Socialism is collective ownership of capital. "Socialism but with private ownership of capital" is like "water but without wetness." So we call it something else.
Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
"deeply stratified class hierarchy" - you have no idea how it was in the Soviet Union, it was nothing short of a cast system. It was so normalized you can see it clearly in the movies of that period.
Is every attempt at socialism the same to you? Do you not see a meaningful difference between Laos and the Soviet Union? Or China and the Soviet Union?
Are all they same to you? The Soviets were as close to socialism as it gets. It WAS the socialism in its purest possible form. This is what you get when you take the ideal marxist socialism AND mix in the actual human nature.
See, to you these things are some abstract ideas, a beautiful theory. To me it is practice - this is what I lived in and lived by. So yes, I can tell the difference between SU and Laos. Laos has never been even close.
The official position was that China (along with Yugoslavia) wasn't truly socialist (they were referred as "opportunists" - google that), a kind of socialist-capitalist-feudalist hybrid. Vietnam, Laos, and DDR were considered developing semi-socialist. Romania, Bulgaria and to some extent Albania were the "true" socialists though.
The arguments were pretty solid. I think it was a fairly correct classification as it was based on who owned and managed the means of production. Only USSR, Romania and Bulgaria (and Albania) had a nearly total ban on private ownership.
Again, it wasn't about who was "better" or "purer" in some superficial sense, but there was a formal criterion: who owns the means of production.
So, if I put on my old soviet socialist hat, I would describe Laos as developing socialist semi-feudal state transitioning from the military communism phase to some opportunistic mixed capitalist form, kind of like NEP. In short, it's not a question whether it is socialism or not, but rather where it fall on the spectrum, and more importantly - in what direction it is developing.
No, I mean a superficial similarity. The ideological aspect drives all aspects of government.
Did you come to the understanding you have through careful consideration and thought? Are you open to re-consideration of the ideas you have about this?
Many socialist and communist ideologies are explicitly opposed to even the existence of a state, and/or want a weak state. Some of them see state control of capital as inherently instituting class rule, and so consider it inherently a threat to their goals. In other words, while you will find ideologies that call themselves socialist that favor a state, the a strong state or even the existence of one is not a defining feature of socialism.
It is, however, an inherent, defining feature of fascism.
At least a dozen different socialist ideologies have entirely different answers to that. First you'll need to decide what you consider a state. Some - e.g. anarchists and other libertarian socialists reject the state outright, and don't want anything to replace it. Others reject "only" top down/involuntary authority, or want any replacement to be minimal in scope (e.g. communes).
A defining trait of a national state is sovereignty over a territory and control of the use of violence in that territory, and those are both traits that multiple socialist ideologies explicitly reject.
Whether or not you believe any of the variations can work is orthogonal to the point that socialism is not a singular ideology, but a spectrum of ideologies that where many reject the state, and so the existence of one is not a defining trait of socialism.
Insisting that it is, is a bit like insisting that capitalism is the same as fascism because capitalism too relies on a state (to enforce property rights). If anything, capitalism is inherently tied to the existence of a state because of the need to enforce property rights that many socialist ideologies reject. But very few socialists would equate capitalism with fascism (some would).
If we're going to use a puritanical definition of socialism then we'll also use one for ownership. Under which the owners of capital under Naziism -- weren't.
They were more akin to socialist party bosses -- do what the nazis say at the directed wages, prices, and quantities and then take your socialist party boss cut off the top.
It's not puritanical to say water is wet. Words mean things. All economies shifted towards command economies during the war. Even the USA. But the USA didn't genocide Jews or starve Kulaks. So your idea that it's all socialism is both practically and theoretically bunk. (You said "communism" but if you can't tell fascism from socialism you definitely can't tell socialism from communism.)
More to the point, it's the type of bunk that is being pushed by the people currently in power to argue that every vaguely left-leaning person in the USA is actually a secret communist revolutionary and should be crushed by any means necessary, law and constitution and common decency be damned:
JD Vance put a blurb on this book praising its core argument. This is how the fascists currently in power will expand their extrajudicial purges from hispanics to political opponents. It's dark shit, and you're helping them.
I don't know anything about Vance's book. I don't understand why people keep pointing to Musk or Vance as if I must be some devout follower or corrupted by same. Even when I was an actual communist in philosophy, as a youngin way before I knew about Musk or Vance, I held the belief that the nazis had a lot of the qualities of the intermediary institutions Marx advocated for. Ludwig Von Mises wrote about it decades ago when he escaped their continental reach.
I'm under no illusion Nazis meet the wet definition of communism, which IIRC when distilled down to just the 'water' without impurities doesn't even have a central government.
Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.