Socialism
Ideology · 19th century onward, Europe and worldwide · Politics, stage 2: Map the ideologies
Socialism holds that the main institutions of economic life should be owned or controlled in common rather than privately, on the ground that private ownership of productive property gives some people standing power over others. Its advocates argue that a market economy distributes not only income but control, that people who must sell their labour in order to eat are not free in any full sense, and that production organised around social need rather than profit would serve people better. The tradition contains sharply different programmes: Marx's account of class conflict and revolution, cooperative and market-socialist models that keep prices while changing who owns the firms, and parties that pursue common ownership through elections. Critics argue that suppressing markets destroys the information that prices carry and so makes rational planning impossible, and that concentrating economic power in the state creates a new and less accountable ruling group, a charge they support by pointing to the record of the 20th-century states built on the doctrine.
What it claims
- Private ownership of the means of production gives owners power over those who must work for them.
- Economic life should be organised around social need rather than private profit.
- Political equality means little without a substantial degree of economic equality.
