Dictionary:

socialism

  (sō'shə-lĭz'əm)

1. Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2. The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

ADVERTISEMENT

Political-economic doctrine that, unlike Capitalism which is based on competition, seeks a cooperative society in which the means of production and distribution are owned by the government or collectively by the people.

A social system based on equality and social justice, once linked with common ownership of the means of production and distribution, but now become more fluid. Some writers consider that socialism is achieved when the major part of the means of production is owned by the state. In communist theory, socialism is the first stage on the road to full communism. It differs from communism in that it is attached to ethical and democratic values and because it allows both common and state ownership.

A political and economic theory or system of social organization based on collective or state ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Like capitalism, it takes many and diverse forms.

The word was first used in the early 1830s by the followers of Owen in Britain and those of Saint-Simon in France. By the mid-nineteenth century it denoted a vast range of reformist and revolutionary ideas in Britain, Europe, and the United States. All of them emphasized the need to transform capitalist industrial society into a much more egalitarian system in which collective well-being for all became a reality, and in which the pursuit of individual self-interest became subordinate to such values as association, community, and cooperation. There was thus an explicit emphasis on solidarity, mutual interdependence, and the possibility of achieving genuine harmony in society to replace conflict, instability, and upheaval. A critique of the social-class basis of capitalism was accompanied by the elevation of the interests of working class or proletariat to a position of supreme importance, and in some cases the principle of direct workers' control under socialism was invoked as an alternative to the rule of existing dominant classes and elites. Images of a future ‘classless’ society were used to symbolize the need for the complete abolition of socio-economic distinctions in the future: an especially important idea in the Marxist tradition. However, socialists rarely agreed on a strategy for achieving these goals, and diversity and conflict between socialist thinkers, movements, and parties proliferated, especially in the context of the First and Second International Working Men's Associations (founded respectively in 1864 and 1889). Increasingly, as the nineteenth century developed, socialist aspirations focused on the politics of the nation-state (despite much rhetoric about socialism as an international and even global force) and the harnessing of modern science, technology, and industry. Yet other, alternative visions of a socialist future—emphasizing, for example, the potential of small-scale communities and agrarianism rather than full-scale industrialization—always coexisted with the mainstream tendency. In addition doctrines such as anarchism, communism, and social democracy drew on the key values of socialism, and it was often difficult to separate the various schools and movements from each other. Thus Marx and Engels regarded themselves as ‘scientific socialists’ (as opposed to earlier ‘utopian socialists’), but saw socialism in the strict sense of the term to be a transitional phase between capitalism and full economic and social communism.

Once socialists moved into government, the focus of interest in socialism inevitably shifted from theory to practice. The most basic disputes amongst socialists have concerned the role of the state in the ownership, control, and organization of the economy (see state socialism), the relationship between socialism and democratic politics, and the tension between gradualist (e.g. parliamentary) and revolutionary strategies for change. By the 1930s two quite different systems of socialism could be seen to represent polar extremes of doctrinal interpretation: the socialism of the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the National Socialism of Hitler in Germany. Liberal, conservative, and even anarchist critics stressed the totalitarian tendency of all socialist thought. After the Second World War the division of Europe into a Western pluralist and liberal democratic bloc and an Eastern Marxist-dominated bloc further accentuated the distinction between alternative concepts of socialism. In Western Europe social democratic and Labour Parties used Keynes to support a non-Marxist approach to the regulation and control of capitalism, stressing the need to achieve social justice and equality through effective management of the economy (and including some, but certainly not total, nationalization of industry) and redistributive welfare policies (see welfare state). Social democrats accepted the reality of the ‘mixed economy’, and turned their back on the Marxist analysis of capitalism and the idea of socializing the main instruments of economic production, distribution, and exchange.

