Note from the Editor:
What follows is the text from an emailed exchange between two Furman University students from the Fall of 2024. The initial piece written by Sam Hart and a response by Steven Raney are being published together.
La Sinistra
Or: What about the Holodomor?
By Sam Hart
INTRODUCTION
As a measure of good faith to my very good friends and critics at the Radical Rose Collective and the Furman University chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, I would like to begin this article by stating some axioms I maintain which inform my worldview (though, not necessarily my argument here). The purpose of stating these axioms is simple. I want to be convinced. Arguments against my own will be better equipped to change my mind by knowing which presuppositions I will hold on to more stubbornly. This is not necessarily because I refuse to alter or abort these axioms, instead I want to give my friends some insight as to which claims to dedicate most of their attention, or to ignore completely. Here are the axioms.
- The Holodomor was an unjustifiable atrocity[1] attributable to Soviet Communist collectivization policies, and;
- Lysenkoism[2], which is a false doctrine which—in communion with Soviet Communism, Marxist ideology, and other factors—caused the Holodomor.
- The Soviet Union (under Stalin) attempted numerous ethnocides. It attempted to maintain cultural, linguistic, economic, religious and territorial control over minority ethnic groups and, through this process of forced russification, stripped them of their inalienable human rights.
And, regarding point (iii), I should add that I understand the russification of the former Soviet states is inherently attributable to the legacy of colonialism in the Russian Empire. I understand this to be a common argument within some leftist circles, but I do not find it very convincing. A similar argument is often made regarding the ongoing Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, bolstered by nostalgic oligarchs, the Russian military-industrial complex, and Soviet revanchism invaded Ukraine because he felt threatened by NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. I find these apologetics unconvincing, regardless of how factual they may or may not be. That is not to say, however, motivation is irrelevant in determining how we ought to form moral judgements on these things. The problem I have with leftism is that I sense a sinister obsession with motivation. In short, I cannot maintain the proposition that a utopian[3] “end” can be justified by any “means.” There are some human costs that are too magnificent for me to remain content.
Now the argument can begin.
WHAT’S SINISTER?
The obvious counterclaim to my concern is to “do that math.” If millions must suffer today for billions to prosper tomorrow—and we know that it is the case that unless we make this sacrifice billions and billions will suffer—how can a rational, moral, person justify anything other than revolution? (And, for what it’s worth, I think an empirical argument on the costs of not transitioning from capitalism to socialism to communism would be the most convincing.) The problem I run into is the apparent desire of some so-called revolutionary socialists to ensure even the ‘libs’ get ‘the bullet too.’ I am not at all familiar with the works of Trotsky, so I am most likely misunderstanding what he means when he—or other communists—refer to a “permanent revolution,” but, all I can imagine—I think others would agree—is perpetual violence. Shepherds culling their herds into oblivion. Even when this desire doesn’t playout in an overt violent aggression, it often manifests in the refusal to enter a dialogue with non-socialists, wishing pain and suffering and death on the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, and a failure to cooperate (even, or especially, amongst themselves). In my view, any political position which refuses to engage with the popular majority—even an outright evil one—worships something different, and therefore worse, than the wellbeing of the human body and soul. In warfare, the strategy of “taking no prisoners” is often understood to be a bad one. To end a war and achieve one’s political ends, one must take as many prisoners as possible. Ideally, one should make being a prisoner in one’s own domain far more comfortable than continuing to fight for the opposition. A socialism that promises, “fascists get the bread and roses too” would be a much more efficient and moral ideology. That is not to say that we should be obligated to work with fascists—or even that anyone should stop fighting against them—it is merely the observation that one ought not chase a rat into a corner. If we do not create a space for a conversion to occur, then what is the opposition to assume about our goals?
It seems that there is something so intoxicatingly beautiful about the idea of communism that it can supersede any concern for humanity. One could describe communism as Edenic. Both in terms of its beauty and childishness, youthful exuberance. This is the only way I rationalize the communist’s intuition to actively exclude the fence-sitters, bootlickers, and landowners. They defied us—as a human race—so now they cannot come into the tree house to play. And, from what I gather, this instinct is not merely excludatory, but murderous (I have seen looks of abject disgust wash across a leftist’s face when encountering a right-leaning position, and it scares me). Here the “math” is not the one aforementioned. It seems that billions[4] must die today for millions to prosper tomorrow. In a utilitarian worldview, if each of the million is experiencing 1000 or more abstract pleasure units—and assume death provides 0 units—this is a good deal, even better if it is extended to me and my comrades—as it is us who are intimately familiar with the real communism.
