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Centre-left

Centre-left

In politics, the centre left of the political spectrum roughly comprises European social democrats, some democratic socialists, progressive liberals, greens and reformist Marxists. Centre Left supporters accept the capitalist market economy but advocate a mixed economy with a significant public sector and also a private sector. Centre Left policies tend to favour limited state intervention in the economy in what is seen as the public interest. The Centre Left also often favours environmentalist policies.

Politics

Politics is the process by which decisions are made for a given society. The method of making decisions for groups varies, but the act of decision making is the key component that characterises politics. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions. Political science is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power, i.e. the ability to impose one's will on another. One theorist, Harold Lasswell, has defined politics as "who gets what, when, and how." Another definition of 'politics' is: "how power is distributed within a group or system".

A natural state

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his most famous work, Leviathan, in which he proposed a model of early human development to justify the creation of human associations. Hobbes described an ideal state of nature wherein every person had equal right to every resource in nature and was free to use any means to acquire those resources. He noted that such an arrangement created a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes). Further, he noted that men would enter into a social contract and would give up absolute rights for certain protections. While it appears that social cooperation and dominance hierarchies predate human societies, Hobbes’s model illustrates a rationale for the creation of societies (polities).

Early history

V.G. Childe describes the transformation of human society that took place around 6000 BCE as an urban revolution. Among the features of this new type of civilization were the institutionalization of social stratification, non-agricultural specialised crafts (including priests and lawyers), taxation, and writing. All of which require clusters of densely populated settlements - city-states. The word "Politics" is derived from the Greek word for city-state, "Polis". Corporate, religious, academic and every other polity, especially those constrained by limited resources, contain dominance hierarchy and therefore politics. Politics is most often studied in relation to the administration of governments. The oldest form of government was tribal organization. Rule by elders was supplanted by monarchy, and a system of Feudalism as an arrangement where a single family dominated the political affairs of a community. Monarchies have existed in one form or another for the past 5000 years of human history.

Definitions

- Power is the ability to impose one's will on another. It implies a capacity for force, i.e violence.
- Authority is the power to enforce laws, to exact obedience, to command, to determine, or to judge.
- Legitimacy is an attribute of government gained through the acquisition and application of power in accordance with recognized or accepted standards or principles.
- A government is the body that has the authority to make and enforce rules or laws.

Political power

Samuel Gompers’ often paraphrased maxim,"Reward your friends and punish your enemies," hints at two of the five types of power recognized by social psychologists: incentive power (the power to reward) and coercive power (the power to punish). Arguably the other three grow out of these two. Legitimate power, the power of the policeman or the referee, is the power given to an individual by a recognized authority to enforce standards of behavior. Legitimate power is similar to coercive power in that unacceptable behavior is punished by fine or penalty. Referent power is bestowed upon individuals by virtue of accomplishment or attitude. Fulfillment of the desire to feel similar to a celebrity or a hero is the reward for obedience. Expert power springs from education or experience. Following the lead of an experienced coach is often rewarded with success. Expert power is conditional to the circumstances. A brain surgeon is no help when your pipes are leaking.

Authority and legitimacy

Max Weber identified three sources of legitimacy for authority known as (tripartite classification of authority). He proposed three reasons why people followed the orders of those who gave them:

Traditional

Traditional authorities receive loyalty because they continue and support the preservation of existing values, the status quo. Traditional authority has the longest history. Patriarchal (and more rarely Matriarchal) societies gave rise to hereditary monarchies where authority was given to descendants of previous leaders. Followers submit to this authority because "we've always done it that way." Examples of traditional authoritarians include kings and queens.

Charismatic

Charismatic authority grows out of the personal charm or the strength of an individual personality (see cult of personality for the most extreme version). Charismatic regimes are often short lived, seldom outliving the charismatic figure that leads them. Examples include Hitler, Napoleon, and Mao.

Legal-rational

Legal-Rational authorities receive their ability to compel behavior by virtue of the office that they hold. It is the authority that demands obedience to the office rather than the office holder. Modern democracies are examples of legal-rational regimes.

References

GOMPERS,SAMUEL; “Men of Labor! Be Up and Doing,” editorial, American Federationist, May 1906, p. 319

Political spectrum

A political spectrum is a way of comparing or visualizing different political positions, by placing them upon one or more geometric axes.

Determining political spectra

The key assumption of such a spectrum is that people's view(s) on many issues correlate strongly, or that one essential issue subsumes or dominates all others. For a political spectrum to exist, there must be a range of beliefs. Political systems in which most people fall clearly into one group or another with almost no one in between, such as most nationalist controversies, are not well described by a political spectrum. In Iran, for instance, a political spectrum might be divided along the issue of the clergy's role in government. Those who believe clerics should have the power to enforce Islamic law are on one end of the spectrum, those who support a secular society are on the other; moderates fall at various points in between. In Taiwan, the political spectrum is defined in terms of Chinese reunification versus Taiwan independence. Even in issues of nationalism, spectra can exist; for example, in the Basque Country of Spain, Basque nationalists range from the EAJ/PNV, who have engaged in coalition governments with both the socialist PSOE and the conservative Partido Popular, to ETA, which engage in terror tactics and armed struggle against the Spanish national government, which they view as an occupying power. Political spectra can end when one group wins so thoroughly that there is no longer a divergence of opinions. This occurred in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China in the case between the rightists and the leftists in which the leftists won, or in the late 18th century controversy between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists in the United States. Often in this situation the winners start disagreeing over new issues, and a new political spectrum is created. In some cases, the defeated side can re-appear after several years or several decades, and start the controversy anew. At other times the political spectrum remains, while the issues which define the spectrum change. The controversy over the selection of William of Orange's successor to the English throne helped to define the British political spectrum which exists to this day, long after the original controversy was resolved. In some cases, especially in democratic countries without a "first past the post" system, multiple spectra can co-exist. For example, from its founding in 1901 to 1909, the Commonwealth of Australia had two equally strong policial spectra - Free Trade vs. Protectionism and Workers vs. Bosses (Liberals). However, by 1909 the first continuum had become irrelevent, and the two leading parties of each idea (Free Trade Party and Protectionist Party) merged to become the Liberal Party, in order to better compete with the strong workers' party (Australian Labor Party). This second continuum remained dominant in federal Australian politics until the mid-1990's.

Left and Right

See main article Left-Right politics In modern Western countries, the political spectrum usually is described along left-right lines. This traditional political spectrum is defined along an axis with conservatism, theocracy, and fascism ("the Right") on one end, and socialism, communism, ("the Left") on the other. Free market liberalism is generally considered to be centrist or center-right; new liberalism or social liberalism is generally assigned to the center, center-left or sometimes (when viewed by conservatives) the left. Christian Democracy may be anywhere from center-right to center-left, depending on the country and era. National and cultural differences in the use of the terms left and right are common. In China, left and right have referred to different positions at different times, although the issues were often very different from those in Western nations.

