Socialistic means 'having something of socialism about it' — based on socialist ideas, or leaning that way. The important thing is the shade of it. English already has a plain adjective, 'socialist' ('a socialist party', 'socialist policies'), and that one is neutral: it just says what the thing is. 'Socialistic' is the vaguer, looser cousin, and in practice it usually carries a frown. Someone who says 'these socialistic policies' is nearly always against them. It is a favourite word of newspaper columnists and politicians, especially in the United States, where it gets thrown at any plan involving government money — health care, free lunches at school — to make it sound suspicious. So the word does two jobs at once: it says 'a bit like socialism' and it says 'and I don't like it'. That said, be careful, because the disapproval is not built into the letters. In older writing, and in some academic writing, socialistic is used quite calmly to mean 'somewhat socialist in character' when the writer does not want to claim the thing is fully socialist — 'the village had socialistic habits of sharing land'. So read the sentence around it before deciding the tone. As a student, you will meet this word far more often than you will need to use it.