Socialism in the Western world entered a new phase of crisis and uncertainty in the 1980s and 1990s as the welfare state has found itself under increasing economic pressure, and as social democratic methods of Keynesian economic management fell victim to alternative neoliberal and new right theories. The collapse of Marxist socialism in the Soviet empire in 1989, and the failures of many Third World socialist regimes, have added further uncertainty. Efforts to modernize, revise, and adapt socialism to new historical circumstances have led to a range of new left ideas and theories over the last twenty-five years, some of them contained within existing socialist movements and parties, others achieving mobilization and support in the arenas of ‘new politics’, post-materialism, feminism, and environmentalism. There is also a conspicuous reawakening of interest amongst contemporary socialists in basic issues of radical democracy, including the changing relationship between state and civil society, the new dimensions of social pluralism, the need for enhanced opportunities for political participation, and the question of citizenship rights. Some formerly socialist parties no longer support anything recognizable as socialism—see New Labour.

— Keith Taylor

For more information on socialism, visit Britannica.com.

The word first appeared in 1827 as a description of the doctrines of Robert Owen. Socialists emphasized a social, as opposed to an individualist, approach to life, especially economic organization. Owenite socialism aimed to change society by the establishment of experimental communities, in which property was held in common and social and economic activity was organized on a co-operative basis. Between 1825 and 1847, seven Owenite communities were founded in Britain. None of them flourished long; but from the co-operativetrading stores came the modern Co-operative movement. The idea of co-operativesocialism was continued by the middle-class Christian socialists of 1848-54.

In 1884 came a revival, beginning with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), founded in 1881. It was basically Marxist. The Socialist League, under the leadership of William Morris, split off from the SDF in 1884; and in the same year the Fabian Society was formed by a group of middle-class intellectuals who derived their socialism not from Marx but from utilitarianism. In 1893 the Independent Labour Party was founded in Bradford, and despite its title was committed to socialism.

Numerically the socialists were only a small body—probably no more than 2, 000 in the 1880s and perhaps 20, 000-30, 000 by 1900. In that year a Labour Representation Committee based on an alliance of socialist societies and trade unions was formed, and in 1906 this became the Labour Party. It did not adopt a specifically socialist programme until 1918. Thereafter the Labour Party was the main vehicle for an empirical, reformist, welfare-statist type of socialism in Britain, which reached its apogee in the Labour victory of 1945 with its ensuing programme of nationalization and welfare legislation.

Political system in which the (major) means of production are not in private or institutional hands, but under social control. Typically this is seen as one aspect of a more general concern for people's equal rights to various benefits (health, education), and of a concern to limit the inequalities of wealth and power produced by the unrestricted operations of market forces. Socialism avoids the totalitarian implications of communism, and works within liberal democratic constitutions.

Socialism, as concept and social movement, has played a vital role in American society as a voice of opposition to class and sex exploitation, to race or ethnic hatreds, to imperial cupidity, and to the acquisitive mentality of the dominant classes at large. Judged by the standard of the ordered class movements of other (especially European) societies, it has been relatively weak in the United States. Yet faced with the monolith of modern capitalism, it has been surprisingly versatile, at times actually threatening the system or forcing major institutional improvements through the promulgation of a popular alternative worldview and the organization of widespread social resistance.

The origins of American socialism lay in the mostly (but not entirely) religious communal settlements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Especially notable in the Radical Reformation's diaspora to Pennsylvania, but also scattered throughout other colonies and then the newly emerging nation, these sought to offer models of social cooperation. Characteristically, the colonists engaged in nongenocidal relations with nearby Native Americans, practiced a greater degree of sexual equality than the outside world (a pattern often maintained through celibacy), and undertook agrarian or small-crafts production.

These colonies made notable contributions to American crafts and culture. The Ephrata Colony, for instance, served as a major publication and educational center in the early eighteenth century, establishing a substantial tradition of German-American literature. The Shakers, famed for their "plain ways" and their furniture, popularized communitarianism for generations. Utopian intellectuals Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, and John Humphrey Noyes, among others, participated in national debates over sexual egalitarianism and "free love." For all their inner strengths, however, the colonies lacked the capital and--especially if secular--the inner cohesion to establish themselves permanently. With the rise of heavy industry following the Civil War, they gave way to immigrant socialist movements and to utopianism of another type, more cultural or intellectual than practical.

