The Kinds of Socialism

In one line

Socialism is a family of doctrines that agree about what is wrong and disagree about how far to go and how to get there, and naming the branch you are discussing is the first requirement of a good answer.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: socialism divides principally into utopian and scientific socialism, a distinction drawn by Engels; into revolutionary socialism, which holds that the existing order must be overthrown, and evolutionary or democratic socialism, which holds that it can be transformed by constitutional means; and into further varieties distinguished by what is to be owned and by whom, including state socialism, Fabian socialism, guild socialism, syndicalism, market socialism and, in India, Gandhian socialism.

Utopian and scientific socialism

This is Engels's own distinction, drawn in a work whose title states it.

Utopian socialism describes the early socialists, chiefly Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen, who denounced the injustice of the new industrial order, designed model communities and appealed to the reason and the benevolence of the rich to bring them about.

Engels's criticism is not that they were wrong about the injustice but about the method. They treated socialism as a good idea that had merely to be explained persuasively, they appealed to all classes indifferently, and they did not see that the transformation depended on the development of the productive forces and on the class that industrial production had itself created.

Scientific socialism is Engels's name for the Marxist alternative: socialism derived from an analysis of the actual development of capitalism and of the class relations within it, rather than from an ideal invented in someone's head.

The word scientific should be handled carefully in an answer. It is a claim, not a description: the claim that the analysis is derived from observable historical development rather than from moral preference. Whether it is scientific in any stricter sense is exactly what critics dispute, and Popper's objection, that a theory which can accommodate any outcome is not testable, is directed at it.

Revolutionary and evolutionary socialism

The most important division in practice, and the one that produced the split between socialists and communists in the twentieth century.

Revolutionary socialism holds that the state is an instrument of the owning class, that it will not be surrendered by consent, and that a fundamental change of ownership therefore requires the existing order to be overthrown. Marx and Engels in most of their writing, Lenin definitively.

Evolutionary, democratic or parliamentary socialism holds that where there is universal suffrage the working class is a majority and can achieve its ends by winning elections, so that a revolution is unnecessary and, in a constitutional state, wrong. Eduard Bernstein's revisionism is the classical statement, and every social democratic party in the world is its descendant.