Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an

economic An economy is an area of the Production (economics), production, Distribution (economics), distribution and trade, as well as Consumption (economics), consumption of Goods (economics), goods and Service (economics), services. In general, it is ...

and

political system In political science, a political system means the form of Political organisation, political organization that can be observed, recognised or otherwise declared by a society or state (polity), state. It defines the process for making official gov ...

supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political pluralism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as "socialist" and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics,

freedom of assembly Freedom of assembly, sometimes used interchangeably with the freedom of association, is the individual right or ability of individuals to peaceably assemble and collectively express, promote, pursue, and defend their ideas. The right to free ...

, ''

habeas corpus ''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a legal procedure invoking the jurisdiction of a court to review the unlawful detention or imprisonment of an individual, and request the individual's custodian (usually a prison official) to ...

,'' and

freedom of expression Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The rights, right to freedom of expression has been r ...

, either due to fear of counter-revolution or as a means to

socialist Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...

ends. Journalists and scholars have characterised several countries, most notably the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

Cuba Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...

, and their allies, as authoritarian socialist states. Contrasted to democratic, anti-statist, and libertarian forms of socialism, authoritarian socialism encompasses some forms of African,

Arab Arabs (, , ; , , ) are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in West Asia and North Africa. A significant Arab diaspora is present in various parts of the world. Arabs have been in the Fertile Crescent for thousands of years ...

and

Latin American Latin Americans (; ) are the citizenship, citizens of Latin American countries (or people with cultural, ancestral or national origins in Latin America). Latin American countries and their Latin American diaspora, diasporas are Metroethnicity, ...

socialism. Although considered an

authoritarian Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political ''status quo'', and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and ...

or illiberal form of state socialism, often referred to and conflated as ''socialism'' by critics and argued as a form of

state capitalism State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, ...

by left-wing critics, those states were ideologically Marxist–Leninist and declared themselves to be workers' and peasants' or people's democracies. Academics, political commentators and other scholars tend to distinguish between authoritarian socialist and

democratic socialist Democratic socialism is a left-wing economic and political philosophy that supports political democracy and some form of a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-mana ...

states, with the first represented in the Soviet Bloc and the latter represented by Western Bloc countries which have been democratically governed by socialist parties - such as Britain, France, Sweden and Western social-democracies in general, among others. Those who support authoritative socialist regimes are pejoratively known as tankies. While originating with the

utopian socialism Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often de ...

advocated by Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) and identified by

Hal Draper Hal Draper (born Harold Dubinsky; September 19, 1914 – January 26, 1990) was an American socialist activist and author who played a significant role in the Berkeley, California, Free Speech Movement. He is known for his extensive scholarship on ...

(1914–1990) as a "socialism from above", authoritarian socialism has been overwhelmingly associated with the Soviet model and contrasted or compared to authoritarian capitalism. Authoritarian socialism has been criticised by the left and right both theoretically and for its practice.

Political roots

Socialism from above

Authoritarian socialism is derived from the concept of socialism from above. Hal Draper defined socialism from above as the philosophy which employs an elite

administration Administration may refer to: Management of organizations * Management, the act of directing people towards accomplishing a goal: the process of dealing with or controlling things or people. ** Administrative assistant, traditionally known as a se ...

to run the

socialist state A socialist state, socialist republic, or socialist country is a sovereign state constitutionally dedicated to the establishment of socialism. This article is about states that refer to themselves as socialist states, and not specifically ...

. The other side of socialism is a more democratic socialism from below. The idea of socialism from above is much more frequently discussed in elite circles than socialism from below—even if that is the Marxist ideal—because it is more practical. Draper viewed socialism from below as being the purer, more

Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...

version of socialism. According to Draper,

Karl Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...

and

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. and further identifies elitism as being one of the six major varieties of socialism from above, among them "Philanthropism", "Elitism", "Pannism", "Communism", "Permeationism" and "Socialism-from-Outside". According to Arthur Lipow, Marx and Engels were "the founders of modern revolutionary democratic socialism", described as a form of "socialism from below" that is "based on a mass working-class movement, fighting from below for the extension of democracy and human freedom". This type of socialism is contrasted to that of the "authoritarian, antidemocratic creed" and "the various totalitarian collectivist ideologies which claim the title of socialism" as well as "the many varieties of 'socialism from above' which have led in the twentieth century to movements and state forms in which a despotic ' new class' rules over a statified economy in the name of socialism", a division that "runs through the history of the socialist movement". Lipow identifies Bellamyism and Stalinism as two prominent authoritarian socialist currents within the history of the socialist movement. The authoritarian– libertarian struggles and disputes within the socialist movement go back to the

First International The International Workingmen's Association (IWA; 1864–1876), often called the First International, was a political international which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing socialist, social democratic, communist, and anarchist ...

and the expulsion in 1872 of the anarchists, who went on to lead the Anti-authoritarian International and then founded their own libertarian international, the Anarchist St. Imier International. In 1888, the individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who proclaimed himself to be an anarchistic socialist and libertarian socialist in opposition to the authoritarian state socialism and the compulsory communism, included the full text of a "Socialistic Letter" by Ernest Lesigne in his essay on "State Socialism and Anarchism". According to Lesigne, there are two types of socialism: "One is dictatorial, the other libertarian". Tucker's two socialisms were the authoritarian state socialism which he associated to the Marxist school and the libertarian anarchist socialism, or simply anarchism, that he advocated. Tucker noted that the fact that the authoritarian "State Socialism has overshadowed other forms of Socialism gives it no right to a monopoly of the Socialistic idea". According to Tucker, what those two schools of socialism had in common was the

labor theory of value The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the exchange value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of " socially necessary labor" required to produce it. The contrasting system is typically known as ...

and the ends, by which anarchism pursued different means. According to George Woodcock, the

Second International The Second International, also called the Socialist International, was a political international of Labour movement, socialist and labour parties and Trade union, trade unions which existed from 1889 to 1916. It included representatives from mo ...

turned "into a battleground over the issue of libertarian versus authoritarian socialism. Not only did they effectively present themselves as champions of minority rights; they also provoked the German Marxists into demonstrating a dictatorial intolerance which was a factor in preventing the British labour movement from following the Marxist direction indicated by such leaders as H. M. Hyndman". According to anarchists such as the authors of ''An Anarchist FAQ'', forms of socialism from above such as ''authoritarian socialism'' or ''state socialism'' are the real oxymorons and the ''libertarian'' socialism from below represents true socialism. For anarchists and other anti-authoritarian socialists, socialism "can only mean a classless and anti-authoritarian (i.e., libertarian) society in which people manage their own affairs, either as individuals or as part of a group (depending on the situation). In other words, it implies self-management in all aspects of life", including at the workplace. Historian Herbert L. Osgood described anarchism as "the extreme antithesis" of authoritarian communism and state socialism. Socialists in general and socialist writers, including Dimitri Volkogonov, acknowledged that the actions of authoritarian socialist leaders have damaged "the enormous appeal of socialism generated by the October Revolution". While some right-wing authors have described conservative socialism,

fascism Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hie ...

and Prussian socialism, among other forms of paternalistic conservatism and

right-wing politics Right-wing politics is the range of Ideology#Political ideologies, political ideologies that view certain social orders and Social stratification, hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position b ...

, as authoritarian socialism, scholars have described their nature as decidedly

capitalist Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by ...

and

conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civiliza ...

rather than socialist.

Utopian socialism

The economy of the 3rd century BCE Mauryan Empire of India was described as "a socialized monarchy" and "a sort of state socialism". Elements of authoritarian socialist thought were discerned in the politics of ancient Greek philosophers such as

Aristotle Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...

and

Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...

. The first advocates of modern socialism favoured social levelling in order to create a

meritocratic Meritocracy (''merit'', from Latin , and ''-cracy'', from Ancient Greek 'strength, power') is the notion of a political system in which economic goods or political power are vested in individual people based on ability and talent, rather than ...

or technocratic society based on individual talent. Henri de Saint-Simon is regarded as the first individual to coin the term ''

socialism Socialism is an economic ideology, economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse Economic system, economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes ...

''. Saint-Simon was fascinated by the enormous potential of science and technology and advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of

capitalism Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit. This socioeconomic system has developed historically through several stages and is defined by ...

and would be based on equal opportunities. He advocated the creation of a society in which each person was ranked according to his or her capacities and rewarded according to his or her work. The key focus of Saint-Simon's socialism was on administrative efficiency and industrialism and a belief that science was the key to progress. This was accompanied by a desire to implement a rationally organised economy based on planning and geared towards large-scale scientific progress and material progress. The first major fictional work that proposed an authoritarian socialist state was Edward Bellamy's novel '' Looking Backward'', which depicted a bureaucratic socialist utopia. Bellamy distanced himself from radical socialist values, and in many ways, his ideal society still imitated many of the systems in the late 19th century United States. However, his book inspired a mass political movement called nationalism within the United States in the late 1800s. Those Nationalist Clubs, so named because of their desire to nationalize industry, were strong supporters of the populists, who wanted the nationalisation of the railroad and telegraph systems. Despite their propaganda and involvement in politics, the nationalist movement began to decline in 1893 due to the financial difficulties of its main publications and Bellamy's failing health, which essentially disappeared by the turn of the century. In the society depicted in the novel, private property has been abolished in favor of state ownership, social classes were eliminated, and all minimal and relatively easy work was done voluntarily by all citizens between the ages of 21 and 45. Workers were rewarded and recognized via a ranking system based on the army. The government is the most powerful and respected institution, necessary for providing and maintaining this

utopia A utopia ( ) typically describes an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book ''Utopia (book), Utopia'', which describes a fictiona ...

. Arthur Lipow identifies the bureaucratic ruling of this ideal society as a quasi-military organisation of both economic and social relations. Bellamy elevated the modern military as a catalyst for national interest. The biggest critique of Bellamy's society is that it is based on the idea of socialism from above. The regime is imposed on the people by an expert elite, and there is no democratic control or individual liberty. Lipow argues that this inherently leads to

authoritarianism Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political ''status quo'', and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and ...

, writing: "If the workers and the vast majority were a brutish mass, there could be no question of forming a political movement out of them nor of giving them the task of creating a socialist society. The new institutions would not be created and shaped from below but would, of necessity, correspond to the plan laid down in advance by the utopian planner". In his preface to

Peter Kropotkin Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist and geographer known as a proponent of anarchist communism. Born into an aristocratic land-owning family, Kropotkin attended the Page Corps and later s ...

's book '' The Conquest of Bread'', Kent Bromley considered the ideas of utopian socialists such as the French François-Noël Babeuf and the Italian Philippe Buonarroti to be representative of authoritarian socialism as opposed to the French socialist Charles Fourier, described as the founder of the libertarian socialism.

Austrian and Chicago schools of economics

While distinguishing between "voluntary and coercive strands", the Austrian and Chicagoan understanding and characterisation of socialism is one based on authoritarianism and

statism In political science, statism or etatism (from French, ''état'' 'state') is the doctrine that the political authority of the state is legitimate to some degree. This may include economic and social policy, especially in regard to taxation ...

. One Austrian definition of ''socialism'' is based on the state socialist notion of "state ownership of capital goods". Another is that socialism "must be conceptualized as an institutional interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a social system based on the explicit recognition of private property and of nonaggressive, contractual exchanges between private property owners".

Friedrich Hayek Friedrich August von Hayek (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-born British academic and philosopher. He is known for his contributions to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobe ...

, an Austrian School economist, was one of the leading academic critics of collectivism in the 20th century. He recognized and was acutely critical of the trends of socialism from above in collectivism, including theories based on voluntary cooperation. Unlike Bellamy, who praised the idea of elites implementing policies, Hayek made the argument that socialism inherently leads to tyranny, claiming that " order to achieve their ends, the planners must create power – power over men wielded by other men – of a magnitude never before known. Democracy is an obstacle to this suppression of freedom which the centralized direction of economic activity requires. Hence arises the clash between planning and democracy". Hayek argued that both fascism and socialism are based in central economic planning and value the state over the individual. According to Hayek, it is in this way that it becomes possible for

totalitarian Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls the public sph ...

leaders to rise to power as happened in the years following World War I. Austrian School economists such as Hayek and his mentor Ludwig von Mises also used the word ''socialism'' as a synonym for authoritarian socialism, central planning and state socialism, falsely linking it to fascism, with Hayek writing that " though our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'". Chicago School economists such as

Milton Friedman Milton Friedman (; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and ...

also equated socialism with centralized economic planning as well as authoritarian socialist states and command or state-directed economies, referring to capitalism as the free market. However, fascism and its variants such as

Falangism Falangism () was the political ideology of three political parties in Spain that were known as the Falange, namely first the Falange Española, the Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FE de las JONS), and afterwa ...

and

Nazism Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power, it was fre ...

, among other fascist-inspired military regimes, are considered by scholars to be a far-right, anti-socialist ideologies that largely adopted corporatist, liberal market economic policies, with

economic planning Economic planning is a resource allocation mechanism based on a computational procedure for solving a constrained maximization problem with an iterative process for obtaining its solution. Planning is a mechanism for the allocation of resources ...

relegated to war efforts. Mises criticised left-leaning, social liberal policies such as progressive taxation as socialism, getting up during a Mont Pelerin Society meeting and referring to those "expressing the view that there could be a justification" for them as "a bunch of socialists". On the other hand, Hayek argued that the state can play a role in the economy, specifically in creating a

social safety net A social safety net (SSN) consists of non-contributory assistance existing to improve lives of vulnerable families and individuals experiencing poverty and destitution. Examples of SSNs are previously-contributory social pensions, in-kind and foo ...

, criticising the right and

conservatism Conservatism is a Philosophy of culture, cultural, Social philosophy, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, Convention (norm), customs, and Value (ethics and social science ...

, even inspiring some towards a form of

market socialism Market socialism is a type of economic system involving social ownership of the means of production within the framework of a market economy. Various models for such a system exist, usually involving cooperative enterprises and sometimes a mix ...

or Hayekian socialism. Hayek advocated "some provision for those threatened by the extremes of indigence or starvation due to circumstances beyond their control". Hayek argued that the "necessity of some such arrangement in an industrial society is unquestioned", be it "only in the interest of those who require protection against acts of desperation on the part of the needy", with some also noting that "he advocated mandatory universal health care and unemployment insurance, enforced, if not directly provided, by the state" and that "Hayek was adamant about this". Mises also equated

central banking Central is an adjective usually referring to being in the center of some place or (mathematical) object. Central may also refer to: Directions and generalised locations * Central Africa, a region in the centre of Africa continent, also known as ...

with socialism and central planning. According to Mises, central banks enable the

commercial bank A commercial bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and gives loans for the purposes of consumption and investment to make a profit. It can also refer to a bank or a division of a larger bank that deals with whol ...

s to fund loans at artificially low interest rates, thereby inducing an unsustainable expansion of bank credit and impeding any subsequent contraction. However, Hayek disagreed and stated that the need for central banking control was inescapable. Similarly, Friedman concluded that the government does have a role in the monetary system and believed that the

Federal Reserve System The Federal Reserve System (often shortened to the Federal Reserve, or simply the Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, after a series of ...

should ultimately be replaced with a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

. While critical of social welfare, especially

Social Security Welfare spending is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specifically to social insurance ...

