Socialism

Owning the means of production, distribution, and exchange, i.e. all natural resources, land, industrial plant and trading institutions by a collective of the people, which may be the state or municipalities, but can be cooperatives or trade unions.

Although it is possible to trace adumbrations of modern socialist ideas as far back as Plato's "Republic", Thomas Moore's "Utopia", and the profuse Utopian literature of the 18th Century Enlightenment, realistically, modern socialism has its roots in the reflections of various writers who opposed the social and economic relations and dislocations that the Industrial Revolution brought in its wake. They directed their critical shafts against what they conceived to be the injustice, the inequalities, the suffering brought about by the capitalist mode of production and the free and uncontrolled market on which it rested. To the acquisitive individualism of the age they opposed a vision of a new community of producers bound to each other through fraternal solidarity. They conceived of a future in which the masses would wrest control of the means of production and the levers of government from the capitalist.

Politically socialism has no predetermined form, since collective ownership can, in theory, be managed by a parliamentary democracy, a single political party claiming to act as the people's executive, or even by a monarchy or theocracy, since from an economic point of view the Vatican, for example, is a socialist organization.