Someone help settle an argument with a friend

[GodLike1001]

we are both noobs when it comes to communism and socialism,

however my idea is:

socialism is same as communism...but in communism, theres no govt..whereas socialism has a state that provides for the everyone...

both provide free resources and free resources means profit cannot exist, which means wages cannot exist

wage labour is a capitalist idea...and socialism with wage labour is socialist capitalism.

My friend believes socialism has wage labour where the workers all work for the govt and are paid by the govt.

any help?

[Raúl Duke]

we are both noobs when it comes to communism and socialism,

however my idea is:

socialism is same as communism...but in communism, theres no govt..whereas socialism has a state that provides for the everyone...

both provide free resources and free resources means profit cannot exist, which means wages cannot exist

wage labour is a capitalist idea...and socialism with wage labour is socialist capitalism.

My friend believes socialism has wage labour where the workers all work for the govt and are paid by the govt.

any help?

In a sense, your friend could be right depending on what kind of socialism one is talking about.

Although, in the anarchist view of socialism there will be money, the economy will mostly be managed (at least in the micro-level if communes and their community councils make macro-level economic decisions, etc) by workers via workplace councils so in a sense there wouldn't be any wage slavery per se even if they're getting paid cash remuneration.

[Tablo]

The term Socialism simply means democratic control of the economy and the workplace from my perspective.

[Zanthorus]

Well "socialism" can mean a lot of things but from my perspective at least it only really has meaning as an antithesis to "capitalism" and thus as a society without capital (Which could also be labelled as communism, the associated mode of production or the Republic of Labour following Marx, along with the thousands of other names conferred on such a society by various other writers).

Now from a Marxist perspective, "capital" doesn't just signify means of production, land etc it signifies specifically the divorce of the producers from their conditions of production. The worker confronts her own conditions of production as something alien instead of appropriating them collectively. Wage-labour can only exist as a corrolary to capital. This unity between wage-labour and capital occurs even in co-operatives where the capital relation is managed collectively by the workers. In these enterprises the form is changed, the management of the relationship, but not the content, the capital relationship itself. Capital as a relation can only be overcome at the same time as the abolition of it's corrolary, wage-labour.

[DaComm]

we are both noobs when it comes to communism and socialism,

however my idea is:

socialism is same as communism...but in communism, theres no govt..whereas socialism has a state that provides for the everyone...

both provide free resources and free resources means profit cannot exist, which means wages cannot exist

wage labour is a capitalist idea...and socialism with wage labour is socialist capitalism.

My friend believes socialism has wage labour where the workers all work for the govt and are paid by the govt.

any help?

The defining difference between Socialism and Communism is that Socialism has a worker's state, that is, there exists a means for the workers to suppress reactionaries/Capitalist sympathizers and to defend from bourgeois invasion. The state does not provide for everyone, the state is the means by which the dominant class imposes it's rule. Communism has no classes at all, so the state ceases to be. Socialism as Marx described is not free access, Marx described Socialism as "From each according to his contribution", that is, you receive compensation via the hours/intensity you work. This however, transforms into free access (higher communism) because of a super-abundance of goods created by superior productivity from a worker-controlled society. Socialism is not Socialism if it has wage labor (assuming we are talking about wage labor that we see in Capitalism, that is a fraction of what worker's should get). Your friend is incorrect in the Marxist sense of Socialism, but you are incorrect too on a few issues.

[ContrarianLemming]

you're not going to get a good defined single answer from a forum devoted to anarchists and marxists.

To a leninist, socialism is a tranitional state, to anarchists and most socialists, it's workers control. To mainstreaers its "big government" or "welfare states".

It's all hocus pocus with definitions.

I'm inclined to call socialism workers control and communism = classlessness.

[mikelepore]

We can't settle the argument for you because the answer is: There are numerous factions that use the words very differently. Each of the factions claims that the way they use the words is right, and the other factions are wrong.

Personally, I come from a branch of Marxism that says the difference between socialism and communism is that socialism was Marx's and Engels's preferred name for the new system, but they temporarily decided to use their second-favorite name for it, communism, during a few decades in which the use of the word socialism would cause others to draw the wrong conclusion that one was talking about the theories not of Marx but of Saint-Simon, Owen or Fourier.

Most people at this site are influenced by the Russian post-1905 usage of the words, which treats socialism and communism as different systems of society.