What is the difference between socialism and communism?

[Norrrm]

What is the difference between socialism and communism?

Socialism is a keyword/buzzword used to incite fear that the other party will control/ruin your personal economy/lifestyle.
.
Communism is a buzzword/keyword used to incite fear that the other party will ruin/control your personal lifestyle/economy.

[SonOfNebanaube]

1. neither is correct

But I will let someone else define it.

[RandySF]

2. Well

I guess my childhood neighbors fled the Soviet Union over nothing.

[RandySF]

3. Communism

Your house is not yours. Your car is not yours. Everything in your home belongs to the state aka “the people”.

[Fiendish Thingy]

4. Socialism and Communism share Marxist roots

Broadly speaking, Socialism is an ideology where the government controls the means of production, but differs from communism in that some forms of private property are allowed.

Most people, Sanders and AOC included, actually mean Social Democracy when they use the term Democratic Socialism. I can’t speak for Mamdani.

Social Democracy is a highly regulated capitalist system, where the well being of the people is prioritized over the profits of corporations.

[orthoclad]

6. You might call China a Social Democracy, then,

with the Party regulating their capitalism.

[Fiendish Thingy]

9. Hardly

But they aren’t a pure communist state either.

Most European nations, but especially the Scandinavian nations, are good examples of Social Democracies.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. "Social democracy" has to involve actual democracy, so that rules out (current) China

It is a centralized state that allows capitalist enterprises if they don't get political power. Once the ruling group has ensured they remain the ruling group, they may order things to provide benefits for the general populace, so it has aspects of socialism, but not democracy.

[orthoclad]

13. We have the electoral college. They elect the Party reps.

There is a level of democracy in both.

I'd say the main difference is that their Party controls their billionaires.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. It's not an open election for political power in China

The people elected are all faithful to the established one-party state, by law. The US electoral college, for all its potential imbalance in the power of voters, is still democratic - people with a wide variety of positions can run, and voters do get to choose their vote.

[orthoclad]

16. The way I think of it

what they call the Party is what we call the government. Both administer a State.

Big difference: recently, the franchise here is universal (after women and Blacks got the vote). Over there, the franchise is limited to members.

Here is what I see as the effective difference:
In China, they built brand-new hospitals within weeks of covid "coming out". After the first impulse to hush it up, they lost comparatively few people to covid.
In the US, our leader said it would go away like magic. We lost about three times as many people as we did from all causes in WWII - in half the time.

[stopdiggin]

11. you might. most people (and authoritive view) would not. - - - - - - - - - -(nt)-

[mr715]

5. Doesn't communism require constant revolution?

Or is that Engels

[Prairie Gates]

7. Never fails to amaze me how easily Trump manipulates people

Yeesh.

[Kid Berwyn]

8. In Communism, the state owns the wealth.

In Socialism, the state helps share the wealth among the People.

We live in the richest times in human history.

Thanks to a half century of Reaganomics, most of it is in very few pockets.

When will it trickle down?

[orthoclad]

12. Well, let's go to the wiki

Without writing an even longer essay:

Communism (from Latin communis 'common, universal')[1][2] is a political and economic ideology whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered on common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products in society based on need.[3][4][5] A communist society entails the absence of private property and social classes,[1] and ultimately money[6] and the state.[7][8][9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

Some communists like Trotsky would say that what the Soviet Union had until ~1954 was Stalinism, not communism.
Stalin starved a lot of people by collectivizing farms and confiscating crops. See Holomodor.

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.[3][4][5] It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems.[6] Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative,[7][8][9] or employee.[10][11] As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries.[12] Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.[13][14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

All the systems I know or have heard of make a distinction between personal property like furniture and private property like ownership of factories or whole industries.

Democratic socialism represents any socialist movement that seeks to establish an economy based on economic democracy by and for the working class. Democratic socialism is difficult to define and groups of scholars have radically different definitions for the term. Some definitions simply refer to all forms of socialism that follow an electoral, reformist or evolutionary path to socialism rather than a revolutionary one.
Social democracy is a socialist tradition of political thought.[147][148] Many social democrats refer to themselves as socialists or democratic socialists and some such as Tony Blair employ these terms interchangeably.[149][150][151] Others found "clear differences" between the three terms and prefer to describe their own political beliefs by using the term social democracy.[152] The two main directions were to establish democratic socialism or to build first a welfare state within the capitalist system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Democratic_socialism_and_social_democracy

My own take is that capitalism is economic feudalism. It arose when European countries were building empires. It relies on stolen labor. The African slave trade arose to provide abundant free labor for the nascent capitalists. In modern America, the average worker sees only about 5% of the value of teir labor.
I see socialism as economic democracy, where we have no "kings of industry", and planning occurs for the whole social body, not just the owner class.

Yes, it's complicated. But if I had to give a one sentence answer, I would say that communism has more State power.

[jmowreader]

15. This is what we were taught in Military Intelligence school

Capitalism, socialism and communism are economic systems defined by ownership of the means of production.

In other words, whoever owns all the businesses in the country defines whether it's a capitalist, socialist or communist country.

In a Capitalist nation, all the businesses are owned by non-government entities, either individual people or some sort of corporation.

In a Socialist nation, all the businesses are owned by The People as a collective whole.

In a Communist nation, all the businesses are owned by the government.

In reality there's no such a thing as a socialist nation. "The People as a collective whole" always means the government, because every communist country refers to its government as The People.

All these other systems like Nazism and Fascism are branches of either Capitalism or Communism.

Strangely enough, the actual National Socialist German Workers' Party, which you know as the Fucking Nazis (FN), was not a socialist party at all. It was a capitalist dictatorship. They used a command economy to direct the resources of the private sector - like having IG Farben produce chemicals needed for the war effort or Krupp make tanks - but the FN didn't own any businesses of their own. It gets better: the Weimar Republic, the first constitutional republic in Germany's history, was economically a communist country. The FN's first act after taking over was to reprivatize everything. China is also a capitalist dictatorship.

[orthoclad]

18. The wiki says C is building towards eventual socialism,

i.e., it does not exist until the State withers away. By that definition, there is no socialism today. What people call socialism these days is different.

A Trot might call China "state capitalism", I think, but I really don't have a good grasp on their system. The capitalists have power, but they are not paramount; the Party will have them shot, at need. Or at least imprisoned.

[Bettie]

17. What they are by defintion versus what they become in practice are

entierly different animals.

Pure communism, where each person has all they need and works according to their ability to do so is a neat idea. Egalitarian, everyone has thier needs met, government serves all equally.

Yeah, once human nature enters the room, that all falls apart....so, we've never really seen a successful communist society.

Pure socialsm runs into the same problem: greed.

Now, a combined socialsim/capitalism seems to work in europe, where people's needs are mostly met and there is still a consumer economy where some people can get wealthy, but there are at least some curbs on how much the wealthy can make the underclass suffer for their amusement.

What we have in the US? It sure isn't Democracy.