What is the Difference Between Socialism and Communism?

The young socialists of today call themselves Democratic Socialists. They are "green" on the outside and "red" on the inside. They truly believe that they can do socialism in America much better than it was done in the twentieth century in the Soviet satellite countries which called themselves democratic socialist republics.

These countries were not democratic; they were tyrannies controlled by the Communist Party. The Communist Party represented about ten percent of the population while the other ninety percent were subjugated by the total control of the top Communist Party executive leaders.

The Communist Party leaders had a huge standing army, a huge street police apparatus, and a large security police controlled by the Dear Leader. The ultimate power resided with the tyrant and his wife.

What is Socialism?

Socialism is a societal form where the central government [the Communist Party] controls all the means of production, the centrally planned economy, government banking, all press, education, travel, health care, all churches, arts, publishing, and all media.

When asked what socialism is, people on the street answered this way:

-           Socialism is a political party that takes care of people; you Americans are not taking care of your people

-           Socialism is being friendly and sociable with others

-           Socialism is compassion, fairness, and equality  

-           Socialism is the other word for communism, and it was horrible, it killed a lot of people

-           I don’t know and I don’t care

-           Socialism is like a worm which destroys its host nation

-           Free stuff like the Nordic people get

Twenty-first century American socialists or Democratic Socialists as they call themselves believe that they can dispense with the political tyranny of socialism and keep the economic programs and thus do socialism the right way, never explaining what the right way is.

The elephant in the room is that under socialism, economic programs did not exist, you had to work hard for a meager salary. There was no incentive to work harder since everybody was paid about the same. This gave rise to the performance motto: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”

Under socialism, land and farms were confiscated, private real estate like nicer homes and hotels were confiscated. Any criticism of the government’s decisions landed one in prison for years and worse.

Shouldn’t rational human beings be able to learn from the experience of millions of people who suffered and died under socialism in the twentieth century, without having to live it personally in the twenty-first century?

The most obvious case against socialism is that it creates abject poverty, loss of all freedoms, and no prosperity because no human is so altruistic that would be willing to share all personal wealth and hard work with the lazy.

Socialism is propaganda, deceit, lies, and false promises. The Government uses force to control and change society. It is a tyrannical society of thieves. The main goal of socialism is communism. Vladimir Lenin wrote, “what is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the ‘first,’ or lower, phase of communist society.”

According to Paul B. Skousen, socialism has seven pillars. (Paul B. Skousen, The Naked Socialist, Ensign Publishing Co., 2014)

1.      All powerful RULERS

2.      Society divided into CASTES (see India) and CLASSES

3.     All things in COMMON

4.     All things REGULATED

5.      Compliance is FORCED

6.      Control of INFORMATION

7.      No UNALIENABLE RIGHTS

Skousen also wrote that there are 46 goals of modern socialists:

1.      Promote Socialism

2.      Demean capitalism

3.      No national boundaries

4.      Install Environmental Rulers (green energy)

5.      One-world currency

6.      Control the Internet

7.      Establish economic rulers

8.      Economic equality

9.      Ruler’s Law (bypass national law)

10.                             Render Congress irrelevant

11.                             Subordinate local government

12.                             Destroy representation (no free elections)

13.                             Deflate constitutional convention

14.                             Uphold 17^th Amendment

15.                             Regulate all transportation

16.                             Regulate all energy

17.                             Eliminate private property

18.                             Destroy family culture

19.                             Redefine normal and healthy

20.                             Destroy the sacrament of marriage

21.                             Discredit the traditional family

22.                             Destroy gender distinctions

23.                             Universal access to abortion

24.                             Limit family size

25.                             Replace God-centered religion with Humanist religion

26.                             Destroy church economies (tax exempt status)

27.                             Eliminate cash in the marketplace

28.                             Nationalize health care

29.                             Supreme World Court

30.                             One-World Super-Legislature

31.                             Environmental rights supersede Human rights

32.                             Nationalize all natural resources

33.                             Destroy nuclear weapons unilaterally

34.                             Neutralize Israel

35.                             Nationalize all industry

36.                             Synch animal rights with Human rights

37.                             Infiltrate and regulate all education

38.                             Control all information

39.                             Infiltrate and regulate labor

40.                             Uphold all labor as Optional

41.                             Discredit the U.S. Constitution

42.                             Discredit all Freedom Heroes and Founding Fathers,

43.                             Rewrite history to discredit American culture.

(The Naked Socialist, Paul B. Skousen, 2014, pp. 493-500)

What is communism?

