The thing about socialism is it's a group of ideas more than a single idea. Unfortunately this leads to a lot of infighting which, as we know, the left is very good at.

On the one hand you have people like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders who push for things like nationalised/free healthcare, public transport. On the other you have a plethora of shades of anarchists who want to dismantle the ideas of nationhood and government entirely. It can be hard to reconcile the fact that these two groups are on the same broad side.

I guess the best way to describe socialism in very broad terms would be the idea that society should be set up as systems that benefit everyone who is part of society, not that people should work to benefit and perpetuate the systems.

I don't have resources, but I would suggest looking into anarchism in Spain - there have been some successful anarchist communities built there that lasted quite some time before being deliberately destroyed.

I'll give a metaexplanation: liberalism, socialism and conservatism are all to an extent responses to trends in 17th century Britain. Socialism, conservatism and later fascism are all, in part, differing reactions to liberalism. The point is, things have been around for a long time by now and each tradition has lots of stuff in it. The messiness is essential and not accidental complexity.

There's also the fact that misunderstandings about what socialism is run rampart in politics. It's not when the government does things like the GOP says.

Y'all are a generally pretty smart and good group and I was wondering if you had Good Reading Resources for People Who Don't Know Things. I'd prefer reading resources that don't add emotional content and also try to provide details in a holistic manner.

I recommend giving a read to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on socialism. It fits your criteria, the encyclopedia is a peer reviewed resource and the article has, like, 100 works in its bibliography. It's also not a 19th century text like the ones socialists online often recommend. Stay away from YouTube for the moment being.

If you don't have experience reading philosophical texts, I recommend to:

1. reading slowly, very slowly. Briefly pause after each sentence, thinking about whether you've understood it. After each paragraph, try to summarize it, think how it's serving the text as a whole (its purpose) and anything that comes into your mind. This with section as well and finally the whole text.
2. return to earlier parts, if needed, liberally. It's not a novel. Later parts inform your understanding of earlier parts.
3. Taking notes is a pretty good practice, and also taking notes of the notes as a summary at the end of each section and trying to construct the essence of the argument.
4. The article might genuinely take 4-5 hours to read with my method, but that's ok.

I mean it's an encyclopedia article, so it's somewhat less bad to read casually, but imho this is step where people fuck up so why not do it right from the beginning?

My own personal take is that Sanders is as a private person a socialist, but he isn't running on a socialist platform for POTUS. He won't bring forth socialism (or make the world much closer to it), but if I were an American, I'd get involved in his campaign, but I see the movement as more important than any figureheads, including Sanders.

This was long because I'm procrastinating, but hopefully it's helpful.

damn i might do that too lol

"Socialist" in America right now basically means "liberal but angry" in the sense that our government has been taken over by extremest conservatives who do not believe that the law applies to them, but will happily kill and oppress millions of vulnerable people. What's socialist about Bernie is less his policies and more that he talks about class consciousness with people, which is necessary to stop a slide into fascism because god we are so far gone.

I am a democratic socialist because I believe in the democratic control of the means of production, that what our society produces and should not be controlled by a handful of psychopaths but a broad working class coalition. I feel that if we don't come together in this way our world is headed towards disaster. I believe in the Bernie campaign because I think the only way to achieve this is to give the working class a gradual taste of their own power, which I believe will stack on top of one another until we can make the steps we need to in order make a world habitable by all. This is all stuff that Marx talks about.

Democratic socialists generally distance themselves is from historical communist countries, though generally we acknowledge that the west has done some incredibly horrible things in the name of fighting communism. It's something to think RE: "it's never worked anywhere", it was never allowed to work because the most powerful nation in the world always stepped in to violently oppose it. A clear example of this is what happened in Chile in the 1970s, when a US backed coup overthrew a peaceful democratic socialist government in the name of free trade.

I hope this helps. I'm not a big reader into this kind of thing but I can answer any questions you have.

P.S. One last thing - that communism thing is a red herring. Socialism is not communism and Sanders is not working to bring forth communism.

I'm gonna be that person who recommends reading Marx because it provides a bit of a different answer than the ones already given. (Plus its the answer I'd give anyways I guess :P)

The Communist Manfiesto is a good introduction. There's Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, (Volume 1 in particular was completed while he was alive) which is a bit large, but its pretty good and still incredibly relevant. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific talks about a distinction made in a lot of Marx and Engels' writing.

These writings use the terms socialism and communism interchangeably (as opposed to some of the other answers here) because of a fundamental difference in perspective. It's one that is talked about in the first and third writing I linked, and somewhat indirectly in the second.

Note that the critiques laid out in Capital in particular are fundamentally as true about the Soviet Union or the PRC as they are about the US, for example.

libcom.org has a great series of introductory guides that do a decent job, in my opinion, of explaining their flavor of libertarian socialism / libertarian communism. (those two terms are used more or less interchangeably, and neither has anything to do with right libertarianism, e.g. of the kind espoused by the american libertarian party, which is an entirely different ideology that came onto the scene much later.)

they tend to be pretty approachable and avoid jargon. they make no bones about being self-interested as workers, in advancing the rights of workers, but their explanations do not substitute emotional content for reasoning.

I also don't, I'm just obsessed with the crimes of capitalists (so I know they're Bad) The Epstein black book/flight logs, Dynecorp, COINTELPRO/CHAOS...

The failures of socialism can be attributed to poverty and foreign aggression. You may recall certain carpet bombings of entire countries. In wealthy Scandinavian nations, which feature a welfare state very relatable to Sanders' proposals, things are going just swell. There is no reason we can't accomplish what they have, here in America; folks are fed up.

Cuba has done great things with their nationalized healthcare, to the point where Americans will commonly vacation there for care. They eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, the first nation to do so. They have famously exported their doctors for charity work.

Cuba is a deeply impoverished nation suffering from corruption, sabotage, embargo, and they can accomplish this since they had the guts to line up a few slaveowners against a wall. It's beautiful.

Sanders is a moderate.