(Canadian Nat Sozi Party) National Socialism is...
100% racialist 100% non racist 100% Aryan Socialism, one folk one nation! 100% Western European blood, and the Aryanisation of Eastern European peoples. Nati...
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This article is about socialism as an economic system and political philosophy. For socialism specifically defined as a stage of development in Marxist theory, see Socialism (Marxism). For the concept where the state promotes the social and economic well-being of its citizens sometimes mistaken with socialism, see Welfare state.
Socialism is a social and economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy,[1][2] as well as a political theory and movement that aims at the establishment of such a system.[3][4] "Social ownership" may refer to cooperative enterprises, common ownership, state ownership, citizen ownership of equity, or any combination of these.[5] There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them.[6] They differ in the type of social ownership they advocate, the degree to which they rely on markets or planning, how management is to be organised within productive institutions, and the role of the state in constructing socialism.[7]
A socialist economic system is based on the organisational precept of production for use, meaning the production of goods and services to directly satisfy economic demand and human needs where objects are valued based on their use-value or utility, as opposed to being structured upon the accumulation of capital and production for profit.[8] In the traditional conception of a socialist economy, coordination, accounting and valuation would be performed in kind (using physical quantities), by a common physical magnitude, or by a direct measure of labour-time in place of financial calculation.[9][10] On distribution of output there has been two proposals, one which is based on the principle of to each according to his contribution and another on the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The exact methods of resource allocation and valuation are the subject of debate within the broader socialist calculation debate.
The socialist political movement includes a diverse array of political philosophies. Core dichotomies within the socialist movement include the distinction between reformism and revolutionary socialism and between state socialism and libertarian socialism. State socialism calls for the nationalisation of the means of production as a strategy for implementing socialism, while libertarian socialism generally place their hopes in decentralized means of direct democracy such as libertarian municipalism, citizens' assemblies, trade unions, and workers' councils[11] coming from a general anti-authoritarian stance.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18]Democratic socialism highlights the central role of democratic processes and political systems and is usually contrasted with non-democratic political movements that advocate socialism.[19] Some socialists have adopted the causes of other social movements, such as environmentalism, feminism and liberalism.[20]
Modern socialism originated from an 18th-century intellectual and working class political movement that criticised the effects of industrialisation and private property on society. The revival of republicanism in the American Revolution of 1776 and the egalitarian values introduced by the French Revolution of 1789 gave rise to socialism as a distinct political movement. In the early 19th century, "socialism" referred to any concern for the social problems of capitalism irrespective of the solutions to those problems. However, by the late 19th century, "socialism" had come to signify opposition to capitalism and advocacy for an alternative post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership.[21] During this time, German philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels published works criticizing the utopian aspects of contemporary socialist trends and applied a materialist understanding of socialism as a phase of development which will come about through social revolution instigated by escalating and conflicting class relationships within capitalism.[22] The socialist movement came to be the most influential worldwide movement and political-economic worldview of the 20th century.[23] Today, socialist parties and ideas remain a political force with varying degrees of power and influence in all continents leading national governments in many countries.