Communism is a classless, stateless society. Communism promises that a communist society, even in the absence of work incentives, will produce greater quantities of goods than any other economic and political system in existence and each person will be provided according to his/her needs.

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that property is to be eliminated and used for public purposes, income tax must be progressive or graduated, property of all emigrants and rebels should be confiscated, credit, transportation, and communication should be centralized in the hands of the state, a common plan for all production and agriculture must exist, all must labor in industrial armies, town and country must be abolished, agriculture and manufacture must be combined,  and education must be free.

“Communist production will produce a state of absolute saturation where all human needs will be satisfied. Supplies are to be stockpiled and distributed according to the needs of every person. Services are also to be made available at central depots and are to be available in such quantity that all elements of competition among consumers will be eliminated.” (W. Cleon Skousen, 2014, The Naked Communist, p. 87)

So, greed, selfishness, jealousy, coveting, markets, money, and prices will disappear? And who decides the needs of each person and by what metrics? You will own nothing and be happy about it? Who will measure your happiness quotient? Who will suppress dissention and dissatisfaction? How would selfishness be eliminated, which, according to communists, leads to class struggle?

 

Socialism for the Gullible

Socialism is the ideology of thieves and tyrants. – Dinesh D’Souza

 'Ship of Fools' (woodcut)

It does not matter how many people speak up against socialism, the steppingstone towards communism, and describe the miserable lives they lived under such system before they were able to escape to capitalism and its various opportunities, the useful idiots who vote time and time again for socialists and the fake Democrat Socialists, have no idea that they are voting themselves into poverty and misery.

The young advocates of socialism live well and safe under the umbrella of capitalism but have been brainwashed that it is so bad that they must change it to socialism immediately and at all costs.

Do they know what socialism really is? No, because schools spent no time teaching them in world history what it is and what it did in all countries in which it has been tried in the twentieth century.

Even socialist countries in Latin America and in Europe keep voting in more socialists expecting a different result. Many give up, sneak across the U.S. border and live illegally off the fruits of capitalism without paying any income taxes. Their children take advantage of the free education and health care system and all the welfare provided if their parents vote illegally for the Democrat Party in elections. They send remittances back to the countries they fled from, supporting dozens of other foreign nationals with welfare tax dollars from the U.S.

If various generations of Americans had studied in schools the world’s history of socialism, they would have learned that the socialist government controls all the means of production, education, land, property, industry, entertainment, travel, vacation, health care, banking, and centrally plans the entire economy. Nobody can own anything and citizens are not happy about it.

In the world of socialism, the steppingstone to communism, “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” Among the young American socialists, men can menstruate and have babies.

Orwell wrote in his 1984 novel that Winston’s world was governed by the Ministry of Truth (arts, entertainment, education, and news), Ministry of Peace (war), Ministry of Love (law, order), and Ministry of Plenty (economic affairs). Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, referred to these ministries as Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty. The Ministry of Love was the most frightening to the main character, Winston, as it was an impenetrable rectangle without windows. “To prevent any penetration other than official business, the building was surrounded by “a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and machine-gun nests.” Gorilla-faced guards in uniforms secured the streets.

Leaving Orwell’s euphemisms aside, the socialist governments everyone experienced in the former Soviet Socialist Republics around the globe were not farfetched from Winston’s imaginary world. (Orwell, 1984, pp. 4-5)

Socialism’s Thought Police was aptly described by Orwell. In real life socialist republics, people had no freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of thought. Americans like the libs of TikTok who constantly complain about the capitalist system as being fascist, would have been carted off to prison in a socialist country and remained there a long time for insulting the party, the Democrat Party that is.

The mainstream media has become the Democrat Party’s constant advocacy group. They repeat the same language of scripted narratives, not unlike Orwell’s Newspeak, the official language of Oceania.

Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984 had three components: the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary.

The A vocabulary was small and only used for everyday life. Such words were not allowed to be used for political, philosophical, or literary purposes.

The B vocabulary was only allowed for use in political purposes. They were “intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.”

The C vocabulary was composed of scientific and technical terms. The words were stripped of any “undesirable meanings.”

The Newspeak reflected the 1984’s societal reality of the people of Oceania who had become soulless automatons by having lost their human qualities, the ability to express themselves clearly and meaningfully, and worst of all, did not even realize the loss.

Young American socialists truly believe that they can do socialism in America much better than it was done in the twentieth century in all the Soviet satellite countries which have failed their populations miserably and destroyed their lives.

Twenty-first century socialists think that they can dispense with the political tyranny and keep the economic programs. They think that this way, they can do socialism the right way. The problem with this thinking is that the economies of every socialist state failed because the Communist Party controlled the economy through disastrous central planning, confiscation of private property, land, and total control of the means of production. Any criticism ended citizens in prison and worse.

Shouldn’t rational human beings be able to learn from the experience of millions of people who suffered and died under socialism in the twentieth century without having to live it personally in the twenty-first century?

The most obvious case against socialism is that it creates abject poverty, loss of all freedoms, and not prosperity. No human is so altruistic that would be willing to share all personal wealth and hard work with the lazy.

Electricity Was a Luxury under Communist Rule

Today, when I enter a public building or store where the lighting is dim, I am immediately transported to the depressing life we lived under communist rule. The immediate reaction is to exit the building.

My entire childhood, grandma’s house, six miles from the biggest refinery in the south, was illuminated by an anemic oil lamp. Years later, their village finally got electricity.

A 40 W bulb was dangling from the ceiling, too weak and inefficient to even light up grandma’s small bedroom. Things and people inside looked yellow and sickly.

The six-mile road from the city to the village remained a gravel road until the communists were dethroned. The rickety bus we traveled on to see grandma had a large hole in the floorboard and fumes and dust billowed inside. There was no running water and no septic tank, just an outhouse. We pumped water from a well.

We did not complain because there was nobody to complain to, the Communist Party bureaucrats ran everything, with the greatest ineptitude. They provided sporadically our electricity, water, hot water, gas, steam heat, food, health care, and concrete apartment housing in which we were forced to live. Their rules and governance were neither efficient nor humane.

When I left in late 1970s, people were desperate to escape the life of misery they endured under the boot of the Communist Party’s socialist republic regime, but few were able to. I considered myself lucky to leave even though I left behind everything I loved, my parents, my family, and my friends.

When people thought that life could not get any harder, it did. The dictator decided in 1981 that Romanians should sacrifice more and live by the light of candles and oil lamps - electricity was cut off daily at sunset. If people had refrigerators, food inside spoiled. Elevators for high rise apartments (nine stories) stopped between floors when the power was cut off, and the unlucky riders were left stranded inside.

In 1981 Ceausescu’s regime also invented a new program called “rational illumination.” According to this irrational program, a two-bedroom apartment could only have one 40 W bulb. An energy snitch was assigned to each bloc entry to check apartments for violators. If the bulb was 60W, a fine was given on the spot. TVs could only run two hours a day. The programs were not great, but it was the interdiction that angered the population.

This forced rationing of energy intensified in 1984-1985. It was bad enough that people had to ration food, water, gas, hot water, steam for heat, and even space, but energy? While the people tripped in the dark, Romania, a major producer of oil and gas, was exporting energy elsewhere so the country could pay its debt to the west.

Without electricity life was even harder in wintertime. Heating with steam was minimal at best. People slept with their clothes on. Windows were covered with comforters to stop the frigid air from coming in. The room temperature was 45 Fahrenheit, and people had to wash with freezing water, dress in darkness, and travel to work on streets without lights. The regime touted on its national radio the “bright accomplishments of socialism.”

