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Universidad Austral de Chile

From the SelectedWorks of Fernando Muoz

2016

Socialism (Entry for the Max Planck


Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional
Law)
Fernando Muoz

Available at: http://works.bepress.com/fernandomunoz/30/

Socialism
Fernando Muoz
A. Introduction
Socialism is an eminently political, rather than juridical, phenomenon. In that sense, it
might seem extraneous to include a discussion of socialism within an Encyclopedia of
Comparative Constitutional Law. However, socialism, as a theoretical and political
tradition of critical and often conflictive engagement with state institutions, constitutes
an important force that has influenced and shaped the evolution of the modern
constitutional state. This entry will offer an overview of some of the most salient issues in
relation to the historical transformations of socialism as a theoretical and political
practice, and it will take note of some of the most significant ways in which it has
influenced the development of modern states, and more specifically of constitutional
democracies, with its critique of the social consequences of the capitalist mode of
production.
B. Socialism as a tradition of theoretical practice
While socialism as a critique of private accumulation of wealth at the hands of the
owners of the means of production and as an ideal for the creation of egalitarian social
arrangements precedes the work of Karl Marx (1818-1883), it is with him that this
nebulous sentiment coalesced into a theoretical tradition endowed with a program for
political action. Marx, imbued in the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment,
believed that the task for any theoretical account of the world is not merely to interpret it,
but to change it. With his groundbreaking work, which included writings on philosophy,
culture, political history, and economics, he laid out a true research program focused on
the constitutive role that the organization of productive activities plays in our social life;
one whose deep implications about political practice
Some of the main theses and concepts that Marx elaborated included the notion of
alienated labor, which he understood as the workers loss of control of the productive
process through proletarianization, i.e. their transformation into mere employees of the
owners of the means of production, a loss of control that, in turn, created the conditions
for the exploitation of the workers, understood as the appropriation, by the owners of the
means of production, of the surplus value they create; the idea of historical materialism
as the theory of the constitutive character that modes of production play in the
development of social formations; and the idea of class struggle as the conscious efforts
by each social class of advancing their interests within the framework of the social
formation in which they live. Marx believed that proletarian class struggle would strain
the capitalist mode of production and its accompanying bourgeois social formation; and
that, eventually, workers would gain power through revolution, replacing the bourgeois
state, which he characterized as the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, with their own
political form, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a political form that would lay down the
conditions for the disappearance of classes and the withering away of the state.
From the outset, Marxs ideas were subject to much attention, debate, criticism, and
revision. One of the most significant early departures from his revolutionary theory of

class struggle was the theory of evolutionary socialism put forward by Eduard Bernstein
(1850-1932), who argued that the transition to socialism could be achieved through the
political engagement of proletarian social and political forces with parliamentarian
institutions. His revisionist theory was countered by other intellectuals such as Vladimir
Lenin (1870-1924), who argued that only the centralization of the class struggle in the
hands of a professional class of revolutionaries could bring about the end of bourgeois
predominance and implement the kinds of economic transformations that would disrupt
and overcome the capitalist mode of production; and Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), who
believed that both spontaneous action on the part of the masses and professional political
organization were necessary in order to set society on the course of socialism. Lenin also
engaged in an acerbic debate over the direction of the Soviet revolution with Karl
Kautsky (1854-1938), one of its earliest critics. This early political confrontation about
the proper road to a socialist world would signal an important split within the theory and
practice of socialism, allowing us to distinguish between revolutionary and reformist
forms of socialist theory and practice. From that moment on, the German Social
Democrat Party assumed a reformist position that brought it closer to other pettybourgeois European parties such as the French Radical Party, relinquishing the
programmatic aspiration of replacing capitalism with socialism and focusing in the
improvement of the working classes within the existing social order.
Perhaps the most significant influential socialist thinker of the interwar period was
Antonio Gramsci (18911937), whose main theoretical contributions were contained in
the notebooks he wrote while imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime. His writings
explored the idea that processes of class and ideological struggle endowed those factions
that prevailed within them with hegemony, a moral and cultural leadership over the rest
of the population. He also argued that in the struggle for hegemony, factions entered into
alliances with other factions and social classes, forming historic blocs that were invested
in the maintenance of the political order.
Before imprisonment, Gramsci had taken part in the organization of the Italian
Communist Party; an organization that, after World War II, attracted the sympathy of
vast parts of the popular and working classes due to its role in the resistance to Fascism.
The French Communist Party, for the same reason, enjoyed the same moral statute and
the same political strength; understandably, they both became the transnational center of
attention for socialists in the West, in a time when the Iron Curtain insulated the Sovietdominated East Bloc, and anti-communism became the official creed of both
dictatorships and constitutional democracies in Europe and the Americas through
informal persecutions (e.g., USA under McCarthyism) and legal bans on communism
(e.g., West Germany since 1956, Chile between 1948 and 1958). In contrast, the
Communist parties of France and Italy had large cadres of affiliates and won significant
parliamentarian pluralities, although remained outside the government; in France, as the
result of directions in that sense from the Soviet Union, while in Italy, as the result of the
commitment of the party of order, the Christian Democratic Party, of keeping it out of
power. Meanwhile, the advance of revolutionary forces that declared its allegiance to the
socialist project in zones that had formed part of the capitalist periphery, such as China,
Cuba, and Vietnam, besides increasing the tensions between East and West, provided
new theoretical influences in term of the revolutionary strategies to conquer power and
bring about socialism. Mao Zedong, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh became

