I can notice many people who claim that socialism is a bridge between capitalism and communism. Several attempts have been made to distinguish the two terms from each other. I can even find some mass organisations of some communist parties, who claim, "our ideology is not communism, but scientific socialism." It is a statement contradicting itself, because there is no difference between "communism" and "scientific socialism".
The reasons why I claim that socialism and communism are same, are mentioned here:
1. Marx, in his "Critique of the Gotha Programme", writes: "a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges."
Here, Marx defines the communist society as just emerging from the communist society. But, there are some people who claim that socialism succeeds capitalism, and that communism succeeds socialism. So, those who say so, are "wrong".
2. In the Preface to the 1888 English Edition of The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels writes, "...we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists."
At that time there were two kinds of socialists: utopian and scientific. By the term "socialism", some would think of Utopian Socialism. This is the only reason why Marx and Engels could not call it a "socialist manifesto".
3. We have always been taught by those who claim a difference between the two, that in socialism, there will be the existence of the state, but in the communist state, there will be no state.
Let's see what Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution: "It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!"
If there is really any difference between socialism and communism, then why did Lenin say that the state will "remain for a time" under communism?
4. Moreover, Friedrich Engels, in his letter to August Bebel, written in London between March 18-28, 1875, writes: "The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear." Here, Engels says about the withering away of the state in the socialist society.
So, we can come to a conclusion that Marx, Engels and Lenin always used the terms "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably.
They called the two stages of the communist society as the "first or lower phase of the communist society" and the "highest phase of the communist society".
Many people are still misguided by this attempt of distinction between the two terms: "socialism" and "communism".
So, why was it necessary to make the distinction between the two terms? To build up the revisionist theory, which is known as "Socialism in one country", which absolutely contradicts the Marxist theory of "Permanent Revolution"!
I oppose the Stalinist theory of "Socialism in one country". But this doesn't mean I am a Trotskyist, but it means I am a Marxist. Marx clearly called for a "Permanent Revolution" in the First Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League to it's members in Germany in March, 1850:
"While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers... Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution."
Stalin thought that building the country capable of fighting against the military intervention of the capitalist countries would make "Socialism in one country" possible. But what if the capitalist countries attack one socialist country peacefully? Peaceful economic intervention of world capitalism is enough to demolish the establishment of socialism in one country. Because the state will have to depend upon capitalist sources for the raw materials which are mostly controlled by capitalist states. For that, the socialist state will have to produce goods for foreign trade, and under the laws of the capitalist market.
* Socialism: (here) Scientific Socialism, not Democratic Socialism or any other form of socialism.
~ Moyoor Sharma.
