difference between communism and socialism

[flaming bolshevik]

I've heard people call themselves communists and socialists so I'm guessing that there is a difference between the two. What is it?
Btw sorry for the dumb question but this has been bothering me for a while.

[Blake's Baby]

Depends who you ask.

Marx and Engels used them to mean the same thing. So do a lot of us now.

The reason that they're differentiated in popular imagination is because the most of the Socialist parties, which mostly existed on a Marxist programme before WWI, betrayed the working class and joined their ruling classes in support of the war. Only a very few of the Second (Socialist) International stayed loyal to the working class; mostly, they began to call themselves Communists.

So in the early 20th century you basically had bourgeois 'Socialist' parties, and proletarian 'Communist' parties. But this doesn't mean that 'socialism' is bourgeois, because the 'Socialist' parties were named in the period when they stood for 'socialism' - that is, what we would mostly understand as communism. The fact that they were called 'Socialist', and became bourgeois, doesn't alter the meaning of 'socialism', it just means they should have called themselves 'Vicious Nationalistic Traitor Parties'. Socialism is still socialism.

[jookyle]

The problem with this kind of question is that different people will give you different answers.

Historically speaking, at least up until the 20th century, the terms were used pretty interchangeably.

One of the more common answers to the question is that socialism comes before communism. It is the transitional period in which the state still exists and in which the reorganization of society,capital,production etc. takes place. Communism is the higher stage, the second stage, in which there is no state, classes have been destroyed, in other words,the goal has been reached. Socialism is the transition with communism the goal. This chapter of Lenin's The State and Revolution deals with the matter in detail: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm#s2

Some people, especially in the west, do not see socialism and communism as leading to one another. Many of these people equate Marxism with communism while socialism can exist without marxism. This is the view of many people who call themselves "democratic socialist". A lot of people in the west use the term socialism to refer to a liberal system that is simply highly regulated rather than what a marxist would consider socialism.

These, I would say, are the most common usage of terms, but I am also sure every tendency is capable of giving a unique answer to the question.

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

The word 'socialist' itself was actually a pretty broad term for many years. This is why proto ancaps like Benjamin Tucker called themselves socialists because for the longest time it simply meant any solution to the 'labor problem'. Even Lysander Spooner, one of the Godfathers of American libertarianism, was a member of the First International.