Monday, Dec 22, 2014
- Socialism
- Shared Beliefs
- The existing distribution of wealth is unjust. The “haves” possess more than they need while the “have-nots” possess barely enough to survive.
- The resources and means of production should be owned by the community.
- The profits of human labor should be equitably distributed.
- Utopian Socialism
- Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, and Robert Owen were the most prominent Utopian Socialists.
- They advocated social and economic planning to create societies based on cooperation rather than competition.
- Although the Utopians founded a number of cooperative communities, their experiments all failed.
- Marxian Socialism
- In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels asserted that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”
- Marx believed that the history of class conflict is best understood through the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The thesis is the dominant state of affairs. It inevitably gives rise to a conflicting or contradictory force called the antithesis. The resulting class between the thesis and the antithesis produces a new state of affairs called the synthesis.
- Marx argued that nineteenth-century society had split “into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.” As the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie were the thesis. The proletariat or workers were the antithesis.
- Marx contended that a class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would lead “to the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
- The “dictatorship of the proletariat” would be a transitional phase leading “to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society” in which there would be no private ownership of the means of production.
- Marx and Engels argued that women were exploited by both men and capitalists.
- Edward Bernstein and Evolutionary Socialism
- Mar predicted that as the workers became more exploited they would unite to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Instead, as capitalism matured, working conditions improved.
- Led by Edward Bernstein, “evolutionary” socialists began to revise Marxian doctrine to adjust to the new economic realities.
- Bernstein rejected Marx’s concept of class struggle and instead sought to achieve socialist goals by a process of gradual reform.