Communism Vs. Socialism

Socialism is a synonym for Communism, right? Wrong, although communism and socialism share some ideas they are distinctly different. Historically they are different, economically, they are different. Before we look at the economic differences we must look at the past differences.

Socialism encapsulates a range of philosophical views and its roots can be traced back to ancient times. One of the earliest proponents of socialist ideas was a Persian priest named Mazdak, who advocated a system of communal possessions and social welfare, gaining a respectable following and influence with the king, before he was ostracized and hunted down by the nobles and killed. The term Socialism is often attributed to a French aristocrat and social thinker of

In 1516, Thomas More wrote in "Utopia" about a society based around common ownership of property. In 1776, Adam Smith advocated the labor theory of value, ignoring the previous Cantillonian view that prices are derived from supply and demand ("Communism vs Socialism"). The word communism derives its roots from the Latin word communis, which means common, and its meaning in the modern context of socioeconomic ideology is also just that, a common, classless society, without the need of restrictive institutions like money, private ownership, nation-states and is based on a common ownership of the factors of production. It can be said to be a form of revolutionary socialism, in that it takes the worker-owned, worker-driven societies evolved from capitalism to the next level, where the traditional machinery of government and economic planning are pulled down and replaced by a new system of thought, that of the common good. It is an economic, political as well as philosophical catharsis among the populace, who rise up against the bourgeois in charge of running things and replace them with

The Soviet economy was probably the greatest example of a planned economy, a task that was undertaken by the Soviet high command, in a centralized fashion. The policies and measures radiated outwards from the politburo and were implemented in the various parts of the economy according to an established command structure. Socialism in its essence requires the production of goods which could be directly distributed to the population in proportion to their efforts, a system that calculates resources in terms of physical units, rather than financial quantities. In a pure Socialist economy this would lead to an eventual end of economic entities such as money, rent, interest and profit. Socialism advocates the cooperative ownership of the factors of production, rather than the capitalist practice of individual or corporate ownership.Since the factors of production are owned in a cooperative manner or even by society as a whole, its management can be relegated to the workers who operate the machinery. Thus, self-regulation can be practiced in a socialist economy without the need of a governing body, which may hold undue power over the greater majority. However, political thinkers like Leon Trotsky were not in favor of a centralized economy, as a central command structure would find it near impossible to understand