Communism vs. Socialism

[Jonathan Randall]

This post by Exile in another thread really got me thinking. It IS true that the Communists considered Socialism their bitter enemy - largly, I believe, because they felt it both didn't go all the way as far as they were concerned and also because it siphoned off energy and possible membership in their own cause. OTOH, according to the Eric Hoffer classic, The True Believer, movements that are closest in ideas and message to the "true believers'" are the ones most bitterly and violently opposed. Thoughts?

Just remember one thing, guys: every communist puppet state set up in Europe following WWII wiped out the local socialists before anyone else. And the stalinists made common cause with the facist Phalange in Spain during the Civil War to destroy the anarcho-syndicalists at Barcelona. For that matter, the first non-absolutist/despotic regime in Russia in several hundred years, following the overthrow of the Czar, were the social-democratic Mensheviks, and guess what happened to them when the Bolsheviks became the next absolutist/despotic regime? Karensky fled to the West one step ahead of the OGPU, and... well, the rest is history, as they say.

With a record like that, it's a baaaad idea to equate communist/Stalinist regimes with socialist movements. What usually happens is that the former wind killing off the members of the latter. On the other hand, in the rare instances in which socialist regimes come to power, communist parties typically thrive....

 

[exile]

Here's my take on this, Jonathan: there is a fundamental, profound difference between socialism and communism.

Socialists are by nature egalitarian and democratic (think the New Democratic Party in Canada, for example). Their thinking is guided by models of pragmatic consensus, and while they accept Marxian styles of economic/political analysis, and believe that politics is a projection of economic interest, they are not Marxists; their MO is based on open debate and one-voter/one-vote methods of tallying. They believe, at bottom, that the public sector is a crucial component of any society and that major resources should be publically owned and operated, not controlled monopolistically... so far as I can tell.

Communists, at least in the western world, follow a Bolshevik model of centralized state control. There are local disagreements—whether communism was a genuinely international movement (Trotsky) or subject to the leadership of particularly `advanced' nation-states (Stalinism), e.g.—but by and large, communism accepts the need for total management of the society by a faceless bureaucracy with the authority to plan all economic and social transactions.

These are broad-brush generalizations, but I think that they prove true over a large number of socialist and communist governments and societies respectively. The socialist movement is different from communism most basically in its rock-bottom reliance on democratic institutions, I suspect. Communism is steeped to its bones in totalitarian asperations. Given the four possibilities anarchism, socialism, communism, facism, the linkage of anarchism and socialism on the one hand and communism and facism on the other—as happened in particularly clear form in Spain in the 1930s—is practically inevitable. At bottom it comes to this, I think: socialists abhor coercion, communists assume coercion as the way in which the Revolution will be implemented. There is a huge, unbridgeable gulf between the two isms. They are way further apart, I'd guess, than Democratic and Republican positions are at this point in 21st century America...

...just my $.02...

 

[Jonathan Randall]

Well said. Communism is totalitarian in its basic assumptions and that is why I don't believe Stalinism was an aberration from "pure communism" as many of today's neo-communists would like us to believe. Great post.

 

[Steel Tiger]

Here's my take on this, Jonathan: there is a fundamental, profound difference between socialism and communism.

Socialists are by nature egalitarian and democratic (think the New Democratic Party in Canada, for example). Their thinking is guided by models of pragmatic consensus, and while they accept Marxian styles of economic/political analysis, and believe that politics is a projection of economic interest, they are not Marxists; their MO is based on open debate and one-voter/one-vote methods of tallying. They believe, at bottom, that the public sector is a crucial component of any society and that major resources should be publically owned and operated, not controlled monopolistically... so far as I can tell.

I like to think of Australia as a very socialist country. There is a strong emphasis on certain utilities being publically owned and administered, even though our current government seems to be moving away from this position.

I think that the states we have seen crop up claiming to be communist have all fallen well short of the particularly unattainable goal Marx set forth. They are totalitarian states dominated by small minded people who desire power and do their utmost to hold on to it. They may not have started out this way but that is always where they end up.

 

[exile]

Well said. Communism is totalitarian in its basic assumptions and that is why I don't believe Stalinism was an aberation from "pure communism" as many of today's neo-communists would like us to believe. Great post.

Thanks Jonathan, and I think you are exactly right about communism and totalitarianism—they work hand in glove, the latter is the means and the former is the goal. A lot of neo-communists want to shed that image, but what they offer is a `red' herring (sorry, couldn't resist!)—namely, they bemoan the Stalinist fallacy that one single nation might be the chosen leader of the proletarian revolution. But that's irrelevant, because Trotsky, who rejected that idea himself, was every bit as state-centralist in his thinking as Stalin; it's just that he wanted every communist society to have the centralized structure that Russian communism had. He had no real problem with the coercive aspect of communist doctrine itself; he just didn't believe that Russia had any special status. The neo-coms you mention take the same line.

