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. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is considered as the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.
A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state in which the totality of the power belongs to a party adhering to some form of Marxism–Leninism, a branch of the communist ideology. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Comintern after its Bolshevisation, and the communist states within the Comecon, the Eastern Bloc, and the Warsaw Pact. After the peak of Marxism–Leninism, when many communist states were established, the Revolutions of 1989 brought down most of the communist states; however, Communism remained the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and to a lesser extent, North Korea. During the later part of the 20th century, before the Revolutions of 1989, around one-third of the world's population lived in communist states.
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women's labor is uncompensated. Marxist feminists extend traditional Marxist analysis by applying it to unpaid domestic labor and sex relations.
Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.
Cultural feminism is a term used to describe a variety of feminism that attempts to revalue and redefine attributes culturally ascribed to femaleness. It is also used to describe theories that commend innate differences between women and men.
Materialist feminism is a theoretical current of radical feminism that was formed around the French magazine Questions féministes. It is characterized by the use of conceptual tools from Marxism—notably historical materialism—to theorize patriarchy and its abolition.
Criticism of capitalism is a critique of political economy that involves the rejection of, or dissatisfaction with the economic system of capitalism and its outcomes. Criticisms typically range from expressing disagreement with particular aspects or outcomes of capitalism to rejecting the principles of the capitalist system in its entirety.
Feminist anthropology is a four-field approach to anthropology that seeks to transform research findings, anthropological hiring practices, and the scholarly production of knowledge, using insights from feminist theory. Simultaneously, feminist anthropology challenges essentialist feminist theories developed in Europe and America. While feminists practiced cultural anthropology since its inception, it was not until the 1970s that feminist anthropology was formally recognized as a subdiscipline of anthropology. Since then, it has developed its own subsection of the American Anthropological Association – the Association for Feminist Anthropology – and its own publication, Feminist Anthropology. Their former journal Voices is now defunct.
Communism is a 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.
Lynne Segal is an Australian-born, British-based socialist feminist academic and activist, author of many books and articles, and participant in many campaigns, from local community to international. She has taught in higher education in London, England, since 1970, at Middlesex Polytechnic from 1973. In 1999, she was appointed Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, where she now works in the School of Psychosocial Studies.
Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily known for her ethnographic work on post-Communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies. She was critical of the role of Western feminist nongovernmental organizations doing work among East European women in the 1990s. She has also examined the shifting gender relations of Muslim minorities after Communist rule, the intersections of Islamic beliefs and practices with the ideological remains of Marxism–Leninism, communist nostalgia, the legacies of Marxist feminism, and the intellectual history of utopianism.
Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an economic and political system supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political pluralism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as "socialist" and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus, and freedom of expression, either due to fear of counter-revolution or as a means to socialist ends. Journalists and scholars have characterised several countries, most notably the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and their allies, as authoritarian socialist states.
Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory is a book by the sociologist Lise Vogel that is considered an important contribution to Marxist Feminism. Vogel surveys Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's comments on the causes of women's oppression, examines how socialist movements in Europe and in the United States have addressed women's oppression, and argues that women's oppression should be understood in terms of women's role in social reproduction and in particular in reproducing labor power.
Lise Vogel is a feminist sociologist and art historian from the United States. An influential Marxist-feminist theoretician, she is recognised for being one of the main founders of the Social Reproduction Theory. She also participated in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements in organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Bread & Roses in Boston. In her earlier career as an art historian, she was one of the first to try to develop a feminist perspective on Art History.
"The Traffic in Women" is an essay by anarchist writer Emma Goldman in 1910. It has been circulated in a variety of publications. Namely, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), published by Mother Earth, as well as the leading essay of The Traffic in Women, and Other Essays on Feminism (1971). Mother Earth was a monthly anarchist magazine founded by Goldman, Max Baginski, and others in 1906. The essay is one of more than 20 articles that Goldman wrote during 1906 to 1940.
Postsocialism is the academic study of states after the fall or decline of socialism, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia. The "socialism" in postsocialism is not based on a Marxist conception of socialism but rather, especially in the Eastern European context, on the idea of "actually existing socialism". Scholars of postsocialist states maintain that, even if the political and economic systems in place did not adhere to orthodox Marxist ideas of "socialism", these systems were real and had real effects on cultures, society, and individuals' subjectivities. Scholars of postsocialism often draw from other theoretical frameworks like postcolonialism and focus especially on the evolution of labor relations, gender roles, and ethnic and religious political affiliations. The idea of postsocialism has also been criticized, however, for placing so much emphasis on the impact of socialism while the term socialism remains difficult to define, especially if extended beyond Eastern Europe.
Anti anti-communism is opposition to anti-communism as applied in the Cold War. The term was first coined by Clifford Geertz, an American anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study, who defined it as being applied in "the cold war days" by "those who ... regarded the [Red] Menace as the primary fact of contemporary political life" to "[t]hose of us who strenuously opposed [that] obsession, as we saw it ... with the insinuation – wildly incorrect in the vast majority of cases – that, by the law of the double negative, we had some secret affection for the Soviet Union." Stated more simply by Kristen Ghodsee and Scott Sehon, "the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that you could be 'anti anti-communism' without being in favour of communism."
Changes in gender roles in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism have been an object of historical and sociological study.
Do Communists Have Better Sex? is a 2006 German documentary film directed by André Meier. It compares the sexuality manifested by Germans during the period being divided into a Western and an Eastern part. The hypothesis manifested by scholars, interviews and footage is that sex was more free and women had more sexual pleasure in East Germany. The film discusses the possible reasons, considering the differences between the ideology and practical politics of a capitalist and a self-proclaimed communist regime.
The Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement (CBWM) (1968–1990) was a government-affiliated organization in Bulgaria that aimed to improve women's participation in the labor force, decrease the declining birth rate, and promote gender equality during the Bulgarian socialist era. It accomplished these goals by advocating for women's rights, redefining gender roles, and securing state support for women's issues. Notable accomplishments include maternity leave and abortion rights and a program of social engineering to encourage men to take a more active role in child-rearing and homemaking activities. The CBWM played a prominent role in securing development aid for struggling economies in Africa and trained female leaders in Bulgaria to help feminist activists from Zambia. The committee has been recently recognized by scholars for its acute impacts of women's rights at the international level, with many progressive policies emerging directly from the committee's initiatives and influences. The CBWM was dissolved in 1990 after the fall of communism in Bulgaria.
