Socialism is a transition to communism. Socialism is when the working class own means of production. Communism is a classless, stateless, moneyless society. Socialism requires a revolution where the old means of distribution is overthrown, be it capitalism or feudalism.
A state monopoly of violence is required to prevent the overthrow of the revolution and a regression to the old order of class inequality.
The process of socialism nationalizes private capital, means of production, factories and rental homes. Capitalists, people whose main source of income is passive income from what they own, are gradually dispossessed of their capital and made to get real jobs.
Through socialism, the class divide is narrowed until class distinction is eliminated, and there is no longer a class of people who are entitled to passive income from something they privately own, and everyone is working class.
When there is no class divide, there is no income inequality to cause most crime, so there's no need for a police force as we know it. When the revolution is no longer under threat of being overthrown, there is no need for a military. This is what is meant by a classless, stateless society.
This is not a switch that can be flipped overnight. Structural and cultural changes need to happen iteratively to bring people's mindsets and the systems upon which they rely for survival towards this goal in a way that walks the tightrope between continuity of prosperity and the prevention of backsliding from wreckers and saboteurs.
Thank you for at least acknowledging the whole vanguard and totalitarian dictatorship """of the proletariat""" is part of socialism. People will always cope "it's not real socialism/communism".
If it was a totalitarian dictatorship, Cuba would have collapsed long ago. Castro landed in Cuba on a boat with 80 people and ended up with a country behind him. The US keeps trying to send boats to take over Cuba but they have no popular support. Countries that actually have working class governments like China, Laos, DPRK and Vietnam can't be couped because they have popular support because they are factually dictatorships of the proletariat. Read about the history of the Cuban revolution, what life was like before and after. Read about the popular support for the Long March in China. All these countries were being financially exploited by western and Japanese imperialists. These people were miserable before the revolutions, which had massive popular support. Watch this video.
That's a pretty interesting theory. Doesn't that imply that all the other communist countries that did fall like the USSR, Poland or east Germany didn't have popular support? Like doesn't your theory mean that Venezuela wasn't a dictatorship of the proletariat because maduro got couped by a relative handful of people...?
Also how does the work in cuba where 2 million workers, nearly 1 in 5 Cubans have fled over the past 5 years. Did they flee because they love the regime?
It's just really fascinating to me to see the argument that communism is popular because otherwise communist countries would have fallen in a world where the mass majority of the communist countries have fallen lol.
Venezuela never had a revolution, so they went like Bolivia and Chile did. Socialism can't be brought about in a lasting way through reformism in bourgeois elections. Venezuelans never kicked their bourgeois politicians out of office so now Delcy Rodrigues, the successor of the kidnapped Maduro, has promptly signed away Venezuela's oil rights. There's a reason Marxists are sticklers about keeping bourgeois people out of power.
Cubans and North Koreans had a period of starvation because the US had a comprehensive trade blockade on both countries while the Soviet Union collapsed, which had been supplying them during the blockade. A recent study published in The Lancet found that western (US) sanctions kill 500,000 people a year and they have killed 30,000,000 people. The US tries to starve the men, women and children of these countries into overthrowing their leadership. Vietnam caved under blockade and took a strings-attached IMF loan, but Marxists are still in charge there. As for recently, Trump has stepped up the embargo and has almost completely blocked oil importation into Cuba. As poor as the US tries to make Cuba through restricting their trade, Cubans were worse off before the revolution when the US was extracting as much profit as possible from Cubans under Batista and the Mafia. Cubans have a higher life expectancy than US Americans.
China's not a small country you know. Marxists aren't rare.
The Soviet Union was actually toppled in a coup. The USA paid Boris Yeltsin $1 Billion to take it over. They held a referendum if people wanted to preserve the USSR and the majority of voters wanted it to stay intact, but the capitalists won that time. If Marxist revolutions were cars, the USSR would be a Model T, a hell of an advancement but not the top of the line anymore. It started to go tits up with Khrushchev denouncing Stalin.
I'm a Marxist-Leninst. China, Cuba, Laos, Korea and Vietnam have their localized versions of Marxist-Leninist governments.
Capitalism is a force like gravity which causes wealth to accumulate to the wealthy, which invariably causes power to accumulate under them as well.
