Rising out of the slums and misery of 18th century life, a number of “socialist” movements began — none organized enough, or unified enough to make any serious changes to the political establishment at the time, but calls for economic reform were undeniable. The “haves” became the owners of the “have nots” in a capitalist-leaning feudal-like society, where employees were forever linked to their jobs with little opportunity to rise or reform as individuals.

Of course, this led to a divide — those who advocated for reform, rarely advocated for the same type of reform. Still, we call all these general ideas “socialism,” for they share common positions on the “everyone’s interest” plane, and opposed to hitherto standard concepts of laissez-faire. Socialism, it could be said, was the attempt to break down self-interest in favor of a more common progression.

Anarchism was the almost leaning outside of the umbrella of “socialism” belief that government was coercive and negative to both the economy and the social state of the world. Anarchists believed that order was not something to be imposed on people by their governments, but rather, to be voluntarily accepted by joining a self-governing group. Many modern day academics suggest that any real establishment of anarchism in a large society like ours would lead to a monolithic modern government over a relatively short period. Anarchists saw production and trade between communities, where members of the community were there entirely voluntarily, furthermore, they saw the ’socialization’ of many services through these communities, where members would contribute towards a centralized health care, education, housing and possibly even food fund.

Marxian socialism, also called “scientific socialism” is the academic-form of socialism, based entirely on Karl Marx’s labor theory of value, the strong distaste of capitalism, as well as a general disdain for the class struggles created, Marx believed, would eventually lead to the overthrow of capitalism in favor of socialism. The bourgeois state would form a dictatorship which would reallocate capital goods like land and factories to a centralized government and control such economic indicators as the rate of investment and general production functions.

Revisionism would create a society where the state built education, regulation of monopolies, the establishment of working conditions — sometimes revisionists believed in the socialization of gas, water and other utilities, leading to the name “gas and water socialism.”

State socialism is the broad idea that the government owns and operates broad sectors of the economy.

Syndicalism was the belief that socialism, regardless of its form, could not exist within the realms of modern government, for its only achievement would be to replace “self-interest chasing money” with “self-interest chasing power.” The idea, was to form a “general workers’ union” and perform a large-scale general strike, which would overthrow capitalism as a power as well as that of coercive government. Under syndicalism, private property would be abolished. Syndicalists believed labor unions in general had the power to slowly eat away at the capitalist structure, eventually replacing it.

Utopian socialism was one of the first socialist movements, with work from the famous socialists such as Saint-Simon and Owen, the move towards universality and cooperation between everyone was designed and appealed to try to eliminate the unfair system created by modern capitalism. Utopian socialism is often considered the origin of socialist thought, the phrase originating not from the believers, but rather from hindsight from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Communism is the stage of society that eventually overtakes socialism, according to the scientific socialist, Karl Marx. The belief was that everyone would contribute the maximum they could to a commune, and take the minimum they needed from the commune; resulting in everyone being satiated to the best possible extent. Of course, the very existence of communism relies on the total abolition of self-interest, and an abundance of goods that more than satiates everyone’s desires — a state which would make capitalism work perfectly as well, as everyone would be entirely satisfied.

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