>>2584029
"Why does socialism dissolve into state-capitalism?"
This is going to be a long post and I'm responding here to avoid getting into an argument with Stalinists.
In the first place I'll say that this is a trick question. None of the 20th century states at any point had socialism. Socialism is a qualitative break from capitalism in which the basic relationships and functioning of society are transformed completely. Yes, I know that many people claim that the USSR was socialist or that China is socialist or whatever. They aren't. They were state-capitalist from the beginning. In the beginning the leadeing Bolsheviks knew that socialism couldn't be attained in the former Russian Empire. It didn't meet the necessary criteria. When Stalin assumed leadership of the USSR he swept these arguments under the rug and anyone who disagreed either disappeared or was killed.
Marx & Engels imagined socialism as being possible only due to the conditions that had developed in Western Europe and Germany - industrial economics, democratic politics, and a high level of cultural development and literacy. And the socialist parties were extremely large in Western Europe. By the end of Engels' life he was writing about how German democratic politics was allowing the socialist movement to grow, legally, far larger than any other political faction.
The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries," the "rebels"—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité notes tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.
But it was clear to Engels by the 1890s that a socialist revolution would require the participation of large masses of the population and not simply a small conspiratorial group:
The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for [with body and soul]. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work which we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.
And yet, the first revolution led by Communists to succeed and maintain itself happened in the Russian Empire - a state still largely undeveloped by industrial capitalism, lacking traditions of legal democratic politics, and having a population that was majority illiterate. This was not what anyone anticipated. No one believed that socialism could be built in such backward conditions. Lenin commented in 1918,
History has now placed us in an extraordinarily difficult position; in the midst of organisational work of unparalleled difficulty we shall have to experience a number of painful defeats. Regarded from the world-historical point of view, there would doubtlessly be no hope of the ultimate victory of our revolution if it were to remain alone, if there were no revolutionary movements in other countries.
I repeat, our salvation from all these difficulties is an all Europe revolution.
At all events, under all conceivable circumstances, if the German revolution does not come, we are doomed.