Differentiating Socialism and Communism

This is a contribution to a discussion and debate that has emerged in the course of the Forging Communist Unity process.

Today the idea of socialism as an alternative to capitalism is an accepted common sense on most of the Left. For all intents and purposes, socialism and communism mean the same thing: when we say socialism we mean communism and vis-versa. In practice the preference appears to be socialism. Since Stalinism presented capitalist rulers with an enviable weapon to demonise communism (even though the Stalinist regime claimed the USSR as ‘socialism in one country’), socialism, even though it is said to mean the same as communism, is usually the favoured term for most left-wing groups who identify with Marxism, when discussing a society beyond capitalism.

My own view, which bears some similarity and real differences with the CPGB’s, is that socialism is not another name for communism, and nor is it a mode of production. Socialism is an inherently unstable transitional relation premised on intensive class struggle. The basis of the latter is the socialisation of capital and of labour. The capitalist class is engaged in a struggle to contain this socialisation by amongst other things utilising, colonising and so corrupting Socialism as an economic and political force, with the objective to prevent communism. Simultaneously the working class (by virtue of its position as a class in itself emerging as a class for itself) is engaged in a struggle to develop this socialisation in the form of Socialism, as a means of transition towards communism. Socialism becomes the transition from capitalism to communism under the democratic rule of the working class, through communes and through the state. Which is to say, working class power exercised through its network of communes and the state, will provide the means through which most of the population will be engaged in some form of administration and management and with the building of democratic control over every sphere of life: ‘the state and politics, work and economy’ ^I.

The above is not a revolution in stages, with no end in sight, but ongoing phases in the, relatively rapid, revolutionary transformation of society, which will depend more on the international scope of the revolution and the external threats to such a revolution (what we do know is that a one country or even several country transformation is unviable and will have similar endings to previous ventures). There is no other reasons as to why the transition should stretch over many decades. The level of productive forces and related science and technology, coupled to the size and power of the working class, and, more crucially, the heightened level of political consciousness among workers implied by such intensification of class power, mean the transition will be rapid rather than prolonged. It also seems improbable that highly politicised and educated workers will have any truck with specialist management and bureaucratic functionaries running state affairs, and it seems much more realistic to assume that they will be replaced by workers and/or brought under the democratic control of workers, where their existing specialisms will be utilised for the common good. Moreover, there is no reason why decisions on what is wasteful, unproductive and barbaric uses of societies productive powers won’t be made relatively quickly. As will decisions of what areas of production ought to be continued and what new areas should be opened for production and rapidly developed according to a common plan.

In sum, no reason to believe in a prolonged transition over many decades. In fact, claims about such long drawn-out periods of transition from socialism to communism, usually end up preventing communism.

To date, socialism has been abused to sustain capitalism and prevent communism, as capitalism develops, matures and socialises capital and labour. Socialism has become deformed through the prism of class struggle and the partial victories and defeats of the working class. As I go on to argue later, Marx emphasised phases of communism not socialism, but as I also point out, later Marxists supplanted Marx’s phases with phases/stages from socialism to communism. It is difficult to re-invent the wheel in terms of the strong identification of the left with the term socialism and indeed, the working class. However, differentiating between socialism and communism does open a useful discussion about a) the nature of the capitalist system that socialists are committed to overthrowing and b) the nature of past and present socialised systems self-identifying as ‘socialist’.

With respect to the former, differentiating between socialism and communism can help us to consider the nature of capitalism as it evolves and declines: whether political and economic developments in capitalism have absorbed versions of socialism to sustain the life of capitalism, by effectively offering escape routes out of crises for the capitalist class and developing alternative political control over the working class. In other words, differentiating brings to light how and to what extent versions of your favourite brand of ‘Socialisms’ provide what Marx referred to as those ‘illusory communities’ in The German Ideology (illusory because they are ‘concealing real divisions and class antagonisms’).

With respect to the latter, the prime example today is of course China. While many socialists won over by China are very quiet on the impoverished conditions and lack of development of the forces of production in ‘communist’ China between 1940-1980, they are most vociferous about the economic and social impact of what they believe to be ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ thereafter (in broad terms a capitalist market sector with state ownership of the strategically important commanding heights of the economy). Differentiating between socialism and communism is key here too. Of course, under the dictatorship (governance) of the working class with a clear vision of transition from socialism to communism, the context changes completely. However, this is of course far from the case. This version of ‘socialism’ is firmly under the dictatorship of a one-party state bureaucracy. The party may call itself Communist, but only the ideology of their version of socialism is used to explain the political economy of China: the means (‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’) become everything, the end (communism) is erased. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is a systemic means of exploiting the labour power of the Chinese working class across state and market sectors.

