As a socialist, I am often frustrated when discussing my beliefs because most people do not understand them. Calls to reduce inequality by socializing health care, housing, etc. are invariably dismissed on the grounds that this will give too much power to the government. The popular understanding seems to be that socialism means state ownership and control, so more government doing stuff = more socialism. Before I can even make a case for socialist solutions, I have to first correct these misconceptions and explain the meaning of the words I'm using. Having to do this repeatedly gets old fast.
So, to save everyone some time, I'm going to do my best to explain what socialism is all about here. That way, next time I meet someone who's confused about this subject, I can just link people to this post.
Basic Definitions
Now then, with that out of the way, what is socialism exactly? Let's start with the dictionary definition, which seems like as good a place as any to begin. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the first thing that came up on Google), socialism is "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
That's a pretty good definition, if a little vague. I would simplify by saying that socialism is a system where both politics and the economy are controlled democratically instead of by rich elites, unaccountable bureaucrats, or oligarchs. To be clear, by democracy I mean a process by which people are able to participate in making decisions that affect their lives (in this case politically and economically). The association from here to collective (or social) ownership is pretty straightforward: if the economy is managed by the people via democracy, no one can deny desirable goods and services from the community as a whole. So you can say that they are owned in common instead of by private individuals. There is some complexity we're glossing over here (building and maintaining democratic systems can be challenging in practice), but I think in general the point holds that where economic resources are democratically managed they are also collectively owned.
To motivate this discussion a bit, the reason that people are talking about socialism in the first place is because of some criticism that has been leveled against the current ascendant mode of production in the international economy: capitalism. So we should review what it is and why socialists have some issues with it. Quoting from the OED again, capitalism is "an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit."
This definition covers pretty much the whole concept. You'll notice that there is no discussion of markets in this definition; we'll come back to the significance of this later. The only wrinkle that may not be obvious from this definition is that it implies unbounded wealth accumulation by private individuals (the owners of capital), which unless counteracted by some sort of economic redistribution results in dramatic wealth inequality. The basic systemic critique of capitalism is that it is inherently undemocratic because, in a society of great wealth inequality, the few people who own the majority of wealth wield much greater economic and political power than everyone else. Even Adam Smith noted that, left to its own devices, capitalism would tend towards fewer and fewer firms owning a larger and larger share of the economy due to individual firms rationally pursuing their own self-interest instead of the public good. This also has the unintended outcome of certain companies "rationally" choosing to contribute to climate change, which if left unchecked will make much of the planet unlivable. As a result, socialists have proposed an alternative that advocates public (instead of private) control of the economy as an antidote to capitalism's tendency towards wealth inequality.
Common Misconceptions
At this point, some of you are probably itching to say something along the lines of, "Socialism isn't democratic control of the economy, it's state control of the economy!" Members of the political right and other anti-socialists often try to frame socialism in this way to discredit the idea. I don't know any socialists who actually advocate for this, though, because it doesn't address the systemic critique of capitalism. Unless a given state is managed democratically, allowing it to control the economy is in no way an improvement on the unbounded wealth accumulation of capitalism; it's merely replacing a private tyranny with a public one. The only good-faith justification for using this definition instead of one encompassing the democratic principle is a rejection of the systemic critique of capitalism or an argument against democracy itself.
The other common misunderstanding of socialism is that it entails enacting an authoritarian regime like the USSR or Cuba. It's true that these countries call themselves socialist states, but in the same way that (as Nathan J Robinson pointed out) the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is neither democratic nor a republic, the Soviet Union claiming that it was socialist did not make it so. In fact, like many Marxist-Leninist states, the USSR was managed by a cabal of unaccountable bureaucrats, not by the people themselves. As noted above, since the state was not controlled democratically, state ownership of the economy did not result in democratic management of the economy. Economic decisionmaking authority was vested not in the workers but in a bureaucracy of ruling elites. In many ways, this economic system is more similar to capitalism than socialism, which is why many socialists criticize the Marxist-Leninist (or Maoist) model in practice as state capitalism.
The point is, apart from some of those in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, most socialists are vigorously opposed to these types of regimes, which is why they tend to specify that they are democratic socialists or libertarian socialists (we'll talk more about that in a separate post). To suggest otherwise by claiming that all socialists are advocating for the policies of Stalin is, intentionally or not, blithely ignoring the diversity of thought on this topic in the socialist community.
