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The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1847-48 just before the Revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, expressing what they termed scientific socialism. In the last third of the 19th century parties dedicated to democratic socialism arose in Europe, drawing mainly from Marxism.
The rise in working class support for Socialism in this period was rapid and very significant as the Italian Socialist Party increased its membership to 250,000, the major Socialist trade union "The General Confederation of Labour", reached two million members, while the anarchist Italian Syndicalist Union saw up to 500,000 affiliates join.
In many cases, the communist parties of Central Europe were faced with a population initially quite willing to reign in market forces, institute limited nationalisation of industry and supporting the development of intensive social welfare states, whereas broadly the population largely supported socialism.
Socialist governments established the mixed economy with partial nationalisations and social welfare. By 1968, the prolonged Vietnam War gave rise to the New Left, socialists who tended to be critical of the Soviet Union and social democracy.
A much later split produced the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Britain's oldest existing socialist party, and the Socialist Labour Party. Although Marxism had some impact in Britain, it was far less than in many other European countries, with philosophers such as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill having much greater influence.
From 2005 until 2007, the country was wracked by thousands of protests from poor working-class communities. One of these gave rise to a mass democratic socialist movement of shack dwellers called Abahlali baseMjondolo which continues to work for popular people's planning and against the proliferation of capitalism in land and housing. [151]
Lenin briefly returned to Russia during the failed Revolution of 1905, and during the First World War campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which he believed would cause the collapse of capitalism and the rise of socialism.
As Theodore Draper explains in The Roots of American Communism, there were two competing social democratic versions of socialism in 19th-century Europe, especially in Germany, [32] where there was a rivalry over political influence between the Lassalleans and the Marxists.