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محروم.كوم · #1 09-13-2010, 05:10 PM

Socialism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Socialism is a broad array of ideologies and political movements with the goal of a socio-economic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the community for the purposes of increasing social and economic equality and cooperation.[1] This control may be either direct, exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils, or indirect, exercised on behalf of the people by the state. As an economic system, socialism is often characterized by state or community ownership of the means of production.

The modern socialist movement largely originated in the late-19th century working class movement. In this period, the term socialism was first used in connection with European social critics who criticized capitalism and private property. For Karl Marx, who helped establish and define the modern socialist movement, socialism would be the socioeconomic system that arises after the proletarian revolution, in which the means of production are owned collectively. This society would then progress into communism.

Since the 19th century, socialists have not agreed on a common doctrine or program. Various adherents of socialist movements are split into differing and sometimes opposing branches, particularly between reformists and revolutionaries. Some socialists have championed the complete nationalization of the means of production, while social democrats have proposed selective nationalization of key industries within the framework of mixed economies.

Stalinists, including those inspired by the Soviet model of economic development, have advocated the creation of centrally planned economies directed by a state that owns all the means of production. Others, including self-titled Communists in Yugoslavia and Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese Communists since the reform era, and some Western economists, have proposed various forms of market socialism, attempting to reconcile the presumed advantages of cooperative or state ownership of the means of production with letting market forces, rather than central planners, guide production and exchange.[2] Anarcho-syndicalists, Luxemburgists (such as those in the Socialist Party USA) and some elements of the United States New Left favor decentralized collective ownership in the form of cooperatives or workers' councils.

Contents
1 Historical precedents
2 Origins of socialism
2.1 Henri de Saint-Simon
2.2 Robert Owen
2.3 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
2.4 Mikhail Bakunin
3 Marxism and the socialist movement
4 International Workingmen's Association (First International)
5 Paris Commune
6 The Second International
6.1 Germany
6.2 Russia
6.3 United States
6.4 France
6.5 World War I
7 British socialism
8 Revolutions between 1917 and 1923

9 The inter-war era and World War II
9.1 Britain
9.2 United States
9.3 Germany
9.4 Sweden
10 Socialism after World War II
10.1 The bi-polar world
10.2 Social Democracy in power
11 Militancy, socialism and the rise of neo-liberalism
12 Socialism in the 21st Century
13 Socialism as an economic system
14 Socialism and social and political theory
15 Criticisms of socialism
16 Notes
17 References and further reading

Historical precedents

Certain elements of a socialist thought long predate the socialist ideology that emerged in the first half of the 19th century. Plato's Republic and Thomas More's Utopia have been cited as including socialist ideas.[3] The fifth century Mazdak movement in what is now Iran has been described as "communistic" for challenging the enormous privileges of the noble classes and the clergy, and for striving for an egalitarian society.[4] William Morris argued that John Ball, one of the leaders of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, was the first socialist.[5] John Ball is credited with saying: "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?"[6] During the English Civil War in the mid 17th Century, movements identified with the socialist tradition include the Levellers and the Diggers; the latter believing that land should be held in common.

During the 18th-century Enlightenment, criticism of inequality appeared in the work of political theorists such as Jean Jacques Rousseau in France, whose Social Contract began, "Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains."[7] Following the French Revolution of 1789, François Noël Babeuf espoused the goals of common ownership of land and total economic and political equality among citizens.

Origins of socialism

The appearance of the term "socialism" is variously attributed to Pierre Leroux in 1834,[8] or to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud in France, or else in England to Robert Owen, who is considered the father of the cooperative movement.[9]

The first modern socialists were early 19th century Western European social critics. In this period, socialism emerged from a diverse array of doctrines and social experiments associated primarily with British and French thinkers—especially Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and Saint-Simon. These social critics criticised the excesses of poverty and inequality of the Industrial Revolution, and advocated reforms such as the egalitarian distribution of wealth and the transformation of society into small communities in which private property was to be abolished. Outlining principles for the reorganization of society along collectivist lines, Saint-Simon and Owen sought to build socialism on the foundations of planned, utopian communities.

According to some accounts, the use of the words "socialism" or "communism" was related to the perceived attitude toward religion in a given culture. In Europe, "communism" was considered to be the more atheistic of the two. In England, however, that sounded too close to communion with Catholic overtones; hence atheists preferred to call themselves socialists.[10]

By 1847, according to Frederick Engels, "Socialism" was "respectable" on the continent of Europe, while "Communism" was the opposite; the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered Socialists, while working class movements which "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" termed themselves "Communists". This latter was "powerful enough" to produce the communism of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.[11]

Henri de Saint-Simon
Henri de Saint-Simon, who is called the founder of French socialism, argued that a brotherhood of man must accompany the scientific organization of industry and society. He proposed that production and distribution be carried out by the state, and that allowing everyone to have equal opportunity to develop their talents would lead to social harmony, and the state could be virtually eliminated. "Rule over men would be replaced by the administration of things."[12]

Robert Owen
Robert Owen advocated the transformation of society into small, local collectives without such elaborate systems of social organization. Owen was a mill manager from 1800-1825. He transformed life in the village of New Lanark with ideas and opportunities which were at least a hundred years ahead of their time. Child labor and corporal punishment were abolished, and villagers were provided with decent homes, schools and evening classes, free health care, and affordable food.[13]

The UK government's Factory Act of 1833 attempted to reduce the hours adults and children worked in the textile industry. A fifteen hour working day was to start at 5.30 a.m. and cease at 8.30 p.m. Children of nine to thirteen years could be worked no more than 9 hours, and those of a younger age were prohibited. There were, however, only four factory inspectors, and this law was broken by the factory owners.[14] In the same year Owen stated:

“ Eight hours' daily labor is enough for any [adult] human being, and under proper arrangements sufficient to afford an ample supply of food, raiment and shelter, or the necessaries and comforts of life, and for the remainder of his time, every person is entitled to education, recreation and sleep.[15] ”

In a Paper Dedicated to the Governments of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and the United States of America written in 1841, Owen wrote: "The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labor for a small pittance of wages from others."[16]

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon pronounced that "Property is theft" and that socialism was "every aspiration towards the amelioration of society". Proudhon termed himself an anarchist and proposed that free association of individuals should replace the coercive state.[17][18] Proudhon, Benjamin Tucker, and others developed these ideas in a free-market direction, while Mikhail Bakunin, Piotr Kropotkin, and others adapted Proudhon's ideas in a more conventionally socialist direction.

In a letter to Marx in 1846, Proudhon wrote:

“ I myself put the problem in this way: to bring about the return to society, by an economic combination, of the wealth which was withdrawn from society by another economic combination. In other words, through Political Economy to turn the theory of Property against Property in such a way as to engender what you German socialists call community and what I will limit myself for the moment to calling liberty or equality. ”

Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin, the father of modern anarchism, was a libertarian socialist, a theory by which the workers would directly manage the means of production through their own productive associations. There would be "equal means of subsistence, support, education, and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity, and equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create his own well-being by his own labor."[19]

While many socialists emphasized the gradual transformation of society, most notably through the foundation of small, utopian communities, a growing number of socialists became disillusioned with the viability of this approach and instead emphasized direct political action. Early socialists were united, however, in their desire for a society ****d on cooperation rather than competition.

Marxism and the socialist movement

1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels drew from the socialist or communist ideas born in the French Revolution of 1789, the German philosophy of GWF Hegel, and English political economy, particularly that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx and Engels developed a body of ideas which they called scientific socialism, more commonly called Marxism.

The Communist Manifesto says "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" [20] and famously declared that the working class would be the "grave digger" of the capitalist class.

Marx and Engels distinguished their scientific socialism from what they termed the utopian socialism of some other socialist trends. For Marxists, socialism or, as Marx termed it, the first phase of communist society, can be viewed as a transitional stage characterized by common or state ownership of the means of production under democratic workers' control and management, which Engels argued was beginning to be realised in the Paris Commune of 1871, before it was overthrown.[21] Socialism to them is simply the transitional phase between capitalism and "higher phase of communist society". Because this society has characteristics of both its capitalist ancestor and is beginning to show the properties of communism, it will hold the means of production collectively but distributes commodities according to individual contribution.[22]

When the socialist state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) naturally withers away, what will remain is a society in which human beings no longer suffer from alienation and "all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly." Here "society inscribe[s] on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!" [23] For Marx, a communist society entails the absence of differing social classes and thus the end of class warfare. According to Marx and Engels, once a socialist society had been ushered in, the state would begin to "wither away", [24] and humanity would be in control of its own destiny for the first time. [25] Furthermore some Marxists, Trotskyists in particular uphold that the USSR nor any of the other "communist states" were actually socialist.

Marx and Engels argued that capitalism "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production" [26] and raised the seminal call, "Proletarians of all countries, unite".[27]

International Workingmen's Association (First International)
The International Workingmen's Association (IWA), also known as the First International, was founded in London in 1864. Victor Le Lubez, a French radical republican living in London, invited Karl Marx to come to London as a representative of German workers.[28] The IWA held a preliminary conference in 1865, and had its first congress at Geneva in 1866. Marx was appointed a member of the committee, and according to Saul Padover, Marx and Johann Georg Eccarius, a tailor living in London, became "the two mainstays of the International from its inception to its end".[29] The First International became the first major international forum for the promulgation of socialist ideas.

The Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany was founded in 1869 under the influence of Marx and Engels. In 1875, it merged with the General German Workers' Association of Ferdinand Lassalle to become what is known today as the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Socialism became increasingly associated with newly-formed trade unions. In Germany, the SPD founded unions. In Austria, France and other European countries, socialist parties and anarchists played a prominent role in forming and building up trade unions, especially from the 1870s onwards. This stood in contrast to the British experience, where moderate New Model Unions dominated the union movement from the mid-nineteenth century, and where trade unionism was stronger than the political labour movement until the formation and growth of the Labour Party in the early twentieth century.

Socialist groups supported diverse views of socialism, from the gradualism of many trade unionists to the radical, revolutionary theory of Marx and Engels. Anarchists and proponents of other alternative visions of socialism, who emphasized the potential of small-scale communities and agrarianism, coexisted with the more influential currents of Marxism and social democracy. The anarchists, led by the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, believed that capitalism and the state were inseparable, and that one could not be abolished without the other.

Paris Commune
In 1871, in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, an uprising in Paris established the Paris Commune. According to Marx and Engels, for a few weeks the Paris Commune provided a glimpse of a socialist society, before it was brutally suppressed by the French government.

“ From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment. ”
— Engels' 1891 postscript to The Civil War In France by Karl Marx[30]

In Paris Commune, large-scale industry was to be "****d on the association of the workers" joined into "one great union", all posts in government were elected by universal franchise, elected officials took only the average worker's wage and were subject to recall. For Engels, this was what the dictatorship of the proletariat looked like (as opposed to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie", which was capitalism). Engels goes on to state: "In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy", and a new generation of socialists, "reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap".[31]

The Second International

As the ideas of Marx and Engels took on flesh, particularly in central Europe, socialists sought to unite in an international organisation. In 1889, on the centennial of the French Revolution of 1789, the Second International was founded, with 384 delegates from 20 countries representing about 300 labour and socialist organizations.[32] It was termed the "Socialist International" and Engels was elected honorary president at the third congress in 1893.

Just before his death in 1895, Engels argued that there was now a "single generally recognised, crystal clear theory of Marx" and a "single great international army of socialists". Despite its illegality due to the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, the Social Democratic Party of Germany's use of the limited universal male suffrage were "potent" new methods of struggle which demonstrated their growing strength and forced the dropping of the Anti-Socialist legislation in 1890, Engels argued.[33] In 1893, the German SPD obtained 1,787,000 votes, a quarter of votes cast. However before the leadership of the SPD published Engels' 1895 Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, they removed certain phrases they felt were too revolutionary.[34]

Marx believed that it was possible to have a peaceful socialist transformation in England, although the British ruling class would then revolt against such a victory.[35] America and Holland might also have a peaceful transformation, but not in France, where Marx believed there had been "perfected... an enormous bureaucratic and military organisation, with its ingenious state machinery" which must be forcibly overthrown. However, eight years after Marx's death, Engels argued that it was possible to achieve a peaceful socialist revolution in France, too.[36]

Germany
The SPD was by far the most powerful of the social democratic parties. Its votes reached 4.5 million, it had 90 daily newspapers, together with trade unions and co-ops, sports clubs, a youth organisation, a women's organisation and hundreds of full time officials. Under the pressure of this growing party, Bismarck introduced limited welfare provision and working hours were reduced. Germany experienced sustained economic growth for more than forty years. Commentators suggest that this expansion, together with the concessions won, gave rise to illusions amongst the leadership of the SPD that capitalism would evolve into socialism gradually.

Beginning in 1896, in a series of articles published under the title "Problems of socialism", Eduard Bernstein argued that an evolutionary transition to socialism was both possible and more desirable than revolutionary change. Bernstein and his supporters came to be identified as "revisionists" because they sought to revise the classic tenets of Marxism. Although the orthodox Marxists in the party, led by Karl Kautsky, retained the Marxist theory of revolution as the official doctrine of the party, and it was repeatedly endorsed by SPD conferences, in practice the SPD leadership became increasingly reformist.

Russia
Bernstein coined the aphorism: "The movement is everything, the final goal nothing". But the path of reform appeared blocked to the Russian Marxists while Russia remained the bulwark of reaction. In the preface to the 1882 Russian edition to the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had saluted the Russian Marxists who, they said, "formed the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe". But the working class, although many were organised in vast modern western-owned enterprises, comprised no more than a small percentage of the population and "more than half the land is owned in common by the peasants". Marx and Engels posed the question: How was Russia to progress to socialism? Could Russia "pass directly" to socialism or "must it first pass through the same process" of capitalist development as the West? They replied: "If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."[37]

In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party began to split on ideological and organizational questions into Bolshevik ('Majority') and Menshevik ('Minority') factions, with Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin leading the more radical Bolsheviks. Both wings accepted that Russia was an economically backward country unripe for socialism. The Mensheviks awaited the capitalist revolution in Russia. But Lenin argued that a revolution of the workers and peasants would achieve this task. After the Russian revolution of 1905, Leon Trotsky argued that unlike the French revolution of 1789 and the European Revolutions of 1848 against absolutism, the capitalist class would never organise a revolution in Russia to overthrow absolutism, and that this task fell to the working class who, liberating the peasantry from their feudal yoke, would then immediately pass on to the socialist tasks and seek a "permanent revolution" to achieve international socialism.[38] Assyrian nationalist Freydun Atturaya tried to create regional self-government for the Assyrian people with the socialism ideology. He even wrote the Urmia Manifesto of the United Free Assyria. However, his attempt was put to an end by Russia

United States
In 1877, the Socialist Labor Party of America was founded in the United States. This party, which advocated Marxism, was a confederation of small Marxist parties from throughout the United States, and came under the leadership of Daniel De Leon. In 1901, a merger between opponents of De Leon and the younger Social Democratic Party joined with Eugene V. Debs to form the Socialist Party of America. This party grew to 150,000 in 1912 and polled 897,000 votes in the presidential campaign of that year, 6 percent of the total vote. Before that, in 1910, the Sewer Socialists, the main group of American socialists, located in Milwaukee, elected Victor Berger as a socialist Congressman and Emil Seidel as a socialst mayor, most of the other elected city officials being socialist as well. Another socialist mayor, Daniel Hoan, was elected in 1916 and stayed in office until 1940. The final Socialist mayor, Frank P. Zeidler, was elected in 1948 and served three terms, ending in 1960. The Socialist Party declined after the First World war.

In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World formed from several independent labor unions. The IWW opposed the political means of Debs and De Leon, as well as the craft unionism of Samuel Gompers.

France
French socialism was beheaded by the suppression of the Paris commune (1871), its leaders killed or exiled. But in 1879, at the Marseille Congress, workers' associations created the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France. Three years later, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, the son-in-law of Karl Marx, left the federation and founded the French Workers' Party.

The Federation of the Socialist Workers of France was termed "possibilist" because it advocated gradual reforms, whereas the French Workers' Party promoted Marxism. In 1905 these two trends merged to form the French Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), led by Jean Jaurès and later Léon Blum. In 1906 it won 56 seats in Parliament. The SFIO adhered to Marxist ideas but became, in practice, a reformist party. By 1914 it had more than 100 members in the Chamber of Deputies.

World War I
When World War I began in 1914, many European socialist leaders supported their respective governments' war aims. The social democratic parties in the UK, France, Belgium and Germany supported their respective state's wartime military and economic planning, discarding their commitment to internationalism and solidarity.

Lenin, however, denounced the war as an imperialist conflict, and urged workers worldwide to use it as an occasion for proletarian revolution. The Second International dissolved during the war, while Lenin, Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, together with a small number of other Marxists opposed to the war, came together in the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915.

British socialism
In continental Europe and elsewhere, by the end of the nineteenth century, the various sources of socialism were tributaries to the "mighty stream of the Marxist movement".[39] In Britain, the world's pre-eminent power at the time, Marxism remained only one strand of opinion, mixing with Christian socialism, ethical socialism, Fabianism, cooperativism, and other trends. In the general election of 1945, the Labour Party won a clear parliamentary majority and carried out extensive reforms. Its largely non-Marxist leadership was conscious of this socialist heritage.

The Christian socialist movement was led by Frederick Denison Maurice [40], J. M. F. Ludlow and Charles Kingsley in 1848. At this time, rather than pursue the Chartist aim of establishing a universal franchise, "they wanted to Christianise socialism and Chartism and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, they wanted to form a whole country of religiously ****d guilds as a development of guild socialism".[41] The Christian Socialist League was established in 1894, and the Church of England Church Socialist League was established in 1906. They shared a rejection of that political economy which supported individualist competitive markets, whose failings in the industrial revolution had been exposed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Arnold and John Ruskin.[42]

Ludlow in particular was inspired by Fourier, believed strongly in democracy, and influenced R. H. Tawney, a devout Christian who had an enormous influence on the interwar Labour Party leadership’s outlook, and on the revisionist school of Anthony Crossland and others after 1945.[43] In particular, he and others gave moral and philosophical guidance to the rejection of 'orthodox' economic policy and the embracing of high levels of taxation of wealthy business owners, and indeed, nationalisation if needs be, which coincided with the arguments of those such as Marxist and Labour Party chairman, Harold J Laski.[44] Rejecting the arguments in favour of a meritocracy and attacking Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand" of the market in capitalist society, Tawney argued in 1931:

“ But opportunities to rise are not a substitute for a large measure of practical equality, nor do they make immaterial the existence of sharp disparities of income and social condition. On the contrary, it is only the presence of a high degree of practical equality which can diffuse and generalise opportunities to rise. The existence in fact, and not merely in form, depends, not only upon an open road, but on an equal start. ”
— R H Tawney, Equality[45]

In 1884, middle class intellectuals organized the Fabian Society, a moderate form of socialism in opposition to Marxist ideas. This society did not seek to build its membership, but only to influence the leaders of the labour movement, which it continues to do to the present day. The Fabians embraced individuals such as Tawney, who was a member from 1906.

