Socialism and communism are two interconnected, and often confused, political ideas. Communism is, broadly speaking, a political ideology or philosophy, whereas socialism is primarily the socioeconomic system associated with it. Like many modern political ideologies, communism has its beginnings in the Enlightenment, and developed in opposition to the rise of capitalism in the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx presented a comprehensive case for communist politics and socialist economics, in which the means of production, distribution and exchange are owned or controlled collectively.
The political implications of this economic system are social justice, equality and cooperation, in contrast to the liberal emphasis on freedoms and individual rights. There have been numerous interpretations of socialism since Marx, with some arguing for a workers’ revolution to end the capitalist system, and others for more gradual democratic reform.
Common to all varieties of socialism and communism is the notion of equality and fairness, and especially an equitable distribution of wealth. The socialist economic model is based on transferring the means of production from private hands to a collective ownership, so that no one has more than their fair share of the fruits of that production. This idea was encapsulated in the maxim adopted by Karl Marx: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’
As with so many principles, the notion of fair distribution has been interpreted in different ways. In order to achieve the objective of a socialist state, production needs to be encouraged by rewarding the workers by sharing the wealth ‘according to deeds’ – in proportion to the amount and quality of their contribution to it – but the aim is ultimately to produce enough to distribute production according to need, even if someone is unable to contribute to the production, and so provide for the disadvantaged in society.
In the Enlightenment period, political philosophers proposed freedom and equality as the foundations for modern society in place of the old order of monarchs and subjects. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, saw things from a different perspective. In his view, civil society does not promote freedom and equality, as it is designed to protect private property rather than rights and liberty. Because of this it actually creates inequality. Left to their own devices, people in a ‘state of nature’ are free, but become enslaved by the restrictions of society. For them to become free again, they must act and make decisions collectively, so that individuals submit to the ‘general will’ of the people. This depends on each member of society being equal in status, which cannot be achieved until they also abandon their right to private property and treat resources as being available for all. Writing in the mid-18th century, Rousseau anticipated the basic elements of socialism that emerged with industrialization and the inequalities created by capitalist ownership of mills and factories.
18th- and 19th-century revolutions
Socialism, and especially communism, are frequently associated with the idea of revolution – not necessarily sudden and violent uprisings, but certainly radical social and economic change. At the end of the 18th century, the American Revolution embodied the idea of liberty and rights that were the foundation of liberalism, but in the French Revolution (maybe because of Rousseau’s influence) the rallying cry was ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’, placing the emphasis more on equality and collectivity.
Socialism and communism emerged in Europe against a backdrop of revolutions in 1848. It is no coincidence that the Communist Manifesto was written in the same year, and not long after, in 1871, the first truly socialist revolution took place in France, establishing a revolutionary socialist government, the Paris Commune. The Commune was described at the time by Karl Marx as a model for revolutionary government, and inspired a number of similar uprisings in France and elsewhere.
Barricades around French government buildings during the Paris Commune.
The socialist goals of an egalitarian and cooperative society have often been dismissed by critics as naive and unrealistic, and many early socialist thinkers were labelled ‘utopian’. Among them were the French political and economic philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon and the Welsh reformer Robert Owen, whose visions of an ideal modern society based on cooperation and equality were an inspiration to more realistic socialist theorists including Karl Marx.
Unlike later socialists, utopian socialists did not advocate political revolution or conflict between capitalists and workers. Owen, as a factory owner, was in a position to put his ideas into practice, and set up just such a community in a mill in New Lanark, Scotland, and later planned a larger one in the USA. Utopian socialism was short-lived, however, as revolutionary communist ideas offered a better chance of bringing about social change. However, some of the principles of utopianism were taken up by parts of the growing anarchist movement.
Robert Owen’s vision of New Harmony, a short-lived but influential utopian settlement established in Indiana, USA in 1825.
Community, cooperation and common ownership
One element of utopian socialism that found an early application was the idea of collectivism – communities collectively taking responsibility for production of goods and service, and their distribution. While the idea is common to all strands of socialist thinking, it has also operated successfully within capitalist societies. The idea of was pioneered by the cooperative movement of Rochdale, in north England, in the 19th century, and continues in many countries today.