Multiplicity of interpretation of the left-right axis

There are various different opinions about what is actually being measured along this axis, and lines often blur among parties. For more detail see the main article Left-Right politics:
- Equal outcomes (left) versus consistent processes (right).
- Redistribution of wealth and income (left), or acceptance of inequalities as a result of the free market (right).
- Whether the government's policy on the economy should be interventionist (left) or laissez-faire (right).
- Support for widened lifestyle choices (left), or support for traditional values (right).
- Whether the state should prioritise equality (left) or liberty (right). Both the left and the right tend to speak in favor of both equality and liberty - but they have different interpretations.
- Whether human nature is more malleable (left) or intrinsic (right).
- Whether the government should promote secularism (left) or religious morality (right).
- Collectivism (left) versus individualism (right).
- Support for internationalism (left), or national interest (right).

Historical origin of the terms

The terms Left and Right to refer to political affiliation originated early in the French Revolutionary era, and referred originally to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France. The aristocracy sat on the right of the Speaker (traditionally the seat of honor) and the commoners sat on the Left, hence the terms Right-wing politics and Left-wing politics. Originally, the defining point on the ideological spectrum was the ancien régime ("old order"). "The Right" thus implied support for aristocratic or royal interests, and the church, while "The Left" implied opposition to the same. Because the political franchise at the start of the revolution was relatively narrow, the original "Left" represented mainly the interests of the bourgeoisie, the rising capitalist class. At that time, support for laissez-faire capitalism and Free markets were counted as being on the left; today in most Western countries these views would be characterized as being on the Right. As the franchise expanded over the next several years, it became clear that there was something to the left of that original "Left": the precursors of socialism and communism, advocating the interests of wage-earners and peasants.

Alternative spectra

Some people feel that it is not obvious how these various concepts are related. They say that it is very confusing to speak of the right or the left without indicating what exactly you are referring to. They believe that one should first establish context by defining the axes upon which different positions will be measured. Many individuals and groups do not fit on such a simple spectrum. While the right-left spectrum is so common as to be taken for granted, numerous alternatives exist, usually having been developed by people who feel their views are not fairly represented on the traditional right-left spectrum. The design of a spectrum itself can be politically motivated. Another alternative spectrum offered by the conservative American Federalist Journal emphasizes the degree of political control, and thus places totalitarianism at one extreme and anarchism (no government at all) at the other extreme. Another alternative, currently popular among certain environmentalists, uses a single axis to measure what they consider to be the good of the Earth against the good of big business, which is seen as being the force most likely to harm the Earth. In 1998, political author Virginia Postrel, in her book The Future and Its Enemies, offered a new single axis spectrum that measures one's view of the future. On one extreme are those who allegedly fear the future and wish to control it: stasists. On the other hand are those who want the future to unfold naturally and without attempts to plan and control: dynamists. The distinction corresponds to the utopian versus anti-utopian spectrum used in some theoretical assessments of liberalism, and the book's title is borrowed from the work of the anti-utopian classic-liberal theorist Karl Popper. Other axes include:
- Role of the church: Clericalism vs. Anti-clericalism. This axis is not significant in the United States where views of the role of religion tend to get subsumed into the general left-right axis, but in Europe clericalism versus anti-clericalism is much less correlated with the left-right spectrum.
- Urban vs. rural: This axis is also much more significant in European as well as Australian and Canadian politics than American.
- Foreign policy: interventionism (the nation should exert power abroad to implement its policy) vs. isolationism (the nation should keep to its own affairs)
- Political violence: pacifism (political views should not be imposed by violent force) vs. militancy (violence is a legitimate or necessary means of political expression). In North America, holders of these views are often referred to as "doves" and "hawks", respectively.
- Foreign trade: globalization (world economic markets should become integrated and interdependent) vs. autarky (the nation or polity should strive for economic independence). During the early history of the Commonwealth of Australia, this was the major political continuum. At that time it was called Free trade vs. Protectionism.
- Trade Freedom vs. Trade Equity: Free trade (businesses should be able trade across borders without regulations) vs. Fair trade (international trade should be regulated on behalf of social justice).
- Diversity: multiculturalism (the nation should represent a diversity of cultural ideas) vs. assimilationism or nationalism (the nation should primarily represent the majority culture)
- Participation: Democracy (rule of the majority) vs. Oligarchy (rule by a limited number of people) vs. Republic (a compromise between the two; this is a specialised use of the term 'republic' based on an interpretation of classical history)
- Freedom: Positive liberty (having rights which impose an obligation on others) vs. Negative liberty (freedom from interference by others)
- Change: radicals (who believe in rapid change) vs.progressives (who believe in measured , incremental change)vs.conservatives (who believe in minimal or cautious change), and sometimes vs. reactionaries (who believe in changing things to the way they were)
- Origin of state authority: popular sovereignty (the state as a creation of the people, with enumerated, delegated powers) vs. various forms of absolutism and organic state philosophy (the state as an original and essential authority)
- International action Multilateralism (states should cooperate and compromise) versus Unilateralism (states have a strong, even unconditional, right to make their own decisions).
Multi-axis models
A one-axis model is highly over-simplified, and lumps together fairly different political propositions; in particular, as seen before, there are many ways to define the left-right spectrum, which do not yield the same classifications. Several of the political philosophies that have arisen over the past two centuries do not fit on the one-dimensional left/right line, in particular anarchism and libertarianism. Anarchism is assumed to be "left", while Libertarianism is assumed to be "right". However, on the one-dimensional spectrum, anarchism shares almost the same position as various forms of Marxism, which is obviously inappropriate. Anarchism implies the rejection of government and societal control (as well as private property), while Leninism and other forms of Marxism imply the control by society of many activities. At the other end of the left/right line, Libertarianism finds itself in the same position as fascism, which is equally inappropriate. In order to address these problems, a number of proposals have been made for a two-axis system, which combines two models of the political spectrum as axes. Sometimes these systems are constructed for the specific purpose of placing one political group in a particular position, and associating it with motherhood values (values with 100% positive connonations). These charts are academic in origin, but are not widely used in political science.
Eysenck model
The first person to devise such a two-axis system was Hans Eysenck in his 1964 book "Sense and Nonsense in Psychology." Starting with the traditional "left-right" spectrum Eysenck added a vertical axis that considered "tough-mindedness" (authoritarian tendencies) and "tender-mindedness" (democratic tendencies). The effect of this new axis is that those who have very different views with regard to authority, but have the same "left-right" view (people like Stalin and Noam Chomsky), can be distinguished.
Nolan chart
Noam Chomsky] Main article: Nolan chart A second chart is the Nolan chart, created by libertarian David Nolan. This chart shows what he considers as "economic freedom" (issues like taxation, free trade and free enterprise) on the x axis and what he considers as "personal freedom" (issues like drug legalization, abortion and the draft) on the y-axis. This puts left-wingers in the left quadrant, libertarians in the top, right-wingers in the right, and authoritarianism and communitarians (whom Nolan originally named populists) in the bottom. The traditional left-right spectrum forms a diagonal across the Nolan chart, with communism and fascism both in the ultra-populist corner, an assignment hotly disputed by more liberal-minded communists who do not advocate state control over matters of "personal freedom". The Nolan chart has been reoriented and visually represented in many forms since David Nolan first created it, and has been the inspiration for an endless array of political self-quizzes, perhaps the most famous of these being the [http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html World's Smallest Political Quiz], which places one on the Nolan Chart.
Political compass
populists Largely following the Eysenck method, the model used by the political compass Organization has economic issues on the horizontal axis and issues of freedom on the vertical axis. Possibly the most popular and well-known online political [http://politicalcompass.org/ quiz], it asks a wide-range of questions before placing you on a chart.
Pournelle chart
political compass Main article: Pournelle chart A third, very different, two axis model was created by Jerry Pournelle. The Pournelle chart has liberty (a dimension similar to the diagonal of the Nolan chart, with those on the left seeking liberty and those on the right focusing control, farthest right being state worship, farthest left being the idea of a state as the "ultimate evil") perpendicular to Rationalism, defined here as the belief in planned social progress, with those higher up believing that there are problems with society that can be rationally solved, and those lower down skeptical of such approaches.
Other models
Rationalism Rationalism] In its January 4, 2003 issue, The Economist discussed [http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/library/main_illustrations.asp a chart, proposed by Dr. Ronald Inglehart] and supported by the World Values Survey (associated with the University of Michigan), to plot cultural ideology onto two dimensions. On the y-axis it covered issues of tradition and religion, like patriotism, abortion, euthanasia and the importance of obeying the law and authority figures. At the bottom of the chart is the traditionalist position on issues like these (with loyalty to country and family and respect for life considered important), while at the top is the secular position. The x-axis deals with self-expression, issues like everyday conduct and dress, acceptance of diversity (including foreigners) and innovation, and attitudes towards people with specific controversial lifestyles such as homosexuality and vegetarianism, as well as willingness to partake in political activism. At the right of the chart is the open self-expressionist position, while at the left is its opposite position, which Dr. Inglehart calls survivalist. This chart not only has the power to map the values of individuals, but also to compare the values of people in different countries. Placed on this chart, EU countries in continental Europe come out on the top right, Anglophone countries on the middle right, Latin American countries on the bottom right, African, Middle Eastern and South Asian countries on the bottom left, and ex-Communist countries on the top left. In addition to the distinctions between different types of "control" on many of these spectra, there is no clear way to locate philosophies such as feminism or environmentalism, even using a two-axis spectrum. Additional dimensions would be required to accommodate them, and that would make the model far too complex to be of any use. As an example, there are even some three axis models, both based on the Nolan Chart. The Friesian Institute has suggested a model that combines the economic liberty and personal liberty axes with positive liberty, creating a cube. The Vosem Chart splits the economic axis of the Nolan chart into two axes, corporate economics (z-axis) and individual economics (y-axis), which combine with the civil liberty axis (x-axis) to form a cube.

