Hey,
Von Mises is right, and you’re definitly wrong. Dont’ you ever feel funny that Prez Obama is perceived as a “communist” ONLY in the US?
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1st hypothesis: “OMG the commies are controlling all over the 199 contries of the free world!!! Actually, Communists are ruling the whole planet and not even the CIA noticed it in its world factbook website !!! Well i’m pretty sure that they are at this very same moment checking this conversation as they also own all organisations on this planet (armies, red cross, NSA, UN, WTO, the Church in your town, Mac Donalds, etc). Better we just surrender if so…”
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2nd hypothesis: you just have no culture in politics. But it’s allright.
Politics is a specific discipline to study and maybe it’s not included in your scholar cursus in your university, so i can’t completely blame you for it : you can’t invent politics understanding, it’s like economics: quite messy as there are many streams and theories. But let’s go back to basics here, in order to rectify some of the fact your announced to be so :
- “if you support a state, then you’re a socialist”… First of all, state was originally created by a guy who decided with other guys he will edict rules applied to all his folks. It means Pharao, Kings, City councils, Presidents of the USA etc. created or supported a STATE at different level and times in History. Do you think King Arthur was a communist? what about Ronald Reagan ? …
On the other hand, “no state” means that you are limited to live in small communities with the fear of any group of individuals that you could meet (clans or tribes or bears), as they are not like you: they would have no common currency, no common culture, no common flag, no common lenguage nor food habits, etc… even worst, no state means low efficient Market, because of low efficient exchange of information, of goods and of services. No state means no guaranty of the security of your land, no law to protect your property, no link with others except with your own village or town or city. Conclusion: you damn need a state, wheter it is “restricted to the strict minimum” or " fat state", the size and limits of the state being another question not dealed with here. By the way, “no state” means no possibility for the USA to exist.
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“to socialize” is a verb. It means “to meet other folks and create social links”. When you go to the church and meet people you socialize. When you go by night to a party with friends, when you have a date with a lovely chick, when you go on sunday to visit your grandma, when you leave comments on this forum, you socialize. There is no political content in this verb. To "SOCIALize is just about SOCIETY, like in the word SOCIOLOGY, not like in SOCIALISM which is a specific ideology. Don’t mix it up it’s very different.
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you said : “since socialism is simply an economic system in which there are private and publicly owned means of production”. No. Socialism is not what you define here and the definition provided by Mises is better than yours as quoted below by another person. What you refer to is just “a state with public participation in the economy”. This category of state existed even well before the word “socialism” was created. As explained in point 1, states and public participation of different kinds were invented before Christ was born, and it continued since then during antique Greek and Rome states, during Kingdoms, etc. they all had a particular participation in local means of production. I doubt it was socialism… Also confer to King Arthur if any doubt were left.
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You have no understanding of socialism. You wrote “socialist”, then “marxist”, then… “commited marxist”. Some comments here:
First of all, i assume you never had the opportunity to read anything written by Marx. But that’s Ok. Second, I assume you don’t really know if Marx was a socialist or does he created socialism himself. Then why are these guy called commies? are socialists marxists?.. Third and last, you may know that at some point in XXth century history more than 50% of the world population was officially under “communist” regimes much more than all the one that ever were dominated by the US… So it’s not just a bunch of punks. it’s a massive movement which means a massive approval somewhere by whole population in many countries even if most of them may have changed their mind at some time aftermath.
Well, again here are some tips to understand the main difference betwen all these words: communists, socialists, marxists, obama, etc.
- : “Socialist” is a word, like “christian”, in the sense that under the same word you can find hundred of streams, groups, tendencies, courants, blocks, parties, leaders, people, etc. It just means “related to the ideology of socialism”. Socialism is a political ideology originated in the XVIII and XIX centuries and developped till now. It goes from hardcore pro-farmer life integrists of the Cambodgian regime in 1970s, to the very peaceful and current president of the International Monetary Fund IMF (Dominique Strauss-Khan, a french guy) or of the WTO (Camdessus, another french).
Socialism was created along with the “Industrial Revolution” in UK, then spred to Continental Europe and then to the whole world. As you know in the Industrial Revolution era, new machines were created for upgraded and higher level of production, and required then a lot of new men to operate it and to source new resources (wood, then coal, water, iron, steel, oil, etc.). A lot of farmers joined the cities and the industrialized areas of the world to gain new jobs but working conditions were very close to slavery (children as well as adults, more than 12 hours a day, no holidays, no health care, no rights to participate to national elections, no citizenship anyway, no propper food nor water, no protections against accidents, etc.). So a bunch of educated workers and of youth from the rich industrial famillies decided that conditions shall be improved. These claims were supported by christian feeling for brotherhood and compassion for the Poor. Progressively, workers revolted against their bad working condition and asked for better treatment and wages, rights, etc. They built an ideology of sharing the wealth they were producing among all, and to have a more equitative retribution for their work. Different socialist “schools” claim for different degree and condition of sharing wealth between private, collective and public sectors, as well as different vision of how complete the owning of the means of production shall be.
