Has “Communism Never Worked?” (A Historiographic and Philosophical Response)
“Communism has never worked.” This is a lazy refrain you’ve certainly heard. Whether from the mouth of a snide petit-bourgeois youth who fancies themself an intellectual or from that of a history teacher at an underfunded American public school phoning in his lesson plan between football games, this empty slogan is routinely wielded to dismiss (without any critical thought) the inevitable forward tide of history, the hopes and dreams of the radical downtrodden masses of the world, and the notion that society might ever be different than it is right now under imperialist capitalism. It is fallacious right down to its very core, of course. Three rebuttals can easily be presented, and I will present them below, to demonstrate the fundamental impotence of this argument against the mighty communist programme of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the students and successors of Chairmen Mao and Gonzalo.
One: What is it to “Work?”
What exactly does it mean to describe a political-economic system as “working,” or functioning? Functioning for whom? Lenin wrote in “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky†” that “It is natural for a Liberal to speak of democracy in general, but a Marxist will never fail to ask the question: democracy for what class? [emphasis added].” This expresses a cardinal truth in the scientific Marxist philosophy we use to view society, which Mao expressed by saying every idea- whether it is objectively right or wrong- is “stamped” with the identity of a given social class in the system of economics and production: as long as there is class society, which there has been since the onset of slave society in ancient civilizations and will be until there is global, stateless, full-stage communism, no social institution or political-economic system or even simply any social idea can be equally for people of every class. They all must serve the interests of one, generally that which chiefly produces and propagates them. We would like it to be possible for a state like that in the US to serve all its “citizens” equally, but it’s not, for a class society’s principal classes are always in antagonistic contradiction- under capitalism and its bourgeois social order, what aids the power of the bourgeoisie retards the liberation of the proletariat and vice versa, so as long as the bourgeoisie are in power what is for them is ever to the detriment of the proletariat and other downtrodden class groupings. Thusly, until the movement of society beyond class (through proletarian ascendance to the point of a ruling democratic majority into which the rest of humanity is united, the achievement of full communism) everything in society must be for or of a certain class, as defined and distinguished from others by their personal and collective relationship to production. We can extrapolate from this to ask for whom a system “works.” If it is stable, if productivity and wealth rises, if those in power stay there, well then, that system seems to work for those on top of it- but if it is stable only because the control of wealth is maintained for some with violence and depression, deprivation and brutality, for others; if the social wealth grows only through labour that is brutally exploited, producing fruits stolen through violence to maintain the social wealth in the hands of only a tiny few of society; if those on top are in their position and control the ever-growing social wealth by means of controlling the very lives of those below them and by means of state violence and imperialist war; then, can it really be said that this system works for the downtrodden masses?
Nobody can question that capitalism is working for Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet and Jack Ma, for Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin. I am not so confident that it is working for those starving and dying under imperialist war in Yemen and Ukraine and Afghanistan, or for those dying under dangerous labouring conditions in the third world for their bosses’ ridiculous profit margins, or for those freezing on the streets of my very own city even as large empty houses sit rotting because nobody can afford to buy them, or indeed for any of the untold millions taking refuge from the ecologic carnage unleashed by the capitalist class’s unwillingness to reign in their expansion of capital enough to curb the destruction we by now know with certainty is caused by limitless expansion of production (a fundamental drive of capitalism- making the contradiction between it and the stability of our planet’s ecological systems one of capitalism’s major secondary contradictions which must be resolved by proletarian revolution). I am not certain capitalism worked for the millions killed for rubber-capital profits in Congo by Belgian capitalist-imperialists and their compradors and soldiers, or for the millions being killed for oil-capital profits now across the Middle East by US and Saudi imperialists and theirs. I am not certain it worked for the poor minorities murdered in their millions by capital-funded fascism.
And conversely, for whom was it that socialism (the lower stage of communism) didn’t work in the countries wherein it has been established? It may certainly be said that the revolutionary CPC’s New Democratic and later socialist leadership of the PRC under the helmsmanship of heroes like Mao and Jiang did not produce a social or an economic order that “worked” for the feudal landlords or the bureaucrat bourgeoisie who were dispossessed by socialist collectivization and forced to become honest workers like the rest of humanity, much to their chagrin.
But what of the masses, the peasants and proletarian workers whose democratic rule the communists were building? From testaments like Hinton’s Fanshen and Shenfan• we find a very different history unfolding parallel to that of the bourgeoisie: the history of a people brutally downtrodden under semifeudal capitalist colonialism being liberated, being given democratic and egalitarian control over the land upon which they worked by People’s Committees and Communes, being freed by their own organized revolutionary work from a culture of servitude, reactionary tradition, and backward feudal patriarchy. Can we really say that this revolutionary social order did not “work” for these people?
The reactionaries, of course, counter this by trotting out some nonsense about famine. All I can say about this is what I have said before: in many countries, including China (and also Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and many of the other Soviet republics), famines have been occurring regularly due to climatic causes for centuries. To blame the few of these that occurred under socialism on socialism, in spite of the dozens or hundreds that occurred just the same under feudalism and capitalism and most probably the ancient slave civilizations as well, is absurd; it is far more worth taking note that these cycles of famine generally ended under collectivized socialist agriculture. Famines occurring within a climate naturally prone to them, even if certain human errors contributed secondarily, cannot possibly be attributed to an economic system over being attributed to the basic problem of weather; further, given they occurred across whole countries and did not target given groups, it is absurd to do as the bourgeois historians do and call these natural events “genocides by hunger”- a better fit for that ignominious title would be the famine wrought in Ireland by English capitalist(!)-imperialist manipulation of agriculture, An Gorta Mór, but it will never be called such by the bourgeois historians because it was wrought by one of their own bourgeois states.
Two: Has Capitalism “Worked?”
Capitalism in Europe, where it was first established, began as early as the Renaissance and the late or even mid-Medieval period, with the increasingly economically prominent bourgeois merchant class in, for instance, the Venetian thalassocratic merchant republic, rebelling against and surpassing the feudal order of peasants and lords, represented by powers like the Byzantine crown (in that case), as a form of bourgeois revolution. This kind of peasant and bourgeois revolutionary rebellion in Europe began as early as the Crusade period and ended as late as the 1900s. The most famous example, though, is from the 18th century: the French Revolution.
Did the first French Revolution “work?” Let us start with what it was. In the late 18th century, the emergent class of bourgeoisie (who emerged from the peasant class and its dialectical struggle against the lords during feudalism, in the growing towns and cities where commodity production was on the riseᵈ, before finally ascending to the status of ruling class in the new capitalist system via bourgeois revolutions, hence why such are sometimes called “peasant revolts” although this is only part accurate- they were revolts of both peasants and the newly emerging bourgeoisie (who led), and they ended with the bourgeoisie ruling society and forcing those peasants who hadn’t joined their elite new class to become the new proletariat) ledᵇ a revolt of the French masses against the decrepit institutions of feudalism, the crown and the socioeconomic system of dividing people up into “estates.” Initially, the liberal leadership of this bourgeois revolution sought to found a kind of constitutional monarchyᵇ; as the most radical revolutionary elements in the emerging bourgeois state (embodied in the great leadership of persons like Saint-Just and Robespierre, within the political groupings of “La Montaigne” and the Jacobin Club) took on greater power, though, what emerged was instead a bourgeois republic, not the first one (see the earlier mention of Venice, or somewhat later the Netherlands; or the slightly earlier establishment of the USA) but the definitive forerunner of most which exist today (it may be interesting to contrast this with bourgeois revolutions like those in Germany, where monarchy persisted through the transition to capitalism, successfully severing itself from the noble class and embedding itself in the state of the bourgeois one). What is key to my point, though, is this: the first French Revolution was not an immediate, deafening success; in many respects it did not “work.” There were some real and permanent changes that lasted in the superstructure from that time, like massive improvements in the lot of science in French society and in the regularity of the measures and units used in commerceᵇ. Much it achieved, though, was ephemeral or half-baked; though it set out to unchain the expansion and reproduction of wealth in the form of capital from the constraints of late-stage feudalism, the economy of this first French bourgeois republic was somewhat of a mess and its paper currency was losing exchange value for essentially its entire existenceᵉ. More significantly, its government was not once in the whole existence of the republic truly stable; it was a succession of provisional bodies in which revolutionaries and reformists vied uneasily for control, and this culminated in the fall of the first bourgeois government and capitalist political-economy in France, with first the Thermidorian Reaction in which reformist, counterrevolutionary elements from the Girondin political group ousted the Jacobin revolutionaries of La Montaigne (killing great leaders Robespierre and Saint-Just) and began a decay away from radical-liberal anti-feudal bourgeois revolution and toward a system of compromise between the new social “estate” of the bourgeoisie (and their exploited proletariat), which had developed out of the struggle of that of the peasantsʰ, and the old ones of the feudal ruling class and clergy, and then the infamous coup of 18th Brumaire: the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Wildly different analyses have been put forward of the character of Napoleon’s rule. Marx himself, in his famed essay The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, compared the original emperor with his nephew and famously remarked that the latter’s rise to power had been a farcical repetition of the original’s, which had been a high tragedy. But he does not have much to say upon the original Napoleon, save including him in a list of those who birthed French bourgeois society: “Camille, Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time — that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society…” I must quibble somewhat with this. In his earlier role as a military man of the republic, yes, Napoleon Bonaparte was a revolutionary. But his coming to power, this was not of the revolution, but was the end of it. Under Napoleon the economy was brought back under central crowned rein, and official nobility was recreatedᶠ- evidently a prelude to the restoration of the feudal ruling class’s social estate as the dominant stratum of the economy, superstructure, and state, especially given that after Napoleon’s fall these new nobles eagerly flocked to support the return of the old Bourbon dynasty, further deepening feudal counterrevolutionᶠ. Even the old feudal cultural institution of heraldry was restored by the Bonaparte stateᶠ, as was the high position of the Catholic Church, essentially a feudal institution in itself. He replaced many of the other bourgeois republics that sprung up following the French inspiration, such as in Italy, with client kingdoms, effecting coups which either installed relatives as kings or as viceroys on behalf of himself as king- evidently, the makings of a return to the political-economic system of dividing society up into fiefs under a nobility made up of propertied familial houses, with that nobility in fealty to a central monarch of their own class and the lower classes in fealty to them- the most classical form of feudalism. We must ask: exactly how different was the House of Bonaparte, really, from the House of Bourbonᵍ?
Napoleon in some respects clearly tried to posture himself as the bringer of an entirely new social order, and often postured himself as hearkening back to the pre-feudal Romans, what with adopting the aguila as a symbol and calling himself “emperor” and “consul” but not “king.” But he was in substance a feudal counterrevolutionary, and committed to a campaign of feudalist reaction to restore the feudal mode of production and the social order of dictatorship of the nobility- a reaction furthered by the Bourbon Restoration that succeeded him (and, of course, he was not the first feudal monarch to erroneously claim the legacy of Rome). The French state and economy only firmly returned to capitalism and bourgeois social rule under the July Monarchy, correctly identified by Marx as “the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe” in his 18th Brumaire.
What all of this means is that the original experiment in capitalism and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in France lasted only about ten years!!! Compared to this, socialism in the USSR from 1922 to about 1953, with building blocks in each SSR even before that, does not seem such a failure! And yet, even as the first French capitalist experiment failed, nobody today (save an idiot) could deny that capitalism has triumphed over feudalism in France and the world. Thus also shall it be for communism, triumphing ultimately across the world via the establishment of socialism in each country.
Stalin wrote in Foundations of Leninism that “…the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to communism, must not be regarded as a fleeting period of ‘super-revolutionary’ acts and decrees, but as an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organizational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats.” This is indubitably true. Likewise, the era of the bourgeois states’ establishment, of bourgeois revolutions and the birth of capitalism (even if we discuss only Europe, ignoring parallel events in other places and the different directions taken in colonized countries) was a complex period of centuries of intensified class struggle, not simply a momentary flick of a switch. Early capitalist experiments occurred and collapsed, just as has occurred in the process of building socialism. And yet, once the contradictions of feudalism reached an explosive point and these revolutions began, the dialectical explosion of struggle that would lead to feudalism ending (except as a tool of bureaucrat capitalism in the colonized countries, as semifeudalism, in which form it persists in some places today) was irrevocably happening, and feudalism on its way out of history. And, in just the same way, we should not be surprised if the era of the communist revolution in every country is an era of even several centuriesᶜ, a historic process of militant combat that takes time and experiences ups and downs. But once the bottle was uncorked, by events like the first ever establishment of a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, in Paris in 1871ª, the long process of revolution worldwide, made up of microcosmic iterations of revolution in every one country (sometimes multiple in one country, after the first ones fail!), refining the methods of revolution in each case through dialectical struggle until victory, had unmistakably begun. Today the process still continues, with red banners waving over India, over Turkey, over Peru. And it will not stop until socialism in those countries, and in every country, is established.
