Kathleen Sears - Socialism 101: from the Bolsheviks and Karl Marx to universal healthcare and the democratic socialists, everything you need to know about socialism

Beginning with the Basics

It seems as if every day someone is denouncing (or sometimes complimenting) someone else with the label of socialist . Yet these people often believe completely different things. Surely they cant all be socialists, can they?

Clearly, the word socialism means different things to different people. The definition of socialism has been stretched very far, but it usually includes a few core beliefs.

Socialism is an economic and political system thats usually put forward as an alternative to or modification of capitalism, the system under which a majority of the worlds countries live. This is one reason that a lot of socialist writing deals with capitalism at least as much as socialism. Karl Marx (18181883), the most important theoretician of socialist ideology, wrote a three-volume book called Capital , devoted to explaining exactly how capitalism works.

Under capitalism, goods and services are produced socially, but they and the wealth they generate are owned privately. For example, if you were to visit a car factory, you wouldnt see each worker constructing only one car, building it from scratch, from engine to lug nuts. Rather, youd see the workers laboring together, each one performing a different task, or series of tasks, to help create the final product: a car.

But when the car makes its way to a dealership and is sold, the profit realized isnt sent back to the factory to be divided among the workers. It goes to whoever owns the factoryin this case, the shareholders, people who bought stock in the company. The largest shareholders realize the greatest amount of profit.

Many Different Capitalisms

Just as there are different varieties of socialism, so are there many types of capitalism. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain (the place Karl Marx wrote about in Capital ) capitalism was largely unregulated. Workers, including young children, worked long hours in highly unsafe conditions and often died in industrial accidents or of diseases brought on by foul working conditions and poor nutrition. Gradually, as youll see in the following pages, workers were able to change many of these conditions and fight for shorter hours and better pay. But the more regulated capitalism seen during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is still capitalism.

Socialistsand well see that the currents of thought that eventually coalesced into socialist ideas go back many centuriesbelieve that goods and services that are produced socially should be owned socially. Such goods and services should not be created for private profit but for public good, administered through the state. In this way, the state becomes a means of social equality and justice.

This isnt to say that socialists believe you shouldnt be able to own your own toothbrush or live in your own house (although there have been some extreme societies, such as Pol Pots Cambodia in the 1970s, that tried to enforce such rigid regulations). For socialists its the larger goods and services that should be owned and administered in common.

Examples of property administered by the state in the interests of the entire population are easy to find. In many countries, including the United States, rail services such as Amtrak are public corporations (there are also private rail companies, such as Union Pacific Railroad and Norfolk Southern Railway). Amtrak has often suffered from issues with funding, since its funds come from the government. But its essentially a national rail system for the United States.

Healthcare is another example. Medicare and Medicaid in the US are socialized healthcare, in which the government pays the majority of health expenses for older and indigent patients. The National Health Service in the UK goes even further, paying the overwhelming majority of healthcare expenses for British citizens. While the program does suffer from problems, its an example of how a socialized system can work. In fact, a majority of first-world countries have some form of socialized healthcare.

Healthcare Around the World

The UK isnt the only place where youll find socialized healthcare. Countries with some form of national healthcare include Mexico, Cuba, Canada, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Israel, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, and almost all of the countries in Europe.