- “Communism”: is one version of this political ideology. it’s one of the more violent and was generated after the fail of numerous attempts to reach a better share of the wealth among workers and owners. Communists are a kind of “hardcore socialists”. They claim that the workers shall take the control of the state by a revolution, in order to own and administrate all the means of production for more justice the wealth among the people. Historically, all regimes which pretended to be “communist” turned into dictatures. But you have to understand that a dictature needs a minimum local support to stay into place. Most of the communist dictatures, how extreme they were, stayed in place because they continued to provide a minimum share of the benefits to the population (usually in education, health, food, but that’s generally all). See USSR that stayed for almost 80 years, see China… The communist party, once controling the state, always turned into an aristocracy: “the government of the ones who know how to do” = a technocracy with full control of the population. In that way, Communist regimes are compared to Fascists and Nazis regimes, as at the end of the day they act and ended exactly on the same way, even if their initial ideology is different. kindly note that most of the Republicans in the US have no idea of what is fascism or nazism. They mix all the words in “-ism”… sad… If required i come back on this later.
By the way, there is another strict difference between socialism and communism: “communism” was supposed to be the very last stage of achievement of the perfect society once transformed for the wealth of all, while “socialism” was just supposed to be the “transitional period to” a perfect society of equality.
- “Marxism”: is simply the ideology based on what K Marx said and wrote. Karl Marx was an academician born in a rich family in Central Europe. More information are available on a certified “non commies” website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx if you are curious. So why an ideology on this guy ideas???
Well, Marx studied and he succesfully passed his PhD in… economics! His thesis was about unbalances between Supply and Demand. He almost lived after the publication of David Ricardo went famous (and Ricardo was a liberal)… here is his main idea developped in Marx’s thesis and later books and theories : in his time worker were almost all in physical works (mining, etc), not in open-office work like ours. If you provide these workers with a miserable wage, just sufficient enough to allow them to regenerate their capacity to work for the next coming day (buy food, rent shelter, sleep and make children), then their revenue is too low to allow any purchase out of minimum spendings for survival. By the way, “proletarian” as were called the workers in this time means 'the ones whose only wealth is their sons". As you can imagine, they had no iPod, nor playstation, nor TV set, no car, not even a house, just very poor fellows.
On the economic side now, what does it means? In a real world the Demand here is very low (workers are the majority of the population and they can hardly spend anything to eat, so they probably won’t buy any iPod this year nor anything else out of food) The Demand is depressed due to unfairly lowered wages.
But workers anyway created wealth. Where doest it go then? Marx said that the wealth generated by the workers is not distributed to them. Nor to the state don’t worry. It just goes into their bosses’hands. But the rich fellows already own it all in these times (19th century! there were no middle class as now!) are they are not buying any iPods either, because they already have tons of it.
So the Industrial Revolution, instead of allowing a progressive rise of both Demand and Supply sides, only allow a growth of the supply side and this disbalance generates repetitive crises due to overproduction. His thesis is based on basic observations that you may find in most of historic economy in Europe in the 18 and 19th century’s books. I don’t report any message from him here, i just synthetise what he pretented to be true and i share i whit you, i don’t ask you at anytime to belive it. Based on these asumptions, Marx tried to make projections in order to guess what will come next and found that probably economic crisis will be more frequent and more devastative, and may cause crises till a final crash of the current economical system that he called “capitalism”, considered as under the rule of one specific group of elite called “bourgeoisie” (in order to distinguish it from the previous elite of “aristocrats and clercs” during the pre-industrial period). He then participated in several meeting and political movements of international socialists and proposed to avoid the final crash by taking over the power from the elite’s hand by taking the control of the state, as it is the only institution able to control the situation and the population by coercition. This state shall however act with a spirit of social justice and provide at last a new form of distribution of the wealth, among all “according to anyone’s needs”.
So to sum up, “Socialism” is about a new and more fair distribution of wealth among workers and owners, “Communism” is about the same but throught a violent revolution against the “bourgeoisie” and for the full control of the state over society, while “Marxism” is just about “the system we have now is disbalance and will crash one day, maybe by taking control of the state the proletarian could make it going closer to their needs.” For reference, Marx died in 1880 something. The USSR was created almost 40 years after, long time after !!!
Obama: now, if you still find that any of these definitions matches with the US nowadays or with Obama, then pls read again from the beginning 
For god sake, does not mix Obama’s election with “a violent and bloody revolution and seize by force the control of the state” (Communism) nor with “take the control of means of production to have a better share between workers and owners” (Socialism), neither with “the system is about to collapse so the workers shall rise and take the state and the means of production”. As far as i know, the private sector in the US is still very strong and is not endangered at all by Obama’s reform, even if tea parties tell you that the hell will fall on earth and Mormon will come back to kill us all!
cheers
PS: btw i’m not a communist, neither socialist nor marxist (not even russian!). I just like to know what i’m talking about before talking, and read it by myself to be able to criticize it without being fooled by fake informations or pre-oriented debates… it’s the price of freedom!