SOCIALISM: An In-Depth Explanation

few ideas can polarize like socialism many see it as the path to freedom many others see it as the path to tyranny this video won't pick sides in that debate we're only here to answer the question what is it what is socialism many would say that the answer is simple and they'd open a dictionary and read a definition about socialism being the government owning the means of production and directing the economy that's definitely a significant understanding of socialism but the problem is it's tied to a certain era and many if not most of modern socialists don't go by it so we're going to need something broader but then if you ask those socialists what they think socialism is their answer is often unusably broad like saying socialism is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the 21st century so by that pretty much anyone can be a socialist this is the point where people usually do a lot of henrying about how difficult it is to nail down a specific conception of socialism i frankly don't think it's that bad i think the best way to do this is to go through socialism chronologically show where the ideas came from where they converged and where they split and where that leaves us today so most of this video is basically going to be a history of socialist thought i think it'll help to start with some general comments the first thing to say is that socialism as a political tradition emerged as a reaction against liberalism specifically as a reaction against the industrial revolution as liberalism grew in popularity and influence socialism grew along with it so the histories of liberalism and socialism are intertwined and he can even think of liberalism as a parent ideology of socialism liberalism can be understood as the political philosophy where individuals are held to be ends in themselves liberals want to create a political order where people can develop into whoever they want to be they can think whatever they want to think believe whatever they want to believe and pursue whatever they want to pursue liberals primarily achieve that through law notably by granting people rights those rights are designed to keep people from suppressing each other's individuality liberalism expressed as an economic philosophy is capitalism so that's when you have property rights backed by law and at least theoretically a free market where people are free to exchange goods and services with others in a liberal order hierarchies naturally develop and socialists traditionally concern themselves with negative effects related to those hierarchies liberals are traditionally concerned with concentrations of political power so they don't want a king to have all the power they don't want a minority to have all the power and they don't want a majority to have all the power so they want power broken up across society socialists are traditionally concerned with concentrations of economic power typically the power that the rich are thought to hold over the poor so socialists typically want their own checks and balances against concentrations of economic power the socialist ethic aspires towards equalitarianism which can also be called egalitarianism but i think equalitarianism is a word that's a little bit easier to intuitively grasp what exactly that means depends on the socialist it could mean that people should get equal portions of things or it could mean that people in some other way should be treated equally or it could just mean the general belief that human beings have fundamentally equal worth or moral status so the concept of equality is very important in socialism socialists tend to be motivated by a sense of injustice they tend to look to the worst off the needy the sick the unfortunate or the oppressed and claim that their circumstances are unnecessary and even unfair people typically point to three founding influences of socialism sans simone charles fourier and robert owen what they all had in common was a sense of the inadequacy of unadulterated liberalism which is to say unregulated capitalism they didn't call themselves socialists because the word socialism wasn't around yet but you can see something recognizably socialist in their work for example when sant simone looked around 18th century france he said here is an idea that seems right to me the first needs of life are the most urgent ones those without property can only satisfy them in an incomplete manner a physiologist sees clearly that their most constant desire should be that of lowering their taxes or increasing in their pay which amounts to the same thing san simon called for the creation of a new christianity founded on the principle that all men must behave as brothers toward one another and whose overall goal was the most rapid possible amelioration of the condition of the poorest class he also advocated for collectively agreeing on rewarding those who succeed in doing works of general utility for example by rewarding the artists who fill the gaps in your busy life with the pleasures which are best suited to develop your intelligence in other words he's saying that if we let things freely develop negative side effects come along with that and he's arguing that we should instead intentionally shape things according to our values going forward that's going to be a running theme in socialism charles ferrier looked at capitalist societies and argued that they weren't organized efficiently he thought immense advantages would result if people were brought together to work communally he said why are there 300 wineries competing against each other most of them in disrepair when there could be one great winery why would a hundred milkmaids go to the neighboring city to get a hundred jugs of milk when one milkmaid could go get a barrel of milk for everybody so if we did these things collectively according to fourier they wouldn't be so wasteful furrier also thought that capitalist societies had unnecessarily depressing work lives and he thought we could reorganize our work lives in a way that would make people more passionate for example you could divide people up into teams and have them compete against each other for honors or rotate jobs throughout the