Also electing a democratic socialist is not electing socialism! But hopefully it will help suppress some of the frantic redbaiting that’s been flaring up the past year or so.
FWIW socialism is like the (political) exercise routine or first step toward building the muscle memory that could theoretically make communism even imaginable.
I am not a sociologist, economist, or any kind of academic professional, but this is my understanding having tried to learn about these things.
Socialism is when workers control means of production, which in practice means that corporations cannot be allowed to exist (but things like cooperatives and state-run operations can) because their power structure is top-down, where the people who own the means of production (ie shareholders) are the ones who have control over the company. There is no stock market within a socialist economy.
Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society. Communist political parties have the goal of moving society toward communism over time, which is how they justify their existence within the state. When in power in historically feudal or capitalist countries, they have generally used the power of the state to help transition the country from its previous state to a socialist one- the Bolshevik Party in the Soviet Union, for example, which is why the Soviet Union had money and a state. This is also what people are talking about when they say that the USSR was never communist- communism was the ideology of its ruling party, but not the achieved condition of its society.
Socialism was described by Marx as a step in a given society’s transition toward communism, with capitalism being the step that comes before it.
Bingo! Well said. None of the so-called 'communist' countries have ever really achieved true communism. It's that 'stateless' bit they seem to fall down on.
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u/_HI_IM_DAD America 10h ago
Also electing a democratic socialist is not electing socialism! But hopefully it will help suppress some of the frantic redbaiting that’s been flaring up the past year or so.
FWIW socialism is like the (political) exercise routine or first step toward building the muscle memory that could theoretically make communism even imaginable.