Definition of: socialism

(sō′shəl·iz′əm) noun
Public collective ownership or control of the basic means of production, distribution, and exchange, with the avowed aim of operating for use rather than for profit, and of assuring to each member of society an equitable share of goods, services, and welfare benefits: as a system of social and economic organization planned, attempted, or achieved through various methods
—in Utopian or Christian Socialism, through cooperative communal groups holding all things in common (approximating the philosophic anarchism of Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Kropotkin, and the communalism and commensalism of the early and undivided church); in Guild Socialism, through organization of producer groups and the professions in syndicalist guilds to be represented in a federal legislative body; in Fabian or British Labour Party Socialism, through parliamentary democracy using gradualist evolutionary processes; in Marxist–Leninist State Socialism, through revolution, expropriation, and dictatorship of the so–called proletariat, in short, Communism. Compare MIXED ECONOMY.
—creeping socialism Anything considered as a gradual or piecemeal encroachment upon the system of private property and free enterprise through state action: used as an epithet.