Socialism: Meaning and Basic Principles

In one line

Socialism is the belief that human beings are cooperative rather than competitive by nature, that the great inequalities of a market society are produced by its institutions rather than by nature, and that production should be owned or controlled in common.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: socialism is the political ideology which holds that human beings are social by nature and cooperative rather than essentially competitive; that the inequalities of wealth and power in a market society arise from its institutions, and in particular from the private ownership of the means of production, rather than from unequal natural endowments; and that the remedy is the common ownership or social control of productive resources, together with distribution according to need, so as to secure equality, community and the fullest development of every person.

The word and its target

Socialism entered political use in the 1820s and 1830s, in England and France, as the name for a set of criticisms of the society that industrialisation had produced.

What it was formed against. Not feudalism, which liberalism had already attacked, but the new industrial order: large scale production, a propertyless working population, extreme inequality, insecurity of employment, and the doctrine that the market's outcomes were natural and beyond criticism.

This matters for the comparison with liberalism at chapter 570. Liberalism was a doctrine of a rising commercial class against aristocratic privilege. Socialism was a doctrine of a working population against the commercial order that liberalism had helped to create. They are successive answers to different enemies, which is why the second takes so much of the first for granted.

The basic principles

1. Community

Human beings are social creatures, bound together by a common humanity, and are best understood by reference to the groups and communities they belong to rather than as separate individuals. This is the direct denial of liberal individualism at chapter 570 and everything else follows from it.

2. Cooperation

People are naturally disposed to work together, and competition sets them against each other and wastes their capacities. Cooperation, socialists argue, moralises the individual and is also more efficient, since it removes duplication and the costs of conflict.

3. Equality

The central socialist value, and it is not equality of opportunity. Socialists argue that formal equality of opportunity is worthless where starting positions differ, and press instead for equality of outcome, or, in more moderate versions, the reduction of inequality to a level compatible with a common life.

Their argument for it. That inequality is largely produced by unequal circumstances rather than by unequal natural talent; that it is unjust to reward what a person did not earn; that inequality corrodes community; and that political equality cannot survive severe economic inequality.