Comment by anovikov
16 hours ago
Time and again we see how half-assed dictatorships don't work. Soviet Union and the Eastern Block failed because they tried to be nice. By doing so, they achieved the worst result possible: cynical, profoundly disillusioned society and an economic failure on top of that. They should've either folded when they realised that "classless and stateless" Communism was never going to work - which is, by the late 1970s at the latest, or practiced pure Stalinism where everyone who wavered, got purged in an instant and thus generations kept being genetically filtered for obedience.
There is no such thing as "Socialism with a human face". It is so anti-human, it can only exist by hard coercion, or not at all.
> which is, by the late 1970s at the latest, or practiced pure Stalinism where everyone who wavered, got purged in an instant and thus generations kept being genetically filtered for obedience.
That’s a good point. The system worked so “well” before, during and a bit after WWII was because of the absolute terror and demand for obedience. With the willingness to kill, enslave, starve and terrorize people by the millions, one can achieve “great” economic results and military victories.
Are you using Socialism and Communism interchangeably?
Communism goes further than Socialism (or Socialism doesn't go as far as Communism), Communism is more extreme, cold and hard and not at all blurry-edged, according to my understanding anyway.
All instances of -isms eventually fall to the unrelenting winds of human nature. Not necessarily due to the ideals within the -ism itself.
Well, Communism was seen by countries we call "Communist" (GDR, Soviet Union, Red China in Mao era, and the like), as something potentially possible in some distant future, it was their endgame (some claim, only notionally so, with no actual plan of getting there, but it doesn't matter really). What they had in reality, they called "Socialism".
Socialism is the "form of industrialised society where private ownership of means of production is outlawed". Communism is the (hypothetical) "classless, stateless society".
The above comment chain is what is wrong with us. We talk about labels more than we talk about issues.
Labels are a distraction. If you have a conversation about real things I find we agree nore than we disagree.
But disagreement is what is fomented by our oppressors, because it distracts us from fighting them.
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Socialism has practically infinite different meanings depending on whom you ask (and in what country). There’s nothing that ideologically unifies Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bernie Sanders, and Joseph Stalin other than being somewhere left of center, but all of them would have described themselves as socialists.
Socialism is defined by social ownership of the means of production. But in those countries, the society did not really have a say in managing the means of production, everything was in the hands of the 'avantgarde party' which inevitably led to centralization of power in the hands of a small clique.
Total socialism is of course unworkable anyway, but this was no socialism.
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Socialism is not Communism.
What is your definition of socialism and communism? “Socialism” is used with a very wide set of definitions. Both the French socialist party (which is at most center-left) and the East German SED would have described themselves as “socialist”, and surely the latter at least would have thought socialism was incompatible with capitalism and that communism was its end goal.
Communism was always the goal if we’re talking about those countries. We were “building communism” and socialism was just a temporary pit stop on the way.