LIBERALISM
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights, capitalism, and the free exercise of religion.
Liberalism first became a powerful force in the Age of Enlightenment, rejecting several foundational assumptions that dominated most earlier theories of government, such as nobility, established religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings.
The early liberal thinker John Locke, who is often credited for the creation of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights and the social contract to argue that the rule of law should replace absolutism in government, that rulers were subject to the consent of the governed, and that private individuals had a fundamental right to life, liberty, and property.
The revolutionaries in the American Revolution and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of tyrannical rule. The nineteenth century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, Latin America, and North America.
Liberal ideas spread even further in the twentieth century, when liberal democracies triumphed in two world wars and survived major ideological challenges from fascism and communism. Today, liberalism in its many forms remains as a political force to varying degrees of power and influence on all major continents.
A twenty-first century development is an emerging new liberalism that is centred on the concept of timeless freedom . This is an idea that has been endorsed by the President of Liberal International Hans van Baalen.
Chief Characteristics of Liberalism
1-Belief in the theory of Natural Rights.
2-Belief in the world of individual.
3-Individual an end.
4-Emphasis on Liberalism.
5-Against Conservatism.
6-Belief in co-existence of classes.
7-Belie in Democracy and Socialism.
8-Right against government.
INDIVIDUALISM Individualism is a political and social philosophy that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Although the concept of an individual may seem straightforward, there are many ways of understanding it, both in theory and in practice. The term individualism itself dates—like socialism and other isms—from the 19th century.
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own interests, whether by society, family or any other group or institution.
Individualism makes the individual its focus and so starts "with the fundamental premise that the human individual is of primary importance in the struggle for liberation." Classical liberalism (including libertarianism), existentialism and anarchism (especially individualist anarchism) are examples of movements that take the human individual as a central unit of analysis.
It has also been used as a term denoting "The quality of being an individual; individuality" related to possessing "An individual characteristic; a quirk." Individualism is thus also associated with artistic and bohemian interests and lifestyles where there is a tendency towards self creation and experimentation as opposed to tradition or popular mass opinions and behaviors as so also with humanist philosophical positions and ethics.
Individualism once exhibited interesting national variations, but its various meanings have since largely merged. Following the upheaval of the French Revolution, individualisme was used pejoratively in France to signify the sources of social dissolution and anarchy and the elevation of individual interests above those of the collective.
The term’s negative connotation was employed by French reactionaries, nationalists, conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, despite their different views of a feasible and desirable social order.
In Germany, the ideas of individual uniqueness and self-realization contributed to the cult of individual genius and were later transformed into an organic theory of national community. According to this view, state and society are not artificial constructs erected on the basis of a social contract but instead unique and self-sufficient cultural wholes.
In England, individualism encompassed religious nonconformity and economic liberalism in its various versions, including both laissez-faire and moderate state-interventionist approaches
For the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97), individualism signified the cult of privacy, which, combined with the growth of self-assertion, had given “impulse to the highest individual development” that flowered in the European Renaissance.
The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) identified two types of individualism: the utilitarian egoism of the English sociologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who, according to Durkheim, reduced society to “nothing more than a vast apparatus of production and exchange,” and the rationalism of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1788), and the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), which has as “its primary dogma the autonomy of reason and as its primary rite the doctrine of free enquiry.”
False individualism, which was represented mainly by French and other continental European writers, is characterized by “an exaggerated belief in the powers of individual reason” and the scope of effective social planning and is “a source of modern socialism”; in contrast, true individualism, whose adherents included John Locke (1632–1704), Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733), David Hume (1711–76), Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), Adam Smith (1723–90), and Edmund Burke (1729–97), maintained that the “spontaneous collaboration of free men often creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend” and accepted that individuals must submit “to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society.”
FASCISM
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community .Under Fascism ,its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state.
A Fascist state seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education, and eugenics. Fascism seeks to purify the nation of foreign influences that are deemed to be causing degeneration of the nation or of not fitting into the national culture. Fascism promotes political violence and war, as forms of direct action that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.
Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violence against opponents or to overthrow a political system. Fascism opposes multiple ideologies: conservatism, liberalism, and two major forms of socialism—communism and social democracy.
Fascism claims to represent a synthesis of cohesive ideas previously divided between traditional political ideologies.To achieve its goals, the fascist state purges forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration.
The fascist party is a vanguard party designed to initiate a revolution from above and to organize the nation upon fascist principles. The fascist party and state is led by a supreme leader who exercises a dictatorship over the party, the government and other state institutions. Fascists reject conventional democracy that is based on majority rule.
Fascists claim to advocate an authoritarian democracy based on rule of the most qualified, rather quantitative majority rule, though multiple scholars are strongly skeptical of fascism's claims to be democratic. Fascism supports a socially united collective national society and opposes socially divided class-based societies and socially-divided individualist-based societies.
Fascists claim it is a trans-class movement, advocating resolution to domestic class conflict within a nation to secure national solidarity. While fascism opposes domestic class conflict, it favours a proletarian national culture and claims that its goal of nationalizing society emancipates the nation's proletariat, and promotes the assimilation of all classes into proletarian national culture.
It opposes contemporary bourgeois class-based society and culture for allegedly being based on selfish and hedonistic individualism that results in plutocracy and war profiteering at the expense of the nation. Fascism claims that bourgeois-proletarian conflict primarily exists in national conflict between proletarian nations versus bourgeois nations; fascism declares support for the victory of proletarian nations.
Fascists advocate a state-directed, regulated economy that is dedicated to the nation; the use and primacy of regulated private property and private enterprise contingent upon service to the nation or state, the use of state enterprise where private enterprise is failing or is inefficient, and autarky. It supports criminalization of strikes by employees and lockouts by employers because it deems these acts as prejudicial to the national community.
There is a running dispute among scholars about where along the left/right spectrum that fascism resides. Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who combined left-wing and right-wing political views, but Italian Fascism gravitated to the right in the early 1920s.
Benito Mussolini in 1919 described fascism as a syncretic movement that would strike "against the backwardness of the right and the destructiveness of the left". Italian Fascists described fascism as a right-wing ideology in the political program The Doctrine of Fascism: "We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right,' a fascist century."
MARXISM
Marxism is an economic and socio-political worldview and method of socio-economic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism.
Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th century by two German philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism encompasses Marxian economic theory, a sociological theory and a revolutionary view of social change that has influenced political movements around the world.
The Marxian analysis begins with an analysis of material conditions, taking at its starting point the necessary economic activities required by human society to provide for its material needs.
The form of economic organization, or mode of production, is understood to be the basis from which the majority of other social phenomena arise .These social relations form the superstructure, for which the economic system forms the base. As the forces of production, most notably technology, improve, existing forms of social organization become inefficient and stifle further progress.
These inefficiencies manifest themselves as social contradictions in society in the form of class struggle. Under the capitalist mode of production, this struggle materializes between the minority (the bourgeoisie) who own the means of production, and the vast majority of the population (the proletariat) who produce goods and services. Taking the idea that social change occurs because of the struggle between different classes within society who are under contradiction against each other. The Marxist analysis leads to the conclusion that capitalism oppresses the proletariat, the inevitable result being a proletarian revolution.
Marxism views the socialist system as being prepared by the historical development of capitalism. Capitalism according to Marxist theory can no longer sustain the living standards of the population due to its need to compensate for falling rates of profit by driving down wages, cutting social benefits and pursuing military aggression. The socialist system would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through worker's revolution. According to Marxism, Socialism is a historical necessity (but not an inevitability).
In a socialist society private property in the means of production would be superseded by co-operative ownership. A socialist economy would not base production on the creation of private profits, but would instead base production and economic activity on the criteria of satisfying human needs - that is, production would be carried out directly for use.
Eventually, socialism would give way to a communist stage of history: a classless, stateless system based on common ownership and free-access, superabundance and maximum freedom for individuals to develop their own capacities and talents. As a political movement, Marxism advocates the creation of such a society.
