An Outline Of A History Of Socialism

by
Robert Vienneau
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In my study of economics, I have learned a bit about socialism.

Writing a book based on this outline is a years-long project. Some parts are not filled out in the outline because I know too much and my thoughts are unorganized (not that you might disagree with my emphasis and story). Others are not filled out because I know too little. I am aware I have spelling mistakes. Some needs to be reorganized.

• Introduction, Overall Themes
• Socialists advocate that capitalism be replaced by a post capitalist society in which the workers, who constitute the vast majority of the population in an industrial society, collectively make decisions on what to produce and how to produce it. From this perspective, advocates of socialism cannot exist until after capitalism has been established. Furthermore, one cannot advocate for an industrial proletariat prior to the existence of a working class. Thus, a history of socialism should properly start around the time of, say, the French revolution. (Alexander Gray disagrees)
• Hardly anybody at Marx's funeral. A century later political parties in every country claimed to be followers of Marx, in some sense. Communists in power ruled how much? of the world's population. Social democracy and democratic socialism dominant in Western Europe.
• When political parties calling themselves labor or social democratic emerged in the 19th century, socialism (or social democracy?) and communism were not sharply distinguished, although they were distinguished from liberalism. (caveat: J. S. Mill). They were distinguished in the 20th century.
• With the new left and post 1989, other radical traditions became more prominent (Greens, feminists, workerism in Italy, anarchists(?), anti-imperialist movements in third world(?), black power…)
• When parties attain some measure of government responsibility (in parliament, as part of coalition governments, as ruling party (including the USSR)), they make compromises. More radical movements arise, to be later co-opted and to become non-pure. The cycle repeats. Examples?
• What to say about liberalism, fascism, neo-liberalism, general background? Reference Hobsbawm four volume series.
• C. B. Macpherson's idea that the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were about civil, political, and economics rights, respectively. Abolition of slavery, extensive of franchise, right to form labor unions. Socialism illegal much of this time, with newspapers published by exiles and conferences outside home country. Socialists elected when legal.
• This history is Eurocentric. Tries not to be a history of ideas, but more a summary of political institutions and political actors.
• Not covering Hegel much. Contrast with Kolakowski.
• Not claiming to be very original. Trying to be terse.
• Range of parties and movements called socialist, etc. Strength is that if you reject one tendency, there is always another.
• Precursors
• The bible, old and new testaments. (what about other religions? E.g. Confucious, Analects, wants social harmony. Constraints on rulers?)
• Utopias: Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Campanella's The City of the Sun, Swift's Gulliver’s Travels? Extend to 19th and 20th century?
• Peasant revolts (jacqueries): French peasants' revolt of 1358, John Ball and 1381 peasants' revolt, 16th century peasants' revolt in Germany (1525, Engels' commentary)
• Millenarianism
• Anabaptists, Diggers, Levellers, Muggletonians, the New Model Army, Ranters, and Quakers in the English revolution
• Political philosophy: Augustine's City of God, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau (Man is born free, but everywhere in chains. The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, "This is mine", and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.). What is Republicanism? Thomas Paine? William Godwin?
• Enlightenment. liberalism is progressive and an ideology for the rising bourgeois
• American revolution. According to Hannah Arendt, not a social revolution. Beards’ idea that the constitutional convention was a counter revolution.
• The French Revolution
• Socialists Before Marx
• France: Saint Simon, Fourier, Proudhon
• Ricardian socialists
• Chartism
• Germany and revolutions of 1848
• Marx and Engels

"German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism… these three sources of Marxism, … are also its component parts..." (Lenin 1977)

• Disagreements Around the Time of the First International
• Distinctions among different kinds of communists in the Communist Manifesto
• Utopian or scientific socialism in Engel's pamphlet. Marx's involvement. Reprint of chapters in Anti-During.
• No definitive distinction between socialism and communism. Maybe communism was perceived as more radical
• Marx's letter, critique of the Gotha program. The Gotha program was put forth at the Gotha conference (1875). The German social democratic party was formed by a compromise between followers of Lasalle and Lafarge. Socialism is the first stage after capitalism, communism the higher stage. Lenin says same in State and Revolution.
• Communards, Paris commune. (1871). Blanqui more involved than Marx. Nickname for Marx in British newspapers, something like the red doctor. Dictatorship of the proletariat.
• Michel Bakunin anarchist who said Marx would lead to a dictatorship. The end of the first international
• The Second International Through World War I
• The socialist or second international. parliamentary parties. The road to socialism through democratic means. Appreciative of bourgeois virtues like freedom of the press.
• The Erfurt program (1891) of Geman social democratic party was Marxist
• Bernstein and revisionism. 1899?. The final destination is nothing, the journey is everything. Split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. What is to be Done? Split in France? Sorel more leftist, Jaures to the right. Compare support for Bernstein from labor unions with Lenin’s critique of economism.
• Fabian socialism in Britain.
• At Stuttgart, in 1907, the Second International adopted a resolution, declaring (later conferences, similar resolutions):
• At Stuttgart, in 1907, the Second International adopted a resolution, declaring (later conferences, similar resolutions):

