Anarchism, Marxism, and Socialism/Communism

Anarchism

Anarchism is an ideology that regards abolition of government as the necessary precondition for a free and just society. The term itself comes from the Greek words meaning "without a ruler." Anarchism rejects all forms of hierarchical authority, social and economic as well as political. What distinguishes it from other ideologies, however, is the central importance it attaches to the state. To anarchists, the state is a wholly artificial and illegitimate institution, the bastion of privilege and exploitation in the modern world.

Anarchist Thought

Although the roots of anarchist thought can be traced at least as far back as the 18th-century English writer William Godwin, anarchism as a revolutionary movement arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its immediate objective was annihilation of the state and of all authority imposed "from above downward." Once liberated from political oppression, society would spontaneously rebuild itself "from below upward." A multitude of grass-roots organizations, or locally controlled economic and political entities, would spring up to produce and distribute economic goods and to satisfy other social needs. Where necessary, these primary associations would form regional and even nation-wide federations. The state, with its impersonal laws and coercive bureaucracies, would be supplanted by a dense web of self-governing associations and free federations.

Like other radical ideologies of its time, anarchism intended to complete the "unfinished business" of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment . It placed special emphasis on the third of the values expressed in the rallying cry "liberty, equality, and fraternity." Anarchists had an enduring faith in the natural solidarity and social harmony of human beings. They believed that the creation of the future society should be entrusted to the free play of popular instincts, and any attempt by anarchists themselves to offer more than technical assistance would impose a new form of authority. They tended to concentrate, therefore, on the task of demolishing the existing state order rather than on social blueprints of the future.

While battling the established order, anarchists also battled the alternatives proposed by liberalism and socialism. Like Marxism, anarchism was anticapitalist and scorned liberalism's dedication to political liberty on the grounds that only the propertied classes could afford to enjoy it. They rejected with equal vehemence, however, the Marxist "dictatorship of the proletariat," the idea of capturing and using the capitalist state to achieve a classless society. Political institutions were seen as inherently corrupting, and even the most selfless revolutionaries would inevitably succumb to the joys of power and privilege. Instead of the state "withering away," as the Marxists anticipated, it would simply perpetuate a new bureaucratic elite. This disagreement led to a bitter conflict between German economic thinker Karl Marx and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in the early 1870s, after which Marxism and anarchism went their separate ways.

Anarchism in Practice

Anarchism attracted a following mainly in the countries of eastern and southern Europe, where the state's repressiveness was especially pronounced and communal traditions remained strong. There were some exceptions: the ideas of the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon left a permanent mark on the French industrial labor movement, and Bakunin's views found adherents among the watchmakers of Switzerland's Jura region. Anarchism had its greatest impact in Russia, where numerous anarchist groups participated in the revolutionary movement both before and during 1917. The two outstanding anarchist theorists also were Russians: Bakunin, whose advocacy of popular revolution had considerable influence, and Prince Peter Kropotkin , whose writing spelled out some of the constructive sides of the anarchist social vision. Spain and Italy also had vigorous anarchist movements. In only two instances did anarchists have a real opportunity to put their social ideals into practice. During the Russian Civil War of 1917-21, the peasant partisan movement led by Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine tried to implement anarchist principles, and in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 anarchism was a significant force in the regions of Catalonia and Andalusia. The results of these experiments were limited and inconclusive. In the United States, anarchism's influence was confined largely to some of the European immigrant communities, but it did produce a striking representative of American radicalism in the person of Emma Goldman.

Because anarchism regarded doctrinal and organizational discipline as contradictions of its principles, it gave rise to a wide variety of interpretations. Anarchist-communists shared many of the collectivist principles of socialism but sought to realize them in autonomous local communities. Anarcho-syndicalism was an adaptation of anarchist ideas to modern industrial conditions. It advocated the running of factories by the workers themselves rather than by owners or managers, with trade unions (in French, syndicats) forming the building blocks of a regenerated society. The novelist Leo Tolstoy formulated a kind of Christian anarchism that rejected the state on religious grounds, and there were anarchist-individualists who proclaimed the sovereignty of the individual personality.

Contrary to widespread belief, terrorism (the sustained, clandestine use of violence, including murder, kidnapping, hijacking, and bombings, to achieve a political purpose) was never an integral part of anarchist theory or practice. Some anarchists, however, did engage in what they called "propaganda by the deed," acts of terror and assassination against state officials and property owners.

Except in Spain, anarchism as an organized movement virtually ceased to exist after the Russian Revolutions. Anarchist ideas, however, have had a longer life. In the 1960s and 1970s, currents of the new left rediscovered anarchist theory, particularly the writings of Kropotkin , and drew from it inspiration for some of their communitarian and antibureaucratic impulses. They also found new merit in the anarchist critique of Marxian socialism. At least some elements of the outlook proved to have a surprising vitality and contemporary relevance.

Marxism

Marxism is a body of social, political, and economic thought derived from the writings of Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels. Various schools of Marxism have emerged since Marx's death in 1883. Many of these remain influential today.

At the center of Marx's work is his analysis of capitalism (a system of economics based on the control of production by forces of popular a ppeal and buying capacity in which the flow of revenue from such sale would be a cyclical process of profit and reinvestment): how it arose, how it works (for whom it works better and for whom worse), and where it is likely to lead. Concentrating on the social and economic relations in which people earn their livings, Marx saw behind capitalism's legal facade a struggle of two main classes (or distinct social divisions, based on economic differences in this case): the capitalist class, who owns the productive resources, and the workers' class, or proletariat, who must work for wages in order to survive.

The main theories that make up this analysis--the theory of alienation, the labor theory of value, and the materialist conception of history--must all be understood with this focus in mind. Even Marx's vision of socialism emerges from his study of capitalism , for socialism is the unrealized potential inherent in capitalism itself for a more rational and egalitarian social order in which people can develop more fully their distinctively human qualities.

Some socialist ideas can be traced as far back as the Bible, but Marxism has its main intellectual origins in German philosophy , English political economy , and French utopian socialism . It is from G. W. F. Hegel that Marx learned a way of thinking about the world, in all its fluid complexity, that is called "dialectics." Adam Smith's and David Ricardo's view that the values of commodities express the amount of labor time that go into their production underlay Marx's own labor theory of value. From the French utopians, especially Charles Fourier and the Comte de Saint-Simon, Marx caught a glimpse of a happier future that lay beyond capitalism. With the paradox of an Industrial Revolution that produced as much poverty as it did wealth, these were the main ingredients that went into the formation of Marxism.

MARXIST THEORY

Marx's study of capitalism was grounded in a philosophy that was both dialectical and materialist. With dialectics, the changes and interactions that anything undergoes are brought into focus and emphasized, and special attention is devoted to whatever patterns emerge. This method enabled Marx, when examining a particular problem within capitalism, to keep in view both the broader interactions that made up the whole and the past and future development of present phenomena. In this way, capitalism as it unfolded as a system in history becomes the main object of his study. The uneasy tension between the historical forces promoting change and the systemic ones promoting equilibrium were captured in the idea of "contradiction," understood as a progressive pulling apart of what is functionally united.

Unlike Hegel's dialectic, which moved in a world of pure ideas, Marx's dialectic was materialist. Marx was primarily concerned with capitalism as lived rather than as thought about, but people's lives also involve consciousness. Marx's materialism puts ideas back into the heads of living people and treats both as parts of a world that is forever being remade through human activities, particularly in production. In this dialectical process, ideas also affect the social conditions and behavior that more generally shape them.

Alienation

Marx's theories about capitalism are best understood as answers to his pointed questions about its nature, effects, and development. How do the ways and conditions in which people earn their living affect their bodies, minds, and daily lives? In the theory of alienation, Marx gives his answer. The people who do the work in capitalism own none of the means (machines and raw materials, for example) that they use in their work. These are owned by the capitalists, to whom workers must sell their "labor power," or ability to do work, in return for a wage. This system of labor displays four relations that lie at the core of Marx's theory of alienation. The worker is alienated from his or her productive activity, playing no part in deciding what to do or how to do it. The worker is alienated from the product of that activity, having no control over what is made or what becomes of it. The worker is alienated from other human beings, with competition and mutual indifference replacing most forms of cooperation. Finally, the worker is alienated from the distinctive potential inherent in the notion of human being.

The severing of these relationships leaves on one side a seriously diminished individual--physically weakened, mentally confused and mystified, isolated and virtually powerless. On the other side of this separation are products and ties with other people, outside the control and lost to the understanding of the worker. In the marketplace, the worker's products pass from one hand to another, changing names and form along the way--value, commodity, capital, profit, interest, rent, wage--eventually reentering the worker's daily life as the landlord's house, the grocer's food, the boss's factory, and the various laws and customs that prescribe relations with other people. The world that the worker has made and lost reappears in the misunderstood form of private property to serve as the necessary conditions for reproducing his or her own alienation.

Theory of Value

What is the effect of the worker's alienated labor on its products, both on what they do and on what can be done with them? Smith and Ricardo used the labor theory of value to explain broad price ratios. Marx took this explanation more or less for granted; his labor theory of value is primarily concerned with the more basic problem of why goods have prices at all. The slave owner takes by force what slaves produce. The feudal lord claims as a right some part of what is produced by the serfs. Only in capitalism is the distribution of what is produced a function of markets and prices. Marx's explanation of this anomaly concentrates on the separation of the worker from his or her means of production and the sale of his or her labor power that this separation makes necessary. As a result of this separation, all the things that workers produce become available for exchange, indeed are produced with this exchange in mind. "Value" is the general social form taken by all products of alienated labor (labor to which the four relations of alienated labor apply). Such products could only sell ("exchange values") and serve ("use values") in ways that express and contribute to this alienation.

