I often see these words used interchangeably, though as I understand it there is a difference between the two ideologies, no?
A socialist society lacks private ownership of the means of production (the things that make society functional), the opposite being social ownership. You can still start a business and make money, but wealth is shared among the workers rather than being hoarded by a single private entity at the top (think co-op)
A communist society is much stricter, lacking private property and social classes. The state owns everything and allocates it based on need
Just for comparison, a capitalist society like the one we (unfortunately) live in is a rat race. Wealth goes to whoever can exploit the system the most, which is usually whoever has the most money to start. It is the Ultimate Deathmatch of society.
There is no state in a communist society.
Who distributes resources then?
We had 65,000 years of communism here in Australia. It was a gift economy. People lived with their families. They hunted food for their families, made tools for their families, constructed shelter for their families, made farms for their families. Reciprocity is one of the fundamental Indigenous values. You give what you can, you take what you need.
If you have a society where people’s work is valued, then they take pride in giving. Look at Linux, look at Wikipedia. People do great things for each other because kindness is a fundamental human trait. Capitalism is the source of our modern greed and selfishness.
I always ask myself “could this ideology produce a world class hospital” when thinking about if I agree with an ideology. Do you think a gift based communist economy could produce one? Not being snarky, I’m genuinely on the fence on one hand I say no but on the other hand, from an altruistic perspective a world class hospital is in everyone’s best interest so… maybe, yeah, it feels at least possible if you got a lot of other stuff right?
I think your approach for evaluating political economic systems is sound, and it’s worth pointing out that, despite decades of unimateral embargo from the us, Cuba has some of the best doctors in the world. They developed their own covid vaccine. From Wikipedia:
Cuba provides more medical personnel to the developing world than all the G8 countries combined.
I think it makes a strong case that a political system oriented towards common good can overcome crippling material restrictions imposed by a hostile neighboring superpower to provide free, high quality, universal healthcare.
I’m not convinced a hospital is the best place to heal the sick. Indigenous health outcomes got a lot worse after colonisation, even when Indigenous people weren’t classed as fauna. A lot of Indigenous people get diagnosed with a serious illness, travel hundreds of kilometres to a hospital, and die there. Because at the hospital, they’re isolated from their family, their community, their home, their country. I grew up in white culture, and I still find hospitals to be isolating places as a patient. It’s gotta be way worse for someone who didn’t grow up in that kind of environment.
Instead, imagine a travelling doctor service where the doctor has hours to get to know you while they treat you, where you feel valued as a patient. The biopsychosocial benefits should be obvious. There’s just one problem: patient volume.
Fortunately, communism has some great solutions to the patient volume problem. For example:
- No more tobacco companies
- No more gambling companies
- No more financial incentive to push hard drugs
- No more financial barriers to preventative medicine
- No more 80 hour workweeks to support your family
- No more dangerous working conditions in the name of profit
- No more fossil fuel companies
- No more car pollution
Capitalism makes people sick in the name of profit, and then sells them the cure. In a communist system, doctors would have more time to treat their patients like people.
Ehh, you’re thinking too small minded to approach the topic of hospitals in a communist society.
There would be far more doctors because the biggest barrier to entry is the cost of years upon years of schooling. If anyone who wanted and was capable were able to simply go to school without taking on huge debt or needing help, far more would try.
On top of that, if there was no money incentive to go be a doctor in a big city, far more people would be good doctors near small towns.
You would absolutely NOT have to travel thousands of miles and be away from your family, unless you had a novel disease that literally only a select few knew how to treat. You’d also still be in much better spirits knowing treatment wouldn’t impoverish you.
On top of that, if there was no money incentive to go be a doctor in a big city, far more people would be good doctors near small towns.
Here in Canada you get HUGE pay bumps if you agree to go practice medicine in a rural community, yet rural communities are still chronically understaffed (granted, we dont exactly have a capitalist healthcare system, but the point still stands).
I agree with most of that, but I think I still need to bring up the benefits of centralised health services. In simple cases, you don’t really need that, but in tricky cases you might. For example, if you need an MRI scan before surgery, you just can’t rely on travelling doctors. Those machines are expensive, so you’re only going to have those in large cities where they can be used more frequently.
Surgery also benefits from being a centralised service. You can’t expect a traveling surgeon to carry all the stuff you need for keeping the whole room clean. Besides, the room itself needs special equipment. A simple scalpel and a steady hand aren’t enough to make it work.
Yeah, that’s true. I think a communist system can make good hospitals, but I also wanted to talk about why a communist system would have fewer patients at hospitals in the first place. Which makes it easier to care for the patients who do need a hospital.
Future communism (as opposed to primitive communism, the mode of production of hunter-gatherer bands that preceded agriculture) is a completely theoretical mode of production that is theorized to come after socialism. Basically, the idea is that the state will eventually wither away. How exactly this occurs is a problem for later, but it doesn’t preclude any form of organization, just no state.
Ok… lithium is mined in Australia and is needed in factories in China and India. Who decides where it gets sent?
The clan or tribe who cares for the land where the lithium is mined will meet for a yarning circle. At the yarning circle, they’ll talk about the foreigners’ need for lithium and whether the foreigners make for good neighbours. The foreigners’ gifts to the clan will be judged. The totem holders of the impacted species will speak on sustainability issues. Everyone will listen to the Elders.
They’ll reach a consensus on whether the foreigners are good neighbours, whether they need the lithium, and how much damage the mine will do to the land. The clan will make a decision together. Then the mine will be approved or denied.
foreigners
Don’t see this word applied much in communist literature. Are we not all the proletariat united?
Everyone will listen to the Elders
On what basis? Are they elected or just old?
And what prevents the group who you decide not to supply lithium to from invading you and taking it?
What if several tribes claim the land with the lithium, as tends to happen with valuable resources?
As a non-Indigenous unperson, I stay out of those kinds of conversations. It’s not My place to speak on internal Indigenous politics. You should ask an Indigenous person.
What you’re describing sounds more like communitarianism than communism. Despite the confusingly similar name they are actually very different ideologies. (though they also have some similar precepts at the same time)
It’s both.
That’s an anarchist society
At that point it’s potato, potay-toh. Marx and pretty much every communist philosopher defined it as stateless.
This makes me very confused because I believe there was nothing stateless about the USSR, even early on following the October revolution. The red army, the new economic policies, the food seizures, forced conscription, the supremacy of the politburo… weren’t they literally banning strikes in factories by claiming all the social issues had been resolved through the soviets, when it wasn’t the case at all (the small bourgeoisie/managers came back and we’re still somewhat in charge)? When I look at it, the power of the Soviet state was omnipresent. But maybe I’m not knowledgeable enough?
The USSR was not communist. They had a communist ideology, sure, but the definition essentially comes down to a communist society being stateless while also being a dictatorship of the proletariat (that is, ALL the workers are essentially the leader at the same time and they make decisions collectively through direct democracy). And the USSR could only barely fit that definition for about one or two years before Lenin essentially steered it into a regular autocratic dictatorship with communist aesthetics.
So essentially, communism is defined as something that cannot exist in reality.
Human society was communist for over a hundred thousand years before the idea of empires and cities came along. Indigenous communities lived under what we would call communism in the modern day until feudalism was invented.
This makes sense, thanks for explaining. A follow up question: how is “democratic socialism” a form of socialism then? Because it doesn’t really sound like socialism. It sounds like capitalism with some wealth redistribution
It’s complicated because ‘social democracy’ and ‘democratic socialism’ are two distinct ideologies, who’s definitions have flipped throughout history, and who’s biggest proponents (in the US at least) get it backwards.
Social democracy isn’t a form of socialism since it’s still capitalism, albeit one with guardrails. Most people that identify as democratic socialists – aside from social democrats misusing the term – are socialists that want to draw a contrast with Marxism-Leninism and other perceived ‘authoritarian’ forms of state socialism. But it’s hard to define a concrete definition for the term since people use it as an umbrella term, including it’s adoption by some state socialists.
Like with all things, it’s a matter of degree. Democracy and socialism are not inherently incompatible, but can be mixed together at different ratios. For example, a democratic socialist society could follow in the Swiss model of direct democracy, meaning everyone has a say in the policy decisions. Such policy decisions include the law but also how to utilize the means of production, which the state owns entirely.
Whereas another democratic socialist society could realize their democracy through a representative model, where citizens elect a local representative that goes to the capital and votes in a state committee on how to amend the law or utilize the means of production, which the state owns entirely. Here, political power is wielded by a committee but the complete socialist ownership is intact.
Yet another democratic socialist society could be much softer on the state ownership of all the means of production. The state might own the utilities, roads, schools, and all land, but may permit certain collectives to privately own businesses that generate value and to distribute those earnings equally amongst themselves. This could be considered a transitional step, since it allows for a controlled amount of capitalist-style development to occur, while avoiding huge concentrations of private capital. But it could also be a step backwards if the state already fully-owned the means of production but then voted to release some of it to small co-ops.
While words have to mean something to be useful at all, I wouldn’t spend too much time trying to fit all possibilities into neat categories. Ultimately, socioeconomics are fluid.
For example, a democratic socialist society could follow in the Swiss
Is Switzerland a direct democracy?
