Narrator: Imagine a factory town in the early 19th century, a place typically defined by grime, exploitation, and misery. Now, picture one where the workers live in good homes, their children receive a free education, and crime is nearly nonexistent. This wasn't a fantasy; it was a real place called New Lanark in Scotland, transformed by a factory owner named Robert Owen who believed that human character wasn't fixed but shaped by its environment. He argued that if you create a society based on cooperation instead of competition, you could create better people and a better world. This radical experiment, which put community well-being above pure profit, was one of the earliest seeds of a powerful and controversial idea that would go on to shape the entire course of modern history. In his book Socialism, Michael Newman unpacks this very idea, tracing its evolution from these utopian beginnings through its revolutionary upheavals and into its present-day struggles for relevance.

Narrator: At its heart, socialism is not a rigid set of policies but a commitment to a core set of values. The most fundamental of these is egalitarianism—a deep-seated opposition to the vast inequalities of wealth and power that capitalism naturally produces. Socialists argue that a person's potential shouldn't be limited by the circumstances of their birth. This is tied to a belief in solidarity and cooperation over the individualistic competition that defines market economies. This optimistic view of human nature suggests that people are not inherently selfish; rather, societal structures can encourage either cooperation or self-interest.

This belief in the power of community was vividly demonstrated by early "utopian" socialists. One of the most famous was Robert Owen, the successful owner of the New Lanark cotton mills. In 1799, he took over a community plagued by the typical social ills of the Industrial Revolution. Instead of simply maximizing profit, Owen set out to prove that a different way was possible. He improved housing, opened a community store with fair prices, and, most radically, established the Institute for the Formation of Character, which provided education for children and adults. He believed that by creating a rational and humane environment, he could cultivate a rational and humane population. And for a time, it worked. New Lanark became a model community, demonstrating that a business could be both profitable and socially responsible. Owen’s experiment, though localized, embodied the early socialist faith that conscious human action could redesign society for the collective good.

Narrator: While utopians like Owen focused on creating small-scale models of a better world, another, more revolutionary tradition was taking shape. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided socialism with its most powerful and enduring critique of capitalism. They argued that history was a story of class struggle and that capitalism was inherently exploitative. In their view, the state was not a neutral arbiter but, as they famously wrote, "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." They predicted that capitalism's internal contradictions would lead to its inevitable collapse, proclaiming, "The expropriators are expropriated."

This theory was put into practice in a way that would permanently divide the socialist movement. In October 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party seized power in Russia, a largely agrarian country not yet at the advanced stage of capitalism that Marx believed was necessary for a socialist revolution. This event marked the birth of modern communism. Lenin introduced a critical, and controversial, innovation: the concept of a "vanguard party." He argued that the working class, on its own, could only develop trade-union consciousness and that it needed a disciplined, centralized party of professional revolutionaries to lead it to true socialist consciousness.

This idea was immediately attacked by other Marxists. Rosa Luxemburg criticized it as "ultra-centralism," warning that it would lead to the party controlling the workers, not liberating them. Leon Trotsky, before joining the Bolsheviks, chillingly predicted the outcome of Lenin's model: "the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization, and finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee." The Bolshevik seizure of power and the creation of the Communist International, which demanded all member parties adopt the Russian model, created a permanent schism. From this point on, socialism was split between the authoritarian, revolutionary path of communism and the democratic, reformist path of social democracy.

Narrator: After World War II, social democracy experienced its golden age, particularly in Western Europe. This era was defined by a political and economic consensus known as the Keynesian welfare state. Governments actively intervened in the economy to maintain full employment, and they built robust social safety nets, funding public healthcare, education, and pensions. Social expenditure as a percentage of GDP in Western Europe soared, from around 9% in 1949 to over 22% by 1977. This model, exemplified by the Swedish "folkhemmet" or "people's home," delivered unprecedented stability and rising living standards.

However, this system began to crumble in the 1970s. Economic stagflation, a combination of high inflation and high unemployment, undermined the Keynesian model. This economic crisis was accompanied by a powerful ideological assault from the New Right. Thinkers like Friedrich Hayek argued that the welfare state was inefficient and eroded individual freedom. This set the stage for a dramatic confrontation, one powerfully illustrated by the British miners' strike of 1984-1985.

