Sweden, Portugal, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Revolutionary Catalonia, and Norway.
All have been described as “socialist” at different times and by different people.
And this causes a lot of problems for us when we’re trying to understand what the term
“socialism” means.
The word has about twenty different meanings, depending on who you’re talking to – generally
loosely connected to the idea of “worker ownership of the means of production”.
But it’s important to state outright from the start that there is no one single perfect
definition that’s universally accepted – it’s always been a contested term.
Following on from this, I can’t claim to speak on behalf of social democrats, anarchists,
or any kind of right-winger, but what I can do is provide a Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
understanding of it So, let’s find out: what is it from our
perspective?
Welcome to Socialism 101: a series designed to help educate people with no prior knowledge
on the basics of socialism and communism from an explicitly Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
perspective with short and easily-digestible videos.
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First and foremost, we view socialism as a stage of historical development.
Specifically, the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.
Earlier, in the writings of Marx, what we’re now calling socialism would’ve been referred
to as “lower-stage communism” while what we’ve been referring to as communism would’ve
been “higher-stage communism”.
It’s really from Lenin onwards that we arrive at this tidier separation of the historical
stages into capitalism, then socialism, then communism.
Now, as socialism is a transitional stage, it’s a bit unstable and prone to backsliding
into capitalism.
In the socialist transition, you’re either continuing the class struggle and moving forward
to communism (which we call the socialist road), or you’re abandoning the class struggle
and backsliding into capitalism (the capitalist road).
Importantly, you may reach a stage where you find that you’ve eliminated classes on paper
within your country – everyone is now legally working-class or proletarian – but what
about the illegal capitalists on the black market?
What about those who’ve joined your leading communist party but have lingering capitalist
ambitions and are working to restore capitalism?
What about the bourgeoisie in the surrounding capitalist countries that are trying to destabilise
your socialist country?
Well, to combat these, we not only continue the class struggle under socialism, but in
fact intensify it.
And this class struggle continues until classes have been abolished everywhere - all over
the world - when we can finally move to fully communist, stateless, classless, moneyless
society.
As much as we’d love to just hit the big red global communism switch, that process
doesn’t happen overnight, but is more likely to take centuries to fully complete.
Now let’s dial it back a bit and take a look at the main features of socialism from
the ML and MLM perspective.
We can loosely group these features under three main categories: 1) The economic aspect;
2) the political aspect, and; 3) the transformational aspect.
Economically, socialist countries operate under the instruction, “From each according
to their ability, to each according to their work.”
You see the transformation from a capitalist society led by the anarchy of the market – with
its boom-and-bust cycles – into a rationally planned, centralised economy.
This of course eliminates problems like wasteful overproduction, as we move towards primarily
producing for Use, rather than production for profit.
We see the transformation from private ownership of the mean of production to public (or state)
ownership – including nationalisations and collectivisations – under which you gradually
see more direct worker control over the means of production develop over time.
You also of course have co-operative ownership.
And the trajectory for all of these is to progressively transition to the full communal
ownership of communism.
However - and this is important – this can only help to advance us closer to a stateless,
classless, moneyless society when led by the political power of the working class.
Which brings us to the second category; the political aspect.
Under capitalism, we live under the Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie.
This means that the capitalists are in charge – that they’re the ruling class – whether
that’s under a liberal democracy, or under outright fascism.
Socialist societies are politically led by the working-class and its genuine representatives.
This is called the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Yeah, I know – we need a less scary-sounding name for it.
This is why you’ll usually hear us saying something like “working-class governance”
instead these days.
The governing body must at all times act in the genuine interests of the working class.
How do we ensure that the leading communist party doesn’t just become a group of power-hungry
elitists disconnected from the masses, not representing the people?
Easy, the leading party stays firmly connected to the masses through the Mass Line organisational
method.
And if the leading party steps out of line, taking the people down a reactionary path,
then the empowered masses rise up against the party itself as part of the Cultural Revolution
that sets it back on the revolutionary communist path.
Alright, maybe we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here.
Links below for more on those.
Finally, the third category is the transformational aspect.
Socialism is the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.
At all times, the society must be progressing from capitalism towards a stateless, classless,
moneyless society.
This includes transformation of the relations of production by abolishing the capitalist
class; advancing towards the full abolition of the commodity form – winding down production
for Exchange and phasing out the capitalist Law of Value; progressively abolishing markets;
eliminating wage-labour; abolishing private property, moving production to public or co-operative
property of the dictatorship of the proletariat and eventually fully communal property as
the capitalist class is abolished; and maintaining the socialist road to communism through cultural
revolution, or, rather, multiple cultural revolutions.
Some, including Marx himself, also talk about the need for labour vouchers rather than money
as we currently understand it in this transformational period, so as to prevent circulation, that
M-C-M capitalist circuit discussed in a previous video, the free purchase of labour power and
the means of production, etc.
When assessing whether or not a country is socialist, we have to consider all three of
these aspects, the economic, the political, and the transformational.
If it doesn’t satisfy all three, we don’t consider it socialist.
Even societies under the political leadership of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat that
are actively building and transforming themselves towards socialism aren’t necessarily socialist
until they’ve also satisfied the economic aspect.
See, for example, the New Economic Policy (or NEP) period of the USSR after the Bolshevik
Revolution, which was State Capitalist due to its economic structure, before the USSR
became actually socialist a number of years later.
Likewise, there was a State Capitalist period in China after the revolution which declared
the People’s Republic of China in 1949 before it became properly socialist a number of years
later.
Today we’ve looked at the Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist understanding
of socialism.
It’s comprised of three equally important and often overlapping aspects, the economic,
the political, and the transformational.
Without satisfying all three, we’re unable to accurately describe a society as socialist
by this Marxist understanding.
That being said, there are certain cases which are extremely clear-cut examples of socialism,
like the post-NEP USSR, while there are also many other societies where their legitimacy
as genuinely socialist according to these three categories is still fiercely debated
among MLs and MLMs.
Next up, we’ll be diving back into the relations of production as we finally flesh out the
answer to the question, “What is Class?”
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