What "Communism" Really Means

Communism is the only alternative to capitalism. When I say that, I don't mean that it's the most feasible alternative, or that it's the best alternative. I mean that it's the only other possible option, in the same way that "light" is the only alternative to "darkness" (literally).

This fact is only unclear to people who don't understand the basic definitions of the two theories. Unfortunately, that's most people, so in this particular article, I'm not going to argue points, but illuminate facts about economic terminology. I do this because I, too, used to be woefully uneducated on these terms, and once that changed, my whole political outlook altered drastically. Maybe the same will happen for you, maybe not. I'm obviously far from unbiased, but I'll try to base this article on facts.

However, I'll have to ask you have to set all politics aside for the time being in order to best get a handle on this. Forget all consideration of democracy or totalitarianism or anything having to do with the question of people's political systems. This is because capitalism and communism, in themselves, are not political systems, but economic ones, meaning that they are systems for dealing with the movement and distribution of wealth. (Yes, that obviously has a very big effect on politics, but it doesn't deal directly with how people make decisions as a society.)

Now, when I say wealth, of course, I'm not actually talking about money. Money has no actual value but that which we assign to it. Real wealth refers to the things that have real value: food, water, energy, land, and desired goods. Things of material value. And this is where we'll start.

Objects of material value are, obviously, limited. Some of them are unique. We all require certain material things to survive and desire other material things for unique purposes. Because human beings are social creatures who don't deal well with just fighting over our stuff and seeing who's the strongest, all of our societies deal with this issue by come up with some concept of "ownership."

Ownership is a social contract, which is a fancy way of saying that it's an agreement among a society of people to live by and respect certain rules. When a society has a social contract regarding ownership, it means that there are rules set in place where the society grants, and protects, an individual or group's right to control the use of a certain item.

There are, of course, many different kinds of criteria for how this ownership is established and have historically been many more. Who does and does not own what may be based on "first come, first served," but it may also be based on the community's understanding of people's needs. It may be based on factors such as race or sex or age, on inheritance, on purchase or trade, on social caste, or a number of other factors - some good and fair, some bad and unjust.

But the other ownership question, one that we often forget it about, is the question of what material items can be owned by an individual or small group and what items cannot be owned (or, depending on how you look at it, are owned by all humans as all will still have equal access to them).

The answer to this question is where we come to the fundamental difference between capitalism and communism.

In capitalism, our social contract is that there is nothing material in the world that cannot be owned. An individual can own as many houses he has had the fortune to come to possess, can own a factory and everything produced in it, or can own enough farmland to feed thousands of people (and thus, set the terms under which those people are or are not fed). There is very little on the planet that has not been claimed, and most of that only remains so because people either have no desire to control it or haven't yet found a way to claim it. New types of ownership are being created all the time, such as companies trying to claim ownership of things like all rainwater in certain regions. (Though of course, it's only fair to point out that other types of capitalist ownership have been defeated in some societies, such as the right to own other human beings.) Government-owned property may also be considered an exception - things such as parks, libraries, etc., to the extent that the public determines how they are used and has free access to them.

Communism, on the other hand, is a social contract wherein limitations are placed upon what kinds of things can be owned by a single person. Things that cannot be privately owned are known as "the means of production" and include anything which is large enough to be of significant social value (in other words, relied upon by much of the community to meet basic needs) and too large to be used by one person. A single person or private entity cannot own a factory, a lake, or all the farmland in an entire county; instead, such things are considered the property of the community at large with access granted to all people according to rules determined by the political process.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between communism and capitalism. If you can own the means of production, it's capitalism. If you can't, it's communism.

So what does communism look like? Well, that depends on how it's implemented - and here's where it gets political. Authoritarian communism, the system in place today in China, North Korea, and Cuba, is a system where a totalitarian government makes all the decisions about people's access to the means of production and how they use them.

An alternative to this is any kind of libertarian communism, including systems of democratic communism. In these types of systems, power is given to the people to determine rules for the use of public property. Anarchist communism is a form of libertarian communism, one in which the political system is required to have no inequality of power distribution.

Simple, huh?