Evolutionary and Revolutionary Socialists Disagree about both Means and Ends - Discuss.
Evolutionary and Revolutionary Socialists Disagree about both Means and Ends Discuss
The word socialist devolves from the Latin idea to share or combine, though many people argue that socialism had its routes as far back as Plato. Realistically true socialism only came to light in the 19th century. It came as a reaction to the growth of liberal capitalism and the ideas, which lay in its base. Socialists saw liberal capitalism fundamentally as being exploitive and saw the poverty and ill treatment it was handing out to the working classes. The lassez faire economic management that the government was using was giving capital owners an easy ride, giving them total control on wealth for its workers with the total control of wages and the total lack of any reasonable working conditions. Socialism was born and aim was to end this exploitary system of liberal capitalism.
Like any ideology socialism has at its foundations a view of the world at present, a view of how they would think a perfect world would be and a way to get there, and within those a view on what Human nature is like. But as socialism is perhaps the biggest of the mainstream political ideologies it has one key difference to many of the other ideologies, which is a split down the middle. This split occurred initially with the route to take, the argument was between revolution or the evolution of society to arrive at a socialist society this choice was at the bottom of many of the big political stories of the 20th century.
Revolutionary socialism was the first to be thought up. Originally it was thought that socialism could only be reached through a justified revolution, which inevitably contained violence, early example included August Blanqui who wanted a small group of conspires to seize power, another example would be Marx and Engels. They saw a proletarian revolution to over throw the capitalism movement. They saw the masses of workers achieving class conscience and seeing the exploitation they were being put through, they would subsequently rise up in revolution. When first thought up revolutionary tactics were seen necessary for a number of reasons. Firstly at its base capitalism is a system of exploitation and oppression, which saw many of the working class being in stricken poverty and mass fear of unemployment, this virtually put any of the working class on the brink of revolution against the land and factory owners. Secondly the reason why they were on the brink of revolution was that there was no other way of changing anything. The masses were unenfrachised so could have no vote to change anything, there weren’t institutions that were listened to out of elections such as pressure groups for any one to join. Urban dwelling was a new thing, many of the workers were new to the city and the ideas of it and struggled within it. Many saw capitalism as unchangeable the fundamentals behind society and ultimately capitalism were wrong from the start so to truly reach their target they would have to start over again completely. For example Marx saw economics as the problem and saw this at the base of society so ultimately you had to destroy the foundations if you were to get any thing essentially better. These reasons led revolution to be the means of revolutionary socialism.
