this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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“Socialism” just means “the ‘social ownership’ of the means of production”.
And “social ownership of the means of production” really just refers to any situation where a business is owned and operated by stakeholders (workers, consumers, the broader community, or some combination of these) whose ownership rights stem directly from their social relationship to the business (as an employee, as a customer, or as somebody who is affected by externalities generated by the business).
And a business which implements such a structure can reasonably be described as a socialist business in a very neutral economic sense.
And an economy primarily composed of socialist businesses can reasonably described as a socialist economy in a similar manner.
And a socialist is simply a person that thinks that some sort of socialist economy would be superior to a capitalist one by whatever metrics they deem to be most important (and to be very clear: it can even be possible for a socialist to think that certain implementations of socialism could actually be worse than capitalism. It’s not like a universal thing.).
This is all to say that socialism is not a very well defined idea and it covers everything from nationalizing industries (at least within the context of a republic) to forming workers or consumer cooperatives without even a care for the philosophy of it all. Many people throughout history who have called themselves socialists have advocated for certain socialist ideas while being quite critical of others that would still be reasonably considered socialist.
I also want to mention one more thing since you mentioned distributism. Distributism is simply the idea that “things are better” when wealth and power are widely distributed throughout society. It does not advocate for any particular economic system, but prescribes a goal that distributists believe any economic system should strive to achieve.