Quite separate from government, cooperatives are autonomous not-for-profit businesses or organizations owned and managed by their members for their mutual benefit. The best known are consumer cooperatives – the collectively owned and run retail outlets and chains – and cooperative insurance services, but there are also workers’ and housing cooperatives, and credit unions that provide for the needs of the community. While not formally aligned with any political ideology, the movement is an example of the socioeconomic principle of socialism in practice.
The original cooperative store in Rochdale is now a museum.
Karl Marx was undoubtedly the most influential socialist thinker of all time, and his ideas laid the foundations for modern socialism and communism. As a student in Berlin, he came across the ideas of Georg Hegel, who believed that history can be seen as a process with a discernible structure: each period has defining characteristics, which he called the Zeitgeist: the spirit of the age. Every idea has a contradictory idea (‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’), and the tension between the two creates a new notion – the synthesis – which forms the spirit of the age that follows.
This appealed to Marx, but as a down-to-earth materialist and atheist, he rejected the philosopher’s preoccupation with metaphysics. Marx adapted Hegel’s dialectic – of thesis–antithesis–synthesis – to show how social, economic and political ideas progressed one to another. At the heart of his thinking was the notion that material conditions such as the means of production brought about social and economic change.
Marx: economics, analysis of capitalism
As well as being a philosopher and historian, Marx was an economist and, having recognized the dominance of the capitalist system, set out to make a thorough analysis of it in Das Kapital. Marx believed that capitalism could be a force for progress as it encouraged economic growth and technical innovation, but also created social injustice and was inherently unstable. In his analysis, however, he saw capitalism as just another stage in human history – the synthesis of conflict between serfs and nobles in a basically agricultural society, which had been brought about by the material change of industrialization. With capitalism, the means of production now rested in the hands of the factory and mill owners, the ‘bourgeoisie’, who exploited the labour of the working class, the ‘proletariat’. Capitalism, he explained, had now produced the conditions for change to the next stage of historical development through the tension between these two classes, which would result in conflict, triggered by financial instability and increasing social unrest.
Central to Marx’s theories of socialism and communism was the concept of tension and conflict between classes, and in his analysis, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle. His interpretation of the progression of history was based on the dialectic: two contradictory concepts in conflict resulting in a third, new idea.
In the ancient world, Marx argued, the conflict was between masters and slaves, which was resolved by the creation of a feudal system. This in turn produced a class of nobility opposed by a class of serfs, and the conflict between them, with industrialization as its catalyst, created capitalism. Under capitalism the class struggle is between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and Marx proposed that the synthesis of this conflict, communism, can be brought about by working-class realization of their situation. The Communist Manifesto ends with a call for greater class consciousness, and for the proletariat to use the class struggle as a tool for change.
Marx: politics and the inevitability of socialism
Before writing his massive book, Das Kapital, Marx had been a co-author with Friedrich Engels of the Communist Manifesto, in which he explains that capitalism contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Because capitalism has created two classes, the business-owning bourgeoisie and the labouring proletariat, the tension between them will inevitably result in social and economic change. In the words of the Manifesto, ‘What the bourgeoisie produces above all is its own grave diggers’, meaning that capitalism has created the conditions for a conflict in which the proletariat will seize ownership of the means of production, and change the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ to a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ run on socialist economic and social principles. But this is, Marx says, only a transitional stage to the ultimate conclusion of historical development, communism – a classless society that brings to an end the historical conflict between classes, and in which private property and the state itself no longer exist.
The term ‘neo-Marxism’ is used to describe a number of different movements that arose in the middle of the 20th century, which re-examined Marxism in the light of modern developments and introduced ideas from other disciplines. Disillusion with the way that communism had turned out in practice in the Soviet Union had prompted a reappraisal of Marxist ideas as early as the 1930s, notably by the group known as the Frankfurt School in Germany. Based originally in the Institute for Social Research, this group incorporated elements of sociology and psychology into traditional Marxist theory, while playing down the emphasis on class struggle. In Italy, Antonio Gramsci suggested that economic and class issues, although important, are not the sole motivators of social revolution and that capitalism maintained its power through cultural hegemony, making change seem unthinkable. These neo-Marxist ideas were taken up after the Second World War by theorists such as Michel Foucault in France and the so-called New Left in the USA and Britain.
Several of the so-called Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists settled in the USA, including Herbert Marcuse (pictured), whose ideas became the foundation for the New Left movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Closely associated with student protest movements, the New Left was less concerned with traditional left-wing issues, such as class struggle and workers’ revolution, and placed more emphasis on social reform.