Ab-initio derived models

While multiple axes on the political spectrum had been postulated for a while, statistical analysis of survey data using principal component analysis to verify the theory and establish their existence, number and meaning was not done until recently. A 2003 study in the UK yielded two significant eigenvectors (that is, groups of questions that tend to be answered consistently), one less well-constrained than the other. If one examines the survey questions and tries to assign a meaning to the axes it turns out that one is like the familiar "left-right" axis that mixes economic and social issues, and the other indicates a degree of political pragmatism. The outcome of that study is that the UK political spectrum is most sensibly described with two axes. [http://politics.beasts.org] [http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/]
Suggested reading
Maximum Liberty by Anonymous. 2003. (ISBN 0974443905) Provides an overview of the different models of the political spectrum. The author proposes a new, universal model for the political spectrum and explains why the various existing models are inadequate. The model separates the scope of government from the form of government, whereas the political spectrum only describes potential levels of government control over society, not forms of rulership and administrative organization. Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum by William S. Maddox and Stuart A. Lilie; foreword by David Boaz. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1984. (ISBN 0932790437) This book emphasises that the world needs a better model of the political spectrum. The authors favor the American libertarian concept of a two-axis model.
See also

- List of politics-related topics
- Nolan chart
- Political compass
- Spectrum (disambiguation)
- Left-right politics
- Syncretic politics
External links

- [http://www.politicalcompass.org/ The Political Compass]
- [http://www.self-gov.org/wspq.html World's Smallest Political Quiz]
- [http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.htm The Pournelle Political Axes - All Ends of the Spectrum]
- [http://www.friesian.com/quiz.htm Friesian Institute]
- [http://www.federalistjournal.com/spectrum.php Alternative Spectrum - American Federalist Journal]
- [http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org The World Values Survey - main site]
- [http://wvs.isr.umich.edu University of Michigan World Values Survey]
- [http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/14/45425/6208 Vosem Chart] Category:Political parties Category:Elections Category:Politics

Democratic socialist

Democratic socialism is a broad political movement propagating the ideals of socialism within the context of a democratic system. In many cases, its adherents promote the ideal of socialism as an evolutionary process resulting from legislation enacted by a parliamentary democracy. Other democratic socialists favor a revolutionary approach that seeks to establish socialism by creating a non-parliamentary democratic system, usually based on democracy rooted at the local level as well as at the national level, including broadbased popular associations such as workers' councils, community groups, and other similar organizations. Thinkers, writers and activists such as Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb can all be said to have contributed to "democratic socialist philosophy". However, popular movements such as the growth of trade unionism, the Chartists and the Labour Party (UK) (a "democratic socialist party" according to the first line of its constitution) or the SPD in Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) are equally critical to understanding democratic socialism.

Definitions

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands held in a closed fist is the international symbol of democratic socialism.]] Many of those who describe themselves as "socialists" often argue that socialism necessarily implies democracy, thus making "democratic socialism" a redundant term. The fact that one specific movement is called Democratic Socialism does not mean that other branches of socialism must be any less democratic. However, the term is often used by those who wish to contrast this form of socialism with Stalinism or other dictatorial ideologies that also claim to be socialist. The terms "Democratic Socialism" and "Social Democracy" have often been used interchangeably, and, indeed, many have considered them synonymous until recently. Today, however, they usually denote two different things: Social Democracy is more centrist and supports a broadly capitalist system, with only some social reforms (such as the welfare state), intended to make it more equitable and humane. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialism is more left-wing and it supports a fully socialist system, seeking to establish that socialist system, either by gradually reforming capitalism from within, or via some form of revolutionary transformation. Thus, Democratic Socialism can be either an evolutionary socialist movement or a revolutionary movement. This tension between the revolutionary and evolutionary tendencies of democratic socialism can be seen in the Socialist Party USA, which has members who advocate both types of positions (although the party statement of principles does use the word "revolution" to describe its position). Revolutionary democratic socialists accuse those who favor evolution of supporting a kind of "socialism from above" that is achieved via legislation and which does not truly abolish the capitalist system. Evolutionary democratic socialists accuse supporters of revolution of being impractical and of supporting pie-in-the-sky approaches. Evolutionary democratic socialists and social democrats both typically advocate at least a welfare state, although some social democrats, being influenced by the Third Way, would be willing to consider other means of delivering a social safety net for the poorest in society. Revolutionary democratic socialists support a welfare state, not as a means toward achieving socialism, but as a way of providing relief until revolutionary change takes place, and also as a means of mobilizing the populace towards revolutionary ideals. Democratic socialists maintain a commitment to the re-distribution of wealth and power and social ownership of most major industry, and some believe in a planned economy; these are all concepts which social democrats have largely abandoned. In addition, many democratic socialists retain a Marxist analysis (though often a reformist one), while social democrats reject Marxism entirely. Democratic socialist parties appeared before the First World War, when no single country could be described as democratic in the full modern use of the term, because of electoral discrimination on the basis of gender, race or wealth. What frequently distinguished these democratic socialists from others was a willingness to work through a parliamentary democracy (even if people were still disenfranchised) to both improve the lives of working classes and win the vote, rather than resort to revolution (the overthrow of the state). Revolutionary Democratic Socialism attracted greater support a few decades later, when many democratic socialists became disillusioned with evolutionary socialism, because social democracy, the largest evolutionary socialist movement, had failed to abolish capitalism and had in many cases abandoned the goal of building a socialist society. Revolutionary democratic socialists also believe that the political structures within existing capitalist societies serve as an impediment to full democracy, which they believe can only achieved by establishing a new political structure built from the bottom up and based on popular organizations that emerge during democratic and socialist struggles.

