Keyword

Axes

Upper Left Quadrant Details Upper Right Quadrant Details Lower Left Quadrant Details Lower Right Quadrant Details Details

Quadrants

Outline

Although socialist ideas can be traced back to the seventeenth century and even before, socialism as ideology and movement of the working class did not develop until the early nineteenth century.
From the late nineteenth century onwards, the socialist movement was divided into two rival camps: revolutionary versus reformist socialists (horizontal axis). Each of these camps was in turn crossed by cleavages along the state-class divide (vertical axis).
In the ULQ, the goal of revolutionary socialism was the abolition of private-enterprise economy (to be replaced with common ownership) and of state power (to be replaced with people's direct self-government). The most influential representative of this brand of socialism was K. Marx, whose political theory provided the foundations for twentieth-century communism. Marxist theory, claiming the need to conquer state power and to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" as the most appropriate means of achieving the socialist goal for economic equality, was developed and implemented by V.I. Lenin through the revolutionary experience of Soviet communism. Another wing of revolutionary socialism (LLQ) emphasized rather the autonomy of the working class in forcing changes to the organization of the capitalist system, independently from trade unions or political parties. After the split between the followers of Bakunin and those of Marx within the First International, many minority movements (from anarcho-syndicalists to the so-called autonomists) in the course of time rose against "orthodox" Marxism. Reformist socialism, influenced mainly by the ideas of the German social democrat "revisionist" E. Bernstein, differed from revolutionary socialism not only for its methods (a peaceful and gradual transition to socialism), but even for its aims, as it promoted the integration of the working class into capitalist society through the improvement of working conditions and the growth of trade unions and mass political parties. In Western Europe, these reformist trends became predominant over revolutionary aspirations, and social democratic and labor parties, with the active support of trade unions, governed their respective countries for lengthy periods. The reformist action can be limited to the representation of class interests, where organized labor shares the pluralist process of interest articulation and intermediation (LRQ), or can be extended to welfare state provisions, giving rise to a corporatist system where workers' organizations are integrated into the policy-process (URQ). [Enrico Melchionda]