State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises. The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies or of public companies in which the state has controlling shares.
The Conquest of Bread is an 1892 book by the Russian anarchist communist Peter Kropotkin. Originally written in French, it first appeared as a series of articles in the anarchist journal Le Révolté. It was first published in Paris with a preface by Élisée Reclus, who also suggested the title. Between 1892 and 1894, it was serialized in part in the London journal Freedom, of which Kropotkin was a co-founder.
New class is a polemic term by critics of countries that followed the Soviet-type state socialism to describe the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist party functionaries which arose in these states. Generally, the group known in the Soviet Union as the nomenklatura conforms to the theory of the new class. The term was earlier applied to other emerging strata of the society. Milovan Đilas' new-class theory was also used extensively by anti-communist commentators in the Western world in their criticism of the Communist states during the Cold War.
James Burnham was an American philosopher and political theorist. He chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy; his first book was An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1931). Burnham became a prominent Trotskyist activist in the 1930s. A year before he wrote the book, he rejected Marxism and became an influential theorist of the political right as a leader of the American conservative movement. His book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, speculated on the future of capitalism. Burnham was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics. He rejected containment of the Soviet Union and called for the rollback of communism worldwide.
Raveendra Nath "Ravi" Batra is an Indian-American economist, author, and professor at Southern Methodist University. Batra is the author of six bestselling books, two of which appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list, with one reaching No. 1 in late 1987. His books center on his idea that financial capitalism breeds excessive inequality and political corruption, which inevitably succumbs to financial crisis and economic depression. In his works, Batra proposes an equitable distribution system known as Progressive Utilization Theory (PROUT) as a means to not only ensure material welfare but also to secure the ability of all to develop a full personality.
There were people and organizations who predicted that the USSR would dissolve before the eventual dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Michel Garder was a Russian-born French author and military man known for his writings about the Soviet Union. He notably predicted in his 1965 book L'Agonie du Régime en Russie Soviétique that the USSR would collapse by 1970.
Criticism of Marxism has come from various political ideologies, campaigns and academic disciplines. This includes general intellectual criticism about dogmatism, a lack of internal consistency, criticism related to materialism, arguments that Marxism is a type of historical determinism or that it necessitates a suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives. In addition, empirical and epistemological problems are frequently identified.
Franz Borkenau was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis. Borkenau is known as one of the pioneers of the totalitarianism theory.
Communism is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes, and ultimately money and the state.
Martin Edward Malia was an American historian specializing in Russian history. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1958 to 1991. He earned degrees from Yale University (BA) and Harvard University (PhD).
"Second Thoughts on James Burnham" is an essay, first published in May 1946 in Polemic, by the English author George Orwell. The essay discusses works written by James Burnham, an American political theorist.
The Great Depression of 1990 is a book by Ravi Batra in the field of economic history and future evolution, originally published in 1985. The book's original title was Regular Cycles of Money, Inflation, Regulation and Depressions. MIT Economics Professor Lester Thurow wrote a favorable introduction for the book with its original title. Retitled, the book entered the New York Times Best Seller list in early 1987 and reached #1 later that year. The book and its sequel, Surviving the Great Depression of 1990, made Batra "one of the best selling economists of all time."
After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action is a 2012 book by United States author Dada Maheshvarananda, an activist, yoga monk and writer. The book argues that global capitalism is terminally ill because it suffers from four fatal flaws: growing inequity and concentration of wealth, addiction to speculation instead of production, rising unsustainable debt and its tendency to exploit the natural environment.
The Coming Collapse of China is a book by Gordon G. Chang, published in 2001, in which he argued that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was the root cause of many of China's problems and would cause the country's collapse by 2011. When 2011 was almost over, Chang admitted that his prediction was wrong but said it was off by only a year, asserting in Foreign Policy that the CCP would fall in 2012. Consequently he made the magazine's "10 worst predictions of the year" twice.
In Trotskyist political theory, a degenerated workers' state is a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the working class' democratic control over the state has given way to control by a bureaucratic clique. The term was developed by Leon Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed and in other works.
A socialist state, socialist republic, or socialist country, sometimes referred to as a workers' state or workers' republic, is a sovereign state constitutionally dedicated to the establishment of socialism. The term communist state is often used synonymously in the West, specifically when referring to one-party socialist states governed by Marxist–Leninist communist parties, despite these countries being officially socialist states in the process of building socialism and progressing toward a communist society. These countries never describe themselves as communist nor as having implemented a communist society. Additionally, a number of countries that are multi-party capitalist states make references to socialism in their constitutions, in most cases alluding to the building of a socialist society, naming socialism, claiming to be a socialist state, or including the term people's republic or socialist republic in their country's full name, although this does not necessarily reflect the structure and development paths of these countries' political and economic systems. Currently, these countries include Algeria, Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.
Proletarian internationalism, sometimes referred to as international socialism, is the perception of all proletarian revolutions as being part of a single global class struggle rather than separate localized events. It is based on the theory that capitalism is a world-system and therefore the working classes of all nations must act in concert if they are to replace it with communism.
World communism, also known as global communism or international communism, is a form of communism placing emphasis on an international scope rather than being individual communist states. The long-term goal of world communism is an unlimited worldwide communist society that is classless, moneyless, stateless, and nonviolent, which may be achieved through an intermediate-term goal of either a voluntary association of sovereign states as a global alliance, or a world government as a single worldwide state.