History

Many early varieties of socialism, particularly those stemming from the sans-culotte branch of French Revolutionary politics, took for granted democratic characteristics such as universal suffrage and equality before the law. Notable among such currents are the egalitarian Jacobinism of Babeuf, the humanistic revolutionary spirit of Louis Blanc, Robert Owen's so-called utopianism, and the communism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Such early socialisms might in retrospect be included as democratic socialist. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Socialist Industrial Unionism of Daniel DeLeon in the United States represented another strain of early Democratic Socialism, which favored a form of government based on industrial unions, but which also sought to establish this government after winning at the ballot box, thus assuming a revolutionary approach while incorporating the parliamentarism of evolutionary democratic socialism. However, democratic socialism as such only becomes a movement in its own right as a current rejecting both Stalinism (with its distinctive visions of the vanguard party and the dictatorship of the proletariat) and, preferably, the reformism characteristic of yellow socialists and social democrats. During the 1920s, Council communism anticipated democratic socialist positions in several respects, notably through renouncing the vanguard role of the revolutionary party and holding that the system of the USSR was not authentically socialist (describing it as defective or corrupted socialism). However, council communism has generally tended towards the "ultraleft" position of opposing any reforms of capitalism in the short term. The guild socialism of G. D. H. Cole was a conscious attempt to envision a socialist alternative to Soviet-style authoritarianism. During India's freedom movement, many figures on the Left of the Indian National Congress organized themselves as the Congress Socialist Party. Their politics, and those of the early and intermediate periods of JP Narayan's career, combined a commitment to the socialist transformation of society with a principled opposition to the one-party authoritarianism they perceived in the Stalinist revolutionary model. The folkesocialisme or people's socialism that emerged as a vital current of the Left in Scandinavia beginning in the 1950s could also be characterized as a democratic socialism in the same vein. In much of Europe and North America during the 1960s, there was a strong current of democratic socialism in the politics of the New Left. For example, the classic Port Huron Statement of the SDS combines a stringent critique of the Communist model with calls for a democratic socialist reconstruction of society. In western Europe, Dany Cohn-Bendit, the situationists, and various groups taking to the streets in May 1968 articulated similar positions. The New Left legacy of democratic socialism may be clearly seen in the post-Marxist positions of a wide range of intellectuals (sometimes identified with post-modernism or post-structuralism), from Chantal Mouffe in Europe to Cornel West in the United States. Simultaneously in Eastern Europe (particularly Czechoslovakia), there was a tendency towards socialism with a human face meant to endow a Marxist-Leninist political establishment with more authentically democratic credentials. Since the end of the Cold War, many traditionally Marxist-Leninist groups and parties have evolved positions more closely resembling democratic socialism. The parties of the European United Left today often include both a "conservative" Marxist-Leninist wing and a "liberal" democratic socialist tendency. The boundaries of what might be categorized as "democratic socialism" are thus necessarily fluid. On the right, democratic socialism shades seamlessly into social democracy; on the left, it passes into various hybrids and permutations of Leninism. Furthermore, it also shades off into a variety of radical progressive groups not specifically identifying with the history or symbolism of "socialism" as such. Since the 1990s much of the political activity of the democratic Left has fed into the international movement against capitalist globalization. Many anti-globalist groups describe themselves as anti-capitalist without self-identifying as socialist, despite sharing a great many positions and analyses with democratic socialism.

Characteristics

Democratic socialists have normally defended the role of the public sector, particularly as regards the provision of key services such as health care, education, utilities, mass transit, and sometimes also banking, mining, and fuel extraction. For evolutionary democratic socialists, their economic vision has often included a mixed economy with a greater emphasis on worker and consumer co-operatives, credit unions, family farms and small businesses, as compared to authoritarian Marxist-Leninists. In India, democratic socialists have to varying degrees seen the traditional village-based peasant economy as a model to be supported and enhanced. Revolutionary democratic socialists usually distinguish between the role of the public sector within parliamentary democraties and the role of social ownership in a post-revolutionary society. They see pre-revolutionary public ownership, not as a means of achieving socialism, but as a means of ameliorating the worst effects of capitalism until a revolution is accomplished and the means of production are transfered directly to the workers and community organizations. With respect to the means of production, many revolutionary democratic socialists prefer to use the term "social ownership" rather than "nationalization", because the latter is often associated with social-democratic style state ownership by the bureacracy of a parliamentary state. Social ownership in this sense conveys a sense of a broadly based democratic control of the means of production at the level of the workplace, from which power in a democratic workers republic would flow. Regarding tactics, democratic socialists include a spectrum of positions, from those advocating nonviolent resistance against capitalism, or the possibility of violent resistance under certain circumstances, to those committed exclusively to anti-capitalist reforms through parliamentary means (see evolutionary socialism and Fabianism). Democratic socialists advocating direct action may tend to similar positions with anarcho-syndicalism (with which democratic socialism shares the characteristics of being both anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian), although democratic socialists characteristically do not regard the state itself as an evil to be abolished.

List of Democratic Socialist parties

The following political parties are either democratic socialist in themselves, social democratic parties with significant numbers of democratic socialist members, or other left-wing parties with democratic socialist members:
- Party of European Socialists, European Union. 32 members and 7 associate members, including:
- Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD), Germany
- Labour Party, UK
- Parti Socialiste, France
- Parti Socialiste, (PS) Belgium (Wallonia)
- Socialistische Partij - Anders (sp.a), Belgium (Flanders)
- Labour party, Ireland
- European United Left - Nordic Green Left, European Union
- Left Party, Sweden
- European Left, European Union
- Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), Germany
- Socialist Party (SP), The Netherlands
- Samajwadi Party, India
- Democratic Labor Party (DLP), South Korea
- Democratic Socialist Party, Japan
- New Democratic Party, Canada
- Union des forces progressistes, Quebec (Canada)
- Socialist Party USA, USA
- Partido Liberal, Colombia
- Unity List, Denmark
- Partido Independentista Puertorriqueño, Puerto Rico
- Partido Socialista, Argentina
- Partido Acción Democrática [http://www.acciondemocratica.org.ve/], Venezuela
- Movimiento V República, Venezuela Some of these political parties, for example, the British Labour Party, and the Social Democrats in Germany, have adopted free market policies which are in contradiction to democratic socialism and are therefore now social democratic parties. These parties supposedly use capitalism to create greater prosperity for the majority, not the few. Thus they usually oppose aspects of trade unionism which democratic socialists would advocate.

