Socialism is generally described as governmental ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods.
It is assumed to be morally based on providing some economic equality to the members of the society. The commonest flaws mentioned in the system are that the members of the society are not equal and that individual productivity is not appropriately rewarded to promote hard work and risk-taking.
In practice, outside of communism, socialism has been usually applied as health-care and pension systems.
Note here that communism is a political and economic buzzword. Socialism is a system that is fairly easy to describe. Communism is much harder to describe, because though it was based on socialism, it was really just a term to denote a system that did not follow the ownership protocols in place since the time of Alexander the Great. These ownership protocols were organizational systems. Even when the Romans conquered other cultures, they tended to legally purchase land and farms from their owners (if at reduced prices that they themselves dictated) so that the legal protocols of ownership were maintained. This is because legal ownership is an artifact that it was in their benefit to support. The legal protocol says that they own it. If they do not support the legal protocol, then anyone could say that they own it. This was the point of communism. The leaders of communism said that the owners claim of ownership was just an artificial artifact that could be ignored well and there was no reason for the Communist leaders not to simply claim that they were the owners. This is the reason that while socialism can be discussed in terms of a political or economic system, communism really cannot be. It is about ownership of and it is why it got the leaders of the historic ownership system so excited and hostile.
It is true that frequently rules of ownership protocols have been violated where the historic ownership system has been followed, but that is not communism, it is simple theft.
In terms of this book, socialism is going to refer to a couple of things. One is the collective action of the society for its members of benefits, such as health-care and retirement care, as it commonly is today. The other thing that socialism refers to in this book will have to do with resources.
Up to now, wealth creation has largely been a matter of exploiting natural resources. The question has come up as to who owns these resources. As the resources become more scarce, these questions are becoming more pointed. Generally the wealth created by exploitation of natural resources has been given to the individuals or groups who have made the investments to exploit the natural resource. Taxes are theoretically so that some of the wealth goes to the society at large. In the case of oil production in Alaska, some of the taxes actually go directly to the individuals of the state.
In that this book talks about a long term stable ecology, a very basic topic is energy production. Within an extremely short ecological time frame, humans will not be deriving their energy from what would traditionally be called natural resources. Our energy resources will be produced by the product of human creativity. This may be solar, fusion, wind or some other form of long term maintainable solution, but it will be based upon a method created by human intellect.
In the long-term view that this book takes this energy source may be controlled by capitalism or socialism. That is it may be controlled privately or by the society. Especially in view of other changes this book is based upon, it seems a much better idea for many reasons, that energy production be controlled by the society. This will probably apply to other resources as well. Initially, there may be issues of copyright or intellectual property, but this is written about the long view that extends far beyond any copyright laws.
Now this is based on the context of a stable ecology. If the ecology is not stable, such as if there were suddenly the capability for easy starflight, then this would not necessarily be true, but that is not what this book is about. On Earth, we must create a stable ecology to survive. This also assumes artificial selection provides us with a much greater functional equality.