I like Sanders and I agree with him on most economic issues as he advances Nordic Socialism, not Marxism.
Karl Marx is the author of socialism right? Thus "marxism"?
No, actually, socialism was around for a lot longer than when Marx jumped in.
Socialism - Wikipedia
Socialist models and ideas espousing common or public ownership have existed since antiquity. It has been claimed, though controversially, that there were elements of socialist thought in the politics of classical Greek philosophers
Plato[61] and
Aristotle.
[62] Mazdak, a Persian communal proto-socialist,
[63] instituted communal possessions and advocated the public good.
Abū Dharr al-Ghifārī, a
Companion of Prophet Muhammad, is credited by many as a principal antecedent of
Islamic socialism.
[64][65][66][67][68] In the period right after the
French Revolution, activists and theorists like
François-Noël Babeuf,
Étienne-Gabriel Morelly,
Philippe Buonarroti, and
Auguste Blanqui influenced the early French labour and socialist movements.
[69] In Britain,
Thomas Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax property owners to pay for the needs of the poor in
Agrarian Justice[70]while
Charles Hall wrote
The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States, denouncing capitalism's effects on the poor of his time
[71] which influenced the utopian schemes of
Thomas Spence.
[72]
The first "self-conscious socialist movements developed in the 1820s and 1830s.
The Owenites,
Saint-Simonians and
Fourierists provided a series of coherent analyses and interpretations of society. They also, especially in the case of the Owenites, overlapped with a number of other working-class movements like the
Chartists in the United Kingdom."
[73] The Chartists gathered significant numbers around the People's Charter of 1838, which demanded the extension of suffrage to all male adults. Leaders in the movement also called for a more equitable distribution of income and better living conditions for the working classes. "The very first trade unions and consumers’ cooperative societies also emerged in the hinterland of the Chartist movement, as a way of bolstering the fight for these demands."
[74] A later important socialist thinker in France was
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who proposed his philosophy of
mutualism in which "everyone had an equal claim, either alone or as part of a small cooperative, to possess and use land and other resources as needed to make a living".
[75] There were also currents inspired by dissident Christianity of
Christian socialism "often in Britain and then usually coming out of left liberal politics and a romantic anti-industrialism"
[69] which produced theorists such as
Edward Bellamy,
Frederick Denison Maurice, and
Charles Kingsley.
[76]
The first advocates of socialism favoured social levelling in order to create a
meritocratic or
technocratic society based on individual talent. Count
Henri de Saint-Simon is regarded as the first individual to coin the term
socialism.
[77] Saint-Simon was fascinated by the enormous potential of science and technology and advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of capitalism and would be based on equal opportunities.
[78][
unreliable source?] He advocated the creation of a society in which each person was ranked according to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work.
[77] The key focus of Saint-Simon's socialism was on administrative efficiency and industrialism, and a belief that science was the key to progress.
[79] This was accompanied by a desire to implement a rationally organised economy based on planning and geared towards large-scale scientific and material progress,
[77] and thus embodied a desire for a more directed or
planned economy. Other early socialist thinkers, such as
Thomas Hodgkin and Charles Hall, based their ideas on
David Ricardo's economic theories. They reasoned that the equilibrium value of commodities approximated prices charged by the producer when those commodities were in elastic supply, and that these producer prices corresponded to the embodied labour – the cost of the labour (essentially the wages paid) that was required to produce the commodities. The
Ricardian socialists viewed profit, interest and rent as deductions from this exchange-value.[
citation needed]
West European social critics, including
Robert Owen,
Charles Fourier,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
Louis Blanc,
Charles Hall, and
Saint-Simon, were the first modern socialists who criticised the excessive poverty and inequality of the
Industrial Revolution. They advocated reform, with some such as Robert Owen advocating the transformation of society to small communities without private property. Robert Owen's contribution to modern socialism was his understanding that actions and characteristics of individuals were largely determined by the social environment they were raised in and exposed to.
[79] On the other hand,
Charles Fourier advocated
phalansteres which were communities that respected individual desires (including sexual preferences), affinities and creativity and saw that work has to be made enjoyable for people.
[80] The ideas of Owen and Fourier were tried in practice in numerous
intentional communities around Europe and the American continent in the mid-19th century.
