Table of Contents
- Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism
- Socialism is not a single, unified theory
- The Soviet Union and China achieved state capitalism, not socialism
- The U.S., Soviet Union, and China have more in common than you think
- Thank American socialists, communists, and unionists for the 1930s New Deal
- If 5 was news to you, that’s due to the massive U.S.-led global purge of socialists and communists after WWII
- Since socialism was capitalism’s critical shadow, it spread to those subjected by and opposed to capitalist colonialism
- Fascism is a capitalist response to socialism
- Socialism has been, and still is, evolving
- Worker co-ops are a key to socialism’s future
Definition, Origins & Countries
Socialism: A Short Primer
Understanding Socialism in the U.S
10 Things You Should Know About Socialism
by RICHARD D. WOLFF https://www.yesmagazine.org/
PHOTO BY UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
What do we mean when we talk about “socialism”? Here are ten things about its theory, practice, and potential that you need to know.
Over the last 200 years, socialism has spread across the world. In every country, it carries the lessons and scars of its particular history there. Conversely, each country’s socialism is shaped by the global history, rich tradition, and diverse interpretations of a movement that has been the world’s major critical response to capitalism as a system.
We need to understand socialism because it has shaped our history and will shape our future. It is an immense resource: the accumulated thoughts, experiences, and experiments accomplished by those yearning to do better than capitalism.
In my latest book, Understanding Socialism (Democracy at Work, 2019), I gather and present the basic theories and practices of socialism. I examine its successes, explore its challenges, and confront its failures. The point is to offer a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy. Here are 10 things from this book that you should know.
1. Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism
Socialism represents the awareness of employees that their sufferings and limitations come less from their employers than from the capitalist system. That system prescribes incentives and options for both sides, and rewards and punishments for their behavioral “choices.” It generates their endless struggles and the employees’ realization that system change is the way out.
In Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx defined a fundamental injustice—exploitation—located in capitalism’s core relationship between employer and employee. Exploitation, in Marx’s terms, describes the situation in which employees produce more value for employers than the value of wages paid to them. Capitalist exploitation shapes everything in capitalist societies. Yearning for a better society, socialists increasingly demand the end of exploitation and an alternative in which employees function as their own employer. Socialists want to be able to explore and develop their full potentials as individuals and members of society while contributing to its welfare and growth.
Karl Marx, date unknown. Photo from Bettmann/Getty Images.
Socialism is an economic system very different from capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Each of the latter divided society into a dominant minority class (masters, lords, and employers) and a dominated majority (slaves, serfs, employees). When the majority recognized slavery and feudal systems as injustices, they eventually fell.
The majorities of the past fought hard to build a better system. Capitalism replaced slaves and serfs with employees, masters and lords with employers. It is no historical surprise that employees would end up yearning and fighting for something better. That something better is socialism, a system that doesn’t divide people, but rather makes work a democratic process where all employees have an equal say and together are their own employer.
2. Socialism is not a single, unified theory
People spread socialism across the world, interpreting and implementing it in many different ways based on context. Socialists found capitalism to be a system that produced ever-deepening inequalities, recurring cycles of unemployment and depression, and the undermining of human efforts to build democratic politics and inclusive cultures. Socialists developed and debated solutions that varied from government regulations of capitalist economies to government itself owning and operating enterprises, to a transformation of enterprises (both private and government) from top-down hierarchies to democratic cooperatives.
Sometimes those debates produced splits among socialists. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, socialists supporting the post-revolutionary Soviet Union underscored their commitment to socialism that entailed the government owning and operating industries by adopting the new name “communist.” Those skeptical of Soviet-style socialism tended increasingly to favor state regulation of private capitalists. They kept the name “socialist” and often called themselves social democrats or democratic socialists. For the last century, the two groups debated the merits and flaws of the two alternative notions of socialism as embodied in examples of each (e.g. Soviet versus Scandinavian socialisms).
Early in the 21st century, an old strain of socialism resurfaced and surged. It focuses on transforming the inside of enterprises: from top-down hierarchies, where a capitalist or a state board of directors makes all the key enterprise decisions, to a worker cooperative, where all employees have equal, democratic rights to make those decisions, thereby becoming—collectively—their own employer.
