30th January 2012

Today in Social Sciences, Mª Ángeles, the mathematical teacher, has been with us. She has given us a sheet of paper to write the names to know who has not assisted. Then we have done the exercises that Paqui wrote on the blog to do today, and they were about Socialism and Anarchism. The socialists were some thinkers who started criticizing wealth concentration in the hands of a few and workers' misery and proposed new ways of organizing society and distributing wealth. Utopian socialism appeared. It was a proposition of a transformation of society based on collective property which failed. The firts proposition were made by Robert Owen, the Count of Saint- Simon and Charles Fourier, who were utopians. Here we can see them:

After that, we have had to explain the main ideas of Marxims/scientific socialism. It started by two German thinkers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who studied capitalism and reached some conclusions, published in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. The ideas were:

-The history of humanity has always been a continuous struggle between oppressors and oppressed.

-In the 19th century there was a class struglle between the bourgeois (oppressors) and the workers (oppressed).

-The hard living conditions of workers and their exploitation by the capitalists would lead to a workers' revolution, in 2 stages:

· 1st stage: Dictatorship of the proletariat: workers would take power and use the State to transform society, changing private properties into collective.

· 2nd stage: When the class differences had disappeared, the State wouldn't be necessary and a communist society would appear: a society without social classes, private property and State.

Marx and Engels considered that workers had to organize themselves and get ready for the moment of the revolution, but also to participate and influence in politics. Here we can also see them:

Finally, we have seen the main ideas of anarchism. It means "without government". Bakunin, Kropotkin and Proudhon were the main anarchist thinkers which their ideas were:

- People are born free, but institutions such as the school, the army, the State snatch their freedom and prevent people from developing all their capabilities.

- The only way of recovering freedom is to end with everything that limits people's capabilities and let people decide how to organize their life: they can choose between associating with other people or staying apart.

They were the following:

That's all for today, I hope you were better Paqui.