EUROPEAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
In Western Europe, despite the presence of large Marxist parties (as in Italy and France) and the Marxist influence among intellectuals, socialism was, and still is, principally represented by widely based social democratic and labor movements, which generally enjoy the active support of trade unions. This predominance of reformist trends over revolutionary aspirations undoubtedly was occasioned by economic stability and the deterrent example of Marxist rule in the East. The social democratic parties of Sweden, Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany (the former West Germany and present reunified state), in particular, governed their respective countries for lengthy periods during the postwar era through constitutional means, fully accepting the principles of parliamentary liberal democracy. The spirit of these Western European parties has tended to be pragmatic and tolerant, seeking accommodation rather than confrontation. Their programs repudiate the doctrines of the class war, revolution, and communism. Instead, they have relied on the expedients of progressive taxation, deficit financing, selective nationalization, the mixed economy, and vast welfare programs in order to bring about socialism; their political success has depended on considerable middle-class support. Although most of these parties have recently accommodated themselves to free-market reforms, they remain committed to the social democratic vision of a “middle way” between the extremes of communism and unfettered capitalism.
Social democratic foreign policy has generally been pacific and until recently was mainly concerned with defusing the cold war and accelerating the processes of decolonization and the banning of nuclear weapons. In domestic politics, European social democrats generally refused to cooperate with communist parties and other extremist socialist groups. The Social Democratic party (SPD) in Germany, although at one time the citadel of orthodox Marxism, has since 1959 been a purely reformist party, abandoning its original goals. The British LABOUR PARTY, socialist in its aims (its constitution since 1919 has had reference to “public ownership”), has never had any serious doctrinal or organizational links with Marxism, although its powerful left wing consistently advocates radical policies. A dispute with the leftists prompted a group of Labour moderates to secede (1981) and found the Social Democratic party, which later merged (1988) with the Liberal party to form the Social and Liberal Democrats (later, Liberal Democrats). The French Socialist party, which had long since abandoned its orthodox Marxism, allied itself with the Communists during the 1960s, but under the leadership of Francois MITTERRAND, it won the presidency on its own and gained a majority in the National Assembly in 1981. In the same year, the Greek Socialists came to power under Andreas PAPANDREOU, and in 1982, Felipe GONZALEZ MARQUEZ formed Spain’s first Socialist government since the Spanish Civil War. Bettino CRAXI became Italy’s first Socialist premier, heading a coalition government from 1983 to 1987. Although Scandinavia’s social democrats suffered electoral defeats in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the political parties of Europe’s moderate left retained broad popular support.
The French Communist party was long known for its subservience to the USSR and its rigid Stalinism. The Italian Communist party, on the other hand, relied on an indigenous Marxist tradition associated mainly with the teaching of Antonio GRAMSCI, one of the party’s founders, who is widely regarded as one of the most significant of European Marxist thinkers. The Italian party, at one time the largest in Western Europe, frequently obtained the highest percentage of the popular vote in Italy’s parliamentary elections and continuously governed a number of Italian municipalities (Bologna is a prime example).
During the 1970s the Italian Communists under Enrico BERLINGUER, the French Communists under Georges Marchais, and the Spanish Communists under Santiago Carillo embraced a doctrine known as Eurocommunism. The Eurocommunists, breaking not only with Stalinism but with some aspects of the Leninist tradition, began moving toward full acceptance of parliamentary democracy and the multiparty system, in many ways prefiguring the glasnost-perestroika reforms that dramatically changed the Communist world in the Gorbachev era. To the left of the Communists were a number of new groups of militant revolutionaries, such as West Germany’s Red Army (Baader-Meinhof) Faction and Italy’s Red Brigades, which carried out campaigns of abduction, subversion, and terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s.
SOCIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES
In North America, Marxist influence never spread very far. In the United States no socialist movement ever held a very large following, and although the country has produced renowned socialist authors and popular leaders, they have not been distinguished for their originality or for their impact on the worldwide development of socialism. Socialism has not taken a firmer root in the United States for several reasons, of which the country’s cultural traditions and its wealth in natural resources are the most important. Whereas in Europe the distribution of wealth was a pressing problem, facilitating the rise of socialist movements, in the United States the moving “frontier” meant the constant creation of new land and wealth and its accessibility for those endowed with initiative and a spirit of individual enterprise. Thus in the United States even radical thinkers tended to be “individualists” and “anarchists,” rather than socialists. In this development the country’s tradition of republican self-government and its ethos of egalitarianism and democracy also played a decisive role: unlike Europe, the United States had no entrenched aristocratic privileges or monarchical absolutism and consequently no need for democratic aspirations to be combined with the socialist demand for economic equality and security. LABOR UNIONS also, for the most part, concentrated on the achievement of higher earnings and were not greatly interested in economic and social organization.
