Difference between Marxism, Communism, and Socialism

[The Yosemite Bear]

oh and the cow explanation people forgot objectivism:  you have two cows you butcher them for meat because thier demands for feed means that they are parasites

[Iosef Cross]

Iosef Cross

These theories were kinda off religious in nature: They predicted that the day would come were the current unjust world will end and another much better world would take it's place. That's like the second coming of Christ.

While they later degenerated to this kind of dogmatism and immanentizing the eschaton, originally it would be better to regard it as pseudoscience. Marx and his followers had pretensions that their vague, qualitative assessments of history and society identified fundamental interactive dynamics and components which could be deterministically modeled. Clearly this was completely unscientific and accepted as a matter of faith as it was, as Karl Popper noted, unfalsifiable.

Marxism is something different from Marx's thoughts. The movement itself always had some religious aspects. However, it was never a pseudoscience in the sense you just described it. I think that word can be used to describe Marx's theoretical system, but with reservations.

The fact is that Marx's theory of exploidation was derived from classical economics. However, only 4 years after the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital, Carl Menger and William S. Jevons published their works with demolished the bases of classical economic thought. So, Marxists after that date can be considered pseudo scientists because they defended obsolete theories and didn't attempt to even dialog with the economics mainstream.

Socialism is a type of economic system were the state is the owner of the means (or factors) of production. Hence, economic activity is organized along a single plan, instead of capitalism/market economy were millions of individual plans are coordinated trough the price system.

This is an inaccurate definition. The classic and dictionary definition is workers' control of the means or factors of production. Several schools of socialism explicitly deny or even oppose state involvement in the economy, even as a mediatizing force or institution of workers' control. Including classical anarchism, libertarian Marxism, other schools of anarchism, various branches of syndicalism are opposed explicitly to the state as the tool of workers' control, denying that a hierarchical and collectivist state can even serve as such a tool. Nor is central unitary state planning even a uniform characteristic of Leninist states: consider the USSR under the New Economic Policy, the post-Mao People's Republic of China (which most independent observers would probably keep under the overall Leninist socialist family in the early years before the radical liberalizations later on), the regional planning initiatives under Khrushchev, decentralization under Gorbachev, and worker cooperative management in the perestroika USSR and Tito's Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia.

Many economists work with the definition of socialism that I have posted. That's because all other definitions are special cases of the first. And if the USSR and Maoist china didn't follow that definition, well, that means that they weren't really socialist countries. The fact is that never any country has been 100% socialist (as never has any country been 100% capitalist). The USSR was much closer to socialism than the US, but both were neither fully socialist or capitalist countries.

Why my definition of socialism is the best? Well, let's analise that other definition you have posted: the workers ownership of the factors of production. In that case every worker gets a share of the means of production that they work on (like every worker gets a share of the factory that they work on). If you allow then to buy and sell these shares, in a few years social inequality will emerge, were some individuals will have capital and will live over the interest paid by it. So, if we start with worker's socialism (some writer called it syndicalism) we will end with capitalism.

Only if the state prevents people from buying and selling ownership shares that we can stabilize the situation. But, if you cannot sell your stuff, then it is really not yours. So, the State ends up being the real owner of the factors of production. So we end up into my definition of socialism.

In fact, this definition is used by the economists with treated the problems of socialist calculation in the first half of the 20 century.

[Iosef Cross]

Clearly this was completely unscientific and accepted as a matter of faith as it was, as Karl Popper noted, unfalsifiable.

Popper was an opponent of all historicism, not just the Marxist variant of it, though. I personally prefer Kuhn's explanation of scientific theories to Popper's.

The fact is that in the social sciences the standards of epistemological rules made to distinguish science from pseudoscience are not quite applicable. For example, if you are a Marxist you can point out to anyone that lives off interest that surplus value exists, proving the Marxist theory of surplus value and exploitation. But a modern economist will look into interest income and see it determined by the marginal productivity of capital and the intertemporal consumption preferences of the agents in the economic system.

The fact is that in social sciences the theory is what determines what is observed. Hence, inductive methods cannot be used to disprove theories with the same degree of certainty than in the exact sciences (hence, they are useful, but not as useful as in the physical sciences).