day so no one has to work for more than a couple hours in any role he thought you didn't have to force people to do this stuff if a few intentional communities first set an example he thought others would follow they would be brought together by a lure of gain and pleasures as he put it if a unified society produced three times as much as an atomized society people would be incentivized to unify robert owen had a theory that people were products of their environment and as such he thought we should use our resources to make people better make them happier make them kinder better mannered and more productive he thought the best place to do that would be through education when people are young and impressionable and he specifically saw the government as a means to that end owen thought governments should establish rational plans for the education and general formation of the characters of their subjects focusing on forming their character in childhood which he thought would prevent bad habits from forming like lying or wanting to hurt others and he thought it would promote good habits like wine to help others this is essentially a reaction against the individualism of liberalism so liberals tend to think that if you're doing well in life or if you're doing badly in life it's your own fault and here he's flipping that he's saying it's not necessarily the individual's fault but rather it's the fault of the environment owen thought that this explained the squalid conditions of the poor saying shall the well-being of millions of the poor half-naked half-famished untaught and untrained daily increasing to a most alarming extent in these islands not call forth one petition one delegate or one rational effective legislative measure no for such has been our education owen also believed that happy employees are more productive he set up a community that paid unusually high wages that also had pleasant working conditions and had comfortable homes for the workers these are just a few of their arguments that shaped socialism going forward looked it more fully none of them were properly socialists as we understand the word now for example when sans simone imagined himself addressing the working class he wrote we are 10 times 20 times 100 times more numerous than the possessors and yet the possessors wield over us a domination far greater than any power we have over them then he says i realize my friends how entirely frustrated you are but note that the possessors although inferior in number possess more enlightenment than you and that for the general good domination must be distributed according to the share of intelligence look at what happened in france while your comrades were dominant there they produced a famine i think this illustrates that we have since then established a definitive idea of what is and is not socialist so you should be able to look at what san simon said and see exactly where it jumps ship and isn't socialist anymore and that's where he accepts hierarchies and even frames them as being natural and even for the greater good the socialist conception of equalitarianism means that socialists want to mitigate hierarchies they probably don't want to frame them as being natural and they especially don't want to frame them as being for the greater good a major figure that solidified that conception of equalitarianism is a man named babuf who wrote under the name gracchus so he is sometimes called gracchus babuf babuf emerged during the french revolution while the revolutionaries were trying to figure out how to order their new society the french revolution's ethic was based on the twin principles of liberty and equality the word fraternity was in there too but liberty and equality were their main principles the philosopher jean-jacques rousseau was an influence on the french revolution on the whole but his social contract and discourse on inequality were especially an influence on babuf who saw himself as simply implementing russo's theories babuf came forward and wanted the revolutionaries to take the word equality much more seriously he wanted their new society to settle for nothing less than perfect class equality he wanted for all individuals without distinction an absolutely equal portion of all the goods since men are absolutely equal babuf wrote they must not have any private possessions but must enjoy everything in common so that no one can by the mere fact of birth be either more or less rich or be considered less worthy than any of those around him which makes babuf arguably the founder of modern communism this was explicitly intended to end class distinctions babuf associates made that clear in their manifesto of the equals where they said let it come to end at last this great scandal that our posterity will never believe disappear at last revolting distinctions between rich and poor great and small masters and servants governors and governed let there be no differences between human beings other than those of age and sex babuf also brought a revolutionary ideology to socialism which means you want a sudden thorough transformation of society typically by seizing power babuf and his associates plotted to take over the revolution and lead it themselves making them the first to imagine revolution as a calculated process directed by a vanguard of conspirators whose goals might be unknown to the mass of their followers this might be reminding you of a later socialist who would actually successfully do that and who will get to babuf's plot was discovered by the revolutionaries they weren't in a forgiving mood so that was the end of baboof but he would live on as an influence for communists who would emerge after him in europe this is babuf being referenced in the communist manifesto the term socialism was coined by the followers of robert owen in the 1820s as capitalism developed through the early to mid 1800s it became increasingly industrialized and with that class distinctions sharpened a self-conscious industrial working class began to take shape in england and western europe new types of socialists emerged that framed their theories through class conflict the socioeconomic halves against the socioeconomic have-nots and they