system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Explain like I'm 5: the difference(s) between socialism and communism.

I have read conflicting descriptions of the difference between socialism and communism, many of them confusing; but I'm looking for a more definitive explanation.
gpt
Socialism, at it's root is the idea that we all live in a society, and depend on eachother, and therefore should decide stuff together. Typically, this goes beyond merely the political. For example, employees should have some say in how the company they work for should be run, parents should have a say in how the school their children attend is run, etc. Wikipedia assures me that in English this is called co-determination. The next step, is that if you already depend on eachother, and decide stuff together, you have some responsibility to take care of eachother.

There's dozens of variation on these basic ideas. In Western Europe there's a lot of Social Democracy, which seperates the idea of decisionmaking and ownership, so that for example employees might have certain rights to make decisions for the company they work for, but does not entitle them to a share of the profit, or to make decisions that do not directly affect their work.

Another type of socialism is communism. This is based on the writing of Marx, and the basic idea is that the right to decide and ownership are inextricably linked, and belong to all people together. The way communism is supposed to organize this, is by people working together, sharing together and deciding together in councils (hence the name "communism"). These councils (or "soviet" in Russian), or their representatives, would come together in an overarching council that would make decisions for the entire country, and own everything on behalf of these councils. Or at least, that's the theory. For a lot of countries, if not all, that tried to implement communism, the result was that a leader would end up being in control of the overarching council and being able to lead the local councils, rather than the other way around, which opens up lots of possibilities for abuse and general dictatorship.