, arguing that it had created welfare dependency, Friedman was supportive of the state provision of some

public goods In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)Oakland, W. H. (1987). Theory of public goods. In Handbook of public economics (Vol. 2, pp. 485–535). Elsevier. is a goods, commodity, product or service that ...

that private businesses are not considered as being able to provide, advocated a

negative income tax In economics, a negative income tax (NIT) is a system which reverses the direction in which tax is paid for incomes below a certain level; in other words, earners above that level pay money to the state while earners below it receive money. NIT ...

in place of most welfare and his views were grounded in a belief that while "market forces ..accomplish wonderful things", they "cannot ensure a distribution of income that enables all citizens to meet basic economic needs. Some Austrian School economists follow Mises in arguing that policies supported by Hayek and Friedman constituted a form of socialism.Block, Walter (15 January 2013). "Was Milton Friedman A Socialist? Yes". ''MEST Journal''. 1 (1): 11–26. . The Austrian and Marxian schools of economics agree in their criticism of the

mixed economy A mixed economy is an economic system that includes both elements associated with capitalism, such as private businesses, and with socialism, such as nationalized government services. More specifically, a mixed economy may be variously de ...

, but they reach different conclusions regarding authoritarian socialist states. In '' Human Action'', Mises argued that there can be no mixture of capitalism and socialism—either market logic or economic planning must dominate an economy. Mises elaborated on this point by contending that even if a market economy contained numerous state-run or nationalized enterprises, this would not make the economy mixed because such organizations do not alter the market economy's fundamental characteristics. These publicly owned enterprises would still be subject to market sovereignty as they would have to acquire

capital good Capital and its variations may refer to: Common uses * Capital city, a municipality of primary status ** Capital region, a metropolitan region containing the capital ** List of national capitals * Capital letter, an upper-case letter Econ ...

s through markets, strive to maximize profits, or at the least try to minimize costs and utilize monetary accounting for economic calculation. Similarly, classical and orthodox Marxist theorists dispute the viability of a mixed economy as a middle ground between socialism and capitalism. Irrespective of enterprise ownership, either the capitalist law of value and accumulation of capital drive the economy or conscious planning and non-monetary forms of valuation such as calculation in kind ultimately drive the economy. From the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

onward, extant mixed economies in the Western world are still functionally capitalist because they operate on the basis of

capital accumulation Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form ...

. On this basis, some Marxists and non-Marxists alike, including academics, economists, and intellectuals, argue that the Soviet Union ''et al.'' were state capitalist countries and that rather than being socialist planned economies, they represented an administrative-command system. Already in 1985, John Howard argued that the common description of the Soviet-type economic planning as

planned economy A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, ...

was misleading because while central planning did play an important role, the Soviet economy was ''de facto'' characterized by the priority of highly centralized management over planning. Therefore, the correct term would be that of an economy that is ''centrally managed'' rather than ''centrally planned''. This has been attributed to both the economy of the Soviet Union and that of its allies which closely followed the Soviet model. On the other hand, while describing wealthy mixed economies as still "capitalist", Austrian School economists routinely describe mixed-economy policies as "socialism". Similarly, they describe fascist regimes such as

Fascist Italy Fascist Italy () is a term which is used in historiography to describe the Kingdom of Italy between 1922 and 1943, when Benito Mussolini and the National Fascist Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship. Th ...

and

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany, officially known as the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German Reich, German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a Totalit ...

as "socialist", although scholars describe them as being capitalist regimes.; ; ;

Response

The Austrian-Chicagoan concept of authoritarian socialism has been criticized. In particular, it has been criticised for conflating

social democracy Social democracy is a Social philosophy, social, Economic ideology, economic, and political philosophy within socialism that supports Democracy, political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist, and democratic approach toward achi ...

and other forms of reformist and democratic socialism with authoritarian and state socialism. In the United Kingdom, British

Conservative Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civiliza ...

politicians such as

Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013), was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of th ...

"loosely labelled socialism" and conflated what "others would call social democracy, corporatism, Keynesianism or the mixed economy" with authoritarian socialism, defined as " vernment support for inefficient industries, punitive taxation, regulation of the labour market, price controls – everything that interfered with the functioning of the free economy". This is particularly relevant in the United States, where the term ''socialization'' has been mistakenly used to refer to any state or government-operated industry or service (the proper term for such being either ''

municipalization Municipalization is the transfer of private entities, assets, service providers, or corporations to public ownership by a municipality, including (but not limited to) a city, county, or public utility district ownership. The transfer may be from p ...

'' or ''

nationalization Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization contrasts with p ...

''). It has also been incorrectly used to mean any tax-funded programs, whether privately run or government-run. Similarly, ''socialism'' has become a pejorative used in the United States by conservatives and libertarians to taint liberal and progressive policies, proposals and public figures. People such as Hayek, Mises, and Friedman have also been criticised for hypocrisy due to claiming to oppose authoritarian socialism yet supporting liberal

dictatorship A dictatorship is an autocratic form of government which is characterized by a leader, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no Limited government, limitations. Politics in a dictatorship are controlled by a dictator, ...

s such as that of the military dictatorship of Chile under

Augusto Pinochet Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (25 November 1915 – 10 December 2006) was a Chilean military officer and politician who was the dictator of Military dictatorship of Chile, Chile from 1973 to 1990. From 1973 to 1981, he was the leader ...

. Mises comments about fascism have been criticized, although others have defended him. Similarly, Hayek's involvement in dictatorships has been criticized. Hayek has stated: "As long term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. ..Personally I prefer a liberal dictatorship to democratic government devoid of liberalism. My personal impression – and this is valid for South America – is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government". Hayek defended himself arguing that he had "not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under alvadorAllende", the democratic socialist Chilean President democratically elected in 1970 as the first self-professed Marxist to be elected president in a country with

liberal democracy Liberal democracy, also called Western-style democracy, or substantive democracy, is a form of government that combines the organization of a democracy with ideas of liberalism, liberal political philosophy. Common elements within a liberal dem ...

and ousted in a CIA-backed military coup. For Hayek, the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism has much importance and he was at pains to emphasise his opposition to totalitarianism, noting that the concept of transitional dictatorship which he defended was characterised by authoritarianism, not totalitarianism. When he visited Venezuela in May 1981, Hayek was asked to comment on the prevalence of totalitarian regimes in Latin America. In reply, Hayek warned against confusing "totalitarianism with authoritarianism" and said he was unaware of "any totalitarian governments in Latin America. The only one was Chile under Allende". For Hayek, ''totalitarian'' signifies something very specific, namely the intention to "organize the whole of society" to attain a "definite social goal," which is stark in contrast to "liberalism and individualism". Friedman's involvement in the Chilean military dictatorship has also been criticized as he served as an economic advisor. Under Pinochet, Chile followed the economic policies of Friedman and his Chicago Boys. While Friedman did not criticize Pinochet's dictatorship at the time, nor the assassinations, illegal imprisonments, torture, or other atrocities that were well known by then, he defended his unofficial adviser position, arguing: "I do not consider it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean Government to help end a medical plague". Although Friedman criticized Chile's political system, he argued that "free markets would undermine inochet'spolitical centralization and political control", that criticism over his role in Chile missed his main contention that freer markets resulted in freer people and that Chile's unfree economy had caused the military government. Friedman advocated for free markets, which undermined "political centralization and political control". However, some economists have argued that the experience of Chile in this period indicated a failure of Friedman's policies, claiming that there was little net economic growth from 1975 to 1982 (during the so-called "pure Monetarist experiment"). After the crisis of 1982, the state controlled more of the economy than it had under the previous socialist regime, and sustained economic growth only came after the later reforms that privatized the economy while social indicators remained poor. Pinochet's dictatorship made the unpopular economic reorientation possible by repressing opposition. Rather than a triumph of the free market, it has been described as "combining neo-liberal sutures and interventionist cures". By the time of sustained growth, the Chilean government had "cooled its neo-liberal ideological fever" and "controlled its exposure to world financial markets and maintained its efficient copper company in public hands". Another criticism is that proponents of the theory overstate the strength of their case by describing socialism as impossible rather than inefficient. In explaining why he is not an Austrian School economist, Bryan Caplan argues that while the

economic calculation problem The economic calculation problem (ECP) is a criticism of using central economic planning as a substitute for Market (economics), market-based allocation of the factors of production. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in his 1920 article ...

is a problem for socialism, he denies that Mises has shown it to be fatal or that it is this particular problem that led to the collapse of authoritarian socialist states. Kristen Ghodsee, ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, posits that the triumphalist attitudes of Western powers at the end of the Cold War in particular the fixation with linking all socialist political ideals with the excesses of authoritarian socialism such as Stalinism had marginalized the left's response to the fusing of democracy with neoliberal ideology which helped undermine the former. This allowed the anger and resentment that came with the ravages of neoliberalism (i.e. economic misery, hopelessness, unemployment and rising inequality throughout the former Eastern Bloc and much of the West) to be channeled into right-wing nationalist movements in the decades that followed. David L. Hoffmann, Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University, raises the issue of whether authoritarian socialist practices of state violence derived from socialist ideology. Placing authoritarian socialist ideologies such as Stalinism in an international context, he argues that many forms of state interventionism used by the Stalinist government, including social cataloging, surveillance, and concentration camps, predated the Soviet regime and originated outside of Russia. He further argues that technologies of social intervention developed in conjunction with the work of 19th-century European reformers and were greatly expanded during World War I, when state actors in all the combatant countries dramatically increased efforts to mobilize and control their populations. As the Soviet state was born at this moment of total war, it institutionalized practices of state intervention as permanent features of governance. Writing two ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' articles in 2002 and 2006, British journalist Seumas Milne wrote that the impact of the post-Cold War narrative that Stalin and Hitler were twin evils and therefore communism is as monstrous as Nazism "has been to relativize the unique crimes of Nazism, bury those of colonialism and feed the idea that any attempt at radical social change will always lead to suffering, killing and failure".

Characteristics

Theory and rationale

Authoritarian socialism is a political-economic system that can be generally described as socialist, but one that rejects the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, ''habeas corpus'' and freedom of expression. Other features that are common to modern authoritarian socialist states starting in the 20th century include an emphasis on

heavy industry Heavy industry is an industry that involves one or more characteristics such as large and heavy products; large and heavy equipment and facilities (such as heavy equipment, large machine tools, huge buildings and large-scale infrastructure); o ...

for development, a single-party system to propel the goals of the

state State most commonly refers to: * State (polity), a centralized political organization that regulates law and society within a territory **Sovereign state, a sovereign polity in international law, commonly referred to as a country **Nation state, a ...

forward, the extensive use of

propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded l ...

to do the same and more. Soviet advocates and socialists responded to this type of criticism by highlighting the ideological differences in the concept of

freedom Freedom is the power or right to speak, act, and change as one wants without hindrance or restraint. Freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of "giving oneself one's own laws". In one definition, something is "free" i ...

and

liberty Liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views. The concept of liberty can vary depending on perspective and context. In the Constitutional ...

. It was noted that "Marxist–Leninist norms disparaged ''

laissez-faire ''Laissez-faire'' ( , from , ) is a type of economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies or regulations). As a system of thought, ''laissez-faire'' ...

individualism Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, and social outlook that emphasizes the intrinsic worth of the individual. Individualists promote realizing one's goals and desires, valuing independence and self-reliance, and a ...

(as when housing is determined by one's ability to pay)" and condemned "wide variations in personal wealth as the West has not" whilst emphasizing equality, by which they meant "free education and medical care, little disparity in housing or salaries, and so forth". When asked to comment on the claim that former citizens of socialist states now enjoy increased freedoms, Heinz Kessler, former East German Minister of National Defence, replied: "Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security".

Formation of industry

As authoritarian powers enforce socialist economics, the process often goes hand in hand with supporting the growth of heavy industry as a means of reaching

industrialization Industrialisation (British English, UK) American and British English spelling differences, or industrialization (American English, US) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an i ...

(as can be seen with

Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...

's control of the Soviet Union). Stalin's goals brought about a rapid industrialization of the Soviet economy that increased the urban population up by another 30 million people by 1930 and the production of automobiles to 200,000 per year by 1940. Outside of the Soviet Union, two rising global participants of the early 20th century were the young states of

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

and

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

. Although many of the policies put in place by German fascist

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...

and Italian fascist

Benito Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who, upon assuming office as Prime Minister of Italy, Prime Minister, became the dictator of Fascist Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 un ...

, who also formed these

cults of personality A cult of personality, or a cult of the leader,Cas Mudde, Mudde, Cas and Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira (2017) ''Populism: A Very Short Introduction''. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 63. is the result of an effort which is made to create ...

, were contradictory and poorly understood, there were a few centrally planned work projects under their states. The Reichsautobahn in Nazi Germany was an example of this. The construction of the

Autobahn The (; German , ) is the federal controlled-access highway system in Germany. The official term is (abbreviated ''BAB''), which translates as 'federal motorway'. The literal meaning of the word is 'Federal Auto(mobile) Track'. Much of t ...

and industries surrounding highway construction elevated the percentage of employed Germans throughout the construction. In Fascist Italy, projects such as the Battle for Grain or the Battle for Land are public work projects that socialism would traditionally support. However, the

Axis powers The Axis powers, originally called the Rome–Berlin Axis and also Rome–Berlin–Tokyo Axis, was the military coalition which initiated World War II and fought against the Allies of World War II, Allies. Its principal members were Nazi Ge ...

, among other fascist regimes, favoured a corporatist mixed economy instead of socialism and were all radical anti-communists, anti-Marxists and anti-socialists. Rather, they have been described as an example of authoritarian and totalitarian capitalism, with Mussolini choosing to link private businesses and the state to organize economic policies. Common among authoritarian socialist regimes was

autarky Autarky is the characteristic of self-sufficiency, usually applied to societies, communities, states, and their economic systems. Autarky as an ideology or economic approach has been attempted by a range of political ideologies and movement ...

