While the emergence of the Soviet Union as the world's first nominally socialist state led to socialism's widespread association with the Soviet economic model, several scholars posit that in practice, the model functioned as a form of state capitalism. Today, many socialists have also adopted the causes of other social movements such as feminism, environmentalism, and progressivism. Socialist parties and ideas remain a political force with varying degrees of power and influence on all continents, heading national governments in many countries around the world. By the early 1920s, communism and social democracy had become the two dominant political tendencies within the international socialist movement, with socialism itself becoming the most influential secular movement of the 20th century. By the late 19th century, after the work of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, socialism had come to signify opposition to capitalism and advocacy for a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production. The socialist political movement includes a set of political philosophies that originated in the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 18th century and out of concern for the social problems that were associated with capitalism. Economic democracy proposes a sort of market socialism, with more democratic control of companies, currencies, investments and natural resources. While retaining socialism as a long-term goal, since the post-war period it has come to embrace a Keynesian mixed economy within a predominantly developed capitalist market economy and liberal democratic polity that expands state intervention to include income redistribution, regulation, and a welfare state. Social democracy originated within the socialist movement, supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice. Socialist politics has been both internationalist and nationalist organised through political parties and opposed to party politics at times overlapping with trade unions and at other times independent and critical of them, and present in both industrialised and developing nations. Anarchism and libertarian socialism oppose the use of the state as a means to establish socialism, favouring decentralisation above all, whether to establish non-market socialism or market socialism. Profits generated by these firms would be controlled directly by the workforce of each firm or accrue to society at large in the form of a social dividend. By contrast, market socialism retains the use of monetary prices, factor markets and in some cases the profit motive, with respect to the operation of socially owned enterprises and the allocation of capital goods between them. A non-market socialist system seeks to eliminate the perceived inefficiencies, irrationalities, unpredictability, and crises that socialists traditionally associate with capital accumulation and the profit system in capitalism. Non-market socialism substitutes factor markets and often money with integrated economic planning and engineering or technical criteria based on calculation performed in-kind, thereby producing a different economic mechanism that functions according to different economic laws and dynamics than those of capitalism. Socialist systems are divided into non-market and market forms. Socialists disagree on whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change. Different types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, on the structure of management in organizations, and from below or from above approaches, with some socialists favouring a party, state, or technocratic-driven approach. While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element. Social ownership can be state/public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As a term, it describes the economic, political and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership.
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