It was surprising finding this question posted; I have been giving this very issue a lot of thought in the past week.
Noam Chomsky once wrote that if the term “socialism” meant anything, it meant a system where the workers who actually produce the profits have the first claim to them. This is distinct from capitalism, where the owners and lenders have the first claim, and communism where the state has the exclusive claim.
Historically, the term “socialism” has been used a lot in Europe to describe various conflicting ideas and systems, whether it was appropriate to do so or not, because the term is viewed favorably there. In America it is used indiscriminately as well, but to describe things people don’t like.
For instance, a coworker was complaining for some weeks that the economics class he was taking at night was a “class in compulsory socialism”, apparently because it involved exposure to a variety of viewpoints, some of which he disliked or found difficult to understand. He wanted his professor to watch a dramatic movie he had seen about life in Russia after the Communist revolution, as he somehow thought this had something to do with socialism and his economics course. Just how, he couldn’t explain.
Recently he dropped out of the class. On the whole I get the feeling that he would have been happier at Liberty College, where, Jerry Falwell proudly promises, “your boy or girl won’t be exposed to a lot of radical ideas from some liberal professor”.
My friend was hardly the only person to use “socialism” to mean anything difeent than what he was comfortable with. Last week in a national chain bookstore I saw a book on “cultural literacy” for fifth graders. It said that Karl Marx was the founder of socialism.
The meaning of words evolve over time, but if we stop using the word “socialism” to mean something in particular, and don’t find another word as a substitute, our ability to talk sense about politics and economics is impaired. These days, people often act as though they have somehow satisfactorily proven that something is a bad idea merely by saying that it is socialism. Since they use “socialism” as a synonym for “bad idea”, though, they are really only saying that something is a bad idea because they think it is a bad idea.
In practice, it seems that government efforts to regulate the economy are denounced as socialism if they are aimed at helping the poor or middle class, and are “market-based economics” if they favor the rich or very large corporations. This is what is known as out national political dialogue.
This broadening and the blurring of fundamental terms until they become close to useless seems to be something Americans are especially prone to with respect to economics. Possibly it is done just as much in other countries–I am just not in a position to say.
For instance, the term “inflation”, as used in the United States, used to mean the growth of a money supply at a rate faster than the growth of goods and services which the money could be used to buy. One consequence of this is that money becomes less valuable and products, being scarcer relative to money, become more expensive.
Then reporters and headline writers started saying things like “high prices fuel inflation”, which is sort of like saying forest fires lead to playing with matches. Then economists started using “inflation” as a synonym for “rising prices” too. And now we have no good way of talking clearly about inflation, as opposed to the rising prices which may result from it.