well you have capitalism where you have free markets and meritocracy. a natural order of things how they work in nature and real world. then you have communism

well you have capitalism where you have free markets and meritocracy. a natural order of things how they work in nature and real world. then you have communism where the government owns everything and there is no meritocracy and everything is dictated. the opposite of natural order and meritocracy or invention and creativity do not exist there. and lastly you also have fascism which is something in between where you still have free markets and meritocracy but the government will occasionally step in and take over over a company or anything, really, and assert their control while leaving the rest of the society and market alone. so it is a triangle. socialism is somewhere within this triangle and it can be closer to any of the sides or edges so it is not just one socialism, it is more about the flavour. but in essence socialism is about taking money from people who have it and giving it to people who do not have it. which will eventually corrupt the entire system where politicians will be buying votes with welfare and inevitably the system will break when the rich will simply leave because consumers always outweighs producers and when you sqweeze your producers too much you end up only with with consumers and such system cannot survive.