Numerous, although small, utopian socialist communities did flourish, however, in the United States, mostly during the early 19th century. Also, a celebrated economist, Henry GEORGE, and writers of repute, such as Edward BELLAMY, advocated socialism, and socialist political leaders, such as Victor L. BERGER, Eugene V. DEBS, Daniel DE LEON, and Norman THOMAS, had at one time considerable popular appeal. The U.S. SOCIALIST PARTY, founded in 1901, reached its greatest strength in the 1912 and 1920 presidential elections, when its candidate, Debs, received more than 900,000 votes. In 1932, Norman Thomas, running on the Socialist ticket, polled more than 800,000 votes. Thereafter the party’s strength ebbed. The New Deal in the 1930s, although not socialist in inspiration, also tended to draw votes away from the party. The New Deal’s policies of economic redistribution seemed to meet demands of those who previously supported the Socialists.
In the economic boom following World War II and especially in the cold-war era of the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. socialism was at a low ebb. Later, however, socialist ideas made considerable, although indirect, impacts on various radical (see RADICALISM) and liberal movements. In the United States many people no longer discuss socialism in its conventional political and economic sense, but rather as a remote ethical and social ideal.
SOCIALISM IN THE THIRD WORLD
Socialism has assumed a number of distinct forms in the Third World. But only in Israel has moderate social democracy proved successful for long periods, mainly as a result of the European socialist tradition brought in by immigrants. There the Labor party in various forms has had a large following and has governed the country longer than any other party. Israel has other socialist parties as well, including a militant Marxist party. At least of equal significance, however, are the cooperative agricultural communes (kibbutzim), which have flourished since 1948. Commentators have argued that kibbutzim more than anything else show the viability of socialist principles in practice; however, the peculiarities of Israeli conditions (for example, religious tradition and constant war readiness necessitated by the hostility of Israel’s Arab neighbors) could not easily be duplicated.
Elsewhere in the Third World, Marxism and various indigenous traditions have been predominant in socialist movements. In developing countries socialism as an ideology generally has been fused with various doctrines of nationalism, also a European cultural import but enriched by diverse motifs drawn from local traditions and cast in the idiom of indigenous cultures. In India, for example, the largest socialist movement has partially adapted the pacifist teaching of Mahatma Gandhi, and distinct native brands of socialism exist in Japan, Burma (Myanmar), and Indonesia. Similarly, in black Africa native traditions were used in the adaptation of socialist, mainly Marxist, doctrines and political systems based on them. Noteworthy instances were the socialist system of Tanzania (decentralized under an internationally supported economic reform program of the early 1990s) and the socialist theories of intellectual leaders such as Kwame NKRUMAH of Ghana, Julius K. NYERERE of Tanzania, Leopold Sedar SENGHOR of Senegal, and Sekou TOURE of Guinea. Socialism in these theories is usually understood as a combination of Marxism, anticolonialism, and the updated tradition of communal landownership and tribal customs of decision making. Most of sub-Saharan Africa’s socialist countries adopted free-market reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Arab socialism likewise represents an effort to combine modern European socialist ideology with some Islamic principles. The BAATH PARTY in Iraq and Syria and the Destour party in Tunisia have held power for considerable periods; Algeria also has had a socialist system since its independence. In the Third World, however, socialism has often been simply an ideology of anticolonialism and modernization. Overtly Marxist movements, aided by the USSR, China, or Cuba, nevertheless seized power in such African countries as Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. South Africa’s AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS (ANC) was also strongly influenced by Marxist ideas.
THE NEW LEFT
In the West in the 1960s a radical socialist movement, known as the New Left, arose principally out of the disaffection of young people with the way of life of advanced industrial society, and not least with its prosperity and conformism. The movement, which was apolitical in nature, sought to expose the growing “alienation” of the individual in advanced industrial conditions, castigating the values of the “consumer society” and attacking many prevailing social institutions. The beliefs of this movement, particularly strong in France, West Germany, and the United States, sprang from many diverse sources. Most important among these were the ideas found in Marx’s early writings; the idea of “alienation,” as interpreted by such contemporary socialist philosophers as Gyorgy LUKACS and Herbert MARCUSE; EXISTENTIALISM; romantic and utopian ideas adapted from earlier socialist writers (for example, Fourier); sexual radicalism derived from the teaching of Sigmund Freud; and some aspects of Eastern religious traditions, such as ZEN BUDDHISM. Despite its initial appeal and successes, however, the New Left did not prove to be a significant or lasting influence on socialism in its worldwide context or even within advanced industrial societies where conventional varieties still dominated.
It could well be argued that socialism as an alternative system of society and government failed to live up to its promises; by and large it is today no more than a dream or at best a set of ideal criteria whereby to judge the shortcomings of existing institutions. Socialist ideology, however, remains a popular and