The socialism that is emerging is not the socialism of our parents and grandparents.
A fundamental shift has happened and we shouldn't be surprised that socialism is changing because,
after all, it's the shadow, as I said, of a capitalism which is also changing.
100 years ago most capitalists were people who ran a relatively small business, who knew
the people they hired, their employees, and they were both the owner and the manager and
the leader.
Nowadays we have a very different capitalism.
The old idea of a capitalist whose the owner and the manager is basically gone except for
what we call "small business".
Most of the business of most capitalist countries is done by huge corporation.
The owners are shareholders but have virtually nothing to do with running the business.
The business is run by a Board of Directors and by the management, who are different people
in most cases from the owners.
My point is only, capitalism has changed a lot, why would we expect that socialism, that
is its shadow, that is its criticism, wouldn't have changed as well.
It has changed.
But socialism also changed for another reason and that's just as important.
In the 20th century socialism went from a set of critical ideas, expressed by intellectuals,
expressed by militant trade unionists, expressed by political parties seeking to get power.
In the 20th century, it turns out, a number of those socialists groups, together, got
power.
They made a social change.
Some of them made it in western European countries like Norway and Sweden and Finland.
Others did it in places like France and Germany.
Socialist governments emerged in many other parts of the world, most famous were the socialist
governments that came out of the revolution in Russia in 1917 and the civil war in China
after WWII.
And so socialism had a new set of tasks in the 20th century.
In places where capitalism still dominated, they continued to be mostly critical.
But in the countries where socialists became the government they had a whole new job, to
administer a new and different kind of economic system.
So we have these early experiments in socialist management, you might call it, in Russia,
China, places like Cuba, and Vietnam as well, where socialists tried to organize another
economy.
So we have the early experiments in what socialism as an alternative to capitalism might look
like.
And we, as people looking at all of this, therefore have lots of raw material with which
to say, what have we learned about socialism?
What is it we want to keep and build on, and what is it that we want to change?
Where do we have to go further than we went before?
Where do we have to go in different directions?
So there is a change in socialism that comes out of a self criticism based on its long,
century and a half of being a major part of the world.
And in the second half of today's program, I'm gonna go through precisely how the old
socialism is changing into the new one.
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