Day 25 – Q 1.While attempts at socialism over the last century have had varying degree of success, each has sought to establish an egalitarian society to replace the structural inequalities inherent to capitalism. Comment.

1.While attempts at socialism over the last century have had varying degree of success, each has sought to establish an egalitarian society to replace the structural inequalities inherent to capitalism. Comment.     

हालाँकि पिछली सदी में समाजवाद के विभिन्न प्रयासों में सफलता की डिग्री अलग–अलग थी, लेकिन प्रत्येक ने पूंजीवाद के लिए निहित संरचनात्मक असमानताओं को बदलने के लिए एक समतावादी समाज की स्थापना करने का प्रयास किया। टिप्पणी करें।

Introduction:

• Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production as well as the political theories and movements associated with them. 
• Capitalism is a type of social system that follows the belief of individual rights. From political perspective, capitalism is the system of laissez-faire (freedom). Lawfully, it is a system of objective laws that is rule of law in contrast to rule of man. In financial terms, when such freedom is applied to the domain of production its result is the free-market.

Body

Attempts of Socialism

• Capitalism is viewed as an irrational system resulting from market anarchy, which leads to high social waste and suffering (notably through crises and unemployment). It produces large inequalities and works in favour of a wealthy minority, both within capitalist societies and at the level of the capitalist world economy. But with its inequalities of power and wealth, capitalism nurtures economic inequality alongside equality under the law. Eg. The wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country’s wealth

• Ideal or existing socialism, on the other hand, is seen as allowing consciously planned rational development, which does away with such capitalist flaws as recurring crises, waste and unemployment; it fosters social equality and may promote a higher form of liberty where a united society comes to master its own progress.
• Socialism, as an alternative system, has proved to be sustainable in terms of decades, but not beyond. Its failure is patent, when judged according to the very objectives and values that were basic to its promoters and advocates, especially the aim of overtaking capitalism in terms of rationality, efficiency and welfare, and of eventually replacing it as a more progressive historical economic system.
• If socialism is interpreted as a substitute for capitalism in countries that had missed the first industrial revolution (as suggested by Robinson, 1960), the overall judgment is more mixed, but in a majority of instances (the Chinese being the exception), the early reduction of the economic distance with capitalist countries at a similar initial level of development was followed by a growing gap during the last two or three decades of the systemic life cycle of socialist economies.
• While some socialist countries managed to introduce positive economic reforms at the end of Great depression, most reformist experiences were disappointing or short-lived. Moreover, the political element in the institutional base of these systems was the ultimate obstacle to genuine adaptive reform (though China later represented an interesting exception, as noted earlier).
• In the current scenario Norway is one of those countries that very closely approximates the democratic socialist ideal and is more successful than Unites states on virtually every social metric one can name.

Also socially, it routinely ranks as the Happiest (2017)or second-happiest (2018) country in the world. 

• On the other hand, on the policy side Venezuela is one of that country which is ostensibly socialist and undergoing a severe economic crisis.

Conclusion 

Socialism, as the term has evolved in mainstream usage, does not mean a total absence of markets, just as capitalism does not imply a total absence of public ownership and regulations.