"Should war break out despite everything, it is the duty of Socialists to act for its rapid conclusion and to work with all their strength to utilize the economic and political crisis provoked by the war to rouse the peoples and thus accelerate the abolition of the rule of the capitalist class." (Mandel 1978)

• Second and a half international. Zimmerwald Conference. Political prisoners.
• Spartacus revolution. Murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
• The distinction between socialism and communism
• Should social democracy be a separate thing? Not trying to replace capitalism, but moderate its rough divisions.
• Other divisions: Council communism. Anarcho-syndicalism. Sorel. POUM in Spain. Gramsci in Turin. Lenin denounced some of this in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Delusion. Rosa Luxemburg. Twists and turns of Bolsheviks? Divisions among followers of Trotsky. Later: Eurocommunism.
• Theoretical developments. Finance capital. Theories of imperialism. Hobson, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Lenin
• The October (Bolshevik) revolution and the Russian civil war
• Georgi Plekhanov and Lenin were leaders of the Russian social democratic party.
• Russian revolutions: 1905, February and October. Explain what is a soviet, Hannah Arendt. Lenin's slogan was all power to the soviets, but immediately took power away from them. What is a commissar?
• What is to be done? Economism: improving working conditions, more pay, shorter hours. Need an outside vanguard to have something more than working class consciousness.
• Stalinism
• Josef Stalin had consolidated power in the USSR, first in alliance with Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev against Leon Trotsky and Evgeny Preobrazhensky in 1923. Vladimir Lenin died in January 1924. Stalin and Bukharin then defeated Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1924. In 1927, Stalin and Bukharin overcame the United Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Finally, Bukharin was stripped of power in 1928, leaving Stalin ruling. Trotsky was exiled in 1929 and assassinated in Mexico in 1940. Preobrazhensky was executed in 1937 during the great purge, Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried and killed in 1936. Bukharin was shot after the most famous Moscow show trial in 1938.
• New Economic Policy (NEP) over Preobrazhensky’s primitive socialist accumulation
• Socialism in one country over Trotsky's permanent revolution.
• Other communist parties are to be subordinated to the CPSU
• Collectivization of agriculture when NEP was supposedly not working
• Need to say something more about purges, thaws, show trials.
• World War II. Social democracy as social fascists. No united front. Alliance with Hitler, and then otherwise.
• Selection among Stalin’s writings. History of the communist party. Comments on a text book on economics. (So much for Preobrazhensky and Bukharin’s ABCs.) Have we achieved communism yet? Summary of dialectics.
• Social Democracy in Europe
• Revolutions in Hungary, Germany
• FIAT occupation of factories (this was not a sit-down strike, like UAW organizing. The workers ran the factories and produced cars.) Italian factory councils
• General Strike in Great Britain
• Red Vienna
• Debts and reparation payments from World War I bedeviled many European countries, with the attendant inflation. Cite Keynes' tract
• Great depression
• Socialists did not do well in responding. Gunnar Myrdal and Kalecki inventing Keynesianism themselves.
• Fascism and World War II
• Fascism was on the rise, with Mussolini having consolidated power in Italy around 1925, after elections in April 1924. The fascists enacted laws against association, removing Mussolini’s responsibility to parliament, giving him power to enact laws independently of the Chamber of Deputies, outlawing the right to strike, and outlawing all political parties except the National Fascist Party (PNF) (Fretigne 2021).
• POUM and Spanish civil war. Cite Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Chomsky? Auden’s Spain. But today the struggle
• After Stalin
• The Warsaw Pact
• Khrushchev’s secret speech
• Mao and China
• Tito, Yugoslavia and Milovan Djilas's The New Class
• Hungary 1956
• Czechoslovakia and the Prague Spring
• I ought to say something about French, Italian communist parties where they are important political players
• From the End of World War II to the New Left
• The golden age, Les Trente Glorieuses. The so-called crisis of democracy and neoliberal reaction
• Bretton Woods
• The U.N., the IMF, the World Bank, WTO/GATT
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The Bandung Conference (1955), the third world, non-aligned countries
• Anticolonialism. Fanon. Amin. Theories of unequal exchange.
• The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse)
• Gramsci, Lukas, Althusser
• Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran
• Notice theorists are no longer leaders of political parties. (Exception: Alain Lipietz)
• Norman Thomas
• McCarthyism
• The New Left
• The Port Huron statement. SDS. Michael Harrington. Looking forward to DSA
• Cuba. Other third world revolutionaries.
• Civil Rights and Martin Luther King
• Vietnam
• Paris 1968, the 68ers, Danny the Red. Be realistic, demand the impossible. Under the paving stones, the beach.
• Lots more about 1968. What can a poor boy do except sing for a rock and roll band? (I saw Bruce do this, and I'm sure he knows this song was in response to Paris.)
• Waves of feminism
• Stonewall
• Prospect of liberation in many parts of the world. Violence and sadness and the security state consciously undermining all.
• After 1989
• Emphasize that 1989 was more than overthrow of actually existing socialism: Philippines people power, Chile, South Africa (maybe write about Biko). Hopeful at the time.
• 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1968, 1989
• Failures of “big bangs”
• Communist parties changing their names
• Occupy wall street. David Greider
• 2008 Global financial crisis
• Covid depression
• Conclusion