Socialism &
Communism
Getting there
Overview
• The Goal
• The Two Roads to Reaching It
– Evolutionary (Democratic) Socialism
• Bernstein
– Revolutionary Socialism
• Lenin
• Trotsky
• Mao
The Goal
“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one
hundred years, has created more massive and more
colossal productive forces than have all preceding
generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to
man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry
and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric
telegraphs, clearing of ground -- what earlier century
had even a presentiment that such productive forces
slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
-- Communist Manifesto
The Goal
• Because capitalism has generated
these enormous productive forces, we
can envision a world where we can use
that social production for social welfare.
Labor
Time
Leisure Time
The Goals
• The Communist Manifesto includes a
variety of goals -- long and short term -of the communist movement
• Long term goals include:
– Abolition of Private Property
– Community of women
– “True” Freedom & Democracy
The Goals
• It also includes some short term goals,
including:
– graduated income tax
– abolition of inheritance
– centralized credit, communication
– free education for children
– abolition of child labor laws
The Roads to Socialism
• Marx and Engels helped unify the
socialist movement in Europe
• With their death, and the resolute failure
of capitalism to collapse as expected,
leadership of the worker’s movement
looks for ways to hasten the advent of
socialism
Roads to Socialism
• In their writings, Marx and Engels sometimes
support democratic change, and sometimes
the need for violent revolution
• Various wings of the socialist movement look
to ground their policies in the writings of Marx
and Engels
• Why?
Roads to Socialism
• The key is the claim
to have developed a
“scientific” socialism
• What’s special about
“science”?
Roads to Socialism
• You can’t dispute the law of gravity
• You can’t argue with
science
• So, the socialists after
Marx attempt to use
the method to support
their policy prescriptions
Evolutionary Socialism
• One road to socialism that eventually
becomes social democracy argues that
the change from capitalism to socialism
will be a protracted affair and that we
need to use democratic means to
achieve a democratic society
Evolutionary Socialism
• Eduard Bernstein
(1850-1932)
• German social
democrat
• Best known for
“revisionist” theory of
Marx (as opposed to
Lenin’s “orthodox”
Marxism
Evolutionary Socialism
• Bernstein argues that a really “scientific”
approach would take new evidence and
modify the theory to conform to the science
• Points out that capitalism has not developed
in the manner predicted by Marx
• Argues for the need to re-examine Marx’s
presuppositions and modify (or revise) the
theory to accommodate the new reality
Evolutionary Socialism
“That the number of the wealthy increases
and does not diminish is not an invention of
bourgeois ‘harmony economists,’ but a fact
established by the boards of assessment for
taxes, often to the chagrin of those
concerned, a fact which can no longer be
disputed…”
Evolutionary Socialism
“One has not overcome Utopianism if one assumes
that there is in the present, or ascribes to the present,
what is to be in the future. We have to take working
men as they are. And they are neither so universally
pauperised as was set out in the Communist
Manifesto, nor so free from prejudices and
weaknesses as their courtiers wish to make us
believe. They have the virtues and failings of the
economic and social conditions under which they live.
And neither those conditions nor their effects can be
put on one side from one day to another.”
Evolutionary Socialism
• In other words, we need, as Marx and Engels
suggested, to take people as they actually
are, not as we want them to be and work with
the real materials we have
• Most workers, as it turns out, have more to
lose than their chains and may be unwilling to
make the leaps to socialism that we would
like
Evolutionary Socialism
That means we need to slow things
down, and work to improve the
conditions now and set the stage for
bigger changes to come
Evolutionary Socialism
“Law, or the path of legislative reform, is the
slower way, and revolutionary force the
quicker and more radical. But that only is true
in a restricted sense. Whether the legislative
or the revolutionary method is the more
promising depends entirely on the nature of
the measures and on their relation to different
classes and customs of the people…”
Evolutionary Socialism
“In general, one may say here that the
revolutionary way (always in the sense of
revolution by violence) does quicker work as
far as it deals with removal of obstacles which
a privileged minority places in the path of
social progress: that its strength lies on its
negative side…”
Evolutionary Socialism
“Constitutional legislation…is stronger than
the revolution scheme where prejudice and
the limited horizon of the great mass of the
people appear as hindrances to social
progress, and it offers greater advantages
where it is a question of the creation of
permanent economic arrangements capable
of lasting; in other words, it is best adapted to
positive social political work.”
Evolutionary Socialism
• In other words, we
may be on a long
and winding road to
socialism, freedom,
and democracy
Revolutionary Socialism
The other road to
socialism may be
considerably
shorter, and that’s
by violent revolution
Revolutionary Socialism
• V.I. Lenin
(1870-1924)
• Leader of the
Russian revolution
of 1917, the first
successful Marxist
revolution in the
world
Revolutionary Socialism
• Argued no need to “revise” the theory of
scientific Marxism to conform to new facts
• Rather, we need to use the theory to explain
new facts
• Marx and Engels saw communism as a
global struggle, and Lenin sought to apply
their analysis to global capitalism
Revolutionary Socialism
• Capitalism has
morphed into
Imperialism, as Marx
and Engels predicted it
would
• It has survived because
it has managed to “buy
off” its own worker class
at the expense of the poorer countries in the world
Revolutionary Socialism
“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for
domination and not for freedom, the
exploitation of an increasing number of small
or weak nations by a handful of the richest or
most powerful nations-- all these have given
birth to those distinctive characteristics of
imperialism which compel us to define it as a
parasitic or decaying capitalism.”
-- “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Revolutionary Socialism
• It’s the “decaying” stage, in the sense that
imperialism can only work for so long
• The Bourgeoisie will quickly run out of poor
countries to exploit
• When the world is fully divided up, the
contradictions of capitalism buried by imperial
conquest will return to the forefront
Revolutionary Socialism
• When the world is
divided up, the
richest countries will
either have to fight
each other for
control and to
conquer the poorer
areas
Or...
Revolutionary Socialism
• The class struggle will
play out first as national
struggles in the poorer
countries
• Loss of the colonies will
then mean return of the
class struggle at home
in the capitalist
countries
Revolutionary Socialism