There has, in fact, been considerable gross social mobility in modern
societies; this is because the shrinkage of first the agricultural sector and then
the unskilled working-class sectors of the economy have inevitably meant a
growth in the middle classes, particularly in lower professional and managerial
employment. However, social mobility researchers concentrate on the idea of
‘relative’ social mobility—how much greater is the probability of a bank
manager’s son gaining a similar job compared to the son of a manual worker?
It is the continued low rates of relative mobility, despite high rates of gross or
absolute mobility, that is thought to be problematic. The use of a male example
is intentional. The biggest single problem with social mobility research is that it
has concentrated excessively on father and sons, in part because of technical
problems in calculating class positions for married women.
Socialism
As with communism, socialism can mean a variety of different things, not
because of ambiguity or vagueness, but because it is a concept that operates in
several different ideological vocabularies. WithinMarxism, socialism has a
very technical meaning, referring to a phase before the establishment of true
communism. Outside that debate, socialism does become extremely vague,
and is best differentiated into a number of versions, such asChristian
socialism,social democracyand so on. At its simplest, the core meaning
of socialism is that it is a politico-economic system where the state controls,
either through planning or more directly, and may legally own, the basic means
of production. In so controlling industrial, and sometimes agricultural, assets
the aim is to produce what is needed by the society without regard to what may
be most profitable to produce.
At the same time all versions of socialism expect to produce an egalitarian
society, one in which all are cared for by society, with no need either for
poverty, or the relief of poverty by private charity. The famous words ‘From
each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, first used by the
French socialist Louis Blanc (1811–82) inThe Organization of Work(1840), may
summarize socialism at its best. Socialism has gone through many variations,
and dating its origin is next to impossible. Certainly it stems most seriously
from the industrial revolution, and many who are not Marxists would probably
agree that socialism arose as a reaction tocapitalism, and could not become a
popular theory until the development of extensive industrial private property
with a society based on contractual relations rather than semi-feudal status
relations. Nevertheless, the essential ideas of equality and the effective abolition
of private property, combined with the need for social protection against the
chances of fate, can be found much earlier in political theory, not least notably
in early Christianity. The basic varieties of socialism today can be arranged
Socialism