Surplus value, the third aspect of value, is the difference between the amount of exchange and use value created by workers and the amount of value returned to them as wages. The capitalist's control over this surplus is the basis of their power over the workers and the rest of society. Marx's labor theory of value also provides a detailed account of the struggle between capitalists and workers over the size of the surplus value. Because of competition among capitalists, workers are constantly being replaced by machinery, enabling and requiring capitalists to extract ever-greater amounts of surplus value from workers remaining.

Paradoxically, the amount of surplus value is also the source of capitalism's greatest weakness. Because only part of their product is returned to them as wages, the workers, as consumers, cannot buy a large portion of what they produce. Under pressure from the constant growth of the total product, the capitalists periodically fail to find new markets to take up the slack. This leads to crises of "overproduction," capitalism's classic contradiction, in which people are forced to live on too little because they have produced too much.

Historical Tendencies

How did capitalism originate, and where is it leading? In the materialist conception of history, Marx answered this question with an account of the transformation of feudalism into capitalism. He focused on the contradictions that arose through the growth of towns, population, technology, and trade, which at a certain point burst asunder the feudal social and political forms in which production had been organized. Relations of lord to serf based on feudal rights and obligations had become a hindrance to the further development of these productive forces; they were replaced by the contractual relations of capitalists to workers. With capitalists free to pursue profits wherever they might take them and workers equally "free" to sell their labor power to capitalists however they might use it, the productive potential inherent in the new forces of production, especially technology and science, was freed. If profit maximization leads to rapid growth when rapid growth maximizes profits, however, profit maximization restricts growth when growth proves unprofitable. According to Marx, the periodic and worsening crises of overproduction that began about 1830 attest to capitalism's growing inability to take full advantage of the potential for producing wealth that has grown up with it.

Within this framework the actual course of history is determined by class struggle. According to Marx, each class is defined chiefly by its relation to the productive process and has objective interests rooted in that relation. The capitalists' interests lie in securing their power and expanding profits. Workers, on the other hand, have interests in higher wages, safer working conditions, shorter hours, job security, and--because it is required to realize other interests--a new distribution of power. The class struggle involves everything that these two major classes do to promote their incompatible interests at each other's expense. In this battle, which rages throughout society, the capitalists are aided by their wealth, their control of the state, and their domination over other institutions--schools, media, churches--that guide and distort people's thinking. On the workers' side are their sheer numbers, their experience of cooperation--however alienated--while at work, trade unions, working-class political parties (where they exist), and the growing contradictions within capitalism that make present conditions increasingly irrational.

Marx believed that once most workers recognized their interests and became "class conscious," the overthrow of capitalism would proceed as quickly and democratically as the nature of capitalist opposition allowed. The socialist society that would emerge out of the revolution would develop the full productive potential inherited from capitalism through democratic planning on behalf of social needs. The final goal, toward which socialist society would constantly build, is the human one of abolishing alienation. Marx called the attainment of this goal communism.

THE IMPACT OF MARXISM

The theories of Karl Marx have had a tremendous impact on the way we live today. It is because of this revolutionary thinking that many social reforms in the Western World have been enacted, including welfare benefits and greater access to such things as health care. Marxist doctrine is what perpetuated the worker movements and call for social and political change in the late nineteenth century, and was the primary force behind the growth of communism all throughout the twentieth century. Just about every philosophical work published after the time of Marx has been in some way or other been affected by his profound and deeply affecting thought. Almost all of the many communist and socialist states which have existed in recent times owe their existence to the ideas and beliefs of Karl Marx. Furthermore, Marxian thought is still a very popular subject among academic circles, and will without a doubt have a major imprint on the political and social changes of the future.

Marxism, as with any other line of thought, isn't without it's detractors. From its beginnings, Marxian theory has been under strong attack by critics, often for claims that Marx himself never made. For example, some have viewed Marx's materialism as evidence that he ignored the role of ideas in history and in people's lives. Others have claimed wrongly that Marx's labor theory of value ignored the effect of competition on prices.

Many argue that with the advent of the welfare state and the relative prosperity of workers in much of the Western world, Marxism is no longer relevant. Marxists answer that the basic structures that set capitalism apart from other social forms--private ownership of industrial wealth and alienated wage labor--have changed little in the past 100 years. Some, finally, cite the antidemocratic practices of many communist countries and claim that authoritarianism is inherent in Marxist doctrine. Marxists respond that Marx concentrated on advanced industrial capitalism and never supposed that socialism could achieve its full promise in relatively poor nations.

