Socialism and communism are not the same word

1848: the words start the other way round

Modern usage treats socialism as the moderate word and communism as the extreme one. In 1848 it was the reverse. Marx and Engels called their pamphlet the Communist Manifesto precisely because socialism was then the respectable word: it belonged to middle-class reformers, utopian colonists and philanthropic mill-owners. Engels said as much in his 1888 preface. Communism was the word of the workers' associations, and choosing it was a way of refusing the company of the reformers.

1875: phases, not parties

In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx distinguishes a first phase of a new society, where people draw on the common store in proportion to the labour they have contributed, from a higher phase where the rule is from each according to ability, to each according to need. He does not label the two phases socialism and communism. That labelling comes later, and is mostly Lenin's, in State and Revolution in 1917.

1889 to 1914: everyone is a social democrat

The parties of the Second International, including the German SPD, called themselves Social Democratic. The words socialist, social democratic and communist were used loosely and often interchangeably by people who agreed about ends and quarrelled about means.

1918: the split that fixed the meanings

In March 1918 the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Communist Party, deliberately breaking with the Second International, and founded the Third in 1919. From that moment the words stopped being synonyms and became addresses. Communist meant the parties aligned with Moscow. Socialist and social democratic meant those who were not.

This is the origin of nearly every modern confusion. The distinction that people now take to be about how far you go was, at the time, about which international you belonged to.

1945 to 1989: the word gets a reputation

The party-states of that period described their societies as socialist while calling their ruling parties communist. What they actually built was state ownership of the means of production, directive planning from a ministry, and a single party fused with the state. Whether that was socialism at all was disputed at the time by socialists, at some risk to themselves. It is what most people now mean by the word, which is a fact about history and says nothing about the idea.

Yugoslavia is an exception that is the closest real relative of this Republic. From 1950 it ran workers' self-management with enterprise councils, and its documented failures are instructive: enterprises favoured existing members over new hires, underinvested because assets could not be taken out of the enterprise, and regional inequality widened. Articles 85(1), 100 and 102 are written with those failures in view.

After 1989: the word loses its edges

In North American usage socialism drifted until it could mean any public provision at all. In western Europe social democracy drifted the other way, until it named the regulated management of a capitalist economy. Both drifts made the word less useful and the argument harder.

Where this Republic sits

The Constitution can be considered as rather eco-socialist than communist. The difference is structural, and it shows up in four places of the text.

The state does not own the workplaces. Article 6(2) holds them as commons, cooperative usufruct, communal enterprise and public establishments. Nationalisation is not socialisation, and a ministry owning a factory is a change of landlord.

There is no leading party, no vanguard and no constitutional role for any party at all. Article 12 guarantees pluralism as a condition of the legitimacy of public power, Article 12(4) forbids any administrative body from classifying a party by its ideology, and Article 263 forbids the integrity office from doing it either. Nine parties currently sit in the chamber, three of which oppose the economic order.

Article 90(3) requires the plan to be decided by assemblies and councils of people, and Article 96(4) leaves the Planning Secretariat with no power of decision at all. The Directorate is the thing the text is written against.

Article 85(7) protects trade union organisation within a cooperative, including action against its own management organ. A system where the workers own the firm and may therefore not strike against it is a different system.

Whether the higher phase Marx described is reachable, the Constitution does not say. Article 267 states a direction of travel and Article 111(6) makes the abolition of the residual token an objective of the plan with no fixed date

Why the text judges by acts

Article 288(3) is the operative provision: a state calling itself socialist, communist, republican or democratic is examined on its acts alone. The Republic will not treat the word socialist as a credential, and will not treat the word communist as an accusation. What it asks of any state is whether it tortures, holds people in forced labour, denies its population the minimum core while able to furnish it, suppresses assembly and expression, persecutes on a prohibited ground, imprisons for opinion, or wages aggression. That test applies to allies too.