Your username is Slavic, so perhaps you grew up in the Eastern Bloc; I certainly did.
Those were not socialist countries. Private enterprise was definitely banned, but the goods were not collectively owned either. The entire country was owned by a small clique with a rigid pyramidal structure.
IMO dictatorship is the inevitable result of Marxism. I once had a girlfriend who was a Marxist. She used to talk about how when the revolution comes, the mean capitalists would all go to prison. I pointed out that mean people don't disappear. They adapt to the system. So a meanie who is adept at scaling the corporate ladder to the commanding heights is equally adepts at scaling the government ladder. Only now he controls the entire economy, education system, courts etc, not just one entity.
Marx advocated some pretty violent means to achieve the change he desired - so, by the principle of "sow wind, reap hurricane", you must be right. The history of Eastern Europe in the 20th century definitely does agree with you.
Just be careful to not unwarrantedly extend the shadow of violence and dictatorship over the socialist ideas too. I know it sounds like trying to tell apples from oranges, but surprisingly many are ignorant, consciously or not, of the difference, especially in the US.
A free market system with socialist overtones can work wonderfully well. Just look at Northern Europe.
Only 100-70 years ago Sweden was a very classist society with quite severe internal conflicts (workers were gunned down by the military in an incident in the 30s for instance).
In the 17th century Sweden was an imperialist country dedicated to the bloody wars of several ambitious kings (Gustav II, Karl XII, etc). Supposedly some people in Germany still warn their kids of the Swedes...
So my point is that Scandinavia was not always a peace-loving hippie region dedicated to sensible socialism-light. That stuff is quite recent.
How they chose their system has nothing to do with whether that system would work for someone else. It also has nothing to do with how well another system would work for them.
No, it isn't; it's a much worse word, because it hides the economic reality of living in a country. And that's what socialism vs capitalism is all about: the way the economic activity is conducted in a country, and the way it affects everyone's life. The regimes were different in Castro's Cuba and Pinochet's Chile, and saying they were both a dictatorship is a way of sweeping that difference under a carpet.
I'm sorry, but it's ludicrous to claim that the Eastern bloc countries were not socialist. The most charitable way I can characterize it is as an extreme instance of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy.
Certainly during those regimes' existence no one seriously doubted they were socialist (except people who wanted to redefine the word "socialism" for their ideological benefit). In fact, even Chomsky realizes he has to explain that somehow and makes up justifications for why the West called USSR socialist and for why the USSR called itself socialist. Those justifications are idiotic, by the way (he's claiming the Soviets called themselves socialist to get sympathy from Western socialists, as if the internal propaganda and ideology weren't in any case by far, by x1000 the more important reason).
It's also not true that "the entire country was owned by a small clique", etc. It was not owned, it was controlled, and the 'small clique' (actually the Party bureaucracy) ostensibly represented the will of the workers, through formally functioning though farcical mechanisms such as elections, the extensive Communist Party hierarchy down to individual members, etc. It was not quite a dictatorship - dictators tend to pass their countries to their offspring or in absence of those to hand-picked successors. In the USSR, the power went to another top Party official after an internal power struggle. Never to a descendant (compare with North Korea, which is closer to a socialist dictatorship).
Now having centralized control over the economy by, say, the top echelons of the Communist Party, representing the will of the people, is an idea that's perfectly compatible with socialism and Marxism. That is why, in fact, countless socialists in the West supported the Soviet Union and saw it as the torch-bearer of the socialist dream; they were not confused about the fact that the economy in the USSR was under central control! Now many of them were naive in thinking that the Party leadership really represented "the will of the people", which it generally didn't. But that's not a reason to say it wasn't socialism; it's a reason to say, maybe, that it was bad socialism, socialism gone haywire, a socialist dictatorship, what have you. But it was, very clearly and unmistakably, socialism. Just as if in a capitalist country an oligarch clique takes over all the real power, that's not a reason to stop considering it a capitalist country. If you don't do that, the no-true-Scotsman fallacy destroys any chance you have of objectively observing whatever it is that actually happens in socialist or capitalist societies, and learning whatever lessons there are to learn from that.
No, it was not.
Your username is Slavic, so perhaps you grew up in the Eastern Bloc; I certainly did.
Those were not socialist countries. Private enterprise was definitely banned, but the goods were not collectively owned either. The entire country was owned by a small clique with a rigid pyramidal structure.
Dictatorship is a much better word.