What is the difference between communism fascism and socialism?

Answer 1

Communism is the theory that all things should be shared equally among all people. The concept of government in communism is that it should exist only to protect this state. In the real world, however, communism always begets totalitarian dictatorships (which are, while not communism in and of themselves, a result of communism).

Fascism is a combination of far-right capitalism and nationalism, where people are completely denied all participation in government in the favor of elites. It is considered the absolute opposite of socialism.

Socialism is the idea that the government exists to help (and to an extent control) people. Socialists support high taxes and government spending on the populus. Basically, it's the concept of "you pay taxes, the government handles everything else."

Answer 2

Socialism is a left-wing ideology that seeks to create a society where the "means of production" (factories, farms, mines, etc) are owned by society, rather than private individuals. As socialism is something of an umbrella term, there are lots of different sub-groups of it, each with different ideas on what the society should be like, how to achieve it, and so forth. Some examples are Social Democracy, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Syndicalism, and Communism.

Communism is one of the major sub-ideologies of socialism. It seeks to create a stateless, moneyless, classless society where the workers control the means of production. There are actually sub-groups of communism too, which seek to achieve their goals in different ways- they're usually named after the guy who thought them up, like Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and so on.

Fascism is a totally separate ideology. It's a far right-wing ideology mostly built up by ex-socialist Benito Mussolini in Italy after World War I. It emphasizes extreme nationalism and militarism, and that society should be dominated by an all powerful central government, usually referred to as "the State", and there is a single dictator in charge of all of it. Under fascism, the economy is to be a fusion of capitalism and government bureaucracy called "corporatism"; the workers are stripped of their rights and are at the mercy of the State. Closely related to fascism is Germany's National Socialism (or Nazism for short), which emphasizes economics much less, but strongly emphasizes extreme racism.

What can be confusing is that historically some of the terms were used interchangeably. Until around the late 1910's, Communists usually called themselves "Socialists"- their belief was that to create a Communist society, Capitalism must somehow evolve into a Socialist system, and then evolve into Communism; so they sought to create the Socialist system that would lead to a Communist one. The primary Communist party in Russia at that time was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; the party split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks took control and renamed themselves the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By this point, the ideologies were separated and continue to be so to this day.

Additionally, Fascism and Nazism occasionally borrowed terms and ideas from Socialist movements even though, in practice, they had little in common. The Nazis even put "Socialism" in their name, as seen earlier- but it was mainly just a scheme to broaden their appeal, and when they did actually talk about "socialism", it was to try to somehow prove to the uneducated masses that their racism was correct. There was a small, left-leaning wing of the Nazi Party, called the Strasserites, who believed in incorporating some socialist ideas, but these Strasserites were murdered during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, ending that once and for all.