I had to deal with a really poor education during my school years, so, for that matter, I have for a long time been (re)teaching myself some of the subjects I (didn’t) learn at school. One of those involves economic ideologies/systems like communism or capitalism.
I have a vague idea of what each one is about thanks to common sense, but it is kind of a shame being an adult and not knowing much about them.
So… where do I start from?
Start with reading Wikipedia articles.
This won’t answer all your questions, but it will give you paths to investigate.
Some articles will be written as if you already know the subject matter, but they should give you enough stuff to keep digging.
This won’t give you a degree in any of this, but it will give you plenty of puzzle pieces to build on as you see fit.
How thorough of an understanding do you want?
One could read Wikipedia pages on the broad strokes of these topics and have a fairly functional definition of both to get on with their daily lives. Or one could take a more academic approach and read Marx and Smith along with other philosophers and economists.
Part of the issue with both methods is that the meaning of Communism and Capitalism seem to change depending who you’re talking to and in what context. They are both such contentious topics that there’s a great deal of propaganda, misinformation, common misunderstanding and willful ignorance around them.
So, are you hoping to engage in debate (or moreoften argument) about the merits of one or another? Or just hoping to gain enough understanding that you aren’t confused when the topics come up in casual conversation? I’d advise against the former. It’s exhausting and seems unproductive. At least online. In person, it makes more sense, but you’ll have a hard time finding people who are opening to considering changing their opinion on either system. If it’s the latter, you can really just make stuff up, it seems like most others do anyway.
Worth keeping in mind that these ideologies each have multiple self-definitions (the ideal with which they describe themselves) as well as a set of definitions from the perspective of each other ideology. Tack on semantic drift (words changing meaning over time, or growing different meanings in different contexts) and it can start to feel hopelessly complicated. And they each offer different ways of understanding the world and history, so on top of all the aforementioned complexity, they also interpret historical events and real-world applications of each ideology differently. So learning about them is a process where your understanding slowly moves from abstract to concrete by getting rough definitions then tempering them with seemingly contradictory definitions, over time building a network of understanding that includes the contexts of each perspective.
My perspective is largely coming from a communist ideology fyi. But here’s a quick rundown.
Capitalism is a system in which a class of owners leverage their ownership of productive assets to engage in non-equal exchange with the un-owning classes, most notably the exchange of labor value for a fraction of the products of said labor value. It necessitates a large government to enforce these hierarchies of ownership and exclusion. (Classical) liberalism is the ideology of capitalism. Conservatism is generally a subset of liberalism. It’s the culturally dominant ideology now, so most of what you see and read will come from this perspective, explicitly or not.
Communism is a theoretical system in which class tensions have resolved themselves. No one knows what it’ll look like, it’s explicitly a theoretical ideal. Communism as an ideology is advocating for the interests of the working class against the owning class. A country that calls itself communist would probably be doing so in reference to the ideology, rather than claiming it has achieved communism.
Socialism as an ideology can be synonymous with communism, although there are subsets of liberalism that have taken on the word to mean capitalism with welfare and regulations. Socialism as a system is the interim stage between capitalism and communism, the point where workers have seized control of the state and means of production and now have a strong influence over how class tensions develop.
This is a good summary. To simplify/describe it slightly differently, the definitions of capitalism and communism and socialism decribe the relationships between workers and the value of the work that they do.
Under capitalism, owners own the business and employ workers who are paid wages. The value of the products or services that the workers make is more than they are paid - and this extra value produced (profit) goes back to the owner. Thus, you end up with two classes of people, the workers/wage laborers (proletariat in communist jargon), and the owners (bourgeoisie in communist jargon).
In socialism, the workers own the businesses, and so the profit goes back to them instead of to the non-working owners. Thus in socialism, there is only the one class, the workers, and the bourgeoisie class has been removed.
This is extremely simplified, but I think describes the overall work and value relationships under the two systems.
I hope this helps too.
https://teachmecommunism.podbean.com/
https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/
I really like these two podcasts for breaking down concepts, history, and significant figures. The second one has two spinoffs, Red Menace for individual works of theory and Guerilla History for historical events, which are both also great.
“Political ideologies, an introduction” by Andrew Heywood, is available for free online.
It was required reading for my history study in uni about ten years ago. This seems to be a newer edition. It’s quite a read, but it covers a lot of isms in a generally unbiased manner.
Read Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels. The quickest way to actually understand Capitalism is to work toward reading Marx’s Capital with a group and other references. It might take a while to get there but this book by Engels will lay the groundwork for you to learn historical materialism and dialectical reasoning.
For Communism, read principles of Communism and the communist manifesto. But start with Socialism: Utopian & Scientific. Since communism hasn’t ever existed, there have been communist groups and parties who may or may not have established different variations of socialism, there’s nothing to study. You can study the history of communist parties and experiments, but there is a lot and much of it is sad or disappointing. Definitely learn about it, but its not where you should start.
Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society. Its a movement, something to work toward. It is not a system where the government owns everything. It isn’t “authoritarianism”. Its the opposite of those things.
https://youtube.com/@realryanchapman
This guy is pretty good.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/@realryanchapman
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The communist manifesto is a good place to start with the communist perspective. It’s written intentionally to be relatively easy to understand, but it was also written 200years ago and translated from german.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Grundsätze des Kommunismus if you know German
Wikipedia defines capitalism as an ‘economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit’. In contrast, communism involves ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products … based on need’. The ‘means of production’ here refer to property that can be used to produce goods, and ultimately, wealth. Factories are the usual example.
I must point out, however, that the meanings of these words change over time and place. Also note that it was the Marxists who popularised these two terms; to quote Wikipedia, ‘scholars who are uncritical of capitalism rarely actually use the term capitalism’.
