How is the Equal Money System the same and how is it different from Communism and Marxism?

This Question was answered on the EMS wiki page: http://equalmoney.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Isn%E2%80%99t_Equal_Money_just_another_name_for_Communism

I am more knowledgeable about Marxism than the Equal Money System. The idea that we produce things collectively and share what we produce equally is not new. It is the basis of Christian communities like monasteries, Jewish Kibbutz and Collectivism. The vision of both philosophies is fairly similar. Marxists want a world where the people decide what to produce and that things are distributed "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs". Both emphasise democracy and equality. The differences lie in the view of the world. Marxists really believe the world system is rotten and needs an overthrow (revolution) of the world order.  The Equal Money System makes no mention of class struggle or revolution. It focuses on self-change as a way of changing society. The Equal Money System has a much greater emphasis on technology. It does propose limits on what can be democratically decided and favours technocrats (experts who can run things). The Equal Money System appears to be more pragmatic and taking the idea of using what works. Marxism has been around a lot longer and is more fixed. I would say the EMS is closer to the Christian ideals of the Diggers, who believed that all the world was created by God and should be shared equally amongst God's children. Versions of this idea lasted for around 1000 years in Northern Europe, with the Viking Strip system. The idea that people working together rather than competing and removing the duplication and waste of the current system will enable us to build a better world is a common goal to both.

Few simple point to make here. It seems strange to me to focus on the word 'Utopia' when the goal of an EMS is to firstly ensure ALL have enough-what they need-as in basic requirements to sustain life, as a human right. If you had/have children is this not the least you would want for them, let alone for yourself? All the talk about this system and that system, from the past, to me is irrelevant-they are words from the past-we are talking about investigating what is here and keep what is good and changing the rest so all are given a decent life/existence. Later, we can concern ourselves with more/extra/'wants'. It just seems crazy to me to focus on that one word when millions/billions(?) do not have enough clean water/food/safe shelter today.  Also, if I concern myself with just my fear that something will be taken away, I cannot 'see' my neighbour as myself/anyone else and am consumed with protecting just my little world/my family. So I am  then controlled by these emotions of greed/fear and I live them as myself. This clearly has not worked throughout history.

https://wealthcycles.com/visual-economy/socialism-in-under-3.5-minutes?utm_source=Social%2BMedia&utm_medium=Twitter%2Band%2BFacebook&utm_campaign=Video%3A%2BTrue%2BCapitalism%2BFree%2Bof%2BInterference%2BHolds%2BKey%2Bto%2BSocietal%2BAdvancement This is why it doesnt work

The Equal Money System is socialism. It is basic redistribution of wealth exactly as Marx described. However, as pointed out in his answer, The Equal Money System authors have a very poor understanding of economics. For starters they have omitted responsibility from the equation. In order for there to be resources to distribute, there must be production. What is your motivation for production? If everything is provided for you, why work. Why not just sit back and enjoy the resource provided without contributing? Marx understood this issue and dealt with it at length. The Equal Money System however says "The motivation to perform ... will come from the understanding that: that which one gives, one will receive." A very naive statement. They have ignored the basic human behaviours. People are greedy, lazy and frequently immoral. They are quite happy to receive more than their fair share of the pie without contributing. While some people will contribute more than their requirement, most people will consume an excess. Some examples of The Equal Money System nonsense. From their website: The only country where the unemployment rate is 0.00 – or in other words, where everyone is employed – is Monaco. Considering that Monaco is a city-state with an area of 1.98 km2, it is a fact that bears little or no significance. In every other country in the world – there are people who are unemployed, with unemployment ranging from 0.5 to 97% of the population. One must remember that the numbers in the above table refer to actual human beings who are willing to work, who are able to work, but for whom jobs are not available. Without access to the labor market, they have no access to money and thus, no means with which to acquire the resource they need to sustain themselves. This places human beings in a position where crime is the only viable option through which to survive in this world – affecting in turn the livelihoods of all members of society. For starters they have ignored the fact that 100% employment is not full employment. A country may be in full employment when there are still unemployed people. This is called structural unemployment. For example, if I have a contract for a years work ending in March and my next contract starts in May, I will be unemployed for one month in between. They have also ignored underemployment. That is where someone has a job but one that is less than what they are capable of. Perhaps a part time job when they want a full time job or perhaps the are a university graduate but are working at McD's flipping burgers. Then the final line in the quote paragraph suggests that unemployed people are forced to resort to crime to fund there lives. Blatantly and demonstrably untrue. Aside from government assistance, people who are temporary unemployed can make use of their own savings plus friends and families. Unemployment is not poverty. Long term unemployment might result in poverty but short term unemployment is a natural part of many people's life's for which they plan.

