The goal of this short book is to discuss what the purportedly socialist societies of the twentieth century were, and what is left of them at present. I approach these societies starting from a specific entry point, that is, I focus on the political dimension, which I elaborate on below, which allows for a broader characterization of the topic. I call the sort of social system discussed here ‘authoritarian collectivism’. It was based on the party-state structure and democratic centralism and was structured as a system of rule. Generally, it did not survive into the twenty-first century, though, in some cases, the specific political dimension and partly its state were retained with the transition to a variant of capitalism in which citizens’ rights remain secondary, thus reproducing the former framework. This was a strategy of adaptation implemented once the system evolutionarily proved too fragile to reform. The political system at its core found a new lease of life in combination with a sort of state-based capitalism, reminiscent of a prior phase of modernity – state-organized – with which the so-called ‘real socialism’ had important affinities. It was then perhaps that this sort of social system more clearly revealed how distant it was from socialism proper, despite the use of the word ‘socialism’ to define it.

The use of the political catchphrase ‘real socialism’ (also ‘really/actually existing socialism’ – real existierender Sozialismus) in this book requires a brief explanation, though this is obviously a rather current expression. It was originally coined by Erich Honecker, the general secretary of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), in 1973. It paralleled Leonid Brezhnev’s introduction of the idea of ‘developed socialism’, also in the 1970s (Sandle 2002). Even though the expression has perhaps a less optimistic ring to it, Honecker coined it as a sort of praise for the society he saw his country as concretely embodying. Afterwards, it was applied in a critical way, rather diffusely, to conceptualize the social system of the Soviet Union and the countries that basically followed its model. That is, while the original coinage implied an actual definition of the concrete model of socialism that would have been built in these countries, others would use it to disqualify them as socialist, or point out how distorted the model was, mostly due to authoritarianism.