Socialism is often made to mean almost anything: public schools, Social Security, government-owned utilities or politicians who promise to make capitalism fairer. These reforms can improve people’s lives. They are not socialism. Socialism begins with a change in which class rules society. The working class takes political power from the capitalist class and brings the banks, factories, mines, transportation, communications and other great means of production into social ownership. Production can then be planned to meet human needs instead of being driven by the private profit of competing owners.
Capitalism already made production social
Capitalism has already made production social. Millions of workers labor together across industries and continents; no individual capitalist builds a railroad, runs a hospital or produces the food for a city. All of it is collective labor. But the wealth produced collectively is privately owned. A small capitalist class decides what will be produced, where investment goes, which factories close and whether millions of workers will have jobs, homes or medical care. Socialism resolves this contradiction by making ownership social as well.
Nationalization is not socialism
This cannot be done simply by electing a government that promises reforms. Capitalist governments sometimes take over banks, railroads or industries when state ownership serves the capitalist class, but government ownership under a capitalist state is not socialism. The decisive question is which class controls the state. The capitalists rule not only through their ownership of industry and finance but through the courts, police, prisons, military and government bureaucracy. The working class cannot end capitalist rule while leaving that machinery in the capitalists’ hands.
Revolution replaces the capitalist state
Socialist revolution means the transfer of political power from one class to another. It is not merely a change of presidents, parties or cabinet ministers; the capitalist state must be replaced by new organs of workers’ power.
The Paris Commune of 1871 gave the first glimpse of such a state. The workers of Paris abolished the old standing army, armed the people and made public officials elected, recallable and paid no more than ordinary workers. The Commune lasted only a little more than two months before the French ruling class drowned it in blood, but it showed that workers could build a new kind of state.
The October Revolution of 1917 carried the struggle further. Led by the Bolshevik Party, the workers and poor farmers of Russia overthrew the capitalist government, took the banks and large industries into public ownership, handed the land to those who worked it and established the first lasting workers’ state.
Workers’ power means deeper democracy
Marx called working-class rule the dictatorship of the proletariat. This does not mean the dictatorship of one person. Every state is the organized rule of one class over another: the capitalist state protects capitalist property even when it works through elections and a parliament, and a workers’ state protects social ownership and puts down attempts by the former exploiters to regain power.
For working and oppressed people, that power must mean a broader and more active democracy than capitalism can offer. Workers need real control over their workplaces, communities, government and economic plan, and officials must be accountable and removable.
Socialism begins a period of transition
Socialist revolution does not create a finished communist society overnight. It begins a period of transition. The working class inherits the society capitalism built — its factories and scientific knowledge, but also its shortages, inequalities, prejudices, damaged environment and division between those who give orders and those who carry them out.
Racism, national oppression, the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people, competition and careerism do not vanish automatically when property relations change. They have to be fought consciously. Social ownership creates the material basis for overcoming them, but the people affected must be active participants in transforming society.
Under socialism the means of production are socially owned, and planning organizes work and secures livelihoods for all. Instead of asking where the greatest profit can be made, society can ask what people need, what resources are available and how production can be organized without exhausting workers or destroying the earth. But planning cannot mean a handful of officials making every decision. It takes the knowledge and participation of the workers who carry it out and the communities it serves. Without workers’ control, bureaucracy and privilege grow.
The class struggle continues under socialism
The class struggle therefore continues under socialism. The former capitalist class does not disappear at once; capitalist habits and interests remain, while the imperialist powers use economic pressure, sabotage and war to restore the old system. Socialist property cannot defend itself. Workers’ power depends on the organization, consciousness and political participation of the workers themselves.
Socialism is international
Socialism is also international. Capitalism created a world economy, and no workers’ state can escape the pressure of the capitalist world. Every socialist revolution has an interest in the struggles of workers and oppressed peoples everywhere. The liberation of each strengthens the liberation of all.
Toward a classless society
As classes and exploitation disappear and production reaches abundance, society can move toward communism: a classless society in which the state as an instrument of class rule is no longer needed, and the principle can be realized — from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
Socialism is not a perfect society invented in advance. It grows out of the contradictions of capitalism and the struggle of the working class. Socialist revolution begins when the people who produce the wealth take power to run society themselves.
Additional reading
The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World — by Walter Rodney (2018). Lectures delivered in Tanzania in the 1970s examining the Bolsheviks, the October Revolution, the civil war and the problems of Soviet development from the standpoint of the oppressed nations.
Blood in My Eye — by George Jackson (1972). A Black revolutionary’s analysis of racism, fascism, class power and the struggle to build a revolutionary movement capable of overturning capitalism.
The Civil War in France — by Karl Marx (1871). Marx’s account of the Paris Commune and the first historical experience of the working class establishing political power.
Critique of the Gotha Program — by Karl Marx (1875). Explains the transition from capitalism to communism and the differences between the earlier and more developed stages of communist society.
Socialism and Man in Cuba — by Che Guevara (1965). On socialist construction as a process in which working people transform society and, through their conscious participation, transform themselves.
Cuba Is a Socialist Nation — by Fidel Castro (1961). Fidel explains the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution: the defeat of capitalist and imperialist rule, social ownership of the main industries and the use of society’s wealth for education, healthcare, work and human development.
Class Struggle in Africa — by Kwame Nkrumah (1970). Examines the class forces created by colonialism and neocolonialism and places the African Revolution within the worldwide struggle for socialism.
A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism — by Marta Harnecker (2015). Draws lessons from revolutionary movements and governments in Latin America, especially Venezuela, on popular power, the state and the struggle to build socialism within a world still dominated by capital.
China: Building Socialism in an Imperialist World — by Gary Wilson. Follows socialist construction in China from land reform and collectivization through the Cultural Revolution, the market reforms after 1978 and the continuing struggle over state ownership, planning and capitalist pressures. Free PDF.