Socialism can it work

Even when women work full time they spend an average of eight hours a week more than their partner cooking and shopping. The oppression of women is rooted in class society. The family plays an ideological and an economic role. It is used to discipline and socialize young people, and to prepare them for their given role in capitalist society.

In doing so she summed up the attitude of capitalism to the family. Thatcher believed that it was the duty of the family to bear the burden of looking after children, the sick and the elderly. Conveniently, this meant that she could cut back on the social services that had previously partially played that role. A greater part of the burden was then dumped on individual families, primarily on women. Thatcher was trying to return to the conditions of Victorian capitalism when no welfare state existed.

Today, women, largely as a result of their increased role in the workplace, are in a far stronger position than in the Victorian era. At the same time, the Tories and now New Labour have cut the welfare state to the bone leaving an increasing burden on working-class people, especially women. However, it could very quickly take economic measures — such as decent wages and jobs for all, free high-quality childcare, free universal education, good housing, widely available inexpensive high-quality restaurants and other measures — which would enormously ease the situation.

Longer term, the change in economic relations, the abolition of class divisions and the construction of a society based on democratic involvement and co-operation would also change social relations. Society would move away from hierarchies and the oppression and abuse of one group by another. Human relations would be freed from all the muck of capitalism. Of course, there would be a transitional period where the new society still had to deal with the problems it inherited from the old.

Nonetheless, many problems could be overcome quite quickly on the basis of the massively increased resources a democratic planned economy would provide. In the longer term, the highest stage of socialism would mean the development of a society free from all the divisions and oppression created by class society. That does not mean that a socialist society would be monolithic or without controversy. Discussion and debate would be on a far higher level.

Passionate arguments would undoubtedly take place. But they would be between parties and groupings with a common starting point — the betterment of humanity as a whole. This would be incomparable with capitalist society where political debate is restricted to a few at the top who spend most of their time disguising, supporting and justifying the indecent wealth and power of a tiny minority.

It is possible to imagine a debate in a socialist society — which could be about, for example, the best method of energy production to meet the needs of humanity and the environment wind or solar power, nuclear fusion or some other — which could increase the understanding of the whole of society and lead to the best way forward being hammered out.

The capitalists try to argue that a socialist government could only come to power by force. This is a red herring. It is they who have the most brutal record of violence imaginable, stopping at nothing to overturn democratic elections if they threaten the rule of capital.

Time and time again the capitalists have been prepared to use violence to protect their rule. Nevertheless, this resistance could be nullified by mobilizing the mass of working-class people in support of a socialist government. The working class is potentially by far the most powerful force in society.

If a socialist government mobilized that power in support of its policies an entirely peaceful transformation of society might be achievable. However, we are realistic. The ruling class will be prepared to use whatever means at its disposal to maintain its power and privileges.

A socialist government could only defend itself if it mobilized the active support of the working class. And it would only be by demonstrating its power in practice that the working class could successfully defend its democratically elected socialist government. If a socialist government were successfully established in Britain, would it come under attack from the rest of the capitalist world, in particular the US?

The ruling classes internationally are prepared to use any means to hold on to power. In a rare moment of straight talking one US strategic planner blurted out the real attitude of US imperialism in In this situation, our real job in the coming period… is to maintain this position of disparity.

To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality… we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.

What could be clearer? It is true that the US ruling class was able to successfully use the horrific events of September 11 to temporarily win the support of the majority of US workers for the war on Afghanistan. Far from being a war on terrorism, it has, in reality, meant the death of tens of thousands of innocent Afghanis and has done nothing to bring genuine democracy to the war ravaged country. However, it is one thing for imperialism to win support for taking action against the reactionary, anti-democratic Taliban regime.

It would be an entirely different question to justify an attack on a popular socialist government which was making open appeals to the US working class for support. And the peasant-based, guerrilla struggle in South Vietnam had far less immediate resonance with workers in the US than a socialist government in an industrialized country would have.

The power of imperialism is potentially more limited today than it was almost a century ago when the Russian revolution took place in October Russia was a poor country, devastated by war and facing attack from 21 capitalist armies desperate to crush the newly-born Soviet Union.

