and how do you wish to avoid that the leaders of said transitional socialist period just cling to power?
as someone who has to live in the aftermath of one of those “transitional socialist periods” that predictably went nowhere and just broke the country’s spirit completely, i’m really damn curious. we are not talking about hypotheticals here.
I grew up in USSR and I certainly preferred it to what followed after the collapse. Claiming that it went nowhere is just brain dead. The fact is that USSR had to compete with the US empire after the war, and US being across the ocean was completely unscathed while USSR had to rebuild under duress. Of course, if you just ignore all that then you can make intellectually dishonest statements of the sort you do.
If you lived in Russia then sure. If you lived in any of the annexed countries and preferred the priviledge of not being able to travel, secret police checking your every fart and people dying while trying to, for some inexplicable reason, escape to the evil west, then you’re a traitor to your own people.
meanwhile in the real world
nice copium, but over here in hungary, one of the countries your glorious ussr managed to colonize that’s not really the picture we got. the ten years following the collapse of the soviet system were by far the best ten years of this country in living memory, until the dust settled and an amalgamation of the old elite and the supposed revolutionaries took back control and re-instituted the same oligopoly, albeit with somewhat less oppression this time.
the whole point of having a transitional period between market capitalism and true communism is to reach that communism. that never happened. instead, the people were robbed of everything of value by an elite who claimed to represent the proletariat but was anything but that, and then it was re-privatized at the end of this period into the hands of a new elite. to give credit where it’s due, this is in fact a redistribution of wealth, it just goes the other way than what’s often heralded, and only made the rich richer and the average person more powerless.
