50 Fun Facts About Socialism

Which physicist made the case for a planned economy in a 1949 essay for the socialist magazine Monthly Review?

Albert Einstein blamed the profit motive for cycles of booms and depressions and for encouraging selfishness. His essay ran in the very first issue of Monthly Review.

Which famous American, portrayed as a child in The Miracle Worker, joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909?

Helen Keller campaigned and wrote in support of the working class until 1921, and in 1920 she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union.

Which American patriotic text was composed in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and Christian socialist?

The Pledge of Allegiance was composed for the children's magazine The Youth's Companion, as part of a schools celebration of Columbus Day. Its reference to God was only added by Congress in 1954.

Which German chancellor created state health and pension insurance in the 1880s to draw workers away from socialism?

Otto von Bismarck had first tried to crush the movement with his Anti-Socialist Laws. His health insurance bill of 1883 was followed by accident cover and then old-age pensions.

Which English novelist, shot in the throat fighting in Spain, said he wrote for democratic socialism?

George Orwell made the claim in his 1946 essay Why I Write, adding that every serious line he had written since 1936 was also aimed against totalitarianism.

Which 1906 novel did Upton Sinclair write to win readers to socialism, only to trigger food safety laws instead?

The Jungle exposed Chicago's meatpacking plants so vividly that public pressure produced the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair complained that he had aimed at the public's heart and hit its stomach.

What did Karl Marx describe as the opium of the people in an article published in 1844?

Religion, Marx wrote in the same passage, is the sigh of the oppressed creature and the heart of a heartless world. The article ran in a journal he edited himself.

Which colour of flag did socialists adopt during the Revolutions of 1848 as the emblem of their movement?

Red had earlier signalled martial law: Lafayette raised a flag of that colour in 1791 to warn rioters to disperse. Britain's Labour Party kept a plain one as an official symbol until the late 1980s.

Which Socialist Party candidate ran for US president in 1920 from inside a federal prison cell?

Eugene V. Debs had been convicted under the Sedition Act for urging young men to resist the wartime draft. It was his fifth run, and he still took 3.4 percent of the popular vote.

In which city did Karl Marx live in exile for over thirty years before being buried at Highgate Cemetery?

London became his base in June 1849, after he was expelled from Germany in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. He died there in 1883 as a stateless person.

Which phrase names the factories, land and tools that socialism wants owned socially rather than privately?

The means of production can be held in common in several ways: by the state, by a local community or by a firm's own employees.

Which German thinker ran a family cotton firm in Manchester while bankrolling Karl Marx and his family?

Friedrich Engels led a double life for two decades: a respectable cotton merchant in the office and a revolutionary writer outside it. He became a partner in the firm in 1864.

Which 1848 pamphlet by Karl Marx closes by calling on the working men of all countries to unite?

The Communist Manifesto was nearly late: the league that commissioned it sent Marx an ultimatum demanding the finished manuscript by 1 February.

Which leader of Russia's October Revolution was embalmed for public display against the protests of his widow?

Vladimir Lenin was laid in a mausoleum in the centre of Moscow, although his widow Nadezhda Krupskaya had protested against the embalming. He had returned from exile in 1917 by train across wartime Germany.

Which Marxist term for the class of wage labourers derives from the Latin word for offspring?

Proletariat is thought to go back to the Roman census, where the poorest citizens had their children listed in place of the property they lacked.

Which date, chosen to commemorate Chicago's Haymarket affair of 1886, is Labour Day or Workers' Day in many countries?

1 May was fixed at an 1889 congress of socialist parties. The United States, where the protests took place, keeps its own Labor Day in September instead.

Which democratic socialist was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981 before reaching the US Senate?

Bernie Sanders won that first race as an independent by a final margin of just 10 votes. He went on to become the longest-serving independent in US congressional history.

Which Labour prime minister beat Winston Churchill in 1945 and went on to create the National Health Service?

