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What Is Socialism: Definition And Types
About 200 years ago, when the industry was revolutionized and new inventions and developments were made, it brought a drastic change in the economic and political world. People who owned the industries or who were wealthy started to become wealthier day by day whereas the workers and poor started getting poorer day by day. That was the time, when a new concept, “Socialism” was emerged and as the name itself suggests, is aimed at achieving equality for all of the society. This concept advocated the distribution of means of production among everyone and talked about an egalitarian society.
Definition- Socialism may be considered as a political philosophy that says that all people in a society share equal status and they shall be given equitable ownership of the means of production in the state. It is an ideology preferring shared ownership of resources over individual ownership and it believes in the collective development of society.
- Utopian Socialism- This was the kind of Socialism that was presented before any other type of Socialism in front of the world. This type is based on a presumption that if the wealthiest agree to renounce their wealth to distribute among the poor, the world will achieve the best version of Socialism. However, this is not practically possible to achieve, therefore it is coined as Utopian Socialism.
- Democratic Socialism- Democratic Socialism believes that socialism must be achieved democratically. In simple words, it states that the means of production and economical resources should be managed by the government elected by the people.
- Market socialism- This socialism advocates that the means of production must be managed by market forces instead of the government and their allocation must be done among the market itself.
- Revolutionary socialism- It says that Socialism can only be achieved after the revolution. This socialism refuses to believe that equality can be achieved peacefully.
- Green Socialism- This kind of Socialism strives to protect green resources and advocates the preservation of natural resources.
- A Society Free of Exploitation- When we talk about Socialism, we talk about the distribution of resources among the society. The system of Socialism ensures that no one in the society is exploited and everyone gets a chance to speak in economical matters. Everyone who has the portion of resources benefits from it, therefore it helps in creating a welfare society.
- Economic Growth- Socialism helps in rapid economic growth and economic stability in the country. The concept is to give collective growth to everyone in the society so that no one remains untouched by the wealth. Socialists divide the resources among everyone; it helps to bring stability to the economy.
- Trustworthy- This kind of economical and political system is trustworthy because everyone participates in the decision making and it has transparency. People tend to believe that they are getting an equal say in matters of importance and they feel motivated.
Disadvantages of Socialism- Every coin has two sides; similarly, Socialism also has some advantages with some disadvantages.
- No Economic Freedom- The idea of Socialism depends upon a cooperative pooling of resources by many people. Now, the fact remains that people in a society feel competitiveness in respect to others; therefore, sometimes it is different for those people to show cooperativeness.
- Lack of Recognition- When a society achieves something collectively, the credit goes to everyone collectively. The people, who contribute more than others are not given their due amount of recognition which somehow demotivates those people.
- Lack of Authenticity- Socialism, as told before, distributes the resources among everyone. But sometimes, there are people who have negative intentions or there are people who are not so authentic in their functions, it strives lack of authenticity.
Now, What Is Socialism?
Socialism occurs whenever a government has a controlling role in producing goods or distributing goods. Goods are things that satisfy human wants. (This definition of goods includes services as goods.)
Governments control territories and their inhabitants by force. This means that the voluntary production and distribution of goods that involves no force being used by cooperating persons is not socialism. If people voluntarily get together to build a barn or to make computers or to aid the poor, these endeavors are not governmental in nature and not socialism. They are social, but that has little import since so much of what human beings do is inherently social.
By the above definition, socialism involves the involuntary. It involves the unwilling or forced participation of some people who are made to participate by the government, which involves other people doing the controlling.
By the definition above, every government is socialistic to a greater or lesser degree. This is the reality and a point in favor of the definition.
Other definitions obscure the socialism inherent in government. For example, a web definition reads “a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
What’s wrong with the preceding web definition? Socialism is not only a theory, and it is not only a normative theory. Socialism is not implemented by communities as a whole but by governments made up of specific people. Communities as a whole do not exist. Socialism is not an all or none thing, that is, it exists along a continuum of 0 percent government ownership and control of production and distribution to 100 percent such ownership and control. If we observe that a government doesn’t (fully) own the means of production, that does not mean that the government is not socialistic.
There need not be any ambiguity whatsoever in describing all the activities of governments as socialistic or as examples of socialism. When a government taxes (net) taxpayers as all governments do, the government people invariably decide what to do with the proceeds. These decisions necessarily involve either producing or distributing goods or both. This is socialism. If government people establish a ceiling price for apartment rent, this necessarily involves the production and distribution of goods. This is socialism occurring. If the government uses taxes to build missiles and drop them on Syria, socialism is occurring.
