With congressional candidate Rashida Tlaib and other emerging Democratic progressives adopting the long-maligned label of socialist, it's time to consider, for the first time in a long time in American politics, what socialism actually means.

It's confusing. One of my colleagues tells me of a survey in which millennials mistook "socialism" — a political and economic movement to oppose concentrated wealth and power — for "social media." Two very different things. Socialism concerns itself with the plight of working people, not with Instagram or Facebook.

Nor, despite what many conservatives may assert, is socialism another name for fascism or communism — two types of dictatorships that punish dissent with breathless cruelty. Socialism may involve more national control of some industry, but more often it's a form of local democracy — local control of the economic levers of society, in which working people free themselves from the impersonal forces of finance.

Many of the programs sought by today's socialists such as Tlaib sound more political in nature than economic. There's Medicare for all, for example — a call to cover all Americans with a government-paid health insurance. That's something that many of today's progressive Democrats want to enact but that conservatives condemn as socialized medicine.

But this Labor Day, let's look at what socialism means in economic, not political, terms. For if socialism means anything, it has to play out on the shop floor and in the boardroom, and at the kitchen table when everyone pays their taxes.

This local democracy by its nature allows all sorts of voices. As George Orwell, the British writer and socialist who insisted upon socialism's willingness to tolerate all political views, put it. "If liberty and democracy mean anything, they mean freedom for individual thought and expression."

That much established, we still need to consider: What is the core of a socialist economic agenda? Two items come to the fore: Employee ownership of enterprises and a different tax structure for the U.S.

Start with employee control. While far-right conservatives might gag at the notion of workers taking over their firms, employee ownership actually is a well-accepted, if admittedly modest, trend in U.S. business.

We see this in the slow spread of employee stock ownership plans — a device by which workers can take over a firm, often in the case of founders and owners retiring. Far from being outside the mainstream, these ESOP plans require a mini-industry of lawyers, bankers and management consultants working with firms to transition to employee ownership.

The National Center for Employee Ownership, a nonprofit trade association that works with such firms, reports that as of 2015, 6,700 worker-owned firms in America employ about 11 million workers — or about 7 percent of all U.S. workers. Michigan has about 212 such firms employing some 284,000 workers.

Admittedly, any socialist worthy of the name would like to extend employee ownership far beyond the ESOP model to include workers running even the most major corporations. That's not likely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future.

But my point here is that employee control of companies need not sound scary. Indeed, the idea is closer to the mainstream than many may think.

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As for taxes, socialists would like to soak the rich, no question about it. Yet the tax structure they advocate could perhaps look no stranger than what existed in the United States at mid-20th Century. That's when the top marginal rate for high earners stood at 90 percent — and America enjoyed an economic dominance in the world never since equaled.

Again, many socialists would go far beyond even that mid-century tax structure. They would confiscate great fortunes and force the "1 percent" to get their hands dirty doing actual work.

That won't happen any more than workers are likely to take over Ford or General Motors. But the idea of a more progressive tax system in which the rich pay a much higher percentage than they do is hardly unusual. It's what the nation operated under and flourished with until very recently.

It may help to remember that Detroit's most famous socialist was Walter Reuther, the champion and longtime president of the UAW. Surviving beatings and assassination attempts in the 1930s and '40s, Reuther led the UAW's campaign to win landmark benefits in the post-World War II era, benefits that many Americans now consider middle class entitlements.

Those benefits included higher pay for factory work, company-paid pensions, company-paid hospitalization and sick benefits, annual profit-sharing checks, and more. All of those benefits bore the socialism label at one time before becoming mainstream.

Granted, a lot of these benefits won by the UAW and other unions over the years, like a moratorium on auto plant shutdowns and supplemental unemployment benefits that served as a kind of guaranteed annual income, have disappeared or been trimmed back over the years.

But make no mistake: Metro Detroit achieved a high standard of living in the post-World War II era when socialists like Reuther forced automakers like Ford and GM to share the wealth. And the sort of benefits they won spread widely throughout American society.

I suppose if we asked a thousand socialists today what they mean by socialism, we'd hear a thousand replies. And no doubt some of the most bitter disagreements on the economic left are among progressives fighting each other rather than conservatives.

But the idea to keep in mind is that socialism isn't quite the scary, never-tried concept that conservatives may portray. In many ways, it's as American as a paid vacation and a profit-sharing check.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep