Socialism
Related: communism - class - social realism - social
Definition
Socialism can refer to a political doctrine, an economic theory, a vision of an ideal society, or a description of an actually existing society. In its broadest sense, socialism is a belief that human society can and should be organised along social lines - that is, for the benefit of all, rather than for the profit of a few, which it argued had been the case hitherto. Its key ideas are placing at least some of the means of production and distribution of goods and services into collective ownership and a centralized government that plans and controls the economy to one extent or another. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist
Adolf Hitler appropriated the term socialism: "Some claim that Nazism was a form of socialism, although many who describe themselves as socialists hotly dispute this categorisation." --http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_and_Nazism
Social ecology
Social Ecology is a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends. It claims to be a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society. Social Ecology is a radical view of scientific ecology and of social/political systems, e.g. those within which Green Parties operate.
Social Ecologists believe that the current ecological crisis is the product of capitalism. They believe it is not the number of people, but the way people relate to one another that has fueled the current economic crisis. Over-consumption, productivism and consumerism are thus symptoms, not causes, of a deeper issue with ethical relationships.
see Murray Bookchin, social darwinism, Peter Kropotkin
contrast with Deep Ecology, Gaia philosophy, terrist, Gaian, Greens --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ecology [May 2004]
Books
- The Murray Bookchin Reader - Murray Bookchin [Amazon.com]
Murray Bookchin was born in New York City on January 14, 1921, to immigrant parents who had been active in the Russian revolutionary movement in tsarist times. Very early in the 1930s he entered the Communist youth movement--first the Young Pioneers, then the Young Communist League--but by the late 1930s became disillusioned with its authoritarian character. Deeply involved in organizing activities around the Spanish Civil War (he was too young to participate directly), he drifted away from the Communists in 1937 because of their counterrevolutionary role in Spain and the Moscow trials. After the Stalin-Hitler pact of September 1939, he was formally expelled from the Young Communist League for "Trotskyist-anarchist deviations." As a young man he worked as a foundryman and became active in union organizing in northern New Jersey (a heavily industrialized area at that time) for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He was sympathetic to and active with the American Trotskyists, but several years after Trotsky's death in 1940, he became increasingly disappointed by their traditional Bolshevist authoritarianism. http://www.social-ecology.org/about/faculty/bookchin.html
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