So, as the communist marches towards her ends. Should she be remiss to think to herself, “what about the Holodomor?” What if this idea—dreamed up in the minds of men—evolves into something else along her long march? How is she meant to trust her comrades? But what other choice does she have? Is she meant to trust that—in her comrade’s attempt to invert—that we do not also engage in a dialectic? That—by running against the grain—she instead arrives, justifies, creates, or wills a novel antithesis into existence. I maintain that she is not incorrect in her worry insofar as ‘revolution’ describes both social upheaval and the movement of a wheel. That is to say, whenever there is a time of great upheaval the ideas which are lost and the ideas which are maintained are not necessarily predictable. Any leading ideology can develop some wrongness. How is our communist meant to trust that her comrades do not go on to reject Mendelian genetics; abstract and modernist art; existentialist literature; or human rights?
ANOTHER THOUGHT
Communism tries to answer a tough empirical question about human behavior. Crime, instability, and social violence—it is generally understood (but perhaps I ought to have cited this)—is the result of inequality (even more so than poverty, as such). This sensitivity to unfairness may be described as instinctual. Capitalism asks of us, “If you have a house, and a car, and clothes, … etc. etc. etc. why should you be upset if your neighbor has double or triple or a billion times more?” Whether the factual nature of this claim holds (Do I actually have all that stuff?) seems irrelevant to the communist. To them, there is something inherently immoral about inequality. In a world where the poorest person has a mansion made of gold and all the medicine and food and education they will ever need and more—if there are somehow rich folks that are even more impossibly wealthy than this is an immoral world. Why? Must wealth be a zero-sum game? Sure, we live on a planet with limited resources. But I still have a sense that a leftist might suggest that the picture I have painted above is somehow immoral. Is this the case?
CONCLUSION
As of writing, I do not maintain any meaningful political ‘label’ for myself (Perhaps that means I am merely reactionary or complicit?). I understand that there are problems with the current system. Change is becoming increasingly necessary. The benefits of caution are becoming overshadowed by the risks of inaction—which is precisely why I write this. My respondents could write to me that a farther-leftist system is better than the current one and I might be inclined to agree with them, but that doesn’t mean that such a system would be good. Goodness relative to what? I am not sure. The only leftism I think I can really ‘get behind’ is one that recognizes the immutable sanctity of a human life. I, we, need an ideology that marches forward in absolute unconditional love for the violated and their violators, the exploited and their exploiters. We ought to always maintain a radical love and forgiveness.
Footnotes for La Sinistra:
[1] I understand that the classification of the Holodomor as a genocide is the object of heated scholarly debate which I do not want to be the subject of this discourse. However, I do find myself leaning towards affirming this belief.
[2] You can also replace with Maoist China’s “Four Evils Campaign”
[3] Good place to potentially change my mind here. I understand that Marx was distinct in that he was a non-utopian socialist. However, I also understand that he was inspired by the tradition of German idealism. Does idealism not implicitly suggest some kind of utopianism? If not at the global, social level then at the individual level?
[4] This is just a big number to do math with. Literal “billions” is not what I am discussing here.
Why I am a Communist
By Steven Raney
Introduction
I would like to begin by thanking our dear comrade Sam (if he will accept the label) for his November 14th letter. It raises a number of common objections to communist doctrine which are worth addressing in a systematic and accessible way. I believe the arguments therein are founded on a series of fundamental misunderstandings which I will attempt to correct before proceeding to our comrade’s points about historical communist projects.
Note that “communism” and “socialism” are broad terms used by many different thinkers, movements, and schools of thought throughout history, predating Marx by generations and often in fundamental disagreement with one another. I will use them interchangeably with each other and with the term “Marxism” because I am a Marxist, because Marxist variations of socialism have been by far the most widely adopted and most historically significant, and because the letter to which I am responding appears to be primarily concerned with Marxism and its descendants.
I. What is Marxism?
The most serious flaw with our comrade’s critique of communism is that it misses the mark on what communists believe. “Inequality” in the abstract is not the basis of Marxism’s critique of capitalism, and “equality” as an abstract ideal to be striven for is not the communist raison d’être. Rather, Marxism is concerned with concrete social relations—the material processes that constitute our society and how those processes condition the human experience. The Marxist critique of capitalism rests on the critique of alienation, which occurs on several levels:
- The alienation of human beings from our means of subsistence, which occurs through the institution of private property. Private ownership of the natural world and the means of production means that our fulfillment of our needs as a species is mediated by property, and those without it must fulfill their needs by exchanging something with those who own it.
- The alienation of the propertyless from their labor. Those who do not own property have nothing to exchange except their own ability to work and produce things with that property, i.e., their labor power. Their labor power is therefore commodified, produced for exchange with the propertied (the capitalists, the bourgeoisie) rather than for their own use. Their time spent working and their time spent replenishing themselves to work again (between the two, their entire lives) become structured around the whims of the property-owners to which they sell their labor.
