What is socialism?

While there are many different variations of socialist thought, they all share a few common factors.  We can say that those factors are the basic ideas of socialism.

The first idea of socialism is that there should be no large-scale private ownership.  What that means is that individual people should be able to own little things like their clothes and their houses, but they should not be able to own big things like companies.  Companies should be owned by society as a whole.  This would probably mean that the government would need to own them.  That way, there would be no owners of companies who get rich off the work of other people.

The second main idea of socialism is that everything should be controlled democratically.  The people should be able to have control of their society.  The needs of the people would be able to override the needs or desires of individuals.  In a socialist society, there would be less emphasis on individual rights and more emphasis on the needs of the collective.

The third and final main idea of socialism is that all people should be more or less equal to one another.  Socialists abhor inequality of wealth such as we have in our society where there are some very rich people and very many people who are much poorer.  Socialism holds that all people should have the right to have all material goods that they need and that no one has the right to have much more than everyone else.

The basic idea of socialism, then, is equality.  Everyone should be about equal and no one’s rights or desires can be placed above the needs of the society.