SOCIALISM. - The terms "socialism," "collectivism," and "communism" denote a set of socio-economic systems that attribute ownership of material goods to the community, excluding private individuals. The primary distinction among them is historical: communism is the oldest term; socialism entered usage in a manifesto of 1820 (Owen); collectivism around 1850. Socialism is the most general term and, with collectivism now almost abandoned, remains in use alongside communism (v. COMMUNISM) to indicate, in political practice, a more moderate form of Marxism.
However, it is difficult to establish a theoretical ratio discriminans between these two socio-economic systems, given the varying usage of the terms depending on the individual or group employing them. The U.S.S.R., which proclaims communism, defines itself, for example, in its own constitution as a federation of socialist republics.
I. HISTORICAL NOTES
The social demand that modern capitalism (v.) is perennial in the history of human societies; it has been taken up, according to the times and civilizations, by religions, philosophical schools, and programmatic political ideations of different epochs, each time interpreted according to the particular postulation of each. Through it, the problem of the relations between rich and poor and between the categories and social classes into which the leaders and executors of productive labor, the holders of goods and those engaged in the most arduous and humble tasks, were differentiated, was posed. But as a social movement theoretically defined and organized in practice for the purpose of renewing economic and social structures, socialism belonged to the modern age. Therefore, the period from 1820 to 1850 deserves special mention in the history of socialism. For the history of classical antiquity, the heretical movements of the Middle Ages and the "Reformation," the utopian programs of the Renaissance up to the attempts at implementation during the French Revolution, V. COMUNISMO.1. Beginnings of modern socialism. — The industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century had profoundly changed the social physiognomy and the modern economic structure: liberalism, theoretically sanctioned by Smith and his followers, led on the one hand to freedom of competition and, on the other, to conflicts between entrepreneur and wage earner; the very rapid industrialization provoked an economic-technical revolution in production, which in turn generated a tragic situation for the working class (England had the first experience in 1810 with Luddism, a revolt against industrialization). The working class agitated, culminating during the decade 1838-48 in the Chartist movement (v. CARTISMO); in France, a utopian socialism emerged, represented by Saint-Simon (v.) Fourier (v.). Similar to Fourier was R. Owen (v.), who can be considered a precursor of cooperativism. Still in France, Louis Blanc (1811-81), relying on the "organization of labor," formulated a reformist program. Alongside the utopian reformists, the extremist and Proudhon (v.), whose anti-bourgeois arguments and, above all, his famous work What is Property? (answer: theft) provided ample material for socialist propaganda.
2. Scientific socialism of Marx. — In contrast to these utopian theories, there emerged in Germany the so-called "scientific" socialism of Marx (v.), because it was founded on the dialectical method of diagnosing social and economic reality and the laws that govern its course in historical becoming. The Communist Manifesto of 1848, ENGELTAL (v.) gave the social question a solidly constructed basis in critical diagnosis, marks the rise of modern socialism in its characteristic as a unitary movement that transcends the limits of nationality, race, and founds political, trade union, and cultural action in the interest of a single class and under the discipline of a single party (for the philosophical aspect and the interpretation of history in Marxism, V. MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO). Shortly after its origins, German socialism took two forms: the Marxist one, rejecting reformist compromises, and the one called state socialism, which, while affirming a subversive program of renewal, considered state intervention, even if bourgeois, as a trait-d'union between the present reality and the future one. It was represented by Rodbertus (1805-75) Lassalle (v.), who, influenced by the writings of Fichte, distanced himself from Marx and envisioned a German national socialism with protectionist interventions in the German economy and a cooperative policy, financed by the state, to free workers from the so-called brazen law of wages.
As in Germany, so in France and England, upon contact with the reality in which the new theories were tested, divergences and revisionist critiques arose. England was in fact the most important secessionist, as the trade union reality had a clear prevalence over the political one. The party, which emerged late and with difficulty, was overshadowed by the prestige of the trade union factor, which succeeded in adapting the socialist impulse to the particular English situation, so that the political movement became a necessary accessory of the Trade Unions, grown into an orderly power and authority (v. LABURISMO; SINDACALISMO).