Quick summary of what's to come: Marxism is a prediction of a violent overthrow of the current socio-economic order leading to utopia, Equal Money is advocacy of a peaceful transition into utopia. And also, Marxism was formulated by someone whose impact on economics and historiography is still felt, Equal Money can't even get a Wikipedia page. At the time of the writing of the Communist Manifesto, capitalism was a truly foul system to be at the bottom of. It's still not great by any stretch of the imagination, but at least at this point in time, the people at the bottom (at least in the US) have some recourse if the people at the top start getting really nasty about things - there's universal suffrage and labor unions, to name two quick examples. This wasn't really true when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, and in many ways, the system didn't seem very different from the "Lords and Serfs" model that feudalism had stipulated or the "Master and Slave" model that had preceded feudalism - except that the concept of noblesse oblige was gone. The class struggle - the opposition between the haves and the have nots due to opposing interests - had heated up. Marx therefore predicted that the working class would rise up in a violent revolution and overthrow the existing capitalist social order. He predicted that capitalism would be replaced with a worker's paradise. Capitalism, as he saw it, was the inevitable final state of societal evolution prior to the revolution. This didn't happen in most places - indeed, in the truly industrialized societies where Marx predicted the revolutions would happen first, they didn't happen successfully at all. This is because the haves started negotiating with the have nots, frequently at the insistence of governments. You go from having these bloody worker-capitalist conflicts such as the Pullman Riots to peaceable contract negotiations between factory owners and unions. Marx's prediction therefore was, depending on how you look at it, wrong, incomplete or premature. That said, there were many people who came after Marx who said "gee, the end results of this communist revolution sure look nice, but this bloody revolution bit doesn't sound palatable." The most famous advocates of "change the system to a Marxist one from within the current system" were the Fabianists. They named themselves after a Roman general whose strategy for fighting the Carthaginian general Hannibal was to keep withdrawing and force Hannibal to tire himself out. The Fabian Society was created in 1884, which just goes to show how old the concept of "Marxism without revolution" is. The Equal Money System's wiki claims that the big difference between it and Marxism is that "communism is based upon the belief that the injustice and inequality of the world is solely based upon a specific class in society as the capitalist – as those that employ a working force – Equal Money is on the other hand based upon the realization that we’re all responsible for the mess that is here..." This is a misreading of Marx. The engine of evil in Marxism is not the upper class, but the class struggle. The problem isn't that there are people who have stuff, but that their interests are opposed to people who don't and the resulting conflicts cause instability and problems. Here's where I start getting a little mean, but frankly, it's earned. Every source I could find on the Equal Money System seemed to spurn Marx. The sources all seemed to realize that various parties had tried Marxism or some variant thereof, and that those governments had been mostly relegated to the scrap heap of history or had abandoned Marxism, and so, were most adamantly advocating against Marxism. But here's the thing: you might not agree with Marx, but you cannot deny that he was a very, very clever man who did his homework. Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, his two most famous works (let's also give credit to Friedrich Engels for the latter) are filled with data and rigorous analysis of how capitalism works. Many of his theories are still widely accepted today, albeit not without controversy (e.g. his theory of history and his law of value) The Equal Money System's documents, on the other hand, are filled with wet-behind-the-ears assertions that are backed up by numbers ripped from Wikipedia when they are attempting to be academically rigorous and, far more often, by hippie-drippy claptrap when they are trying to be convincing. And if you're going to be as dismissive of Marxism as the Equal Money System people invariably are, it usually helps to 1) make an effort to understand it first and 2) copy-edit your work. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of Marxism, at least its founding documents were copy-edited.