I don’t understand what you mean to say socialism can’t address and change potential issues. Socialism is when the working class have overthrown the previous economic apparatus and secured proletarian democracy, it doesn’t mean heaven on earth is created, it means the work has finally just started.
Taking power is step 1. The mechanism for change and addressing of issues as they arise is democracy, specifically democratic centralism. If you want to say socialist countries are behind in certain progressive social liberties, that’s perfectly valid to say. What’s not valid is to say this is somehow a failing of proletarian democracy, but rather, we should look why countries are the way they are. Every socialist country around today (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK) was colonized between 100-120 years ago. That’s going to have a lasting impact that will take a while to dismantle, even when a communist party has taken power. That’s what we mean when we say there are contradictions that haven’t been resolved yet.
I think a problem that comes along with these definitions is that we interpret socialism as meaning “expanded democracy to enfranchise the proletariat.” That proletariat might be just coming out of the yoke of being a colony, that proletariat might have widespread bigotry, who knows. An early project of the USSR was criminalizing antisemitism since pogroms had been so common. The USSR would also sometimes have pro-natal policies relating to population growth, where abortion rights were restricted. That was a direct consequence of Tsarist Russia being so behind in industrial development compared to the rest of the developed world.
I don’t understand what you mean to say socialism can’t address and change potential issues. Socialism is when the working class have overthrown the previous economic apparatus and secured proletarian democracy, it doesn’t mean heaven on earth is created, it means the work has finally just started.
Taking power is step 1. The mechanism for change and addressing of issues as they arise is democracy, specifically democratic centralism. If you want to say socialist countries are behind in certain progressive social liberties, that’s perfectly valid to say. What’s not valid is to say this is somehow a failing of proletarian democracy, but rather, we should look why countries are the way they are. Every socialist country around today (Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK) was colonized between 100-120 years ago. That’s going to have a lasting impact that will take a while to dismantle, even when a communist party has taken power. That’s what we mean when we say there are contradictions that haven’t been resolved yet.
I think a problem that comes along with these definitions is that we interpret socialism as meaning “expanded democracy to enfranchise the proletariat.” That proletariat might be just coming out of the yoke of being a colony, that proletariat might have widespread bigotry, who knows. An early project of the USSR was criminalizing antisemitism since pogroms had been so common. The USSR would also sometimes have pro-natal policies relating to population growth, where abortion rights were restricted. That was a direct consequence of Tsarist Russia being so behind in industrial development compared to the rest of the developed world.