Forms of government

Democracy
Democracy is a form of government in which the supreme power is held completely by the people under a free electoral system.In political theory, democracy describes a small number of related forms of government and also a political philosophy. Even though there is no universally accepted definition of 'democracy', there are two principles that any definition of democracy includes. The first principle is that all members of the society have equal access to power and the second that all members enjoy universally recognized freedoms and liberties.There are several varieties of democracy some of which provide better representation and more freedoms for their citizens than others. However, if any democracy is not carefully legislated to avoid an uneven distribution of political power with balances such as the separation of powers, then a branch of the system of rule is able to accumulate power in a way that is harmful to democracy itself. The "majority rule" is often described as a characteristic feature of democracy, but without responsible government it is possible for the rights of a minority to be abused by the "tyranny of the majority". An essential process in representative democracies are competitive elections, that are fair both substantively and procedurally. Furthermore, freedom of political expression, freedom of speech and freedom of the press are essential so that citizens are informed and able to vote in their personal interests. Popular sovereignty is common but not a universal motivating philosophy for establishing a democracy. In some countries, democracy is based on the philosophical principle of equal rights. Many people use the term "democracy" as shorthand for liberal democracy, which may include additional elements such as political pluralism, equality before the law, the right to petition elected officials for redress of grievances, due process, civil liberties, human rights, and elements of civil society outside the government. In the United States, separation of powers is often cited as a supporting attribute, but in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, the dominant philosophy is parliamentary sovereignty (though in practice judicial independence is generally maintained). In other cases, "democracy" is used to mean direct democracy. Though the term "democracy" is typically used in the context of a political state, the principles are also applicable to private organizations and other groups. Democracy has its origins in ancient Greece.[17][18] However other cultures have significantly contributed to the evolution of democracy such as the American Indians ( Weatherford 1990) Ancient Rome[17], Europe[17], and North and South America.[19] Democracy has been called the "last form of government" and has spread considerably across the globe.[20] Suffrage has been expanded in many jurisdictions over time from relatively narrow groups (such as wealthy men of a particular ethnic group), but still remains a controversial issue with regard to disputed territories, areas with significant immigration, and countries that exclude certain demographic groups.

Forms of democracy
Representative
Representative democracy involves the selection of government officials by the people being represented. The most common mechanisms involve election of the candidate with a majority or a plurality of the votes. Representatives may be elected or become diplomatic representatives by a particular district (or constituency), or represent the entire electorate proportionally proportional systems, with some using a combination of the two. Some representative democracies also incorporate elements of direct democracy, such as referendums. A characteristic of representative democracy is that while the representatives are elected by the people to act in their interest, they retain the freedom to exercise their own judgment as how best to do so. Parliamentary democracy Parliamentary democracy where government is appointed by parliamentary representatives as opposed to a 'presidential rule' by decree dictatorship. Under a parliamentary democracy, government is exercised by delegation to an executive ministry and subject to ongoing review, checks and balances by the legislative parliament elected by the people.[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] Liberal democracy A Liberal democracy is a representative democracy in which the ability of the elected representatives to exercise decision-making power is subject to the rule of law, and usually moderated by a constitution that emphasizes the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals, and which places constraints on the leaders and on the extent to which the will of the majority can be exercised against the rights of minorities (see civil liberties).

Constitutional democracy Direct Democracy

Direct democracy is a political system where the citizens participate in the decisionmaking personally, contrary to relying on intermediaries or representatives. The supporters of direct democracy argue that democracy is more than merely a procedural issue (i.e., voting).[29] Most direct democracies to date have been weak forms, relatively small communities, usually city-states. However, some see the extensive use of referendums, as in California, as akin to direct democracy in a very large polity with more than 20 million in California, 1898-1998 (2000) (ISBN 0-8047-3821-1). In Switzerland, five million voters decide on national referendums and initiatives two to four times a year; direct democratic instruments are also well established at the cantonal

and communal level. Vermont towns have been known for their yearly town meetings, held every March to decide on local issues.

Socialist Democracy
Socialist thought has several different views on democracy. Social democracy, democratic socialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat (usually exercised through Soviet democracy) are some examples. Many democratic socialists and social democrats believe in a form of participatory democracy and workplace democracy combined with a representative democracy.

Anarchist Democracy
The only form of democracy considered acceptable to many anarchists is direct democracy. Some anarchists oppose direct democracy while others favour it. PierreJoseph Proudhon argued that the only acceptable form of direct democracy is one in which it is recognized that majority decisions are not binding on the minority, even when unanimous.[30] However, anarcho-communist Murray Bookchin criticized individualist anarchists for opposing democracy,[31] and says "majority rule" is consistent with anarchism.[32] Some anarcho-communists oppose the majoritarian nature of direct democracy, feeling that it can impede individual liberty and opt in favour of a nonmajoritarian form of consensus democracy, similar to Proudhon's position on direct democracy.[33]

Sortition
Sometimes called "democracy without elections", sortition is the process of choosing decision makers via a random process. The intention is that those chosen will be representative of the opinions and interests of the people at large, and be more fair and impartial than an elected official. The technique was in widespread use in Athenian Democracy and is still used in modern jury selection.

Consensus democracy
Consensus democracy requires varying degrees of consensus rather than just a mere democratic majority. It typically attempts to protect minority rights from domination by majority rule.

Interactive Democracy
Interactive Democracy seeks to utilise information technology to involve voters in law making. It provides a system for proposing new laws, prioritising proposals, clarifying them through parliament and validating them through referendum.

History
Ancient origins The term democracy first appeared in ancient Greek political and philosophical thought. The philosopher Plato contrasted democracy, the system of "rule by the governed", with the alternative systems of monarchy (rule by one individual), oligarchy (rule by a small lite class) and timocracy.[37] Although Athenian democracy is today considered by many to have been a form of direct democracy, originally it had two distinguishing features: firstly the allotment (selection by lot) of ordinary citizens to government offices and courts,[38] and secondarily the assembly of all the citizens. All the male Athenian citizens were eligible to speak and vote in the Assembly, which set the laws of the city-state, citizenship was not granted to women, or slaves. Of the 250,000 inhabitants only some 30,000 on average were citizens. Of those 30,000 perhaps 5,000 might regularly attend one or more meetings of the popular Assembly. Most of the officers and magistrates of Athenian government were allotted; only the generals (strategoi) and a few other officers were elected.[2]The island of Arwad, settled in the early 2nd millennium BC by the Phoenicians, has been cited[39] as one of the first known examples of a democracy in the world. In Arwad, the people, rather than a monarch, are described as sovereign. In Greek, Arwad was known as Arado or Arados. Another possible example of primitive democracy may have been the early Sumerian city-states.[40] Vaishali in what is now Bihar, India is also one of the first governments in the world to have elements of what we would today consider democracy, similar to those found in ancient Greece (although it was not a monarchy, ancient Vaishali is perhaps better described as an oligarchy). A similar proto-democracy or ogligarchy existed temporarily among the Medes in the 6th century BC, but which came to an end after the Achaemenid Emperor Darius the Great declared that the best monarchy was better than the best ogligarchy or best democracy. [41] Even though the Roman Republic contributed significantly into certain aspects of democracy, such as Laws, it never became a democracy. The Romans had elections for choosing representatives, but again women, slaves, and the large foreign population were excluded. Also the votes of the wealthy were given more weight and almost all high officials, such as being member of Senate, come from a few wealthy and noble families. [42] A serious claim for early democratic institutions comes from the independent "republics" of India, sanghas and ganas, which existed as early as the sixth century BCE and persisted in some areas until the fourth century CE. The evidence is scattered and no pure historical source exists for that period. In addition, Diodorus (a Greek historian at the time of Alexander the Great's excursion of India), without offering any detail, mentions that independent and democratic states existed in India.[43] However, modern scholars note that the word democracy at the third century BC had been degraded and could mean any autonomous state no matter how oligarchic it was.[44][45].

Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, there were various systems involving elections or assemblies, although often only involving a minority of the population, such as the election of

Uthman in the Rashidun Caliphate, the election of Gopala in Bengal, the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth, the Althing in Iceland, certain medieval Italian city-states such as Venice, the tuatha system in early medieval Ireland, the Veche in Novgorod and Pskov Republics of medieval Russia, Scandinavian Things, The States in Tyrol and Switzerland and the autonomous merchant city of Sakai in the 16th century in Japan. However, participation was often restricted to a minority, and so may be better classified as oligarchy. Most regions in medieval Europe were ruled by clergy or feudal lords.A little closer to modern democracy were the Cossack republics of Ukraine in the 16th-17th centuries: Cossack Hetmanate and Zaporizhian Sich. The highest post - the Hetman was elected by the representatives from country's districts. Because these states were very militarised, the right to participate in Hetman's elections was largely restricted to those who serve in the Cossack Army and overtime was curtailed effectively limiting these rights to higher army ranks.The Parliament of England had its roots in the restrictions on the power of kings written into Magna Carta. The first elected parliament was De Montfort's Parliament in England in 1265. However only a small minority actually had a voice; Parliament was elected by only a few percent of the population (less than 3% in 1780.[46]), and the system had problematic features such as rotten boroughs. The power to call parliament was at the pleasure of the monarch (usually when he or she needed funds). After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the English Bill of Rights was enacted in 1689, which codified certain rights and increased the influence of the Parliament.[46] The franchise was slowly increased and the Parliament gradually gained more power until the monarch became largely a figurehead.[47]Democracy was also seen to a certain extent in bands and tribes such as the Iroquois Confederacy. However, in the Iroquois Confederacy only the males of certain clans could be leaders and some clans were excluded. Only the oldest females from the same clans could choose and remove the leaders. This excluded most of the population. An interesting detail is that there should be consensus among the leaders, not majority support decided by voting, when making decisions.[48][49] Band societies, such as the Bushmen, which usually number 20-50 people in the band often do not have leaders and make decisions based on consensus among the majority. In Melanesia, farming village communities have traditionally been egalitarian and lacking in a rigid, authoritarian hierarchy. Although a "Big man" or "Big woman" could gain influence, that influence was conditional on a continued demonstration of leadership skills, and on the willingness of the community. Every person was expected to share in communal duties, and entitled to participate in communal decisions. However, strong social pressure encouraged conformity and discouraged individualism.[50]

18th and 19th centuries

Although not described as a democracy by the founding fathers, the United States founders shared a commitment to the principle of natural freedom and equality.[51] The United States Constitution, adopted in 1788, provided for an elected government and protected civil rights and liberties. However, in the colonial period before 1776, only adult white male property owners could vote; enslaved Africans, free black people and women were not extended the franchise. On the American frontier, democracy became a way of life, with widespread social, economic and political equality.[52] However the frontier did not produce much democracy in Canada, Australia or Russia. By the 1840s

almost all property restrictions were ended and nearly all white adult male citizens could vote; and turnout averaged 60-80% in frequent elections for local, state and national officials. The system gradually evolved, from Jeffersonian Democracy to Jacksonian Democracy and beyond. In Reconstruction after the Civil War (late 1860s) the newly freed slaves became citizens with (in the case of men) a nominal right to vote.In 1789, Revolutionary France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and, although short-lived, the National Convention was elected by all males.[53]Liberal democracies were few and often short-lived before the late nineteenth century. Various nations and territories have claimed to be the first with universal suffrage.

20th century
20th century transitions to liberal democracy have come in successive "waves of democracy," variously resulting from wars, revolutions, decolonization, religious and economic circumstances. World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman and AustroHungarian empires resulted in the creation of new nation-states in Europe, most of them at least nominally democratic. In the 1920s democracy flourished, but the Great Depression brought disenchantment, and most of the countries of Europe, Latin America, and Asia turned to strong-man rule or dictatorships. Fascism and dictatorships flourished in Nazi Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as nondemocratic regimes in the Baltics, the Balkans, Brazil, Cuba, China, and Japan, among others.[54]World War II brought a definitive reversal of this trend in western Europe. The successful democratization of the American, British, and French sectors of occupied Germany (disputed[55]), Austria, Italy, and the occupied Japan served as a model for the later theory of regime change. However, most of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet sector of Germany was forced into the non-democratic Soviet bloc. The war was followed by decolonization, and again most of the new independent states had nominally democratic constitutions. India, however emerged as the world's largest democracy and continues to be so.[56] In the decades following World War II, most western democratic nations had mixed economies and developed a welfare state, reflecting a general consensus among their electorates and political parties. In the 1950s and 1960s, economic growth was high in both the western and Communist countries; it later declined in the state-controlled economies. By 1960, the vast majority of nation-states were nominally democracies, although the majority of the world's populations lived in nations that experienced sham elections, and other forms of subterfuge (particularly in Communist nations and the former colonies.)A subsequent wave of democratization brought substantial gains toward true liberal democracy for many nations. Spain, Portugal (1974), and several of the military dictatorships in South America returned to civilian rule in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Argentina in 1983, Bolivia, Uruguay in 1984, Brazil in 1985, and Chile in the early 1990s). This was followed by nations in East and South Asia by the mid- to late 1980s. Economic malaise in the 1980s, along with resentment of communist oppression, contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the associated end of the Cold War, and the democratization and liberalization of the former Eastern bloc countries. The most successful of the new democracies were those geographically and culturally closest to western Europe, and they are now members or candidate members of the European Union[citation needed] . The liberal trend spread to some nations in Africa in the 1990s, most

prominently in South Africa. Some recent examples of attempts of liberalization include the Indonesian Revolution of 1998, the Bulldozer Revolution in Yugoslavia, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.Currently, there are 123 countries that are democratic, and the trend is increasing[57] (up from 40 in 1972)[citation needed]. As such, it has been speculated that this trend may continue in the future to the point where liberal democratic nation-states become the universal standard form of human society. This prediction forms the core of Francis Fukayama's "End of History" controversial theory. These theories are criticized by those who fear an evolution of liberal democracies to Post-democracy, and other who points out the high number of illiberal democracies.