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_referendums_in_Switzerland
Switzerland is also a rarity where there isn’t quite a separate head of state (eg UK Monarch, German President) but also the head of government role is done by a council of seven, where the majority decision is what happens. So the legislative body writes the law and the council of seven is tasked with executive power to carry out the law.
The modern Swiss constitution (1848) took inspiration from the American constitution (1789), but rather than a consolidated head of state/government like the American President, they wanted to hew even closer to the long-standing ideals of democracy amongst the Cantons, to also avoid concentrating too much power to individuals. Thus, even though the Swiss Federal Council rotates the title of president every year in turn, it confers zero extra powers.
That’s super interesting. I like that model of governance, seems much more stable the the alternatives
Pretty much.
I think no one can give a clear definition of what a socialist democracy is because they don’t live in one, I do and I work for the state and will try explain it.
We have a free market economy and stock exchange ergo full-fledged capitalism, however the collected tax/revenue base collected for the state is used to fund three core functions refered to as “Apex Priorities” namely Health, Education and Housing - these are all free to citizens and legal foreign nationals, we have fee-free schools and means-determined fully funded higher education, healthcare is fully free and an application for a basic, but functional dwelling is applied for and built. These are the conditions that the State believes every citizen requires to reach self-actualisation. There are further support functions through social interventions paying for things such as child-care, disability, old-age to provide the unemployed with no means of monthly income a mometary base to take care of their basic needs.
The State is also responsible for creating new infrastructure based on citizen needs auch as schools, colleges, universities, clinics, hospitals, roads, high-ways, bridges, agriculture, forestry, nature conservation, water supply, electrical supply, sanitation, arts, culture, sport, implementing legislative policies and laws etc etc etc.
What the State is also responsible for, which people get confused, is that it DOES NOT create jobs or job opportunities, its sole-purpose by doing all of these functions is to create a conducive environment for business to operate, this is from brick and mortar to factory and import/export functionaries - every aspect for business, employer and employee to thrive is to provide all the necessary soft and hard means to execute their goals and conteibute to the economy thus driving further investment from local and foreign entities.
Nutshell: the State needs to take care of the citizens needs so that capitalism can flourish. The logic is that is a recursive loop where if the citizens can work, the state gets tax to put back into the citizen - if the one fails the other fails.
N.B. This State is far from perfect but since inception to date we class ourselves as a socialist democracy, and this is why.
Thats interesting. Where do you live if you dont mind me asking?
Democratic socialism is when democracy but also the workers control the means of production. Social democracy is when democracy but also private aristocrats control the means of production but also taxes spent on nice things. Democratic Socialists Of America is when democratic socialism but also social democracy but also baby weenie pee pants social democracy but also self sabotage but also like 1% tankies occupying 7% of leadership.
Capitalism with wealth redistribution is considered to be a potential method of achieving socialism or at least a significant amount of it.
When you really get into the weeds on a lot of these ideologies you’ll find that the 40,000 foot overview of the single word that defines them is actually quite different from the actual process of getting there, and the people arguing for these ideologies actually understand that. They also understand that the means of getting to the goal, or even just closer to the goal, is sometimes the more important and worthy part than the actual end which may not even be realistically attainable nor permanent.
The state owns everything
Incorrect, Marx defined communism as stateless.
Marx while influential isn’t the defining authority.
Well I’m pretty sure most every expert agrees that communism is stateless, and the above definition is based on the Soviet Union, which never actually claimed to have achieved communism. The USSR claimed to be ideologically communist, not to have implemented communism.
Sparkling socialism.
Communism is abused by controlling the government, as seen in real world large scale governments. They don’t get personal wealth, but the same benefits as being wealthy while in power.
Socialism is the most practical distribution of power.
That’s an example of a false choice.
The most practical distribution is actually a mixture of the three systems divided up based on industry and other factors.
There is no reason we can’t have communism for the food industry, socialism for housing, and capitalism for clothes and movies.
This is a good point
The terms themselves are somewhat vague and slippery. Marx and Engels used them interchangeably. The USSR and China really tainted the word communism, which is why socialism is much more common nowadays.
As I understand it, communism is a form of socialism. Socialism is ultimately about worker control over the means of production, rather than private capital. As such, socialists inherently support strong unions, and the sensible ones also support social welfare, minimum wage, and basic income so that business owners have less leverage to exploit their workers.
If you just take workers’ rights to it logical conclusio, you get market socialism. This is an economic system in which all privately-owned (including publicly-traded) companies are replaced with worker-owned coöperatives, which still compete in a market.
Communism goes further. Self-identified communists will tell you that communism is a moneyless. classless, stateless society where the means of production are held in common by those who use them. If this sounds like anarchism, it basically is.
