Socialist Systems

Socialist systems are those regimes based on the economic and political theory of socialism, which advocates public ownership and [Page 2457]cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources. These include states described as socialist, communist, or Marxist, all of which claim to be based on efforts to achieve social justice and equality. The best term for these regimes may be state socialism, which has gained wide currency in the political science literature. In response to the crisis and collapse of state socialism at the end of the 1980s, many analysts have emphasized that the universalistic goals of socialism were not thereby invalidated, since many other currents of socialism, for instance, social democracy, have been vigorously developing around the world.

According to the classical Marxist approach, socialism is only the first stage of the postcapitalist society, followed by communism as a second stage in which people receive “according to their needs.” Marxist theory was elaborated for, and based on, the most developed countries of the world. Although the state socialist project originated from Marxist theory, it was, however, a deviation from the original theory of Karl Marx. The application of this theory in backward countries, starting with Lenin's Russia, can be considered as turning it to the other extreme—that is, to a revolutionary theory for the poorest countries of the world. This trend reached its peak under Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and, later, was embraced by Fidel Castro of Cuba and by other local leaders in the developing countries. What is more, there have been two basically different paths to state socialism. Along the above-mentioned lines was a series of internal revolutions and subsequent transformations, as in Russia, China, and Cuba, leading to state socialist regimes on different continents. In the second case, there were also some repressive impositions of communist rule on some countries by conquest, as for instance in Poland and Hungary. This second path to state socialism has usually been distinguished from the first, since these state socialist regimes were to a great extent alien in terms of the historical course of the countries concerned.

The following sections briefly describe the history and main features of state socialist systems, the political science models that account for their emergence, and their historical trajectories from their origins, through phases of industrialization and social transformation to their abrupt collapse in response to the global economic and political crises of the 1970s and 1980s.