The recent collapse of the USSR has led many to wonder whether Marxism too may have come to the end of its tether. But Marxism, as we have seen, is essentially an interpretation of capitalism in which socialism and its final stage, communism, emerge as the still-unrealized potential within capitalism itself, as a way of resolving the main problems created by capitalism using means that have themselves come into existence during the capitalist era. What failed in the Soviet Union, then, Marxists will argue, is not Marxism but an effort to build socialism without any of the preconditions, such as developed industry, material plenty, democratic institutions, and a literate public, that arise with capitalism and which Marx considered absolutely necessary to the success of this effort.

Socialism/Communism

The term socialism is commonly used to refer both to an ideology--a comprehensive set of beliefs or ideas about the nature of human society and its future desirable state--and to a state of society based on that ideology. Socialists have always claimed to stand above all for the values of equality, social justice, cooperation, progress, and individual freedom and happiness, and they have generally sought to realize these values by the abolition of the private-enterprise economy and its replacement by "public ownership," a system of social or state control over production and distribution. Methods of transformation advocated by socialists range from popular education through constitutional change (achieving parliamentary majorities, for example) to violent revolution.

ORIGINS OF SOCIALISM

Some scholars believe that the basic principles of socialism derived from the philosophy of Plato, the teachings of the Hebrew prophets, and some parts of the New Testament (the Sermon on the Mount, for example). Modern socialist ideology, however, is essentially a joint product of the 1789 French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in England--the word socialist first occurred in an English journal in 1827. These two great historical events, establishing democratic government in France and the conditions for vast future economic expansion in England, also engendered a state of incipient conflict between the property owners (the bourgeoisie) and the growing class of industrial workers (the proletariat); socialists have since been striving to eliminate or at least mitigate this conflict. The first socialist movement emerged in France after the Revolution and was led by Francois Noel Babeuf, Filippo Michele Buonarrotti (1761-1837), and Louis Auguste Blanqui; their insurrection in 1796 ended in failure. Other early socialist thinkers, such as Comte de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Etienne Cabet in France and Robert Owen and William Thompson (c.1785-1833) in England, believed in the possibility of peaceful and gradual transformation to a socialist society by the founding of small experimental communities; mainly for this reason, later socialist writers dubbed them with the label utopian (after the title of a work by Sir Thomas More, which described an ideal state).

VARIETIES OF EUROPEAN SOCIALISM

Marxist ideas made a great impact on European socialist movements. By the second half of the 19th century socialists in Europe were organizing into viable political parties with considerable and growing electoral support; they also forged close links in most countries with trade unions and other working-class associations. Their short-term programs were mainly concerned with increasing the franchise, introducing state welfare benefits for the needy, gaining the right to strike, and improving working conditions, especially shortening the work day.

Moderate Socialism

Ideas other than those of Marx were at this time also becoming influential. Such ideas included moderate socialist doctrines, for example, those of the Fabian Society in England, founded by Sidney Webb and including among its adherents the writers H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw; those of Ferdinand Lassalle in Germany; and of Louis Blanc in France. These moderates sought to achieve socialism by parliamentary means and by appealing deliberately to the middle class. Fabianism had as one of its intellectual forebears the utilitarian individualism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and it became a doctrine that sought to reconcile the values of liberty, democracy, economic progress, and social justice. The Fabians believed that the cause of socialism would also be aided by the advancement of the social sciences, especially economics and sociology. These doctrines, collectively known as social democracy, did not, like Marxism, look toward the complete abolition of private property and the disappearance of the state but instead envisaged socialism more as a form of society in which full democratic control would be exercised over wealth, and production would be controlled by a group of responsible experts working in the interests of the whole community. The achievement of socialism was seen by social democrats as a long-term goal, the result of an evolutionary process involving the growth of economic efficiency (advanced technology, large-scale organization, planning), education in moral responsibility, and the voluntary acceptance of equal shares in benefits and burdens; socialism would be the triumph of common sense, the inevitable outcome of Liberalism, the extension of democracy from politics to industry.

Christian socialism spread from its beginnings in England to France and Germany. Charles Kingsley, John M. F. Ludlow (1821-1911), and Frederick D. Maurice were among its founders. They in the main supported moderate social democracy, emphasizing what they understood as the central message of the church in social ethics, notably the values of cooperation, brotherhood, simplicity of tastes, and the spirit of self-sacrifice. Their ideas proved fertile in both the short and the long runs, although in actual political terms, Christian socialism never succeeded in altering the predominantly secular orientation of most socialist movements.

