What are the differences between communism and liberalism?

Please forgive my ignorance if the answers are obvious: I'm new here. I currently identify as a liberal (am I allowed to be on this site with that view?). I joined revleft to learn about communism, and see if I might agree with it (right now I don't know much about it, only that it's left-wing, and liberalism technically is too). What are the differences between the two? What are the similarities? I'm a working-class female person of colour, and consider myself socially liberal (Pro-Choice, Pro-LGBT rights, Pro-Egalitarianism, Anti-Patriarchy etc.), but I'm unsure what to think when it comes to economic issues. So far (I'm quite young) I've gone through life thinking that as long as I have all the social freedoms I want I don't care much about economic issues, but perhaps that is an unwise viewpoint to hold. I want to learn more.

Liberalism is concerned with a social equality and vague sense of fairness, while maintaining the capitalist system. Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society that exists after overthrowing capitalism.

It's a very narrow sense of fairness at that, like how everybody has a legal right to start a business. Of course, it's not really fair in a more broad sense since starting a business also requires money, education, and luck but they'll say its technically fair since there's no laws barring people from it. And women and minorities are basically equal in this extremely narrow view of fairness. Any economic disparity is really just because they're lazy, since hey, it's completely legal for them to work their way up right? A lot of liberals will even say they are for complete equality, but will laugh at any mention of abolition of money or class (actually a lot of them don't even think class divisions exist), economic equality is not even a thing to them. This jus goes to show how narrow and meaningless their conception of equality is

EDIT: oh and I forgot to mention, OP, there's a bit of a difference between American liberalism, which is somewhat like social democrats, and European ligeralism. As communists we oppose both, but i thought I would mention that my post addresses the broader definition of liberalism

How would/does a communist society function? I know very little about communism (I'm quite young and have spent my whole life in the UK, where the only time people usually heard about communism was in history lessons in school being told that Stalin was a dictator) and the concept of a stateless, moneyless society puzzles me. Classless I could accept, since class causes inequality, but I don't understand how a society can exist without money.

I disagree with the idea that liberals state they are for complete equality. The center-left liberals I have talked to are always very quick to quote John Rawls statement that inequality is only acceptable if those on the bottom benefit. They acknowledge that inequalities exist, so you end up giving the person who is slicing the cake the last piece that is cut. Basically, they want to allow people to be able to actualize they capabilities.

Oh, I guess my post to RTR is now irrelevant. :(

I am interested, OP, in why you don't care about "economic" issues, when economics ties into many of the things you say you're for or against?

Sorry to anyone if I take time to reply: since I'm new my comments are going through the moderators.

I think you're right for the most part, but in America I've come across a lot of liberals who genuinely think they are for equality, they don't even think class actually exists in some cases as everybody has a chance to start a business and pull themselves up. (As long as we're given free enterprise that is).

This idea that american liberals are for equality could also explain why american conservatives are so quick to label them as communists. It's because conservatives as well don't really see the difference between the liberals narrow conception of equality and actual abolition of class, probably due to them not recognizing the material hierarchies liberals protect as constituting inequality

I will say though that many of them seem to acknowledge non legal barriers, like patriarchy, and they will sometimes say that extreme wealth inequality can be problematic. But, they don't recognize capitalism and class as the root causes of the problems and therefore their proposed solutions never actually achieve any meaningful sort of "equality", even if they sometimes can have a superficial understanding of the issues.

I suppose it's not so much that I don't care so much as it is something that I've not yet had to deal with (I'm a young adult who still lives with my mother) so don't have an opinion on because I have no experience with/am not educated about the economy. That's why I came here to learn about alternative viewpoints.

To me (others feel free to correct) Liberalism is more about working within - or regulating - capitalism so that the people on the bottom can reap some benefits through redistribution of wealth, e.g. higher taxing on rich, welfare benefits for poor etc.

Communism is a completely different system to capitalism. Here the working class would control the means of production (all the equipment/buildings used to make things). This itself removes the ability for somebody (such as a factory owner) to exploit workers and make money from their labour. There would be no money, everything (food, clothing, material goods etc) would be distributed to whoever needed it. Things which would be in demand would be created more, and things not in demand would be made less with no excess waste. Explanations like this will probably make you have a hundred more questions but if you stick around and ask you will get good answers here.

It has effected you, though. It effects everyone. That's kind of the beauty of capitalism is that it operates so far in the background that it's hard for people to see the connection to it and themselves, except in the most blatant ways. You've got to start from the point that it is the economic structure itself that is at the base and ultimately influences almost everything we do, sometimes those things reinforcing the system itself.

Do you have any specific questions about communism, though?

What does communism support? People have mentioned what it doesn't support (e.g. capitalism), but what does it support instead?