icons of anti-imperialist struggle; and their writings, often epigrammatic, became staples
of socialist discourse in the 60s.
In France, the intellectual prestige of the socialist Left served as the context for the
emergence of a mixture between Marxism and structuralist semiotics in the work of the
philosopher Louis Althusser, whose reading of Marxs intellectual discontinuities or
epistemological breaks, his observations about ideological apparatuses and their
capacity to constitute the subject through processes of interpellation, and his assertion
that society was constituted by various formations that were relatively autonomous from
each other so that the mode of production was determinant only in the last instance,
offered ample space for the development of new postures within theoretical socialism.
His work, however, was castigated by other intellectuals such as E.P. Thompson, who
perceived althusserian philosophy as senseless jargon; a criticism that contributed to the
emergence of so-called analytical Marxism, a group of Anglo-American academics such
as Gerald Cohen who strived to clarify the contents of historical materialism and to
endow the socialist critique of capitalism with conceptual precision.
In the early 70s, the perspectives of a compromesso storico in Italy between the Christian
Democratic Party and the Communist Party, although did not lead at the time to the
arrival of communists to power, created an opening that relegitimized political dialogue
and cooperation with bourgeois parties, and paved the way for the emergence of what
was then known as Eurocommunism, a term that seemed to describe the old idea that
socialism could be brought about through parliamentarian advance. But Eurocommunism
proved, over time, to represent a phase within a process of renovation of ideals and
strategies within the European Left that replaced its radicalism with moderation, and
superseded its focus on class struggle with a preoccupation with democratization, human
rights, as well as with a new political agenda incorporating elements such as gender
equality, environmental protection, and nuclear non-proliferation. The end of the Cold
War contributed to the crisis of the socialist project, which seemed not only dead but also
buried when, in the 90s, the centrist factions of the UK Labour Party and the USA
Democratic Party proclaimed the end of ideological, contentious politics through the
advent of a Third Way that, while claimed to distance itself equally from the old Left and
the Right, amounted to the embrace of the neoliberal program by the Left. Since then,
socialism has survived politically in the discourse of charismatic Latin American leaders
such as Hugo Chvez and Evo Morales, and, more recently, in the recent movement
against fiscal austerity in the European Union. It is unclear, nonetheless, to what extent
these groups represent a survival of the old project of replacing a capitalist mode of
production and its accompanying bourgeois social formation with a classless society.
C. Socialist contributions to the modern state: from the Rechtsstaat to the
democratic and social constitutional state
A socialist account of the historical emergence of the Rechtsstaat itself, i.e. of the form of
state that recognizes as its constitutive principles the primacy of the individuals sphere
of freedom and the strict definition of the competencies recognized to differentiated state
branches (Schmitt 170), would characterize it as the result of class struggle between the
bourgeoisie and the forces that sustained the Ancien Rgime; and it would emphasize that
the most significant transformations within this institutional framework, and that led to
the emergence of a democratic and social constitutional state, have also been the result of