- The alienation of humanity from society. Humanity is a social species, and human nature is socially determined by the sum total of all the social relations that constitute our society. In a society with commodified labor, laborers are reduced to appendages in a machine. As workers they live a social existence, “collaborating” with a complex web of other producers to create the society they live in, but they do so blindly, without a say in what or how that society is produced, and without time in their lives to do the things which enrich the human experience except as a means of replenishing their labor power for the next workday. In other words, as laborers they live social lives, but as people they are atomized. Humanity is alienated from society and from itself.
This alienation, founded on the commodification of people and the planet, is degrading to human life because it subjects us to domination—it robs us of control over our own fates in this world, both as individuals and as a collective. This domination takes three forms:
- Objective domination in the workplace. The property-owner who purchases the worker’s labor power has effectively absolute control over the price offered for it (wages) and the conditions of production (working hours, etc.). The capitalist workplace is a dictatorship of the employer.
- Impersonal domination of the market. Market forces guide all productive activity and shape all of society under capitalism. No one controls these forces—they are the agglomeration of uncountable exchanges of commodities (and speculation on future exchanges) between mutually competing, self-interested entities (capitalists, firms, individual workers on the labor market, etc.) on a vast scale. Capitalist society is not rationally organized, and the forces that do organize it are beyond the conscious control of even the capitalists. Humanity has enslaved itself to productive forces of its own making. Marx describes this form of domination in demonological terms, as an inhuman force imposing a terrible and alien logic on all of society. This is the dictatorship of the “free” market.
- Political domination by the capitalist state. Because the logic of the market ensures that property accumulates in fewer hands over time, the class that benefits from the objective domination of workers finds itself as a minority of society. To keep the propertyless majority in line, the capitalist class relies on an anti-democratic, repressive political order that enshrines minority rule. Capitalist states are constituted to restrict or distort suffrage and place power in the hands of unelected judges and bureaucrats, which also allows the ruling class to maintain control over society’s organs of compulsion—the police, the military, and other “special bodies of armed men.”[1] This is the dictatorship of the capitalist class.
The interests of the capitalist class stand opposed to those of the propertyless laboring class, or proletariat. Where the proletariat wants higher wages to claw back the value it produces with its labor, the capitalist class wants to reduce wages to the minimum necessary for the working class to (on average) survive and replenish itself enough to continue working. Where the proletariat wants shorter working hours to rescue its life from the degradation of labor, the capitalists want to maximize working hours to squeeze more labor out of each worker and increase the rate of profit. Where the proletariat wants secure access to the necessities of life, the capitalists want a permanent fraction of society stripped of them, an unemployed and abandoned “reserve army of labor,” to keep the price of labor power low. Because the capitalist class controls all structural points of leverage (objective domination in the workplace and political domination via the state), and because the dominating logic of the market drives the capitalist class to seek infinitely expanding profits, the natural tendency of capitalist society is towards greater immiseration of the proletariat and greater enrichment of the bourgeoisie. As Marx put it, “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”[2] The society our comrade has envisioned as a thought experiment to push the limits of the supposed communist obsession with “inequality,” one in which vast inequality exists but every person lives a dignified and even luxurious life, is a toy model of a society, one which does not and could not possibly exist. Marxism is not concerned with toy models, it is concerned with understanding and transforming the world as it exists.
Marxism does not seek an “equal” society, it seeks one free of domination. To achieve this, the anti-democratic, repressive capitalist state would need to be replaced by true democracy in the political realm. Workers’ control of production would need to supplant the dictatorship of the employer. The economy would need to be planned by the collective for collective ends, with production undertaken to meet human needs rather than to produce commodities for profit. Such a society, to be clear, would be vastly more equal. No one would be born into wealth, or acquire it off the backs of others. The world would not be divided into gated suburbs, golf resorts, and marinas full of superyachts on the one hand and rotted slums, plantation barracks, and tent cities on the other. Estates and hedge funds would disappear. None of these things serve the ends of dignified human life, and none of them could be upheld without a profoundly dominating and dominated society. In a world free of the arbitrary tyranny of class society, a world where human sovereignty is not filtered through the institution of private property and all the various structures of oppression downstream of it, we could instead guarantee adequate food, housing, medicine, leisure, and care for every person on Earth. Human beings would be free to pursue fulfilling lives on their own terms rather than lives of desperation on the outskirts of the vast expanse of life abandoned to labor on terms dictated to them by the interests of their exploiters and the alien logic of capital. To use our comrade’s words, is striving for this world not the embodiment of “radical love?”
It is understandable that critics of communism, like our comrade, might see a doctrine aimed at realizing such a world as a “utopian” one striving for an “Edenic” future. Marxists have not historically seen it this way, and in fact have critiqued other socialists as “utopians.” As mentioned previously, the terms “communism” and “socialism,” and the general striving for a classless society, predate Marx and Engels. For several decades before them, socialism was the domain of intellectuals like Joseph Fourier or Robert Owen who thought of communism as a perfect state of human affairs that could be designed and then realized out of whole cloth. They and their followers spent their time making plans for the classless future and attempting to put them into practice by establishing “utopian communities” across Europe and North America, often with funding from wealthy benefactors. This same preoccupation with getting away from the grind of capitalist life to live as communists in the here and now has reappeared frequently throughout the last two centuries, including in living memory with the “back-to-the-land” communes of the 1960s and anarchist “intentional communities” in the modern day.
Marxism’s historical significance, then, is not as the origin of communism but as an intervention in communism. The Marxist intervention is to reject this sort of utopian voluntarism—the idea that, with people with the right ideas and the will to live them out, communism can simply be created out of thin air—by insisting that communism can only be created out of the social matter that actually exists. This requires communists to scientifically analyze the historical evolution of society and interact with it directly as an organized political movement. If communism is to be won by a political movement, its base must be drawn from the part of the population that, first, has no material stake in the present state of affairs and thus no objection to revolutionizing them, and second, has an interest in a majoritarian political system overseeing social control of the economy. The only part of society that meets these criteria is the proletarian class, which holds no property, is immiserated, and makes up the large majority of the population yet has no control over the distribution of wealth and power. Capitalism is the first form of society in human history where a social formation of this kind exists, where the majority of the population is organized into a propertyless class of commodified laborers. In other words, it is the first time in history where a class with both an interest in creating communism and the means to do so has existed. This is what Marxists mean when they say capitalism creates the conditions for communism, a statement often misinterpreted as a teleology by critics who wish to paint Marxism as a utopian dogma or religion. But Marxism is no religion. The historical accomplishment of Marx, Engels, and their elaborators is in merging the intellectual tradition of utopian socialism, the dialectical philosophy of the Hegelians, the school of critical political economy inherited from Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others, the emerging organized labor movement, and the radically democratic political practice of the Levellers, the Jacobins, and the Chartists into a political doctrine informed by a method of scientifically interpreting history.
II. Marxism as political strategy
In his letter, our comrade spends a great deal of time speculating on the desires motivating communists, concluding that there is something sinister about a doctrine that motivates people to refuse to “enter a dialogue with non-socialists” or “engage with the popular majority,” let alone to wish “pain and suffering and death” on the ruling class and other opponents. Whatever anecdotal experiences have informed this perception of communists are beyond the scope of my response here, but suffice it to say, this image of a communist is far removed from the actual content of Marxist political strategy.
Firstly, though Marxism is not a religion, if it were one, it would be an evangelical one. The Marxist theory of change sees the conquest of democracy by the working-class majority as the path to socialism, and therefore requires that the popular majority not only be engaged with but be won over to a revolutionary democratic socialist program. This requires agitation, propaganda, political education, and yes, debate. But Marxists do not organize themselves into debate clubs. The goal is to organize a mass party of the working class, bringing the most militant layers of the proletariat into motion together for common ends expressed in a political program. Such a party cannot be brought into existence by deferring to what the popular majority already believes. Majorities are to be created, not catered to. The experience of the most successful revolutionary movements of the modern era shows us that the road to a majority mandate for revolution starts with a principled minority sticking to its program against seemingly hopeless odds. The Marxists of imperial Russia and the abolitionists of antebellum America both went from reviled fringe movements to the vanguards of their own revolutions only by patiently building their ranks, refusing compromise with the ruling class and the forces of reaction, challenging the state at every opportunity, and establishing themselves as the most capable, most consistent, most tireless fighters for freedom in every arena of their respective class struggles.
Marxists stake our claim in the public forum through debate, but the fora where our mandate will be won or lost are the sites of class struggle where the oppressed and exploited are stirred to action against the ruling class. Rather than attempting to convince those farthest from us by presenting our politics in a form palatable to committed liberals or even reactionaries, our task is to organize those closest to us into a bloc capable of clearly articulating its interests and acting upon them with the force of numbers—with petitions, protests, civil disobedience, strikes, occupations, et cetera, but also by contesting elections on our own terms, electing tribunes of the people to the halls of power to disrupt the functioning of the state, agitate public opinion, and champion the cause of the oppressed against the ruling-class consensus. From there, and only from there, is it possible to build that bloc into a majority. There are no shortcuts. Without a party of our own, one committed to the project of winning the battle for democracy and overturning capitalist rule, we have nothing. So yes, the fascists will “get the bread and roses too” once they are eliminated as a threat to working and oppressed people. Marxists have always maintained that the society we wish to create would be kinder and more humanizing for everyone, including our most vicious enemies. But that does not mean our finite efforts are wisely spent telegraphing our harmlessness the most committed defenders of the present dominating and inhuman society. We want a better world, and in order to win it we intend to destroy the cruel world our opponents uphold. And for that we should not apologize.
III. An ethic of history beyond utilitarianism
Much of our comrade’s letter is concerned with whether communism is worth it. The classless society of the future certainly sounds wonderful, but if people are driven to do terrible things in the present to realize it, is that not an indictment of the idea itself? It’s great in theory, but it makes things worse in practice. The ends cannot justify the means. These are familiar refrains. Our comrade, attempting to understand the communist perspective, assumes the “obvious counterclaim” to his critique is to “do the math,” and so he has set up a basic utilitarian calculus for us wherein “millions must suffer today for billions to prosper tomorrow.” The argument then holds that the “intoxicating” end represented by communism perverts this calculus until any means become justifiable. All of this is almost logically consistent, but once again has very little to do with what communists actually believe. To critique Marxism on ethical grounds, we must understand Marxism as an ethical framework, and to do that we must understand the Marxist conception of history.
The question of what it is ethical for human beings to do in pursuit of a better world is partly a question of how much autonomy human will has in history. A common mistake critics of Marxism make is to assume it is a deterministic philosophy that claims we are impotent in the face of overriding “material conditions” operating above the realm of human agency or even comprehension. It could not be more apparent in the foundational texts of Marxism that this is not the case. The relationship between human agency and our material conditions is a dialectical one. One does not absolutely determine or restrain the other because they are two interacting parts of the same whole. Marx put it succinctly in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
“Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[3]
The present is not an open field on which free agents can interact in any combination and towards any ends they can conceive of. The present society inherits conditions that are the result of past transformations of society, and these conditions circumscribe both thought and action for those living today. Marxists seeking to bring about communism have the power to transform capitalist society, but this is not an unlimited power; we cannot outright negate the forms of domination that shape our society because the very act of challenging and overthrowing them leaves their imprint on us. For instance, the Bolsheviks chose to work for the overthrow of the Tsar and Russian capitalism, but they did not choose to do so under conditions of intense police repression, world war, famine and plague, widespread societal collapse, a thirteen-army imperialist invasion, et cetera. These circumstances were “existing already, given and transmitted from the past” by dynamics internal to capitalism—its need to exercise political domination of the proletariat, its tendency towards imperialist expansion and cyclical crises, its hollowing-out of food, fuel, and medical infrastructure. Regardless of what the Bolsheviks wanted, the fact that these conditions existed shaped the ways in which the party acted (or could act) to birth the new society it was attempting to create. Police repression and war bred militarized party structures suited for wartime organizing but not for governing a democratic workers’ state. Famine, plague, and social disintegration lowered the ceiling on what was possible in the prefiguration of socialism, forcing the party to make impossible choices. The effects of these things could not simply be willed away once the dust had settled. They “gave and transmitted” a new set of circumstances to the generations born in their wake. We are deluding ourselves if we imagine that similarly terrible challenges will not confront any future attempt to revolutionize society. What, then, is it ethically justifiable for communists to do in confronting those challenges?
To ask whether the ends justify the means is practically a non-sequitur. We do not have a completely free hand in choosing either our ends or the means we employ to reach them. The contradiction between our desired ends and our present conditions creates the means available to us, and the means we choose in turn shape the actually-existing ends, which then seamlessly become the new present conditions. Even this framing is crude and reductive, because in reality, there are no discrete “means” and “ends.” To return to the Bolshevik example, the Soviet Union was no more an “end” than Russian capitalism was, or feudalism before it, and the daily operation of those class systems was no less a “means” than the October Revolution was. Each “end” is in fact a constitutive process, a “means” of its own, as well as a new terrain on which class struggles play out under new conditions towards new “ends.” The more important question for us to answer is whether this new terrain is more conducive to the creation of a society free of domination. This is the criterion Marxists use to weigh the ethical mass of history.
IV. What about the Soviet Union?
Both communists and their critics live in the long shadow of the late Soviet Union. In the world of international politics, it is en vogue to describe the semi-peripheral states of Eastern Europe and Central Asia as “post-Soviet countries.” This misses the forest for the trees. The reality is that we all live in a post-Soviet world. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the global political-economic order was shaped by the existence of the USSR in the twentieth century, and the extent to which it has been reshaped in its absence. It is no surprise, then, that debates about communism are often framed at least in part as debates about the legacy of the Soviet experiment. Our comrade takes just such an approach in his letter, laying down a set of “axioms” about the Soviet Union as a way of preparing the ground for his argument that communist ideology stokes “sinister” ways of thinking that inevitably produce atrocities.
So what about the Soviet Union?
Critics of communism typically hold out the Soviet Union as a negative example on two grounds: 1) it failed on its own terms, by failing to defeat world capitalism and then collapsing, and 2) it failed by universal humanist standards by becoming a repressive regime guilty of atrocities against its own people (e.g. the Great Terror) and others (e.g. the invasion of Hungary).