3. The Soviet Union and China achieved state capitalism, not socialism
As leader of the Soviet Union, Lenin once said that socialism was a goal, not yet an achieved reality. The Soviet had, instead, achieved “state capitalism.” A socialist party had state power, and the state had become the industrial capitalist displacing the former private capitalists. The Soviet revolution had changed who the employer was; it had not ended the employer/employee relationship. Thus, it was—to a certain extent—capitalist.
Lenin’s successor, Stalin, declared that the Soviet Union had achieved socialism. In effect, he offered Soviet state capitalism as if it were the model for socialism worldwide. Socialism’s enemies have used this identification ever since to equate socialism with political dictatorship. Of course, this required obscuring or denying that (1) dictatorships have often existed in capitalist societies and (2) socialisms have often existed without dictatorships.
After initially copying the Soviet model, China changed its development strategy to embrace instead a state-supervised mix of state and private capitalism focused on exports. China’s powerful government would organize a basic deal with global capitalists, providing cheap labor, government support, and a growing domestic market. In exchange, foreign capitalists would partner with Chinese state or private capitalists, share technology, and integrate Chinese output into global wholesale and retail trade systems. China’s brand of socialism—a hybrid state capitalism that included both communist and social-democratic streams—proved it could grow faster over more years than any capitalist economy had ever done.
4. The U.S., Soviet Union, and China have more in common than you think
As capitalism emerged from feudalism in Europe in the 19th century, it advocated liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. When those promises failed to materialize, many became anti-capitalist and found their way to socialism.
Experiments in constructing post-capitalist, socialist systems in the 20th century (especially in the Soviet Union and China) eventually incurred similar criticisms. Those systems, critics held, had more in common with capitalism than partisans of either system understood.
Self-critical socialists produced a different narrative based on the failures common to both systems. The U.S. and Soviet Union, such socialists argue, represented private and state capitalisms. Their Cold War enmity was misconstrued on both sides as part of the century’s great struggle between capitalism and socialism. Thus, what collapsed in 1989 was Soviet State capitalism, not socialism. Moreover, what soared after 1989 was another kind of state capitalism in China.
5. Thank American socialists, communists, and unionists for the
1930s New
Deal
FDR’s government raised the revenue necessary for Washington to fund massive, expensive increases in public services during the Depression of the 1930s. These included the Social Security system, the first federal unemployment compensation system, the first federal minimum wage, and a mass federal jobs program. FDR’s revenues came from taxing corporations and the rich more than ever before.
In response to this radical program, FDR was reelected three times. His radical programs were conceived and pushed politically from below by a coalition of communists, socialists, and labor unionists. He had not been a radical Democrat before his election.
Socialists obtained a new degree of social acceptance, stature, and support from FDR’s government. The wartime alliance of the U.S. with the Soviet Union strengthened that social acceptance and socialist influences.
6. If 5 was news to you, that’s due to the massive U.S.-led
global purge of
socialists and communists
after WWII
After its 1929 economic crash, capitalism was badly discredited. The unprecedented political power of a surging U.S. left enabled government intervention to redistribute wealth from corporations and the rich to average citizens. Private capitalists and the Republican Party responded with a commitment to undo the New Deal. The end of World War II and FDR’s death in 1945 provided the opportunity to destroy the New Deal coalition.
The strategy hinged on demonizing the coalition’s component groups, above all the communists and socialists. Anti-communism quickly became the strategic battering ram. Overnight, the Soviet Union went from wartime ally to an enemy whose agents aimed “to control the world.” That threat had to be contained, repelled, and eliminated.
U.S. domestic policy focused on anti-communism, reaching hysterical dimensions and the public campaigns of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Communist Party leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and deported in a wave of anti-communism that quickly spread to socialist parties and to socialism in general. Hollywood actors, directors, screenwriters, musicians, and more were blacklisted and barred from working in the industry. McCarthy’s witch hunt ruined thousands of careers while ensuring that mass media, politicians, and academics would be unsympathetic, at least publicly, to socialism.
In other countries revolts from peasants and/or workers against oligarchs in business and/or politics often led the latter to seek U.S. assistance by labeling their challengers as “socialists” or “communists.” Examples include U.S. actions in Guatemala and Iran (1954), Cuba (1959-1961), Vietnam (1954-1975), South Africa (1945-1994), and Venezuela (since 1999). Sometimes the global anti-communism project took the form of regime change. In 1965-6 the mass killings of Indonesian communists cost the lives of between 500,000 to 3 million people.