Democracy and republic

In contemporary usage, the term democracy refers to a government chosen by the people, whether it is direct or representative.[63] The term republic has many different meanings, but today often refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, serving for a limited term, in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state, even if these states also are representative democracies with an elected or appointed head of government such as a prime minister.[64]The Founding Fathers of the United States rarely praised and often criticized democracy, which in their time tended to specifically mean direct democracy; James Madison argued, especially in The Federalist No. 10, that what distinguished a democracy from a republic was that the former became weaker as it got larger and suffered more violently from the effects of faction, whereas a republic could get stronger as it got larger and combats faction by its very structure. What was critical to American values, John Adams insisted,[65] was that the government be "bound by fixed laws, which the people have a voice in making, and a right to defend." Also, as Benjamin Franklin was exiting after writing the U.S. constitution, a woman asked him Sir, what have you given us?. He replied A republic ma'am, if you can keep it[66]

Constitutional monarchs and upper chambers

Initially after the American and French revolutions the question was open whether a democracy, in order to restrain unchecked majority rule, should have an elitist upper chamber, the members perhaps appointed meritorious experts or having lifetime tenures, or should have a constitutional monarch with limited but real powers. Some countries (as Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavian countries and Japan) turned powerful monarchs into constitutional monarchs with limited or, often gradually, merely symbolic roles. Often the monarchy was abolished along with the aristocratic system (as in the U.S., France, China, Russia, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Greece and Egypt). Many nations had elite upper houses of legislatures which often had lifetime tenure, but eventually these senates lost power (as in Britain) or else became elective and remained powerful (as in the United States).

Non-government democracy
Aside from the public sphere, similar democratic principles and mechanisms of voting and representation have been used to govern other kinds of communities and organizations.

Many non-governmental organisations decide policy and leadership by voting. Most trade unions choose their leadership through democratic elections. Cooperatives are enterprises owned and democratically controlled by their customers or workers.

Political instability
More recently, democracy is criticised for not offering enough political stability. As governments are frequently elected on and off there tends to be frequent changes in the policies of democratic countries both domestically and internationally. Even if a political party maintains power, vociferous, headline grabbing protests and harsh criticism from the mass media are often enough to force sudden, unexpected political change. Frequent policy changes with regard to business and immigration are likely to deter investment and so hinder economic growth. For this reason, many people have put forward the idea that democracy is undesirable for a developing country in which economic growth and the reduction of poverty are top priority.

Conflicts between groups

Conflicts between people with different opinions and interests can arise. Whenever this occurs, democracy tends to support a referendum or vote in which the majority's wish is carried out. Critics therefore, argue the accountability of making decisions based on this.

Social, religious, and political segregation

Segregation can occur, especially in direct democracy, if a majority approves laws against a minority. Since there is no higher power to inhibit the racial, religious, and/or political segregation, such events go unchecked.

Capitalism
Capitalism is the economic system in which the private ownership of property is protected by law. In most capitalist systems, the definition of property ranges from the simple goods that make up Personal property to capital goods that control the means of production, such as factories. A capitalist political system protects the exchange and distribution of capital between openly competing profit-seeking[1] legal or private persons and where investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and

services are predominantly determined through the operation of a market economy[2] in which anyone can participate in supply and demand and form contracts with each other, rather than by central economic planning. Capitalism is originally defined as a mode of production, where it is characterized by the predominant private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange in a mainly market economy[3]. Capitalism is usually considered to involve the right of individuals and businesses to trade, incorporate, and employ workers, in goods, services (including finance), labor and land.[2] In modern "capitalist states", legislative action is confined to defining and enforcing the basic rules of the market[4] though the state may provide a few basic public goods and infrastructure. [5] Capitalist economic practices became institutionalized in England between the 16th and 19th centuries, although some features of capitalist organization existed in the ancient world, and early forms of merchant capitalism flourished during the Middle Ages.[6][7] Capitalism has been dominant in the Western world since the end of feudalism.[6] From Britain it gradually spread throughout Europe, across political and cultural frontiers. In the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism provided the main, but not exclusive, means of industrialization throughout much of the world.[8]Some have argued that the concept of capitalism has limited analytic value, given the great variety of historical cases over which it is applied, varying in time, geography, politics and culture, and some feel that the term "mixed economies" more precisely describes most contemporary economies.[9][10] Some economists have specified a variety of different types of capitalism, depending on specifics of concentration of economic power and wealth, and methods of capital accumulation.[8] The "capitalist mixed economy" is the main capitalistic system, where the state intervenes in market activity and provides some services. Other systems include laissez-faire, where the state plays a minimal role and anarcho-capitalism where the market and private enterprise are completely free from the state which is nonexistent. During the last century capitalism has been contrasted with centrally planned economies, such as Marxian economies. The concept of capitalism has evolved over time, with later thinkers often building on the analysis of earlier thinkers. Moreover, the component concepts used in defining capitalism such as private ownership, markets and investment have evolved along with changes in theory, in law, and in practice.

Classical political economy

The "classical" tradition in economic thought emerged in Britain in the late 18th century. The classical political economists Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, and John Stuart Mill published analyses of the production, distribution, and exchange of goods in a capitalist economy that have since formed the basis of study for most contemporary economists. Contributions to this tradition are also found in the earlier work of David Hume and the physiocrats like Richard Cantillon.Adam Smith's attack on mercantilism and his reasoning for "the system of natural liberty" in The Wealth of Nations (1776) are usually taken as the beginning of classical political economy. Smith devised a set of concepts that remain strongly associated with capitalism today, particularly his theory of the "invisible hand" of the market, through which the pursuit of individual self-interest unintentionally produces a collective good for society. He

criticized monopolies, tariffs, duties, and other state enforced restrictions of his time and believed that the market is the most fair and efficient arbitrator of resources. This view was shared by David Ricardo, second most important of the classical political economists and one of the most influential economists of modern times.[13] In The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) he developed the law of comparative advantage, which explains why it is profitable for two parties to trade, even if one of the trading partners is more efficient in every type of economic production. This principle supports the economic case for free trade. Ricardo was a supporter of Say's Law and held the view that full employment is the normal equilibrium for a competitive economy.[14] He also argued that inflation is closely related to changes in quantity of money and credit and was a proponent of the law of diminishing returns, which states that each additional unit of input yields less and less additional output.[15]The values of classical political economy are strongly associated with the classical liberal doctrine of minimal government intervention in the economy, though it does not necessarily oppose the state's provision of a few basic public goods.[16]. Classical liberal thought has generally assumed a clear division between the economy and other realms of social activity, such as the state. [17] While economic liberalism favors markets unfettered by the government, it maintains that the state has a legitimate role in providing public goods.[18] For instance, Adam Smith argued that the state has a role in providing roads, canals, schools and bridges that cannot be efficiently implemented by private entities. However, he preferred that these goods should be paid proportionally to their consumption (e.g. putting a toll). In addition, he advocated retaliatory tariffs to bring about free trade, and copyrights and patents to encourage innovation.[18]

Marxian political economy

Karl Marx considered capitalism to be a historically specific mode of production (the way in which the productive property is owned and controlled, combined with the corresponding social relations between individuals based on their connection with the process of production) in which capitalism has become the dominant mode of production. [19] The capitalist stage of development or "bourgeois society," for Marx, represented the most advanced form of social organization to date, but he also thought that the working classes would come to power in a worldwide socialist or communist transformation of human society as the end of the series of first aristocratic, then capitalist, and finally working class rule was reached[20]. Karl Marx Following Adam Smith, Marx distinguished the use value of commodities from their exchange value in the market. Capital, according to Marx, is created with the purchase of commodities for the purpose of creating new commodities with an exchange value higher than the sum of the original purchases. For Marx, the use of labor power had itself become a commodity under capitalism; the exchange value of labor power, as reflected in the wage, is less than the value it produces for the capitalist. This difference in values, he argues, constitutes surplus value, which the capitalists extract and accumulate. In his

book Capital, Marx argues that the capitalist mode of production is distinguished by how the owners of capital extract this surplus from workers all prior class societies had extracted surplus labor, but capitalism was new in doing so via the sale-value of produced commodities.[21]For Marx, this cycle of the extraction of the surplus value by the owners of capital or the bourgeoisie becomes the basis of class struggle. However, this argument is intertwined with Marx's version of the labor theory of value asserting that labor is the source of all value, and thus of profit. This theory is contested by most current economists, including some contemporary Marxian economists.[8] One line of subsequent Marxian thinking sees the centrally planned economic systems of existing "communist" societies that were still based on exploitation of labor as "state capitalism."[22]Vladimir Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), modified classic Marxist theory and argued that capitalism necessarily induced monopoly capitalism - which he also called "imperialism" - in order to find new markets and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism.[23]Some 20th century Marxian economists consider capitalism to be a social formation where capitalist class processes dominate, but are not exclusive.[24] Capitalist class processes, to these thinkers, are simply those in which surplus labor takes the form of surplus value, usable as capital; other tendencies for utilization of labor nonetheless exist simultaneously in existing societies where capitalist processes are predominant. However, other late Marxian thinkers argue that a social formation as a whole may be classed as capitalist if capitalism is the mode by which a surplus is extracted, even if this surplus is not produced by capitalist activity, as when an absolute majority of the population is engaged in non-capitalist economic activity.[25]

Weberian political sociology

Max Weber in 1917 In some social sciences, the understanding of the defining characteristics of capitalism has been strongly influenced by 19th century German social theorist Max Weber. Weber considered market exchange, rather than production, as the defining feature of capitalism; capitalist enterprises, in contrast to their counterparts in prior modes of economic activity, was their rationalization of production, directed toward maximizing efficiency and productivity. According to Weber, workers in pre-capitalist economic institutions understood work in terms of a personal relationship between master and journeyman in a guild, or between lord and peasant in a manor.[26]In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905), Weber sought to trace how capitalism transformed these traditional modes of economic activity. For Weber, the 'spirit of capitalism' began with the Puritan understanding of ones calling in life and their laboring for God rather than for men. This is pictured in Proverbs 22:29, Seest thou a man diligent in his calling? He shall stand before kings and in Colossians 3:23, "Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men." In the Protestant Ethic Weber further stated that moneymaking provided it is done legally is, within the modern economic order, the result and the expression of diligence in ones calling Thus in Weber's opinion, it was with a devotion to God in the workplace and seeking assurance of salvation described as the Protestant work ethic that the Puritans helped form the basis to the modern economic order.This 'spirit' was gradually codified by law; rendering wage-

laborers legally 'free' to sell work; encouraging the development of technology aimed at the organization of production on the basis of rational principles; and clarifying the apparent separation of the public and private lives of workers, especially between the home and the workplace. Therefore, unlike Marx, Weber did not see capitalism as primarily the consequence of changes in the means of production.[27]Capitalism, for Weber, was the most advanced economic system ever developed over the course of human history. Weber associated capitalism with the advance of the business corporation, public credit, and the further advance of bureaucracy of the modern world. Although Weber defended capitalism against its socialist critics of the period, he saw its rationalizing tendencies as a possible threat to traditional cultural values and institutions, and a possible 'iron cage' constraining human freedom.[28] This is further seen in his criticism of "specialists without spirit, hedonists without a heart" that were developing, in his opinion, with the fading of the original Puritan 'spirit' associated with capitalism.

The Crisis of the 14th Century and the "Pre-History of Capitalism

According to some historians, the modern capitalist system has its origin in the "crisis of the fourteenth century," a conflict between the land-owning aristocracy and the agricultural producers, the serfs. Feudal arrangements inhibited the development of capitalism in a number of ways. Because serfs were forced to produce for lords, they had no interest in technological innovation; because serfs produced to sustain their own families, they had no interest in co-operating with one another. Because lords owned the land, they relied on force to guarantee that they were provided with sufficient food. Because lords were not producing to sell on the market, there was no competitive pressure for them to innovate. Finally, because lords expanded their power and wealth through military means, they spent their wealth on military equipment or on conspicuous consumption that helped foster alliances with other lords; they had no incentive to invest in developing new productive technologies.[38]This arrangement was shaken by the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century. This crisis had several causes: agricultural productivity reached its technological limitations and stopped growing; bad weather led to the Great Famine of 1315-1317; the Black Death in 1348-1350 led to a population crash. These factors led to a decline in agricultural production. In response feudal lords sought to expand agricultural production by expanding their domains through warfare; they therefore demanded more tribute from their serfs to pay for military expenses. In England, many serfs rebelled. Some moved to towns, some purchased land, and some entered into favorable contracts to rent lands, from lords desperate to repopulate their estates.[39]The collapse of the manorial system in England created a class of tenantfarmers with more freedom to market their goods and thus more incentive to invest in new technologies. Lords who did not want to rely on rents could buy out or evict tenant farmers, but then had to hire free-labor to work their estates giving them an incentive in investing in production.[40] This process was encouraged by the enclosure movement, which transferred public lands to large landowners, who used the land to graze sheep rather than produce food. As Englands wool exports grew in the fifteenth century, the process of enclosure accelerated, forcing many tenant-farmers to give up farming and seek wage-labor.[41] According to Karl Marx, the rise of the contractual relationship is inextricably bound to the end of the obligatory relationship between serfs and lords. Marx

characterizes this transformation as the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.[42] It was this divorcing that turned the serfs land into the lords capital. According to Marx, this rearrangement led to a new division of classes:two very different kinds of commodity owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of value they have appropriated by buying the labour power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their own labor-power, and therefore the sellers of labour. Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves nor do they own the means of production that transformed land and even money into what we now call capital.[43] Marx labeled this period the "pre-history of capitalism.[44]

Mercantilism
The economic and political system of the early modern period (16th to 18th centuries) from which capitalism evolved is commonly described as merchant capitalism or mercantilism[19] (EB). This period was associated with geographic discoveries by merchant overseas traders, especially from England and the Low Countries; the European colonization of the Americas; and the rapid growth in overseas trade. The associated rise of a bourgeoisie class eclipsed the prior feudal system. It is mercantilism that Adam Smith refuted in his Wealth of Nations which is a recognized treatise of capitalist theory. Mercantilism was a system of trade for profit, although commodities were still largely produced by non-capitalist production methods.[8] Noting the various pre-capitalist features of mercantilism, Karl Polanyi argued that capitalism did not emerge until the establishment of free trade in Britain in the 1830s. Under mercantilism, European merchants, backed by state controls, subsidies, and monopolies, made most of their profits from the buying and selling of goods. In the words of Francis Bacon, the purpose of mercantilism was "the opening and wellbalancing of trade; the cherishing of manufacturers; the banishing of idleness; the repressing of waste and excess by sumptuary laws; the improvement and husbanding of the soil; the regulation of prices"[45] Similar practices of economic regimentation had begun earlier in the medieval towns. However, under mercantilism, given the contemporaneous rise of absolutism, the state superseded the local guilds as the regulator of the economy.Among the major tenets of mercantilist theory was bullionism, a doctrine stressing the importance of accumulating precious metals. Mercantilists argued that a state should export more goods than it imported so that foreigners would have to pay the difference in precious metals. Mercantilists asserted that only raw materials that could not be extracted at home should be imported; and promoted government subsidies, such as the granting of monopolies and protective tariffs, were necessary to encourage home production of manufactured goods.Proponents of mercantilism emphasized state power and overseas conquest as the principal aim of economic policy. If a state could not supply its own raw materials, according to the mercantilists, it should acquire colonies from which they could be extracted. Colonies constituted not only sources of supply for raw

materials but also markets for finished products. Because it was not in the interests of the state to allow competition, held the mercantilists, colonies should be prevented from engaging in manufacturing and trading with foreign powers.

