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Socialism: Ideology In The United States

Decent Essays

SOHEYL HAMZAVI
POLSC-120, A. ARAIM
12/9/15
SOCIALISM Socialism is not an ideology that most people in the United States discuss often, but why is that? It is sometimes regarded as a “dirty” word to most, as it has distant similarities to the form of government that Joseph Stalin ruled his nation as, Communism; one of the very forms of governments our nation fought against. We as a people try to distant ourselves from Socialism because we are afraid that it will eventually lead to a similar transformation that Russia had when it became the USSR. The reason for that, I believe, is because people aren’t educated enough about the topic itself, therefore leading them to stray away into their comfort of living in a nation led by Capitalism. In order …show more content…

In simplest terms, Socialism is an economic system and ideology where the means of producing wealth are owned by society as a whole. This means that the value produced belongs to everyone in society as opposed to a small class of private owners. Control is generally delegated by the state, while distribution comes in the form of underlying social welfare that satisfies everyone’s needs such as housing, education, healthcare, and so forth. The end result of Socialism is to guarantee a level playing field for every person in a society by removing class distinctions based on ownership. Most countries today don’t use this form of government, excluding Nordic countries like Sweden and Norway, but I will get into detail about that later …show more content…

It started out by having two branches of socialism; those being “utopian” and “revolutionary” socialism. Utopian socialism was associated to Comte de Saint Simon and Charles Fourier, who were both against revolutionary action after seeing the carnage of the French Revolution. The other French socialists were the revolutionaries. The most important of these revolutionaries was Louis Auguste Blanqui, and he associated a lot of his terms with Communism. Like the utopians, he criticized Capitalism but he believed that it could only be overthrown through violent revolution by the working classes. In the last third of the 19th century in Europe social democratic parties arose in Europe drawing mainly from Marxism. By 1968, the Vietnam War created the New Left, socialists who tended to be critical of the Soviet Union and social democracy. Some elements of the New Left and others favored decentralized collective ownership in the form of cooperatives or workers' councils. In Latin America, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez coined the term 'Socialism of the 21st Century', which included a policy of nationalization of national assets such as oil, anti-imperialism, etc. By 1842, socialism became the topic of a major academic analysis by a German scholar, Lorenz von Stein, in his Socialism and Social Movement. According to an 1888 volume of A New English Dictionary on Historical

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