Radical Socialism

On the other hand, many doctrines and movements were decidedly more militant than Marxism. Anarchists, influenced mainly by the ideas of the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and later of the Russian emigres Mikhail Bakunin and Prince Peter Kropotkin, were intent on immediately overthrowing the capitalist state and replacing it with small independent communities. Unlike the Marxists, whom they bitterly criticized, anarchists were against the formation of socialist parties, and they repudiated parliamentary politics as well as the idea of revolutionary dictatorship. Their followers, never very numerous, were and are found mainly in the Latin countries of Europe and America. Syndicalism, an offshoot of anarchism, was a movement of militant working-class trade unionists who endeavored to achieve socialism through industrial action only, notably by using the weapon of the general strike. Their doctrine was similar to Marxism in that they also believed that socialism was to be achieved only by and for the working class, but unlike the Marxists they rejected the notion of a future centralized socialist state. Their most eminent theorist was Georges Sorel. Syndicalist ideas also had intermittent success in the British and American trade union movements, for example, the Industrial Workers of the World, an American-based syndicalist union active around the turn of the century. Guild socialism in England, dominated by George D. H. Cole (1889-1959), the academic economist and historian, represented a modified and milder form of syndicalism.

In Russia, where it was impossible to organize openly a popular socialist movement under the tsarist regime, socialism became mainly the ideology of young militant intellectuals whose favored means of furthering the cause were secret conspiracies and acts of individual terrorism. Debate raged between those who believed in the native socialist ethos of the Russian village community and those who wanted to adopt Western ideas of modernization. The latter party, which eventually emerged victorious, soon came under Marxist influence. Among its adherents was V. I. Lenin, who emerged at the turn of the century as the leader of a small but dedicated group of "professional revolutionaries," the Bolshevik (radical) wing of the illegal Russian Social Democratic Workers' party. Lenin was also the theorist who irrevocably gave a markedly elitist and authoritarian twist to Marxism: he worked out the theory of the proletarian vanguard, that is, the Communist party, which is destined to lead the masses toward socialism, irrespective of the masses' present inclinations.

SCHISM AND CONTROVERSY

Throughout the 19th century the socialist movement was beset by a number of ever-deepening conflicts and doctrinal controversies.

The Internationals

The International Workingmen's Association (First International), founded in 1864, was expected to achieve unity among various socialist and militant trade union organizations, but its efforts were greatly hindered by, among other things, the conflict between the followers of Bakunin and those of Marx . It came to its demise soon after the suppression of the Commune of Paris (1871).

The Second International (1889-1914) assumed for a time at least an outward appearance of unity, in that it represented the high watermark of classical Marxist influence in West European socialism. It was dominated by the largest socialist parties then in existence, the French--led by Jean Jaures, Jules Guesde (1845-1922), and Paul Lafargue (1842-1911)--and the German--led by August Bebel, Karl Johann Kautsky, and Wilhelm Liebknecht--who agreed at least in their broad understanding of the aims and methods of socialism. Their spokesmen emphasized the need to foster international solidarity among the mass of the working class and thus to avert the threat of a major war in Europe. This effort proved singularly unsuccessful: nationalism in 1914 and later proved a much stronger mass emotion than socialism. Apart from a few exceptions, such as Lenin and his Bolshevik group, socialist movements supported the war effort of their respective governments. As a result of the general conflagration in 1914 the Second International disintegrated and therewith also the hopes of socialist unity.

Revisionism

Another important controversy broke out in the 1890s within Marxism, involving the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). This party was divided then between a militant revolutionary left wing, an orthodox center that held to the classical Marxist doctrine of economic determinism, and a right wing moving rapidly toward a position of open reformism. The right wing had as its most renowned spokesman Eduard Bernstein, a personal friend of Marx and Engels, who was, however, also influenced by English Fabian ideas.

Bernstein repudiated the notion of violent revolution and argued that conditions in civilized countries such as Germany made possible a peaceful, gradual transformation to socialism. He sought to reinterpret Marxist doctrine in the light of fresh advances made in economic science, such as those also embraced in Fabian doctrine, and argued that socialism was compatible with individual economic responsibility. He rejected, furthermore, the idea of "class morality," which judged all actions according to their revolutionary import. Instead he advocated a code of individual morality, derived from Kant's moral philosophy. Consequently, Bernstein asserted the need for socialists to concentrate on immediate tasks instead of ultimate and remote objectives; the movement, he wrote, was everything; the goal, nothing.

This doctrine, henceforward called revisionism, immediately became the subject of bitter attacks by the revolutionary left wing, represented above all by Rosa Luxembourg, which on this issue was supported by the orthodox center and its principal theorist, Karl Kautsky. The terms of the debate on revisionism centered on the facts, noted by Bernstein, of considerable improvement in the living standards of the working class, its resultant political integration in the constitutional (republican or monarchical) state, the purely reformist stance of trade unions, and the virtual absence of any desire for a radical change on the part of the great majority of workers.