specifically saw the have-nots as being the industrial working class who they called the proletariat but these socialists tended to be middle class and they saw themselves as needing to lead and educate the working class one of those was louis blanchy who said the poor man does not know the source of his ills ignorance the daughter of subjection makes him into the docile instrument of the privileged crushed by toil a stranger to the intellectual life what can he know about these social phenomena in which he plays the role of the beast of burden another leading socialist that emerged was pierre joseph prudhon he wanted a society based in mutualism which is essentially an anarchist society a society with no government where workers sell their labor to each other there were many other thinkers during that time period like louis blanc who wanted to extend voting rights to the working class but none of these are names that people really know anymore in the mid-1800s one figure rose up and dominated socialism with his ideas easily becoming the biggest figure in the tradition and that of course is karl marx marx came from a philosophical tradition of system building which was popular up until his time but isn't really done anymore so system building is when you make an elaborate self-contained body of work that tries to explain just about everything as bertrand russell put it marx was the last of the great system builders i think this brought an intellectual grandiosity to socialism that hasn't been matched since there were all these separate socialist ideas floating around at the time that had mostly come from france and england and what marx did was to combine them together with a german philosophy popular in his time which was the philosophy of georg hegel i'm going to spend some time laying this out because it's crucial to understanding what marx brought to socialism and it's also crucial to understanding what happened to socialism going forward marx was influenced by hegel who was influenced by aristotle who was influenced by plato all four were system builders with aristotle and plato there's only one aspect of their thought that we're concerned with here and that's their idea of essence plato was interested in the difference between universals and particulars for example think of the word cat just the abstract concept of a cat it's not any one cat in particular it transcends them it's a universal concept an ideal cat any one particular cat for plato is always made imperfectly in the image of the ideal cat so the ideal cat contains the essence of cat which we could call cattiness it's an essence that exists outside of particular cats it exists before they do when they come into existence it shapes their size their health their strength and also their behavior for example plato thought these essences explained why like things gravitate toward one another a rock dropped falls to be with other rocks fire rises to be with air each thing has a tendency to be toward its kindred element that tendency makes the heavy go down and the light go up aristotle seemed to believe that he was updating plato's essence by claiming that it's not external but inside you it's what you are by your very nature aristotelian essences are things that you can't change and still be you like your humanity for example these essences shape your properties and your potentialities they shape how you look and how you feel and also how you move and how you behave through these essences things possess the principle of motion in themselves aristotle used that to develop his theory of natural places if things are removed from their natural place because of these essences they have a tendency to return to it also for aristotle essence can precede existence he said things can subsist as a sort of potential energy before they become actualized before a house is built for example it was fit for being built the fact that it was fit for being built acts as an essential cause that builds the house we're talking about ancient philosophy here part of this was an attempt to explain the world before the discovery of genes and before newtonian physics around newton's time things started to sharpen and become less mystical but even that was a slow gradual change so western philosophy was deferential to aristotle and plato for some 2000 years after their time as a result the notion of essence was an intimate part of every western philosophy subsequent to aristotle until we came to modern times georg hegel writing in early 1800s prussia was in that sense a pre-modern thinker he took aristotle's notion of essence and applied it to history he wanted to answer the question what is the ultimate design of the world and he answered that due to these hidden undeveloped essences the world had a principle it had a plan of existence a law and that law was a law of historical progress a progression from the imperfect towards the more perfect as evidence he pointed to the spreading of freedom over time and pointed to the prussian monarchy where he lived as a place where all had finally achieved freedom it's a redefinition of the word freedom so if that was confusing to you i wouldn't lose sleep over it the point is that hegel thought that these hidden undeveloped essences brought an inexorable logic to the history of the world and that was to make it move over time towards this increasing perfection and for hegel this was both an ethical and a logical perfection hegel thought that the spirit of nations were ultimately the drivers of history they drove history forward so hegel's philosophy was ultimately nationalist marx grew up studying hegel so he wanted to take hegel's ideas and place them in an updated socialist context during marx's time enlightenment values were spreading and hegel's idea that the world was driven forward by spirit was too mystical for marx so he preferred to base his theory in matter literally physical stuff specifically physical stuff that relates to the economy and our ability to provide for ourselves like land and coal and machines so marx called those material conditions and believed that they determined the kind of economy we have as he put it the windmill gives you society