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In short, totalitarianism is the ideology of absolute power. State socialism, Communism, Nazism, fascism, and Muslim fundamentalism have been some of its recent raiments. Totalitarian governments have been its agency. The state, with its international legal sovereignty and independence, has been its base.
Apr 4, 2022 · Characterizing Orwell’s late political sensibility as one of desperate radicalism, the article demonstrates that Orwell remained both a socialist and a steward of the utopian imagination and that he feared totalitarianism because it threatened to expunge utopian ideals from historical consciousness. 1984 depicts a world in which this effort has ...
- 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
Considered as an economic system, socialism is best understood in contrast with capitalism. Capitalismdesignates an economic system with all of the following features: 1. The means of production are, for the most part, privately owned; 2. People own their labor power, and are legally free to sell it to (or withhold it from) others; 3. Production is...
Although this article focuses on socialism rather than Marxism per se, there is an important distinction within Marxist thought that warrants mention here. This is the distinction between socialism and communism. Both socialism and communism are forms of post-capitalism. Both feature social rather than private ownership of the means of production. ...
Is socialism worthy of allegiance, and if so, why? The standard normative argument for socialism is comparative. Socialists typically single out certain moral and political values, argue that these values are poorly served under capitalism, and then support socialism by contending that these values would fare better—not necessarily perfectly, but b...
The article turns now to the normative case against capitalism and in favor of socialism, starting with democracy. Democracy means rule by the people, as opposed to rule by the rich, or rule by the excellent, or, more generally, rule by any part of the people over the rest. Systems plausibly claiming to be democratic can vary along at least three d...
According to many socialists, one of capitalism’s central moral failings is that it is exploitative. Socialism, by contrast, would not be exploitative—or so these socialists allege—and this is one of the main reasons for preferring it to capitalism. But what is exploitation? Is capitalism truly exploitative? And would socialism really eliminate exp...
Many socialists point to considerations of freedom, broadly understood, to support socialism over capitalism. Freedom comes in many varieties. This article will discuss two. Formal freedom involves the absence of interference. Effective freedominvolves the presence of capability. A person who is unable to walk has the formal freedom to ascend a ste...
Capitalism is competitive and cut-throat; socialism is cooperative and harmonious. Capitalism divides; socialism unites, or so many socialists have argued. The crucial value in play in these arguments is “community”. The concept of “community” admits of at least two different interpretations. The first concerns producers’ motivations: what drives p...
What, in practice, would a socialist society actually look like? What concrete institutions and policies—political, economic, and social—would it use to organize, motivate, and direct economic activity? It is difficult to assess the desirability of socialism without answering these questions. The normative case for socialism depends, at least in pa...
Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso, 2003.Albert, Michael, and Robin Hahnel. Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century. South End Press, 1991.Arneson, Richard. “Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare.” Philosophical Studies 56 (1), 77-93, 1989.Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. Dover, 1996 [1888].May 12, 2024 · socialism, social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. According to the socialist view, individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another.
Jul 15, 2019 · Socialism is a rich tradition of political thought and practice, the history of which contains a vast number of views and theories, often differing in many of their conceptual, empirical, and normative commitments.
Nov 20, 2020 · Most fundamentally, socialism is a political, philosophic, and economic system in which the means of production—that is, everything that goes into making goods for use—are collectively controlled, rather than owned by private corporations as they are under capitalism, or by aristocrats under feudalism.
Totalitarian democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government. [1]
