A difference that makes no difference

What’s the difference between socialism and communism? For all intents and purposes, nothing. Sure, if you look either term up there will be some slight differences. One says something like controlled by the people, the other says control by the state. One says an economic system, one says a political system. But the terms have been used interchangeably, even by people within socialist and Communist countries.

Communists consider socialism as the first stage leading to full blown communism. We have heard Russia is a Communist country, yet it is also referred to as the U.S.S.R., the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST republics. Which is it? It’s both and that’s why both Socialism and Communism have a deservedly bad name.

EVERY Communist nation in the world is a brutally oppressed, impoverished, tyrannical 3rd world dictatorship where anybody deemed unpatriotic, is tortured, jailed or killed.

Socialists try and give their countries a good name, the problem is they’re not really socialist, they all depend on very heavy taxation of private, capitalist companies, without which their economies would collapse.

Anyone in America who claims to be a socialist is either ignorant, a globalist or a liar. Socialism ALWAYS reduces society down to it’s lowest common denominator, along the way disarming the citizens who resist. Socialism brings about two types of citizens, peasants and the rich.

There is no such thing as “Democratic socialist” this is nothing more than a very heavily taxed nanny state and it can not come about in America as long as we have a Constitution and millions of guns. This is why the left is trying to confiscate guns and diminish the relevance of the constitution, to brainwash each younger generation into accepting the garbage they spew. This is why they have taken control of the schools and media, to control and change the message and to erase and change the past evils done by Socialism and Communism.

Make no mistake, proponents of Socialism believe in the utter destruction of America. They will destroy our economy, crash the stock market, begin confiscating private property and put kids in government run education camps.

This is exactly their vision for America. Listen to what they say and look how Communist countries progressed, then look at what they’re doing.

Vote these evil clowns out, tell them hell no. Never happen in America

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Welp, better vote Trump. Lesser of the two evils. My hands are tied.

Lennin believed Communism was the end goal of socialism and that it was socialism perfected.

You’re always right, it says so in your screen name. Personally, I agree that the lesser of two evils is better than the mainstream Liberal Evil themselves. Just like the mainstream Liberal Democrat Evil, and the Democrat Politicians that employ them.

Just because other people lazily equate the two doesn’t mean you have to. Words have distinct meanings.

Agreed. I hate communism too!

It’s almost like countries have realized you can mix in a little “socialism” and your country won’t go to hell.

Haven’t you already established that most “socialist” countries are a mix? What countries have these two types of citizens?

High taxes and social programs are unconstitutional? The last century has proven you wrong.

Plenty of countries around the world have strict gun laws yet they are pleasant places to live being similar to the US. They aren’t lurching towards communism nor are they whitewashing communism.

Quit talking like a sausage. This sort of demonization is pernicious to our political system. I may disagree with conservatives but I don’t think they are trying to destroy our country. That’s just plain crazy talk.

When…you’re scared fecesless about facing life and the responsibilities that come with it, those who would prefer socialism over capitalism, are actually professing, they would still rather be babies and suck the teet. Life…is too hard.

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Yeah crazy like a fox because the OP is spot on correct!

You can not transform the system from within. It is based on lies and an absolute ignorance of our nature.
The first thing people like Bernie want to do is massively redistribute wealth. This is just another term for “taxing the rich.” It never happens though. The “socialist” leaders start by appealing to the masses, first by creating envy and resentment among the poor, then by gradually increasing taxes. The promise is EQUALITY. The higher taxes will end up helping the poor. By these promises, politicians gain support and get elected. After getting elected, they continue to promise more and more taxes on the rich, with more and more benefits to the poor. The taxes though, never seem to diminish poverty. The poor remain poor but are constantly reassured of better things to come. Meanwhile, more and more things are confiscated from the rich, in the name of fairness. NOBODY surrenders their stuff voluntarily or votes to have it taken from them. Socialism always is forced on society and it becomes indistinguishable from communism.

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Then you have nothing to fear of Democratic Socialists.

Again it sounds more like you are complaining about social democracy which is similar to the current DNC platform. In general Socialists don’t want to help the poor via taxing the rich, they want to instead have the workers own the factories and companies so that there is less of an income gap between the various classes because the workers will retain more of the fruits if their labor instead of a company owner profiting off of it.