In general, it can be said that the history of socialism unfolds in the division of its currents: the intransigent (revolutionary, integralist) and the revisionist (or reformist, conciliatory, laborist). In France, Jaurès and Guesde held the field as leaders for a long time until 1914. In Germany, Kautsky, Bebel, Bernstein, Liebknecht, Ebert, and Noske, who repressed the revolutionary movement led by Liebknecht's son in 1920. But the distinctions themselves are imprecise, since in practice Western socialism found its own path in every country and manifested its tendencies regarding the method of political struggle and trade union action in its own ways.
The same situation occurred within the Internationals (v.), which were successively created in vain attempts to realize a homogeneous and concordant socialist International. The first congress of the First International, held in Geneva under the presidency of Marx in 1866, opened its doors to socialists of all shades; however, internal disagreements soon led to schisms and secessions (Lassalle, Bakunin), and the International dissolved. With the Second International, convened in Paris in 1889, the organizational phase began: it included all the socialist parties of the various countries, whose internationalist program, never fully achieved, shattered at the outbreak of the First World War. Subsequently, attempts to reconstruct a Third International culminated in the Moscow meeting of 1919, where it was founded with a distinctly communist program.
II. SOCIALISM IN ITALY
1. The beginnings. — In Italy, the spread of socialist doctrines initially ran parallel to the Risorgimento movement, which from 1848 onward was championed by several key advocates of national unity. For these figures, the problem of the new State had to be integrated with the social element, though each held a distinct vision: PISACANE, CARLO (v.) was the most convinced proponent of the necessity and inevitability of social revolution. Similar to him, though more expansive in outlining the relationship between the social and the political, were G. FERRARIENSIS (v.) and the federalist Cattaneo. MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE (v.) also engaged with the social question, but his spirituality led him to view the nation and the people as the environment and subject of an evolutionary-educational revolution; he opposed the materialistic foundation of social doctrine as the sole factor, as well as classicism in the labor movement as the sole subject of economic life and the sole driving force of human history. Only after the Risorgimento was complete did the social question in Italy assert itself in line with Marxist orientation, both in theory and practice. The foremost disseminator and advocate Labriola (v.), who, though personally averse to political struggle, contributed significantly to the formation of a Marxist culture and thus to the establishment of the Italian Socialist Party.From 1857 to 1864, M. BAKUNIN, MICHAIL (v.), a Russian anarchist socialist, agitated in Italy and spread the principles of internationalist socialism. From Bologna, his propagandistic efforts sought to exploit the discontent stemming from the strains of national unification and the emergence of unrest and aspirations among peasants in some northern regions, particularly among groups of workers and intellectuals drawn to the socialist-materialist tendencies widespread across Europe. Bakunin’s activities yielded no positive results, but his propaganda must be acknowledged as the first step in Italian socialism. The extremist, barricade-oriented tendency he promoted was defeated at the 1894 Genoa Congress, which marked the true beginning of the Italian Socialist Party, already formed in 1893. Among the promoters of the Genoa Congress was Andrea Costa, a prominent figure among the founders of socialism, who later adhered to the methods adopted by the Second International.
