title: History of socialism

text: In Minnesota, the General Drivers Local 574 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters struck, despite an attempt to block the vote by American Federation of Labor officials, demanding union recognition, increased wages, shorter hours, overtime rates, improved working conditions and job protection through seniority. In the battles that followed, which captured country-wide media attention, three strikes took place, martial law was declared and the Minnesota National Guard was sent in. Two strikers were killed. Protest rallies of 40,000 were held. Farrell Dobbs, who became the leader of the local, had at the outset joined the "small and poverty-stricken" Communist League of America, founded by James P. Cannon and others in 1928 after their expulsion from the Communist Party USA for Trotskyism. Success for the CIO quickly followed its formation. In 1937, one of the founding unions of the CIO, the United Auto Workers, won union recognition at General Motors Corporation after a tumultuous forty-four-day sit-down strike, while the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which was formed by the CIO, won a collective bargaining agreement with U.S. Steel. The CIO merged with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955 becoming the AFL–CIO.


title: History of socialism

text: In 1928, the Communist International, now fully under the leadership of Stalin, turned from the united front policy to an ultra-left policy of the Third Period, a policy of aggressive confrontation of social democracy. This divided the working class at a critical time. Like the Labour Party in the UK, the Social Democratic Party in Germany, which was in power in 1928, followed an orthodox deflationary policy and pressed for reductions in unemployment benefits in order to save taxes and reduce budget deficits. These policies did not halt the recession and the government resigned. The Communists described the Social Democratic leaders as "social fascists" and in the Prussian Landtag they voted with the Nazis to bring down the Social Democratic government. Fascism continued to grow, with powerful backing from industrialists, especially in heavy industry, and Hitler was invited into power in 1933.


title: History of socialism

text: Hitler's regime swiftly destroyed both the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, the worst blow the world socialist movement had ever suffered. This forced Stalin to reassess his strategy, and from 1935 the Comintern began urging the formation of Popular Fronts, which were to include not just the Social Democratic parties but critically also "progressive capitalist" parties which were wedded to a capitalist policy. After the election of a Popular Front government in Spain in 1936 a fascist military revolt led to the Spanish Civil War. The crisis in Spain brought down the Popular Front government in France under Léon Blum. Ultimately the Popular Fronts were not able to prevent the spread of fascism or the aggressive plans of the fascist powers. Trotskyists considered Popular Fronts a "strike breaking conspiracy", an impediment to successful resistance to fascism due to their inclusion of pro-capitalist parties which demanded policies of opposition to strikes and workers’ actions against the capitalist class.


title: History of socialism

text: The Swedish Social democrats formed a government in 1932. They broke with economic orthodoxy during the depression and carried out extensive public works financed from government borrowing. They emphasised large-scale intervention and the high unemployment they had inherited was eliminated by 1938. Their success encouraged the adoption of Keynesian policies of deficit financing pursued by almost all Western countries after World War II.


title: History of socialism

text: During the Spanish Civil War, anarchists set up different forms of cooperative and communal arrangements, especially in the rural areas of Aragon and Catalonia. However, these communes were disbanded by the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic.


title: History of socialism

text: Jewish Zionists established utopian socialist communities in Palestine, which were known as kibbutzim, a small number of which still survive.


title: History of socialism

text: In the 1930s, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), a reformist socialist political party that was up to then based upon revisionist Marxism, began a transition away from Marxism towards liberal socialism beginning in the 1930s. After the party was banned by the Nazi regime in 1933, the SPD acted in exile through the Sopade. In 1934 the Sopade began to publish material that indicated that the SPD was turning towards liberal socialism. Sopade member Curt Geyer was a prominent proponent of liberal socialism within the Sopade, and declared that Sopade represented the tradition of Weimar Republic social democracy—liberal democratic socialism, and declared that Sopade's held true to its mandate of traditional liberal principles combined with the political realism of socialism. After the restoration of democracy in West Germany, the SPD's Godesberg Program in 1959 eliminated the party's remaining Marxist-aligned policies. The SPD then became officially based upon (liberal socialism). West German Chancellor Willy Brandt has been identified as a liberal socialist.


title: History of socialism

text: In 1945, the three great powers of the Allies of World War II met at the Yalta Conference to negotiate an amicable and stable peace. UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined USA President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee. With the relative decline of Britain compared to the two superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, however, many viewed the world as "bi-polar"a world with two irreconcilable and antagonistic political and economic systems. As a result of the failure of the Popular Fronts and the inability of Britain and France to conclude a defensive alliance against Hitler, Stalin again changed his policy in August 1939 and signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, with Nazi Germany. Shortly afterwards World War II broke out, and within two years Hitler had occupied most of Europe, and by 1942 both democracy and social democracy in Central and Eastern Europe fell under the threat of fascism. The only socialist parties of any significance able to operate freely were those in Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941 marked the turning of the tide against fascism, and as the German armies retreated another great upsurge in left-wing sentiment swelled up in their wake. The resistance movements against German occupation were mostly led by socialists and communists, and by the end of the war the parties of the left were greatly strengthened.


title: History of socialism

text: One of the great postwar victories of democratic socialism was the election victory of the British Labour Party led by Clement Attlee in June 1945. Socialist (and in some places Stalinist) parties also dominated postwar governments in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Norway and other European countries. The Social Democratic Party had been in power in Sweden since the 1932 general election, and Labour parties also held power in Australia and New Zealand. In Germany, on the other hand, the Social Democrats emerged from the war much weakened, and were defeated in Germany's first democratic elections in 1949. The united front between democrats and the Stalinist parties which had been established in the wartime resistance movements continued in the immediate postwar years. The democratic socialist parties of Eastern Europe, however, were destroyed when Stalin imposed so-called "Communist" regimes in these countries.


title: History of socialism

text: The Second International, which had been based in Amsterdam, ceased to operate during the war. It was refounded as the Socialist International at a congress in Frankfurt in 1951. Since Stalin had dissolved the Comintern in 1943, as part of a deal with the imperialist powers, this was now the only effective international socialist organisation. The Frankfurt Declaration took a stand against both capitalism and the Communism of Stalin and stated that "Socialism aims to liberate the peoples from dependence on a minority which owns or controls the means of production. It aims to put economic power in the hands of the people as a whole, and to create a community in which free men work together as equals... Socialism has become a major force in world affairs. It has passed from propaganda into practice. In some countries the foundations of a Socialist society have already been laid. Here the evils of capitalism are disappearing... Since the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Communism has split the International Labour Movement and has set back the realisation of socialism in many countries for decades. Communism falsely claims a share in the Socialist tradition. In fact, it has distorted that tradition beyond recognition. It has built up a rigid theology which is incompatible with the critical spirit of Marxism... Wherever it has gained power it has destroyed freedom or the chance of gaining freedom..."


title: History of socialism

text: Anarcho-pacifism became influential in the Anti-nuclear movement and anti war movements of the time<ref</ref> as can be seen in the activism and writings of the English anarchist member of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Alex Comfort or the similar activism of the American catholic anarcho-pacifists Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day. Anarcho-pacifism became a "basis for a critique of militarism on both sides of the Cold War." The resurgence of anarchist ideas during this period is well documented in Robert Graham's , "Volume Two: The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939–1977)".


title: History of socialism

text: The first socialist government of Canada and one of the most influential came to power in the province of Saskatchewan in 1944. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation of Tommy Douglas won an overwhelming victory toppling the age old Liberal regime which had dominated Saskatchewan politics since the founding of the province in 1905. Douglas and the CCF won five consecutive electoral victories. During his time in office he created the Saskatchewan Power Corporation which extended electricity services to the many rural villages and farms who before did without, created Canada's first public automobile insurance agency, created a substantial number of Crown Corporations (government and public owned businesses) many of which still exist today in Saskatchewan, allowed the unionisation of the public service, created the first system of Universal Health Care in Canada (which would later be adopted nationally in 1965), and created the Saskatchewan Bill of Rights, the first such charter in Canada. This preceded the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as the previous Canadian Bill of Rights.


title: History of socialism

text: The New Democratic Party (as the CCF became known in 1962) went on to dominate the politics of Saskatchewan and form governments in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and the Yukon Territory. Nationally the NDP would become very influential during four minority governments, and is today by far Canada's most successful left-wing political party.


title: History of socialism

text: In 2004 Canadians voted Tommy Douglas in as "The Greatest Canadian" as part of a nationwide contest organised by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).


title: History of socialism

text: The social democratic governments in the post war period introduced measures of social reform and wealth redistribution through state welfare and taxation policy. For instance the newly elected UK Labour government carried out nationalisations of major utilities such as mines, gas, coal, electricity, rail, iron and steel, and the Bank of England. France claimed to be the most state controlled capitalist country in the world, carrying through many nationalisations. In the UK the National Health Service was established bringing free health care to all for the first time. Social housing for working-class families was provided in council housing estates and university education was made available for working-class people through a grant system. However, the parliamentary leadership of the social democracies in general had no intention of ending capitalism, and their national outlook and their dedication to the maintenance of the post-war 'order' prevented the social democracies from making any significant changes to the economy. They were termed 'socialist' by all in 1945, but in the UK, for instance, where Social Democracy had a large majority in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, "The government had not the smallest intention of bringing in the 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange'" as written in Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party of Germany adopted the Godesberg Program in 1959, which rejected class struggle and Marxism.