with the feudal lord the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist you can call the type of economy we have like a capitalist one our mode of production and then mark says the mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social political and spiritual processes of life so for marx everything stems from material conditions the material conditions create capitalism and from there you have the way we think our culture our law politics society so as material conditions change society changes along with them unlike adam smith who saw capitalism as bringing people together into voluntary and mutually beneficial relationships karl marx saw antagonism when he looked at capitalism he saw involuntary labor and class conflict lower class people had to work if they didn't they would starve if you asked workers how much they wanted to be paid their answer would be as much as possible but if you ask bosses how much they should pay the workers the bosses would answer as little as possible also if you ask these bosses how hard they should work these workers the answer would be as hard as possible after all they had other businesses to compete with marx like hegel believed that history was progressive and he believed that class conflict drove that historical progression so classes were for marx what nations were for hegel as marx wrote the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles freeman and slave patrician and plebian lord and cerf guildmaster and journeyman in a word oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another carried on an uninterrupted now hidden now open fight a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes when one class wins a class struggle according to this theory a new society is created so when middle-class journeymen won power against guild masters and implemented modern property rights feudalism ended and capitalism began and again he argued that the underlying force here is changing material conditions he argued that it was time for feudalism to go marx believed that the new societies were preferable to the ones that came before for example he credits the bourgeoisie who are the property owning class in capitalism with creating enormous cities which greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural and thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life but marx still fundamentally condemned the capitalism of his time and the society that came along with it this was a time when capitalism was mostly unregulated so he had child labor and he had longer hours and low pay and dangerous conditions the lowest paid workers at the time were working for subsistence wages which means that they were barely making enough to be able to feed themselves marx didn't leave his feelings about these things up for interpretation he found it morally horrifying he pointed out average life expectancies for the working class around urban england where he did most of his writing in manchester it was 17 years in liverpool it was just 15. he believed that the problem was the legal right to own private property by that he mostly meant property relating to industry so it could be factories could be machines could be products coming out of a company or the intellectual property of a company itself so private property for marx is mostly property relating to industry and in his analysis he broke capitalist societies down into two main classes you had the bourgeoisie who owned private property and he had the proletariat who were property-less industrial workers he thought the right to own private property gave the bourgeoisie supreme political power in capitalist societies making them the ruling class what we would normally call liberal society to him was bourgeois society so he thought the law morality and religion coming from capitalist societies reflected bourgeois prejudices and bourgeois interests it's not clear how aware marx was of the implications of this next part but he crucially took an idea of hegel's and applied it to his theory and that's hegel's idea that due to a hidden undeveloped essence human societies had a law of historical development like hegel he believed society was inexorably moving towards an increasing perfection and also like kegel this was both an ethical and a logical perfection he said if the conflict hinges on the right to own private property and if the people without property far outnumber the people with property then the solution is for the property-less masses to realize their common oppression than to band together rise up seize power and implement a new society a communist society where the right to own private property is abolished which he thought would finally break the historical saga of class conflict by being the first society without class conflict as he wrote in his twenties communism is the riddle of history solved and it knows itself to be this solution as marx got older he toned down that kind of mystical talk but his historicist conviction and his support for communism remained the fall of capitalism and the rise of communism he maintained was inevitable this is an end of history kind of argument he's saying that capitalism is the last form of society to feature class conflict and that communism will be the first society without class conflict which will bring on a new era of history so everything up until that to marx is prehistory i think this is a good time to nail down what communism is communism is a type of socialism so socialism is the broad tradition and communism is a specific variant of the mainstream types of socialism communism is probably the furthest to the left it has three main features one is the abolition of private property which is at least any kind of property relating to industry which is also called the means of production the second feature is its goal it wants to abolish class distinctions so the goal is a society with no class inequality in marx's writing the dictatorship of the proletariat holds power which is his term for the communist working class once they take power although he never clearly articulated what that means or what that looks like one important thing he did say was to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat was to take all capital from the bourgeoisie and to place all instruments of production in the hands of the state what's supposed to happen from there is a matter of debate marx saw communism as an international movement which would transcend nationality and eventually sweep the world which led to a history of international aspirations in communism and even socialism more broadly but i think it's worth saying that this hasn't been consistent in practice even marx himself leaned into nationalism when times seemed to call for it marx thought communism would develop in stages he thought there'd be a lower stage where he'd still have wealth inequality since people don't have equal needs or ability to work but he seemed to think that in a higher stage of communist society all goods would be publicly owned and wealth distinctions and perhaps money itself would disappear as he wrote once all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners from each according to his ability to each according to his needs marx thought in that kind of society where the public had control over resources people would have more freedom to choose what they want to do in their work lives so he thought people wouldn't be forced to specialize like they often are in capitalist societies he thought people would be free to do one thing today and another tomorrow to hunt in the morning fish in the afternoon rear cattle in the evening or criticize after dinner although that last bit was probably a joke on his part marx refrained from elaborating much more on his vision for communism he said he didn't want to write receipts for the cook shops of the future he instead spent most of his writing criticizing his competitors and laying out his economic theory that we mostly see in capital which he believed proved the inevitable fall of capitalism and rise of communism as he wrote capital aims to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society his theory essentially claims that in capitalism business owners extract as much profit as they possibly can from their workers while paying them as little as they can back in return the business owners then take those profits and use them to expand their businesses buy more machines and develop technology which further develops the material conditions of capitalism as this continues and business owners compete with each other and push everyone else's wages down as marx described it a few winners would emerge and the great masses would be pushed down into poverty and subsistence wages marx described this as two large poles developing on one end you have the accumulation of wealth which again was supposed to be into fewer and fewer hands and on the other end you have an accumulation of misery agony of toil slavery ignorance brutality mental degradation he said that as there was this growing massive misery there'd be a corresponding growing revolutionary impulse and eventual revolt of the working class as material conditions and the social conditions that correspond to them continue to develop in that manner they eventually outgrow capitalism bursting it like a shell once that happened he thought a revolution would occur as he wrote the knell of capitalist private property sounds the expropriators are expropriated so with that the die was cast i think that aspect of marx has since been downplayed but at the time it was the centerpiece of marxism the question was will it happen or won't it happen in the decades following marx's death capitalism seemed to be developing in the way that marx predicted class dynamics seemed to be polarizing and sharpening marxist parties sprang up across europe and the german socialist party emerged as an international leader of socialism and was explicitly marxist it occupied an increasing number of seats in the local state and national legislatures controlled immense trade unions and was exceedingly well disciplined and organized acting the belief that marxian sociology provided irrefutable assurance of its ultimate triumph but in the last decade of the 19th century ominous contradictions to marxism began to appear capitalism was reforming and becoming gentler misery wasn't increasing it seemed to be shrinking wealth was spreading across all classes of society and the working class didn't seem to be turning towards communism marxists were faced with a choice stick with the position that marx was right which was the orthodox marxist position or say that at least in some aspects he was wrong which implies diversifying your sources of belief the person who came to embody the latter position was a man named edward bernstein bernstein was a highly regarded marxist he was mentored by marx's collaborator friedrich engels he was even asked by engels to produce a new volume of capital based on marx's notes but as time went on these trends troubled bernstein and they reached a point where he couldn't reconcile them with his commitment to marx anymore he wrote a book called evolutionary socialism as an extended critique on marx that brought about a split in socialism that still remains to this day marxists at the time gave bernstein's views a name revisionism to show that the historical trend that marx predicted wasn't occurring bernstein checked certain statements in capital against modern evidence like tax receipts and concludes that it is quite wrong to assume that the present development of society shows a relative or indeed absolute diminution of the number of the members of the possessing classes their number increases both relatively and absolutely if you just looked at what was happening in society he argued improvement was unmistakable society was transforming in a humane direction which signifies not hopelessness but capability of improvement in the condition of the worker he said it is not only useless it is the greatest folly to attempt to conceal this from ourselves he also broke from marx as a theorist for example by saying that his framing wasn't pluralistic it doesn't make sense to speak of workers as a homogenous mass and he criticized traditional socialist goals he called the experiments that had been done with collective societies until then sad experiences that were causing people in socialist circles to turn their backs more and more on the whole cooperative movement he even called central planning absurd he calculated how much work it might take for a government to direct an economy in an advanced european country and concluded what abundance of judgment practical knowledge talent for administration must a government or a national assembly have at its disposal to be even equal to the supreme management or managing control of such a gigantic organism in the meantime he argued that socialists were actually making progress by working democratically within the system in all advanced countries he said we see the privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie yielding step by step to democratic organizations as a result he said socialists in those countries are no longer dreaming of an imminent victory for socialism by means of a violent revolution and instead they rely more and more on work in the municipalities and other self-governing bodies then he reframes the goal of socialism he says to me that which is generally called the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing but the movement is everything this is now i believe the most highly regarded mission statement we have for democratic socialism the idea of achieving socialism by gradual reforms surfaced during marx's time which was led by ferdinand lasalle but marx found it unsettling and he wrote a letter denouncing it he said as far as we are concerned there is only one way open for almost 40 years now we have emphasized the class struggle as the fundamental driving force of history and especially the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of modern social upheaval it is impossible for us to go together with people who wish to strike this class struggle from the movement so orthodox marxists ended up defeating lasalle it's also probably worth saying that there was a socialist gradualist organization active in england for about a decade before bernstein called the fabian society which used an image of a tortoise as a symbol for gradualism but they did have an end goal of complete socialism it was bernstein's position that the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing but the movement is everything that ended up leading democratic socialist thought so bernstein is generally recognized as sort of the father of democratic socialism the gradualist argument if you think about it breaks orthodox marxism if workers are making improvements in their lives through gradual reforms then they're becoming less miserable they now have something to lose besides their chains so why would they risk their lives in a sudden and probably violent revolution if they could improve their lives peacefully and democratically by working within the system so the further we move towards reformism the further away we move from marx's prediction strictly understood this led to a split that was framed as a question within marxism reform or revolution reformists more or less went with bernstein and revolutionists stuck with the orthodox position rosa luxemburg distinguished herself by publishing a popular pamphlet affirming the revolutionary position the head of the german socialist party karl kotsky also reaffirmed the orthodox marxist position over and over but reformism seemed to be the winning argument in the long term within about 20 years most socialists in the party moved over to bernstein's camp the next and in my opinion the last major development in socialism came from vladimir lenin i think lenin's contribution to socialism can be mainly understood in two phrases neither of which he said but both i think summarize his philosophy well the first is that the revolution must happen socialism must be implemented by any means necessary lenin was both committed and creative he believed in throwing himself into a problem and figuring things out as he went something captured in a napoleonic maxim that lennon was fond of saying he was also a devout marxist who treated marx's writing like scripture like marx lennon was also a historicist he was driven by an absolute faith in his own historical destiny the destiny of leading a marxist revolution london was convinced that he would be the one to wield the conductor's baton as he put it in order to make this revolution happen the first problem that lenin had to deal with was the fact that communism wasn't spreading among the working class like marx predicted in other words class consciousness wasn't spreading lenin made this out to be not only not a problem but natural he said historically socialism including marxism comes from the upper classes from educated intellectuals he then implied that the reason why it hadn't spread among the working class was that it's too complicated he goes on at length about how difficult it is to educate someone to give them genuine class consciousness as he sees it implying this is something the working class can't figure out on their own so he concluded that class consciousness cannot come from the working class it has to come from without so that was a major break in socialism since elites are the ones who understand marxism as he argued then the revolution needs to be led by those elites in other words by a vanguard so this vanguard of elites is as he said to stand undeviatingly on the basis of marxism while it leads the whole of the political struggle with a staff of professional agitators so in orthodox marxism also called classical marxism workers are supposed to lead the revolution and hold power once the revolution succeeds in leninism elites lead the revolution and hold power once it succeeds so orthodox marxism is bottom up and lenin's philosophy is top down elites claim to rule in the name of the people lenin's philosophy of revolution by any means necessary meant that the bolsheviks maintained a certain amount of ideological and moral flexibility for example the bolsheviks made allies on their way into power but when they saw opportunity to suddenly seize power for themselves they took it then promptly turned to destroy all parties opposed to that seizure they also called themselves internationalists but then leaned into nationalism