Comparing Communism And Socialism

“Any cook should be able to run the country,” said Vladimir Lenin, a renowned Russian revolutionary and devout communist, while preaching the keystone principles of both communism and socialism. While similar, Communism and Socialism have many differences that create a minuscule divide between the two ideologies that can be seen by a negligent eye as the same.
First published in 1827 England, and five years later in France, Socialism became a large part of the region's history. Conveniently beginning in and around England’s Industrial Era and a pre-revolutionary France, Socialism prodded the two monumental moments along and helped to further history by piggybacking on the struggle of everyday people during the aforementioned events. Being
that the French Revolution was fueled by rampant starvation and aggravation at the tyrannical government, people unified and began to desire a new governing force. As an answer to their wishes, Socialism was created as “...a movement of both the worker and middle-class, all for a common democratic goal” (Diffen). This ideology that seemed to favor the entire Third Estate was one that made the people happy but did not stay in France long as it dispersed to other regions of the continent.
With the publication of “The Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Communism became the younger, more radical, counterpart to Socialism.
With a main focus on destroying Capitalism, Communism made extensive changes to everything- pious, politics, and personal matters. Led by many figures, including Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communism abolished religion, democracy, and private property.
Still a headlining topic, equality was something both Communism and Socialism touched on. While Communism believed that all people are the same- a garbage collector equal to a neurosurgeon equal to a factory worker- having believed that all had valuable roles in society and that society could not function without each of them and, since everyone was valuable, class systems didn’t make sense and were eradicated. Socialism took a less radical approach, believing that all people were important but there was a slight divide between the politically impressive and the working
class.
Another thing that Communism and Socialism disagreed on was the ownership of property. While Communism believed that there should be no private property and that everything should be owned by the government, Socialism believed that there should be collective ownership and that nearly everything was owned by everyone. In Socialism, there are two kinds of property: personal and public. While personal property contained mainly clothing, housing, and household goods public property was owned by everyone and generally included places of production and hospitals that were, technically, owned by the state and controlled by the workers. This is because property as seen as a sort of status symbol, a show of pomp and luxury, and should therefore be removed in order to create a more perfect society: “... we are enemies of the capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak...it’s unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property…” (Hitler).
While all of this might seem good on paper, in practice it failed miserably as it caused many wars.
One such war would include the Cold War as The United States of America and Communist Russia had an ideological war. A bloodier, less recent, war would include World War II as The Allied Powers (Great Britain, The United States, and France) fought with The Soviet Union and Japan. While the reaction from outsiders is nothing unprecedented, the reaction of the people inside these regimes is one of fear and panic. The outcome has been predicted, by Thomas Jefferson, just years before the beginning of Socialism: “...when the people fear the government there is
tyranny.”
Communism and Socialism are ineffective because they are fear-mongering and are incapable of keeping enthusiasm and momentum for the cause. This has been proven time and time again with the fall of many Communist empires.
Meanwhile, They are effective forms of government because of the unity and common goal to better society that arise with the administration. This excitement fuels the fire and helps the new government emerge. While the utopian government has yet to be found and bring peace to the grand globe we live on, it is clear that neither Socialism nor Communism is a solution- or even a close resolution- to the world’s many problems and conflicts. For, in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “... a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed.”