- Under communism, how would the economy function?
- Does communism support all jobs being considered equal, like I've heard capitalists say? Because if so, I can't see how that could possibly work. If doctors and road-sweepers get paid equally very few people would want to be doctors. No one will want to spend years in medical school when they could just become a road-sweeper with much less education and get the same pay.
- What are communism's social stances? Abortion, Euthanasia, LGBT rights, recreational drug use, egalitarianism/feminism/men rights movements issues etc.

You don't mean socially liberal, you mean progressive. Liberalism, or social liberalism, involves an economic standpoint, even though it is popularly used as an equivalent of the earlier. Here, we all have the utmost agreement with these progressive stances, and at the same time stand in disagreement to the economic side of liberalism, which implies, for instance, the recognition of private ownership of socially useful productive wealth as 'legitimate'.

Liberalism is defined as an ideology which supports capitalism combined with support for certain freedoms, in certain instances coupled with support for progressive causes, and in other instances even with certain economic reforms which communists would agree with.

Meanwhile, communism is defined as the movement that will abolish the private ownership of the socially useful productive wealth, a movement which is not intellectually or arbitrarily designed but rather based around a Marxist understanding.

Communists also have doubts about whether liberalism is really able to fulfil liberal ideals, and in fact believe that communism fulfils some of these ideals much better.

The problem when people try to understand this is that they think that communism would be certain conditions applied to the present situation. No, we can't make money go away now. That is ridiculous. Money will be gone in a long time, in which many things will have changed, a lot. Surely in the highest evolution of a communist society money would not exist, but this is not where to start at for understanding communism.

Suffice it to say, however, that consumer-grade goods can all be freely distributed, that money is not the only incentive for people, and that in an event of say, nobody working, then such goods could be restricted to non-workers.

The same thing goes for the state. In another definition the state could be said to exist under communism, and surely a community and decision-making will exist, but this is not the Marxist understanding of the concept 'state'. It is not that Marxists re-define words, but it is rather that it is irrelevant to Marxists whether such a 'state' exists; rather, it is relevant about what is meant by 'state' in Marxism to not exist in the highest evolution of communist society.

And yeah, Stalin was a dictator, and the anti-communist propaganda is not saying that he was, but rather in how this fact is understood. There is a relationship between Stalin and communism, the propaganda is in manipulating the representation of this relationship.

In the UK, check the following political parties, which should give you more or less an idea of the views of most members of this forum, which vary a little depending on tendency:

Communist Party of Great Britain (PCC) (Marxists)
Socialist Party of Great Britain (Marxists - impossibilists)
Socialist Party (Trotskyists - CWI)

How a very very helpless worker under liberal-capitalism can make both ends meet is the very foundation which causes us and makes us communists. During the 60s, a cancer patient loses ownership to his house in order to cover his hospitalization expenses. We need not go further in discussing other topics or other issues.

When communists say that they are opposed to private ownership, does that just refer to no private industries (e.g. no one can own private factories or airways), or to no private property of any kind (e.g. no one can own a house, private land, or a car)?

Either way, why do communists oppose private ownership of any kind? If a person has worked, earned money, and used it to acquire private property, why should they not have the right to do so? It's their money, should they not have the right to decide how to spend it?

I'm no fan of the rich, but I don't think I agree with saying "sorry, I know you worked for 60 years and now you want to pass your self-created business on to your children so that they can benefit from your efforts, but I don't agree with private ownership so I'm confiscating your property".

Are you American? I'm British, so have socialised healthcare (which I absolutely love), so people in my country don't have to choose between healthcare bills or losing their home. I am extremely opposed to the way American healthcare works. How a country can claim to be 'first-world' yet leaves its citizens to die if they can't afford healthcare is unbelievable.

The earlier, but personal ownership will most likely undergo a transformation in communist society.

That is a moralist-style argument. Our opposition to private ownership of the means of production (i.e. not personal goods) does not come from such arbitrary principles, but rather from a Marxist understanding.

Think of it another way, why should someone be able to deprive society from making use of its wealth in order to ensure the good of all? The legitimacy of any property is based not on any such arbitrary principles, but rather on who has more power of coercion/violence, and indeed historically property has had a bloody history.

We're not doing individual confiscations, but rather confiscation would be part of a plan of making a broader social transformation which would create a new and better society in which his children would not even need to have such a business. They could still participate in their business, but in equality with all others, not with a supreme role in it.

Again, we don't regard property on such arbitrary principles as 'someone worked for 60 years on it'. Great Britain worked a lot in building their empire (which includes the individual effort of a lot of people), yet that doesn't mean we shouldn't instantly trash it. What about people who have worked 60 years their whole life, yet can't have even a decent livelihood because of capitalism? And again, with an understanding in vacuum it may seem that their problems may be able to be fixed without challenging the legitimacy of private property. But what we say has nothing to do with an in-vacuum understanding.

