Systems of Government

Systems of Government Chapter 24 American Vision Chapter 34 American Pageant By: Dennis “Coach” Martin

TotalitarianismAbsolute power, especially when exercised unjustly or cruelly • a modern autocratic government in which the state involves itself in all facets of society, including the daily life of its citizens. A totalitarian government seeks to control not only all economic and political matters but the attitudes, values, and beliefs of its population, erasing the distinction between state and society. The citizen's duty to the state becomes the primary concern of the community, and the goal of the state is the replacement of existing society with a perfect society. (No Individualism)

FascismA system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism • The name was first used by the party started by Benito Mussolini (How named). , It has also been applied to similar ideologies in other countries, National Socialism in Germany

FascismCharacteristics • is obliged to be anti-theoretical and frankly opportunistic in order to appeal to many diverse groups. • Key concepts are one, glorification of the state and total subordination of individual to it • The state is defined as an organic whole into which individuals must be absorbed for their own and the state's benefit. This "total state" is absolute in its methods and unlimited by law in its control and direction of its citizens.

Fascism Characteristics Continued • Second ruling concept of fascism is embodied in the theory of social Darwinism. The doctrine of survival of the fittest and the necessity of struggle for life is applied by fascists to the life of a nation-state. • Peaceful, complacent nations are seen as doomed to fall before more dynamic ones, making struggle and aggressive militarism a leading characteristic of the fascist state. • Imperialism is the logical outcome of this dogma.

Fascism Characteristics Continued • Third, Elitism. Salvation from rule by the mob and the destruction of the existing social order can be affected only by an authoritarian leader who embodies the highest ideals of the nation. • This concept of the leader as hero or superman, is closely linked with fascism's rejection of reason and intelligence and its emphasis is on vision, creativeness, and "the will“ of the state. (No Individualism)

Fascism Characteristics Continued • Fascist abhors the idea of a classless society and sees desirable order only in a state in which each class has its distinct place and function. Representation by classes (i.e., capital, labor, farmers, and professionals) is substituted for representation by parties, and the corporative state is a part of fascist dogma. • Theory and practice of organizing the whole of society into corporate entities subordinate to the state, employees would be organized into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and largely controlling the people and activities within their jurisdiction.

CommunismA system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people. • A socioeconomic system based on communal ownership and production of goods, communal self-government, and sometimes communal living. The slogan ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ encapsulates the disappearance of market mechanisms of exchange.

Communism • The most familiar form of communism is that established by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and it has generally been understood in terms of the system practiced by the former Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe, in China in 1949, and in countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea. • Communism embraced a revolutionary ideology in which the state would wither away after the overthrow of the capitalist system. In practice, however, the state grew to control all aspects of communist society.

CommunismContinued • Communist society as espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 were the ideas of the Soviet system in twentieth-century Russia associated with Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. • In the 1980s, as the weaknesses of the Soviet economy and system became apparent, the appeal of communism, so closely linked to the Soviet experience, dimmed. In 1989 and 1991, when socialist states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed.

CommunismContinued • The communist systems still exist in North Korea, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, even these governments made concessions to non-socialist economic activity. • Capitalism- An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned providing jobs and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market. (JOBS) (Individualism matters, you can rise is society)

Socialismthe stage of society, in Marxist doctrine, coming between the capitalist stage and the communist stage, in which private ownership of the means of production and distribution has been eliminated • System of social organization in which private property and the distribution of income are subject to social control; also, the political movements aimed at putting that system into practice. Because "social control" may be interpreted in widely diverging ways, socialism ranges from statist to libertarian, from Marxist to liberal.

Socialism Continued • Socialism differs from communism in that it is attached to ethical and democratic values and because it allows both common (private) and state ownership. • Because of the collective nature of socialism, it is to be contrasted to the doctrine of the sanctity of private property that characterizes capitalism. • Where capitalism stresses competition, profit, and creation of jobs, socialism calls for cooperation, redistribution of wealth, and social service.

Socialism Continued • In a broader sense, the term socialism is often used loosely to describe economic theories ranging from those that hold that only certain public utilities and natural resources should be owned by the state to those holding that the state should assume responsibility for all economic planning and direction.

ProletariatThe class of industrial wage earners who, possessing neither capital nor production means, must earn their living by selling their labor. • In Marxian theory, the class of exploited workers and wage earners who depend on the sale of their labor for their means of existence.

Proletariat Continued • Engels, and the Marxists effectively captured the word. For them, the proletariat was that class which lived solely by its labor power, a class which could not live as the bourgeoisie could by profit from capital, or by ownership of the means of production, a class which had been totally dispossessed during the course of the industrial revolution. • Engels in the Principles of Communism (1847) maintained that while there had always been a working class, just as there had always been poor people, there was a proletariat only in the nineteenth century.

NazismThe ideology and practice of the Nazis, especially the policy of racist nationalism, national expansion, and state control of the economy. • Nazism (Nationalsozialismus, National Socialism), variously denotes the totalitarianideology and practice of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), and Adolf Hitler’s government as dictator of Nazi Germany, from 1933 to 1945.

Democracy

Systems of Government