External links

- [http://www.socialistinternational.org/ The Socialist International] Category:Socialism

Progressive

Progressive can be a political word referring to:
- Progressivism, a political philosophy
- Progressive Party, a political party
- The Progressive, a left-wing monthly magazine
- Progressive tax Progressive may also refer to:
- Progressive music
- Progressive rock
- Progressive metal
- Progressive electronica
- Progressive Era in the United States (1890-1913)
- Progressive (insurance company), a company providing auto insurance in the US
- Progressive tense in grammar
- Progressive lenses, used to correct presbyopia
- Progressive function, in mathematics
- Progressive JPEG, image format which displays scans from lower quality to higher quality during transmission
- Progressive scan is a form of video transmission which is frame-based instead of field-based

Greens

:This article is about the political category. For the vegetables, see Leaf vegetable. Greens are people who support some or all of the goals of a Green Party without necessarily working with or voting for that or any party. Most of them consider themselves to be part at least of a global Green movement. A potential basis of unity for Greens could be Green values (as made explicit in the Four Pillars and other documents), but even these aren't shared by all people who consider themselves Greens. Historically, "being green" developed as a political identity together with the blooming of the peace movement, the ecology movement (see preventive paradigm), and the feminist movement in the late 1970s, the time the first green parties on a local level were founded.

Different kinds of Greens

A small sample of the factions or tendencies that exist on the movement's fringe — some only in very small numbers:
- Deep Greens follow the ascetic ethics of Spinoza, Mohandas Gandhi, and indigenous peoples. They are usually rural people who prefer wild to "tamed" living. Cf. also the ideology of deep ecology.
- Wild Greens are a youth movement of New Zealand Green Party, committed to direct action and taking bodily risks to protect nature.
- Viridian Greens are a more artistic movement in the U.S., originated by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, and have fewer objections to media or technology.
- Eco-Anarchists (Eco-anarchism, Green anarchism) can also be thought of as greens (but not generally Greens).

Marxism

Marxism is the social theory and political practice based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century German philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. Marx drew on G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy, the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and theorists of 19th century French socialism, to develop a critique of society which he claimed was both scientific and revolutionary. This critique achieved its most systematic (albeit unfinished) expression in his masterpiece, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, more commonly known as Das Kapital. Since its inception and up to the present day, Marxism has been situated largely outside the political mainstream, although it has played a major role in history. Today, Marxist political parties of widely different sizes exist in most countries around the world, and Marxism continues to enjoy significant intellectual respect in many circles. Das Kapital Das Kapital Since Marx's death in 1883, various groups around the world have appealed to Marxism as the theoretical basis for their politics and policies, which have often proved to be dramatically different and conflicting. One of the first major political splits occurred between the advocates of 'reformism', who argued that the transition to socialism could occur within existing bourgeois parliamentarian frameworks, and communists, who argued that the transition to a socialist society required a revolution and the dissolution of the capitalist state. The 'reformist' tendency (later known as Social Democracy) came to be dominant in most of the parties affiliated to the Second International and these parties supported their own governments in World War One. This issue caused the communists to break away and form their own parties which became members of the Third International. The contemporary meanings of these terms was initially very different: Lenin, for example, was considered a social democrat until the mutation of the latter movement. Although there are still many Marxist revolutionary social movements and political parties around the world, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, relatively few countries have governments which describe themselves as Marxist. Although social democratic parties are in power in a number of Western nations, they long ago distanced themselves from their historical connections to Marx and his ideas. As of 2005, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and the People's Republic of China had governments in power which describe themselves as socialist in the Marxist sense. However, the private sector comprised more than 50% of the Chinese economy by this time and the Vietnamese government had also partially liberalized its economy. The Laotian and Cuban states maintained strong control over the means of production. While Marx theorized that such a socialist phase would eventually give way to a classless society in which the state essentially ceases to exist and workers collectively own the means of production (communism), such a development has yet to occur in any historical self-claimed Communist state, often due to an initial authoritarian regime's unwillingness to relinquish the power it gained in revolution. These historically communist states have generally followed a socialist, command economy model without making a transition to this hypothetical final stage. North Korea is another contemporary Communist state, though the official ideology of the Korean Workers' Party (originally led by Kim Il-sung and currently chaired by his son, Kim Jong-il,) Juche, does not follow doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism as had been espoused by the leadership of the Soviet Union. Libya is often thought of as a socialist state; it maintained ties with the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc and Communist states during the Cold War. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, describes the state's official ideology as Islamic socialism, and has labelled it a third way between capitalism and Marxism. Some libertarian members of the laissez-faire and individualist schools of thought believe the actions and principles of modern capitalist states or big governments can be understood as "Marxist". This point of view ignores the overall vision and general intent of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, for qualitative change to the economic system, and focuses on a few steps that Marx and Engels believed would occur, as workers emancipated themselves from the capitalist system, such as "Free education for all children in public schools". A few such reforms have been implemented — not by Marxists but in the forms of Keynesianism, the welfare state, new liberalism, social democracy and other minor changes to the capitalist system, in most capitalist states. To Marxists these reforms represent responses to political pressures from working-class political parties and unions, themselves responding to perceived abuses of the capitalist system. Further, in this view, many of these reforms reflect efforts to "save" or "improve" capitalism (without abolishing it) by coordinating economic actors and dealing with market failures. Further, although Marxism does see a role for a socialist "vanguard" government in representing the proletariat through a revolutionary period of indeterminate length, it sees an eventual lightening of that burden, a "withering away of the state."