And, so what if that person or their children doesn't like that? Big deal. They'll go living as everyone else does from then on. If society was ever fixed to such principles, then there would have never been progress throughout forms of society.

Part of the way to tell what communists support is to look at arguments about transcending capitalism. Regardless:

Communism is, eventually, the abolition of economy. When first starting out, though, after a revolution has happened that overturns the values of capitalism, it would be necessary to ration out scarce goods. Marx proposes, and I agree with him, that this would happen along the lines of a proportional remuneration system. That is, you work one hour and you get to draw out (after deductions have been made for social projects) one hour's worth of the general social product. Say, a TV takes half an hour of labor to make. Then you can request, through a social plan, two TVs for an hour of work you've done. The eventual goal is to have such great material abundance where working like this would become irrelevant, and things can be distributed according to "From each according to ability, to each according to need." That is, free access of all the things made by society. For this to be done, a complete automation of all toiling work would need to be achieved (which, personally, I think is something that isn't too far off in the future.)

This is the classic "garbageman" issue, which we get a question like almost on a weekly basis here. The fact of the matter is that people do become doctors for non-monetary reasons. Consider Cuba. Cuba isn't socialist, but the way their jobs are sussed out is such that a doctor does not make more than a teacher or a farmer. When you take that into account, take this into account: Cuba has a shit load of doctors. So many, in fact, that the government sponsors doctors to go and practice and train in other countries.

Aside from this, along with an economic revolution comes a social revolution. We'll be working in positions and fields, not in order to get paid (because this becomes unnecessary), but because it's something we want to do. If no one wants to do street sweeping work, we can get together and choose to automate that job (something that has been done to a large degree already.) Or we change the way we consider that job. Street sweeping isn't something that one person has to do. If it is a task that needs to be done, then the community would come together and figure out how to keep streets clean. I'm not an anarchist, but you can look at anarchist Catalonia to see this sort of dynamic in action, where community members just started driving buses because it was something that the community needed.

We support, generally, full abortion rights for all women, as well as the right to commit suicide if that is something a person wants to do. Of course we support LGBT rights and the right of LGBT folks to not be discriminated against. Ultimately, the end goal is freely cooperative labor that is not subject to things like discrimination. Many of these ills flow out of capitalism itself, which is what I meant earlier by the economy touching you in ways you wouldn't even realize.

Housing, cas, "private" land are all things that would need to be socialized. Of course, if you're living in a house, it shouldn't be the prerogative of a community to force you out over x-reason. But generally, when we talk about abolition of property, we are talking about the common ownership of the means of production.

No money would be acquired in communism, because there is no money. But that aside, certainly no one could "buy" land, either. If you wanted a piece of land, you would put in a request through a housing committee and, I'd imagine, you'd negotiate for the kind of land you wanted to live on. It's not "yours" in a legal sense, but you'd be living on it so it would be yours in a de facto sense, but society still has de jure ownership over it.

"Rights," also, are not natural. They are subject to the overarching ideology of a given society. Capitalism has property rights and capitalists fight for the enforcement of that right through the state; it's a bourgeois right. No right would exist as such in communism since society would have undergone a transformation where such a concept would be incoherent.

Why should people live off the product of others if they haven't earned it? If there is social ownership, then all of society has, in a sense, "earned" it and we all would decide how is best to distribute that land, rather than it going through a chaotic market or being passed down through familial hands. Inheritance itself is a the backbone of patriarchy, since inheritance is one of the primary reasons for patriarchal policies that we have in place today. The bourgeois family exists so the father has a clear lineage in which to pass down his property, etc.

While I don't think that people can collectively turn back time, I think it's worth noting that most of human's existence on this planet (derided in colonial nomenclature as "prehistory") has been in classless, stateless, moneyless societies characterized in many cases by relatively egalitarian relations, and in some cases by quite complicated non-binary notions of gender, highly developed use of traditional land-bases (including knowledge of plants, etc.), and so on.
I don't necessary see there being any reason why such societies should be outside of the contemporary political imagination (except as deeply problematic "noble savage" type fantasies) - not necessarily in a so-called "primitivist" sense, but as particular reference points among others for human beings' capacity for radically different ways of being.

All of that said, I imagine the question of "How will we economy?" being something that is worked out in the process of overturning capitalism: that is, the forms of communication and cooperation which develop in the struggle against capitalism will in-and-of-themselves constitute the coming-into-being of communism. To borrow an oft quoted (for a variety of different ends!) line from every communist's favourite poet:

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."

Which, y'know, I know sounds like I'm dodging the question. Honestly though, I'm interested in laying it out as an important starting point that needs to come before speculating on specifics of "Well how will the workers' councils know how many toasters to produce?" or whatever.