Socialism

Socialism is a political and economic doctrine calling for public or collective ownership and control of property and the means of production, rather than private ownership. Its legitimacy claim is that authority over economic life belongs collectively to the community or to the people who produce, rather than to individual owners of capital, on the ground that private ownership of the means of production lets a small class command the labour and livelihoods of everyone else without their genuine consent. It developed as an organised movement in early nineteenth-century Europe, associated with thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen. Robert Owen, the Welsh mill owner whose New Lanark cotton works became a model for cooperative industrial welfare, is generally credited as the movement's practical founder in Britain; Owenite publications of the late 1820s were among the first in English to use the word socialist, and Owen's later writings on cooperative communities helped found the worldwide consumers' cooperative movement. The atlas records no single honest founding year for socialism, since it developed as an organised movement through the independent work of several early nineteenth-century thinkers rather than being founded by one person or text at one moment.