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| Socialism was never premised on a subjective definition or injunction; rather, it was a real phenomenon only later given this name.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbu-AAlqDJg&list=PLAJIhnd1mbiCVeVI3Pu8NihIZzfWMhg5h&index=5 The New Era of Socialism] this article draws heavily on this Infrared Vision video</ref> Socialism was the spontaneous response of consciousness to an objective apocalypse of traditional order and meaning in every sense which took place in late 18th and 19th century Europe. Concretely, this apocalypse took dual form as the Industrial Revolution in England and the political revolution in France. This gave rise to the '''Social Question'''. As the "feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations" which formed the fabric of ''Ancien'' life were torn asunder, the cold brutality of all against all, dog eat dog, and every man for himself took their place. Socialism was simply the practical recognition of this fact and some corresponding program to remedy it. Production had to be reconciled with the majority of people's actual lives, serving social ends to guarantee a minimum of dignified, human life. | | '''Socialism''' came about as a result of the advent of Classical [[Modernity]], and the Social Question<ref>https://youtu.be/cxGIdrXAGyw</ref>. Many different people have had their response to this question across history, but Marx and Engels were the first to properly investigate the nature of this phenomenon, giving rise to the tradition of [[Marxism-Leninism]] which culminates in Scientific Socialism, and [[Communism]]. Socialism, according to [[Friedrich Engels|Engels]], is the "direct product of the recognition of [[Class antagonism|class antagonisms]] between capitalists and wage workers".<ref>https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm</ref> It exists as a stage of human progress in which private property is sublated, and [[Capitalism]] is incorporated into the Political, and Common Sphere. |
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| For [[Utopian socialism|Utopians]] like '''Simon''' and '''Fourier''', this was an intellectual problem, one which they considered themselves to have solved. Marx departs with the simple premise that capitalism would never voluntarily annihilate itself in service of better angels, as the Utopians suggested, that instead it would ''involuntarily but automatically'' annihilate itself as a mode of production due to objective contradictions essential to its very process of reproduction. Circulation of commodities at exchange value would lead to a falling rate of profit and economic crises which trigger the consolidation of capital under fewer and fewer firms. Somewhere along the line this process would no longer be sustainable as a free system without intervention. Socialism is therefore the sublation of Capitalism in the precise Hegelian sense: ''in preservation'' (cartels setting prices, central banks ordering the economy) ''it passes away'' (competition ceases, property becomes hereditary and institutional). <ref>“just where it fancies it is pursuing its own self-preservation and particular interest, is in fact doing the very opposite, is an activity that results in its own dissolution, and makes itself a moment of the whole.” (Preface to the Phenomenology, ($54))</ref>
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| Marx and Engels recognized capitalism as a force of disruption and immiseration, but in it they recognized also the forces which would lead to socialism. Never did they assert this trajectory as voluntaristic, self-conscious construction of a new system by individuals subjectively opposed to capitalism. Rather, socialism was the inevitable conclusion of tendencies integral to capitalism itself. '''Capitalism was for them the process by which Socialism constructed itself, ''independent of any individual subjective will.'' [[Communism]]''' is the real movement which gives discursive and political recognition to this fact.
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| == The Dual Revolution and the Social Question ==
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| [[File:George-grosz-explosion.jpg|thumb|George Grosz, "Explosion"]] | |
| England's enclosure movement and industrial revolution destroyed the familiar, stable and traditional way of life that peasants had been accustomed to for centuries. Peasants without land faced unprecedented social and economic insecurity. They were crowded into cities, where the same state that had driven them off their land refused to provide for them, leading to controversy over the Elizabethan Poor Laws.
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| The French revolution overturned the stable hierarchy of Feudalism, tearing apart the Great Chain of Being which had long allowed commoners to identify themselves in a meaningful social reality. What hatched in Paris soon spread wings, as Napoleon carried world-history across the continent, smashing the Holy Roman Empire and laying the groundwork for German unification through a legal and political leveling process. Aside from formal changes, the wars upended the unspoken traditional hierarchies of old Europe; as a German footsoldier in the ''Grande Armee'' recorded in his diary upon taking Moscow:<blockquote>Everyone was disguised in furs, rags, and pieces of cloth; they wore round hats and peasant caps on their heads, and many had priest’s robes from the churches. ''It was like a world turned upside down.''<ref>''Diary of Napoleonic Footsoldier,'' p.71 [https://annas-archive.org/md5/5ffefc15b99be3aecd066bcd04d2e881 link]</ref></blockquote>Taken together, the dual revolution ushered in Modernity. For common people, this was more or less a biblical apocalypse. In Marx's immortal words:<blockquote>Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.<ref name=":0">[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ Marx, "Communist Manifesto"]</ref></blockquote>It is in this context that the '''Social Question''', long an object of contemplation for humanist philosophers, first acquired real-world relevance. European humanists such as '''Hobbes''' and '''Rousseau''' had inquired as to the real premises of man, but before the eruption of modernity and its attendant restlessness, these realities were ultimately ''unwritten'', and could safely remain so. It was taken for granted that societies had a way of relating to the ineffable, sacred and sublime thing that made them whole. That sociality had to be reflexively, explicitly named implies a devastating loss of the ability to relate to it implicitly. By 1848, this crisis and its attendant question had become apparent to all. ''Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies'' - none could ignore it.
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| == Variations == | | == Variations == |
| In the '''Communist Manifesto''', Marx describes more than half a dozen socialist currents popular circa 1848. From every conceivable disaffected corner issued a corresponding socialism, articulated to varying degrees of seriousness.
| | Socialist tendencies are divided primarily on the basis of philosophy; [[utopian socialism]] vs [[Marxism-Leninism|scientific socialism]]. The former is used to refer to Marxism. |
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| === Reactionary Socialism ===
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| '''Obsolete aristocrats''' in France and England upbraided their bourgeois successors. Dismayed, not so much by the conditions of the proletariat but by the attendant social instability, their cry went up: "half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future... always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history."<ref name=":0" />
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| '''Petty-Bourgeois adjuncts''' (Sismondi at their head) decried capital only insofar as they found themselves tumbling from its seat and thrown beneath the wheels. Competition doomed them, and they sought therefore to constrain it, to cramp productive development to the point of their own preservation, making them both reactionary and Utopian.
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| '''German philistines''' imported and presumed to correct French socialism, forgetting meanwhile that they did not import the conditions of France along with her literature. Against every modest gain of bourgeois liberalism they ham-fistedly flung the rhetoric of Socialists in France (a country in which such rhetoric was deployed against an already developed bourgeois state), serving the absolute governments more than anyone. After 1848, this type lost their appetite for such rhetoric and became full-throated reactionaries.
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| === Bourgeois Socialism ===
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| Typified by '''Proudhon''', Marx includes here "economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind."<ref name=":0" /> They enjoyed bourgeois society as a whole, but decried its extremes, which they proposed to prune away until they are left with self-propagating fruit sans tree.
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| === Utopian Socialism ===
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| See main page: [[Utopian socialism]]
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| The systems of [[Utopian socialism|Owen]], [[Utopian socialism|Fourier]], and [[Utopian socialism|Saint-Simon]] did not lack historical vision. These men understood that the crisis was both irreversible and progressive, and therefore that the only way out was forward. They differed from Marx chiefly in their understanding of class, a difference which Marx ascribes to their prematurity. Utopians saw their theories as ''above'' class antagonism, and sought a new social science with which to improve the condition of all classes. They appealed to society at large, with particular emphasis on the role, not of the proletariat, who they deemed significant only insofar as they suffered more than others, but of the upper class, to the benevolence of whom they entrusted their historical mission. They saw socialism as a naturally and universally appealing idea, the realization of which required nothing but for level-headed men to read their book.
