Meanwhile - all (and I mean ALL) countries which adopted socialism - all of them plunged into poverty, corruption and in some cases civil war and dissolution.
One can think it should teach a lesson... but some people just want to believe.
Since all socialist revolutions are met with the full ferocity of the capitalist states, it's not clear how they can win militarily without becoming a dictatorship. A military is perhaps the social organization least amenable to democracy and most amenable to dictatorship. It's no surprise that socialist revolutions which succeed via military dictatorship and never demobilize (because they can't, because they are constantly under threats real and perceived) begin to reflect military dictatorship in their social structure.
No socialist revolution has succeeded in an industrialized nation. They have all taken place in the periphery, either in colonies of imperial powers or extremely weak states like tsarist Russia. None of those successful revolutions managed to industrialize without devolving into centralized, dictatorial rule. Socialist thinkers back to Marx thought that socialism is enabled by industrialization; not something that can be implemented beforehand. This sounds entirely consistent with history. Note that the State had a crucial role to play in the development of capitalism. You can't pretend that capitalism isn't born of and sustained by violence when it has been instrumental in every development that led to capitalism's ascent, from forcible enclosure of the commons, to imperialist plundering of non-industrialized nations, to strikes broken by national militaries, and so forth.
If it doesn't seem so violent now, maybe it's because resistance to it has been thoroughly purged from your milieu and the violence that remains has been pushed slightly out of your perspective. Nothing to see. There's no possible way capitalist nations were responsible for, say, the world's largest ever cholera outbreak in Yemen.
Socialism is the democratic control of the means of production. All attempted socialist revolutions devolved into a system of bureaucratic control by a centralized government. It sounds like socialism hasn't ever been achieved.
> One can think it should teach a lesson... but some people just want to believe.
Most socialists think that an alternative system is necessary because capitalism with all its contradictions are untenable. Treating socialists as shallow thinkers just makes you look shallow. But it is quite a fashionable look these days.
This is unwarranted, it has almost managed to win WW1 (which was unwinnable anyway, hence "almost" counts)
All those countries were protecting assets sent to Russia and Czechs abused by Bolsheviks. If they were actually _participated_ in civil war, Bolsheviks will be crushed in a week or so.
> Since all socialist revolutions are met with the full ferocity of the capitalist states, it's not clear how they can win militarily without becoming a dictatorship.
Yes, sure. "I'm not guilty, they've made me do it" - looks like favourite mantra for wrongdoers all over the world.
> No socialist revolution has succeeded in an industrialized nation. They have all taken place in the periphery.
Correlation doesn't imply causation. Many "peripheral" countries didn't have socialist revolutions and there were few attempts in industrialized nations. For example, Poland and Finland, having even lower industrialized level than Russian Empire - they were spared from socialist revolutions. Not that Bolsheviks didn't tried to instigate them.
> It sounds like socialism hasn't ever been achieved.
Ok, why you're still calling USSR, Venezuela, Cuba etc socialist countries then?
Just because they didn't fully mobilize to crush the revolution doesn't mean they didn't participate. You're splitting hairs over definitions. "Protecting assets" with military action is... military action.
> Yes, sure. "I'm not guilty, they've made me do it" - looks like favourite mantra for wrongdoers all over the world.
I never said they're not guilty. I think they all fucked up. You're arguing against a strawman of your own devising.
> Ok, why you're still calling USSR, Venezuela, Cuba etc socialist countries then?
You'll note that I never mentioned a socialist state, but a socialist revolution. A revolution is socialist if it aims to achieve socialism. A revolution succeeds if the forces that attempt it seize power. All successful socialist revolutions have failed to achieve socialism after they seize power. It's a very simple argument. I've given a hypothesis for why that's the case: All the successful ones were achieved by military means and never demobilized. Their structures after the revolution grew to reflect the autocracy that is intrinsic to all known forms of effective military organization.
Some tried more democratic military organization-- it failed spectacularly. Is it reasonable to conclude that socialism can't be achieved through violent confrontation? It's plausible.
Honestly, you're being so combative that you have to resort to pedantry and strawmen. Who are you trying to convince with such a hostile uncharitable attitude?
To be fair, most so-called “socialist” revolutions of them have been Leninist, in which centralized elite direction replacing mass democracy (vanguardism) is a core part of the theory.
But then, there's a reason why for many decades non-Leninist socialists have called Leninism and it's descendants “state capitalism”.
All the real advances toward socialism have been evolutionary steps in democratic “capitalist” (arguably mostly a misnomer since the mid-20th Century) states; this shouldn't be surprising, while many feudal or monarchic regimes were overthrown by political revolutions, the replacement of feudalism by capitalism as the dominant economic system of the West also was more one of evolution than revolution. (It was “revolutionary” in the degree of fundamental change over a fairly brief time period on a grand historical scale, but not in the coordinated overthrow of the established order by a group with a well-defined agenda; most of the theory supporting capitalism was developed well into or even after the transition, some of it after the 19th Century critiques in which the system was named.)