Socialism is a tricky thing to define since many types exist. Some modern countries that are called socialist really refer to a few aspects of the country. For instance, most government-controlled health care is labeled “social medicine.” There are many countries with such health care plans, which are paid for usually through higher taxation of the people. Such countries don’t necessarily eliminate or dismantle class structure, or advocate rebellion toward the ruling class.

If you look at definitions of socialism, you’ll see that it arises in the early 19th century, and that the key work of the time was Karl Marx and Frederick Engel’s The Communist Manifesto published in 1848. In the book, socialism is viewed as a step between a country’s current state and its move to complete communism. Prior to Marx and Engel’s work, there were many people who noted the disparity between rich and poor, and felt systems in a government should help to evenly distribute wealth so that no one was impoverished. This was the impetus behind the French Revolution, though it did not result in the equality of classes and the banishment of poverty that early advocates of the revolution foresaw.

Typically, socialism is concerned with both the social and economic system in a country. Property and wealth are shared, and their distribution are subject to the control of the people, who exert equal control of the government. The community or state owns all the things used for work production, called the means of production, and thus may also decide what is produced and how to distribute as evenly as possible the moneys paid for things produced.

In the social context, since all, and not a few people, control the means of production, disparity between rich and poor shrinks. All can expect a fairly even distribution of wealth from what is produced, so all live at approximately the same income level. Further, all have a place as workers in such a society, since everyone is equally invested in production proving beneficial to the society and the individual.

This is where differences in socialism begin to emerge. Should a government control the means of production or should only certain industries be under such control? Should the people control the means of production more than a government? Do people who control production plan in advance for what they will produce or do they look at what the market demands and produce accordingly?

For Marx and Engel, socialism was a preparatory first step toward creating communism, where a country is stateless, and under complete control of the people. There is no such state in existence, and never has been in the way that Marx envisioned it. There have been a few very small commune-like societies. A kibbutz, for example, is structured on the completely equal sharing of wealth, power, and status. Small agrarian societies where everything is shared have come the closest to Marxist ideals.

The fear that socialism engendered for most was varied. Marx deliberately saw the abolishment of religion as an important step, since religion was tied to keeping the worker downtrodden and accepting of his or her humbler status based on the rewards of heaven. Further, Marx claimed that establishing a socialist state would probably require bloody revolution and the mass killings of people in the upper classes so that workers could rule. This scared people tremendously, especially when they saw socialist states develop in countries like the USSR and China. There were mass executions, and critics of socialist policies were summarily killed or jailed.

Others took some of the ideas of socialism and applied them to democratic states, as for instance government health care, social welfare, or retirement plans. Complete control and power over distributing wealth was thought undesirable as it might discourage ingenuity and development, when no reward beyond a little recognition existed. In a completely socialist state, if you invented something, you did it for the greater glory of all, not for any personal fame or notoriety.

In this transition phase of socialism to communism, Marx also refers to the need for a strong leader to enforce the new policies. This is where Russian socialism got into hot water. A strong leader was necessarily above other citizens, and very little control by the people could get such a leader to back down and pursue gentler policies. Plato had long ago envisioned a “philosopher-king” leader who would accord places to each person based on his needs and skills. Marx envisioned the same type of ruler, but the Soviet Union instead got hard-line rulers who performed mass executions, strong-armed citizens and corrupted Marx’s ideal picture of a communist or socialist society.