State socialism is an economic system with limited socialist characteristics, such as public ownership of major industries, remedial measures to benefit the working class, and a gradual process of developing socialism through government policy. "State socialism" may also be used to classify any variety of socialist philosophies that advocates the ownership of the means of production by the state apparatus, either as a transitional stage between capitalism and socialism, or as an end-goal in itself.

In Statism and Anarchy, Mikhail Bakunin identified a "statist" tendency within the socialist movement and contrasted it with anarchist socialism, arguing that Karl Marx's theory of transition from capitalism to socialism in which the working class seized state power in a Dictatorship of the proletariat would eventually lead to a usurpation of power by the state apparatus acting in its own self-interest.Benjamin Tucker, an American individualist anarcho-socialist author, wrote of "state socialism" in his 1886 essay entitled State Socialism and Anarchism, defining it as a tendency that advocated for governmental control over the means of production as a necessary strategy in order to transition from capitalism to socialism.

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Gar Alperovitz (born May 5, 1936) is Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, College Park Department of Government and Politics. He is a former Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics; a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution. Alperovitz also served as a Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and as a Special Assistant in the Department of State. Alperovitz is a founding principal of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, and a member of the board of directors for the New Economics Institute.

Alperovitz is a political economist and revisionist historian whose numerous articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Nation, and The Atlantic among other publications. Alperovitz has been profiled by The New York Times, the Associated Press, People, UPI, and Mother Jones and has been a guest on numerous network TV and cable news programs, including Meet the Press, Larry King Live, The Charlie Rose Show, Crossfire, and The O'Reilly Factor.

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (April 17, 1854 – June 22, 1939) was a proponent, in the 19th century, of American individualist anarchism, which he called "unterrified Jeffersonianism", and editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty.

Tucker was born on April 17, 1854 in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In 1872, while a student at M.I.T., Tucker attended a convention of the New England Labor Reform League in Boston, chaired by William B. Greene, author of Mutual Banking (1850). At the convention, Tucker purchased Mutual Banking, True Civilization, and a set of Ezra Heywood's pamphlets. Furthermore, Free-love anarchist, Ezra Heywood introduced Tucker to William B. Greene and Josiah Warren, author of True Civilization (1869). He also started a relationship with Victoria Woodhull, which lasted for 3 years.

Tucker made his debut into radical circles 1876, when Heywood published Tucker's first ever English translation of Proudhon's classic work What is Property?. In 1877-1878, Tucker published his original journal, Radical Review, which ran for only four issues. From August 1881 to April 1908, he published the periodical, Liberty, "widely considered to be the finest individualist-anarchist periodical ever issued in the English language".^{[citation needed]} In 1892, he moved the Liberty from Boston to New York.

George Gerald Reisman (born January 13, 1937) is an American economist and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Pepperdine University. He is the author of The Government Against the Economy (1979), which was praised by both F. A. Hayek and Henry Hazlitt, and Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996). He is known as an advocate of free market or laissez-faire capitalism.

Reisman was born in New York City and earned his Ph.D. from New York University under the direction of Ludwig von Mises, whose methodological work The Epistemological Problems of Economics Reisman translated from the German original into English. In the 1980s, with his wife, psychologist Edith Packer, J.D., Ph.D., he organized The Thomas Jefferson School of Philosophy, Economics, and Psychology, which held several conferences and seminars. Its lecturers included Leonard Peikoff, Edward Teller, Petr Beckmann, Hans Sennholz, Bernard Siegan, Anne Wortham, Robert Hessen, Allan Gotthelf, David Kelley, John Ridpath, Harry Binswanger, Edwin A. Locke, Walter E. Williams, Mary Ann Sures, Andrew Bernstein and Peter Schwartz. Attendees of these conferences include later Objectivist writers Tara Smith and Lindsay Perigo.