As a reasonable person living in the 21st century, and scion of a former communist country, I am still baffled about how many people still support Socialism as a viable political system, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The most amusing part is that whenever you point out repeated failures of the system, the main argument one always gets is “Well, that was not real socialism.” Not real socialism my ass, is my standard comment, but allow me to elaborate.
Let’s analyze this for a moment. You have an ideology that, whenever people holding that ideology get into power, bad things happen. So how can you justify it’s not true whatever? Simple, you formulate some unattainable hypothetical utopia of much stretched imagination, and then hold the real-world implementations as not being the exact utopic ideal and, as such, not a real representation of the ideology. This is, in my humble opinion, a bullshit strategy, that cannot ever be falsified. If socialism is defined as utopia and utopia has not be achieved, well it was not really socialism, was it?
In words and imagination, you can conceive anything. One only needs to look at the corpus of sci-fi and fantasy literature for this. You can think of cold fusion and interstellar travel and more. What matters if the real world implementation of the frankly meaningless ideals. If you make an electronic circuit schematic with ideal components, it will look great on a computer simulation, but it will always crash and burn in any physical implementation, as there are no ideal components in reality. Any political ideology depends on the components – a.k.a humans – which are far from ideal, and must take into account all the flaws and faults and issues and problems human beings have. Implementation versus words is the key – otherwise words are wind, as some fat fantasy writer remarked.
So how bout them socialist ideals? Every single real-world implementation is similar to the other, authoritarianism, oppression, failing economies, the works. So still holding to the impossible ideal does not disprove anything about socialism failures. Real world is all that matters.
But, but state capitalism! Some argue. It was not stateless and hence not socialism. But as the state will not disappear by itself, socialism does not just manifest in reality. If it did, we would have it and not much need to talk about it. So all implementations needed some individuals to seize power and impose it by means of the state. And, due to basic human nature, once they got there and had power, they would never give it up to bring about some sort of stateless utopia. If any of them wanted this, there would be a Stalin behind them to shoot them in the back and seize the power. Power attracts certain people, people who do not give it up. Without revolution no socialism can come about. After revolution no one will just give up power: okay guys, we are done, let’s go stateless.
Also one can note that as you move towards the ideal, even if not fully implemented, things should improve. In socialism, maybe it wasn’t ideal socialism, but without private ownership, it was closer to it than the private ownership countries. A libertarian will say that true free market was not implemented, but the bits of free market that were gave results. With all it’s flaws, on the long run, western systems created a lot of prosperity.
The funny part is that, while all the socialist republics of the world were not true socialism, socialists give examples from Scandinavian countries about successes of socialism. What about Denmark, am I right? Despite the fact that for most history there was nothing socialist about Denmark or Sweden, and when they actually started to go towards socialism in the 60s to 80s ,it started not to work and they had to reform. Without authoritarianism, the socialist direction was changed. There is very little real socialism at the basis of Denmark’s economy. Some degree of economic wealth redistribution through taxation is further away from socialism then all the various communist and socialist countries that failed miserably. But that is somehow a success of true socialism, or something. I mean, who can understand the though patterns behind this? Certainly not me.
So news flash: it was socialism, it failed, and we should be looking for other solutions to humanity's problems.
But the beauty of the argument is that it will never go away. No matter what happens, there will be some minute detail which will make any failure not true socialism. And humanity will move on to the next disaster. C’est la vie!