OP, if you take nothing else away from this conversation, it is that different people have different notions of what exactly the word “socialism” refers to, which in practice makes it a useless word to use in the context of discussing public policy because you just end up with groups talking past each other. In the most extreme case, if someone thinks you are proposing “socialism”, then they might abruptly stop listening to what you are actually saying and assume that what you are actually proposing is to turn over the entire country to a corrupt authoritarian government because that is what the word “socialism” means to them. For this reason, should you find yourself in a discussion about public policy, it is generally better to be very specific about exactly what policies you are saying are good or bad and why you think they are good or bad without resorting to using what are in practice ambiguous and loaded terms like these. (Just to be clear, I am not saying that this state of affairs is reasonable, just that this is how it is at the moment.)
In real general terms, communism is about people/state’s ownership of the means of production. Under this system, most private property is nationalized.
Socialism allows for private property and sees the role of the state to redistribute power and wealth among its citizens through some sort of state program.
Also for additional information, Countries/Economies don’t have to be entirely one or the other.
The US has both socialist and capitalist components. The post office system is socialist, so are functions like public roads, and fire and police services. There are also overtly socialist programs in place in things like food stamps, medicare, etc.
Other countries like Canada are the same, but generally have more socialist organizations and programs in comparison (like our healthcare system and electric grids)
The post office system is socialist, so are functions like public roads, and fire and police services.
I’d argue that having the government provide a service isn’t enough to call something socialist. In “The Wealth of Nations”, Adam Smith said that in a free-market economy, the governments role was to provide defence, law and order, and public works (eg. roads and education). If we’re using Marx’s definitions for communism, then surely we have to use Smith’s definitions for Capitalism.
Even if you do exclude those pieces, the US still has socialist organizations and programs that fall outside that definition. I’d argue that even Adam smith is just realizing that socialism is required for certain industries because capitalism has extreme market failures in situations where two or more providers are not economically viable, or in situations where the public good an profit are not aligned.
Florida has a public state insurance company for example. It had to because insurers are fleeing the state.
Texas maintains a publicly controlled electricity distribution organization (Ercort) covering most of the state.
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First off, you may live in a republic. I don’t. Don’t assume everyone is American.
Secondly, your definition of Socialism is too narrow. Socialism isn’t strictly an economic system of who owns things. Social welfare programs are Socialism, but in the political sense. The political movement of Socialism almost always involves wealth redistribution programs like food stamps.
The US is very obviously not strictly a capitalist country. The government owns and controls significant assets including land, resources, and companies which it utilizes to the benefit of the citizenry and would fall under even your definition of Socialism.
Between the federal and state governments, they own around 60% of all the land in the US. https://www.nrcm.org/documents/publiclandownership.pdf
Fanny and Freddie? FDIC? Government owned Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM)? Government owned Hospitals? There’s a number that are owned by State Governments Airports? Liquor Stores? Lotteries? Utilities? Transit Systems? Also lots of them owned by Governments in the US
You are mistaken. Socialism is worker owned means of production. Communism is a theoretical stateless, classless, moneyless society that Marx supposed would eventually form from the conditions of socialism (AKA dictatorship of the proletariat).
Does communism really only have this one meaning defined by marx? At least to me that sounds stoopid to let one guy define something that could be a spectrum
I mean, he wrote the book(s) that started the whole ideology. Why would we want one word to mean a bunch of different ideologies? Pick a new word for the other ideas.
No, there have been many theorists after Marx who added their own thoughts. Marx came up with it though so his influence is great.
Thank you for clarifying that ^^
Wtat i interpret from this is that even though there where others who reinterpreted it the original ideas from marx where so “point on” that it like stayed this way
Your definition of socialism is false. Socialism is when the means of production are owned by the workers. This is incompatible with capitalism, where the means of production are held by those who own capital. In simpler terms, under socialism workers have agency over how their workplace whereas under capitalism that is decided by a CEO/board of directors.
What you’re describing is a social democracy, which is a more socialised version of capitalism.
What do they mean by means of production?
Factories and stuff. In capitalism, a rich person buys the equipment necessary to turn raw materials into useful products, pays workers a set wage to operate that equipment, and then pockets the difference between the cost of raw materials and employee wages, and the sales price of the product. In socialism, the equipment is collectively owned by the workers themselves, who share the difference between the price of raw materials and sales price.
Thanks.
It seems really unintuitive at first. Now that you explain it, I get it
Probably important to also include that personal property is not private property. Private property would be means of production such as farms or factories - they are owned by the workers collectively. You still can have a house, a bed, a refrigerator, a TV, etc.
Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Socialism would be a country like USSR. What you are on about could easily be a capitalist country like Denmark. I’m a big time capitalist because I think socialism is inherently unstable and prone to have huge huge inefficiencies as seen in the USSR. You need the market to correct itself. But like capitalist countries like Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland I think the capitalist state should correct the market with externalities and via taxes pay for education, healthcare etc. As time goes on I support UBI and we should start that now. Economists are beginning to push cash transfers as the best means of improvement the welfare of citizens. But this is absolutely capitalism, the free market and capital expenditure by individuals is the foundation of the system.
I have no idea why, at times, Americans do not understand the word socialism. Plenty of people in European capitalist countries died to try get out of a socialist system or to avoid it. Yet some Americans say they are socialist. It’s crazy and disrespectful.
It depends a lot on what you actually mean by socialism and communism because these words can have very different meanings to different people and ideology.