2. Revolutionary socialism and reformist socialism. — Two tendencies emerged within the new Party: the revolutionary one, which, through various elaborations (from maximalism to communism), temporarily gave rise to a revolutionary syndicalist current in 1903–1904, derived from the French thinker Sorel, with Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone as its exponents. The reformist tendency, led by Turati, Bissolati, Rigola, and others, aimed at the gradual realization of a reform program termed "minimal" in contrast to that of the maximalists. Reviewing the chronicles of the Socialist Party reveals a shifting dynamic that explains many of the Party’s stances since its founding: during periods of peaceful and orderly national development, the reformist current gained prestige and pursued a program of penetration, supported by the General Confederation of Labor, into national, central, and peripheral institutions, state bodies, provinces, and municipalities, practically implementing socialist principles in legislation and social welfare practices. D'Aragona, Rigola, and Buozzi were never far from Turati, Bissolati, Bonomi, Prampolini, and Treves. It was they who accepted the invitation to collaborate in a State that had definitively opened to social demands after the painful experiences of the 1894 uprisings in Sicily and the 1898 disturbances in various parts of Italy. From 1900 onward, socialism gradually integrated into national life, undoubtedly contributing to the modernization of Italy’s political and economic climate. However, a certain sense of restraint prevented socialists from participating in government, and it was only during World War I that Bissolati and Bonomi patriotically overcame their hesitation and accepted participation in the name of national unity, as the risky gamble of victory was at stake.
The conflict between the two tendencies resurfaced fully in those years, as the leaders of the "revolutionary" tendency became co-initiators and participants in the internationalist congresses of Zimmerwald (1915), Kienthal (1916), and Stockholm (1917). At these congresses, the internationalist precondition was opposed to the various forms of patriotism, labeled as bourgeois, which were embraced by the majority of socialists in the belligerent countries, foremost among them those of Wilhelmine Germany, which had nonetheless thrown down the gauntlet of war. Lenin played a significant role at this juncture, having succeeded, with the aid of a tiny minority, in carrying out the revolutionary coup of October 1917. The Third International, established in the midst of the ongoing Revolution, defiantly proclaimed that adherence was reserved for those who accepted the Bolshevik program and the Russian Revolution. With this constitutive act, the Third International was destined for the task—not precisely international—of converting socialist forces toward Russia. This fateful imperialist deviation, characteristic of all great revolutions, was once again revealed in the thirty-year action of the new Russian power. New in its political institutions and ideological framework, yet in direct continuity with the expansionist policy pursued by the Muscovite Empire from the 17th century onward.
The Soviet Revolution inevitably led to Russia’s isolation from Europe. The platform provided by the Third International was intended not only as a tribute to the revolutionary principles that inspired and guided it but also as a well-organized attempt to break or at least mitigate the ensuing isolation and the distrust of countries with Western civilization and bourgeois economies.
Indeed, the Moscow declaration, which rejected the adherence of socialist parties or factions not aligned with the Bolshevik maximalist program, also spurred the Italian, French, German, and other socialist movements toward schism. Communist parties were formed, drawing large contingents from the unitary socialist parties. In Italy, the Italian Communist Party was established in 1920. Yet even so, except for the British Labour Party and the socialist parties of the Nordic countries, internal harmony did not find an ideal favorable terrain. At the 1921 Milan Congress, the reformists were explicitly warned. Participation of socialists in government was declared incompatible and subject to expulsion, and despite the Moscow declaration excluding non-communist adherents from the Third International, the Congress theoretically, yet explicitly, maintained the Party’s adherence to II.
In a subsequent congress (Rome, 3-4 October 1922), the expulsion was approved. However, at the Milan Congress of 15-18 April 1923, following the rise of Fascism and the advent of the new government, presided over by Mussolini, the need for unity resurfaced with an appeal for the union of all workers in defense of the Party: in other words, the union of all socialists without distinction of tendencies. During the long twenty-year Fascist interlude, the representation of the Italian Socialist Party was reconstituted in France, which, while united in its anti-Fascist opposition, was never in agreement on Party directives. The Russian Revolution, the policy of the Bolshevik Party, the purges both against the Muscovites and the Trotskyists, raised varying repercussions, unresolved indecisions, and never-resolved conflicts. Two different conceptions emerged within Italian socialism, as in all European countries, in the face of the laborious but inexorable consolidation of Russian Bolshevism (v. BOLSCEVISMO). The current, which could now be recognized as the Westernist one, embodied by the well-known names of Turati, Modigliani, Treves, and Saragat, inevitably positioned itself against the pro-Bolshevik tendency, known as the leftist current, oriented toward a credit of confident expectation in the experiment of the first socialist state, founded according to the theoretical postulates of Marxism and the tactically realizational directives of Leninism and Stalinism. Within this second current of the Socialist Party, Pietro Nenni made his way in Paris, having, after 1922, renounced his Mazzinian-Republican past to accept the socialist program.
