Has socialism turned into communism anywhere in the world?

[Not Heidi]

I'm at a restaurant and just overheard this from the table behind me. The speaker cited Venezuela.

Does this really happen?

(I know little about socialism, and even less about communism. I loathe my ignorance.)

[leftstreet]

1. You sit near fascinating conversations

I never hear people talking like that

[Not Heidi]

14. . . . and at McDonald's.

😁

[qazplm135]

2. True communism is more or less impossible

On any level larger than a handful of people.

[Wounded Bear]

3. Probably almost everywhere it is tried in large countries...

IDK if it's true, but one thing I do know is that unregulated capitalism leads directly to fascism.

[Omnipresent]

7. A communist would say that.

[JohnSJ]

4. Not really, but it failed miserably in Greece

[Xolodno]

5. Nope.

Communism will happen when we get to Star Trek level technology and morality.

Some nations have attempted to create communism and have failed. Often to become just totalitarian states.

At the small level there has been a bit of success in the form of communal farms. But beyond that, we are simply not able to centrally plan an economy.

[brush]

6. Not quite, as communism is a form of socialism. See the Soviet Union and Red China.

It's been tried but neither a pure socialist society or its offshoot, communism, has been successfully sustained permanently in any nation. And what I mean by successfully sustained permanently would be centuries as we've seen in several extant, capitalist democracies with varying degrees of regulation.

[hunter]

17. Totalitarian governments can call themselves anything they like and they do.

These totalitarian governments might call themselves capitalist, Christian, Islamic, communist, socialist, monarchy... whatever the fuck they like, oppressing, imprisoning, or killing anyone who argues.

But it's true, messy democracies with mixed economies are stable. Let the free market do what it does best, let government do what it does best.

[brush]

18. Yes, democracies can get messy but they survive. Totalitarian...

Last edited Tue Oct 26, 2021, 06:36 PM - Edit history (1)

rightist reigns don't as the excesses of top family/leaders hogging all the wealth cause them to fall to revolutions. Ironically to leftist revolutions and then the cycle repeats itself.

The only leftist revolution which eventually held democratic elections that I recall was Ortega in Nigaragua, which is a credit to him.

[hunter]

23. Huh? Noriega was a typical Latin American strongman backed by the CIA.

Noriega even called himself a strongman.

The U.S.A. backed him against the trade unions that were forming in Panama.

Noriega eventually overreached, becoming too dirty and inconvenient for his dirtiest patrons, and fell.

Do you mean Daniel Ortega?

[brush]

26. Sorry. You are correct. I meant Ortega in Nicarogua. I gotta...

get a program, can't keep my dictators straight without a program.

[pecosbob]

8. The conditions that have lead to nation-states becoming communist don't exist

in the typical socialist nation-state, i.e. extreme poverty and the concentration of wealth among the few. The rabble, if you will, needs to be really pissed off and active participants in their current system's overthrow.

[Hortensis]

9. As Brush says. An extreme form. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

China's interesting now. It was supposed to progress through stages and forms of socialism toward communism, but, extreme as its efforts were, they never "advanced" beyond socialism to a communist society.

They've had to add capitalism back in to keep the nation from collapse, but now, with money in the kitty, the military beefed up big time, and capitalism threatening the party's control, the central committee (Xi Jingping) reportedly wants to rev up socialism for another try.

I don't think there ever have been, strictly speaking, any successful socialist nation-states. They all fell, usually to authoritarian dictatorships and various violent uprisings, or like China reinstituted capitalism to stave off collapse.

Europe's are capitalism-based nations like ours, with some "socialized" public services that are paid for by their capitalist engines of prosperity, like our VA.

[brush]

19. Good analysis. And I agree China is interesting...what with...

the interjection of capitalism and its subsequent endangering of their central planning system.

Wonder if Xi is looking towards a mixed economy or eventually stricter central planning?

Makes one wonder if once a society gets a taste of the profit incentive if it can go back to "to each according to his/her ability, to each according to her/his needs."

[Farmer-Rick]

10. The problem is that in the US

The definitions of socialism and communism are adulterated.

Everyone with an opinion has different definitions. And they are embued with Totalitarian qualities that they were not originally used to describe.

But going back to Marx, those 2 things are very different in his descriptions of them. That they don't neccassarily evolve from one another. They are 2 distinct economic descriptions like slavery and capitalism are distinct descriptions of forms of economic systems.

And you can have all 4 types of economic systems mentioned above in one country or government. Then eventually one would overshadow the other like slavery overshadowed capitalism in the South but not in the North before the civil war.

So, possibly somewhere it happened that communism overshadowed socialism. These economic systems are usually fluid unless it creates an elite rich class that refuses to give up power and control like feudalism and capitalism.

