SOCIALISM. — The terms “socialism,” “collectivism,” and “communism” denote a set of economic and social systems that assign to the community, excluding private individuals, ownership of material goods. The principal difference separating them is historical in nature: communism is the oldest term; socialism entered into use in a manifesto of 1820 (Owen); collectivism around 1850. Socialism is the most general term, and since collectivism has now almost fallen out of use, it remains alone in the field alongside the term communism (q.v.), which in practical politics denotes a more attenuated form of Marxism.
It is, however, difficult to provide in theory a clear criterion for distinguishing between the two systems, so varied is the use of the terms according to the person or group employing them. The U.S.S.R., which rejects the term communism, for example defines itself in its very constitution as a federation of socialist republics.
I. Historical Origins
The social concern that modern socialism reasserts in opposition to capitalism (q.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 formulations of different eras, each interpreting it in accordance with its own particular postulates. At issue was the problem of relations between rich and poor and between the social categories and classes into which those directing and executing productive labor, the possessors of goods and those engaged in the most arduous and menial toil, were divided. Yet as a socially defined and theoretically organized movement aimed at renewing economic and social structures, it belongs to the modern age. Hence the period from 1820 to 1850 deserves special mention in the history of socialism. For the history of antiquity, medieval heretical movements, the Reformation, Renaissance utopian programs, and attempts made during the French Revolution, see COMMUNISM.II. The Beginnings of Modern Socialism
The Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century had profoundly altered the social landscape 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; rapid industrialization brought about an economic and technical revolution in production, which in turn generated a tragic situation for the working class (England experienced this first in 1810 with Luddism, a movement of revolt against industrialization). The working class agitated, culminating during the decade 1838–48 in the Chartist movement (q.v.). In France there emerged an utopian socialism, represented by Saint-Simon (q.v.) and Fourier (q.v.). Closely akin to Fourier was R. Owen (q.v.), who may be considered a precursor of cooperativism. Also in France, Louis Blanc (1811–81), by entrusting labor with its own organization, formulated a reformist program. Alongside the utopian reformers, the extremist and anarchic thesis was upheld by Proudhon (q.v.), whose anti-bourgeois arguments and, above all, his famous work Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (an answer: “property is theft”) provided ample material for socialist propaganda.2. Scientific Socialism of Marx
In contrast to these utopian theories, there emerged in Germany the socialism termed “scientific” by Marx (q.v.) because it was founded on the dialectical method of diagnosing social and economic reality and the laws governing its historical development. The Communist Manifesto of 1848, in which Marx and Engels laid the social question upon a solidly constructed critical analysis, marked the rise of modern socialism in its characteristic form as a unified movement transcending national, racial, and other limits and grounding political, trade-union, and cultural action in the interests of a single class and under the discipline of a single party (for the philosophical aspect and interpretation of history in Marxism, see DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM; HISTORICAL MATERIALISM). Soon after its origins, German socialism assumed two forms: the Marxist, averse to reformist compromise, and the so-called State socialism, which, while affirming a subversive program of renewal, regarded state intervention—even if bourgeois—as a bridge between present reality and the future. It was represented by Robertus (1805–75) and especially by Lassalle (q.v.), who, influenced by the writings of Fichte, departed from Marx and envisaged a German national socialism with protective economic policies and a state-financed cooperative system designed to free workers from the so-called iron law of wages.As in Germany, so too in France and England, in response to the realities in which the new theories were tested, critical divergences and revisionist tendencies arose. England in fact became the most important secessionist, since the trade-union reality there had a clear preponderance over the political. The party, which arose late and with difficulty, succumbed to the prestige of the trade-union factor, which managed to channel socialist impulses into the particular situation of England, so that the political movement became a necessary adjunct of the Trade Unions, which had grown into an orderly power and authority (q.V. LABOURISM; TRADE UNIONISM).