Clement Attlee's government also took public utilities and major industries into state hands. His health minister, Aneurin Bevan, had to overcome the British Medical Association to launch the service.

Which Nordic country's Social Democrats led its government without a break from 1936 to 1976?

Sweden's Social Democrats later led all but one term from 1982 to 2006 as well. Back in 1932 the party had promised to help every victim of capitalism, not only industrial workers.

Which type of Israeli collective community, first tried at Degania, began as a blend of socialism and Zionism?

Kibbutz children once slept in separate children's houses and visited their parents for only a few hours a day. Villages of the looser moshav type kept family life private.

Which critique of capitalism did Karl Marx publish in 1867 as the first of three volumes?

Das Kapital was unfinished when Marx died: only the first volume appeared in his lifetime, and the other two were pieced together from his manuscripts in 1885 and 1894.

Which exiled rival of Joseph Stalin was killed with an ice axe in his study in Mexico City in 1940?

Leon Trotsky had built the Soviet army and led it to victory in the civil war before losing the struggle for power. He lived in Turkey, France and Norway before settling in Mexico.

Which country led by Tito wrote workers' self-management into law in 1950 after breaking with Joseph Stalin?

Yugoslavia kept the system until 1990, with firms formally controlled through workers' councils. In practice, business decisions were often handed to those who already had the experience.

Which emblem, designed in 1918 as a holiday decoration in Moscow, stands for the unity of workers and peasants?

The hammer and sickle was the work of the artist Yevgeny Kamzolkin. The Soviet Union, founded at the end of 1922, adopted it for its state emblem the following year.

Which Polish-born theorist co-founded Germany's Spartacus League and was murdered in Berlin in 1919?

Rosa Luxemburg was shot by paramilitaries and her body, weighted with stones, was thrown into a canal. A memorial at the edge of the Tiergarten now marks the spot.

Which Welsh mill owner tested his socialist ideas at New Lanark in Scotland and New Harmony in America?

Robert Owen had grown rich from his Scottish textile mill before sinking most of his fortune into the American experiment. It lasted only about two years.

Which Argentine-born doctor fought beside Fidel Castro in Cuba and was executed in Bolivia in 1967?

Che Guevara owed his nickname to his habit of saying che, an Argentine filler word used much like eh in English. He had earned his medical degree in 1953.

Which Irish wit behind The Importance of Being Earnest wrote the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism?

Oscar Wilde wrote the 1891 essay after reading the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, and it doubles as an attack on charity. He argued that altruism only patched up the problems capitalism caused.

Which label, later a put-down, describes the early socialism of Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon?

Utopian was the tag later socialists pinned on these thinkers to dismiss their schemes as fanciful and unrealistic. Marx's circle described its own brand as scientific instead.

Which Soviet programme was first launched under Joseph Stalin in 1928?

The five-year plans were drawn up by the state planning committee Gosplan, which launched thirteen in all. The first was declared complete a year early.

Which faction of Russia's Social Democratic Labour Party took a name meaning majority after the 1903 party split?

Bolsheviks kept the flattering label even though neither side held a firm majority through the congress. Their Menshevik rivals had actually won the vote on membership rules.

Which physician, elected Chile's president in 1970 as a Marxist, was toppled by a military coup in 1973?

Salvador Allende has been described as the first Marxist elected president in a liberal democracy in Latin America. His government took over the large copper mines and the banks.

Which British organisation, founded in 1884 and named after a delaying Roman general, helped create the Labour Party?

The Fabian Society once used a wolf in sheep's clothing as its coat of arms, a metaphor for advancing socialism gradually. It later dropped the image because of its obvious negative connotations.

Which revolutionary government held power for two months in 1871 before the French army crushed it?

The Paris Commune was put down by the French army in what became known as the bloody week. Because it lasted so briefly, only a few of its decrees were ever carried out.