From Social Democracy to Democratic Socialism
This doesn't answer all of our questions, though. Especially nowadays, with the rise of Bernie Sanders-style "democratic socialism", people often wonder: how is this different from social democracy? This is an important and relevant distinction. If our supposed calls for socialism are actually indistinguishable from the progressive wing of liberal capitalist democracy (ala the Nordic model or even classical New Deal/Keynesian liberalism) with an expansion of the welfare state to balance out the influence of unregulated capitalism, why the need for a new, more radical term?
While I'm sure there are some people who use socialism just to refer to social democratic policies (as Bernie Sanders often does), historically speaking most self-described socialists draw a distinction between the two. Social democracy is ultimately a capitalist society that allows for some government regulation to provide social welfare to the people, but doesn't prevent capitalism's unbounded wealth accumulation or the resultant wealth inequality. The best it can do is mitigate that inequality through progressive taxation and other redistributive economic policies.
A socialist society, by contrast, would need to limit private control of the economy to the point that no individual could accumulate that much wealth through the profits of capital investment in the first place. There are a variety of ways one could accomplish this, but to my mind at least two components are necessary: 1) radical political and economic democratization, and 2) decommodification of essential goods and services. Both of these are pretty loaded terms, so let's review each of them in turn.
Political and Economic Democratization
By political and economic democratization, I mean allowing individuals hitherto excluded from the decisionmaking process to participate in it instead of leaving wealthy elites in charge. There are a variety of ways we can accomplish this task (as it's a tall order), but I can lay out some rough guidelines. On the economic side of things, this probably entails replacing privately-owned companies with worker-owned and run firms. So, instead of having management policy ultimately decided by the CEO, who is chosen by the shareholders to represent their financial interests, the board of directors (and other managers) is elected by and from the workers, who each have an equal vote in who is chosen to represent them on the board. For larger companies (or ones that otherwise might cause negative externalities), some representatives of the local community may also serve on the board to serve the public's interest. Worker-owned businesses are not particularly common in our society today, but they have been shown to have equal or greater productivity and stability compared to privately-owned firms, with examples of successful firms around the world.
This would replace the various investor markets (wherein a private individual can profit off of other's labor without doing any actual labor themselves) with a system of worker cooperatives (which only provide profit to active workers), massively limiting the potential for unbounded wealth accumulation that comes from private capital investment. As a result, the negative influence of big money on politics would also be mitigated. Making political compaigns publicly-funded (and forbidding them from recieving private funds) would go a step further, as would allowing representatives to be recalled at any time if a majority of constituents are displeased with their performance, adding some much-needed accountability to the process. Other electoral reforms to make our political system more democratic include ranked-choice voting, multi-member districts, making election day a holiday, allowing universal vote-by-mail/online voting, and liquid democracy.
You could go even farther with this attack on private property by making certain possessions (e.g. land, housing) only legally considered personal property if the owner is actually using them. So you only have usufruct rights for that property, not full ownership. The details of these types of economic theory are getting a little off-topic for this post, but if you're interested you can read more about mutualism or check out the book Radical Markets by E. Glen Wyl and Eric Posner, which discusses some related ideas.
Decommodification of Essential Goods and Services
Decommodification is a simple concept, but one with profound consequences. It means taking something that is currently a commodity (that is, a good/service which must be purchased on the market) and making it freely available for no cost at the point of use. Many of our basic necessities (food, housing, medical care) that those of us with privilege take for granted are currently provided as commodities, and thus only available to those with the means to pay for them. If some or all of these basic necessities are made available to all on the basis of need instead of ability to pay, it frees up working-class people, many of whom currently rely on low-paying jobs to survive, to pursue the work best suited to their abilities and interests. This ensures that everyone has a guaranteed right to survive, and ideally thrive, regardless of their income.
Coming from a capitalist mindset, this may seem like a ridiculous proposal, but it has a strong philosophical justification. In most Western countries (such as the United States), all residents have a theoretical right to life, liberty, and property, but if you can't afford the things you need to survive, you don't actually have those rights in practice. Guaranteeing that everyone has access to food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and other essentials by making them free at the point of use ensures that our society is living up to the democratic principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It's specifically mentioned in article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And by protecting these fundamental rights, people can move beyond basic subsistence to pursue more productive goals and become more engaged citizens. There isn't any good economic reason for this deprivation, either; we produce more than enough food for everyone, it's just not distributed fairly.
While not technically the same thing as decommodification, I would be remiss if I didn't mention universal basic income (UBI) in this section. UBI, which essentially provides a certain level of income to all citizens regardless of employment, is a crude way to approximate decommodification of essential goods if you can ensure that all of those goods (including, most notably, food and rent) are affordable to someone who is receiving only basic income as financial support. When introduced alongside other social democratic reforms as a means of reducing inequality and giving working people more opportunity to bargain for good employment and/or pursue their desired form of work, this can help lay the groundwork for decommodification. Ensuring everyone has the money to buy bread, however, is not as convenient as making bread directly available to everyone and free at the point of use, since the process still requires a financial transaction even if the cost is negligible. UBI can also be used to entrench the power of capital, particularly if it is instead offered as a replacement for other welfare services, which allows the rest of the economy to continue to be dominated by market forces. So there is some nuance and risk involved with this policy.
Market Socialism
With both radical democratization and decommodification achieved, we start to have a society where unbounded capital accumulation is increasingly limited, and the resulting social hierarchy (and associated political power) of wealth inequality is avoided. Money and wages may still exist, and can be used to purchase certain (non-essential) goods and services on the market, but the economy is no longer oriented primarily towards producing profits for the owners of capital. This system, which still has money and thus isn't communist, is definitely starting to lean more towards socialism than capitalism. Since it is something of a compromise between moneyless socialism and social democracy (which still operates on the capitalist market), it is called market socialism.
I'd also like to note, before we wrap up this section, that the term "democratic socialism" is somewhat redundant. Since socialism already means democratic control of the economy, it is automatically implied to be democratic. As we pointed out in the previous section, a number of regimes have called themselves socialist but were not in fact socialist in any practical sense specifically because of their lack of democracy. So authoritarian socialism is something of an oxymoron, since authoritarianism is in direct opposition to the democratic principles that are inherent to socialism. This is getting a little off topic (the topic of libertarian vs. authoritarian socialism will be discussed in a later post), but the point is that people are only making a distinction between democratic socialism and socialism in general because of the anti-socialist stigma that persists due to decades of Cold War-era propaganda.
The Spectrum of Socialism
So far we've discussed what socialism is and how it's distinct from capitalism, including the difference between socialism and social democracy. These are not just binary differences, though. If we imagine trying to measure all societies, real and hypothetical, based off of how socialist (or democratic) they are, with full capitalism (e.g. free-market/laissez-faire/neoliberal capitalism) on one side and full socialism (e.g. communism, which we'll get to in a minute) on the other, a whole spectrum of potential political economies emerges. Starting from the right, we have neoliberal capitalism, which starts to bleed into social democracy as we move further to the left and add more wealth redistribution to our capitalist framework. Moving even further left, we reach the middle of the spectrum, where the power of capital is countered by organized labor, collectively-owned firms, grassroots activism, and decommodification. Once this balance tips in favor of the many instead of the few (or the working class instead of the capitalist class, in Marxist terms), we enter the center-left side of the spectrum, the territory of market socialism.
If we continue to move left on the spectrum from market socialism, the process of democratization and decommodification continue until buying things with money begins to seem redundant in a society where production is based on human need instead of profit. This causes the purchase of goods and services on the market to start being steadily replaced with mutual aid. The fullest extent of this process of socialization, at the far left side of the spectrum, is communism.
But what is communism, you may ask? There are a few competing definitions in the general discourse, but in the Marxist sense of the term (the only one I've heard used by self-described communists), it refers to a stateless, classless, moneyless society organized on the principle "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need." (Compared to socialism, the level of agreement between leftists on the meaning of communism is remarkably consistent.) So you can see how this is essentially the "final form" of socialism, one that has shed all vestiges of capitalism and has totally socialized, democratized, and decommodified society.
Utopia and Revolution
A fully communist society probably sounds utopian to you. In the sense of being an idealized society that some people (leftists) would like to form in the long term, it is utopian. But in the sense of being an unrealistic fantasy, I think it depends on where you're looking at it from. Viewed from the perspective of our current, fairly neoliberal capitalist society, the concept of communism seems absurd and alien. People just doing things for each other for free? Ridiculous! But viewed from the perspective of market socialism, where the political economy already prioritizes meeting people's basic needs over market forces, it's a fairly natural extension of the existing egalitarian principles. Looking at socialism from the view of social democracy would afford a similar realization, I think. In order to progress from the right side to the left side, you can't just jump straight to full communism: from both a material and social standpoint, you need to move steadily along the spectrum without skipping so culture is able to socially adapt to the new system.
This insight gives us some context needed to answer an important question. Socialists are (mostly) in agreement on what society is like currently and what it ought to be, but often have serious disagreements on how to get from the former to the latter. One of the biggest debates is whether to focus on reform or revolution, which are considered to be in opposition to each other. But, when viewing socialism as a spectrum, we see that the goals of the socialist project are not merely "doing socialism" in isolation. In order to get to market socialism (or communism), we first need to replace neoliberalism with social democracy. Providing greater political and economic equality using those reforms helps to protect and liberate the working class, which makes it easier to organize for the next leftward transition, including revolution if necessary. So, ultimately, social democracy is not the same thing as socialism, but it is a useful stepping stone on the way to socialism.
