Portal:Socialism

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Socialism is a political philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic and social systems, which are characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can be public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element, and is considered left-wing. Different types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, on the structure of management in organizations, and from below or from above approaches, with some socialists favouring a party, state, or technocratic-driven approach. Socialists disagree on whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change.

Socialist politics has been both internationalist and nationalist; organised through political parties and opposed to party politics; at times overlapping with trade unions and at other times independent and critical of them, and present in both industrialised and developing nations. Social democracy originated within the socialist movement, supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice. While retaining socialism as a long-term goal, since the post-war period it came to embrace a mixed economy based on Keynesianism within a predominantly developed capitalist market economy and liberal democratic polity that expands state intervention to include income redistribution, regulation, and a welfare state. Economic democracy proposes a sort of market socialism, with more democratic control of companies, currencies, investments, and natural resources.

While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally socialist state led to socialism's widespread association with the Soviet economic model, several scholars posit that in practice, the model functioned as a form of state capitalism. Several academics, political commentators, and scholars have distinguished between authoritarian socialist and democratic socialist states, with the first representing the Eastern Bloc and the latter representing Western Bloc countries which have been democratically governed by socialist parties such as Britain, France, Sweden, and Western countries in general, among others. Following the end of the Cold War, many of these countries have moved away from socialism as a neoliberal consensus replaced the social democratic consensus in the advanced capitalist world. (Full article...)

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Socialist Resistance (SR) is an ecosocialist, feminist and revolutionary organisation in Britain, which publishes a Marxist periodical of the same name. In July 2009 the International Socialist Group (ISG) merged into it, making SR the British Section of the Fourth International.

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Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.^{[citation needed]}

Keller worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) from 1924 until 1968. During this time, she toured the United States and traveled to 35 countries around the globe advocating for those with vision loss.^{[citation needed]} (Full article...)

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

Image 1Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, early French socialist (from Socialism)
Image 2Mikhail Bakunin speaking to members of the International Workingmen's Association at the Basel Congress in 1869 (from Socialism)
Image 3Mao Zedong in 1959 (from History of socialism)
Image 4Mikhail Bakunin speaking to members of the IWA at the Basel Congress in 1869 (from History of socialism)
Image 5Encounter between Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Che Guevara in Cuba, three radical icons of the 1960s (from History of socialism)
Image 6Leonid Brezhnev (from History of socialism)
Image 7Rosa Luxemburg, prominent Marxist revolutionary and martyr of the German Spartacist uprising in 1919 (from Socialism)
Image 8Socialist feminist Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg in 1910 (from Socialism)
Image 9Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, founder of French socialism (from History of socialism)
Image 10Antonio Gramsci, member of the Italian Socialist Party and later leader and theorist of the Communist Party of Italy (from Socialism)
Image 11Arabic letters "Lam" and "Alif" reading "Lā" (Arabic for "No!") are a symbol of Islamic Socialism in Turkey. (from Socialism)
Image 12Alexis 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 13Statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Alexanderplatz, Berlin (from History of socialism)
Image 14Eduard Bernstein
Image 15The 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 16Pierre Leroux founder of the Parisian newspaper Le Globe in which the term socialism first appeared (from History of socialism)
Image 17Noam Chomsky, an American libertarian socialist (from History of socialism)
Image 18The 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 19Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985–1991) (from Socialism)
Image 20New Harmony, a utopian attempt as proposed by Robert Owen (from History of socialism)
Image 21Socialists in Union Square, New York City on May Day 1912 (from Socialism)
Image 22Salvador Allende, President of Chile and member of the Socialist Party of Chile, whose presidency and life were ended by a CIA-backed military coup (from Socialism)
Image 23Einar Gerhardsen, Prime Minister of Norway for the Labour Party (from Socialism)
Image 24Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, main theorist of mutualism and influential French socialist thinker (from Socialism)
Image 25Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden for the Swedish Social Democratic Party (from Socialism)
Image 26Edward 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 27The writings of Karl Marx provided the basis for the development of Marxist political theory and Marxian economics. (from Socialism)
Image 28Russian 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 29Presidents 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 30Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana and theorist of African socialism, on a Soviet Union commemorative postage stamp (from History of socialism)
Image 31Charles Fourier, influential early French socialist thinker (from Socialism)
Image 32FAI militia during the Spanish Revolution in 1936 (from Socialism)
Image 33Barricades Boulevard Voltaire, Paris during the uprising known as the Paris Commune (from History of socialism)
Image 34Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist Vladimir Lenin in1920 (from Socialism)

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

... that Princess María Teresa of Bourbon-Parma was nicknamed the "Red Princess" because of her socialist activism?
... that Julia Dawson's first Clarion Van was named for Scottish socialist Caroline Martyn?
... 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 the short-lived Socialist Soviet Republic of Lithuania and Belorussia had a Yiddish-language state theatre?
... that Western media treated Egyptian activist Gihan Ibrahim as a face of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, but rarely mentioned her revolutionary-socialist political views?
... that a Socialist Youth League candidate in the 1990 Bosnian general election registered his ethnicity as 'Eskimo' as an apparent protest against ethnic registry requirements for candidates?
... that Moldavian leader Nikita Salogor called for an expansion of the borders of Soviet Moldavia in 1946, which may have led to his removal from office later that year?

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“

Socialists have always condemned war between nations as barbarous and brutal. But our attitude towards war is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and of the Anarchists. We differ froth the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within the country; we understand that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created; and we also differ in that we fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary. We Marxists differ from both the pacifists and the Anarchists in that we deem it necessary historically (from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism) to study each war separately. In history there have been numerous wars which, in spite of all the horrors, atrocities, distress and suffering that inevitably accompany alt wars, were progressive, i.e., benefited the development of mankind by helping to destroy the exceptionally harmful and reactionary institutions (for example, autocracy or serfdom), the most barbarous despotisms in Europe (Turkish and Russian). Therefore, it is necessary to examine the historically specific features of precisely the present war.

”

— Vladimir Lenin, Socialism and War, 1915

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