Portal:Socialism

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Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.

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...)

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In Marxist theory, socialism, also called the socialist mode of production, refers to a specific historical phase of economic development and its corresponding set of social relations that supersede capitalism in the schema of historical materialism. The Marxist definition of socialism is a mode of production where the sole criterion for production is use-value and therefore the law of value no longer directs economic activity. Marxist production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning, while distribution of economic output is based on the principle of to each according to his contribution. The social relations of socialism are characterized by the working class effectively owning the means of production and the means of their livelihood, either through cooperative enterprises or by public ownership or private artisanal tools and self-management, so that the social surplus accrues to the working class and society as a whole. This view is consistent with, and helped to inform, early conceptions of socialism where the law of value no longer directs economic activity, and thus monetary relations in the form of exchange-value, profit, interest and wage labor would not operate and apply to Marxist socialism.

The Marxian conception of socialism stands in contrast to other early conceptions of socialism, most notably early forms of market socialism based on classical economics such as mutualism and Ricardian socialism. Unlike the Marxian conception, these conceptions of socialism retained commodity exchange (markets) for labor and the means of production, seeking to perfect the market process. The Marxist idea of socialism was also heavily opposed to utopian socialism. Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote very little on socialism and neglected to provide any details on how it might be organized, numerous social scientists and neoclassical economists have used Marx's theory as a basis for developing their own models of socialist economic systems. The Marxist view of socialism served as a point of reference during the socialist calculation debate.

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Debs, c. 1912

Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. Through his presidential candidacies as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States.

Early in his political career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs led his union in a major ten-month strike against the CB&Q Railroad in 1888. Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), one of the nation's first industrial unions. After workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company organized a wildcat strike over pay cuts in the summer of 1894, Debs signed many into the ARU. He led a boycott by the ARU against handling trains with Pullman cars in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike, affecting most lines west of Detroit and more than 250,000 workers in 27 states. Purportedly to keep the mail running, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was convicted of federal charges for defying a court injunction against the strike and served six months in prison. (Full article...)

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General images

The following are images from various socialism-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Socialists in Union Square, New York City on May Day 1912 (from Socialism)
Image 2New Harmony, a utopian attempt as proposed by Robert Owen (from History of socialism)
Image 3Russian 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 4World Map of Socialist countries in 1985 (from History of socialism)
Image 5Arabic letters "Lam" and "Alif" reading "Lā" (Arabic for "No!") are a symbol of Islamic Socialism in Turkey. (from Socialism)
Image 6Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, early French socialist (from Socialism)
Image 7Man, Controller of the Universe produced by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (from Socialism)
Image 8The Soviet of Workers' Deputies of St. Petersburg in 1905, Trotsky in the center. The soviets were an early example of a workers council. (from Socialism)
Image 9Eduard Bernstein
Image 10Barricades Boulevard Voltaire, Paris during the uprising known as the Paris Commune (from History of socialism)
Image 11The Soviet of Workers' Deputies of St. Petersburg in 1905, Trotsky in the center. The soviets were an early example of a workers council. (from History of socialism)
Image 12The 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 communist Joseph Déjacque, the first recorded person to describe himself as libertarian. (from Socialism)
Image 13The writings of Karl Marx provided the basis for the development of Marxist political theory and Marxian economics. (from Socialism)
Image 14Presidents Fernando Lugo of Paraguay, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela in World Social Forum for Latin America (from History of socialism)
Image 15Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist Vladimir Lenin in 1920 (from Socialism)
Image 16Edward Carpenter, philosopher and activist who was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party as well as in the early LGBTI western movements (from Socialism)
Image 17Leonid Brezhnev (from History of socialism)
Image 18Albert Einstein advocated for a socialist planned economy with his 1949 article "Why Socialism?" (from History of socialism)
Image 19Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, main theorist of mutualism and influential French socialist thinker (from Socialism)
Image 20Pierre Leroux founder of the Parisian newspaper Le Globe in which the term socialism first appeared (from History of socialism)
Image 21Encounter between Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Che Guevara in Cuba, three radical icons of the 1960s (from History of socialism)
Image 22New Harmony, a utopian attempt as proposed by Robert Owen (from Socialism)
Image 23R. H. Tawney, founder of ethical socialism (from Socialism)
Image 24Socialist feminist Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg in 1910 (from Socialism)
Image 25Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, founder of French socialism (from History of socialism)
Image 26Noam Chomsky, an American libertarian socialist (from History of socialism)
Image 27Statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Alexanderplatz, Berlin (from History of socialism)
Image 28Mikhail Bakunin speaking to members of the IWA at the Basel Congress in 1869 (from History of socialism)
Image 29Albert Einstein advocated for a socialist planned economy with his 1949 article "Why Socialism?" (from Socialism)
Image 30Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana and theorist of African socialism, on a Soviet Union commemorative postage stamp (from History of socialism)
Image 31Alexis Tsipras, socialist Prime Minister of Greece who led the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) through a victory in the January 2015 Greek legislative election (from History of socialism)
Image 32Project Cybersyn was an early form of computational economic planning (from Socialism)

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

... that the Eurovision Song Contest 1990, held in Yugoslavia, was the first Eurovision Song Contest to be held in the Balkans or in a socialist state?
... that an essay of jailed Socialist Revolutionary politician Alexander Helfgot was smuggled out of Russia and published in Berlin in 1922?
... that Martine Froger was elected to the National Assembly of France without the support of the national leadership of her party?
... that Left Socialist-Revolutionary leader Maria Spiridonova addressed her party's fourth congress in October 1918 by letter as she was in jail?
... that in its 1962 election campaign, the Socialist Party of India demanded that twice-yearly inter-caste dining be made a mandatory criterion for government employment?
... that Marcela Revollo's pragmatic approach to legislating led her to cooperate with both neoliberal and socialist governments on women's rights legislation?
... that by mid-1920, hundreds of German and Austrian communists fought in Red Army units in Turkestan?

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“

It was Adolf Hitler who declared war against all this. In Austria, with her various peoples, he had realised that nationalism was something that had to be defended ever anew; now he saw that it also would have to be defended in the Reich even though here it was a birthright. In the Sudetenland a small National Socialist party was already in existence -- yet another reason why he should found his own. Hitler had come the conclusion that a just socialism had, PER SE, nothing to do with class war and internationalism. To perpetuate class war was wrong. It would have to be eliminated. Thus he became an opponent of Marxism in all of its manifestations, and characterised it as a philosophy of government inimical to both the state and the working class. As far as the workers were concerned it was, therefore, a question of renouncing this doctrine as well as their opposition to both the farmer and the property owner. The middle classes, too, had every reason to revise their attitude. They had failed to provide the working classes in their hour of dire need with leaders conversant with their requirements and had left them to the tender mercy of international propagandists. German nationalism, Hitler believed, was hemmed in by the nobility, while an entirely false conceit separated the middle classes from the broad mass of the productive population. The bourgeoisie would have to shed its prejudices before it would once again be entitled to leadership. To end Germany's fratricidal strife he proposed to gather together all active nationalists of every party, and fighters for social justice from every camp, to form a new movement.

”

— Alfred Rosenberg, Memoirs, 1945

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