In general it may be said that the history of socialism unfolded in the division of its currents: the intransigent (revolutionary, integralist) and the revisionist (or reformist, foreign, Labour). In France, Jaurès and Guesde held the field for a long time until 1914. In Germany, Kautsky, Bebel, Bernstein, Liebknecht, Ebert, and Noske—who revived the revolutionary movement led by Liebknecht’s son in 1920—were prominent. Yet the distinctions themselves are imprecise, for in practice Western socialism found its own path in each country and displayed its own tendencies regarding methods of political struggle and trade-union action.
The same situation obtained within the Internationals (q.v.), which were successively created in vain attempts to achieve a homogeneous and united socialist International. The first congress of the First International, held in Geneva under Marx’s presidency in 1866, opened its doors to socialists of all shades; soon, however, internal dissensions led to schisms and secessions (Lassalle, Bakunin), and the International dissolved. With the Second International, meeting in Paris in 1889, the movement entered an organizational phase: all the socialist parties of the various countries belonged to it, though its internationalist program, never fully realized, was shattered by the outbreak of the First World War. Subsequent attempts to reconstitute a Third International culminated in the Moscow meeting of 1919, where it was founded with a distinctly communist program.
II. SOCIALISM IN ITALY
I. The Beginnings
In Italy the spread of socialist doctrines was, in its early stages, in a certain way linked to the Risorgimento movement, which from 1848 onward was championed by several influential promoters of national unity. For them, the problem of the new State had to be integrated with a social element, but each had his own vision of it: PISACANE, CARLO (v.) was the most convinced advocate of the necessity and inevitability of social revolution. Close to him, but more measured in delineating the relationship between the social and the political, were G. FERRARIENSIS (v.) and the federalist Cattaneo. MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE (v.) took up the social question, but his spiritual outlook led him to view the nation and the people as the environment and subject of an evolutionary-educative revolution; he opposed the materialistic foundation of social doctrine as the sole factor, and operatic classicism as the sole subject of economic life, as well as the notion that economics alone is the driving force of human history. Only after the completion of the Risorgimento did the social question begin to assert itself in Italy along Marxist lines, both in theory and in practice. Labriola (v.) was the disseminator and supporter of this orientation; although he himself avoided direct participation in political struggle, he contributed greatly 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.), the Russian anarchist socialist, agitated in Italy and spread the principles of internationalist socialism. From Bologna, his propaganda sought to exploit the discontent arising from the efforts of national unification and from the emergence of widespread unrest and aspirations among peasants in certain northern regions and especially among groups of workers and intellectuals drawn to the socialist-materialist tendencies prevalent across Europe. Bakunin’s activity yielded no positive results, but his propaganda must be recognized as marking the first steps of Italian socialism. The extremist, barricade-oriented tendency he promoted was defeated at the Genoa Congress of 1894, from which the proper Italian Socialist Party emerged, already founded in 1893. Among the promoters of the Genoa Congress was Andrea Costa, a prominent figure among the early initiators of socialism in Italy, who later adhered to the methods adopted by the Second International.
3. Revolutionary and Reformist Socialism
Two main tendencies emerged within the new Party: the revolutionary one, which, through various developments (from maximalism to communism), eventually led to the temporary ascendancy of a revolutionary syndicalist current in 1903–1904, derived from the French thinker Sorel and represented by Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone. The reformist tendency, on the other hand, led by Turati, Bissolati, Rigola, and others, aimed at the gradual implementation of a reform program known as the “minimum” in contrast to that of the maximalists. A review of the chronicles concerning the Socialist Party reveals a shifting rhythm that explains many of its stances from its very foundation: in 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 the organs of national life—central and local, state institutions, provinces, and municipalities—putting socialist principles into practice through legislation and social welfare measures. The D’Aragona, Rigola, Buozzi, and others were never far removed from Turati, Bissolati, Bonomi, Prampolini, and Treves. It was they who accepted the invitation to collaborate in a State that had finally opened itself to social demands, following the painful experiences of the 1894 riots in Sicily and the 1898 disturbances in various parts of Italy. Gradually, from 1900 onward, socialism became integrated into national life, undoubtedly contributing to the modernization of Italy’s political and economic climate. Yet a kind of modest reluctance kept socialists from participating in government, and it was only during the First World War that Bissolati and Bonomi overcame their hesitations and accepted participation in the name of national unity, when the high-stakes gamble of victory was at play.
