As the pundits trip over poli-sci-class definitions, my question is, what’s the difference?
As far as freedom-lovers go, safeguarding our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, there is none. To be sure, communists and socialists argue and split hairs. They fight and break heads. But they also work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination of collectivism.
To that point of ideological convergence, here are a couple of clarifying quotations from recognized experts—one, from the anti-communist camp; the other, from the communist camp.
The first is from Rene A. Wormser, a renowned lawyer specializing in estate planning and taxation who served admirably as the general counsel of the Reece committee, the second of two 1950s congressional committees investigating the Marxist–socialist–communist–progressive subversion of the great American foundations, which undergirded the subversion of our educational institutions over the past century.
“The two recent congressional investigations were largely concerned with ’subversion.‘ The Cox Committee interpreted this term to include only international communism of the Stalinist brand and organized fascism. The Reece Committee, in the course of its work, came to give the term broader or deeper meaning. Neither investigation established sharply, however, the characteristics of Communist activity that would be clearly held to be subversive. In the public mind, the term ’subversion’ is generally confined to Moscow-directed Communist activity, or that of domestic Communists allied in an international conspiracy. The emphasis on a search for organized Communist penetration of foundations absorbed much of the energy of the investigators and detracted somewhat from the efficacy of their general inquiry into ’subversion.’
The anti-communist Wormser makes a strong case for intertwining socialism and communism; however, so, too, does his political opposite, the British socialist Harold Laski.
Renowned as a leading British Fabian—yet another term for socialist—Laski was also known as a Marxist (see what I mean about interchangeability?), as well as being a friend and counselor to Franklin D. Roosevelt and just about everyone else on the left in the first half of the 20th century.
“Why ‘communist’ and not ’socialist‘ Manifesto? Obviously, in the first instance, because it was the official publication of the Communist League. We have little other evidence on which to base speculations. It was possibly the outcome of a recollection of the Paris Commune, an institution to which all socialists did homage. It was possibly a desire to distinguish the idea for which they stood from socialist doctrines which they were criticizing so severely. The one thing that is certain, from the document itself, is that the choice of the term ’Communist' was not intended to mark any organizational separation between the Communist League and other socialist or working-class bodies.