However, communists in the 20th century were mostly vamguardists. This idea, pioneered by Lenin, advocates for a vanguard of smarties who understand communism to overthrow the government and impose communism from the top down, fixing the system on behalf of those workers too stupid to join the revolution. Workers who did not support the revolution would see that everything was much better with the communist vanguard in charge, and would embrace communism. If a few insisted on being counterrevolutionary, they would just need to be reëducated.
The Russian Revolution was heavily criticised by anarchists at the time, on the grounds that if the revolution does not rise from below, it is simply a coup that makes Lenin an uncrowned tsar. They were correct, and thus the word communism was utterly tainted in the capitalist world to refer to oppressive dictatotships that are (nominally) anticapitalist.
For what it’s worth, Lenin himself described the USSR as state capitalist, whereby the state ran all industry on behalf of the workers until the workers came around to the glorious revolutionaries’ perspective. Because those in.power never want to relinquish it, the ruling soviet aggressively cracked down on and suppressed trade unions, because organised workers were a threat not only to capitalists, but also to the nominally communist government. To maintain a veneer of being about the workers, farms and factories were administered by soviets vetted and approved by the government, who could be guaranteed to operate as the government wanted.
Communism was supposed to academically be a utopia like society that could only come after socialism, the original sense has no relationship at all to the current use. That’s why it’s a bit confusing.
This is an excellent question IMO, and I’m sure you’ll receive plenty of excellent (and energetic) responses, but I do want to point out something which chronically gets overlooked, as part of these discussions. Ready?
Homo sapiens is traditionally a tribal, social, and clan-based animal, not unlike our cousin chimpanzees, and others such as wolf & dog packs, elephant herds, parrot flocks, and a couple other examples. Our organisation upon such likely goes back at least 2.4Myrs, when biologists and those in related fields first classified “Homo” as a distinct genus. But arguably, such goes back perhaps as long as our common ancestor of chimps, maybe 7Myrs ago or so. Or earlier!
My point is-- modern humans’ natural state is to exist in smallish, commune-like situations, and that is a fact. That’s literally in our DNA upon a multitude of levels, and literally spans the entire length of H. sapiens ~300Kyr history.
Meaning? That we’re naturally communists of a kind, and my take on “socialism” is that it’s roughly an attempt to make our traditional style work, when organised upon regional and national levels.
THAT SAID: I think it’s good to also observe how things happen in the wild. For example, my mentors Robert Sapolski and Jane Goodall famously observed our fellow apes & monkeys being total assholes towards each other, amidst hierarchy-type situations. It’s a complicated discussion, anyway, and maybe not hard to imagine why so many of our fellow rich, needy, powerful human monkeys are such total, narcissistic assholes towards everyone else.
i would be a bit more careful when ascribing general character traits to all humans because frankly, humans can be extremely different depending who you’re interacting with.
I suppose that’s an interesting point in general, Gandalf, but I was speaking to species-wide instances. If you have a more efficient method of framing such things, then please be my guest…
i mean i agree that most people prefer to live in small groups. i was just pointing it out for reasons that i now forgot.
also, Johnny, it’s really weird to be called by name somehow. especially mid-conversation.
Oh, entschuldigen Sie bitte!
kein problem ;-)
🏅
There are many different defenitions of it, the one i go with is that in an socialist society the “means of production” (factorys and such) are run by the workers there in an democratic way. In communism the society woulf be run without states and with no money as well as there bring no classes (like workers, labdlords, politicans or bosses)
The various states that claim and claimed to be socialist or communists aren’t fulfilling these conditions as to why many people say that these aren’t examples of socialism/communismPeople say that because it’s true. There is nowhere outside of a few scattered households that has ever been the platonic ideal of either communism or socialism.
Communism of a sort existed…in tribes.
Depends who you ask, but at the core of it, communism is a political structure, while socialism is an economic structure.
That’s a very succinct explanation
Yes, yes, it is indeed. You’re on your way to the lounge suite, Karl. Question number two. The struggle of class against class is a what struggle?
socialism: workers control the means of production (the factories, the farms, the freight trains, etc). there is no separate owner. this is usually considered a key step on the way to communism.
communism: a society without any classes (no capitalists, no working class, no one in poverty, everyone is on the same level of society); without money (everything ppl need is provided for free and fairly, there are no capitalist markets); and without a state (government is not a separate group of people who command others, the people make decisions on things that affect them).
Even those communists who believe the right strategy to reach a communist society requires them to take control of the state first believe that the ultimate goal is for the state to “wither away” as it becomes less necessary over time. other communists disagree that it is a possible to reach a communist society by taking control of the state, rather the people have to build their own non-state power that eventually defeats it.