3. Present Situation. — With the fall of Fascism, amid the anxious turmoil of defeat and the arrival of the Anglo-Americans, the Socialist Party resurged in Italy in 1944-45, defining itself as the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity. With the formation of the first government, designated by the National Liberation Committee and presided over by Ivanoe Bonomi, the issue of participation in power was overcome. The representatives of the allied Socialist and Communist Parties had a field of political action at the time of the first electoral appeal with the constitutional referendum of 2 June 1946 and the election of the Constituent Assembly, which led to the proclamation of the Italian Republic, with the Socialist Romita as Minister of the Interior and Pietro Nenni as Minister of Foreign Affairs. However, the internal Italian situation, agitated by the dynamism of its beginnings, did not facilitate the coexistence of the two predominant currents within the Socialist Party, and the alternation of attitudes and moods repeatedly skirted and ultimately led to a split.
In 1947, the ministerial coalition of the National Liberation Committee entered a crisis, and consequently, the crisis of the Socialist Party deepened, with various events of partial and national congresses, separations, and polemics, with the laborist tendency on the right led by Giuseppe Saragat, the left-leaning center by Giuseppe Romita, and the openly pro-Communist left by Pietro Nenni. And the Party fell back into schismatic struggles: approximately a third of its members went with Saragat, a smaller portion polarized with Romita, and a significant majority remained in the original party with Nenni. Characteristics of the first faction were open Westernism and Italy's adherence to the Union of Nations associated with the Atlantic Pact; of the Romita faction, adherence to the Atlantic Pact but with significant reservations regarding domestic policy and participation in governments presided over by Hon. De Gasperi. This position essentially persists even today, even after the union of the two factions in the new Italian Socialist Party of Workers.
III. NATURE OF SOCIALISM — The economic essence of scientific socialism lies entirely in the transition of privately owned capital, held and employed for economic purposes under a regime of competition, to a new regime of collective-unitary capital.
Socialism thus pursues the aim of replacing private capital—that is, the speculative dynamism of individualistic production—with collective capital, through which a unitary organization of national or even international labor would be realized. This collectivist system, by suppressing free competition, would subject the productive process to the direction of the community, inevitably represented by the State. The socialist State may avail itself, in its organic constitution, of cooperative and trade union associations, within which the distribution of the social product would take place, according to the criterion of the measure and social use-value attributed by the State to the productive labor performed by each individual. In the socialist State, the instrumental means of production and the circulation of goods, being ideally possessed in common by all, can only be devolved to the State. The organs of the community are responsible for the social distribution of collective labor to individual workers and for proceeding to the allocation of products in proportion to the contributions of each. Current private wages would be replaced by remunerations of a salaried nature. The means necessary for the production of various goods and types of products should be determined by a continuous official inquiry conducted by offices, with the aim of ascertaining needs and thus defining the budget forecast of the productive cycle. All expenses related to the components of the total cost should correspond to the total value of production, according to the plan prepared in advance. This preliminary plan would thus become the basis of the entire social productive system. Any deficiencies in actual products compared to the forecasted needs would be periodically compensated by reserve stocks, stored in warehouses that are, naturally, public and not private. Collectivism therefore means public organization of labor in opposition to the present anarchy of individualistic competition, according to the recurring expression of socialist critics.
