Socialism summary

In the early 1800s, huge leaps in technology led to the industrial revolution. Across the West, new factories and industries sprang into being. As a result, masses of people who’d previously lived in cooperative, rural communities were crowded into poorly planned cities. The conditions were dreadful, cramped and filthy. To survive, residents were forced to compete with each other for factory jobs that paid measly wages.

Many welcomed these changes, hailing them as signs of progress. Others, angry at the extreme poverty and inequity inherent to this new industrial system, were less pleased. These disillusioned thinkers and activists gradually banded together under the banner of “socialism.”

By the end of the nineteenth century, all mass socialist organizations essentially agreed on the importance of reducing – or abolishing – economic inequality and of promoting human cooperation and solidarity.

But a gap in Marx’s philosophy led to growing disagreement among socialists about exactly how to implement socialism.

By the 1920s, socialism was struggling. Social democratic parties in democracies such as Germany were being frozen out of government, despite winning elections, and totalitarianism – in the form of Stalinism and fascism – was growing increasingly powerful. It seemed that socialism was in retreat.

But one nation bucked the trend: Sweden.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the Caribbean island nation of Cuba experienced a very different form of socialism than Sweden. Unlike Sweden’s democratic route to a socialist society, Cuba’s journey began in 1959 with a revolution overthrowing US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

One of the revolution’s leaders, Fidel Castro, quickly began implementing a distinct Cuban form of socialism that he branded humanism. This ideology centered on policies such as agrarian reform, anti-imperialism and rent reduction. Directly after the revolution, about 15 percent of the nation’s wealth was transferred from landowners to laborers and peasants.

In the post-war era, social movements like feminism and environmentalism presented socialism with fresh problems.

Today, it seems obvious that an egalitarian society must promote equality for women. However, this wasn’t always self-evident.

Capitalism is the most powerful system today. In the last 30 or so years, neoliberalism – a form of capitalism that advocates the deregulation of markets, privatization and austerity – has been on the march.

To understand why neoliberalism is so influential today, we need to look back to its first few years of domination.