I saw this firsthand when I was a graduate student at Columbia University during the student uprising there in 1968. There were Trot groups and Maoist groups and they were the most repressive outfits you could imagine. There were also labor organizations which were essentially socialist in nature (it was more complex than that, but that's the closest I can get to it)—and the labor guys, who organized unions in the Garment District and regularly thumbed their noses at ... um, guys making them offers they weren't supposed to be able to refuse, let's say...—thought the Trot/Maoist groups (who hated each other, LOL) were the nastiest pieces of work they'd ever come across. Privileged elitists who blathered about oppression and class warfare but had never actually done any hard work in their lives and got their ideologies from the sides of cereal boxes, it seemed like—that's how the union guys saw these pint-sized ideologues. Most of the latter are now probably lawyers or commodities brokers living in six-figure houses in gated communities....

Added in edit: right on, Steel Tiger! This is completely in accord with what seems to have been happening in the Antipodes during the past quarter of a century.

 

[Jonathan Randall]

I saw this firsthand when I was a graduate student at Columbia University during the student uprising there in 1968. There were Trot groups and Maoist groups and they were the most repressive outfits you could imagine. There were also labor organizations which were essentially socialist in nature (it was more complex than that, but that's the closest I can get to it)—and the labor guys, who organized unions in the Garment District and regularly thumbed their noses at ... um, guys making them offers they weren't supposed to be able to refuse, let's say...—thought the Trot/Maoist groups (who hated each other, LOL) were the nastiest pieces of work they'd ever come across. Privileged elitists who blathered about oppression and class warfare but had never actually done any hard work in their lives and got their ideologies from the sides of cereal boxes, it seemed like—that's how the union guys saw these pint-sized ideologues. Most of the latter are now probably lawyers or commodities brokers living in six-figure houses in gated communities....

Yes, and my family lived in the Bay Area during the "Free Speech Movement". I was a baby at the time, but my father recalled to me once that no group was ever less tolerant of other's right to speak than the Berkley radicals were.

I've done some study on the Red Brigades - Italy's Communist Terror Organization - and boy, do they match up with your observations regarding the nasty pieces of work you saw at Columbia in the late 1960's. Even worse than most of ours, their uninformed spoiled kids (mostly younger with a handful of older manipulators) felt that they had the right to kill people for the "crime" of being wealthy or, and this is important to note, being socialist and NOT communist.

 

[Andrew Green]

Marx style communism never happened.

To put it simply, Marx predicted the rise of the workers against the ruling class. That never happened.

What did happen was power was seized in a bunch of countries that where basically thrown into 3rd world status, meaning completely dependent on other countries economically, and largely controlled by those countries.

In an attempt to break that dependency different approaches where tried, one of which was a goal of communism. Although true communism was never really reached, and there has yet to be a real communist country.

But to lump it all into one boat is a mistake. Marx, Lenin and Stalin all had pretty different views.

The west often refers to countries as being communist, when really they aren't. Cuba defines itself as a socialist state. China is a socialist state as well. USSR was socialist. But often the ruling party is called the communist party. Which I guess you could say is more of a ideal, but not the actual structure.

In the same sort of way as in the US there is a Republican Party and a Democratic Party. When one is in charge it is not a republic, and when the other is in charge a democracy. Nazi Germany was fascist, yet the ruling party called themselves the "National Socialist" party

Socialism was, in a sense, a success in a lot of countries. It made the USSR intoa world power, when they where a 3rd world nation (economic sense), same for China.

Whether it is sustainable in the long term remains to be seen, and whether it can actually evolve into communism is also questionable. But the same could be said for western systems, which are relatively new in world history as well. I imagine in a few hundred years government will take on a new form.

 

[exile]

Yes, and my family lived in the Bay Area during the "Free Speech Movement". I was a baby at the time, but my father recalled to me once that no group was ever less tolerant of other's right to speak than the Berkley radicals were.

Nothing could suprise me less! The elitist nature of a lot of those groups was legendary.

I've done some study on the Red Brigades - Italy's Communist Terror Organization - and boy, do they match up with your observations regarding the nasty pieces of work you saw at Columbia in the late 1960's. Even worse than most of ours, their uninformed spoiled kids (mostly younger with a handful of older manipulators) felt that they had the right to kill people for the "crime" of being wealthy or, and this is important to note, being socialist and NOT communist.

Something very similar happened in Cambodia, apparently, during the worst days of the Kmer Rouge. These young cadres were given life-and-death power over many of the prisoners, middle-aged bourgeoisie and professionals and artists, and they did exactly the same thing.