title: History of socialism

text: In the UK, cabinet minister Herbert Morrison famously argued that, "Socialism is what the Labour government does", and Anthony Crosland argued that capitalism had been ended. However many socialists within the social democracy, at rank and file level as well as in a minority in the leadership such as Aneurin Bevan, feared the 'return of the 1930s' unless capitalism was ended, either directly or over a definite period of time. They criticised the government for not going further to take over the commanding heights of the economy. Bevan demanded that the "main streams of economic activity are brought under public direction" with economic planning, and criticised the Labour Party's implementation of nationalisation for not empowering the workers in the nationalised industries with democratic control over their operation. In the post war period, many Trotskyists expected at first the pattern of financial instability and recession to return. Instead the capitalist world, now led by the United States, embarked on a prolonged boom which lasted until 1973. Rising living standards across Europe and North America alongside low unemployment, was achieved, in the view of the socialists, by the efforts of trade union struggle, social reform by social democracy, and the ushering in of what was termed a "mixed economy".


title: History of socialism

text: Social democracy at first took the view that they had begun a "serious assault" on the five "Giant Evils" afflicting the working class, identified for instance by the British social reformer William Beveridge: "Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness". At the same time, the wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the west broke down from 1946 onward, and relations between the Communist parties and the democratic socialist parties broke down in parallel. Once the Stalinists helped stabilise the capitalist governments in the immediate upheavals of 1945, as per the agreements between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, the capitalist politicians had no more use for them. The French, Italian and Belgian Communists withdrew or were expelled from post-war coalition governments, and civil war broke out in Greece. The imposition of Stalinist regimes in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia not only destroyed the socialist parties in those countries, it also produced a reaction against socialism in general. The Australian and New Zealand Labour governments were defeated in 1949, and the British Labour government in 1951. As the Cold War deepened, conservative rule in Britain, Germany and Italy became more strongly entrenched. Only in the Scandinavian countries and to some extent in France did the socialist parties retain their positions. But in 1958 Charles de Gaulle seized power in France and the French socialists (SFIO) found themselves cast into opposition.


title: History of socialism

text: In the 1960s and 1970s the new social forces, introduced, the social democrats argued, by their 'mixed economy' and their many reforms of capitalism, began to change the political landscape in the western world. The long postwar boom and the rapid expansion of higher education produced, as well as rising living standards for the industrial working class, a mass university-educated white collar workforce, nevertheless began to break down the old socialist-versus-conservative polarity of European politics. This new white-collar workforce, some claimed, was less interested in traditional socialist policies such as state ownership and more interested expanded personal freedom and liberal social policies. The proportion of women in the paid workforce increased and many supported the struggle for equal pay, which, some argued, changed both the composition and the political outlook of the working class. Some socialist parties reacted more flexibly and successfully to these changes than others, but eventually the leaderships of all social democracies in Europe moved to an explicitly pro-capitalist stance. Symbolically in the UK, the socialist clause, Clause four, was removed from the Labour Party constitution, in 1995. A similar change took place in the German SDP.


title: History of socialism

text: Particularly after the coming to power of British Premier Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and US President Ronald Reagan in 1981, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many social democratic party leaders were won to the ideological offensive which argued that capitalism had "won" and that, in the words of Francis Fukuyama's essay, capitalism had reached "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.". Some parties reacted to these changes by engaging in a new round of revisionist re-assessment of socialist ideology, and adopting a neo-liberal outlook. Some critics argue that in practice the Social Democratic parties, and the Labour Party in particular, can no longer be described as socialist. On Prime Minister Tony Blair's departure in June 2007, left wing trade union leader Bob Crow, general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers union (RMT), argued that Blair will be remembered for "seamlessly continuing the neo-liberal economic and social policies of Margaret Thatcher".


title: History of socialism

text: Another manifestation of this changing social landscape was the rise of mass discontent, including the radical student movement, both in the United States – where it was driven mainly by opposition to the Vietnam War, and in Europe. Aside from the Civil Rights Movement, in which socialists participated, the anti-war movement was the first left-wing upsurge in the United States since the 1930s, but neither there nor in Europe did the traditional parties of the left lead the movement. In the mid-20th century some libertarian socialist groups emerged from disagreements with Trotskyism which presented itself as Leninist anti-stalinism. As such the French group "Socialisme ou Barbarie" emerged from the Trotskyist Fourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal Tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism", leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German "left" of the 1920s". Instead Trotskyist, Maoist and anarchist groups arose. They became particularly influential in 1968, when riots amounting almost to an insurrection broke out in Paris in May 1968. Between eight and ten million workers struck, challenging the view becoming popular amongst socialists at the time that the working class were no longer a force for change. There were also major disturbances such as the 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activity in Chicago, the Columbia University protests of 1968 in New York, the embryonic Red Army Faction in West Berlin, and in other cities. In the short-term these movements provoked a conservative backlash, seen in De Gaulle's 1968 election victory and the election of Richard Nixon in the 1968 United States presidential election. In the 1970s, as particularly the far left Trotskyist groups continued to grow, the socialist and Communist parties again sought to channel people's anger back into safe confines, as they did in 1945. The British Labour Party had already returned to office under Harold Wilson in 1964, and in 1969 the German Social Democrats came to power for the first time since the 1920s under Willy Brandt. In France François Mitterrand buried the corpse of the old socialist party, the SFIO, and founded a new Socialist Party in 1971, although it would take him a decade to lead it to power. Labour governments were elected in both Australia and New Zealand in 1972, and the Austrian Socialists under Bruno Kreisky formed their first post-war government in 1970.


title: History of socialism

text: The emergence of the New Left in the 1950s and 1960s led to a revival of interest in libertarian socialism. The New Left's critique of the Old Left's authoritarianism was associated with a strong interest in personal liberty, autonomy (see the thinking of Cornelius Castoriadis) and led to a rediscovery of older socialist traditions, such as left communism, council communism, and the Industrial Workers of the World. The New Left also led to a revival of anarchism. Journals like "Radical America" and "Black Mask" in America, "Solidarity", "Big Flame" and "Democracy & Nature", succeeded by "The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy", in the UK, introduced a range of left libertarian ideas to a new generation. Social ecology, autonomism and, more recently, participatory economics (parecon), and Inclusive Democracy emerged from this.


title: History of socialism

text: The New Left in the United States also included anarchist, counter-cultural and hippie-related radical groups such as the Yippies who were led by Abbie Hoffman, The Diggers and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. By late 1966, the Diggers opened free stores which simply gave away their stock, provided free food, distributed free drugs, gave away money, organised free music concerts, and performed works of political art. The Diggers took their name from the original English Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley and sought to create a mini-society free of money and capitalism. On the other hand, the Yippies employed theatrical gestures, such as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal") as a candidate for president in 1968, to mock the social status quo. They have been described as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic politics". Since they were well known for street theatre and politically themed pranks, many of the "old school" political left either ignored or denounced them. According to ABC News, "The group was known for street theatre pranks and was once referred to as the 'Groucho Marxists'."


title: History of socialism

text: Autonomist Marxism, Neo-Marxism and Situationist theory are also regarded as being anti-authoritarian variants of Marxism that are firmly within the libertarian socialist tradition. For libcom.org "In the 1980s and 90s, a series of other groups developed, influenced also by much of the above work. The most notable are Kolinko, Kurasje and Wildcat in Germany, "Aufheben" in England, Theorie Communiste in France, TPTG in Greece and Kamunist Kranti in India. They are also connected to other groups in other countries, merging autonomia, operaismo, Hegelian Marxism, the work of the JFT, Open Marxism, the ICO, the Situationist International, anarchism and post-68 German Marxism." Related to this were intellectuals who were influenced by Italian left communist Amadeo Bordiga but who disagreed with his leninist positions; these included the French publication "Invariance" edited by Jacques Camatte, published since 1968, and Gilles Dauvé who published "Troploin" with Karl Nesic.


title: History of socialism

text: After the Stonewall Rebellion, the New York Gay Liberation Front based their organisation in part on a reading of Murray Bookchin's anarchist writings.". In 1968 in Carrara, Italy the International of Anarchist Federations was founded during an international anarchist conference held there in 1968 by the three existing European federations of France, the Italian and the Iberian Anarchist Federation as well as the Bulgarian federation in French exile. During the events of May 68 the anarchist groups active in France were , and the publications close to Émile Armand.


title: History of socialism

text: The early 1970s were a particularly stormy period for socialists, as capitalism had its first worldwide slump of 1973-4, suffered from rising oil prices, and a crisis in confidence. In southern Europe, for example, the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974 threatened the existence of capitalism for a while due to the insurrection and the occupations which followed. A "New York Times" editorial on February 17, 1975, stated "a communist takeover of Portugal might encourage a similar trend in Italy and France, create problems in Greece and Turkey, affect the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send tremors throughout Western Europe." The Greek military dictatorship fell in Greece, PASOK arose at first with a strong socialist outlook, and in Spain, the Spanish State fell in a period of rising struggle. In Italy there was continual unrest, and governments fell almost annually. The Italian workers won and defended the "scala mobile", the sliding scale of wages linked to inflation. However, as before, neither the Communists nor the social democracy had any plans to abolish capitalism, and the occupations in Portugal, variously estimated to have taken between 70 - 90% of the economy, were gradually rolled back. The UK saw a state of emergency and the three-day week, with 22 million days lost in strike action in 1972, leading to the fall of the Heath government. The Trotskyist Militant, an entryist group active in the Labour Party, became the "fifth most important political party" in the UK for a period in the mid-1980s, according to the journalist Michael Crick.


