this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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History
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The real underlying answer is that socialist governments bought into the Western propaganda narrative of "legitimacy." This is where, if socialist governance fails to deliver economic growth, it loses its "legitimacy" and should then be overthrown in favor of capitalist restoration.
Socialism, therefore, is not seen of intrinsic value in of itself, nor are the socioeconomic achievements and benefits of a socialist society recognized. The "purpose" of socialism is solely for delivering and maintaining perpetual economic prosperity agnostic of externally suppressive economic pressures. This is due to the cyclical nature of 1) socialist governance buying into the need for "legitimacy," 2) pursuing "legitimacy," 3) creating public cognizance in their population on the idea of "legitimacy" - and 4) then setting their own population's expectations on the necessity for their governments to maintain this "legitimacy or else ..." approach - which then further 5) reinforces the narrative of "legitimacy" for socialist governments.
Meanwhile, all of this happens as Western propaganda further eggs on the narrative through channels like Radio Free Europe which expands the class of capitalist restoration comprador aspirants in those socialist states.
The 80s were a time of international economic headwinds through the export of the fallout of Reaganomics to the global economy. This caused economic crises most famously in places like Japan, but even though the rest of the world was going into the shitter through the American weaponization of their financial hegemony under Reagan to rescue their own domestic economy, socialist governments weren't "permitted" to stumble themselves, even though everyone else was, through the buying in of the "legitimacy" narrative.
Governments in the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia then, through desperation in maintaining "legitimacy," approached the IMF with its poison pill loans and structural adjustment program austerity mandates. Because the conditions of these loans were purposely designed to sabotage socialist societal stability, this then further exacerbated the economic stagnation such that eventually the socialist governments fell victim to the appeal of pursuing the ultimate Western poison pill - shock therapy - which led to the collapse of these socialist states.
The result was that, rather than being overthrown by the collective people as Western propaganda had fantasized, these governments voluntarily, and unilaterally, committed suicide due to the idea that they, and the entirety of socialism, had "lost legitimacy" and the only remedy to this being full-on capitalist restoration.
Thank you! Very informative write up
I should add that the "legitimacy" narrative still very much exists to the present day in the Western discourse throughout the propaganda in the media and in academic works on contemporary socialist states. It's like shining a UV light on a shoddy roadside hotel room in that once you recognize the narrative utility, you start to see it everywhere like an ooze. It's particularly evident in coverage of China and Vietnam, through less so with the DPRK and Cuba because the economic warfare against the latter two states has encouraged their governments to actively emphasize the inherent value of socialism against the (historically nihilistic) logic of the "legitimacy" narrative. This Western propagated narrative festered across socialist states in the late 20th century and drove those states to the decisions of pursuing IMF loans and neoliberal Chicago school shock therapy which brought about capitalist restoration and the progress of Cuba and the DPRK in maintaining socialism in spite of their externally-induced economic hardships is a positive step to countering the narrative.
To summarize, "legitimacy" is one of those irregular verbs in the Western dictionary: "You seek continual legitimacy but I have a perpetual, unquestionable right to rule." The concept never applies to the Western capitalist structure even with the routine collective generational economic trauma inflicted from the boom-bust "business cycles." Japan has now gone through three "lost decades" of stagnating GDP per capita and yet its socioeconomic condition will never be discussed in the narrative framework of "legitimacy" for obvious reasons, whereas every single fiscal quarter of perceived lackluster economic performance in China and Vietnam brings about endless citations of this narrative like clockwork.