What's really interesting about that is that the Kmer Rouge wound up murdering two million or so of their fellow Cambodians in an effort to uproot the industrial economy of Cambodia and return it to a fantasy agricultural-workers' paradise, whereas the vast crimes of Stalinism in Russia were ultimately driven by Stalin's obsession with achieving a state-of-the-art industrial Soviet empire resting on a platform of advanced technology. The only thing the two societies seem to have had in common was the centralized apparatchik bureaucracy and a complete contempt for human life.

 

[Steel Tiger]

Marx style communism never happened.

To put it simply, Marx predicted the rise of the workers against the ruling class. That never happened.

What did happen was power was seized in a bunch of countries that where basically thrown into 3rd world status, meaning completely dependent on other countries economically, and largely controlled by those countries.

In an attempt to break that dependency different approaches where tried, one of which was a goal of communism. Although true communism was never really reached, and there has yet to be a real communist country.

When I read Das Capital I got the distinct impression that Marx did not think the workers would rise up. It looked to me as though he were putting forward his version of a utopian state. Others, on reading his work attempted to put it into practise and were doomed to failure.

 

[Andrew Green]

For a pretty good overview of Marx's general theory, and a little Lenin thrown in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

Marx believed the revolution would happen from what I remember, but was wrong about a lot of details, like where. He believed it would happen first in the developed countries. Lenin on the other hand believed it would happen in less developed countries, that where tied to developed countries interests and not really independant.

 

[exile]

For a pretty good overview of Marx's general theory, and a little Lenin thrown in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism

Marx believed the revolution would happen from what I remember, but was wrong about a lot of details, like where. He believed it would happen first in the developed countries. Lenin on the other hand believed it would happen in less developed countries, that where tied to developed countries interests and not really independant.

Marx expected the revolution to happen in Germany, on an industrialized base. I read at least one thing by him in which he explicitly talked about what a disaster it would be if it happened in Russia, because the lack of such an industrial base would make it necessary to impose Draconian measures on the population to generate the surpluses necessary to finance the transition from an agricultural economy to a developed communist state. And of course, that's exactly what happened under Stalin, with a vengeance. Terrorized people aren't going to give you much trouble when you keep their standard of living low and skim off the top for the development of an enormous factory system; they're just glad to be alive. And just to remind them of what can happen, you periodically take their neighbors away at 4a.m., forever. Terror as everyday State policy. So in that sense, Marx was right about what would happen if the communist experiment started in Russia...

 

[CoryKS]

The only difference between communism and socialism is the degree of implementation. Hayek argues in "The Road to Serfdom" that all socialism must eventually devolve into Soviet-style totalitarianism, because once you remove personal gain as an incentive the only motivation available is force.

In "Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism", Ben Wattenberg describes the history of the New Harmony community organized by Robert Owen. It failed in a way which matched on a smaller scale the demise of the Soviet Union. For a more entertaining take, see The Onion's "Marxists' Apartment a Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn't Work".

For me, however, it isn't relevent whether socialism works or not. One could argue that the South's plantation economy worked well, but I'm sure that was cold comfort to the slaves.

 

[exile]

The only difference between communism and socialism is the degree of implementation. Hayek argues in "The Road to Serfdom" that all socialism must eventually devolve into Soviet-style totalitarianism, because once you remove personal gain as an incentive the only motivation available is force.

In "Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism", Ben Wattenberg describes the history of the New Harmony community organized by Robert Owen. It failed in a way which matched on a smaller scale the demise of the Soviet Union. For a more entertaining take, see The Onion's "Marxists' Apartment a Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn't Work".

For me, however, it isn't relevent whether socialism works or not. One could argue that the South's plantation economy worked well, but I'm sure that was cold comfort to the slaves.

I think this kind of thinking involves a major oversimplification of human motivation. Have you ever belonged to a cooperative or some such organization, in which people donate labor in order to maintain the functioning of an organization that makes goods available to people who cannot afford to pay normal commercial retail prices for the goods involved? Many of the people who do this can well afford to pay these prices, but in effect they donate their labor to subsidize people who do not have the same resources available that they do. Altruism is a powerful force which corresponds to the extension to others of an ideal of social treatment one wants for oneself.

A lot of total rubbish has been written about altruism, but evolutionary biologists have shown that it is an almost inevitable accompaniment of a biological imperative: protect your genetic lineage. Many animal species are programmed in such a way that they will unhesitatingly sacrifice themselves to protect their `bloodline'. The idea that the only factors which motivate people are those which show up in a cyclical bottom-line profit sheet is false from the ground up: people may indeed seek to maximize, but material profit is only one of the things they seek to maximize.

And this is why the claim that socialism and communism are only different in degree is fundamentally false: the difference is that socialists believe that an informed electorate—motivated by a hierarchy of `goods' which includes individual profit as only one, possibly small component—will democratically arrive at a concensus on the allocation of resources. Communists (aka bolshevists, stalinists et al.) allocate power to a minority by a dictatorship and impose their decisions through the instrumentality of state-implemented terror. BIG difference, Cory.

The claim that maximization of profits is the sole or primary motivation for human behavior has as much empirical credibility as the Freudian claim that the essential Oedipal conflict is based on the male child's sexual jealousy of his father—sounds fine and plausible until you look at societies (which Freud never did) based on matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence. And then, lo and behold, it turns out that boys display hostility not to their fathers (weak outsiders in such societies), but their mother's brothers, the disciplinary figures in those cultures. It's not sex, it's authority. Expand the data base and you get a very different picture of what people are maximizing. Hayek is to political economy as Freud was to developmental psychology, and about as correct, IMO....

 

[Blotan Hunka]

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." - Winston Churchill

Both communism and socialism have an end utopian goal of complete equality in their ideal state.

Both communism and socialism employ the practice of centralized economic managing and income redistribution as their primary means of working toward this so called "equality."

Both communism and socialism experience the same types of problems in accomplishing this economic managing - the unintended side effect.

Both socialism and communism are structured in such a way that an inherent inequality develops from the administrative top of the power structure for such is necessary to enforce compliance. Such compliance must be mandated in a socialist system due to the fact that human nature creates skepticism, opposition to the control of others, and a desire for free will.

In both systems when this unequal elite inevitably emerges, the concentration of widespread power in a single space must intensify. This naturally attracts individuals seeking widespread power, or it corrupts individuals already in power with the lure of the same widespread power.

As a result of the government structures found in both systems, the intensification of power and control on the upper level necessarily translates into the usurpation of remaining personal freedoms during its expansion.

 

[heretic888]

In both systems when this unequal elite inevitably emerges, the concentration of widespread power in a single space must intensify. This naturally attracts individuals seeking widespread power, or it corrupts individuals already in power with the lure of the same widespread power.

As a result of the government structures found in both systems, the intensification of power and control on the upper level necessarily translates into the usurpation of remaining personal freedoms during its expansion.

Y'know, its funny.

Your last two paragraphs describe perfectly our own "capitalist" system to the letter.

 

[Sukerkin]

Darn it gentlemen! A thread in which I might finally be able to put my Economics degree to use and you chaps are already eloquently putting all the salient issues to bed :grr: :lol:!

Very good posts all round; even the ones that I consider not to be quite right have supporting references - yet one more example of why I'm getting more and more settled here at MT i.e. even those you disagree with (or have the wrong end of the stick as far as you're concerned) stil have inteligent reasons why.

Mmm, that sentence was a bit 'advanced' in terms of grammatical structure ... sorry, I blame the chardonnay .

In general terms, Exile's posts cover much of the necessary ground but the elaborations and clarifications from everyone else help fill out the picture.

The simple yardstick is that Socialism is a democratic system that believes in public ownership of core social resources whilst Communism is a totalitarian regime that believes in the centralisation of all governance and power.

I personally am a Socialist (i.e. I think that such things as health care, power, water, rail et al should be government controlled and public owned). For me, it's the most sensible way to run things. Let economic forces manage those things not absolutely necessary to a nations life and let the government co-ordinate the rest.

In England we're paying the price now of a short-sighted (some might argue 'self-serving') selling off of all the public owned utilities to private hands by the Tories. Profit motive is not an efficient way to maintain such services, which is why the government is now having to 'bail out' these 'businesses' with billions of tax payers pounds.

Service and quality of supply have nosedived because these things do not provide dividends to shareholders.

As far as power transmission and distrbution is concerned, I admit to a conflict of interest, as the underfunding of previous years is turning into a bonanza for the company I work for, but I still think that we would've been better off keeping it Nationalised in the first place.

A bit off topic there as I'm straying off the Communism vs Socialism line and into the Capitalism is not always best area . The points still valid tho'.

Anyhow; great thread chaps and in the words of Arnie "I'll be back!" (when I'm more sober :blush: ).

 

[Steel Tiger]

In England we're paying the price now of a short-sighted (some might argue 'self-serving') selling off of all the public owned utilities to private hands by the Tories. Profit motive is not an efficient way to maintain such services, which is why the government is now having to 'bail out' these 'businesses' with billions of tax payers pounds.

Service and quality of supply have nosedived because these things do not provide dividends to shareholders.

Down here in Australia, which is (as I've said before) quite a socialist country, we are right in the middle of attempts by the government to privatise everything. They are not having a lot of success, probably because of the example of the British government.

Personally, I think we have a good blend of socialism and capitalism. I would not want to swing too much to either extreme.