[Silent3]

11. The important thing is that a strong social safety net, progressive taxation, and regulation...

...of businesses to protect consumers and the environment has never, ever been a slippery slope into totalitarianism or authoritarianism, no matter how much the real fascist authoritarians in our country howl about the dangers of so-called socialism.

[peppertree]

12. No - but sure enough, neo-feudal capitalism has (and repeatedly)

As Andy Rooney might say: why is that?

[Gaugamela]

13. According to Richard Wolff and others, socialism is a doubling down on democracy.

In other words, socialism seeks to democratize the workplace by making the workers the owners of the enterprise. As it is, the typical corporate enterprise is a top-down, feudalistic hierarchy. Wolff's idea is that the workers would not pay themselves subsistent wages, send their jobs oversees, or pollute their hometown.

Perhaps more traditionally, in socialism the enterprise would be owned not directly by the workers employed by that enterprise, but by a democratically elected state. In this case the people own all enterprise ("the means of production" in Marxist terminology) indirectly, and control production decisions through their elected representatives.

Here is one definition of the difference between socialism and communism:

Both socialism and communism place great value on creating a more equal society and removal of class privilege. The main difference is that socialism is compatible with democracy and liberty, whereas Communism involves creating an ‘equal society’ through an authoritarian state, which denies basic liberties.

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/socialism-vs-communism/

It's disputable that socialism in either sense has ever been tried, although there are certainly many worker owned companies, with Spain's Mondragon Corporation being an often cited example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation), but there many in the US. Whenever any country tries to go independently socialist or communist they are typically sabotaged or destroyed by US economic sanctions or warfare (ie., Cuba, South Vietnam, Nicaragua, Greece, Chile, etc.).

My personal feeling is that democratic societies will always be vulnerable to attack from a kind of corrupt, parasitic and authoritarian mindset, and that the more democratic and open the society, the easier it will be for these forces to debauch. We are of course witnessing this kind of debauchery from the right in the US right now. Thus, I suspect that true "Socialism" cannot exist. For every Salvador Allende there lurks an Augusto Pinochet in the wings.

[ProfessorGAC]

15. I'm Going With No

I can't think of a country that actually started out with a truly socialist system.
The USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela and others started as statist dictatorships. The nationalization of industries with the ownership held by the state and not distributed as parts to all the citizens, policies dictated by one person or a small cadre, a classiest caste system starting with that cadre (Trotsky was driven around in a Rolls Royce), conscripted military, etc.
So, IMO, there was never a true socialist state in the first place, therefore no way to morph into a communist system.
Now, for the real problem:
Socialism is an economic construct. Communism is a political construct.
They really can't morph from one into another.
A democratic socialism could move toward communist socialism, & vice versa.
But, socialism doesn't turn into communism.
Just as capitalism doesn't turn into democracy. In fact there are many historical examples of capitalist democracies becoming dictatorships. (Pre-Castro Cuba, the Philippines, 1930s Germany, 1920s Italy)
And, there have been, and still are, capitalist monarchies.
One could make the case that a socialist economy is a logical precursor to a communist state, but it's not an inevitability.

[Zeitghost]

16. Communisim

Is a totalitarian political system that utilizes a socialist economic system.

[Stuart G]

20. NO !!!!...stupid is indeed ..."STUPID"

[RFCalifornia]

21. Worse: socialism has never turned into socialism

With the exception of a few times (Paris Commune, Free Ukraine, First Weeks of the Russian Revolution, CNT-FAI led Barcelona, FLZN)

[jmowreader]

22. In reality, socialism and communism are the same thing

There are three major economic systems, and none of them are “pure.”

Capitalism is where all the means of production are in private hands.

Socialism is where all the means of production are owned by the people.

Communism is where all the means of production are owned by the government.

Since communist countries generally call their governments “the people,” socialism and communism are the same thing.

The most successful “communist” country is China, where the economy is largely capitalist and the government is a dictatorship.

Even in the most communist countries like East Germany and the Soviet Union, there was a limited amount of free enterprise. And in the US, the government owns some productive enterprises, like Unicor (federal prison industry), Skilcraft (the National Association for the Blind’s factories; these products are sold on Amazon), most of the military’s small arms ammunition production, and the Watervliet Arsenal that is the free world’s only source of cannon barrels.

[hunter]

24. As the foundation of any fair and just government all the "isms" and religions are liquid bullshit.

The only exception that immediately comes to mind is humanism, and I'm not entirely certain about that.

[Klaralven]

25. In Russia, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party eventually evolved into the Bolsheviks.

Prior to the Revolution of 1917, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party included various factions, among which the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Bolsheviks were the three largest factions.

During and after the Revolution, the Bolsheviks became dominant under Lenin.

Between the February Revolution and the October Revolution the Provisional Government, was led by Alexander Kerensky, a young, popular lawyer and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.