title: History of socialism

text: In Indonesia within the Indonesian killings of 1965–66, a right wing military regime killed between 300,000 and one million people mainly to crush the growing influence of the Communist Party of Indonesia and other leftist sectors In Latin America in the 1960s a socialist tendency within the catholic church appeared which was called Liberation theology


title: History of socialism

text: Immediately after the Second World War, a period known as the Cold War began. It represented a period of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. Throughout the period, the rivalry between the two superpowers was played out in multiple arenas: military coalitions; ideology, psychology, and espionage; military, industrial, and technological developments, including the space race; costly defence spending; a massive conventional and nuclear arms race; and many proxy wars. The term "Cold War" was introduced in 1947 by Americans Bernard Baruch and Walter Lippmann to describe emerging tensions between the two former wartime allies. There never was a direct military engagement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but there was a half-century of military buildup, and political battles for support around the world, including significant involvement of allied and satellite nations. Although the U.S. and the Soviet Union had been allied against Nazi Germany, the two sides differed on how to reconstruct the postwar world even before the end of World War II. Over the following decades, the Cold War spread outside Europe to every region of the world, as the U.S. sought the "containment" of communism and forged numerous alliances to this end, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.


title: History of socialism

text: In 1946, speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, former British prime minister Winston Churchill warned that, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." In the months that followed, Josef Stalin continued to solidify a Soviet sphere of influence in eastern Europe. For example, Bulgaria received its new Communist premier, Georgi Dimitrov, in November 1946, a Communist government under Bolesław Bierut had been established in Poland already in 1945, and by 1947, Hungary and Romania had also come under full communist rule. The last democratic government in the eastern bloc, Czechoslovakia, fell to a Communist coup in 1948, and in 1949 the Soviets raised their occupation zone in Germany to become the German Democratic Republic under Walter Ulbricht. To coordinate their new empire, the Soviets established a number of international organisations, first the Cominform to coordinate the policies of the various Communist parties, then the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), in 1948, to control economic planning, and finally (in response to the entry of the Federal Republic of Germany into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) the Warsaw Pact in 1955, which served as a military alliance against the West. One crack within that sphere of influence emerged after 1948, when Marshal Josip Broz Tito became the president of Yugoslavia. Initial disagreement was over the level of independence claimed by Tito as the only East European Communist ruler commanding a strong domestic majority. Later the gap widened when Tito's government initiated a system of decentralised profit-sharing workers' councils, in effect a self-governing, somewhat market-oriented socialism, which Stalin considered dangerously revisionist. Stalin died in 1953.


title: History of socialism

text: In the power struggle that followed Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev emerged triumphant. In 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he denounced the "personality cult" that had surrounded Stalin in a speech entitled On the Personality Cult and its Consequences. In the de-Stalinization campaign that followed, all buildings and towns that had been named for him were renamed, pictures and statues were destroyed. Although in some respects Khrushchev was a reformer and allowed the emergence of a certain amount of intra-party dissent, his commitment to reform was thrown into doubt with the brutal use of military force on the civilian population of Hungary in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution and the March 9 massacre in Tbilisi, 1956.


title: History of socialism

text: By the late 1960s, the people of several Eastern bloc countries had become discontented with the human and economic costs of the Soviet system, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic especially so. As a result of the growing discontent, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia began to fear a popular uprising. They initiated reforms to attempt to save the regime, but eventually relied on help from the Stalinists in Russia. In 1968, Alexander Dubček initiated what is known as the Prague Spring, ending censorship of the press and decentralizing production decisions, so that they were to be made not by central planners but by the workers and managers of the factories. People were to be allowed to travel abroad. Brezhnev reacted by announcing and enforcing what became known as the Brezhnev doctrine, which stated: "When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism the suppression of these counter-revolutionary forces becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries." In August 1968, pursuant to this announcement, Soviet Armed Forces troops occupied Czechoslovakia. The following year, the Ukrainians responded to a campaign of passive disobedience on the part of the Czech populace by arranging the replacement of Dubček as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The new first secretary, Gustáv Husák, would prove more compliant. He presided over a 'cleansing' of the Czech Communist Party and the introduction of a new constitution.


title: History of socialism

text: The early 1970s saw a period of détente. The arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union slackened. Brezhnev worked with US President Richard Nixon to negotiate and implement the Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty of 1972. Brezhnev also scored some diplomatic advances with the non-aligned world, such as a 1971 friendship pact with India, and the close relations the Soviet Union enjoyed with several Arab countries after Soviet material support in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. After his death in 1982, Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, who died in 1984, and then Konstantin Chernenko, who died in 1985. Andropov's brief tenure as General Secretary indicated that he might have had reformist plans, and though Chernenko put them aside, Andropov had had time to groom a group of potential reformist successors, one of whom was Mikhail Gorbachev. It was also during Andropov's tenure and this period of generational turmoil that the rule of Communists next door, in Poland, came under challenge from Solidarność, or Solidarity, a labour union under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa. The union was sufficiently threatening to the government that on 13 December 1981, the head of state, Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law, suspended the union, and imprisoned most of its leaders.


title: History of socialism

text: Through the Second World War, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under the leadership of Mao Zedong and the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek lived in an uneasy truce in order to combat the common foe, the Japanese occupation. Upon the Surrender of Japan, the Chinese Civil War immediately resumed. Another truce, negotiated by American general George C. Marshall early in 1946, collapsed after only three months. While war raged in the Republic of China, two post-occupation governments established themselves next door, in Korea. In 1948, Syngman Rhee was proclaimed president of the Republic of Korea (South Korea), at Seoul, while the Communist Workers Party of North Korea in the north proclaimed the establishment of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea).


title: History of socialism

text: In January 1949, the Republic of China Armed Forces suffered a devastating defeat by the Communist People's Liberation Army at Tientsin. By spring, Chiang Kai-shek, now losing whole divisions by desertion to the Communists, began the removal of remaining forces to Formosa (Taiwan). In August, U.S. aid to the Nationalists ended due to Chiang's regime, which was corruption. In October, Mao Zedong took office as the Chairman of the Central People's Administrative Council of the People's Republic of China in Beijing. Zhou Enlai was named premier and foreign minister of the new state. The nascent People's Republic did not yet control all of the territory of the Republic of China. Mao declared it his goal in 1950 to "liberate" Hainan, Tibet, and Formosa, and while he accomplished that of the first two, the third was interrupted: On 25 June 1950, the Korean People's Army invaded South Korea unleashing the Korean War. The United States Seventh Fleet was summarily dispatched to protect Formosa from a mainland Red Chinese invasion. Although Mao was apparently unenthusiastic about that war, a Chinese volunteer force entered the Korean War in November.


title: History of socialism

text: Claiming a victory against colonialism in the Korean War stalemate, the Communist government in China settled down to the consolidation of domestic power. During the 1950s, they redistributed land, established the Anti-Rightist Movement, and attempted mass industrialisation, with technical assistance from the Soviet Union. By the mid-1950s, after an armistice in Korea and the surrender of French Union forces in the First Indochina War, China's borders were secure. Mao's internal power base was likewise secured by the imprisonment of those he called "left-wing oppositionists". As the 1950s ended, Mao became discontented with the status quo. On the one hand, he saw the Soviet Union attempting "peaceful co-existence" with the imperialist Western powers of NATO, and he believed China could be the centre of worldwide revolution only by breaking with Moscow. (Mao viewed then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as a revisionist [i.e. not a true Communist] and a traitor to socialism.) On the other hand, he was dissatisfied with the economic consequences of the revolution thus far, and believed the country had to enter into a program of planned rapid industrialisation known as the Great Leap Forward.


title: History of socialism

text: The economic planning of the Great Leap period focused on steelbecause steel was considered emblematic of industry. The government arranged to have small backyard steel furnaces built in communes, in the hope that the mobilisation of the entire populace would compensate for the absence of the usual economies of scale. During this period, Mao stepped down as head of state in favour of Liu Shaoqi, but Mao remained Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. The rushed program of industrialisation was a disaster. It diverted labour and resources from agriculture to marginally productive cottage industry and so contributed to years of the Great Chinese Famine. It also caused a loss of Mao's influence upon the Communist Party and government apparatus. Modernisers such as Liu and Deng Xiaoping sought to relegate him to the status of figurehead. Mao was not ready to be a figurehead. In the early 1960s he gathered around himself the so-called "Shanghai Mafia" consisting of his fourth wife, Jiang Qing (a.k.a. "Madame Mao"), as well as Lin Biao, Chen Boda, and Yao Wenyuan, unleashing the Cultural Revolution.