The contrast between the two tendencies came fully to the fore during these years, as the leaders of the “revolutionary” tendency became co-initiators and participants in the Zimmerwald (1915), Kienthal (1916), and Stockholm (1917) internationalist congresses. At these gatherings, the internationalist premise was opposed to the various forms of patriotism, deemed “bourgeois,” which were embraced by the majority of socialists in the belligerent countries, particularly those of Wilhelmine Germany, which had thrown down the gauntlet of war. Lenin played a significant role at this time, having succeeded—with the help of a tiny minority—in carrying out the revolutionary coup of October 1917. The Third International, founded in the climate of the still-ongoing Revolution, proudly declared that adherence was reserved only for those who accepted the Bolshevik form and the Russian Revolution. With that founding act, the Third International took on the task—not precisely an international one—of converting socialist forces toward Russia. This fateful imperialistic deviation, characteristic of all great revolutions, revealed itself once again in the thirty-year activity of the new Russian system, new in its political institutions and ideological framework but directly derived from the expansionist policy pursued since the 17th century by the Muscovite Empire.
The Soviet Revolution inevitably led to Russia’s isolation from Europe. The platform of 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 isolation and difficulties faced by countries of Western civilization and bourgeois economy.
Indeed, the Moscow Declaration, which rejected the adherence of parties or factions of socialist parties not aligned with the maximalist program of Bolshevism, also spurred the Italian, French, German, and other socialist movements toward division. Communist parties were formed, drawing large numbers away from the unitary socialist parties. In Italy, the Italian Communist Party was founded in 1920. Yet even so, except in the British Labour Party and the socialist parties of the Nordic countries, inner harmony did not find fertile ground. At the Milan Congress of 1921, the reformists were openly warned. Participation by socialists in government was declared incompatible and grounds for expulsion, and despite the Moscow Declaration’s exclusion of non-communist parties from the Third International, the Congress theoretically but explicitly maintained the Party’s adherence to II.
In a subsequent congress (Rome, 3–4 Oct. 1922) the expulsion was approved. But at the Milan Congress of 15–18 Apr. 1923, after the affirmation of Fascism and the advent of the new government presided over by Mussolini, the demand for unity re-emerged with an appeal for the union of all workers for the defence of the Party: in other words, for the union of all socialists without distinction of tendencies. During the long twenty-year parenthesis of Fascism, the Italian Socialist Party was reconstituted in France; it was united in antifascist opposition, yet never agreed on party directives. The Russian Revolution, the policy of the Bolshevik Party, and its actions both against the Mensheviks and against the Trotskyists provoked, from time to time, differing repercussions, unresolved indecision, and persistent conflicts.
Two distinct conceptions took shape within the Italian Socialist Party, as in all European countries, in the face of the arduous but inexorable consolidation of Russian Bolshevism (v.). The tendency that came to be recognised as the Westernist current, personified by such well-known figures as Turati, Modigliani, Treves, and Saragat, inevitably positioned itself against pro-Bolshevism. This leftist tendency was oriented towards a stance of confident expectation in the experiment of the first socialist State, founded both on the theoretical postulates of Marxism and on the tactical directives of Leninism and Stalinism. In this second current of the Socialist Party, Pietro Nenni gained ground in Paris; after 1922, he had abandoned his Mazzinian-republican past to embrace the socialist programme.
4. Present situation
With the fall of Fascism, amid the anguish of defeat and the arrival of the Anglo-Americans, the Italian Socialist Party re-emerged 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 resolved. The socialist and communist representatives, now allied, were able to exercise political influence at the first electoral appeal—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. Yet the internal situation in Italy, stirred by the dynamism characteristic of its early post-war phase, did not facilitate the coexistence of the two predominant currents within the Socialist Party. The alternation of attitudes and moods repeatedly verged on—and ultimately resulted in—a split.In 1947 the ministerial coalition of the National Liberation Committee entered into crisis, and the crisis of the Socialist Party deepened accordingly, marked by a series of congresses—both partial and national—by separations and polemics. To the right stood the Labourist tendency, led by Giuseppe Saragat; at the centre-left was the grouping around Giuseppe Romita; and to the left, openly pro-communist, was Pietro Nenni. The Party thus relapsed into the travails of socialism: roughly a third of its members joined Saragat, a smaller portion aligned with Romita, and a significant majority remained in the original party under Nenni. The first faction was characterised by its Western orientation, open support for Italy’s adhesion to the United Nations associated with the Atlantic Pact; the Romita faction adhered to the Atlantic Pact but maintained significant reservations regarding domestic policy and participation in governments presided over by Hon. De Gasperi. This stance essentially persists today, even after the union of the two factions into the new Italian Socialist Party of Workers.
III. NATURE OF SOCIALISM
The economic essence of scientific socialism lies entirely in the transfer of capital from private ownership—held and employed for economic ends under a regime of competition—to a new regime of collective, unified capital.Socialism thus pursues the aim of replacing private capital—that is, the speculative dynamism of individualistic production—with collective capital, through which a unified organisation of national or even international labour would be realised. This collectivist system, by abolishing free competition, would subject the productive process to the direction of the community, inevitably represented by the State. The socialist State, in its organic constitution, may also avail itself of cooperative and trade-union associations, within which the distribution of the social product would occur according to the criterion of the measure and social use-value attributed by the State to the productive labour performed by each individual. In the socialist State, the instrumental means of production and the circulation of goods, being ideally held in common by all, can only be entrusted to the State. The organs of the community are responsible for assigning social labour to individual workers and for distributing products in proportion to each person’s contribution. Current private wages would be replaced by remuneration in the form of stipends. The means necessary for the production of various kinds and types of goods would have to be determined through continuous official inquiries conducted by state offices, in order to ascertain demand and thus establish the preventive budget of the production cycle. All expenses related to the components of total cost would have to correspond to the total value of production, as forecast in the plan. This preventive plan would thus serve as the foundation of the entire social production system. Any shortfalls in actual production compared to the planned demand would be periodically offset by reserve stocks, held in public—not private—warehouses. Collectivism therefore signifies public organisation of labour in opposition to the present-day anarchy of individualistic competition, as repeatedly expressed by socialist critics.
In the socialist program, with the fundamental concept of collective ownership taking the place of individual ownership of the means of production, it is the social organization of labor that will realize the laws of the division of labor and the association of efforts, instead of the automatic interplay of competing and converging individual initiatives in private enterprise, as classical economics indicates. Consequently, there would no longer be, in the future, the current distribution of the fruits of economic activity into profit for the enterprise, wages for workers, rent for the private owner of land, nor interest on capital. This, entirely acquired by the State, would no longer be constituted by individuals through the subscription of shares or bonds, whether nominal or bearer, 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 proportional to their individual labor. This means recognizing only the proceeds deriving exclusively from labor. Those who provide services of general utility to the State or to collective entities within it, such as officials, military personnel, judges, administrative employees, teachers, artists, scientists, etc., who do not directly participate in the production of material goods, would receive a share of the products of national labor, deducted by the collectivist state administration from the collective product, proportionate to the time spent working for the benefit of society as a whole. However, it seems difficult for such a theoretical form to be applied; see the example of the USSR, where compensation for the labor of all these categories escapes determination based on hourly value, giving way to an a priori-synthetic assessment by the leaders of the state administration.
In the Marxist critique of property, there are historical admissions of interest. Marx, at the end of his critique, states that modern large capital owes its existence to the destruction of those forms of small property (artisans and peasants) in which labor and individual ownership were truly linked, and where the true worker was also the effective owner of the means of production. This form of individual ownership of the means of production was, for its time, socially harmonious because it was largely identified with labor; however, it carried 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, i.e., the inferiority of this system in the more suitable industrial processes of today, compared to larger and stronger public units. Due to this defect, small industry had to perish, and this ruin continues and will continue among the remnants of small industry and small rural property, in the face of the overwhelming prevalence of large agrarian and industrial capital. Large capital will become small, converting workers in small industries into proletarians, i.e., workers deprived of their own means of production.
The process of capitalist centralization will continue until it transforms the capital of such smaller enterprises into modern large capital, eliminating even the small capitalist and proletarianizing them as well.
The monopoly of large capital itself will eventually become an obstacle to the productive system, which arose and developed under its impulse and support. 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 Marxist predictions. Large industry, in fact, due to its technical structure, obeys a tendency that trains proletarians in large production units and pushes them toward collective conceptions and concentrations in unions and politics; more than any agitation, large industry, mechanically constituted and driven by the entire centralizing tendency of our time, itself serves to discipline the 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 here as well. These, in the final analysis, are also understood as being subtracted from the fruit of workers' labor, considered the sole creative factor of value. The profit of capitalist enterprise derives from the lower wages paid to workers, which do not correspond to the full value of their labor, while the surplus value is taken from the worker and goes to constitute and increase the capitalist's gain. Wages, instead, should be reduced to the minimum necessary for the worker's subsistence. Consequently, the greater value becomes profit day by day, and, in the final analysis, an increment of capital, in which the frozen labor of workers is embedded.
The conditions and forms of this appropriation are illuminated with the aid of extensive material drawn from the social and economic conditions, particularly of England, industrialized in the decades around and after 1820. Only when, instead of the system of competing private capitals, collective ownership of capital takes over, with a social organization of labor and the distribution of collective income, will there no longer be wage laborers, but only producers. There will no longer be profit, interest, or wages, but only social stipends. It is not to say that the entire value of labor embodied in the product will go to the worker: deductions will still have to be made, which would be acquired in the form of direct tribute or requisition and would stand in place of current taxes; these must include the necessary share to form, maintain, and, if necessary, increase the collective capital for the continuation of production and the increments to be achieved in subsequent cycles.
Marx expresses his thought on this matter summarily as follows: a) the entire social product is a social product. One part of this product serves as a new means of production in the reconstruction of capital: it remains social. b) The remaining part necessary for the individual needs of the producers is distributed among them. It is assumed to be determined by the duration of each person's labor.
IV. Evaluation
5. Critical Observations
In the field of criticism, the Marxist forecast has been judged at least cursory. Critics of Marxism have long argued that, while the final establishment of social ownership of all means of production may no longer be in doubt for socialists after such criticism of individual capital, the immense difficulty of transitioning from the old to the new order remains a formidable challenge for those tasked with realizing II. The mystics and fanatics of socialism rely on the expropriated masses, on the comprehension of a process that aims to destroy the middle classes, and on the ultimate impossibility of continuing private production with a working population deeply discontented and stripped of any faith or respect for authority. Yet they depend on pressures that have manifested in ways and proportions quite different from Marxist assumptions, a fact well noted by various revisionist tendencies in Germany, France, England, Italy, and by the Mensheviks in Russia. It is further observed that, with the administration of the means of production and the determination of labor value—and thus of use-value and exchange-value (social value)—entrusted to the State, the first and most decisive preliminary question is removed from socialism’s grasp, namely, the preservation of the advantageous aspects of freedom in labor and private life. The supposed advantages could easily invert into excesses contrary to these aims, should coercive labor and a narrow sphere for individual freedom be imposed in comparison to the absolutist, bureaucratic collectivism structured in the periodic schemes of planning. Critics further contend that even a socialized economy must confront the complex economic phenomenon of supply and demand, the relationship between need and availability, which ultimately determines value.It is therefore argued that the rectification of the theory of social value should incorporate three elements: a) the capacity to maintain economic equilibrium amid a varied organic cost of labor and production, a vast array of human needs—all the more pronounced as the population grows—and to maintain reserves of new capital and extraordinary stocks to address inevitable production crises and agricultural shortages; for even the socialist State cannot escape the necessity of operating capital, investment capital, and reserve capital; b) recognition of the necessary individual freedom in labor and consumption, without which the damage of an automatism of dignity would weigh more heavily on the inalienable recognition of the worker’s personality—a recognition that socialism, in seeking to protect, could not suppress or oppress; c) a well-conceived, non-coercive, yet always active stimulus for each individual to make economic use of their labor power.
In this way, the moderate and revisionist tendency within socialism is led to believe that the new order would ultimately resemble the present life and its customs, but without the benefit of unquestionable personal freedom, even if not perfect. The subjective principle of liberal economics—individual freedom, the freedom to choose one’s residence and occupation—could still prevail, but only by correcting the current deficiency of unified organization and coordination. In these objections and critical observations, at least in part, the suggestions of revisionist criticism are expressed, which, especially in Europe and America, rose against the thought of Marx and his followers as the reality of the social question evolved with a perceptible and progressive improvement in the working conditions of the laboring classes, and as social legislation (v.) in various states and the action of labor unions, affirmed everywhere in the second half of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th centuries, promoted and effected such changes.
6. Socialism and Liberalism
One cannot fail to note the success of socialist theories within barely a century of their enunciation. The traditional course of world history has been influenced by them, and the actual viability of economic freedom and liberal institutions has been called into question. It is argued, and not without justification, 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 by the limits imposed by the actual capacity to acquire the goods necessary to satisfy the essential needs of human personality (for example, for the unemployed, freedom is nearly nonexistent).It is within this contradiction between liberal rights and social reality that the dramatic impetus for the persistent urgency of the social question (v.) lies. To temper this urgency, Christian social doctrine (v.) is positioned. Given that need is the primary motivator of every economic necessity—individual and collective, particular and general—the productive process, accounting for the variations imposed by nature through its changes and the partial or total depletion of existing natural resources and instrumental goods, should unfold in such a way that the satisfaction of elementary and recurring daily needs occurs with a relative regularity of a more or less constant average, without the excessive fluctuations that characterize recurring crises. Otherwise, under a regime of unchecked individual economic freedom, the social question will persist with the critical force of a freedom affirmed in principle but contradicted in the reality of daily life.
To resolve this antithesis, which has historical rather than merely dialectical or polemical value, socialism expresses a priori an authoritarian demand, the realization of which is intended to lead to social justice through expropriatory revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, according to the Marxist formula as tested in Russia—that is, direct dictatorship maintained and guaranteed by the effective dictatorship of the ruling political party. Yet since the demand for freedom, innate in man, is likewise insuppressible, many have asked—and consider themselves justified in asking—whether socialism truly intends to guarantee individual freedom in determining not only the material needs of the person and the family unit. If it abolishes such freedom, it must be said to be an enemy of freedom, opposed to every development of individual character and moral improvement.
The demand for egalitarianism gives rise to the suppression 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. What emerges are artificially uniform and automated visions of life that fail to persuade and ultimately attract only the deluded or the fanatics, while leaving prudent well-wishers unconvinced—those for whom no theory seems closer to human proportions, to the harmonious balances of economic, moral, and intellectual interests in life, than a median line, so to speak, between socialism and liberalism.