Yet the Soviet Red Army, poorly equipped, hungry and tired, was able to declare victory in a little under three years. Primarily, because of the working-class support internationally. Inspired by Russia, Europe was plunged into a series of revolutionary movements. A strike by Hungarian munitions workers in January spread like wildfire to Vienna, Berlin and throughout Germany, involving over two million workers. Their central demand was peace.

After months of fighting it was crushed with the help of German troops. Then on 4 November mutiny broke out at the German naval base of Kiel, igniting the German revolution. Mass strikes and a naval mutiny swept France. British soldiers mutinied, and the red flag was hoisted over the Clyde in Scotland.

Strikes involving four million workers convulsed the USA in On the battlefields, the Red Army were dropping thousands of leaflets appealing to the enemy troops. British and American soldiers began to mutiny. On the Black Sea, French sailors flew the red flag. The imperialists were compelled to withdraw their forces. For genuine socialism to have developed as a result of it would have been necessary for working-class people to have taken power in other countries.

The potential for this existed — revolutionary movements took place in Germany, Hungary and other countries — but, tragically, they were defeated. Today any genuine socialist government would face the same task, that of spreading the revolution internationally.

That set of policies — often called "Scandinavian social democracy" or the "Nordic model" — was adopted largely at the instigation of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark's "social democratic" parties, which serve as their countries' primary left-of-center political entities, usually in conjunction with agrarian parties as a "red-green" coalition.

Over the course of the 20th century, as those parties took power across the region, they gradually cobbled together a large, comprehensive safety net, where programs were generally universal — think free health care for all, not Medicaid-style free health care just for the poorest — and which, because of that, came to enjoy wide public support. The agrarian parties are largely to thank for the universalistic aspect; farmer income tended to vary considerably, which made non-means-tested benefits attractive.

Enabling and sustaining this system were large and powerful labor unions. In Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, a little under 70 percent of workers are in unions, which also run the countries' unemployment systems; many non-union members are nonetheless covered by collective bargaining contracts. To Americans, this may just look like a hardcore version of the Democratic Party platform.

But social democratic parties have traditionally identified as socialist, and emerged out of socialist movements. And historically, social democracy developed not as a more moderate form of capitalism, but as a revised and refined version of Marxism. Social democracy is a version of socialism that emphasizes the need to achieve socialist goals — worker empowerment, a more even distribution of wealth and income, universal access to health care, education, and other essential services — through representative democracy rather than through revolution.

It's the version of socialism that's enjoyed the most real-world success, both in the Nordic countries and in other rich nations, and it's the version that the main left-of-center parties in all European countries, many Latin American ones, and Australia and New Zealand embrace. The term "social democrat" dates back at least to , when Karl Marx used it to translate the name of a left-wing party of the French middle class that he disliked.

By , it was being used in the name of the Social Democratic Party also known by its German acronym, SPD , which has been the dominant German socialist party ever since. But it only became a clearly distinct approach to socialism in the late s and early s, when, a few decades after Marx's death, a historically consequential debate broke out between two prominent members of SPD: Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg.

The basic question was whether socialists should work toward revolution and the outright collapse of the capitalist system — or whether they should work to pass social reforms that make capitalism more humane. Bernstein favored the reformist approach. Socialists, he believed, should abandon the goal of bringing capitalism to a point of crisis and achieving some final socialist end state.

The point of having a socialist movement is not to "achieve socialism" in some sense, but to exist as a force pushing to make life better for workers. Luxemburg thought this was rank apostasy.

It contradicted the Marxist theory that capitalism was prone to crisis and would, in time, develop to a point at which it would collapse and give rise to socialism. Bernstein's version of Marxism suggested that such a revolution may not be necessary — and indeed, that socialist goals were best achieved not through revolutionary foment but merely by passing social reforms.

This debate, between reform and revolution, predated Bernstein and Luxemburg, and it continued after them. But their dispute clarified it as the central divide among socialists in the early 20th century.

Luxemburg was critical of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia and wary of the failed communist revolution in Germany in which she participated and perished. But she helped lay the theoretical groundwork for that general approach, of achieving socialism through revolt and mass social upheaval.

