The Young League Forum

CONFEDERALISM       Confederal system of government is a system of government based on structural arrangement whereby component or federating units are stronger than the central government . Under this system, central government is weak compared to the power of the component regions. Each component unit has legal right to govern and develop its entity at its own pace.      Contemporarily, confederalism has been loosely used to refer to a union of states in which each member state retains their sovereign power: like the United Nations, African Union, European Union, Organization of American States, Arab League, etc.     The following are some of the characteristics of confederalism: weak centre, autonomous union, flexible constitution, right of secession and so forth.    

COMMUNISM      According to Karl Marx, communism is the highest stage of socialism in which all forms of injustice, exploitation, man’s inhumanity to man and other deprivations will cease to exist. He went further to posit that even the state and its monopoly will wither away or cease to exist because it is a mere instrument of the ruling class to exploit the poor; the state is not an impartial being as claimed by the liberal scholars. Therefore, communism is the extreme form or last stage of socialism. It is a subset of socialism.      Karl Marx was the founder of the extremist and radical revolutionary movement known as the Communist League in the 1840s. He conceptualized the notion of communism in his famous book entitled the Communist Manifesto which was co-authored by Frederick Engels and published in 1848. He criticized the asocial nature of capitalist society and called for revolution which will overthrow capitalist mode of product...

COMMUNALISM     This was a classless society where production, distribution and exchange of goods and services were collectively owned by the people. Communalism anchored on the principle of original concept of humanism which was based on philosophy of “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs”.      Besides, it should be noted that communalism was the second stage of the evolution of human society according to Karl Marx in the analysis of his “historical dialectical materialism”. The followings are the processes in which human society evolves: from primitive Communalism– Communalism- Feudalism – Capitalism- Socialism- Communism.

COMMODIFICATION OF LABOUR      Commodification of labour is the transformation of human labour or power into commodity which can be sold and bought. It is one of the characteristics of capitalism.  In a capitalist society, there are two broad classes: class who owns the means of production (bourgeoisie or the haves) and class who does not own the means of production (proletariat or the have-nots).      Hence, for those who do not own the means of production to survive they have to sell their labour power to those who have the means of production. In other words, they have to be employed and work for those who own the means of production as workers so that the owner of industry can exploit their labour power and pay them salaries or wages for their services depending on the monetary value of their labour. Therefore, they have sold or commodified their labour power in exchange for salaries or wages.      As Claude Ake (...

COLD WAR Cold war was an ideological conflict between mainly the United States commonly known as western bloc and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or eastern bloc immediately after the Second World War in 1945. It was an ideological tension, because what caused the war was based on two ideologies that dominated the world political, economic and social spheres then. According to Heywood (2007:133) “the term Cold war was coined by Walter Lippman in 1944.” He described it as “a state of protracted and extreme tension between countries or rival alliances that stops short of all-out war. The term is most commonly associated with a period of political, economic, cultural and military rivalry between the ‘capitalist’ western bloc and the ‘communist’ eastern bloc, and thus between the US and Soviet superpowers.” The two ideologies are: Capitalism ––– the United States Communism ––– the Soviet Union Analysis of Cold war: How did Cold War Start?   Cold...

CAPITALISM     Capitalist economic system first emerged in the sixteenth century and seventeenth century in Europe. It developed from feudal system of production which was predominantly obtainable in Middle Ages. Feudalism was characterized by agrarian-based production geared to the needs of landed aristocratic class and baron lords (Heywood, 2007).  The emergence of capitalism started with the emergence of bourgeois merchant class who placed too much emphasis on capital rather than the land. This led to Industrial Revolution which brought in capitalism as a means of system of production.     According to the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics, capitalism is “a term denoting a distinct form of social organization, based on generalized commodity production, in which there is private ownership and/or control of the means of production”. Nwankwo (1992:29) defines capitalism as “an economic system which allows private ownership of property, m...

Analysis of Capitalism How can we know a capitalist society? What is the parameter or yardstick for measuring capitalism? What are the nature and characteristics of a capitalist state?      These fundamental questions have remained an intractable debate among scholars and students of political science and other social scientists. This work was done out of the curiosity to fill an existing vacuum and to answer these puzzling questions.      Over the time, some scholars have argued that the parameter for measuring or knowing a capitalist society is by the level of roles played by government and private individuals on the areas of production and distribution. In other words, it means how government or state involves in economic management in the state. If the economic system is managed by private individuals for profit making and other self-aggrandizement, the country in question is a capitalist state. If the government dominates the ec...