Could Socialism ever work?

Introduction

Socialist systems are those regimes based on the economic and political theory of socialism, which advocates public ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. These include states described as socialist, communist, or Marxist, all of which claim to be based on efforts to achieve social justice and equality. The best term for these regimes may be state socialism, which has gained wide currency in the political science literature. In response to the crisis and collapse of state socialism at the end of the 1980s, many analysts have emphasized that the universalistic goals of socialism were not thereby invalidated, since many other currents of socialism, for instance, social democracy, have been vigorously developing around the world (Sassoon, Pp. 98).

Discussion

According to the classical Marxist approach, socialism is only the first stage of the postcapitalist society, followed by communism as a second stage in which people receive “according to their needs.” Marxist theory was elaborated for, and based on, the most developed countries of the world. Although the state socialist project originated from Marxist theory, it was, however, a deviation from the original theory of Karl Marx. The application of this theory in backward countries, starting with Lenin's Russia, can be considered as turning it to the other extreme—that is, to a revolutionary theory for the poorest countries of the world. This trend reached its peak under Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and, later, was embraced by Fidel Castro of Cuba and by other local leaders in the developing countries. What is more, there have been two basically different paths to state socialism (Lichtheim, Pp. 29).

Characteristics of Socialist Systems

The main features of state socialist systems are the following:

One-Party System

Political rule is based on the unified power of partocracy or on the concentration of power in the Communist Party as a superstate. In state socialism, there is no division of power because the party represents the dictatorship of the proletariat and builds a bureaucratic system of political control. Democratic centralism, first in the party and then in all political institutions, became the general organizational principle for state socialism. In the constitutions of the countries concerned, the leading role of the party in state and society is stipulated (Wilhelm, Pp. 59).

Command Economy

This is an economic system with central planning (Five-Year Plans) in the state-administered economy. There can be no private ownership of the means of production, since these are nationalized and state owned. Directive planning as instructions from above is the method of economic management in an economy based on state property, in which the State Planning Agency (Gosplan in Russia) acts as a superministry. But planning was a bargaining process between/among various actors and organizations, with centrally determined prices, heavily subsidized products, and huge subsidies for the heavy industries. Command economy is accompanied by the coercive collectivization of agriculture, which produced a general scarcity and low quality of agricultural goods (Selbourne, Pp. 69).

Personality Cult of the Leader

A cultural system based on the ideological monopoly of “Marxism-Leninism” ...