For Andrew Vincent "The word socialism finds its root in the Latin sociare, which means to combine or to share. The related, more technical term in Roman and then medieval law was societas. This latter word could mean companionship and fellowship as well as the more legalistic idea of a consensual contract between freemen." [24] The term "socialism" was created by Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the founders of what would later be labelled "utopian socialism". The term "socialism" was created to contrast against the liberal doctrine of "individualism", which stressed that people act or should act as if they are in isolation from one another.[25] The original socialists condemned liberal individualism as failing to address social concerns of poverty, social oppression, and gross inequality of wealth.[25] They viewed liberal individualism as degenerating society into supporting selfish egoism that harmed community life through promoting a society based on competition.[25] They presented socialism as an alternative to liberal individualism, that advocated a society based on cooperation.[25] The term socialism is attributed to Pierre Leroux,[26] and to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud in France; and in Britain to Robert Owen in 1827, father of the cooperative movement.[27][28]
The modern definition and usage of the term "socialism" settled by the 1860s, becoming the predominant term among the earlier associated words "co-operative", "mutualist" and "associationist". The term "communism" also fell out of use during this period, despite earlier distinctions between socialism and communism from the 1840s.[29] An early distinction between "socialism" and "communism" was that the former aimed to only socialize production while the latter aimed to socialize both production and consumption.[30] However, by 1888 the term "socialism" was used by Marxists in place of "communism", which was now considered an old-fashion term synonymous with socialism. It was only until 1917 after the Bolshevik revolution that "socialism" came to refer to a distinct stage between capitalism and communism, introduced by Vladimir Lenin as a means to defend the Bolshevik seizure of power against traditional Marxist criticisms that Russia was not sufficiently developed for socialist revolution.[31]
Socialist models and ideas espousing common or public ownership have existed since antiquity. Mazdak, a Persian communal proto-socialist,[32] instituted communal possessions and advocated the public good. And it has been claimed, though controversially, that there were elements of socialist thought in the politics of classical Greek philosophers Plato[33] and Aristotle.[34] In the post-revolutionary period right after the French Revolution activists and theorists like Franois-Nol Babeuf, tienne-Gabriel Morelly, Filippo Buonarroti, and Auguste Blanqui influenced the early French labour and socialist movements.[35] In Britain Thomas Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax property owners to pay for the needs of the poor in Agrarian Justice [36] while Charles Hall wrote The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States denouncing capitalisms effects on the poor of his time[37] which influenced the utopian schemes of Thomas Spence.[38] The first "self-conscious socialist movements developed in the 1820s and 1830s. The Owenites, Saint-Simonians and Fourierists provided a series of coherent analyses and interpretations of society. They also, especially in the case of the Owenites, overlapped with a number of other working-class movements like the Chartists."[39] A later important socialist thinker in France was Pierre Joseph Proudhon who proposed his philosophy of mutualism in which "everyone had an equal claim, either alone or as part of a small cooperative, to possess and use land and other resources as needed to make a living".[40] There were also currents inspired by dissident Christianity of christian socialism "often in Britain and then usually coming out of left liberal politics and a romantic anti-industrialism"[35] which produced theorists such as Edward Bellamy, Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley.[4]
The first advocates of socialism favoured social levelling in order to create a meritocratic or technocratic society based upon individual talent. Count Henri de Saint-Simon is regarded as the first individual to coin the term socialism.[41] Saint-Simon was fascinated by the enormous potential of science and technology and advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of capitalism and would be based upon equal opportunities.[42][unreliable source?] He advocated the creation of a society in which each person was ranked according to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work.[41] The key focus of Saint-Simon's socialism was on administrative efficiency and industrialism, and a belief that science was the key to progress.[43] This was accompanied by a desire to implement a rationally organised economy based on planning and geared towards large-scale scientific and material progress,[41] and thus embodied a desire for a more directed or planned economy. Other early socialist thinkers, such as Thomas Hodgkin and Charles Hall, based their ideas on David Ricardo's economic theories. They reasoned that the equilibrium value of commodities approximated to prices charged by the producer when those commodities were in elastic supply, and that these producer prices corresponded to the embodied labour the cost of the labour (essentially the wages paid) that was required to produce the commodities. The Ricardian socialists viewed profit, interest and rent as deductions from this exchange-value.[44]
West European social critics, including Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Charles Hall and Saint-Simon, were the first modern socialists who criticised the excessive poverty and inequality of the Industrial Revolution. They advocated reform, with some such as Robert Owen advocating the transformation of society to small communities without private property. Robert Owen's contribution to modern socialism was his understanding that actions and characteristics of individuals were largely determined by the social environment they were raised in and exposed to.[43] On the other hand Charles Fourier advocated phalansteres which were communities that respected individual desires (including sexual preferences), affinities and creativity and saw that work has to be made enjoyable for people.[45] The ideas of Owen and Fourier were tried in practice in numerous intentional communities around Europe and the American continent in the mid-19th century.
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Socialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Socialism, as concept and social movement, has played a vital role in American society as a voice of opposition to class and sex exploitation, to race or ethnic hatreds, to imperial cupidity, and to the acquisitive mentality of the dominant classes at large. Judged by the standard of the ordered class movements of other (especially European) societies, it has been relatively weak in the United States. Yet faced with the monolith of modern capitalism, it has been surprisingly versatile, at times actually threatening the system or forcing major institutional improvements through the promulgation of a popular alternative worldview and the organization of widespread social resistance.
The origins of American socialism lay in the mostly (but not entirely) religious communal settlements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Especially notable in the Radical Reformation's diaspora to Pennsylvania, but also scattered throughout other colonies and then the newly emerging nation, these sought to offer models of social cooperation. Characteristically, the colonists engaged in nongenocidal relations with nearby Native Americans, practiced a greater degree of sexual equality than the outside world (a pattern often maintained through celibacy), and undertook agrarian or small-crafts production.
These colonies made notable contributions to American crafts and culture. The Ephrata Colony, for instance, served as a major publication and educational center in the early eighteenth century, establishing a substantial tradition of German-American literature. The Shakers, famed for their "plain ways" and their furniture, popularized communitarianism for generations. Utopian intellectuals Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, and John Humphrey Noyes, among others, participated in national debates over sexual egalitarianism and "free love." For all their inner strengths, however, the colonies lacked the capital and--especially if secular--the inner cohesion to establish themselves permanently. With the rise of heavy industry following the Civil War, they gave way to immigrant socialist movements and to utopianism of another type, more cultural or intellectual than practical.
German-American immigrants, along with Jewish immigrants at the end of the century and a scattering of other groups, established a roughly Marxian socialist presence within labor organizations (which they frequently founded), ethnic newspapers, mutual benefit societies, and cultural associations in large cities and small industrial towns. At two points they had a major impact. During the national railroad strike of 1877, the few thousand organized socialists contributed speakers, leaflets, and in the case of St. Louis (governed briefly by a strike committee), insurrectionary political leaders. In the working-class drive of the middle 1880s for an eight-hour day and for local labor parties, socialists (and "revolutionary socialists," or anarchists) often took a leading regional or local role--and suffered the brunt of the murderous repression following the Haymarket Square incident in which a bomb thrown by persons unknown killed a number of Chicago policemen.
A second wave of utopianism, following the publication of Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward (1888), briefly organized hundreds of study circles or clubs seeking a peaceful route to the classless society. This initiative, along with the waning populist movement, the catastrophic 1890s depression, and a widespread disillusionment with increasingly corporate control of nominally democratic institutions, prompted an education-minded political socialism among the native-born. Eugene V. Debs, erstwhile champion of the American Railway Union, had become by 1900 the personal symbol of this sentiment, linked to the varied immigrant socialist movements.
The Socialist party, although it elected hundreds of candidates to local office and obtained nearly a million votes for Eugene Debs's 1912 presidential candidacy, failed nevertheless to bridge the gaps between skilled and unskilled workers, and native-born whites, blacks, and immigrants. Unlike their European counterparts who encompassed a more homogeneous mass and led the working class into modern political participation, American socialists offered only a philosophy of brotherhood and the resistance of particular groups at the rough edges of all-powerful American capitalism.
For a while, the Industrial Workers of the World (iww) seemed to pose another alternative. Organized in 1905, the iww promulgated the vision of "one big union" for all workers. By the lights of socialist ideologue Daniel De Leon, the new union constituted nothing less than the basis of a new civilization, ready to substitute a purely functional economic cooperative coordination for state-dominated political rule. Although mounting great strikes among the unskilled, the iww could not overcome the combined hostility of employers, the state, and craft labor movements. With U.S. entry into World War I and the collaboration of the American Federation of Labor's leader with government aims, socialists and iww activists suffered beatings, jailings, deportations, and the suppression of their publications.
One section of the socialist movement thereafter allied itself with newly founded communist factions, amid much destructive internecine warfare, government infiltration, and antiradical propaganda. Another section joined in emerging farmer-labor movements or became largely quiescent. The rollback of labor organizations in the 1920s sealed the Left's isolation, but enjoined socialists of all kinds (particularly Christians and communists) to address otherwise virtually unchallenged racism and imperialism. In a subtle but decided reorientation, radicals became the often lonely champions of a multiracial democratic American society.
The depression years saw a revival of socialist movements not so much in a directly political sense as in activity within labor and reform causes. The struggles of the unemployed, the victims of racism, the Spanish Republicans, and above all the unskilled workers enabled the Left to mount one fairly impressive political effort (Norman Thomas's 1932 bid for the presidency) and many dramatic campaigns. Industrial unions and progressive ethnic movements, by the end of the 1930s, fairly radiated a socialistic consciousness, even as they leaned upon the presence of the New Deal for political legitimation. Leftish political figures, such as New York congressman Vito Marcantonio, wove immigrant aspirations with a militantly democratic internationalism. Intellectual influences from the Left meanwhile fairly dominated a generation of writers and artists. Leaders of the communist Left, Earl Browder the most prominent among them, briefly gained, if not respectability, at least a wide hearing.
The approach of World War II, and the political obeisance of communists to Moscow's direction, permitted a powerful engine of political repression to surface within Congress and to utilize the infiltration and intimidation the fbi had already set in motion. The outbreak of the cold war brought with it a heresy-hunting national mood. The president, Congress, the Justice Department, the commercial press, the Catholic church, employers, compliant labor leaders, and a wing of prestigious liberals joined to isolate dissent and dissenters. Socialists of all kinds faded away, and only scatterings of radicals openly opposed the arms race, U.S. foreign adventures, and neocolonialism in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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socialism: Definition from Answers.com
Socialismdefined as a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of productionwas the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty. Yet the idea and the ideal of socialism linger on. Whether socialism in some form will eventually return as a major organizing force in human affairs is unknown, but no one can accurately appraise its prospects who has not taken into account the dramatic story of its rise and fall. The Birth of Socialist Planning
It is often thought that the idea of socialism derives from the work of Karl Marx. In fact, Marx wrote only a few pages about socialism, as either a moral or a practical blueprint for society. The true architect of a socialist order was Lenin, who first faced the practical difficulties of organizing an economic system without the driving incentives of profit seeking or the self-generating constraints of competition. Lenin began from the long-standing delusion that economic organization would become less complex once the profit drive and the market mechanism had been dispensed withas self-evident, he wrote, as the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording, and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.
In fact, economic life pursued under these first four rules rapidly became so disorganized that within four years of the 1917 revolution, Soviet production had fallen to 14 percent of its prerevolutionary level. By 1921 Lenin was forced to institute the New Economic Policy (NEP), a partial return to the market incentives of capitalism. This brief mixture of socialism and capitalism came to an end in 1927 after Stalin instituted the process of forced collectivization that was to mobilize Russian resources for its leap into industrial power.
The system that evolved under Stalin and his successors took the form of a pyramid of command. At its apex was Gosplan, the highest state planning agency, which established such general directives for the economy as the target rate of growth and the allocation of effort between military and civilian outputs, between heavy and light industry, and among various regions. Gosplan transmitted the general directives to successive ministries of industrial and regional planning, whose technical advisers broke down the overall national plan into directives assigned to particular factories, industrial power centers, collective farms, and so on. These thousands of individual subplans were finally scrutinized by the factory managers and engineers who would eventually have to implement them. Thereafter, the blueprint for production reascended the pyramid, together with the suggestions, emendations, and pleas of those who had seen it. Ultimately, a completed plan would be reached by negotiation, voted on by the Supreme Soviet, and passed into law.
