Edexcel A2 Political Ideologies

3 Socialism

A Short-answer questions

1 Why did Marx believe that capitalism was doomed to collapse?

• Capitalism is doomed to collapse because of its own internal contradictions.

• Capitalism embodies its own antithesis, the proletariat, seen by Marx as the ‘gravedigger’ of capitalism.

• Capitalism is defined by the creation of profit. This is only possible by the exploitation of the proletariat — that is, by the extraction of surplus value from the workers by the bourgeoisie.

• Marx believed that the inherent contradictions of capitalism would cause the proletariat to achieve revolutionary class consciousness. This would occur as capitalism went through a series of deepening crises, leading to the immiseration of the proletariat. This would inevitably result in a proletarian revolution which was destined to overthrow capitalism.

2 Distinguish between fundamentalist and revisionist socialism.

• Fundamentalist socialism rejects capitalism entirely and seeks to abolish it. It usually attributes the flaws of capitalism to private property for private profit, and seeks to establish socialism in the form of common ownership and very substantial equality of outcome. The Marxist or communist tradition is the clearest example of fundamentalist socialism. However, some fundamentalists pursue their goals by the parliamentary road — i.e. it is possible to be ‘fundamentalist democrats’ in the parliamentary sense. Eurocommunists (the post-war Western European communist parties) and early Fabians such as the Webbs were parliamentary socialists who were, nevertheless, fundamentalist in their goals.

• Revisionist socialism, by contrast, seeks to reform or tame capitalism rather than abolish it. It seeks to reconcile socialism with capitalism. It seeks social justice in the sense of narrowing the economic and