Actually exiting socialism?

Prior to 1990, a considerable number of countries around the world claimed to embrace Marxist-Leninist ideology and to practise some form of planned economy. No one in the socalled ‘Second World’ claimed to have reached the stage of communism. These imperfect forms were sometimes characterised as ‘actually existing socialism’, a phrase that became well known in the English-speaking world through the work of the East German ‘dissident’ Rudolf Bahro – see his The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978). Older readers familiar with this background may suspect a typo in my title. But my adaptation is intentional. A generation after the collapse of the Soviet bloc (the object of Bahro’s critique, which landed him a hefty jail sentence), the major survivors of that deluge are before our eyes ‘actually exiting’ their previously existing forms of socialism.