Socialism has nothing to do with government or command economy. That’s just the American straw-man definition of Socialism. Socialism is entirely to do with who owns and ultimately controls the means of production: It advocates the people who use the means of production (labour) should rather than someone else (capitalists). The argument goes that if labour doesn’t own the means by which they can produce things then they will be subjugated by those that do in order to produce and create wealth and effectively become wage slaves to their bosses. Communism is just one of the proposed ways of achieving a labour ownership of the means of production by making them public. Even communism is not about government or central control; it claims to only use the state as a means to an end in getting the social structure right for communism and then eventually dissolve the state and leave only true communism.
— http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ah3wc/his_single_known_mathematical_failure_was_not/