Once the U.S.—as the world’s largest economy, most dominant political power, and most powerful military—committed itself to total anti-communism, its allies and most of the rest of the world followed suit.
7. Since socialism was capitalism’s critical shadow, it spread to
those subjected
by and opposed to
capitalist colonialism
In the first half of the 20th century, socialism spread through the rise of local movements against European colonialism in Asia and Africa, and the United States’ informal colonialism in Latin America. Colonized people seeking independence were inspired by and saw the possibility of alliances with workers fighting exploitation in the colonizing countries. These latter workers glimpsed similar possibilities from their side.
This helped create a global socialist tradition. The multiple interpretations of socialism that had evolved in capitalism’s centers thus spawned yet more and further-differentiated interpretations. Diverse streams within the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist tradition interacted with and enriched socialism.
8. Fascism is a capitalist response to socialism
A fascist economic system is capitalist, but with a mixture of very heavy government influence. In fascism, the government reinforces, supports, and sustains private capitalist workplaces. It rigidly enforces the employer/employee dichotomy central to capitalist enterprises. Private capitalists support fascism when they fear losing their position as capitalist employers, especially during social upheavals.
Under fascism, there is a kind of mutually supportive merging of government and private workplaces. Fascist governments tend to “deregulate,” gutting worker protections won earlier by unions or socialist governments. They help private capitalists by destroying trade unions or replacing them with their own organizations which support, rather than challenge, private capitalists.
Frequently, fascism embraces nationalism to rally people to fascist economic objectives, often by using enhanced military expenditures and hostility toward immigrants or foreigners. Fascist governments influence foreign trade to help domestic capitalists sell goods abroad and block imports to help them sell their goods inside national boundaries.
A similarity between fascism and socialism seems to arise because both seek to strengthen government and its interventions in society. However, they do so in different ways and toward very different ends. Fascism seeks to use government to secure capitalism and national unity, defined often in terms of ethnic or religious purity. Socialism seeks to use government to end capitalism and substitute an alternative socialist economic system, defined traditionally in terms of state-owned and -operated workplaces, state economic planning, employment of dispossessed capitalists, workers’ political control, and internationalism.
9. Socialism has been, and still is, evolving
During the second half of the 20th century, socialism’s diversity of interpretations and proposals for change shrank to two alternative notions: 1.) moving from private to state-owned-and -operated workplaces and from market to centrally planned distributions of resources and products like the Soviet Union, or 2.) “welfare-state” governments regulating markets still comprised mostly of private capitalist firms, as in Scandinavia, and providing tax-funded socialized health care, higher education, and so on. As socialism returns to public discussion in the wake of capitalism’s crash in 2008, the first kind of socialism to gain mass attention has been that defined in terms of government-led social programs and wealth redistributions benefitting middle and lower income social groups.
The evolution and diversity of socialism were obscured. Socialists themselves struggled with the mixed results of the experiments in constructing socialist societies (in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.). To be sure, these socialist experiments achieved extraordinary economic growth. In the Global South, socialism arose virtually everywhere as the alternative development model to a capitalism weighed down by its colonialist history and its contemporary inequality, instability, relatively slower economic growth, and injustice.
Socialists also struggled with the emergence of central governments that used excessively concentrated economic power to achieve political dominance in undemocratic ways. They were affected by criticisms from other, emerging left-wing social movements, such as anti-racism, feminism, and environmentalism, and began to rethink how a socialist position should integrate the demands of such movements and make alliances.
10. Worker co-ops are a key to socialism’s future
The focus of the capitalism-versus-socialism debate is now challenged by the changes within socialism. Who the employers are (private citizens or state officials) now matters less than what kind of relationship exists between employers and employees in the workplace. The role of the state is no longer the central issue in dispute.
A growing number of socialists stress that previous socialist experiments inadequately recognized and institutionalized democracy. These self-critical socialists focus on worker cooperatives as a means to institutionalize economic democracy within workplaces as the basis for political democracy. They reject master/slave, lord/serf, and employer/employee relationships because these all preclude real democracy and equality.
The new socialism’s difference from capitalism becomes less a matter of state versus private workplaces, or state planning versus private markets, and more a matter of democratic versus autocratic workplace organization. A new economy based on worker co-ops will find its own democratic way of structuring relationships among co-ops and society as a whole.
Worker co-ops are key to a new socialism’s goals. They criticize socialisms inherited from the past and add a concrete vision of what a more just and humane society would look like. With the new focus on workplace democratization, socialists are in a good position to contest the 21st century’s struggle of economic systems.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2020/01/30/socialism-understanding
Socialism - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Socialism is both an economic system and an ideology.
- A socialist economy features social rather than private ownership of the means of production. It also typically organizes economic activity through planning rather than market forces, and gears production towards needs satisfaction rather than profit accumulation.
- Socialist ideology asserts the moral and economic superiority of an economy with these features, especially as compared with capitalism. More specifically, socialists typically argue that capitalism undermines democracy, facilitates exploitation, distributes opportunities and resources unfairly, and vitiates community, stunting self-realization and human development. Socialism, by democratizing, humanizing, and rationalizing economic relations, largely eliminates these problems.
Socialist ideology thus has both critical and constructive aspects.
- Critically, it provides an account of what’s wrong with capitalism;
- constructively, it provides a theory of how to transcend capitalism’s flaws, namely, by transcending capitalism itself, replacing capitalism’s central features (private property, markets, profits) with socialist alternatives (at a minimum social property, but typically planning and production for use as well).
How, precisely, socialist concepts like social ownership and planning should be realized in practice is a matter of dispute among socialists. One major split concerns the proper role of markets in a socialist economy.
- Some socialists argue that extensive reliance on markets is perfectly compatible with core socialist values.
- Others disagree, arguing that to be a socialist is (among other things) to reject the ‘anarchy of the market’ in favor of a planned economy.
But what form of planning should socialists advocate? This is a second major area of dispute, with
- some socialists endorsing central planning and
- others proposing a radically decentralized, participatory alternative.
This article explores all of these themes. It starts with definitions, then presents normative arguments for preferring socialism to capitalism, and concludes by discussing three broad socialist institutional proposals: central planning, participatory planning, and market socialism.
Two limitations should be noted at the outset. The article focuses on moral and political-philosophical issues rather than purely economic ones, discussing the latter only briefly. Second, little is said here about socialism’s rich and complicated history. The article emphasizes the philosophical content of socialist ideas rather than their historical development or political instantiation.
Table of Contents
- Socialism and Capitalism: Basic Institutional Contrasts
- Socialism vs. Communism in Marxist Thought
- Why Socialism? Economic Considerations
- Why Socialism? Democracy
- Why Socialism? Exploitation
- Why Socialism? Freedom and Human Development
- Why Socialism? Community and Equality
- Institutional Models of Socialism for the 21st Century
- References and Further Reading
Socialism - Definition, Origins & Countries
( https://www.history.com/ )
Socialism describes any political or economic theory that says the community, rather than individuals, should own and manage property and natural resources.
The term “socialism” has been applied to very different economic and political systems throughout history, including utopianism, anarchism, Soviet communism and social democracy. These systems vary widely in structure, but they share an opposition to an unrestricted market economy, and the belief that public ownership of the means of production (and making money) will lead to better distribution of wealth and a more egalitarian society.
How Socialism Emerged
The intellectual roots of socialism go back at least as far as ancient Greek times, when the philosopher Plato depicted a type of collective society in his dialog, Republic (360 B.C.). In 16th-century England, Thomas More drew on Platonic ideals for his Utopia, an imaginary island where money has been abolished and people live and work communally.
In the late 18th century, the invention of the steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution, which brought sweeping economic and social change first to Great Britain, then to the rest of the world. Factory owners became wealthy, while many workers lived in increasing poverty, laboring for long hours under difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions.
Socialism emerged as a response to the expanding capitalist system. It presented an alternative, aimed at improving the lot of the working class and creating a more egalitarian society. In its emphasis on public ownership of the means of production, socialism contrasted sharply with capitalism, which is based around a free market system and private ownership.
Utopian Socialism
Sketch of a city plan for a new community in Indiana, based on the principles advocated by Robert Owen, a socialist philanthropist. The city was designed to give "greater physical, moral, and intellectual advantages to every individual."
