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Socialism’s Past, New Social Democracy, and Socialism’s Futures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Brad Rose  and
George Ross
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Extract

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , Fall 1994 , pp. 439 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1994 

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