Socialism: Charting a Path to Equity and Justice

By Fouad Sabry

What is Socialism

As opposed to private ownership of the means of production, socialism is a political and economic concept that encompasses a wide range of economic and social systems. Socialism is distinguished by the existence of social ownership of these means of production. The economic, political, and social theories and movements that are involved with the implementation of such systems are described in this article. The concept of social ownership can be expressed in a number of different ways, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or private ownership. The numerous different forms of socialism cannot be summed up by a single description, but the feature that is shared by all of them is social ownership. Historically speaking, socialism has been considered to be on the left-wing of the political spectrum. The form of management in companies, the role that markets and planning play in resource allocation, and the various approaches that come from below or from above are all factors that contribute to the development of different types of socialism. While there are socialists who support a party, state, or technocratic-driven strategy, there are also socialists who disagree on whether or not the government is the appropriate organization to bring about change.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Socialism

Chapter 2: Libertarian socialism

Chapter 3: State capitalism

Chapter 4: Anti-capitalism

Chapter 5: Anarchist economics

Chapter 6: Anarchism and capitalism

Chapter 7: Mutualism (economic theory)

Chapter 8: Left-libertarianism

Chapter 9: Issues in anarchism

Chapter 10: Modern portfolio theory

Chapter 11: Criticism of welfare

Chapter 12: Democratic socialism

Chapter 13: State socialism

Chapter 14: Types of socialism

Chapter 15: Socialist mode of production

Chapter 16: Market socialism

Chapter 17: Socialist economics

Chapter 18: World Socialist Movement

Chapter 19: Socialist state

Chapter 20: History of socialism

Chapter 21: Standard deviation

(II) Answering the public top questions about socialism.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of socialism in many fields.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Socialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Socialism

The term socialism refers to both a political ideology and a social and economic movement that encompasses many different models. Socialist parties and ideals continue to be a political force, although one with various degrees of strength and influence, on every continent.

Both developed and underdeveloped countries have been home to socialist movements. Socialist politics have been both internationalist and nationalist, party-based and anti-party, overlapping with and critical of labor unions.

[t]he word'socialism' finds its root in the Latin sociare, which means to combine or to share. The related, more technical term in Roman and then medieval law was societas. This latter word could mean companionship and fellowship as well as the more legalistic idea of a consensual contract between freemen, writes Andrew Vincent.

Pierre Leroux, claiming to have coined the word socialism, said he did it in the 1832 issue of the Parisian publication Le Globe.

Common or public ownership is a central tenet of socialist regimes that date all the way back to antiquity. Because of the nationalization of industries, the economy of the Mauryan Empire of India, an absolute monarchy in the third century BCE, has been called a socialized monarchy and a type of state socialism by some researchers. In the middle of the 19th century, intentional communities throughout Europe and North America put Owen's and Fourier's theories into effect.

From March 18 (officially March 28) until May 28, 1871, the Paris Commune served as the city's administration. After France's loss in the Franco-Prussian War, Parisians rose up and established the Commune. Elections for the Commune took place on March 26. They chose 92 people to serve on the Commune council, or one for every 20,000 people.

The First International was established in London in 1864. It brought together socialists like the French supporters of Proudhon in the revolutionary movement. Disagreements amongst the groups were most apparent in the methods they recommended to realize their goals. The First International was the first significant gathering of socialists from all around the world to discuss and spread their beliefs.

Collectivists, as Bakunin's followers were labeled, believed that the means of production should be owned collectively while still compensating workers based on the quantity and quality of their output. They shared the Proudhonist belief that everyone should own what they've made and be fairly compensated for their efforts. On the other hand, anarcho-communists advocated for common ownership of productive resources. To paraphrase Errico Malatesta: Let's work together and consolidate our efforts rather than wasting time attempting to establish clear boundaries between my responsibilities and yours. This manner, everyone will contribute as much as they are able to society until there is enough for everyone, and everyone will take as much as they need, with the exception of scarce resources . Various multinational labor unions under the anarcho-syndicalist umbrella of the International Workers Association.

To promote socialism by incremental and reformist measures, the Fabian Society was founded in Britain. The society, which is one of fifteen socialist groups with connections to the Labour Party, originally served largely as a discussion forum but has now shifted its focus to policymaking. The Australian Fabian Society, the Canadian Douglas-Coldwell Foundation, and the New Zealand League for Social Reconstruction are all examples of such organizations.