How would it even be possible to have a stateless society on the scale that communists envision? For example how could China become stateless (I know that might be their ultimate aim but still, it’s a useful example)? It doesn’t at all seem feasible to me
Well, why does it have to be one single government covering all of China? “China” refers to a state, a centralized government made of a small number of people who command and control a huge territory and its peoples. It doesn’t make sense to define a future communist society by the criteria of a state. Instead, take all the land and people that are currently within the state of China. If we tried to set up a communist society there, how can we do that? People can have different answers (especially when it comes to details), and I’m certainly open to ideas.
Disclaimer: the following is not “the answer”, it’s a set of ideas that I believe are compatible with a communist society and can be one example of how such a society could look.
I’d imagine that power that the state usually has would need to be dispersed among directly democratic assemblies and unions. This would create a federation of communist societies that work together on bigger issues.
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Geographical Organization : Since government is something everyone participates in and since everyone affected by a decision gets a say in it, we can have federated layers of assemblies of the people. So, at the most local level, a single neighborhood in a city or a single village or a single other municipal unit (e.g., “the people who live along this 2km stretch of river”) can have an assembly. Neighboring assemblies can talk to/cooperate with each other to solve issues that affect all of them. Local assemblies can regularly send delegates (who can be instantly recalled, don’t serve timed terms, have no power of their own, they just communicate their assembly’s position) to meetings and create citywide, regional, etc medium-level assemblies to handle bigger projects. That could include rail lines, ecological issues like forest management, anything that needs to be produced at a larger scale, etc. Then, for those few questions that really and truly affect a territory and people the size of China (e.g., coordinating defense vs a large national army; dealing with climate change; coordinating specialized, high-tech production of medicines, and so on), there can be “national” assemblies. Again, the power would need to be held at the lowest level, or else you risk forming a state when a few greedy people use their position to accumulate power.
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Membership Organization: Parallel to the geographic assemblies I mentioned above, you can also have unions and associations of workers who are in the same workplace and industry. Everyone who works in a local cafe has a say in how that cafe is run. Then the Cafe Workers Union can make presentations/have an additional say (beyond what the members already have in the geographic assembly) in any local or regional decisions involving, say, food service and safety, disposal of food scraps and cooking oils, and whatever else is relevant. This would go for any union: an agricultural workers union, a research physicists’ union, a students’ union, and so on. Also, since people can split their time how they like, maybe some minimum amount of commitment to a job would be needed for union membership? Not sure.
Where do these ideas come from? The Next Revolution by Blair Taylor and Debbie Bookchin (discussing the ideas of Murray Bookchin and others). Also check out council communism and, more broadly, Libertarian Socialism as a tendency. Communism is really interesting! There are many different ideas about how we can get there. Whatever you believe, even if you think we need to capture the state, we are at a point in history in which we need to work together to build the power of workers and ordinary people vs. capitalists and the state.
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this is the only good comment in this entire thread so far.
it’s illuminating how poorly most of the so called socialist/anarchist/communists on lemmy understand the thing they claim to believe in and espouse. just a lot of virtue signalling and grasping at straws by desperate folks I guess. like that dude who keeps posting how to learn about socialism but he refuses to read or watch videos or anything… lol
Socialism: If you have two cows, you give one to your neighbor.
Communism: If you have two cows, you give them to the government and the government then gives you some milk.
My take on it is that socialism is still fundamentally a capitalist approach to resource distribution, while Communism does away with most private property. Some people like to try and dress it up more with ideals, but that’s the basic difference in practice – it doesn’t make sense in this context, from my pov, to talk about the imaginary “ideal” of communism, rather than the realistic implementations of it that have occurred.
So, like under communism everything is basically state owned. People who’ve lived under communism will hear things like “state owned grocery stores” and think “Oh shit, I’ve lived this – you get food stamps/allocations of food assigned by the govt, and that’s what you’re allowed to ‘buy’/‘eat’. And the govt workers will get better stamps/allocations, cause it’ll be inevitably corrupt. This is bad!”. (I’ve heard this very sentiment from people who fled communist states, when topics like Mamdani’s govt run stores comes up). Applied communism isn’t some idyllic fairytale, it’s more “The state has declared the university system too elitist, so we’re forcing you all to do back breaking labour in the fields. Refusal means firing squad”.