German-American immigrants, along with Jewish immigrants at the end of the century and a scattering of other groups, established a roughly Marxian socialist presence within labor organizations (which they frequently founded), ethnic newspapers, mutual benefit societies, and cultural associations in large cities and small industrial towns. At two points they had a major impact. During the national railroad strike of 1877, the few thousand organized socialists contributed speakers, leaflets, and in the case of St. Louis (governed briefly by a strike committee), insurrectionary political leaders. In the working-class drive of the middle 1880s for an eight-hour day and for local labor parties, socialists (and "revolutionary socialists," or anarchists) often took a leading regional or local role--and suffered the brunt of the murderous repression following the Haymarket Square incident in which a bomb thrown by persons unknown killed a number of Chicago policemen.

A second wave of utopianism, following the publication of Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward (1888), briefly organized hundreds of study circles or clubs seeking a peaceful route to the classless society. This initiative, along with the waning populist movement, the catastrophic 1890s depression, and a widespread disillusionment with increasingly corporate control of nominally democratic institutions, prompted an education-minded political socialism among the native-born. Eugene V. Debs, erstwhile champion of the American Railway Union, had become by 1900 the personal symbol of this sentiment, linked to the varied immigrant socialist movements.

The Socialist party, although it elected hundreds of candidates to local office and obtained nearly a million votes for Eugene Debs's 1912 presidential candidacy, failed nevertheless to bridge the gaps between skilled and unskilled workers, and native-born whites, blacks, and immigrants. Unlike their European counterparts who encompassed a more homogeneous mass and led the working class into modern political participation, American socialists offered only a philosophy of brotherhood and the resistance of particular groups at the rough edges of all-powerful American capitalism.

For a while, the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) seemed to pose another alternative. Organized in 1905, the iww promulgated the vision of "one big union" for all workers. By the lights of socialist ideologue Daniel De Leon, the new union constituted nothing less than the basis of a new civilization, ready to substitute a purely functional economic cooperative coordination for state-dominated political rule. Although mounting great strikes among the unskilled, the iww could not overcome the combined hostility of employers, the state, and craft labor movements. With U.S. entry into World War I and the collaboration of the American Federation of Labor's leader with government aims, socialists and iww activists suffered beatings, jailings, deportations, and the suppression of their publications.

One section of the socialist movement thereafter allied itself with newly founded communist factions, amid much destructive internecine warfare, government infiltration, and antiradical propaganda. Another section joined in emerging farmer-labor movements or became largely quiescent. The rollback of labor organizations in the 1920s sealed the Left's isolation, but enjoined socialists of all kinds (particularly Christians and communists) to address otherwise virtually unchallenged racism and imperialism. In a subtle but decided reorientation, radicals became the often lonely champions of a multiracial democratic American society.

The depression years saw a revival of socialist movements not so much in a directly political sense as in activity within labor and reform causes. The struggles of the unemployed, the victims of racism, the Spanish Republicans, and above all the unskilled workers enabled the Left to mount one fairly impressive political effort (Norman Thomas's 1932 bid for the presidency) and many dramatic campaigns. Industrial unions and progressive ethnic movements, by the end of the 1930s, fairly radiated a socialistic consciousness, even as they leaned upon the presence of the New Deal for political legitimation. Leftish political figures, such as New York congressman Vito Marcantonio, wove immigrant aspirations with a militantly democratic internationalism. Intellectual influences from the Left meanwhile fairly dominated a generation of writers and artists. Leaders of the communist Left, Earl Browder the most prominent among them, briefly gained, if not respectability, at least a wide hearing.

