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Comment by wmwragg | Hacker News Reader

There is a significant difference between socialism and communism, Americans seem to purposely conflate the two, they are not the same.

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Smells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh?

This basically sums it up:

> According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...)

(To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)

That's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.

It doesn't help that a lot of the suggested policies are mind numbingly stupid. Like "wealth tax" for people who own controlling equity in companies. Someone else values your company more and now you are forced by law to sell it and lose control, probably destroying the company.

But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.

No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which.

To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it

Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy.

Maybe we need better terminology

I think we’re actually agreeing the terms are confusing. The point is that Western European socialism is not the same as the thing that was essentially synonymous with communism in the USSR in the early 20th century.

In the UK at least, the distinction was important because calling oneself a socialist was acceptable, whereas being a communist during the Cold War was not.

The USSR was economically socialist, ideologically communist, and politically somewhere on the autocracy-dictatorship spectrum. (That last varied over time, as is normal for such governments. Underlings always want autocracy, which means more power for them. The top guy almost always wants an absolute dictatorship.)

There were plenty of communists who didn't like that last part - but they were brutally purged by the autocratic-dictatorial faction. Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky

I'd blame the angry, simplistic Western denunciations of anything vaguely resembling communism (including socialism) on the Western monied classes. Whether Old Money, Plutocrats, Wall Streeters, wanna-be's, sycophants, or whatever - those folks generally hate any idea which might mean less for them, and more for the 99%.

The German Social Democratic Party is the literal actual identical party of Marx and Engels.

That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func

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