Real socialism, better known asactually existing socialism,[1] alsodeveloped socialism, was an ideological catchphrase popularized during theBrezhnev era in theEastern Bloc countries and theSoviet Union.[2]
The term referred to theSoviet-type economic planning implemented by theEastern Bloc at that particular time.[2] From the 1960s onward,Communist states such asPoland,East Germany,Hungary,Czechoslovakia, andYugoslavia began to argue that their policies represented what was realistically feasible given their level of productivity.
The concept of real socialism alluded to a highly developed socialist system in the future. The actual party claims of nomenclatory socialism began to acquire not only negative, but also sarcastic meanings. In later years and especially after thedissolution of the Soviet Union, the term began to be remembered as only one thing, i.e. as a reference forSoviet-style socialism.[note 1]
AfterWorld War II, the terms "real socialism" or "really existing socialism" gradually became the predominating euphemisms used as self-description of theEastern Bloc states' political and economical systems and their society models.[3]De jure often referred to as "people's republics", these states were ruled by acommunist party, all of which were ruled autocratically and had adapted a form ofplanned economy and propagated socialism and/orcommunism as their ideology.[3] The term "real (-ly existing) socialism" was introduced to explain the obvious gap between the propagated ideological framework and the political and economical reality faced by these states' societies.[3][4][5] As US Communist Party activistIrwin Silber put it in 1994,
The term 'actually existing socialism’ is not (despite the quotation marks) a sarcasm; in fact, while obviously containing an implicit irony, the phrase itself was coined by Soviet Marxist-Leninists and was widely used by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its supporters in polemics with those who postulated a model of socialism significantly different from the system developed in the Soviet Union. Its point was that various alternatives to the Soviet-derived model existed only in the minds of their advocates, while 'actual socialism' existed in the real world.[6]
The term was also taken up by somedissidents, such asRudolf Bahro, who used it in a more critical way.[7][8]
Socialism as it actually exists, irrespective of its many achievements, is characterized by: the persistence of wage-labour, commodity production and money; the rationalization of the traditional division of labour; a cultivation of social inequalities that extends far beyond the range of money incomes; official corporations for the ordering and tutelage of the population; liquidation of the freedoms conquered by the masses in the bourgeois era, instead of the preservation and realization of these freedoms (only consider the all-embracing censorship, and the pronounced formality and factual unreality of so-called socialist democracy). It is also characterized by: a staff of functionaries, a standing army and police, which are all responsible only to those above them; the duplication of the unwieldy state machine into a state and a party apparatus; its isolation within national frontiers.
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