. While also adopted by other authoritarian regimes, it was pursued for vastly different reasons. Authoritarian socialist states pursued autarky to reach a post-scarcity economy to guarantee a communist society whereas fascist regimes pursued it for

nationalist Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation,Anthony D. Smith, Smith, A ...

and

imperialist Imperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power ( diplomatic power and cultural imperialism). Imperialism fo ...

goals such as for Nazi Germany's living space, with

fascist Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural soci ...

and far-right movements claiming to strive for autarky in platforms or in propaganda, but in practice they crushed existing movements towards self-sufficiency. They established extensive capital connections in efforts to ready for expansionist war and genocide while allying with traditional

business Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for ...

and

commerce Commerce is the organized Complex system, system of activities, functions, procedures and institutions that directly or indirectly contribute to the smooth, unhindered large-scale exchange (distribution through Financial transaction, transactiona ...

elites. Authoritarian socialist states and fascist regimes also differed in that the latter shifted a focus on class conflict to a focus on conflict between

nations A nation is a type of social organization where a collective identity, a national identity, has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory, or societ ...

and races. A Marxist societal analysis puts forth that the process of industrialization in the 19th century placed the current metropoles in their current positions of power. In theory, industrialization should allow the

regime In politics, a regime (also spelled régime) is a system of government that determines access to public office, and the extent of power held by officials. The two broad categories of regimes are democratic and autocratic. A key similarity acros ...

of non-metropoles to raise the

standard of living Standard of living is the level of income, comforts and services available to an individual, community or society. A contributing factor to an individual's quality of life, standard of living is generally concerned with objective metrics outsid ...

and competitiveness of their

population Population is a set of humans or other organisms in a given region or area. Governments conduct a census to quantify the resident population size within a given jurisdiction. The term is also applied to non-human animals, microorganisms, and pl ...

s to be on economic par with these metropoles.Keefe, Jopshua R. (2009)
"Stalin and the Drive to Industrialize the Soviet Union"
''Inquires Journal''. 1 (1): 1. Retrieved 21 April 2020. However, aside from

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

and a number of former Eastern Bloc members, many

post-Soviet states The post-Soviet states, also referred to as the former Soviet Union or the former Soviet republics, are the independent sovereign states that emerged/re-emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Prior to their independence, they ...

and both former and current authoritarian socialist states are not categorized as industrialized countries.

Single-party system

Authoritarian socialist states often oppose the

multi-party system In political science, a multi-party system is a political system where more than two meaningfully-distinct political parties regularly run for office and win elections. Multi-party systems tend to be more common in countries using proportional ...

to instill power of the

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a State (polity), state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive (government), execu ...

into a

single party A one-party state, single-party state, one-party system or single-party system is a governance structure in which only a single political party controls the ruling system. In a one-party state, all opposition parties are either outlawed or en ...

that could be led by a single head of state. The rationale behind this being that elites have the time and resources to enforce socialist theory because in this socialist state the interests of the people are represented by the party or head of the party. Hal Draper referred to this as socialism from above.Draper, Hal (1966)
''The Two Souls of Socialism''
''New Politics''. 5 (1): 57–84. Retrieved 23 April 2020. According to Draper, socialism from above comes in six strains or forms that rationalize and require an elite group at the top of a socialist system. This differs from a Marxist perspective that would advocate for socialism from below, a more pure and democratically run form of socialism. Outside of Europe,

Eritrea Eritrea, officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa, with its capital and largest city being Asmara. It is bordered by Ethiopia in the Eritrea–Ethiopia border, south, Sudan in the west, and Dj ...

Mozambique Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique, is a country located in Southeast Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west, and Eswatini and South Afr ...

and

Vietnam Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and depende ...

stand as examples of states that were socialist and ruled by a single-party at some point in the 20th century. In Eritrea, the ruling party emerging in 1970 was the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) and with control of the state the EPLF began work on socialist ideals such as broadening women's rights and expanding education. In Mozambique, the single-state rule of FRELIMO occurred while the state was still ideologically socialist right after Portuguese rule was ending in 1975. In Vietnam, the Communist Party of Vietnam considers itself to be in transition to socialism and also the "vanguard of the working people and the whole nation".

Propaganda

Departments of propaganda are not at all rare in these regimes. The extensive use of propaganda is spills into art, cinema,

poster A poster is a large sheet that is placed either on a public space to promote something or on a wall as decoration. Typically, posters include both typography, textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or w ...

newspaper A newspaper is a Periodical literature, periodical publication containing written News, information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as poli ...

book A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, ...

s. In the Soviet Union, a byproduct of strict

censorship Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governmen ...

was the blossoming of Russian science fiction and fantasy as well as socialist realism. In Latin America,

Che Guevara Ernesto "Che" Guevara (14th May 1928 – 9 October 1967) was an Argentines, Argentine Communist revolution, Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, Guerrilla warfare, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and Military theory, military theorist. A majo ...

represented and acted on the idea that socialism was an international struggle by operating Radio Rebelde and having his station transmitted from Cuba to as far north as Washington D.C.

Economics

There are several elemental characteristics of the authoritarian socialist economic system that distinguish it from the capitalist

market economy A market economy is an economic system in which the decisions regarding investment, production, and distribution to the consumers are guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand. The major characteristic of a mark ...

, namely the communist party has a concentration of power in representation of the working class and the party's decisions are so integrated into public life that its economic and non-economic decisions are part of their overall actions; state ownership of the means of production in which natural resources and capital belong to society; central economic planning, the main characteristic of an authoritarian-state socialist economy; the market is planned by a central government agency, generally a state planning commission; and socially equitable distribution of the national income in which goods and services are provided for free by the state that supplement private consumption. This economic model is greatly characterized by the government's central planning.Wilczynski, J. (1977). ''The Economics of Socialism: Principles Governing the Operation of the Centrally Planned Economies in the USSR and Eastern Europe Under the New System ''. London: Allen and Unwin. pp. 22–23; 33–34; 34–41. . Ideally, society would be the owner as in the social ownership of the means of production, but in practice the state is the owner of the means of production. If the state is the owner, the idea is that it would work for the benefit of the working class and society as a whole. In practice, society is the owner only in theory and the political institutions governing society are completely set up by the state. While Marxist–Leninists maintain that workers in the Soviet Union and other socialist states had genuine control over the means of production through institutions such as trade unions, democratic and libertarian socialists argue that these states had only a limited number of socialist characteristics and in practice were state capitalists that followed the capitalist mode of production.Chomsky, Noam (1986)
"The Soviet Union Versus Socialism"
''Our Generation'' (Spring/Summer). Retrieved 29 January 2020.Howard, M. C.; King, J. E. (2001)
"'State Capitalism' in the Soviet Union"
. '' History of Economics Review''. 34 (1): 110–126. . In '' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'', Friedrich Engels argued that

state ownership State ownership, also called public ownership or government ownership, is the ownership of an Industry (economics), industry, asset, property, or Business, enterprise by the national government of a country or State (polity), state, or a publi ...

does not do away with capitalism by itself, but rather it would be the final stage of capitalism, consisting of ownership and management of large-scale production and communication by the bourgeois state.Engels, Friedrich (1970) 880 '' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific''
"Historical Materialism"
''Marx/Engels Selected Works''. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 95–151. In '' Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism'' and ''Imperialism and World Economy'', both

Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...

and

Nikolai Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (; rus, Николай Иванович Бухарин, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ bʊˈxarʲɪn; – 15 March 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prominent Bolshevik ...

, respectively, had similarly "identified the growth of state capitalism as one of the main features of capitalism in its imperialist epoch". In '' The State and Revolution'', Lenin wrote that "the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called 'state socialism' and so on, is very common". Several economists and scholars have argued that authoritarian socialist states did not follow a planned economy, but were rather described as following an administrative-command system and called '' command economies'', a term that highlights the central role of hierarchical administration and public ownership of production in guiding the allocation of resources in these economic systems, where important allocation decisions are made by government authorities rather than by the workers themselves and are imposed by law. This goes against the Marxist understanding of conscious planning.

Central planning

In a

centrally planned economy A planned economy is a type of economic system where investment, production and the allocation of capital goods takes place according to economy-wide economic plans and production plans. A planned economy may use centralized, decentralized, ...

, there is a central planning authority usually named the State Planning Commission that is in charge of acting within the framework of social goals and the priorities designated by the party. The planning was done under the idea that leaving market indicators would allow for social advancement. The central planning authority is responsible for five specific tasks, namely determining the criteria for the economic calculations of the planning decisions; determining and quantifying targets to be achieved within the a specified period; "coordinating targets to ensure the plan is consistent and reliable; determining the methods to ensure the realization of the plan; and revising targets in accordance to changing economic calculations. The planning process involved the creation of one-year plans, five-year plans and long-term plans. The one-year plans contained schedules and details that addressed current production and market equilibrium issues. The five-year plans integrated the political, military and economic strategy that would be pursued in the next five years as well as changes in capacity and production rates. It was done by a team of around the fifty leading experts from all the departments, ministries, professional and scientific organizations. The long-term plans encompassed a global strategy development. This plan was about goals for the state and society, not about individual responsibilities. Structural changes were a main theme. Nevertheless, centrally planned economies provided a better quality of life than market economies at the same level of economic development in nearly all cases. Some economists have argued that the major reason for the economic shortcomings of authoritarian socialist states which adopted Soviet-type planning was due to their authoritarian and administrative, command nature rather than socialism itself or planning as a whole and that both economic planning and government direction of the economy through non-coercive means such as

dirigisme Dirigisme or dirigism () is an economic doctrine in which the state plays a strong directive (policies) role, contrary to a merely regulatory or non-interventionist role, over a market economy. As an economic doctrine, dirigisme is the opposite ...

have been practiced with success during the post-war consensus. It has been argued that authoritarian socialist states failed because they did not create rules and operational criteria for the efficient operation of

state enterprise A state-owned enterprise (SOE) is a business entity created or owned by a national or local government, either through an executive order or legislation. SOEs aim to generate profit for the government, prevent private sector monopolies, provide goo ...

s in their administrative-command allocation of

resources ''Resource'' refers to all the materials available in our environment which are Technology, technologically accessible, Economics, economically feasible and Culture, culturally Sustainability, sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and want ...

and

commodities In economics, a commodity is an economic good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them. Th ...

and the lack of

democracy Democracy (from , ''dēmos'' 'people' and ''kratos'' 'rule') is a form of government in which political power is vested in the people or the population of a state. Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitiv ...

in the political systems that the authoritarian socialist economies were combined with. A form of competitive socialism that rejects dictatorship and authoritarian allocation of resources in favour of

economic democracy Economic democracy (sometimes called a democratic economy) is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift ownership and decision-making power from corporate shareholders and corporate managers (such as a board of directors) to a larger ...

could work and prove superior to the capitalist market economy. Others have argued that a central deficiency of such economic planning was that it was not premised on final consumer demand, but that such a system would be increasingly feasible with advances in information technology.

Economy of the Soviet Union

The essence of Soviet economics is that the communist party is the sole authority of the national interest. The party makes all the decisions, but they should take into account the desires of the population and these desires were then to be weighted into the decision making. According to Article 11 of its 1977 constitution, the main goal of the Soviet Union was to "raise the material and cultural standards of the working people". Marxist thought and its interpretation by the Soviet Union dictated that private ownership was to be banned and the nationalization of all aspects of production a necessity, yet some things were not nationalized for the sake of economic efficiency or production targets. There was an emphasis on rapid industrialization, the development of heavy industry, relegation of consumer production as non-essential and collectivization of agriculture. Soviet-type economies also used a larger proportion of their resources on investment than do market economies. The issue with this was that current consumption was undercut because of the over-investment. All these actions supported the purposes of the state, not the people. During the 1940s–1970s, the economy of the Soviet Union grew at a rate that outpaced that of Western European nations, but by the 1980s the Soviet economy was in shambles. This has been attributed to the Era of Stagnation, a more tolerant central government and increasing military spending caused by the

nuclear arms race The nuclear arms race was an arms race competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. During this same period, in addition to the American and Soviet nuc ...

with the United States, especially under

Ronald Reagan Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician and actor who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. He was a member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party a ...

, whose administration pursued more aggressive relations with the Soviet Union instead of détente that was preferred in the 1970s. The end to the post-war consensus and

Keynesianism Keynesian economics ( ; sometimes Keynesianism, named after British economist John Maynard Keynes) are the various macroeconomics, macroeconomic theories and Economic model, models of how aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) strongl ...

in the 1970s and the rise of

neoliberalism Neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism, which became dominant in policy-making from the late 20th century onward. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is most often used pe ...

and economic globalization in the 1980s also caused problems as they forced the Soviet Union and other countries to adapt and reform themselves. Unlike China, the Soviet's failure to do so further contributed to its dissolution in December 1991. A main problem of the Soviet Union was that it pushed agriculture to the bottom of its priorities and that its central planning scheme inhibited technological innovation. Despite the attempts of the Soviet Union to guarantee employment to all of its labor force, it did not satisfy the human desires of its laborers because "people want land, not collectivization. Consumers want goods, not gigantic industrial enterprise. Workers want better wages and higher living standards, not citations and medals. ndan economy cannot be politically tailored to perfection".Wellisz, Stanislaw (1964). ''The Economies of the Soviet Bloc: A Study of Decision Making and Resource Allocation''. New York: McGraw. pp. 12–27; 26–27. . The Soviet Union had a poor overall performance. Although it had high growth rates in productions, many enterprises operated with losses.Lavigne, Marie (1974). ''The Socialist Economies of the Soviet Union and Europe''. White Plains: International Arts and Sciences Press. pp. 32–36; 80–98. . Nevertheless, the Soviet Union's growth in GDP per capita compared favorably with Western Europe. In 1913, prior to both

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

and the

Russian Revolution The Russian Revolution was a period of Political revolution (Trotskyism), political and social revolution, social change in Russian Empire, Russia, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia Dissolution of the Russian Empire, abolish its mona ...

of 1917, the former Soviet Union had a GDP per capita of $1,488 in 1990 international dollars which grew 461% to $6,871 by 1990. After its dissolution in December 1991, this figure fell to $3,893 by 1998. By comparison, Western Europe grew from a higher base of $3,688 international dollars by a comparable 457% to $16,872 in the same period and reached $17,921 by 1998. From the Stalin era to the early Brezhnev era, the Soviet economy grew faster than the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

and maintained itself as the second largest economy in both nominal and purchasing power parity values for much of the

Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...

until 1988, when

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

took the second place. It is also claimed that the Soviet model provided a better

quality of life Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards ...

and human development than market economies at the same level of economic development in nearly all cases. With the

dissolution of the Soviet Union The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Declaration No. 142-Н of ...

"The Fall of the Soviet Union"
Levada-Center. 9 January 2017. Retrieved 26 June 2019. followed by a rapid decrease of the quality of life, there has been a growing Soviet nostalgia that has been most prominent in Russia and with older people.

Economy of the Eastern Bloc

The initial move for socialism was in 1963 after a Central Committee meeting, these countries became the

Comecon The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, often abbreviated as Comecon ( ) or CMEA, was an economic organization from 1949 to 1991 under the leadership of the Soviet Union that comprised the countries of the Eastern Bloc#List of states, Easter ...

countries. There were countries that chose to introduce the new economic system gradually (

Bulgaria Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey t ...

East Germany East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from Foundation of East Germany, its formation on 7 October 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on ...

and

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...

) and countries that decided to first prepare theoretically, then experimentation at different levels and then in a large scale (

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

and

Romania Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central Europe, Central, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to ...

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

was set apart because the first stage of its transition consisted of economic recovery and then socialism was gradually implemented.