The New Left movement was taken more seriously in Britain, led as it was by respected Marxist academics who departed from the strict Marxist/Leninist line of the ailing Communist Party of Great Britain – adopting the American emphasis on social reform, while retaining Marx’s notion of class struggle. The popularity of the New Left waned in the 1980s, but some elements of new-left thinking have re-emerged recently in, for example, Spain and Greece, where Podemos and Syriza have abandoned the ‘old left’ traditional socialist and communist parties in their opposition to capitalism.
State ownership and nationalization
One of the defining features of the socialist socio-economic model is that the means of production and distribution are owned and controlled by the people rather than privately. This can be done by cooperatives at a community level, where all members have a stake in the business, and goods and services are produced for their benefit rather than profit. Many socialists also advocate state ownership of industries, so that they belong to the people of a nation as a whole, with authoritarian communist states taking all businesses into state ownership, effectively running state monopolies in every industry. Other countries have adopted the idea of the state-owned enterprise (SOE) to a greater or lesser extent, having a mix of private and nationalized companies, which may or may not be in competition. SOEs formed a significant proportion of many countries’ economies during the 20th century, particularly those under social-democratic governments, but as laissez-faire free-market policies became more widespread from the 1980s, many were taken back into private ownership.
Nationalized industries are a way for people to own the means of production and distribution. In this form of state socialism, the state owns the firms and makes decisions about how much should be produced and how it should be distributed. This, in turn, means that the entire economy can be centrally planned by the government. With no competitive market determining prices the government can decide directly on the allocation of resources.
And because the goods are produced for use rather than profit, production does not have to react to market fluctuations and the output can be planned so that there is no surplus or deficit – effectively ironing out the ups and downs of the business cycle and bringing stability of prices and employment. In practice, however, a nation’s economy is too large and complex for any single organization to manage, and communist states that attempted central economic planning have often failed to meet the needs of the people.
Marx developed his influential theories in a period of history shaped by revolutions – social, cultural, industrial and economic. However, other than the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, no revolution succeeded in his lifetime to replace capitalism with socialism. But his ideas were vindicated in the 20th century, when Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky led the Russian workers into revolution and established a socialist state. They believed this could not have happened without a vanguard of revolutionary socialists to help the proletariat to achieve class consciousness and mobilize them into action. Although Marx and his fellow revolutionary socialists advocated revolution, they did not necessarily mean the sort of hard-fought and bloody battle of the Russian Revolution. Rather, they refer to a rapid removal of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and complete social and economic transformation. In practice, however, this usually involves the use of force, and far from being a swift overthrow of capitalism, is often a protracted armed struggle against the forces of the establishment.
There are perhaps more divisions and different ideological interpretations in socialism and communism than any other political philosophy. Many of the older-established communist groups believe that only they are true to the fundamental principles of socialism and communism, and often reject any watering down of what they see as orthodoxy. New ideas are often dismissed as ‘revisionist’, a pejorative term that is used to refer to any of the many reinterpretations of Marx’s original communist theory.
The first major split in the movement came with reformist evolutionary socialism, which was seen as revisionist by revolutionaries, such as Rosa Luxemburg, and later was at the core of the split between Lenin (revisionist) and Trotsky (old guard, pictured). Later, the argument between fundamentalists and revisionists was not over the means of achieving socialism, but the ends: orthodox Marxism views as revisionist any idea that does not see as its goal the overthrow of capitalism.
Reformism, or evolutionary socialism
Instead of sudden, radical changes, a number of socialists proposed a more gradual transition or evolution. The idea of evolutionary socialism was first formulated around the turn of the 20th century by a German socialist, Eduard Bernstein. He suggested that socialism could be achieved by democratic means, by reforms introduced through parliament and the existing political system. Reformism was rejected by orthodox revolutionary socialists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, who not only saw it as ineffective, but were also impatient for change.
However, the reformist idea of alleviating the injustices of capitalism, and in time replacing it entirely, became the guiding principle of several democratic socialist parties in Europe, including Bernstein’s German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In the end, the critics were proved right, and evolutionary socialism did not bring about a socialist state – in fact in 1959, the SPD officially changed its policy to one of social reform rather than working towards an end to capitalism.
Alexis Tsipras led the anti-austerity party SYRIZA to victory in the Greek general election of 2015.
