If you're American they seem to be understood as being synonymous, and US sites will often explain or discuss them incorrectly from that assumption they describe the same thing. In Europe they manage to remain mostly distinct.
Investopedia has the following to say. I don't know if it agrees with the distinction that you like to draw:
"Communism and socialism are economic and political structures that promote equality and seek to eliminate social classes. The two are interchangeable in some ways, but different in others.In a communist society, the working class owns everything, and everyone works toward the same communal goal. There are no wealthy or poor people -- all are equal, and the community distributes what it produces based only on need. Nothing is obtained by working more than what is required. Communism frequently results in low production, mass poverty and limited advancement. Poverty spread so widely in the Soviet Union in the 1980s that its citizens revolted. Like communism, socialism’s main focus is on equality. But workers earn wages they can spend as they choose, while the government, not citizens, owns and operates the means for production. Workers receive what they need to produce and survive, but there’s no incentive to achieve more, leaving little motivation. Some countries have adopted aspects of socialism. The United Kingdom provides basic needs like healthcare to everyone regardless of their time or effort at work. In the U.S., welfare and the public education system are a form of socialism. Both are the opposite of capitalism, where limitations don’t exist and reward comes to those who go beyond the minimum. In capitalist societies, owners are allowed to keep the excess production they earn. And competition occurs naturally, which fosters advancement. Capitalism tends to create a sharp divide between the wealthiest citizens and the poorest, however, with the wealthiest owning the majority of the nation's resources."
I saw something interesting the other day which pointed out that the meaning of "socialist" to America's political left, in 2019, is very different from its original meaning. Today people use it when talking about very basic social programs like public health care and regulated employment benefits. Because we're at a point now where even those fundamental protections are considered "extreme". Originally the word's meaning was much closer to that of "communist", which is probably the source of the miscommunication.
The author is an economist. They coarsely distinguish between command economies on one side, market economies on the other. Socialism and communism may mean different things to different people, but the terms are generally considered to oppose markets and the closely related concept of private property.
Basically, socialism is a transition to communism [0], and so they are viewed as gradations of the same ideology. The idea is that communism is workers controlling the means of production, but there must be an intermediary where the government owns the means of production (defined above as "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat", but marx was a cynic and believed revolution was an absolute, and dictatorship of the proletariat is basically direct democracy without regard to the constitution).
Perhaps many people think that socialism and communism are such toxic ideologies that any defense of them deserves to be downvoted into oblivion. I did not downvote, but being from a former communist country i agree with the sentiment as this ideologies are the ones responsible for the largest amount of deaths and misery in the last century.
Any form of government that involves central planning and large redistribution of income is going to create worse outcomes for society. This is partly the reason why things like SpaceX Amazon etc are created in US and not in Europe.
Of course some social programs as free education and free healthcare are necessary, since it is essentially a form of vc funding where it pays off to invest in many people as some of them would make enough money later in life to cover all the investment. But even here it is important to not take too large a chunk of societies resources and to keep the service itself capitalist with many competing actors.
I don't want to dismiss your experience... but space is a bad example here. The USSR was far ahead of the US on basically every "first" except landing people on the moon (which was important! It just wasn't everything.). I'm skeptical of SpaceX. While they make claims about Mars, they've mainly innovated in regaining access to space (which was lost through lack of investment) and making it cheaper (in an impressive way). These aren't wholly new capabilities.
The fact that USSR was happy to spend enormous resources on anything weapon related in a hungry country doesn't speak about communism being better for space. The main reason USSR had its "firsts" was that by shear luck Korolev didn't die in gulag (though was very close to) and that we were more willing to risk human lives. Perhaps one of the reasons soviet moon program has failed was that in 1966 Korolev have died just 59 years old because of his time at gulag. The other reason was that until mid fifties cybernetics was considered anti-communist science and USSR never managed to recover from that and develop good computers. (This is typical with communism where utility of things is determined not by people freely choosing where to invest their money, but by government). So i can't agree that USSR being first makes space a bad example.
That being said i was bringing SpaceX not as a comparison with USSR, but with the mild socialism of current day Europe which despite having more people doesn't produce the kind of innovation US does.
