Socialism combines policies of income redistribution and nationalization of all business firms. The state must own and control the “means of production.” “Communists” are those zealously endoctrinated with the necessity of such a system, but “communism” is a mythical situation in which the socialist dictatorship has created an enforced acceptance of all citizens of total state control of the economy. The state can then wither away and all men can, in peace, (the capitalist roaders of any counter revolution are either dead or in Siberia), work together to ameliorate the natural state of economic relations.
Most political pundits and journalists operate on the assumption that socialism may be innocuous, but communism is more extreme and possibly even dangerous. This they assume because they are aware of the disastrous effects of communism in the Soviet Union. That may be a good beginning for those who have no real knowledge of either system. Such pundits seem to have the same level of expertise as the millennials have on socialism.
Naive socialists in the United States often aspire to be democratic since they have not yet discovered that the implementation and maintenance of a socialist economy cannot be a democratic process. It requires political power and grim determination. True socialism, such as Comrade Bernie Sanders aspires to establish in his proposed transformation of our economic system requires state ownership and management of “property.” Of course socialists can own their own homes and “cars”[1]; the property restriction is on the private ownership of the means of production.
[1 ] Socialists have “cars” if you are willing to call such creations as the Trabant (East German) or Vlada (Russian) as genuine automobiles. The central planning nemesis of creating new technologies or appealing consumer products was never overcome in the socialist countries and socialist highways seemed populated with something other than real automobiles.
Marx insisted that true socialism requires the state to own and manage all the country’s businesses – the (Communist) Party ran everything related to production and distribution of the national product. Modern socialists, such as those in Europe, have experience enough to know that when the state overextends to this degree the result is economic disaster. When the state takes over all businesses, it must prepare a single economic plan to replace all the millions of economic plans pursued by individual workers, consumers, small and private businesses, corporations and multinational corporations, not to mention all the nation’s normal public, governmental business. The state determines everything that will be produced, what firms, factories, and farms will produce it, who will distribute it, sell it, and consume it, and how much each individual product will cost.
No socialist state has ever been able to do this satisfactorily. In the United States the government was incapable of rolling out effectively even a partial, introductory plan for about 16% of the national economy with Obamacare. After a number of decades of trying to meet the nationalization and planning challenge, socialism passed away from the European and central planning economies without a whimper. The only thing remaining from the socialist tradition in these now-reformed capitalist economies was the practice of income redistribution. Countries continuing and expanding the redistribution practice still had socialist political parties, but had no genuine socialism. Since most non-radical and even conservative political parties also approve of and actively engage in income redistribution policies, such policies alone can hardly be said to represent socialism.
True socialism, including nationalization of industry and direct, state management of the entire economy, is what occurred in the Soviet Union. No informed socialist would call the Soviet economic system “communism.” Those who suffered through this experiment called it “Marxist-Leninist socialism,” not communism.
Being tyrannical and dictatorial did not make Stalin’s socialism a communist system. Straightforward political and economic necessity caused Stalin’s system to be tyrannical and dictatorial. It will inevitably be so wherever true socialism is attempted for reasons I elaborate on frequently elsewhere. It is true that wherever Marxist economies have existed, and wherever Marxist advocates have been numerous, “communist” parties have been established. These have always advocated the revolution of which Marx dreamed with fondness. But the communist parties of Eastern Europe never came close to establishing a “communist” economy or country. They always established central planning and full state ownership of the means of production or “Marxist-Leninist Socialism.” That is genuine socialism, which is implemented by communist parties in “communist countries.”
So what is communism then? Communism was the dream of Marx and his followers for the future. They never fully described what it would be, but offer some supposition on how it might in some distant future era be achieved. As the Christian dreams of and hopes for heaven, the Marxist-Leninist socialist dreams of and hopes for the arrival of communism.
After communist parties have gained control, they must maintain it by preventing a counter-revolution of the bourgeoisie or former capitalist class. They must assure full compliance with the nation’s implementation of the national economic plan. The cooperation of all citizens and workers would be secured through the dictatorship of the proletariat under the “vanguard of the party.” (You comply or get locked up or silenced in some cold part of the country.) Once that is accomplished and “people are no longer exploiting people,” society can then experience the “withering away of the state.” The state, as viewed by good socialists, is merely a police force to keep the unwashed “deplorables” under control. When society is working together in the harmony of a communist utopia, there is no more need for a political state. Central government can then disappear.
Exactly how that will work, nobody really knows. Karl Marx was so busy trying to stoke up a revolution of the working class that he had no time to write about any vision he might have had regarding the utopian future communists still believe to be indefinitely far away. Marx was too busy trying to solve the microeconomic transformation problem that befuddled his years of trying to be an economist in the British Museum; he never had time to explain to us his vision of reaching communism, if he really had one.
Thus, communism is the distant dream of those who find the only solution to the human problem of poverty to be the extermination of all capitalists, the dictatorship of the centrally planned economy, and the passage of enough time for people gradually to become nice again, to work together to overcome the challenges of nature, and for the state to shrivel up and go away. Thus communism is not what communist parties do – they establish centrally planned socialism, not communism. Marx always hoped communism would be achieved automatically after the communist parties had slaughtered enough of their recalcitrant subjects to make the world nice again. Presumably, citizens could then gradually go off to enjoy a life of video games and recreational drugs.
If you order a copy of Socialism: Origins, Expansion, Decline, and the Attempted Revival in the United States, you won’t read much about communist fantasies. But you can learn a ton about the socialism you are just beginning to really understand. A pdf or Kendall Reader copy of the book ordered from Amazon costs next to nothing, and even the hard copy is only a fraction of what Palgrave Macmillan would have sold it for.