There is a political movement known as guild socialism that promotes worker ownership of business via the establishment of specialized guilds in an implied contractual relationship with the public..

Socialists attempted to form a global organization as support for Marx and Engels' ideas grew, especially in the heart of Europe. The Second International was established in 1889 (the centenary of the French Revolution) by 384 delegates from 20 nations, representing over 300 labor and socialist organizations.

Labor Party leader Chris Watson served as Prime Minister of Australia for four months that year. This made Watson the first socialist or social democratic leader of a legislative administration anywhere in the world. In 1902, members of the British Labor Party were elected for the first time to the House of Commons.

In Australia, much of Europe, and the United States, World War I patriotism morphed into political radicalism by 1917. The Italian Socialist Party, the French Section of the Workers' International, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the Socialist Party in Argentina, the Socialist Workers' Party in Chile, and the Socialist Party of America all rose to prominence in their respective national politics in the early 20th century.

There was a revolution in Russia in February of 1917. Soviets (councils) were formed by workers, soldiers, and peasants; the monarchy was overthrown; and a temporary administration was created until a constituent assembly could be elected. Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin, also known as the Bolshevik, was granted permission to traverse Germany and return from exile in Switzerland in April of that year.

Lenin authored writings that discussed his thoughts on imperialism, the monopoly/globalization phase of capitalism, and the current state of society. As capitalism advanced in Europe and the United States, he saw that workers were still too preoccupied with making ends meet to create a sense of class. Therefore, he said, a vanguard party of class-conscious revolutionaries from the educated and politically engaged segment of the public would need to lead the social revolution. Small and medium-sized businesses were opened up to private ownership during the NEP. While most major industries remained under government oversight.

Millions of people died as a consequence of a second great famine that took place between 1930 and 1933.

The Soviet economy was the first fully planned economy in the modern era. Gosplan (the State Planning Commission), Gosbank (the State Bank), and Gossnab (the State Regulatory Authority) were established to oversee state control of industry (State Commission for Materials and Equipment Supply). The economy was planned according to a series of 5-year blueprints. Heavy industrial expansion came at the price of farming. In addition to modernizing formerly agricultural civilizations, rapid industrialisation created a politically committed working class. In the 1950s and 1960s, the quality of life rose as a result of modernization.

Many communist groups and uprisings until the mid-1920s were inspired by the Bolshevik Russian Revolution of January 1918. The success of socialist revolutions led by the working class in advanced capitalist nations was seen by most communists as essential to replicating the Russian experience. The Communist International (Comintern), or Third International, was formed in 1919 by Lenin and Leon Trotsky to unite communist parties throughout the globe.

Numerous revolts throughout the world found inspiration in the Russian Revolution. After the revolution of 1918–19, Germany became a republic rather than an imperial state. From November 1918 until the Weimar Republic was established in August 1919, the revolution lasted for a full year. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was one of the featured episodes.

At its fourth congress in 1922, the Communist International adopted the united front strategy. It argued that communists should cooperate with ordinary social democrats while retaining their critical stance toward the party's leadership. To them, those leaders' backing of the capitalists' war effort was a betrayal of the working class. The social democrats blamed revolution and the subsequent authoritarianism of communist parties for the country's disarray. In 1920, when the Communist Party of Great Britain sought to join the Labour Party, they were denied.

Dying in 1923, Lenin lamented that Russia had become a bourgeois tsarist machine... scarcely coated with socialism due to the expanding coercive power of the Soviet State.

French, American, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Brazilian, Chilean, and Indonesian communist parties all rose to power following the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.

Left-wing uprisings were led by parties that opposed the Bolshevik Party's centralization and abandoning of the soviets (see anti-Stalinist left). The Socialist Revolutionaries belonged to this category, In February 1919, during a conference in Bern, Switzerland, groups seeking to revive the Second International founded the International Socialist Commission (ISC, or Berne International).

Divergence widened between democratic and reformist socialists (mostly affiliated with the Labour and Socialist International) and revolutionary socialists (mostly affiliated with the Communist International) in the 1920s and 1930s, but there was also conflict within the Communist movement between the ruling Stalinists and dissidents like Trotsky's Left Opposition. After Trotskyists believed the Comintern or Third International was lost to Stalinism and unable to lead the working class to power, they founded Trotsky's Fourth International in France in 1938.