3. Triumph of socialism? — The final stage of socialist evolution, the time of realization that Marx did not wish for, nor even foresee. He expected an intense and pathological development of capitalism, especially in the various countries of Europe and North America; a simultaneous spread of extreme social demands and extreme socialist resolutions among the working masses, among wage-earning peasants, and above all among workers in industries advanced by technical progress. He anticipated a growing strengthening of the trade union base and the political efficiency of socialist parties in countries where the most 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 bring about the proletarianization of the masses, the reduction to minimal proportions of the residual groups still clinging to traditional artisanry and small rural and urban property, and, finally, more frequent and severe cyclical crises in an environment hardened 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 confirm this forecast in part; this was evident at the outbreak of the World War of 1914–18, especially when, in March 1917, the Russian Revolution transferred all power, through Lenin’s coup, to the Bolshevik minority. Yet reality, ever complex, did not fully conform to the predictions of militant Marxism. Cyclical crises were overcome, particularly the extremely severe and nearly worldwide crisis of 1929–33, in contrast to catastrophic forecasts. The concentration of capital in the banking-industrial circuit, characteristic of modern capitalism (whose driving force is manifested in the institution of the joint-stock company and its highly corrupt cartel and trust connections), did indeed progress, driven by the almost normally physiological process of the current economy. However, at the same time, there was a continuous increase in medium-sized private property and mixed forms of association between capital and labor in agricultural colonies, in cooperatives of farmers, artisans, and smaller industries—enterprises that operated outside the great banking-industrial units or were subsidiarily linked to them in production but independent in their organization and management.
By the end of the Second World War (1939–45), despite the growing influence of extremist social tendencies in state policies worldwide, the majority did not shift to extremist socialist parties except in a few countries, and especially not where the spirit of human personality, widely recognized and accepted in the customs of life, tempered—both in theory and practice—the value of the premises and prejudices of Marxism. The example of the totalitarian states of Central and Eastern Europe does not fit this counter-observation, because in their case, in situations independent of internal currents and tendencies of their respective peoples, the acceptance of the leadership of the Russian Communist Party was imposed as a political-military result of the foreign policy of the USSR. In truth, the vast majority of European and non-European countries with a Western way of life experienced the rise of the working masses to progressive achievements; an ascent that, especially in the years following the war of 1919 and beyond, was driven not only by socialist parties proper but also by other democratic currents—particularly those with social affirmations in parties and trade unions that appealed to Catholic principles. Even from the ruling circles of non-Marxist totalitarian experiments, despite their stated right-wing political orientations, with the recognition of unitary or pluralist unions, encouragement was given to class collaboration and social, welfare, and social security reforms through the increasingly widespread adoption of collective labor contracts as public acts, and labor unions were integrated into the legal and political life of the state (Italy, Spain, Portugal).
Moreover, in the sphere of economic action, whether in the most sensitive industrial sectors in terms of national interest or in public services, state intervention has become increasingly profound to achieve situations with collectivist tendencies through direct state administration or through autonomous entities financed and controlled by the state. Thus, it can be said that the so-called capitalist countries are all, to a greater or lesser extent, now participants—beyond the sphere of the so-called bourgeois economy—in concurrent and interconnected 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 significant indicator of capitalist economy, the principle of *laissez-faire* is more a historical memory than a reality. Controls and monetary defenses against inflationary and deflationary pressures have given state banks increasing regulatory authority over the circulation of monetary values and credit. Even the regulation of international arbitrage, arising from the exchange of goods and values in foreign trade among individual countries, is now subject to a nearly universal system of quasi-socialist character.
Finally, one aspect of the indirect socialist influence in Western countries and the dominant Anglo-Saxon world consists in the acceptance and promotion of broad cooperative productive associations, such as cooperative enterprises and related forms, which, while operating within the framework of competition, often originate from worker or peasant initiatives, frequently fostered by socialist groups, and benefit from preferential administrative and fiscal concessions granted by their respective states.
If, therefore, various aspects of contemporary reality partly correspond to Marxist predictions, others contradict its simplistic and unitary final perspective. More in keeping with the social needs that the world economy presents in our time are the Catholic social principles, which favor an ethical-political system open to the associated initiatives of producers and workers, the protection of natural solidarities arising from shared interests among participants in the same productive category, and the integrative interventions of the modern state, which is 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 a critique of the philosophical principles of socialism, V. MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO.