Socialism vs Communism

[Moontanman]

I've seen a lot of posts lately that seem to say the two things, Socialism vs Communism, are the same things, everywhere recent politics are being talked about Socialism is talked about as though it was the same as Communism. No matter if it's health care or world government as in AE wanted a world government the two are equated. If I remember my HS civics classes the two are not the same, socialism does not mean the government owns everything, no matter how evil either one is they are not the same thing. For that matter the governments of the world are a combination of different government types, socialism is a big part of all working governments and at least some collectivism is part of all governments. am i totally off base here or have the definitions changed due to some unknown PC effort?

[Buffy]

Well of course they're not the same.

 

But there is a certain group of people who find it useful to exploit people's ignorance about their definitions in the furtherance of their agendas.

 

In it's normally accepted definition, "socialism" is a "just left of center" political philosophy in which a democratic government is directly involved in or has a monopoly over certain social functions. This is a very gray definition, as military defense as well as "socialized medicine" both qualify as "social programs."

 

Oddly enough, "these groups" that manipulate the meaning come from both political extremes, and don't always treat it the same way:

• Lenin and Stalin found it useful to bury the truly extreme government outlined in Marx' "Communist Manifesto" as the softer "socialism" resulting in the old "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics"
  
• Today's American Reactionaries make their own extremist views "mainstream" by calling the frankly right-of-center initiatives of the Obama administration "socialist" and then use connotation to conflate its meaning with Communism.
  
• Hitler's Fascist goals were masked under the name of the "National Socialist Party" because his rise to power was predicated on the notion of speaking for the "common man" who had been preyed upon by both the German monarchal ruling class as well as the evil allies who forced the unfair Treaty of Versailles after WWI. Of course what Hitler really did was to cut deals with all the major industrialist families of Germany to gain their support as well, and then built a tiered society that basically sold out the poor and the minorities...so much for "socialist"....
  

 

Unfortunately, in political discourse, people will take the inherently ill-defined categories used by political scientists and twist them to their advantage.

 

And many will say in defense of that practice, "everyone does it" as if that makes it okay.

 

What's been really fascinating to me is how the right wing here has been calling Obama BOTH "fascist" and "socialist": if the fact that they say this with a straight face--and apparently without being caught by people noticing this is about as logical as screaming "it's completely black and totally white!" doesn't show how insane they are, it shows how well they understand P.T. Barnum....

 

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel, :shrug:

Buffy

[A23]

I don't know how to interprete The pope(ss) John XXIII (23), said that socialsim (kind of alien nations, terrorists in infinitely and always colder waiting queues ?), nazism (M<-?) and capitalism (eating bad stuff ?), where the 3 devils destroying the society.

 

How would you interprete this with a basic approach (under the belt some say) (what destroy marriages for example) ? (Which is a bit unclear, since the institution of the marriage comes the church based in Rome, which in the new testament is called babylon mother of all the abomination and world pros..). So should it be understood that the marriage is also an abomination ?

[Moontanman]

I don't know how to interprete The pope(ss) John XXIII (23), said that socialsim (kind of alien nations, terrorists in infinitely and always colder waiting queues ?), nazism (M<-?) and capitalism (eating bad stuff ?), where the 3 devils destroying the society.

 

How would you interprete this with a basic approach (under the belt some say) (what destroy marriages for example) ? (Which is a bit unclear, since the institution of the marriage comes the church based in Rome, which in the new testament is called babylon mother of all the abomination and world pros..). So should it be understood that the marriage is also an abomination ?

 

A23, I honestly have no idea what you are asking or saying.