Socialism and communism are virtually synonymous

Geoffrey M. Hodgson

In a recent New York Times interview, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz declared that Bernie Sanders, “a self-described democratic socialist, wasn’t actually a socialist”. Unfortunately, Sanders shows no sign of dropping the s-word description or of making a clear case for an enduring private sector in a mixed economy. Then Stiglitz went on the say that “socialism … was never the same as communism”. But he failed to define either term.

Stiglitz is wrong. The persistent vagueness and misuse of such words sows confusion. In fact, socialism has an enduring meaning that is virtually identical to that of communism. In this blog I explain why.

The origins of the words socialism and communism

The word socialism appeared in November 1827 in the Co-operative Magazine, published by followers of Robert Owen, where a writer referred to “Communionists or Socialists”. It was used in the Poor Man’s Guardian in 1833 and moved into more frequent usage thereafter. As J. F. C. Harrison noted: “By 1840 socialism was virtually synonymous with Owenism”.

For Owen and his followers, socialism meant the abolition of private property. It also acquired the broader ideological connotation of cooperation, in opposition to selfish or competitive individualism. Communal property was seen as its defining institutional foundation. As Owen argued in 1840, “virtue and happiness could never be attained’ in “any system in which private property was admitted”. He aimed to secure “an equality of wealth and rank, by merging all private into public property”.

In 1840 in Paris, the word communiste appeared in an article by Étienne Cabet and in a pamphlet by Théodore Dezamy and Jean-Jacques Pillot. Influenced by Owen, Cabet was a Christian advocate of utopian communist communities.

Carrying a letter of introduction from Owen, John Goodwyn Barmby went to Paris in 1840 to meet the advocates of le communisme. On his return, Barmby founded the London Communist Propaganda Society in 1841 and established the Communist Chronicle newspaper. Despite his close working links with the Owenites, Barmby criticised socialism because “it wants religious faith, it is too commercial, too full of the spirit of this world, and therefore is rightly damned”. Communism for him was less materialistic and more divine.

With the investment of these idiosyncratic spiritual connotations, Barmby imported the word communism into English. It spread in the UK and the US, where the term socialist was already prominent. The word Kommunist had appeared in German by 1842, when Marx noted its usage.

In 1843 Engels reported to the Owenite journal The New Moral World that there were “more than half a million Communists in France” and that “Communist associations” and individuals describing themselves as communists were plentiful in Germany, Italy, Switzerland and elsewhere. Engels addressed his Owenite readers as “English socialists” and saw them as having very similar aims to the Continental communists.

In the second (1849) and later editions of his Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill noted another early difference of meaning between socialism and communism. For followers of Saint-Simon or of Fourier in France, communism meant “the entire abolition of private property”, whereas socialism was “any system which requires that the land and the instruments of production should be property, not of individuals, but of communities or associations, or of the government.” Unlike communism, this meaning of socialism would allow for individual ownership of personal possessions. Hence Mill described Owenism as communism, because it upheld the abolition of all private property. But this particular distinction in meaning between the two words was forgotten after the Owenite and other utopian experiments faltered.

Perhaps more influentially, the 1848 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary defined socialism as a “social state in which there is a community of property among all the citizens”, and defined communism as “a new French word, nearly synonymous with … socialism”.

Hence both socialism and communism referred to the abolition of (most or all) private property and the establishment of common ownership of the means of production. Henceforth the two terms became entwined within Marxism, there to perform an entirely different dance of meaning.

Marxism, communism and socialism

Marx and Engels often treated the terms socialism and communism as interchangeable. But occasionally they gave them different nuances. In 1845 they adopted the new word communism as their label for their movement: “Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” When they henceforth started setting up political organizations they adopted and promoted the term communist rather than socialist. But their ultimate goals were the same as most socialists at the time.

In 1888 Engels explained why he and Marx had chosen the word Communist for theirfamous Manifesto of 1848. Engels claimed that the word socialism was then too ‘respectable’ and too ‘middle class’. He wrote:

“Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a ‘Socialist’ manifesto. By ‘socialists’, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks … in both cases men outside the working-class movement … Whatever portion of the working class had … proclaimed the necessity of a total change, that portion then called itself communist. … Thus, socialism was, in 1847 a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement.”

Engels omitted to note that the self-described communists in the 1840s also had more than their fair share of middle-class devotees, quacks, bizarre utopians and radical clerics.

It is possible that Marx and Engels adopted the term communist partly because it had become more popular in a Continental Europe on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. While socialism remained more widespread in Britain, the Owenite movement, with which it was largely associated, had already passed its peak by 1847. While the younger term communism had already attracted several oddballs in the seven years of its use, socialism had the additional negative legacy of numerous failed utopian experiments in the 1820s and 1830s, in the UK and the US.

