The family of political and economic ideas holding that production, distribution, and the major resources of society should be owned or regulated collectively rather than by private individuals — an idea that has generated revolutionary movements, welfare states, authoritarian regimes, and ongoing debates about the relationship between equality and freedom.
Socialism is not one idea but a family of arguments that share a single question: why should the wealth produced by workers be owned by those who did not produce it? Every version of socialism is an answer to that question. The answers have ranged from revolutionary communism to Nordic social democracy — and the distance between them is the history of the left.