Industrial capitalism and laissez-faire capitalism

Mercantilism declined in Great Britain in the mid-18th century, when a new group of economic theorists, led by David Hume[46] and Adam Smith, challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines as the belief that the amount of the worlds wealth remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state. However, in more undeveloped economies, such as Prussia and Russia, with their much younger manufacturing bases, mercantilism continued to find favor after other states had turned to newer doctrines.The mid-18th century gave rise to industrial (bourgeois) capitalism, made possible by the accumulation of vast amounts of capital under the merchant phase of capitalism and its investment in machinery. Industrial capitalism, which Marx dated from the last third of the 18th century, marked the development of the factory system of manufacturing, characterized by a complex division of labor between and within work process and the routinization of work tasks; and finally established the global domination of the capitalist mode of production.[19]During the resulting Industrial Revolution, the industrialist replaced the merchant as a dominant actor in the capitalist system and effected the decline of the traditional handicraft skills of artisans, guilds, and journeymen. Also during this period, capitalism marked the transformation of relations between the British landowning gentry and peasants, giving rise to the production of cash crops for the market rather than for subsistence on a feudal manor. The surplus generated by the rise of commercial agriculture encouraged increased mechanization of agriculture and the rise of the bourgeoisie.The rise of industrial capitalism was also associated with the decline of mercantilism. Mid- to late-nineteenth-century Britain is widely regarded as the classic case of laissez-faire ( bourgeois) capitalism.[19] Laissez-faire capitalism gained favor over mercantilism in Britain in the 1840s with the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts. In line with the teachings of the classical political economists, led by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Britain embraced liberalism, encouraging free competition for all classes, and eliminating barriers to the development of a market economy. However, due to companies legislation, British laissez-faire was not exclusively unregulated.[47] The Limited Liability Act 1855 and the Joint Stock Companies Act 1856 were examples.Most of the early proponents of a economic liberalism in the United States subscribed to the American School. This school of thought was inspired by the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, who proposed the creation of the First National Bank and the Second National Bank and increased tariffs (e.g. tariff of 1828) to favor northern industrial interests. Following Hamilton's death, the more abiding protectionist influence in the antebellum period came from Henry Clay and his American System.In the mid-19th century, the United States followed the Whig tradition of economic liberalism, which included increased state control, regulation and macroeconomic development of infrastructure.[48] Public works such as the provision and regulation transportation such as railroads took effect. The Pacific Railway Acts provided the development of the First Transcontinental Railroad.[48] In order to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil

War, the United States government imposed its first personal income tax, on August 5, 1861, as part of the Revenue Act of 1861 (3% of all incomes over US $800; rescinded in 1872).Following the Civil War, the movement towards a mixed economy accelerated with even more protectionism and government regulation. In the 1880s and 1890s, significant tariff increases were enacted (see the McKinley Tariff and Dingley Tariff). Moreover, with the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the Sherman Anti-trust Act, the federal government began to assume an increasing role in regulating and directing the country's economy.

Finance capitalism and state monopoly capitalism

In the late 19th century, the control and direction of large areas of industry came into the hands of financiers. This period has been defined as "finance capitalism," characterized by the subordination of processes of production to the accumulation of money profits in a financial system.[8] Major characteristics of capitalism in this period included the establishment of large industrial cartels or monopolies; the ownership and management of industry by financiers divorced from the production process; and the development of a complex system of banking, an equity market, and corporate holdings of capital through stock ownership.[8] Increasingly, large industries and land became the subject of profit and loss by financial speculators.Late 19th and early 20th century capitalism has also been described as an era of "monopoly capitalism," marked by movement from laissezfaire ideology and government policies to the concentration of capital into large monopolistic or oligopolistic holdings by banks and financiers, and characterized by the growth of large corporations and a division of labor separating shareholders, owners, managers, and actual laborers.[49] Although the concept of monopoly capitalism originated among Marxist theorists,[50] non-Marxist economic historians have also commented on the rise of monopolies and trusts in the period. Murray Rothbard, asserting that the large cartels of the late 19th century could not arise on the free market, argued that the "state monopoly capitalism" of the period was the result of interventionist policies adopted by governments, such as tariffs, quotas, licenses, and partnership between state and big business.[51] By the last quarter of the 19th century, the emergence of large industrial trusts had provoked legislation in the U.S. to reduce the monopolistic tendencies of the period. Gradually, the U.S. federal government played a larger and larger role in passing antitrust laws and regulation of industrial standards for key industries of special public concern. However, contemporary, non-bourgeois economic historians believe these new laws were in fact designed to aid large corporations at the expense of smaller competitors.[52] By the end of the 19th century, economic depressions and boom and bust business cycles had become a recurring problem, although such problems were most likely caused by government intervention (according to the bourgeoisie of the time), not failures in free markets (Rand 1967, Friedman 1962, Bernstein 2005). In particular, the Long Depression of the 1870s and 1880s and the Great Depression of the 1930s affected almost the entire capitalist world, and generated discussion about capitalisms long-term survival prospects. During the 1930s, Marxist commentators often posited the possibility of capitalism's decline or demise, often in alleged contrast to the ability of the Soviet Union

to avoid suffering the effects of the global depression, despite the fact that the Soviet Union represented a nationalist dictatorship rather than a Marxist state.[53]

After the Great Depression

The economic recovery of the world's leading capitalist economies in the period following the end of the Great Depression and the Second World War a period of unusually rapid growth by historical standards eased discussion of capitalism's eventual decline or demise (Engerman 2001).In the period following the global depression of the 1930s, the state played an increasingly prominent role in the capitalistic system throughout much of the world. In 1929, for example, total U.S. government expenditures (federal, state, and local) amounted to less than one-tenth of GNP; from the 1970s they amounted to around one-third (EB). Similar increases were seen in all bourgeois economies, some of which, such as France, have reached even higher ratios of government expenditures to GNP than the United States. These economies have since been widely described as "mixed economies."During the postwar boom, a broad array of new analytical tools in the social sciences were developed to explain the social and economic trends of the period, including the concepts of post-industrial society and the welfare state.[19] The phase of capitalism from the beginning of the postwar period through the 1970s has sometimes been described as state capitalism, especially by Marxian thinkers.[22]The long postwar boom ended in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the situation was worsened by the rise of stagflation.[54] Exceptionally high inflation combined with slow output growth, rising unemployment, and eventually recession caused loss of credibility of Keynesian welfare-statist mode of regulation. Under the influence of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Western states embraced policy prescriptions inspired by the laissez-faire capitalism and classical liberalism. In particular, monetarism, a theoretical alternative to Keynesianism that is more compatible with laissez-faire, gained increasing prominence in the capitalist world, especially under the leadership of Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher in the UK in the 1980s. In the eyes of many economic and political commentators, collapse of the Soviet Union supposedly brought further evidence of superiority of market capitalism over communism.

Globalization
Although overseas trade has been associated with the development of capitalism for over five hundred years, some thinkers argue that a number of trends associated with globalization have acted to increase the mobility of people and capital since the last quarter of the 20th century, combining to circumscribe the room to maneuver of states in choosing non-capitalist models of development. Today, these trends have bolstered the argument that capitalism should now be viewed as a truly world system.[19] However, other thinkers argue that globalization, even in its quantitative degree, is no greater now than during earlier periods of capitalist trade.[55]After the abandonment of the Bretton Woods system and the strict state control of foreign exchange rates, the total value of transactions in foreign exchange was estimated to be at least twenty times greater than that of all foreign movements of goods and services (EB). The internationalization of

finance, which some see as beyond the reach of state control, combined with the growing ease with which large corporations have been able to relocate their operations to lowwage states, has posed the question of the 'eclipse' of state sovereignty, arising from the growing 'globalization' of capital.[56]Economic growth in the last half-century has been consistently strong. Life expectancy has almost doubled in the developing world since the postwar years and is starting to close the gap on the developed world where the improvement has been smaller. Infant mortality has decreased in every developing region of the world, thanks to the work of a handful of charitable bourgeoisie, but the destitute continue to suffer and die while the bourgeoisie increase their profits.[57] While scientists generally agree about the size of global income inequality, there is a general disagreement about the recent direction of change of it.[58] However, it is growing within particular nations such as China.[59] The book The Improving State of the World argues that economic growth since the industrial revolution has been very strong and that factors such as adequate nutrition, life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, prevalence of child labor, education, and available free time have improved greatly.In 2008, state intervention in global capital markets by the American and other governments was seen by many as signaling a crisis for free-market capitalism. Serious turmoil in the banking system and financial markets due to the subprime mortgage crisis reached a critical stage during September 2008, characterized by severely contracted liquidity in the global credit markets and going-concern threats to investment banks and other institutions. [60][61]

Criticism
Capitalism has met with strong opposition throughout its history. Most of the criticism came from the left, but some from the right, and some from religious elements. Many 19th century conservatives were among the most strident critics of capitalism, seeing market exchange and commodity production as threats to cultural and religious traditions. Some critics of capitalism consider economic regulation necessary in order to reduce corruption, negligence, and numerous other problems caused by free markets.Prominent leftist critics have included socialists like Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg, and anarchists including Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Murray Bookchin, Rudolf Rocker, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and others. Movements like the Luddites, Narodniks, Shakers, Utopian Socialists and others have opposed capitalism for various reasons. Marxism advocated a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism that would lead eventually to communism. Marxism also influenced social democratic and labour parties, which seek change through existing democratic channels instead of revolution, and believe that capitalism should be heavily regulated rather than abolished. Many aspects of capitalism have come under attack from the relatively recent anti-globalization movement.Some religions criticize or outright oppose specific elements of capitalism. Some traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam forbid lending money at interest, although methods of Islamic banking have been developed. Christianity has been a source of both praise and criticism for capitalism, particularly its materialist aspects.[76] The first socialists drew many of

their principles from Christian values (see Christian socialism), against "bourgeois" values of profiteering, greed, selfishness, and hoarding. Christian critics of capitalism may not oppose capitalism entirely, but support a mixed economy in order to ensure adequate labor standards and relations, as well as economic justice. There are many Protestant denominations (particularly in the United States) who have reconciled with or are ardently in favor of capitalism, particularly in opposition to secular socialism. However, in the U.S. and around the world there are many Protestant Christian traditions which are critical of, or even oppose, capitalism. Another critic is the Indian philosopher P.R. Sarkar, founder of the Ananda Marga movement, who developed the Social Cycle Theory and proposed a solution called the Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT).[77] [78] Some problems said to be associated with capitalism include: unfair and inefficient distribution of wealth and power; a tendency toward market monopoly or oligopoly (and government by oligarchy); imperialism and various forms of economic and cultural exploitation; and phenomena such as social alienation, inequality, unemployment, and economic instability. Critics have maintained that there is an inherent tendency towards oligolopolistic structures when laissez-faire is combined with capitalist private property. Because of this tendency either laissez-faire, or private property, or both, have drawn fire from critics who believe an essential aspect of economic freedom is the extension of the freedom to have meaningful decision-making control over productive resources to everyone. Economist Branko Horvat asserts, "it is now well known that capitalist development leads to the concentration of capital, employment and power. It is somewhat less known that it leads to the almost complete destruction of economic freedom."[79]Near the start of the 20th century, Vladimir Lenin claimed that state use of military power to defend capitalist interests abroad was an inevitable corollary of monopoly capitalism.[80] This concept of political economy concerning the relationship between economic and political power among and within states includes critics of capitalism who assign to it responsibility for not only economic exploitation, but imperialist, colonialist and counterrevolutionary wars, repressions of workers and trade unionists, genocides, massacres, and so on.Some environmentalists claim that capitalism requires continual economic growth, and will inevitably deplete the finite natural resources of the earth, and other broadly utilized resources. Such thinkers, including Murray Bookchin, have argued that capitalist production passes on environmental costs to all of society, and is unable to adequately mitigate its impact upon ecosystems and the biosphere at large.Some labor historians and scholars, such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Tom Brass and, latterly Marcel van der Linden, have also argued that unfree labor the use of a labor force comprised of slaves, indentured servants, criminal convicts, political prisoners, and/or other coerced persons is compatible with capitalist relations.[81]

Fascism
Fascism is a totalitarian nationalist ideology that advocates itself as being a third position alternative to both capitalism and communism.[1][2] It seeks to form a mass movement of militants who are willing to engage in violence against their political opponents and groups or individuals that the movement deems to be enemies.[3] Fascist movements threaten or utilize revolution against governments in order to allow the movement to gain

power.[4] Fascists wish to solve existing economic, political, and social problems by achieving a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation or race as well as promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.[5][6][7][8][9]Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: nationalism (including collectivism and populism based on nationalist values); Third Position (including class collaboration, corporatism, economic planning, mixed economy, national socialism, national syndicalism, protectionism,); totalitarianism (including dictatorship, indoctrination, major social interventionism, and statism); and militarism.[10] [11] Fascism opposes communism, liberalism and conservatism.[12][6][5][13][14][15][16][17]Some authors reject broad usage of the term or exclude certain parties and regimes.[18] Following the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II, there have been few selfproclaimed fascist groups and individuals. In contemporary political discourse, the term fascist is often used by adherents of some ideologies as a pejorative description of their opponents.