Thus, the final plan resembled an immense order book, specifying the nuts and bolts, steel girders, grain outputs, tractors, cotton, cardboard, and coal that, in their entirety, constituted the national output. In theory such an order book should enable planners to reconstitute a working economy each yearprovided, of course, that the nuts fitted the bolts; the girders were of the right dimensions; the grain output was properly stored; the tractors were operable; and the cotton, cardboard, and coal were of the kinds needed for their manifold uses. But there was a vast and widening gap between theory and practice.
The gap did not appear immediately. In retrospect, we can see that the task facing Lenin and Stalin in the early years was not so much economic as quasi militarymobilizing a peasantry into a workforce to build roads and rail lines, dams and electric grids, steel complexes and tractor factories. This was a formidable assignment, but far less formidable than what would confront socialism fifty years later, when the task was not so much to create enormous undertakings as to create relatively self-contained ones, and to fit all the outputs into a dovetailing whole.
Through the 1960s the Soviet economy continued to report strong overall growthroughly twice that of the United Statesbut observers began to spot signs of impending trouble. One was the difficulty of specifying outputs in terms that would maximize the well-being of everyone in the economy, not merely the bonuses earned by individual factory managers for overfulfilling their assigned objectives. The problem was that the plan specified outputs in physical terms. One consequence was that managers maximized yardages or tonnages of output, not its quality. A famous cartoon in the satirical magazine Krokodil showed a factory manager proudly displaying his record output, a single gigantic nail suspended from a crane.
As the economic flow became increasingly clogged and clotted, production took the form of stormings at the end of each quarter or year, when every resource was pressed into use to meet preassigned targets. The same rigid system soon produced expediters, or tolkachi, to arrange shipments to harassed managers who needed unplannedand therefore unobtainableinputs to achieve their production goals. Worse, lacking the right to buy their own supplies or to hire or fire their own workers, factories set up fabricating shops, then commissaries, and finally their own worker housing to maintain control over their own small bailiwicks.
It is not surprising that this increasingly Byzantine system began to create serious dysfunctions beneath the overall statistics of growth. During the 1960s the Soviet Union became the first industrial country in history to suffer a prolonged peacetime fall in average life expectancy, a symptom of its disastrous misallocation of resources. Military research facilities could get whatever they needed, but hospitals were low on the priority list. By the 1970s the figures clearly indicated a slowing of overall production. By the 1980s the Soviet Union officially acknowledged a near end to growth that was, in reality, an unofficial decline. In 1987 the first official law embodying perestroikarestructuringwas put into effect. President Mikhail Gorbachev announced his intention to revamp the economy from top to bottom by introducing the market, reestablishing private ownership, and opening the system to free economic interchange with the West. Seventy years of socialist rise had come to an end.
Understanding of the difficulties of central planning was slow to emerge. In the mid-1930s, while the Russian industrialization drive was at full tilt, few raised their voices about its problems. Among those few were ludwig von mises, an articulate and exceedingly argumentative free-market economist, and friedrich hayek, of much more contemplative temperament, later to be awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in monetary theory. Together, Mises and Hayek launched an attack on the feasibility of socialism that seemed at the time unconvincing in its argument as to the functional problems of a planned economy. Mises in particular contended that a socialist system was impossible because there was no way for the planners to acquire the information (see Information and Prices)produce this, not thatneeded for a coherent economy. This information, Hayek emphasized, emerged spontaneously in a market system from the rise and fall of prices. A planning system was bound to fail precisely because it lacked such a signaling mechanism.
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Socialism: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library ...
socialism,social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. According to the socialist view, individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. Furthermore, everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members.
This conviction puts socialism in opposition to capitalism, which is based on private ownership of the means of production and allows individual choices in a free market to determine how goods and services are distributed. Socialists complain that capitalism necessarily leads to unfair and exploitative concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of the relative few who emerge victorious from free-market competitionpeople who then use their wealth and power to reinforce their dominance in society. Because such people are rich, they may choose where and how to live, and their choices in turn limit the options of the poor. As a result, terms such as individual freedom and ... (200 of 8,350 words)
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socialism -- Encyclopedia Britannica