once they realized its psychological power the bolsheviks also made themselves out as the party of peace something that made them popular among russian soldiers at the time but then shortly after coming into power were embroiled in a civil war as well as wars with ukraine armenia and georgia as they all tried to separate from the soviet union and also a war with poland to give one more example the bolsheviks allowed an election once they came into power when that election refuted them they dissolved the constituent assembly ending democracy in the soviet union so for the bolsheviks getting power and implementing socialism as they saw it was the overriding goal they said what they needed to say and they did whatever they thought they needed to do in order to make that happen the second phrase to understand leninism is the phrase there shall be no dissent within the party to understand lenin's position on that you could look at how he defined the word freedom dealing with calls for free speech in his time he said freedom is a grand word but the type of freedom that socialists needed he argued was freedom from dissent freedom to express your ideas without anyone conflicting with it he said socialists need complete liberty to reveal to the working class that its interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie in lenin's framing there are only two choices socialist or bourgeois ideology there's nothing in between and within that he calls for absolute conformity to socialism he says to belittle socialist ideology in any way to deviate from it in the slightest degree means strengthening bourgeois ideology in practice this meant absolute conformity to lenin since lenin's system was a top-down one and he dictated what socialist ideology was when the bolsheviks first came into power in 1917 no other political party had ever been so closely tied to the personality of a single man as orlando fighters put it in practice this led to a style of rule that can best be described as authoritarian so marxism-leninism is an authoritarian style of socialism this also typically means an effectively one-party state marxist leninists don't tolerate political opposition if it's deemed a threat to the state they also typically use propaganda to enforce their messaging and censorship to block ideas that are deemed politically harmful this also typically means mass imprisonment of political opposition and some sort of secret police that surveils the population with lenin's cheka setting the example for that who later became the kgb the bolsheviks also heavily repressed the russian orthodox church and tried to replace their religious authority with the authority of the communist state so they encouraged a sort of new warship of the state which at first was mainly done through propaganda with lenin at its head complete with socialist icons like marx and engels replacing traditional religious ones being socialists marxist-leninist states also typically take steps to reduce socioeconomic hierarchies for example once russia's economy stabilized under lenin's new economic policy the bolsheviks spread electricity throughout the russian countryside for the first time in its history the bolsheviks also ran on an all-power to the soviets slogan which at first when the government was weak meant the direct self-rule of the peasantry soldiers and workers another bolshevik slogan was loot the looters which was apparently designed to justify working-class resentment and direct action against the rich this ended up being a winning formula for gaining power in the 20th century marxist leninists were able to use it to come into power in china southeast asia eastern europe sub-saharan africa and cuba all marxist leninists tend to be welfarist for example by trying to provide housing and full employment and health care economically speaking marxist leninists tend to be pretty experimental they tend to abolish certain types of property ownership and nationalize certain industries they've also historically run experiments with collective work namely with collective farms lenin's first few years in office were especially experimental with his war communism which even tried to abolish money and replace it with the universal system of state rationing but their policies tend to eventually settle somewhere between capitalism and communism we call marxist land as communists not because their policies are fully communistic but because on one hand they tend to call themselves that and on the other hand it helps us distinguish them from other types of thinkers who aren't inspired by communism like other types of socialists and liberals in the years following world war ii people were looking for solutions that were more moderate and hopefully more stable than those provided by authoritarians in the decades prior that led to the mass adoption of liberal democracy throughout the world especially in europe the socialists that were content to work within that system were democratic socialists and their influence led to the spread of socialist ideas throughout europe it was thought that if the government brought inequality under control for example by providing housing or health care or mandating higher wages that would make for a happier and therefore more stable society the views of liberals and socialists began to blur it became normal for liberals to want some amount of welfare and regulated capitalism and it became normal for socialists to be okay with capitalism and some amount of income inequality so people generally started to think more in terms of compromise and moderation the story of democratic socialism from world war ii onward typically isn't told as the story of standout individuals but instead it's told as the story of political parties the german socialist party had long been seen as discredited following their decision to support the kaiser and join world war one the british labor party and swedish social democrats instead took up the mantle as democratic socialists they don't tend to have any kind of end goal in mind like complete socialism and instead they focus their efforts on trying to diagnose problems in their time as they see it and solving those problems