Socialist State - Controversy With The Term

Controversy With The Term

Because there are several different branches of socialism, a country's claim to the label of "socialist state" or "socialist republic" is almost always disputed by some branch. Indeed, there are many socialists who strongly oppose certain (or all) self-proclaimed socialist republics. Trotskyists, for instance, are particularly known for their opposition to what they term «Stalinist states».

Within the socialist movement, a number of criticisms are maintained towards the use of the term "socialist states" in relation to countries such as China and previously of Soviet Union and, Eastern and Central European states before what some term the 'collapse of Stalinism' in 1989. Democratic Socialists, left communists, Anarchists and some Trotskyists claim that the so-called "socialist states" or "people's states" were actually state capitalist and thus cannot be called "socialist".

Other Trotskyists, while agreeing that these states could not be described as socialist, deny that they were state capitalist. They support Trotsky's analysis of (pre-restoration) USSR as a workers' state that had degenerated into a "monstrous" bureaucratic dictatorship which rested on a largely nationalised industry run according to a plan of production, and claimed that the former "Stalinist" states of Central and Eastern Europe were deformed workers' states based on the same relations of production as USSR.