Under a communist system, that may be true. Socialism, however, has co-existed amicably with private business for a century.  Socialism split in half a long time ago and moderates embraced  democracy, a mixed economy and the idea that collectivization is often the wrong way to go

Actually that is true of socialism. By definition countries like the former USSR and Cuba today are/were socialist not communist. Under communism there would be no government at all, under socialism there would be a central government controlled by the workers. Marx theorized that the world economic systems would change in stages from fuedalism to capitalism to socialism, culminating in communist, which would be a stateless society.

A mixed economy is definitely not the same as a socialist or command economy. What you have in Scandanavia is the social democratic model, where by heavy government spending on social programs is meant to aleviate the suffering of capitalism as much as possible. People often confuse the two, but they are definitely different systems.

DING DING DING DING

Lee's got it.

(Also the US government involvment in allocaitng resources is NOT socialism... it is welfare capitalism).

Socialism often gets labeled as "government control" when in reality it would be the public ownership of production means instead of private ownership. Class conflict, not government, is the key here.

Great job lee!

Yeah people often use socialism and communism interchangibly as well. I'm a politcal science major and beleive me I get frustrated when I hear people throwing around terms they don't understand such as communism socialism and fascism.

But Lee, Social democracy is still socialism.  You might operate in the US with the distinctions you use, defining the Soviet Union as "socialist, not communist" and defining Social Democrats away from Socialism, but that's not how it's defined over here.

While we recognize that true or "pure" communism has never been implemented, we still call the system of the Soviet Union communism. And soviet communism and scandinavian social democracy are both considered socialist.  they have the same roots, but social democracy evolved in a democratic and economically pragmatic direction.

I suspect this is the same type of "definition confusion" as when you refer to the Democrats as liberals and say that liberal equals "big government" when "liberal" in europe means "opposed to government interference of any kind" (meaning that the Lincoln Republicans were hardcore liberals and the current Republicans are much more liberal than the Democrats on economic issues, though they have now succumbed to an intrusive form of social conservatism).

As someone who has grown up in a social democratic country, and have studied history, I can safely say that no-one here would ever say that Social Democrats are not socialists.

I suppose the definitions you use (derived from Marx?) may have their limited usefulness in discussing relative differences between theoretical models within  a political science context, but in terms of applied European politics, the terminology is a bit different than you describe.

Lee, has there ever been a truly communist country?

Not by defnition. As I said, a country would have to make the transition from socialism to a stateless (meaning no government) society in order to be communist. Countries like the USSR obviously never made the transition and China went from being socialist to a mixed economy.

(Also the US government involvment in allocaitng resources is NOT socialism... it is welfare capitalism).

   I have another way to spin it, James.  Remember the Roman Empire?  They did something like this to keep their citizens happy and stupid while they went about their business fighting "barbarians" and stabbing each other in the back.  "Bread and circuses."

   We hairless monkeys really haven't changed much.  Knut raises a good point about maintaining some sort of balance in the debate, but I'm starting to think that the United States is looking more like 5th Century BC Athens than imperial Rome.  Our debate has been hijacked by competing demagogues who can only see dollar signs for themselves and everyone in between as boobs to be bribed and controlled to their own benefit.

   My view of what Lee said about Marx's theory on the progression into communism seems to be "It's ANARCHY!"  Seriously, if Russia had actually gone into what he is describing here, we wouldn't need to worry about there being a "cold war" because the Russians would be happy little anarchists minding their own business.  European (and, by our entaglement, American) power politics might have had a hand in exacerbating the conflict, but the rhetoric and actions of leaders like Trotsky and Stalin, who behaved very much like medieval barons towards their own people while touting a global revolution aimed at overthrowing the world over, were in many ways responsible for its escalation.  We monkeys hadn't moved very far from the era when the Greeks were aiming daggers towards the Persian empire.

   From my own experience, I'm not very happy with the "capitalist" system currently in play in the United States.  In my POV, Big Business is too hand-in-glove with the DC politicos and bureaucrats and standing in the way of small business owners and individuals to allow us to work our own ways out of debt.  If Joe Blow wasn't being taxed and regulated so much in order to give handouts to Billy Box Store and Lazy Luke, there's a chance that I'd have been gainfully employed within a few weeks of being laid off and not shouldering as big of a debt as my own luck had saddled me with.  Hence my sympathies with the Tea Party movement.

   Joe Quesada's reaction to the outrage (real or manufactured) is only symptomatic of how the United States is being shaken by the current political conflict...