The first claim is unequivocally true. The Soviet Union failed to establish a classless communist society and suffered a final ignominious defeat at the hands of a resurgent global capitalism in the final decade of its existence. This alone does not prove the non-viability of transitioning to a communist world. The emergence of capitalism was no smoother a transition; it had its own fits and false starts, like the dead end of the bourgeois merchant republics in medieval Italy. Only after centuries of failures and partial successes did the capitalist class establish itself as the global ruling class. It stands to reason that the process of replacing global capitalist rule with global working-class rule will be similarly uneven, to say nothing of the process of transforming the capitalist world-system under proletarian rule into classless world communism.
The second claim deserves deeper investigation than the first. Marxists themselves are fiercely divided in their approach to the history of “actually existing socialism,” sometimes called “AES” for short. The harshest critics of “AES,” including left-communists and many Trotskyists, reject that history outright, insisting that states like the USSR were not truly communist, but some form of “state capitalism” or “bureaucratic collectivism.” Some, including the most hardline Marxist-Leninists (or “Stalinists”), lay claim to it and tend to minimize its darker aspects, arguing that capitalist propaganda exaggerates and distorts the history of socialism to discredit it. There are kernels of truth in both of these approaches, but neither on its own is a particularly useful way of understanding our heritage as Marxists. Convincing ourselves that there is nothing condemnable about the history of socialism, whether by outright denialism or by severing ourselves from it and labeling it “not real socialism,” does nothing to help us understand and evolve from past socialist experiments, which were—whatever critiques we might have—undeniably earnest attempts at socialist revolution conceived of and led by people with largely the same convictions we have. Rather than lionizing these people as infallible heroes or assuming we simply know better and could never find ourselves doing the same things they did, we should take a pragmatic approach to the states they created and led, viewing them as case studies from which to extract valuable lessons, both positive and negative. That includes the USSR.
Firstly, to be clear, there were atrocities. The ethnic deportations, the Great Terror, and the repression of dissent by the monolithic state bureaucracy were all inexcusable. The Soviet realpolitik that led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, support for the creation of Israel, the repression of the Prague Spring, and the invasion of Afghanistan should likewise be seen as at least symptomatic of deep structural failures within what should have been a project of universal emancipation.
But secondly, no serious analysis can say that the USSR or any other such state was uniquely bad. The framework of “totalitarianism,” emerging out of the post-WWII consensus, allows liberals to place states like the USSR in the same category as states like Nazi Germany, a category of uniquely violent and repressive states motivated by the “twin evils” of fascism (the totalitarian right) and communism (the totalitarian left) counterposed to liberal constitutionalism (the democratic center). The reality is that liberalism itself is bloodsoaked. It emerged from the muck of colonialism and imperialism, built on the backs of the dispossessed and enslaved. It has always sustained itself through the violent repression of the working class, creating an entire way of life upheld by police, prisons, and strikebreaking militias. Through imperialist competition, it produced two world wars that claimed tens of millions of lives. It continues to enforce a reign of terror on most of the world’s population through endless deprivation and warfare. By any serious metric, the age of global liberalism has actually been orders of magnitude worse in every regard than the various attempts by socialists to break away from it. The critical difference is that for two centuries now liberalism has operated in a world where it plays by its own rules; the liberal regimes have been able to survive in such a world and the socialist ones thus far have not, so we learn a great deal about the socialist failures and atrocities and comparatively little about the liberal ones. All we can say with confidence is that over the last century communism has merely failed to make an incredibly violent, repressive world sufficiently less violent and repressive.
Anyone who rejects communism on the grounds that past attempts to realize it have incurred incredible human loss and suffering must also reject liberalism and all other expressions of capitalism tenfold on the same grounds. Anyone who can forgive liberalism as a historical project and look for what good it might have to offer in spite of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Chinese century of humiliation, the billion murders of British colonialism in India, or the First World War must also be willing to do the same for communism in spite of the Soviet Great Terror or the Chinese Great Famine. In fact, considering the great gap in magnitude between the two, to find the dark parts of socialist history objectionable at all, one logically must find the dark parts of the history of capitalism totally unforgivable and discrediting. In other words, a consistent critique of the USSR on universal humanist grounds can only come from communists themselves, and must seek out the good it has to offer as well as the bad.
For that reason, while the Soviet Union deserves to be critiqued, it also deserves to be celebrated for its indispensable role in the defeat of Nazism, and as a bulwark against Western colonialism and patron of a period of massive economic and social development across the colonized world.[4] It should be celebrated for eliminating illiteracy and unemployment and doubling life expectancy at birth. It should be celebrated as the first state to legalize on-demand abortion and no-fault divorce, the first to democratize childcare and domestic work through a system of public creches, one of the first to abolish legal distinctions between sexualities, the first to formally outlaw racism and materially support the self-determination of occupied nations such that it inspired liberation movements from the Vietnamese independence struggle to the US Civil Rights Movement, the first to create a public universal healthcare system, and one of the first (after revolutionary Mexico) to guarantee publicly-provided education and housing as constitutional rights. Even disregarding these advances, it should be celebrated as the first large-scale attempt to create a society run by and for the working-class majority, which created, for at least a brief few years, a more thoroughly enfranchised group of human beings than had ever existed anywhere else in world history.
