3.8 Socialism, State Socialism, and Communism

The words socialism, state socialism, and communism are sometimes used as if they mean the same thing.

Although they are related, they refer to different ideas.

Socialism is the broadest term. It is the idea that the means of production (land, factories, machines, businesses, technology, and resources used to produce goods and wealth) should be owned or controlled socially rather than privately by a small capitalist class.

For Marxists, socialism is not mainly about the government giving people free things. It is about changing ownership and power.

Instead of private owners controlling production for profit, socialism aims to place economic power in the hands of workers, communities, the public, or society as a whole.

However, there are various forms of socialism and different socialists disagree about what it should look like.

Some socialists support worker cooperatives, where workers collectively own and manage their workplaces. Others support democratic socialism, where socialist goals are pursued through elections, unions, public accountability, and civil liberties. Others support much stronger state control of the economy, often called state socialism.

State socialism is a form of socialism where the government owns or controls major parts of the economy in the name of the people or working class. Instead of private owners controlling factories, banks, transportation, energy, and major industries, the state controls them.

In theory, state socialism is supposed to use public power to end capitalist exploitation and organize the economy around social needs.

In practice, however, state socialism has often created a serious problem: when the state controls the economy, politics, law, media, and police power, ordinary citizens may have very little ability to challenge those in power.

State socialism became very controversial in the twentieth century. In many Marxist-Leninist systems, the ruling party claimed to represent the workers, but real power often became concentrated in the state, the party, and the bureaucracy. We will talk more about Lenin soon.

———

Marx’s ultimate vision was called communism. He imagined communism would be the final stage after capitalism and socialism.

Marx understood communism as a future classless society where exploitation would disappear, productive resources would be held in common, and the state would eventually “wither away” because class divisions no longer existed.

Communism was not supposed to mean a massive permanent government controlling everything forever. For Marx, communism was when society no longer needed a state to manage class conflict because classes themselves had disappeared.

But historically, governments that called themselves communist did not usually reach that stateless ideal. Instead, many became highly centralized one-party states with powerful governments, restricted freedoms, censorship, political repression, and state-controlled economies.

Real governments that later claimed Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, or communist inspiration resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with some estimates reaching around 100 million. These deaths are associated with famine, executions, forced labor, deportations, political repression, revolutionary violence, and state-created economic disasters. Historians debate the exact number and what should be counted, but the scale of suffering under many communist regimes is impossible to ignore.

———

Socialism is the broad idea of social or collective control of production.

State socialism is when the government controls major parts of the economy in the name of society or the working class.

Communism, in Marx’s theory, is the final classless and eventually stateless society.

People often confuse these terms because many twentieth-century communist governments used state socialism as the method they claimed would lead to communism. But in practice, the state often became stronger rather than weaker.

In section 3.9, we will look at how Marxism moved from theory into revolutionary politics through Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution.