Currently, these countries include Algeria,[5] Bangladesh,[6] Guyana,[7] India,[8] Nepal,[9] Nicaragua,[10] Sri Lanka[11] and Tanzania.
Economically, this involves the development of a state capitalist economy with state-directed capital accumulation with the long-term goal of building up the country's productive forces while simultaneously promoting world communism.
The political systems of these Marxist–Leninist socialist states revolved around the central role of the party which holds ultimate authority.
[28] During the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961, Nikita Khrushchev announced the completion of socialist construction and declared the optimistic goal of achieving communism in twenty years.
Originally regarded as a variant of Marxism–Leninism, Juche was declared to be fully distinct by his son and successor, Kim Jong Il, and was adopted as the official state ideology in the 1972 constitution of North Korea.
Further developed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Juche made significant ideological breaks with Marxism–Leninism, and in the country's 1992 constitution, all references to Marxism–Leninism and communism were removed from state and party materials.
[32] Scholars are divided over the classification of the modern-day Juche, with some considering it to be a departure from Marxist–Leninist principles,[33] given the primacy of family lineage and nationalism over class struggle, and where social distinction and hierarchy are promoted over classless society and egalitarianism,[34] and others considering it to still be a form of Marxism–Leninism, combined with nationalism and idolization, deification, and mystification of the Kim family.
In the case of many Middle Eastern states, the term socialism was often used in reference to an Arab socialist/nationalist philosophy adopted by specific regimes, such as that of Gamal Abdel Nasser and that of the various Ba'ath parties.
In addition, countries such as Belarus, Colombia, France, Russia, and Spain use the varied term social state, leaving a more ambiguous meaning.
[23][24][25][26] In 1956, leading British Labour Party politician and author Anthony Crosland claimed that capitalism had been abolished in Britain, although others such as Welshman Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health in the first post-war Labour government and the architect of the National Health Service, disputed the claim that Britain was a socialist state.
[52]Although, as in the rest of Europe, the laws of capitalism still operated fully and private enterprise dominated the economy,[53] some political commentators claimed that during the post-war period, when socialist parties were in power, countries such as Britain and France were democratic socialist states and the same is now applied to the Nordic countries and the Nordic model.
[54][55] Nevertheless, public ownership in France and the United Kingdom during the height of nationalization in the 1960s and 1970s never accounted for more than 15–20% of capital formation, further dropping to 8% in the 1980s and below 5% in the 1990s after the rise of neoliberalism.
Despite this, the PAP still claimed to be a socialist party, pointing out its regulation of the private sector, state intervention in the economy, and social policies as evidence of this.
[56] The Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew also stated that he has been influenced by the democratic socialist British Labour Party.
[58][59][60][61][62] Additional people's republics emerged following the Allied victory in World War II, mainly within the Eastern Bloc.
[76][77] Influenced by the pre-Marxist utopian-socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Friedrich Engels theorized that the nature of the state would change during the transition to socialism.
[81][82] With the fall of the 1871 Paris Commune, Marx cautiously argued in The Civil War in France that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.
The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism".
Engels states that in order to avoid overthrow once having conquered power, the working class "must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment".
In this view, only through revolution can a socialist state be established as written in The Communist Manifesto: In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
[88]Other historic reformist or gradualist movements within socialism, as opposed to revolutionary approaches, include Fabian socialist and Menshevik groupings.
According to Lenin's April Theses, the goal of the revolution and vanguard party is not the introduction of socialism (it could only be established on a worldwide scale), but to bring production and the state under the control of the soviets of workers' deputies.
Following the October Revolution in Russia, the Bolsheviks consolidated their power and sought to control and direct the social and economic affairs of the state and broader Russian society to safeguard against counterrevolutionary insurrection, foreign invasion, and to promote socialist consciousness among the Russian population while simultaneously promoting economic development.
With the failure of the worldwide revolution, or at least European revolution, envisaged by Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Russian Civil War and finally, Lenin's death, war measures that were deemed to be temporary, such as forced requisition of food and the lack of democratic control, became permanent and a tool to boost Joseph Stalin's power, leading to the emergence of Marxism–Leninism and Stalinism, as well as the notion that socialism can be created and exist in a single state with theory of socialism in one country.
Lenin argued that as socialism is replaced by communism, the state would "wither away"[89] as strong centralized control progressively reduces as local communities gain more empowerment.
[90] In this way, Lenin was thereby proposing a classically dynamic view of progressive social structure which, during his own short period of governance, emerged as a defensive and preliminary bureaucratic centralist stage.
— 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".
Preceding the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, many socialist groups—including reformists, orthodox Marxist currents such as council communism, 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.
[96] Stalin 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.
[121][122] On seeing the Soviet Union's growing coercive power, Lenin was quoted as saying that Russia had reverted to "a bourgeois tsarist machine [...] barely varnished with socialism".