Understand the world to change it

The notion of socialism can be traced back centuries in various forms, notably among the earliest Christians (Acts 4:34-5:11); and the model of “gospel” communism as in the Anabaptist and other religious movements, with individuals owning nothing except what they collectively shared. But the roots of modern socialism lie in the period of the industrial revolution. The goals and ideals of socialism had their beginnings in 19th-century pre-industrial movements and organisations, which cultivated in workers a keen sense of common identity. The Industrial Revolution had many profound effects on European civilization. It rendered much of the old aristocracy irrelevant, boosted the capitalists to economic and political power, and drafted much of the old peasant class into its factories. The result was naturally a shift in attitude toward wealth. Capitalist wealth seemed to have no natural limits. Partly because the new industrial modes of production had no pre-assigned place in feudal order of things, the industrialists viewed themselves as the creators of their wealth. Dependency was considered self-destructive, so the poor were punished for their poverty by harsh laws designed to drive them to work. Ideas still very familiar to us today with attacks on benefit claimants and how investment is viewed, now as then, as the engine that drives the economy. Any measure which can encourage investors to buy more stock is viewed as beneficial to society as a whole. This class also created the various movements for democratic government which swept across Europe; and it was only natural that they should have viewed their economic and political ideals as functioning hand in hand. Democracy was necessary to wrest power from the old nobility, to pass laws enabling business to thrive, and to guarantee their property rights. 

Not everyone agreed that the shift of power into the hands of the new rich was entirely benign. In the newly industrialising countries of England and Germany, people suffered under many forms of exploitation. The old feudal restrictions which had fixed peasants in place on the land and limited their income had also guaranteed them a place in the world. They may not have prospered, but they were often able to fend off starvation and homelessness simply because they had been born onto estates from which they could not be removed against their wills. The dissolution of this old order meant that workers could be hired and fired at will and had to sell their labor for whatever the going rate was--and that rate was determined by their competition with each other to work cheaply enough to gain them an advantage in the job market. Traditional rules and protections went by the board in the new factories, which often ran for twenty-four hours a day (two twelve-hour shifts), seven days a week under the most inhumane conditions. Women and children were absorbed into the work force as well, often preferred because they cost much less than men. Industries severely polluted their environments, their machinery maimed and killed many workers, and food in the new factory towns was often of poor quality and in short supply.  Living standards and educational levels actually declined in many areas. Even many well-to-do people became concerned over the wretched conditions under which the new working class toiled, as reflected in the novels of Charles Dickens.

The late 1830s and 1840s saw the development of a mass movement known as Chartism, which demanded an end to political corruption and the introduction of democratic reforms. Chartism was not exactly a socialist movement, but it was a very important early, mass-political movement that tapped into the political energies of the working class. In the 1840s, Karl Marx was just one of a diverse group of socialist thinkers who gained adherents because he provided a solid historical justification for socialism. According to Marx, human societies had progressed through a series of economic stages determined by the forces of production, each one calling forth the next through an unavoidable conflict between old and new forces of production. Thus, the slave societies of the ancient world had given rise to feudalism, which in turn had been supplanted by capitalism. Marx further argued that capitalism was planting the seeds of its own destruction by first creating - and then increasingly oppressing and impoverishing - the working class (the proletariat.) The logic of competition and profit accumulation inherent to capitalism tended to keep wages at the minimal level necessary to physically sustain the proletariat.

The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation, all the means of production and distribution. Workers sell their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers ability to labour, but pay them only a portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of paying workers’ wages and other costs of production — unpaid labour that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits. This surplus is the source of profit. These profits are turned into capital which capitalists use to further exploit the sources of all wealth — nature and the working class. Capitalists are compelled by competition to seek to maximise profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid labor of workers, by increasing exploitation what capitalists often call increasing productivity. Under capitalism, economic development happens only if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our times. With the rapid advance of technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximise profit and exploit new markets.

"Socialism" is an exceedingly fuzzy term which has been used to label an extraordinarily wide array of political and economic beliefs. But generally socialists advocate a democratically controlled economy run for the benefit of all. The unfettered competition of capitalists is replaced by cooperation and the anarchic business cycle by planned stability. Private ownership of industry and land abolished and replaced by a moneyless society in which market forces play no role, in which production is for the use of the producers, in which lands and factories are commonly owned and in which the State - and with it, war - is abolished.