Which anthem of the socialist movement began as a French text of 1871, later set to music by Pierre De Geyter?

The Internationale brought its composer a long fight for credit: his own brother was falsely named as the author of the tune, and confessed the fraud in a note left at his death in 1916.

Which Labour leader persuaded the party in 1995 to rewrite Clause IV and drop its call for common ownership?

Tony Blair succeeded where Hugh Gaitskell had failed: Gaitskell tried to remove the 1918 clause after Labour lost the 1959 general election. The rewrite became a defining moment for New Labour.

Which Venezuelan president, jailed for a failed 1992 coup, championed a socialism of the 21st century?

Hugo Chávez borrowed the phrase from the German sociologist Heinz Dieterich, who first set out the idea in the 1990s. Leaders in Ecuador and Bolivia later took up the same banner.

In which capital did Alexander Dubček's 1968 reforms promise socialism with a human face until Soviet tanks arrived?

Prague gave its name to that season of reform, which half a million Warsaw Pact troops ended in August. Mikhail Gorbachev later said his own liberalising policies owed Dubček a great deal.

Which country added the word socialist to the preamble of its constitution in 1976, during a state of emergency?

India had been described simply as a sovereign democratic republic until then. When the text was first drafted, one proposal was to name the country a union of socialistic republics.

Which term did Karl Marx use for what workers produce beyond their wages, which he saw as the source of profit?

Surplus value renders Marx's German word Mehrwert, a cousin of the English phrase more worth. In his account the employer pockets it as profit once the goods are sold.

Which leader after Mao steered China toward markets under the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics?

Deng Xiaoping set up special economic zones and courted foreign investment while keeping the party in charge. His official obituary told citizens to go on studying his method.

Which 1944 book by the economist F. A. Hayek warned that central economic planning leads towards tyranny?

The Road to Serfdom reached millions once Reader's Digest ran a condensed version in April 1945. Wartime paper rationing had made the original so scarce that its author called it unobtainable.

Which type of member-owned business did the Rochdale Pioneers launch in 1844 with a small shop on Toad Lane?

A cooperative of this kind hands its profits back to customers: the Rochdale store was among the first to pay members a dividend. It opened with little more than butter, sugar, flour and oatmeal.

Which Midwestern city elected three Socialist mayors between 1910 and 1960, a tradition nicknamed sewer socialism?

Milwaukee's socialists boasted so often about the city's excellent public sewers that a party rival coined the label as a put-down in 1932. One of the three, Daniel Hoan, held office for 24 years.

Who became the first socialist president of France's Fifth Republic in 1981 and abolished the death penalty?

François Mitterrand began by taking key firms into state hands and bringing in a 39-hour working week. Faced with economic tensions, he soon swung round to austerity and market liberalisation.

Which French thinker declared that property is theft and was the first person to call himself an anarchist?

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon later riled Karl Marx with a work subtitled The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx hit back with a book-length critique that flipped the title around.

Which Victorian designer, best known for wallpapers and fabrics, founded the Socialist League in 1884?

William Morris serialised his novel News from Nowhere in the league's paper Commonweal, which lifted its circulation. In his own lifetime he was best known as a poet.

Which French socialist, founder of the newspaper L'Humanité, was assassinated in July 1914 as war loomed?

Jean Jaurès had been trying to organise general strikes in France and Germany to force both governments to negotiate. A young nationalist shot him through a restaurant window as he dined.

Which former Scottish coal miner helped found the Labour Party and became its first parliamentary leader in 1906?

Keir Hardie started work at the age of seven and was down the Lanarkshire pits by ten. He scandalised the press by taking his seat in a tweed suit and deerstalker instead of a frock coat and top hat.

Which East African country adopted Ujamaa, the village-based socialism championed by its leader Julius Nyerere?

Tanzania took the policy's name from a Swahili word meaning fraternity. From 1973 it turned coercive, with rural families moved into planned villages under Operation Vijiji.