real socialism
- noun
- /riːəl ˈsoʊʃəlɪzəm/
- Formal
:
socialismo real
- "Real socialism" was what the authorities chose to call the post-1968 Czech society, rejecting "socialism with a human face" as "naive political romanticism."
Examples
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In fact, the transition from real socialism to capitalism has proven much more difficult than the transition in the opposite direction.
Academic text (1991) -
Many Eastern European countries struggled to adapt after the collapse of their "real socialism" systems.
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Since Stalinism, there had developed the habit of claiming growth in stages toward full communism, "real socialism" being the current term.
Academic text (1991) -
In other words, owing to our five years of experience trying to reform real socialism and to the experience of political economic reforms during the 1970s and 1980s in Eastern Europe, we realize the inevitability of facing the need to restore everything we had rejected during socialist transformation; we must restore the structures and institutions of civil society.
Academic text (1991) -
The Motherland of "real socialism" can (in theory at least) accept the market as it did in the time of Lenin's "New Economic Policy," but to accept private property would be an open admission that the whole economic history of communism has been a costly mistake.
Academic text (1991) -
In educational discussions, we often analyze how "real socialism" influenced political changes in the Soviet Union.
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Supporters argue that "real socialism" provides a practical approach to governance, focusing on achievable goals.
Antonyms
How Practical
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase straightforwardly combines 'real' (actually existing) with 'socialism' (the political/economic system), so a learner can plausibly infer it means socialism as practiced in reality rather than as a theory. However, the expression functions as a technical political term with historical and ideological nuances (e.g., Soviet/Eastern Bloc practice) that are not fully predictable from the parts alone, so knowledge beyond the constituent meanings is needed.
Etymology
Real socialism began as a way for leaders to describe the socialism they had in real life, not the perfect socialism in books. They used real to mean 'practical', so today real socialism usually means the actual, often not perfect, form of socialism people lived under.