class and ideological struggle. Universal suffrage, for example, can be regarded as a
political conquest of the popular classes struggling in the last decade of the 19th century
to become part of the republican project of the bourgeoisie. Similarly, the developments
that created so-called welfare or social states were also solutions addressing the socialist
critique of capitalism.
Since a broader characterization of the relevance of class struggle for the transformations
of the modern state would require a lengthier theoretical and historical exploration, here
will be exposed succinctly the way in which modern constitutions have addressed
specifically the latter aspects, those that endow states with a distinct social component.
1. The ideological orientation of the state
The socialist critique of the classical Rechtsstaat characterized it as a class dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie, insofar it did not contain any institutional protection or recognition of the
interests of the working and popular classes. Thus, the creation of institutions that address
this critique enables the characterization of those states as something new and different
from that form of state. This recognition, understandably, varies depending on
ideological, political, and institutional constraints. For example, the Constitution of Cuba,
in its article 1, declares its country as a socialist state of workers; while the Preamble to
the Constitution of India characterizes its political form as a sovereign, socialist, secular,
democratic republic. Many other countries, ranging from Germany (article 20.1) and
Spain (Preliminary Title, Section 1, 1) to Venezuela (article 2) and Bolivia (article 1),
have in force constitutions that characterize their political form of organization as a social
state.
2. Workers rights
The interests and demands of workers have always been a crucial concern for socialism,
particularly in its Marxist variant. Workers, for Marx, are the universal class, whose
particular form of oppression enables them to wage a struggle aiming at the suppression
of all forms of oppression. The epic call for action that closes The Communist Manifesto
summarizes this hopeful idea in a theatrical way: Working men of all countries, unite!.
The socialist concern with the interests and demands of workers has permeated
constitutionalism ever since the enactment on February 5, 1917, of the Political
Constitution of the United Mexican States, whose Title VI, On Labor and Social
Security, regulated various aspects of the rights of workers, including the establishment
of a maximum of working hours and a minimum wage, special protections for working
women and youth including a guarantee of equal payment for equal work, the allocation
on employers of the costs of labor accidents and occupational diseases, and the
recognition of the right of workers to organize themselves in unions and to strike. Many
other constitutions have followed suit, enshrining legal protections for workers either in
the form of individual and collective rights, such as in the case of Chapter II of the
Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil and of articles 25 and 53 to 57 of the
Political Constitution of Colombia, or in the form of policy orientations to be pursued by
the authorities, such as in the case of article 39 of the Constitution of India. Yet other
constitutional texts have assigned labor a symbolic place within the social order; that is
the case of the Constitution of the Italian Republic, whose article 1 declares that Italy is a
democratic republic founded on labor.

To be sure, not only socialism has a discourse about the rights of workers; other
ideological positions have also done so, in some cases managing to enshrine those visions
in constitutional clauses or decisions. For example, libertarianism has expressed itself in
the form of a concern with the contractual freedom of individual workers, which is
regarded as endangered, for example, by restrictions establishing maximal working hours
and minimal wages, and by legislative requirements of unionization. An early expression
of this was the decision Lochner v. New York, issued by the Supreme Court of the United
States in 1905, which sustained that [t]here is no reasonable ground for interfering with
the liberty of person or the right of free contract by determining the hours of labor in the
occupation of a baker. More contemporary examples come from right-to-work clauses,
which prevent the enactment of legislation that make it mandatory to register in a union
in order to perform any type of work, exemplified in the Political Constitution of the
Republic of Chile (article 19 N 16) and in the constitutions of several USA states such as
Florida (article 1, 6), Kansas (article 15, 12), and Mississippi (article 7, 198-A).
From a socialist perspective, these formulations impinge on both the workers interests in
minimally acceptable conditions of work and in counting with strong collective
associations that can further their interests and demands.
2. Social rights
Social rights consist in the constitutional guarantee that some specific good will be
provided to all citizens without regard for their capacity to pay. Logically speaking, this
guarantee does not differ from other constitutional guarantees such as the right to a fair
trial, which involves providing access to courts to all citizens. Historically, however,
social rights have been understood as an addition to so-called first generation rights,
which constitutionalized the specific interests of the bourgeois, propertied classes that
founded the classical Rechtsstaat. Social rights, in that regard, constitutionalize the
interest of the propertyless classes who often lack the resources to pay for their access to
key goods such as education, healthcare, and social security. For this reason, the idea of a
social right echoes important socialist themes, including the critique of commodification
put forward by Marx in The Capital and the criterion of justice elaborated by Louis Blanc
and embraced by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Program: from each according to his
ability, to each according to his needs.
Several constitutions have included various guarantees of social rights; for example, the
Brazilian Constitution (article 6) recognizes as such education, health, nutrition, labor,
housing, leisure, security, social security, protection of motherhood and childhood and
assistance to the destitute. The same objective is often pursued by means of delineating
policy orientations to the state; such is the case of the Constitution of the Portuguese
Republic (article 9.d), which declares as a fundamental task of the state the effective
implementation of economic, social, cultural and environmental rights by means of the
transformation and modernization of economic and social structures; and of the
Constitution of the Italian Republic (article 3), which declares as a duty of the Republic
the removal of those obstacles of an economic or social nature which constrain the
freedom and equality of citizens, thereby impeding the full development of the human
person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic and social
organization of the country.