title: History of socialism

text: In the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1967, the terms Ultra-Left and left communist refers to political theory and practice self-defined as further "left" than that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the GPCR ("Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution"). The terms are also used retroactively to describe some early 20th century Chinese anarchist orientations. As a slur, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the term "ultra-left" more broadly to denounce any orientation it considers further "left" than the party line. According to the latter usage, in 1978 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party denounced as "ultra-left" the line of Mao Zedong from 1956 until his death in 1976. "Ultra-Left" refers to those GPCR rebel positions that diverged from the central Maoist line by identifying an antagonistic contradiction between the CCP-PRC party-state itself and the masses of workers and "peasants" conceived as a single proletarian class divorced from any meaningful control over production or distribution. Whereas the central Maoist line maintained that the masses controlled the means of production through the Party's mediation, the Ultra-Left argued that the objective interests of bureaucrats were structurally determined by the centralist state-form in direct opposition to the objective interests of the masses, regardless of however "red" a given bureaucrat's "thought" might be. Whereas the central Maoist leaders encouraged the masses to criticise reactionary "ideas" and "habits" among the alleged 5% of bad cadres, giving them a chance to "turn over a new leaf" after they had undergone "thought reform," the Ultra-Left argued that "cultural revolution" had to give way to "political revolution" – "in which one class overthrows another class".


title: History of socialism

text: Mikhail Gorbachev (born 1931), who took control in 1985, was the first Soviet leader to have been born after the October revolution. He is remembered for three initiatives: "glasnost", "perestroika", and the "Frank Sinatra doctrine". "Glasnost", or "openness", was Gorbachev's term for allowing public debate in the Soviet Union to an unprecedented degree. "Perestroika" was his term for market-oriented economic reforms, in recognition of the stagnating effects of central planning. The "Frank Sinatra" doctrine was his reversal of the Brezhnev doctrine. Sinatra sang "My Way", and the doctrine named for him was that each Warsaw Pact country could find its own "way" of doing things.


title: History of socialism

text: In 1989, Gorbachev also withdrew Soviet troops from their engagement in Afghanistan, ten years after Brezhnev had sent them there. They had been fighting the anti-government Mujahideen forces which since 1979 as part of its cold war strategy had been covertly funded and trained by the United States government through the Pakistani secret service known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). By August 1991, anti-reform Communists in both the Communist Party and the Soviet Armed Forces were sufficiently desperate to attempt a military coup. Coup leaders called themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency. They announced that Gorbachev had been removed from his position as President of the Soviet Union due to illness. Although the coup rapidly collapsed and Gorbachev returned to Moscow, it was Boris Yeltsin who had played a leading role in the street resistance to that Committee, and the incident marked a shift of power away from Gorbachev toward Yeltsin. By the end of that year, Yeltsin was the President of Russia, and the Soviet Union was no more.


title: History of socialism

text: In 1965, Wenyuan wrote a thinly veiled attack on the deputy mayor of Beijing, Wu Han. Over the six months that followed, on behalf of ideological purity, Mao and his supporters purged many public figures, Liu Shao-chi among them. By the middle of 1966, Mao had not only put himself back into the centre of things, he had initiated what is known as the Cultural Revolution, a mass and army-supported action against the Communist Party apparatus itself on behalf of a renovated conception of Communism. Chaos continued throughout China for three years, particularly due to the agitations of the Red Guards until the CCP's ninth congress in 1969, when Lin Biao emerged as the primary military figure, and the presumptive heir to Mao in the party. In the months that followed, Lin Biao restored domestic order, while diplomatic efforts by Zhou Enlai cooled border tensions with the Soviet Union. Lin Biao died under mysterious circumstances in 1971. Mao's final years saw a notable thaw in the People's Republic's relations with the United States, the period of "Ping Pong Diplomacy". Mao died in 1976, and almost immediately his ideological heirs, the Gang of Four lost a power struggle to more "pragmatic" figures such as Deng Xiaoping. The term "pragmatic" is often used in media accounts of these factional struggles but should not be confused with the philosophy of pragmatism proper.


title: History of socialism

text: Deng launched the "Beijing Spring", allowing open criticism of the excesses and suffering that had occurred during the Cultural Revolution period. He also eliminated the class-background system, under which the communist regime had limited employment opportunities available to people deemed associated with the pre-revolutionary landlord class. Although Deng's only official title in the early 1980s was chairman of the central military commission of the CP, he was widely regarded as the central figure in the nation's politics. In that period, Zhao Ziyang became premier and Hu Yaobang became head of the party. Near the end of that decade, the death of Hu Yaobang sparked a mass demonstration of mourning students in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. The mourning soon turned into a call for greater responsiveness and liberalisation, and the demonstration was captured live on cameras to be broadcast around the world. On May 30, 1989, students erected the "Goddess of Democracy" statue, which looked a bit like Lady Liberty in New York Harbor. On 4 June 1989 under the orders of Deng Xiaoping, troops and tanks of the People's Liberation Army ended the protest. Thousands were killed in the resultant massacre.


title: History of socialism

text: By the start of the 21st century, though, the leadership of China was embarked upon a program of market-based reform that was more sweeping than had been Soviet leader Gorbachev's perestroika program of the late 1980s, which is traceable to Deng's Socialism with Chinese characteristics. It is in this context that Leo Melamed, chairman emeritus and senior policy adviser to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, spoke to the 2003 Beijing Forum on China and East Asian Prospects of Financial Cooperation on September 23. He said that the CME applauds the National People's Congress for recognising their country's need for additional trading in futures contracts.


title: History of socialism

text: Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez as president in Venezuela and the beginnings of his "Bolivarian Revolution" aimed at creating greater equality, Latin American nations have seen a tide of democratically elected socialist and centre-left governments emerge. They have been elected in increasing numbers as the poor and middle classes of many countries have become increasingly disillusioned with the neoliberal economic policies still encouraged by the United States and as a very large gap continues to exist between rich and poor, denying millions of people basic opportunities and necessities. A long and very controversial history of U.S. military and political intervention in the region dating back to the 19th century has severely tarnished the image of the United States in the eyes of many Latin Americans and shapes governments' policies to this day. A recent example of the influence of the aforementioned sentiment was the Latin American and Caribbean Congress in Solidarity with Puerto Rico's Independence, an international summit held at Panama City, Panama, in which fifteen incumbent political parties (in government) requested that the United States "relinquish its colonial rule over said island-nation and recognise Puerto Rico's independence". Chavez is joined by the democratic socialist president of Bolivia, Evo Morales (that nation's first indigenous leader), who has adopted strong reformist agendas and attracted overwhelming majority electoral victories. The democratically elected president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa is also an ally of Chavez. Correa describes himself as a humanist, Christian of the left and proponent of socialism of the 21st century.


title: History of socialism

text: A number of centre-left/social democratic presidents have also come to power in Latin American countries recently promising a greater redistribution of wealth within the framework of the free market. They include Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay, Alan García of Peru, Álvaro Colom in Guatemala and Fernando Lugo of Paraguay. In Brazil Lula da Silva and his The Workers Party were in power for 13 years.


title: History of socialism

text: The majority of these governments are still enjoying high approval ratings in their nation's public opinion polls. In Nicaragua's 2006 elections the former Sandinista President Daniel Ortega was re-elected President after having been out of office since 1990. In Colombia's previous presidential elections, Carlos Gaviria Díaz of the socialist Alternative Democratic Pole came in second place to Álvaro Uribe of Colombia First, a conservative party. While in Peru's previous presidential election Alan García's main challenger was Ollanta Humala of the Union for Peru, a left-wing Peruvian nationalist with close ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The results of the 2006 Peruvian election were close. In El Salvador, the FMLN a former left-wing guerrilla group which once fought against a military dictatorship is now the official opposition to the Salvadoran government.


title: History of socialism

text: Other parts of the developing world have also seen a rise in radical socialist parties and movements. In Nepal following the end of the Civil War, the formerly militant Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the more moderate Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) have emerged as the two most powerful opposition parties in the country. In Nepal's 2008 Constituent Assembly elections the Maoists emerged as the largest party allowing them to form an interim government. Their leader, Prachanda has vowed to respect multiparty democracy. In some of the poorest parts of India, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has also been fighting the violent Naxalite–Maoist insurgency against the Government of India and controls the "red corridor"; a similar rebellion is being waged by the Maoist, New People's Army in the Philippines.


title: History of socialism

text: In many developed nations, the rise of Third Way policies and the increase in capitalism and free-market economies has led to the rise of many new socialist parties. They include Sinn Féin in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (they also represent the Nationalist constituency of Northern Ireland), The Left of Germany, Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Left Party of Sweden, Left Alliance of Finland, New Zealand Progressive Party, Socialist Party of Ireland, Socialist Party of the Netherlands, Respect Party of the United Kingdom, Scottish Socialist Party and Québec solidaire in the Canadian province of Quebec.


title: History of socialism

text: The Progressive Alliance is a political international founded on 22 May 2013 by political parties, the majority of whom are current or former members of the Socialist International. The organisation states the aim of becoming the global network of "the progressive, democratic, social-democratic, socialist and labour movement".


title: History of socialism

text: African socialism has been and continues to be a major ideology around the continent. Julius Nyerere was inspired by Fabian socialist ideals. He was a firm believer in rural Africans and their traditions and ujamaa, a system of collectivisation that according to Nyerere was present before European imperialism. He believed Africans were already socialists.


title: History of socialism

text: Other African socialists include Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, Nelson Mandela and Kwame Nkrumah. Fela Kuti was inspired by socialism and called for a democratic African republic. In South Africa the African National Congress (ANC) abandoned its partial socialist allegiances after taking power and followed a standard neoliberal route. From 2005 through to 2007, the country was wracked by many thousands of protests from poor communities. One of these gave rise to a mass movement of shack dwellers, Abahlali baseMjondolo that despite major police suppression continues to work for popular people's planning and against the creation of a market economy in land and housing.


title: History of socialism

text: In Asia, states with socialist economies—such as the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam—have largely moved away from centralised economic planning in the 21st century, placing a greater emphasis on markets. Forms include the Chinese socialist market economy and the Vietnamese socialist-oriented market economy. They use state-owned corporate management models as opposed to modelling socialist enterprise on traditional management styles employed by government agencies. In China living standards continued to improve rapidly despite the Great Recession, but centralised political control remained tight. Brian Reynolds Myers in his book "The Cleanest Race", later supported by other academics, dismisses the idea that "Juche" is North Korea's leading ideology, regarding its public exaltation as designed to deceive foreigners and that it exists to be praised and not actually read, pointing out that North Korea's constitution of 2009 omits all mention of communism.


title: History of socialism

text: Although the authority of the state remained unchallenged under "Đổi Mới", the government of Vietnam encourages private ownership of farms and factories, economic deregulation and foreign investment, while maintaining control over strategic industries. The Vietnamese economy subsequently achieved strong growth in agricultural and industrial production, construction, exports and foreign investment. However, these reforms have also caused a rise in income inequality and gender disparities.


title: History of socialism

text: Elsewhere in Asia, some elected socialist parties and communist parties remain prominent, particularly in India and Nepal. Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist–Leninist) in particular calls for multi-party democracy, social equality and economic prosperity. In Singapore, a majority of the GDP is still generated from the state sector comprising government-linked companies. In Japan, there has been a resurgent interest in the Japanese Communist Party among workers and youth. In Malaysia, the Socialist Party of Malaysia got its first Member of Parliament, Michael Jeyakumar Devaraj, after the 2008 general election. In 2010, there were 270 kibbutzim in Israel. Their factories and farms account for 9% of Israel's industrial output, worth US$8 billion and 40% of its agricultural output, worth over $1.7 billion. Some Kibbutzim had also developed substantial high-tech and military industries. Also in 2010, Kibbutz Sasa, containing some 200 members, generated $850 million in annual revenue from its military-plastics industry.


title: History of socialism

text: The United Nations "World Happiness Report 2013" shows that the happiest nations are concentrated in Northern Europe, where the Nordic model is employed, with Denmark topping the list. This is at times attributed to the success of the Nordic model in the region that has been labelled social democratic in contrast with the conservative continental model and the liberal Anglo-American model. The Nordic countries ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.


title: History of socialism

text: The objectives of the Party of European Socialists, the European Parliament's socialist and social democratic bloc, are now "to pursue international aims in respect of the principles on which the European Union is based, namely principles of freedom, equality, solidarity, democracy, respect of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and respect for the Rule of Law". As a result, today the rallying cry of the French Revolution—"Liberté, égalité, fraternité"—is promoted as essential socialist values. To the left of the PES at the European level is the Party of the European Left (PEL), also commonly abbreviated "European Left"), which is a political party at the European level and an association of democratic socialist, socialist and communist political parties in the European Union and other European countries. It was formed in January 2004 for the purposes of running in the 2004 European Parliament elections. PEL was founded on 8–9 May 2004 in Rome. Elected MEPs from member parties of the European Left sit in the European United Left–Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) group in the European parliament.


title: History of socialism

text: The socialist Left Party in Germany grew in popularity due to dissatisfaction with the increasingly neoliberal policies of the SPD, becoming the fourth biggest party in parliament in the general election on 27 September 2009. Communist candidate Dimitris Christofias won a crucial presidential runoff in the 2008 Cypriot presidential election, defeating his conservative rival with a majority of 53%. In Ireland, in the 2009 European election Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party took one of three seats in the capital Dublin European constituency. In Denmark, the Socialist People's Party (SF) more than doubled its parliamentary representation to 23 seats from 11, making it the fourth largest party. In the 2011 Danish general election, the Social Democrats, Socialist People's Party and the Danish Social Liberal Party formed government, after a slight victory over the main rival political coalition. They were led by Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and had the Red-Green Alliance as a supporting party. In Norway, the Red-Green Coalition consists of the Labour Party (Ap), the Socialist Left Party (SV) and the Centre Party (Sp) and governed the country as a majority government from the 2005 general election until 2013.


title: History of socialism

text: In the Greek legislative election of January 2015, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) led by Alexis Tsipras won a legislative election for the first time while the Communist Party of Greece won 15 seats in parliament. SYRIZA has been characterised as an anti-establishment party, whose success has sent "shock-waves across the EU". In the United Kingdom, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers put forward a slate of candidates in the 2009 European Parliament elections under the banner of No to EU – Yes to Democracy, a broad left-wing alter-globalisation coalition involving socialist groups such as the Socialist Party, aiming to offer an alternative to the "anti-foreigner" and pro-business policies of the UK Independence Party. In the following May 2010 United Kingdom general election, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, launched in January 2010 and backed by Bob Crow, the leader of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), other union leaders and the Socialist Party among other socialist groups, stood against Labour in 40 constituencies. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition contested the 2011 local elections, having gained the endorsement of the RMT June 2010 conference, but gained no seats. Left Unity was also founded in 2013 after the film director Ken Loach appealed for a new party of the left to replace the Labour Party, which he claimed had failed to oppose austerity and had shifted towards neoliberalism. In 2015, following a defeat at the 2015 United Kingdom general election, self-described socialist Jeremy Corbyn took over from Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party.


title: History of socialism

text: In France, Olivier Besancenot, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) candidate in the 2007 presidential election, received 1,498,581 votes, 4.08%, double that of the communist candidate. The LCR abolished itself in 2009 to initiate a broad anti-capitalist party, the New Anticapitalist Party, whose stated aim is to "build a new socialist, democratic perspective for the twenty-first century". On 25 May 2014, the Spanish left-wing party Podemos entered candidates for the 2014 European parliamentary elections, some of which were unemployed. In a surprise result, it polled 7.98% of the vote and thus was awarded five seats out of 54 while the older United Left was the third largest overall force obtaining 10.03% and 5 seats, 4 more than the previous elections. The government of Portugal established on 26 November 2015 was a Socialist Party (PS) minority government led by prime minister António Costa, who succeeded in securing support for a Socialist minority government by the Left Bloc (B.E.), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Ecologist Party "The Greens" (PEV). All around Europe and in some places of Latin America there exists a social centre and squatting movement mainly inspired by autonomist and anarchist ideas.


title: History of socialism

text: According to a 2013 article in "The Guardian", "[c]ontrary to popular belief, Americans don't have an innate allergy to socialism. Milwaukee has had several socialist mayors (Frank Zeidler, Emil Seidel and Daniel Hoan), and there is currently an independent socialist in the US Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont". Sanders, once mayor of Vermont's largest city, Burlington, has described himself as a democratic socialist and has praised Scandinavian-style social democracy. In 2016, Sanders made a bid for the Democratic Party presidential candidate, thereby gaining considerable popular support, particularly among the younger generation, but lost the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries to Hillary Clinton. As of 2019, the Democratic Socialists of America have two members in the United States Congress, and various members in state legislatures and city councils. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, 37% of American adults have a positive view of socialism, including 57% of Democrat-leaning voters and 16% of Republican-leaning voters. A 2019 YouGov poll found that 7 out of 10 millennials would vote for a socialist presidential candidate, and 36% had a favorable view of communism. An earlier 2019 Harris Poll found that socialism is more popular with women than men, with 55% of women between the ages of 18 and 54 preferring to live in a socialist society while a majority of men surveyed in the poll chose capitalism over socialism.


title: History of socialism

text: Anti-capitalism, anarchism and the anti-globalisation movement rose to prominence through events such as protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 in Seattle. Socialist-inspired groups played an important role in these movements, which nevertheless embraced much broader layers of the population and were championed by figures such as Noam Chomsky. In Canada, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the precursor to the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP), had significant success in provincial politics. In 1944, the Saskatchewan CCF formed the first socialist government in North America. At the federal level, the NDP was the Official Opposition, from 2011 through 2015.


title: History of socialism

text: In their "Johnson" linguistics column, "The Economist" opines that in the 21st century United States, the term "socialism", without clear definition, has become a pejorative used by conservatives to attack liberal and progressive policies, proposals, and public figures.


title: History of socialism

text: For the "Encyclopedia Britannica", "the attempt by Salvador Allende to unite Marxists and other reformers in a socialist reconstruction of Chile is most representative of the direction that Latin American socialists have taken since the late 20th century. ... Several socialist (or socialist-leaning) leaders have followed Allende's example in winning election to office in Latin American countries". The success of the Workers' Party () of Brazil, formed in 1980 and governing Brazil from 2003 to 2016, was the first major breakthrough for this trend.


title: History of socialism

text: Foro de São Paulo is a conference of leftist political parties and other organisations from Latin America and the Caribbean. It was launched by the Workers' Party in 1990 in the city of São Paulo, after the PT approached other parties and social movements of Latin America and the Caribbean with the objective of debating the new international scenario after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequences of the implementation of what were taken as neoliberal policies adopted at the time by contemporary right-leaning governments in the region, the stated main objective of the conference being to argue for alternatives to neoliberalism. Among its members have been socialist and social-democratic parties in government in the region such as Bolivia's Movement for Socialism, the Communist Party of Cuba, Ecuador's PAIS Alliance, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the Socialist Party of Chile, Uruguay's Broad Front, Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front, El Salvador's Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and members of Argentina's Frente de Todos.


