Socialist party

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As Socialist Party are in a general and overarching sense since the mid-19th century political parties referred that appeal to the Social Democrats , the Socialist or the Communist oriented and thus claim to the interests of the labor movement to represent - even if do not name all socialist parties as such on their behalf. For example, the British Labor Party (freely translated: Labor Party ) is also widely understood as a socialist or social democratic party.

At the present time the moderate, in the pluralistic sense democratically oriented socialist and social-democratic parties are united in the Socialist International , among them also the Social-Democratic Party of Germany and the Social-Democratic Party of Austria . In the 1950s and 1960s, many of the large socialist / social democratic parties in Western Europe renounced the specific interest politics for the labor movement and Marxist economic and social theory in order to open up ideologically to a wider potential of voters. Since then, they have been considered to be popular parties .

The forerunner organization of the Socialist International was founded in Paris in 1889 after the dissolution of the First International in 1876 and is considered the Second International in the chronological order of the various - ideologically differing - internationals of the labor movement .

Most socialist parties until the beginning of the 20th century were still in conformity with the revolutionary theories of Marxism , founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . Up to the First World War , a reform-oriented direction prevailed in them . As a result, after the Russian October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks around Lenin and Trotsky led to revolutionary splits from social democracy and the founding of revolutionary socialist and communist parties . These set themselves apart from the reform-oriented social democracy and, on Lenin's initiative, formed the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow in 1919 , which lasted until 1943.

Even a communist party claims to be a socialist party. Communist parties often accuse the “reformist” social democratic parties of betraying the revolution and Marxism.

After the Second World War at the latest , various new communist tendencies developed, initially in individual political issues, later, after the de-Stalinization by Khrushchev, initially in the USSR from 1956, increasingly and in some cases fundamentally differentiated from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . They represented other revolutionary socialist theories and ideologies that the situations in the countries in which they were active and partly to power (been used for and in Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito , in the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong or in Cuba under Fidel Castro ). As early as the 1930s, Leon Trotsky founded another socialist theory in opposition to Stalinism in the Soviet Union with the ideology of Trotskyism named after him . From his exile in Mexico in 1938, Trotsky called the Fourth International , which has existed to this day, and which unites various Trotskyist-socialist parties.

In the 1960s, reform communist parties developed primarily in Europe, but also in other continents. In particular, the large traditional communist parties in Italy, France and, from the mid-1970s, also in Spain championed the new line of pluralistic-democratic so-called Eurocommunism .

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the CPSU at the beginning of the 1990s, the influence of communist parties declined significantly in most countries. At least in Western Europe and many other democratic-pluralistic industrialized countries , the remaining relatively small communist parties have only a small influence on the politics of the respective countries, apart from France for example. Some former communist parties in Eastern Europe gave themselves a new profile as a result of the democratization process, which is more oriented towards social democracy or democratic socialism , for example Die Linke in Germany or the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in Bulgaria. This change is also evident in the choice of a new name for the party, with words such as communist or communism being deleted and replaced by socialist / social democratic or socialism / social democratic .

In contrast, the social democratic and moderate socialist parties as mass parties and large popular parties continue to play major roles in many pluralistic democratic states.

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