In the socialist program, the fundamental concept of collective property in place of individual ownership of the means of production predominates; it will be the social organization of labor that realizes the laws of the division of labor and the association of efforts, instead of the automatism of competing and converging individual initiatives of private economy, as indicated by classical economics. Consequently, in the future, there would no longer be the current distribution of the fruits of economic activity into profit for the enterprise, wages for workers, rent for the private owner of land, or interest on capital. The latter, entirely acquired by the State, would no longer be constituted by private individuals through the subscription of registered or bearer shares or bonds, nor through investment by persons or groups. The entire proceeds of production, represented by the value of the collective product, would be distributed directly by the collective (state) society to each individual, as remuneration in proportion to individual labor. This means recognizing only the proceeds derived exclusively from labor. Those who would provide their services of general utility to the State or to the collective entities constituted within it, such as high officials, military personnel, judges, administrative employees, teachers, artists, scientists, etc., not directly participating in the production of material goods, would enjoy a share of the products of national labor, deducted by the collectivist state administration from the collective product, proportionally analogous to the time spent working for the benefit of the entire society. It seems, however,
difficult for this theoretical form to be applied; see the example of the USSR, where compensation for the labor of all these categories escapes determination on an hourly-value basis, giving way to an a priori assessment by the leaders of the state administration.
In the Marxist critique of property, there are interesting historical admissions. Marx states, at the end of his critique, that today’s large capital owes its existence to the destruction of those forms of small property (artisans and peasants) in which labor and individual property were truly connected and where the true worker was also the actual owner of his means of production. This form of individual ownership of the means of production was, for its time, fruitful of social harmony, because it was largely identified with labor; it nevertheless carried with it the serious defect of excessive fragmentation of the means of production, which is why, in the current system of industrialized economy, it would result in relative unproductivity, that is, the inferiority of this system in implementing the most suitable industrial processes, compared to larger and stronger units. Due to this defect, small industry had to collapse, and this collapse continues and will continue in the remnants of small industry and small rural property, faced with the encroaching prevalence of large agrarian and industrial capital. Large capital will devour small capital, converting those engaged in small industries into proletarians, that is, into workers deprived of their own means of production.
The process of capitalist centralization will continue until it transforms the capitals of these smaller enterprises into modern large capital, eliminating even the small capitalist and proletarianizing the latter as well.
The monopoly of large capital itself will eventually become an obstacle to the productive system, which arose and developed through its impetus and aid. Then the final hour of individual capitalist property will strike; the expropriators will be expropriated. This solution will be reached through an irresistible logical process of social evolution, in accordance with the Marxist prediction. Large industry, in fact, due to its technical constitution, obeys a tendency that educates proletarians in discipline within large productive units and pushes them toward collectivist conceptions and trade union and political concentrations; more than any agitation, large industry itself, mechanically constituted and driven by the entire centralizing tendency of our time, serves to discipline proletarians and unite them, making them a political-social force.
The central target of the attack is profit, but interest and land rent necessarily converge in it as well. These, too, are ultimately understood to be subtracted from the fruit of workers' labor, considered the sole creative factor of "value." The profit of the capitalist enterprise derives from the lower wage that the salaried worker receives, which does not correspond to the full value of his labor, while the residual surplus value is taken from the worker and goes to constitute and increase the capitalist’s gain. Wages, instead, should be equated to the minimum necessary for the worker’s subsistence. Consequently, the greater value becomes, day by day, profit and, ultimately, an increment of capital, into which the frozen labor of workers passes.
The conditions and forms of this appropriation are highlighted with the aid of extensive material drawn from the social and economic conditions, particularly of England, which had industrialized in the decades around and after 1820. Only when, in place of the system of competing private capitals, collective ownership of capital is introduced—along with a social organization of labor and the distribution of collective income—will there no longer be wage earners, but only producers. Profit, interest, and wages will cease to exist, replaced solely by a social stipend. It is not to be understood that the entire value of labor embedded in the product will go to the worker: deductions must still be made, which would be collected in the direct form of tribute or requisition and would replace current taxes. These deductions must also include the share necessary to form, maintain, and—if needed—increase the collective capital for the continuation of production and the improvements to be achieved in subsequent cycles.
Marx summarizes his thought on this matter as follows: a) the entire aggregate product is a social product. A portion of this product serves as new means of production in the reconstitution of capital: it remains social. b) The remaining portion, necessary for the individual needs of the producers, is thus distributed among them. It is presumed to be determined by the duration of each individual's labor.
IV. EVALUATION
1. Critical Observations
In the realm of critique, the Marxist forecast has been deemed at least summary. Critics of Marxism have argued—and continue to argue—that while, following such a critique of individual capital, the final establishment of social ownership of all means of production may no longer be in doubt for socialists, the immense difficulty of transitioning from the old to the new order of things nevertheless remains before the power to realize II. The mystics and fanatics of socialism rely on the expropriated masses, on the unfolding process that tends to destroy the middle classes, and on the ultimate impossibility of continuing private production with a deeply discontented working population, stripped of all faith and respect for authority. Yet they rely on forecasts that have materialized in ways and proportions quite different from the Marxist assumption, a fact well considered by the various revisionist tendencies in Germany, France, England, Italy, and by the Russian Mensheviks. It is further observed that, with the administration of the means of production, the determination of labor value and, consequently, of use and exchange value (social value), entrusted to the State, the preservation of the advantageous aspects of freedom in labor and private life becomes the first and most decisive preliminary question for socialism. The hypothesized advantages could reverse into equally excessive opposites if one were to arrive at a state of forced labor and no broad sphere of action were granted to agile individual freedom, compared to absolute, bureaucratic, collective dirigisme, designed in the periodic schemes of planning. Critics argue that even a socialist economy will face the complex economic phenomenon of supply and demand, of the relationship between need and availability, through which the determination of value passes.It is therefore observed that the rectification of the theory of social value should involve three elements: a) the possibility of maintaining economic equilibrium in such a vast organism of labor and production, a most human world of needs—all the more notable as the population grows—and of keeping in operation, for the inevitable production crises and agricultural famines, reserves of new capital and extraordinary stocks; for even the socialist State cannot escape the necessity of working, investment, and reserve capital; b) a recognition of the necessary individual freedom in labor and consumption, without which the harm of dirigiste automatism would weigh more heavily on the inalienable recognition of the personality of the working man, which socialism, in seeking to better protect, could not compress or oppress; c) a well-understood, that is, not coercive but ever-active stimulation of every individual to the economic use of his labor power.
In this way, the tendency that may be called moderate and revisionist in socialism is led to think that the new order of things would end up resembling not a little the present life and its habits, but without the benefit of an undoubted personal freedom, even if imperfect. The subjective element of liberal economics—the individual freedom, the freedom to choose one’s dwelling and work—might still prevail only by correcting the current deficiency of organization and unitary coordination. In these objections and critical observations are, at least in part, expressed the suggestions of revisionist critique, which, especially in Europe and America, arose against the thought of Marx and his followers, all the more as the reality of the social question evolved with a perceptible and progressive improvement in the environmental conditions of labor, in the economic conditions that social legislation (v. LEGISLAZIONE SOCIALE) of various States and trade union action, everywhere affirmed, were promoting and effecting in the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century.