Yugoslavia , common_name = Yugoslavia , life_span = 1918–19921941–1945: World War II in Yugoslavia#Axis invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Axis occupation , p1 = Kingdom of SerbiaSerbia , flag_p ...

differed from other Eastern European countries in that after 1950 it modified its economic system by making self-management the base of enterprise activity. There were also a few differences between the economic model of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries such as East Germany and Poland. Czechoslovakia and East Germany were administered along regional lines. Poland retained a centralized system similar to the Stalinist centralization of the Soviet Union. The Eastern European countries differed from the Soviet Union in that they had greater flexibility in the management of subordinate firms, the market was assigned a greater importance, accessible foreign trade and liberalization of the exchange of capital goods. There was also less bureaucracy than in the Soviet Union involved in the planning of the countries. The Eastern Bloc countries achieved high rates of economic and technical progress, promoted industrialization and ensured steady growth rates of labor productivity and rises in the standard of living despite experiencing misdevelopment by central planners. During the 1950s–1960s, growth rates were high, progress was rapid by European standards and per capita growth within the Eastern European countries increased by 2.4 times the European average, accounting for 12.3 per cent of European production in 1950 and 14.4 in 1970, but most of their economies were stagnant by the late 1970s and 1980s as the system was resistant to change and did not easily adapt to new conditions. For political reasons, old factories were rarely closed, even when new technologies became available. Growth rates within the Eastern Bloc experienced relative decline after the 1970s. This has also been attributed to the 1970s energy crisis, including the

1973 oil crisis In October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced that it was implementing a total oil embargo against countries that had supported Israel at any point during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began after Eg ...

, the 1979 energy crisis and the 1980s oil glut, the post-war displacement of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism and economic globalization. Countries such as China that did not isolate and instead reformed themselves thrived, but this did not happen in most Eastern Bloc countries as they depended upon the Soviet Union, especially for significant amounts of materials. From the end of the World War II to the mid-1970s, the economy of the Eastern Bloc steadily increased at the same rate as the economy in Western Europe, with the least none-reforming Stalinist nations of the Eastern Bloc having a stronger economy then the reformist-Stalinist states. While most Western European economies essentially began to approach the GDP per capita levels of the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Eastern Bloc countries did not, with per capita GDPs trailing significantly behind their comparable Western European counterparts. Following the fall of the Eastern Bloc with the

Revolutions of 1989 The revolutions of 1989, also known as the Fall of Communism, were a revolutionary wave of liberal democracy movements that resulted in the collapse of most Communist state, Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and other parts ...

, the economies of post-Soviet states quickly fell apart and took a long time to return to pre-1989 levels. Not only growth plummeted following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, but also living standards declined, drug use, homelessness and poverty skyrocketed and suicides increased dramatically. Growth did not begin to return to pre-reform-era levels for approximately fifteen years. Some scholars have claimed that the Soviet model's industrialization and modernization laid the groundwork for their later

economic growth In economics, economic growth is an increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and Service (economics), services that a society Production (economics), produces. It can be measured as the increase in the inflation-adjusted Outp ...

, without which their current market-oriented economy may have not thrived or growth as much, or that it provided a better quality of life than market economies. The 1991 Soviet Union referendum (77% on an 80% turnout voted to preserve the Soviet Union and all Soviet republics voters voted in favor, with the Turkmenia Republic showing the most support at 98% and the lowest in the

Russian Republic The Russian Republic,. referred to as the Russian Democratic Federative Republic in the 1918 Constitution, was a short-lived state which controlled, ''de jure'', the territory of the former Russian Empire after its proclamation by the Rus ...

at 73%) has also been cited to argue that a vast majority of people did not want the Soviet Union dissolved, but rather more autonomy for the states within the union instead of a separation and the massive privatizations which had disastrous effects including giving rise to powerful oligarchs, especially in

and

Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...

Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...

, the last Soviet leader, supported Scandinavian social democracy in the form of the

Nordic model The Nordic model comprises the economic and social policies as well as typical cultural practices common in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden). This includes a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level colle ...

. In light of those results, post-Soviet states have seen a growing nostalgia and a constant high number of people have expressed a longing for the Soviet period and its values since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, although the level of Soviet nostalgia varies across the former republics and certain groups of people may blend the Soviet and post-Soviet experience in their daily lives. Polls have also showed that a majority of post-Soviet states viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union negatively and felt that it could have been avoided. An even greater number would openly welcome a revival of the Soviet system. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union has appeared in the former Eastern Bloc, especially in eastern Germany, Poland, Romania and the former Yugoslavia. The dissolution of the Soviet system was followed by a rapid increase in

poverty Poverty is a state or condition in which an individual lacks the financial resources and essentials for a basic standard of living. Poverty can have diverse Biophysical environmen ...

crime In ordinary language, a crime is an unlawful act punishable by a State (polity), state or other authority. The term ''crime'' does not, in modern criminal law, have any simple and universally accepted definition,Farmer, Lindsay: "Crime, definiti ...

corruption Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense that is undertaken by a person or an organization that is entrusted in a position of authority to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's gain. Corruption may involve activities ...

unemployment Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is the proportion of people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work du ...

homelessness Homelessness, also known as houselessness or being unhoused or unsheltered, is the condition of lacking stable, safe, and functional housing. It includes living on the streets, moving between temporary accommodation with family or friends, liv ...

, rates of

disease A disease is a particular abnormal condition that adversely affects the structure or function (biology), function of all or part of an organism and is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medical condi ...

infant mortality Infant mortality is the death of an infant before the infant's first birthday. The occurrence of infant mortality in a population can be described by the infant mortality rate (IMR), which is the number of deaths of infants under one year of age ...

, domestic violence and income inequality, along with decreases in

calorie The calorie is a unit of energy that originated from the caloric theory of heat. The large calorie, food calorie, dietary calorie, kilocalorie, or kilogram calorie is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one liter o ...

intake,

life expectancy Human life expectancy is a statistical measure of the estimate of the average remaining years of life at a given age. The most commonly used measure is ''life expectancy at birth'' (LEB, or in demographic notation ''e''0, where '' ...

, adult literacy and

income Income is the consumption and saving opportunity gained by an entity within a specified timeframe, which is generally expressed in monetary terms. Income is difficult to define conceptually and the definition may be different across fields. F ...

. Many people in post-Soviet states felt that their lives were worse off after 1989, when capitalist markets were made dominant. Subsequent polls and qualitative research across post-Soviet states "confirmed these sentiments as popular discontent with the failed promises of free-market prosperity has grown, especially among older people".

Economy of China

The Maoist economic model of China was designed after the Stalinist principles of a centrally administrated command economy based on the Soviet model. In the common program set up by the

Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is a political advisory body in the People's Republic of China and a central part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s United front (China), united front system. Its members adv ...

in 1949, in effect the country's interim constitution, state capitalism meant an economic system of

corporatism Corporatism is an ideology and political system of interest representation and policymaking whereby Corporate group (sociology), corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, come toget ...

. It provided the maxim "Whenever necessary and possible, private capital shall be encouraged to develop in the direction of state capitalism". After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,

Mao Zedong Mao Zedong pronounced ; traditionally Romanization of Chinese, romanised as Mao Tse-tung. (26December 18939September 1976) was a Chinese politician, revolutionary, and political theorist who founded the People's Republic of China (PRC) in ...

condemned Stalinism and the flaws in the Marxist–Leninist movement that peaked with the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. This gave Mao space in which to experiment with departure from the Soviet socialist economy. The Maoist economic model was reliant on ''High Tide of Socialism in the Chinese Countryside'', '' How to Handle Contradictions Among the People'' and '' Ten Great Relationships''. Mao modeled the Chinese socialist economy in such a way that it led to the

Great Leap Forward The Great Leap Forward was an industrialization campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Party Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to transform the country from an agrarian society into an indu ...

and the Commune Movement. In ''High Tide of Socialism in the Chinese Countryside'', Mao focused on the industrialization and mechanization of the countryside. In ''How to Handle Contradictions Among the People'', Mao wrote about his thoughts on the problems of socialist states as well as the conflicts of interest in the Chinese socialist society. In ''Ten Great Relationships'', Mao wrote about his vision of China's economy. The Maoist model had a dual economic goal, namely the industrialization of the countryside and the socialization of its people. It differed from the Soviet Union's goals in that Mao emphasized the class struggle against the

bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted wi ...

while the Soviet Union started advocating peaceful coexistence. China also allowed for more flexibility and experimentation than the Soviet Union and the countryside was at the center of its policies. Supporters argue that life expectancy greatly improved under Mao and that he rapidly industrialized China and laid the groundwork for the country's later rise to become an economic superpower while critics see many of Maoist economic policies as impediments to industrialization and modernization that delayed economic development and claim that China's economy underwent its rapid growth only after Maoist policies had been widely abandoned.

Economic challenges and legacy

The problem with the central planning of authoritarian socialist states is that as the state develops, it also grows in complexity and the possible errors grow and the possibilities of dis-allocations and waste of resources. As commented by Karl Marx, capitalism works because it is a system of economic force, but in socialist economics this force is insufficient to provide enough incentive. Human needs should be taken into account to make a socialist society function, but there is no necessary connection between the accumulation of capital and human satisfaction. Some of the issues that emerged during the socialist phase of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and Maoist China included inflation, lagged consumption, fixed prices, production structure and disproportionality. There was a lag between when products were fabricated and when they were accessed to by the population, goods tended to stockpile. Yugoslavia raised its industrial prices by 17% and its agricultural prices by 32% from 1964 to 1965 while Czechoslovakia raised the prices of foodstuffs and services by 20% in 1966 and by 1967 prices were up by 30%. The production of consumer products also diminished in Yugoslavia, where the share of consumer products fell from 70% before World War II to 31% in 1965. Prices were fixed under the premise that it would force producers to behave more efficiently and as such the price-controlled products were produced in lower quantities. In Yugoslavia, the market distortion caused by the price fixing was realized and led to the un-freezing of prices in 1967. Hungary also had frozen prices and slowly unfroze them over a period of ten to fifteen years because otherwise the structural disproportions of the Hungarian economy would spin prices out of control. Many factories were kept running through government subsidies and protection despite any economic losses of the factories. This decreased overall efficiency of the socialist economies, increased the financial losses of those economies and caused them to have a disproportionate amount of available jobs and manpower. As argued by Ljubo Sirc, the "Soviet Union and other communist countries have the worst of both worlds: some enterprises or operations are inefficient because they are too capital-intensive, other enterprises or operations because they are too labour-intensive". The Stalinist economic model in which the socialist economies were based did not allow for a decrease in growth rates. It did not allow for the flexibility needed to keep up with growing economies. According to Paul Roderick Gregory, the

collapse of the Soviet Union The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Declaration No. 142-Н of ...

was due to the inherent drawbacks of the administrative-command system, namely poor planning, low expertise of planners, unreliable supply lines, conflict between planners and producers and the dictatorial chain of command. According to Gregory, "the system was managed by thousands of 'Stalins' in a nested dictatorship". Once the enterprises gained some freedom during ''

perestroika ''Perestroika'' ( ; rus, перестройка, r=perestrojka, p=pʲɪrʲɪˈstrojkə, a=ru-perestroika.ogg, links=no) was a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s, widely associ ...

'', the rigid administrative-command system imploded. Despite these shortcomings, the Soviet Union's growth in GDP per capita compared favorably with Western Europe. It has also been noted that such states compared favorably with Western states in some health indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy, making some significant gains and that "one thought ..bound to occur is that communism is good for poverty removal". A lasting legacy of the Soviet Union remains physical infrastructure created during decades of policies geared towards the construction of heavy industry and widespread environmental destruction. Under the Soviet system, income, property and social equality was radically increased. Income inequality in Russia dropped, then rebounded after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Similarly, income inequality also dropped rapidly in the Eastern Bloc and after Eastern Europe went under the Soviet

sphere of influence In the field of international relations, a sphere of influence (SOI) is a spatial region or concept division over which a state or organization has a level of cultural, economic, military, or political exclusivity. While there may be a formal a ...

at the end of World War II. After the collapse of the Soviet system, economic and

social inequality Social inequality occurs when resources within a society are distributed unevenly, often as a result of inequitable allocation practices that create distinct unequal patterns based on socially defined categories of people. Differences in acce ...

went back up. The breakdown of economic ties that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a severe economic crisis and catastrophic fall in living standards in post-Soviet states and the former Eastern Bloc which was even worse than the Great Depression. Poverty and economic inequality surged between 1988–1989 and 1993–1995, with the Gini ratio increasing by an average of 9 points for all former socialist states. Even before Russia's

financial crisis A financial crisis is any of a broad variety of situations in which some financial assets suddenly lose a large part of their nominal value. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many financial crises were associated with Bank run#Systemic banki ...

in 1998, Russia's GDP was half of what it had been in the early 1990s. In the decades following the end of the Cold War, only five or six of the post-communist states are on a path to joining the wealthy capitalist West while most are falling behind, some to such an extent that it will take over 50 years to catch up to where they were before the end of the Soviet system. In a 2001 study by economist Steven Rosefielde, he calculated that there were 3.4 million premature deaths in Russia from 1990 to 1998, partly blaming on the "shock therapy" that came with the

Washington Consensus The Washington Consensus is a set of ten economic policy prescriptions considered in the 1980s and 1990s to constitute the "standard" reform package promoted for Economic crisis, crisis-wracked developing country, developing countries by the Was ...

. According to Klas-Göran Karlsson, discussion of the number of victims of authoritarian socialist regimes has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased". Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under authoritarian socialist regimes depends greatly on definitions, ranging from a low of 10–20 millions to as high as 110 millions. The criticism of some of the estimates are mostly focused on three aspects, namely that the estimates were based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable; that the figures were skewed to higher possible values; and that those dying at war and victims of civil wars, Holodomor and other famines under authoritarian socialist governments should not be counted. Critics also argue that

neoliberal Neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism, which became dominant in policy-making from the late 20th century onward. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is most often used pej ...

policies of

liberalization Liberalization or liberalisation (British English) is a broad term that refers to the practice of making laws, systems, or opinions less severe, usually in the sense of eliminating certain government regulations or restrictions. The term is used ...

, deregulation and privatisation "had catastrophic effects on former Soviet Bloc countries" and that the imposition of Washington Consensus-inspired "shock therapy" had little to do with future economic growth. It has been argued that the establishment of

welfare state A welfare state is a form of government in which the State (polity), state (or a well-established network of social institutions) protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal oppor ...

s in the West in the early 20th century could be partly a reaction by elites to the Bolshevik Revolution and its violence against the bourgeoisie which feared violent revolution in its own backyard. The welfare states gave rise to the post-war consensus and the post-war economic boom, where the United States, the Soviet Union and Western European and East Asian countries in particular experienced unusually high and sustained economic growth, together with full employment. Contrary to early predictions, this high growth also included many countries that had been devastated by the war such as Japan ( Japanese post-war economic miracle), West Germany and Austria (

Wirtschaftswunder The ''Wirtschaftswunder'' (, "economic miracle"), also known as the Miracle on the Rhine, was the rapid reconstruction and development of the Economy, economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II. The expression was first used to re ...

), South Korea ( Miracle of the Han River), France ( Trente Glorieuses), Italy ( Italian economic miracle) and Greece ( Greek economic miracle). Similarly, Michael Parenti holds that the Soviet model played a role in "tempering the worst impulses of Western capitalism and imperialism" and that Western business interests are "no longer restrained by a competing system" in the post-Cold War era and are now "rolling back the many gains that working people in the West have won over the years". For Parenti, there were clear differences between fascist and socialist regimes as the latter "made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care and women's rights" and in general "created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers and Western capitalists". Other have criticized the linking of all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism by the elites in the West in hope to discredit and marginalize all political ideologies that could "threaten the primacy of private property and free markets", emphasising Stalin and other socialist leaders' crimes and neglecting legitimate achievements such as education, literacy, the modernisation of the economy, social security, the rise in the standard of living and women's rights. Similarly, it has been argued that there is a double standard in emphasising famines, labour camps, mass killings and purges under socialist regimes in a death toll body count, but not applying the same standard to capitalist, colonial- imperial regimes. The collapse of the Soviet system, the Soviet Union in particular, is seen as the proof that communism and socialism can not work, allowing for all left-wing criticism of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism to be silenced, for the alternatives will supposedly inevitably result in economic inefficiency and violent authoritarianism. Some Western academics argue that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in states under authoritarian socialist rule, or that those states provided

human rights Human rights are universally recognized Morality, moral principles or Social norm, norms that establish standards of human behavior and are often protected by both Municipal law, national and international laws. These rights are considered ...

such as

economic, social and cultural rights Economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR) are Socioeconomics, socio-economic human rights, such as the right to education, right to housing, right to an adequate standard of living, right to health, victims' rights and the right to science and ...

not found under

capitalist state The capitalist state is the state, its functions and the form of organization it takes within capitalist socioeconomic systems.Jessop, Bob (January 1977). "Recent Theories of the Capitalist State". ''Soviet Studies''. 1: 4. pp. 353–373. Th ...

Development

Authoritarian socialism is best understood through an examination of its developmental history, allowing for the analysis and comparison of its various global examples. Although authoritarian socialism was by no means restricted to the Soviet Union, its ideological development occurred in tandem with the Stalinist regimes. As the Soviet Union was a developmental model for many socialist states in the post-World War II era, Soviet authoritarian socialism was adopted by a diverse range of states and continued to develop well into the 20th century in the Middle East and North African regions. Those regions, characterized by authoritarian traits such as uncontested party leadership, restricted civil liberties and strong unelected officials with non-democratic influence on policy, share many commonalities with the Soviet Union. Authoritarian socialist states were ideologically Marxist–Leninist (the state ideology of the Soviet Union that arose in Imperial Russia within the

Bolshevik The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...

faction of the

Russian Social Democratic Labour Party The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), also known as the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP) or the Russian Social Democratic Party (RSDP), was a socialist political party founded in 1898 in Minsk, Russian Empire. The ...

) or one of its variants such as Maoism, among other national variants and updating, following the Soviet developmental model. While those socialist states saw themselves as a form of democracy opposed to that of Western states and claimed to be workers and peasants' states or people's democratic republics, they are considered to be authoritarian because they featured external controls such as violent repression and forms of artificial socialization. The implementation of authoritarian forms of socialism was accomplished with a dogmatized ideology reinforced by terror and violence. The combination of those external controls served to implement a normality within an authoritarian country that seemed like illusion or madness to someone removed from its political atmosphere. For many authoritarian socialist countries, their regimes were a mix of this form of external control-based

totalitarianism Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls the public s ...

(for intellectually and ideologically active members of society) and traditional or cultural authoritarianism (for the majority of the population). With the

fall of the Soviet Union The Soviet Union was formally dissolved as a sovereign state and subject of international law on 26 December 1991 by Declaration No. 142-N of the Soviet of Nationalities, Soviet of the Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. :s: ...

and that of the Eastern Bloc, most former authoritarian socialist regimes reformed themselves. Some of those in Eastern Europe underwent shock doctrine and moved into a free-market capitalist and liberal-democratic direction, although some of them such as Hungary or Russia are described as illiberal democracies and others as hybrid regimes. In Africa, many ruling parties retained power and moved into a democratic socialist or social-democratic direction while others moved into liberal-democratic multi-party politics. Other countries such as Cuba and Vietnam followed the Chinese development in applying economic reforms while maintaining centralised political control. They also include Chinese allies such as the Philippines and Thailand, who were not authoritarian socialist regimes, but are now favouring the Beijing Consensus over the

followed by Eastern European countries. Rather than moving in the direction of

democratic capitalism Democratic capitalism, also referred to as market democracy, is a political and economic system that integrates resource allocation by marginal productivity (synonymous with free-market capitalism), with policies of resource allocation by socia ...

followed by the majority of Eastern European countries, China and its allies, including Hungary, Nicaragua, Russia, Singapore, Turkey and Venezuela, are described as authoritarian capitalist regimes.

Soviet Union

Despite the Marxian basis of Vladimir Lenin's socialism, the realities of his system were in direct opposition to Karl Marx's belief in the emancipation and autonomy of the working class. Those contradictions stemmed primarily from Lenin's implementation of a vanguard or regimented party of committed revolutionaries "who knew exactly what history's mandate was and who were prepared to be its self-ordained custodians". The function of this party was meant to be primarily transitional, given that Lenin believed that the working class was politically unprepared for rule and Russia was not yet industrially poised for socialism. Lenin adopted state-capitalist policies.Lenin, Vladimir (1965)

918 __NOTOC__ Year 918 (Roman numerals, CMXVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Julian calendar. Events By place Europe * December 23 – King Conrad I of Germany, Conrad I, injured at one of his battles with Arnulf, D ...

br>''Lenin Collected Works''
27. Moscow: Progress Publishers. p. 293. Quoted b

. Retrieved 23 April 2020.Lenin, Vladimir (1965) 921br>"The Tax in Kind"
''Lenin Collected Works'' (1st English ed.). 32. Moscow: Progress Publishers. pp. 329–365. Retrieved 23 April 2020.Pena, David S. (21 September 2007)
"Tasks of Working-Class Governments under the Socialist-oriented Market Economy"
''Political Affairs''. . Retrieved 5 September 2008. On seeing the Soviet Union's growing coercive power in 1923, a dying Lenin said Russia had reverted to "a

bourgeois The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and Aristocracy (class), aristocracy. They are tradition ...

tsarist machine ..barely varnished with socialism". Marx coined the term '' barracks communism'' () to refer to a form of authoritarian socialism in which all aspects of life are bureaucratically regimented and communal. Originally, Marx used the expression to criticize the vision of Sergey Nechayev outlined in ''The Fundamentals of the Future Social System'' which had a major influence on other Russian revolutionaries like Lenin and others such as Pyotr Tkachev. The term itself did not refer to military barracks, but rather to the workers' barracks-type primitive dormitories in which industrial workers lived in many places in the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

of the time.
PDF text
Political theorists of the Soviet Union later applied the term to China under Mao Zedong. During the later perestroika period, it was applied to the

history of the Soviet Union The history of the Soviet Union (USSR) (1922–91) began with the ideals of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and ended in dissolution amidst economic collapse and political disintegration. Established in 1922 following the Russian Civil War, ...

. Unlike Stalin, who first claimed to have achieved socialism with the Soviet Constitution of 1936 and then confirmed it in the '' Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR'', Lenin did not call the Soviet Union a socialist state, nor did he claim that it had achieved socialism. While Stalin's colleagues described him as Asiatic and Stalin himself told a Japanese journalist that "I am not a European man, but an Asian, a Russified Georgian", Lenin identified ethnically as Russian, believed that other European countries, especially Germany, were culturally superior to Russia which he described as "one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries". From his youth, Lenin had wanted Russia to become more culturally European and Western. In his testament, Lenin grow concerned about the rise of the bureaucracy and proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet governing bodies. He also made criticism of several Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin and

Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky'' was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure ...

, warning of the possibility of a split developing in the party leadership between Trotsky and Stalin if proper measures were not taken to prevent it. In a post-script, Lenin suggested Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party's Central Committee. Isaac Deutscher, a biographer of both Trotsky and Stalin, argued that " e whole testament breathed uncertainty". Leninist socialists remain divided in their views on Stalin. Some view him as Lenin's authentic successor while others believe he betrayed Lenin's ideas by deviating from them. The socio-economic nature of Stalin's Soviet Union has also been much debated, varyingly being labelled a form of bureaucratic collectivism, state capitalism, state socialism or a totally unique mode of production.

Vladimir Lenin

Marx chronicled a history of development through a capitalist age of industrialization that resulted in the manipulation of the

working class The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most c ...

. This development culminated in the empowerment of a proletariat which could benefit from the fruits of industrialization without being exploited. Although he meant his ideology to appeal to the disenfranchised working class of an industrialized society, it was widely accepted by developing countries that had yet to successfully industrialize. This resulted in stagnant economies and socialist states without the necessary organization and structure to industrialize. Seeing the failure of those models, Lenin concluded that socialism in Russia had to be constructed from above through party dictatorship that appealed to both the working class and peasants. Because the working class accounted for only 15% of the population, Lenin was forced to appeal to the much greater peasant class (accounting for nearly 80%) to propel the Bolshevik faction of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party that under Lenin eventually became the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) due to a split within social democracy. The Bolsheviks promised "Bread, Peace, and Land" to the peasants and delivered, redistributing land from the landlords and increasing the number of farms in Russia from 427,000 in 1917 to 463,000 in 1919. For some, Lenin's legacy was one of violent terror and concentration of power in the hands of few. Lenin intentionally employed violence as a means to manipulate the population and tolerated absolutely no opposition, arguing that it was "a great deal better to 'discuss with rifles' than with the theses of the opposition". He worked for the ideological destruction of society as a whole so that it could easily adopt the rhetoric and political ideals of the ruling party. Lenin's use of terror (instilled by a secret police apparatus) to exact social obedience, mass murder and disappearance, censoring of communications and absence of justice was only reinforced by his successor Joseph Stalin. In contrast to those who support this thesis, others have disputed this characterization and separated Lenin from Stalin and Leninism from Stalinism. A controversial figure, Lenin remains both reviled and revered, a figure who has been both idolised and demonised. This has extended into academic studies of Lenin and

Leninism Leninism (, ) is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the Dictatorship of the proletariat#Vladimir Lenin, dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary Vangu ...

which have often been polarised along political lines. While there have been both sympathetic and expressly hostile Lenin's biographies, some sought to avoid making either hostile or positive comments about Lenin, thereby evading politicized stereotypes. Some Marxist activists, who defend both the

October Revolution The October Revolution, also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution (in Historiography in the Soviet Union, Soviet historiography), October coup, Bolshevik coup, or Bolshevik revolution, was the second of Russian Revolution, two r ...

and

soviet democracy Soviet democracy, also called council democracy, is a type of democracy in Marxism, in which the rule of a population is exercised by directly elected '' soviets'' ( workers' councils). Soviets are directly responsible to their electors and boun ...

, emphasise how the Bolsheviks wanted to avoid terror and argue that the

Red Terror The Red Terror () was a campaign of political repression and Mass killing, executions in Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Russia which was carried out by the Bolsheviks, chiefly through the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police ...

was born in response to the White Terror which has been downplayed. Lenin has been variously described as "the century's most significant political leader", "one of the undeniably outstanding figures of modern history" and one of the 20th century's "principal actors" as well as "one of the most widespread, universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century" and "one of the most significant and influential figures of modern history". Some historians have characterized Lenin's administration as totalitarianLeggett, George (1981). ''The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . or a police state; or they have described it as a one-party dictatorship, with Lenin as its dictator, although noting differences between Lenin and Stalin in that under the first there was a dictatorship of the party and under the latter that of one man. Others have argued against the view that Lenin's government was a dictatorship, viewing it as an imperfect way of preserving elements of democracy without some of the processes found in liberal democratic states. According to the latter view, "the personal qualities that led Lenin to brutal policies were not necessarily any stronger than in some of the major Western leaders of the twentieth century". Among sympathisers, Lenin was portrayed as having made a genuine adjustment of Marxist theory that enabled it to suit Russia's particular socio-economic conditions. The Soviet view characterised him as a man who recognised the historically inevitable and accordingly helped to make the inevitable happen. Conversely, the majority of Western historians have perceived him as a person who manipulated events in order to attain and then retain political power, moreover considering his ideas as attempts to ideologically justify his pragmatic policies. More recently, revisionists in both Russia and the West have highlighted the impact that pre-existing ideas and popular pressures exerted on Lenin and his policies.

Joseph Stalin

Stalin sought to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union, but perhaps in a way that was unrealistic, given the aggregate skill level and capital of the population and Stalin's argument that the Soviet Union had to accomplish in a decade what England had taken centuries to do in terms of economic development in order to be prepared for an invasion from the West. Acknowledging this inadequacy, Stalin ordered that resources slotted for consumption be redirected to production or exported as a temporary sacrifice on the part of the population for the sake of rapid growth. The model was successful initially, with ideology and nationalism promoting morale despite shortages in resources such as food and construction materials for housing. Presumably, the exploited classes believed that once the rapid and successful industrialization of Russia had taken place, power would be relinquished by the vanguard party and communism would ensue. However, Stalin continued to demand even more far-reaching sacrifices. Because of his control over both political and economic arenas which historians argue gave his vanguard party an amount of control surpassing that of Russia's tzars or emperors, citizens were unwilling to challenge his decrees, given that aspects of their lives such as medical care, housing and social freedoms could be restricted according to the discretion of the party. Despite failures, Stalin's expectations remained uncontested by the working class and the model was adopted by a multitude of emerging socialist states during that era. The Soviet attempt to collectivize agriculture, transforming the Soviet Union from one of the world's largest exporters of grain to the world's largest importer of grain, was widely replicated despite its failure. Many historians claim that extermination was the fate of a wide variety of people during Stalin's regime such as political opponents, ideological rivals, suspect party members, accused military officers, kulaks, lower-class families, former members of the societal elites, ethnic groups, religious groups and the relatives and sympathizers of these offenders. Those deaths occurred as a result of collectivization, famine, terror campaigns, disease, war and mortality rates in the Gulag. As the majority of excess deaths under Stalin were not direct killings, the exact number of victims of Stalinism is difficult to calculate due to lack of consensus among scholars on which deaths can be attributed to Stalin. However, it is far lower than the estimates of 20 million or above which were made before access to the archives. Regarding the Holodomor, part of the greater Soviet famine of 1932–1933, the consensus argues that while Stalin's policies contributed significantly to the high mortality rate, it rejects the view that Stalin or the Soviet government consciously engineered the famine. It has been argued that Stalin's "purposive killings" fit more closely into the category of "execution" rather than "murder", given he thought the accused were indeed guilty of crimes against the state and insisted on documentation. Among the

anti-Stalinist left The anti-Stalinist left encompasses various kinds of Left-wing politics, left-wing political movements that oppose Joseph Stalin, Stalinism, neo-Stalinism and the History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953), system of governance that Stalin impleme ...

and anti-communist Russians and Westerners, Stalin's legacy is largely negative, with the Soviet Union under him characterised as a totalitarian state and Stalin as its authoritarian leader. Various biographers have described Stalin as a dictator, an autocrat,Volkogonov, Dimitri (1991). ''Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy''. Translated by Shukman, Harold. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. . an Oriental despot, or accused him of practicing Caesarism. A man who "perhaps ..determined the course of the twentieth century" more than any other individual, described as "one of the most notorious figures in history" and possessing "that rare combination: both 'intellectual' and killer", the "ultimate politician" and the "most elusive and fascinating of the twentieth-century titans" as well as "one of the most powerful figures in human history", Stalin initially ruled as part of the party oligarchy which he turned into a personal dictatorship in 1934 and became absolute dictator between March and June 1937. Stalin later built a "personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship", concentrated an "unprecedented political authority in his hands" and has been described as "closer to personal despotism than almost any monarch in history". Others argued that the campaigns of terror organized by Stalin were driven by his fear of counter-revolution. Other historians and scholars cautioned against "over-simplistic stereotypes" that portrayed Stalin as an omnipotent and omnipresent tyrant who controlled every aspect of Soviet life through repression and totalitarianism, noting that "powerful though he was, his powers were not limitless" and that Stalin's rule depended on his willingness to conserve the Soviet structure he had inherited. It has been observed that Stalin's ability to remain in power relied on him having a majority in the

Politburo A politburo () or political bureau is the highest organ of the central committee in communist parties. The term is also sometimes used to refer to similar organs in socialist and Islamist parties, such as the UK Labour Party's NEC or the Poli ...

at all times. It was noted that at various points, especially in his later years, there were "periodic manifestations" in which the party oligarchy threatened his autocratic control. Stalin denied to foreign visitors that he was a dictator, stating that those who labelled him as such did not understand the Soviet governance structure. Several historians have criticized the

totalitarian twins Various historians and other authors have carried out a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, with particular consideration to the similarities and differences between the two ideologies and political systems, the relationship between the two re ...

concept and comparisons between

communism Communism () is a political sociology, sociopolitical, political philosophy, philosophical, and economic ideology, economic ideology within the history of socialism, socialist movement, whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a ...

