Comment by tpm
12 hours ago
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.
Well, defining any social order in this manner will result in the same conclusion. Just as with democracy, the power is never in the hands of people.
Defining it negatively though - as a social order in which the private ownership of means of production is prohibited by law - socialism definitely existed.
In democracy the power is to some extent in the hands of the people. That even enables partial socialism, when e.g. some industries or transport companies belong to the state, but rest of the economy is private. But if there is no democracy, there is also no socialism.
> private ownership of means of production is prohibited by law - socialism definitely existed
It did not exist, it was merely declared to exist by law. And there are several issues with that, one is that means of production are also your hands and your head and you can always refuse to use them, explicitly or implicitly, however painful that may be. And the second one is the existence of huge informal economy that has supplanted the shortcomings of the formal one and that one has always been dependent on private production and this has been the case in all 'communist' economies AFAIK. It was certainly the case in communist Czechoslovakia where I lived.