Other early advocates of socialism took a more scientific approach by favouring social leveling to create a meritocratic society based upon freedom for individual talent to prosper. Because the people who proposed the creation of such societies called themselves socialists, the term socialism came to refer not only to a certain moral doctrine, but also to a type of egalitarian society based on such a doctrine. A constant feature of these ideal societies was social and economic equality. Some of them also created small communities that put their ideals into practice. In the first half of the 19th century, many writers who described themselves as socialists-and who would be later called utopian socialists-wrote down descriptions of what they believed to be the ideal human society. In a similar vein, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon claimed that socialism is 'every aspiration towards the amelioration of society'. Robert Owen also viewed socialism as a matter of ethics, although he used it with a slightly more specific meaning to refer to the view that human society can and should be improved for the benefit of all. Alexandre Vinet, who claimed to have been the first person to use the term, defined socialism simply as 'the opposite of individualism'. The term socialism was coined in the 1830s and it was first used to refer to philosophical or moral beliefs rather than any specific political views. Some of those definitions of socialism are very vague while others are so specific that they only include a small minority of the things that have been described as socialism in the past such as a mode of production, state socialism, or the abolition of wage labour. Different self-described socialists have used socialism to refer to different things such as an economic system, a type of society, a philosophical outlook, an ethical socialism in the form of a collection of moral values and ideals, or a certain kind of human character. There have been numerous political movements such as anarchism, communism, the labour movement, Marxism, social democracy, national socialism and syndicalism, whose members called themselves socialists under some definition of the term-some of these interpretations are mutually exclusive and all of them have generated debates over the true meaning of socialism. In the second type of socialism, planning is utilized and include a system of accounting based on calculation-in-kind to value resources and goods wherein production is carried out directly for use. The first type of socialism utilize markets for allocating inputs and capital goods among economic units.

Socialist economic systems can be further divided into market and non-market forms. Īs a term, socialism represents a broad range of theoretical and historical socioeconomic systems and has also been used by many political movements throughout history to describe themselves and their goals, generating a variety of socialism types. There are many varieties of socialism and no single definition encapsulates all of them, but social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms (excluding Liberal socialism etc.) Socialists disagree about the degree to which social control or regulation of the economy is necessary, how far society should intervene, and whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change. Types of socialism most of include a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and organizational self-management of enterprises as well as the political theories and movements associated with socialism, Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity in which surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole.

Democracy 3 socialism