ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: POLITICAL SCIENCE
SOCIALISM
SOCIALISM
A Short History
By
NORMAN MACKENZIE
Volume 57
First published 1949
Second (revised) edition first published 1966
This edition first published in 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
New material 1966 Norman MacKenzie
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 10: 0-415-49111-8 (Set)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49111-2 (Set)
ISBN 10: 0-415-55599-X (Volume 57)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-55599-9 (Volume 57)
Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.
SOCIALISM
A SHORT HISTORY
Norman MacKenzie
B.SC(ECON)
HUTCHINSON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
LONDON
HUTCHINSON & CO (Publishers) LTD
178202 Great Portland Street, London WI
London Melbourne Sydney
Auckland Bombay Toronto
Johannesburg New York
First published 1949
Second (revised) edition May 1966
Reprint March 1967
for new material Norman MacKenzie 1966
For
John Oakley
Drongen: May 1944
CONTENTS
Foreword
This is a revised edition of a book first published in 1949. Events since then have made it desirable to substitute new chapters for those that appeared originally as , but only minor textual changes have been made elsewhere. Since 1949, moreover, the development of paperback publishing has made it possible to drop the original bibliographymany titles in which have become difficult to procureand to supply in its place a shorter list of books for further reading, all of which are available in Britain and the United States in paperback editions. The original purpose of the book remains. It was not written to provide a definitive history of socialist ideas and movements, for such a task could not be accomplished in so limited a space. It was designed to offer an introductory volume from which the reader could go on to more detailed or specialist studies.
N.M.
A New View of Society
At the end of the eighteenth century, two momentous changes took place in Europe. The first was political: the French Revolution dramatically asserted the rights of man to liberty, equality and fraternity. The second was economic: new technical inventions, harnessed to the steam-engine, quickly promoted an industrial revolution. Together, they produced the capitalist system, a bourgeois order based upon political liberty, formal equality before the law, private ownership of the means of production, and free competition in the market. But the very changes which created this new society provided the basis for criticising it. The slogans of democracy, originally directed against feudal privilege, could as well be turned against inequalities that arose from acquired wealth. The idea of solidarity (or fraternity) could be opposed to the competitive ethos of liberal individualism. The principle of common political action could easily be extended, by the working class that was being formed by the factory system, to common industrial action against the employers. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, the essential features of industrial capitalism had been established in Britain; but, at the same time, the political and economic conditions that had made this possible had also made it possible to conceive of an alternative view of societywhat we now call socialism.
A New View of Society, indeed, was the title of one of the earliest pamphlets which set out such an alternative. Its author, Robert Dale Owen, was a successful but radically-minded manufacturer, who had become convinced that human needs could best be satisfied by a combination of political democracy and the common ownership of industry which he called co-operation. The first use of the word socialism actually occurred in an Owenite publication, the Cooperative Magazine, in 1827; for several years thereafter no clear distinction was made between socialism, co-operation, radical democracy or even communism. All these terms were loosely used for any system of ideas which was politically radical and socially collectivist.
Even today the word socialist has many meanings. It may be used, for instance, by members of the British Labour Party to describe their programme of moderate social reform; or by Soviet communists to characterise the present stage of development of the USSR; or by Israelis talking about a kibbutz, or co-operative farm. But unless the term is to lose all pretence at precision, becoming merged at one extreme with any form of democratic reform and at the other extreme with all types of totalitarian state control, it must refer to certain ideas about the nature of society and the ways in which it can be changed. A liberal democrat in the United States, for example, may argue for a publicly-sponsored health service; but such a reform would be no more socialist than the provision of public education or a national postal system. In wartime, an English conservative could support many kinds of state action which, in time of peace, he would oppose as destructive of personal initiative and private property rights. Nazi Germany had many collectivist features, but despite the name, National Socialism, no one would seriously propose including the Hitler regime in a study of socialism simply because there was highly centralised control of the political and economic system. Some aspects of socialism, certainly, are akin to utilitarian reformism, as others are to authoritarianism; but as the term has been employed by various social movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it implies a distinct group of doctrines which it may be helpful to summarise at the outset of this book.
Every socialist theory implies a moral criticism of the existing social order, and opposes to it a conception of a society free from injustice and the strictures of inequality. Whether the system that is attacked is a modern bourgeois democracy, such as contemporary Britain or America, or a colonialist regime such as those that Britain, France and Holland maintained until after World War II, or a society based on racial segregation, such as South Africa, the socialist critique focusses upon its denial of human equality. Even though much of Marxs writing was devoted to proving, by the logic of scientific socialism, that the capitalist system was ultimately doomed, the pages of
