• Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    This is true! Socialism is a spectrum of different political expressions of the idea of socially held wealth. The term was coined by Marx to a wider already existant school of thought regarding how basic human needs should be handled through copious economic planning. The slogan we hear about workers and means of production isn’t quite accurate as it is kind of a short quippy way to summerize passages that uses terms like “use-value”.

    There were other promenant thinkers who served as and creditied as predecessors on that school of thought. We tend to use the term “proto socialists” to that group because many of them predeceased the term but Socialism is an umbrella term. If you believe on any form distribution of resources required to meet basic needs then you fall under the umbrella.

    A lot of the Socialist movers and shakers of the past saw variable amounts and expressions of success in integration of Socialist principles inside democratic systems.

    Communism has somewhat less shades of grey and while technically under the umbrella term socialism in some ways it is unique. It refers in practice of the supposed handover of power to a system that is supposed to have a diminishing need for a state while also prohibiting privately held property. It sometimes aims for a currency free situation. As such it is incompatible with current models of liberal-socialist spectrums of representitive democracies. It has also never technically succeeded in that handoff… Which is sometimes veiwed as a critical failure point inate to the attempted implementation of the ideology - or as a set of individual failures of the movements who attempted to adopt the ideology in name and fumbled the landing.

    There is a lot of interesting history on different forms of socialism!