Under a socialist approach, you get things like private stores, honoring things like food stamps that are provided to people in need, but most of the transactions are done without government involvement. The talk of setting up government run grocery stores, is viewed more as “We want to provide a baseline that can sell food at cost, but we still want private stores too, especially for more luxury/foreign goods and other options/competition in the market. Having a market option that is providing cheap generic products should have a stabilizing effect on food prices, and downward pressure on cost of living in general for folks”. To provide these services, socialist regimes typically have higher tax rates on private citizens – but those taxes are still fundamentally driven by a capitalist system of private property and individual choice/freedom.
This is a lot of propagandistic bullshit. The USSR was the second-best fed country in the world according to the CIA. And they did it by lifting up the bottom and literally eliminating the nobility. Meanwhile the US was the first-best fed country in the world with a much worse poverty and homeless problem.
The USSR also didn’t force people out of university to do physical labor or face a firing squad. The USSR landed a dozen of remote probes on Venus before anything even remotely resembling that was possible in the West. They had incredible academics and research in all fields and that outpaced the West in tons of ways. They absolutely had academics and strong education for people.
The fact that you’re so wrong, and so obviously wrong, should not be a moment of anger and resistance but a moment to go read about things that contradict your current beliefs and an examination of not only how you came to believe those things but what it says about potentially other beliefs you have about communism and politics in general
Yes yes, Mr .ML propagandist, tell me more about how the people who I work with, who grew up in Communist states, describe their experiences and reasons for fleeing those states are totally wrong, and that I should tow the .ML bootlicker line. Shitheels online are far more worthwhile a news source than actual people I know / interact with regularly, who lived in those countries! I can do my own online research, just like all those American dimwits who are shunning vaccines because facebook is true and doctors are fakenews!
Mmmm tastey communist boot! Comes in one size, only left shoe, because communism in practice is so wonderfully functional! And all stats produced by communist leader are true and trustworthy! All hail .ML!
Yeah. You come across like a person who knows how to navigate the world effectively. Good luck to you! You’ll need it
TL;DR:
Socialism: maintains monetary system. You earn and spend money like usual, except you are restricted from using the labor of others to generate profit for yourself (example: maintaining a large business). Key formula: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their labor.
Example of a socialist country: USSR, Eastern Bloc, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Allende’s Chile, pre-1986 Vietnam, North Korea
What socialism is not: Nordic model, capitalist states with social support.
Communism: no monetary system. Everything is free. Communism assumes one of three ways to make it happen: either everyone understands the intrinsic value of labor and does it for the sake of it, or labor is mandatory, or all of the unlikeable jobs are automated. Communism is normally considered not as an immediate outcome, but a future goal. Key formula: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs
Example of a communist country: War communism period in Soviet Russia, Khmer Rouge
What communism is not: socialism (although it’s a development of one), capitalism with state support.
The each according to their labour versus needs distinction is helpful here
My understanding is (and I could be wrong on some details, I’m no political scientist!), communism is a broad idea for the end goal of a society with no class boundaries, no private ownership, workers (or a representative for them, in some models) owning the factories/“seizing the means of production”, rights for all, everyone gets their fair share.
There are many, very different ideologies for achieving such an ideal society. Additionally, different people have tacked on their own ideas onto it (such as the necessity of a violent or peaceful revolution, how to redistribute land, etc.). You can go from forms of anarchism (very anti-authoritarian) and democratic socialists (usually quite anti-authoritarian) to Stalin’s USSR and the Eastern bloc during the Cold War (very authoritarian with cruel dictators at the helm). Like most belief systems, there is plenty of infighting between various different factions.
“Socialist” is another broad term and is usually used to describe groups, people, and governments that implement policies that will build up towards the communist ideal. It’s thrown around for many democratic groups as well as deeply authoritarian ones, hence the separation between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian communists that is very common.
You might have heard of terms like “democratic socialist” and “social democracy”. The former are socialists who usually advocate for slow reform over a revolution, the latter are capitalists who implement socialist elements in their policies. Both try to uphold liberal democratic processes and are against one-party states like that of the USSR.
TLDR:
- “communism” is the ideal and optimistic goal for a state, people who pursue that are called “communists”. It is an incredibly broad term that can describe very different ideologies
- “socialism” is used to describe groups that implement policies towards the goal of communism, people who support this are called “socialists”
- “democratic socialists” are socialists who support liberal democratic practices and usually advocate for slow reform rather than violent revolution
- “social democracies” are people who support some degree of socialist policies in order to make society more equal and fair while retaining the capitalist system
- the separation between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian communism is very important! They are vastly different despite their shared goal of a classless society
It’s even muddier than that. Most socialist parties in Europe have no intention to move towards communism, they are more akin to social democrats.
When there is a lot of overlap and ideas get very complicated, our human labels never quite fit (this applies to so many things, see taxonomy, astronomy, religion, psychology, biology, etc.)
the separation between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian communism is very important!
