Yes, of course, if an experiment gets the wrong result, you declare the experiment faulty and try again. You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence.
No, it's not socialist, because the socialist nation is a utopia, and thus practically unreachable. The USSR (and DDR, Cuba, Zimbabwe, pre-Deng China and so on), however, is what you get when you make an attempt at reaching it.
Especially given that Marxism is a science, and has undergone major changes as things are learned. Hence "Marxism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism."
Edison: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have
successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."
If Edison had killed even a millionth as many people failing to invent the light bulb as socialists did failing to invent socialism, I suspect he would have stopped trying.
Leninism (and Trotskyism and Stalinism, depending on which side of the Stalinist/Trotskyist divide you fall on as to which one was simply fidelity to Leninism and which one was a substantial revision that unfairly characterized the other) and Maoism were not scientific revisions of Marxism; that is, they were not a result of Marxism being a hypothesis that was empirically tested, failed, and alternative hypothesis whih better fit the available evidence being offered and tested.
My understanding is that ML and MLM _were_ considered to be legitimate, scientific advancements, and that's why it's just M, ML, and MLM, and why Trotskyism/Stalinism/Hoaxianism/Luxemburgism don't get the full-on status that the top three too. That said, I am not as educated on the topic as I would like to be.
Also, let me just say that I never expected to read a post like yours or type a post like mine into an HN comment box, kudos.
