Around the beginning of the 19th century, the world, especially Europe, started to change. Machines were used more animals were used less and people started migrating to cities. Different people had very different reactions to this, and a lot of different words started getting coined and thrown around to describe people's attitudes towards these changes, two of which would wind up sticking around for a very long time. Socialism and Communism. These two words were originally used more or less interchangeably to describe a lot of different people with vastly different ideas, like Robert Owen, Sansi Mone, Louis Blanc, Pierre Joseph, and plenty of others. All of these guys did focus on some common themes. They all talked about how the onset of the industrial revolution was making it possible for a few entrepreneurs to exploit their workers in order to make themselves very rich, and they all talked about how society needed to be radically reorganized in order to make things more fair. But after that, their agreement ended, like if not these rich business owners who should own the factories and how should they be managed. Should we even have property? How should goods be distributed? And by who? How should we motivate people to work? Each socialist and each communist from the time would have given you a very different answer. One of the many documents from this early period was the Communist Manifesto. It was written by Karl Marx, who you've probably heard of, and also Frederick Ingles, who you might have? Maybe? I don't know. Anyway, according to them, a communist was someone who, among other things, wanted, abolition of land as private property, free education, the requirement that everyone who can work does work, centralization of banks, communication, transportation, and everything else, I think, it's a little unclear. The way the document talks about things, it seems like they viewed communism as an extreme type of socialism. Where socialists are just anyone who wants to help out the average worker, but communists are people who want to completely overturn the current social order. Now, this document became incredibly influential, but the terminology it uses with communists as a particularly radical subset of socialist didn't really catch on. The word communism fell out of favor, and people started describing themselves mostly by how much they agreed with Marx. So instead of communism as a subset of socialism, we wound up with Marxism as a subset of socialism. Over the course of the 1800s, a lot of countries in Europe started getting a lot more democratic, and political parties started forming to compete in elections. A lot of these political parties were socialist, and they tended to be dominated by Marxists, especially the SDP in Germany. Here's the problem, though. A big part of Orthodox Marxism was the belief that the working class would have to revolt in a glorious, violent revolution, because the ruling bourgeoisie would never willingly relinquish power. So the fact that Marxists were actually winning some elections wound up kind of discrediting Marxism, in response, other more moderate forms of socialism started popping up, like phobianism in the UK. The phobian socialists believed that the average worker would benefit best by a slow, peaceful, gradual transition to a more equitable, state-directed economy, and they would become very influential in the early days of the British Labour Party. Meanwhile, in Russia, things were taking a different turn. The leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, disagreed with Orthodox Marxists on some issues, but unlike the more moderate socialists scanning ground in Europe, he still believed that revolution was the only way forward. Lenin and his followers broke off from the Russian Socialist Party, and named to themselves the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which as far as I can tell was the beginning of a revival of the word Communist. It seems like they were using it in much the same way Marx had, as a way to separate themselves from other more moderate socialists. After they gained power, a split formed in socialists around the world. On one hand were those who wanted to follow the example of the Soviet Union, who began calling themselves Communists. They frequently formed their own parties, specifically to challenge other socialists, and sometimes they were really successful. On the other hand, there were other socialists. Some were hardcore Marxists and some were more moderate socialists, but they all thought that the Soviet Union was a terrible example to follow. During World War II, there was an uneasy alliance between socialists, capitalists, and communists, as they all struggled against their common enemies. But when that was over, and the Cold War started, socialists around Europe started becoming progressively more moderate. They started defining themselves as democratic socialists, people who, yes, wanted some government control over industry, but were committed to doing so by democratic means unlike the communists in the USSR. The Labour Party won the 1945 election in Britain on a socialist platform, and the UK didn't exactly turn into Russia. They created a national healthcare system and nationalised major utilities, and when they lost the elections to the Conservatives in 1951, they peacefully relinquished power. In Germany, the Marxist SDP had become one of Germany's most powerful political parties, but after losing a few elections in a row really badly, they basically completely rewrote their platform, giving up on Marxism, and instead embracing a moderate form of socialism where government would protect the rights of workers while still allowing the existence of capitalism, what they called a social market economy. All across Europe, socialism stopped meaning complete overthrow of current capitalist institutions, and started meaning more government influence over the economy than exists right now. Meanwhile, in the United States, things worked out a bit differently. We had our own socialist party for a while, and during the first few decades of the 20th century, it even got a few congressmen elected. But socialism existed for us at the same time as progressivism, a much more moderate movement that wound up being very influential in the early days of the US's left wing, while the socialist party basically just kinda died out. Later, during the Cold War, the word socialist and communist both became permanently linked to our arch nemesis the USSR, and ever since the two words have been treated basically like curse words in American politics. So today, we've wound up in a bit of a weird semantic situation, where socialist might just mean vaguely left wing, or it might mean Soviet freedom hating Russian, depending on exactly who you talk to. A confusing mess, which I hope this video has made at least a little more clear.