Re: @AC USSR
Historical and modern political movements never fit into neat lexical boxes. So at that level any attempt to frame "pure socialism" is meaningless at the root. They also aren't monotypic. Each of those historical cases had features of socialism as set dressing over a subverted democracy with elements of authoritarianism, rule by tyrants, and the terror of a new breed of totalitarianism who's closest cousin was fascism.
You also missed most of the categorical layers as those weren't full alternative movements, they were sub-types leveraging a shared ideology. Not that I'm saying you don't know about them, just that you didn't really mention them.
But people were reacting to your statement that there has never been "pure socialism" (technically true but framed in a misleading way) and that they didn't call themselves Socialist, which other than the translation to English is kind of horseshit. "Sotsialisticheskikh" or "Социалистических" is effectively the same word, same idea, and was associated with the government and philosophical movement among other terms in both western and Russian literature.
Lenninst was just the branding of a more extreme strain of a broader ideological movement. Communism as a subset of fringe socailsm, Marxism as a more specific branch of authoritarian revisions within Lennist thinking. The closest think to "pure socialism" as you seem to imply it was an academic diversion to keep counter-revolutionaries from pulling back the curtain and exposing the new authoritarians calling all the shots. It never existed as anything but a pipe dream, was never intended to be implemented as anything but a pretty set of empty promises that don't work.
It irritates me to no end when modern conservatives try to conflate the massive failures of the various families Soviet Communism and governments with all other forms of socialism, but I also tend to lose it when someone whines about how we never "tried" pure socialism. It's been tried to the literal deaths of millions, and it has failed at every turn. Socialism is a useful tool for narrow policies, but the attempts to make it into a universal political or social philosophy are doomed. Much like capitalism as a philosophy or system of government, it's flawed to it's core. It inevitably succumbs to the exploitable power vacuum it holds no answers preventing, creating a vulnerable host to whatever tyrant or oligarchy that comes along to seize the reins next.
Worse still, the idea that a socialist framework can be forced onto a culture or civilization as a revolutionary transformation. The few functional societies that are both stable over the long haul and strongly socialist got that way by implementing socialist strategies pragmatically, and only keeping the ones that are working. They are also still open to other ideas that aren't solely presented through the lens of socialism as a gimmick. Like I said, socialist as a utilitarian tool not an ideological framework.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
