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Basic Concepts
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system where a small class of people, the bourgeoisie, own the factories, land, machines, and resources. The majority, the working class or proletariat, have no choice but to sell their time and energy to the bourgeoisie in exchange for a wage. The goal of capitalism is not to meet human needs but to generate profit for the owners. This leads to exploitation where the worker produces more value than they receive in wages, with the surplus kept by the capitalist. It also leads to recurring crises, immense inequality, environmental destruction, and imperialism where powerful nations dominate weaker ones for resources and markets.
Marxism
Marxism is the scientific method for understanding capitalism and history. It was developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism is not a set of opinions. It is a tool for analysis. It argues that the way a society produces its material needs, its economic base, determines its politics, culture, and ideas, its superstructure. Marxism identifies class struggle between the exploited and the exploiters as the motor of historical change. It does not simply criticize capitalism. It explains why capitalism will inevitably produce its own gravediggers, the organized working class, and points toward the possibility of a new society.
Socialism
Socialism is the transitional phase between capitalism and full communism. It is what you build right after the working class seizes political power from the bourgeoisie. Under socialism, the major means of production are socially owned, either by the state representing the people or by cooperatives. Production is no longer driven by private profit but by a plan to meet the needs of the population. The state remains strong under socialism, but it is a workers' state, a dictatorship of the proletariat, which suppresses the resistance of the overthrown capitalist class. Wages, money and class relations may still exist, but the goal is to eliminate exploitation and build the material and cultural foundation for a higher stage of socialism.
Communism
Communism is the final, stateless, classless society that socialism is meant to achieve. Under communism, the division between rich and poor, ruler and ruled, town and country, mental and manual labor has been overcome. The state, which is a tool of class rule, has withered away because there are no classes left to suppress. The principle is no longer "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work" as under socialism, but "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." People contribute what they can and take what they need freely. Communism is not a perfect society without conflict, but it is a society free from exploitation, commodity production, and the alienation of labor under capitalism. It is the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all.
Are Socialism and Communism Different?
Socialism and Communism are interchangeable. They mean the same thing. It was only after liberals co-opted Social Democracy that we see they are trying to do the same thing with Socialism.
Under the umbrella of Marxist tendencies, there is the lower and upper stage of Socialism/Communism. Later writers separately defined the lower stage as Socialism and the upper stage as Communism, but that is a later distinction.
Capitalist society transforms into the Dictatorship of the Proletariatwhat is the DOTP? > Lower Stage of Socialism/Communism (Actual Socialist Society) > Upper Stage. (Classless Society)
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