ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a rigorously centralized, tendentially totalizing economic-political-social structure. In regimes of real socialism there has been a tremendous development of the productive, civil, and cultural structures. The first communist who applied the term "degeneration" of socialism to the Stalin era was Palmiro Togliatti, in his deservedly famous 1956 interview in Nuovi Argomenti. Actually existing socialism—first and foremost the Soviet model—is a system fundamentally different in essence from that delineated in Marx's socialist theory, for one basic reason. In the language of the Italian left the expressions "postcapitalist society" and "postrevolutionary society" have been enjoying increasing currency as equivalents for the "Soviet system", or, more generally, for "actually existing socialism". In the USSR there is "a capitalist state" of a particular type, "state capitalism" with an exploiting state bourgeoisie and an exploited proletariat. The clear, definitive transition to state socialism occurred with the forced collectivization in the countryside and forced industrialization.
