Explaining Communism and Socialism

Even though I was a political science major in my college days, it has taken me many years to really understand the various political philosophies of the world. I came to realize in my research over several decades that a great many people in both politics and the media are quite misinformed about the fundamentals of various world philosophies. Lately, I've been involved in numerous discussions trying to explain the differences in the various labels that are applied to individuals. Because some people have found these explanations helpful, and at their request, I am adding this information to my blog site. I hope it will help others to better understand how these terms apply in our current political environment. It should be kept in mind that these are philosophies and as such are always open to debate. That is the nature of philosophy. However, where it comes to describing a specific philosophy such as Communism, that philosophy is defined by its creator. In order to understand its meaning, people must go to the source and not rely on individual interpretations and claims of academic pundits of some particular political position. Claiming to believe a personal version of a philosophy does not make it a correct interpretation. You don't need to rely on my explanations or those of any other writer to get the correct version. You can read it for yourself in the source documents of their creators. That statement will also likely spark some debate, but I would encourage all to do their own research and I don't mean by reading some book that analyzes these things and offers their own opinions.

Lately, we've been hearing lots of liberal politicians calling themselves progressives or political moderates or various other terms that in my view simply obscure what they really believe. Even Glenn Beck who I believe has done an excellent job in trying to educate the public on the political issues, seems to have missed some key points where it comes to understanding political philosophy. He has made some distinctions about progressives that I view as a bit artificial and unnecessary. It took Marx an entire book to describe the principles of Socialism and Communism and no one that I know can boil that down in a few paragraphs, so I will try to confine my explanations to the most basic points I can. The first is to try to explain why Socialism and Communism are part of the same thing and cannot be separated. We have a great many politicians in Washington doing their best to avoid being called Socialist or Communists when they seem to not even understand the terms. Those who do are intentionally distorting their positions to avoid the negative connotation of those terms in America. Americans often associate communism with brutal totalitarians, like Mao in China, Stalin in the Soviet Union, and Castro in Cuba. However, many of our own members of Congress and the executive branch appear to hold very socialist communist ideologies. It isn't who they say they are or want to call themselves that matters. What matters is what they believe and do, and lately that has been very much a socialist communist behavior and legislation. I'll try to explain why that is true.

Many people try to avoid the label communist, while admitting to holding socialist values. They often believe there is a difference between communists and socialists and even talk about them as though they were different philosophies. They don't understand that socialism and communism are just different parts of the same philosophy. You cannot claim to believe in one without the other. Communism is simply the economic system and the ultimate goal in which all socialist systems seek to achieve. Socialism is the governmental system for administering policies and programs to achieve the communist objective. Nearly all socio political systems require two or more components to operate. There is the economic system like communism and capitalism and there are governmental administrative systems such as socialism and republicanism, as just two examples. Communism, like most philosophies is an idealistic governmental objective that has not been achieved by any nation. It is the economic system of in which a government operates. The polar opposite of communism is capitalism. Both are economic systems. There are no communist governments in any Western European country, nor socialist governments. All are capitalist parliamentarian systems who have adopted various socialist programs. None operates as socialist nations and it is a complete misunderstanding to call them socialist. They are not. Use of these labels becomes dangerous because people really do not understand what they mean. They tend to assume they know because they heard someone say it on television or heard a politician say it. Most politicians I've talked to don't seem to understand the differences either.

Republicanism relies on very little central control by a government unit and decentralizes authority down to the lowest levels of government, usually at a local level. Capitalism can only survive in such a government structure because it depends on the freedom of individual initiative and invention to grow. The more direct government control over capitalism, the less individuals can decide for themselves and the less they can achieve through individual initiative.

Socialism requires complete central control in order to operate, because it is government that makes all decisions for the economic system. It decides what will be produced and how much. It decides who receives the benefits of the output. It makes all decisions for the citizens. Communism must have such control in order to operate. However, the reason it has and will always fail is that government does not produce wealth and can only operate by extracting the money it needs from industry that it controls. As it pulls more and more resource from the system to support the bureaucracy, there is a constant draining of the wealth and unless production can outpace that extraction, people become poorer. Since there is never enough wealth to make everyone equally wealthy, people become equally poor, thereby creating a new society of discontented citizens ready for the next revolution. That is what has happened repeatedly in such countries.

When people refer to themselves as progressives or liberal democrats, often they mean they favor a strong central government that makes the economic decisions for the individual. Many believe that government knows best what is good for the majority. The problems with that belief are many, but the one that has happened throughout mankind's history is that the growth of central control is never satisfied. The power to control always leads to more control and the power is usually held by the elite's within the government. Governments are almost never static. In nearly every populous revolution, the goal was to take back power from the elites and give it back to the people. However, human social evolution seems to lead to individuals who believe they know what is best and begin again to seize power and control from the masses. Progressives might believe they are creating a benevolent central powerful government, but it has never turned out that way. Once control is acceded to the government it is seldom ever returned to the people until the next revolution occurs. Such governments have always ended in totalitarianism and that is why it is such a danger for the public to give away their freedom. What they get in return is never what they expected or wanted.

What we tend to have in most countries is a mixture of different political and economic philosophies in which the society has adopted various levels of the principles of one philosophy or the other. None are pure forms of anything, but tend to be in transition from one type of government to another. There are entire books devoted to these subjects and I cannot begin to get into the details in an article such as this. I am simply trying to explain here the most fundamental differences in these terms. For more information, readers need to buy a few books on the subject. Happy reading.