History
According to contemporary critics of capitalism, rapid industrialization in Europe created working conditions viewed as unfair, including: 14-hour work days, child labor, and shanty towns. Some modern economists argue that average living standards did not improve, or only very slowly improved, before 1840.
Early socialist thinkers rejected capitalism altogether, attempting to create socialist communities free of the perceived injustices of early capitalism. Among these utopian socialists were Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederich Engels released the Communist Manifesto, which outlined a political and economic critique of capitalism based on the philosophy of historical materialism. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon a contemporary of Marx was another notable critic of capitalism, and was one of the first to call himself an anarchist.
By the early 20th century, myriad socialist tendencies (e.g., anarcho-syndicalism, social democracy and Bolshevism) had arisen based on different interpretations of current events. Governments also began placing restrictions on market operations and created interventionist programs, attempting to ameliorate perceived market shortcomings (e.g., Keynesian economics and the New Deal). Starting with the 1917 Russian revolution, Communist states increased in numbers, and a Cold War started with the developed capitalist nations. Following the Revolutions of 1989, many of these Communist states adopted market economies. The notable exceptions to this trend have been North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, the latter instituting a philosophy referred to as "Socialism of the 21st century".
Read more about this topic: Formal Democracy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)