indeed, one of the easiest and least equivocal ways of defining them is in their vision of the “enemy”. Liberals in the early 19th century first distinguished themselves by their attacks on conservatives, on the latter’s political and social pre-eminence, based on an “unfair” and irrational privilege. Later, liberals would begin to focus more on the challenge to individual freedom that they believed was posed by socialists. Similarly, as we have noted, socialism first appeared as an attack on liberal individualism, especially insofar as it was used to defend the emerging capitalist system. Above all, socialism was a critical response to early industrial capitalism, to an unregulated market economy in which the means of production were privately owned and propertyless workers were forced to sell their labor power to capitalists for often meager wages. Ironically, the actual practice of socialism on the state level was begun by Otto von Bismarck who invented the modern welfare (nanny) state in 1871 to gain the support of the working class to lure them away from the “socialists”.

More historical explorations are coming. Stay tuned.

Sources: A History of European Socialism by Albert S. Lindemann

Shorter Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck