Socialism [addendum]

Socialism [addendum]

Socialism has seen enormous changes since the above entry was written. Its cachet has gone up and down and, after an all-time low during the early 1990s, is now perhaps going to go up again. The socialist ideal fell on hard times when "actually existing socialism" collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellite states in 1989 and somewhat later in Yugoslavia. The headlong rush of China towards free-market development has further deepened the crisis of contemporary socialism. Only Cuba, North Korea, and perhaps Vietnam and Laos remain as "actually existing socialisms."

There have been similar upheavals in socialist theory. Most Western socialists, including most Marxists, while not being cold warriors, did not regard these "actually existing socialisms" as genuinely socialist but as statist noncapitalist societies that were authoritarian, nondemocratic and excessively bureaucratic regimes parading as paradigms of socialist societies. Instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat (what was supposed to be the mass but democratic governing of the working class by the working class in the interim before "the withering away of the state" and the attaining of a classless society), there were what anarchist socialists (most notably Mikhail Bakunin) called the dictatorship over the proletariat, namely the rule over the proletariat by a small elite calling themselves communists.

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