/socialism and fascism or Stalinism and Nazism as Cold War concepts that focus upon the upper levels of society and which use have obscured the reality of the system. Others further noted how the concept became prominent in Western anti-communist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-war anti-fascism into post-war anti-communism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the release of the archives, some of the heat has gone out of the debate and politicization has been reduced. It has been argued that the Soviet political system was not completely controlled from the center and that both Lenin and Stalin only responded to political events as they arose. Some also questioned the previously published findings that Stalin organized himself the murder of Sergey Kirov to justify his campaign of Great Terror. Others stated that mass deaths from famines are not a "uniquely Stalinist evil" and compared the behavior of the Stalinist regime vis-à-vis the Holodomor to that of the

British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, Crown colony, colonies, protectorates, League of Nations mandate, mandates, and other Dependent territory, territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It bega ...

(towards Ireland and India) and even the G8 in contemporary times, arguing that the latter "are guilty of mass manslaughter or mass deaths from criminal negligence because of their not taking obvious measures to reduce mass deaths" and that a possible defense of Stalin and his associates is that "their behaviour was no worse than that of many rulers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries". Despite the criticism, Stalin has been considered an outstanding and exceptional politician as well as a great statesman and state-builder, with some suggesting that without Stalin the Soviet Union might have collapsed long before 1991 as he strengthened and stabilized the country. In under three decades, Stalin transformed the Soviet Union into a major industrial world power, one which could "claim impressive achievements" in terms of urbanisation, military strength, education and Soviet pride. Under his rule, the average Soviet life expectancy grew due to improved living conditions, nutrition and medical care as mortality rates also declined. Although millions of Soviet citizens despised him, support for Stalin was nevertheless widespread throughout Soviet society. Citing those achievements and highlighting crimes committed by the Western world and its leaders during the colonization and imperialist period as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the 20th century whilst arguing that Stalin's hatred came mainly from

General Secretary Secretary is a title often used in organizations to indicate a person having a certain amount of authority, Power (social and political), power, or importance in the organization. Secretaries announce important events and communicate to the org ...

Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Chai ...

's Secret Speech read during the 20th Congress of the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),. Abbreviated in Russian as КПСС, ''KPSS''. at some points known as the Russian Communist Party (RCP), All-Union Communist Party and Bolshevik Party, and sometimes referred to as the Soviet ...

in February 1956, some have attempted to rehabilitate Stalin and its legacy, or otherwise gave a more neutral and nuanced view. However, those attempts have been criticized and most of its authors labelled as '' neo-Stalinists''. In the 21st century, more than half of Russians view Stalin positively and many support restoration of his monuments either dismantled by leaders or destroyed by rioting Russians during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Stalin's popularity has tripled among Russians in the last twenty years and the trend accelerated since

Vladimir Putin Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has served as President of Russia since 2012, having previously served from 2000 to 2008. Putin also served as Prime Minister of Ru ...

, who has been described as holding neo-Soviet views, has come to power.

China

Following the fall of the elite, land-owning class of the early 20th century, China began its Communist Revolution through the countryside. As relationships between agrarian masses and state-controlled programs splintered, the

Chinese Communist Party The Communist Party of China (CPC), also translated into English as Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP emerged victorious in the ...

led by Mao Zedong began seizing power. In his 1949 essay ''On People's Democratic Dictatorship'', Mao committed himself and the Chinese state to the creation of a strong state power with increased economic control. He stressed the importance of an authoritarian state, where political order and unity could be established and maintained. Mao committed himself to unification in the vein of complete system overthrow. As party chairman, Mao allowed himself complete control over the structure and execution of the party with his own

cult of personality A cult of personality, or a cult of the leader,Cas Mudde, Mudde, Cas and Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira (2017) ''Populism: A Very Short Introduction''. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 63. is the result of an effort which is made to create ...

, an almost mythical position as a guardian of wisdom and charisma. With such power, Mao was able to influence popular opinions, allowing his agenda support without going through state-controlled measures. During the Great Leap Forward, an initiative to develop China from an agrarian sector a major industrial powerhouse, Mao relied greatly on his prestige to influence the people. However, the Great Leap Forward proved a failure as widespread crop and irrigation failures led to the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine. There was no suggested end to the revolution—it was meant to be a continuing process of empowerment of the peasant class. With the aggressive failure of his

Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a Social movement, sociopolitical movement in the China, People's Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until his de ...

, Chinese support for the party and for Mao waned. Continuing struggles after his death would undermine his socialist system, allowing a more democratic yet still one-party ruled system to continue into today. As there is little agreement over his legacy both in China and abroad, Mao is a controversial figure who has been regarded as one of the most important and influential individuals in modern world history. Supporters credit Mao with driving imperialism out of China, modernizing the nation and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women and improving education and health care as well as increasing life expectancy as China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million under his leadership, among other achievements. Conversely, his regime has been called autocratic and totalitarian and condemned for bringing about mass repression and destroying religious and cultural artifacts and sites. It was additionally responsible for vast numbers of deaths, with estimates ranging from 30 to 70 million victims through starvation, prison labour and mass executions. While some critics argue that Mao was dismissive of the suffering and death caused by his policies, or that he was well aware that his policies would be responsible for the deaths of millions, others have disputed this. Praised as a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, poet and visionary, Mao has been variously described as a "great historical criminal", "both monster and a genius", who was also "a great force for good","Mao Tse Tung: China's Peasant Emperor" (2005). ''

Biography A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curri ...

''. A&E Network. ASIN B000AABKXG. a "great leader in history" and a "great criminal" as well as "one of the great tyrants of the twentieth century", comparable to

and Joseph Stalin, with a death toll surpassing both. However, others reject those comparisons, arguing that whereas the deaths caused by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were largely systematic and deliberate, the overwhelming majority of the deaths under Mao were unintended consequences of famine, noting that the landlord class was not exterminated as a people due to his belief in redemption through thought reform. Mao has been compared to 19th-century Chinese reformers who challenged China's traditional beliefs in the era of China's clashes with Western colonial powers as well as to

United States President The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed For ...

Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was the seventh president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Before Presidency of Andrew Jackson, his presidency, he rose to fame as a general in the U.S. Army and served in both houses ...

. Similarly, Maoist economics policies are controversial. Supporters argue that life expectancy greatly improved under Mao and that such policies rapidly industrialized China and laid the groundwork for the country's later rise to become an economic superpower.; ; ; Critics argue that policies such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were impediments to industrialization and modernization that delayed economic development and claim that China's economy underwent its rapid growth only after Maoist policies had been widely abandoned. All in all, both supporters and critics alike generally agree that the human cost has been staggering.

Maoism

Maoism is an adapted Sino-centric version of

Marxism–Leninism Marxism–Leninism () is a communist ideology that became the largest faction of the History of communism, communist movement in the world in the years following the October Revolution. It was the predominant ideology of most communist gov ...

. While believing in democratic centralism, where party decisions are brought about by scrutiny and debate and then are binding upon all members of the party once implemented, Mao did not accept dissenters to the party's decisions. Through the Cultural Revolution and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, Mao attempted to purge any subversive idea—especially capitalist or Western threat—with heavy force, justifying his actions as the necessary way for the central authority to keep power. At the same time, Mao emphasized the importance of cultural heritage and individual choice as a way of creating this national unity. He described his ideal system as "a political situation in which there is both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of purpose and personal ease of mind and liveliness to facilitate the socialist revolution". While the system advocates contradiction, Mao believed the state above all could provide the masses with the tools for their own expression, but his own brand of self-expression was wholly manufactured, built largely on replacing traditional practices and artifacts of

Chinese culture Chinese culture () is one of the Cradle of civilization#Ancient China, world's earliest cultures, said to originate five thousand years ago. The culture prevails across a large geographical region in East Asia called the Sinosphere as a whole ...

with his own. Through this, transformation of the people towards an internal party collectiveness was possible. Notably, Mao's authoritarianism was rooted in a collective bottom-up style of empowerment. In his system, the proletariat and peasantry were responsible for rising up against the bureaucracy and capital of the state. Joining the peasant class with the bourgeoisie of the countryside (the land-holding, local farmers), the group was able to stifle the claims to power by the wealthier, urban landowners through the banner of

. Only when this collection of

peasant A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasan ...

s and petty bourgeoisie existed could Mao grow his own, custom bureaucracy. Once this unity was established, Mao argued that the people were the ones who could control the state, but his government's intense control over the citizenry emphasizes the contradiction in his theory—a contradiction, he maintained, was a necessary reality of their specialized system.

Post-Maoism

Following the Chinese economic reforms in the 1980s by

Deng Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping also Romanization of Chinese, romanised as Teng Hsiao-p'ing; born Xiansheng (). (22 August 190419 February 1997) was a Chinese statesman, revolutionary, and political theorist who served as the paramount leader of the People's R ...

, most then current and former authoritarian socialist regimes have followed the Chinese model while only leaders such as Kim Jong-il and

Mobutu Sese Seko Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga ( ; born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu; 14 October 1930 – 7 September 1997), often shortened to Mobutu Sese Seko or Mobutu and also known by his initials MSS, was a Congolese politician and military officer ...

maintained their orthodox views. Countries such as Vietnam ( socialist-oriented market economy) and more recently Cuba have followed the Chinese

socialist market economy The socialist market economy (SME) is the economic system and model of economic development employed in the China, People's Republic of China. The system is a market economy with the predominance of public ownership and State-owned enterpr ...

. With the

Great Recession The Great Recession was a period of market decline in economies around the world that occurred from late 2007 to mid-2009.

, the

has been losing favour to the Beijing Consensus. According to Joshua Kurlantzick, the Chinese model "offer a viable alternative to the leading democracies. In many ways, their systems pose the most serious challenge to democratic capitalism since the rise of communism and fascism in the 1920s and early 1930s". While arguing that "the 'China model' has become shorthand for

economic liberalization Economic liberalization, or economic liberalisation, is the lessening of government regulations and restrictions in an economy in exchange for greater participation by private entities. In politics, the doctrine is associated with classical liber ...

without political liberalization", Kurlantzick cautiones that "China's model of development is actually more complex. It builds on earlier, state-centered Asian models of development such as in South Korea and Taiwan, while taking uniquely Chinese steps designed to ensure that the Communist Party remains central to economic and political policy-making". Kurlantzick argues that "the Beijing government maintains a high degree of control over the economy, but it is hardly returning to socialism". China developed "a hybrid form of capitalism in which it has opened its economy to some extent, but it also ensures the government controls strategic industries, picks corporate winners, determines investments by state funds, and pushes the banking sector to support national champion firms". Although noting that "China privatized many state firms" in the 1980s and 1990s, he states that "the central government still controls roughly 120 companies. ..Working through these networks, the Beijing leadership sets state priorities, gives signals to companies, and determines corporate agendas, but does so without the direct hand of the state appearing in public". According to Kurlantzick, "government intervention in business is utilized, in a way not possible in a free-market democracy, to strengthen the power of the ruling regime and China's position internationally. ..In short, the China model sees commerce as a means to promote national interests, and not just to empower (and potentially to make wealthy) individuals. And for over three decades, China's model of development has delivered staggering successes". Along with India, China is providing "virtually the only growth in the whole global economy" and in about thirty years the country has gone from a poor, mostly agrarian nation to the second-largest economy in the world.

Arab world

Socialism was introduced into the Middle East in the form of populist policies designed to galvanize the working class into overthrowing colonial powers and their domestic allies. These policies were held by authoritarian states interested in the rapid industrialisation and social equalisation of Arab nations and often were characterised by redistributive or protectionist economic policies, lower class mobilization, charismatic leaders and promises to improve national living standards. Those states were progressive in terms of the colonial development that had occurred thus far. They allowed important political and economic gains to be made by workers, encouraged land redistribution, unseated oligarchical political powers and implemented import-substituting industrialisation development strategies. With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc following the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 as well as the push for

democratization Democratization, or democratisation, is the structural government transition from an democratic transition, authoritarian government to a more democratic political regime, including substantive political changes moving in a democratic direction ...

, many Arab states have moved toward a model of fiscal discipline proposed by the

. Although authoritarian leaders of those states implemented democratic institutions during the 1980s and 1990s, their multi-party elections created an arena in which business elites could lobby for personal interests while largely silencing the lower class. Economic liberalisation in these regions yielded economies that led to regimes built on the support of

rent-seeking Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic effi ...

urban elites, with political opposition inviting the prospect of political marginalisation and even retaliation. Academics and political scientists have classified Ba'athist Syria as an Arab government that is based on the cold war era model of authoritarian socialism. While some Trotskyists such as the

Committee for a Workers' International The Committee for a Workers' International (CWI; , or CIT; or CIO) was an Political international, international association of Trotskyism, Trotskyist political parties and organisations. Today, two groups claim to be the continuation of the C ...

have included Ba'athist Syria as an authoritarian socialist state when they have had a nationalized economy as deformed workers' states, other socialists argued that the neo-Ba'athists promoted capitalists from within the party and outside their countries.

Resistance to democratisation

A great deal of debate has been paid by the field of comparative politics to how the Arab region was able to avoid the third wave of democratisation. A number of arguments have been offered by professionals in the field, ranging from a discussion of prerequisites for democratisation not supported by the

Arab culture Arab culture is the culture of the Arabs, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, in a region of the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab world. The various religions the Arabs have adopted throughout Histor ...

to a lack of democratic actors initiating the necessary democratic transition. Marsha Pripstein Posusney argues that the "patriarchal and tribal mentality of the culture is an impediment to the development of pluralist values", rendering Arab citizens prone to accept patriarchal leaders and lacking the national unity that many argue is necessary for democratization to be successful. Eva Bellin concedes that the prevalence of

Islam Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...

is a distinguishing factor of the region and therefore must contribute to the region's exceptionalism, "given Islam's presumed inhospitality to democracy". Posusney argues that this "intrinsic incompatibility between democracy and Islam" remains unproven given that efforts to test this association quantitatively have failed to produce conclusive results. Ethnic divisions in the area have also been cited as a factor as well as a weak civil society, a state-controlled economy, poverty, low literacy rates and inequality. In his book ''Debating Arab Authoritarianism: Dynamics and Durability in Nondemocratic Regimes'', Oliver Schlumberger has argued that there is in fact an international ambivalence toward authoritarianism in the Middle East given that stability is preferred over the uncertainty of democratisation due to the region's oil and gas supplies and the strategic importance of its geopolitical location.

Africa

During the 1945 Pan-African Conference, calls for increased organization, development and self-determination in the poverty stricken African continent put the impetus on colonial powers to negotiate

national sovereignty A nation state, or nation-state, is a political entity in which the state (a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory) and the nation (a community based on a common identity) are (broadly or ideally) co ...

. While there were few Marxist movements into the continent, Soviet Union activity spurred anti-imperialist and globalization movements from African countries. The congress established national liberation as the main topic of their sessions, emphasizing the elimination and exploitation by the imperialist powers over authentic national sovereignty. However, they did not establish clear social or political parameters for this new liberation. African leaders consistently viewed socialism as a direct rejection of the colonial system and in turn dismissed the notion of creating independent capitalist systems throughout the continent. They attempted to infuse various forms of socialism—some Marxist–Leninist, others democratic—into tailored ideologies specific to each country. Once these systems were in place, countries developed towards a "focal institutional" society. According to sociologist William Friedland, societies adopted a totalitarian vision of rule, allowing one-party systems and institutions to "penetrate every sphere of private or public activity".

Senegal

Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor was among the first and most vocal African advocates for socialism. Before being elected president, Senghor served as one of nine African delegates to the 1945 French Constituent Assembly, negotiating for the transfer of self-governing and policy-making power through locally elected councils. The measure shortly failed, keeping autonomy from the colonies until the independence movements of the 1960s. After Senegalese independence in 1960, Senghor's Union Progresiste Senegalaise, a derivative of the French Socialist Party, grew massive support throughout the continent. Much of his party's success hinged on his revisionist version of Marxism–Leninism, where he argued that "the major contradiction of Marxism is that it presents itself as a science, whereas, despite its denials, it is based on an ethic". By framing it as an ethic, Senghor was able to remove the strict determinism from the ideology, allowing it to be molded towards an Afro-centric model. His revision proved similar to that of Benito Mussolini as he called on a national movement from and for his one-party-ruled government, arguing: "In a word, we must awaken the National Consciousness. ..But the government cannot and must not do it all. It must be helped by the party. ..Our party must be the consciousness of the masses".

Ghana

In the same vein as Senghor, socialist leader

Kwame Nkrumah Francis Kwame Nkrumah (, 21 September 1909 – 27 April 1972) was a Ghanaian politician, political theorist, and revolutionary. He served as Prime Minister of the Gold Coast (British colony), Gold Coast from 1952 until 1957, when it gained ...

sought to advance this one-party, nationalized form of socialist obedience. Nkrumah stressed the importance of government-owned property and resources. He maintained that "production for private profit deprives a large section of the people of the goods and services produced", advocating public ownership to fit the "people's needs". To accomplish this, Nkrumah emphasized the importance of discipline and obedience towards the single socialist party. He argued that if people submitted and accepted the singular party's program, political independence would be possible. By 1965, his one-party rule had produced an Assembly entirely made up of his own party members. Nkrumah saw law as a malleable weapon of political power, not as a product of a complex system of political institutions. Ghanaian power structures were dominated and controlled by his hand, but elite landowners questioned the legitimacy of Nkrumah's power. Those elites were only afforded one choice, namely to align with their government if they wanted access to the state. Gradually, those who were not granted or did not desire entrance into the party created regions blocs. The Asante emerged as a regional force capable political sway. With the power to set the agenda, the authoritarian party often clashed with these emerging regional groups, ultimately undermining the one-party system.

Tanzania

Julius Nyerere Julius Kambarage Nyerere (; 13 April 1922 – 14 October 1999) was a Tanzanian politician, anti-colonial activist, and political theorist. He governed Tanganyika (1961–1964), Tanganyika as prime minister from 1961 to 1962 and then as presid ...

attempted to socialist reform for

Tanzania Tanzania, officially the United Republic of Tanzania, is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It is bordered by Uganda to the northwest; Kenya to the northeast; the Indian Ocean to the east; Mozambique and Malawi to t ...

following those in

Ghana Ghana, officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It is situated along the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and shares borders with Côte d’Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, and Togo to t ...

and

Senegal Senegal, officially the Republic of Senegal, is the westernmost country in West Africa, situated on the Atlantic Ocean coastline. It borders Mauritania to Mauritania–Senegal border, the north, Mali to Mali–Senegal border, the east, Guinea t ...

. The tenets of his initiatives were to promote the Tanzanian economy; secure state control over development; create a sole political party called the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) which would be under his control; and share the benefits of all gathered income. The system—called ujaama—became a tool for nationalization of the Tanzanian people. In the system, all Tanzanains were encouraged to run for office, with no campaign funding allowed. Speeches in the election would not focus on the national issues, but rather on the quality of the individual, each of whom would be closely controlled by TANU. Structurally, the power was shared along regional boundaries, giving increased policy making power and resource allocation to these regions. Local institutions were downplayed, with leadership organizations often facing subversion from higher governmental structures. The first wave of elections in the Tanzanian general election produced a 100% voting rate for TANU officials.

Latin America

Socialism of the 21st century is an interpretation of socialist principles first advocated by German sociologist and political analyst Heinz Dieterich and taken up by a number of

leaders. Dieterich argued in 1996 that both free-market industrial capitalism and 20th-century authoritarian socialism have failed to solve urgent problems of humanity like poverty,

hunger In politics, humanitarian aid, and the social sciences, hunger is defined as a condition in which a person does not have the physical or financial capability to eat sufficient food to meet basic nutritional needs for a sustained period. In t ...

, exploitation, economic oppression,

sexism Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but primarily affects women and girls. It has been linked to gender roles and stereotypes, and may include the belief that one sex or gender is int ...

racism Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one Race (human categorization), race or ethnicity over another. It may also me ...

, the destruction of

natural resource Natural resources are resources that are drawn from nature and used with few modifications. This includes the sources of valued characteristics such as commercial and industrial use, aesthetic value, scientific interest, and cultural value. ...

s and the absence of a truly

participatory democracy Participatory democracy, participant democracy, participative democracy, or semi-direct democracy is a form of government in which Citizenship, citizens participate individually and directly in political decisions and policies that affect their ...

.Dieterich, Heinz. ''Socialism of the 21st Century''. While having democratic socialist elements, it primarily resembles Marxist revisionism. Leaders who have advocated for this form of socialism include Hugo Chávez of

Venezuela Venezuela, officially the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, is a country on the northern coast of South America, consisting of a continental landmass and many Federal Dependencies of Venezuela, islands and islets in the Caribbean Sea. It com ...

, Néstor Kirchner of

Argentina Argentina, officially the Argentine Republic, is a country in the southern half of South America. It covers an area of , making it the List of South American countries by area, second-largest country in South America after Brazil, the fourt ...

Rafael Correa Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado (; born 6 April 1963) is an Ecuadorian politician and economist who served as the 45th president of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017. The leader of the PAIS Alliance political movement from its foundation until 2017, Corr ...

Ecuador Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. It also includes the Galápagos Province which contain ...

, Evo Morales of

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

and

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (; born Luiz Inácio da Silva; 27 October 1945), known Mononym, mononymously as Lula, is a Brazilian politician, trade unionist and former metalworker who has served as the 39th president of Brazil since 2023. A mem ...

Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...

. Because of the local unique historical conditions, it is often contrasted with previous applications of socialism in other countries, with a major difference being the effort towards a more decentralised and participatory planning process. Critics claim that this form of socialism in Latin America acts as a façade for authoritarianism. The charisma of figures like Hugo Chávez and mottoes such as "Country, Socialism, or Death!" have drawn comparisons to the Latin American dictators and ''

caudillo A ''caudillo'' ( , ; , from Latin language, Latin , diminutive of ''caput'' "head") is a type of Personalist dictatorship, personalist leader wielding military and political power. There is no precise English translation for the term, though it ...

s'' of the past. According to

Steven Levitsky Steven Robert Levitsky (born January 17, 1968) is an American political scientist and professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow for democracy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a senior fellow at the Kette ...

, only under "the dictatorships of the past ..were presidents reelected for life", with Levitsky further stating that while Latin America experienced democracy, citizens opposed "indefinite reelection, because of the dictatorships of the past". Levitsky then noted how in Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela "reelection is associated with the same problems of 100 years ago". In 2014, ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' also argued that "Bolivia's Evo Morales, David Ortega of Nicaragua and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez ..used the ballot box to weaken or eliminate term limits". The sustainability and stability of economic reforms associated with governments adhering to such socialism have also been questioned. Latin American countries have primarily financed their social programs with extractive exports like petroleum, natural gas and minerals, creating a dependency that some economists claim has caused inflation and slowed growth. While some critics say the crisis is caused by socialism or the country's socialist policies, its policies have been described as populist or "hyper-populist" and the crisis has more to do with authoritarianism as well as anti-democratic governance, corruption and mismanagement of the economy. According to analysts and critics alike, the Bolivarian government has used those populist policies in order to maintain political power. Although socialists have welcomed a socialism of the 21st century, they have been skeptical of Latin America's examples and criticized their authoritarian qualities and occasional cults of personality. While citing their progressive role, they argue that the appropriate label for these governments is ''populism'' rather than ''socialism''. Chávez and Maduro have been compared to Lenin and Stalin, respectively, including Chávez and Lenin's early deaths and the economic problems after their deaths. Maduro, who has joked about his similar appearance and walrus moustache with Stalin, argued he is not a new Stalin and claimed to be merely following Chávez. Nonetheless, Maduro has been variously described by newspapers such as the ''

New Statesman ''The New Statesman'' (known from 1931 to 1964 as the ''New Statesman and Nation'') is a British political and cultural news magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first c ...

'' and ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British Newspaper#Daily, daily Newspaper#National, national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its modern name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its si ...

'' as the "Stalin of the Caribbean" and the "tropical Stalin", respectively. According to '' The Daily Beast'', Maduro has embraced the "tropical Stalin" moniker. According to Joshua Kurlantzick, Latin American countries such as Nicaragua and Venezuela have been following the Chinese model and are described as authoritarian capitalist regimes.

Venezuela

Venezuela under Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution moved toward authoritarian socialism. Chávez campaigned for a constituent assembly and to draft a new constitution, which was approved in 1999. The 1999 Venezuelan constitution eliminated much of Venezuela's checks and balances, Chávez's government controlled every branch of the Venezuelan government for over 15 years after it passed until the 2015 parliamentary election. The 1999 constitution also brought the military closer to political power, allowing military officers the right to vote, eliminating its apolitical nature, and transferring the function of military promotions of high officers to the president, which in the 1961 constitution was the responsibility of the

Senate A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior (Latin: ''senex'' meaning "the el ...

. By January 2007, after being reelected in the 2006 presidential election and swearing in as president, Chávez began openly proclaiming the ideology of socialism of the 21st century. The Bolivarian government used "centralized decision-making and a top-down approach to policy formation, the erosion of vertical power-sharing and concentration of power in the presidency, the progressive deinstitutionalization at all levels, and an increasingly paternalist relationship between state and society" in order to hasten changes in Venezuela. In practice, Chávez's administration proposed and enacted populist economic policies. Using record-high oil revenues of the 2000s, his government nationalized key industries, created communal councils and implemented social programs known as the Bolivarian missions to expand access to food, housing, healthcare and education. Venezuela received high oil profits in the mid-2000s, resulting in improvements in areas such as poverty, literacy, income equality and quality of life occurring primarily between 2003 and 2007. However, those gains started to reverse after 2012 and it has been argued that government policies did not address structural inequalities. On 2 June 2010, Chávez declared an economic war due to shortages in Venezuela, beginning the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela. By the end of Chávez's presidency in the early 2010s, economic actions performed by his government during the preceding decade such as

deficit spending Within the budgetary process, deficit spending is the amount by which spending exceeds revenue over a particular period of time, also called simply deficit, or budget deficit, the opposite of budget surplus. The term may be applied to the budg ...

and price controls proved to be unsustainable, with the

economy of Venezuela The economy of Venezuela is based primarily on petroleum, as the country holds the largest crude oil supply in the world. Venezuela was historically among the wealthiest economies in South America, particularly from the 1950s to 1980s. During ...

faltering while poverty,

inflation In economics, inflation is an increase in the average price of goods and services in terms of money. This increase is measured using a price index, typically a consumer price index (CPI). When the general price level rises, each unit of curre ...

and

shortage In economics, a shortage or excess demand is a situation in which the demand for a product or service exceeds its supply in a market. It is the opposite of an excess supply ( surplus). Definitions In a perfect market (one that matches ...

s increased. His use of enabling acts and his government's use of Bolivarian propaganda were also controversial. On the socialist development in Venezuela, Chávez argued with the second government plan (') that "socialism has just begun to implant its internal dynamism among us" whilst acknowledging that "the socio-economic formation that still prevails in Venezuela is capitalist and rentier". This same thesis is defended by Maduro. In 2015, ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British newspaper published weekly in printed magazine format and daily on Electronic publishing, digital platforms. It publishes stories on topics that include economics, business, geopolitics, technology and culture. M ...

'' argued that the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela—now under Nicolás Maduro after Chávez's death in 2013—was devolving from authoritarianism to dictatorship as opposition politicians were jailed for plotting to undermine the government, violence was widespread and independent media shut down. Chávez and Maduro administrations' economic policies led to shortages, a high inflation rate and a dysfunctional economy. The government has attributed Venezuela's economic problems to the decline in oil prices, sanctions imposed by the United States and economic sabotage by the opposition. Western media coverage of Chávez and other Latin American leaders from the 21st-century socialist movement has been criticized as unfair by their supporters and left-leaning media critics. Broadly, '' chavismo'' policies include nationalization,

social welfare Welfare spending is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specifically to social insurance p ...

programs and opposition to neoliberalism, particularly the policies of the

International Monetary Fund The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution funded by 191 member countries, with headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is regarded as the global lender of las ...

and the

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and Grant (money), grants to the governments of Least developed countries, low- and Developing country, middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development ...

. According to Chávez, Venezuelan socialism accepts

private property Private property is a legal designation for the ownership of property by non-governmental Capacity (law), legal entities. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which is owned by a state entity, and from Collective ownership ...

