Socialism was a specific philosophy of government ownership of the means of production.
The democratic welfare state was never a variety of socialism. Marx, the most famous socialist, despised democracy. He despised all attempts at economic amelioration through legislation. He wanted a proletarian revolution. He preached — the correct verb — a religion of revolution. That was the thesis of my first book, Marx’s Religion of Revolution (1968). You can download it here.
He was silent about how the state would allocate resources under his system. He published nothing about the actual operations of the post-revolutionary society, socialism, and its final successor, communism. Late in his career, in his final major publication, little more than a pamphlet, he wrote this: “Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (Critique of the Gotha Program, Pt. IV, 1875) This was a purely political focus. He was silent throughout his career about how the state should or will or can run the economy.
He provided some famous slogans. He offered rhetoric about the inevitable triumph of the proletarian class. But he offered no guidelines for the leaders of the victorious proletarians.
Socialists in the nineteenth century were equally silent about how the state can allocate production so as to create the good society. In the twentieth century, there was no major detailed theoretical treatise on the economics of
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