Religious socialism
Christian socialism was one of the founding threads of the British Labour Party and is claimed to begin with the uprising of Wat Tyler and John Ball in the 14th century CE.
[3] Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, a companion of Muhammad, is credited by multiple authors as a principal antecedent of Islamic socialism.
[4][5][6][7][8] The Hutterites believed in strict adherence to biblical principles and church discipline, and practised a religious form of communism.
In the words of historians Rod Janzen and Max Stanton, the Hutterites "established in their communities a rigorous system of Ordnungen, which were codes of rules and regulations that governed all aspects of life and ensured a unified perspective.
The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists, while working-class movements that "proclaimed the necessity of total social change" denoted themselves communists.
This branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany.
The Marxist ethos that aims for unity reflects the Christian universalist teaching that humankind is one and that there is only one god who does not discriminate among people.
[13] Pre-Marxist communism was also present in the attempts to establish communistic societies such as those made by the Essenes and the Judean desert sect.
[17] Several groupings in the English Civil War supported this idea, especially the Diggers, who espoused clear communistic yet agrarian ideals.
[21] Criticism of the idea of private property continued into the Enlightenment era of the 18th century through such thinkers as the profoundly religious Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Both Buddhism and socialism seek to provide an end to suffering by analyzing its conditions and removing its leading causes through praxis.
Both also seek to provide a transformation of personal consciousness (respectively, spiritual and political) to bring an end to human alienation and selfishness.
[24] People described as Buddhist socialists include Buddhadasa Bhikkhu,[25] B. R. Ambedkar, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, Han Yong-un,[26] Girō Senoo,[27] U Nu, Uchiyama Gudō[28] and Norodom Sihanouk.
[32] Some individuals and groups, past and present, are both Christian and socialist, such as Frederick Denison Maurice, author of The Kingdom of Christ (1838).
[34] The foundation of Christian anarchism is a rejection of violence, with Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You regarded as a key text.
[35][36] Tolstoy sought to separate Russian Orthodox Christianity—which was merged with the state—from what he believed was the true message of Jesus as contained in the Gospels, specifically in the Sermon on the Mount.
It is a theological and political theory based upon the view that the teachings of Jesus Christ compel Christians to support communism as the ideal social system.
[citation needed] Prominent theoreticians of the Labor Zionist movement included Moses Hess, Nachman Syrkin, Ber Borochov, and Aaron David Gordon, and leading figures in the movement included David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Berl Katznelson.
