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...)
Socialism with Chinese characteristics, meaning socialism adapted to Chinese conditions, is the official ideology of the Communist Party of China (CPC), claimed to be based upon scientific socialism. This ideology supports the creation of a socialist market economy dominated by the public sector since China is, as claimed by the CPC, in the primary stage of socialism. The People's Republic of China (PRC) government maintains that it has not abandoned Marxism but has developed many of the terms and concepts of Marxist theory to accommodate its new economic system. The CPC argues that socialism is compatible with these economic policies. In current Chinese Communist thinking, China is in the primary stage of socialism—a view which explains the PRC government's flexible economic policies to develop into an industrialized nation.
Bernstein joined the Social Democratic Workers Party in 1872, which was merged into the SPD in 1875. He lived in exile in Switzerland and later London from 1878 to 1901, and in 1880 met Marx and Engels, who impressed him with their thought. With Karl Kautsky, Bernstein was one of the drafters of the party's Erfurt Program of 1891. In his 1899 book The Prerequisites of Socialism, Bernstein argued that socialism would be achieved through accumulated reforms and improvements of capitalism, rejecting the dialectical and revolutionary elements of Marxism. He was a member of the Imperial Reichstag from 1901 to 1907, and again from 1912 to 1918. After World War I, during which he joined the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), he was again a member of the Reichstag from 1920 to 1928. (Full article...)
Image 23Russian 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 24The 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 socialists received 31 percent of the vote in the 1917 Łódź City Council election, but the system implemented by the German occupying authorities only gave them 8 percent of the seats?
... 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?
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.
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