Capitalism
A form of economic order characterized by private ownership of the means of
production and the freedom of private owners to use, buy and sell their property or
services on the market at voluntarily agreed prices and terms, with only minimal
interference with such transactions by the state or other authoritative third parties.
Communism
1.Any ideology based on the communal ownership of all property and a classless
social structure, with economic production and distribution to be directed and
regulated by means of an authoritative economic plan that supposedly embodies
the interests of the community as a whole. Karl Marx is today the most famous
early theoretician of communism, but he did not invent the term or the basic
social ideals, which he mostly borrowed and adapted from the less systematic
theories of earlier French utopian socialists — grafting these onto a philosophical
framework Marx derived from the German philosophers Hegel and Feuerbach,
while adding in a number of economic theories derived from his reinterpretation
of the writings of such early political economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas
Malthus, and David Ricardo. In most versions of the communist utopia,
everyone would be expected to co-operate enthusiastically in the process of
production, but the individual citizen’s equal rights of access to consumer goods
would be completely unaffected by his/her own individual contribution to
production — hence Karl Marx’s famous slogan “From each according to his
ability; to each according to his need.” The Marxian and other 19th century
communist utopias also were expected to dispense with such “relics of the past”
as trading, money, prices, wages, profits, interest, land-rent, calculations of profit
and loss, contracts, banking, insurance, lawsuits, etc. It was expected that such a
radical reordering of the economic sphere of life would also more or less rapidly
lead to the elimination of all other major social problems such as class conflict,
political oppression, racial discrimination, the inequality of the sexes, religious
bigotry, and cultural backwardness — as well as put an end to such more
“psychological” forms of suffering as alienation, anomie, and feelings of
powerlessness.
2.The specifically Marxist-Leninist variant of socialism which emphasizes that a
truly communist society can be achieved only through the violent overthrow of
capitalism and the establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that is to
prepare the way for the future idealized society of communism under the
authoritarian guidance of a hierarchical and disciplined Communist Party.
3.A world-wide revolutionary political movement inspired by the October
Revolution (Red Oktober) in Russia in 1917 and advocating the establishment
everywhere of political, economic, and social institutions and policies modeled
on those of the Soviet Union (or, in some later versions, China or Albania) as a
means for eventually attaining a communist society.
Socialism
A class of ideologies favoring an economic system in which all or most productive
resources are the property of the government, in which the production and distribution
of goods and services are administered primarily by the government rather than by
private enterprise, and in which any remaining private production and distribution
(socialists differ on how much of this is tolerable) is heavily regulated by the government
rather than by market processes. Both democratic and non-democratic socialists insist
that the government they envision as running the economy must in principle be one that
truly reflects the will of the masses of the population (or at least their “true” best
interests), but of course they differ considerably in their ideas about what sorts of
political institutions and practices are required to ensure this will be so. In practice,
socialist economic principles may be combined with an extremely wide range of
attitudes toward personal freedom, civil liberties, mass political participation,
bureaucracy and political competition, ranging from Western European democratic
socialism to the more authoritarian socialisms of many third world regimes to the
totalitarian excesses of Soviet-style socialism or communism.
