History of socialism

[6] Ancient Egypt had a strong, unified, theocratic state which, along with its temple system employed peasants in massive labor projects and owned key parts of the economy, such as the granaries which dispensed grain to the public in hard times.

[23] The French philosophes such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau and other European intellectuals such as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant criticized the traditional purview, policies, and character of governments, believing that through reform changes could be made that benefited all of society rather than just a privileged elite.

[23] Some thinkers believed differently such as the French writers Jean Meslier, Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, and Abbé de Mably who formulated schemes to solve the inequality in society through the redistribution of wealth and the abolition of private property.

[24] The French Enlightenment philosopher Marquis de Condorcet did not oppose the existence of private property, but did believe that the primary cause of suffering in society was the lower classes' lack of land and capital and therefore supported policies similar to the modern social safety net that could be used to protect the most vulnerable.

Popular radical leaders of the sans-culottes, such as Jean-François Varlet, Théophile Leclerc, Pauline Léon, Claire Lacombe and Jacques Roux, advocated for a plethora of policies, such as a "maximum [for necessities]," and "a stringent law against speculators and hoarders.

[52] While Fourier and Owen sought to build socialism on the foundations of small, planned, utopian communities, Saint-Simon desired to enact change through a large scale initiative that put industrialists and experts in charge of society.

[60][66][59] Saint-Simon did not see the working class or proletariat as crucial to change, but instead believed that manufacturers, bankers, artists, scholars, and other educated people would transform society into one where humans made the best possible use of nature and the government was chiefly concerned with the proper administration of material goods and services.

[78] Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary Robert Owen (1771–1858) advocated the transformation of society into small, local collectives without such elaborate systems of social organisation.

[81] In the same year Owen stated: "Eight hours' daily labor is enough for any [adult] human being, and under proper arrangements sufficient to afford an ample supply of food, raiment and shelter, or the necessaries and comforts of life, and for the remainder of his time, every person is entitled to education, recreation and sleep.

[83] In a Paper Dedicated to the Governments of Great Britain, Austria, Russia, France, Prussia and the United States of America written in 1841, Owen wrote: "The lowest stage of humanity is experienced when the individual must labour for a small pittance of wages from others".

Marx and Engels drew from these socialist or communist ideas born in the French revolution, as well as from the German philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and British political economy, particularly that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

George Woodcock manifests that "a notable contribution to the activities of the Commune and particularly to the organisation of public services was made by members of various anarchist factions, including the mutualists Courbet, Longuet, and Vermorel, the libertarian collectivists Varlin, Malon, and Lefrangais, and the bakuninists Elie and Elisée Reclus and Louise Michel".

[185] There, in the Makhnovshchina, they fought in the civil war against the Whites (a Western-backed grouping of monarchists and other opponents of the October Revolution) and then the Bolsheviks as part of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine led by Nestor Makhno, who established an anarchist society in the region for a number of months.

A Marxist current critical of the Bolsheviks emerged and as such "Luxemburg's workerism and spontaneism are exemplary of positions later taken up by the far-left of the period – Pannekoek, Roland Holst, and Gorter in the Netherlands, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, Gramsci in Italy, Lukacs in Hungary.

The invasion of Russia by the Allies, their trade embargo and backing for the White forces fighting against the Red Army in the civil war in the Soviet Union was cited by Aneurin Bevan, the leader of the left-wing in the Labour Party, as one of the causes of the Russian revolution's degeneration into dictatorship.

Anthony Crosland argued in 1956 that under the impact of the 1931 slump and the growth of fascism, the younger generation of left-wing intellectuals for the most part "took to Marxism" including the "best-known leaders" of the Fabian tradition, Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

In Minnesota, the General Drivers Local 574 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters struck, despite an attempt to block the vote by American Federation of Labor officials, demanding union recognition, increased wages, shorter hours, overtime rates, improved working conditions and job protection through seniority.

They were termed 'socialist' by all in 1945, but in the UK, for instance, where Social Democracy had a large majority in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, "The government had not the smallest intention of bringing in the 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange'" as written in Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution.

The long postwar boom and the rapid expansion of higher education produced, as well as rising living standards for the industrial working class, a mass university-educated white collar workforce, nevertheless began to break down the old socialist-versus-conservative polarity of European politics.

A New York Times editorial on February 17, 1975, stated "a communist takeover of Portugal might encourage a similar trend in Italy and France, create problems in Greece and Turkey, affect the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send tremors throughout Western Europe."

[251][252][253] These events resulted not only in the total destruction of the PKI but also the political left in Indonesia, and paved the way for a major shift in the balance of power in Southeast Asia towards the West, a significant turning point in the global Cold War.

Through the Second World War, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek lived in an uneasy truce in order to combat the common foe, the Japanese occupation.

"Ultra-Left" refers to those Cultural Revolution rebel positions that diverged from the central Maoist line by identifying an antagonistic contradiction between the CCP-PRC party-state itself and the masses of workers and "peasants"[257] conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution.

It is in this context that Leo Melamed, chairman emeritus and senior policy adviser to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, spoke to the 2003 Beijing Forum on China and East Asian Prospects of Financial Cooperation on September 23.

A long and very controversial history of U.S. military and political intervention in the region dating back to the 19th century severely tarnished the image of the United States in the eyes of many Latin Americans and shapes governments' policies to this day.

[citation needed] Chavez is joined by the democratic socialist president of Bolivia, Evo Morales (that nation's first indigenous leader), who adopted strong reformist agendas and attracted overwhelming majority electoral victories.

These actions were precipitated by ad hoc, leaderless, anonymous cadres known as black blocs; other organisational tactics pioneered in this time include security culture, affinity groups and the use of decentralised technologies such as the internet.

One of these gave rise to a mass movement of shack dwellers, Abahlali baseMjondolo that despite major police suppression continues to work for popular people's planning and against the creation of a market economy in land and housing.

[270] Although the authority of the state remained unchallenged under Đổi Mới, the government of Vietnam encourages private ownership of farms and factories, economic deregulation and foreign investment, while maintaining control over strategic industries.

[319] In their Johnson linguistics column, The Economist opines that in the 21st century United States, the term socialism, without clear definition, has become a pejorative used by conservatives to attack liberal and progressive policies, proposals, and public figures.