Socialist State - Establishing A Socialist State By Reformism or Revolution

Establishing A Socialist State By Reformism or Revolution

Reformist socialists and Marxists, exemplified by Eduard Bernstein, take the view that a socialist state will evolve out of political reforms won by the struggle of the socialists. "The socialist movement is everything to me while what people commonly call the goal of Socialism is nothing." These views are considered a "revision" of Marxist thought.

Revolutionary Marxists, following Marx, take the view that, on the one hand, the working class grows stronger through its battle for reforms, (such as, in Marx's time, the ten-hours bill):

"Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers... it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried." —Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians

However, on the other hand, in the orthodox Marxist conception, these battles of the workers reach a point at which a revolutionary movement arises. A revolutionary movement is required, in the view of Marxists, to sweep away the capitalist state, which must be smashed, so as to begin to construct a socialist society:

"In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat." —Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter I. Bourgeois and Proletarians

In this view, only in this way can a socialist state be established.

Read more about this topic:  Socialist State

Famous quotes containing the words establishing, socialist, state and/or revolution:

    “The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.”
    —Derek Jarman (b. 1942)

    “Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.”
    —Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931)

    “The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational—an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.”
    —Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)

    “In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
    —Irving Kristol (b. 1920)