The Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) was Burma's ruling party from 1962 to 1988 and sole legal party from 1964 to 1988. Party chairman Ne Win overthrew the country's democratically elected government in a coup d'état on 2 March 1962. For the next 26 years, the BSPP governed Burma under a totalitarian military dictatorship, until mass protests in 1988 pressured party officials to adopt a multi-party system. Founding and programme The BSPP was established on 4 July 1962, after the declaration of the "Burmese Way to Socialism" (BWS) by the Union Revolutionary Council (URC) on 30 April 1962. The BWS set out the political and economic ideology of the URC which had taken over power in the military coup of 2 March 1962. The BSPP advocated a programme of the "Burmese Way to Socialism" which, according to Ne Win, incorporated elements of Buddhism, humanism, and Marxism. The programme was described by some scholars as anti-Western and isolationist. A booklet entitled Special Characteristics of the Burma Socialist Programme Party was published in January 1963 in both Burmese and English. The booklet distinguished the BSPP's ideology from those of both "bourgeois" social democratic parties and communist parties. The BSPP, the booklet stated, rejected the "bourgeois" belief and practices of social democratic parties that socialism could be reached through parliamentary methods (even before the announcement of the BWS, the URC had already abolished, by decree, the parliament that was established under the 1947 Burmese Constitution stating in effect that parliamentary democracy was not suitable for Burma). The booklet further stated that, although there was much to be learnt from the doctrines of Marx, Engels and Lenin, it did not regard their word as "gospel" unlike the Burmese communists, which the booklet referred to as "vulgar materialists". Later in the same year the BSPP elaborated on its ideology in a book published in both Burmese and English entitled The System of Correlation between Man and His Environment, commonly referred to simply as "correlation" (). The book used both Buddhist and Marxist rhetoric to espouse what came to be known as the "Burmese Way to Socialism". Its most memorable line was borrowed from an old popular expression, "One can only afford to be moral on a full stomach", which struck a chord with the people trying to eke out a living in increasingly dire economic circumstances under the rule of the BSPP. These economic conditions