Socialism: Trials and Errors

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University Historian Rosario Romeo puts it, "Everyone imagines socialism in his own way." To Senegal's President Léopold Senghor, socialism is "the rational organization of human society according to the most scientific, the most modern and the most efficient methods." To Britain's Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan, it is "a society based on cooperation instead of competition." France's Mitterrand calls it "an élan, a collective movement —the communion of men in search of justice." In a more colloquial vein, a current hit song in Jamaica, pulsating with reggae beat, teaches: "Socialism is love for your brother/ Socialism is linking hearts and hands/ Love and togetherness—that's what it means."

Despite its myriad and overlapping forms, socialism assumes three more or less familiar main varieties (case studies of the three follow this report), which can be summed up as:

Marxism-Leninism, frequently known as Communism, is the governing force in the Soviet Union and its East bloc satellites, as well as in China, Mongolia, North Korea, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Albania and Yugoslavia. The most repressive variant of socialism, Marxism-Leninism is a kind of secular religion, preaching the necessity of class warfare, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the concentration of near total power in a tightly structured party that is supposedly the vanguard of the revolutionary masses. Communism is dogmatic in its determination to abolish private property and nationalize the means of production as the first steps toward achieving its ultimate goal, the classless society.

Social democracy is the most liberal version of socialism. Marxist-Leninists complain that social democrats are "bourgeois revisionists" and they have traditionally been the first victims of Communist coups. Social democrats can justly answer back that the "true socialists" of Moscow are dictators who have betrayed Marxism's humanistic vision. Alone or in coalitions, social-democratic leaders control the governments of Britain, West Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Norway, The Netherlands, Portugal—to cite only European examples. (Sweden's Social Democrats, after 44 years in power, were defeated in 1976 by a narrow margin.) Social democracy accepts a multiparty political system and believes in gradual, peaceful means of reaching its socialist goals. In practical terms, this has meant that social democrats have concentrated more on alleviating what they regard as hardships created by capitalist economies (unemployment, salary and wage inequities) than on directly restructuring societies according to a collectivist blueprint.

States ruled by social democrats are generally mixed economies, combining elements of free-enterprise competition with state ownership or direction of key industries. Some, most notably West Germany, are basically capitalist. Firmly rooted in the West, such social democracies as Norway and West Germany have more in common with the capitalist U.S. than has the U.S. with, say, capitalist states like Ecuador or the Ivory Coast.

Third World socialism embraces such disparate systems as the Islamic socialism preached by Algeria and Libya, the Baathist (Renaissance) socialism of Syria and Iraq, the ujamaa (familyhood) socialism of