I don't want to discount the value of revolution to the socialist project, though. As you may have noticed, since our current political system is a flawed democracy at best (even according to The Economist), certain people wield much more power than others, and consequently have a strong incentive not to upset the status quo too much. Given these facts, it seems likely that attempts to change the system from the system, which gives a massive and unfair advantage to those currently in control, are unlikely to succeed in fundamentally changing society. To create a socialist society when our leaders do not want to give up their power, it may be necessary to make drastic changes to the system that go beyond playing by its current rules, or even rewrite the rules of the system from scratch. This is the argument for revolution, whether political or social in nature.
In arguing for the importance of advancing along the spectrum of socialism in stages (so culture has time to adapt to the new political economy), I don't want to suggest that revolution is unnecessary. In point of fact, in order to create the conditions for these new socialist cultural norms which advance the movement for workers' liberation, a social revolution of some form is absolutely critical. Even if it isn't realistic to overthrow the federal government and establish a totally new system, revolutionary activity can absolutely be used to force political rulers to make concessions they would not have made through reformist parliamentary process alone. So, in one form or another, I view revolution as essential to the socialist movement.
Conclusion
I hope that answers some of your questions about socialism, communism, and how they relate to social democracy (and each other). Perhaps you even feel a little sympathetic to our cause now that you understand it better. If not, that's also fine; my main goal with this post was to try and explain my beliefs so socialists and non-socialists can have more productive discussion in the future. In particular (as noted above), social democrats and socialists have some shared goals, so I think we can find common ground even if we disagree on some things.
There's a lot more to discuss, but this is a complicated topic, and I wanted to make it accessible to everyone, including people who don't know anything about socialism. I'm interested in writing more posts about political economy, particularly Marxism, anarchism, and the history of liberalism. If you have a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let me know in the comments!
As for fellow lefties reading this, I hope I didn't make any serious mistakes. If you see anything I've written that's wrong, please feel free to correct me. In trying to speak about our goals to a general audience, some differences in language and precise definition were necessary to keep the piece from being weighed down by pedantic obfuscation. I think making this outreach in good faith, in order to welcome more people who might be interested into our movement, hopefully should make up for a few broad generalizations. I would be happy if this was the start of more discussion between different groups of socialists about what we disagree on (so we can learn from each other) and what we hold in common (so we can put those ideas into praxis). Solidarity, comrades!
Further Reading/Watching
Articles
Teen Vogue, "What is Democratic Socialism?" Believe it or not, Teen Vogue actually has a whole series of articles on socialism and its rise in popularity among the younger generation. From what I've read so far, these articles are accessible and well-researched.
Current Affairs, "Socialism As A Set Of Principles" A good piece on why the specifics of how socialism might work can be a little vague because we're trying to build a system that can accomplish certain principles, instead of defining based on doing specific processes in isolation of people's material conditions.
Monthly Review, "Why Socialism" An article by Albert Einstein, who not many people today know was in fact a socialist. A short and lucid explanation of what drew Einstein to socialist values.
Books
Robinson, Why You Should Be a Socialist A more in-depth primer on socialism for those who are skeptical of the idea.
Nichols, The S Word Exactly what it says on the tin: a history of socialism in the United States, including a look at how popular many socialist ideals were among the people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Graeber, Bullshit Jobs A strong critique of capitalism from the perspective of the many workers who suspect that there isn't a good reason why they are required work so much.
Bregman, Utopia for Realists For more information on Universal Basic Income and shortening the workweek, if you're curious about that topic.
Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto The classic! If you want to understand communism or Marxism as originally devised in the 19th century, this is the place to start. While dense and convoluted by modern sensibilities (like all of Marx's writing), it's much shorter and more accessible than Capital.
Videos
An Introduction to Socialism This is a pretty good primer on socialism and its history, although it confuses social democracy and socialism a few times.
Noam Chomsky on Socialism The best short explanation of what socialism means that I could find on the Internet. Chomsky is great, I recommend reading some of his work if you want to gain a more in-depth understanding of leftist politics!
The Difference Between Socialism, Communism, and Marxism Explained by a Marxist Exactly what it says in the title. A great summary of these terms and what they mean.
Democratic Socialism and Its Future in America A good overview of the democratic socialist movement in the US in particular.