State socialism is a political and economic ideology within the socialist movement that advocates state ownership of the means of production. This is intended either as a temporary measure, or as a characteristic of socialism in the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production or to a communist society. State socialism was first theorised by Ferdinand Lassalle. It advocates a planned economy controlled by the state in which all industries and natural resources are state-owned.
Aside from anarchists and other libertarian socialists, there was, in the past, confidence amongst socialists in the concept of state socialism as being the most effective form of socialism. Some early social democrats in the late 19th century and early 20th century, such as the Fabians, claimed that British society was already mostly socialist and that the economy was significantly socialist through government-run enterprises created by conservative and liberal governments which could be run for the interests of the people through their representatives' influence, an argument reinvoked by some socialists in post-war Britain. State socialism declined starting in the 1970s, with stagflation during the 1970s energy crisis, the rise of neoliberalism and later with the fall of state socialist nations in the Eastern Bloc during the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union.
Libertarian socialists often treat state socialism as synonymous with state capitalism, arguing that the economic systems of Marxist–Leninist states such as the Soviet Union were not genuinely socialist due to their autocratic nature. Democratic and libertarian socialists claim that these states had only a limited number of socialist characteristics. However, others maintain that workers in the Soviet Union and other Marxist–Leninist states had genuine control over the means of production through institutions such as trade unions.
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The theory of state monopoly capitalism (also referred as stamocap) was initially a Marxist thesis popularised after World War II. Lenin had claimed in 1916 that World War I had transformed laissez-faire capitalism into monopoly capitalism, but he did not publish any extensive theory about the topic. The term refers to an environment where the state intervenes in the economy to protect larger monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from threats.
The 1970s energy crisis occurred when the Western world, particularly the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, faced substantial petroleum shortages as well as elevated prices. The two worst crises of this period were the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 energy crisis, when, respectively, the Yom Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution triggered interruptions in Middle Eastern oil exports. The crisis began to unfold as petroleum production in the United States and some other parts of the world peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Democratic socialism is a left-wing political philosophy that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist economy or an alternative form of a decentralised planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society.
In the history of education, college represented an alternative to family life. At college, children and adolescents were separated from the care of their parents and integrated into a religious or secular community for their civic or professional educatio ...
2023
The tradition of planning in China is multisecular. The planning of the Chinese Imperial city was based on the model of the walled city that was reproduced and extended over several scales, from micro (courtyard) to macro (an entire city). The spatial revo ...
The aim of this project is to understand the correlation between alloy composition and the build-up of internal stresses in 18 carat Au-Ag-Cu alloys under thermo-mechanical loads. The copper rich end of this ternary system exhibits order-hardening of the e ...