system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
Is there an easy explanation without needing to dig into a lot of articles for one?
gpt
One of the problems here is defining Communism. This is a term that comes from Anti-Capitalist activists of the mid-1800s, which is closely related to Socialism, but there's no agreement on how. Some of them used the terms interchangeably, OTOH the Soviets insisted that Capitalism was the stage of human development prior to Socialism, and that Socialism would lead to Communism. Communism was supposed to be Star Trek. When the top Soviet Military commander (Trotsky) fled one step ahead of Stalin's goons he declared that the Soviets were neither Socialist nor Communist, but "State Capitalist." This makes it...difficult...to figure out whether something is actually Communist or not, even when it's invented by people who swear up and down they're trying to do Communism.

What the Soviets had was a planned economy. This meant that every five years the smartest industrial planning geeks in the nation issued a "five year plan" detailing things like how much steel was going to be produced, who got to turn it into tools, what those tools would make, etc. Everything that was a "Means of Production" was on the plan, so you can't...like knit socks or something...that are not on the plan or you are stealing from the plan, welcome to the Gulag. The Holodamar (and similar crimes against Khazaki herdsman, etc.) happened because Ukrainian peasants preferred to remain Ukrainian peasants. The plan required most of them to move to some ethnic-Russian industrial city and become Russian factory workers.

This worked until the planners found things they didn't anticipate. With capitalism Bear-Sterns can go bankrupt whenever it wants and things work themselves out pretty much the same, with a five-year-plan a bad surprise in year two is a really bad surprise. Moreover they could easily plan for Tech that was well-understood (ie: bigger rocket goes higher), but planning for tech that didn't exist at all was basically impossible (Soviet computer tech was non-existent).

Co-ops were actually tried by a number of Socialist/Communist adjacent people. From the late 40s through the late seventies the Israelis were basically a federation of co-ops. Most of the Kibbutz are for-profit corporations now. Don;t know exactly why. The Catalans managed to run themselves as a co-op for a little more than a year during the Spanish Civil War.

Other folks will claim that various Nordic countries are Socialist. This is true from the Moral Philosophy PoV that they have set up their systems with slightly different values than ours, and Socialism is a handy word for that. In terms of actual difference? Not that big a deal. The Danes who pledged their lives to die for the Capitalist alliance against the Soviets were economically left of the current crop of Danes. Taxes are higher (and higher primarily on folk the Squad would call working class: taxing the rich is really hard to do when the mother-fuckers can just book a flight to Luxembourg and never see you again), and social spending is higher; but that's really it from an economics PoV.