Socialists (including the democratic socialist Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the Marxist Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) alongside anarchists (both communist and syndicalist) and socialists (the Workers' General Union) on the Republican side, loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic.

The LSI broke apart in 1940 because to the advent of Nazism and the beginning of World War II. The Socialist International, its successor, was established in Frankfurt in July 1951.

The Swedish Social Democratic Party was in power throughout the majority of the postwar period, and they worked closely with labor unions and businesses.

The Rehn-Meidner paradigm is widely used in nations like Sweden.

During the height of the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, headed by the Soviet Union, competed with the Western Bloc, led by the United States. Throughout the majority of the 20th century, the Soviet system was considered as a competitor and a danger to Western capitalism. countries including Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and even Yugoslavia at one point. From 1948 on, Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito used Socialist self-management, a kind of state socialism that was more decentralized than the norm in the rest of the Eastern Bloc. This was during the Informbiro era.

Uprising in Hungary in 1956, a widespread uprising against the communist regime that was violently put down by Soviet troops, In the same year that the New Left emerged, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's rule for its excesses at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party (see below).

After more than a decade, Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubček also attempted to pursue a more democratic model of state socialism, Socialism with a human face, to be precise, During the Prague Spring; The Soviet Union likewise violently repressed this.

Many nations in the decades after World War II saw a rise in the popularity of socialism. Countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America often nationalize companies as part of their socialist policies. Many leaders from the Indian National Congress's left wing split out to form the Congress Socialist Party during the country's struggle for independence. They, along with Jayaprakash Narayan's early and mid-career politics, coupled a commitment to socialist social change with a principled resistance to the one-party tyranny they saw in the Stalinist model.

In the United Kingdom and the United States, the phrase the New Left was often used to describe a movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that advocated for social change across a wide spectrum of topics, including homosexual rights, abortion, gender roles, and drug policy.

Protests in 1968 were a global phenomenon, marking a turning point in social conflicts that were characterized by public rebellions against military, corporate, and bureaucratic elites, who then reacted with increased political repression. These demonstrations were a watershed moment in the American civil rights movement, giving rise to radical groups like the Black Panther Party. Martin Luther King Jr., a notable civil rights activist, led the Poor People's Campaign to advocate for economic fairness. Protests against the Tet Offensive spread throughout the United States and beyond, to cities including London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. At a convention in Carrara in 1968, the four existing European federations—the French, the Italian, and the Iberian Anarchist Federations—along with the Bulgarian federation in French exile established the International of Anarchist Federations.

The United States was not the only region where mass socialist groups grew. Protests against dictatorships, governmental persecution, and colonization were not unique to Mexico City's Tlatelolco massacre or Brazil's escalating guerrilla warfare against the military dictatorship in 1968.

Communist-led nations also had popular uprisings directed against their bureaucratic and military establishments. Protests in Eastern Europe became more intense, most notably during the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. The Soviet Union retaliated by occupying Czechoslovakia. Both Italy and France strongly condemned the occupation.

During the Cultural Revolution in China, a group of young people organized to combat the bourgeois groups they believed were working to restore capitalism. In the backdrop of the Sino-Soviet divide, this movement encouraged Maoism-inspired groups all over the globe.

A socialist movement within the Latin American Catholic Church, known as liberation theology, emerged in the 1960s. The SI admitted the Nicaraguan FSLN, the left-wing Puerto Rican Independence Party, and former Communist parties like the Democratic Party of the Left of Italy and the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique as member parties in the late 1970s and 1980s and engaged in extensive contacts and discussion with the two powers of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, about east-west relations and arms control (FRELIMO). The SI helped social democratic parties reestablish itself when dictatorships collapsed in Portugal (1974) and Spain (1975). (1975).

Deng Xiaoping gained leadership in the People's Republic of China after Mao Zedong's death in 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four, who were responsible for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. As part of China's shift from a planned economy to a mixed economy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) relaxed its grip on people' daily lives and abolished communes in favor of private land leases. This economic model is known as socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Since at least 1965, the Soviet Union's death rate has been steadily climbing, especially among males.

In 1990, the São Paulo Forum was launched by the Workers' Party (Brazil), a network of Latin American socialist