From the SFRY to Lange to Deng Xiaoping, this school actually made significant progress in developing a theory of market socialism, where worker ownership* coincides with market pricing.

Well, the fact is that Lange's and Deng Xiaoping's socialisms are quite different.

Lange's model of "market socialism" was developed in response to criticism of the socialism ideal by some economists. The criticism was based on the idea that market prices guide decision making processes in a complex economy. Without market prices rational decision making would be impossible. Hence, socialism is impossible. Lange responded that socialism would have to develop a market like pricing system in order to work.

His model worked as such: Each individual plant will have a manager and the economy as a whole would have a central planning board. Each manager would have the order to maximize profits of the plant that they manage, based on prices announced by the central planning board, of the inputs and outputs (hence, the managers would have to equate marginal revenue = price to marginal cost). The central planning board would announce prices and the managers in the nation would adjust their supply and demand schedules to them. Based on the supply and demand schedules of the factory managers and the consumers of final products, the central planning board would compute if there is discrepancies between total supply and demand quantities, if there are prices would be adjusted upward to prevent excess demand and downward if there is excess supply. Hence, the system would tend to reach a general equilibrium, where excess demand is zero for all goods.

Equipped with knowledge that every decent scholar of socialism possesses, Lange's model is based on the definition of socialism as the state as owner of the means of production. The existence of markets for these means of production is simply the product of orders to the plan managers. Suffice to say that Lange's model of market socialism is ridiculous and is based on a twisted interpretation of walrasian general equilibrium theory.

China's type of adopted socialism is not socialism at all. It is capitalism.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Why my definition of socialism is the best? Well, let's analise that other definition you have posted: the workers ownership of the factors of production. In that case every worker gets a share of the means of production that they work on (like every worker gets a share of the factory that they work on). If you allow then to buy and sell these shares, in a few years social inequality will emerge, were some individuals will have capital and will live over the interest paid by it. So, if we start with worker's socialism (some writer called it syndicalism) we will end with capitalism.

Only if the state prevents people from buying and selling ownership shares that we can stabilize the situation. But, if you cannot sell your stuff, then it is really not yours. So, the State ends up being the real owner of the factors of production. So we end up into my definition of socialism.

In fact, this definition is used by the economists with treated the problems of socialist calculation in the first half of the 20 century.

Appealing to the authority of economists does not an argument make: there are various anarcho-socialist economic schemes that treat worker participation in management over any enterprise he engages in as an inalienable right. Besides the theoretical basis, there are historical cases of primitive and even peasant and light industrial cooperative management and organization which does not involve distributed individualistic property of the capitalist sort as a means of controlling the enterprises in which they work (Spanish anarchist communities, limited self-management in revolutionary Russia, peasant collectivities in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, and so on). One would do well to note that modern capitalist property is not a historical constant or law of nature, and property of this sort was not the primary form of social and economic organization or transmission of possessed goods in pre-capitalist European societies. In light of most of human history, it is an aberration.

[K. A. Pital]

The fact is that Marx's theory of exploidation was derived from classical economics. However, only 4 years after the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital, Carl Menger and William S. Jevons published their works with demolished the bases of classical economic thought. So, Marxists after that date can be considered pseudo scientists because they defended obsolete theories and didn't attempt to even dialog with the economics mainstream.

I thought that much like classical economics gave way to neo-Classicism, orthodox Marxism gave way to neo-Marxism. Perhaps not as swiftly, but neither was the shift from classicism to neo-classicism and then to the flurry of competing schools we have now instantaneous.

Many economists work with the definition of socialism that I have posted. That's because all other definitions are special cases of the first.

That is profoundly wrong. Why should you accept the definition of socialism given by some (not all) economists and some (not all) socialists instead of the one that describes the desired system for all socialists, whereas some cases are "special" cases of the general worker ownership/control concept?

Why my definition of socialism is the best? Well, let's analise that other definition you have posted: the workers ownership of the factors of production. In that case every worker gets a share of the means of production that they work on (like every worker gets a share of the factory that they work on). If you allow then to buy and sell these shares, in a few years social inequality will emerge, were some individuals will have capital and will live over the interest paid by it. So, if we start with worker's socialism (some writer called it syndicalism) we will end with capitalism.

