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Sometimes those debates produced splits among socialists. Socialists developed and debated solutions that varied from government regulations of capitalist economies to government itself owning and operating enterprises, to a transformation of enterprises (both private and government) from top-down hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Socialists found capitalism to be a system that produced ever-deepening inequalities, recurring cycles of unemployment and depression, and the undermining of human efforts to build democratic politics and inclusive cultures. People spread socialism across the world, interpreting and implementing it in many different ways based on context. Socialism is not a single, unified theory. That something better is socialism, a system that doesn’t divide people, but rather makes work a democratic process where all employees have an equal say and together are their own employer. It is no historical surprise that employees would end up yearning and fighting for something better. Capitalism replaced slaves and serfs with employees, masters and lords with employers. The majorities of the past fought hard to build a better system. When the majority recognized slavery and feudal systems as injustices, they eventually fell. Each of the latter divided society into a dominant minority class (masters, lords, and employers) and a dominated majority (slaves, serfs, employees).

Socialism is an economic system very different from capitalism, feudalism, and slavery.

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Socialists want to be able to explore and develop their full potentials as individuals and members of society while contributing to its welfare and growth. Yearning for a better society, socialists increasingly demand the end of exploitation and an alternative in which employees function as their own employer. Capitalist exploitation shapes everything in capitalist societies. Exploitation, in Marx’s terms, describes the situation in which employees produce more value for employers than the value of wages paid to them. In Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx defined a fundamental injustice - exploitation - located in capitalism’s core relationship between employer and employee. That system prescribes incentives and options for both sides, and rewards and punishments for their behavioral “choices.” It generates their endless struggles and the employees’ realization that system change is the way out. Socialism represents the awareness of employees that their sufferings and limitations come less from their employers than from the capitalist system. 1.Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism. Here are 10 things from this book that you should know. The point is to offer a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy. I examine its successes, explore its challenges, and confront its failures.

In my latest book, Understanding Socialism (Democracy at Work, 2019), I gather and present the basic theories and practices of socialism. It is an immense resource: the accumulated thoughts, experiences, and experiments accomplished by those yearning to do better than capitalism. We need to understand socialism because it has shaped our history and will shape our future. Conversely, each country’s socialism is shaped by the global history, rich tradition, and diverse interpretations of a movement that has been the world’s major critical response to capitalism as a system. In every country, it carries the lessons and scars of its particular history there. Over the last 200 years, socialism has spread across the world.

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