3. State control of the economy and collective property


One of the ideas most often associated with socialism is state control of the economy and
collective property as measures to counter the power of private property. This conflation,
however, rests on a mistaken assumption about the nature of socialist strategy. Marx and
Engels criticized, in The Communist Manifesto, the social effects of individual property
of the means of production, and declared that an important revolutionary objective was
the centralization of all instruments of production and of credit in the hands of the state.
State control of the economy was for them, however, not a measure intrinsically valuable,
but one whose emancipatory power depended on the previous seizure of political power
by the proletarian class, who would use this supersession of private property as a means
to divest the bourgeoisie of its economic power, the basis of its social prestige and its
political power. That is the standard that one must use to judge the success or failure of
economic planning under so-called real socialism.
Nevertheless, the socialist critique of free markets was one of the forces that contributed
to the development of economic planning in constitutional democracies. Sometimes, the
possibility of state planning of the economy is expressly contemplated, such as in the
case of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (article 43), the Constitution of
the Federal Republic of Germany (article 15), the Constitution of Spain (section 38), the
Constitution of Nicaragua (article 150 N 13), and, more recently, the Transitional
Constitution of South Sudan (schedule C, N 25). Other times, constitutions declare both
public and collective property as a constitutionally protected good, as it is the case with
the Constitution of Bolivia (article 311), the Constitution of China (Chapter I, article 12),
and the Constitution of Colombia (article 329). Finally, another form in which
constitutions have attempted to limit the power of individual, private property has
consisted in inclusion of clauses declaring that private property entails obligations and
that its use must serve the public good, such as the one contained in the Constitution of
the Federal Republic of Germany (article 14).

Select Bibliography
Anderson, P, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Verso, 1983).
Althusser, L, For Marx (Verso 2005).
Cohen, G, Karl Marxs Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton University Press 1978).
Gramsci, A, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (International Publishers 1971).
Guevara, E, Guerrilla Warfare (BN Publishing 2012).
Lenin, V, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism (Pluto Press 2008).
Luxemburg, R, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution & The Mass Strike
(Haymarket Books 2006).
Marx, K, Selected Writings (Oxford University Press 2000).
Schmitt, C, Constitutional Theory (Duke University Press 2008).

Thompson, EP, The poverty of theory & other essays (Monthly Review Press 1978).
Zedong, M, On Practice and Contradiction (Verso 2007).
Select Cases
Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).
Select Constitutions
Political Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia: February 9, 2009 (Bol).
Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil: October 5, 1988 (Braz).
Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile: March 11, 1980 (Chile).
Constitution of the Peoples Republic of China: December 4, 1982 (China).
Political Constitution of Colombia: July 4, 1991 (Colom).
Political Constitution of the Republic of Cuba: January 24, 1976 (Cuba).
Constitution of the State of Florida: November 5, 1968 (FL).
Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany: May 23, 1949 (Ger).
Constitution of India: January 26, 1950 (India).
Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran: July 28, 1982 (Iran).
Constitution of the Italian Republic: December 22, 1947 (It).
Constitution of the State of Kansas: January 29, 1861 (KS).
Political Constitution of the United Mexican States: February 5, 1917 (Mex).
Constitution of the State of Mississippi: November 1, 1890 (MS).
Political Constitution of Nicaragua: January 9, 1987 (Nicar).
Constitution of the Portuguese Republic: April 25, 1976 (
Spanish Constitution: December 6, 1978 (Spain).
Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan: July 9, 2011 (S Sudan).
Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela: December 20, 1999 (Venez).
Date of Writing: April 2016

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