Conservative socialism

Conservative or right-wing socialism is a term used by some right-wing movements and politicians to describe support for social solidarity as opposed to individualism, commercialism, and laissez-faire economics. According to the Austrian School economist Jesús Huerta de Soto, the fundamental objective of "right-wing socialism" is to maintain the status quo by preventing the free exercise of entrepreneurship and creative human action from disrupting the pre-established framework of social organization It supports state promoted social hierarchy and certain people and groups to hold higher status in such a hierarchy.

The term is also used, more commonly but distinctly, to refer to moderate, social democratic forms of socialism when contrasted with Marxism–Leninism and other more radical left-wing alternatives. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels criticised the Philosophy of Poverty by the anarchist writer and theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as representing "Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism". Military socialism, guild socialism, agrarian socialism, and some forms of Christian socialism are also termed "right-wing socialism" by various authors.

The term "conservative socialism" was used as a rebuke by Karl Marx for certain strains of socialism, but it has also been used by proponents of such a system.

An early proponent of self-described "conservative socialism" was 19th century Austrian politician Klemens von Metternich as early as 1847.Monarchists had begun to use "socialist" as an antithesis of "bourgeois laissez-faire" indicating reliance on a "social conscience" as opposed to pure individualism. Metternich said the aims of such a conservative socialism were "peaceful, class-harmonizing, cosmopolitan, traditional". "Monarchic socialism" promoted social paternalism portraying the monarch as having a "fatherly" duty to protect his people from the effects of free economic forces. Metternich's "conservative socialism" saw liberalism and nationalism as forms of middle-class dictatorship over the masses.

...
Wikipedia