They’re pretty easy to separate. One exists and the other does not.
Back in the 19th century—before the working class was split into the factions of socialism, communism and anarchism—these words and their movements were often used interchangeably, with socialism meaning something along the lines of “the people own the means of productions”, communism describing a society that follows the paradigm of “each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” and anarchism meaning that no instance of anything should rule over others.
As you can see, these ideas were not contradicting each other but rather focussing on different aspects of the liberation of the working class
The countries that were ruled as single-party states by communist parties in the 20th century, including those that survive until today, called themselves “socialist” and called the goal they were supposedly working towards “communism”.
Of course all of this ideology was always nonsense. The liberal revolutions of the centuries before that were all about taking power away from the (monarchical/aristocratic) government in order to establish a society in which the government was elected by, and served, the people, and there were no longer any formally defined classes and all inequalities that remained were about income and property, which were (at least ideally) possible to overcome through one’s own achievements… why did communists ever think that the next step after that might be to once again establish a powerful government that serves as the only (or only major) employer, that’s a movement precisely in the other direction, not the natural next step…
So as much as communists may mock the idea that “socialism is when the government does stuff, the more stuff it does the more socialist it is, and when the government does everything it’s communism”, I think that (while very simplified) is certainly a more accurate description of things than what communists claim their movement is about. Government and people are never going to have the same interests and it’s generally a good thing to take power away from the government and let the people handle things through free association; it’s a bad thing to do the opposite.
The liberal revolutions of the centuries before that were all about taking power away from the (monarchical/aristocratic) government in order to establish a society in which the government was elected by, and served, the people, and there were no longer any formally defined classes and all inequalities that remained were about income and property, which were (at least ideally) possible to overcome through one’s own achievements… why did communists ever think that the next step after that might be to once again establish a powerful government that serves as the only (or only major) employer, that’s a movement precisely in the other direction, not the natural next step…
Because the liberal system leads to concentration of wealth and allows for outsized political influence by the rich (which leads to wealth becoming even more concentrated). The rich also have significant influence over people’s lives as employers, outside of the political sphere, and they are accountable to no one. The fact that “ideally,” on an individual level, anyone could hit it big does nothing to address those systemic problems.
The state, as an employer, is more accountable to the people than a private individual or company is, because it has to answer to the voters. Naturally, that also depends on taking measures to prevent the bourgeoisie from exerting their outsized control on said state.
There are advantages to having private companies and competition, but those advantages tend to disappear as the economy becomes more developed and saturated, and the tendency of the rate of profit to decline kicks in. Once companies can’t increase profits by expanding in productive ways, all they do is enshittify their products and look for new and innovative ways to fleece their customers. In such cases, the profit motive causes more harm than good, and the industry would be better off run by the state.
There are advantages to having private companies and competition, but those advantages tend to disappear as the economy becomes more developed and saturated, and the tendency of the rate of profit to decline kicks in. Once companies can’t increase profits by expanding in productive ways, all they do is enshittify their products and look for new and innovative ways to fleece their customers.
This is a good point
Government and people are never going to have the same interests and it’s generally a good thing to take power away from the government and let the people handle things through free association; it’s a bad thing to do the opposite.
I think you gave a good explanation however, I disagree with your conclusion; it’s a shame you’re down voted because of people disagreeing (probably) with this statement (or because they’re .ml tankies)
Democratically elected government should have the people’s interests in its core, since you know, it’s democratically elected. Obviously propaganda and sociology exist; but those problems are problems no matter what organizational structure you are in.
The point of democratic elections is, in my mind, to somewhat tame the natural tendency of government to work against the interest of the people. We still need to remember that even a democratic government isn’t the same thing as the people themselves (who for the most part want to live a life where they can do what they like as long as they aren’t harming anyone else), and has its own interests that may be quite different from that of the people… it’s better than a dictatorship, no doubt!
We currently have a very good example of this: a lot of governments around the world are currently passing laws requiring age verification on social media. Did the people ever ask for this? Is it in the interest of the people to have that? Is it harmful to anyone if young people are using social media? No: it’s in the interest of governments to be able to identify people posting on the Internet, it’s in the interest of governments if there aren’t too many different social media sites operating so that they have an easier time monitoring what’s going on on them… it is, I guess, also in the interest of governments that young people aren’t having too much fun and don’t hear too many diverse voices so that school is the main source of information for them and they don’t get distracted too much? Nobody can tell me that any government that’s doing this is acting in the interest of the general population, especially not the ones affected!
Nobody can tell me that any government that’s doing this is acting in the interest of the general population, especially not the ones affected!