The Materialist Interpretation of History
The historical materialist theory of history, also synonymous to “the economic interpretation of history” looks for the causes of societal development and change in the collective ways humans use to make the means for living. The social features of a society (social classes, political structures, ideologies) derive from economic activity; “base and superstructure” is the metaphoric common term describing this historic condition.
The base and superstructure metaphor explains that the totality of social relations regarding “the social production of their existence” i.e. civil society forms a society’s economic base, from which rises a superstructure of political and legal institutions i.e. political society.
The base corresponds to the social consciousness (politics, religion, philosophy, etc.), and it conditions the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production provokes social revolutions, thus, the resultant changes to the economic base will lead to the transformation of the superstructure. This relationship is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure, in the first instance, and remains the foundation of a form of social organization which then can act again upon both parts of the base and superstructure, whose relationship is dialectical, not literal.Marx considered that these socio-economic conflicts have historically manifested themselves as distinct stages (one transitional) of development in Western Europe.
5. Socialism: workers gain class consciousness, and via proletarian revolution depose the capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, replacing it in turn with dictatorship of the proletariat through which the socialization of the means of production can be realized.
IMPORTANT MARXIST IDEOLOGY
1-Dialectical Materialism
2-The Materialistic Interpretation of history.
3-The theory of Surplus Value.
4-The Class war.
5-The Dictatorship of the proletariat.
6-Withering away of the state.
KARL HEINRICH MARX
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818 –1883) was a German philosopher, political economist, and socialist revolutionary, who addressed the matters of alienation and exploitation of the working class, the capitalist mode of production, and historical materialism. He is famous for analysing history in terms of class struggle, summarised in the initial line introducing the Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. His ideas were influential in his time, and it was greatly expanded by the successful Bolshevik October Revolution of 1917 in Imperial Russia.
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
Friedrich Engels (1820 – 1895) was a German political philosopher and Karl Marx’s co-developer of communist theory. Marx and Engels met in September 1844; discovering that they shared like views of philosophy and socialism, they collaborated and wrote works such as Die heilige Familie (The Holy Family). After the French deported Marx from France in January 1845, Engels and Marx moved to Belgium, which then permitted greater freedom of expression than other European countries; later, in January 1846, they returned to Brussels to establish the Communist Correspondence Committee.
In 1847, they began writing The Communist Manifesto (1848), based upon Engels’ The Principles of Communism; six weeks later, they published the 12,000-word pamphlet in February 1848. In March, Belgium expelled them, and they moved to Cologne, where they published the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a politically radical newspaper. Again, by 1849, they had to leave Cologne for London.
GANDHISM
1-Ideas ,Principles,Techniques and methods of Ganghiji is known as Gandhism.
2-Gandhism is a way of life
3-It offers solutions to modern proplems.
4-pTruth,Ahimsa,satygraha,khadi,charks,ramraj,swadeshi,trusteeship etc are his famous ideologies.
5-Truth and non-violence are the two means to achive ganghian objectives.
6-Truth,non-violence,respect for all religion,social equality,opposition to exploitation,colonialism,imperialism,and capitalism were Gandhi’s guiding principles of Political Ideology.
7-Gandhi’s religion was areligion of Humanity.
8-Gandhi believed that the essence of all religion is non-violence and truth.
9-Gandhi evolved satyagraha as a way of resisting evils.Satygraha meant firmness in a just cause. Satyagraha is a proof of truth by bearing witness to it through self suffering or love.To Gandhi, satyagraha is a weapon of the strongest and the bravest.The technique of Satyagraha may take the form of non-co-operation ,civil disobedience,fasting and strike.The satygrahi establishes spiritual identity with the opponent and awakens in him a feeling that he cannot hurt him without herting himself.
10-Gandhi criticised the western culture at first but later modified some of his vision on western civilization.
11-Gandhi was an egalitarian.He wanted everyone to have proper house to live in,sufficient and balanced food to eat and sufficient cloth with which to cover himself.Gandhi also advocated the state interference if the capitalists failed to act as a trustee.
12-To gandhi property as an hindrence in the realisation of God.
13-Gandhi’s method of conflicts were non-violence and satyagraha...
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