I hear mixed things about countries that are building socialism vs are described as socialist.
Am I overthinking their stages? Especially with a timeline expected for china to hit socialism by their own definition posted a bit back, don’t have a link offhand.
Stagism is an introductory model and thus reductive. It’s not a very precise descriptor/predictor for the real world.
The real world is an infinitely complex network of spectrums and intensities and flows. The categories we invent are useful to understand and discuss aspects of it, but they don’t exist in and of themselves.
That being said (and I’m pretty sure other comments have probably already explained this better but I can’t see other comments on my app while commenting myself) Marx’s categories and stages were never intended to be strictly delineated and distinct from each other. Dialectics as a science is all about constant change, the shifting of tensions, and a dialectical understanding of history will see social change as a continuous process rather than an instantaneous and spontaneous rupture into a new epoch.
“Early stage socialism” might be a useful category to describe these AES states that are majoritively run for proletarian interests rather than bourgeois ones, but still contain many of the internal contradictions of capitalism (and are forced to exist within the largest contradiction of global imperialism). These contradictions don’t blip out of existence when a revolution happens, there’s no communism button that the workers parties are simply too corrupt or stupid to push. They have to be guided and developed towards a larger socialist goal.