Socialist ideas also began to spread amongst the British working class. In 1881, the Marxist Social Democratic Federation met for the first time, and in 1888 the successful Matchgirls Strike began a period of New Unionism in which members and former members of the Social Democratic Federation played a prominent role. In 1889, Will Thorne, who was taught to read by Eleanor Marx, organized the Gasworkers, and gained a reduction in the working week from twelve to eight hours a day. In the same year, the London Dock Strike of 1889, organized by Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, (who like Thorne had been members of the Social Democratic Federation), won significant gains and was seen as a landmark in British trade unionism.

The new unions brought a new socialist consciousness to the trade union movement. In 1899, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants proposed that the Trade Union Congress call a special conference to bring together the trade unions and all the left-wing organisations, to sponsor Parliamentary candidates independent of the Liberal Party. In 1900, the trade unions, together with the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians, founded the Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906. The Cooperative movement, which traces its foundation to the work of Robert Owen, although not represented at the founding conference of 1900, nevertheless affiliated soon after to become a core affiliate of the Labour Party.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the concept of guild socialism was championed by G.D.H. Cole: "It follows that there must be, in the Society, as many separately elected groups of representatives as there are distinct essential groups of functions to be performed."[46] Each factory, workshop, etc, has a representative council and internal autonomy. The administration of an industry is to be a federation of such groups.[47]

Revolutions between 1917 and 1923
By 1917, the atmosphere of enthusiastic patriotism that had greeted the start of World War I had evaporated and was replaced by an upsurge of radicalism in most of Europe, as well as in the United States and Australia.

In February 1917, revolution broke out in Russia and the workers, soldiers and peasants set up workers', soldiers' and peasants' councils (in Russian, soviets), while power was placed into the hands of a Provisional government prior to the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. Lenin arrived in Russia in April 1917 and called for "All power to the Soviets". The Bolsheviks won a majority in the Soviets in October 1917 and at the same time the October Revolution was led by Lenin and Trotsky. At the Petrograd Soviet on the 25 October 1917, Lenin declared, "Long live the world socialist revolution!" [48]

The elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in November 1917 and were won by the non-Marxist, peasant-****d Socialist-Revolutionary (SR) party with almost twice as many votes as the Bolsheviks.[citation needed] The Constituent Assembly was convened for 13 hours between 4 p.m. and 4:40 a.m., January 5-6, 1918. The SR leader Victor Chernov was elected President of the fledgling republic. The following day the Bolsheviks dissolved the assembly.[citation needed]

In this period, few Communists — least of all Lenin and Trotsky — doubted that the success of socialism in Soviet Russia depended on successful socialist revolutions carried out by the working classes of the most developed capitalist counties.[49][50] For this reason, in 1919, Lenin and Trotsky drew together the Communist Parties from around the world into a new 'International', the Communist International (also termed the Third International or Comintern). The new Soviet government immediately nationalised the banks and major industry, and repudiated the former Romanov regime's national debts. It implemented a system of government through the elected workers' councils or soviets. It sued for peace and withdrew from the First World War.

Arguably for the first time, socialism was not just a vision of a future society, but a description of an existing one, at least in embryo. On 26 October 1917, the day after seizing power, Lenin drew up a Draft Regulations on Workers' Control, granting workers' control in enterprises with not less than five workers and office employees, who were to be granted access to all books, documents and stocks, and whose decisions were to be "binding upon the owners of the enterprises".[51] The Russian revolution of October 1917 gave rise to the formation of Communist Parties around the world, and the revolutions of 1917-23 which followed.

The German Revolution of 1918 overthrew the old absolutism and, as in Russia, Workers' and Soldiers' Councils almost entirely made up of SPD and Independent Social Democrats (USPD) members were set up. The Weimar republic was established and placed the SPD in power, under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert. The Workers' and Soldiers' Councils were put down by the army and the Freikorps. In 1919 the Spartacist uprising challenged the power of the SPD government, but it was put down in blood and the German Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were discovered and brutally murdered. A Communist regime under Kurt Eisner in Bavaria in 1919 was also put down in blood.

A Communist regime briefly held power under Béla Kun in Hungary. There were revolutionary movements in Vienna, the industrial centres of northern Italy, and revolutionary movements in the Ruhr area in Germany in 1920 and in Saxony in 1923.

However, these revolutionary movements failed to spread the socialist revolution into the advanced capitalist countries of Europe. In Soviet Russia things were desperate. In August 1918, Lenin was shot in the head and wounded by Fanya Kaplan. Under siege from a trade boycott and invasion by Germany, UK, USA, France and other forces, facing civil war and starvation, the Soviet regime implemented War Communism in June, 1918. All private enterprise was made illegal, strikers could be shot, "non-working classes" were forced to work and the Soviet regime could requisition grain from the peasants for the workers in the cities.

By 1920, the Red Army, led by Trotsky, had largely defeated the White Armies. In 1921, War Communism was ended, and under the New Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership was restored to small and medium enterprises, and especially to the peasants. The peasants had resented and hindered the requisitions of grain so that the situation in the cities remained desperate or was getting worse. Lenin declared that the "commanding heights" of industry would still be under state control, but that the NEP was a capitalist measure in a country that was still largely unripe for socialism. Businessmen and women, called 'NEPmen', began to flourish,[52] and the rich peasant (or 'Kulak', meaning 'fist') gained more power.

Lenin, now half paralysed from several strokes, castigated the powers the state had assumed in the Soviet Union by 1923. It had reverted to "a bourgeois czarist machine... barely varnished with socialism".[53] After Lenin's death in January 1924, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, falling steadily under the control of Stalin, rejected the theory that socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union on its own. Stalin declared a policy of "socialism in one country", namely the Soviet Union. Despite demands by the increasingly marginalised Left Opposition for the restoration of soviet democracy,[54] the Soviet Union continued to develop a bureaucratic and authoritarian model of social development, which was condemned by moderate socialists, Trotskyists and others for undermining the initial socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution.[55]

The inter-war era and World War II
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 brought about the definitive ideological division between Communists as denoted with a capital "C" on the one hand and other communist and socialist trends such as anarcho-communists and social democrats, on the other. The Left Opposition in the Soviet Union gave rise to Trotskyism which was to remain isolated and insignificant for another fifty years, except in Sri Lanka where Trotskyism gained the majority and the pro-Moscow wing was expelled from the Communist Party.

In 1922, the fourth congress of the Communist International took up the policy of the United Front, urging Communists to work with rank and file Social Democrats while remaining critical of their leaders, who they criticised for "betraying" the working class by supporting the war efforts of their respective capitalist classes. For their part, the social democrats pointed to the dislocation caused by revolution, and later, the growing authoritarianism of the Communist Parties. When the Communist Party of Great Britain applied to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1920 it was turned down.

Britain
Once the world's most powerful nation, Britain avoided a revolution during the period of 1917-1923 but was significantly affected by revolt. The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, had promised the troops in the 1918 election that his Conservative-led coalition would make post-war Britain "a fit land for heroes to live in". But many demobbed troops complained of chronic unemployment and suffered low pay, disease and poor housing.[56]

In 1918, the Labour Party adopted as its aim to secure for the workers, "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange". In 1919, the Miners Federation, whose Members of Parliament pre-dated the formation of the Labour Party and were since 1906 a part of that body, demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Soviet Russia. The 1919 Labour Party conference voted to discuss the question of affiliation to the Third (Communist) International, "to the distress of its leaders".[57] A vote was won committing the Labour Party committee of the Trades Union Congress to arrange "direct industrial action" to "stop capitalist attacks upon the Socialist Republics of Russia and Hungary."[58] The threat of immediate strike action forced the Conservative-led coalition government to abandon its intervention in Russia.[59]

In 1914 the unions of the transport workers, the mine workers and the railway workers had formed a Triple Alliance. In 1919, Lloyd George sent for the leaders of the Triple Alliance, one of whom was miner's leader Robert Smillie, a founder member of the Independent Labour Party in 1889 who was to become a Labour Party MP in the first 1924 Labour government. According to Smillie, Lloyd George said:

“ Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps. We have just emerged from a great war and the people are eager for the reward of their sacrifices, and we are in no position to satisfy them. In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us.
But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state. Gentlemen, have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?
”
— Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear [60]

"From that moment on", Smillie conceded to Aneurin Bevan, "we were beaten and we knew we were". When the UK General Strike of 1926 broke out, the trade union leaders, "had never worked out the revolutionary implications of direct action on such a scale", Bevan says.[61] Bevan was a member of the Independent Labour Party and one of the leaders of the South Wales miners during the strike. The TUC called off the strike after nine days. In the North East of England and elsewhere, "councils of action" were set up, with many rank and file Communist Party members often playing a critical role. The councils of action took control of essential transport and other duties.[62] When the strike ended, the miners were locked out and remained locked out for six months. Bevan became a Labour MP in 1929.

In January 1924, the Labour Party formed a minority government for the first time with Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister. The Labour Party intended to ratify an Anglo-Russian trade agreement, which would break the trade embargo on Russia. This was attacked by the Conservatives and new elections took place in October 1924. Four days before polling day the Daily Mail published the Zinoviev letter, a forgery that claimed the Labour Party had links with Soviet Communists and was secretly fomenting revolution. The fears instilled by the press of a Labour Party in secret Communist manoeuvres, together with the half-hearted "respectable" policies pursued by MacDonald, led to Labour losing the October 1924 general election. The victorious Conservatives repudiated the Anglo-Soviet treaty.

The leadership of the Labour Party, like social democratic parties almost everywhere, (with the exception of Sweden and Belgium), tried to pursue a policy of moderation and economic orthodoxy. At times of depression this policy was not popular with the Labour Party’s working class supporters. The influence of Marxism grew in the Labour Party during the inter-war years. Anthony Crosland argued in 1956 that under the impact of the 1931 slump and the growth of fascism, the younger generation of left-wing intellectuals for the most part "took to Marxism" including the "best-known leaders" of the Fabian tradition, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The Marxist Professor Harold Laski, who was to be chairman of the Labour Party in 1945-6, was the "outstanding influence" in the political field. [63]

The Marxists within the Labour Party differed in their attitude to the Communists. Some were uncitical and some were expelled as "fellow travellers", while in the 1930s others were Trotskyists and sympathisers working inside the Labour Party, especially in its youth wing where they were influential.

In the general election of 1929 the Labour Party won 288 seats out of 615 and formed another minority government. The depression of that period brought high unemployment and Prime Minister MacDonald sought to make cuts in order to balance the budget. The trade unions opposed MacDonald’s proposed cuts and he split the Labour government to form the National Government of 1931. This experience moved the Labour Party leftward, and at the start of the Second World War an official Labour Party pamphlet written by Harold Laski argued that, "the rise of Hitler and the methods by which he seeks to maintain and expand his power are deeply rooted in the economic and social system of Europe... economic nationalism, the fight for markets, the destruction of political democracy, the use of war as an instrument of national policy":

“ The war will leave its meed[64] of great problems, problems of internal social organisation... Business men and aristocrats, the old ruling classes of Europe, had their chance from 1919 to 1939; they failed to take advantage of it. They rebuilt the world in the image of their own vested interests... The ruling class has failed; this war is the proof of it. The time has come to give the common people the right to become the master of their own destiny... Capitalism has been tried; the results of its power are before us today. Imperialism has been tried; it is the foster-parent of this great agony.
Given power [the Labour Party] will seek, as no other Party will seek, the basic transformation of our society. It will replace the profit-seeking motive by the motive of public service... there is now no prospect of domestic well-being or of international peace except in Socialism.
”
— Harold Laski, The Labour Party, the War and the Future (1939) [65

After the Paris Commune, the differences between supporters of Marx and Engels and those of Bakunin were too great to bridge. The anarchist section of the First International was expelled from the International at the 1872 Hague Congress and they went on to form the Jura federation. The First International was disbanded in 1876.

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