Early socialists like Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and Charles Fourier offered up their own models for social organization based on cooperation rather than competition. While Saint-Simon argued for a system where the state controls production and distribution for the benefit of all society’s members, both Fourier and Owen (in France and Britain, respectively) proposed systems based on small collective communities, not a centralized state.
Owen, who had owned and operated textile mills in Lanark, Scotland, headed to the United States in 1825 to launch an experimental community in New Harmony, Indiana. His planned commune was based on the principles of self-sufficiency, cooperation and public ownership of property. The experiment soon failed, and Owen lost much of his fortune. More than 40 small cooperative agricultural communities inspired by Fourier’s theories, were founded across the United States. One of these, based in Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted into the 1930s.
Influence of Karl Marx
It was Karl Marx, undoubtedly the most influential theorist of socialism, who called Owen, Fourier and other earlier socialist thinkers “utopians,” and dismissed their visions as dreamy and unrealistic. For Marx, society was made up of classes: When certain classes controlled the means of production, they used that power to exploit the labor class.
In their 1848 work The Communist Manifesto, Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, argued that true “scientific socialism” could be established only after a revolutionary class struggle, with the workers emerging on top.
Though Marx died in 1883, his influence on socialist thought only grew after his death. His ideas were taken up and expanded upon by various political parties (such as the German Social Democratic Party) and leaders like Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong.
Marx’s emphasis on the revolutionary clash between capital and labor came to dominate most socialist thought, but other brands of socialism continued to develop. Christian socialism, or collective societies formed around Christian religious principles. Anarchism saw not just capitalism but government as harmful and unnecessary. Social democracy held that socialist aims could be achieved through gradual political reform rather than revolution.
Socialism in the 20th Century
In the 20th century—particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the formation of the Soviet Union—social democracy and communism emerged as the two most dominant socialist movements throughout the world.
By the end of the 1920s, Lenin’s revolution-focused view of socialism had given way to the foundation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its consolidation of absolute power under Joseph Stalin. Soviet and other communists joined forces with other socialist movements in resisting fascism. After World War II, this alliance dissolved as the Soviet Union established communist regimes across Eastern Europe.
With the collapse of these regimes in the late 1980s, and the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union itself in 1991, communism as a global political force was greatly diminished. Only China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam remain communist states.
Meanwhile, over the course of the 20th century, social democratic parties won support in many European countries by pursuing a more centrist ideology. Their ideas called for a gradual pursuit of social reforms (like public education and universal healthcare) through the processes of democratic government within a largely capitalist system.
Socialism in the United States
In the United States, the Socialist Party never enjoyed the same success as in Europe, reaching its peak of support in 1912, when Eugene V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote in that year’s presidential election. But social reform programs like Social Security and Medicare, which opponents once denounced as socialist, became over time a well-accepted part of American society.
Some liberal politicians in the United States have embraced a variation on social democracy known as democratic socialism. This calls for following socialist models in Scandinavia, Canada, Great Britain and other nations, including single-payer health care, free college tuition and higher taxes on the wealthy.
On the other side of the political spectrum, conservative U.S. politicians often label such policies as communist. They point to authoritarian socialist regimes such as that of Venezuela to raise concerns about big government.
The wide range of interpretations and definitions of socialism across the political spectrum, and the lack of a common understanding of what socialism is or how it looks in practice reflects its complicated evolution. Nonetheless, socialist parties and ideas continue to influence policy in nations around the world. And socialism’s persistence speaks to the enduring appeal of calling for a more egalitarian society.
https://www.history.com/topics/industrial-revolution/socialism
Socialism: A Short Primer
There was an important distinction, however, between Soviet-style communism and the system that socialist parties advocated after World War II. The Soviet system was undemocratic and totalitarian. The state (that is, the Communist party) controlled not only the entire economy but also civil society. As a “vanguard” party, the CPSU claimed to represent, infallibly, the “real interests” of the working class, even though average citizens of the Soviet Union might well disagree with the party’s “line” at any given moment.
By contrast, the program of Western socialist parties was both democratic and non-totalitarian. Western socialists acknowledged the importance of the individual liberties that Communists dismissed as “bourgeois.” These parties distinguished between the parts of the economy that needed to be brought under public control and those that did not. In the main, they did not seek government control of civil society, and they were willing to submit to the electorate’s democratic verdict on an ongoing basis...