Here in Canada the current gov is looking to pass age verification laws and polls show that they have like 70% support from the general population. I’m not saying these laws are a good thing, but I think it’s more complicated than a simple story of government oppression.
holy shit not Canada too >:(
Of course, why wouldn’t we? We all have the same boss.
[Edit: if you’re gonna downvote, make an argument]
Real talk. They are not different ideologies. At all.
The reason the words are used interchangeably is because they are, in fact, interchangeable. Any distinction between the two terms is entirely context dependent and one should never assume that anyone you’re talking with shares the same distinction you have for the terms.
We can understand why first linguistically.
Social-ism is the ideology of “social” ownership of the material wealth of society. This is opposed to “private” ownership.
Commun-ism is the ideology of “communal” ownership of the material wealth of society. This is also opposed to “private” ownership.
What is the difference between “social” ownership and “communal” ownership? Nothing. There is no definitional difference between these two words at this level. This is the beginning of the source of your question
We can then understand why they are used interchangeably from a historical perspective.
When Marx and Engels were producing their critique of capitalism and their writings on the type of society of that would come after it, they described that future society as one in which the wealth of society was managed, effectively, as a commons. That means social/communal ownership. At this time, not they nor anyone else in the tradition was making a hard distinction between these terms and they were using them interchangeably.
So they are used interchangeably today for linguistic and historical reasons.
And then we have historical-linguistic reasons. Lenin saw these two terms being used interchangeably and he decided to give them separate definitions. But these definitions were Lenin’s definitions and no one else’s. Some people adopted them, some didn’t, and some adopted them and then later changed their mind. However, it is very important to note that he did not use the terms to distinguish between two different ideologies, he used them to distinguish between two different organizations of society. A communist party, according to Lenin, is a political party that seeks to build communism. There is no such thing a socialist party that means something different than a communist party. But a society is socialist first and then later it becomes communist, despite a continuity of the communist party. Lenin said a socialist society is a capitalist society that is becoming communist and a communist society is one that has achieved communism.
But then the political backlash hit the EuroCentric world (which includes the US). The Nazis were vehemently opposed to communism, but the workers in Germany associated socialism with a movement for a better life. So the German elites made communism the enemy and a taboo, but then the National Socialist party formed. They said “socialism is when workers get what they want” and they promoted better lives for workers to get their support, but they also said “communists are the enemy”. So now we have socialism and communism being framed in a way that is ideologically distinct but in a completely disingenuous and manipulative way.
This sort of perversion continued for a while all over the white world. Communism was “bad” but “unions are socialist” and red scares had to work with the ways in which the communist parties branded themselves as communist instead of socialist. The words kept twisting under the torture of social manipulation in order to obfuscate revolutionary politics.
And now we live in a society where people think socialism and communism are legitimately distinct ideologies, and people believe socialism is fine but communism is just too far, and people believe that communism is a defined phenomenon (moneyless, stateless, classless) with distinct boundaries and a country is either communist or it’s not and that no country has ever been communist.
You are right to ask this question, because you are living a very obfuscated context. But there is no simple answer to your question that is satisfactory. The simplest and most accurate answer is “there is no difference and you can use them interchangeably”. Going beyond that requires engaging with the history and the discourse and it takes a lot of time and effort.
The historical context definitely helps illuminate the issue. I’m not sure why you’re getting downvotes, this was an interesting analysis
Socialism is a broad idea which includes a lot of different ideologies. Some believe in a state, others don’t. Some believe in markets, others don’t. Some believe in currency, others don’t. Many believe socialism is a step on the way to communism.
Communism is the end goal for some of the most radical. “A classless, stateless, moneyless society. Where goods and services are distributed from each according to ability, to each according to need.”
Soulism is communism’s material liberation, plus a spiritual liberation. We ditch the material mechanisms of capitalism, AND the mind prison of capitalism. One of the reasons the USSR failed to enact socialism is because the workers who seized the state remained inside the capitalist mind prison. Giving them power just turned them into capitalists.
Communism is an eventual end goal, a classless, stateless society. Socialism is a system that aims to progress towards that goal.
These terms have become muddled due to social democrats dropping the pretense that they want to establish communism (early social democrats like Eduard Bernstein argued for using reformism to establish communism), while still holding on to the “socialist” label. So there are some people who would use “socialist” to describe social democracy and reformism while reserving “communism” for Marxist-Leninists. This is quite strange considering that it was called the USSR and not the USCR, but what are you gonna do?
Since it’s often controversial whether a state that claims to be socialist is actually aiming to establish communism, some people use the term AES or “actually existing socialism” to describe modern states that call themselves socialist, because, whether or not they are “truly socialist,” they bear enough similarities and are distinct enough to warrant having a term to describe them.
