Comment by anovikov
15 hours ago
Well, Communism was seen by countries we call "Communist" (GDR, Soviet Union, Red China in Mao era, and the like), as something potentially possible in some distant future, it was their endgame (some claim, only notionally so, with no actual plan of getting there, but it doesn't matter really). What they had in reality, they called "Socialism".
Socialism is the "form of industrialised society where private ownership of means of production is outlawed". Communism is the (hypothetical) "classless, stateless society".
The above comment chain is what is wrong with us. We talk about labels more than we talk about issues.
Labels are a distraction. If you have a conversation about real things I find we agree nore than we disagree.
But disagreement is what is fomented by our oppressors, because it distracts us from fighting them.
Nevertheless, words (let's not call them labels, maybe terms) are what allows us to communicate ideas. While yes communicating about real things is the real deal, having a common understanding of words, language and concepts, is what allows everybody to have discussions. Labels are just shortcuts which may or may not be understood the same way by the participants, so such clarifications are always necessary at the beginning.
I agree. No matter how you call it, society without private ownership of means of production - without legalised ability to build capital and gain economic power by extracting value from productive assets for private gain - cannot work except by hard coercion provided by relentless, unblinking, crushing force. Just because a society like that is contrary to human nature and every bit of freedom we get, we will use to circumvent and undermine it.
And difference in terms - socialism vs communism - is just a west/east terminology difference.
Soviets called what they had "socialism" and what they (as they claimed) wanted to get, "communism".
The West called what Soviets had, "communism" and the social order in "soft" Western countries like Sweden or 1960s UK, "socialism". Which was "a society where private ownership of means of production still dominates, but is heavily taxed, and proceeds are used to fund a lot of social programs and public infrastructure, housing and other programs are centrally planned long term". Soviets never accepted that as "socialism" and kept saying that this term was only used by the West manipulatively to disarm the Western working class, and they were probably right.
Socialism has practically infinite different meanings depending on whom you ask (and in what country). There’s nothing that ideologically unifies Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bernie Sanders, and Joseph Stalin other than being somewhere left of center, but all of them would have described themselves as socialists.
Socialism is defined by social ownership of the means of production. But in those countries, the society did not really have a say in managing the means of production, everything was in the hands of the 'avantgarde party' which inevitably led to centralization of power in the hands of a small clique.
Total socialism is of course unworkable anyway, but this was no socialism.
Well, defining any social order in this manner will result in the same conclusion. Just as with democracy, the power is never in the hands of people.
Defining it negatively though - as a social order in which the private ownership of means of production is prohibited by law - socialism definitely existed.
In democracy the power is to some extent in the hands of the people. That even enables partial socialism, when e.g. some industries or transport companies belong to the state, but rest of the economy is private. But if there is no democracy, there is also no socialism.
> private ownership of means of production is prohibited by law - socialism definitely existed
It did not exist, it was merely declared to exist by law. And there are several issues with that, one is that means of production are also your hands and your head and you can always refuse to use them, explicitly or implicitly, however painful that may be. And the second one is the existence of huge informal economy that has supplanted the shortcomings of the formal one and that one has always been dependent on private production and this has been the case in all 'communist' economies AFAIK. It was certainly the case in communist Czechoslovakia where I lived.