Difference between socialism and communism?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

What exactly is the difference? I know that socialism is the stage before communism but I don't really understand why there are two distinct marxist organizations.What is exactly the point of having two marxist groups that persue the same goal?

Shouldn't there only be communist parties if socialist parties, essentially, work towards the same goal?

[Tablo]

It depends on your definition of the term Socialism. For Marxists it is the transitional period from Capitalism to Communism in which the workers establish a dictatorship of the proletariat to reshape society. Communism is the end goal where the world is free and equal and operate under a planned gift economy.

All Marxists are Socialists and Communists.

[fa2991]

A lot of non-communist "socialist" organizations are social democratic, which means that they believe you can create socialism by electing a socialist party in a capitalist democracy, which is bullshit. That may be the source of your confusion.

[ContrarianLemming]

Socialism is workers control, communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society.

[Reznov]

Socialism is workers control, communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society.

What if you would prefer to stay in Socialism because that would help create a drive for continuing to advance in fields like Medicine, science etc... (i.e. Cuba and their big number of doctors, could we produce as many in communism?)

[ContrarianLemming]

What if you would prefer to stay in Socialism because that would help create a drive for continuing to advance in fields like Medicine, science etc... (i.e. Cuba and their big number of doctors, could we produce as many in communism?)

I don't see why communism woudn't be as efficient, if not far more efficient.

Iknow you might not notice, but you are implicitely taking the line that a stateless society wont be as creative, efficient, and that a socialist state is necessary to get there because it's more directed. Basically the line that hierarchy = order.

[Zanthorus]

What exactly is the difference?

This will vary from tendency to tendency.

I think before Marx and Engels came on the scene there wasn't really much of a distinction between "socialism" and "communism". You can even read early letters by Marx where he calls Pierre Proudhon (The first person to call himself an anarchist and the originator of a kind of "market socialism") a communist, and he even invited the latter to be the French correspondent for the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels. When the time came to write up the aims of the Communist League though, Marx and Engels found it necessary to distuinguish themselves from the various forms of reactionary and conservative socialism, as well as those socialists who didn't base themselves on the workers' movement ("Utopian socialists"), and those who recognised the necessity for the working class seizure of power but who didn't yet agree with the need to abolish capitalism as an economic system ("Democratic socialists"). The thing to keep in mind is that this distinction between socialism and communism was a distinction between two movements, that is, between those who recognised the necessity for the working class seizure of power and the abolition of commodity production, wage-labour, money and market exchange, and between those tendencies that in some ways tried to alleviate the suffering of the working-class, but failed to realise what Marx and Engels thought was necessary to accomplish this.

This division was very quickly dropped once the revolutions of 1848 had taken their course. In the 18th Brumaire Marx talks of "revolutionary socialism" and "communism" as essentially interchangeable. For most of their writings, Marx and Engels used socialism and communism interchangeably to refer to the free association of producers.


I know that socialism is the stage before communism

This particular distinction comes from the second international and is carried on by the majority of those calling themselves Leninists (The exception being the various Bordigist tendencies and all those tendencies which derive themselves from the Left faction of the Partito Communista d'Italia). In the SI it was used because the maximum programme of revolutionary social-democracy was a form of beuracratic-state commodity production which couldn't be characterised plausibly as communism (The "pope" of second international Marxism, Karl Kautsky, once said that money would have to be used until something better could be found) so this distinction proved useful in their move away from communism proper. For the various "Marxist-Leninist" and Trotskyist tendencies it also served to allow them to characterise the Soviet Union as either some form of "socialism", or something that could plausibly become socialism if only there was a "political revolution" which ousted the beuracrats running the fSU. Because of these associations, the distinction is generally dropped by Marxist tendencies which didn't/don't regard the fSU as a "workers' state" of any kind.

There is one other distinction between socialism and communism which can be made, and was made by Lenin in The State and Revolution and by the Italian "ultra-Leninist" Amadeo Bordiga in his critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of the USSR. According to this school of thought socialism is Marx's "lower phase of communism" in which money, wage-labour, market exchange and commodity production have all been abolished, but where a system of labour-time accounting is still used to plan production, as opposed to the "free access" which exists in the "higher phase of communism".

From Adam Buick's chapter on Bordigism in Non-Market Socialism in the 20th Century:



The following schema can serve as a re-capitulation of our difficult subject... :

Transition stage: the proletariat has conquered power and must withdraw legal protection from the non-proletarian classes, precisely because it cannot 'abolish' them in one go. This means that the proletarian state controls an economy of which a part, a decreasing part it is true, knows commercial distribution and even forms of private disposition of the product and the means of production (whether these be concentrated or scattered). Economy not yet socialist, a transitional economy.

Lower stage of communism: or, if you want, socialism. Society has already come to dispose of the products in general and allocates them to its members by means of a plan for 'rationing'. Exchange and money have ceased to perform this function. It cannot be conceded to Stalin that simple exchange without money although still in accordance with the law of value could be a perspective for arriving at communism: on the contrary that would mean a sort of relapse into the barter system. The allocation of products starts rather from the centre and takes place without any equivalent in exchange. Example: when a malaria epidemic breaks out, quinine is distributed free in the area concerned, but in the proportion of a single tube per inhabitant.

In this stage, apart from the obligation to work continuing, the recording of the labour time supplied and the certificate attesting this are necessary, i.e. the famous labour voucher so much discussed for a hundred years. The voucher cannot be accumulated and any attempt to do so will involve the loss of a given amount of labour without restitution of any equivalent. The law of value is buried (Engels: society no longer attributes a 'value' to products).

Higher stage of communism which can also without hesitation be called full socialism. The productivity of labour has become such that neither constraint nor rationing are any longer necessary (except for pathological cases) as a means of avoiding the waste of products and human energy. Freedom for all to take for consumption. Example: the pharmacies distribute quinine freely and without restriction.

In other words, for Bordiga, both stages of socialist or communist society (sometimes distinguished as 'socialism' and 'communism') were characterised by the absence of money, the market, and so on, the difference between them being that in the first stage labour-time vouchers would be used to allocate goods to people, while in full socialism this could be abandoned in favour of full free access. This view distinguished Bordiga from other Leninists, and especially the Trotskyists, who tended (and still tend) to telescope the first two stages and so have money and the other exchange categories surviving into 'socialism'.http://libcom.org/library/bordigism-adam-buick


Socialism is workers control

Well that depends. Since socialism is usually counterposed to capitalism, I don't think the term really has any meaning besides as a way of talking about a society which is post-capitalist and post-capital. Worker management of capital doesn't make it not capital.

[Queercommie Girl]

Not saying a socialist society won't be more productive than a capitalist one, but why does everyone focus so much on "productivity-centrism" anyway?

Only in the ultra-individualistic ultra-competitive US bourgeois culture perhaps. That itself will change under socialism.

Who would want to live in a society that is slightly more productive but also grossly unequal, where there is no co-operation, solidarity, compassion or friendship? I know I certainly don't. Why is "productivity" in this abstract and non-social sense so so important? :confused: Is life really just about "acquistion, acquisition, acquisition!" ad infinitum...?

[Queercommie Girl]

What if you would prefer to stay in Socialism because that would help create a drive for continuing to advance in fields like Medicine, science etc... (i.e. Cuba and their big number of doctors, could we produce as many in communism?)

It's based on worker's democracy.

No-one has the right to dictate exactly how long the period of socialism would last.

If workers democratically decide it would last, then it would, otherwise it won't. No-one can predict the future.