Why Not Socialism?: The Right’s red-baiting has been far too effective

[patrice]

107. True! and yet, there must be some essential trait in common that makes it all Socialism, otherwise

there are a whole hell of a lot of people who aren't talking about the same thing, but make the mistake of assuming that they are.

My sewing analogy applies here again: we can take materiel, each of us, some materiel the same as what other use, some different, and each of us put our materiel together and produce clothing, but we could look at all of that clothing and see a practically infinite variety of ways in which a given piece of clothing is constructed and, yet, we call all of it clothing.

So of all of the different ways that people think about Socialism, what is it (like a Venn diagram) that all of them have in common and without which you would not be talking/thinking about Socialism at all, but rather MISTAKING something else for Socialism that lacks one or more essentially Socialist traits.

I have my own answer to this question, just curious what other people think, especially since we see ONCE AGAIN that mistaken old saw that it isn't Socialism unless the government owns the means of production. I don't think government ownership is an essential trait of Socialism, because government ownership does not necessarily accomplish one of, if not *THE*, most essential goal-traits of that which is Socialism or is Socialistic.