Instead of small-scale utopian experiments, Marx and Engels favoured a global insurrectionary strategy. As Engels observed in 1843, the French communists understood the need for “meeting force by force … having at present no other means”. Marx and Engels chose the word communism in the 1840s, not because their goal was different from socialism, but partly because many self-described communists in Continental Europe promoted armed insurrection. The penultimate section of the Communist Manifesto attacks various strands of socialism, not for their collectivist goals, but for their impractical strategies and their failure to countenance the use of force. The final paragraph of the whole work drives the point home: “The Communists … openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forceful overthrow of all existing conditions.”

But a few decades later, the word socialism was again in the ascendant. In 1880 Engels published Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique in the French Revue socialiste: notably he put socialisme rather than communisme in the title. By 1890 a number of parties describing themselves as socialist or social-democratic had taken root in Germany, France and elsewhere. In 1895, Engels wrote approvingly of “the one great international army of Socialists, marching irresistibly on and growing daily in number”. The earlier emphasis on physical force was also reduced: the possibility of achieving their goal by democratic means, rather than by insurrection, seemed greater than before. One of the major reasons for using the term communism rather than socialism had disappeared.

William Morris was an artist, craftsman and writer, and one of the first English intellectuals to embrace Marxism. Writing in a 1903 Fabian Tract, he saw socialism and communism as virtual synonyms: “between complete Socialism and Communism there is no difference whatever in my mind”. They assert that the means of production and the resources of nature “should not be owned in severalty, but by the whole community”.

Whether they used the term socialism or capitalism, their fundamental aim was clear. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels echoed Owen and called for the “abolition of private property.” They proclaimed an economic order in which “capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society.” Engels repeated in 1847: “The abolition of private ownership is the most succinct and characteristic summary of the transformation of the entire social system … and … is rightly put forward by the Communists are their main demand.” In 1850 Marx and Engels again declared: “Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it”.

This meant the complete abolition of markets. They wanted an end to the “free selling and buying” of commodities. As Marx wrote in 1875: “Within the cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products”. Engels argued in 1884 that “no society can permanently retain the mastery of its own production … unless it abolishes exchange between individuals.” The abolition of markets was seen as necessary for social control.

By emphasizing national ownership, Marx and Engels went much further than Owen and most other early socialists or communists. Marx and Engels welcomed efforts “to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state” and looked forward to a time when “all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation”. Described as either communism or socialism, this utopia of national ownership and “social” control persisted in their writings.

Phases of communism

In his Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875, Marx used the term communism to describe his goal. He considered “the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society.” Eventually a new order would follow:

“In a more advanced phase of communist society, when the enslaving subjugation of individuals to the division of labour, … when the all-around development of individuals has also increased their productive powers and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can society … inscribe on its banner: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”

Hence Marx considered a “first phase” and then a “more advanced phase” of communism. Writing in his State and Revolution in August 1917, Lenin referred to this passage from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme but introduced a different usage. He wanted to defend the planned Bolshevik seizure of power against the criticism that Russia was insufficiently developed economically for a radical Marxist revolution.

Lenin amended the Marxist dictionary and renamed Marx’s “first phase of communist society” as socialism. Under this socialism the means of production would be in public ownership but there would still be a struggle against bourgeois ideas and material shortages. When that struggle was completed, and after the subjugation of ‘capitalist habits’, full communism would be established. “The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of labour and pay.”

In contrast, Marx and Engels never distinguished the terms socialism and communism in this way. For them, socialism and communism both meant the abolition of the private ownership of the means of production. They wrote of lower and higher “phases” but did not use different nouns to distinguish them.

The Socialist International (also known as the Second International) was a global association of socialist parties, formed in 1889. In 1919, Lenin and the Bolsheviks broke from the Socialist International and formed the Communist International (also known as the Third International). The difference between the Communist and Socialist Internationals was not stated in terms of ultimate objectives. Instead the Communist International was formed because several parties in the Socialist International had supported their national governments in the First World War. There was no declared amendment of final goals, although leaders of the Second International were accused of de facto abandoning socialism.

As I show in my book Is Socialism Feasible? the original meaning of socialism persisted even in the relatively moderate UK Labour Party. It was endorsed by leading members such as Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan.

The failure of revisionism

Especially since the Second World War, there have been a number of attempts to change the meaning of socialism, including by Tony Crosland and Tony Blair. But the resilience of the original meaning is testified by the endurance of the UK Labour Party’s original version of Clause Four from 1918 to 1995. This original version calls for complete “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” and offers no defence of markets or a private sector. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is among those that would like to return to the 1918 formulation.

Some writers obfuscate the issues, but the undying commitment on the left to common ownership and the left’s widespread agoraphobia (fear of markets) testify that socialism has not changed much in meaning. Although some communists may differ from some socialists in terms of strategy, in general there is little if any difference in terms of goals.

By contrast, the term social democracy has successfully changed its meaning. It now contrasts with socialism, especially in terms of its advocacy of a mixed, market economy. In 1959 the (West) German Social Democratic Party committed itself to a “social market economy” involving “as much competition as possible – as much planning as necessary.”

This was very different from the enduring meanings of the words socialism and communism. Politicians like Sanders need to make clear where they stand.

20 April 2019

 

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