Bernstein, in turn, established a socialist tradition in which electoral politics was of the utmost importance. This became the strategic inspiration for the SPD, the Socialist Party in France, and just about every other Western European country's major left party. In this, Bernstein was helped by the existence of non-Marxist "ethical socialists," who, unburdened by Marx's focus on capitalism's tendency toward crisis, also tended to emphasize social reforms and electoral politics ahead of revolution.

The most important group here was the Fabian Society in Britain, which grew to be a key intellectual hub of the nascent Labour Party. This one is complicated. On the one hand, "socialism" and "communism" are technical terms in Marxist theory.

On the other, they're disparate political movements that have developed on the international left for a century not to mention that socialism predates Marx by quite a bit. In Marxist theory, socialism and communism are both as-yet-unrealized stages of humanity's economic development, with the former preceding the latter.

Socialism succeeds capitalism, and is heralded by the working class's seizing of the state. Using that power, the working class then assumes control over the means of production, either by establishing cooperative enterprises in which companies are owned by their workers, or by effecting state ownership. Workers are compensated in relation to their contribution to society. In other words, stop treating houses as a commodity and distribute them on the basis of need.

The same principles could be applied to transport. At present transport is a complete mess. Technologically, of course, it is possible to transport people around the world more efficiently than ever before in history, but under capitalism the organisation of transport is both inefficient and destructive.

The main form of transport is the private car, and car ownership and use have become so widespread that the roads are clogged up to the point where in London travel by horse and carriage in the 19th century was as quick and the pollution generated is a major contributor to climate change.

The socialist solution is obvious: set up a comprehensive integrated system of free public transport. This would involve a huge expansion of the railways for freight and intercity travel, since they are clearly faster, more cost efficient and more environmentally friendly than cars and lorries. Within towns it could be a combination of trams, buses, subways, monorails, minibuses and bicycles.

The precise details don't matter here. The point is that, provided the public transport was sufficiently extensive and effective, the private car, with its attendant problems of parking, congestion, accidents, petrol and pollution, could virtually be eliminated in urban areas and rural areas too if the public network was extensive enough.

So at this point we have free food, housing and transport along with, I assume, free health and education. Inevitably the question arises, "How would this all be paid for? The first answer is simply that it would be paid for out of taxation, as the NHS, schools and, of course, the armed services and their wars are at present.

Clearly if food, housing and transport were all free, people would have more money to pay tax with. However, looking a bit further we have to remember that money does not itself create wealth, or goods or services. Only the application of labour to nature does that. Money is just a means of exchanging goods and services that have become commodities. The less goods and services are treated as commodities, and socialism would systematically reduce commodity production until it disappeared, the less role money will have.

So the real question becomes, would it be possible for society to allocate sufficient labour to grow and distribute enough food to feed everyone adequately, to build enough houses for everyone and to make and operate enough trains, trams, buses, etc to move people around. And we know the answer to this is yes because we more or less do it already. But how would all these collectively owned industries be run? Wouldn't it involve vast armies of state bureaucrats, at best soulless jobsworths and at worst monstrous tyrants?

And the answer to it goes to the very heart of what we mean by the socialist alternative. Socialist planning will not be socialist and will not work practically unless it is democratic and actively involves the mass of ordinary people. Again the years of conditioning ensure that a little conservative ideologue pops up in our head and says, "That'll never happen.

Ordinary people, working class people, can't run things. They are not clever enough. They haven't had enough education or management training, etc. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance.

Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Economy Economics. Key Takeaways Capitalism provides incentives to be productive and has led to great wealth while simultaneously leading to widening gaps in income equality. A defining feature of socialism is public ownership of the means of production where the government allocates jobs and basic needs for the entire population are taken care of.

In contrast to socialism, capitalism depends on market forces to allocate resources efficiently and the government has little to no involvement. Socialism as seen through its implementations in various countries has proved to be impractical as it did not achieve the mass equality it intended to. Emulating the socialist aspect of Nordic countries could provide a template, with overall well-being, highly organized labor markets, universal welfare states, and relatively high levels of public ownership of capital.

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