Definitions
The popular presentation of Fascism in the publications of the Western World have been radically different in the period during and after World War II than in the period 1919 1939, when Mussolini and the Italian Fascists were widely acclaimed.[22][23] As fascism was associated with the Axis powers who fought and lost the war, and the Western World were mostly among the victorious Allied powers, it was difficult for many years to provide a neutral view of the topic. English-speaking (and other) historians, political scientists, and other scholars have engaged in long and furious debates concerning the exact nature of fascism.[24] However since the 1990s scholars have begun to gather a rough consensus on the system's core tenets. Noted proponents[clarify] include Stanley Payne, Hamish MacDonald, Roger Griffin, Nicholas Burgess Farrell and Robert O. Paxton.While various attempts to define Fascism have been made, the problem scholars often run into is that each form of fascism is different from any other, leaving many definitions as too wide or too narrow.[25][26]

Political spectrum
The place of fascism in the political spectrum remains highly debated. The founders of fascism in Italy included people who were previously socialists, syndicalists, military men and anarchists who had become angered at the international left's opposition to patriotism. Benito Mussolini, Michele Bianchi and Dino Grandi were all previously socialists.[28] In 1932, Italian Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile wrote in the Italian Encyclopedia: "We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a Fascist century. If the 19th century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the 'collective' century, and therefore the century of the State."[29]Walter Laqueur says that historical fascism "did not belong to the extreme Left, yet defining it as part of the extreme Right is not very illuminating either", but that it "was always a coalition between radical, populist ('fascist') elements and others gravitating toward the extreme Right".[9] Some authors such as Roger Griffin argue that since the end of World War II, fascist

movements have become intertwined with the radical right, describing certain groups as part of a "fascist radical right".[30][31] Stanley Payne notes the alliances and sometimes fusion between fascists and right-wing authoritarians but stresses the important differences between the two.[32] One of the biggest differences between fascism and leftwing politics is that fascism rejects the idea of class conflict in favor of class collaboration,[33] while also rejecting socialist internationalism in favor of statist nationalism.[34] A. James Gregor argues that the most "uninspired effort to understand fascism" is to simply place it on the right-wing, or the radical right, as the common tendency was in the Anglosphere during the post-war period.[24]The Fascist Manifesto's initial promises included nationalization property and class conflict, but some their promises were moderated or abolished later. Many economists define "socialism" as an ideology which aims at constructing a society in which the means of production are socialized.[35] Some argue that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were socialist countries according to this definition. Sternhell sees fascism as anti-Marxist form of socialism. [36] Fascists described themselves a "third force" that was outside the traditional political spectrum altogether. Many scholars accept fascism as a search for a third way among these positions.[37][38][39][40][41][42][6][43][44] Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, described his position as "hard centre" in the political spectrum.[45] Lipset sees fascism as "extremism of the center".[36]

Nationalism
Fascism sees the struggle of nation and race as fundamental in society, in opposition to communism's perception of class struggle[50] and in opposition to capitalism's focus on the value of productivity, materialism, and individualism. The nation is seen in fascism as a single organic entity which binds people together by their ancestry and is seen as a natural unifying force of people. Fascists promote the unification and expansion of influence, power, and/or territory of and for their nation. Expansionism Fascists claim the expansion of a nation is a natural process. On the issue of expansionist imperialism, Italian Fascists described it as a necessity for the nation, the Italian Encyclopedia written in 1932 in Fascist Italy declared: "For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence."[51] Similarly the Nazis promoted territorial expansionism to in their words provide "living space" to the German nation.[52]Fascists use left-wing political terms to describe society such as "bourgeois" and "proletariat".[53] While fascists support the unifying of proletariat workers to their cause along socialistic or syndicalistic lines, fascists specify that they advocate national socialism or national syndicalism which promotes the creation of a strong proletarian nation, but not a proletarian class.[54] Fascists also make clear that they have no hostility to the petite bourgeosie (lower middle-class) and small businesses and promise these groups protection alongside the proletariat from the upper-class bourgeosie, big business, and Marxism.[55] Also, national-socialistic fascists, unlike international socialists, do not believe in the notion of equality of people across ethnic, cultural, national, or religious

lines. Fascists declare either nation or race as the supreme unifying source of a people, and claim that class divisions which they perceive as being imposed by capitalism, communism, and international socialism must be subdued to allow the nation or race to unify.In the case of Italy, Fascism arose in the 1920s as a mixture of national syndicalist notions with an anti-materialist theory of the state. Many Italian Fascists were former international socialists who abandoned international socialism due to its perceived unpatriotic nature for being unwilling to support Italy's war against Austria-Hungary in World War I as international socialists condemned the conflict as being a "bourgeois war". While others with nationalist sympathies saw the war as necessary to reunite Italian territories in Austria to Italy to end what they perceived as national oppression of Italians in Austria-Hungary. Mussolini and other ex-socialists formed the Fascist movement in 1919 with a left-wing platform combined with nationalism in the Fascist Manifesto of 1919. Over time the Italian Fascists would drift rightward on social and economic policies, such as abandoning previous hostility to the monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and businesses in order to attract more support for the Fascist regime while retaining its nationalist agenda. Upon being ousted in 1943 and a new Fascist regime being created in the German puppet state of the Italian Social Republic, Mussolini briefly returned to earlier left-wing promises to attempt to regain support for the Fascist movement, such as advocating major nationalization of property and promoting the Fascist movement as a left-wing movement.[56]Fascists accused parliamentary democracy of producing division and decline, and wished to renew the nation from decadence. Fascists dismissed the Marxist concept of "class struggle" and oppose international socialists' promotion of internationalism instead of nationalism, by advocating "class collaboration" devoted to unifying the nation. Corporatism It is the system in which economy is collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at national level. [63] In such system capital and labor are integrated into guilds, known as "corporations" (not the same as contemporary business corporations), that represent economic, industrial, agrarian, and professional groups. These associations are obligatory bodies with a strict hierarchy; their purpose is to exert control over their respective areas of social or economic life through class collaboration. As a concept, corporatism is closely liked with syndicalism. Class collaboration Under fascist corporatism, class collaboration is advocated as a means to resolve class conflict and create a unified society across class lines. Fascist corporatism opposes class conflict and class-based society as promoted by communism and international left, and blames capitalism for exploiting workers and nations. Economic planning Fascists opposed what they believed to be laissez-faire or quasi-laissez-faire economic policies dominant in the era prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Income

Tax, and the subsequent Great Depression.[64] People of many different political stripes blamed laissez-faire capitalism for the Great Depression, and fascists promoted their ideology as a "third way" between capitalism and Marxian socialism.[65] Their policies manifested as a radical extension of government control over the economy without wholesale expropriation of the means of production. Fascist governments nationalized some key industries, managed their currencies and made some massive state investments. They also introduced price controls, wage controls and other types of economic planning measures.[66] Fascist governments instituted state-regulated allocation of resources, especially in the financial and raw materials sectors.Other than nationalization of certain industries, private property was allowed, but property rights and private initiative were contingent upon service to the state. to ensure that "benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual."[70] They also introduced price controls and other types of economic planning measures.[66]Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak. [71] In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. [72] Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."[73]Fascists were most vocal in their opposition to finance capitalism, interest charging, and profiteering.[74] Some fascists, particularly Nazis, considered finance capitalism a "parasitic" "Jewish conspiracy".[75] Nevertheless, fascists also opposed Marxism and independent trade unions.According to sociologist Stanislav Andreski, fascist economics "foreshadowed most of the fundamental features of the economic system of Western European countries today: the radical extension of government control over the economy without a wholesale expropriation of the capitalists but with a good dose of nationalisation, price control, incomes policy, managed currency, massive state investment, attempts at overall planning (less effectual than the Fascist because of the weakness of authority)."[66] Politics professor Stephen Haseler credits fascism with providing a model of economic planning for social democracy.[76]In Nazi economic planning, in place of ordinary profit incentive to guide the economy, investment was guided through regulation to accord to the needs of the State. The profit incentive for business owners was retained, though greatly modified through various profit-fixing schemes: "Fixing of profits, not their suppression, was the official policy of the Nazi party." However the function of profit in automatically guiding allocation of investment and unconsciously directing the course of the economy was replaced with economic planning by Nazi government agencies.[77]

Totalitarianism
Fascism explicitly supports the creation of a totalitarian state. Italian Fascists declared the following:The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or
spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist Statea synthesis and a unit inclusive of all valuesinterprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people. Doctrine of Fascism 1935.[79]Some have claimed however that in

spite of Italian Fascism's attempt to form a totalitarian state, this was not achieved in Italy, arguing that Fascism in Italy as a political movement devolved to a cult of personality around Mussolini.[80] However both proponents and opponents of Italian

Fascism at the time of its rule in Italy claimed that it had a clear intention to establish a totalitarian state.[81] In addition, Hungarian fascist leader Gyula Gmbs and his fascist Hungarian National Defence Association attempted to form a totalitarian state in Hungary but failed after Gmbs' death in 1936 and the movement subsequently failed to remain in government.[82]The Nazi regime in Germany has also been seen by most scholars as well as critics as being a totalitarian regime.[83][84]In addition while fascist movements declared their intention to form a totalitarian state, they exercised much less influence over the economy that that of communist-led states, in that private property remained largely free from government interferance.[85] Nevertheless, like the Soviet Union, fascist states pursued economic policies to strengthen state power and spread ideology, such as by consolidating trade unions to be state-controlled unions.[86] Attempts were made by both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to establish "autarky" (selfsufficiency) through singificant economic planning, but both failed to make the two countries self-sufficient.[87] Dictatorship A key element of fascism is its endorsement of the leadership over a country of a dictator, who is often known simply as the "Leader" (Duce in Italian, Fhrer in German, Caudillo in Spanish, and Conductor in Romanian). Fascist leaders that rule countries are not always heads of state, but heads of government, such as Benito Mussolini who held power under the largely figurehead King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III. As part of a totalitarian agenda, the fascist movement does not only ask for obedience to the leader, but wants people to recognize and worship the leader as an infallible saviour of the people. Indoctrination Fascist states have pursued policies of indoctrination of society to their fascist movements such as through propaganda deliberately spread through education and media through regulation of the production of education and media material.[92][93] Education was designed to glorify the fascist movement, inform students of it being of major historical and political importance to the nation, attempted to purge education of ideas that were not consistant with the beliefs of the fascist movement, and taught students to be obediant to the fascist movement.[94]
Positions on culture, gender roles and relations, and sexual orientation

Fascism also tends to promote principles of masculine heroism, militarism, and discipline; and rejects cultural pluralism and multiculturalism.[109]The Italian Fascist government during the "Battle for Births" gave financial incentives to women who raised large families as well as policies designed to reduce the number of women employed to allow women to give birth to larger numbers of children.[110]Nazi propaganda sometimes promoted pre- and extramarital sexual relations, unwed motherhood, and divorce and at other times opposed such behaviour.[111] The growth of Nazi power, however, was accompanied by a breakdown of traditional sexual morals with regard to extramarital sex

and licentiousness.[112]The Italian Fascist government declared homosexuality illegal in Italy in 1931.[113] The Nazis opposition to homosexuality was based on the Nazis view that homosexuality was degenerate, effeminate, and perverted and undermined the masculinity which they promoted and because they did not produce children for the master race.[114] Nevertheless the Nazis considered homosexuality curable through therapy. They explained it though modern scientism and the study of sexology which said that homosexuality could be felt by "normal" people and not just an abnormal minority.[115] Critics have claimed that the Nazis' claim of scientific reasons for their promotion of racism, and hostility to homosexuals is pseudoscience,[116][117] in that scientific findings were selectively picked that promoted their pre-existing views, while scientific findings opposing those views were rejected and not taken into account.

Positions on racism
Initially Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were at odds over the idea of racism. Mussolini in the early 1930s claimed that the concept of a biologically pure and superior race as believed by Hitler was flawed and impossible and saw racism as a flawed ideology. On the issue of social equality, Mussolini on a number of occasions rejected racism, and rejected the notion of the Nazis of biologically superior races. Hitler believed that race and racism was fundamental and based many of his views and policies on the issue of race and racism. Under pressure from Germany, Mussolini enacted racist policies in the late 1930s, including anti-Semitism which was highly unpopular in Italy and in the Italian Fascist movement itself. Fascists in other countries also had varying positions on racism, Plnio Salgado and his Integralists of Brazil opposed racism, Gyula Gmbs and his M.O.V.E. party in Hungary supported racism, and others were divided on this issue as well. Neofascism has tended to associate with racism.

Positions on religion
The attitude of fascism toward religion has run the spectrum from persecution, to denunciation, to cooperation, [119] to embrace.[120] Stanley Payne notes that fundamental to fascism was the foundation of a purely materialistic "civic religion" which "would displace preceding structures of belief and relegate supernatural religion to a secondary role, or to none at all" and that "though there were specific examples of religious or would-be 'Christian fascists,' fascism presupposed a post-Christian, post-religious, secular, and immanent frame of reference." [121]According to a biographer of Mussolini, "Initially, fascism was fiercely anti-Catholic" - the Church being a competitor for dominion of the people's hearts. [122] Mussolini, originally a socialist internationalist and atheist, published anti-Catholic writings and planned for the confiscation of Church property, but eventually moved to accommodation. [119] Hitler was born a Roman Catholic but renounced his faith at the age of twelve[citation needed] and largely used religious references to attract religious support to the Nazi political agenda.[citation needed] Mussolini largely endorsed the Roman Catholic Church for political legitimacy, as during the Lateran Treaty talks, Fascist officials engaged in bitter arguments with Vatican officials

and put pressure on them to accept the terms that the regime deemed acceptable.[123] Nazis arrested and killed thousands of Catholic clergy (18% of the priests in Poland were killed), eventually consigning thousands of them to concentration camps (2600 died in Dachau alone).[124] Although Jews were obviously the greatest and primary target, Hitler also sent Roman Catholics to concentration camps along with the Jews and killed 3 million Catholic Poles along with three million Jewish Poles.[125] The Nazi party had decidedly pagan elements. Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anticlerical, some believe they both understood that it would be rash to begin their Kulturkampfs prematurely, such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, being put off while they dealt with other enemies. [126]Relations were close in the likes of the Belgian Rexists (which was eventually denounced by the Church). In addition, many Fascists were anti-clerical in both private and public life. [127] In Mexico the fascist[128][129][130] Red Shirts not only renounced religion but were vehemently atheist[131], killing priests, and on one occasion gunned down Catholics as they left Mass.[132]Others have argued that there has been a strong connection between some versions of fascism and religion, particularly the Catholic Church.[133] Religion did play a real part in the Ustasha in Croatia which had strong religious (Catholic) overtones and clerics in positions of power.[134] Spain's Falangists emphasized the struggle against the atheism of the left. The nationalist authoritarian movement in the Slovak Republic (the People's Party) was established by a catholic priest (Father Hlinka) and presided over by another (Father Tiso). The fascist movement in Romania known as the Iron Guard or the Legion of Archangel Michael invariably preceded its meetings with a church service and "their demonstrations were usually led by priests carrying icons and religious flags." Similar to Ayatollah Khomeini's Shi'a Islamist movement in Iran, it promoted a cult of "suffering, sacrifice and martyrdom."[135] [136] In Latin America the most important Fascist movement was Plinio Salgado's Brazilian "Integralism." Built on a network of lay religious associations, its vision was of an "integral state," that `comes from Christ, is inspired in Christ, acts for Christ, and goes toward Christ.` [137][138][139] Salgado, however, criticised the "dangerous pagan tendencies of Hitlerism" and maintained that his movement differed from European fascism in that it respected the "rights of the human person".[140] According to Payne, such "would be" religious fascist only gain hold where traditional belief is weakened or absent, as fascism seeks to create new nonrationalist myth structures for those who no longer hold a traditional view.[141] Hence, the rise of modern secularism in Europe and Latin America and the incursion and large scale adoption of western secular culture in the mideast leave a void where this modern secular ideology, sometimes under a religious veneer, can take hold.One theory is that religion and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic weltanschauungen" claiming the whole of the person. [119] Along these lines, Yale political scientist, Juan Linz and others have noted that secularization had created a void which could be filled by a total ideology, making totalitarianism possible[142][143], and Roger Griffin has characterized fascism as a type of anti-religious political religion.[144] Such political religions vie with existing religions, and try, if possible, to replace or eradicate them. [145] Hitler and the Nazi regime attempted to found their own version of Christianity called Positive Christianity which made major changes in its interpretation of the Bible which said that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but was not a Jew and claimed that Christ despised Jews, and that the Jews

were the ones solely responsible for Christ's death. By 1940 however, it was public knowledge that Hitler had abandoned even the syncretist idea of a positive Christianty.[146]

Italian Fascism
Italian Fascism was the first form of fascism to emerge and the originator of the name. Founded by Benito Mussolini, it is considered to be the model for the other fascisms, yet there is no agreement about which aspects of structure, tactics, culture, and ideology represent the "fascist minimum" core.

