Socialism

SOCIALISM. - "S.", "collectivism", "communism" indicate a set of socio-economic systems that assign to the community, to the exclusion of private individuals, the ownership of material goods. The main difference separating them is of a historical order: communism is the older term; s. came into use in a manifesto of 1820 (Owen); collectivism around 1850. S. is the more general term and, with the term collectivism now almost abandoned, it alone remains in the field, along with the term communism (v.), to indicate in political practice a more attenuated Marxism.

It is difficult, however, to give in theory the ratio discriminans between the two socio-economic systems, so different is the use of the terms according to the person or persons using them. The U.S.S.R., which bans communism, defines itself, for example, in its own constitution as a federation of socialist republics.

I. HISTORICAL NOTES

The social demand that modern socialism (S.) presents anew in opposition to capitalism (v.) is perennial in the history of human societies; it has been taken up, according to the times and civilizations, by religions, by philosophical schools, by programmatic conceptions of the politics of different epochs, interpreted each time according to the particular postulation of each. For it there arose the problem of the relations between rich and poor and between the categories and social classes into which the directors and the executors of productive labor, the holders of goods and those assigned to the heaviest and humblest toils, were differentiated. But as a social movement theoretically defined and organized in practice for the purpose of a renewal of the economic-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 of the "Reformation," the utopian programs of the Renaissance down 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 continuators, leads on the one hand to freedom of competition and, on the other, to conflicts between entrepreneur and wage-earner; the extremely rapid industrialization brings about an economic-technical revolution in production, which in turn generates a tragic situation for the working class (England would have its first experience in 1810 with Luddism, a movement of revolt against industrialization). The working class is in ferment, culminating during the decade 1838-48 in the Chartist movement (v. CARTISMO); in France a utopian socialism manifests itself, whose representatives are Saint-Simon (v.) and Fourier (v.). Akin to Fourier is R. Owen (v.), who can be considered a precursor of cooperativism. Also in France, Louis Blanc (1811-81), relying on the "organization of labor," formulates a reformist program. Alongside the utopian reformists, the extremist and anarchist thesis is upheld by Proudhon (v.), whose anti-bourgeois arguments and, above all, his famous writing What Is Property? (answer: a theft) provided ample material for socialist propaganda.

2. Marx's "scientific" socialism

In contrast to such utopian theories, there takes shape in Germany the socialism called "scientific" by Marx (v.) because it is 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, in which Marx and Engels (v.) give the social question a base solidly constructed in critical diagnosis, marks the rise of modern socialism in its character as a unitary movement that overcomes the limits of nationality and race and founds political, trade-union and cultural action in the interest of a single class and in 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 assumed two forms: the Marxist one, shrinking from reformist compromises, and the one which, called State socialism, while always affirming a subversive program of renewal, considered the intervention of the State, even a bourgeois one, as a trait-d'union between present reality and that of the future. It is represented by Rodbertus (1805-75) and above all by Lassalle (v.), who, influenced by the writings of Fichte, moved away from Marx and dreamed of a German national socialism with protectionist interventions in the German economy and with a cooperativist policy, financed by the State, in order to withdraw the workers from the so-called brazen law of wages.

As in Germany, so in France and in England, in contact with the reality in which the new theories are tested, divergences and revisionist criticisms arise. England was in fact the most important secessionist, since the trade-union reality had a clear predominance over the political one.

The party, which arose late and with difficulty, was subject to the prestige of the trade-union factor, which succeeded in situating the socialist impulse within 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 may be said that the history of socialism unfolds in the division of its currents: the intransigent (revolutionary, integralist) and the revisionist (or reformist, accommodating, Labourist). In France, Jaurès and Guesde held the field for a long time as leaders, 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 are themselves imprecise, since in practice Western socialism found its own path in each country and revealed in its own ways its tendencies regarding the method of political struggle and of trade-union action.