The opponents of revisionism, while acknowledging these tendencies, argued that material improvements were insufficient and ephemeral. They felt that if the working class and its organizations accepted the constitutional state they were merely postponing indefinitely the change to socialism. According to them, the principal tasks of the socialist leader are to arouse dissatisfaction with existing conditions and to reemphasize constantly the worth of the ultimate goal. The arguments on both sides continue today with only slight changes in the debate between reformist and revolutionary socialists everywhere. In Marxist jargon the term revisionism became synonymous with treason. Ironically--but in a way that pointed toward the subsequent fate of Marxist doctrine--the orthodox center in the German party was soon to be denounced by left-wingers as revisionist. Lenin, too, came to condemn sharply the German social democrats and the "renegade" Kautsky. The latter, in turn, vehemently denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for their adoption of terrorist methods in the consolidation of their revolutionary gains in Russia. Marxist unity, like the Second International, thus also fell victim to World War I and its aftermath: from then on Marxists have tended to be either Marxist-Leninists, that is, communists embracing the elitist doctrine of the vanguard party, or moderate revisionists moving ever closer to the position of reformist social democracy.

MARXIST SOCIALISM TODAY

Modern socialism owes its shape and fortune at least as much to secular events as to the continuing attraction of its various doctrines. The major upheavals caused by two world wars greatly contributed to the success of the Russian (1917) and Chinese (1949) revolutions, and the governments of these two powerful countries thereafter endeavored by diverse means to spread the Marxist revolutionary doctrine further afield, resorting to military methods (as in Eastern Europe), economic pressures, military and economic aid, as well as subversion and propaganda. Indigenous Marxist movements also succeeded in gaining power in Cuba (1959) and Nicaragua (1979). During most of the 20th Century, Marxist socialism has meant the dictatorial rule of the Communist party, intensive industrialization, central state direction of the economy, and the collectivization of agriculture. These were accompanied, particularly during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin in the USSR, by a reign of terror and the general absence of individual freedom. The Stalinist system, though shorn of some of its worst brutalities, essentially remained in place until the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. In a few short years Gorbachev's policies of Glastnost ("openness") and Perestroika ("restructuring") brought rapid liberalization to the USSR and Eastern Europe, fundamentally altering the accepted picture of Marxist socialism in the process. As the Soviet regime loosened its grip, the countries of Eastern Europe threw off the Communist governments that had been imposed on them after World War II. In the USSR itself, the Communist party renounced its dictatorial control, and Marxist theorists repudiated the long-cherished doctrines of Leninism with bewildering speed.

EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

In Western Europe, despite the presence of large Marxist parties (as in Italy and France) and the Marxist influence among intellectuals, socialism is still principally represented by widely based social democratic and labor movements, which generally enjoy the active support of trade unions. This predominance of reformist trends over revolutionary aspirations has undoubtedly been occasioned by economic stability and the deterrent example of Marxist rule in the East. The social democratic parties of Sweden, Britain, France, and West Germany in particular governed their respective countries for lengthy periods during the postwar era, gaining political power through constitutional means and fully accepting the principles of parliamentary liberal democracy. Their spirit has tended to be pragmatic and tolerant, seeking accommodation rather than confrontation. Their programs repudiate the doctrines of the class war, revolution, and communism. Instead they have relied on the expedients of progressive taxation, deficit financing, selective nationalization, the mixed economy, and vast welfare programs in order to bring about socialism; their political success has depended on considerable middle-class support. On the other hand, in no Western country have socialist parties commanded the allegiance of the whole of the working class.

Social democratic foreign policy is generally pacific and has been mainly concerned with defusing the cold war and accelerating the processes of decolonization and the banning of nuclear weapons. In domestic politics they have refused to cooperate with communist parties and other extremist socialist groups. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany, although at one time the citadel of orthodox Marxism, has since 1959 been a purely reformist party, abandoning its original goals. The British Labour Party, socialist in its aims (its constitution since 1919 has had reference to "public ownership"), has never had any serious doctrinal or organizational links with Marxism, although its powerful left wing consistently advocates radical policies. A dispute with the leftists prompted a group of Labour moderates to secede (1981) and found the Social Democratic party, which later (1988) merged with the Liberal party to form the Social and Liberal Democrats. The French Socialist Party only recently modified its doctrinal position, moving away from its orthodox Marxism. At the same time, however, under the leadership of Francois Mitterand, it entered in the 1960s into an electoral alliance with the Communist party, eventually winning the presidency and gaining a majority in the French National Assembly in 1981. Mitterrand's cabinet included representation from the French Communist party. Since World War II, Italy has had two major social democratic parties, one allied to the Communists. In Spain, the Socialist party won the national elections in 1982 and formed their first government since the Spanish Civil War. Bettino Craxi became came Italy's first Socialist premier, heading a coalition government from 1983 to 1987.

