According to Karl Marx, the inevitable rise of socialism and communism would happen automatically, in the wake of an equally inevitable and equally automatic collapse of the capitalist system. The workers would experience continually increasing poverty and suffering, while the capitalist system would break down economically.
After the failure of the old system, Marx’s new system would institute itself in human civilization.
Yet half a century after the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, socialists and communists were still waiting. Capitalism wasn’t collapsing. In fact, it was getting stronger.
(While there is complicated discussion surrounding the many types of socialism and the many types of communism, for the present purposes, ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ may be regarded as almost synonymous. The word ‘capitalism’ here is shorthand for ‘free market’ capitalism or ‘laissez faire’ capitalism, which is significantly different from other types of capitalism.)
During the second half of the nineteenth century, working-class wages and standards of living improved steadily. Working conditions became more humane. In some cases, the rise of labor unions made the workers see themselves as parts of, instead of the enemies of, the capitalist system.
Disappointed socialists and communists began to rethink Marx’s doctrines. How would they impose their system on civilization, if the spontaneous collapse of the old system didn’t happen? One answer was the incremental establishment of statist redistribution schemes and the partial abolition of private property by introducing government ownership of certain industrial sectors.
If capitalism wasn’t going to cave in on itself suddenly, then perhaps it could be deliberately weakened so that it crumbled slowly. This tactic is sometimes called ‘Fabian’ socialism, named after the Fabian Society, a British political group.
The specific actions which would undermine civilization were systems of various redistribution programs and the nationalization of industries, as historian William Hagen writes:
In 1899, theoretician and journalist Eduard Bernstein challenged the capitalist breakdown theory. He argued that, despite Marx’s forecast, industrialization was neither eliminating the small-scale property-owning middle classes (“petty bourgeoisie”) nor, despite injustices and inequalities, “immiserating” the working class, whose real living standards, in the economically bustling pre-1914 decades, were actually rising as industrial society matured. Socialists should therefore abandon ideas of utopian collectivism beyond capitalism — that is, in a future socialism or communism — and ally with village farmers and small businessmen, and with the educated middle class, to seek realizable ends gradually by nonrevolutionary means. In Bernstein’s British-influenced view, socialism would amount in practice to a modern welfare state with nationalized big industry and finance, but preserving property rights in smaller enterprises and family farms.
The implementation of many small redistribution mechanisms would hide the fact that, taken together, their net impact would be quite large. Government ownership of various industries and financial institutions would be justified by various ad hoc explanations regarding safety or efficiency. Thus Fabian socialism is not only a gradualist, but also deceptive.
To make way for such programs, the socialists would need to eliminate the organic functions of society which naturally and historically had served the same purposes. Private-sector charities, foundations, community services, volunteerism, etc., would have to be dismantled so that government-operated social services were seen as the better, or only, option.
The notion that the government can, or should, take over functions previously and traditionally carried out by the private sector is and was like a virus, spreading and replicating itself, and destroying bit by bit charitable institutions which had so significantly helped people, and replacing those institutions with inefficient bureaucracies.
To trade the viral metaphor for a fungal one, the slow rot of incremental socialism might yet, in the dreams of the communists, bring about Marx’s enthusiastically anticipated destruction of society.