That’s a contradiction. When you have a communist society there is no government to “force” socialism. Everyone freely works for the benefit of all. I personally don’t think that’s going to be possible until we are post-scarcity… so like, no time soon.
Conflating socialism with communism is intellectually lazy and is disingenuous. It pastes all the failures of so-called communist states onto socialism despite being an umbrella term for a broad variety ideas and solutions many of which aren’t related to communism.
In fact its partially because of this disingenuous association that socialism is become more popular in the US because the younger generation is realizing that the “scary” communist states of the USSR and China aren’t actually representative of socialism as a whole. When you lie, people stop believing you. It’s like kids of my generation (80s-90s) who by high school stopped believing what the government was saying about drugs because it was obvious they were lying about the effects marijuana. There might very well be good reasons why socialism/marijuana are bad, but if you make up untrue exaggerations instead of laying out the facts, no one is going to listen.
In summary, if you want to protect capitalism from socialism, its in your interest to drop the red-scare ■■■■■■■■ and instead deal in actual facts.

I began by explaining that the definitions of Socialism and communism are easily looked up. However, even the definitions are sometimes interchanged depending on where you look them up. What you guys seem incapable of doing is getting past a dictionary definition of a word and seeing how it is playing out in the real world.

For cryin out loud, do you think " the people" would have been behind Lenin, Mao or Castro if they were proclaiming the truth about what Socialism and Communism ALWAYS lead to??? If so, you are the perfect example of everything I pointed out. You went through school just as the left was nearing it’s complete control of the public schools. It’s so much easier to slowly feed mush heads full of crap over time then a fairly quick revolution, but the results are the same.

While “Socialism” is being pushed, our country is seeing exactly the same other things being done as was done in Communist countries. The media, while not out right controlled by the government, had become so infiltrated with left wing bias, it might as well be renamed the American Pravda. Society is being dumbed down, distracted, lied to, misdirected, homogenized and divided into smaller and smaller groups. Our rights are being slowly diminished by political correctness, ignorance and apathy. And last but not least, the push to disarm us.

The most telling and disturbing thing you say, which is communism to the core is " everyone freely works for the benefit of all." IOW, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, which I’m sure you haven’t been taught, is the Communist mantra… Yes, I’m the one intellectually lazy for not being able to tell the difference between Socialism and Communism …

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I’m sure those living under communist China and the Communist Soviet Union would disagree.

Communism in practice never looks like it does in a text book.

Marx believed that. It’s not a belief that began with Lenin.

Do tell…

There are plenty of countries in Europe that have much higher tax rates than we do. By your own words, these countries should be indistinguishable from communism; Finland, Norway, Germany, Denmark, Sweden…

You honestly cannot tell the difference between those countries and communism? They all have higher tax rates which you claim leads to communism. Please explain.

By definition, which you guys love, Socialism does not allow private land ownership or private ownership of companies. All these nations rely heavily in taxes from exactly that, PRIVATE ownership. They’re not truly socialist. They are heavily taxed capitalist nanny states. The closer to true socialism a country gets, the worse it’s economy becomes until it collapses. That’s usually about the time a military dictatorship begins with some enlightened, benevolent, beloved, dear leader comes to power. But it happens easier if the people are prepared. Divided, brainwashed, made envious, impoverished, hopeless, ignorant, uninformed and of course, disarmed. The last part is what the left is doing to America.

Excellent. So we should have no fear about raising taxes on wealthy people here in America since we can see it works in Europe and does not lead to communism.

What you fail to grasp is that there’s more than what the dictionary provides when in comes to these two different ideologies/philosophies. You need at least an encyclopedia. Socialism is an umbrella term that encompasses many variations on the central idea of the workers owning the means of production. 85~% of them have not been tried out in the real world, so the real world is a poor guide. Communism, being essentially impossible to achieve in a world that has scarcity, has never been tried on any country wide scale.

As I said, Communism was never reached in these countries… so what Communism leads to can only be guessed. They are also not accurate portrayals of socialism because outside forces intentionally made it harder for them by restricting trade. On top of that there were other issues that made these countries bad including authoritarianism, cults of personality, and massive corruption. Part of what enabled this was the fact that these were violent revolutions that completely replaced the governments with whatever these dictators wanted.
Contrast that with democratic socialism which leaves the existing government in place and lessening the odds of a dictatorship. In addition since socialism would come about via the democratic process more of the public would be in support of it and there would be no bloodshed. More importantly democratic socialism ensures that socialism won’t replace capitalism until the public is ready for it and votes for it.

This is an absurd statement. First off, journalism, like academia, has almost always leaned towards the left… it was just less obvious back in the day because there were fewer TV channels and the mainstream papers were usually left leaning. Second, the conservatives currently have greater power in government… were the media “controlled by the government” their “bias” would change with who was in power.

Huh? You’re accusing me of being intellectually lazy because one of the features of communism is similar to a popular mantra of communism? Go figure!

Communism and Socialism are kissing cousins in my book.

Both to be avoided like the plaque!

Easily avoided by regular brushing and flossing.

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That and keep Democrats out of office…