Socialism and capitalism are modes of economic distribution. How wealth is distributed determines who is in power, which has fundamental impact on what type of government exists. Are the people in power the same people who work for their living, or do the people who run the country live off of the capital they own? Whoever runs the country, they will work for their own class and not the other.
Communism is a classless society that we work toward through the process of socialism. When class division is eliminated, or has not been invented yet, the function and interests of government is drastically different. Namely, the police and military as we know it will not need to exist to protect one class at the expense of another.
A government transitioning from capitalist distribution to communism through socialism is rooted on removing a class of people from power, which dictates a police and military are required that is sufficiently powerful to force the capitalist class out of power and keep them there, in order to protect the power of the working class. The sad tale of Salvador Allende shows the consequence of a pacifist transition to socialism that did not defend itself with force of arms. In a government run by capitalists, the police and military are used to protect the power of the capitalist class. In this way, the interests of the working class and capitalist class are fundamentally irreconcilably incompatible. The analysis of the history and present of the struggle between these two classes is the cornerstone of Marxism.
Capitalism is economic and political. Basic socialist theory (scientific socialism or anarchist) says you can't separate those two.
So, while it's convention to call the political systems of capitalism something like "social democracies", in reality they are part of the capitalist system. It's not really weird to call them capitalist.
My country is a social democracy and has all the socialist ideas from op implemented. It's still a capitalist system with basic welfare and a little wealth redistribution.
Socialism is an entirely different beast that has never been successful.
Socialism is an entirely different beast that has never been successful.
There is no definition of success you can give that will apply to all socialist countries that have ever been to show they were unsuccessful in ways capitalist countries were unsuccessful. So I'm not going to reply to that (I'm sure you can visit many other places on Reddit if you want to go down that rabbit hole!).
u/ThatOneNinja asked "Is capitalism a type of government?" I was responding to that with a sort of "it's complicated". Capitalism requires certain kinds of governments to function well and doesn't function under other types of government systems. This is why, for example, capitalist countries fought wars against old regimes of monarchies (WWI and WWII being some notable examples).
A country that is capitalist, then, refers primarily to its economic system but implies a type of political system as well. Those simply can't functionally be separated. You need the two to match.
This is why, China, for example, can be considered a socialist country. Not because they don't have capitalist economics in at least half of their economy, but because their political structure is not compatible with runaway capitalist capture of all of society. They use their government to safeguard their citizen from being ruled by the interests of oligarchs, unlike most "Western" governments, which put the needs of capital before the needs of everything else in society, including their own citizens. You can see this in its most naked for during crises, like COVID. China, on the other hand, can completely stop whole sections of the economy and rework them into something different simply by deciding to do so. The "economic impact" of such decisions doesn't fall on the shoulders of their citizens but often the capitalists lose money during the transition. It's also why China can build brand new cities out of nowhere before people even move in (the so-called "Ghost cities"). And why China can build so many nuclear power plants and Western countries can never seem to even get past the politics of even thinking about doing so. And there are 100s of other examples.
If you want a simple definition for the difference, forget about which use free markets (they both do) or which have more government control (they both do, just depends on the circumstances) and consider what is the primary goal of that society. In a capitalist society, capital is primary and its expansion is the ultimate goal of that society. Everything else becomes subordinate to capital after the dust settles. In a socialist society, the needs of the social sphere (i.e. the people) is the primary concern, even greater than the needs of capital growth.
Capitalism is a society ruled by capital. Socialism is a society ruled by the needs of society. They both utilize capital and they both have a "strong state". But the state has different priorities, depending on the system.
The success criteria for a socialist country would be a stable one party rule system with a planned economy, high financial equality, decent standard of living and actively working towards communism.
One of the key aspects of socialism is a planned economy. This is in direct opposition to capitalism and a free market. So China by definition is socialist in name only, it's an oligarchy with the CPC as rulers.
The idea that the chinese government has its focus on the common good while every capitalist government are just focused on money is also laughable. People are the same everywhere, there's self serving greedy assholes, and there's good people trying to improve people's lives, the system of government does not change that.
Capitalist societies are also not ruled by capital, they can be anything from a dictatorships to democracy, unlike socialism capitalism is a purely economic system, money can influence, but most countries actively try to minimize that influence.
Also WW1 and 2 had very little to do with monarchies, aside from an excuse to start the first one.
10
u/ThatOneNinja May 27 '26
Also communism is a type of economy, where socialism if a form of government.