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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

anon944273 Post 99

You think that the 1 percent that controls more than 60 percent of America's wealth actually works for their money? They don't. Look at the real numbers because they don't lie. People are living in fantasy land if they think people who are rich are those who work hard because that's not true. I don't see a problem with socialism. Period.

You people are arguing about something that can't happen. We're too spoiled, obese and lazy, complacent and greedy to ever try to have true socialism. We would have to have a world wide disaster that wiped out most of the population. Then we would all hopefully work together for the common good.

Look at Star Trek -- what do you think they're practicing in the Federation? True Socialism, not the bastardized versions of reality. Man ruins most everything he sticks his finger in.

Socialism, or as we call it in Europe social-democracy is different in terms from the socialism of Latin America. In Spain, the socialism of Latin America we call communism that even exists but it's a minority.

The social-democracy defends also capitalism and its basic rule is to attempt to reduce the lack of equality between the rich and poor. It defends the middle class.

When you say that Spain is a socialist country, that is a big mistake. Spanish people are more liberal than socialist or conservative. The socialists must moderate their election manifesto and speech in order to govern.

In the case of the conservatives, they are even less supported than socialists and must win the liberal voters in order to govern. If in Spain there were a Democratic Party like in the USA, neither the Socialists nor the conservatives will ever win. The Spanish democratic party disappeared in the 80s.

The first and second elections in the Spanish democracy showed the true Spanish reality: Spanish democratic party: 35 percent; Socialist/social-democratic party: 29 percent; Communist Party: 11 percent;

Conservative Party: 8 percent.

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What Is Socialism? (with picture) - wiseGEEK

Socialism is an economic and political system where the workers control the means of production, such as machinery or farmland, instead of their bosses. Those people that advocate this cooperative society are called socialists. Another key belief is that goods and services should be produced for the people's use, not for profit. Socialists believe that everything in society is made by the cooperative efforts of the people.

There are many varieties of socialism, so no one definition can apply to all of them; however, in all varieties, the workers own the means of production.[1] The major differences between the different varieties are the role of the free market or planing, the method of ownership of the means of production, the role of management of workers and the government's role in the economy.

Socialism is an economic and governmental system where the workers own and run companies. Its goal is to have the industries make money which can be used for the benefit of everyone. It wants to give workers control over their workplaces.

Social democracy is a form of socialism that tries to mix parts of communism with capitalism. In this system, the government redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor like a communist state, but people can also run their own businesses and own private property like a capitalist state. Unlike communism, it is public money raised from taxes being redistributed to the poor, rather than private property eg. seizing all funds over $1 million to give to everyone. It supports gradual reform over revolution. Much of the time the people collectively (as a group) contribute money or other goods for the benefit of the entire community. An example of this would be the U.S. fire departments. They rely on taxes paid by the people to keep equipment and staff for the benefit of the community, should something catch on fire. Some of these countries use a progressive tax, where richer people are taxed more than poorer people. This tax, and other measures, helps to reduce the inequality between rich and poor in a nation.

In many countries that practice social democracy, specific services, and some industries, are subsidized and/or partially controlled by the government. For example, education, health care, housing, utility companies or public transportation are some industries that might be owned/maintained by the government in a socialist system. For the most part, people working in these industries are paid by the government, with money paid by the people as taxes. Welfare is likely offered under socialism.

Another kind of Socialism is "Collectivization." In this system, money and goods are shared more equally among the people, with the government in control. In theory, this system results in the divide between classes getting smaller, with the poorest of a nation's people being better cared for while the richest accept higher taxes and economic regulations. Of course, socialism as it is commonly practiced differs in many ways from communism (See "The History of Socialism and Communism", later in the article.)

Today, many democratic socialists, especially in Western Europe, want industries to be guided jointly (together) by representatives of shareholders as well as the workers working together in what is known as an industrial democracy because both groups have interests in the success of the enterprise. This would be a more direct democratic way of organizing rather than control by central government. Trade unions and/or workers councils would represent the interests of the employees.

Many countries see Socialism differently. Social Democracy, for example, a Democratic form of Socialism, is the most common kind of government in the world. Socialist International is an organization dedicated to the cause of promoting socialist ideals, and has ties with many Socialist parties, especially Social Democratic ones.

Most non-communist people say "communism" when they mean the Marxist and Leninist ideas of Russia's Bolshevik party. Marx believed that capitalism followed the economic and political system of feudalism. He also believed that capitalism would oppress many people, and those people would eventually revolt and use socialism. Then he thought that socialism can be another bridge, but to Communism. However, many people incorrectly use the term "Communist" to refer to a socialist state. Others call this 'State Socialism,' to distinguish it from the communist goal that does not need a state or any form of government. To non-communists, the word 'socialism' is now mostly used for attempts to come close to this goal in a democratic state. Often in United States politics "socialism" is used as a slur against liberals, by conservatives.

A Welshman, Robert Owen, was the first socialist. His followers began calling themselves socialists in 1841.[2] He is still regarded as a pioneer of the Co-operative Movement in Britain. He said that workers should own the companies they worked for. The workers would then share the profits among themselves. He set up a new model factory in New Lanark, Scotland.[3]

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Socialism - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia