Approaching Definitions - What is Socialism?

In this consideration, we take up the notion of socialism, which has come into greater prominence in the past few years. There is a welter of confusion around this concept, perhaps especially in an American context where it is often associated with the deployment of state to constrain the effects of so called market excess, or in fuller expression, to appropriation of private property to the state altogether. However, this is a flawed apprehension in two senses. On the one hand, at least under the first sense, a kind of compatibility is mooted between a market framework and the assumption of socialism which casts the task of the latter as the maintenance of the former. However, such an order of priority inverts the real end of socialism - namely the realization of a society where economic decisions are altogether subordinated to the attainment of the broader social good. Insofar as the market frameworks are structurally indifferent, and at times hostile to that good, there is likely an ultimate incommensurability between their perpetuation and socialism. On the other hand, the assimilation of property to the state, as in part happened under the Soviet or Maoist projects is also problematic as it can countenance an enormous coercive assertion on the state's part. Reliance on force stands in obvious tension with the aforementioned notion of socialism as aiming to broad social good. In both cases of misunderstanding, what in effect is happening is a reduction of socialism to a mode of economy or politics. However, socialism is a vision which transcends such a reduction, one which  should, by contrast, guide economy or politics rather than be determined by them.