real socialism
real socialismWith 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...
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