where do we find the resources to change the world?
By: Nia Frome
Tags: Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Politics

I’m a communist because I believe that capitalism is a particular (not natural or logically inevitable) way of doing things, that it’s a terrible way of doing things, and that only an organized working class can get rid of it, and with it class society in general. That position isn’t too unusual these days. The critique of capitalism is in vogue. Socialists are in the news. There are even a few in Congress! You may wonder, though: “Why do you have to call yourself a communist? Isn’t that just gonna make people think of the Soviet Union and, like, Stalin?”

Among socialists there are two basic answers to this question. One insists that the Soviet Union wasn’t really socialist. If right-wing common sense relies on the equation Socialism = USSR = Bad, this answer denies the first leg, claiming that Socialism ≠ USSR = Bad. This protects the idea of socialism, which helps explain why it’s so popular. It allows the speaker to define socialism as they like and saves them the burden of having to constantly apologize for the past. It’s forward-looking and, in a way, faithful to Marx’s critical spirit.

But there is another way to answer the question, and that’s to say Socialism = USSR ≠ Bad.¹ I’d like to explain why I opt for this answer.

Defending the positive accomplishments of the USSR (and the tradition that understands itself to include Stalin and Mao, which I’ll call Really Existing Socialism, or RES) is important because it 1) helps us develop solidaristic habits of thought, 2) decenters the Western experience, 3) helps us view world history in perspective, 4) reminds us of certain hard facts about socialism and class struggle, 5) highlights the way media are used against the left, 6) insists on the value of partial victories, 7) serves as a rebuke to a priori and utopian thinking, 8) focuses our attention on people’s material needs and constraints, and 9) connects us with a tradition that has actually made revolutions.

Trying to understand the obstacles and pressures faced by RES and the ways socialists in power answered them is often dismissed as ‘apologetics’. Another way to understand it, though, is as an exercise in imagination. It’s the same kind of imaginative stretch a person might do after seeing someone protest in a way they don’t approve of: try to gather more information about where that person’s coming from, their history, what options are really available to them, why they may have settled on those methods instead of others, etc. What matters more than the verdict is the willingness to try, which we might also term ‘solidarity’.

Solidarity is very easy to claim as long as the people you’re claiming to have it with don’t do anything that makes you look bad. It’s easy when they’re disorganized, when their suffering is the only thing they’re known for, when they’re respectable victims. But to be effective, real solidarity cannot be so conditional. We must side with the oppressed even when we don’t agree with their methods, or else we give them no reason to count us as their allies. Solidarity is the difference between a united class and a losing one.

Thinking solidaristically makes us smarter, too. A recent example from Colombia: certain dissidents from the demobilized-guerrilla-army-turned-political-party FARC have decided to resume armed struggle. If we simply write them off as Stalinists, it’s obvious why they’d do such a thing — they’re mad, bloodthirsty, would-be tyrants, etc. If we empathize, though, and try to understand where they’re coming from, we notice that the government hasn’t upheld any of the major components of the peace process, former guerrillas who dutifully laid down their weapons are being systematically assassinated along with would-be unionizers and other leftist social leaders across the country, there is no accountability on the horizon for right-wing politicians or the paramilitaries they empowered, which are responsible for at least 80% of civilian casualties in the conflict, and it doesn’t look like land will be returned to the thousands of peasants it was stolen from, since the big landowners who scooped it up have only cemented their hold on power since peace was signed. In short, none of FARC’s options, including staying the course and hoping the peace process works out, are good options. It’s just lazy moralism to say “Well they shouldn’t have taken up arms in the first place” or “They should renounce the pursuit of state power” — it isn’t an analysis, and it doesn’t help anyone do anything.

Every major example of RES comes from the developing world. No developed capitalist country has experienced a successful socialist revolution. It may be the case that only such a revolution can win through to full communism, but no one really knows. What is certain is that racism is a deeply-rooted feature of Western political culture, white people have a habit of viewing non-white societies as backwards and barbaric, and denunciations of ‘oriental despotism’ are as popular now as they ever were. Don’t believe me? Go check out whatever the Guardian’s published on China recently. Most Sovietology (a blessedly defunct field) belongs to the same genre of racist fear-mongering and orientalism. The refrain “not real socialism” is often indistinguishable from “not the kind of socialism us white Europeans would have done”. This judgment is confirmed by anti-Stalinist brands of socialism when they helpfully remind us that governments subject to US-based regime change efforts aren’t really socialist anyway.²

The idea of RES as undemocratic is tinged with Western chauvinism. Most socialist states use(d) a system of hierarchical elections in which people elect local representatives who elect higher bodies which elect a chief executive. Representatives, including the executive, are typically revocable at any time by the body that elected them. There is no obvious reason why this setup is any less democratic than what we do in the West. Do our institutions typically express the will of the people, or are they designed to obstruct it? Consider the UK’s monarchy, the House of Lords, the selection of its Prime Minister, or in the US, the Electoral College, the Senate, or the Federal Reserve. Does the existence of two major parties in the US protect its citizens against domination by rich elites, or does it strengthen that domination? Only a very cartoonish and jingoistic concept of democracy would let us view RES states as especially lacking in it. The idea that the (liberal capitalist) West has a monopoly on democracy and thus an obligation to school the world on it is the same ideology Bush carried into Iraq.³

Of course, for criticizing the West in an essay that’s supposed to be about RES, I may be accused of “whataboutism”, that is, of changing the subject or distracting the reader from the key question of whether RES is good or bad on its own. People who level this accusation like to remind us that “Two things can both be bad at the same time.” Yes, but two competing socioeconomic systems can’t both be worse, and that’s what’s at issue here: the superiority or inferiority of RES to Western ‘liberal democracy’.

Viewing world history in perspective means, firstly, understanding that a worker’s state in an underdeveloped country cannot survive if that country remains underdeveloped. The imperative to economic growth is imposed from without, by reactionary opposition to workers’ power anywhere. In the Soviet case, this opposition kicked off with an invasion by at least fourteen capitalist powers in the first year of the new state’s existence (full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Civil_War ).

Perspective means weighing the crimes of both systems in a holistic way rather than on the basis of select events taken out of context. It means weighing everything the West did to become rich and powerful — colonialism, slavery, countless wars, the genocide of the Americas, etc. — against everything the Soviet Union did to catch up — forced industrialization, collectivization, the gulag, the terror, etc. And it means appreciating what it means that the USSR managed to close this gap in just a few decades, despite being invaded by and defeating Nazi Germany.

Historical perspective is indispensable if we want to make sense of the twentieth century. Suppose we said that both the US and the USSR were fundamentally capitalist, or pursuing the same basic Enlightenment project of instrumental rationality. In this case we would have to interpret the twentieth century as a more or less smooth capitalist progression, interrupted perhaps by scattered outbursts of freedom and creativity that were sadly (but inevitably) stifled. But this is simply Whig history, the inexorable March of Progress, with its value judgments reversed! It’s just as dismissive of human agency as the original. This way of seeing things erases the revolutionary social advances won over the last hundred years, minimizes the efforts of Western states to destroy socialism, denigrates the work of millions of communists who fought and died for a better world, and flies in the face of Marx and Engels’ claim that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

What’s more, colonialism isn’t over. Not only was the current disparity between rich and poor countries founded on brutal violence, pillage, and exploitation, it’s sustained by those very same methods. The US has taken the lead role in working to ensure that the West stays on top of the global (im)balance of power by any means necessary. This can be as innocuous as political pressure (in favor of opening up markets, against industrial, environmental, or labor protections, and of course against nationalization), as cunning as an astroturfed protest movement, or as blunt as cruise missiles and a full-blown invasion.⁴ We can’t disrupt this pattern as long as we’re still caught up in the idea of a basically just and harmonious liberal world order, and that’s the mindset we remain in as long as we view the exceptional crimes of ‘authoritarian regimes’ somewhere else as the worst of the worst.

People who uphold RES don’t believe that its leaders or policies were perfect — with so many leaders, sometimes disagreeing with each other, that would be absurd. What we do maintain is that socialism is better than capitalism, that socialist leaders have on balance advanced the cause of human emancipation while capitalist leaders have actively opposed it, that anticommunism obscures this fact by exaggerating the crimes and denying the accomplishments of RES, and that the real crimes of socialism pale in comparison to those of capitalism and colonialism (in terms of both body count and the intent of those responsible). The crimes of RES, therefore, do not constitute a compelling argument against revolutionary socialism.

“Why not?” you may ask. “There was violence, right? You won’t deny that, I hope. Why isn’t that enough to reject authoritarian socialism altogether? What we need is a nonviolent approach. It’s the only kind of socialism that won’t end in tyranny and dictatorship.” This attitude is not at all uncommon. It comes from a particular kind of education, one that teaches a whitewashed version of the US civil rights movement and the struggle for Indian independence, and one that grows out of religious rather than revolutionary traditions. It’s not an attitude that’s compatible with the revolutionary transformation of society.

Statehood can be understood as ‘that violence which is socially acceptable’. If we do not ‘seize the state’, then it will remain in the hands of pro-capitalist forces, meaning that violence in defense of the capitalist status quo will remain acceptable. There is no way for a socialist movement to succeed if murderous reaction against it (e.g. COINTELPRO) is state policy. Hence the necessity, for socialists, of ‘taking state power’ — we must ensure that the only violence that’s socially acceptable is left violence, e.g. expropriation of the rich, defense against capitalist restoration, etc. This is what Marxists mean when we talk about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and what Engels was talking about when he said

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Those who fail to heed this advice don’t usually last long enough to make for good examples, but the best-known case is Chile, 1973. Reactionary forces do not shrink from using violence. If you let them, they will overthrow whatever socialist order you hope to introduce. It’s not the taking of power but the holding of it that makes nonviolence unviable. If we don’t want someone to come along and introduce a state that works on behalf of the propertied classes (e.g. the Constitutional Convention of the United States), then we need our own, one that works on behalf of the propertyless and is capable of defending itself.

If we say instead that Socialism ≠ USSR = Bad, then the concept of socialism we end up with is pristine, untainted by violence, and there’s no limit to the sunny modifiers we can add to indicate how different it will be from RES: real socialism must be democratic, horizontal, decentralized, autonomous, libertarian, humanist, participatory, non-bureaucratic, non-dogmatic, grassroots, “from below”, etc. In other words, socialism, to count as socialism, must be perfect. It’s not hard to see how this definition becomes increasingly useless and moralistic the more synonyms for ‘good’ we pile on, how it mimics the logic of respectability politics. These modifiers do nothing to address the question of power, rarely stating but often implying that it won’t be a problem because the consensus in socialism’s favor will be so universal. This isn’t how major social transformations work, especially the kind with winners and losers. We should expect a socialist revolution to look more like a slave revolt than like a conference on historical materialism.

That said, RES was nothing like the image most people in the West have of it. It’s easy to pay lip service to but hard to really understand how much the ruling class and its media lie about socialism until you start to investigate its history. Stalin did not kill 30 million people. The famine of 1932–33 was not a genocide against Ukrainians or anyone else. Being sent to the gulag was not a death sentence — mortality in the gulag was dramatically lower than in imperial prisons. Most purges consisted of no more than party members having their memberships revoked for incompetence, corruption, drunkenness, or not being who they said they were. There was an outbreak of political violence in 1936–38, but Stalin didn’t design or control it. Instead it was a broadly participatory and anti-bureaucratic process, a mass hysteria in which people from all levels of society sought redress for their grievances (both real and imagined) in a paranoid, hyperpatriotic outpouring of state violence that disproportionately targeted state officials. It claimed around 700,000 lives.

Now for the parts you may not have heard about. In the first thirty years of its existence, the USSR put an end to the periodic famines that had plagued Russia for thousands of years. It lifted millions of people out of crushing poverty. It guaranteed housing, healthcare, and education for its citizens while also nearly eliminating inequality, something that no capitalist society has ever done. It catapulted Russia, a semi-feudal country, into the space race and the status of world superpower, reaching standards of living and life expectancy comparable to those of the rich colonizing countries in spite of those countries’ tremendous head start. It oversaw massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women with respect to men. Shortly after it gave women the vote in 1917, the UK, Canada and the US were obliged to follow suit in order to stop the flow of disenfranchised women towards Bolshevism. The Soviet example served as a continuous challenge to the legitimacy of Western capitalist powers and gave them an incentive to pass social reforms, including social security and civil rights, or else see their discontent turn to revolution.

Besides that, the Soviet Union won World War II for the Allies and ended the Holocaust. It inspired and provided material aid to left-wing national liberation movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Cuba, etc.) across the colonized world. And it operated a centrally planned economy specifically designed to make homelessness, hunger, and unemployment impossible. This was accomplished, after a very rocky start, by decommodifying life’s wants, by replacing market anarchy and the profit motive with conscious planning and production on the basis of need.

And it was democratic, democratic in a way only revolutionary states can be, because their policies haven’t been decided in advance, because their legitimacy is still fragile and depends to a great extent on public opinion, because there are no old boy networks in place, because the revolution and its ideology give workers a sense of entitlement over their government that they don’t have under capitalism. And because of its elections, as mentioned above.

If you find all this hard to believe or unconvincing because “it doesn’t change the fact that Stalin was evil”, think about how that certainty and its emotional charge were formed. The power of the media (including “historians” like Robert Conquest of the IRD) to shape common sense through omissions, distortions and outright fabrications is hard to properly appreciate. We usually overestimate our rational and critical faculties, thinking ourselves immune to the power of brute repetition, behind which so often lurks the power of money. Even people familiar with Noam Chomsky’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’ rarely adopt the deep skepticism towards received wisdom that its critique would seem to imply. Capitalist interests shape what we see and hear and believe — the CIA did not spend the Cold War lollygagging. Unless we want to serve those interests ourselves, we have to actively compensate for the media’s distortions and omissions, even those we haven’t identified yet, with the certainty that media bias always favors the ruling class. Nothing drives this point home more clearly than studying and talking to people about the history of RES. We need to learn to distrust the mainstream media’s version of what’s going on in the world or we will remain ideologically captive to capitalist interests.

The overwhelmingly negative opinion most Westerners have of the Soviet Union is shared by many on the left. These leftists have put forward a dizzying array of theories to explain what went wrong: maybe the USSR was never more than state capitalist, or it started good but then degenerated, or became Bonapartist, or bureaucratic collectivist, or the Bolsheviks were too positivist, or teleological, or voluntarist, or vulgar materialist, or they didn’t recognize the need to abolish the value form, etc. Such critics almost always agree, though, that Stalin’s doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ was a betrayal of socialist values.

Here’s the thing. Most of the Bolsheviks expected that the Russian Revolution would set off a chain of revolutions in Western Europe (especially Germany with its powerful SPD), and that these revolutions would strengthen the geopolitical position of their own fledgling workers’ state and provide them with economic support from the heart of the developed capitalist world. When, in the early twenties, it became clear that this plan had fallen through, the Soviet Union basically had to choose between saying “No, I refuse to accept that, we must have a revolution in Western Europe” and saying “Okay, we’ll try and survive on our own, then.” Stalin went with the latter.

We know now, with the arrogance of hindsight, that the Soviet Union did not manage to abolish the state or usher in a global communist order. Ultimately it was overthrown, after which, as Stalin predicted, “set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries” that today we call neoliberalism. While it lasted, though, the USSR accomplished a great deal of good in extremely adverse circumstances, not only for its own citizens but for working people everywhere. These are perhaps the defining traits of RES: its resilience in the face of unimaginable hardship, and the fact that lower classes the world over, even people who despise socialism, enjoy the fruits of its victories.

Those who compare these victories unfavorably to a fully realized communism that exists only in the imagination aren’t saying anything interesting. It’s always trivially true that things could be better, and it’s not hard to list the things you’d do differently. What is interesting are those partial victories, like the existence of the first socialist state, that hold lessons for revolutionaries today.⁵ How do you organize food production on a non-capitalist basis? How do you hold on to necessary technical expertise despite the political apathy or hostility of experts as a class? How do you abolish private property in land? How should a socialist state act in its dealings with capitalist states? How do you mediate between the divergent interests of town and country in a way that lets you soften that contradiction over time? What do you do if no one will trade with you and you’re not yet set up to be self-sufficient? These are hard questions that are generic to socialism, that only socialist states have had to answer under all the relevant constraints. You don’t get to breeze past them just because you’ve rhetorically distanced your socialism from RES. You don’t get to answer with “We’ll do it democratically” because that’s a non-answer, a deferral.

Partial victories are the stuff victory is made of. They’re how we win socialism acclaim, how we hone our tools, how we gain ground and build momentum. The transition from one mode of production to another is never smooth — it emerges in patches, it advances and retreats. If we look at the first capitalist states, how many of them are still around today? Was the early Dutch Republic indisputably capitalist, with no traces of feudalism? If we reject partial victories, seeing them as disastrous missteps, we soon begin to celebrate only patience and defeat.

The scorn heaped on ‘Socialism in One Country’, then, is a clear example of the perfect acting as the enemy of the good. No one is saying we shouldn’t refine our ideals based on past experiences. What’s too often forgotten, though, is that those ideals (say, that of a revolution sweeping the globe without pausing to consolidate power in any particular region) are themselves products of class society and may constitute obstacles or dead ends for the revolutionary movement. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote

[The communists] do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement … The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.

To proceed otherwise is to engage in a priori or utopian speculation. Earlier I said that Socialism ≠ USSR = Bad was, in a way, faithful to Marx’s critical spirit, because the man spent most of his life criticizing socialists for not being sufficiently radical. But Marx’s criticism was always firmly materialist, starting from the conditions of real life, not from a pre-established plan for the ideal society or ideal revolution. This was a recurrent, if not the dominant, theme in his criticisms of other socialists. In real politics, he unequivocally supported the Union cause in the American Civil War (despite its statism, capitalism, etc.), national liberation movements in Ireland and Poland (despite their mixed class character), and the Paris Commune (despite its indifference towards the task of abolishing wage labor, commodity production, etc.).

A priori reasoning about revolution is just about all that’s left to us once we dismiss RES as a positive example. This can happen for a couple reasons. The most common is that people buy into the official story about the Soviet Union: deliberately manufactured famines, death camps, totalitarianism, etc. Another more rarefied argument reaches the same basic conclusion, but from ‘the left’: the Soviet Union was no more than bourgeois nationalism, a developmentalist regime, an example of social democracy. This tendency holds the achievements of RES in contempt. It desires only communism, which it understands not as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” but as “the riddle of history solved”, i.e. in metaphysical terms. Is it any surprise that this way of thinking hasn’t given us any works of revolutionary strategy, let alone revolutions? If communism is totally ineffable from within our blinkered capitalist paradigm, then there’s no point in planning for a transition into it. Notice the feedback loop here: if socialism has never existed, then the only way we can learn anything about it is through contemplation, in which case we’re bound to discover it is a very fine and glorious thing, infinitely removed from our lived experience, only confirming our suspicion that it’s never existed.

Material gains matter. Human activity matters. The aspirations of ordinary people to improve their lives aren’t something to look down on, they’re what revolutions are made of. The Cold War wasn’t a caprice, it was the result of a cold calculation by the Western powers that RES was a mortal threat to their interests (or “way of life”). The abundance of anticommunist propaganda we see even today⁶ is not an accident, and it’s not dumb. It derives from real class interests that Western states have defended continuously since colonial times: private property and the unrestricted use of our time, our bodies and our planet.

This is the basic flaw with the answer Socialism ≠ USSR = Bad. It imagines that if we transport the debate about socialism onto the ideal plane, then it’ll be easy to win, and this victory will eventually trickle down into real life. “If we can just get it right on paper…” But ideals don’t get to dictate reality, since reality is just as busy shaping ideals. Talk to people about socialism and they’ll often bring up Stalin on their own, without prompting. One response is to challenge this association, but can you really blame them for making it? Stalin was a major historical figure and he remains a powerful trope. His name stands for the perverse emergence of injustice from the overzealous pursuit of justice. It’s dramatic irony, a morality tale about how power corrupts, especially when it’s new, i.e. proletarian. The trope implies that radically changing the world is a bad idea. If people continue to believe in it because we never challenge the shoddy and mercenary history-writing that made it into common sense, then they won’t ever come to support radical change. Even if you give them other heroes to look up to, the temptation to read those other people as Stalins won’t go away.

What does work is studying the tradition of RES, where we find insights into questions socialists are still asking today. What distinguishes these insights from those you might find in the supermarket checkout aisle is that they come from revolutionary experience. Learning isn’t a one-way process of internalizing facts about the world. It’s a cycle, in which we examine the world, act to change it, and then reflect on how our interventions have panned out. The distinctive advantage of RES over the different brands of speculative or ideal socialism is this: a deeper engagement with reality than mere contemplation of it, a theory with real stakes.

This explains why enemies of socialism don’t harbor the same hatred for those other traditions that they do for RES. Many varieties of academic Marxism are tolerated on university campuses. Anarchism is seen as a fairly harmless phase for middle-class teenagers. Left-wing journals like Encounter were at one time even financed by the CIA. That’s because the enemies of socialism, those who work tirelessly to destroy it, don’t care where you stand on Deleuze or Adorno or communism in the abstract. They care about your feelings towards guerrilla groups like the ELN and the Naxalites, towards governments in Havana, Pyongyang, and Caracas. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They aren’t worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know those things can be brought back in line through the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they’re mainly concerned to protect, because with just that they can guarantee the rest. That’s why, when you desert RES in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.