Ever the survivalists, people bought large bags of candles and built a reserve in their closets. Students studied by candlelight or oil lamps inherited from their grandmas.

The bizarre situation of living in a modern city in high-rise apartments with elevators that did not work and older people stuck in their apartments because they were unable to climb stairs daily, was best described by the coined phrase “blindman’s Sunday.”

The communist system was so irrational that people kept mostly in darkness could watch their dear leader, during the two hours of television allowed, dedicate energy from power plants and hydropower plants for export while Romanians stayed in darkness and their food spoiled in refrigerators in the heat of summer. In winter, window sills became their refrigerators but had to fight the clever crows.

Restaurants and cafeterias were permitted to have three items on the menu. It is unclear why there were only three since the atheists did not believe in the Trinity. Food portions were weighed in grams and people were assigned specific caloric daily values according to the exertion in their professions. Customers ate in semi-darkness.

It is hard to imagine electricity as a luxury good or service, but it was. We take electricity for granted in this country, cheap and easily available energy. Considering the massive development of energy-gobbling data centers, we should not.

As Romania has proven, electricity was a luxury which the police state gave and took away as it pleased. One communist dictator kept twenty-three million humans in darkness for years, with light from candles, while exporting their energy abroad.

The moral of the story is, stay away from socialism, communism, and any other ism that guarantees free everything because there is no such thing as free, someone has to pay for it. 

Remember that there is no such thing as democratic socialism, it’s a Democrat Party invention, but there is socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. Communists lie and never deliver on their empty promises. Communism never ends well when their reign of misery and poverty grips peoples’ lives.

Drab Grey Socialism and Communism Are Popular in the U.S.

If you ask the young American generations if they believe that capitalism is evil and socialism is good, they will answer with a definitive “yes.” When asked to explain the fundamental differences between the two and whether socialism is the steppingstone to communism, silence will follow.

They repeat the media sound bites that socialism is for “the people” and “things are free.” They do not know exactly what is free, but they enumerate things they want such as free abortions, free food, free housing, free schooling, free transportation, free day care, and free travel. None of these were free in socialist countries ruled by the Communist Party and nor are they free under capitalism. There is no such thing as a free meal, someone must pay for it.

The answers are sad, as they reveal the fact that young Americans have no historical idea about the end-product, communism, and its murderous and sordid history. They believe the media’s and the Democrat Party’s NGO’s disinformation machines that feed them lies daily on every platform possible.

Young women and Jews turned out in droves to vote for the self-described communist for Mayor of the largest U.S. city, a young man with no working experience, who had been an American citizen less than eight years. He promised rent control housing and city-run grocery stores among other things.

Communism has been promoted in public schools and in academia as the future of all Americans. Teachers shamelessly avoided teaching the subjects they were assigned and pushed political activism; they promoted communism verbally or through clever choices of class activities and assignments that had little to do with the subject matter and all to do with their political ideology of Democrat Socialism, a term invented by the left.

Imagine my surprise upon the realization that the corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry: the exterior of buildings, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of grey, ash, concrete grey, black, white, and brown, to include cars, a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous 20 years lived under communism. Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, depressed, and sad. Everything became a soul-less grey and darker grey, barely lit train station as if to conceal the stains of misery.

I have noticed after the lockdowns that all public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes had undergone a similar transformation of dark grey, black, brown, and beige everywhere.

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic colors, grey, black, white, beige and brown. Many excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

The Bauhaus or Staatliches Bauhaus (state building house) was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was quickly adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe which started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision from Weimar spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to some sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is grey and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

Recently, while visiting my favorite department store which was always decorated by red, white, and green everything, long before the Christmas season, I was unpleasantly surprised to see the Christmas decorations in the form of a grey table with grey chairs, grey plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the dismal and funereal décor.

It is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and grey, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the hapless population in every way.

The freedom to choose anything will completely disappear once digital currency will be imposed on all citizens.

Ronald Reagan aptly said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

And that refers to the freedom to choose anything we want or dream of, including the colors in our lives.

