A socialist society lacks private ownership of the means of production (the things that make society functional), the opposite being social ownership. You can still start a business and make money, but wealth is shared among the workers rather than being hoarded by a single private entity at the top (think co-op)

A communist society is much stricter, lacking private property and social classes. The state owns everything and allocates it based on need

Just for comparison, a capitalist society like the one we (unfortunately) live in is a rat race. Wealth goes to whoever can exploit the system the most, which is usually whoever has the most money to start. It is the Ultimate Deathmatch of society.

The terms themselves are somewhat vague and slippery. Marx and Engels used them interchangeably. The USSR and China really tainted the word communism, which is why socialism is much more common nowadays.

As I understand it, communism is a form of socialism. Socialism is ultimately about worker control over the means of production, rather than private capital. As such, socialists inherently support strong unions, and the sensible ones also support social welfare, minimum wage, and basic income so that business owners have less leverage to exploit their workers.

If you just take workers' rights to it logical conclusio, you get market socialism. This is an economic system in which all privately-owned (including publicly-traded) companies are replaced with worker-owned coöperatives, which still compete in a market.

Communism goes further. Self-identified communists will tell you that communism is a moneyless. classless, stateless society where the means of production are held in common by those who use them. If this sounds like anarchism, it basically is.

However, communists in the 20th century were mostly vamguardists. This idea, pioneered by Lenin, advocates for a vanguard of smarties who understand communism to overthrow the government and impose communism from the top down, fixing the system on behalf of those workers too stupid to join the revolution. Workers who did not support the revolution would see that everything was much better with the communist vanguard in charge, and would embrace communism. If a few insisted on being counterrevolutionary, they would just need to be reëducated.

The Russian Revolution was heavily criticised by anarchists at the time, on the grounds that if the revolution does not rise from below, it is simply a coup that makes Lenin an uncrowned tsar. They were correct, and thus the word communism was utterly tainted in the capitalist world to refer to oppressive dictatotships that are (nominally) anticapitalist.

For what it's worth, Lenin himself described the USSR as state capitalist, whereby the state ran all industry on behalf of the workers until the workers came around to the glorious revolutionaries' perspective. Because those in.power never want to relinquish it, the ruling soviet aggressively cracked down on and suppressed trade unions, because organised workers were a threat not only to capitalists, but also to the nominally communist government. To maintain a veneer of being about the workers, farms and factories were administered by soviets vetted and approved by the government, who could be guaranteed to operate as the government wanted.

This is an excellent question IMO, and I'm sure you'll receive plenty of excellent (and energetic) responses, but I do want to point out something which chronically gets overlooked, as part of these discussions. Ready?

Homo sapiens is traditionally a tribal, social, and clan-based animal, not unlike our cousin chimpanzees, and others such as wolf & dog packs, elephant herds, parrot flocks, and a couple other examples. Our organisation upon such likely goes back at least 2.4Myrs, when biologists and those in related fields first classified "Homo" as a distinct genus. But arguably, such goes back perhaps as long as our common ancestor of chimps, maybe 7Myrs ago or so. Or earlier!

My point is-- modern humans' natural state is to exist in smallish, commune-like situations, and that is a fact. That's literally in our DNA upon a multitude of levels, and literally spans the entire length of H. sapiens ~300Kyr history.

Meaning? That we're naturally communists of a kind, and my take on "socialism" is that it's roughly an attempt to make our traditional style work, when organised upon regional and national levels.

THAT SAID: I think it's good to also observe how things happen in the wild. For example, my mentors Robert Sapolski and Jane Goodall famously observed our fellow apes & monkeys being total assholes towards each other, amidst hierarchy-type situations. It's a complicated discussion, anyway, and maybe not hard to imagine why so many of our fellow rich, needy, powerful human monkeys are such total, narcissistic assholes towards everyone else.

socialism: workers control the means of production (the factories, the farms, the freight trains, etc). there is no separate owner. this is usually considered a key step on the way to communism.

communism: a society without any classes (no capitalists, no working class, no one in poverty, everyone is on the same level of society); without money (everything ppl need is provided for free and fairly, there are no capitalist markets); and without a state (government is not a separate group of people who command others, the people make decisions on things that affect them).

Even those communists who believe the right strategy to reach a communist society requires them to take control of the state first believe that the ultimate goal is for the state to "wither away" as it becomes less necessary over time. other communists disagree that it is a possible to reach a communist society by taking control of the state, rather the people have to build their own non-state power that eventually defeats it.

There are many different defenitions of it, the one i go with is that in an socialist society the "means of production" (factorys and such) are run by the workers there in an democratic way. In communism the society woulf be run without states and with no money as well as there bring no classes (like workers, labdlords, politicans or bosses)
The various states that claim and claimed to be socialist or communists aren't fulfilling these conditions as to why many people say that these aren't examples of socialism/communism

Depends who you ask, but at the core of it, communism is a political structure, while socialism is an economic structure.