The same situation occurred within the Internationals (v.), which were successively created in order to bring about, in vain, 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 every shade; very soon, however, internal dissensions brought about splits and secessions (Lassalle, Bakunin) and the International dissolved. With the second, convened in Paris in 1889, the organizational phase begins: all the socialist parties of the various countries take part in it, and their internationalist program, never completely attained, is shattered at the outbreak of the First World War. Subsequently the attempts to reconstruct a third International resulted in the Moscow meeting of 1919, at which it was founded with a clearly communist program.

II. SOCIALISM IN ITALY

1. The beginnings

In Italy the spread of socialist doctrines is in a certain way linked, in its earliest phase, to the Risorgimento movement, which declared itself from 1848 onward thanks to certain able champions of national unity. For them the problem of the new State had to be integrated with the social element, but each had his own vision on the matter: Carlo Pisacane (v.) is the most convinced assertor of the necessity and fatality of social revolution. Kindred to him, but more expansive in outlining the relation of the social to the political, were G. Ferrari (v.) and the federalist Cattaneo. Mazzini (v.) too engaged with the social problem, but his spirituality led him to regard the nation and the people as the environment and the subject of the evolutionary-educative revolution; he opposed the materialistic foundation of social doctrine as the sole factor, and operistic classicism as the sole subject of economic life, as well as the notion of economics as the sole motive force creating human history. Only once the Risorgimento was completed did the social question come to assert itself in Italy along Marxist lines, both in theory and in practice. The disseminator and supporter of that orientation was Antonio Labriola (v.), who, although averse to personal participation in political struggle, contributed much to the formation of a Marxist culture and therefore to the constituting of the Italian Party of s.

From 1857 to 1864 M. Bakunin (v.), a Russian anarchist socialist, agitated in Italy and spread the principles of internationalist s. From Bologna his propagandistic action attempted to exploit the discontent derived from the effort of the national Risorgimento and from the surfacing of unrest and aspirations widespread among the peasants of certain zones of the north and above all among groups of workers and intellectuals attracted by the socialist-materialist tendencies diffused throughout Europe. Bakunin's activity had no positive result, but it is to his propaganda that one must look in order to recognize the first steps of Italian s. The tendency he promoted, extremist, barricade-minded, would be defeated at the Congress of Genoa of 1894, from which the true Italian Socialist Party set out, having already been constituted in 1893. Among the promoters of the Congress of Genoa was Andrea Costa, an eminent figure among the initiators of s., later adhering to the method adopted by the Second International.

2. Revolutionary s. and reformist s

There were two tendencies within the new Party: the revolutionary one which, through various elaborations (from maximalism to communism), arrived at the temporary affirmation of a revolutionary syndicalist current in 1903-1904, derived from the Frenchman Sorel, whose exponents were Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone. The reformist tendency, on the other hand, led by Turati, Bissolati, Rigola and others, aimed at the realization of a gradual program of reforms which was called "minimum" in comparison with that of the maximalists. Scanning the chronicles concerning the Socialist Party, one finds a changing rhythm that permits an explanatory indication of not a few of the Party's attitudes from its very foundation: in moments of peaceful and orderly development of national life the reformist current rose in prestige and thus carried out a program of penetration, supported by the General Confederation of Labor, into the organs of national life, central and peripheral, into state institutions, the provinces and the communes, affirming in practical experience the principles of s. in legislation and in the practice of social provisions. The D'Aragonas, Rigola, Buozzi were never far from Turati, Bissolati, Bonomi, Prampolini, Treves. And it was precisely they who accepted the invitation to collaborate in a State that had definitively opened itself to social demands, after the painful experience of the disturbances of 1894 in Sicily and of 1898 in various parts of Italy. From 1900 onward s. had gradually inserted itself into national life, undoubtedly benefiting the updating of the Italian political and economic climate. Nevertheless, almost a chaste sense of embarrassment held the socialists back from participating in government, and it was only during the First World War that Bissolati and Bonomi patriotically broke off their hesitations and accepted participation in the name of the unity of the national forces, while the risky card of victory was in play.

The contrast between the two tendencies reappeared in full in those years, since the leaders of the "revolutionary" tendency became co-initiators of and participants in the internationalist Congresses of Zimmerwald (1915), of Kienthal (1916), of Stockholm (1917). At those congresses the internationalist precondition was opposed to the various patriotisms, qualified as bourgeois, to which the socialists of the belligerent countries adhered in the majority, in the first place those of Wilhelmine Germany, which had after all thrown down the gauntlet of the warlike challenge. A conspicuous part was then played by Lenin, who had succeeded, with the help of a tiny minority, in carrying out the revolutionary coup of Oct. 1917. The Third International, constituted in the climate of the Revolution still in progress, proclaimed disdainfully that adherence was reserved to those who accepted the Bolshevik formula and the Russian Revolution. With that constitutive act the Third International was destined to the task, not precisely international, of effecting the conversion of socialist forces toward Russia. This fatal imperialistic deviation, characteristic of all great revolutions, has revealed itself once again in the thirty-year action of the new Russian power. New in its political institutions and in its ideological framework, but in direct derivation from the expansionist policy pursued from the 17th century onward by the Muscovite Empire.

The Soviet Revolution inevitably brought about the isolation of Russia from Europe. And the platform provided by the Third International was intended to be not only a homage to the revolutionary principles that inspired and guided it, but also a well-organized attempt to break or at least attenuate the isolation that had come about and the diffidence of the countries of Western civilization and bourgeois economy.

Indeed, from the declaration of Moscow, which rejected the adherence of the parties or fractions of socialist parties not adhering to the maximalist program of Bolshevism, there came also to Italian s., as to that of France, Germany and other countries, the impulse toward schism. Communist parties were constituted, drawing large contingents away from the unitary socialist parties. In Italy the Italian Communist Party was constituted (1920). But even so, except in the English Labour Party and in the socialist parties of the Nordic countries, intimate concord did not find the ideal favorable ground. At the Congress of Milan of 1921 the reformists were clearly given notice. The participation of socialists in government was declared incompatible and subject to expulsion, and, despite the declaration of Moscow which excluded from the Third International those not adhering to the Communist Party, the Congress maintained theoretically, but explicitly, the Party's adherence to it.

At 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 need for unity re-emerged with an appeal for the union of all workers in defense 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 representation of the Italian Socialist Party was reconstituted in France; though united in antifascist opposition, it was nevertheless never united in its Party directives. The Russian Revolution, the policy of the Bolshevik Party, and the purges directed both against the Moscow supporters and against the Trotskyists, from time to time stirred up differing repercussions, unappeased indecisions, and never-resolved conflicts. Two different conceptions came to be outlined within Italian socialism, as in all the countries of Europe, in the face of the laborious but inexorable consolidation of Russian Bolshevism (v.). The current that may henceforth be recognized as the Westernist one, embodied in the well-known names of Turati, Modigliani, Treves, and Saragat, inevitably set itself against the pro-Bolshevik one, called the left tendency, oriented toward a credit of trustful expectation in the experiment of the first socialist State, founded according to the theoretical postulates of Marxism and the tactically realizing ones of the Leninist and Stalinist directives. Within this second current of the Socialist Party, Pietro Nenni made his way in Paris; after 1922 he had renounced his past as a Mazzinian republican in order to accept the socialist program.

3. Present situation

With the fall of fascism, in the anxious travail of defeat and with the arrival of the Anglo-Americans, the Socialist Party, defining itself as the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity, rose again in Italy in 1944-45. With the formation of the first government, designated by the National Liberation Committee and presided over by Ivanoe Bonomi, the problem of participation in power was overcome. The representatives of the coalitioned Socialist and Communist Parties had scope for political action at the moment 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, the socialist Romita being Minister of the Interior and Pietro Nenni Minister of Foreign Affairs. But the Italian internal situation, agitated by the dynamism proper to beginnings, did not facilitate the coexistence of the two predominant currents in the Socialist Party, and the alternation of attitudes and moods more than once came close to, and finally ended in, schism.

In 1947 the ministerial coalition of the National Liberation Committee entered into crisis, and the crisis of the Socialist Party consequently deepened, with various vicissitudes of congresses, both partial and national, of separation and of polemics, the laborist tendency being on the right with Giuseppe Saragat at its head, Giuseppe Romita in the left-leaning center, and Pietro Nenni, openly pro-Communist, on the left. And the Party fell back into schismatic travails: roughly a third of the members went over to Saragat, a smaller portion polarized around Romita, and a substantial majority remained in the party of origin with Nenni. Characteristic of the first faction were open Westernism and Italy's adherence to the Union of the United Nations associated with the Atlantic Pact; of the Romitan faction, adherence to the Atlantic Pact, but with substantial reservations about internal policy and about participation in the governments presided over by Hon. De Gasperi. This position substantially endures even today, also after the union of the two factions in the new Italian Socialist Party of Italian 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-unitary capital.

Socialism therefore 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 brought about. This collectivist system, by abolishing free competition, would subject the productive process to the direction of the collectivity, inevitably represented by the State. In its organic constitution the socialist State may also avail itself of cooperative and trade-union associations, within which the distribution of the social product would be carried out according to the criterion of the measure and the social use-value attributed by the State to the productive labor performed by each person. In the socialist State the instrumental means of production and of the circulation of goods, since they are ideally to be possessed in common by all, cannot be assigned to anyone but the State. It falls to the organs of the collectivity to carry out the social distribution of collective labor among individual workers and to proceed to the distribution of products in proportion to each one's contributions. Present-day private wages would be replaced by remunerations in the nature of salaries. The means necessary for the production of the various kinds and types of products would have to be fixed by a continuous official inquiry on the part of the offices, for the purpose of ascertaining needs and thus determining the preliminary budget of the productive cycle. All the expenses relating to the factors making up the total cost would have to correspond to the total value of production, according to the forecast of the plan drawn up. Such a preliminary plan would thus become the basis of the entire social productive system. Any shortfalls of actual products relative to the estimated need would be periodically offset by reserve stocks, kept in storage warehouses, naturally public and not private. Collectivism therefore means public organization of labor in antithesis to today's anarchy of individualistic competition, as the recurring expression of socialist critics has it.

In the socialist program, since the fundamental concept of collective property prevails over the individual property of the means of production, it will be the social ordering of labor that realizes the laws of the division of labor and of the association of efforts, in place of the automatism of the competing and converging individual initiatives of the private economy, as classical economics indicates. Consequently, in the future there would no longer be today's distribution of the fruits of economic activity into profit for the enterprise, wages for the workers, rent for the private owner of landed property, or interest on capital. Capital, wholly acquired by the State, would no longer be constituted by private individuals through the subscription of shares or of registered or bearer bonds, nor through investment by persons or groups. The entire yield of production, represented by the value of the collective product, would be distributed directly by the collective (State) society to each person, as remuneration in proportion to individual labor. This means recognizing only the yield deriving exclusively from labor. Those who would perform services of general utility for the State or for the collective bodies constituted within it, in the capacity, for example, of high officials, soldiers, 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, drawn by the collectivist State administration from the collective product, similarly proportioned to the time spent working for the benefit of the whole society. It seems, however, difficult for this theoretical form to be applied; see the example of the USSR, where the compensation for the labor of all these categories escapes determination on an hourly-value basis, an a priori assessment by the directors of the State administration taking its place.

In the Marxist critique of property there are interesting admissions of a historical order. Marx says, at the end of his critique, that today's large capital draws its existence from the destruction of those forms of small property (artisans and peasants) in which labor and individual property were really linked and where the true worker was also the effective owner of his instruments of production. This form of individual property in the means of production was, for its time, fruitful in social harmony, because it was identified in considerable part with labor; it nevertheless carried with it the grave defect of an excessive fragmentation of the means of production, for which reason, under the present system of industrialized economy, this would bring about a relative unproductiveness, that is, the inferiority of this system in carrying out the most suitable industrial processes, in comparison with the more complex and stronger units. Because of this defect small industry had to go to ruin, and this ruin continues and will continue in the remnants of small industry and small rural property, in the face of the encroaching predominance of large agrarian and industrial capital. Large capital will devour small capital, will convert 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 capital of these smaller enterprises into modern large capital, eliminating the small capitalist as well, proletarianizing him too.

The very monopoly of large capital will in the end become an obstacle to the productive system, which arose and developed through its impulse and aid. Then the final hour of capitalist individual 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 forecast. Large industry, in fact, by its technical constitution obeys a tendency that trains the proletarians to discipline in the large productive units and drives them toward collectivist conceptions and toward trade-union and political concentrations; more than any agitation, large industry, mechanically constituted and driven by the whole centralizing tendency of our time, itself serves to discipline the proletarians and to unite them, making of them a politico-social force.

The central target for the attack is profit, but interest and land rent necessarily converge upon it as well. These too, in the final analysis, are understood to be subtracted from the fruit of the workers' labor, considered the sole creative factor of "value." The profit of the capitalist enterprise derives from the lower wage that the wage-earner receives and that does not correspond to the integral value of his labor, while the residual surplus-value is taken from the wage-earner and goes to constitute and swell the capitalist's gain. The wage, on the other hand, must come to be leveled to the minimum need for the worker's sustenance. Consequently the greater value becomes day by day profit and, in the final analysis, an increase of capital, into which the congealed labor of the workers passes.

The conditions and forms of such appropriation are brought to light with the aid of a broad body of material drawn from the social and economic conditions particularly of England, which had become industrialized in the decades around and after 1820. Only when, in place of the system of competing private capitals, the collective ownership of capital has come in, together with a social organization of labor and the distribution of the collective income, will there no longer be wage-earners, but only producers. There will no longer be profit, interest and wages, but only a social salary. It is not to be said that the entire value of the labor put into the product will go to the worker: deductions will also have to be made, which would be acquired in the direct form of a tax or a requisition and would stand in place of the present taxes; these must also include the share necessary to form, maintain and increase, as needed, the collective capital for the continuation of production and the increases to be achieved in subsequent cycles.

Marx summarizes his thought on the matter as follows: a) the entire aggregate 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 free part necessary for the individual needs of the producers is therefore distributed among them. It is presumed to be determined by the duration of each one's labor.

IV. EVALUATION

1. Critical observations

In the field of criticism, the Marxist prediction has been judged at least summary. It was said and is still said by critics of Marxism that if, after such a critique of individual capital, the final institution of social ownership of all the means of production may no longer be an object of doubt for socialists, there nevertheless remains, before the realizing power, the immense difficulty of the passage from the old to the new order of things. The mystics and fanatics of socialism count on the expropriated masses, count on the completion of the process that tends to destroy the middle classes and on the final impossibility of continuing private production with a working population deeply discontented and freed from all faith and respect for authority. But they count on predictions that have come true in ways and proportions quite different from the Marxist assumption, and this was well taken into consideration 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, therefore, of use and exchange value (social value), entrusted to the State, as the first and most decisive preliminary question, the preservation of the advantageous aspects of freedom of work and private life is taken away from socialism. The hypothesized advantages could be overturned into just as many contrary excesses, when a state of forced labor were reached and no ample sphere of action were granted to agile individual freedom, in comparison with absolute, bureaucratic collective dirigisme, contrived in the periodic schemes of planning. It is objected by critics that even the socialist economy will find itself faced with the complex economic phenomenon of demand and supply, of the relationship between need and availability, through which the determination of value passes.

It is therefore observed that three elements should contribute to the rectification of the theory of social value: a) the possibility of keeping in economic equilibrium so vast an organism of labor and production, a most human world of needs, all the more notable the larger the population, and of keeping in operation, for the inevitable crises of production and agricultural famines, the reserves of new capital and extraordinary stocks; since even the socialist State cannot escape the necessity of working, investment and reserve capital; b) a recognition of the necessary individual freedom in work and consumption, without which the harm of a dirigiste automatism would be aggravated upon the inalienable recognition of the personality of the working man, which socialism, in order better to protect it, could not compress and oppress; c) a well-understood, that is, not forced but always active, stimulation of every single individual to the economic use of his labor power.

In this way, the tendency that may be called moderate and revisionist of socialism is led to think that the new order of things would end up resembling today's life and its habits not a little, but without the benefit of an undoubted personal freedom, even if not perfect. The subjective datum of liberal economy, individual freedom, the freedom to choose one's own dwelling and one's own work, could still prevail only by correcting the present deficiency of a unitary organization and coordination. In these objections and critical observations there are expressed, at least in part, the suggestions of the revisionist critique that, especially in Europe and America, were raised against the thought of Marx and his followers, the more the reality of the social question was evolving with a perceptible and progressive improvement of the environmental conditions of working-class labor, of the economic conditions that the social legislation (v.) of the various States and trade-union action, wherever it had established itself, were urging and effecting in the second half of the 19th and in 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 economic freedom 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 of freedom and its integrally understood enjoyability is evident. In practical life, economic freedom is constrained within the limits imposed by the effective possibilities of acquiring the goods necessary for the satisfaction of the essential needs of the human personality (for example, for the unemployed freedom is almost nothing).

In this contradiction between liberal right and social reality lies the dramatic incentive to the permanent anxiety of the social question (v.), to temper which Christian social doctrine (v.) is placed. Given need as 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 the existing endowments of raw materials and natural instrumental goods, should unfold in such a way that the determinations of elementary and daily recurring needs were effected with the relative regularity of a more or less constant average, without the excessive oscillations in which recurring crises are characterized. Otherwise, under 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 prejudicially expresses an authoritarian demand, by realizing which it may attain social justice, through the expropriating revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, according to the Marxist formula tried out in Russia, that is, a direct dictatorship, maintained and guaranteed by the effective dictatorship of the ruling political party. But since the demand for freedom too, innate in man, is likewise irrepressible, many have asked themselves and consider themselves entitled to ask whether socialism actually intends or does not intend to guarantee individual freedom in the determination of the not merely material needs of the person and of the family unit. If it abolishes it, it will have to be called an enemy of freedom, opposed to every development of individual character and to every moral perfecting.

The demand for egalitarianism gives rise to the compression of freedom. The social utopia, from the distant and mythical positions attributed to antiquity, down to the works and novels of the Middle Ages and the modern age, in its various imaginings, frequently assumes egalitarian representations between the sexes, in the family and even beyond the boundaries of nationality, race and religion. And from it emerge representations of artificially uniform and automatized life that do not persuade and in the end attract only the deluded or the fanatics, but prudently leave the right-thinking diffident, to whom no theory appears closer to human proportions, to the harmonious equilibria of 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 realization, Marx neither wanted nor was able to foresee. An intense and pathological development of capitalism was expected, 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 salaried peasants and above all among the workers of specialized industries kept up to date with technological progress. A growing strengthening of the trade-union base and of the political efficiency of socialist parties was expected in the countries where the most advanced capitalist initiative would have favored the formation of militant workers' elites, capable of attracting and convincing the slower masses. On the other hand, the growing concentration of capitalist initiative would have brought with it, just as progressively, the proletarianization of the masses, the reduction to minimal consistency of the residual groups lingering in traditional handicrafts and in small rural and urban property, and finally cyclical crises more frequent and severe in an environment made rigid by capitalist expansion with a strong monopolistic tendency.

These predictions, interpreted according to historical materialism and the deterministic conception of social evolution, led logically to the prospect of the final collapse. Reality seemed, and in certain respects still seems, to want partly to consolidate such a predictive prospect; so it appeared at the outbreak of the world war of 1914-18, all the more so when, in March 1917, the Russian Revolution passed, through Lenin's coup, all power to the minority Bolshevik faction. But reality, always complex, did not fully second the predictions of militant Marxism. The cyclical crises were overcome, particularly the very grave and almost worldwide one of 1929-33, in contrast to the catastrophic predictions. The centralization of capital in the banking-industrial circuit, characteristic of modern capitalism (whose driving force manifests itself in the institution of the joint-stock company and its ultra-modern cartel and trust connections), progressed, it is true, spurred by the almost normally physiological process of the current economy; but, on the other hand, average private property also revealed itself in continuous increase, along with mixed forms of association between capital and labor in agricultural colonies, in cooperatives of farmers, artisans and smaller industries, producing outside the great banking-industrial units or even connected to them subsidiarily in production, but independent in their constitution and corporate management.

At the end of the Second World War of 1939-45, although the influence of extremist social tendencies in the politics of States was accentuated everywhere, the majority passed to extremist socialist parties only in a few countries and above all did not pass there where the spirit of human personality, widely recognized and accepted as a way of life, came to temper, in theory and in action, the value of the premises and presuppositions of Marxism. The example of the totalitarian States of east-central Europe does not fit the counter-observation, because, for them, in situations independent of the internal currents and tendencies of the respective peoples, the acceptance of the leadership of the Russian Communist Party was affirmed, as a political-military result of the foreign policy of the USSR. Indeed the great majority of European and non-European countries, with a Western way of life, has known the rise of the working masses to progressive conquests; a rise that, especially in the post-war years of 1919 and following, was spurred not only by the socialist parties properly so called, but by the other simply democratic currents and in particular by social affirmations in the parties and trade-union associations that appeal to Catholic principles. Even from the directing spheres of the non-Marxist totalitarian experiments, despite their affirmed right-wing political orientations, with the recognition of unitary or multiple unions, encouragements were promoted for class collaboration and for social, welfare and social-security reforms through the ever more widespread adoption of collective labor contracts as public acts, and the labor union was introduced into the very juridical and political life of the State (Italy-Spain-Portugal).

Moreover, in the sphere of economic action, both in the productive industrial sectors most jealous from the standpoint of national interest and in those of public services, state intervention manifested itself ever more extensively and deeply in order to realize situations with a collectivist tendency through direct state administrations, or administrations entrusted to autonomous bodies financed by the State and controlled by it. So that one can well say that the so-called capitalist countries are all, to a greater or lesser degree and in a more or less pronounced manner, by now co-participants, beyond the sphere of so-called bourgeois economy, in concomitant and connected organizations and institutions of a socialist type, with sensible and progressive reductions of the sphere reserved to private initiative. In the banking sector itself, which would be the most significant of capitalist economy. The first principle of "laissez faire, laissez passer" is more a historical memory than a reality. Monetary controls and defenses for and against inflationary and deflationary pressures have led State banks to a growing regulatory authority over the circulation of monetary values and credit. The regulation of international arbitrage itself, consequent upon the exchanges of goods and values of the foreign trade of individual countries, is still constrained within an almost general discipline of a para-socialist character.

Finally, one aspect of indirect socialist action in the Western countries and in the Anglo-Saxon dominions consists in accepting and favoring the broad realization of productive associations, such as cooperative, consortium and similar enterprises which, although operating within the sphere of competition, are of purely working-class and peasant origin, often at the initiative of socialist groups, enjoying preferential administrative and fiscal facilitations from the respective States.

If therefore various aspects of contemporary reality correspond in part to Marxist predictions, others contradict its final, simplistic and one-sided prospect. More suited to the social needs that the world economy presents in our time are the Catholic social principles tending toward an ethico-political system, open to the associated initiatives of producers and workers, to the protection of the natural solidarities arising from the affinity of interests among the co-participants of the same productive category and together to the integrating interventions of the modern State, committed "recta ratione" to respecting the freedom and dignity of the human person, in the exercise of all his faculties (v. CORPORATIVISMO; DOTTRINA SOCIALE CRISTIANA). For the critique of the philosophical principles of socialism, v. MATERIALISMO DIALETTICO; MATERIALISMO STORICO.