11. How do you define socialism
Socialism:
a political and economic theory of social organization which
advocates that the means of production, distribution, and
exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a
whole.
(in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between the
overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.
12. Do you agree that Socialism is the thing in the past?
It functions as critique, via utopia;
socialist theory remains the alter ego of capitalism
Into the millennium, the presence of socialism may be more discernible as a
culture than as a politics. In this broader sense socialist argument replays various
claims and counter-claims associated with modernity and critique via
Romanticism and Enlightenment.
13. Is socialism and Marxism Identical?
Socialism has a history; of which Marxism is a part.Socialism precedes, and
postdates Marxism (see generally Sassoon, 1996).
Socialism as a social theory coincides not only with the radical aspirations of the
French Revolution but also with the earliest reactions against the Industrial
Revolution.
14. Does this mean, however, that socialism can only ever
be a negative or oppositional trend?
Socialism is often identifed with statism, but this is misleading. The earliest
socialists like Owen and Fourier favoured the local level of analysis and viewed
cooperation or self-management as crucial, and Marx follows them in this; even
Marx's greatest work, Capital itself.
15. In the perspective of sociologist
Marx fails to bridge intellectually the gap between the individual factory and the
globalized world-system. Local socialism thus historically coincides with the idea
that small is beautiful, and thus reveals the power of its own romanticism or anti-
modernism
it is only with the work of Weber, Simmel and Durkheim in different ways that
sociologists centre upon scale and complexity as irreversible features of modern
social organization
16. Can you tell the audience, why there has been a
collapse of Marxism
The first involved the rediscovery of methodological pluralism, in principle
available in Weber but politically accessible through the work of Foucault.
Foucault widely replaced Althusser, who had replaced Marx. Power was
discovered to exist throughout modernity, and not only in economy.
17. The second point of erosion involved the
rediscovery or renegotiation of democracy, via
liberalism as political theory in the re-emergence of
social movements and the reappraisal of civil
society (Arato and Cohen, 1992).
18. Marxism now appeared to be a regional theory rather than a general theory. The
fact that liberalism could be seen as radical again gave a second chance to
various non Marxian socialist alternatives.
The general problem, inasmuch as it could be named, was now re-
identifieed as the problem not of capitalism but of modernity. Working out of the
Budapest School tradition of Weberian Marxism, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher
identified the field of modernity as at least threefold, characterized by the differing
logics or dynamics of capitalism, industrialism and democracy (Heller and Feher,
1983). T
19. So, where can we see socialism nowadays?
Socialism lived in the academy perhaps more than anywhere else, as its claims to
being taken seriously as a culture of social theory had outgrown its street
credentials as a practical politics.
socialism remains the kind of critique and utopia which it began as, diminished in
its certainty just as its existence is warranted by what surrounds it, part of the past
and thereby of our present.
20. Formally speaking, socialism might be said to have returned to the civil societies
and social movements which originally called it forth. For as socialists have
declared that the core of their utopia is democracy, and not only equality, so have
their ambitions returned to the horizons of social democracy and the radical
liberal heritage which often informs it.
If socialism began as the claim to pursue the ideals of the French Revolution,
supporting the expansion of democracy against power or capitalism, then its
Marxian claims to absolute difference may have been illusory. Socialism remains
part of the critique of modernity; neither term seems possible without the other.
21. TAKE AWAYS
(a key fact, point, or idea to be remembered, typically one emerging from a
discussion or meeting.)
Editor's Notes
C.
A.Rich peopleRich people
D. too many to count
2
D. Capitalism
D.
D.
Socialism is a rich tradition of political thought and practice, the history of which contains a vast number of views and theories, often differing in many of their conceptual, empirical, and normative commitments.
The term 'socialism' was coined by Henri de Saint-Simon, a founder of utopian socialism (along with Robert Owen). Socialism falls between communism and capitalism in terms of beliefs and ideology. The fundamental view of socialism is that man, society, and the universe are equal.