The French Communist party was long known for its subservience to the USSR and its rigid Stalinism. The Italian Communist party, on the other hand, has relied on an indigenous Marxist tradition associated mainly with the teaching of Antonio Gramsci, one of the party's founders, who is widely regarded as one of the most significant of European Marxist thinkers. The Italian party, the largest in Western Europe, has frequently obtained the highest percentage of the popular vote in Italy's parliamentary elections, and has continuously governed a number of Italian municipalities (Bologna is a prime example).

During the 1970s the Italian Communists under Enrico Berlinguer, the French Communists under Georges Marchais, and the Spanish Communists under Santiago Carillo embraced a doctrine known as Eurocommunism. The Eurocommunists, breaking not only with Stalinism but with some aspects of the Leninist tradition, began moving toward full acceptance of parliamentary democracy and the multiparty system, in many ways prefiguring the glasnost-perestroika reforms that dramatically changed the Communist world in the Gorbachev era. To the left of the Communists were new groups of militant revolutionaries, such as West Germany's Red Army (Baader-Meinhof) Faction and Italy's Red Brigades, which carried out campaigns of subversion and terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s.

SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES

In North America, Marxist influence never spread very far. In the United States no socialist movement has ever held a very large following, and although the country has produced renowned socialist authors and popular leaders, they have not been distinguished for their originality or for their impact on the worldwide development of socialism. Socialism has not taken a firmer root in the United States for several reasons, of which the country's cultural traditions and its wealth in natural resources are the most important. Whereas in Europe the distribution of wealth was a pressing problem, facilitating the rise of socialist movements, in the United States the moving "frontier" meant the constant creation of new land and wealth and its accessibility for those endowed with initiative and a spirit of individual enterprise. Thus in the United States even radical thinkers have tended to be "individualists" and "anarchists," rather than socialists. In this development the country's tradition of republican self-government and its ethos of egalitarianism and democracy also played a decisive role: unlike Europe, the United States had no entrenched aristocratic privileges or monarchical absolutism and consequently no need for democratic aspirations to be combined with the socialist demand for economic equality and security. Labor unions also, for the most part, have concentrated on the achievement of higher earnings and have not been greatly interested in economic and social organization.

Numerous, although small, utopian socialist communities did flourish, however, in the United States, mostly during the early 19th century. Also, a celebrated economist, Henry George, and writers of repute, such as Edward Bellamy, advocated socialism, and socialist political leaders, such as Victor L. Berger, Eugene V. Debs, Daniel De Leon, and Norman Thomas, had at one time considerable popular appeal. The U.S. Socialist Party, founded in 1901, reached its greatest strength in the 1912 and 1920 presidential elections, when its candidate, Debs, received more than 900,000 votes. In 1932, Norman Thomas, running on the Socialist ticket, polled more than 800,000 votes. Thereafter the party's strength ebbed. The New Deal in the 1930s, although not socialist in inspiration, also tended to draw votes away from the party. The New Deal's policies of economic redistribution seemed to meet demands of those who previously supported the Socialists.

In the economic boom following World War II and especially in the cold-war era of the 1950s and '60s socialism was at a low ebb. More recently, however, socialist ideas have made considerable, although indirect, impact on various radical and liberal movements. In the United States, however, many people no longer discuss socialism in its conventional political and economic sense, but rather as a remote ethical and social ideal.

SOCIALISM IN THE THIRD WORLD

Socialism has assumed a number of distinct forms in the Third World. Only in Israel has moderate social democracy proved successful for long periods, mainly as a result of the European socialist tradition brought by immigrants. Here the Labor party in various forms has had a large following and governed the country for the longest time since the foundation of the republic. Israel has other socialist parties as well, including a militant Marxist party. At least of equal significance, however, are the cooperative agricultural communes (kibbutzim), which have flourished since 1948. Commentators have argued that kibbutzim more than anything else show the viability of socialist principles in practice; however, the peculiarities of Israeli conditions (for example, religious tradition and constant war readiness) could not easily be duplicated.

Elsewhere in the Third World, Marxism and various indigenous traditions have been predominant in socialist movements. In developing countries socialism as an ideology generally has been fused with various doctrines of nationalism, also a European cultural import but enriched by diverse motifs drawn from local traditions and cast in the idiom of indigenous cultures. In India, for example, the largest socialist movement has partially adapted the pacifist teaching of Mahatma Gandhi, and distinct native brands of socialism exist in Japan, Burma, and Indonesia. Similarly, in black Africa native traditions have been used in the adaptation of socialist, mainly Marxist, doctrines and political systems based on them. Noteworthy instances are the socialist system of Tanzania and the socialist theories of intellectual leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Leopold Senghor of Senegal, and Sekou Toure of Guinea. Socialism in these theories is usually understood as a combination of Marxism, anticolonialism, and the updated tradition of communal landownership and tribal customs of decision making, trying mainly to bypass Western "individualism" and capitalist economic organization.

