The terms "communism" and "socialism" are often used interchangeably in American political discourse. That is to say, they're used incorrectly. They're even used incorrectly by people who recognize that others around them are using them incorrectly. Socialism is not "Communism Lite," where there's a mix of communism and capitalism. It does not mean a system of government like those found in Western Europe, where rich people trade stocks but poor people can still count on food and housing from the government. That is not socialism.
The Chinese Communist Party isn't communist any more than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic. These days, they're not even particularly socialist. An economy can have a mix of socialism and capitalism, but a government, by definition, cannot be communist. Almost everyone I hear using any of these terms gets all of them completely wrong--even "capitalism." Capitalism doesn't just mean "There are stores that sell stuff and you have choices about what to buy." There are socialist countries that have that. That's not what capitalism is.
Let's start by sorting out what these words mean.
Capitalism - One so often hears the phrase "free market" paired with the word "capitalism" that many people think that's simply a redundancy, and that the words are basically interchangeable. That's not the case at all. The key is in the name: capital. Karl Marx's master work was not The Communist Manifesto, as is often assumed by people who defend capitalism and attack socialism and communism without knowing what any of those words actually mean. His big, boring book that really laid out his ideas about socialism was Capital (or Das Kapital in the original German). In it, he meticulously dissected the (at that time fairly new) economic system he called capitalism.
In the beginning, when humans were nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no ownership of land. That's not to say that bands of humans didn't claim certain areas for themselves and chase off other bands of humans who intruded, but there were no deeds defining the precise borders of a plat of land and naming a certain person as the owner, let alone any such plats being sold and the deeds transferred. It would have been an alien concept to them.
Then once agriculture started to take root and all a family's food grew in one place, with enough surpluses to carry them through winters and dry seasons, there was no longer any reason to move in search of food. People invested their time into clearing land, building fences, keeping gardens weeded, and so on. As such, they had an interest in protecting this investment. They didn't want to be pushed off their land and have it claimed by others.
One problem with this is that when a farm family's children grow up, the farm that supported parents and ten children isn't going to support the two parents and ten children, plus ten children's spouses and 100 grandchildren. When the kids grow up, at least some of them need to go start their own farms. And when an entire community is doing this, they quickly run out of land. Fortunately, those farms are so productive that they not only produce surpluses to carry families through the winter, they also provide enough food to feed some people who don't have farms. These people, in turn, can specialize in occupations that provide convenience or expertise--as healers, potters, weavers, or what have you--to the farmers in exchange for food.
This system of trade that pre-dated money itself, was not capitalism. For one thing, almost everyone was self-employed or worked for their family. That's closer to what we'd call distributism.
Then there were thousands of years of other developments like the invention of money and hereditary rule and statism and a lot of other things that we don't need to get distracted by right now. But as we're skipping through time here, let's pause briefly to observe one thing that really grew with agriculture, a thing that scarcely anyone had any real use for before then--slavery.
What's the point of slavery? The slave owner has more work to do than he's able or willing to do on his own or with his family's help, but he still wants to own more than he's capable of producing. All his technology (whatever that is) has made him as productive as he can be, but he still wants more. To get what he wants, he needs a scheme where he can get someone else to do the work, and then claim ownership of what they've produced. Various such schemes have been devised over the ages, from debt to taxation, but the simplest of them is plain old slavery, where a person claims ownership of another person just as they might claim ownership of a sheep or a cow.
Americans, particularly, have a tendency to think of slavery only in the form in which it existed in the United States until that was abolished under Abraham Lincoln. That one's called "chattel slavery." It's where a slave is property like any other piece of property. You can buy it, sell it, trade it, lend it out, use it for profit or pleasure, even destroy it. It's a pretty horrible and psychopathic way to think of a human being.
But that's not the only form of slavery that has ever existed. The Vikings were known to have captured, bought, and sold slaves, but they society also allowed slaves to advance in the social hierarchy and eventually not be slaves anymore. Mesoamerican peoples had temporary slavery, where a person might work for a time as a slave in order to pay off a debt, often as a result of gambling. Under feudalism, the serfs were seen as being part of the land itself, much like wildlife, so that the owner of the land controlled them, but they couldn't be sold to other landowners. As populations grew and non-farming workers formed guilds of specialists, apprentices served a term of temporary slavery, wherein they did whatever work their master told them to do with no pay other than food and shelter, so that they could learn the trade and eventually have apprentices of their own. Various cultures throughout history have and still do force convicted criminals or prisoners of war to do work, with or without pay.
Controversy exists over whether any of those things can rightly be called "capitalism," so let's compromise and call them "proto-capitalism."
Capitalism is a system in which the owner of a thing--a farm, a machine, a share of a business--also owns anything produced by that thing, no matter who actually does the work of producing it. So if you own a farm, for example, and someone else comes and grows the vegetables and tends the animals, and then brings you food or money or whatever other form of payment just because you're the owner, that's capitalism. It doesn't matter whether that person is a slave, an indentured servant, a convict, a prisoner of war, a debtor, an apprentice, a tenant, a serf, a volunteer, or whatever other sort of relationship might compel them to do this. If they do the work, and you're entitled to at least a piece of what they produced just because you own the resource they used to do the work, even if you didn't lift a finger (or even if you did), then you are a capitalist.
This gets a lot more abstract when the resource is money. Maybe you lend someone some money, and they use it to start a business, then pay you back with interest. You've been paid money just for being the owner of money. That makes you a capitalist.
Marxists tend to talk in terms of extremes, where capitalists are all extremely wealthy and workers are all barely surviving, but that's not necessary for capitalism to be capitalism. A person can own capital and earn income from it without that income being sufficient to sustain them all by itself, so they still work. That describes most of the middle class and even some of the lower class. People might work every day, but they have a retirement account or a savings account that earns interest. Or they might rent out a house they inherited and earn income from that. The system that allows them to do this is capitalism. They're getting paid just for owning stuff. Success in capitalism is when you get paid so much for owning stuff that you don't need to work anymore. Other people do all the work, and you just sit back and get paid for being the owner.
Some people who have, for whatever reason, deeply internalized capitalism and come to see it as part of their identity get defensive when they hear what they think is any sort of criticism of capitalism. They'll get emotional reading what I've just written and lash back with statements like, "Why shouldn't I get a profit from my retirement account? I worked hard for that money and didn't get to use it while it was sitting there being used by others until I retired!" or "Running a business and maintaining a rental property is hard work!" But remember, I've already stated that one can be both a capitalist and a worker. You deserve the product of your own labor. You don't, morally, deserve the product of anyone else's, unless it's compensation--say, as payment for something you're trading to them, or because they harmed you in some way and they're making restitution. Just because you're shoulder to shoulder with your slave in the fields picking cotton doesn't mean you're morally entitled to their work. Inherent in capitalism is the idea that it's okay and even desirable and laudable to exploit other people for your own profit.
Socialism - In the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, particularly in England, capitalism grew rapidly. Owners of factories, mines, and farms grew astoundingly rich while the people who worked to make them rich were often barely surviving, leading writers like Charles Dickens and Karl Marx to comment on how unfair and shockingly immoral the situation was. Marx painstakingly detailed what exactly was unjust about capitalism, and proposed what he believed would be a better, fairer system in which everyone would have enough of everything. No one would starve, no one would be homeless, and nobody would be rich enough to use their wealth to wield power over others. He called this system socialism. This idea became popular with social progressives and with poor workers around the world. In some places, they actually overthrew their governments and instituted this new system, socialism.
Under socialism, no one person owned a farm. The government owned the farm, some of the people worked there, and everyone got to share the food from it. No one person or collection of elite shareholders owned a factory. Everyone collectively owned the factory. The government controlled it and distributed to the people the things that the factory produced. At least that's how it was supposed to work.
While defenders of capitalism will tell you that the problem with socialism is that the people had no motivation to be productive or innovative, or that all the hard workers left socialist countries and only lazy people were left behind, the real problem is that the same sort of exploitation that had existed under capitalism still existed, but was now centralized and organized under the power of the state instead of being widely dispersed among individual businessmen. As far as exploitation was concerned, it was like capitalism on steroids. The Soviet Union put the first man in space, rivaled the United States in military power, and was productive enough to prop up the economies of client states like Cuba and Angola. There was no lack of productivity.
It's true enough that there was less choice for consumers. In a capitalist society, different manufacturers of breakfast cereals are all trying to get the same customers' dollars. They're like flowers competing for the attention of a bee, each trying to be showier than the next, so there are many, very different and attractive choices. For the consumer, it's a dazzling, sometimes overwhelming array of options. But those choices are the manifestation of a struggle in which many will fail. Under socialism, the government has a goal--feed everyone breakfast--and might make a massive amount of one kind of very bland food that achieves that goal, whether anyone likes it or not. Nobody will go hungry, but that's the best-case scenario. There's no flash, no dazzle, no dizzying display of options, and possibly not even much flavor.
But I said above that the real problem was centralized, organized exploitation. That is, the part elites who are actually running a socialist country will find ways to funnel a lot more money and resources into their pockets than the common worker would ever see, and this typically comes directly at the cost of the workers. So maybe not everyone does get breakfast, because the Supreme Leader wants to fill his swimming pool with champagne. It's the same problem socialism was created to solve, but worse, because no one can kick him out of office through re-election, because political dissent is criminalized.
If there were a way that the people could have a socialist economy without sacrificing their power to a dictator or single, unrivaled and unchecked political party, then that might be an improvement. Not only would everyone get breakfast, but they could actually take a vote on what to make for breakfast. This is democratic socialism. To my knowledge, this isn't actually done anywhere, but the idea is popular among progressives in many capitalist countries who don't want starvation under capitalism or the horrors of socialist dictatorship. The closest we get to it is capitalist democracies with strong social safety nets, where taxes on the rich are used to fund buying the basics for the poor and giving everyone a vote on how that should be managed.
Communism - Defenders of capitalism often complain (usually in a whining tone of voice), that when they criticize communism (meaning socialism), they're met with the response that "real" communism has never been tried, and that all those other horrible (socialist) governments that called themselves communist didn't really count. Well, they don't count, because they weren't communist. They were (and are) socialist, not communist. We know this because a communist government is an oxymoron. Communism is anarchical. That is, it is stateless. A communist society has no government, no hierarchy. It's a utopia where everyone shares everything and nobody outranks anybody else. Nobody in a communist government has the power to force others to do things they don't want to do. It's completely non-coercive. There would be no gulags because there would be no system of government to run them or force anyone into them.
This has never even been attempted on a national level, and for good reason. A place as large as a nation needs some kind of system of organization, and an organization that large doesn't stay organized for long unless there is someone who's recognized as having the authority to keep everyone else on track. If millions of people are doing their own thing, even if they all have good intentions and want the best for each other, they're not going to be unified as an efficient, smoothly functioning organization.
The Soviet Union recognized this and actually did try to decentralize power into "soviets"--districts of local control that operated mostly independently, much like American states or counties. But they never got anywhere close--and I'd argue that the people in charge never really wanted to get anywhere close--to abolishing the overarching national government that tied all those soviets together.
The fact that this has never even been attempted on a national scale doesn't mean that the idea is wholly without merit, though. It has been done, with varying degrees of success, on much, much smaller levels. I'm talking about communes. Whether the "intentional communities" of hippies, or "utopias" of various religious groups in the past few centuries, or simply bands of indigenous hunter-gatherers who don't even scold their children, there have been countless groups of people who decided that the best way to do things was to all share what they had, help each other, and not have anyone bossing anyone else. It really only works well, though, at an intimate level--extended family, for example, or a group of friends about the size of a small church, perhaps. Any larger than that, and having recognized leaders becomes a necessity. Sure, the people can vote for a leader, but unless there's consensus, it isn't really communism. Bullying is antithetical to communism. Communists join together. If they're in conflict with each other, they're not communing.
To anyone who's come to accept the dog-eat-dog competition of capitalism as normal, communists' attempt to suppress their own individuality for the good of their group looks creepy. It looks like a cult. It's like we can't wrap our minds around the idea of putting others' well-being ahead of our own unless someone is forcing us...unless we bring it down to the level of a parent making sacrifices for their children, for example. We live in such an unloving society that we can't imagine voluntarily accepting the vulnerability of loving everyone in our community enough to take care of them, especially when they seem undeserving, and taking care of them would mean neglecting ourselves. It's because we're so accustomed to being neglected ourselves that we know intuitively that if we don't take care of ourselves, no one else will do it for us. We're afraid to share our food with the starving because we fear there won't be enough left for us because nobody will share with us. We've built a whole culture and personal identities around being proud of being able to provide for ourselves without anyone else's help. We look at it as a mark of adulthood to never need help; if you ever have to ask for assistance, it must mean you failed in some way, probably something you should feel ashamed of.
In a communist society, rather than being motivated by the shame of being somehow incompetent as an adult, we'd be motivated by the pride we'd feel in being of value to the community, able to help others beyond just ourselves. It's the same feeling as what capitalists sometimes describe to their workers as being "a productive member of society." Communists would celebrate those who went above and beyond to provide good things to their neighbors.
It's entirely possible for this to work at the small scale and probably sounds like a dream to many who've never even considered the possibility of living like this. Marx saw how dehumanizing capitalism was, how it turned the workers--the majority of society--into livestock and machines who existed just to make other people rich, and how even the rich had trouble finding any real satisfaction in life. His hope was that, though the automation of industrialism, organized under socialism, we might eventually get to a Star Trek-like economy where anybody who wants anything can just push a button and get it without anyone having to do any work, so that we could all be free to pursue creative expression like art and inventing. He thought socialism, with a benevolent dictator calling the shots, was the path there; about that, he was dead wrong.
I don't believe that communism could ever function at a national level. Even at a regional level, there would have to be some sort of hierarchy for enforcing judicial decisions that settled disputes. One community might have a dispute with another community, and they'd turn to an authority to mediate a settlement. If one party tried to deviate from the settlement, there'd need to be some kind of enforcement. That can't happen unless someone has the authority to make someone else do something they don't want to do. Even at the small group level, communism doesn't work without love. It is deeply dependent on all the participants purging greed from their hearts, and no one can truly do that while they still fear scarcity. The bigger the group, the harder it is to trust that all participants love you and care about your best interests. Some of us can't achieve that level of trust with even another individual, let alone with a group of hundreds, let alone millions, of other people.
That's why we say there's never been a truly communist country. Most countries that said they aspired to communism never even achieved success at socialism. Communism is anarchy based in loving cooperation. It's the Heaven that socialists hope to earn their way into. Anarchy without loving cooperation is an apocalyptic hellscape where we crave the stability of having a bigger, all-powerful bully to keep all the smaller bullies in check. When local warlords are terrorizing your community, having a dictator and clearly defined, if oppressive, laws looks like an improvement.
Marx was clear that he felt that industrial capitalism (with its automation) was a necessary stepping stone to socialism. But historically, a lot of "communist" (socialist) countries went straight from mostly agrarian economies to being socialist--Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, North Korea. Actually, I can't think of a single socialist nation, current or defunct, that had a thriving, industrial, capitalist economy firmly in place before becoming a socialist dictatorship. That, combined with intense, hostile interference from capitalist nations, may be why we don't see thriving socialist countries today, let alone a single country even approaching communism.
