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Communism vs Socialism

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
The point of this is not to attack either Communism or Socialism but to understand what people see as the difference between the two.
Some say it is not well defined, or maybe it is.

We spend a lot of time on Socialism, not a lot of debates on Communism.

I've also heard that Communism is the natural evolution of Socialism. Is that true/still true? Or is it its own political/economic ideology completely independent of Communism?
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
As you say, it depends on definitions. Which iteration of "Socialism" is it that naturally evolves into Communism?
 

Secret Chief

nirvana is samsara
Random thought... possibly wrong.
Marx saw socialism as a staging post to communism.
Apart from that (Marxism)...communism is but one form of socialism.
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
I think Communism defines itself, I don't expect much argument about it.

BUT Socialism means different things to different people. In Europe it is basically a left of centre political stance. It accepts capitalism but also has free healthcare and education for all.
 

epronovost

Well-Known Member
Random thought... possibly wrong.
Marx saw socialism as a staging post to communism.
Apart from that (Marxism)...communism is but one form of socialism.

Well according to Marx, communism is the end goal, the utopian society that would put an end to human history as defined by Marx as the conflict between classes. Socialist revolution is how it's achieved. Socialism is, according to Marx, neither desirable nor sustainable as it must end in communism or fall flat and be destined to repeat itself like so many other revolutionary movements before. It took more than one revolution to burry feodalism afterall.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I think Communism defines itself, I don't expect much argument about it.

BUT Socialism means different things to different people. In Europe it is basically a left of centre political stance. It accepts capitalism but also has free healthcare and education for all.
I don't think Communism is that well defined. Is a monastery Communist? A Hutterite colony? A Bruderhof community? A Family?
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
As you say, it depends on definitions. Which iteration of "Socialism" is it that naturally evolves into Communism?

As defined by Marx.
Or the Socialism which is not compatible with Capitalism.

Although I read that Marx didn't define the difference very well.
So yes, the step from Socialism to Communism. When is that ideological line crossed?
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
I don't think Communism is that well defined. Is a monastery Communist? A Hutterite colony? A Bruderhof community? A Family?
I would say not ... but they do have elements of communism about their sharing ethics
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
How are they not? How are you defining communism, that doesn't include these?
Maybe it is just me, but I think only of countries and parties as Socialist and/or Communist.
The fact that say a hippy commune shares values and resources does not make it communist.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Maybe it is just me, but I think only of countries and parties as Socialist and/or Communist.
The fact that say a hippy commune shares values and resources does not make it communist.
The means of production is owned communally, and the profits are shared among those who produced it, ergo: Communism.
 

74x12

Well-Known Member
The point of this is not to attack either Communism or Socialism but to understand what people see as the difference between the two.
Some say it is not well defined, or maybe it is.

We spend a lot of time on Socialism, not a lot of debates on Communism.

I've also heard that Communism is the natural evolution of Socialism. Is that true/still true? Or is it its own political/economic ideology completely independent of Communism?
The NWO is a socialist world government in HG Well's book The New World Order.

The NWO was even back then going to be a socialist system. This was previous to post world war 2 Western Europe largely adopting socialism. So the NWO system is already being implemented since ww2. Some people theorize that it will take WW3 in order to complete the NWO.

Communism was allowed to rise in order to bring in the antithesis of capitalism. The people behind the NWO believe their system will arise out of conflict between these two forces. This is why certain east Asian countries were basically divided in half between communism and capitalism when clearly USA could have ended the war in Korea or Vietnam simply by invading the north.

But this didn't happen because these regions provided a perfect case study to highlight the differences between the systems on the same demographic ... apparently Vietnam didn't go so well for the capitalist side and communism didn't go so well for Korea.

So communism has never really been the end game. It's a means to an end. The conflict between thesis and antithesis is designed to bring about synthesis which will be the system they wanted for the NWO.
 

Revoltingest

Pragmatic Libertarian
Premium Member
Socialism:
People own private property.
The people own the means of production.

Communism:
People don't own private property.
The people own everything.
 

Laika

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
The point of this is not to attack either Communism or Socialism but to understand what people see as the difference between the two.
Some say it is not well defined, or maybe it is.

We spend a lot of time on Socialism, not a lot of debates on Communism.

I've also heard that Communism is the natural evolution of Socialism. Is that true/still true? Or is it its own political/economic ideology completely independent of Communism?

Part One. A History of Socialism from 1789-1917

Socialism (as a secular ideology) has it's origins in the French Revolution of 1789. Socialism, Communism and Anarchism were all part of the same ideology for most of the nineteenth century and the terms were used interchangeably.

In 1871, you had the Paris Commune and the repercussions to it led to a split in the "First International" between Anarchists and "Social Democrats" (Communists and Socialists), with Anarchists arguing against a post-revolutionary state and "Social-Democrats arguing for one.

With the failure of the first international, in the late nineteenth century you then had the "second internal", which was a high point of European Socialism. This started to break down after 1899, when Eduard Bernstein published "The Preconditions of Socialism", leading to debates on whether Socialism should be achieved by revolution (which became the Communists) or democratic reform (which became the Socialists).

In 1917, you had the Russian Revolution which led to the final split between Communists (who supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks) and Socialists (who opposed them). The Communists were then organised in to the "Third International" in 1919 which led to the formation of the international communist movement and the spread of Communist principles from Russia around the world.

Part Two. Socialism and Communism from 1917-1945

After 1917, disputes between Socialists and Communists over the use of term greatly confused the issue. Lenin (interpreting Marx) understood Socialism as the lower phase of communism. Hence the USSR was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and was not regarded as full communism, but only Socialist as the transitory stage. Of course, if you happen to be one of the anti-communist "democratic socialists", you are going to dispute that and there are a wide range of analyses that question the Socialist interpretation of the USSR as a "worker's and peasants state" as instead being the "dictatorship of the communist party" as a bureaucratic class.

