When a socialist country undergoes a liberalization of the economy -- of using the market and participating in free trade with capitalist nations, and opening the economy for private businesses, this isn't a rejection of socialism. It's adapting to real life circumstances.

Socialism does not equal poverty, it's not the aesthetic of choosing something shoddy over something refined out of fear of seeming bougie. Socialism is to uplift humanity. To build a world from each according to their ability and to each their need, we need to generate wealth.

One of the challenges faced by the USSR or even Mao's PRC was economic isolation from the rest of the "developed" world -- through sanctions or through domestic policies, forcing them to develop an almost insular economy...

...however this came with the toll of technological slowdown at certain key periods of their development for lack of an internal material base to sustain further technological or economic growth -- like computing or genetics in the USSR or industrial development in the PRC.

There also develops a contradiction among the people as later generations are born, the more common people will take their access to free healthcare, education for granted and start demanding commodities, like east Germans demanding blue jeans or Poles demanding action movies.

You might think it's petty but these were real demands in the socialist bloc, which charged the way for regime change operations that won people's support -- "if the socialism were more like the west, then we can have greater access to personal fulfillment through commodities."

Now what is a socialist country to do when it has weaker productive forces and has a slower technological development than western imperialism? It needs to adapt its economy to compensate and think of ways that can fill the gap between the two economic systems.

Here comes the use of the market. The market's use is that it's able to attain resources, commodities, and wealth rapidly because these transactions and interactions don't need to be planned on the state level -- they can happen organically.

However when a socialist country adopts a market approach, it doesn't exclude the planning altogether, but rather the market is utilized to consolidate the resources and manpower needed to meet economic plans with expediency.

Surplus is rewarded with personal profit, giving incentive for more people in the domestic population to engage in the economy and develop the productive forces of society, closing and even exceeding the gap between socialism and imperialism.

Lastly, when a socialist country takes this approach, they *have* to make sure that the fundamental political control of the country serves the working class, for the cause of the development of socialism -- passing legislation that protects the workers and advances their power.

Basically if markets and bourgeois elements exist in a socialist country, they must be forced and utilized to serve the overarching mission of the working class movement as it marches to the development of a communist society -- building the groundwork for its realization.

This is the story of China, Vietnam, Laos, and recently Cuba. Where these policies lead them, what stage of socialism they will achieve that can sustain a 21st century socialism will be something we haven't seen before, and something only they can decide.