Benito Mussolini Fascism was born during a period of social and political unrest following the First World War. The war had seen Italy, born from the Italian unification less than a century earlier begin to appreciate a sense of nationalism, rather than the historic regionalism.[148] Despite the Kingdom of Italy being a fully fledged Allied Power during the war against the Central Powers, Italy was given what nationalists considered an unfair deal at the Treaty of Versailles; which they saw as the other allies "blocking" Italy from progressing to a major power.[148] A significant example of this was when the other allies told Italy to hand over the city of Fiume at the Paris Peace Conference, this saw war veteran Gabriele d'Annunzio declaring the independent state Italian Regency of Carnaro.[38] He positioned himself as Duce of the nation and declared a constitution, the Charter of Carnaro which was highly influential to early Fascism, though he himself never became a fascist.[38]An important factor in fascism gaining support in its earliest stages was the fact that it opposed discrimination based on social class and was strongly opposed to all forms of class war.[149] Fascism instead supported nationalist sentiments such as a strong unity, regardless of class, in the hopes of raising Italy up to the levels of its great Roman past. This side of fascism endeared itself to the aristocracy and the bourgeois, as it promised to protect their existence; after the Russian Revolution, they had greatly feared the prospect of a bloody class war coming to Italy by the hand of the communists and the socialists. Mussolini did not ignore the plight of the working class, however, and he gained their support with stances such as those in The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle, published in June 1919.[149] In the manifesto he demanded, amongst other things, creation of a minimum wage, showing the same confidence in labor unions (which prove to be technically and morally worthy) as was given to industry executives or public servants, voting rights for women, and the systemisation of public transport such as railways. [149] Mussolini and the fascists managed to be simultaneously revolutionary and traditionalist;[150][151] because this was vastly different to anything else in the political climate of the time, it is sometimes described as "The Third Way".[152] The Fascisti, led by one of Mussolini's close confidants, Dino Grandi, formed armed squads of war veterans called Blackshirts (or squadristi) with the goal of restoring order to the streets of Italy with a strong hand. The blackshirts clashed with communists, socialists and anarchists at parades and demonstrations; all of these factions were also involved in clashes against each other. The government rarely interfered with the blackshirts' actions,

due in part to a looming threat and widespread fear of a communist revolution. The Fascisti grew so rapidly that within two years, it transformed itself into the National Fascist Party at a congress in Rome. Also in 1921, Mussolini was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the first time and was later appointed as Prime Minister by the King in 1922. He then went on to install a dictatorship after the 10 June 1924 assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, who had finished writing The Fascist Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, by Amerigo Dumini and others agents of the Ceka secret police created by Mussolini.Influenced by the concepts of the Roman Empire, with Mussolini viewing himself as a modern day Roman Emperor, Italy set out to build the Italian Empire[153] whose colonialism would reach further into Africa in an attempt to compete with British and French colonial empires.[154] Mussolini dreamt of making Italy a nation that was "great, respected and feared" throughout Europe, and indeed the world. An early example was his bombardment of Corfu in 1923. Soon after he succeeded in setting up a puppet regime in Albania and ruthlessly consolidated Italian power in Libya, which had been a colony (loosely) since 1912. It was his dream to make the Mediterranean mare nostrum ("our sea" in Latin), and he established a large naval base on the Greek island of Leros to enforce a strategic hold on the eastern Mediterranean.

Iron Guard (Romania)

The Iron Guard was a totalitarian ultra-nationalist, antisemitic movement and political party in Romania from 1927 to 1941.[183] It was briefly in power from September 14, 1940 until January 21, 1941. The Iron Guard was founded by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on 24 July 1927 as the "Legion of the Archangel Michael" (Legiunea Arhanghelul Mihail), and it was led by him until his death in 1938. Adherents to the movement continued to be widely referred to as "legionnaires" (sometimes "legionaries"; Romanian: legionari) and the organization as the "Legion" or the "Legionary Movement" (Micarea Legionar), despite various changes of the (intermittently banned) organization's name.The Iron Guard presented itself as an alternative to corrupt, clientelist political parties, using marches, religious processions and patriotic hymns and anthems, along with volunteer work and charitable campaigns in rural areas. It was strongly anti-Semitic, promoting the idea that "Rabbinical aggression against the Christian world" in "unexpected 'protean forms': Freemasonry, Freudianism, homosexuality, atheism, Marxism, Bolshevism, the civil war in Spain, and social democracy" were undermining society.[184].The Iron Guard "willingly inserted strong elements of Orthodox Christianity into its political doctrine to the point of becoming one of the rare modern European political movements with a religious ideological structure."[185] The Guard differed from other fascist movements in that it had its mass base among the peasantry and students. However, it shared the fascist penchant for violence, up to and including political assassinations.

Nazism
Nazism, a short name for National Socialism[1][2][3][4] (German: Nationalsozialismus), refers primarily to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers

Party under Adolf Hitler; and the policies adopted by the government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.[5][6][7][8]Nazism is sometimes considered by scholars to be a form of fascism. While it incorporated elements from both political wings, it formed most of its alliances on the political right.[9]. Among the key elements of Nazism were antiparliamentarism, Pan-Germanism, racism, collectivism,[10][11] eugenics, antisemitism, opposition to economic liberalism and political liberalism,[12][13][11] anti-communism and totalitarianism.[14][15]Nazism was not a monolithic movement, but rather a (mainly German) combination of various ideologies and groups, sparked by anger at the Treaty of Versailles and what was considered to have been a Jewish/communist conspiracy to humiliate Germany at the end of the World War I. This Nazi party came to power in 1933 in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and promised a "third way" between capitalism and communism.[16]

History
National Socialist philosophy came together during a time of crisis in Germany; the nation had lost World War I in 1918, but had also been forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, a devastating capitulation, and was in the midst of a period of great economic depression and instability. The Dolchstosslegende (or stab in the back),[20] described by the National Socialists, featured a claim that the war effort was sabotaged internally, in large part by Germanys Jews. The National Socialists suggested that a lack of patriotism had led to Germanys defeat (for one, the front line was not on German soil at the time of the armistice). In politics, criticism was directed at the Social Democrats and the Weimar government (Deutsches Reich 19191933), which the National Socialists accused of selling out the country. The concept of Dolchstosslegende led many to look at Jews and other so-called non-Germans[21] living in Germany as having extra-national loyalties, thereby raising antisemitic sentiments and the Judenfrage (German for Jewish Question),[22] at a time when the Vlkisch movement and a desire to create a Greater Germany were strong.On January 5, 1919, the party that eventually became the Nazi Party was founded under the name German Workers' Party (DAP) by Anton Drexler, along with six other members.[23][24] German intelligence authorities sent Hitler, a corporal at the time, to investigate the German Workers Party. As a result, party members invited him to join after he impressed them with the speaking ability he displayed while arguing with party members. Hitler joined the party in September 1919, and he became the propaganda boss.[24][25] The party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party on February 24, 1920,[24] against Hitlers choice of Social Revolutionary Party.[26][27] Hitler ousted Drexler and became the party leader on July 29, 1921.[27][24]Although Adolf Hitler had joined the Nazi Party in September 1919, and published Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in 1925 and 1926, the seminal ideas of National Socialism had their roots in groups and individuals of decades past.[24] These include the Vlkisch movement and its religious-occult counterpart, Ariosophy. Among the various Ariosophic lodge-like groups, only the Thule Society is related to the origins of the Nazi party.The term Nazism refers to the ideology of the National Socialist German Workers Party and its Weltanschauung, which permeated German society (and to some degree European and American society) during the partys years as the German government (1933 to 1945). Free elections in 1932 under Germanys Weimar Republic made the NSDAP the largest

parliamentary faction; no similar party in any country at that time had achieved comparable electoral success. Hitlers January 30, 1933 appointment as Chancellor of Germany and his subsequent consolidation of dictatorial power marked the beginning of Nazi Germany. During its first year in power, the NSDAP announced the Tausendjhriges Reich (Thousand Years Empire) or Drittes Reich (Third Reich), a putative successor to the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire).During the night of February 27, 1933, the Reichstag fire provided Hitler with a convenient excuse for suppressing his opponents. The following day, he persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree suspending civil liberties and stripping the power of the federal German states. Opponents were imprisoned first in improvised camps (wilde Lager) and later in an organized system of Nazi concentration camps. On March 23, the Reichstag passed an Enabling Law which granted Hitler dictatorial powers. Unions were abolished and political parties, other than the National Socialists, forbidden.Having dealt with his political enemies, Hitler moved against his rivals in the party, principally those allied with Ernst Rhm, leader of the Sturmabteilung (known as SA or brownshirts) and Gregor Strasser, leader of the Nazi left wing. Between June 30 and July 2, 1934, these were purged in the so-called Night of the Long Knives. With this, Hitler assured the support of the powerful Reichswehr. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg on August 2, there was no one left who could present an effective challenge to Nazi power.The Nazi Party had been anti-Semitic from the beginning, and shortly after seizing power had attempted a boycott against the Jews (see Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses). Official measures against the Jews had been limited by the reluctance of President Hindenburg, but the Nuremberg Laws, proclaimed by Hitler at the 1935 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, provided a legal basis for systematic persecution. Visible signs of anti-Semitism were removed during the 1936 Summer Olympics, but replaced shortly thereafter.

Foreign reaction
The British Conservative party and the right-wing parties in France appeased the Nazi regime in the mid- and late 1930s, even though they had begun to criticise its totalitarianism and, in Britain especially, Nazi Germanys policies towards the Jews. However, Britain had appeased pre-Nazi Germany too. Important reasons behind this appeasement included, first, the erroneous assumption that Hitler had no desire to precipitate another world war, even though in Mein Kampf, he explained the partys program to the voters in detail, describing World War I very much as he actually fought it (overtly and explicitly committing himself to World War II in precise detail) and second, when the rebirth of the German military could no longer be ignored, a concern that neither Britain nor France was yet ready to fight an all-out war against Germany.The second reason, that the West was not ready for war with Germany is, as Churchill pointed out, unsatisfactory, for the appeasement program worsened that problem, for example by removing Czechoslovakias resources from the anti Nazi side, and adding them to the Nazi side. As Churchill said of appeasement:You were given the choice between war and
dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war. If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds are against

you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.

In 1936, Nazi Germany and Japan entered into the Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed directly at countering Soviet foreign policy. This alliance later became the basis for the Tripartite Pact with Italy, the foundation of the Axis Powers. The three nations united in their rabid opposition to communism, as well as their militaristic, racist regimes, but they failed to coordinate their military efforts effectively.In his early years, Hitler also greatly admired the United States of America. In Mein Kampf, he praised the United States for its racebased anti-immigration laws and for the subordination of the inferior black population. According to Hitler, America was a successful nation because it kept itself pure[citation needed] of lesser races[citation needed]. Nevertheless, his view of the United States became more negative as time passed.During Nazi party rule, Germany began World War II by invading Poland in September 1939 and conquered or directly controlled most of continental Western Europe except Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland by the summer of 1940. On June 22, 1941, they invaded the Soviet Union, betraying the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, and came close to capturing Moscow in December 1941. However, its fortunes in the war declined by late 1942 and early 1943 when the Allies defeated Nazi forces at Stalingrad and at both El-Alamein and Tunisia in North Africa.The Nazi regime in Germany ended with World War II in 1945, when the party was declared a criminal organisation by the victorious Allied Powers. Since 1945, Nazism has been outlawed as a political ideology in Germany, as are forms of iconography and propaganda from the Nazi era. Nevertheless, neo-Nazis continue to operate in Germany and several other countries. Following World War II and the Holocaust, the term Nazi and symbols associated with Nazism (such as the Swastika) acquired extremely negative connotations in Europe and North America.