To explore these differentiations further, with the aim of working with what we have and make it work for communism, the rest of this paper considers capitalist abuse of socialism and then reflects on Marx’s position vis-à-vis socialism and communism, as a basis for exposing the abuse of socialism at the hands of socialists and capitalists towards the prevention of communism.

Capital’s abuse of ‘socialism’

Whenever the capitalist class has been under pressure since the early twentieth century (mainly in the thralls of political and/or economic crises), it has, very reluctantly, leaned towards deformed variants of ‘socialism’ to disarm the working class. This is certainly so in the case of post-1945 social democracy. However, when enjoying class dominance over the working class, as in the era we like to call ‘neo-liberalism’, capitalists can prop up their ailing system, not by eroding socialisation, but by endorsing the much more capitalist-friendly terminology of ‘social market’ or ‘socialist markets’, ‘social enterprises’, and so on.

Indeed, the preoccupation with planning capitalism, which began in the latter part of the nineteenth century was already setting a course of a ‘socialising’ third way between capitalism and communism. The ongoing centralisation and concentration of capital, paralleled by the developing socialised power of labour, offered the foundations for a capitalist system based on capital and labour as a social collective force across society and the state. A basis for diverse political persuasions to propagate ideas about state capitalism and or socialism came into being. Both versions cross-referenced the language of municipality, ‘socialisation’ and corporatism as a means of explaining the trends in sway. Marx was aware of both the possibilities and the dangers of such developments. On the one hand, possibilities for setting the material basis for workers to take power and a future communist society. On the other hand, the dangers of the potential for political compromises and reforms that would act to prevent communism.

Marx, Socialism and Communism

Perhaps this is one reason why Marx favoured the term communism (for material reasons not semantics)? Marx certainly has communism to the fore when reflecting on the future society beyond capitalism ^II. From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where communism is pitched against alienated labour, to The Grundrisse, where communism is the necessary response to the decline of value in mature capitalism, communism remains at the forefront of Marx’s reflections. When Marx does invoke socialism, it is a process towards communism; part of the developmental phases from ‘lower’ (socialism) to ‘higher’ (communism). Even so, Marx more often uses the terms, ‘initial’ or ‘immediate’ communism not ‘socialism’, when referring to this developmental phase to full blown communism. Indeed, this ‘phases’ perspective is dominant in Marx’s later writings in which the language of ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ phases of communism are stressed, with hardly any reference to socialism.

Moreover, when Marx does use both socialist and communist phases, it is less clear as to whether the development he has in mind is socialism within a declining/transitional capitalism or the other side of capitalism. On the one hand, Marx’s use of the metaphor of ‘birth marks’ in relation to transformations in modes of production suggest he has in mind that the initial transitioning to socialism is within a maturing capitalism.  On the other hand, his emphasis on the dictatorship of the proletariat (whether using the term socialism or immediate phase of communism) suggests he thinks this phase occurs beyond capitalism. Arguably, he means both. In which case socialism implies not a system but the intensification of class struggle aimed at vanquishing value and surplus value and imposing use value and social need in all matters of production, distribution and exchange; a struggle waged within maturing capitalism, but one that continues in accelerated and more directive forms in a situation where the working class have taken power. The implication is that once the working class takes power, socialism is rested from its abuse under capitalism and takes on a form conducive to the acceleration towards communism, which is to say, an intensive period involving the expropriation of the capitalist class and rapid development of the socialisation of production under a common plan, premised on the objective, regarding human labour, of widening the realm of freedom by reducing the realm of necessity.

If the above is correct, then one can imagine why Marx would be very wary of the capacity for socialism to be utilised or colonised by forces supporting the prolonging of capitalism in ways that either blurred the boundaries of the phases from socialism to communism or, worse still, conflated communism into socialism. Even in his early writings Marx gave expression to this danger,

‘At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labour, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.’ ^III

Marx later, in Capital Volume 3, labelled the above ‘ruling class despotism’ over workers under conditions of socialised capital, capital of directly associated producers. In Capital, he reflects on how capital develops as a social power across state and society, substantiating the capitalist class’s capacity for directly associated production:

‘The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself’ ^IV.

The above runs parallel with socialist reformers willing to compete with the ruling class by manoeuvring concepts of socialism from above for their own ends, effectively containing working class struggle, via an array of ideas about ‘really feasible socialism’, specifically within narratives of a gradual transition from state capitalism to state socialism.

Marx was alert to the capitalist class adapting socialising trends as a basis for reforms within the system, but what concerned him most was the thought of socialism being utilised in this manner by organisations purportedly promoting working class power. Take Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875. The direction of the proposed Programme led Marx to reclarify his approach to the terms, socialism and communism, in opposition to how they appeared to be adulterated by the fledgling SPD. The socialism being proposed by SPD leaders was anchored to a top-down bureaucratic evolutionary transformation of economy, state and society. Yet only four years earlier Marx had celebrated the importance of the emergence of the specific form through which the working class could achieve self-emancipation, the Paris Commune,

‘What is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?..Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour ‘ ^V.

In stark contrast, the SPD Programme worked under the assumption that a party of professional socialists would transform the capitalist state into a socialist state, expropriating private ownership, install common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, legislate for universal suffrage, regulate employment contracts and working conditions, end child labour and create conditions for a fairer distribution of the social wealth.

As the apparent heirs to this brand of socialism, the SPD was always careful to explain the latter as the self-activity of the working class. In basic terms, the reforms would improve conditions for the selling of labour power and enhance prospects for political involvement. Marx critiqued such emergent forms of socialism because they seemed to ignore the lessons of the Commune and so presented a roadblock to a higher stage of communism. For Marx, the Programme made no distinction between an immediate and higher stage of communism and held nascent assumptions of stages of socialism in one country, wherein each nation comes together in peaceful coexistence as they develop their commonly owned nationally planned economy. This form of ‘socialism’ would be more likely to resolve problems besetting capitalism and its ruling class and put a brake on the movement to communism. It would do so by producing a politics and form of state governance more befitting the socialisation of capital that was characteristic of the era.

The strident, venomous, trenchant and blunt tone of Marx’s critique, usually reserved for the in-human degradation of capitalism and the ruling class, arises here among fellow socialists because he sees in the Programme the hallmarks of class treachery. Marx’s observations when addressing the Communist League three decades earlier in 1847 might well express his sentiments towards the Gotha Programme:

“With us it cannot be a mere matter of a change in the form of private property, but of destroying it as an institution; not in hushing up class antagonisms but in abolishing all classes; not in the improvement of present-day society but in the foundation of a new society.” ^VI

As Marx consistently argued, transferring private property into public property under the tutelage of the state, even one purportedly governed by a party of the left, merely ‘hushes up’ class antagonisms rather than destroy them. Moreover, the improvements forthcoming only make sense in the context of the initial phase of communism as part of a permanent revolution towards a higher phase of communism, certainly not socialism per-se. In sum, Marx is scathing about the Gotha Programme because it clearly brandishes socialism as an end process, brought to the working class by the SPD through the state, when, for Marx, socialism was an inherently unstable class struggle in the context of an increasingly social capital drawing versions of ‘socialism’ into its orbit.

Events in the late decades of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century have borne out Marx’s worst fears. Socialism and communism became redefined as stages rather than the more fluid transitionary phases. The turn to stages was to become part of the eventual separation of socialism and communism, as a prelude to phasing out the latter all together. At first socialism was classified as the ‘lower stage’ because it is a hybrid of capitalist and communist relations, involving a wage system based on to each according to her/his labour, running parallel with common ownership of the means of production and a state with parliament, standing police and army to control and administer the transition.

More crucially the terminology of ‘stages’ opened political possibilities for misapplication, principally, holding out intimations of separate systems in linear time and therefore the possibility of making politics by perpetually kicking the ‘higher’ stage into the long grass and making do with the ‘lower stage’ of ‘socialism’. In other words, reformism became a dominant feature within socialist politics battling it out with revolutionary perspectives with arguments that socialism was a real movement in and of itself. Socialism in reformist hands became an end in itself, eventually to be carried forward within Social Democracy, ideas and movements that have shifted from revolutionary to reform.

During the period in question, Marxism succumbed to and resisted this possibility. Bernstein infamously succumbed by effectively erasing communism and reinventing socialism as a form of liberalism, or as he put it, ‘when one examines more closely the organisations that socialism wants and how it wants them, he will find that what distinguishes them above all from the feudalistic organisations, outwardly like them, is just their liberalism, their democratic constitution, their accessibility’ ^VII. Ideas about the dictatorship of the working class and their communes had become passé. Socialism became a gradual affair, occurring within the bounds of mature capitalism, arising via the gradual takeover of a capitalist system busy erasing its own inner contradictions and crisis tendencies, to be subsumed by the greater administration of the socialising impulses of capitalist production, distribution and exchange, all of which would be delivered to the working class by the Social Democratic Party.

Lenin equally famously resisted this possibility by placing both ‘lower’ and ‘higher stages’ within an ontology of transition within the real movement of communism. Following Engels, Lenin viewed all states as a ‘special force for the suppression of the oppressed class ^VIII. Only once the working class had abolished the capitalist state could it suppress the capitalist class, rapidly develop the productive base of society and begin the transition from socialism to communism. The basic propositions are not so well defined by Lenin, and the same ambiguities exist as to the period of the withering away of the state, when it begins, but the essential point here is that, with Lenin, unlike Bernstein, if socialism is not to be absorbed by capitalism, but become a transitional period towards communism, the working class must seize power and abolish the rule of capital and state power. In which case socialism is not a system in and of itself, but part of a process in which ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ fold into each other over time, as part of the revolutionary transition of society (including the seizure of power, dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the state). Lenin reminded Kautsky of his previous view that,

‘if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it”, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation’. ^IX

Notwithstanding Lenin’s position pre-revolution, Bolshevik expediency post-October was to reduce the power of the soviets and secure state power by the party, now acting ‘on behalf of the working class’. Separated from the working class, forced into draconian measures, the resolve of the Bolshevik’s attempt to grapple with emerging economic and political problems withered into a decade of factional struggle, through which Stalinism emerged victorious. The historical aftermath reinvented the idea of socialism as a system to sustain capitalism in ways Bernstein would be familiar with. Stalinism masqueraded as socialism in one country, first pushing communism into the long grass and then extinguishing it altogether.

The victory of ‘socialism(s)’

The political defeat of the working class in the first half of the twentieth century erased the idea of transition and replaced it with distinct (never to be reached) ‘stages’, framed by ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the world of capitalism, through the prism of Social Democracy in the west and Stalinism in the east. The same defeat created a hostile environment for the Left as it fought to preserve the integrity of its critique of capitalism and its materialist conception of history, from the damage done by Stalinism.

Throughout the cold war period the dominance of social democracy was always fragile, and the degree of its application varied nationally. It was most developed in north European nations, and less so in North American. Social democracy’s variability, its degrees of dominance and instability depended on the variations in key areas, such as the national composition of class struggle, a nation’s pecking order within imperialism, and the degree to which Stalinism influenced the composition of class forces.

Social democracy offered a twisted and perverse ‘socialism’ premised on control over money capital, the terms and conditions of the sale of labour power to capital (and the state), and a form of welfare provision allowing substantial direct access to need and mass consumption outside of the sale of labour power as a commodity. In sum, this socialism within capitalism was bounded by a commitment to the controlled decoupling of money from money capital with limits placed on the mobility of the latter, on the one hand; and the partial decommodification of a range of core commodities and labour power itself.

In its weakest manifestations, social democracy meant regulation of capital flows to direct accumulation along national frontiers to achieve national goals, along with improved employment programmes, job guarantees, and credit to increase money available for mass consumption. The state, in this weakest form, would ensure the latter offered increased possibilities for profits to be redistributed to capitalists through lucrative contracts. The ‘multiplier effect’, basically the idea that extra state spending would lead to a greater rations output, became part of the technical language to describe the above in non-class parlance.

In its strongest manifestations, social democracy would also lead to states taking large swathes of capital into public ownership. Objectively, nationalisation of energy industries is inefficient because their aim is to provide stable employment, offer subsidised (?) prices to the private sector and other public sector organisations, essentially socialising taxation and borrowing the capitalist class’s commitment to the partial (?) decommodification of labour power and public goods and services. A social welfare state would also feature, consisting of free or heavily state-subsidised national health services and social housing programmes. And aligned to the above, would develop a national commitment to full employment and rising living standards to support a mass consumer society.

For a period, this allowed the capitalist elite to escape the secular stagnation of the 1930s, but at the cost of allowing more space to the expansion, distribution and consumption of use values, the hallmark of welfare Keynesianism and variously modified nationalisation programmes. However, this ‘allowance’ not only placed limitations on the primacy of valorisation (surplus value extraction), but also necessitated the heavy costs involved in policing use values to constrain their development quantitatively and qualitatively within the overall objectives of providing subsidies and infrastructure for capital, and amelioration for the working class. Policing took the direct form of tripartite management of trade union demands through the state and business mediations; and indirectly through various prices and incomes policies and the imposed limits of ‘budget constraints’.

This was an era in which, for a short time at least, the capitalist elite had reluctantly to accept the normalisation of the language of ‘socialism’. The revival of capitalism in the mid-twentieth century up until the 1970s necessitated that the capitalist elite reluctantly fall in with the language of socialism to prevent the fall of capitalism and place barriers on the real development of communism. Of course, ideologues blurred the boundaries by reinterpreting the changes as transitional to ‘corporatism’ (Schumpeter) and/or the convergence of planning and market within a larger technocratic society (Galbraith).

When social democracy came to an end, the capitalist class re-asserted the terms of its rule over the working class, at the expense of letting finance capital and so parasitic forms of capital loose the world over, creating a distance between itself and the working class, atomising workplaces via the financialisaton of corporations, fragmented into separate business units and a string of external supply chains. Among the benefits for capital were resecuring the political atomisation of the working class, as social democracy began to fail under the weight of its own contradictions; opening new avenues of parasitic activity and surplus value extraction based on a global division of cheap and more pliable labour. And among the cost to capital were/are stagnant economic growth, reliance of issuing mountains of debt to the working class to stave off chronic under-consumption.

Summary

The point here, is that capitalism cannot sustain itself unless propped up by some variant of socialism (for capital), as years of stagnation are testament to. In the era of social democracy with Stalinism as its life support, the term ‘socialism’ was pressed into the service of capital, as a means of preventing communism. Once communism is erased from the pole of opposition, socialism is pressed into a method of economic and political control over the working class; in effect, one has socialism for capital, as a means of system survival in an era of decline. In such a world, the opposition between market and plan becomes a dictatorship over the working class by capital via the rule of the state. This is so, because in ‘socialism for capital’ lies the capacity to utilise two forms of dictatorship, one over social use value/needs, and one over value/surplus value as the arbiter of all needs. And those grotesque forms include municipal socialism, market socialism, socialism in one country, national socialism, which all owe their existence to social democracy and Stalinism, which in turn owe their existence to a context consisting of a major working-class defeat and a mature capitalism in decline and the specific forms of class struggle arising from the latter.

Short of the working-class taking power, then socialism, as an unstable transitional relation with a missing pole of communism, will inevitably lead the working class back towards a declining capitalism, with all the grotesque dictatorship over use values, from education, health to housing. This will present the ruling class with more opportunities to fashion new forms of social control over the working class, sold as socialistic reforms, which only serve to assist the reproduction of labour power and capital accumulation.

The ruling class and their significant helpers, have, so far, won the battle of ideas shaping the meaning of socialism, to prevent communism. However, the working class’s path to power is to grasp socialism for what it is a) the battle ground of unstable, contradictory class struggle within a declining capitalism, and not some stable system worth re-inventing/defending per-se, and b) to salvage socialism for the working class, i.e., as part of the real movement towards communism.

1. CPGB, Draft Programme, https://communistparty.co.uk/draft-programme/5-transition-to-communism/>[↩]
2. Engels’ pamphlet, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, is often viewed as evidence that he and Marx favoured socialism. However, Engels’ focus is on providing a scientific theory of the socialisation of production under capitalism, that offers the material basis for workers to take power, as the contradiction between the developed socialised forces set in motion by capitalism and the state, and their basis in private property reaches its limits.[↩]
3. Marx, K. (1871) The Paris Commune, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm [↩]
4. Capital Vol. III Part V. Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital, Chapter 27. The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch27.htm[↩]
5. Marx, K. (1871) The Paris Commune, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm[↩]
6. Marx, K (1875) ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’,  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/[↩]
7. Bernstein, E. (1889) ‘Evolutionary Socialism, Chapter III., The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy’, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/ch03-1.htm[↩]
8. Lenin, V.I. (1917) ‘The state and revolution. Class society and the state’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm[↩]
9. Lenin, V.I. (1917) ‘The state and revolution. Class society and the state’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm[↩]