What should we do?

A whirlwind tour of the history of socialism and its relevance today.

What is socialism?

There are a great variety of political movements and strains of political thought that can be grouped under the heading of "socialism". In Britain, we've had Diggers, Levellers, Luddites, Chartists, co-operative Owenites and Christian socialists; also Fabians, Labourites and guild socialists. In France, the conspiracy of equals and the Paris communards, the syndicalists' revolutionary unionism. In Russia, the anarcho-communism of Prince Peter Kropotkin and the writings of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which including a classic novel of social propaganda, What is to be Done?, which inspired both the peasant populists and Lenin. In America, the Knights of Labour, Eugene Debs and the Wobblies. Not forgetting Marxism in its 57 varieties.

The main distinctive idea that runs through them is probably egalitarianism, the striving for equality in social, economic and political life. In this, it should be-but has not always been in fact-unswervingly democratic and anti-elitist, in favour of the maximum possible popular control, not only of political power, but also of social and economic power. I would say it is also inescapably a philosophy of freedom, because it recognises that the fates of individuals, their room to manoeuvre and to develop, and the kinds of societies that they live in are inseparably intertwined.

So socialism aims to contribute to the political, cultural and institutional changes that might help to equip the majority working population with the self-confidence, skills and opportunities to shape the outcomes of their own lives, individually and together. But it aims to do this not only in Britain, or in Europe, but everywhere. This is another impulse that is often considered to be essential to socialism: internationalism. The well being of people in China, Poland or Angola is not less important to me than that of people in Britain. On the other hand, neither is it more important.

Precursors, emergence, split and chance of reconciliation

Some of the main elements of socialist thinking can be traced back to the distant past. An example from the 16th century would be Thomas More's Utopia, a word he invented meaning "nowhere". (To tie-in with our constituency, that's why William Morris's socialist novel of the 19th century is called News from Nowhere.) In the blurb, he (or his publicist!) describes the work modestly as "A pamphlet truly golden, no less beneficial than enjoyable concerning the republic's best state". He argues for the abolition of private property, because he thinks that the uneven distribution of wealth that it produces is unjust. For him, a more equal distribution of wealth would do away with two equally objectionable social outcomes: the idleness of the rich and the excessive work load of the poor. That's the upside. On the other side, the "good" society he imagines is rigidly regimented, and its rulers are selected from a "gifted" group-an idea reminiscent of Plato's philosopher kings that, unfortunately, has tended to crop up periodically in various guises in the history of the socialist movement.

So there are precursors to socialist ideas before the modern era. But socialism really only starts to develop as a social and political force with the industrialisation and urbanisation that were part and parcel of the development and spread of capitalism. (The purpose of production under capitalism is to sell output at a price above what it cost to make. In pre-capitalist agrarian economies-in Europe, usually called feudalism-production of crops and small manufactures was for use by those who produced them (the peasants or serfs), minus the tribute ceded to the feudal lord in return for military "protection".) This is because the intensification of competition between businesses under early capitalism triggered fluctuations in wages and working conditions that encouraged the establishment by workers and artisans of their own organisations in order to protect and educate themselves.

Other important schools of thought feeding into socialist ideas, both at the start and ever since, are Renaissance humanism, which puts people at the centre of things, and the European Enlightenment, which emphasises reason, evidence and the possibility of social improvement.

Of these broader trends, probably the most important distinction has been-a little confusingly-between social democracy and socialism. In the 19th century, these terms were more or less interchangeable, but today the differences between them are conventionally summarised as accommodation or hostility to private property, capitalism and business; an emphasis on gradual versus rapid political and social change, of reform versus revolution; of democratic as against authoritarian methods, acceptance of parliamentary democracy versus the rejection of it. This split, although present earlier, was crystallised by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. However, in the wake of first the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and now the severe and ongoing crisis of the most recent incarnation of global capitalism since 2007-especially in the advanced capitalist countries, like ours-there may be some grounds for believing that the hard and fast divisions between the two are, in places, starting to dissolve, and that this change is to be welcomed. 

Social democracy

The main line of social democratic belief is in the amelioration of the worst social and economic effects of capitalism through evolutionary reforms, using the existing political system. It is characterised by gradualism, as well as accommodation or even partnership with capitalism, and at least parts of the capitalist class.