As a very broad baseline, socialism is the socialization of the means of production, as opposed to the current privatization of those means. Now there are a lot of ways this could be done, and thus a lot of ways to define socialism. Some socialists want a strong State that can enforce strict rules of ownership, others want no State at all and a free cooperation between individuals, with a lot of variations in between. An anarchist, a communist, a social-democrat would all consider themselves socialists, even when they actually have very distinct ideologies.
Now communism, at least in its most recognizable form, is basically the end state of socialism in the Marxist ideology specifically. It designates a stateless, classless society in which each person contributes according to their ability and receives according to their needs. It’s basically the end goal theorized by Marx that has never been achieved yet in History.
Socialism is a system where individuals do not own corporations. A lot of the other posters here are emphasizing the state ownership aspect where the government owns everything. But really socialism is about collections of people owning things without an elitist class (like modern billionaires). Who those collections of people are that owns things is where the interpretation and ambiguity begins though.
Imagine if Microsoft instead of having a board of directors and being on a stock exchange, instead was owned and operated by it’s employees and selected the CEO of their company by an internal election process, where the workers could select leaders that they thought would best represent their interests in the company. That would be another example of socialism that can exist without government involvement at all. The collection of owners here is simply the employees of Microsoft.
Communism is socialism, but socialism is not necessarily communism. Socialism is the counter part to capitalism, and communism is a form of socialism. I found this video very helpful when I had the same question.
Lots of people has great answers here. I would love to explain a bit of the reasoning behind these production relations in very crude and hand-wavy terms.
At the time of Marx, people see the economy consists of two major inputs, labour and means of production (land, machinary, tools, etc), with machinary and tools (things that can be produced and enables production) called capitial.
In a capitalistic society, like its name suggest, capital is a valuable resource. That means people owning these capital, aka capitalist, can make money just by renting these capitals without contributing labor.
However with the productivity increase, it was theorized that capitals will lose its value, hence enabling workers to collectively own the means of production. At that stage, only labour will be valuable resource, hence the compensation will be directly tied to the value of labour a worker can provide.
Finally, when the productivity is way over the capacity of consumption, communism is achieved. Human will no longer fight for resource, since the amount of resource can fullfill the need of any individual. Thus the society will be able to distribute resource simply by need.
However like other has said, there are many means of achieving these ideals, not necessarily by pure market changes or by a authoritarian state.
in my understanding, relying on wiki for definitions:
communism is stateless moneyless propertyless religionless classless society where there is the common ownership or non-ownership of the means of production
socialism in theory wants to prioritize the value of labor and seeks to have the common social democratic ownership of the means of production
A lot of words but not many sources here. So here’s a few:
Marx defined socialism as: “…Socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis.”
— Capital III, translated by Ernest Untermann, Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago 1909, p. 954
To understand Marx’s definitions you have to realise he was writing mostly in response to the Paris Commune uprising and therefore saw ‘communism’ as the practical application of a theory of socialism. However, the terms and their meaning were radically reshaped by Lenin, Mao and Stalin.
— The Paris Commune: First Proletarian Dictatorship, Revolution, Vol. 3, No. 6, March 1978.
In March 1918 the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in order to distinguish it from Social Democratic parties in Russia and Europe and to separate the followers of Lenin from those affiliated with the nonrevolutionary Socialist International.
— https://www.britannica.com/place/Soviet-Union/Lenin-and-the-Bolsheviks
Sure, but Marx didn’t invent socialism. The Commune itself was massively inspired by Proudhon’s socialist ideas. Even before that, Saint-Simon’s socialism influenced some factions that took part in the French Revolution.
All that to say that yeah, nowadays Marxism is the main socialist ideology, but it’s not the only one
I think this video helps
Hi. I’m definitely not an expert on the subject but I had a teacher in highschool who taught us about this and this is what I remember.
Communism is an utopia, is a system that goes against human nature therefore it’ll never work. It has never worked, the so called communist countries are actually socialist.
First, in communism there’s no government. You as an individual who is aware that lives in a community you do everything for the “greater good” of the community. So if you’re very good at singing and dancing but the community needs let’s say potatoes then you, by your own choice you go to the farm and produce potatoes. Now once you have all your potatoes you say:
Ok, I have a wife and a kid, that’s a family of 3 so I’ll take only 3 potatoes. My buddy Rick who has a wife and 4 children, that’s a family of 6 so he takes 6 potatoes.
Again it goes against human nature, since when we plant something we consider everything we harvested ours.
Now socialism is just one step back but a huuuuge step back where a government exists.
So a random guy comes in and say:
Hey people of the community since we are not ready just yet to give to the community from our hearts, I’ll act as a government and dictate what you do and how to distribute what you produce.
Billy I know you are very good at singing and dancing but we don’t need entertainment, we need potatoes so get your lazy ass up and go to the farm!
Billy since you have a family of 3 then you get 3 potatoes.
My cousin Rick, I know he has a family of 6 but give him 20 potatoes because I’m the government, I decide how much everyone gets.
So socialism is very prone to corruption.
There you have it. Again I’m not an expert here, everyone is welcome to correct me. I’m just regurgitating what a highschool teacher taught us.
Eh your teacher does not know what they’re talking about in the slightest.
Socialism does not have to be centrally planned. For example, you could have market socialism by just making every company a worker cooperative.
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Nope.
Short-sighted questions is the exact reason for this community. Let the ppl answering it define their assumptions.
You make an excellent point, sir! It’s not like this is a community geared towards answering stupid… umm… nevermind.
