Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. Traditionally, socialism is on the left wing of the political spectrum. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.
Anti-capitalism is a political ideology and movement encompassing a variety of attitudes and ideas that oppose capitalism.
Bolshevism is a revolutionary socialist current of Soviet Leninist and later Marxist–Leninist political thought and political regime associated with the formation of a rigidly centralized, cohesive and disciplined party of social revolution, focused on overthrowing the existing capitalist state system, seizing power and establishing the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Lindsey Ann German is a British left-wing political activist. A founding member and convenor of the British anti-war organisation Stop the War Coalition, she was formerly a member of the Socialist Workers Party, sitting on its central committee and editor of its magazine, Socialist Review.
John Rees is a British political activist, academic, journalist and writer who is a national officer of the Stop the War Coalition, and founding member of Counterfire. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.
István Mészáros was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher. Described as "one of the foremost political philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries" by Monthly Review, Mészáros wrote mainly about the possibility of a transition from capitalism to socialism. His magnum opus, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995), was concerned not only with this theme but provided a conceptual distinction between capitalism and capital, and an analysis of the current capitalist society and its "structural crisis". He was interested in the critique of the "bourgeois ideology", including the idea of "there is no alternative", and he also elaborated analysis on the failures of "real socialism".
Counterfire is a Marxist and revolutionary socialist organisation in the United Kingdom. Founded in 2010, it runs a website and has published pamphlets under the Counterfire imprint. It has its origins in the Trotskyist political tradition.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and supports a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach towards achieving socialism. In practice, social democracy takes a form of socially managed welfare capitalism, achieved with partial public ownership, economic interventionism, and policies promoting social equality.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a far-left political party in the United Kingdom. Founded as the Socialist Review Group by supporters of Tony Cliff in 1950, it became the International Socialists in 1962 and the SWP in 1977. The party considers itself to be Trotskyist. Cliff and his followers criticised the Soviet Union and its satellites, calling them state capitalist rather than socialist countries.
Marxist literary criticism is a theory of literary criticism based on the historical materialism developed by philosopher and economist Karl Marx. Marxist critics argue that even art and literature themselves form social institutions and have specific ideological functions, based on the background and ideology of their authors. The English literary critic and cultural theorist Terry Eagleton defines Marxist criticism this way: "Marxist criticism is not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aims to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and, meanings. But it also means grasping those forms styles and meanings as the product of a particular history." In Marxist criticism, class struggle and relations of production are the central instruments in analysis.
Michael Lavalette is a member of the Socialist Workers Party and former local councillor in Preston, Lancashire, England. He was first elected as a Socialist Alliance candidate shortly after the Iraq War began in 2003. In 2007, he was re-elected, this time standing for the Respect Party. In the Respect split in 2007 he remained loyal to the SWP and broke with George Galloway. Re-elected in 2012 as an Independent Socialist, he was affiliated with TUSC until he retired from his seat in 2015.
People's democracy is a theoretical concept within Marxism–Leninism and a form of government which developed after World War II and allows in theory for a multi-class and multi-party democracy on the pathway to socialism. People's democracy was established in a number of European and Asian countries as a result of the people's democratic revolutions of the 1940s.
The Stop the War Coalition (StWC), informally known simply as Stop the War, is a British group that campaigns against the United Kingdom's involvement in military conflicts.
György Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, literary critic, and aesthetician. He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy. He developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. He was also a philosopher of Leninism. He ideologically developed and organised Lenin's pragmatic revolutionary practices into the formal philosophy of vanguard-party revolution.
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is a term describing the ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation and inequality intrinsic to the social relations between classes. According to Marxists, false consciousness legitimizes the existence of different social classes.
Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought which emerged after the death of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the late 19th century, expressed in its primary form by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky's views of Marxism dominated the European Marxist movement for two decades, and orthodox Marxism was the official philosophy of the majority of the socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War in 1914, whose outbreak caused Kautsky's influence to wane and brought to prominence the orthodoxy of Vladimir Lenin. Orthodox Marxism aimed to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying perceived ambiguities and contradictions in classical Marxism. It overlaps significantly with Instrumental Marxism.
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, in which the author re-emphasizes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on the philosopher Karl Marx, analyzes the concept of "class consciousness," and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Marxism:
The Junius Pamphlet was a text written by Rosa Luxemburg in 1915 while she was in prison, against the brutality of the First World War. The actual title of the work was The Crisis of German Social Democracy but she used the pen-name “Junius” to avoid prosecution, and this became the basis of the work's popular name. The name “Junius” was apparently a reference to Lucius Junius Brutus, a hero of the Roman Republic. The pseudonym also echoed a name used to sign political polemics against King George III of England, known as the Letters of Junius.
