Communism entails the collective ownership and administration of all means of production and the absence of social classes, while socialism advocates for worker control over means of production within a democratic society, allowing for some individual ownership and social stratification.
In addition, there are different levels of socialism. “Some” individual ownership turns people off. “The State owns the house I worked so hard to pay off?” You can have full private ownership of your things AND have single-payer health care, top-tier public education, reining in predatory banks, etc. We want to be Norway, not Venezuela.
I agree with what you’ve said. That’s how I saw it too. Communism is the last stage, while Socialism is a transition period, as a Communist friend once told me. P.S. WTF am I getting downvoted for asking a question?
Communist and socialist terms have been conflated for a long time.
See https://existentialcomics.com/comic/123 for an illustration.
Communists believe in abolition of capitalism through communist revolution and eventually want to reach a Communist society. Given that such vision has not actually happened yet, Communists often support Actually Existing Socialism (AES).
Socialism is some varying degree in between that and capitalism. On the one hand, there are democratic socialists like Bernie. On the other, there’s also AES countries (e.g. USSR, China).
(P.S. If any other communists see any problems, feel free to correct my mistakes.)
While democratic socialism is a variety of socialism, Bernie isn’t really a democratic socialist, but a social democrat. Social democracy is the left of capitalism, which is right of socialism in any form.
Before some moron turns up, Nazism is not socialism.
I’m gonna leave out utopian communism because it’s not what we’re talking about and isn’t really relevant.
Communists are working toward a classless, stateless society. Viewing the world through the lens of class struggle, they see the state as a tool of class repression and seek to use it to get to that stateless classless society. Its important here to recognize that communists want to use the tools of capitalism to develop the productive forces on the way.
Socialism is worker control of the means of production.
Social democracy is a set of policies enacted by bourgeois societies to keep people from revolting.
Isn’t this the comic where Marx is playing Monopoly, starts losing and Flips the fuck out the table?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Sq0EYo_ZQVU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Most Americans definitely do not want socialism. People simply want things to be affordable, and be able to live with the social services we need readily available, and to have the freedom to do what they want. That’s not socialism, that’s a well functioning democracy with a strong economy.
A lot of Americans “definitely do not want” Obamacare either, but they sure don’t want to give up the improvements that came with the Affordable Care Act.
In other words, Americans hate the label, but not the policies.
(By the way, regarding your other comment: FDR doesn’t get to decide what words mean. It doesn’t matter whether he called himself a socialist or not; what matters is whether he acted like one.)
FDR said he was not a Socialist.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/16/democrats-socialism-fdr-roosevelt-227622/
