I was just saying to someone else that the average american thinks socialism and communism are the same thing, and when they hear either of them they think stalinism.

[–] novibe@lemmy.ml 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I’m not American but I say socialism and communism are the same. The distinction came from anti-Soviet social democrats, and academicist leftists.

It’s not a distinction made in Marx or Engel’s works, or even Lenin or any other actual revolutionary.

The idea of communism having “stages”, and the lower one being “socialism” is not based in anything really.

Socialism and communism are synonyms for the movement of self-abolition by the working class.

Like communism is not even a “stateless, moneyless, classless” society. That’s just because state and money and symptoms of class society. If the working class abolishes itself, the symptoms of class society will (likely) fade away.

But communism is not an endpoint to arrive at. The start of the abolition of classes and the end of it are both communism, and socialism.

What comes after, where all aspects of class and class society are but a distant memory, that’s not communism. That’s a new thing to come that we can’t imagine while we live in capitalism, in class.

(Not that we can’t imagine it ofc, but like predict it with any realism).