The approach of World War II, and the political obeisance of communists to Moscow's direction, permitted a powerful engine of political repression to surface within Congress and to utilize the infiltration and intimidation the fbi had already set in motion. The outbreak of the cold war brought with it a heresy-hunting national mood. The president, Congress, the Justice Department, the commercial press, the Catholic church, employers, compliant labor leaders, and a wing of prestigious liberals joined to isolate dissent and dissenters. Socialists of all kinds faded away, and only scatterings of radicals openly opposed the arms race, U.S. foreign adventures, and neocolonialism in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The Vietnam War, and the unwillingness of institutional authorities to redress adequately the full consequences of racism, brought a new socialist movement into being, but only briefly. Student opposition to the war met with tenacious institutional resistance by campus authorities and wide public denunciation by opinion leaders--conservative and liberal alike--effectively containing the transformational potential of "the movement." Racial protests, where not deflected by ameliorative social programs, were uprooted through massive government infiltration, harassment, and arrest of known leaders. Thus hampered, the New Left could propose only the possibility of a new and better society, free of class, sexual, racial, and imperial depredations.

With the presidential victory of Richard Nixon in 1972, and the end of the Vietnam War, that socialist movement disappeared as well. In the decades since, its traces could best be found in resistance movements against continued U.S. aggression in Latin America, in feminist and homosexual causes, and in ecological opposition to globe-depleting economics.

Bibliography:

Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (1987).

Author:

Paul M. Buhle

See also Debs, Eugene V.; Elections: 1912; Haymarket Affair; Industrial Workers of the World; New Left; Populism; Radicalism; Railroad Strike of 1877; Shakers; Socialist Party; Utopian Communities.

Broadly speaking, socialism is the ideology of collective ownership of the means of production and the joint distribution of goods. There were two principal currents in Russian socialism. One held that the peasants, who comprised more than 80 percent of the population, would be the driving force in the creation of the new society; and the other assigned that role to the industrial proletariat. The first current was initially advocated by Alexander Herzen (1812 - 1870), who had been a supporter of the Decembrists and left Russia for the West in 1847 to escape persecution. The failure of the Revolutions of 1848, which he attributed to the conservatism and attachment to private property of most Europeans, disappointed him deeply. He concluded that the chances for socialism were much better in his native country because the peasant commune had accustomed the Russian people to communal life and egalitarianism. The Russian peasant, Herzen contended, "has no morality save that which flows instinctively, naturally, from his communism." These ideas came to be known as narodnichestvo, which literally means "populism" but is perhaps better translated as "Russian socialism." Taken up by such thinkers and activists as Mikhail A. Bakunin (a radical anarchist), Nikolai K. Mikhailovsky, and Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, the populists gained a substantial following among the intelligentsia by the 1860s and 1870s. Although all populists agreed that Russia could by-pass capitalism in its evolution toward socialism, there was considerable disagreement over the means to achieve the final goal. Toward the end of his life, Herzen believed that socialism could be attained by peaceful means. Peter I. Lavrov was another strong advocate of peaceful methods; from the 1860s until his death in 1900 he argued that it was the obligation of intellectuals to educate the people politically and thus prepare them to undertake their own liberation. Chernyshevsky, on the other hand, did not believe that force could be avoided.

The failed attempt by the populist Dmitry V. Karakozov to assassinate Alexander II in 1866 and the ensuring repression prompted many revolutionary intellectuals to opt for peaceful tactics. Early in the 1870s, idealistic young narodniki launched the Go to the People movement; hundreds of them moved to the countryside and lived with the peasants in order to teach them to read and write as well as the rudiments of modern technology. But the ultimate goal of the populists was to prepare the masses for the revolution. Many peasants were baffled by the visitors and feared they were trying to lead them astray. Some peasants even turned them in to the police, who in the mid-1870s arrested many of the populists, bringing the well-intentioned project to a close. But the ideas of the populists remained alive and were incorporated by the largest socialist movement in Russia, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), founded in 1902. The SRs advocated the transfer of all land to peasant communes or local associations, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to all who wished to earn their living by farming. Industry would be similarly socialized. Although the Socialist Revolutionaries insisted that the final goal, socialism, must be achieved by means of persuasion, they tolerated the "Combat Organization," an independent organ of the party that carried out dozens of political assassinations. Political terror, many believed, was necessary to bring about the dismantling of the autocratic regime.

