Protestant England preferred 'socialist' because 'communist' sounded too Catholic
In nineteenth-century England, communism sounded uncomfortably close to the Catholic rite of communion, and across Christian Europe communists were assumed to be atheists. Socialist was the safer word. Friedrich Engels later recalled that in 1848, the year of The Communist Manifesto, socialism was respectable in Europe while communism was not.
Pierre Leroux claimed to have coined socialism in the Paris journal Le Globe in 1832. A follower of Henri de Saint-Simon, he set the word against liberal individualism, which early socialists blamed for poverty, oppression and yawning inequality during the Industrial Revolution. The Latin root sociare means to combine or share, and the legal term societas could mean fellowship or a contract between free people. Saint-Simon wanted economic planning and scientific administration, while Robert Owen proposed organising production through cooperatives.
By the 1860s the vocabulary had settled, with socialist displacing rivals such as associationist, mutualist and collectivist. One early distinction held that socialists wanted to share production, whereas communists wanted to share consumption as well, through free access to goods. By 1888 Marxists used socialism because communism seemed an old-fashioned synonym. Only after the Bolshevik Revolution did Lenin redefine socialism as a stage between capitalism and communism, partly to answer critics who said Russia was too undeveloped for communism, and in 1918 the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party renamed itself the All-Russian Communist Party.
By the early 1920s communism and social democracy were the two dominant currents of the movement, and socialism became the twentieth century's most influential secular movement. The Soviet Union and its allied parties identified it with central planning and total state ownership, while reformists elsewhere won power through elections. In Britain, Labour's Herbert Morrison joked that socialism was whatever a Labour government did, whereas Aneurin Bevan insisted it meant bringing the main streams of economic activity under public direction.
Socialism today covers both non-market systems and market socialism, which keeps prices and sometimes profit, with ownership that may be public, cooperative, collective or held by employees. The Vietnam War helped give rise in 1968 to a New Left critical of both the Soviet Union and social democracy, and in 1990 Brazil's Workers' Party launched the São Paulo Forum linking Latin American left-wing parties.
Source: Socialism
