- Already an ambiguous ideology but this already differs on the different type of socialist.
- Two broad types: fundamentalist and revisionist.
- Core themes surrounding them: Are they compatible with private property and a capitalist economy.
- Socialism is at odds with private ownership and capitalism are fundamentalists. Those who think it can work together is revisionist.
Fundamentalist
Socialism:
- At odds with capitalism and private ownership.
- Capitalism should be abolished
- But how? Done right away through revolution change, or evolution change?
- Remove capitalism right away, evolution = remove capitalism through elections and voting.
- Evolution - work in current system. Revolution – overthrow.
Classical
Marxist:
- Made it clear that capitalism must disappear before socialism and then communism could be established.
- Capitalism promoted exploitation, alienation and oppression of one class by another and therefore at odds with key socialist principles such as equality and fraternity.
Marx
& Dialectical Materialism:
- Private property and the economy.
- Marx undersaw a clash of ideas and perceptions which would take place during history and would eventually lead to the disappearance of existing society.
- History has a ‘final destination’ and each stage of this has an intellectual clash
- The ruling class are no longer corresponding to the perception of the majority and are now being alienated.
- Not a clash of economic interests but one class which was dominate economically whilst others would be exploited for economic purposes.
- This is what lead to Marx and Engels believing that capitalism was ‘historically doomed’ given that class consciousness would produce a number of people who were to be exploited.
- Dialectic: Hegel was the creator of it
- A clash of economic interests. A clash between rich and poor, a clash over the control of money.
Historical
Materialism:
- The prevailing idea that each stage of history has been defined by a clash of economic ideas relating to how society’s resources should be produced and distributed.
Further
On For Marx:
- Heavily shaped by a belief of revolution.
- When capitalism became unsustainable (exploiting the lower classes) it was necessary to ‘smash’ capitalism with violence and replace it with another economy and society.
- This could not happen peacefully within the current liberal political state such as that in the UK
- The state is merely a ‘servant’ of the very economic system that socialism must destroy.
- They rejected evolutionary or reformist socialism which they considered a contradiction.
- A new economy and new state is essential if socialist values are to be secured.
- The dictatorship of the proletariat needs to remove all traces of liberal capitalist values and pave the way for a stateless communist society based on common-ownership. It would represent the peak of human achievement ‘the end of history’ – what Marx dubbed it as.
Marxism
– Leninism (Orthodox Communism):
- De facto leader of the new socialist state that emerged in political history
- Wanted to refine Marx’s prescriptions for how communism should arise.
- Lenin was concerned by how Marx sought that the dictatorship of the proletariat could only occur in societies where capitalism and the proletariat was well developed.
- Less developed countries would have to endure many more decades of oppressive rule and all the horrors of a developing capitalist society before socialism could truly arrive
- Lenin and Luxemburg both believed this.