In the meantime, in the late 1870s, a small group of intellectuals led by Georgy V. Plekhanov founded a Marxist movement in the name of the industrial working class, and this represented the second major current in Russian socialism. The Marxists contended that Russia's development would be similar to trends in Central and Western Europe. The country would be industrialized, and would undergo a bourgeois revolution during which the autocratic system would be replaced by a constitutional order dominated by a middle class committed to capitalism. Eventually, when industrialization had reached maturity and the proletariat had become a powerful force, it would stage a second, socialist revolution. In 1898, the Russian Marxists founded the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, which five years later split into two factions.

The split occurred over the seemingly minor question of how to define a party member, but it soon turned out that the differences between the Bolsheviks (majoritarians) led by Vladimir I. Lenin and the Mensheviks (minoritarians) led by Yuli O. Martov and Paul B. Axelrod touched on fundamental issues. Lenin, in keeping with views he had expressed in 1902 in What Is to Be Done?, favored a highly centralized, elitist, hierarchically organized political party, whereas the Mensheviks stressed the necessity and desirability of broad working-class participation in the movement's affairs and in the coming revolutionary events. In short order, it also became evident that while both factions subscribed to a revolutionary course, the Mensheviks tended to adopt more moderate tactics than did the Bolsheviks.

On November 7, 1917, after the country had endured three years of war that caused untold devastation and loss of life and eight months of revolutionary turbulence, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government, which consisted of moderates committed to democracy and had been formed when the tsarist regime collapsed earlier that year, in March. Then, on November 8, one day after the Bolsheviks had formed a new government, Lenin sought to placate the peasants, still the vast majority of the population, by adopting the SR land program. He ordered the abrogation of the property rights of the nobility and placed land in the rural regions at the disposal of land committees and district soviets of peasants' deputies for distribution to the peasants. But the Bolsheviks also remained faithful to their own program by introducing workers' control in industry and in commercial and agricultural enterprises, abolishing distinctions and special privileges based on class, eliminating titles in the army, and outlawing inequality in wages. Lenin was convinced that the economically more advanced countries of Europe with large proletarian populations would soon follow Russia's example in adopting socialism.

When this did not happen, his successor, Josef V. Stalin, in 1924 formulated the doctrine of "socialism in one country," according to which Russia was strong enough economically to reach the final goal of socialism by itself. Four years later, the Soviet government launched a second revolution by forcing the peasants into collectives and speeding up the process of industrialization. Much more so than ever before, the major economic decisions were now made by officials in Moscow. Then, in 1936, Stalin formally declared that the goal of socialism had in fact been attained. This claim was disputed by Leon D. Trotsky, the man he had defeated in the struggle over the leadership of the country after Lenin's death in 1924. Trotsky maintained that socialism could triumph only on a worldwide basis. Stalinist socialism remained the regnant ideology of the country until 1991, although many Stalinist methods of rule were gradually abandoned following Stalin's death in 1953.

Bibliography

Baron, Samuel H. (1963). Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marxism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Haimson, Leopold H. (1955). The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lampert, Evgenii. (1965). Sons against Fathers: Studies in Russian Radicalism and Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Malia, Martin. (1961). Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 1812 - 1855. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Walicki, Andrzej. (1995). Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Woehrlin, William F. (1971). Chernishevskii: The Man and the Journalist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wolfe, Bertram D. (1948). Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical Study. New York: Dial Press.

—ABRAHAM ASCHER

An economic and social theory that seeks to maximize wealth and opportunity for all people through public ownership and control of industries and social services.

The general goal of socialism is to maximize wealth and opportunity, or to minimize human suffering, through public control of industry and social services. Socialism is an alternative to capitalism, where the means and profits of production are privately held. Socialism became a strong international movement in the early nineteenth century as the Industrial Revolution brought great changes to production methods and capacities and led to a decline in working conditions. Socialist writers and agitators in the United States helped fuel the labor movement but were often branded as radicals and jailed under a variety of laws punishing attempts to overthrow the government. Although government programs such as Social Security and welfare incorporate some socialist tenets, socialism has never posed a serious challenge to capitalism in the United States.

