Award-winning investigative reporter and a senior editor at The Epoch Times, Joshua Philipp is a recognized expert on asymmetrical hybrid warfare and subversion, with 10-plus years of research and investigations into the Chinese Communist Party.
We’ve been hearing a lot about Socialism and how an alarming percentage of Americans in their 20s who were polled indicated that they wanted to see Socialism introduced to America. In this video, he aims to clear up any misunderstandings we may have about any “difference” between Communism and Socialism.
What is Communism? Karl Marx described it as a social state, where all hierarchy, all morality, all tradition, all belief and all social structures have been annihilated. It not only aims to destroy morality, culture and beliefs but to even to wipe out the memory of such things, by destroying national heritage, down to each person’s perceptions of history and the world around them.
Marx and Engels explained this goal very clearly in their writings. In The Communist Manifesto, they write, “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality.”
Marx believed that societies develop along five stages, starting with the primitive society, that he called Primitive Communism., which develops into Feudalism and then the system of trade he called Capitalism.
After Capitalism, Marx proposed a new system would follow, where the state has seized control of all means of production. He referred to that state as Socialism. He believed that Socialism would naturally collapse, leading to the final goal that he called Communism.
When Marx and others called for revolution, they were calling for the creation of a Socialist government, believing of this political system of totalitarian control or the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would be able to drive society rapidly towards the goal of Communist moral and social desolation. Socialism was merely the system of state dictatorship used to achieve Communism. It was the political system, while Communism was the envisioned goal.
In the days of Marx, many people who believed in this system used the words “Socialism” and “Communism” almost interchangeably, to describe their goals. The only difference was that of process and intent. When Marx proposed these theories, there were not yet any so-called Socialist or Communist systems. Both of these were proposed concepts from the same group of individuals.
In the book Communism, Bryan Caplan states that, “Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, Socialism and Communism were synonyms. Both referred to economic systems in which the government owns the means of production. The two terms diverged in meaning, largely as a result of the political theory and practice of Vladimir Lenin.” Lenin referred to Socialism as a stage of state Capitalist monopoly needed to establish Communism.
Philipp says that the so-called Nordic model of Socialism has only remotely worked because it maintains Capitalism as its business model. Socialist regimes and their attempts to realize the destructive goals of Communism in the last century have caused the unnatural deaths of at least 150 million people.
