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real socialism

real socialism With the non-applicability of the terms socialism and communism, given the divergence of the reality of Soviet socialism from the ideal as interpreted within the corpus of the Marxist-Leninist classics, an alternative term was required. ‘Actually existing socialism’, ‘developed socialism’, and ‘state socialism’ were just some of the contenders suggested by supporters and detractors alike. ‘Real socialism’, which emerged as the favoured caption, implied that the economic, political, and social make-up of the Soviet bloc societies was in fact a distinct mode of production, with its own immanent tendencies, which could not be grasped either by reference to the concepts of Western social science or by the instruments of official communist ideology.

Its defining feature was the primacy of politics over economics and the intertwining of the two. Although the features of capitalism (such as distinctive property rights, and markets of commodities, capital, and labour) were absent, this did not imply the existence of socialism. The latter would have required the organization of the economy along collective lines, with co-operation through a plan which articulated the interests of the direct producers, and tied consumption, production, and investment together, through the human logic of expressed (rather than imposed) needs. State ownership of productive means in fact led to a property vacuum. Absent ownership rights fostered corruption, eroded motivation, distorted managerial priorities, and diverted state energies into control rather than planning and directive functions. The power of lobbies replaced societal interest formation and articulation. The primacy of the nomenklatura system undermined professional and expertise criteria of performance, dissipated the mechanisms of accountability, and vested power in the hands of groups who ruled this monocentric society and whose aim was the maximization of power over a non-controllable economy. Party, state bureaucracy, security apparatus, and military formed a power élite, presiding over a bureaucratically centralized, segmented society. Extensive economic growth exhausted the natural and human resources of countries tied into patterns of dependence devoid of an economic logic but rooted within the overriding needs of the military-industrial complex. Soft budgets, poor labour discipline, the politicization of the workplace, the use of the factory-based welfare system to impose labour discipline in the absence of unemployment, all became attributes of the system of redistribution. Economic interests, rather than being based upon economic rationality, were distorted by this redistributional mechanism. Finely graded occupational and hierarchical privilege incorporated most of the population into an artificial set of dependencies.

For its part, society was effectively classless, although forms of social closure existed—particularly within the partocracy and the intelligentsia. Social atomization and amorphous structures were juxtaposed to the burgeoning second society where social self-organization existed around the satisfaction of interstitial but authentic needs. These social relations substituted for the absence of civil society, the missing meso-level, connecting the individual and family to the statesponsored organizations and institutions, and sought to break out of the segmentalism and opaqueness which allowed the rulers to manipulate sections of society, often against each other.

An interesting insider's view of real socialism is offered in Rudolf Bahro's Marxist critique of the East German State (The Alternative in Eastern Europe, 1977). Bahro identifies a fundamental contradiction in actually existing socialism, and not in class terms, but as the production of a ‘surplus consciousness’ that can transform society.

It is impossible at this stage to provide anything like a satisfactory characterization of real socialism, for it is only in the leaving of it that one can see clearly its economic and political axial principles, its major institutional contours, and social residues. Health crises, environmental despoliation, a debilitated work ethic, poverty, criminality, political malaise, and the almost endless litany of other failings of this system of imposed modernization tend to detract from some of its undoubted achievements.

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	A revolutionary process never ends: Sylvere Lotringer talks with Antonio Negri.(Interview) Magazine article from: Artforum International; 5/1/2008; ; 700+ words ; ...after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the sudden collapse of real socialism, as the Soviet regime used to be called, you're arguing...bureaucratic system. They allowed for the possibility of overcoming real socialism, of recovering freedom. SL: What did you make of those events... Read more
	Deirdre Coleman. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery.(Book review) Magazine article from: Utopian Studies; 1/1/2006; ; 700+ words ; ...primitivism, nostalgia, millenarianism, mercantilism, labour discipline, production, trade, and empire. To the extent that the...undermined by the imperialist and mercantilist themes of labour discipline, production, and trade. The Sierra Leone colony, for example... Read more
	Religious reawakening: stirrings in Cuba. (Column) Magazine article from: The Christian Century; 10/19/1994; ; 700+ words ; ...people, participating in liturgical functions may be prompted by a search for new values in the face of the collapse of real socialism ; or it may be a result of the more conciliatory attitude toward religion assumed by the Communist Party and the government... Read more
	Rethinking East German education.(Repainting the Little Red Schoolhouse: A History of Eastern German Education, 1945-1995)(Book Review) Magazine article from: Modern Age; 1/1/2005; ; 700+ words ; ...the 1950s, the Party leaders felt sufficiently confident to proclaim an end to bourgeois democracy and the beginning of real socialism, with education oriented toward producing true communists ready to finish the building of socialist society. This new generation... Read more
	Chavez as shining light.(letters)(Letter to the Editor) Magazine article from: New Internationalist; 8/1/2005; 421 words ; ...empowering of working people and peasants through the creation of new and diverse types of co-operatives. That is Chavez's real socialism and a socialism that progressives should be actively supporting. Chavez is trying hard truly to give 'power to the people... Read more
	Latin America's crony capitalism.(Alvaro Vargas Llosa)(Interview) Magazine article from: Reason; 11/1/2005; ; 419 words ; ...explain, Well, listen, this is not real capitalism. People tended to think of those who said, Oh, the Soviet Union was not real socialism. But public spending in Argentina increased 100 percent during that period. How can that be called liberal in any sense? Read more
	Back in the USSR: two decades after the end of the Cold War, Belarus has yet to warm to democratic capitalism--for good and ill.(World)(Country overview) Magazine article from: The American Conservative; 9/8/2008; ; 700+ words ; ...should have clubbed together to maintain the old East Germany as a theme park so that future generations could see what real socialism was truly like, right down to the soup, the beer, and the plumbing. Many East Germans, as is now clear, would have been... Read more
	The great refusal. Magazine article from: Artforum International; 5/1/2008; ; 700+ words ; ...zigzagged across the world map. And yet May '68 crossed every border, regardless of what it stood for. Those who opposed the real socialism of the Soviet Union pressed for freedom and democracy, thus embracing capitalism and American pop culture; those who opposed... Read more
	Courage, heroism, and the postmodern paradox. Magazine article from: Social Research; 3/22/2004; ; 700+ words ; ...communism it was easier: it took heroism and courage to protect individual opinion and not conform to the regime of so-called real socialism. But heroism and courage require the conviction that what one is saying is really true. And we had that. I'm not so sure... Read more
	Never blame the left: the left is perceived as kind and caring, despite its extensive history of promoting genocide. Magazine article from: National Review; 12/31/1995; ; 700+ words ; ...himself a socialist. Five days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he confided in his diary that real socialism would be established in that country after a Nazi victory, in place of Bolshevism and Czarism. The evidence that Nazism... Read more

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