One of the many consequences from America’s long cold war with the Soviet Union is that anything even remotely resembling communism was declared evil and reviled. Americans, ever ones to overcompensate, started calling everything socialist, communist, as if to mark it as inherently evil as well. This trait of treating socialism and communism as the same thing persists to this day despite the fact that the Cold War ended many years ago. Now, the average person doesn’t recognize that there is a world of difference between the two and uses them both in political argument interchangeably. As a politics student who knows the difference, this is really starting to piss me off and I’m getting pretty tired of people butchering political arguments by doing this, so I’ve decided to lay the matter to rest…permanently.

First, we’ll start with communism. Communism broadly refers to a socioeconomic order built around a classless and stateless society where the means of production are owned in common. It holds an antagonism towards capitalism, which it sees as inherently exploitative and believes will eventually trigger a revolution between the working class and the capitalist class (aka the rich). The most famous proponent of Communism was Karl Marx whose theories (called Marxism imaginatively enough) formed the backbone of modern communist thought. Several nations have attempted to structure themselves along Marxist lines, but each of them has had to abandon true communism or failed to keep pace with the modern world. It’s from these failures and the horrors they created that the present perception of communism as evil comes from and what has largely discredited it as a viable form of government.

Moving on, socialism is a system that emphasizes the social ownership of property and democratic control or regulation of the means of production. Now this sounds almost identical to communism, but the key difference between the two is that communism is mostly based around the theories of Marx and his supporters whereas socialism has dozens of different iterations. Socialism can be understood as an umbrella term that encompasses a broad range of ideas from democratic socialists trying to win elections to revolutionary anarchists trying to overthrow the government. Not to mention the fact that while communism is widely discredited by the political mainstream, socialism is still very much a part of it, whether in the ‘utopian’ Scandinavian countries or even in the rabidly anticommunist United States.

As you can see there are some clear similarities and even overlap between the two systems, but they are nonetheless different things. In shot communism is just one aspect of many among the various forms of socialism while socialism itself remains rather vague and undefined. So the next time you find yourself in a political argument just remember, all communists are socialist but not all socialists are communists. If you do you will not only sound smarter to your opponent, but you wont drive the politics students in the room insane anymore. Isn’t that something to be proud of?