During the 1920's and 1930's, groups of the far-right recognised that Communists and Socialists were incredibly successful and popular amongst working people. So to draw support away from them, they began to employ socialist terminology, hence the use of the term "national socialism" in Nazi Germany. Even in Nazi racial theory however, there is a clear distinction between "Ayran Socialism" (i.e. Nazism) and "Jewish Socialism" (i.e. Marxism/Communism) as conflicting ideologies.

By around 1950, "Democratic"/Anti-Communist Socialists began to change the very definition of Socialism. Before the Second World War Socialism had meant a commitment to public ownership, typically relying on Marxist economic theories. Afterwards, people began to talk about Socialism, not in terms of being economic system, but in terms of moral values. This eventually calumniated in the "New Labour" period in the 1990s where the Labour Party rejected public ownership but still claimed to be a "socialist" or "social democratic" party.

Part Three. ...Enter American Exceptionalism and the Cold War... 1945- the Present

Now, everything up to this point accounts for the International and European definition of Socialism and Communism. Americans did something completely different.

In the United States, there was never a Socialist, Social Democratic or Labour Party in the same way there was in western europe. Many of the changes brought in by Socialist Parties in Europe, were instead implemented by the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the New Deal (excluding the Progressive era).

The definition of Socialism in America therefore wasn't a reflection of a particular ideology of a particular party. Instead, it evolved to describe nearly any aspect of state activity. As far as Americans were concerned, the state and socialism were interchangable.

F. A. Hayek's book "The Road to Serfdom" (1944) used the example of Germany to argue that Socialism inevitably evolves in to Fascism, Hayek's book wasn't widely published in the UK due to paper rationing, but was a major hit in the United States. Similar theories had been advanced before Hayek such as "The Managerial Revolution" by James Burnham (1941) , which was a influence of George Orwell's "1984".

In the context of the Cold War, this proved useful for equating Fascism and Communism as "socialist" ideologies because they both sought to expand the role of the state in the economy and society. Basically, it meant that the Soviets couldn't use the Second World War to claim to be "Anti-Fascists" because Americans decided they were "red fascists" or "totalitarians".

During the McCarthy era, Americans employed their fear of Socialism to attack anyone who had a slightly left-of-centre political views. It didn't matter whether you professed to believe in the Constitution, civil liberties or democracy because Socialism automatically leads to Communism, so your either a "useful idiot" or pathological liar for Moscow.

Part Four. Socialism: What does it mean anyway?

If the historical evolution of socialism and communism as ideologies and conflicting usages of the terms by their supporters and opponents wasn't confusing enough, there is a particular problem in the use of political language.

Marxism claimed to be a science and therefore claimed that the definition of Socialism and Communism could be objectively understood and that their definition was the only correct one. As Marxism lost popularity, the confusion only grows because western philosophers rejected Marxism's claim to be a science, including it's authority to define the words Socialism and Communism.

Hence, anti-communists could define communism and socialism in any way they saw fit and often in ways to maximise it's negative assocations, particularly in associating socialism with "coercion" and "violence", whilst exonerating capitalism of any association with coercion because it is based on "voluntary exchange" within the market place. Hence suddenly historical abuses such as slavery and colonialism aren't the fault of Capitalism, but of the state- and therefore somehow add to the reason to oppose "socialism".

Moreover, the Marxist definition of Science is basically "heretical" to western philosophical traditions because it treats the principles of natural science as appropriate to social science. Though ideas of history as a law governed evolutionary process were popular in the nineteenth century, by the twentieth century there was a profound movement away from this, asserting that every individual had free will and individual rights and there were no "laws of history" and that Marxism wasn't a scientific study of reality, but merely a social construct- or a "dogma", "faith", "religion", "ideology", etc (which ever term you prefer- they all generally mean the same thing- Marxism is "false" or "wrong"). The definition of Socialism and Communism were thus casualties of these disputes over the nature of truth, knowledge and science, because philosophers thought that language was a series of symbols which did not necessarily reflect an objective reality. abstract concepts such as "ownership", "property" and "means of production" thus started to lose all decipherable meaning entirely because they were treated more as opinions and less as objects of scientific study.

We are hence left with a legacy where Socialism and Communism are philosophically considered undefinable due to the limitations of our understanding of the meaning of language, and are politically defined by the victors of the Cold War to mean anything and everything that opposes the interests of rich people or involves the state in some tenuous way.
 
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epronovost

Well-Known Member
I don't think Communism is that well defined. Is a monastery Communist? A Hutterite colony? A Bruderhof community? A Family?

Have you ever read Marx? If not that might help and to answer your question the answer is no. They are what marxist philosophers call proto-communist groups. A marxist society is post-industrial not pre-industrial.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Have you ever read Marx? If not that might help and to answer your question the answer is no. They are what marxist philosophers call proto-communist groups. A marxist society is post-industrial not pre-industrial.
As I said before, it depends on definitions. Is the classical, Marxian definition the only one? If so, why is Russia considered communist?
 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
Socialism:
People own private property.
The people own the means of production.

Communism:
People don't own private property.
The people own everything.

Depending on your definition of "people" which could be ESOP, people owning the business, the state owning the business in the name of "the people".

Confusing the mess, we also have "state capitalism".
 

epronovost

Well-Known Member
As I said before, it depends on definitions. Is the classical, Marxian definition the only one? If so, why is Russia considered communist?

It never was and never considered itself a communist country. It refered to itself as a socialist country first in pursuit of a communist revolution and then as some sort of permanent socialist State to "protect the future of the communist revolution". Stalin wrote about this and the end of the worldwide communist revolution.
 
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