19/20 - Socialism Flashcards
Core socialist themes
- Community
- Cooperation
- Significance of socioeconomic class
- Common ownership
- Social equality as a demand of justice
Thomas Moore - early socialism
- Against poverty and inequality
- Abolish money and private property
- No more pride, greed, envy
- Conflict and inequality are unnatural
Saint-Simon - early socialism
- Class-based historical stages
- Belief-based economic systems
- Replace capitalist inefficiency with expert planning and organizational hierarchy
Fourier - early socialism
- Evils of commercial society
- Utopian socialist ideal
- Stateless
- Free cooperation
- The common good
Robert Owen - early socialism
- Human nature is malleable
- Capitalism rewards greed and selfishness
- Combat this by producing cooperatively fo the public
Hegel on religion
- History as the development of Spirit
- God comes to self-awareness in history
Feurerbach on religion
- We create God in our own image
- We alienate our human capacities for knowledge, power, and goodness
Marx on religion
- Religion is created in response to poverty and suffering
- “Religion is the opium of the people”
- Produces euphoria, buzz
- Painkiller
- Can render you incapable of flourishing
Marx on alienation
- Human essence detached from human existence
- Creative producers whose work is punishing, degraded, commoditized
- Workers’ lives are subject to alien forces
Alienated from
- From the product
- From the productive activity
- From our species-being
- From other human beings
Marx’s theory of history
- History is a class struggle
- Growth of human productive power
- Our production methods develop with economic structures
- Economic structures have characteristic ‘relations of production’
Society is like a 3 level building
1) Forces of production
2) Relations of production
3) Superstructure - economic structure determines legal and political superstructure
Level of development of productive forces explains the nature of economic structure
Economic structure determines legal and political superstructure
Themes in Marx
- Religion
- Exploitation
- Alienation
- Class struggle
- History
- State and revolution
- Human nature
Marx on Exploitation
- Exploitation = extraction of surplus labour
- Distinction between labour and labour-power
- Capitalist profit = surplus value created by the workers
- Capitalist role: never pay the workers enough
- Marx wants a world with surplus value for the common good
Marx on class struggle
- History = class struggle
- Capitalism = Bourgeoisie (capitalists) vs. proletarians (workers)
- Concrete conflicts of interest (relation to the means of production)
- Future communist society = classless
- State: created/exists to deal with conflicts of interest generated by coercive surplus extraction
- Under communism, the state will wither way
Marx’s 2 accounts of state
1) State as a committee for managing the common interests of the bourgeoisie
based on 19th century British politics
2) The state as an independent actor
Based on 19th century French and German politics
Marx on revolution
- Revolution is likely in states that fail to integrate their excluded classes
- Bismarck’s strategy: buy off the working class and maintain a loyal army (welfare state)
- Universal suffrage could lead to the election of a socialist government
Engel’s objections to capitalism
-Destructive trade cycle
-Large number of unproductive people
(superfluous middlemen)
-Capitalist market generates unjust inequalities
Bernstein
- Evolutionary socialist: No need for revolution
- Revolutionist: Update and revise Marx’s claims
- Morality: Freedom, respect, and a peaceful movement for change
What is a social democracy?
- Politics: Socialist parties can achieve social reform
- Economics: Working class standard of living improved
Fabian socialism in Britain (1884)
- G.B. Shaw, H.G. Wells. S. & B. Webb
- Parliamentary path to socialism
- Nationalization and social welfare