Socialism is a practice, not simply a theory, not simply an ideal, not simply what various governments did in the past who had “Socialist” in their names. It is not simply what “democratic socialists” of today advocate or say is socialism. Socialism is a pervasive practice that we see spread over the entire world.
Socialism, which involves involuntary human action via governments, co-exists with voluntary human action that occurs conceptually outside the realm of government control. Government regulation of economic activity is so widespread, however, that there is almost no free market activity, conceptually speaking, that is untouched by socialism.
Still, it is essential in analyzing socialism vs. free markets to distinguish these two opposing ways of organizing human social behavior. And, for that purpose, we need a clear understanding of what socialism is, which is any degree of government control over the production and/or distribution of goods.
By this understanding, the Soviet Union was socialist to a high degree as was the German government of the 1930s. American governments are far more socialist today than in 1900, as measured by the taxes taken by those governments as a fraction of total income.
Single-payer health care is clearly more socialist than the current system, which in turn is more socialist than the production of health care in 1940.
There is no need to get into debates over whether or not a government-enacted measure of control or a government is or is not socialist. They all are, to a greater or lesser degree. There is no need to debate varieties of socialism or Marxism or obscure theories, not when what we need is a clear understanding among great masses of people as to what socialism is and is not.
Socialism is basically control over the economic decisions of many people by a small set of government people. Its opposite is free markets, which is control over economic decisions on a voluntary basis using a price system and a division of labor that arises in an unforced way.
There is a lot more that has been said about why socialism is to be avoided and free markets preferred. There is a lot more to be said about controls that are social in nature, or that leak over into government control. These lie beyond the scope of this blog.
Bernie Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist.” (Who’d admit to being the other kind?) He always thought wearing “socialism” on his sleeve was cute. But now he’s trying to sugar-coat it, as nothing to fear, saying it means no more than economic fairness. Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.”
And now we’re even told everything government does – building roads, fire protection, schools – why, that’s all “socialism!” But if that’s all socialism means, then it means nothing at all.
Time for some Political Science 101.
Why was the government invented in the first place? Philosopher Thomas Hobbes explained: in a “state of nature” your neighbor could whack you and grab your food, or wife. the unknown solution is to give up your freedom to bash a neighbor in return for others giving up theirs. Now you can spend less time on self-defense and tending your wounds, and more on getting food or nookie. To enforce this system of law (the “social contract”), we create a government.
However, giving the government this monopoly on violence is itself dangerous, so you want to be very careful it’s limited. And while we have found many other worthy functions for the government (like the mentioned road building, fire protection, etc.), the government doesn’t work by voluntary cooperation, but through its ultimate power to punish non-cooperators. unknown-3With all the talk these days about “corporate power,” remember that no corporation can put you in jail.
What “socialism” actually means is government performing not only its rule-of-law enforcement function – and communal functions like fire protection – but also economic functions; in the lingo, “owning the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” What, in a market economy, is done by people individually or, more commonly, grouped together in businesses. A purely socialist economy doesn’t allow that. (Socialists talk of “common ownership.” In practice that means sole government ownership.)
Now, of course, just as we don’t have a pure market economy, you could also have a socialist economy that isn’t pure. But that doesn’t negate the basic dichotomy between the socialist and market economic concepts. Though you can have a mix, what socialism fundamentally means is government supplanting private business activity.
For Sanders to claim his “socialism” means nothing of the sort is disingenuous. Words have meaning, and that’s what “socialism” does in fact mean. And Sanders’s “democratic socialism” is really something of an oxymoron too, because it is, once more, the essence of socialism to supplant private activity. And the more pervasive government becomes, in running society, the harder it is to be democratic. While a market economy entails numerous non-government institutions (importantly, businesses and corporations) as independent power centers, a counterweight to government power, socialism constricts that power dispersal and concentrates power in government hands.
And so it has indeed been the experience that countries with basically socialist economies have not been very democratic. The two ideas are fundamentally incompatible. This is a key reason why so many nations so decisively turned away from socialism in the late twentieth century (Venezuela’s tragic contrary example vividly illustrates the point.)
And socialism just didn’t work. While the idea of socialism is purportedly to give ordinary people better economic outcomes, in practice, it did the opposite (as in Venezuela). The government has proven itself incapable of creating wealth, as does a market economy of enterprises competing with each other to give consumers better products and services at better prices. You can redistribute till the cows come home, but without a market economy creating wealth in the first place, people will be poorer. Whine all you like about the unfairness, the “harshness” of capitalism fueled by greed, but the ordinary person is still better off than under socialism.
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