Everyone OK with this?

[Igel]

55. You're trying to impose a definition on a word with a continuum of meanings.

Yeah, the RW tainted the word. But let's not forget the US Socialist R. That's an extreme. Maduro's socialist. Words are set by usage, and that's part of the usage. Saying "that's not real socialism" is dangerously close to "he's not a true Scotsman".

And let's not forget that we had public schools, a military, a road system, customs, and a lot of other things before "socialist" was a word of any import in English, before the New Deal. If you make them socialist then you wind up saying that Geo. Washington was socialist. The Russian zemstvo wasn't socialist--it was fostered by antisocialists and condemned by self-appointed socialists, but it "looks" socialist to some. But that's another extreme. Both extremes stretch the definition past the breaking point.

I'm boring and simple. I like the old fashioned denotation "a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." (some random web definition, but it's a good enough version).


There were a number of socialisms around at the end of the 19th century. The Czech popular (narodni) socialism took one form; the French another form. But you don't get "socialism" as entailing the provision of social services until the 1920s, as far as I can see. By then "community" was, as in the USSR, taken to mean "government." It's a distortion of the older meaning and the theory that we still often cite that assumes the older theory, but there it is.

Social services got backed into the definition around the 1920s, I suspect. For some, that's the main gist of the word. I'm still old fashioned. If you're not asking for control over production by some government or collective, it's not socialist.