re: #80 Obdicut

It’s not. Socialism requires that the means of production be under the control of the people. In a dictatorship or authoritarian regime, this is not possible. Furthermore, if you’re defining socialism only as an economic system, then Norway and France are not socialist, since the majority of their economies are privately owned.

Gonna have to agree with you on this one. A dictatorship calling it’s system “socialist” doesn’t make it so, regardless of how many bumper stickers are thrown around.

en.wikipedia.org

After disposing of the Bourgeois dictatorship through socialist revolution, Leninists seek to create a socialist state in which the working class would be in power, which they see as being essential for laying the foundations for a transitional withering of the state towards communism (Stateless society). In this state, the vanguard party would act as a central nucleus in the organisation of socialist society, presiding over a single-party political system. Leninism rejects political pluralism, seeing it as divisive and destructive. Instead, Leninism advocates the concept of democratic centralism as a process to ensure the voicing of concern and disagreement and to refine policy. Generally, the purpose of democratic centralism is “diversity in ideas, unity in action.”