WOPR said:
No Socialism is the idea of the goverment controlling everything. Communism inevitably leads to Socialism, when your dealing with a society of more than a tiny group of people.
In a Communist system the idea is set up where the hunters hunt, the weavers weave, etc... and nobody buys anything. They just come and get the food, or the clothing, or whatever as they need it, and everyone pretty much does their own thing. This is a simplistic and low end explanation of course.
Socialism generally occurs when you have a lot of people, and need a lot of highly specialized jobs, not to mention coordination to make sure that everything is done. The idea being that a centralized authority controls everything and doles it out based on need and also ultimatly assigns people to specific roles to make sure that everything gets done.
A basic example of this can be seen in Russia. To begin with the people rebelled against their aristocracy, feeling it was unfair that so few had so much, while the hard working lower classes had so little (which is a problem in every society). A lot of fighting took place as people rebelled in the name of communism. When the smoke cleared the people pretty much wanted their "Worker's Paradise", and pretty much everyone wanted to stop doing back breaking labour while expecting a society capable of supporting them in whatever they chose to do to contribute to evolve. Needless to say this didn't occur, and things fell apart. This is why Stalin stepped in, started the Gulags/Reeducation Camps, and so on.
Russia transformed into the USSR we knew, which stood for "Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics" where instead of leadership by royalty and nobility, or leadership run through capitolism and competition, everything was pretty much run by "The Party". While the Russians were generally called Commies, that isn't accurae, it's just the basis the society started from.
The same can be said of China, it was another revolt by the lower classes with dreams of some kind of shared communist utopia, that turned into Draconian socialism.
In general you'll find that there aren't any societies (except very small tribes perhaps) that practice a pure form of any social system. Just about everything is some kind of hybrid. The US isn't truely a democracy, nor are we truely capitolist due to the limitations we put on business (ie no monopolies and things like that). Mostly it's about what concepts a society is based around.
As I've said in other threads, the big problem with human society is that any system results in having a tiny group of people on top, and masses at the bottom. At the end of the day SOMEONE has to sweep the floors and take out the trash, and you need a LOT more of those people than you do managing, or doing prestigious jobs like being a Doctor. In The United States this is resolved through competition, cynically referred to as "the rat race" since overall competition involves things like personal charisma and ruthlessness along with things like pure intelligence or athletic abillity. Even a totally corrupt tool of a politician needs to convice other people that he's the guy they want to run as opposed to someone else. In a Socialist system the goverment winds up making sure all the jobs are done and ultimatly decides who does what, and who is going to get what. In Anarchy, the strongest guys wind up ruling through pure might and their abillity to force other people to do what they want. In Communism you kind of just hope that everyone gravitates towards doing the nessicary jobs on their own, and that like 95% of the people decide to do crap jobs on their own (which is why it doesn't work).
The situation is largely blurred, because as I said, groups like the USSR were called "Commies" but were socialists. The same can more or less be said of the Chinese.
The concern over Communism in the US is because that is how things start when your looking at a capitolist/competitive system. The people who wash out at the bottom (of which there are massive numbers of) are discontent and think that just because someone else competed better it's not fair that they get stuck in a rut. Communism in it's true form can be very seductive because to many people it holds the promise of being able to somehow do easy, or rewarding work, and be provided for with whatever they could want. It never works out that way, but it sounds really good when you do backbreaking labour. Let that kind of thing go on too long and you have an armed revolt, which ironically changes very little since you sitll wind up with 95% of the people on the bottom, including the people with those dreams.
"Commie Witch Hunts" were done pretty much because the revolutions that hit Russia and China and other places started with "rats in the walls", and any kind of revolution/civil war weakens a nation as a whole no matter how it turns out.