Ideology
Nazism has come to stand for a belief in the superiority of an Aryan race, an abstraction of the Germanic peoples. During Hitlers time, the Nazis advocated a strong, centralized government under the Fhrer and claimed to defend Germany and the German people (including those of German ethnicity abroad) against Communism and so-called Jewish subversion. Ultimately, the Nazis sought to create a largely homogeneous and autarkic ethnic state, absorbing the ideas of Pan-Germanism.Historians often disagree on the principal interests of the Nazi Party and whether Nazism can be considered a coherent ideology. The original National Socialists claimed that there would be no program that would bind them, and that they wanted to reject any established world view. Still, as Hitler played a major role in the development of the Nazi Party from its early stages and rose to become the movements indisputable iconographic figurehead, much of what is thought to be Nazism is in line with Hitlers own political beliefs the ideology and the man remain largely interchangeable in the public eye. Some dispute whether Hitlers views relate directly to those surrounding the movement; the problem is exacerbated by the inability of various self-proclaimed Nazis and Nazi groups to decide on a universal ideology. But if Nazism is the world view promulgated in Mein Kampf, that world view is consistent and coherent, being characterized essentially by a conception of history as a

race struggle; the Fhrerprinzip; anti-Semitism; and the need to acquire Lebensraum (living space) at the expense of the Soviet Union.[28] The core concept of Nazism is that the German Volk is under attack from a judeo-bolshevist conspiracy,[28] and must become united, disciplined and self-sacrificing (must submit to Nazi leadership) in order to win.Hitler's political beliefs were formulated in Mein Kampf. His views were composed of three main axes: a conception of history as a race struggle influenced by Social Darwinism; antisemitism; and the idea that Germany needed to acquire land from Russia. His antisemitism, coupled with his anti-Communism, gave the grounds of his conspiracy theory of judeo-bolshevism.[28] Hitler first began to develop his views through observations he made while living in Vienna from 1907 to 1913. He concluded that a racial, religious, and cultural hierarchy existed, and he placed Aryans at the top as the ultimate superior race, while Jews and Gypsies were people at the bottom. He vaguely examined and questioned the policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where as a citizen by birth, Hitler lived during the Empires last throes. He believed that its ethnic and linguistic diversity had weakened the Empire and helped to create dissent. Further, he saw democracy as a destabilizing force because it placed power in the hands of ethnic minorities who, he claimed, weakened and destabilized the Empire by dividing it against itself. Hitlers political beliefs were then affected by World War I and the 1917 October Revolution, and saw some modifications between 1920 and 1923. He formulated them definitively in Mein Kampf.[29]

Racism and discrimination

The Nazi racial philosophy was influenced by the works of Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Madison Grant, and was elaborated by Alfred Rosenberg in the Myth of the Twentieth Century.Hitler also claimed that a nation was the highest creation of a race, and great nations (literally large nations) were the creation of homogeneous populations of great races working together. These nations developed cultures that naturally grew from races with natural good health, and aggressive, intelligent, courageous traits. The weakest nations, Hitler said, were those of impure or mongrel races, because they had divided, quarreling, and therefore weak cultures. Worst of all were seen to be the parasitic Untermensch (subhumans), mainly Jews, but also Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the disabled and so-called antisocials, all of whom were considered lebensunwertes Leben (life-unworthy life) owing to their perceived deficiency and inferiority, as well as their wandering, nationless invasions (the International Jew). The persecution of homosexuals as part of the Holocaust (with the pink triangle) has seen increasing scholarly attention since the 1990s, even though many homosexuals served in the Sturmabteilungen.According to Nazism, it is an obvious mistake to permit or encourage plurality within a nation. Fundamental to the Nazi goal was the unification of all German-speaking peoples, unjustly divided into different Nation States. The Nazis tried to recruit Dutch and Scandinavian men into the SS, considering them of superior Germanic stock, with only limited success.Hitler claimed that nations that could not defend their territory did not deserve it. He thought slave races, like the Slavic peoples, to be less worthy to exist than leader races. In particular, if a master race should require room to live (Lebensraum), he thought such a race should have the right to displace the inferior indigenous races.[35]Races without

homelands, Hitler proclaimed, were parasitic races, and the richer the members of a parasitic race were, the more virulent the parasitism was said to be. A master race could therefore, according to the Nazi doctrine, easily strengthen itself by eliminating parasitic races from its homeland. This idea was the given rationalization for the Nazis later oppression and elimination of Jews, Gypsies, Czechs, Poles, the mentally and physically handicapped, homosexuals and others not belonging to these groups or categories that were part of the Holocaust. The Waffen-SS and other German soldiers (including parts of the Wehrmacht), as well as civilian paramilitary groups in occupied territories, were responsible for the deaths of an estimated eleven million men, women, and children in concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, labor camps, and death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. Antisemitism According to Nazi propaganda, the Jews thrived on fomenting division amongst Germans and amongst states. Nazi antisemitism was primarily racial: The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race; however, the Jews were also described as plutocrats exploiting the worker: As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nations goods.[38] In addition, the Nazis articulated opposition to finance capitalism with an emphasis on antisemitic claims that this was manipulated by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers.[39] Homosexuality An estimated 100,000 homosexuals were arrested after Hitlers rise to power in the 1930s. Of those, 50,000 were suspected to be incarcerated in concentration camps, making for 5,000 to 15,000 deaths. According to Harry Oosterhuis, the Nazis original view toward homosexuality was at least ambiguous if not openly tolerant or even approving, with homosexuality common in the Sturmabteilung(SA) which was critical to Hitler as the paramilitary arm of the NSDAP.[40] Thus, the eventual arrests of homosexuals should not be viewed in the context of race hygiene or eugenics. Vlkisch-nationalist youth movements attracted homosexuals because of the preaching of Mnnerbund (male bonding); in practice, Oosterhuis says, this meant that the persecution of homosexuals was more politically motivated or opportunistic than anything else.[41] For example, the homosexuality of Ernst Rhm and other leaders of the Sturmabteilung was well known for years and became the basis for satire and jokes, including in the Army, which was highly suspicious and resentful of the SAs power and size.[42] Rhm was killed chiefly because he was perceived as a political threat, not for his homosexuality. Indeed, it was only after the murder of Roehm that the Nazis publicly expressed concern about the depraved morals of Roehm and the other S.A. leaders who were shot. Hitler in addressing the surviving storm troop leaders in Munich at noon on June 30[when?], just after the first executions, declared that for their corrupt morals alone these men deserved to die.[43]Eventually, Nazism declared itself incompatible with homosexuality, because gays did not reproduce and perpetuate the master race. In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and

Abortion." Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment,"[44] and gay men were regarded as "defilers of German blood." Homosexuals were persecuted for their sexuality. When they were prisoners in a concentration camp, they were forced to wear a pink triangle.[45]

Religion
Hitler extended his rationalizations into a religious doctrine, underpinned by his criticism of traditional Catholicism. In particular, and closely related to Positive Christianity, Hitler objected to Catholicisms ungrounded and international character that is, it did not pertain to an exclusive race and national culture. At the same time, and somewhat contradictorily, the Nazis combined elements of Germanys Lutheran community tradition with its northern European, organic pagan past. Elements of militarism found their way into Hitlers own theology; he preached that his was a true or master religion, because it would create mastery and avoid comforting lies. Those who preached love and tolerance, in contravention to the facts, were said to be slave or false religions. The man who recognized these truths, Hitler continued, was said to be a natural leader, and those who denied it were said to be natural slaves. Slaves especially intelligent ones, he claimed were always attempting to hinder their masters by promoting false religious and political doctrines.Though the "National Socialist leaders and dogmas were basically uncompromisingly antireligious" [46], the Nazi State primarily (but with exceptions) did not act officially in a directly anti-clerical manner except to those who refused to accommodate the new regime and yield to its power.[citation needed] As Martin Bormann put it, "Priests will be paid by us and, as a result, they will preach what we want. If we find a priest acting otherwise short work is to be made of him. The task of the priest consists in keeping the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted." [47] As a result almost 16% of the Catholic clergy in Poland were killed and many more including 13 out of the original 38 Bishops were sent to concentration camps [48] in an attempt to demoralize the Polish population. [49] These actions, combined with their closings of various religious instruction institutions and semininaries was successful in causing some great clergy shortages given Poland's highly Catholic populace. [50] Within more loyal nations of the Reich, anti-clericism typically occurred in a more unofficial sense which took the form of arresting disliked clergy for non-religious offences such as immorality, [51] [52] as well as secret harassment by Nazi instigators [53] and agents, especially those of the Gestapo and the SD. [54] A particularly poignant example is seen in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, the Nazis often used the church to justify their stance and included many Christian symbols in the Third Reich[55] while in other cases, they replaced Christian symbols with those of the Third Reich. [56]The vlkisch movement was inherently hostile toward atheism: freethinkers clashed frequently with Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s.[citation needed] On taking power, Hitler banned freethought organizations (such as the German Freethinkers League)[57] and launched an antigodless movement. In a 1933 speech he declared: We have undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.[58]Several of the founders and subsequent leadership of the Nazi Party had been associates and very occasionally members of the Thule-Gesellschaft (the Thule Society), which romanticized the Aryan race through theology and ritual.[59]

The Thule Society had been an offshoot of the Germanenorden. The racist-occult notions of Ariosophy were not uncommon within these groups; Rudolf von Sebottendorf and a certain Wilde gave two lectures on occultism for the Thule Society.[60] In general, however, its lectures and excursions were devoted to such subjects as Germanic antiquity and antisemitism, and historically it is more notable for the role it played as a paramilitary group fighting against the Bavarian Soviet Republic.[61]Dietrich Eckart, a remote associate of the Thule Society (he gave a reading there once from his plays, on 30 May 1919)[62] coached Hitler on his public speaking skills, and Hitler later dedicated Mein Kampf to him. However, Hitler himself has not been shown to have been a member of the Thule Society or even to have attended its meetings. The DAP initially received support from the group, but the Thulists were quickly sidelined because Hitler favoured a mass movement and denigrated the occult-conspiratorial approach.[63]Heinrich Himmler, by contrast, showed a strong interest in such matters, although as Steigmann-Gall points out, Hitler and many of his key associates attended Christian services.[55]Himmler's activities at the Wewelsburg, the Thule Society and several other remote connections of Nazism with the occult are commonly brought up in the modern mythology of Nazi occultism. This image of Nazism only vaguely corresponds to its historic reality.The prevailing scholarly view[64] since the Second World War is that Martin Luthers 1543 treatise, On the Jews and their Lies, exercised a major and persistent influence on Germanys attitude toward its Jewish citizens in the centuries between the Reformation and the Holocaust . The National Socialists displayed On the Jews and their Lies during Nuremberg rallies, and the city of Nuremberg presented a first edition to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Strmer, the newspaper describing it as the most radically antisemitic tract ever published.[65] Against the majority view, theologian Johannes Wallmann writes that the treatise had no continuity of influence in Germany, and was in fact largely ignored during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. [66] According to Daniel Goldhagen, Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman, published a compendium of Martin Luthers writings shortly after the Kristallnacht; Sasse applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day, writing in the introduction, On November 10, 1938, on Luthers birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany. The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.[67] Diarmaid MacCulloch argued that On the Jews and Their Lies was a blueprint for the Kristallnacht.[68]There was a Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany as well as of members of some other small Christian communities. Those groups were forced to wear a purple triangle in Nazi concentration camps.

Working class appeal

Hitler attempted to insure that the Nazis were seen as a unique movement by discredting other nationalist and racialist political parties as being out of touch with the masses, especially lower-class youth, saying in 1922:
The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable but fantastically naive men of learning,

professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers - in short a bourgeois, idealistic and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour.[81]Many scholars have

discredited the Nazis' appeal to the working-class as neither being effective nor true in intent, and say that the Nazis were largely a movement of the middle-class.[82] Other scholars like Michael Burleigh have challenged this notion, claiming that there was a sizable number of working-class supporters of the Nazis.[83] Burleigh also claims that the financial situation of middle-class supporters must be considered, in that the economic situation of hyperinflation of currency in the 1920s smashed the financial situation of middle-class and caused high unemployment of middle-class people who previously held white-collar jobs.[84] Therefore, a larger percentage of declared middle-class support for the Nazis does not necessarily mean that a financially-stable middle-class supported the Nazis, but rather a financially-unstable middle-class.[85] In the early 1930s amid high unemployment and poverty in Germany, the Nazis emphasized their socialist policies by providing shelter and food to unemployed or homeless recruits to the SA.[86]

Nazi economic policy

Nazi economic practice concerned itself with immediate domestic issues and separately with ideological conceptions of international economics. Domestic economic policy was narrowly concerned with four major goals to eliminate Germanys issues, elimination of unemployment, rapid and substantial rearmament, protection against the resurgence of hyper-inflation, and expansion of production of consumer goods to improve middle and lower-class living standards. All of these policy goals were intended to address the perceived shortcomings of the Weimar Republic and to solidify domestic support for the party. In this, the party was successful. Between 1933 and 1936 the German Gross National Product (GNP) increased by an average annual rate of 9.5%, and the rate for industry alone rose by 17.2%.This expansion propelled the German economy out of a deep depression and into full employment in less than four years. Public consumption during the same period increased by 18.7%, while private consumption increased by 3.6% annually. According to the historian Richard Evans, prior to the outbreak of war the German economy had recovered from the Depression faster than its counterparts in other countries. Germanys foreign debt had been stabilized, interest rates had fallen to half their 1932 level, the stock exchange had recovered from the Depression, the gross national product had risen by 81 per cent over the same period. Inflation and unemployment had been conquered.[92]German marriages increased from about 511,000 in 1932 to 611,000 in 1936, while births rose from 921,000 births in 1932 to 1,280,000 in 1936. Suicides committed by young people under 20 dropped by 80% between 1933 and 1939.[93]Internationally, the Nazi Party believed that an international banking cabal was behind the global depression of the 1930s. Control of this cabal, which had grown to a position where it controlled both Europe and the United States, was identified with an elite and powerful group of Jews. Nevertheless, a number of people believed that this was part of an ongoing plot by the Jewish people, as a whole, to achieve global domination. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which began its circulation in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, were said to have confirmed this, already showing evidence that the Bolshevik takeover in Russia was in accordance with one of the protocols. Broadly speaking, the existence of large international banking or merchant

banking organizations was well known at this time. Many of these banking organizations were able to exert influence upon nation states by extension or withholding of credit. This influence is not limited to the small states that preceded the creation of the German Empire as a nation state in the 1870s, but is noted in most major histories of all European powers from the sixteenth century onward. Nevertheless, after the Great Depression, this libelous and unverified manuscript took on an important role in Nazi Germany, thus providing another link in the Nazis ideological motivation for the destruction of that group in the Holocaust.The Nazis viewed private property rights as conditional upon the mode of use.[94] If the property was not being used to further Nazi goals, it could be nationalized. Government takeovers and threats of takeovers were used to encourage complance with government production plans, even if following these plans cost profits for companies. For example, the owner of the Junkers (aircraft) factory refused to follow the governments directives, whereupon the Nazis took over the plant, placed the owner Hugo Junkers under house arrest, then compensated him for his loss. While the Nazis transferred public ownership and services in the private spector, they increased state control, regulation, and inference in economic affairs.[95] Under the Nazis, free competition and regulation by the market greatly decreased.[96] Nevertheless, Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to disregard competition and private property.[97]Central planning of agriculture was a prominent feature. In order to tie farmers to the land, the selling of agricultural land was prohibited. Farm ownership was nominally private, but ownership in the sense of having discretion over operations and claims on residual income were taken away. This was achieved by granting monopoly rights to marketing boards to control production and prices through a quota system. Quotas were also set for industrial goods, including pig iron, steel, aluminum, magnesium, gunpowder, explosives, synthetic rubber, all kinds of fuel, and electricity. A compulsory cartel law was enacted in 1936 which allowed the Minister of Economics to make existing cartels compulsory and permanent and to force industries to form cartels where none existed, though these were eventually decreed out of existence by 1943 with the objective being to replace them with more authoritarian bodies.[98]In place of ordinary profit incentive to guide the economy, investment was guided through regulation to accord to the needs of the State. The profit incentive for business owners was retained, though greatly modified through various profit-fixing schemes: Fixing of profits, not their suppression, was the official policy of the Nazi party. However the function of profit in automatically guiding allocation of investment and unconsciously directing the course of the economy was replaced with economic planning by Nazi government agencies.[99] Government financing eventually came to dominate the investment process, which the proportion of private securities issued falling from over half of the total in 1933 and 1934 to approximately 10 percent in 19351938. Heavy taxes on business profits limited self-financing of firms. The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits, however government control of these were extensive enough to leave only the shell of private ownership.Taxes and subsidies were also used in order to direct the economy. Underlying economic policy was the use of terror as an incentive to agree and comply. Nazi language indicated death or concentration camp for any business owner who pursued his own self interest instead of the ends of the State.[100]It is often regarded that businesses were private property in name but not in substance. Chritoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner dissent, saying that despite controls by the state firms still had

significant freedom in planning their own production and investment activities, though they admit that the economy was state directed.[101]Many companies dealt with the Third Reich: Volkswagen was created by the German state and was heavily supported by the Nazis; Opel employed Jewish slave labour to run their industrial plants; Daimler-Benz used prisoners of war as slaves to run their industrial plants; Krupp made gas chambers; Bayer worked with the Nazis as a small part of the enormous IG Farben chemistry monopoly; and Hugo Boss designed the SS uniforms (and admitted to this in 1997). There has been some disagreement about whether IBM had dealt with the Nazis to create a cataloguing system, the Hollerith punch-card machines, which the Nazis used to file information on those who they killed.[102] Some companies that dealt with the Third Reich claim to have not known the truth of what the Nazis were doing, and some foreign companies claimed to have lost control of their German branches when Hitler was in power.[103][104]

