Communism was originally intended as what we now call "anarchocommunism", but is now associated with Stalinism and other authoritarian socialist regimes. Socialism is the economic system of communism, and of course of democratic socialism. It stresses workers' rights, public ownership of the means of production, egalitarianism, internationalism, and stuff like that.

Sorry if I was supposed to watch the video. Hope I didn't do something wrong.

one is a joke and one is a murderous state cult. You tell me which is which.

@ND those words didn't always mean the same things. Especially before they were tried.

@Ishmale, how did we come to the current definitions?

I think communism mean something more like Leninism than Stalinism or Marxism... But we have all these words...

The most popular interpretation of Communism was Marxism. The most popular interpretation of Marxism was Leninism. The Soviet Union was founded on Lenin's interpretation of Marxism (Leninism) and that's why it's the most popular "kind" of communism. Stalinism was Stalin's interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and Maosim was Mao Zedong's interpretation of Marxism-Leninism.

Most communist regimes implemented in the 20th century turned into repressive, authoritarian, state cults that utilized fear and murder. Marx's original philosophy though like any Utopian state while nice in theory is impossible to implement due to humanity's evolutionary state. Socialism is a joke because it is communist lite. It's a movement that is perpetually stuck because the movement's drivers are too afraid to completely transform the state they work within. There will always be vestiges of the past culture that works to influence and minority/majority opposition. Thus it can never truly succeed because it lacks the revolutionary nature of communism.

Capitalism with elements of Socialism works best I think. Europe is a good example.

What a useless video. It is just plain wrong on even the more basic points, like how to spell Engels.

I would not recommend it to a friend.

ND: You're assuming that all socialists are Marxists. Most socialists are not Marxists; there is nothing "communist lite" about the vast majority of socialists.

I think we're getting confused by the terms which are not well defined.

Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism, are much easier to define, because they were more specific implementations with a solid history of what happened

But the definitions of socialism and communism have clearly changed over time.

Also has anyone heard of distributism? It was (i believe) a largely right wing movement which advocate for less state control and more local power in distributed grouping. But was still very much inspired by some of the problems of industrialisation which socialism/communism was trying to solve.

(@spelling engels - if i recall correctly, this guy is a 19 year who loves linguistics and is making videos which have more information in them than i've ever seen conveyed in such a simple manner. I really like his product despite any problems - apart from spelling, what else does he get wrong?)

For Marx (and for the soviets), communism is a potential economic form. It is characterized by common ownership of the means of production and... that's pretty much it. That's Marxist communism. Socialism is a way to get there and socialist economic elements can exist alongside capitalist ones. Under capitalism, land, machinery, technology, and knowledge are all owned by a few people and profit is the driving factor in determining what is produced. We've experienced a bunch of different forms of capitalism, from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. These differ on the role of markets. Socialism comes in many forms, the same way that capitalism does. Associating communism with Stalin I think is a very American viewpoint, a relic of the cold war.
Other places have very different conceptions of communism. In Kerala the Communist Party of India (Marxist) were recently in power and brought in land reforms, and education reforms, and the female literacy rate is now the highest in India. Meanwhile the Naxalites (maoist guerillas) are occupying the middle of India. So modern Indians have a much different idea of communism than we would in North America (or Europe, western world in general). There have been a lot of states in modern history which have had 'actually existing socialism': Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, China, and North Korea off the top of my head. Most of these haven't lasted as socialist because of international intervention, especially from the USA. North Korea for instance, was a workers state supported by the USSR until the Korean war. After the country was totally dessimated by the US army it lost a lot of its resources, became much more concerned with its protection, and became a dictatorship; this worsened after losing the USSR as its only ally. Vietnam's communism disappeared after the Vietnam war. South American communists and socialists have trouble

A lot of Marxists (especially Trotskyists) feel the need to distance themselves from Stalin, to go out of their way to condemn Stalin. I don't really think this is necessary. Stalin was horrible and violent but his actions I think say a lot more about the dangers of state violence than about communism. The same way that studying Robespierre tells us very little about liberal democracies. The USSR was originally formed as a dictatorship of the proletariat, and then a dictatorship of one dude. The main charateristic or soviet socialism is a centrally planned economy.

"Vietnam's communism disappeared after the Vietnam war."

I feel this is disingenious. The US lost the vietnam war and the communist backed vietnamese took over the country. Then lots of things happened, including eventually the Vietnamese raising money from the international bond market - which means they proved to investors that they were a secure investment - this was without huge development aid from international 'developed' countries, they got money not in the form of aid, but in the form of investment bonds.

(Note: they did not have a particularily good relationship with Communist China, who saw them as a regional power challenging Chinese dominance, and were invaded by the about 300,000 Chinese troops after they took down the Kmer Rouge (a Chinese ally) They Chinese ( like the Americans and French before them) were also defeated. )

I know my narrative excludes a LOT of the details of how this happened (and not being friendly towards China was mostly a side-note. But i don't know the details... How much of China uses 'free markets' to stimulate economic growth? (In the so-called special economic zones) How mch of a mixed economy is Vietnam?

orathaic: You want me to give this video another view it doesn't deserve?

The 19-year-old may have an interest in linguistics, but this video is about history and ideology more than it is about linguistics. That the word 'Communist' wasn't really used between "The Communist Manifesto" and the foundation of the CPSU = interesting. Much of the the rest of the video = inaccurate or outright incorrect. As a tool for explaining communism and socialism, let alone the difference between the two, the video isn't very helpful.

The key words in ND's diatribe were in the first sentence where he said "communist" and "turned into" ...i.e., thus what he went on to describe was not communist.

Authoritarianism and totalitarianism are not synonymous with communism; even though your media and McCarthys would have you believe otherwise.

Arborinius makes some very good points.

"Associating communism with Stalin I think is a very American viewpoint, a relic of the cold war."

This is very true.

Victors write history. Capitalism has been the true victor for the past 400 or so years. It's worth bearing this in mind.

Actually, words gain meaning through use - so if communism means stalinism then that is because it is used to mean stalinism, particularily by americans...

^^exsctly.

However, there's a difference between denotation and connotation, and it's important to realize that Stalinism, by definition, was not communist (lowercase c). However, with the denotation of communism being "whatever the USSR comes up with next", communism became associated with Soviet policies.