These are all monumental achievements. They do not excuse the atrocities, but any assessment of the Soviet Union that wishes to highlight the atrocities but conceal the achievements should be disregarded, especially if attached to an intellectual project that does the inverse for capitalism (as is always the case). However, as communists we must hold historical communists to a higher standard. It is not enough to say that they merely were not as bad as the capitalists, nor is it enough to say they made positive contributions in this or that way and leave the issue there. We must confront the reality that they catastrophically failed to create socialism. The achievements they can be credited with are precisely what makes their failure tragic. They prove that things might have been different, that revolutionary workers and peasants did indeed open up new and more favorable terrain in the struggle for a society free of domination, but that the struggle was lost even on this new terrain and the global working class was forced into a long period of retreat that continues today, where the aforementioned victories were largely erased but the trauma of the various errors still lingers.
To confront that reality in a useful way, we have to investigate the root causes of the Soviet Union’s failure. The state that existed under Stalin was a far cry from what the Bolsheviks had envisioned when they issued their 1903 program calling for “a democratic republic” consisting of “universal, equal, and direct suffrage,” “extensive local self-government,” “inviolability of person and domicile,” “unrestricted freedom of conscience, speech, publication, and assembly, freedom to strike and freedom of association,” “freedom to travel and engage in any occupation,” and “replacement of the standing army with the universal arming of the people,” to begin with.[5] As mentioned previously, the Bolsheviks encountered unprecedented obstacles in trying to implement this program when they came to power in 1917—world war, complete economic and social collapse, famine, invasion on multiple fronts, attempted coups and countercoups, military revolts, the White Terror—and were forced to grapple with them with essentially zero prior experience to draw from, being the first people to attempt a revolution so sweeping in the modern era. Moreover, the one condition all Russian Marxists assumed was necessary for their survival failed to pan out when the revolutions in Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe were crushed in 1918-1920. Under the very definition of emergency conditions, the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) took increasingly absolute control over the new Soviet state at precisely the same time the party became “militarized” to the detriment of its internal democracy. When antidemocratic maneuvering by the right wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party defrauded the constituent assembly elections of November 1917, the Communists disbanded the assembly and created a new popularly-supported coalition government with the Left-SRs on the basis of the soviets, or workers’ councils.[6] When the Left-SRs then attempted to start an insurrection against their own coalition government to force Russia to abrogate the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and re-enter World War I, the Communists expelled them and took sole responsibility for governing the young Soviet state. While the Soviet governing coalition narrowed, the bureaucratic machinery of the Communist Party and the repressive machinery of the state both expanded enormously. The Communist-led Soviet government created the professionalized Red Army and the Cheka, or political police, to combat the existential threat of counterrevolution, and the Party created a powerful internal administrative apparatus to manage the influx of new members caused by the revolution. At the Tenth Party Congress in 1921, the Communists banned internal factions, effectively completing the Party’s transition from the democratic mass party that had won the October Revolution into a militarized bureaucratic one. Meanwhile, the soviets proved to be structurally deficient as instruments of democratic governance, meeting only infrequently and delegating their decision-making power to their executive committees in the interim. In practice, this meant the real decision-making was outsourced to the parties controlling the soviets, which in turn meant the Communists alone once the Left-SRs and other coalition partners had been ejected, which in turn effectively meant the upper layer of the Communist Party’s leadership as militarization took its toll on rank-and-file democracy.
By the end of the active phase of the Russian Revolution, the arena in which the revolution’s fate would be decided had shrunk from one that included millions of politically active workers and peasants as protagonists of history to one that included at most a few thousand Party full-timers, from among whom the most prominent names are still well known—Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Bukharin, et cetera. Stalin’s faction, which had grown powerful through networks of influence and patronage cultivated within the Party bureaucracy during his time as General Secretary, found that terrain to be favorable and ultimately won the internal power struggles that defined the decade after the civil war. Trotsky’s Left Opposition and Bukharin’s Right Opposition were outmaneuvered and excised from the Party. By the end of the 1920s the Soviet Union had embarked on a crash course of brute-force development. Rushed collectivization and industrialization schemes exacerbated famine conditions, but also broke the historic alliance between the Soviet proletariat and peasantry, leading to unnecessary strife and a renewed atmosphere of crisis that drove a paranoid Soviet state into Party purges, clampdowns on dissent, and far-reaching political terror to root out “saboteurs.” This is the Soviet Union all of us in the West are well acquainted with—a land of show trials, secret police, and labor camps.