Nazism in popular culture

The term Nazi has become a generic term of abuse in popular culture, as have other Third Reich terms such as Fhrer (often spelled differently in English-speaking countries). Related terms (such as fascist or Gestapo or Hitler) are sometimes used to describe any people or behaviours that are viewed as thuggish, authoritarian, or extremist. Phrases such as grammar Nazi, feminazi, open source Nazi, and parking enforcement Nazi, are sometimes used in the United States. These uses are offensive to some, as indicated by the controversy in the mainstream media over the Seinfeld Soup Nazi episode. These types of terms are used frequently enough to inspire Godwin's Law.Some people strongly associate the blackletter typefaces (e.g. Fraktur or Schwabacher) with Nazi propaganda (although the typeface is much older, and its usage was banned by the Nazi German government in 1941).[105] [106] In films such as the Indiana Jones series, Nazis are often portrayed as villains, whom the heroes battle without mercy. Video game website IGN declared Nazis to be the most memorable video game villains ever.[107]

Socialism
Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of an egalitarian society.[1][2] Modern socialism originated in the late nineteenth-century working class political movement. Karl Marx posited that socialism would be achieved via class struggle and a proletarian revolution which represents the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.[3][4]Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and creates an unequal society. All socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.[1]Socialism is not a discrete

philosophy of fixed doctrine and program; its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalization, sometimes opposing each other. Another dividing feature of the socialist movement is the split on how a socialist economy should be established between the reformists and the revolutionaries. Some socialists advocate complete nationalization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange; while others advocate state control of capital within the framework of a market economy. Social democrats propose selective nationalization of key national industries in mixed economies combined with tax-funded welfare programs; Libertarian socialism (which includes Socialist Anarchism and Libertarian Marxism) rejects state control and ownership of the economy altogether and advocates direct collective ownership of the means of production via co-operative workers' councils and workplace democracy.In the 1970s and the 1980s, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, Polish and Chinese Communists instituted various forms of market socialism combining co-operative and State ownership models with the free market exchange.[5] This is unlike the earlier theoretical market socialist proposal put forth by Oskar Lange in that it allows market forces, rather than central planners to guide production and exchange.[6] Anarcho-syndicalists, Luxemburgists (such as those in the Socialist Party USA) and some elements of the United States New Left favor decentralized collective ownership in the form of cooperatives or workers' councils.

International Workingmen's Association First International

In 1864, the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) the First International was founded in London. Londoner Victor le Lubez, a French radical republican, invited Karl Marx to participate as a representative of German workers.[12] In 1865, the IWA had its preliminary conference, and its first congress, at Geneva, in 1866. Karl Marx was member of the committee; he and Johann Georg Eccarius, a London tailor, were the two mainstays of the International, from its inception to its end; the First International was the premiere international forum promulgating socialism. In 1869, under the influence of Marx and Engels, the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany was founded. In 1875, the SDW Party merged with the General German Workers' Association, of Ferdinand Lassalle, metamorphosing to the contemporary German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Since the 1870s, in Germany, Socialism was associated with trade unions, as the SPD constituted trade unions, while, in Austria, France, and other countries, socialist parties and anarchists did like-wise. That ideologic development greatly contrasts with the British experience of Socialism, wherein politically-moderate New Model Unions dominated unionized labor from the mid nineteenth century, and trade-unionism was stronger than the political labor movement, until appearance of the Labour Party in the early twentieth century. The first U.S. socialist party was founded in 1876, then metamorphosed to a Marxist party in 1890; the Socialist Labor Party exists today. An early leader of the Socialist Labor Party was Daniel De Leon who had considerable influence beyond the United States as well.[citation needed] Socialists supported and advocated many branches of Socialism from the Gradualism of trade unions to the radical Revolution of Marx and Engels to the Anarchists emphasizing small-scale communities and agrarianism; all co-existing with the most influential Marxism and Social Democracy. The Anarchists, led by the Mikhail

Bakunin, believed Capitalism and State inseparable, neither can be abolished without abolishing the other.

The Second International

As the ideas of Marx and Engels gained popularity, especially in Central Europe, Socialists united into an international organization, and founded the Second International in 1889, the centennial of the French Revolution; from 20 countries, 300 socialist and labor union organizations sent 384 delegates.[13] The Second International was denominated the Socialist International with Friedrich Engels its honorary thirdcongress president in 1893.In 1895, Engels said there now is a single, generally recognized, crystal clear theory of Marx and a single, great international army of socialists.Despite being outlawed in Germany by the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, the Social Democratic Party of Germany masterfully used the limited, universal, male suffrage available to exercise the electoral strength necessary to compel rescindment of the Anti-Socialist laws in 1890.[14] In 1893, the SPD received 1,787,000 votes, a quarter of the votes cast. Before the SPD published Engels's 1895 introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France 18481850, they deleted phrases felt too-revolutionary for mainstream readers.[15]Karl Marx believed possible a peaceful, socialist transformation of England, despite the British Aristocracy and Ruling Class revolting against such a popular victory.[16] Whereas the United States and Holland might also effect peaceful transformations, not France; Marx thought it had perfected . . . an enormous, bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious State machinery that required forcible deposition; nevertheless, with Karl Marx only eight years dead, Engels said it was possible to achieve a peaceful, socialist revolution in France.[17]

World War I
When World War I began in 1914, most European socialists supported the bellicose aims of their national governments. The British, French, Belgian, and German social democratic parties discarded their political commitments to proletarian internationalism and worker solidarity to co-operate with their imperial governments.In Russia, N. Lenin denounced the Europeans' Great War war as an imperialist conflict, and urged workers, worldwide, to use the war as occasion for proletarian revolution. The Second International dissolved during the war; Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg, and other anti-war Marxists conferred in the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915.. By the year 1917, the third year of a ninety-day war, the patriotism propelling the First World War metamorphosed to political radicalism in most of Europe, the United States (cf. Socialism in the United States), and Australia. In February, popular revolution exploded in Russia when workers, soldiers, and peasants established soviets (councils) wielding executive power in a Provisional Government valid until convocation of a Constituent Assembly. In April, Lenin arrived in Russia from Germany, calling for All power to the soviets. In October, his party (the Bolsheviks) won support of most soviets while he and Trotsky simultaneously led the October Revolution. On 25 October 1917, at

the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin declared "Long live the world socialist revolution!"[18]On 26 October, the day after assuming executive power, Lenin wrote Draft Regulations on Workers' Control, which granted workers control of businesses with more than five workers and office employees, and access to all books, documents, and stocks, and whose decisions were to be "binding upon the owners of the enterprises".[19] Immediately, the Bolshevik Government nationalised banks, most industry, and disavowed the national debts of the deposed Romanov royal rgime; it governed via elected soviets; and it sued for peace and withdrew from the First World War.Despite that, the peasant SocialistRevolutionary (SR) Party won the Constituent Assembly against the Bolshevik Party, who then acted resolutely the next day.[20] The Constituent Assembly convened for thirteen hours (16.00 hrs 5 Jan 4.40 hrs 6 Jan 1918). Socialist-Revolutionary Leader Victor Chernov was elected President of a Russian republic; next day, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Constituent Assembly.[21] The Bolshevik Russian Revolution of October 1917 engendered Communist parties worldwide, and their concomitant revolutions of 1917-23. Few Communists, then, doubted that the Russian success of Socialism depended upon successful, working-class socialist revolutions effected in developed capitalist-economy countries;[22][23] thus, in 1919, Lenin and Trotsky organised the world's Communist parties into a new international association of workers the Communist International, the Comintern, also denominated the Third International.In November 1918, the German Revolution deposed the monarchy; as in Russia, the councils of workers and soldiers were comprised mostly of SPD and USPD (Independent Social Democrats) revolutionaries installed to office as the Weimar republic; the SPD were in power, led by Friedrich Ebert. In January 1919. the left-wing Spartacist Putsch challenged the SPD government, and President Ebert ordered the Army and Freikorps mercenaries to violently suppress the Workers' and Soldiers' councils. In the event, Communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were captured and summarilly executed. Also that year, in Bavaria, the Communist rgime of Kurt Eisner in Bavaria was so suppressed. In Hungary, Bla Kun briefly headed a Hungarian Communist government. Throughout, popular socialist revolutions in Vienna, Italy's northern industrial cities, the German Ruhr (1920) and Saxony (1923); all failed in spreading revolutionary socialism to Europe's advanced, capitalist countries.In Russia, Socialist circumstances were desperate; in August 1918, assassin Fanya Kaplan shot Lenin in the neck, leaving him with wounds from which he never fully recovered. Earlier, in June, the Soviet Government had implemented War Communism to manage the foreign economic boycott of Russia, and invasions by Imperial Germany, Imperial Britain, the U.S., and France, interfering in the Russian Civil War beside royalist White Russians; to control starvation, private business was outlawed, strikers could be shot, the white collar classes were forced to work manually, and, from the peasantry, they required grain for workers in cities.By 1920, as Red Army commander, Trotsky had mostly defeated the royalist White Armies. In 1921, War Communism was ended, and, under the New Economic Policy (NEP), private ownership was allowed for small and medium peasant enterprises; industry remained State-controlled, Lenin acknowledged that the NEP was a necessary capitalist measure for a country mostly unripe for Socialism, thus, the existence of NEP businessmen and NEP women (NEP Men) flourished,[24] and the Kulaks gained capitalist power as rich peasants.In 1923, on seeing the Soviet State's greatly coercive power, the dying Lenin said Russia had reverted to a bourgeois tsarist machine . . . barely varnished

with socialism.[25] After his death (January 1924), the Communist Party of the Soviet Union then controlled by Joseph Stalin rejected the theory that socialism could not be built solely in the U.S.S.R., and declared the Socialism in One Country policy. Despite the marginal Left Opposition's demanding restoration of Soviet Democracy,[26] Stalin developed a bureaucratic, authoritarian government, that was condemned by Democratic Socialists, Anarchists, Trotskyists, et alles, for undermining the initial Socialist ideals of the Bolshevik Russian Revolution.[27]

The inter-war era and World War II

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 brought about the definitive ideological division between Communists as denoted with a capital "C" on the one hand and other communist and socialist trends such as anarcho-communists and social democrats, on the other. The Left Opposition in the Soviet Union gave rise to Trotskyism which was to remain isolated and insignificant for another fifty years, except in Sri Lanka where Trotskyism gained the majority and the pro-Moscow wing was expelled from the Communist Party. In 1922, the fourth congress of the Communist International took up the policy of the United Front, urging Communists to work with rank and file Social Democrats while remaining critical of their leaders, who they criticized for "betraying" the working class by supporting the war efforts of their respective capitalist classes. For their part, the social democrats pointed to the dislocation caused by revolution, and later, the growing authoritarianism of the Communist Parties. When the Communist Party of Great Britain applied to affiliate to the Labour Party in 1920 it was turned down.

Socialism after World War II

In 1945, the worlds three great powers met at the Yalta Conference to negotiate an amicable and stable peace. UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined USA President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee. With the relative decline of Britain compared to the two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, however, many viewed the world as "bi-polar" a world with two irreconcilable and antagonistic political and economic systems. Many termed the Soviet Union "socialist", not least the Soviet Union itself, but also commonly in the USA, China, Eastern Europe, and many parts of the world where Communist Parties had gained a mass base. In addition, scholarly critics of the Soviet Union, such as economist Friedrich Hayek were commonly cited as critics of socialism. This view was not universally shared, particularly in Europe, and especially in Britain, where the Communist Party was very weak. In 1951, British Health Minister Aneurin Bevan expressed the view that, "It is probably true that Western Europe would have gone socialist after the war if Soviet behaviour had not given it too grim a visage. Soviet Communism and Socialism are not yet sufficiently distinguished in many minds."[28]

Chinese socialism

In 1949, the Chinese Revolution established a Communist state in China. Criticizing the invasion and trade embargo of the young Soviet state, Bevan wrote "At the moment it looks as though the United States is going to repeat the same folly in China... You cannot starve a national revolution into submission. You can starve it into a repressive dictatorship; you can starve it to the point where the hellish logic of the police state takes charge."[29]

Socialism in the 21st century

In some Latin American countries, socialism has re-emerged in recent years, with an antiimperialist stance, the rejection of the policies of neo-liberalism and the nationalisation or part nationalisation of oil production, land and other assets. Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez and Bolivian President Evo Morales, for instance, refer to their political programs as socialist. Chvez has coined the term "21st century socialism" (sometimes translated more literally as "Socialism of the 21st century"). After winning re-election in December 2006, President Chvez said, "Now more than ever, I am obliged to move Venezuela's path towards socialism."[44]In the developing world, some elected socialist parties and communist parties remain prominent, particularly in India and Nepal. The Communist Party of Nepal in particular calls for multi-party democracy, social equality, and economic prosperity.[45] In China, the Chinese Communist Party has led a transition from the command economy of the Mao period to an economic program they term the socialist market economy or "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Under Deng Xiaoping, the leadership of China embarked upon a program of market-based reform that was more sweeping than had been Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika program of the late 1980s. Deng's program, however, maintained state ownership rights over land, state or cooperative ownership of much of the heavy industrial and manufacturing sectors and state influence in the banking and financial sectors. In South Africa the ANC abandoned its partial socialist allegiances on taking power and followed a standard neo-liberal route. But from 2005 through to 2007 the country was wracked by many thousands of protests from poor communities. One of these gave rise to a mass movement of shack dwellers, Abahlali baseMjondolo that, despite major police suppression, continues to advocate for popular people's planning and against the marketization of land and housing. Communist candidate Dimitris Christofias won a crucial presidential runoff in Cyprus, defeating his conservative rival with a majority of 53%.[46] The Left Party in Germany has also grown in popularity.[47]African socialism continues to be a major ideology around the continent. List of socialist countries:

People's Republic of China (since 1949); Communist Party of China Republic of Cuba (Cuban Revolution in 1959, socialist state declared in 1961); Communist Party of Cuba; Democratic People's Republic of Korea (since 1948); Korean Workers' Party officially describes itself as a socialist republic governed according to the ideology of Juche, which is derived from Marxist-Leninist theory.[48] Lao People's Democratic Republic (since 1975); Lao People's Revolutionary Party

Socialist Republic of Vietnam (since 1976); Communist Party of Vietnam (ruled the Democratic Republic of Vietnam since 1954)

Socialism as an economic system

Economically, socialism denotes an economic system of state ownership and / or worker ownership of the means of production and distribution. In the U.S.S.R., state ownership of the means of production was combined with central planning what goods and services to make and provide, how they were to be produced, the quantities, and the sale prices (cf. Economy of the Soviet Union). Soviet economic planning was an alternative to allowing the market (supply and demand) to determine prices and production. During the Great Depression, socialists considered Soviet-style planned economies the remedy to Capitalism's inherent flaws monopoly, business cycles, unemployment, unequally distributed wealth, and the economic exploitation of workers.In the West, neoclassical liberal economists, e.g. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, said that socialist planned economies would fail, because planners could not have the business information inherent to a market economy (cf. economic calculation problem), nor would managers in Soviet-style socialist economies match the motivation of profit.Consequent to Soviet economic stagnation in the 1970s and 1980s, socialists began to accept parts of their critique. Polish economist Oskar Lange, an early proponent of "market socialism", proposed a Central Planning Board establishing prices and controls of investment. The prices of producer goods would be determined through trial and error. The prices of consumer goods would be determined by supply and demand, with the supply coming from state-owned firms that would set their prices equal to the marginal cost, as in perfectly competitive markets. The Central Planning Board would distribute a "social dividend" to ensure reasonable income equality.[49] In Western Europe, particularly in the period after World War II, many socialist parties in government implemented what became known as mixed economies.[50] These governments nationalised major and economically vital industries while permitting a free market to continue in the rest. These were most often monopolistic or infrastructural industries like mail, railways, power and other utilities. In some instances a number of small, competing and often relatively poorly financed companies in the same sector were nationalised to form one government monopoly for the purpose of competent management, of economic rescue (in the UK, British Leyland, Rolls Royce), or of competing on the world market.[51] Typically, this was achieved through compulsory purchase of the industry (i.e. with compensation). For example in the UK the nationalization of the coal mines in 1947 created a coal board charged with running the coal industry commercially so as to be able to meet the interest payable on the bonds which the former mine owners' shares had been converted into.[52][53]Some socialists propose various decentralized, worker-managed economic systems. One such system is the "cooperative economy," a largely free market economy in which workers manage the firms and democratically determine remuneration levels and labor divisions. Productive resources would be legally owned by the cooperative and rented to the workers, who would enjoy usufruct rights.[54] Another, more recent, variant is "participatory economics," wherein the economy is planned by decentralized councils of workers and

consumers. Workers would be remunerated solely according to effort and sacrifice, so that those engaged in dangerous, uncomfortable, and strenuous work would receive the highest incomes and could thereby work less.[55] Some Marxists and Anarcho-communists also propose a worker managed economy based on workers councils, however unlike participatory economics in Anarcho communism workers are remunerated according to their needs (which are largely self determined in an anarcho communist system). Recently socialists have also been working with the Technocracy movement to promote such concepts as Energy Accounting.[citation needed]

Socialism and social and political theory

Doctrinally, Marxist and non-Marxist social theorists agree that Socialism developed in reaction to modern industrial capitalism, but disagree on the nature of their relationship. mile Durkheim posits that socialism is rooted in the desire to bring the State closer to the realm of individual activity, in countering the anomie of a Capitalist society. In socialism, Max Weber saw acceleration of the rationalization started in Capitalism. As critic of Socialism, he warned that placing the economy entirely in the State's bureaucratic control would result in an iron cage of future bondage.In the middle of the twentieth century, Socialist intellectuals retained much influence in European philosophy; Eros and Civilization (1955), by Herbert Marcuse, explicitly attempts merging Marxism with Freudianism; and the social science of Structuralism much influenced the socialist New Left in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Communism
Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless society based on common ownership of the means of production and property in general.[1][2][3] Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human society, evolving into a classless, stateless society of "pure communism". Leninists have attempted to produce communist societies by setting up political parties, which in some cases have become governments. These attempts have never produced the "pure" communist societies envisoned by Marx, and have led to totalitarian states.Communism is usually considered to be a branch of socialism, a broad group of social and political ideologies, which draws on the various political and intellectual movements with origins in the work of theorists of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution.[4] Communism attempts to offer an alternative to the problems believed to be inherent with capitalist economies and the legacy of imperialism and nationalism. Communism states that the only way to solve these problems is for the working class, or proletariat, to replace the wealthy bourgeoisie, which is currently the ruling class, in order to establish a peaceful, free society, without classes, or government. [2] The dominant forms of communism, such as Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism and

Trotskyism are based on Marxism, but non-Marxist versions of communism (such as Christian communism and anarchist communism) also exist.

Marxist schools of communism

Self-identified communists hold a variety of views, including Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, council communism, Luxemburgism, anarchist communism, Christian communism, and various currents of left communism. However, the offshoots of the Marxist-Leninist interpretations of Marxism are the most well-known of these and have been a driving force in international relations during most of the 20th century.[2]

Marxism
The Communist Manifesto. Like other socialists, Marx and Engels sought an end to capitalism and the systems which they perceived to be responsible for the exploitation of workers. But whereas earlier socialists often favored longer-term social reform, Marx and Engels believed that popular revolution was all but inevitable, and the only path to the socialist state.[7]According to the Marxist argument for communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation; and communism is desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom.[8] Marx here follows Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as an absence of restraints but as action with content.[9] According to Marx, Communism's outlook on freedom was based on an agent, obstacle, and goal. The agent is the common/working people; the obstacles are class divisions, economic inequalities, unequal life-chances, and false consciousness; and the goal is the fulfillment of human needs including satisfying work, and fair share of the product.[10][11] They believed that communism allowed people to do what they want, but also put humans in such conditions and such relations with one another that they would not wish to exploit, or have any need to. Whereas for Hegel the unfolding of this ethical life in history is mainly driven by the realm of ideas, for Marx, communism emerged from material forces, particularly the development of the means of production.[9]Marxism holds that a process of class conflict and revolutionary struggle will result in victory for the proletariat and the establishment of a communist society in which private ownership is abolished over time and the means of production and subsistence belong to the community. Marx himself wrote little about life under communism, giving only the most general indication as to what constituted a communist society. It is clear that it entails abundance in which there is little limit to the projects that humans may undertake.[citation needed] In the popular slogan that was adopted by the communist movement, communism was a world in which each gave according to their abilities, and received according to their needs. The German Ideology (1845) was one of Marx's few writings to elaborate on the communist future:Marx's lasting vision was to add this vision to a theory of how society was moving in a law-governed way toward communism, and, with some tension, a political theory that explained why revolutionary activity was required to bring it about.
[9]

In the late 19th century, the terms "socialism" and "communism" were often used interchangeably. However, Marx and Engels argued that communism would not emerge from capitalism in a fully developed state, but would pass through a "first phase" in which most productive property was owned in common, but with some class differences remaining. The "first phase" would eventually evolve into a "higher phase" in which class differences were eliminated, and a state was no longer needed. Lenin frequently used the term "socialism" to refer to Marx and Engels' supposed "first phase" of communism and used the term "communism" interchangeably with Marx and Engels' "higher phase" of communism.[3]These later aspects, particularly as developed by Lenin, provided the underpinning for the mobilizing features of 20th century Communist parties. Later writers such as Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas modified Marx's vision by allotting a central place to the state in the development of such societies, by arguing for a prolonged transition period of socialism prior to the attainment of full communism.[citation
needed]

Marxism-Leninism
Marxism-Leninism is a version of socialism adopted by the Soviet Union and most Communist Parties across the world today. It shaped the Soviet Union and influenced Communist Parties worldwide. It was heralded as a possibility of building communism via a massive program of industrialization and collectivization. Historically, under the ideology of Marxism-Leninism the rapid development of industry, and above all the victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War occurred alongside a third of the world being lead by Marxist-Leninist inspired parties. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, many communist Parties of the world today still lay claim to uphold the Marxist-Leninist banner. Marxism-Leninism expands on Marxists thoughts by bringing the theories to what Lenin and other Communists considered, the age of capitalist imperialism, and a renewed focus on party building, the development of a socialist state, and democratic centralism as an organizational principle.

Stalinism
"Stalinism" refers to the brand of communist regime that dominated the Soviet Union, and the countries within the Soviet sphere of influence, during the leadership of Joseph Stalin. The term usually defines the style of a government rather than an ideology. The ideology was "Marxism-Leninism theory", reflecting that Stalin himself was not a theoretician, in contrast to Marx and Lenin, and prided himself on maintaining the legacy of Lenin as a founding father for the Soviet Union and the future Socialist world. Stalinism is an interpretation of their ideas, and a certain political regime claiming to apply those ideas in ways fitting the changing needs of society, as with the transition from "socialism at a snail's pace" in the mid-twenties to the rapid industrialization of the Five-Year Plans. The main contributions of Stalin to communist theory were:

The groundwork for the Soviet policy concerning nationalities, laid in Stalin's 1913 work Marxism and the National Question,[13] praised by Lenin. Socialism in One Country, The theory of aggravation of the class struggle along with the development of socialism, a theoretical base supporting the repression of political opponents as necessary.

Christian Communism
Christian Communism is a form of religious communism centered around Christianity. It is a theological and political theory based upon the view that the teachings of Jesus Christ urge Christians to support communism as the ideal social system. Christian communists trace the origins of their practice to teachings in the New Testament, such as this one from Acts of the Apostles at chapter 2 and verses 42, 44, and 45:Christian communism can be seen as a radical form of Christian socialism. Also, due to the fact that many Christian communists have formed independent stateless communes in the past, there is also a link between Christian communism and Christian anarchism. Christian communists may or may not agree with various parts of Marxism.Christian communists also share some of the political goals of Marxists, for example replacing capitalism with socialism, which should in turn be followed by communism at a later point in the future. However, Christian communists sometimes disagree with Marxists (and particularly with Leninists) on the way a socialist or communist society should be organized.

Growth of modern communism

In the late 19th century, Russian Marxism developed a distinct character. The first major figure of Russian Marxism was Georgi Plekhanov. Underlying the work of Plekhanov was the assumption that Russia, less urbanized and industrialized than Western Europe, had many years to go before society would be ready for proletarian revolution to occur, and a transitional period of a bourgeois democratic regime would be required to replace Tsarism with a socialist and later communist society. (EB) In Russia, the 1917 October Revolution was the first time any party with an avowedly Marxist orientation, in this case the Bolshevik Party, seized state power. The assumption of state power by the Bolsheviks generated a great deal of practical and theoretical debate within the Marxist movement. Marx predicted that socialism and communism would be built upon foundations laid by the most advanced capitalist development. Russia, however, was one of the poorest countries in Europe with an enormous, largely illiterate peasantry and a minority of industrial workers. Marx had explicitly stated that Russia might be able to skip the stage of bourgeoisie capitalism.[25] Other socialists also believed that a Russian revolution could be the precursor of workers' revolutions in the West.The moderate Mensheviks opposed Lenin's Bolshevik plan for socialist revolution before capitalism was more fully developed. The Bolsheviks' successful rise to power was based upon the slogans "peace, bread, and land" and "All power to the Soviets", slogans which tapped the massive public desire for an end to Russian involvement in the First World War, the peasants' demand for land reform, and popular support for the Soviets.[citation

needed]

The usage of the terms "communism" and "socialism" shifted after 1917, when the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Communist Party and installed a single party regime devoted to the implementation of socialist policies under Leninism.[citation needed] The Second International had dissolved in 1916 over national divisions, as the separate national parties that composed it did not maintain a unified front against the war, instead generally supporting their respective nation's role. Lenin thus created the Third International (Comintern) in 1919 and sent the Twenty-one Conditions, which included democratic centralism, to all European socialist parties willing to adhere. In France, for example, the majority of the SFIO socialist party split in 1921 to form the SFIC (French Section of the Communist International).[citation needed] Henceforth, the term "Communism" was applied to the objective of the parties founded under the umbrella of the Comintern. Their program called for the uniting of workers of the world for revolution, which would be followed by the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat as well as the development of a socialist economy. Ultimately, if their program held, there would develop a harmonious classless society, with the withering away of the state.[citation needed] During the Russian Civil War (1918-1922), the Bolsheviks nationalized all productive property and imposed a policy of war communism, which put factories and railroads under strict government control, collected and rationed food, and introduced some bourgeois management of industry. After three years of war and the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, Lenin declared the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, which was to give a "limited place for a limited time to capitalism." The NEP lasted until 1928, when Joseph Stalin achieved party leadership, and the introduction of the first Five Year Plan spelled the end of it. Following the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks formed in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), or Soviet Union, from the former Russian Empire.Following Lenin's democratic centralism, the Communist parties were organized on a hierarchical basis, with active cells of members as the broad base; they were made up only of elite cadres approved by higher members of the party as being reliable and completely subject to party discipline.[26]A map of countries who declared themselves to be socialist states under the Marxist-Leninist or Maoist definition (in other words, "communist states") at some point in their history. The map uses present-day borders.After World War II, Communists consolidated power in Eastern Europe, and in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led by Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China, which would later follow its own ideological path of Communist development.[citation needed] Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, and Mozambique were among the other countries in the Third World that adopted or imposed a pro-Communist government at some point. Although never formally unified as a single political entity, by the early 1980s almost one-third of the world's population lived in Communist states, including the former Soviet Union and People's Republic of China. By comparison, the British Empire had ruled up to one-quarter of the world's population at its greatest extent.[27]Communist states such as Soviet Union and China succeeded in becoming industrial and technological powers, challenging the capitalists' powers in the arms race and space race and military conflicts.