16 Facts About State socialism

State socialism is a political and economic ideology theorised by Ferdinand Lassalle within the socialist movement that is against private ownership and advocates state ownership of the means of production, either as a temporary measure or as a characteristic of socialism in the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production or communist society.

State socialism declined starting in the 1970s, with stagflation during the 1970s energy crisis, the rise of neoliberalism and later with the fall of state socialist nations in the Eastern Bloc during the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Today, state socialism is mainly advocated by Marxist–Leninists and other socialists supporting a socialist state.

The philosophy of state socialism was first explicitly expounded by Ferdinand Lassalle.

Early concepts of state socialism were articulated by anarchist and libertarian philosophers who opposed the concept of the state.

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Bakunin predicted that Marx's theory of the transition from capitalism to socialism involving the working class seizing state power in a dictatorship of the proletariat would eventually lead to a usurpation of power by the state apparatus acting in its self-interest, ushering in a new form of capitalism rather than establishing socialism.

The Stalinist theory of socialism in one country was an attempt to legitimise state-directed activity to accelerate the industrialisation of the Soviet Union.

Political philosophies contrasted with state socialism include libertarian socialist philosophies such as anarchism, De Leonism, economic democracy, free-market socialism, libertarian Marxism and syndicalism.

In Marxist theory, State socialism is projected to emerge in the most developed capitalist economies, where capitalism suffers the greatest internal contradictions and class conflict.

State socialism was traditionally advocated as a means for achieving public ownership of the means of production through the nationalization of industry.

Blatchford's practical socialism was a state socialism that identified existing state enterprises such as the Post Office run by the municipalities as a demonstration of practical socialism in action while claiming that practical socialism should involve the extension of state enterprise to the means of production as the common property of the people.

In contrast, Marxism and revolutionary State socialism holds that a proletarian revolution is the only practical way to implement fundamental changes in the structure of society.

Tucker noted that "the fact that State Socialism has overshadowed other forms of Socialism gives it no right to a monopoly of the Socialistic idea".

Many democratic and libertarian socialists, including anarchists, mutualists and syndicalists, criticize state socialism for advocating a workers' state instead of abolishing the bourgeois state apparatus outright.

State socialism is often referred to by right-wing detractors simply as socialism, including Austrian School economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who used socialism as a synonym for central planning and state socialism.

One criticism primarily related to state socialism is the economic calculation problem, followed by the socialist calculation debate.