What Is Socialism? | Socialism 101 #5

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.

If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and hit subscribe and turn on the notification

bell below.

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