One of the early forms of socialism was the communitarian movement, popularized by the brothers George and Frederick Evans, who came to New York from England in 1820. Communitarianism, which was based on the ideals of the French theorists Jean-Jacques Rousseau and François-Noël Babeuf, involved the pursuit of utopian living in small cooperative communities. Cooperative living gained greater popularity under the utopian socialists, such as the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen and the French philosopher Charles Fourier. Owen's followers established a self-sufficient utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825 and Fourier's followers did the same in the 1830s and 1840s on the east coast. Both of these efforts failed, however.

In 1848 the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels introduced scientific socialism with their extremely influential work, the Communist Manifesto. Scientific socialism became the definitive ideology of a second, more powerful phase of socialism. Scientific socialism applied the dialectic method of the German philosopher Georg Hegel to the political and social spheres. Using discussion and reasoning as a form of intellectual investigation, Marx and Engels identified a historical progression in human society from slavery to feudalism and finally to capitalism. Under capitalism — defined as a global system based on technology transcending national boundaries— society was divided into two components: the bourgeoisie, who owned the methods of production, and the proletariat, the laborers who operated the production facilities to produce goods. Marx and Engels predicted the disappearance of the middle class and ultimately a revolution as the vast proletariat wrested the methods of production from the control of the small bourgeoisie elite. This revolution would usher in an era when resources were owned by the people as a whole and markets were subject to cooperative administration.

The Communist Manifesto made less of an impact in the United States than in Europe, in part because the nation's attention was focused on the issue of slavery and the growing division between the North and South. When these tensions escalated into the Civil War, a great increase in industrialization led to the emergence of socialist labor organizations. At the same time, political refugees from Europe contributed socialist theories to labor and political movements. In 1866 socialists who had been heavily influenced by German immigrants helped create the National Labor Union. Their efforts led to an 1868 statute (15 Stat. 77) establishing the eight-hour day for federal government workers; however, it went ignored and unenforced. The National Labor Union disappeared a few years after the death of its founder, William Sylvis, in 1869, but the ties between labor and socialism remained.

As socialists across Europe and the United States debated and extrapolated on Marx's initial definitions and their application under widely varying conditions, socialism gradually divided into three major philosophies: revisionism, anarchism, and bolshevism. Revisionist socialism promoted gradual reform, compromise, and nonviolence. Initially, "reform" meant the nationalization of state and local public works and large-scale industries. Dedicated to democratic ideals, revisionists believed they could achieve civilized progress and higher consciousness through economic justice and complete equality.

Anarchic socialism, best exemplified by the Russian Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), sought the abolition of both property and the state. Under anarchic socialism society would be composed of small collectives of producers, distributors, and consumers. Anarchism reflected the desire of the dispossessed to eliminate bourgeois institutions altogether. Like its contemporary syndicalism in France, anarchic socialism sought the immediate implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Anarchic socialism and its derivations failed to attract a mass following, but its doctrines of disrespect for political institutions and immediate action found a home in the Industrial Workers of the World.

Bolshevism advocated the use of a select revolutionary cadre to seize control of the state. Bolshevists asserted that this cadre was needed to raise the consciousness of the proletariat and move toward a socialist future through absolute dictatorship. Their preferred method of redistributing wealth and resources was authoritarian collectivism, commonly known as Communism. Under authoritarian collectivism the state would own and distribute all goods and services. In envisioning this role for the state, the Bolshevists rejected both classical and theoretical socialism. Their only tie to classical socialism, besides the rhetorical one, was their view of the state as having a role in ameliorating the suffering brought about by industrial capitalism.

The Knights of Labor, which was formed in 1871 in Philadelphia, became the first truly national and broadly inclusive union in the United States. Revisionists worked within this union and other labor and third-party groups, often in leadership roles, to achieve definable goals that would culminate in a socialist state. Preaching reform, education, and cooperation, the union grew in numbers until 1886. In May of that year, during a strike sanctioned by the Knights against the McCormick Harvester plant in Chicago, an unknown person threw a bomb into the ranks of police sent to disperse a public gathering organized by anarchist socialists. The Haymarket Riot, as it became known, set the stage for the first Red scare in U.S. history. Eight anarchist leaders were charged with murder on the basis of speech defined as conspiracy. The use of a judge-selected jury and his instructions to them led to the conviction of the anarchists, four of whom were sentenced to death and hanged. The U.S. Supreme Court could find no principle of federal law to review the case.

The reaction that followed the riot signaled the end of anarchism as a force in U.S. politics. It was also the end of the first phase of inclusive, or industrial unionism, as opposed to trade unions. Under the pressure of economic downturns, factionalization, and the stigma of being affiliated with anarchists, the Knights of Labor declined into a negligible force.

In 1887 revisionists created the Socialist Labor party. Beset with internal strife over policy, its refutation of trade unionism led to its demise. Only the reemergence of the theory of "one big union" brought socialism back as a force in U.S. politics. Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) became a national figure at this time, having previously proved his abilities as a leader and orator as head of the American Railway Union (ARU). The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, ostensibly passed to curb the accelerating trend of monopolization, was used to stop the ARU's strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in 1895. When the ARU ignored the injunction granted under authority of the act, Debs was sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of court. On appeal the sentence was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564, 15 S. Ct. 900, 39 L. Ed. 1092 (1895). Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the revisionists attempted to unionize various companies but suffered a series of defeats, as at Andrew Carnegie's Homestead Steel in 1892, where private armies and the Pennsylvania state militia were used to break up the strike. Such defeats ultimately led the revisionists to join with Progressives and Populists to form the Social Democratic party in 1905.

In the early twentieth century, socialists worked with members of the Progressive movement in calling for changes to currency and taxation, an eight-hour day, an end to adulteration of food, more attention to product safety, improved working conditions, urban sanitation, and relief for the poor and homeless. Congress took notice of these demands and passed various laws granting the government the authority to regulate industry. As an electoral force, socialism peaked in 1912, when Debs garnered six percent of the popular vote.

The Supreme Court, however, was slow to recognize workers' rights and government regulation of industry. The Court repeatedly struck down state laws restricting the hours women and children could work on the ground that the laws violated the doctrine of liberty of contract. In 1910, the Court forced Standard Oil to divest itself of some of its operations; the decision was the first real antitrust victory, although it was limited in scope. Standard Oil v. United States, 221 U.S. 1, 31 S. Ct. 502. Not until Muller v. Oregon (208 U.S. 412, 28 S. Ct. 324, 52 L. Ed. 551) in 1908 did the Court recognize a limited legislative right to protect health and morals.

During World War I (1914-1918) socialism faced new setbacks. In the United States, the Espionage Act of 1917 (codified in scattered sections of 22 and 50 U.S.C.A.) was used to prevent socialist literature from being sent through the mail. The Industrial Workers of the World, which had been formed in 1905 and represented the legacy of direct action advocated by the earlier anarchists, was one of the main targets of the wartime hysteria. The "Wobblies," as they were called, and their leaders, William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood and Mary Harris Jones, were effectively silenced during this period. Debs was jailed again, this time for interfering with military recruitment in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Again the Supreme Court upheld the conviction (Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211, 39 S. Ct. 252, 63 L. Ed. 566 [1919]). Many other socialists were imprisoned for antiwar activities.

After World War I democratic socialists came into power, alone or as part of coalition governments, in Germany, France, Great Britain, and Sweden. They all faced the problem of how to make socialist principles viable within a capitalist system. Only in Sweden, and only after a lengthy conflict, were labor and capital able to cooperate to establish a socialist system without abandoning socialism's philosophic foundation.

In the United States, socialists faced another wave of repression during the strikes that erupted after the war. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had aroused new fears of Bolshevism, which led to greater intolerance. Under the auspices of the Justice Department, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer conducted raids against individuals and organizations considered a threat to U.S. institutions. The nationwide arrest of dissidents ultimately prompted the Supreme Court to reconsider federal protection of individual rights. Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis D. Brandeis argued for greater protection of the right to voice unpopular ideas.

