Socialism is termed as an economic political and social philosophy covering an assortment of social and economic frameworks characterized by social ownership of the means of production and the self-control of enterprises by workers. It incorporates the political movements and theories related to such systems. A social obligation may be mainstream, collective, collaborative, or equitable. Socialism and communism are described fundamentally as economic principles that promote the public in place of private ownership, primarily in a system of factors of production, distribution, and exchange of products and services that aim at making money. Both elements are poised for resolving the rising problems they consider to be created by a series of misguided industrial policies. The complex evolution of socialism reflects the broad variety of definitions and interpretations of socialism across the political landscape and the absence of a common consensus of what socialism is or how it appears to look in the practical realm. Even so, within countries around the globe, socialist party outfits and concepts continue to shape policy matters. And the prevalence of socialism contributes to the universal appeal of seeking a more egalitarian social implementation.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1839.

This highly topical book presents a new theory on the characteristics of entrepreneurial knowledge. It explores the recent shift among professional economists and scholars in their evaluation of the debate of socialism. Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship presents an application of Israel M. Kirzner's theory of entrepreneurship to the theory of the impossibility of socialism. It discusses the influence of the fall of socialism, with particular reference to the evolution of economic thought.

The rise to dominance of marginalist economics coincided with a major increase in the spread of socialist ideas. As many socialist and Marxist thinkers were preocuppied with economic questions this was scarcely a development that could be ignored. Socialists either had to defend Marxist economics against marginalist criticism or show that socialism and marginalism were compatible. This volume explores the varied socialist responses in a number of major European countries including Italy, France, Russia and German speaking countries.

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises proclaimed that all attempts to establish socialism would come to grief, for reasons of informational efficiency. At first, socialists and economists took Mises's argument seriously, but by the end of the Second World War, a consensus prevailed that Mises had been discredited. More recently, that consensus has been rapidly reversed: it is now widely agreed that 'Mises was right'. Yet the momentous implications of the Mises argument - for economics, politics, culture, and philosophy - remain largely unexplored. From Marx to Mises is a clear, penetrating exposition of the economic calculation debate, and a scrutiny of some of the broader issues it raises.

The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.

This book discusses socialism and democracy. It approaches socialism not as a label but as an ideology. Based on a careful examination of what socialism is, traced back to Karl Marx, this book explains the tense relationship between socialism and democracy and how it has influenced political thought and practice in both Europe and America. This book carefully avoids conventional wisdom, seeking instead to originate its definition and analysis of socialism in its political theory and practice. Building on the relationship between socialism and democracy, the book explores how this uneasy roommate agreement may affect America’s future.

Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and Attempted Revival in the United States This book is an attempt to address all the important economic aspects of socialismthe concepts and theories, the historical attempts to implement socialist economic systems, and the endeavor to establish socialism in the United States. Part I reviews the origins and ideas of socialism, which reflect an aspiration radically to transform the market system, the great advantages of which were explained by Adam Smith. Part II reviews the establishment of Marxist-Leninist economic systems in the USSR and the East European countries. The movement featured central economic planning, which survived from the 1920s until about 1990; its failure was the attempt of statist organization to crush the market system and replace it with Stalinist command planning. Central planning was meticulously copied in the bloc countries of East Europe, in China, in India, and elsewhere. The national replications of central economic planning always produced the same disappointing, usually disastrous results. Efforts to reform the system always failed. Meanwhile, the democratic countries of Western Europe established socialist parties and policies, but in less than a century after Marx, the great hopes of socialism to achieve successful and productive nationalization of industries on the basis of a national economic plan had been recognized as unproductive and undesirable. Part III reviews the failed attempt to establish a viable socialist party in the United States. The real thrust toward socialism, originally launched by the New Deal of Roosevelt, came when Barak Obama, a thoroughly indoctrinated and dedicated socialist, ascended to the US presidency. This socialism is an attempt to expand income redistribution and social welfare policies and to pursue massive industrial regulation and unconstitutional interventions in the private sector. The implications of these policies are discussed together with the associated loss of market freedoms and personal liberties.

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.