Subtle differences?

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What are the definable differences, in your own words, between communism, anarchism, socialism, and social democracy?

There seems to be a lot of discrepancy and misconception out there.

[Maraam]

'Social democracy' nowadays usually refers to 'nice' capitalists - the Labour Party in the UK, perhaps some aspects of the left wing of the Democrat Party, etc. Essentially capitalism with a human face. Historically however it was also used somewhat interchangably with communist (most prominent example, what later became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union started life as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party).

The difference between socialism and communism is more subtle. Generally, both actually refer to the same thing. Within Marxism, what's usually referred to as 'socialism' is the lower stage of communism - wherein property is communized, the workers own the means of production, and so on, but the state would still exist along with various other things. 'Communism' then refers to the higher stage of communism, a worldwide, stateless and moneyless society established after the withering away of the state (for a bit more on this, read Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme or Lenin's State and Revolution).

Anarchism is, broadly, a socialist movement, although there are many substrands. The primary difference between Marxism and anarchism is the latter's analysis of the state needing to be abolished straight away; compared to the Marxist analysis of the state 'withering away' once the economic and social preconditions are right because the state is created by the class contradictions in society, not the other way around.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

As far as political movements called "socialism" and "communism" go, these are one and the same thing (most Marxists would also say that socialism and communism as social forms are the same, but that's material for another thread) - revolutionary proletarian movements striving for the smashing of the bourgeois state and socialisation of all of the means of production. People who call themselves "socialist" but not "communist" are usually some kind of social-democrat.

Social-democracy (also called "socialism" - the "socialism" of the "Socialist International", which is to say no socialism at all - "democratic socialism" and so on) arises when representatives of workers' parties aim to administer the bourgeois state, in order to institute some sort of "nicer" (or sometimes "national", "progressive" etc.) capitalism.

Anarchism is a socialist current that advocates the immediate abolition of the state and denies the necessity of a transitional dictatorship of the working class. (This is true of class-struggle anarchists - of course there are "anarchists" who are anything but, like an-caps, Georgists and god knows what else.)