Socialism

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government in France and the conditions for vast future economic
expansion in England, also engendered a state of incipient conflict between the
property owners (the bourgeoisie) and the growing class of industrial workers;
socialists have since been striving to eliminate or at least mitigate this
conflict. The first socialist movement emerged in France after the Revolution
and was led by Francois BABEUF, Filippo Buonarrotti (1761-1837), and Louis
Auguste BLANQUI; Babeuf's revolt of 1796 was a failure. Other early socialist
thinkers, such as the comte de SAINT-SIMON, Charles FOURIER, and Etienne CABET
in France and Robert OWEN and William Thompson (c.1785-1833) in England,
believed in the possibility of peaceful and gradual transformation to a
socialist society by the founding of small experimental communities; hence,
later socialist writers dubbed them with the label utopian.

THE EMERGENCE OF MARXISM

In the mid-19th century, more-elaborate socialist theories were ...

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the growing intensity of the
struggle between capitalists and workers (the proletariat), the latter being
progressively impoverished and as a result assuming an increasingly
revolutionary attitude.

Marx further asserted, in his most famous work, Das KAPITAL, that the capitalist
employer of labor had, in order to make a profit, to extract "surplus value"
from his employees, thereby exploiting them and reducing them to "wage-slavery."
The modern state, with its government and law-enforcing agencies, was solely the
executive organ of the capitalist class. Religion, philosophy, and most other
forms of culture likewise simply fulfilled the "ideological" function of making
the working class ...

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