title: History of socialism

text: In the first decade of the 21st century, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Bolivian President Evo Morales and Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa referred to their political programmes as socialist, and Chávez adopted the term "socialism of the 21st century". After winning re-election in December 2006, Chávez said: "Now more than ever, I am obliged to move Venezuela's path towards socialism". Chávez was also reelected in October 2012 for his third six-year term as president, but he died in March 2013 from cancer. After Chávez's death on 5 March 2013, Vice President from Chávez's party Nicolás Maduro assumed the powers and responsibilities of the President. A special election was held on 14 April of the same year to elect a new president, which Maduro won by a tight margin as the candidate of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and he was formally inaugurated on 19 April. "Pink tide" is a term used in political analysis, in the media and elsewhere to describe the perception that leftist ideology in general and left-wing politics in particular were increasingly influential in Latin America in the 2000s. Some of the pink tide governments were criticised for turning from socialism to populism and authoritarianism. The pink tide was followed in the 2010s by a "conservative wave" as right-wing governments came to power in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, and Venezuela and Nicaragua experienced political crises. However, socialism saw a resurgence in 2018–19 after successive electoral victories of left-wing and centre-left candidates in Mexico, Panama, and Argentina.


title: History of socialism

text: Australia saw an increase in interest of socialism in the early 21st century, especially amongst youth. It is strongest in Victoria, where three socialist parties have merged into the Victorian Socialists, who aim to address problems in housing and public transportation.


title: History of socialism

text: In New Zealand, socialism emerged within the budding trade union movement during the late 19th century and early 20th century. In July 1916, several left-wing political organisations and trade unions merged to form the New Zealand Labour Party. While Labour traditionally had a socialist orientation, the party shifted towards a more social democratic orientation during the 1920s and 1930s. Following the 1935 general election, the First Labour Government pursued socialist policies such as nationalising industry, broadcasting, transportation, and implementing a Keynesian welfare state. However, the party did not seek to abolish capitalism, instead opting for a mixed economy. Labour's welfare state and mixed economy were not challenged until the 1980s. During the 1980s, the Fourth Labour Government implemented a raft of neoliberal economic reforms known as Rogernomics which saw New Zealand society and the economy shift towards a more free market model. Labour's abandonment of its traditional values fractured the party. Successive Labour governments have since pursued centre-left social and economic policies while maintaining a free-market economy. The current Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern formerly served as President of the International Union of Socialist Youth. Ardern is a self-described social democrat who has criticized capitalism as a "blatant failure" due to high levels of homelessness and low wages. New Zealand still has a small socialist scene, mainly dominated by Trotskyist groups.


title: History of socialism

text: Melanesian socialism developed in the 1980s, inspired by African socialism. It aims to achieve full independence from Britain and France in Melanesian territories and creation of a Melanesian federal union. It is very popular with the New Caledonia independence movement.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Mount Carmel (; ), also known in Arabic as Mount Mar Elias (), is a coastal mountain range in northern Israel stretching from the Mediterranean Sea towards the southeast. The range is a UNESCO biosphere reserve. A number of towns are situated there, most notably the city of Haifa, Israel's third largest city, located on the northern and western slopes.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The word "karmel" means "garden-land" and is of uncertain origin. It is either a compound of "kerem" and "el", meaning "vineyard of God" or a clipping of "kar male," meaning "full kernel." Martin Jan Mulder suggested a third etymology, that of "kerem + l" with the lamed a sufformative, but this is considered unlikely as evidence for the existence of a lamed sufformative is weak.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The phrase "Mount Carmel" has been used in three distinct ways, referring to either one of the following three areas:


title: Mount Carmel

text: The Carmel range is approximately wide, sloping gradually towards the southwest, but forming a steep ridge on the northeastern face, high. The Jezreel Valley lies to the immediate northeast. The range forms a natural barrier in the landscape, just as the Jezreel Valley forms a natural passageway, and consequently the mountain range and the valley have had a large impact on migration and invasions through the Levant over time.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The mountain formation is an admixture of limestone and flint, containing many caves, and covered in several volcanic rocks.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The sloped side of the mountain is covered with luxuriant vegetation, including oak, pine, olive, and laurel trees.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Several modern towns are located on the range, including Yokneam on the eastern ridge; Zikhron Ya'akov on the southern slope; the Druze communities of Daliyat al-Karmel and Isfiya on the more central part of the ridge; and the towns of Nesher, Tirat Hakarmel, and the city of Haifa, on the far northwestern promontory and its base. There is also a small kibbutz called Beit Oren, which is located on one of the highest points in the range to the southeast of Haifa.


title: Mount Carmel

text: As part of a 1929–1934 campaign, between 1930 and 1932, Dorothy Garrod excavated four caves, and a number of rock shelters, in the Carmel mountain range at el-Wad, el-Tabun, and Es Skhul. Garrod discovered Neanderthal and early modern human remains, including the skeleton of a Neanderthal female, named Tabun I, which is regarded as one of the most important human fossils ever found. The excavation at el-Tabun produced the longest stratigraphic record in the region, spanning 600,000 or more years of human activity. The four caves and rock-shelters (Tabun, Jamal, el-Wad, and Skhul) together yield results from the Lower Paleolithic to the present day, representing roughly a million years of human evolution. There are also several well-preserved burials of Neanderthals and "Homo sapiens" and the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer groups to complex, sedentary agricultural societies is extensively documented at the site. Taken together, these emphasize the paramount significance of the Mount Carmel caves for the study of human cultural and biological evolution within the framework of palaeo-ecological changes."


title: Mount Carmel

text: In 2012, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee added the sites of human evolution at Mount Carmel to the List of World Heritage Sites. The World Heritage Site includes four caves (Tabun, Jamal, el-Wad, and Skhul) on the southern side of the Nahal Me'arot/Wadi El-Mughara Valley. The site fulfils criteria in two separate categories, "natural" and "cultural".


title: Mount Carmel

text: In December 2020, archaeologists from the University of Haifa announced the discovery of the oldest known tool used for grinding or scraping, dating back about 350,000 years at the Tabun Cave at Mount Carmel site. According to researchers, this cobble belongs to the Acheulo-Yabrudian complex from the late Lower Paleolithic and was used by hominids for abrading surfaces.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Due to the lush vegetation on the sloped hillside, and many caves on the steeper side, Carmel became the haunt of criminals; Thickly-wooded Carmel was seen as a hiding place, as implied by the Book of Amos. According to the Books of Kings, Elisha travelled to Carmel straight after cursing a group of young men because they had mocked him and the ascension of Elijah by jeering, "Go on up, bald man!" After this, bears came out of the forest and mauled 42 of them. This does not necessarily imply that Elisha had sought asylum there from any potential backlash, although the description in the Book of Amos, of the location being a refuge, is dated by textual scholars to be earlier than the accounts of Elisha in the Books of Kings.


title: Mount Carmel

text: According to Strabo, Mount Carmel continued to be a place of refuge until at least the first century.


title: Mount Carmel

text: According to Josephus and Epiphanius, Mount Carmel had been the stronghold of the Essenes that came from "Nazareth"; this Essene group are sometimes referred to as "Nazareans", possibly akin to the Nazarenes, which followed the teachings of Jesus.


title: Mount Carmel

text: During World War I, Mount Carmel played a significant strategic role. The Battle of Megiddo took place at the head of a pass through the Carmel Ridge, which overlooks the Valley of Jezreel from the south. General Allenby led the British in the battle, which was a turning point in the war against the Ottoman Empire. The Jezreel Valley had played host to many battles before, including the very historically significant Battle of Megiddo between the Egyptians and Canaanites in the 15th century BCE, but it was only in the 20th-century battle that the Carmel Ridge itself played a significant part, due to the development in artillery and munitions.


title: Mount Carmel

text: In ancient Canaanite culture, "high places" were frequently considered to be sacred, and Mount Carmel appears to have been no exception; Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III lists a "holy headland" among his Canaanite territories, and if this equates to Carmel, as Egyptologists such as Maspero believe, then it would indicate that the mountain headland was considered sacred from at least the 15th century BCE.


title: Mount Carmel

text: According to the Books of Kings, there was an altar to God on the mountain, which had fallen into ruin by the time of Ahab, but Elijah built a new one ().


title: Mount Carmel

text: In mainstream Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, Elijah is indelibly associated with the mountain, and he is regarded as having sometimes resided in a grotto on the mountain. Indeed, one Arabic name for Mount Carmel is جبل مار إلياس ("Jabal Mar Elyas", lit. "Mount of Saint Elias"). In the Books of Kings, Elijah challenges 450 prophets of "Baal" to a contest at the altar on Mount Carmel to determine whose deity was genuinely in control of the Kingdom of Israel. As the narrative is set during the rule of Ahab and his association with the Phoenicians, biblical scholars suspect that the "Baal" in question was probably Melqart.


title: Mount Carmel

text: According to chapter 18 of the Books of Kings in the Hebrew Bible, the challenge was to see which deity could light a sacrifice by fire. After the prophets of Baal had failed, Elijah had water poured upon his sacrifice to saturate the altar. He then prayed. Fire fell and consumed the sacrifice, wood, stones, soil and water, which prompted the Israelite witnesses to proclaim, "The LORD, He is God! The LORD, He is God!" In the account, Elijah also announced the end to a long three-year drought, which had previously been sent as divine punishment for Israel's idolatry.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Though there is no biblical reason to assume that the account of Elijah's victory refers to any particular part of Mount Carmel, Islamic tradition places it at a point known as "El-Maharrakah" or rather El-Muhraqa, meaning "the burning".


title: Mount Carmel

text: Two areas have been hypothesized as the possible site for the story about the battle against the priests of Baal. The slaughter could have taken place near the river Kishon, at the mountain base, in an amphitheater-like flat area. The site where the offering took place is traditionally placed on the mountain above Yokneam, on the road to the Druze village of Daliyat el-Karmil, where there is a monastery, built in 1868, called El-Muhraqa ("the burning", possibly related to the burnt sacrifice"). It is regarded as one of the must-visit tour sites in the area of Haifa. (See below under "Carmelites (12th c.–present): El-Muhraqa site" for more).


title: Mount Carmel

text: Although archaeological clues are absent, the site is favoured because it has a spring, from which water could have been drawn to wet Elijah's offering. There is also a sea view, where Elijah looked out to see the cloud announcing rain. However, the biblical text states that Elijah had to climb up to see the sea. There is an altar in the monastery which is claimed to be that which Elijah built in God's honour, but that is unlikely, as it's not made of the local limestone.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Druze venerate Elijah, and he is considered a central figure in Druzism, and due to his importance in Druzism, the settlement of Druze on Mount Carmel had partly to do with Elijah's story and devotion. There are two large Druze towns on the eastern slopes of Mount Carmel: Daliyat al-Karmel and Isfiya.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Iamblichus describes Pythagoras visiting the mountain on account of its reputation for sacredness, stating that it was "the most holy of all mountains, and access was forbidden to many", while Tacitus states that there was an oracle situated there, which Vespasian visited for a consultation; Tacitus states that there was an altar there, but without any image upon it, and without a temple around it.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The existence of a pagan temple on Mount Carmel is supported by the "Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax", a fourth century periplus that mentions Mount Carmel as the "mount and temple of Zeus".


title: Mount Carmel

text: A Catholic religious order was founded on Mount Carmel in 1209, named the Carmelites, in reference to the mountain range; the founder of the Carmelites is still unknown (d.1265). In the original Rule or 'Letter of Life' given by Albert, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem who was resident in Acre, around the year 1210, this hermit is referred to simply as 'Brother B'; he probably died around the date 1210 and could have been either a pilgrim, someone serving out a penance or a crusader who had stayed in the Holy Land.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Although Louis IX of France is sometimes named as the founder, he was not, and had merely visited it in 1252.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The Order was founded at the site that it claimed had been the location of Elijah's cave, above sea level at the northwestern end of the mountain range.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Though there is no documentary evidence to support it, Carmelite tradition suggests that a community of Jewish hermits had lived at the site from the time of Elijah until the Carmelites were founded there; prefixed to the Carmelite Constitution of 1281 was the claim that from the time when Elijah and Elisha had "dwelt devoutly on Mount Carmel", priests and prophets, Jewish and Christian, had lived "praiseworthy lives in holy penitence" adjacent to the site of the "fountain of Elisha" in an uninterrupted succession.


title: Mount Carmel

text: A Carmelite monastery was founded at the site shortly after the Order itself was created, and was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of "Star of the Sea" ("stella maris" in Latin), a common medieval presentation of her.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The Carmelite Order grew to be one of the major Catholic religious orders worldwide, although the monastery at Carmel has had a less successful history. During the Crusades the monastery often changed hands, frequently being converted into a mosque. In 1799 the building was finally converted into a hospital, by Napoleon, but in 1821 the surviving structure was destroyed by the pasha of Damascus. A new monastery was later constructed directly over a nearby cave, after funds were collected by the Carmelite Order for restoration of the monastery. The cave, which now forms the crypt of the monastic church, is termed "Elijah's grotto" by the Discalced Carmelite friars who have custody of the monastery.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Under Islamic control the location at the highest peak of the Carmel came to be known as "El-Maharrakah" or "El-Muhraqa", meaning "place of burning", in reference to the account of Elijah's challenge to the priests of Hadad. This, perhaps not coincidentally, is also the highest natural point of the mountain range.


title: Mount Carmel

text: One of the oldest scapulars is associated with Mount Carmel and the Carmelites. According to Carmelite tradition, the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was first given to St. Simon Stock, an English Carmelite, by the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Carmelites refer to her under the title "Our Lady of Mount Carmel," and celebrate 16 July as her feast day.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Mount Carmel is considered a sacred place for followers of the Baháʼí Faith, and is the location of the Baháʼí World Centre and the Shrine of the Báb. The location of the Baháʼí holy places has its roots in the imprisonment of the religion's founder, Bahá'u'lláh, near Haifa by the Ottoman Empire during the Ottoman Empire's rule over Palestine.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The Shrine of the Báb is a structure where the remains of the Báb, the founder of Bábism and forerunner of Bahá'u'lláh in the Baháʼí Faith, have been laid to rest. The shrine's precise location on Mount Carmel was designated by Bahá'u'lláh himself and the Báb's remains were laid to rest on March 21, 1909, in a six-room mausoleum made of local stone. The construction of the shrine with a golden dome was completed over the mausoleum in 1953, and a series of decorative terraces around the shrine were completed in 2001. The white marbles used were from the same ancient source that most Athenian masterpieces were using, the Penteliko Mountain.


title: Mount Carmel

text: Bahá'u'lláh, the founder of the Baháʼí Faith, writing in the "Tablet of Carmel", designated the area around the shrine as the location for the administrative headquarters of the religion; the Baháʼí administrative buildings were constructed adjacent to the decorative terraces, and are referred to as "the Arc", on account of their physical arrangement.


title: Mount Carmel

text: The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community has its largest Israeli mosque on Mount Carmel, in the Kababir quarter of Haifa, known as the Mahmood Mosque. It is a unique structure with two minarets. The mosque was once visited by the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, for an iftar dinner.


title: Easwari Rao

text: Easwari Rao is an Indian actress who has worked in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada cinema. She played the lead roles from 1990 to 1999. She started to play supporting and character roles from 2000 onwards.


title: Easwari Rao

text: Eswari Rao's debut movie was "Intinta Deepavali" (1990) in Telugu; she came to prominence in Telugu with the film "Rambantu" alongside Rajendra Prasad. She debuted in Tamil in "Kavithai Paadum Alaigal" (1990) credited as Janani. Though the songs were popular, the movie was a failure in box office. She got her first major break in "Raman Abdullah" (1997), directed by Balu Mahendra, where she was credited as Easwari Rao. She notably opted out of a project titled "Koottaali" as she felt the role was too glamorous. She went on to appear in Manoj Kumar's film "Guru Paarvai" (1998). Eeshwari also had a role in Bharathiraja's "Siragugal Murivadhilai", although the film was shelved after pre-production. In the Tamil film "Appu" (2000) she portrayed Prasanth's sister. She received praise for her performance as Selvi in "Kaala" (2018).