The Hegelian roots of Marxism

market failure Marx's immensely rich and varied politico-theoretical preoccupations were initially influenced by his contact with Hegelian philosophy. Hegel proposed a form of idealism in which the progress of freedom is the guiding theme of human history. Freedom progresses by the development of ideas into their contraries. This process, dialectic, sometimes involves gradual accretion but at other times requires discontinuous leaps -- violent upheavals of previously existing status quo. World-historical figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte are, on the Hegelian reading, servants of a World Spirit whose Freedom has reconciled with the Necessity of History. Hegel's dialectical process included the personal as well as the natural, the ideal as well as the material. Marx did not study directly with Hegel, but after Hegel died Marx studied under one of Hegel's pupils, Bruno Bauer. Bauer was a leader of the circle of Young Hegelians and Marx attached himself to Bauer. However, Marx and Engels came to disagree with Bruno Bauer about socialism and also about the usage of Hegel's dialectic. Marx and Engels quit the Young Hegelians and wrote a scathing criticism of the Young Hegelians in two books, "The Holy Family," and "The German Ideology." Marx, "stood Hegel on his head," in his own view of his role, by turning the idealistic dialectic into a materialistic one, in proposing that material circumstances shape ideas, instead of the other way around. In this, Marx was following the lead of another Young Hegelian, Ludwig Feuerbach. (Feuerbach had not been one of Hegel's favorite pupils; when Feuerbach sent his thesis to Hegel, Hegel refused to reply. So, the title of Young Hegelian should be considered loosely when considering Feuerbach.) What distinguished Marx from Feuerbach, however, was his view of Feuerbach's humanism as excessively abstract, and so no less ahistorical and idealist than what it purported to replace, namely the reified notion of God found in institutional Christianity that legitimized the repressive power of the Prussian state. Instead, Marx aspired to give ontological priority to what he called the "real life process" of real human beings, as he and Friedrich Engels said in an 1846 essay they entitled "The German Ideology": :In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this, their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. Also, in his "Theses on Feuerbach," Marx writes that "the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change. In 1844-5, when Marx was starting to settle his account with Hegel and the Young Hegelians in his writings, he critiqued the Young Hegelians for limiting the horizon of their critique to religion and not taking up the critique of the state and civil society as paramount. Indeed in 1844, by the look of Marx's writings in that period (most famous of which is the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts", a text that most explicitly elaborated his theory of alienation and that was only published in the twentieth century), Marx's thinking could have taken at least three possible courses: the study of law, religion, and the state; the study of natural philosophy; and the study of political economy. He chose the last as the predominant focus of his studies for the rest of his life, largely on account of his previous experience as the editor of the newspaper "Rheinische Zeitung" on whose pages he fought for freedom of expression against Prussian censorship and made a rather idealist, legal defense for the Moselle peasants' customary right of collecting wood in the forest (this right was at the point of being criminalized and privatized by the state). It was Marx's inability to penetrate beneath the legal and polemical surface of the latter issue to its materialist, economic, and social roots that prompted him to critically study political economy. Marx summarized the materialistic aspect of his theory of history, otherwise known as historical materialism (although Engels was the one who coined this term and Marx himself never used it), in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: :In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. In this brief popularization of his ideas, Marx emphasized that social development sprang from the inherent contradictions within material life and the social superstructure. This notion is often understood as a simple historical narrative: primitive communism had developed into slave states. Slave states had developed into feudal societies. Those societies in turn became capitalist states, and those states would be overthrown by the self-conscious portion of their working-class, or proletariat, creating the conditions for socialism and, ultimately, a higher form of communism than that with which the whole process began. Marx illustrated his ideas most prominently by the development of capitalism from feudalism and by the prediction of the development of socialism from capitalism. The base-superstructure and stadialist formulations in the 1859 preface took on canonical status in the subsequent development of orthodox Marxism, but some believe that Marx regarded them merely as a short-hand summary of his huge ongoing work-in-progress (which was only published posthumously over a hundred years later as "Grundrisse"). These sprawling, voluminous notebooks that Marx put together for his research on political economy, particularly those materials associated with the study of "primitive communism" and pre-capitalist communal production, in fact, show a more radical turning "Hegel on his head" than heretofore acknowledged by most mainstream Marxists and Marxiologists. In lieu of the Enlightenment belief in historical progress and stages that Hegel explicitly stated (often in a racist, Eurocentric manner, as in his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History"), Marx pursues in these research notes a decidedly empirical approach to analyzing historical changes and different modes of production, emphasizing without forcing them into a teleological paradigm the rich varieties of communal productions throughout the world and the critical importance of collective working-class antagonism in the development of capitalism. Moreover, Marx's rejection of the necessity of bourgeois revolution and appreciation of the obschina, the communal land system, in Russia in his letter to Vera Zasulich; respect for the egalitarian culture of North African Muslim commoners found in his letters from Algeria; sympathetic and searching investigation of the global commons and indigenous cultures and practices in his notebooks, including the "Ethnological Notebooks" that he kept during his last years, all point to a historical Marx who was continuously developing his ideas until his deathbed and does not fit into any pre-existing ideological straitjacket, including that of Marxism itself (a famously telling anecdote is the one in which Marx quipped to Paul Lafargue "All that I know is that I'm not a Marxist").

The political-economy roots of Marxism

Political economy is essential to this vision, and Marx built on and critiqued the most well-known political economists of his day, the British classical political economists. Political economy predates the 20th century division of the two disciplines, treating social relations and economic relations as interwoven. Marx proposed a systematic correlation between labour-values and money prices. He claimed that the source of profits under capitalism is value added by workers not paid out in wages. This mechanism operated through the distinction between "labour power", which workers freely exchanged for their wages, and "labour", over which asset-holding capitalists thereby gained control. This practical and theoretical distinction was Marx's primary insight, and allowed him to develop the concept of "surplus value", which distinguished his works from that of the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Workers create enough value during a short period of the working day to pay their wages for that day (necessary labour); however, they continue to work for several more hours and continue to create value (surplus labour). This value is not returned to them but appropriated by the capitalists. Thus, it is not the capitalist ruling class that creates wealth, but the workers, the capitalists then appropriating this wealth to themselves. (Some of Marx's insights were seen in a rudimentary form by the "Ricardian socialist" school [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/utopia.htm] [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/schools/ricardian.htm].) He developed this theory of exploitation in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, a "dialectical" investigation into the forms value relations take. Capital is written over three volumes, of which only the first was complete at the time of Marx's death. The first volume, and especially the first chapter of that volume, contains the core of the analysis. Hegel's legacy is especially overpowering here, and the work is seldom read with the thoroughness Marx urges in his introduction. According to his prescriptions, the method of presentation proceeds from the most abstract concepts, incorporating one new layer of determination at a time and tracing the effects of each such layer, in an effort to arrive eventually at a total account of the concrete relationships of everyday capitalist society. This investigation is commonly taken to commit Marx to a species of labor theory of value as described above. This and other intrinsic theories of economic value are incompatible with modern, predictive economics in which the theory of value is that of marginalism: on one side, technical production coefficients; on the other, subjective preferences. To neoclassical economists, the labor theory is the reason Marxism failed as an economic theory. Marx critiqued Smith and Ricardo for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected specifically capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of human society, and could not be applied unchanged to all societies. Marx's theory of business cycles; of economic growth and development, especially in two sector models; and of the declining rate of profit, or crisis theory, are other important elements of Marxist economics. Marx later made tentative movements towards econometric investigations of his ideas, but the necessary statistical techniques of national accounting only emerged in the following century. In any case, it has proved difficult to adapt Marx's economic concepts, which refer to social relations, to measurable aggregated stocks and flows. In recent decades, however, a loose "quantitative" school of Marxist economists has emerged. While it may be impossible to find exact measures of Marx's variables from price data, approximations of basic trends are possible. Marx suggested that capitalist dynamics included the tendential law of a falling rate of profit. The general tendency could be explained by the actions of individual capitalists. Competition forced them to cut costs by boosting labour productivity, yet this technical change through mechanisation caused a corresponding fall in the "productivity of capital" (the output-capital ratio). As such the average rate of profit fell over the economy as a whole. Certain Marxist economists, such as Henryk Grossman and Paul Mattick Sr, have used this theoretical edifice to construct a theory of capitalist "breakdown". Others have explained it as an aspect of capitalist crisis, and prone to counter-tendencies during economic booms. Marx argues that capitalism is, in the words of Ernest Mandel, an editor of Marx's "Capital," a "gigantic enterprise of dehumanization." In "The Communist Manifesto," co-written with Engels and published in 1848, Marx and Engels describe the effects capitalism has on the individual and society: Capitalism "drowns the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalric enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation."

The liberal challenge

The Austrian School were the first liberal economists to systematically challenge the Marxist school. This was partly a reaction to the Methodenstreit when they attacked the Hegelian doctrines of the Historical School; Marxist authors have decried the Austrian school as a "bourgeois" reaction to Marx. The Austrian economists were, however, the first to clash directly with Marxism, since both dealt with such subjects as money, capital, business cycles, and economic processes. Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk wrote extensive critiques of Marx in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists—including Rudolf Hilferding—attended his seminar in 1905-06. In the middle of the twentieth century, prominent US economist Paul Samuelson also devoted several journal articles to the alleged inconsistencies of Marxian theory. Later, neo-Ricardian Sraffians launched a significant attack on the labour theory of value.

Class analysis

Marxists believe that in its pure form capitalist society is divided into two powerful social classes:
- the working class or proletariat: Marx defined this class as "those individuals who sell their labor and do not own the means of production" whom he believed were responsible for creating the wealth of a society (buildings, bridges and furniture, for example, are physically built by members of this class). Ernest Mandel, in an introduction to Capital, updates this definition to mean people who work for a living (whether "white collar" or "blue collar") and who have no significant savings, where sufficiently large savings are typically invested in the abstract means of production on a shareholder basis.
- the bourgeoisie : those who "own the means of production" and exploit the proletariat. The bourgeoisie may be further subdivided into the very wealthy bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie: those who employ labor, but may also work themselves. These may be small proprietors, land-holding peasants, or trade workers. Marx predicted that the petty bourgeoisie would eventually be destroyed by the constant reinvention of the means of production and the result of this would be the forced movement of the vast majority of the petty bourgeoisie to the proletariat. An example of this would be many small businesses giving way to fewer larger ones, without increasing the number of petty bourgeois bureaucrats required to administer each company. From a Marxist perspective, the actually-existing basic classes in today's advanced economies are the capitalist class, the new middle classes who engage in both labour and managerial responsibilities, self-employed proprietors, the working class and a lower "lumpenised" stratum. At first the bourgeoisie, and now the proletariat, are considered to be the universal class, the section of society best equipped to take human progress forwards a further step. Marx developed these ideas to support his advocacy of socialism and communism: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently; the point is, to change it." Communism would be a social form wherein this system would have been ended and the working classes would be the sole beneficiary of the "fruits of their labour". Some of these ideas were shared by anarchists, though they differed in their beliefs on how to bring about an end to the class society. Socialist thinkers suggested that the working class should take over the existing capitalist state, turning it into a workers revolutionary state, which would put in place the democratic structures necessary, and then "wither away". On the anarchist side people such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin argued that the state per se was the problem, and that destroying it should be the aim of any revolutionary activity. Many governments, political parties, social movements, and academic theorists have claimed to be founded on Marxist principles. Social democratic movements in 20th century Europe, the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, Mao and other revolutionaries in agrarian developing countries are particularly important examples. These struggles have added new ideas to Marx and otherwise transmuted Marxism so much that it is difficult to specify its core. It is common to speak of Marxian rather than Marxist theory when referring to political study that draws from the work of Marx for the analysis and understanding of existing (usually capitalist) economies, but rejects the more speculative predictions that Marx and many of his followers made about post-capitalist societies..

Marxist revolutions and governments

Marx's views on the structure of communist society

Other than control by the working class, Marx laid out no plans for the structuring of a communist society or of the society that the working class would build on the way to communism. He assumed the working class could do that for themselves and that it would be a productive society able to meet the needs of the people and much more. The political parties who adopted his theories followed Marx in his optimistic approach and detailed plans for the structuring of socialist society were not put forth or developed. With the success of the October Revolution in Russia, a Marxist party took power, but without any blueprints for building the new society.

The October Revolution

1917 October Revolution, led by Vladimir Lenin was the first large scale attempt to put Marxist ideas about a workers' state into practice. The new government faced counter-revolution, civil war and foreign intervention. Further, many, both inside and outside the revolution worried that the revolution came too early in Russia's economic development, as Marxism requires capitalism to have exhausted its mechanisms of growth before attaining socialism, and consequently the major Socialist Party in the UK decried the revolution as anti-Marxist within twenty-four hours, according to Jonathan Wolff. Socialist revolution in Germany and other western countries failed and the Soviet Union was on its own. An intense period of debate and stopgap solutions ensued, war communism and the New Economic Policy (NEP). Lenin died and Joseph Stalin gradually assumed control, eliminating rivals and consolidating power as the Soviet Union faced the horrible challenges of the 1930s and its global crisis-tendencies. Amidst the geopolitical threats which defined the period and included the probability of invasion, he instituted a ruthless program of industrialisation which, while successful, was prosecuted at great cost in human suffering, including millions of deaths, along with long-term environmental devastation. Modern followers of Leon Trotsky maintain that as predicted by Lenin, Trotsky, and others already in the 1920s, Stalin's "socialism in one country" was unable to maintain itself, and according to some Marxist critics, the USSR ceased to show the characteristics of a socialist state long before its formal dissolution. Following World War II, Marxist ideology, often with Soviet military backing, spawned a rise in revolutionary communist parties all over the world. Some of these parties were eventually able to gain power, and establish their own version of a Marxist state. Such nations included the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Romania, East Germany, Albania, Poland, Cambodia, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, and others. In some cases, these nations did not get along. The most notable examples were rifts that occurred between the Soviet Union and China, as well as Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (in 1948), whose leaders disagreed on certain elements of Marxism and how it should be implemented into society. Many of these self-proclaimed Marxist nations (often styled People's Republics) eventually became authoritarian states, with stagnating economies. This caused some debate about whether or not these nations were in fact led by "true Marxists". Critics of Marxism speculated that perhaps Marxist ideology itself was to blame for the nations' various problems. Followers of the currents within Marxism which opposed Stalin, principally cohered around Leon Trotsky, tended to locate the failure at the level of the failure of world revolution: for communism to have succeeded, they argue, it needed to encompass all the international trading relationships that capitalism had previously developed. The Chinese experience seems to be unique. Rather than falling under a single family's self-serving and dynastic interpretation of Marxism as happened in North Korea and before 1989 in Eastern Europe, the Chinese government - after the end of the struggles over the Mao legacy in 1980 and the ascent of Deng Xiaoping - seems to have solved the succession crises that have plagued self-proclaimed Leninist governments since the death of Lenin himself. Key to this success is another Leninism which is a NEP (New Economic Policy) writ very large; Lenin's own NEP of the 1920s was the "permission" given to markets including speculation to operate by the Party which retained final control. The Russian experience in Perestroika was that markets under socialism were so opaque as to be both inefficient and corrupt but especially after China's application to join the WTO this does not seem to apply universally. The death of "Marxism" in China has been prematurely announced but since the Hong Kong handover in 1997, the Beijing leadership has clearly retained final say over both commercial and political affairs. Questions remain however as to whether the Chinese Party has opened its markets to such a degree as to be no longer classified as a true Marxist party. A sort of tacit consent, and a desire in China's case to escape the chaos of pre-1949 memory, probably plays a role. See also: Communist government and Communist state. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the new Russian state ceased to identify itself with Marxism. Other nations around the world followed suit. Since then, radical Marxism or Communism has generally ceased to be a prominent political force in global politics, and has largely been replaced by more moderate versions of democratic socialism—or, more commonly, by aggressively neoliberal capitalism.