In this sense, the writings of the early 19th century of Henri de Saint-Simon can be seen as foreshadowing the social democratic approach. Saint-Simon was a slightly mad aristocrat with a fondness for grandiose schemes, but who fought for the republic in the French revolution. He thought it was in the interests of workers and peasants to join with industrialists to sweep away the power of the "unproductive" land owners and their hangers on in the clergy. But he was not wholly a democrat. With the "parasites" (the landowners and the clergy) tamed politically and their social and economic power checked, he imagined business leaders and intellectuals using industry and science gradually to raise the incomes and the educational-cultural level of the working population, who might in this way eventually rule themselves. (Again, a bit similar to Plato and Thomas More; also, arguably, Leninism.)

In Britain, the Chartists' campaign for parliamentary reform is almost a case study of proto-social democratic politics. Chartism was a working class movement that rose in the 1830s in response to the Corn Laws, which restricted grain imports and so put up the price of food, hitting the livelihoods to the working class and the urban poor in particular. It had a list of political demands, or a charter, to change the workings of parliament as follows:

• Universal male suffrage
• Secret ballot
• Equal sized constituencies
• Abolition of property qualification for MPs
• Pay for MPs
• Annual parliament.

It took until 1918 to achieve five of the six demands, or around 80 years. The sixth demand, for an annually chosen parliament, has remained elusive.

Continental social democracy and British Labourism can be linked through the association of Eduard Bernstein with the Fabians in the 1880s.

There is more than an inkling of reformism in the socialism of Ferdinand Lassale, the great rival of Marx for the leadership of the early German socialist movement. I especially like his idea of producer (rather than consumer) co-operatives which, supported by state capital, might provide a way for the working class to become its own collective employer, and of countering the "inevitability" of falling wages. But it was first most cogently and dramatically set out by Eduard Bernstein. 

In contrast to the middle class Marx and Engels, whose fathers were a lawyer and a cotton manufacturer, respectively, Bernstein's dad was a train driver. Starting off as a bank clerk, Bernstein educated himself through his involvement in the budding socialist movement in Germany. He was instrumental in helping to create a unified German workers' party in Gotha 1875, and in 1891 wrote the second "practical" part of its political programme (the Erfurt programme). Following Bismarck's anti-socialist laws of the late 1870s, he left Germany and ended up eventually in Britain, became friends with Engels and, eventually, the executor of his literary estate. He edited the party newspaper for ten years and became, alongside Karl Kautsky, one of its two most well-known thinkers or "theoreticians".

In was because of this position as the virtual inheritor of the mantle of Marx and Engels that Bernstein's open and systematic profession of reformism with the publication of The Prerequisites for Socialism (known in English as Evolutionary Socialism) made such waves in European socialist circles at the end of the 1890s. This was knows as the revisionist controversy. In particular he:

• rejected the ideas that the collapse of capitalism was inevitable and that class struggle was essential to realise socialism;
• thought capitalism, through state intervention, was capable of overcoming its worst tendencies regarding unemployment, distribution and overproduction;
• thought parliamentary democracy could pave the way to socialism through promotion of workers' rights, as well as by co-operation with both peasants and dissatisfied elements of the middle class; and
• emphasised the moral case for socialism: it wasn't inevitable, but "ought to be".

The Fabian Society was started by a small group of middle class intellectuals (boo!) to xxx. The clue is the name: Fabius Maxiumus was a Roman general known for his tactic of postponing battle until the enemy was worm out by the chase.

Socialism

Marxism is the most profound of the recognisable bodies of socialist thought, but it is also the most problematic. It has had the most impact, intellectually and historically, but a great deal of this has been tremendously destructive and negative. (There are plenty of non-Marxist strands of socialist thought, too, such as syndicalism, and the British and US democratic socialists.)

The main line of Marxist thinking is that the amelioration of the worst effects of capitalism merely serves to lengthen the lifespan of an unjust economic system, but cannot prevent its eventual decline. This is because interests of the vast majority of society-the working class-and the capitalist class are mutually incompatible over the long run. 

Overview of the envisaged pattern of social development, from earliest times into the future

An outline of the structure of society and the dynamics of economic and political development under capitalism according to classical Marxism goes like this: 

