4min chapter

5. How Do We Know What Left and Right Mean? Who’s who on the left and right: 1789-1917

WHAT IS POLITICS?

CHAPTER

Socialism in the Late Nineteenth Century

The only paradime that makes sense is hierarchy versus equality. The state was simply an instrument of oppression used by the ruling class to jugate oppressed classes, he says. People to day often define socialism as state or government control of the economy - but that's largely a relic of the soviet union and of cold war propaganda,. Traditionally, the defining element of socialism is worker control of theeconomy and of society. A majority of socialists in this period, and certainly some of the most historically important socialists, were against the state as an appropriate instrument for socialist government.

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