My understanding is (and I could be wrong on some details, I'm no political scientist!), communism is a broad idea for the end goal of a society with no class boundaries, no private ownership, workers (or a representative for them, in some models) owning the factories/"seizing the means of production", rights for all, everyone gets their fair share.

There are many, very different ideologies for achieving such an ideal society. Additionally, different people have tacked on their own ideas onto it (such as the necessity of a violent or peaceful revolution, how to redistribute land, etc.). You can go from forms of anarchism (very anti-authoritarian) and democratic socialists (usually quite anti-authoritarian) to Stalin's USSR and the Eastern bloc during the Cold War (very authoritarian with cruel dictators at the helm). Like most belief systems, there is plenty of infighting between various different factions.

"Socialist" is another broad term and is usually used to describe groups, people, and governments that implement policies that will build up towards the communist ideal. It's thrown around for many democratic groups as well as deeply authoritarian ones, hence the separation between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian communists that is very common.

You might have heard of terms like "democratic socialist" and "social democracy". The former are socialists who usually advocate for slow reform over a revolution, the latter are capitalists who implement socialist elements in their policies. Both try to uphold liberal democratic processes and are against one-party states like that of the USSR.

TLDR:

• "communism" is the ideal and optimistic goal for a state, people who pursue that are called "communists". It is an incredibly broad term that can describe very different ideologies
• "socialism" is used to describe groups that implement policies towards the goal of communism, people who support this are called "socialists"
• "democratic socialists" are socialists who support liberal democratic practices and usually advocate for slow reform rather than violent revolution
• "social democracies" are people who support some degree of socialist policies in order to make society more equal and fair while retaining the capitalist system
• the separation between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian communism is very important! They are vastly different despite their shared goal of a classless society

Socialism: If you have two cows, you give one to your neighbor.

Communism: If you have two cows, you give them to the government and the government then gives you some milk.

Socialism is a broad idea which includes a lot of different ideologies. Some believe in a state, others don't. Some believe in markets, others don't. Some believe in currency, others don't. Many believe socialism is a step on the way to communism.

Communism is the end goal for some of the most radical. "A classless, stateless, moneyless society. Where goods and services are distributed from each according to ability, to each according to need."

Soulism is communism's material liberation, plus a spiritual liberation. We ditch the material mechanisms of capitalism, AND the mind prison of capitalism. One of the reasons the USSR failed to enact socialism is because the workers who seized the state remained inside the capitalist mind prison. Giving them power just turned them into capitalists.

Back in the 19th century—before the working class was split into the factions of socialism, communism and anarchism—these words and their movements were often used interchangeably, with socialism meaning something along the lines of "the people own the means of productions", communism describing a society that follows the paradigm of "each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" and anarchism meaning that no instance of anything should rule over others.

As you can see, these ideas were not contradicting each other but rather focussing on different aspects of the liberation of the working class

Communism is an eventual end goal, a classless, stateless society. Socialism is a system that aims to progress towards that goal.

These terms have become muddled due to social democrats dropping the pretense that they want to establish communism (early social democrats like Eduard Bernstein argued for using reformism to establish communism), while still holding on to the "socialist" label. So there are some people who would use "socialist" to describe social democracy and reformism while reserving "communism" for Marxist-Leninists. This is quite strange considering that it was called the USSR and not the USCR, but what are you gonna do?

Since it's often controversial whether a state that claims to be socialist is actually aiming to establish communism, some people use the term AES or "actually existing socialism" to describe modern states that call themselves socialist, because, whether or not they are "truly socialist," they bear enough similarities and are distinct enough to warrant having a term to describe them.

TL;DR:

Socialism: maintains monetary system. You earn and spend money like usual, except you are restricted from using the labor of others to generate profit for yourself (example: maintaining a large business). Key formula: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their labor.

Example of a socialist country: USSR, Eastern Bloc, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, Allende's Chile, pre-1986 Vietnam, North Korea

What socialism is not: Nordic model, capitalist states with social support.

Communism: no monetary system. Everything is free. Communism assumes one of three ways to make it happen: either everyone understands the intrinsic value of labor and does it for the sake of it, or labor is mandatory, or all of the unlikeable jobs are automated. Communism is normally considered not as an immediate outcome, but a future goal. Key formula: from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs

Example of a communist country: War communism period in Soviet Russia, Khmer Rouge

What communism is not: socialism (although it's a development of one), capitalism with state support.

Both words are complicated, debated, co-opted, etc., so it's hard to come up with a definition and relationship that'd be universally accepted. But Socialism, broadly speaking, is the ownership of the means of production (things that, when work, generate money like factories, etc.) by the workers. Different variants of socialism call for that ownership by different means, usually either by a government as a proxy for the workers, or by industrial unions, or by the workers' directly.

Communism is a variant of Socialism that, broadly, assumes that socialism will eventually progress to a classless and stateless society.

I made this just because I want to say that the easiest way to think about it is precisely that.

Communism = perfect, pure socialism, and perfected pure capitalism is Laissez-faire capitalism.

But more people personally prefer diluted forms of communism or pure-capitalism.