@Ethan,

There are many definitions of socialism on offer. (Some common definitions get little beyond a kindergarden-level praise of “sharing”; others include everything from “opposition to monopolistic corporatism,” to “centralized state planning for its own sake,” from “the abolition of private property in the means of production” to “all-encompassing gift economies for most or all goods and services” to “systems of production which ensure that a worker receives the equivalent of the full marginal productivity of her labor” (with this last goal usually to be achieved by abolishing of government-backed monopolies over land and capital), etc. Some are for global-scale top-down “rational” planning and “expert” management in all things; some are for abolishing all forms of coercive planning and relying on the spontaneous harmonization of interests. If you’re curious as to what this wealth of conceptions all have in common, I’d say that the concept they are all riffing on is the concept of opposition to actually-existing monopolistic big business, because of a sense that it rigs the system in favor of a class of idlers who live off of a skim from the work of common workers, and a desire to adopt new forms of living which better serve the material and social needs of those common workers. The vast differences amongst conceptions of socialism have to do with the analysis of how the rigging and skimming happen, and what ought to be done about it.

Those who couch their understanding in terms of ownership of the means of production generally do not have in mind “public” (if that means “governmental”) ownership of the means of production; rather, the proposal is typically either for worker ownership of the means of production (among mutualists, syndicalists, and autonomists), or else for common ownership of the means of production (among communists). “Common ownership” may mean ownership managed by a political apparatus, supposedly at the direction of “the people” or “the proletariat” — ha, ha, ha. But it may also mean, as in Bakunin or Kropotkin — genuine common ownership by everyone within the community, with some sort of agreed-on joint decision-making process and backed by common consent, rather than a professionalized political body with coercive powers.

In the worker-ownership and the anarcho-common-ownership versions, I think it ought to be easy to see how these things can come about without coercion. These are just different ways of arranging what laissez-faire economics would call a “firm.” Firms can be owned jointly among many shareholders, and there’s no requirement that those shareholders be absentee investors; as with existing co-ops, the joint owners might be the workers in the firm; or they might be the regular consumers of the firm’s goods and services, or might be a very broad class of community “stakeholders,” etc. Firms can also be run more or less directly by their owners; although most very large firms have a significant separation of ownership from management (that is, the shareholders hire on an agent or a handful of agents to make executive decisions on their behalf), worker-owned or community-owned co-ops are different sorts of beasts, and might well opt for more participatory, hands-on management by the worker or community owners themselves. Hence, worker-ownership or common-ownership of the means of production within a freed market and without coercion.

Well, one way is just by distinguishing the terms “anarchistic socialism” and “state socialism.” Francis Tandy (a follower of Tucker) used the term “voluntary socialism.” Today, Kevin Carson likes to use the term “free market anti-capitalism”.

If more than two or three words are needed, you can explain that, even though most people today use “socialism” to refer only to state socialists, anarchistic socialism has been around as part of the socialist movement longer than Marxism and Social Democracy have, and that anarchistic socialism is based on the idea that workers should own the means of production, either individually or as part of voluntary associations, rather than the government owning the means of production, as state socialists suggest. You might also point interested parties to Benjamin Tucker’s essay, “State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Differ,” which explicitly mentions Proudhon and his ideas, and is, I think, one of the finest discussions of the distinction ever put to paper.

You write: “PLEASE NOTE THAT PROUDHON WAS BY NO MEANS A SOCIALIST, AT LEAST NOT BY THE MODERN DEFINITION OF THE TERM, …”

Well. Proudhon certainly was a Socialist by his own definition of the term, and by the definition of the term that was widely in use at the time amongst other people who called themselves Socialists. In the General Idea, he flatly states that Socialism is “the new name for the Revolution,” and also that “But an idea cannot perish. It is born again, always from its contradictory. Let Rousseau triumph: his glory of a moment will be but the more detested. While waiting for the theoretical and practical deduction of the Contractual Idea, complete trial of the principle of authority will serve for the education of Humanity. From the fulness of this political evolution, we finally arise the opposite hypothesis: Government, exhausting itself, will give birth to Socialism as its historic sequel.”

If many people who use the word “Socialism” today think that it implies something incompatible with Proudhon’s views (e.g. government expropriation of the means of production, or central economic planning by the state), that hardly settles the question of whether or not Proudhon should be called a Socialist. Those people may be using the word incorrectly or confusedly. Or they may be using it as part of an ideological package-deal, which should be combated rather than pandered to. I for one see no reason why the views of Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, V.I. Lenin, or whoever you like have a better claim to the word “Socialism” than the views of Proudhon, or other anarchistic socialists, such as Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, et al. Proudhon came to both the term and the movement years before Karl Marx ever did, and there is an old and continuing tradition of anarchistic socialism that rejects, root and branch, the Marxist disaster of State monopoly and State planning.

Many people today misunderstand what the word “anarchist” means; they think that an anarchist is someone who advocates riot and social disorder. Nothing could be further from the views that Proudhon was referring to when he called himself an “anarchist.” Does that mean we should go around saying, “Proudhon was by no means an Anarchist, at least not in the modern definition of the term”? No, of course not. What we should do is correct the misconceptions that people have about the meaning of the term “Anarchism.”