Free market economy

Adam Smith's theory

Decisionmaking

The\economy" is usually associated with capitalism.

Market Failure

Examples of market failures include: negative externalities, monopolies,lack of provision of public goods, and social disparities such as extreme poverty. These failures are the reason some think limited government intervention is paramont.

Government Intervention

It is possible for a market economy to have government intervention in the economy. The key difference between market economies and planned economies lies not with the degree of government influence but whether that influence is used to coercively preclude private decision. In a market economy, if the government wants more steel, it collects taxes and then buys the steel at market prices. In a planned economy, a government which wants more steel simply orders it to be produced and sets the price by decree. An economy where both central planning and market mechanisms of production and distribution are present is known as a mixed economy. The proper role for government in a market economy remains controversial. Most supporters of a market economy believe that government has a legitimate role in defining and enforcing the basic rules of the market. More controversial is the question of how strong a role the government should have in both guiding the economy and addressing the inequalities the market produces. For example, there is no universal agreement on issues such as protectionist tariffs, federal control of interest rates, and welfare programs.

Comparison to planned economies

In the 1980s, most of the planned economies in the world attempted to transform themselves into market economies, for various reasons and with varying degrees of success. In the Soviet Union, this process was known as perestroika while in China the creation of a "socialist market economy" was one element of Chinese economic reform. "In a planned economy those with political power make up the plans, in a market economy those who have money make up the plans" is a common joke in Central European countries who have experienced planned economy and are now experiencing market economies.

Criticism of market economy

Mixed economy

A mixed economy is an "economy that combines capitalism and socialism" [http://www.bartleby.com/59/18/mixedeconomy.html]. Some sources prefer the use of "command economy" over "socialism" in defining a mixed economy (see external links below). Relevant aspects include a degree of private economic freedom (including privately owned industry) intermingled with centralized economic planning (which may include state ownership of some of the means of production). Most Western countries, including the United States [http://economics.about.com/od/howtheuseconomyworks/a/mixed_economy.htm], have a mixed economy.

Philosophy

United States A mixed economy contains private ownership of the means of production, infrastructure, and institutions but may also contain state-ownership of some of these things. It allows for private financial decisions by businesses and individuals, but not absolute nor near absolute autonomy, as many of these decisions are otherwise overridden by government. The term mixed economy was coined to identify economic systems which stray from the ideals of either capitalism or various command economies and "mix" with elements of each other. As most political-economic ideologies are defined in an idealized sense, what is described rarely if ever exists in practice. Most would not consider it unreasonable to label an economy that, while not being a perfect representation, very closely resembles an ideal by applying the rubric that denominates that ideal. However, when a system in question diverges to a significant extent from an idealized economic model or ideology, the task of identifying it can become problematic. As it is unlikely that an economy will contain a perfectly even mix, mixed economies are usually noted as being skewed either toward capitalism or statism in varying degrees.

Elements of a mixed economy

The elements of a mixed economy typically include a variety of freedoms:
- to possess means of production (farms, factories, stores, etc.)
- to travel (needed to transport all the items in commerce, to make deals in person, for workers and owners to go to where needed)
- to buy (items for personal use, for resale; buy whole enterprises to make the organization that creates wealth a form of wealth itself)
- to sell (same as buy)
- to hire (to create organizations that create wealth)
- to fire (to maintain organizations that create wealth)
- to organize (private enterprise for profit, labor unions, workers' and professional associations, non-profit groups, religions, etc.)
- to communicate (free speech, newspapers, books, advertizements, make deals, create business partners, create markets)
- to protest peacefully (marches, petitions, sue the government, make laws friendly to profit making and workers alike, remove pointless inefficiencies to maximize wealth creation) with tax-funded or subsidized services and infrastructure:
- legal assistance
- libraries and other information services
- roads and other transportation services
- schools and other education services
- hospitals and other health services (contrary to popular belief, even in the US, the health system is only partially private)
- personal and property protection at home and abroad (police, military)
- subsidies to agriculture and other businesses
- government monopolies and government-granted monopolies and providing some autonomy over personal finances but including involuntary spending and investments such as transfer payments and other cash benefits such as:
- welfare for the poor
- social security for the aged and infirm
- government subsidies to business
- mandatory insurance (example: automobile

Public sector

The public sector is that part of economic and administrative life that deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the government, whether national, regional or local/municipal. Examples of public sector activity range from delivering social security, administering urban planning and organising national defences. The organisation of the public sector (public ownership) can take several forms, including:
- Direct administration funded through taxation; the delivering organisation generally has no specific requirement to meet commercial success criteria, and production decisions are determined by government.
- Publicly-owned corporations (in some contexts, especially manufacturing, "State-owned enterprises"); which differ from direct administration in that they have greater commercial freedoms and are expected to operate according to commercial criteria, and production decisions are not generally taken by government (although goals may be set for them by government).
- Partial outsourcing (of the scale many businesses do, e.g. for IT services), is considered a public sector model. A borderline form is
- Complete outsourcing or contracting out, with a privately owned corporation delivering the entire service on behalf of government. This may be considered a mixture of private sector operations with public ownership of assets, although in some forms the private sector's control and/or risk is so great that the service may no longer be considered part of the public sector. (See Britain's Private Finance Initiative.) The decision about what are proper matters for the public sector as opposed to the private sector is probably the single most important dividing line among socialist, liberal, conservative, and libertarian political philosophy, with (broadly) socialists preferring greater state involvement, libertarians favoring minimal state involvement, and conservatives and liberals favoring state state involvement in some aspects of the society but not others.

Private sector

The private sector of a nation's economy consists of those entities which are not controlled by the state - i.e., a variety of entities such as private firms and companies, corporations, private banks, non-governmental organisations. But not controlled by the government doe

Centre-left

See also

Politics

A natural state

Early history

Definitions

Political power

Authority and legitimacy

Traditional

Charismatic

Legal-rational

References

See also

Political spectrum

Determining political spectra

Left and Right

Multiplicity of interpretation of the left-right axis

Historical origin of the terms

Alternative spectra

Multi-axis models

Eysenck model

Nolan chart

Political compass

Pournelle chart

Other models

Ab-initio derived models

Suggested reading

See also

External links

Democratic socialist

Definitions

History

Characteristics

List of Democratic Socialist parties

See also

Books

Papers

External links

Progressive

Greens

Different kinds of Greens

See also

Marxism

The Hegelian roots of Marxism

The political-economy roots of Marxism

The liberal challenge

Class analysis

Marxist revolutions and governments

Marx's views on the structure of communist society

The October Revolution

See also

Other articles about Marxism

See also

External links

Market economy

Free market economy

Adam Smith's theory

Decisionmaking

Market Failure

Government Intervention

Comparison to planned economies

Criticism of market economy

See also

Mixed economy

Philosophy

Elements of a mixed economy

Public sector

See also

Private sector