The Great Depression marked another turning point for socialism. Overproduction, underconsumption, and speculation led to an implosion of markets, a result predicted by Marx. One response was powerful centralized governments in the form of totalitarian regimes such as those of Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Socialism was revived by the British economist John Maynard Keynes who advocated that the government stimulate consumption and investment during economic downturns. Previously used only on a limited scale, deficit financing, as it came to be called, was now used by socialists in Europe and liberals in the United States to revive capitalism. Many countries still use Keynesian economics to provide a bridge between capitalism and socialism.

As the Depression deepened from 1929 to 1933, U.S. socialism attracted more adherents, but its influence was still relatively slight. In the 1932 presidential elections, Socialist party candidate Norman M. Thomas won only 267,000 votes. Increasingly made up of middle-class intellectuals, socialists became isolated from the needs and demands of workers. Socialism's greatest achievement during this period was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program, which expanded government services to help the poor and stimulate economic growth. The Supreme Court, however, struck down much of the New Deal legislation, most notably, the National Industrial Recovery Act (48 Stat. 195) in 1935 (A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 55 S. Ct. 837, 79 L. Ed. 1570). Only when Roosevelt threatened to enlarge the Court to include justices with his perspective did the Court begin to uphold New Deal legislation.

The Wagner Act, also known as National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (29 U.S.C.A. § 151 et seq.), the first recognition of labor's right to organize, was the culmination of eighty years of socialist-labor efforts. Ironically, however, the socialists' message lost its urgency with the broadening of workers' rights and regulatory reform. With the coming of the cold war, politicians and the public began to equate socialism with Communism. People with socialist backgrounds, who had been part of the Roosevelt administration, were denied employment, fired, and blacklisted during the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1951, in Dennis v. United States (341 U.S. 494, 71 S. Ct. 857, 95 L. Ed. 1137), the Supreme Court upheld the Smith Act (18 U.S.C.A. § 2385), which had been passed in 1940. The decision established the legality of anti-subversive legislation under the theory that a vast underground horde of Communists and "fellow travelers" was working for the violent overthrow of the government. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin proclaimed that Communists had infiltrated U.S. politics on a broad scale. Meanwhile the House Un-American Activities Committee tried suspects in the popular media, destroying numerous careers in the arts, entertainment, and politics. Only when McCarthy charged that the Army had been infiltrated by Communists and then failed to prove his allegations did his power decline.

By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a et seq.) was passed in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, socialist precepts had again become acceptable topics of conversation. The remedies politicians and scholars proposed for urban blight, poverty, and inequitable distribution of wealth drew heavily on the traditional socialist tenet that the state should play a role in alleviating suffering and directing society toward desirable ends. The socialist perspective on the treatment of third-world nations in the transnational capitalist system also influenced protests against the Vietnam War.

Socialists, such as Debs, have argued that the legal system under capitalism serves only to protect the status quo, that is, the control of the wealthy over the means of production. Capitalists make a similar criticism of law under socialism, arguing that socialist regimes use law as a means of implementing policy. Widespread abuse of the law under either system can lead to revolution. The collapse of the iron curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s brought an end to Communism's biggest regime and led to the renaming of many "socialist" states. Yet the vast disparities in resources that exist between wealthy and poor nations and between individuals keep the state control of industry and resources in practice, or under consideration, in many of the world's countries.

See: Dennis v. United States; Jurisprudence; Labor Law; Labor Union.

An economic system in which the production and distribution of goods are controlled substantially by the government rather than by private enterprise, and in which cooperation rather than competition guides economic activity. There are many varieties of socialism. Some socialists tolerate capitalism, as long as the government maintains the dominant influence over the economy; others insist on an abolition of private enterprise. All communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - socialisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
socialisme

Français (French)
n. - socialisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Sozialismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - σοσιαλισμός

Italiano (Italian)
socialismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - socialismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
социализм

Español (Spanish)
n. - socialismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - socialism

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
社会主义, 社会主义运动

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 社會主義, 社會主義運動

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 사회주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 社会主義

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) نظريه سياسيه وأقتصاديه لنظام أجتماعي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שתפנות, סוציאליזם‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.