Should we define capitalism and communism?

Question

I think this community could benefit defining precisely the use of terms like Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism. These terms are often used in their colloquial/intuitive sense, i.e.,

• capitalism is associated with greed
• socialism is associated with social/society and therefore positive
• communism is associated with common/commune and therefore positive as well

This leads to proliferation of debates that are based essentially on different definitions of these terms (Equivocation fallacy^1), which I would classify as follows:

• Intuitive definitions (capitalism=greed, socialism=social/society, communism=common/commune)
• Marxist and communist definitions (these are well detailed in the respective work, but largely centered on state vs. private ownership of the means of production, and the opposition of *liberal/individual rights vs. the rights of class/nation/race.)
• Historical definitions - one cannot really separate communism from a century-and-a-half of more or less faithful attempts to implement it with dismal consequences for individual rights and economic well-being, like in the USSR, China, North Korea, etc. It is however often claimed that these were not true communism (but according to which definition?)
• Alternative definitions - a popular trend in rehabilitating communism is trying to reinterpret Marx in the modern context (he supposedly would be liberal, if he wrote today) or appealing to pre-Marxist currents in the communism (which are somewhat obscure.)
• Definitions as used in legal or economic discourse in western society. E.g., most western states colloquially referred to as socialist actually define themselves constitutionally as social - the term socialist being reserved mainly for the states colloquially named communist. Similarly, economists and economics textbooks usually often talk of capitalism as a system based on free exchange.

Potentially, the community could create a wiki or an extended tag, specifying what exactly is meant in discussions of capitalism, communism, and socialism, closing the questions that misuse these terms and thus reducing the amount of clutter.
Discussing it as a separate thread could however be also useful: I am sure that this was discussed previously in various forms, so I am looking for answers with precise definitions and references - e.g., if you cite a Marxist definition, give a quote and a reference to the relevant work.

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Suggested tags:

• Capitalism (concept in Marxism and Scientific Communism)
• Capitalism (popular notion)
• Capitalism (economic relations based on free exchange)
• Communism (political and economic system in the USSR, China, etc.)

All of the above obviously apply mutatis mutandis to the other terms mentioned earlier in the post.

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^1 In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word/expression in multiple senses within an argument.

Answer 1

I disagree.

We could adopt a specific definition of these words, but that wouldn't stop others from using different definitions. Moreover any question of "Is X Communist" which is answered along the lines of "According to the meaning of 'communist' adopted by Politics Stackexchange, it is Communist." would have limited value.

This leads to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. "No Capitalist State would have a role for socialised health care/ What about the UK?/ Aye well no True Capitalist State"...

What is useful is to find the relevant tag wiki for these terms and discuss how there isn't a single fixed definition that everyone agrees on, but there are some features of capitalism or communism that are generally agreed upon, and others which are controversial.

But when you speak of "misusing the term" this causes problems. By what logic does our little website have the right to tell the Communist Party of China that they are misusing the term?

There should not be a proliferation of debates, since questions that ask the same thing can be closed as duplicates, and questions asking for opinions (or asking for opinions dressed as facts) can already be closed.

So, do edit the tag wiki, if you have the required reputation. And do close duplicate questions and questions that invite debate. But don't close questions just because the OP has a different understanding of a word from that which you hold.

Answer 2

I don't think this would be constructive to form a consensus about the definition of terms that's valid in our community. Who gives our community the authority to define what communism is? We certainly don't have more authority in this regard than Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Joseph Stalin or Xi Jinping.

So I propose that we come to the consensus that there is no consensus how these terms are defined.

That means that we should insist that people who ask a question about an ill-defined term (like communism, capitalism, democracy, fascism, smurfism etc.) to properly state which definition they refer to in the context of their question and close it until they do. Or in cases where getting a proper definition of the term is the whole purpose of the question (like in "Communism in the Soviet Union, China, etc., wasn't real communism" - is that true? for example) reject the question as primarily opinion-based. Because otherwise anyone who answers can just pick any definition they want and use it as the premise of their answer. Questions which have no right or wrong answers are not a good fit for Stack Exchange.

