No, they were governments someone choose to call socialist to give authoritarian state capitalism a good name.

Somewhat more generously Leninism (which they represent, or represent later derivatives of), was an attempt to adapt Marxist Communism (in which “socialism” is the name of a stage of development, and not necessarily in the same sense as “socialism” is used by people who identify it as an ideology of its own) to the conditions that existed in Russia at the time, particularly, the absence of capitalist development and broad proletarian class consciousness. This shortcut was then controversial within the Marxist community, much less the broader socialist community.

Even if one is generous enough to accept Leninism as a valid form of socialism, there is no possible justification for seeing it as representative of socialism in general, more than, say, the broad displacement of the system Marx described as capitalism with a new system shaped largely by socialist critiques of capitalism (sometimes called “mixed economy” or “welfare state”) as the dominant system of the developed West is.

Now, if someone is actually substantively advocating Lenin-/Stalin-/Mao-ism, then, sure, the experience of actual states practicing those systems tend to be relevant. If they are advocating something else, then those experiences are about as relevant as looking to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to assess systems other than Juche that nonetheless are described as “democratic republics”.

The only organized societies (at a state level) that have called themselves “socialist” are Leninist or descendants of Leninism; Leninism was (viewed generously) an attempt to adapt Marxist Communism to bypass the necessary (in Marx’s view) development through mature capitalism on which the socialist society, the next stage in the evolution to the communist end-state. Part of that adaptation is moving the development of a broad-based educated distributed ruling class from a prerequisite to the socialist transition to something which was to be built afterwards, with a narrow educated and ideologically pure vanguard assuming authoritative direction of the movement in the interim.

Modern Western forms of socialism, whether rooted in or identifying as Marxist or not (and many of them are neither) almost never are ideologically rooted in Leninism—for which there is no need, even if it worked well in its motivating case, in the developed world—or its descendants (with the exception that some of the far fringes are Maoist, but they are just a fragment of the fringes) and tend particularly to strongly reject vanguardism and authoritarianism in favor of more robust development of the democratic institutions of liberal democratic states. Western socialism is a continuation of the long arc of change in developed Western economies since Marx first described capitalism, not a recreation of the Leninists rejection of development through capitalism.

Whether Leninism is genuinely a socialism is a matter of fairly heated debate among self-styled socialists, but it is very clearly a very different thing than modern Western socialism, and it'd outcomes have limited, if any, value in assessing the merits of modern Western socialisms.

Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles).

You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants.

The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.

The way I'm reading this is that the problems in Stalin Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, North-Korea, etc. was/is caused by capitalist countries. And while these were "the worst of it", the practical implementations in many other countries wasn't exactly great either. I don't know of a single example where it worked well, and that's not for lack of trying.

I'm not sure if this is what you meant. It would help being a bit more concrete.

This is an incredibly disingenuous view, as though Socialist/Communist states were simply allowed to exist and failed, and weren't targeted very explicitly by every Capitalist state on the planet with everything ranging from economic sanctions to intelligence manipulation and assassinations to actual boots-on-the-ground war, and that doesn't even take into account Capitalism's toll on the global south in general, which is bad enough to cause huge problems by itself.

All those states that failed had problems and many did terrible things too, but to say that Capitalism is required because everything else failed as though Capitalism in many cases wasn't there making sure they failed is intellectually dishonest.

No, it didn't. I mean, the whole point of Leninism is “How do we skip past the requirement identified for Marx to have well-estsablished capitalism with proletarian class consciousness before proceeding to the socialist stage on the route to Communism?” Leninism abandons the essential context for which the Marxist program is designed. (And even then, the program wasn't particularly specific, unless you mean Marx and Engels program for the specific capitalist states of Europe in the mid-19th Century, which Russia was even more distant from then the generalized capitalist states of Marx’s theory.)

> It is dishonest to keep claiming "socialism" is something different than what you get when you follow the procedures to get there.

Marx is not the first or definitive socialist; socialism existed before and is broader than Marxist theories, so even if Russia and other Leninist states were an example of direct application of Marxist process, this would still be an example of mistaking a particular subset for the whole.

Judging Marxism by Leninist examples is like judging Christianity by Protestant Fundamentalism; judging socialism on the same basis is like judging Abrahamic monotheism by the Protestant Fundamentalism.

You are correct that Marx predicted a brief transition period between capitalism and true communism, which of course is not what ever happened.

>Marx’s socialism is not a utopian state.

But his communism is supposed to be a utopia, which is what I said.

Let me add that the vocabulary is not consistent here. Sometimes leftists refer to communism as a form of socialism, sometimes they are spoken of as two different systems.

>No, non-Leninist Leftists say none of this is relevant to non-Leninist communism and the broader non-Leninist Left, because all these systems were Leninist vanguardism, and non-Leninists on the Left reject vanguardism and generally also the Leninist deviation from classical Marxism in bypassing capitalist democracy as a necessary part of the path.

True, but non-Leninist communists have never come to power in a state, and as far as I can tell there is no particular reason to think they ever will. And even if they somehow did, there still remains the question of how good a society they would actually produce. Leftists have attained power (ie Labour in the UK), but have not done so well over the long term.

By the way, what are you? A non-Leninist communist or a non-Leninist socialist or what?

Also, I am going into this because when leftists say "but that wasn't true communism" they seem to be implying that it could have been if the leaders had done things right. However, when you look at the circumstances in Russia/USSR, it simply was not possible, much less for any of the other communist countries.

More generally, I went into this whole history because I think everyone should know it, but very few do. Do you agree?

There are no Marxist regimes; all “Communist” regimes are (or are derived from) Leninism which introduces vanguardism and other changes to avoid the prerequisite of developing proletarian class consciousness through mature capitalism in Marxism, and feature a (theoretically) transitional initial phase to replace development through private capitalism, which none have ever escaped from to anything that was supposed to be beyond it (though China rewrote the plan to include authoritarian quasi-private capitalism.)

There's a wide array of arguably socialist non-“Communist” regimes, but all of them are democratic/market socialism that explicitly accepts plural democracy and regulated (not “free”) markets as important elements.

> Nazi (national-socialist) Germany was totally socialist.

This is true to about the same extent as “the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is totally a democratic republic” is true.

Among the problems with your evidence is that it all concerns Leninist and their ideological descendants. While capitalists tend to accept the Leninist propaganda that Leninism is Marxism, non-Leninist Marxists have, from very early in the existence of Leninism, viewed it as a departure, and even characterized it as “state capitalism”.

So, even to the extent that it represents a general problem with Leninism, and also generalizes to a broader category, whether the right broader category is “Marxist” or “capitalist” or something else is a matter itself of ideological dispute that would require additional evidence to answer in any objective fashion, if that is even possible.

Leninism didn't, but there's a reason why non-Leninist Marxists have been calling Leninism state capitalism since well before it's failure was obvious.

Socialism, specifically a form of what Marx referred to as “bourgeois socialism”—though not so much by conscious design but as a compromise between Marxist and other proletarian socialists who were instrumental in labor, abolition, suffrage, and other social justice movements and more moderate forces within and outside of those movements—was completely successful in the environment (advanced democratic capitalist states) for which Marx prescribed his form of socialism, being so successful as to entirely displace the late-19th Century system for which Marx coined the term “capitalism” with a system in which the rent seeking power of capital was significantly more constrained in favor of broad (varying from country to country) guarantees for the basic necessities of the general population, which has been referred to by a variety of names (the “modern mixed economy”), though it's so completely displaced the original system called “capitalism” in the same states where that systemmwas once dominant that it is now most frequently just called “capitalism” despite being very different from it.

Even the ones that want Marxist socialism don't want Cold War USSR-like government, which is Leninist, an authoritarian adaptation of Marxism to bypass the prerequisite in Marx’s theory of developed capitalism and broad working-class class consciousness.

> democratic socialist not full socialism

“Democratic socialism” is not “like socialism, but reduced strength”.

Leninists and their descendants might be; socialists aren't any more than capitalists are, as pretty much every advanced economy is some hybrid of the two. Because of the Cold War (by which point that was already largely true), it's become fashionable to call those mixed economies “capitalist”, that is not particularly accurate (though it comports well with Leninist propaganda.)

I recommend you do more research on systems that have tried to eliminate money, private property and trade. While there has been some US intervention to disrupt them, as in the case of US backed coup attempts, funding of political and armed opposition, and sanctions, the totalitarianism and dysfunction they create is so extreme that there is doubt that anti-market systems are unnatural and unworkable.

>>We have a lot more examples of failed capitalist countries than failed communist ones.

Look at China before and after its 1978 market reforms, or East versus West Germany, or South versus North Korea.

We have socialists in the West, like Jacobin magazine founder Bhaskar Sunkara defending the Berlin wall, that was used to prevent people in East Germany from fleeing, and even the brutal murder of Czar Nicholas II's little children, to avoid admitting that socialism is harmful. Beware of who you believe.

What about them? I think it is widely spread that socialism is like, if not the same as communism.

No, its about the people (specifically, the workers) controlling the means of production. The State is a vehicle for that in some forms of socialism, but not all. There are forms of socialism that see a role for the state but not that of vehicle of control of the means of production, and there are forms of socialism (e.g., libertarian socialism) which reject statism entirely (in fact, not only does that whole spectrum exist withi socialism broadly, the entire state socialist to anti-statist spectrum exists within explicitly Marxist socialism.)

Too many people’s ideas of “socialism” is a product of Leninist propaganda (often through the further filter of Western right-wing propaganda, which has a weird semi-alignment with Leninists in misrepesenting “socialism”.)

But they would be wrong, it's the other way around.

> and Xi Jinping would tell you that the PRC is socialist (with Chinese characteristics!),

It is, economically speaking, at least until it entered the WTO it was 100% a socialist country.

You're conflating politics and economics, China is a socialist country, Sweden is mostly a socialist country, Italy is mostly a socialist country, the state has a lot of economic power in these countries.

It is simply true.

What the U.S. take wrong (among many other things) is that it is not bad for the citizens. I live in Italy and would never change it for Silicon Valley. I don't want to live where homeless are homeless because the staste cares more about selling more guns, so that another mass shooting in a school can happen, than helping poor people.

You don't have to be a Marxist to claim that the USSR wasn't properly "socialist." You just have to read whoever you think lays out a clear definition of socialism, and compare it to the government of the USSR as observed.

When your analysis of the facts of the situation values the power dynamics of differing groups of adherents to fringe radical movements over simple observation and checking of requirements off of a list, you're caught up in political drama, not ideological drama.

I have and I kind of see where you coming from now. Because I would never use the word socialist for what you have in the UK, the word I would use is social. You make it sound socialist invented healthcare, transportation and education when all those things existed long before the first socialist was born. And yes ideology does matter a lot. There is a good reason why there wasn't a single successful socialist country in the world and there also a good reason why a lot of ex-socialist countries still have so many problems even after they nominally became capitalist. Value set and the ideology behind it really do matter.

As someone from Northern Europe I feel the need to point out that socialism != communism. The failed states you mentioned above all have/had a communistic rule. My impression is that media in the USA portrays these as being the same and evil which I don’t agree with.