Word: socialists
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There are non-Marxian socialists, but all owe some debt to Karl Marx, who framed the classic socialist indictment of capitalism, accusing it of turning labor into a commodity and thus exploiting and dehumanizing workers while it enriches bourgeois owners. Most important, perhaps, was Marx's claim that he had discovered certain "scientific" laws of history. By creating an increasingly numerous and impoverished working class, goes his familiar argument, capitalism produced the very forces that one day would destroy it in an Apocalypse of violent revolution. This confident prediction, which for more than a century inspired nearly all socialists with...
...Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?which represents socialism in its extreme form?give the lie to the Marxist claim that it is necessarily capitalism and not socialism that enslaves the human spirit. Economically, socialism has logged impressive achievements, sometimes against tremendous odds. Yet in comparing neighboring countries where one is socialist and the other is not (North Korea v. South Korea, Tanzania v. Kenya), the statistical evidence almost always favors the nonsocialist nation...
...order into the economy. Most argue that controls or central planning will lead to increased output, more equitable distribution of goods, and a concentration of resources in socially useful production. Explains Claude Estier, a national secretary of the French Socialist Party: "We consider it necessary to direct the economy toward the general interest rather than toward the interests of a small number of capitalists...
Because social democrats have mostly come to power in industrially advanced and politically democratic nations, they have been cautious in their efforts to change existing systems by, for example, nationalizing economies. Says French Socialist...
...record on liberty of some Third World socialists is no better than that of the Marxist-Leninists. Tanzania's prisons contain about 1,500 opponents of Nyerere's regime. Mozambique's socialist rulers have herded up to 10,000 "undesirables," including political dissidents, into primitive "reeducation camps." Iraq's xenophobic Baathist socialists have not held national elections since they came to power in 1968, and any critic of the Ahmed Hassan Bakr regime is quickly arrested by the Soviet-trained secret police...