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| == "We already live in socialism" ==
| | '''Proletarian socialism''' is a term used to describe socialist states that are a [[dictatorship of the proletariat]], and is almost always an instance of applied scientific socialism. Exceptions to this include countries like Gaddafi's Libya, where the religious values of [[Islam]] have been applied to socialism. |
| See main page: [[''We already live in socialism'']]
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| In the Communist Manifesto, Marx used '''bourgeois socialism''' to refer to certain reformists of his time who sought to remedy the ills of capitalism within capitalism. However, certain remarks about the efficacy of joint-stock companies and banks in Engels ''Socialism, Utopian and Scientific,'' and in the third Volume of Marx's ''Capital,'' may be coupled with [[Lenin]]'s ''Imperialism, the Highest Stage'' to historically analyze the bourgeois economic developments during the 20th century. Although neither Marx nor Engels use the term in this sense, one could use the term '''bourgeois socialism''' to describe the way in which - especially in the wake of the Great Depression - bourgeois states began to manage their economies through central banks, public work programs, and other means.
| | '''Bourgeois socialism''' is a term used to describe bourgeois states bearing resemblance to socialism, with things like [[Central planning|central planning of the national economy]]. In 2022, [[Haz Al-Din]] put forth the theory that [[''We already live in socialism''|we already live in socialism]], stating that we are already in the stage of bourgeois socialism, and that we are beginning the transition to proletarian socialism. |
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| In 2021, [[Haz Al-Din]] put forth the theory that [[''We already live in socialism''|we already live in socialism]], stating that we have already transitioned into an incipient socialist mode of production, but that this is not reflected by society's institutions, which are characterized by the continued rule of the now dynastic and semi-hereditary capitalist class who accumulate derivative profits from a more or less centrally planned economy.
| | '''National socialism''' is a [[Fascism|fascist]] form of socialism. The term was coined by [[Adolf Hitler]] when he named the [[Nazi Party|National Socialist German Workers Party]] in the 1920s. |
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| ==Notable socialist states== | | ==Notable socialist states== |
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| *[[China|People's Republic of China]] (1949- ) | | *[[China|People's Republic of China]] (1949- ) |
| *[[Cuba|Republic of Cuba]] (1959- ) | | *[[Cuba|Republic of Cuba]] (1959- ) |
| *[[Laos|Lao Democratic People's Republic]] (1975- ) | | *[[Laos|Lao Democratic People's Republic]] (1991- ) |
| * [[Polish People's Republic]] (1947-1989) | | * [[Polish People's Republic]] (1952-1989) |
| * [[Socialist Republic of Romania]] (1947-1989) | | * [[Socialist Republic of Romania]] (1947-1989) |
| *[[Yugoslavia|Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]] (1945-1992) | | *[[Yugoslavia|Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]] (1945-1992) |
| *[[East Germany|German Democratic Republic]] (1949-1989) | | *[[East Germany|German Democratic Republic]] (1949-1989) |
| *[[Green Libya|Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya]] (1969-2011) | | *[[Libya|Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya]] (1976-2011) |
| *[[Syria|Syrian Arab Republic]] (1963- ) | | *[[Syria|Syrian Arab Republic]] (2000- ) |
| *[[Vietnam|Socialist Republic of Vietnam]] (1945- )
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| *[[Baathist Iraq|Republic of Iraq]] (1968-2003)
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| *[[Nasserist Egypt|United Arab Republic]] (1952-1970)
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| *[[People's Socialist Republic of Albania]] (1946-1991)
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| *[[Czechoslovak Socialist Republic]] (1948-1989)
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| *[[Hungarian People's Republic]] (1949-1989)
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| *[[People's Republic of Bulgaria]] (1946-1989)
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| *[[Mongolian People's Republic]] (1924-1990)
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| *[[Democratic Kampuchea]] (1975-1979)
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| *[[People's Democratic Republic of Yemen]] (1967-1990)
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| *[[Second Republic of Seychelles]] (1977-1991)
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| ==Further Reading== | | ==Further Reading:== |
| *[[Karl Marx]] | | *[[Karl Marx]] |
| *[[Islamic Socialism]] | | *[[Islamic Socialism]] |
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| [[Category:Ideologies]] | | [[Category:Ideologies]] |
| [[Category:Good Articles]]
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| [[Category:WIP]]
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