• In an unforgiving natural world, people club together to make a living. But only some ways of organising work in order to do this are compatible with the kinds of tools and equipment available. 
• These distinctive ways of organising work shape the kinds of social and political institutions, and so also the ideas and perceptions, that are compatible them, that grow out of and support them as part of the same living, integrated social whole. 
• One benefit of co-operation is social and technological improvement: better tools and/or better social organisation to make the best use of those tools. 
• Because of this, an excess of goods develops above what is needed for subsistence. With this comes the possibility of one social group living from the labour of others (classes), as well as the separation of intellectual and physical work. 
• Conflict between classes over who gets what from the emerging surplus is the great motive force of social and political change throughout history. 
• Under capitalism, market competition is an additional force driving forward economic, social and especially technological change, conditioning the political and social landscape on which the class struggle takes place, placing limits on what is possible, but also creating new opportunities.
• Capitalism is just such an ensemble of social, political and economic institutions suited to a characteristic way of organising the process of wresting a living from the hostile natural world and distributing the spoils. Centrally, it is based on the employment of labourers by owners to work machines and equipment in return for a wage, with a view to selling production above cost. This is the "general light" in which all the other socio-economic institutions bathe. 
• " As capitalist development spreads within and across countries, it produces an expanding section of the population-the working class-whose awareness of their common interests in opposition to capitalism, as well as their capacity to pursue these interests politically, is fostered by numerous socio-economic processes within the system.
• In contrast, the inner workings of the capitalist system tend to produce economic breakdowns of increasing severity. The short-term peaks and troughs of each business cycle tend to rise more weakly and fall more steeply around a general, economy-wide tendency for profitability to decline, as the ratio of new value produced to capital inputs inevitably declines under the impetus from market competition to invest. 
• As the economic mechanisms that hold capitalism together begin to malfunction ever more widely, the institutional mechanisms needed to stabilise capitalist ownership become less automatic and require more force. Political repression and state violence are practical proof that the state apparatus developed within capitalism-its parliaments, judiciaries, legal systems, bureaucracies, police forces and armies-is not neutral between economic systems, as so between classes, but is integral to the stable reproduction of the existing one.
• However, enduring economic weakness eventually undermines capitalism's stabilising institutions too. At some point, therefore, workers' organisations are strong enough, and those of the capitalist economy and state weak enough, for the existing order to be overthrown. 
• To replace it with what? Probably socialism. Why? Because a more thoroughgoing development of democracy-encompassing the economy and working life, as well as social policy and politics-reflects in a systematic way the common interests of the working class as they have developed within capitalism, in opposition to it. 
• The pivotal role of workers' organisations in the struggle against the previous, recently defeated economic system puts them in a unique position, with the political experience and legitimacy to begin to set up the new economic, social and political institutions that stabilise and reproduce the collective interests of the working class, just as the institutions of capitalism did so for the capitalist class. The difference is that the collective interests, and the social and political values developed by the working class under capitalism are also more of less universal human interests and values, the interests and values of humanity in general.

Some criticisms of Marxism

Not all criticisms of Marxism are worth bothering with, because they are often based on caricatures of what it says. But here are some questions that are worth thinking about:

• Does capitalism have a tendency towards self-destruction? Profits may be lower in advanced capitalist economies than in immature ones, but evidence for a continuous long-term tendency towards a dwindling of profits on global scale has been harder to track down. 
• Is labour really the only source of value? The labour theory of value says that the special quality of the commodity that the worker sells (labour power) is the source of all value, and so profits, in a capitalist economy. But this may well be wrong. "The value of commodities should be thought of as determined by the amount of scarce resources of all sorts that are embodied in their production, not just labour". And if there is no reason to think that labour power is the sole source of value, then there is no need expect that a rise of the ratio of capital to labour-as market competition drives capital investment-will bring about a decline in profitability over the long-run that would make it ever harder for capitalist economic structures to reproduce themselves.
• Is there a tendency towards polarisation and simplification of classes? It seems more the case that, at least in the advanced West, working class structures have become more complex and stratified. As a result, to the common experience of working life that is supposed to build collective values and political organisations may be absent. Also, capitalist democracies have offered real opportunities and some political space for working people to organise to improve their lives within capitalism, through compromise and co-operation between classes, in this way offsetting for long periods the development and attraction of anti-system ideas and political groups.
• Is the aftermath of a violent political revolution the best political terrain on which to conduct extensive and probably very lengthy experiments in democratic social and economic institution building? For example, revolutionary parties may be effective in some conditions in toppling states, but not in developing egalitarian democratic ones. 

Marx's schematic presentation in his own words

"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close."

Why bother?

The main purpose of Labour politics is to help to develop social, economic, political and legal changes that give people a better chance to make the most of their lives. Firstly, this means getting Labour candidates elected to public office, where they have the authority and resources to deal with bit the grand overarching issues and the local nitty-gritty ones, from fixing the drains on Abbey Road or the parking in Nuxley Village to the great question of national economy or foreign policy of the day. But it also that Labour members equip themselves with the ideas and skills so that the party becomes a self-renewing and effective organisation, a political force suited to this society as it is now, in a changed and changing global and ideological context.

So, how is it now? What is the changed context?

The great crisis in global capitalism that had been bubbling up beneath the boom of the early 2000s—the greatest economic boom in human history—first surfaced in 2007 as a series of spectacular crashes in a number of property markets around the world.

The scale of the wave of panic and fear ripping through world financial markets became too destructive to ignore just over a year later with the fall of several of the ancient pillars of investment banking, most visibly the spectacular collapse of the US Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which led, among other things, to a fall of around $10trn in equity values internationally, the large-scale withdrawal of investment across borders, the plummeting of national currencies, a steep contraction of demand, a boost to inflation and rising unemployment.

Last year’s lurch of the euro zone towards crisis was directly linked to the earlier great recession because of the legacy of debt that it left with banks, businesses, households and governments. While these institutions are weighed down by debt, their spending or lending tends to be restrained, depressing both business investment and demand for household goods. In the early months of 2012 the offer and acceptance of vast loans from the European Central Bank (ECB) to the European banks, valued at more or less the size of everything made or sold in the British economy in a year, seemed to pull the euro area back from a collapse that would most likely trigger a depression across the world, and at least on the scale—and with all the associated uncertain social and political outcomes—of the socioeconomic convulsions that tore Europe apart in the 1930s.

But the fundamental issues that face European institutions—that they hold together a collection of economies with different structures, at different levels of development, with different business cycles and policy needs, with a wide spectrum of political cultures—have not been solved. And until they are, nervous financial markets could send the situation spinning out of control at any time—as in April, when concerns rose again about Spanish budget policy and debt, or again in May following the elections in France and Greece.

In this context: Our political tasks

There is no escape for anyone from the consequences of these events, but, as it turns out, reports on the death of history—which is the same as saying the final and eternal triumph of liberal capitalist democracy—have been greatly exaggerated.

What the Labour Party needs to do, what individual party members needs to do, is adapt to this enormous change of the international context in which British economic and political life takes place. We must always periodically, personally and as a political party, question and reinvent our political beliefs. We need both to adapt and to learn from the past, but not wholesale or uncritically from pre-existing models of socialism or social democracy—which is the essence of the slightly pintless and mutually cancelling skirmishes between Old and New Labours. Because this is not 1997, not least for the very positive reason that we no longer find ourselves submerged beneath the ruling ideology that in Britain took the name of Thatcherism, but in Europe and the West more generally signalled at core a fight-back by owners against the infringements on property rights by the post-war welfare or liberal/social democratic consensus. Rather, this ideology finds itself in retreat—yet keeps going, zombie-like, in part because of the momentum of habit, and in part because of a lack of imagination of what else could be done instead, of what else could be put in its place. That is, just as it is not 1997, we should also be keenly aware that it is not the 1950s or 60s, the heyday of the short-lived post-war social democratic consensus. Still less is it 1917, as in the fantasies of the conservative and backward-looking Bolshevik re-enactment societies that nowadays often pass for the far left in the West.

Sometimes the lofty language and abstract concerns of political philosophy can seem a long way from everyday practical issues, such as fixing the drains of Abbey Road or the parking in Nuxley Village. So what's the point in bothering with any grand political ideas of the past? My answer is that by working out your own political goals and values, you can develop the confidence and the reference points to be able to weigh up-and so better tackle-unfamiliar political and social questions as the arise. This is especially important in our own times, when past certainties have already begun to melt away. It should also improve the chances of making more coherent, and so more effective, policy.

To this end, earlier in the year, I said I would put together some short, readable outlines on three areas of political ideas that should be relevant to Labour members. The first, above, is a very impressionistic outline of socialist ideas historically, focusing on the main strands of socialism and social democracy, but also hinting at something of the great variety of ideas and social movements that could be gathered under this heading. The second, nearer to home, will be a summary of some of the different left-leaning contemporary tendencies in and around the Labour Party, and their policy proposals, that have sprung up or offer themselves for consideration in the wake of the 2010 election defeat. This should now include the slightly unfortunately labelled (on first hearing) "One Nation" Labour being touted as the latest slogan by the party leadership. The third, an outline of recent ideas from around the world for furthering a social democratic and/or socialist agenda, which the Labour Party might be able to learn from or be inspired by. I hope that these will aid and stimulate discussion among members as they try to make sense for themselves, and participate in, the political choices facing the party in a much-changed and still rapidly changing political and economic context globally and at home.