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The Revenge" class, sometimes referred to as the Royal Sovereign" class or the R class, consisted of five superdreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy in the 1910s. All of the ships were completed to see service during the First World War. There were originally to have been eight of the class, but two were later redesigned, becoming the s, while the other, which was to have been named HMS "Resistance", was cancelled outright. The design was based on that of the preceding , but with reductions in size and speed to make them more economical to build.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: Two of the ships, and , were completed in time to see action at the Battle of Jutland during the First World War, where they engaged German battlecruisers. The other three ships were completed after the battle, by which time the British and German fleets had adopted more cautious strategies, and as a result, the class saw no further substantial action. During the early 1920s, the ships were involved in the Greco-Turkish War and the Russian Civil War as part of the Mediterranean Fleet. They typically operated as a unit during the interwar period, including stints in the Atlantic Fleet. All five members of the class were modernised in the 1930s, particularly to strengthen their anti-aircraft defences and fire-control equipment.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The ships saw extensive action during the Second World War, though they were no longer front-line units by this time and thus were frequently relegated to secondary duties such as convoy escort and naval gunfire support. "Royal Oak" was sunk at her moorings in Scapa Flow in October 1939 by a German U-boat, and two other ships of the class were torpedoed during the war; , hit by a Vichy French submarine off Dakar in 1940 and , attacked by a Japanese submarine in Madagascar in 1943; both survived. ended the war in service with the Soviet Navy as "Arkhangelsk", but she was returned in 1949, by which time her three surviving sister ships had been broken up for scrap. She, too, was dismantled that year.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: In the early 1900s, Germany challenged Britain in a naval arms race under the direction of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz that was exacerbated by the dreadnought revolution. The Royal Navy embarked on a construction programme to out-build the Germans to maintain its dominance of the seas. Beginning with the launch of , the British had built or laid down twenty-seven all-big-gun battleships to the Germans' seventeen built or building by 1913; to cement their lead, the British ordered another group of battleships for the 1913 Estimates.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The "Revenge"-class ships (sometimes referred to as the ""Royal Sovereign" class" or the "R class") were designed as slightly smaller, slower, and more heavily protected versions of the preceding s. The design staff, led by Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, the Director of Naval Construction, had been charged by the Board of Admiralty with developing a version of the earlier armed with the same battery of guns used in the "Queen Elizabeth"s, albeit with the same number as the "Iron Duke"s—ten rather than the eight of the "Queen Elizabeth" design. As an economy measure they were intended to revert to the previous practice of using both fuel oil and coal, but First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher rescinded the decision for coal in October 1914. Still under construction, the ships were redesigned to employ oil-fired boilers that increased the power of the engines by over the original specification.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The initial design completed by d'Eyncourt's team mounted only eight 15 in guns, despite the request from the Board, since he could not fit the fifth twin-gun turret in the specified displacement limit. The Board suggested triple turrets to solve the weight problem, but d'Eyncourt pointed out that no suitable design existed, which would significantly delay construction. He was also opposed to the idea since a single hit on a turret would disable more guns. As a result, the Board approved d'Eyncourt's proposal on 31 March 1913.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The ships of the "Revenge" class were long between perpendiculars, long at the waterline, and had a length overall of . They had a beam of (which was increased to approximately with the addition of anti-torpedo bulges) and a deep draught of fully loaded without a bulge and with a bulge. They had a normal displacement without a bulge of approximately and at deep load. Equivalent figures for those ships fitted with a bulge were about or , depending on the type of bulge fitted. The ships' metacentric height was at deep load without a bulge fitted and with a bulge.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: Their crew numbered between 909 and 940 officers and ratings in 1917; by the early 1920s, the number of crew had grown to 1,012 to 1,240. Each battleship carried a number of smaller boats, including a variety of steam and sail pinnaces, steam launches, cutters, whalers, dinghies, and rafts. These were handled by five boat derricks. The ships were fitted with eight searchlights, four on the bridge, two at the base of the funnel and two on the after superstructure.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: They were powered by two sets of Parsons steam turbines, each driving two shafts with 3-bladed screws, using steam provided by eighteen Babcock & Wilcox boilers at a working pressure of in all but "Resolution" and "Royal Oak", which received boilers manufactured by Yarrow. The boilers were ducted into a single funnel. The turbines were divided into three watertight compartments arranged side by side; the low-pressure turbines driving the inner pair of shafts were in the centre engine room together, while the high-pressure outboard turbines were in the rooms on either side.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The turbines were rated at and intended to give the ships a maximum speed of , although "Revenge" only reached a top speed of from during her sea trials on 24 March 1916. The other members of the class had similar performance, with only "Royal Oak" making on trials. The bulged "Ramillies" reached from during her sea trials on 20 September 1917, less than half a knot slower than the unbulged ships. Fuel storage amounted to of fuel oil and of coal as designed, but on conversion to only oil-fired boilers, the storage capacity was 3,400 long tons of oil. This enabled the ships to steam for at a cruising speed of , which fell to at full speed.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The "Revenge" class was equipped with eight breech-loading (BL) Mk I guns in four twin-gun turrets, in two superfiring pairs fore and aft of the superstructure, designated 'A', 'B', 'X', and 'Y' from front to rear. The guns were initially supplied with eighty shells per gun, but the magazines were later modified to allow for up to one hundred shells per gun. The ships carried the guns in Mk I turrets that allowed for elevation to 20 degrees and depression to -5 degrees. The guns could be loaded at any angle, but the crews typically returned to +5 degrees, since the guns could be cleared faster that way. They fired projectiles at a muzzle velocity of to a range of . Their designed rate of fire was one shot every 36 seconds.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The ships' secondary battery consisted of fourteen BL Mk XII guns, twelve of which were mounted in casemates along the broadside of the vessel amidships; the remaining pair were mounted on the shelter deck and were protected by gun shields. The casemate guns were moved further aft from the bow to reduce the tendency of the gun ports to ship water in heavy seas, a problem encountered with both the "Iron Duke" and "Queen Elizabeth" classes. The guns had a muzzle velocity of from their projectiles. At their maximum elevation of 15 degrees, they had a range of .


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The ships also mounted four 3-pounder () guns. Their anti-aircraft (AA) armament consisted of two quick-firing (QF) 20 cwt Mk I guns. They were fitted with four submerged torpedo tubes, two on each broadside. Each ship was supplied with a total of twenty-one torpedoes of the Mk II, Mk IV, and MK IVHB types.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The "Revenge"-class ships were completed with two fire-control directors fitted with rangefinders. One was mounted above the conning tower, protected by an armoured hood, and the other was aloft on the tripod mast. Each turret was also fitted with a 15-foot rangefinder. The main armament could be controlled by 'X' turret as well. The secondary armament was primarily controlled by directors mounted on each side of the compass platform on the foremast once they began to be fitted in March 1917. A torpedo-control director with a rangefinder was mounted at the aft end of the superstructure. The rangefinders in 'B' and 'X' turrets were replaced by models between 1919 and 1922.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: Flying-off platforms were fitted on all the ships on the roofs of 'B' and 'X' turrets in 1918. Between them the ships carried two fighters and eight reconnaissance aircraft. These platforms were removed as the ships were refitted in the early 1930s. "Resolution" was briefly fitted with an aircraft catapult on the quarterdeck in early 1930 and "Royal Sovereign" had one in 1933–1936. All of the ships except "Revenge" and "Royal Sovereign" were equipped with a catapult atop 'X' turret in the mid-1930s. "Resolution" kept hers until late 1942 or early 1943.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: The ships' waterline belt consisted of Krupp cemented armour (KC) that was thick between 'A' and 'Y' barbettes and thinned to 4 to 6 inches (102 to 152 mm) towards the ships' ends, but did not reach either the bow or the stern. Above this was a strake of armour 6 inches thick that extended between 'A' and 'X' barbettes. Transverse bulkheads 4 to 6 inches thick ran at an angle from the ends of the thickest part of the waterline belt to 'A' and 'Y' barbettes. The gun turrets were protected by of KC armour, except for the turret roofs which were thick. The barbettes ranged in thickness from above the upper deck, but were only 4 to 6 inches thick below it. The "Revenge"-class ships had multiple armoured decks that ranged from in thickness. The main conning tower had 11 inches of armour on the sides with a 3-inch roof. The torpedo director in the rear superstructure had 6 inches of armour protecting it. After the Battle of Jutland, 1 inch of high-tensile steel was added to the main deck over the magazines and additional anti-flash equipment was added in the magazines.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: "Ramillies" was the least advanced in construction when the Director of Naval Construction decided to fit bulges to the ship to improve her survivability against naval mines and torpedoes in March 1915, making her the first capital ship in the world to be bulged. Testing had revealed that a bulge filled with hollow tubes substantially reduced the effectiveness of a torpedo warhead. The bulge scabbed onto "Ramillies"s hull was long and high; it was divided into two watertight compartments with the upper and lower inner compartments filled with steel "crush" tubes with their ends plugged by wooden bungs. They were intended to absorb the force of an underwater detonation and prevent splinters and debris from penetrating the inner torpedo bulkhead. The watertight outer compartment was also divided longitudinally, but it was empty to allow the force of the detonation to disperse. The form of the bulge increased the ship's beam to , decreased her draught by about and increased her displacement by .


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: "Resolution" and "Revenge" were fitted with a different form of bulge in 1917–1918 that was intended to improve their stability as well as protect them against underwater threats. This discarded the crushing tubes to save weight and was only a single watertight compartment deep. It was divided into upper and lower compartments, of which the upper was filled with a mixture of concrete and scrap wood while the lower was empty. The bulge increased their beam to about , reduced their draught by and increased their displacement by .


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: Yet another form of bulge was installed aboard "Royal Sovereign" during her 1920–1924 refit. Based on the preceding form, the upper compartment was enlarged so that it extended above the waterline and crush tubes replaced the concrete and wood mixture. This weighed . Reports had been received from the bulged ships of excessive rolling and the Admiralty Experiment Works conducted experiments to determine the best form of a bulge to eliminate the problem in conjunction with improved bilge keels. "Royal Oak" was the only ship of the class lacking a bulge by this time. When fitted during her 1922–1924 refit, her bulges were mostly empty, although their lower compartments were partially filled with water. They also extended much further up the side of the ship. This form of the bulge increased her metacentric height to . "Ramillies"s bulges were modified during her 1926–1927 to a form much like those of "Royal Oak"; all of her crush tubes were removed, except those abreast of the magazines. "Resolution" had the concrete and wood mixture removed from her bulge and the lower compartment partially filled with water during her 1929–1931 refit; the same was done for "Revenge" during her 1931 refit.


title: Revenge-class battleship

text: Three members of the class entered service by May 1916: "Revenge", "Royal Sovereign", and "Royal Oak". "Revenge" was assigned to the 6th Division of the 1st Battle Squadron (BS), Grand Fleet, while "Royal Oak" initially served with the 3rd Division, 4th Battle Squadron. "Royal Sovereign" was left in port when the fleet sortied to meet the German High Seas Fleet off the coast of Jutland in late May, as her crew had not fully worked up by that time. During the ensuing Battle of Jutland, both "Revenge" and "Royal Oak" engaged German battlecruisers, "Revenge" damaging two of them— and —while "Royal Oak" scored a hit on a third—. "Revenge" was forced to turn away to avoid torpedoes that damaged her squadron flagship and caused her squadron to lose contact with the rest of the fleet. "Royal Oak" remained with the main fleet for the duration of the action. Both ships emerged from the battle unscathed.