Ask an average Joe what is socialism and he will point out to China, the former Soviet Union, Cuba or other state capitalist or totalitarian dungeon. Of course, it's not his fault, after a cold war based upon indirect intervention and massive propaganda the truth lies underneath, to quote Noam Chomsky: "When the world's two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction." So it's not much about education here, as it is about misinformation. Socialism in the classical/libertarian sense does not imply state ownership of the means of production, if we involve the state in distributing wealth and owning all means of production, than we defeat the very purpose of socialism. Socialism meant, until the rise of Leninism, democratic workers control over the means of production and distribution. In the infamous Russian Revolution for example, we saw a revolutionary factory committee movement throughout the Russian working class as factories and plants were seized and run under workers self management. Lenin's idea was vastly different than the libertarian socialist tendency of the organized Russian masses, for Lenin "socialism" ran through the terrain of state capitalism and, in fact, simply built upon its institutionalized means of allocating recourses and structuring industry. As Lenin put it, "the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates, an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and registration work . . . This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrestled from the control of the capitalists," it "must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets" and "it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide." This meant that the Bolsheviks would "not invent the organizational form of work, but take it ready-made from capitalism" and "borrow the best models furnished by the advanced countries." Although I intentionally omit "social democracy", knowingly it is older than Leninism and was considered the "mainstream" form of socialism until the rise of Leninism, maybe I can be accused of intellectual dishonesty, but social democracy for me is the same state monopolistic system, albeit minus the "revolutionary" vanguardism of the Leninist. This statist vision of socialism, coupled with Lenin’s vanguardist interpretation of Marx's "Communist Manifesto"(although Marx's own writings alluded to centralization of economic and social power into the state) paved the way for modern totalitarianism and the disasters that followed it. This form of socialism based upon democratic workers control and anti-Leninism, was known in the time of Lenin, as “left communism”, this tendency along with anarcho-syndicalism, anarchist communism and other forms of social anarchism, come from the same philosophical and political tradition called “libertarian socialism”. Libertarian socialism unites all these varied tendencies under one umbrella term, although with many differences between them, the main characteristics of these tendencies, such as workers control, anti-vanguardism, anti-centralism etc. puts them under one overall tradition, which is constantly evolving. For example, new tendencies occurred inside the libertarian socialist tradition at the end of the 20th century, tendencies such as “Participatory Economics”, “Inclusive Democracy”, “Libertarian municipalism” etc. All of these tendencies drew inspiration from the later libertarian socialist trends, building upon the already vast theories that came before them. So overall, the term socialism cannot be monopolized by the Leninists and its derivates, because socialism in this tradition is vastly different and unique.
