Politics Essay: Socialism

Distinguish between fundamentalist socialism and revisionist socialism

One of the major issues that have divided competing traditions and tendencies within socialism is the goals or ends for which socialists should strive. Socialists have held very different conceptions of what a socialist society should look like and so have developed competing definitions of socialism. The principal disagreement is between fundamentalist socialism and revisionist socialism, represented respectively by the communist and the social democratic traditions.

Fundamentalist socialism rejects capitalism and seeks to abolish and replace it with a form of communism. Both revolutionary socialists and evolutionary socialists can seek fundamentalist socialism. Marxists use revolution to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a new system. This system would involve a class-less society in which there is common ownership rather than private property and total social equality to have a substantial equality of outcome. Groups such as The Fabian Society, on the other hand, felt that the development of the democratic state made the call for revolution redundant and would rather that the working class used the ballot box to introduce socialism. Nevertheless, they too sought the goal of communism, albeit by pursuing a democratic road.

Revisionist socialism, by contrast, seeks to reform or tame capitalism rather than abolish it. Unlike with fundamentalist socialism, there can only be evolutionary revisionist socialists, never revolutionary. The most obvious example of revisionist socialism is social democracy. Revisionist socialism seeks social justice to reduce economic and social inequalities rather than common ownership. This is achieved through the welfare state which would act as a redistributive mechanism. In the view of revisionist socialism, capitalism is no longer needed to be abolished, only modified through the establishment of reformed or welfare capitalism.