, but this socialism is a form of social democracy that seeks to promote social property. In January 2007, Chávez proposed to build the communal state, whose main idea is to build self-government institutions like communal councils, communes and communal cities. While Chávez remained relatively popular throughout his time in office, Maduro suffered unpopularity with the deterioration of the economy during his tenure and there was a decline of self-identified ''chavistas''. Despite its socialist rhetoric, ''chavismo'' has been frequently described as being state capitalist by critics. Critics frequently point towards Venezuela's large private sector. In 2009, roughly 70% of Venezuela's

gross domestic product Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the total market value of all the final goods and services produced and rendered in a specific time period by a country or countries. GDP is often used to measure the economic performanc ...

was created by the private sector. According to Asa Cusack, an expert on Latin America and frequent contributor to

mainstream media In journalism, mainstream media (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large Mass media, mass news media that influence many people and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought.Noam Chomsky, Choms ...

, Venezuela's economy remained "market-based and private-sector dominated" throughout Chávez's time in office. Although "the social economy and the public sector were heavily promoted", for example through nationalization, "the private sector was expected to remain dominant, and it did. A centrally planned socialist economy like Cuba's was neither the aim nor the reality". ''Chavismo'' has been widely discussed in the media. According to Kirk A. Hawkins, scholars are generally divided into two camps, namely a liberal-democratic one that sees ''chavismo'' as an instance of

democratic backsliding Democratic backsliding or autocratization is a process of regime change toward autocracy in which the exercise of political power becomes more arbitrary and repressive. The process typically restricts the space for public contest and politi ...

and a radical-democratic one that upholds ''chavismo'' as the fulfillment of its aspirations for participatory democracy. Hawkins argues that the most important division between these two groups is neither methodological nor theoretical, but ideological. It is a division over basic normative views of democracy, i.e.

liberalism Liberalism is a Political philosophy, political and moral philosophy based on the Individual rights, rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. ...

versus radicalism. Scholars in the first camp tended to adhere to a classical liberal ideology that valued procedural democracy (competitive elections, widespread participation defined primarily in terms of voting and

civil liberties Civil liberties are guarantees and freedoms that governments commit not to abridge, either by constitution, legislation, or judicial interpretation, without due process. Though the scope of the term differs between countries, civil liberties of ...

) as the political means best suited to achieving human welfare. They saw ''chavismo'' in a mostly negative light as a case of democratic backsliding or even competitive authoritarianism or electoral authoritarian regime. On the other hand, scholars in the second camp generally adhered to a classical socialist ideology that mistrusted market institutions in either the state or the economy. Although accepting the importance of liberal-democratic institutions, they saw procedural democracy as insufficient to ensure political inclusion and emphasized participatory forms of democracy and collective worker ownership in the economy.

Criticism

Left-wing

Left-wing critics argue that it is a form of state capitalism that followed

anti-imperialism Anti-imperialism in political science and international relations is opposition to imperialism or neocolonialism. Anti-imperialist sentiment typically manifests as a political principle in independence struggles against intervention or influen ...

populism Populism is a essentially contested concept, contested concept used to refer to a variety of political stances that emphasize the idea of the "common people" and often position this group in opposition to a perceived elite. It is frequently a ...

nationalism Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Theory, I ...

and social democracy. Rather than representing a socialist planned economy, the Soviet model has been described in practice as either a form of state capitalism or a non-planned, command economy. The fidelity of those varied socialist revolutionaries, leaders and parties to the work of Karl Marx and that of other socialist thinkers is highly contested and has been rejected by many Marxists and other socialists alike. Some academics, scholars and socialists have criticized the linking of all leftist and socialist ideals to the excesses of authoritarian socialism.

Anarchism and Marxism

Many democratic and libertarian socialists, including anarchists, mutualists and syndicalists, deride it as state socialism for its support of a workers' state instead of abolishing the bourgeois state apparatus outright. They use the term in contrast with their own form of socialism which involves either

collective ownership Collective ownership is the ownership of private property by all members of a group. The breadth or narrowness of the group can range from a whole society to a set of coworkers in a particular enterprise (such as one collective farm). In the la ...

(in the form of

worker cooperative A worker cooperative is a cooperative owned and Workers' self-management, self-managed by its workers. This control may mean a Company, firm where every worker-owner participates in decision-making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one ...

s) or

common ownership Common ownership refers to holding the assets of an organization, enterprise, or community indivisibly rather than in the names of the individual members or groups of members as common property. Forms of common ownership exist in every economi ...

of the

means of production In political philosophy, the means of production refers to the generally necessary assets and resources that enable a society to engage in production. While the exact resources encompassed in the term may vary, it is widely agreed to include the ...

without central planning by the state. Those libertarian socialists believe there is no need for a state in a socialist system because there would be no class to suppress and no need for an institution based on coercion and regard the state being a remnant of capitalism. They hold that statism is antithetical to true socialism, the goal of which is the eyes of libertarian socialists such as

William Morris William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was an English textile designer, poet, artist, writer, and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement. He was a major contributor to the revival of traditiona ...

, who wrote as follows in a ''Commonweal'' article: "State Socialism? — I don't agree with it; in fact I think the two words contradict one another, and that it is the business of Socialism to destroy the State and put Free Society in its place". Classical and orthodox Marxists also view the term as an oxymoron, arguing that while an association for managing production and economic affairs would exist in socialism, it would no longer be a state in the Marxist definition which is based on domination by one class. Preceding the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, many socialist groups—including reformists, orthodox Marxist currents such as

council communism Council communism or councilism is a current of communism, communist thought that emerged in the 1920s. Inspired by the German Revolution of 1918–1919, November Revolution, council communism was opposed to state socialism and advocated wor ...

and the Mensheviks as well as anarchists and other libertarian socialists—criticized the idea of using the state to conduct planning and nationalization of the means of production as a way to establish socialism. Lenin himself acknowledged his policies as state capitalism, defending them from left-wing criticism, but arguing that they were necessary for the future development of socialism and not socialist in themselves. American Marxist Raya Dunayevskaya dismissed it as a type of state capitalism because state ownership of the means of production is a form of state capitalism; the dictatorship of the proletariat is a form of democracy and single-party rule is undemocratic; and Marxism–Leninism is neither

Marxism Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...

nor Leninism, but rather a composite ideology which socialist leaders such as Joseph Stalin used to expediently determine what is communism and what is not communism among the Eastern Bloc countries.

Left communism

Critical of the economy and government of socialist states, left communists such as the Italian Amadeo Bordiga argued that Marxism–Leninism was a form of political opportunism which preserved rather than destroyed capitalism because of the claim that the exchange of commodities would occur under

; the use of popular front organisations by the

Communist International The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern and also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. Emerging from the collapse of the Second Internationa ...

; and that a political vanguard organised by organic centralism was more effective than a vanguard organised by democratic centralism. For Bordiga and those left communists supporting his conception of Stalinism, Joseph Stalin and later Mao Zedong,

Ho Chi Minh (born ; 19 May 1890 – 2 September 1969), colloquially known as Uncle Ho () among other aliases and sobriquets, was a Vietnamese revolutionary and politician who served as the founder and first President of Vietnam, president of the ...

and other anti-imperialist revolutionaries were great Romantic revolutionaries, i.e. bourgeois revolutionaries. According to this view, the Stalinist regimes that came into existence after 1945 were extending the bourgeois nature of prior revolutions that degenerated as all had in common a policy of expropriation and agrarian and productive development which those left communist considered negations of previous conditions and not the genuine construction of socialism. While the Russian Revolution was a

proletarian revolution A proletarian revolution or proletariat revolution is a social revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie and change the previous political system. Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialist ...

, it degenerated into a bourgeois revolution and represented the French Revolution of the Eastern and

Third World The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. The United States, Canada, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Southern Cone, NATO, Western European countries and oth ...

, with socialism taking liberalism's place. Although most Marxist–Leninists distinguish between communism and socialism, Bordiga, who did consider himself a

Leninist Leninism (, ) is a political ideology developed by Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that proposes the establishment of the Dictatorship of the proletariat#Vladimir Lenin, dictatorship of the proletariat led by a revolutionary Vangu ...

and has been described as being "more Leninist than Lenin", did not distinguish between the two in the same way Marxist–Leninists do. Both Lenin and Bordiga did not see socialism as a separate mode of production from communism, but rather just as how communism looks as it emerges from capitalism before it has "developed on its own foundations". This is coherent with Marx and Engels, who used the terms ''communism'' and ''socialism'' interchangeably. Like Lenin, Bordiga used ''socialism'' to mean what Marx called the " lower-stage of communism". For Bordiga, both stages of communist or socialist society—with stages referring to historical materialism—were characterized by the gradual absence of money, the market and so on, the difference between them being that earlier in the first stage a system of rationing would be used to allocate goods to people while in communism this could be abandoned in favour of full free access. This view distinguished Bordiga from Marxist–Leninists, who tended and still tend to telescope the first two stages and so have money and the other exchange categories surviving into socialism, but Bordiga would have none of this. For him, no society in which money, buying and selling and the rest survived could be regarded as either socialist or communist—these exchange categories would die out before the socialist rather than the communist stage was reached. Stalin first made the claim that the Soviet Union had reached the lower stage of communism and argued that the law of value still operated within a socialist economy. Other left communists such as the councilists explicitly reject the Leninist vanguard party and the organic centralism promoted by Bordigists. Otto Rühle saw the Soviet Union as a form of state capitalism that had much in common with the state-centred capitalism of the West as well as fascism. While Rühle saw the Leninist vanguardist party as an appropriate form for the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy, it was ultimately an inappropriate form for a proletarian revolution. For Rühle and others, no matter what the actual intentions of the

Bolsheviks The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...

, what they actually succeeded in bringing about was much more like the bourgeois revolutions of Europe than a proletarian revolution.

Libertarian communism and socialism

A variety of non-state, libertarian communist and socialist positions reject the concept of a socialist state altogether, believing that the modern state is a byproduct of capitalism and cannot be used for the establishment of a socialist system. They reason that a socialist state is antithetical to socialism and that socialism will emerge spontaneously from the

grassroots A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or continent movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from volunteers at the local level to imp ...

level in an evolutionary manner, developing its own unique political and economic institutions for a highly organized

stateless society A stateless society is a society that is not governed by a state. In stateless societies, there is little concentration of authority. Most positions of authority that do exist are very limited in power, and they are generally not perman ...

. Libertarian communists, including anarchists, councilists, leftists and Marxists, also reject the concept of a socialist state for being antithetical to socialism, but they believe that socialism and communism can only be established through

revolution In political science, a revolution (, 'a turn around') is a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society's class, state, ethnic or religious structures. According to sociologist Jack Goldstone, all revolutions contain "a common set of elements ...

and dissolving the existence of the state. Within the socialist movement, there is criticism towards the use of the term ''socialist state'' in relation to countries such as China and previously of Soviet Union and Eastern and Central European states before what some term the "collapse of Stalinism" in 1989. Anti-authoritarian communists and socialists such as anarchists, other democratic and libertarian socialists as well as revolutionary syndicalists and left communistsCommunist Workers Organisation (2000)
"Trotsky, Trotskyism, Trotskyists: From Revolution to Social Democracy""Trotsky and the Origins of Trotskyism"
"The Nature of the USSR". Internationalist Communist Tendency. Retrieved 22 June 2020. claim that the so-called socialist states cannot be called socialist because they actually presided over state capitalist or non-planned administrative economies. Those socialists who oppose any system of state control whatsoever believe in a more decentralized approach which puts the means of production directly into the hands of the workers rather than indirectly through state bureaucracies which they claim represent a new elite or class. This leads them to consider state socialism a form of state capitalism (an economy based on centralized management, capital accumulation and wage labor, but with the state owning the means of production) which Engels and other Bolshevik leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin stated would be the final form of capitalism rather than socialism. Similarly, others pointed out that nationalisation and state ownership have nothing to do with socialism by itself, having been historically carried out for various different purposes under a wide variety of different political and economic systems.

Trotskyism

Some Trotskyists following on from Tony Cliff deny that it is socialism, calling it state capitalism. Other Trotskyists agree that these states could not be described as socialist, but they deny that those states were capitalist, supporting Leon Trotsky's analysis of pre-restoration Soviet Union as a workers' state that had degenerated into a bureaucratic dictatorship which rested on a largely nationalized industry run according to a plan of production. and claimed that the former Stalinist states of Central and Eastern Europe were deformed workers' states based on the same relations of production as the Soviet Union. Trotsky believed that regardless of their intellectual capacity, central planners operate without the input and participation of the millions of people who participate in the economy that can understand and respond to local conditions and changes in the economy. In advocating a decentralised planned socialist economy, Trotsky and some of his followers have criticized central state planning as being unable to effectively coordinate all economic activity. Some Trotskyists have emphasised Trotsky's revolutionary-democratic socialism and Trotskyists such as Hal Draper described it as such. Those third camp revolutionary-democratic Trotskyists and socialists supported a socialist political revolution that would establish or re-establish socialist democracy in deformed or degenerated workers' states. Some such as Draper also compared social democracy and

Stalinism Stalinism (, ) is the Totalitarianism, totalitarian means of governing and Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953), 1927 to 1953 by dictator Jose ...

as two forms of socialism from above.

Right-wing

Right-wing criticism is mainly related to communist party rule as well as

anti-communism Anti-communism is Political movement, political and Ideology, ideological opposition to communism, communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global ...

, anti-Marxism and anti-socialism. Another criticism is that of the economic calculation problem as first outlined by Austrian School economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, followed by the socialist calculation debate. Socialist states and state socialism are often conflated to and referred to by detractors simply as ''socialism''. Austrian School economists such as Mises and Hayek continually used ''socialism'' as a synonym for authoritarian socialism and its command economy. The attributive ''state'' is usually added by socialists with a non-state-based method for achieving socialism to criticize state socialism. This is especially notable in the United States, where ''socialism'' is a pejorative term used to refer to either authoritarian socialist states, any state or tax-funded industry, program and service, or the degree of government and

economic interventionism A market intervention is a policy or measure that modifies or interferes with a market, typically done in the form of state action, but also by philanthropic and political-action groups. Market interventions can be done for a number of reas ...

by the state. In their broader critique of socialism, right-wing commentators have emphasised the lack of democracy in socialist states that are considered to be authoritarian or undemocratic, arguing that democracy and socialism are incompatible. Chicago School economist Milton Friedman argued that a "society which is socialist cannot also be democratic" in the sense of "guaranteeing individual freedom". Sociologist Robert Nisbet, a philosophical conservative who began his career as a leftist, argued in 1978 that there is "not a single free socialism to be found anywhere in the world". For anti-communist academic Richard Pipes, the tendency to "merge political and economic power" is "implicit in socialism" and authoritarianism is "virtually inevitable". According to the Hungarian-born political sociologist and communist-studies scholar Paul Hollander, a critic of communism and left-wing politics in general,

egalitarianism Egalitarianism (; also equalitarianism) is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds on the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all hum ...

was one of the features of authoritarian socialist states that was so attractive to Western intellectuals that they quietly justified their authoritarianism and the murder of millions of capitalists, landowners and supposedly wealthy kulaks in order to achieve this equality.

Notes

References

Bibliography

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