system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 what is a socialist?
gpt
A socialist is someone who believes in economic democracy; under capitalism or feudalism, a relative few people are in charge of most of the wealth. In a socialist system, theoretically, the ownership and control would be much more spread out somehow. Different socialist factions disagree on exactly how that should be implemented and maintained.  

A traditional capitalist business is usually owned by one person or a small group of people, who make all the important decisions. An example of a socialist business is a worker co-operative, in which all the workers own a share and run the place democratically. 

Countries like the former Soviet Union, in which there is little to no democracy and the economy is planned, are often called socialist and called themselves that, but if we take socialism to mean “economic democracy” they were actually nothing of the sort. The USSR’s first leader Vladimir Lenin himself called what they were doing “state capitalism”—it replicated the concentrated, top-down structure of capitalism except with government taking the place of rich people.