2. Socialism and Liberalism
One cannot fail to note the fortune of socialist theories, within barely a century of their enunciation. The traditional line of the world’s life has been influenced by them, and the effective consistency of the freedom of the economy and of liberal institutions has been affected. It is said—and not without foundation—that this freedom is, at least in part, hypothetical and illusory, and that the contradiction between the proclaimed right to freedom and its full enjoyment is evident. In practical life, economic freedom is constrained within the limits imposed by the actual possibilities of acquiring the goods necessary to satisfy the essential needs of the human person (e.g., for the unemployed, freedom is almost nil).In this contradiction between liberal right and social reality lies the dramatic incentive to the persistent urgency of the social question (v. QUESTIONE SOCIALE), to temper which stands the social doctrine of Christianity (v. DOTTRINA SOCIALE CRISTIANA). Given that need is the primary motive of every economic necessity, individual and collective, particular and general, the productive process, taking into account the variations imposed by nature with its mutations and the partial or total exhaustion of existing deposits of raw materials and natural instrumental goods, should unfold in such a way that the determinations of elementary and daily recurring needs are effected with the relative regularity of a more or less constant average, without the excessive oscillations that characterize recurring crises. Otherwise, in a regime of uncontrolled individual economic freedom, the social question will persist with the critical efficacy of a freedom affirmed in principle but contradicted in the fact of daily life.
To resolve this antithesis, which has historical value, not merely dialectical and polemical, socialism expresses a preemptive authoritarian demand, the realization of which would enable the attainment of social justice through expropriative revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, according to the Marxist formula experimented in Russia—that is, a direct dictatorship, maintained and guaranteed by the effective dictatorship of the leading political party. But since the demand for freedom, innate in man, is also ineradicable, many have asked and consider themselves entitled to ask whether socialism truly intends to guarantee individual freedom in the determination of not only the material needs of the person and the family unit. If it abolishes it, socialism must be deemed an enemy of freedom, opposed to every development of individual character and every moral perfection.
The demand for egalitarianism gives rise to the compression of freedom. The social utopia, from the distant and mythical positions attributed to antiquity to the works and novels of the Middle Ages and the modern age, in its various imaginings, frequently assumes egalitarian representations between the sexes, within the family, and even beyond the boundaries of nationality, race, and religion. And from these emerge representations of life artificially uniform and automatized, which do not persuade and ultimately attract only the deluded or the fanatics, but leave the prudent and well-intentioned cautiously distrustful, for whom no theory appears closer to human proportions, to the harmonious equilibria of the economic, moral, and intellectual interests of life, than a middle line, so to speak, between socialism and liberalism.
3. Triumph of Socialism? — The final phase of socialist evolution, the phase of Marxist realization, was neither desired nor foreseen by Marx. He anticipated an intense and pathological development of capitalism, particularly in the various countries of Europe and North America; a simultaneous spread of extreme social demands and radical socialist solutions among the working masses, salaried peasants, and especially among workers in specialized and technologically advanced industries. He expected a growing strengthening of the trade union base and the political effectiveness of socialist parties in countries where advanced capitalist initiative would foster the formation of militant worker elites, capable of attracting and convincing the more sluggish masses. On the other hand, the increasing concentration of capitalist initiative would progressively lead to the proletarianization of the masses, the reduction to minimal levels of residual groups lingering in traditional artisanry and small rural and urban property, and finally, more frequent and severe cyclical crises within an economic environment rigidified by capitalist expansion with a strong monopolistic tendency.
These predictions, interpreted in light of historical materialism and the deterministic conception of social evolution, logically led to the prospect of a final collapse. Reality seemed—and in some respects still seems—to partially confirm this forecast; this appeared especially true at the outbreak of the World War of 1914-18, even more so when, in March 1917, the Russian Revolution handed all power to the minority Bolshevik faction through Lenin’s coup. Yet reality, always complex, did not fully align with the predictions of militant Marxism. Cyclical crises were overcome, particularly the severe and nearly global one of 1929-33, contrary to catastrophic forecasts. The concentration of capital within the banking-industrial circuit, characteristic of modern capitalism (whose propulsive force manifests in the institution of the joint-stock company and its supranational cartel and trust connections), indeed progressed, driven by the almost physiologically normal process of the current economy. However, on the other hand, the growth of medium private property and mixed forms of association between capital and labor in agricultural colonies, cooperatives of farmers, artisans, and small industries—producing outside or even subsidiarily connected to large banking-industrial units but independent in their structure and management—also revealed continuous expansion.
At the end of the Second World War (1939-45), while the influence of extreme social tendencies in state politics intensified everywhere, the majority did not pass to extreme socialist parties except in a few countries, and especially not where the spirit of human personality, widely recognized and embraced in the way of life, tempered—in theory and action—the value of Marxist premises and prejudices. The example of the totalitarian states of Eastern Europe does not apply to this counter-observation, because for them, in situations independent of the internal currents and tendencies of their respective peoples, the acceptance of the guidance of the Russian Communist Party was imposed as a politico-military result of the USSR’s foreign policy. Indeed, the great majority of European and extra-European countries with a Western way of life witnessed the rise of the working masses to progressive achievements; a rise that, especially in the post-war years following 1919, was promoted not only by properly socialist parties but also by other simply democratic currents, particularly through social affirmations in parties and trade union associations that appealed to Catholic principles. Even from the ruling spheres of non-Marxist totalitarian experiments, despite their declared right-wing political orientations, with the recognition of unitary or plural trade unions, encouragements were promoted for class collaboration and social, welfare, and insurance reforms through the increasingly widespread adoption of collective labor contracts as public acts, and the trade union was introduced into the juridical and political life of the state itself (Italy-Spain-Portugal).
Furthermore, in the economic sphere, whether in the most sensitive industrial productive sectors from the standpoint of national interest or in those of public services, state intervention has manifested itself ever more extensively and profoundly to realize situations with collectivist tendencies through direct state administrations or through autonomous entities financed and controlled by the state. Thus, it can rightly be said that the so-called capitalist countries are all, to varying degrees and in different ways, now participants—beyond the sphere of so-called bourgeois economy—in concomitant and connected organizations and institutions of a socialist type, with significant and progressive reductions in the sphere reserved for private initiative. Even in the banking sector, which would be the most emblematic of capitalist economy, the primary principle of "laissez-faire, laissez-passer" is more a historical memory than a reality. Controls and monetary defenses against inflationary and deflationary pressures have led state banks to increasing regulatory authority over the circulation of monetary values and credit. The regulation of international arbitrations resulting from the exchange of goods and values in the foreign trade of individual countries is still constrained by an almost general discipline of a parasocialist character.
Finally, an aspect of the indirect socialist action in Western countries and Anglo-Saxon dominions consists in accepting and favoring the broad realization of productive associations, such as cooperative, consortial, and similar enterprises, which, while operating within competition, are of pure worker, peasant, or often socialist group origin, benefiting from preferential administrative and fiscal advantages from their respective states.
If, therefore, various aspects of contemporary reality partially correspond to Marxist predictions, others contradict their final, simplistic, and unilateral perspective. More suited to the social demands that the global economy presents in our time appear the Catholic social principles, tending toward an ethical-political system open to the associated initiatives of producers and workers, to the protection of natural solidarities arising from the affinity of interests among participants in the same productive category, and together to the integrative interventions of the modern state, committed—"recta ratione"—to respecting the freedom and dignity of the human person in the exercise of all its faculties (v. CORPORATIVISMO; DOTTRINA SOCIALE CRISTIANA). For the critique of the philosophical principles of socialism, V. MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO.
BIBL.:
- K. Marx, Das Kapital, Hamburg 1867-94;
- F. Engels, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft, Berlin 1882;
- G. Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence, Paris 1908;
- W. Sombart, Der proletarische Sozialismus, Jena 1924;
- L. von Mises, Socialism, London 1936;
- J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York 1942;
- G. Pirou, Les doctrines économiques en France depuis 1870, Paris 1946;
- A. Fanfani, Cattolicesimo e protestantesimo nella formazione storica del capitalismo, Milano 1948;
- per la critica cattolica, vedi le encicliche Rerum novarum (1891) e Quadragesimo anno (1931) di Leone XIII e Pio XI.
A. FANFANI