I often see these words used interchangeably, though as I understand it there is a difference between the two ideologies, no?
one is utter fantasy role play shite
the other can be watered down and integrated into democracy and functional economic systems
Depends who you ask, but at the core of it, communism is a political structure, while socialism is an economic structure.
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?
That’s a very succinct explanation
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.
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.
I’d count those as the scattered households.
The basic idea is the same. No state needed. People function to help each other, etc.
Sorry, I’m a big David Graeber guy and he made a point to discuss this in some of his work. It exists throughout history.
I don’t know if you’re in software, but IMO communism is like agile. It works very well at small scale (which is why products from startups are good), but once a community loses autonomy and division of labor becomes a thing…it’s over.
Socialism is an attempt at SAFE (scaled agile framework for enterprise). IMO it doesn’t really work, but I do like the idea of having markets where it makes sense, and having social programs that are not profit motivated or maybe even run by the government…so basically Bernie’s position.
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.
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.
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?
No idea where they come from, but do take a look at some of the Scandinavian countries systems.
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.
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.
There is no state in a communist society.
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.
Yes, not at large scales. There are too many people around nowadays for something like this to work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds just like today. The positions of elders would soon atract the ruthless psychopats that seek power. The sustainability speak soon becomes an empty ritual. A few powerfull people decide the important stuff based on their potential gains.
To become a traditional Elder, you need to be an Indigenous person, have an ancestral connection to the local region, live there for many decades, hold and pass on sacred cultural knowledge, be a mentor to young people in your community, and be respected by the local Indigenous community for your wisdom.
If we’re talking about, say, Greenbushes lithium mine (oldest and biggest lithium mine in Australia), that’s located on country shared by the Wardani, Kaniyang, and Bibbulmun peoples of the Noongar nation. To be a Wardani, Kaniyang, or Bibbulmun Elder, you’d have to be from that small local area for many generations, and be respected by the local families. You’d have to know all those people by name and be their uncle or auntie. You’d have to be the person they look to when they have a spiritual problem or they need someone to look after their baby.
How’s that gonna attract ruthless [insert ableist slur]
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.
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
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.
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 ;-)
🏅
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!
Thank you, I’m from a former communist country, so I meet direct witnesses every day. What you’re talking about is real.
Yeah. You come across like a person who knows how to navigate the world effectively. Good luck to you! You’ll need it
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
In my mind, pure communism would use no money, just job assignments and resource distribution. In Socialism, money is still used but it is used for the benefit of all, not just a few.
I would seem them as different sides of the same coin, both self governence, communisms being where communities govern, and socialism being the anarchists version.
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.
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
I made this just because I want to say that the easiest way to think about it is precisely that.
This is also how the political compass sort of displays it;
communism is stuff at the left hand edge of the compass, “Laissez-faire” capitalism is at the right hand edge of the compass. Stuff on the right but not the edge are varying degrees of capitalism, stuff on the left but not the edge are varying degrees of socialism.
Communism = perfect, pure socialism, and perfected pure capitalism is Laissez-faire capitalism.
But more people personally prefer diluted forms of communism or pure-capitalism.
I personally think that a lot of other explanations, like communism has to have no currency are literally just opinion, not objectively true.
because certain leftists think their type of communism/socialism is the only one that should be considered valid. This seems foolish because it treats politics like religion; politics is in fact primarily policy decision in response to issues - or it should be this - so you can’t really argue that there’s a “correct denomination” like some Christians or Muslims do between other members of their faith.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production. Communism is the freedom of the means of production.
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.
