what is the basic difference between socialism and communism ?what is socialism and which religious book is source of Indian socialism?
Answers
Answer:
The Difference Between Communism and Socialism
Defining Communism and Socialism
To better understand the slippery distinctions between communism and socialism, let's trace the history of both terms.
Communism
Communism traces its roots to "The Communist Manifesto," which laid out a theory of history as a struggle between economic classes, which will inevitably come to a head through a violent overthrow of capitalist society, just as feudal society was violently overthrown during the French Revolution, paving the way for bourgeois hegemony (the bourgeoisie is the class that controls the means of economic production).
Following the communist revolution, Marx argued, workers (the proletariat) would take control of the means of production. After a period of transition, the government would fade away, as workers build a classless society and an economy based on common ownership. Production and consumption would reach an equilibrium: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Religion and the family, institutions of social control that were used to subjugate the working class, would go the way of the government and private ownership.
Marx's revolutionary ideology inspired 20th-century movements that fought for, and in some cases won, control of governments. In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution overthrew the Russian czar and following a civil war established the Soviet Union, a nominally communist empire that collapsed in 1991.4 The Soviet Union was only "nominally" communist because, while ruled by the Communist Party, it did not achieve a classless, stateless society in which the population collectively owned the means of production.
In fact, for the first four decades of the Soviet Union's existence, the Party explicitly acknowledged that it had not created a communist society. Until 1961, the Party's official stance was that the Soviet Union was governed by the "dictatorship of the proletariat," an intermediate stage along with the inevitable progression towards the final stage of human evolution: true communism. In 1961, Premier Nikita Khrushchev declared that the Soviet state had begun "withering away," though it would persist for another three decades.5 When it did collapse in 1991, it was supplanted by a nominally democratic, capitalist system.
Socialism
Socialism predates the Communist Manifesto by a few decades. Early versions of socialist thought were articulated by Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), who was himself an admirer of ur-capitalist Adam Smith, but whose followers developed utopian socialism; Robert Owen (1771–1858); Charles Fourier (1772–1837); Pierre Leroux (1797–1871); and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), who is famous for declaring that "property is theft."7
These thinkers put forward ideas such as a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, a sense of solidarity among the working class, better working conditions, and common ownership of productive resources such as land and manufacturing equipment. Some called for the state to take a central role in production and distribution. They were contemporary with early workers' movements such as the Chartists, who pushed for universal male suffrage in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s.8 A number of experimental communities were founded based on the early socialists' utopian ideals; most were short-lived.
Marxism emerged in this milieu. Engels called it "scientific socialism" to distinguish it from the "feudal," "petty-bourgeois," "German," "conservative," and "critical-utopian" strains the Communist Manifesto singled out for criticism. Socialism was a diffuse bundle of competing ideologies in its early days, and it stayed that way. Part of the reason is that the first chancellor of newly unified Germany, Otto von Bismarck, stole the socialists' thunder when he implemented a number of their policies. Bismarck was no friend to socialist ideologues, whom he called "enemies of the Reich," but he created the West's first welfare state and implemented universal male suffrage in order to head off the left's ideological challenge.
Since the 19th century, a hard-left brand of socialism has advocated radical societal overhaul—if not an outright proletarian revolution—that would redistribute power and wealth along more equitable lines. Strains of anarchism have also been present in this more radical wing of the socialist intellectual tradition. Perhaps as a result of von Bismarck's grand bargain, however, many socialists have seen the gradual political change as the means of improving society. Such "reformists," as hardliners call them, were often aligned with "social gospel" Christian movements in the early 20th century. They logged a number of policy victories: regulations mandating workplace safety, minimum wages, pension schemes, social insurance, universal healthcare, and a range of other public services, which are generally funded by relatively high taxes.
Answer:
The basic difference is that under communism, most property and economic resources are owned and controlled by the state (rather than individual citizens); under socialism, all citizens share equally in economic resources as allocated by a democratically-elected gov.
Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production and workers' self-management of enterprises. It includes the political theories and movements associated with such systems.