The Train Wreck of Democrat Socialism

“Communism was never conclusively destroyed, and it was never condemned in some kind of court.”   Vladimir Bukovsky

Without brakes, a train will eventually derail and cause an unimaginable disaster and suffering. Similarly, a free society like the United States which tolerates divergent opinions and groups, will be unable to stop the existence or the activism of communist organizations, groups, and individuals who rebrand themselves as Democrat Socialists who want to fundamentally change America from a constitutional republic to a socialist republic.

Socialist appears to be a much less threatening term than communist, and it is very appealing to half of the country who has slept soundly through American history classes or has been indoctrinated since the 1980s by Howard Zinn’s manufactured version of American history.

Socialism, Democratic Socialism, and Communism are incomprehensible terms and notions to most Americans because they did not study specific details about socialism or communism and how many millions have been killed by the Communists under the ruling of the Communist Party.

Democratic Socialism is a term invented by Democrats who love euphemisms and rebrand old and dangerous ideologies that would benefit their plans for total control of the population that would become dependent on them.

Most Americans adopt the exact words and phrases of the daily MSM broadcast and regurgitate them ad nauseam without really understanding what they are saying, and what they are asking for. Such blatant useful idiot ignorance inevitably leads to New Yorkers voting for a Muslim communist as their Democrat mayoral candidate.

A train that derails causes immediate reaction and alarm. But, once people vote for the pie in sky promises of socialism, communism, Democrat Socialism, the results take years before the oppression of what they voted for rears its ugly head. By then, the possibility of reversal is farfetched. It may take decades to reverse the damage. It is easy to vote for a communist, all you need is a ballot and a ballot box. But you need a revolution to reverse course and undo the damages caused by the Communist Party or the Democrat Party rule.

The Bolshevik activists of the Soviet Union, Germany, England, and America of the 20^th century had fanned across the world to indoctrinate poor farmers, factory workers, and all the useful idiots they found into the wonders and freedoms of the promised land of socialism. The Communist Party was going to give them anything free they desired. When the activists were met with pointed questions and resistance by the populace, those farmers and workers were beaten up and disappeared. It was indoctrination by force and by the promise of murderous violence.

Once the Communist Party was successful in eliminating several monarchies, the socialist republics that replaced those monarchies began to build walls, prisons, and gulags (forced labor camps) to keep their populations in, restricting most of their freedoms.

Sadly today, the new generations of indoctrinated Americans have not been taught about the major failures of Marxist economics and the murder of 100 million innocents at the altar of communism.

Vladimir Bukovsky wrote about the absurd theories of Marx and about his predictions that never came true. The numbers of the “proletariat” actually decreased significantly in the developed capitalist countries. Their living standards have increased and not fallen. Marx was wrong about “super-monopolization.”  Small producers have grown and still do. The “market economy” improved the “means of production.” Socialism destroyed their centralized economies. And who are the “proletarians” of today? Marx wrote about “the crises of over-production every ten years.” It never happened because supply and demand controlled that possibility.

The reality is that the socialist regime and their central planning under the guidance of the Communist Party have never been successful at anything except oppressing the masses, paying them the lowest wages possible, and making their lives a continuous misery for most of the twentieth century. They never supplied enough goods to keep their citizens well fed, happy, warm in winter, with a plentiful supply of water, medications, and other necessities for a decent life. The only ones who lived well were the Communist Party members, their apparatchiks, their informers, the standing army, and the security police.

Despite the constant semantics and euphemisms rebranding communism in a positive light by the Democrat Party and the left, we do not have a proletariat in America, nor workers, we have employees. And we are not a democracy; we are a Constitutional Republic. If we are smart enough, we can keep it, but if we keep following the Democrat Party’s direction, we might all be “Democratic Socialists,” whatever that means.

Final note from RevealedEye: 

"Accepting Socialism is basically admitting you can't compete in the real world. You are saying, 'I'm willing to give up my liberty, my religion, and my dreams as long as the state will take care of me.' Accepting Socialism is accepting failure."