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Topic Summary

Posted by: Mitthrawnuruodo
« on: June 30, 2018, 02:51:00 PM »

I think it's important to distinguish these terms between the colloquial and the political context, i.e. how a guy on the street uses the words compared to the textbooks.

Marxism - colloquially, Marxism means agreement with Karl Marx's outlook on capitalist society, but not necessarily advocating the following ideas of revolution, proletariate dictatorship, or a classless stateless society. Politically, this term only really crops up as an identifier for a certain brand of ideology, e.g. the Soviet Union was Marxist-Leninist as opposed to China which is Maoist, a different kind of Communism.

Socialism - colloquially, this means left-wing economic policy - nationalised industries and services, income tax, etc. In the Communist Manifesto, Socialism is a stepping-stone to Communism, the means to the end; a Socialist Society is one where changes are being made to achieve Communism. Communist States (which I'll get to next) claim to be such societies and use the word Socialism as a description of their ideology, policies and practices during the transitory period.

Communism - colloquially, Communism means left-wing dictatorship and a Communist would be someone who advocates for one. In the Communist Manifesto, Communism is the end-game, a functioning classless stateless society. A Communist State is one with a single-party dictatorship, and Communism means supporting the achievement of a classless stateless society. Note that a country with a Communist government in a multi-party democracy is not considered a Communist State.
Posted by: Pali
« on: February 18, 2018, 09:33:00 AM »

Note: the following is based on my limited understanding of Marxism and the history of socialism and communism, and I should not be taken as an expert or authoritative source regarding any of the subject matter at hand, only someone providing food for thought.  If you find scholarly or historical sources that contradict what I say, I almost certainly deserve less benefit of the doubt than they do, and the reasonable course of action is to assume I am in error and they are correct. (edit: I originally had a much longer post because I'm drunk and post-happy, but I deleted the majority of it as extraneous)

Quote from: Daanishmalik on February 17, 2018, 01:48:11 PM
Socialism and communism were seen by karl Marx as the perfect world

Not quite.  As Corey pointed out quite eloquently earlier in this thread, socialism and communism are not the same thing, and Marx foresaw socialism as an economic and political ideology that would grow within the wealthy industrializing societies of his time - the UK, central and western Europe, and the USA especially being where he expected support for communism to grow with the most strength, given the rapidly growing class of industrial laborers in those societies.  I don't know that Marx necessarily saw a socialist society as a "perfect" society, whatever that entails, but he definitely expected a socialist society to be the natural result of growing economic disparities among the wealthy and working classes once the working classes realized just how much they were getting screwed by the wealthy.

So who knows, maybe the next few years of US politics will finally prove him right. ;)
Posted by: Daanishmalik
« on: February 17, 2018, 01:48:11 PM »

Socialism and communism were seen by karl Marx as the perfect world
Posted by: Mr.Puerto
« on: September 11, 2017, 11:42:18 PM »

Quote from: Illidan Stormrage on September 11, 2017, 10:59:57 PM
*Writes down this for future Honors History class*
Unless you are covering Russian history, not many courses are going to cover something like that.Especially in American High School. But its good to keep for college.
Posted by: Illidan Stormrage
« on: September 11, 2017, 10:59:57 PM »

Quote from: Mr.Puerto on September 11, 2017, 06:18:21 PM
writing this down to use this semester
*Writes down this for future Honors History class*
Posted by: Mr.Puerto
« on: September 11, 2017, 06:18:21 PM »

Quote from: Corey on September 10, 2017, 06:33:22 PM
Close but not quite. To put them fairly simply:

1. Marxism: A political theory, which aims to be explanatory and predictive of how society functions, not to be confused directly with communism. So, before Marx there was a lot of other kinds of political thought and theories, but Marx was arguably most concerned with a guy named Hegel who you'll primarily hear talked about with the idea of a historical dialectic, which basically means the idea that two opposing idea come together (called the thesis and antithesis) to form a new idea, the synthesis, or the problem, the reaction to the problem, and then the solution. What Marx did was take the idea of the historical dialectic and apply it to material things, because he believed that Hegel was too abstract. He wanted to deal with the actual material world, not just ideas. He was also reacting to very common belief in a teleological process of society developing- that society ended up how it was because it was always heading towards this way, and whatever happens is unavoidable. Instead it was a series of reactions against the previous models, resulting in conflicts and new systems, which got people to where they are now (or, where they were in the 1800s). Marx then contextualized society and human history within the ideas of the means of production, and who controls them. Essentially, how does each kind of society organize itself in order to interact with and distribute material goods? When people think of Marx, they like to focus on the idea of communist revolution, which is certainly a large part of his broader philosophy, but a lot of his work was about talking about what is capitalism, and how did humans get to it, which you can separate and find value in even without buying into the idea that society should or must be moving towards communism, which is a different kind of thing.

2. Communism: A political ideology, ie a set of beliefs how the world should be organized. The core tenets of communism is that the means of production are owned by society, and not for the accumulation of wealth for one class or set of individuals through the exploitation of another, because there'd be no such thing as class- each person contributes what they're best at, and society gives everyone what it can. An important distinction between this and other types of socialism is the role of the state- communism, in its end form, involves the abolition of the state. Many Marxist communists would argue that a state like the Soviet Union, for example, would be called on the very extreme end of "state capitalists," because instead of the society and the means of production (machinery and industry) being owned by and for the people as a whole, it was owned and run by the state, though within Marxist Communism, state capitalism was seen as a sort of a temporary measure between capitalism and communism. Really though, if you're looking at the Soviet Union, you're not really looking at anything that theoretical communism would have really been about so it can sometimes skew people's perceptions of it- there's also the idea that an attempt for communist state would necessarily become what Stalinism or Marxism-Leninism ended up being in the Soviet Union, even if it's not what anyone but the Party wanted.

3. Socialism: Another grouping of political ideology. Communism is socialism, but not all socialism is communism. Communism is basically socialism taken to one far end of the spectrum. Socialism, at its most basic, involves some level of services being provided to all people with as close to possible as equal access. At one end, you could look at something like how health care in Canada works, and on the other you could look at communism- both are technically different types of socialism. There are softer forms of socialism where most market forces are still in play, but you have the social safety net of things like universal health care, or universal education, or whatever else, typically owned and operated by the state and funded with taxes. This is essentially what you'd see in most European countries and Canada. Every country has some level of it though, it's just a question of how far it goes and when you wanna start calling something socialist- American Medicare is a somewhat socialist aspect to your medical system, save that it only applies after a certain age.


tl;dr

Marxism: Political theory. An explanatory framework based on material analysis of history.

Communism: A political ideology, which can be seen as a subset of socialism. Several forms, including Marxism-Leninism, but mostly a bit more concisely defined than socialism.

Socialism: A broader spectrum of political ideologies, which can involve anything from specific ideas on specific topics (ie health care, education, etc) to democratic socialism to communism.

writing this down to use this semester
Posted by: Corey
« on: September 10, 2017, 06:33:22 PM »

Close but not quite. To put them fairly simply:

1. Marxism: A political theory, which aims to be explanatory and predictive of how society functions, not to be confused directly with communism. So, before Marx there was a lot of other kinds of political thought and theories, but Marx was arguably most concerned with a guy named Hegel who you'll primarily hear talked about with the idea of a historical dialectic, which basically means the idea that two opposing idea come together (called the thesis and antithesis) to form a new idea, the synthesis, or the problem, the reaction to the problem, and then the solution. What Marx did was take the idea of the historical dialectic and apply it to material things, because he believed that Hegel was too abstract. He wanted to deal with the actual material world, not just ideas. He was also reacting to very common belief in a teleological process of society developing- that society ended up how it was because it was always heading towards this way, and whatever happens is unavoidable. Instead it was a series of reactions against the previous models, resulting in conflicts and new systems, which got people to where they are now (or, where they were in the 1800s). Marx then contextualized society and human history within the ideas of the means of production, and who controls them. Essentially, how does each kind of society organize itself in order to interact with and distribute material goods? When people think of Marx, they like to focus on the idea of communist revolution, which is certainly a large part of his broader philosophy, but a lot of his work was about talking about what is capitalism, and how did humans get to it, which you can separate and find value in even without buying into the idea that society should or must be moving towards communism, which is a different kind of thing (don't get me wrong, Marx believed both those things, but his analysis still had some value even without that).

2. Communism: A political ideology, ie a set of beliefs how the world should be organized. The core tenets of communism is that the means of production are owned by society, and not for the accumulation of wealth for one class or set of individuals through the exploitation of another, because there'd be no such thing as class- each person contributes what they're best at, and society gives everyone what it can. An important distinction between this and other types of socialism is the role of the state- communism, in its end form, involves the abolition of the state. Many Marxist communists would argue that a state like the Soviet Union, for example, would be called on the very extreme end of "state capitalists," because instead of the society and the means of production (machinery and industry) being owned by and for the people as a whole, it was owned and run by the state, though within Marxist Communism, state capitalism was seen as a sort of a temporary measure between capitalism and communism. Really though, if you're looking at the Soviet Union, you're not really looking at anything that theoretical communism would have really been about so it can sometimes skew people's perceptions of it- there's also the idea that an attempt for communist state would necessarily become what Stalinism or Marxism-Leninism ended up being in the Soviet Union, even if it's not what anyone but the Party wanted.

3. Socialism: Another grouping of political ideology. Communism is socialism, but not all socialism is communism. Communism is basically socialism taken to one far end of the spectrum. Socialism, at its most basic, involves some level of services being provided to all people with as close to possible as equal access. At one end, you could look at something like how health care in Canada works, and on the other you could look at communism- both are technically different types of socialism. There are softer forms of socialism where most market forces are still in play, but you have the social safety net of things like universal health care, or universal education, or whatever else, typically owned and operated by the state and funded with taxes. This is essentially what you'd see in most European countries and Canada. Every country has some level of it though, it's just a question of how far it goes and when you wanna start calling something socialist- American Medicare is a somewhat socialist aspect to your medical system, save that it only applies after a certain age.


tl;dr

Marxism: Political theory. An explanatory framework based on material analysis of history.

Communism: A political ideology, which can be seen as a subset of socialism. Several forms, including Marxism-Leninism, but mostly a bit more concisely defined than socialism.

Socialism: A broader spectrum of political ideologies, which can involve anything from specific ideas on specific topics (ie health care, education, etc) to democratic socialism to communism.
Posted by: tlmiller
« on: September 10, 2017, 06:32:48 PM »

Marxism and Communism are both a form of socialism.  Socialism is a "generic" government type.  The other 2 are derived from socialism, but have important differences that make them different.
Posted by: Mr.Puerto
« on: September 10, 2017, 05:40:24 PM »

Quote
Quote from: Illidan Stormrage on September 10, 2017, 04:50:49 PM
I was only asking because I wanted to know since I was reading about them.

So Communism is just a extreme form of Marxism which is a form of socialism?

simply put yes,  but its a lot deeper than that. I would keep reading on that. Since I don't know the detailed differences between all of them.
Posted by: Illidan Stormrage
« on: September 10, 2017, 04:50:49 PM »

I was only asking because I wanted to know since I was reading about them.

So Communism is just a extreme form of Marxism which is a form of socialism?
Posted by: Pentastar Enforcer
« on: September 10, 2017, 12:23:49 AM »

They're easy to know the basics, but once you get into the whole mess of it, political ideologies become some of the most indecisive, confusing, misleading, messes of things I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and I'm a Poly-Sci major so I have to mess with them a lot. Please keep this forum clean of political stuff. This is one of my few non-politics safe havens.

Now if you wanna talk Imperial Politics and the issues with Rebel Scum, I'm all ready.
Posted by: Mr.Puerto
« on: September 10, 2017, 12:20:20 AM »

Very simple overview I think we have the no politics rule here as well

Marxism came before communism, its based teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Socialism is the public and collective ownership of production and so on. Its based on equality. it started a little bit earlier than the rest.

Communism comes from the followers of Marxism. Its where the worker takes over and all property is owned publicly and everyone is paid according to their needs and ability.

USSR was based on Communism, however it was not a true communist nation.  It was Leninist and Stalinist.
Posted by: Illidan Stormrage
« on: September 09, 2017, 10:34:21 PM »

Can someone please explain these things to me? They confuse the hell out of me.
also what makes them different from each other?
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