A common misconception, particularly among those critical of communism, is that ‘communism’ refers to the political and economic system seen in self-styled ‘communist states’, such as Soviet Russia. These states, however, are very different from communism as it was envisaged by Marx. Despite the label ‘Marxist–Leninist’ they had little in common with either Marx or Lenin, and more to do with the authoritarian rule of Stalin, which many true communists regard as a form of state capitalism.
In contrast, the communism described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto is the final stage of a historical development, which is realized once a socialist state has been established, and the working class has gained control of the means of production. Once it has been achieved, true communism can be brought about – in Marx’s words ‘characterized by the absence of social classes, money and the state’. A far cry from any so-called communist state ever established.
Within the socialist movement there are several different and often opposing views. There is, for example, the divergence of opinion between revolutionary and reformist socialism. And there are also those who reject the idea of state socialism and state ownership, which they see as creating a new, oppressive political and economic elite, little better than capitalism. These libertarian socialists call for an end to centralized control over the means of production, giving workers control of their own workplace through trades unions and workers’ councils, and introducing direct democracy in decentralized political government. Libertarian socialism is directly opposed to any authoritarian institutions, including the state, making its core philosophy very close to that of anarchism and, in particular, anarcho-syndicalism (see here). But where anarcho-syndicalists see the absence of the state as a necessary condition for achieving a libertarian socialism, libertarian socialists see the eventual disappearance of the state as a result of applying socialist principles.
Trades unions and the labour movement
Industrialization not only changed the pattern of peoples’ working lives, moving them from agricultural jobs or traditional crafts to factories and mills in the cities, but it also changed who they worked for and their job security. In the 19th century, workers in newly industrialized countries began to form trade unions (also known as labour unions) – associations with the aim of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment, filling a gap left by the old craftsmens’ guilds.
While this was generally a practical rather than a political movement, dealing with negotiation of wages and conditions of employment and so on, it, perhaps inevitably, evolved a strong socialist undercurrent. This, after all, was a prime example of the workers of the world uniting and acting collectively to ensure the value of their labour-power was reflected in their pay packets. More than this, trades unions helped to instil a sense of class consciousness and, because of this, the movement became a significant force for socialism.
From the evolutionary socialism of reformists such as Bernstein (see here) emerged a movement that sought not to overthrow the capitalist system but to combine it with socialist policies to remove its injustices and inequalities. Rather than whole-scale state socialism, social democrats advocated state ownership of certain businesses, such as those providing public goods and services, and partially owning others in key industries. Other firms, although in private ownership, would be managed jointly by the shareholders and workers, and their operations strictly regulated by the government. A redistribution of wealth from rich to poor is achieved in social democracy through taxation, with the money raised being used to provide public services, subsidize state-owned enterprises and make welfare payments. Although rejected by both hardline communists and capitalists, the mixture of socialist and capitalist ideologies had great appeal, and social democrat parties of various sorts have been formed in most European countries.
In the years immediately following the Second World War, people in West Germany were faced with the prospect of rebuilding their country. They found themselves, literally, between two opposing political ideologies, communism and capitalism, but chose what became known as the ‘Third Way’, an attempt to reconcile the two. In essence this was an adoption of capitalist economic policies alongside mainly socialist social policies, a concept known as the social market economy.
Unlike social democrats, third-way adherents put an emphasis on minimal government interference in industry and commerce, preferring partnerships between public and private owners. Rather than redistribution of wealth, they recommended greater equality of opportunity. The so-called ‘economic miracle’ of post-war Germany was attributed to the policies of the Third Way, inspiring other countries to adopt a similar approach. It loomed large in European politics and paved the way for the more laissez-faire capitalism of the 1980s.
Socialism’s emphasis on collectivity contrasts starkly with classical liberalism’s focus on the individual, encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 statement ‘There is no such thing as society.’ Many on the right-wing, although supporting capitalist principles, are uncomfortable with the loss of community values that neoliberal policies have brought along with them. Communitarianism, although not a political movement as such, has become a principle informing the policies of many centrist governments in recent years. Communitarians believe that as well as the right’s dismissal of collectivity, there has been a failure of the left to recognize traditional culture and community, and that these should be revived by strengthening civil society. Rather than either the individual or the state being responsible for social welfare, it should be communities, using what communitarians describe as ‘social capital’. Described by its advocates as a sort of ‘radical centrism’, communitarianism has its greatest support in countries that have enthusiastically pursued neoliberal policies, such as the USA and Britain.
