My new Socialism

Socialism philosophy was a byproduct of early industrialization. In the middle to late 19th century conditions for workers were horrible, capitalists grabbed power and killed people in the process. Marx, Engels and others had an understandably extreme reaction to this situation. They saw that the social system arising from the new technologies and class structure as unsustainable. To their eyes the new world of industrial capitalism was an unending, unbending trend in world history that could only be altered by revolution. They were right and they were wrong.

Industrial capitalism is still in place a century and a half later. The class structure is still exploiting workers and enriching the exploiters. But this is not a universal condition as it was in their time. Technological and social changes have slowly mitigated the horrible excesses of capitalism that these men reacted to. These changes have mostly killed the labor movement.

Now socialism primarily exists in the struggle between government and private power. We do not have a class structure as the fathers of socialism saw it. There are no loosely organized masses of unskilled and semi-skilled workers needing informed leaders to consolidate their common goals into a revolutionary movement against capitalist economic structures. Society is more complex than these critics saw it, and it always was. But there is a power struggle going on now. It is a jockeying between public and private interests, between selfishness and collectivism. This neatly fall into modern partisan lines of left and right leaning arguments.