Arab socialism likewise represents an effort to combine modern European socialist ideology with some Islamic principles. The Baath Party in Iraq and Syria and the Destour party in Tunisia have held power for considerable periods; Algeria also has had a socialist system since its independence. Although the depressed condition of the masses in Latin America would seem to make that area fertile ground for socialism, it was slow to develop there. The Mexican constitution of 1917 contained a number of socialist features, but the first and for some time the only important Latin American socialist party was Peru's Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA), founded in 1924. The next major indigenous socialist group was the National Revolutionary Movement of Bolivia, which first came to power in 1952. Most significant for its influence on the region as a whole, however, was the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, which began in 1959. The success of Castro's one-party Marxist-Leninist regime inspired similar leftist guerrilla movements in a number of other Latin American nations, most notably Nicaragua's Sandinista Liberation Front, which seized control of that country's government in 1979. A Marxist government that won power in the area by peaceful means was that of Salvador Allende in Chile (1970-73). One factor that has inhibited the success of socialism in Latin America has been the influence of the United States, which has frequently intervened to help overthrow leftist governments in the Western Hemisphere.

Socialism in the Third World is often simply an ideology of anticolonialism and modernization. Overtly Marxist movements, aided by the USSR, China, or Cuba, seized power in such African countries as Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. South Africa's African National Congress (ANC) is also strongly influenced by Marxist ideas.

THE NEW LEFT

In the West in the 1960s, a radical socialist movement, known as the New Left, arose principally out of the disaffection of young people with the way of life of advanced industrial society, and not least with its prosperity and conformism. The movement, which was apolitical in nature, sought to expose the growing "alienation" of the individual in advanced industrial conditions, castigating the values of the "consumer society" and attacking many prevailing social institutions. The beliefs of this movement, particularly strong in France, West Germany, and the United States, sprang from many diverse sources. Most important among these were the ideas found in Marx's early writings; the idea of "alienation," as interpreted by such contemporary socialist philosophers as Gyorgy Lukacs and Herbert Marcuse; existentialism; romantic and utopian ideas adapted from earlier socialist writers (for example, Fourier); sexual radicalism derived from the teaching of Sigmund Freud; and some aspects of oriental religious cults, such as Zen Buddhism. Despite its initial appeal and short-lived successes, however, the New Left has not so far proved a significant or lasting influence on socialism in its worldwide context or even within advanced industrial societies where conventional varieties still dominate.

It could well be argued that socialism as an alternative system of society and government has failed hitherto to live up to its promises; by and large it is still no more than a dream or at best a set of ideal criteria whereby to judge the shortcomings of existing institutions. Socialist ideology, however, remains a popular and widely held political belief today, and it has deeply penetrated other ideologies, as can be seen, for example, in the acceptance by many conservatives of the Welfare State (a governmental system in which heavy government intervention is undertaken to support and improve the situation of economically disadvantaged citizens) and planning. The worldwide spread of socialist ideas has also been accompanied by a process of dilution of original principles, as in Western social democracy, and by the degeneration and falsification of its values, as in Marxist states.

COMMUNISM

The term communism is generally applied to the Marxist-Leninist political and socioeconomic doctrines that guided the USSR until its disintegration in 1991 and that were shared by governments and political parties in eastern Europe, China, and elsewhere. The term also denotes the centralized political system of China and of the former Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe. This system, associated with collective ownership of the means of production, central economic planning, and rule by a single political party, was discredited almost everywhere outside China, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam as a result of its collapse in Europe and the USSR. What remains is its Marxist ideology, shorn of its Leninist--and, in China, much of its Maoist--trappings.

Communism is an outgrowth of the 19th-century Socialism. It became a distinct movement after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, when a group of revolutionary socialists seized power and adopted the name Communist party of the USSR. Mongolia became a Communist state in 1921. After World War II other Communist states were established in the Eastern European countries of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania, and in the Asian countries of China and North Korea. Communist regimes were subsequently established in Cuba, in the Southeast Asian countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and in Afghanistan. For fifteen or more years pro-Soviet revolutionary governments ruled South Yemen and several African states, notably Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. In the Western Hemisphere the leftist Sandinista regime (1979-90) in Nicaragua was under substantial Soviet and Cuban influence. Much of the strength of communism has eroded away in the face of brutal totalitarian rule and political and social inequality in communist countries during most of this century. In the late 1980s and early '90's, most "communist" countries completely changed or substantially reformed their modes of government. The future of the communist movement is uncertain, and many are looking at communism as an old and utopian ideal which has come of age in the last eighty or so years.


Special thanks to M. S. Shatz, B. Ollman, and R. N. Berki of the New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia for their prevalent contribution to this section.