through piecemeal reforms one notable shift in democratic socialist philosophy was to move support away from central planning and from the government owning the means of production basically experiments with those policies in the 20th century didn't work out as well as many had hoped countries that tried those policies tended to struggle economically and intended to lead to all kinds of other problems like corruption and even worse which was a general understanding that the fall of the soviet union seemed to confirm you can see the change in their outlook in the change of clause 4 from the british labour party's constitution in 1918 clause 4 said that the party's purpose was to secure for the workers the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production distribution and exchange but in 1995 the clause was revised to say that the party now wants a dynamic economy serving the public interest in which the enterprise of the market and the rigor of competition are joined with the forces of partnership and cooperation to produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work and prosper with a thriving private sector and high quality public services where those undertakings essential to the common good are either owned by the public or accountable to them so you can see they're adopting a more moderate position and endorsing some amount of capitalism the swedish social democratic party was the most electorally successful democratic socialist party in the 20th century consistently winning elections in sweden between the 30s and the 80s they distinguished themselves by toning down ideas of class conflict and instead pitching a kind of universal socialism a socialism that represents the people as a whole as a party leader put it in 1934 the party and its policies don't differentiate between progress for the industrial proletariat and the agricultural classes or workers of the hand and brain instead the party's efforts are based on the conviction that society has a special responsibility to ensure care for those most in need regardless of who they are this is people's politics in the words truest meaning democratic socialism means different things to different people but generally speaking they don't want the government to own the means of production anymore and they don't want the government to direct the economy they also don't explicitly see themselves as representing the working class they see themselves as representing people's interests more broadly if i had to venture a mission statement for democratic socialists besides bernstein's i think it would go something like in a world without democratic socialists people work for capitalism in a world with democratic socialists capitalism works for people this video covered the main currents of socialism as seen through the lens of the 21st century namely marxism marxism leninism and democratic socialism there are many other types of socialism that either were briefly touched on here or not mentioned at all for example there are other types of authoritarian socialists say in south america and africa who are somewhat less committed to marx and police states but also uncommitted to open and fair elections and rule of law syndicalism could also be treated as an honorable mention in socialism syndicalism is seen as an idea that has been long dead but syndicalists were influential around the turn of the 20th century they wanted a new society where trade unions were the highest political authority but i think that's enough said to wrap things up the purpose of the video was to answer the question what is socialism i'll give a concise answer here but i think the rest of the video should be treated as the longer more thorough answer to the question so if the question is what is socialism i'd say it's a socioeconomic philosophy primarily concerned with shaping wealth institutions or economic activity according to various interpretations of equalitarianism i think that's about as simultaneously precise and broad as we can get the only alternative i can think of is to base a definition on the principle of association like bernstein did which you could also call the principle of cooperation or collectivism in my opinion equalitarianism runs deeper i see collectivism as a common solution in socialism and equalitarianism as the motivating principle that runs through the tradition so to define socialism by saying that it's based on the principle of collectivism i think is fine for basically all intents and purposes but if we're going to nitpick i'd say that it gets it subtly wrong i'd say collectivism is more of a solution and equalitarianism is the motivating principle so where does that leave us with the central planning definition that definition is based in a moment in time when that was the prevailing goal of socialists in the 21st century i don't think that's the case any longer so i think this is a case where the dictionary definition is out of date it's not the job of socialists to stay conformed to dictionary definitions it's the job of definitions to describe socialists as they exist in reality and that can change over time to sum it up i think the case for socialism can be mainly understood as resting on the following point in a society where individuals are seen as ends in themselves where individuals are able to freely develop and pursue ventures and accumulate property as they see fit the gifted the ambitious or the lucky can exploit those who are less gifted ambitious or lucky or perhaps outperform them so dramatically that those left behind understandably live lives marked with shame the logic follows whether it convinces you or not that a better society morally and perhaps economically should have protections in place to mitigate that the business of sorting out what those protections are or how thorough they should be is much of the substance of socialism and with that thank you for watching goodbye [Music]

Channel: Ryan Chapman

Views: 1,991,770

Keywords: socialism, socialism explained, what is socialism, democratic socialism, marxism, leninism, video essay, karl marx

Id: lrBRV3WK2x4

Length: 50min 22sec (3022 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 28 2022