> The fact that USSR was happy to spend enormous resources on anything weapon related in a hungry country doesn't speak about communism being better for space.
They were terrified by the US. For good reason, arguably. I mean, I've read that the US nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki in part as a warning shot for the Soviets. And there were discussions in the late 40s of nuking the Soviet Union, preemptively.
For both sides, I agree that space exploration was a side effect of the arms race. Putting stuff in orbit was a demonstration that you could put it anywhere.
Also, it was an issue of national pride. So in that sense, for the Soviets, not that different from gross whale harvest. Or wheat, nails, or whatever.
But in the end, it's arguable that the arms race played a large role in destroying the Soviet Union. Its military budget was so large, relative to its GNP, that everything else fell apart.
As someone who grew up in a former socialist state, I mostly understand the distinction. But you gotta admit that the only countries so far that have attempted outright socialism were/are all communist as well.
That's true. But I support socialist policies around things like education and healthcare. Heck, the public education system in the United States /is/ socialist. But good luck getting a politician to admit that.
Anyway, my point is that systems like single-payer healthcare is certainly a socialist policy, but I don't think calling it a communist policy would be accurate.
I could be wrong, but it seems like socialism is more about the application of tax dollars towards social security programs, whereas communism is a form of rules and organization imposed on the private market. I'm probably oversimplifying it, though.
Socialism is economic and need not distribute only according to need. Communism is political with some economics.
In Europe there's a lot of shades of grey. No one would consider the UK or Nordic countries communist, and no one the UK socialist. Yet with the NHS there is a socialised health service. Nordic model countries go much further with their social policies but are still capitalist democracies far removed from communism. Few would even call them socialist but social democratic or similar.
Europe has a lot of social democrat, and middle ground socialist parties that believe in some level of redistribution and other somewhat socialist ideas and healthy capitalism with profit, and freedom to become wealthy.
America uses them in a far more black and white manner.
There are many socialisms. The weakest form that many socialists (such as myself) don't consider socialism is social democracy, which accepts the market as legitimate and attempts to "fix it" or otherwise tame it with regulations and social spending. Obviously, this doesn't work because eventually, the ruling class decides it wants more money and undoes the regulations - the story of America since the last Gilded Age.
The socialisms to the left of social democracy focus on fundamentally changing the basis of the economic and therefore social system. These interventions focus on workers owning the means of production. In "market socialism" this means the market is left intact, but the old capitalist class is eliminated or otherwise largely disempowered in favor of worker ownership of private companies. If we go further left, we get state capitalism, where a democratic state owns the means of production and uses it to serve the people (with various levels of employee empowerment in the workplace). Communism is supposed to be a state where the state, no longer needing to suppress class struggle, fades away as being unnecessary. Many of these ideas are up for interpretation. I currently think that at least large parts of the security state would fade away, but am unsure about other public services and see the need for central authorities to coordinate on environmental issues now that we are facing catastrophe.
In the early part of the 20th century, "socialists" and "communists" distinguished themselves from each other. "Socialists" claimed the mantle of an electoral road to one of these outcomes, while "communists" focused on militant revolution, seeing the bourgeois state as hopelessly captured by the ruling classes / reactionaries / counter-revolutionaries.
Anywho, I hope that helps defines terms for y'all.
In the end the greedy who are also powerful end up corrupting any system; therefore the problem is clearly the humans. I hope if we manage to build an AI it turns out better.
Not aruging but just wanted to point out Yugoslavia as one of the only examples of pretty successful market socialism. According to Wikipedia at least Cuba is also working on such reforms.
Socialism was supposed to be a transitory period towards true communism, so e.g. in the Soviet Union you had the communist party ruling over a socialist nation. Using the two words interchangeably in this situation is reasonable.
The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics was communist. So was Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania, etc. even though officially they all had “socialist” in their official names while they were under soviet influence, so it’s no surprise people find the terms interchangeable.
That’s just their other usage of democratic where to them it is equivalent to folks’ or people’s (keeping with Greek etymology, if not spirit of the word). But we keep the traditional meaning of it.
