Product Code Database
Real socialism, better known as actually existing socialism, also developed socialism, was an ideological catchphrase popularized during the Leonid Brezhnev era in the Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union.
The term referred to the Soviet-type economic planning implemented by the Eastern Bloc at that particular time. From the 1960s onward, such as Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia began to argue that their policies represented what was realistically feasible given their level of productivity.
The concept of real socialism alluded to a highly developed socialist system in the future. The actual party claims of nomenclatory socialism began to acquire not only negative, but also sarcastic meanings. In later years and especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the term began to be remembered as only one thing, i.e. as a reference for Soviet socialism.
The term 'actually existing socialism’ is not (despite the quotation marks) a sarcasm; in fact, while obviously containing an implicit irony, the phrase itself was coined by Soviet Marxist-Leninists and was widely used by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its supporters in polemics with those who postulated a model of socialism significantly different from the system developed in the Soviet Union. Its point was that various alternatives to the Soviet-derived model existed only in the minds of their advocates, while 'actual socialism' existed in the real world.
The term was also taken up by some dissidents, such as Rudolf Bahro, who used it in a more critical way.
|
|