When Margaret Thatcher's government announced plans to close dozens of coal pits, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) launched a nationwide strike. The year-long struggle was more than an industrial dispute; it was a battle over the future of Britain. The Thatcher government was determined to break the power of the unions, which it saw as a key obstacle to its free-market reforms. It used the full force of the state, deploying police in unprecedented numbers and using legal maneuvers to seize the union's funds. The strike's eventual defeat was a crushing blow not just to the miners but to the entire trade union movement and the social democratic model it supported. It symbolized the passing of an era and the rise of a new neoliberal order that prioritized market forces over collective rights.

Narrator: By the 1960s and 70s, the old certainties of both communism and social democracy were being challenged from within. The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 shattered the image of the USSR as a liberator, leading to the rise of a "New Left" that was deeply skeptical of both Moscow and the bureaucratic nature of Western social democracy. This New Left brought fresh perspectives that enriched and fragmented socialist thought, most notably from feminism and environmentalism.

Feminist socialists argued that traditional Marxism had a massive blind spot: the oppression of women. While early Soviet Russia under leaders like Alexandra Kollontai had made strides in legal equality and social support for women, these gains were often rolled back, and the party leadership remained deeply patriarchal. Lenin himself admonished female communists for prioritizing discussions of sex and marriage over party business. Second-wave feminists challenged the idea that women's liberation would automatically follow a class revolution. Thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir argued that women's oppression was rooted not just in economics but in a deeper "aspiration to dominate the Other." This forced socialists to confront issues of domestic labor, sexuality, and power relations within the family and the party itself.

Similarly, the emerging Green movement challenged socialism's traditional focus on industrial growth. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 was a terrifying demonstration that state-run "socialist" industrialism could be as environmentally catastrophic as its capitalist counterpart. Green thinkers like Rudolf Bahro, reflecting on his experience in Eastern Europe, declared that "industrialism, productivism, Fordism, etc. obstruct the socialist exit rather than lead to it." This critique forced a painful re-evaluation, questioning the long-held belief in unlimited production and forcing socialists to integrate ecological sustainability into their vision for the future.

Narrator: The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to be the final nail in socialism's coffin. In the triumphant atmosphere of the time, many believed that liberal-democratic capitalism was the undisputed victor, the "end of history." The intellectual Perry Anderson wrote that neoliberalism had become "the most successful ideology in world history," with no systematic rival outlooks left. Social democratic parties, in turn, shifted dramatically to the center, with leaders like Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Gerhard Schröder embracing market-friendly "Third Way" politics that abandoned many traditional socialist goals.

Yet, Newman argues that this is not the end of the story. The core socialist critique of capitalism—that its unregulated form generates profound and destabilizing inequality—has become more relevant than ever in the 21st century. The very success of neoliberalism has led to soaring disparities of wealth and power, both within and between nations. The book suggests that the failure was not of socialism's core values, but of its dominant 20th-century models: authoritarian communism and a social democracy that became too tied to the nation-state and an outdated industrial economy.

The path forward, Newman concludes, requires learning the lessons of the past. A socialism for the 21st century must be fundamentally democratic, rejecting any form of vanguard party or authoritarian state. It must be internationalist, capable of confronting global capital on a global scale. And it must be inclusive, fully integrating the vital insights of feminism, environmentalism, and other social movements. It must move beyond grand, rigid blueprints and instead, as the revisionist Eduard Bernstein once said, focus on "the movement" itself—the continuous struggle for a more just and equal world.

Narrator: Ultimately, Michael Newman's Socialism presents a compelling argument that socialism is not a monolithic, failed ideology to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Instead, it is a rich, diverse, and evolving tradition of thought defined by a persistent moral protest against inequality. Its central project has always been the pursuit of an egalitarian society built on cooperation and solidarity. The catastrophic failures of 20th-century state communism and the decline of post-war social democracy do not invalidate these core values; they offer harsh but necessary lessons about the dangers of authoritarianism and the challenges of a globalized world.

The book leaves us with a powerful question for our time. As we witness the social fractures and environmental crises fueled by an increasingly unequal global system, can we afford to dismiss the fundamental questions that socialism has always asked? Perhaps the most challenging idea is that a truly just society requires more than just "equality of opportunity"—which, as Zygmunt Bauman noted, is merely the equal chance to compete within an unequal system. It requires a direct challenge to that inequality itself, demanding that we envision a world organized not around profit and competition, but around human dignity and collective well-being.