The Dilemma: Ever since they took the rod out of the Iron Curtain and sent communism to the cleaners, your knowledge ofcompeting political philosophies has blurred.

People You Can Impress: your ninth-grade civics teacher and Fidel Castro

The Quick Trick: Just toss socialism around in conversation and you’re guaranteed to be right.

The Explanation:
While both terms basically mean that property and the means of production are being shared for the good of the people, socialism is much more loosely defined and, as such, encompasses communism. The spectrum of socialism is pretty wide, from social democracies like Sweden to societies where the state assumes responsibility for all economic planning, like the Soviet Union back when it was the Soviet Union. The idea, put simply, is cooperation instead of competition.

More specifically, communism has evolved from the Greeks (Plato advocated a world of communal bliss and harmony without private property) to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto to Vladimir Lenin’s Russian revolution. Much of the theory for communism grew out of discontent in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Blue-collar workers were often treated appallingly, and the idea of a classless society with shared resources seemed ideal. In fact, Engels and Marx predicted that when economic forces became insufferable, the lower classes would revolt to create a communist state. Well, maybe not. While there are quite a few social democracies extant today, communist strongholds are few and far between.

Good to Know
Oddly enough, Adam Smith’s bible of capitalism, Wealth of Nations—often quoted with authority by proponents of small government—actually advocates a somewhat socialist brand of democracy. Smith, who famously coined the term “invisible hand” to describe the way in which looking out for number one magically equates to looking out for the whole community, also recognized that increased wealth alone would not make for healthy communities.

Seeing Red: American Communists
In the 1950s, everyone was accused of belonging to the Communist Party. But these folks actually did:

John Dos Passos
Langston Hughes
Pete Seeger
Richard Wright
Elia Kazan
W.E.B. DuBois