Answer 3

I disagree.

Polysemy, i.e., the reality that the same word often has similar but not identical meanings in different contexts, is a practice at the heart of the practice of politics.

Words don't have the same meaning to all people at all times, and there is no purpose beyond idle pedantry to respond to questions about "was John Doe's" incorrect in calling "some policy" "Socialism" in "this speech.", changing the quoted material as needed. There isn't a right and wrong definition for a word, or more precisely, there is more than one possible right definition for a word, although some definitions are so far from the mark that everyone would agree that the definition was wrong.

For example, Socialism could be anything from free parking on Main Street to the political and economic ideology of the Soviet Union, depending upon context, but it definitely isn't a trigonometric function that is the inverse of the sine function.

Answer 4

"Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism" are incredibly complex concepts which entries in encyclopedias about them filling pages after pages and endless citation lists. It's virtually impossible to say in only a few sentences what each of these is about without simplifying matters to at least some degree. You don't want us to become the authoritative source to decide that these terms really mean. We couldn't anyway.

Additionally, these things never appear in their pure form in nature. Many practically relevant questions here deal with adaptations of capitalism, communism, ... . They wouldn't be covered by any out-of-the-box definitions.

And restricting questions to a particular meaning of these terms would mean that if a question ever wants to discuss another meaning, how shall it describe these concepts then?

Example: "Is Communism intrinsically authoritarian?" clearly seems to assume that a non-authoritarian Communism might be possible. But what if we decided that it's not possible? How could one still word the question keeping a succinct title?

Instead, questions should simply give additional specifications to limit their scope. Example "Is Communism intrinsically authoritarian?" ideally would define or point to a used definition of communism to be answerable and not suffer from ambiguities of the used terms.

So indeed there is a problem, but the solution is not a new policy but simply giving sufficient context in questions to make them about concepts, not about definitions. Each and every question should make sure by itself (i.e. by sufficient explanations) that misunderstandings based on different readings of used terms are minimized.

You gave a few possible definitions in this question. I suggest that questions on the main site simply follow this example when they ask about something and specify capitalism, communism, ... more when asking about them.

Answer 5

On the more recent proposal

• Capitalism (concept in Marxism and Scientific Communism)
• Capitalism (popular notion)
• Capitalism (economic relations based on free exchange)
• Communism (political and economic system in the USSR, China, etc.)

I'm not exactly sold on this because essentially the only proposal here is to have 3 tags for capitalism. The "popular notion" being that capitalism = greed? Possibly distinguishing capitalism in the more elaborate definitions from a/the market economy in a wider sense is useful, but I'm not sure there are even 10 of the 50 or so capitalism-tagged questions here that use the specific Marxist def (or Schumpeter modification thereof--which I'm pretty sure zero questions use). There are only two questions that are tagged with both Marxism and capitalism. And one of those questions was closed as too confused. The other one seem indeed to be about some Marxist notions. I'd say that tag combos handle the situation well enough for now.

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If I understood the mutatis mutandis proposal, it's also have

• Communism (political and economic system in the USSR, China, etc.) [vs]
• Communism (concept in Marxism and friends)

I suspect, at least based on recent events, that we get more questions that would justify two tags, or at least a way to make the distinction there... but I'm not too sure what the concise names should be for those. Wikipedia uses communist-state vs communism, it seems. Perhaps it should be a separate proposal, since I suspect people would like to yay/nay that separately, or maybe they have other alternative names to propose there.

Answer 6

These definitions are easy enough to make from a political science perspective, e.g.:

• Capitalism: a political economy in which productive property and wealth (aka capital) are primarily owned and developed in the private sector. Government can be regulative, laissez faire, or cronyist, but generally allows private interests broad liberties.
• Socialism: a political economy in which productive property and wealth (aka capital) are primarily owned and developed in the public sector, under direct government control. Government can be centralized, distributed, or bureaucratic, but generally puts broad public interests above private goals.
• Communism: (ideally) a political economy in which class structures have been dissolved and broad liberties have been secured across the population, reducing the need for formal governance.

Unfortunately, the general public uses these terms non-analytically, as gestures within the magical thinking of performative politics. That type of linguistic sleight-of-hand is geared towards emotional stimulation, and thus doesn't have much truck with 'pedantic' definitions. You'll always have someone arguing with any definition that doesn't serve their chosen polemic.

Sad state of affairs...

I don't have a solution at the moment; just pointing out the problem.

Answer 7

How is compiling such definitions significantly different from linking people to Wikipedia (assuming the quality of the respective articles there doesn't deteriorate).

I mean the problem is that these have always been politically charged terms that describe:

• utopian ideals
• practical political goals
• ideologies
• political movements trying to achieve these goals (without power)
• governments under that banner (with power)
• Definitions of all these things by their respective adversaries

And as a consequence you've got a clusterfuck of definitions that often enough contradict each other. Like for definitions of followers and adversaries that is to be expected, but there's also deviations between "idealists" and "realists" and sometimes even by the same people "before" and "after" a revolution. So to know what a particular group is talking about you probably have to check out the definition of that particular group, but disclaimer, they are political advocacy groups so they might also be strategically lying. Not to mention that one person's "progression of character" is another person's "treason and betrayal of ideals".

But it's not just a clusterfuck of definitions it's also a clusterfuck to disentangle them. Because most self-descriptions will still refer to the positive popular notion of the term of their ideology, the problem is just that this is often a rather broad statement that is the least common denominator of all the different uses of the term and as such lacks detail and those "details" can end up subverting the meaning of the tag entirely. So if people just stack tags to "make sure every possible meaning is covered" you haven't really won anything, do you?

Also why do you give 3 definitions of capitalism, something that arguably isn't even a real ideology with followers, but just a mode of production described by the people who don't like it, but only 1 definition of communism that is by most accounts also wrong?

Like communism is the ideal end goal of a mutual society of equals that governs itself direct democratically by mutual consensus and produces for it's own consumption based and the ability and needs of it's members.

Just because these parties called that or a variation of that their ultimate goal and named their party like that, doesn't mean that the system they produced looked anything like that or that, given that people realized such discrepancies, didn't avoid actually naming their systems as such, but often preferred the more ambiguous term of "socialism" (also by their own definition). Who called it "communist" were often anti-communists who didn't like the idea or the implementation or both.

Probably a more fitting tag would be Marxist-Leninist or Stalinist as these governments are all a particular kind of ideology and usually follow the blueprint of Marxism-Leninism, an ideology practiced by Lenin and formulated by Stalin. The thing is where Marx argued that a surplus economy with unequal distribution of labor and reward, would lead to a revolution of the working class majority using their power to change the mode of production. Lenin argued in favor of destabilizing a country and having a minority cadre party seizing the power and then preparing the material conditions and convincing the majority.

Regardless of that he was right in so far as selling the idea of a revolution that changes the economic status quo is much more popular when talking to poor people in authoritarian and colonial regimes that are already fucked over and yearning for change than it is to workers wealthy countries that might complain all the time but rather not risk their cozy lifestyle if they don't have to. So as said that became the blueprint for a lot of such regimes. However it still faced the problem that distributed nothing is still nothing, so regardless of the color of their flags they nonetheless engaged in exploiting of the working class for profit... As well as the fact that a minority revolution usually has a majority of people whom they antagonized so paranoia about real and perceived enemies and totalitarianism were most often a consequence of that.

Answer 8

I would argue that there's no such thing as Capitalism.

Any society where any goods are exchanged for any other goods, for the benefit of both parties, can be called Capitalist, and that makes Capitalism not an -ism - it is not an ideology. Capitalism is more like a force, not unlike gravity. One can use gravity in their ideological constructs, but gravity will exist regardless.

There are societies where market forces play larger role, and the ones where they play smaller role, but we will struggle to define that at some point a society will become "capitalitic".

So that word should be avoided and should be a red flag almost always.

Answer 9

An "ism" is a philosophy, practice, or belief that is often associated with political or religious ideologies. Therefore, these ideologies can only be defined by their characteristics because they are a matter of social construction.