The socialist political movement includes political philosophies that originated in the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 18th century and out of concern for the social problems that socialists associated with capitalism. By the late 19th century, after the work of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, socialism had come to signify anti-capitalism and advocacy for a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production. By the early 1920s, communism and social democracy had become the two dominant political tendencies within the international socialist movement, with socialism itself becoming the most influential secular movement of the 20th century. Many socialists also adopted the causes of other social movements, such as feminism, environmentalism, and progressivism. (Full article...)
The International Workingmen's Association (IWA) (1864–1876), sometimes called the First International, was an international organization which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wingsocialist, communist and anarchist political groups and trade union organizations that were based on the working class and class struggle. It was founded in 1864 in a workmen's meeting held in Saint Martin's Hall, London. Its first congress was held in 1866 in Geneva.
In Europe, a period of harsh reaction followed the widespread Revolutions of 1848. The next major phase of revolutionary activity began almost twenty years later with the founding of the IWA in 1864. At its peak, the IWA had 5 million members according to the police reports, although the official journal reported 8 million members.
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825), better known as Henri de Saint-Simon (French:[ɑ̃ʁidəsɛ̃simɔ̃]), was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon.
Saint-Simon created a political and economic ideology known as Saint-Simonianism that claimed that the needs of an industrial class, which he also referred to as the working class, needed to be recognized and fulfilled to have an effective society and an efficient economy. Unlike conceptions within industrializing societies of a working class being manual laborers alone, Saint-Simon's late-18th-century conception of this class included all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society, such as businesspeople, managers, scientists, bankers, and manual labourers, amongst others. (Full article...)
Image 17The celebration of the election of the Commune on 28 March 1871—the Paris Commune was a major early implementation of socialist ideas. (from Socialism)
Image 22Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin opposed the Marxist aim of dictatorship of the proletariat in favour of universal rebellion and allied himself with the federalists in the First International before his expulsion by the Marxists (from History of socialism)
Image 37The first anarchist journal to use the term libertarian was Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social, published in New York City between 1858 and 1861 by French libertarian communistJoseph Déjacque, the first recorded person to describe himself as libertarian. (from Socialism)
... that following the ban of its labour unions in 1934, the Romanian United Socialist Party would rely on its youth and women's wings for political action?
... that Marcela Revollo's pragmatic approach to legislating led her to cooperate with both neoliberal and socialist governments on women's rights legislation?
Marx disturbed German socialism at the very root. He stifled the seeds of a national socialism which were beginning to shoot in Wilhelm Weitling and, in another form, in Rodbertus. Marx's influence was characteristic: he was the ruthless dissector of the European economic system. A homeless man. He had no roots in the past yet he took upon himself to mould the future. We must now set about making good the mischief he effected.
The Russians have demonstrated it. The Russian socialism if the Revolution gave birth to the new militarism of the Soviets. Those same millions who broke off the War because they wanted peace and only peace, allowed themselves to be formed into a new red army. There came a moment when the only factories in the country that were still at work were the munition factories. The Russian bowed his head in patient acceptance of the severe militarism of a new autocracy. He had shaken off the bureaucrats and police of the Tsar's autocracy which smacked of St.Petersburg and the West, and which had come to seem foreign and hostile. But he welcomed the autocracy of socialism; he had asked for it; he accepted it, Bolshevism is Russian, and could be nothing else.
Every people has its own socialism. The German working man does not believe it even yet. That is very German of him. Before the War he had hastened so gladly and so long to the comforting gospel of a union of the proletariats of all countries. He really beleved it when they told him that proletarians everywhere have the same class interests that they have more in common with each other than with the other classes in their own country. The German working man marched to the War because he obeyed the dictates of his own sound nature and the wholesome discipline in which he had been reared. That was also very German of him. He ended the War in his own way because he thought it was lost and the voice of the tempter came over to him, promising that a just peace would be granted to his people.
That was also very German of him. Then he lost his head. He believed nothing. He did not believe his leaders. He has kept nothing but an idealism which will not admit that he has been betrayed. He must learn to admit it. He must learn to recognize that he has never been so enslaved as he is now by the capitalists of foreign nations. Having recognized this he must act accordingly.