A Critique of State Socialism by Mikhail Bakunin

Their common factor was the idea that material goods should be held in common and that producers should keep the fruits of their labor, all in the name of a better, happier, more healthy community and, perhaps, nation. It had economic arguments to make, of course, but those arguments were based on moral or ethical claims.īy the middle of the nineteenth century, the word socialism came to be used more widely to describe several different movements than had hitherto been considered in isolation from one another. For the first decades of its existence socialism was less a movement with economic foundations than with ethical ones. Socialism proposed a new and better moral order, one in which the members of a society would care not only for themselves, but for one another. Right from its inception, socialism was contrasted with individualism and egoism, of the selfish and self-centered pursuit of wealth and power.

It was created in 1834 to contrast with individualism, a favorite term among liberals but one that early socialists saw as a symptom of moral decay. It sought to address both the economic repercussions of the industrial revolution, especially in terms of the living conditions of workers, and to provide a new moral order for modern society.

Socialism was a specific historical phenomenon born out of two related factors: first, the ideological rupture with the society of orders that occurred with the French Revolution, and second, the growth of industrial capitalism. The third and last of the new political ideologies and movements of the early nineteenth century was socialism.

A Critique of State Socialism by Mikhail Bakunin