This is a dark and regrettable legacy. But where would the world be today if the excesses of the French Reign of Terror or the counterrevolution of Napoleon had been enough to convince republicans to lay down their arms in the fight against autocratic tyranny? Or if the massacre of Haitian whites caused abolitionists to give in to slaveowner-driven racial hysteria, spit on the triumph of the Haitian revolution and withdraw from the fight to end slavery?
If we return to the ethical framework outlined in part III, we should ask whether the October Revolution created new terrain that was more or less conducive to the creation of a society free of domination, and what the Communists might have done differently to improve by this standard. To the first point, the Bolshevik victory was an accelerant for revolutions the world over. From the perspective of movements of the oppressed and exploited, the existence of the USSR in the following decades provided both a place to turn to for direct support and a way to triangulate against their own ruling classes, with the threat of world communism making capitalist governments everywhere “softer targets” in reform struggles. In the US, for example, neither Social Security nor the Voting Rights Act would likely exist as we know them without the Soviet Union and the local Communist movement it supported, and—no surprise—both have been gradually undermined in the thirty years since the USSR fell.[7] It is hard to deny that the USSR reshaped the world in a way that was favorable to people fighting for a freer, more just society.
At the same time, the bureaucratic party-state that emerged in the USSR certainly had a stultifying effect on the struggle for socialism within the country. Additionally, the exportation of the organizational forms that had evolved during the most desperate years of the Russian Revolution overseas to all the various groups that drew inspiration from it tended to set back the world socialist movement in some ways even as the existence of the Soviet Union strengthened it in others. To reiterate the question, then, what might the Communists have done differently to better pave the way for an undominated world? With hindsight, we can suggest that it would have been better for them to maintain their commitment to the democratic republic rather than abandoning it for the soviet republic, or that they should have voted down the ban on factions at the Tenth Party Congress, though these suggestions would have come with their own practical difficulties at the time. But when it comes to the creation of the Cheka, the recreation of a standing army, and the suppression of revolts against the new soviet system, while we should recognize these as dire measures which should have been undone or mitigated as soon as possible and which future revolutionaries should attempt to avoid recreating, we must also seriously consider whether the alternative would have been better. The Russian Revolution was not a contest between the Bolsheviks and a kinder, gentler socialism. It was a contest to the death between the Bolsheviks and the restoration of reactionary capitalist rule. Would it have been more justifiable for the Bolsheviks to surrender to the forces of reaction, allowing the landlords, capitalists, and aristocrats to return to power in Russia? However brutal the Red Terror was, the terror that would have been unleashed by a victorious White Army seeking revenge on the workers and peasants of Russia would have been unimaginably worse. Globally, where the proletariat of the West and the colonized subjects of the East and South had an imperfect ally in the Soviet Union, they would have instead been left without aid in the face of a revanchist Russian Empire colluding with the great imperialist powers to strangle every movement for liberation in its cradle.
If we decide that both the life-or-death measures of a desperate revolution and the crushing counterrevolution they preempted are totally unacceptable, then we can only conclude that the “least-worst” outcome would have been to avoid the revolution altogether. But what kind of philosophy holds that it is categorically wrong to rebel, even against systems of oppression that crush the very humanity out of people, sending generations to their graves as exhausted, starving, illiterate, abused, and atomized machines, never knowing what it means to live free? Even if this were ethically justifiable in theory, it would be impossible in practice, and therefore useless. It is a fact of history that the oppressed rebel. We have only to answer whether it is more ethical to aid in their victory or in the victory of their oppressors over them. Above all else, communists always unequivocally choose the former. No stain on the history of communism eclipses the hope it offers—the hope that another way is possible, that we make our own history, even if not under circumstances of our own selection, and that we are not bound to die in the society we were born into. That is why I am and will always be a communist.
Footnotes for “Why I am a Communist”
[1] The State and Revolution, VI Lenin, chapter I, part 2: “Special Bodies of Armed Men, Prisons, etc.”
[2] Capital, Karl Marx, Volume I, Chapter 25: “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” p. 449.
[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx, chapter I, p. 5.
[4] For a detailed treatment of Soviet developmental aid to China, described as the largest transfer of technology in human history, see Tao Chen and Jan Zofka’s “The Economy of the Sino-Soviet Alliance” in the Economic History Yearbook for 2022. For data on the proliferation of radical land reform in the Third World during the Soviet era, see Zhun Xu’s From Commune to Capitalism, especially the table on p. 19. For data on the de-linking of countries in the socialist bloc from the imperialist world-economy, see Ernest Mandel’s The Second Slump.
[5] “Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party” [1903], Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm.
[6] The soviets emerged during the revolution as a way of coordinated general strikes and establishing immediate workers’ control of production, based on the St. Petersburg Soviet founded during the earlier Revolution of 1905. The Bolsheviks and Left-SRs won a majority in the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets shortly before the October Revolution.
[7] For a detailed history of the role of domestic and international communism in shaping both the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement, see Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950.
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