That is a common argument against anarcho-syndicalism which sounds quite similar to the Marxist critique of the same. But how is it relevant to the fact that the theory of socialism presumes worker ownership, not state ownership (i.e. most socialists do not consider capitalist nationalization to be socialist), and state ownership being merely a form of worker ownership? That state ownership is fundamentally characterized by which class is in power/in control in the state - a capitalist nationalization does not constitute socialism? Some strains of socialism argue that worker ownership is impossible without total nationalization of means of production (at least the industrial means of production, e.g. Marxism-Leninism). But that is definetely not all there is to socialism.

Social inequality does not automatically mean capitalism - you are profoundly wrong. Even in a totally nationalized planned economy there is inequality between a physics professor and a janitor. Yet, neither is a capitalist, and capitalism is thus not present.

Your argument seems to boil down to "some will have capital" - some who? Some workers? If some workers have capital, but wage labour is banned legally, syndicalism remains viable, because despite the inequality, it will not be capitalist in nature, unless you be willing to call the workers capitalists.

Only if the state prevents people from buying and selling ownership shares that we can stabilize the situation. But, if you cannot sell your stuff, then it is really not yours. So, the State ends up being the real owner of the factors of production. So we end up into my definition of socialism.

Buying and selling shares to whom? To other workers? Unless there is a class of capitalists, income disparities alone do not indicate capitalism is present. The state can provide the institutional framework for syndicalism to arise - instead of anarcho-syndicalism, you can have state-supported syndicalism, where the state does not own the means of production, and yet, it helps to maintain a legal institutional framework which prevents capitalism (and thus the class of capitalists) from arising. Such examples do exist.

So the concept is more complex than you try to say.

For example, if you are a Marxist you can point out to anyone that lives off interest that surplus value exists, proving the Marxist theory of surplus value and exploitation. But a modern economist will look into interest income and see it determined by the marginal productivity of capital and the intertemporal consumption preferences of the agents in the economic system.

That is only if you accept, no-holds barred, all tenets of marginalism down to the very extreme, the Austrian school, where value is entirely subjective, and allocation creates value. Which is nowhere near to being the end of all in economic science, neither does it explain many other fundamental problems of economics aside from the theory of value. Marginalism itself is rife with unexplained paradoxes. So technically, not every modern economist will do so; or do so without reservations. A classical Marxist would argue from LTV, but a modern Marxist might argue that there is no contradiction between the observed fact of exploitation and the marginal productivity of capital, or construct more elaborate arguments regarding the principal difference of the reward system of the capitalist class and the worker class, which are factually, regardless of whether you are Marxist or not, very different.

Suffice to say that Lange's model of market socialism is ridiculous and is based on a twisted interpretation of walrasian general equilibrium theory.

General equilibrium theory is itself a contested point. So Lange's attempt to include it in a socialist framework may be misguided, but it's doubtless that his theory did influence other economic thinkers, just as the other Polish economists of the "market Marxism" strain.

China's type of adopted socialism is not socialism at all. It is capitalism.

It may be capitalism (or, more likely, a highly advanced state-monopolistic capitalism) from an orthodox Marxist point of view; I merely said that the Chinese have devised a theory which explains their system as socialism. That is all.

[Illuminatus Primus]

According to Iosef, one might as well ask why the state carelessly prevents the commoditization of the franchise? After all, if you can sell or rent all your rights or functions of participation in organized institutions, why not liberal democratic ones? Do I not "own" anything I cannot sell? What about my rights? What about the various institutions I participate in by right of membership, be it a union, student body, church etc., etc. Are none of these different from the modern corporation? Do I own myself, since I cannot truly sell myself into slavery? How does the "libertarian" reply to these facts? The "libertarian" (a curious term, given their atypically extreme constraint on the definition of freedom v. both mainstream intellectual and especially public opinion of the meaningful composition of rights and freedoms, including basic positive freedoms) is incapable of imagining alternative social or economic modes of relation or means of organization. This, despite the fact that modern capitalism is a historical aberration when one looks at anthropology and human history in a global sense. The idea political participation were inalienable rights invested in each individual was historically radical and unconventional, being tied up with pre-capitalist concepts of economic control and heredity based on the feudal system in Europe. Capitalist property was equally alien to these conventional, stable, and long-lasting human social forms.