There seems little consensus on this, and the polls reflect this confusion.
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Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez may know what they mean by socialism, I sincerely doubt most of the others throwing the label around have any real understanding of the term.
Eduard Bernstein, the preeminent theorist of democratic socialism, made the same point 120 years ago: “If we asked a number of people … to give a brief definition of socialism, most of them would be in some difficulty. … If we consult the literature of socialism itself, we will find very different accounts of the concept. … They will vary from … legal ideas (equality, justice) to … its identification with the class struggle … to the explanation that socialism means cooperative economics.”
Bernstein’s socialist program was so mainstream (i.e., not radical) that much of it was achieved in America long ago: universal suffrage, workers’ rights to form unions, an end to child labor for those under 14 and improved conditions for agricultural workers.
Bernstein explicitly rejected Marx and revolution, preferring evolution, and unlike some current American socialists, opposed “full state maintenance” of the unemployed, saying it was damaging the will to work of those voluntarily unemployed.
Soviet socialism was radically different, as are other visions of socialism. Saint-Simon’s socialism and Proudhon’s and Owens’s and Bakunin’s and Debs’s and Olof Palme’s socialisms were all quite different from each other.
But that’s exactly the point: There’s lots of disagreement, even among socialists, about what constitutes socialism.
So what are polls measuring when they ask about socialism?
