ABSTRACT
Socialism has many faces. At the ideological level, it is clearly a system for the sharing of control and ownership of a society’s resources, and this is commonly taken also to imply a substantial degree of sharing in policymaking and the management of public affairs. At the level of action, this ideal of popular participation has been often tempered by a number of real or asserted practical constraints. In many socialist regimes, ‘socialism from above’, sometimes in quite oppressive forms, has been deemed necessary for the sake of efficiency and, at least temporarily, for the control and/or re-education of recalcitrant and unenthusiastic groups still burdened by their bourgeois aspirations.
