Socialist economies larger than kibbutzes could only be created and sustained by totalitarian states. Socialism means collective ownership of means of production.

And people won't give up their shops and fields and other means of production to the government voluntarily, at least not en masse. Thus they have to be forced at a gunpoint, and they always were.

All the subsequent horror is downstream from that. This is what is inherent to building a socialist economy: mass expropriation of the former "exploitative class". The bad management of the stolen assets is just a consequence, because ideologically brainwashed partisans are usually bad at managing anything including themselves.

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dns_snek an hour ago | parent [-]

This is exactly what I meant, a centrally-planned economy where the state owns everything and people are forced to give everything up is just one terrible (Soviet) model, not some defining feature of socialism.

Yugoslavia was extremely successful, with economic growth that matched or exceeded most capitalist European economies post-WW2. In some ways it wasn't as free as western societies are today but it definitely wasn't totalitarian, and in many ways it was more free - there's a philosophical question in there about what freedom really is. For example Yugoslavia made abortion a constitutionally protected right in the 70s.

I don't want to debate the nuances of what's better now and what was better then as that's beside the point, which is that the idiosyncrasies of the terrible Soviet economy are not inherent to "socialism", just like the idiosyncrasies of the US economy aren't inherent to capitalism.

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inglor_cz an hour ago | parent [-]

"just one terrible (Soviet) model"

It is the model, introduced basically everywhere where socialism was taken seriously. It is like saying that cars with four wheels are just one terrible model, because there were a few cars with three wheels.

Yugoslavia was a mixed economy with a lot of economic power remaining in private hands. You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism". Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands.

You also shouldn't discount the effect of sending young Yugoslavs to work in West Germany on the total balance sheet. A massive influx of remittances in Deutsche Mark was an important factor in Yugoslavia getting richer, and there was nothing socialist about it, it was an overflow of quick economic growth in a capitalist country.

	▲	dns_snek an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You've created a tautology: Socialism is bad because bad models are socialism and better models are not-socialism. > You cannot point at it and say "hey, successful socialism" Yes I can because ideological purity doesn't exist in the real world. All of our countries are a mix of capitalist and socialist ideas yet we call them "capitalist" because that's the current predominant organization. > Tito was a mortal enemy of Stalin, stroke a balanced neither-East-nor-West, but fairly friendly to the West policy already in 1950, and his collectivization efforts were a fraction of what Marxist-Leninist doctrine demands. You're making my point for me, Yugoslavia was completely different from USSR yet still socialist. Socialism is not synonymous with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. It's a fairly simple core idea that has an infinite number of possible implementations, one of them being market socialism with worker cooperatives. Aside from that short period post-WW2, no socialist or communist nation has been allowed to exist without interference from the US through oppressive economic sanctions that would cripple and destroy any economy regardless of its economic system, but people love nothing more than to draw conclusions from these obviously-invalid "experiments". "You" (and I mean the collective you) are essentially hijacking the word "socialism" to simply mean "everything that was bad about the USSR". The system has been teaching and conditioning people to do that for decades, but we should really be more conscious and stop doing that.