...Although social democracy came to represent the dominant political program in most democracies, its triumph was short-lived. Starting in the late 1970s, conservative leaders who challenged key tenets of social democracy scored electoral victories in the U.K., U.S., Germany, and elsewhere. They argued that excessive government intervention and spending had slowed economic growth, impeded innovation, and promoted inflation. Moreover, excessive deference to organized labor had reduced private sector profits and investments, while the pursuit of equal outcomes had deprived the “job creators” of needed incentives to take risks. Government was not the solution for the problems of capitalism, the new conservative wisdom held, but rather the principal obstacle to the success of a market economy. Industries had to be deregulated; spending on programs of social protections had to be curtailed; taxes had to be slashed; and unions needed to be brought to heel.
The political success of conservative policies persuaded many center-left leaders that their social democratic programs needed to adjust to new circumstances. As this movement gathered strength, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the political situation. It seemed that every alternative to capitalism had faded. The future lay in a dynamic and increasingly global market economy with the fewest possible fetters on the free flow of capital, goods, services, workers, and information. Appropriate fiscal, trade, investment, immigration, and education policies would enable Western democracies to seize the commanding heights of the new economy. The future for workers lay in lifetime education and training, not in organized labor’s efforts to thwart needed change. Regulations that impeded efficiency in key sectors such as banking needed to be swept away. Competition would promote “self-regulation” as an alternative to the heavy hand of the state. Programs to promote economic and retirement security were acceptable—as long as they did not break the bank, raise interest rates, and squeeze out private investment.
Led by key figures such as Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in the U.K., and Gerhardt Schroeder in Germany, this new economic vision—dubbed the Third Way by its friends and neo-liberalism by its foes—guided changes in center-left parties. As long as the new economy delivered ample jobs and broad-based income gains, center-left parties enjoyed political success. But the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing severe global recession undermined public confidence in the institutions and policies that permitted the disaster. On the Right, populist forces began to stir. (In retrospect, the Tea Party was a harbinger of things to come.) On the Left, the failure of post-Cold War globalized capitalism opened the door to critics of the status quo. Occupy Wall Street targeted the “1 percent”—the wealthy elites whose greed and myopia, they said, triggered the crisis and left those of lesser means to suffer the losses and pay the costs.
By 2016, right-wing populism had taken over the previously center-right Republican Party in the U.S., while Sanders gave Hillary Clinton, the establishment center-left candidate, a surprisingly tough race. Throughout Europe, traditional center-left and center-right parties suffered heavy losses while both right-wing populists and far-left parties gained support. In the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere, insurgents have rejected what they see as the Third Way’s objectionable and ineffective compromises with conservative principles and programs. It is against this historical backdrop that young adults in America embraced programs that promised more than incremental change—and that they were not afraid to call themselves socialists.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2019/05/13/socialism-a-short-primer/
Understanding Socialism in the U.S.
Overview
Today, amidst the backdrop of a highly polarized country with income equality in the U.S. at its highest point in tracked history, socialism has been gaining increasing interest and attention. However, confusion and misconceptions are still prevalent in conversations about socialism—in part due to the term being mischaracterized and weaponized by American media and politicians throughout history.
In this piece, we aim to offer a clear foundation of how socialism operates as an economic and political framework. Our goal is to encourage more robust, thoughtful, and accurate discussions about both the benefits and shortcomings of incorporating aspects of socialism in our society today.
Table of Contents
What is Socialism?
An overview of socialism from an economic & political perspective
Socialism as a Critique of Capitalism
An overview of capitalism, socialism, communism, major critiques of
capitalism, and the ways in which socialism evolved from communism
- What is Capitalism?
- Socialist Critiques of Capitalism
- Capitalism As A Solution to Capitalism?
- Features & Characteristics of Socialism
- Socialism Versus Communism
Issues with Socialism
An analysis of the key issues with socialism
Socialism in the United States
An overview of the evolution of socialism in the U.S., analysis of how
socialism has been and continues to be weaponized today, and examples of
democratic socialist policies
- The Evolution of Socialism in the U.S.
- The Weaponization of Socialism in the U.S.
- What’s Next for Socialism in the U.S.?
How Do We Encourage Change?
Ways for individuals to take steps towards a more equitable and democratic
society
Further Reading
Relevant resources to read and learn more about socialism