Three: Hasn’t It?
Let us suppose I had a blender. Let us suppose the blender worked well for a number of years, and then broke. I would throw it out and get a new one; perhaps I would note problems with the old blender and get a better one. But I would not denounce blenders, and I would not say- in defiance of all facts- “my blender never worked.”
No analogy, of course, can perfectly capture the essence of the analogized reality. But my point is made. My blender, obviously, worked for years. I may hope that the next blender I buy will work even longer. Socialism in the USSR stood from the revolutionary construction of the Soviet Republics in 1917–1922, not counting the partial capitalist development in some places under the NEP, until the Khruschevite coup and counterrevolution around 1953. It weathered the assault of fascism, and withstood the economic crisis of capitalism in the 1920s that so totally wrecked the economies of the capitalist-imperialist powers like the US. At the end of tsarism the soon-to-be-Soviet Union was still feeling the backwardness and deprivation of late feudalism in many places; by Stalin’s time at the Party’s head it was a mighty economy and state able to defend its people from fascism, to educate and nourish them, and to become a defining institution in the history of class struggle and historical progress. Was all of this resilience and progress socialism “not working?”
The idea that, because socialism in the USSR broke down when confronted with a plot within the Party against the ideological and cultural leaders of socialism and workers’ democratic society, its prior decades of historic progress are invalid and it “never worked” is equivalent to the suggestion that, because my blender broke when I dropped a pebble in it, it never worked at all. It’s absurd.
Furthermore, the further development of blender technology, or rather of the philosophical doctrine and political-economic theory of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, since the fall of the Soviet Union, provides us important mechanisms of insurance against the noxious “pebbles” of revisionist wreckerism within communist Parties. The theory and practice of Mass Line leadership and of the need for revolution in the field of the cultural superstructure, theorized under the great leadership of Mao in China and further refined under that of Gonzalo in the ongoing revolution in Peru, teaches us how to stamp out the lingering bourgeois forces that can destroy socialism from within. Reactionaries, of course, point out that the Cultural Revolution did not stop the revisionist takeover of such bad actors as Liu, Hua, and above all Deng- this is true, but not as significant as it may seem, for the Cultural Revolution in China was not even devised until after the problems of bourgeois restoration had begun to arise (embodied in the ideological and economic line of Liu), whereas in the Maoist revolutions being waged today, it is known by the People’s Warriors from the beginning that it will be necessary.
Conclusions
So, has “communism never worked?” Arguably, perhaps yes. It has never worked for the ruling classes. And every experiment in socialism has folded eventually. Yet it is capitalism that has failed the working classes, the vast majority of our species. And, a few hundred years ago, a French count or duke could have said snidely to the peasants and bourgeoisie that capitalist experiments had failed. And, while those socialist experiments folded in the end when faced with the internal contradictions of revisionist wrecking, each of them worked for the revolutionized socialist proletariat for a progressively greater series of periods, bringing literacy, education, workers’ democracy, industrialization, plenitude, equity for women, etc. And, just as the first capitalist experiments foreshadowed the eventual ascendance of the bourgeois class and its values, we know that the progress of history through class struggle shall continue as with each socialist experiment Marxism grows more advanced and finely honed, until we all find ourselves in what the old German antifascist song calls Die Sozialistische Weltrepublik- the Socialist World Republic!
The future is bright! Look forward to world communism!
FOOTNOTES AND SOURCES
These are not in the proper order, because I am in the first place busy and in the second place lazy. When I have more time and more discipline, I may fix this.
†This polemic in response to Kautsky, one of the original revisionist traitors to Marxism (together with Bernstein etc.), defended the Marxist doctrine of the necessity of a democratic class dictatorship of the proletarian majority, in place of the present oligarchic one of the bourgeois minority, for the historic progress of humanity toward classless and egalitarian communism. Lenin elaborated on this theory in The State and Revolution and The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, the former of which is a foundational text of Marxism-Leninism and its further evolution into the Marxism of today, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, in which its view of the state as a tool of class rule for repression of other classes, either for reactionary or progressive interests of different classes (workers, capitalists, feudal nobility, slaveholders, etc.), is outlined.
•This legendary pair of documentary texts were written by Hinton, an American communist and trained agronomist, while living in rural China’s “Longbow Village” (AKA Zhangzhuangcun) as an authentic first-hand testimony to the experience of the revolution by both him and the Chinese proles and peasants around him.
ªMarx both celebrated and critiqued this government in Civil War in France and elsewhere. Its own founding documents decreed “The proletarians of Paris amidst the defeats and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the country by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs … They have understood that it is their duty and their absolute right to become the masters of their own destinies, by seizing in their own hands state power,” essentially describing even as it was being formalized by Marx and Engels the theory of the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
ᵇBoth the leadership of the revolution by moderately wealthy merchants, artisans, and intellectuals (i.e. the new bourgeoisie which emerged from the peasantry in Europe toward the tail end of feudalism, as people moved into towns and trade developed), and the fact that the revolutionaries initially did not intend to abolish the monarchy, are attested to in this BBC documentary, which is interesting though of course not Marxist in perspective, and so flawed. It is also somewhat interesting to note that the French tricolor, though widely assigned symbolism of the bourgeois liberal values of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, was likely originally a simple combination of the white of the feudal class’s ruling house, the Bourbons (here is a recreation of their white banner), and the red and blue of the people of Paris and their liberal, anti-feudal, bourgeois municipal government, (symbols originating with the arms, featuring a ship on red and blue, of a corporation of merchants that began dominating the city in the late Medieval period, i.e. the said merchants which emerged from the peasantry as people moved into cities and the contradictions of feudalism mountedᵈ, presaging their emergence through bourgeois revolutions as the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie, gravediggers of feudalism and masters of capital). The above-cited documentary also talks over the bit about science and units and such.
ᶜI’d like to make a little note on this idea: several people, including myself in the past, have made a big emphasis on the idea that ongoing climate disaster makes the need to establish socialism and end capitalist waste and destruction urgent; I think this is correct. But we should be careful not to fall into the rhetoric of a supposed looming “apocalypse”; the destruction of the ecosystem is terrible, but humanity is overwhelmingly likely to survive it, and history will continue to progress. Indeed, establishing socialism is urgent, and we should fight to do it as soon in a historical scale as possible. But even a failed effort toward socialism is a historical step forward; though the Soviet Union collapsed, the world today is surely further forward than it would be if it had never existed at all; likewise, if the next socialist state crumbles, we will mourn, but we shall know that we have stepped forward both in historic progress and in our ideological development, and that in the end we shall one day win the final victory.
ᵈEngels argues in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific (a book composed of certain chapters from the larger Anti-Dühring arguing especially in favor of dialectical materialism, its application as historical materialism to analyzing the development of human societies, and the conclusion therefrom of the inevitability of first socialism and then full communism and an end to class society) that the essential contradiction in feudalism (at least in Europe; feudal/”tributary” economies elsewhere were largely similar but not as uniform as capitalism, as feudalism does not globalize in the way capital does) was an emergence out of the system of artisanal and pastoral production by the peasants under feudalism of increasing demand for commodities, contradicting with the primarily non-commodity production of feudalism, leading to increasing centralization of production and circulation of use values into conurbations instead of the rural estates of feudal fiefs and thus to increasing sociality of production, leading to the appearance, as a new emergent bourgeois class, of merchants and tradesmen controlling this commodity production, leading to class struggle between them and the old feudal rulers in which they won, establishing new bourgeois states and capitalist rule in politics and economics. This process is basically what I mean when I talk of the feudal estates breaking down and capitalist production relations developing together with “people moving into the cities.”
ᵉWilliam Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution; see also this therefrom derived chart.
ᶠMy source on the nobility of Napoleon’s France and related topics is this online historical archive on the life of Napoleon.
ᵍI will include, although I have only seen it mentioned on wikipedia, that a pretender to the House of Bonaparte’s lost throne is in fact now married to one of a cadet branch of the Bourbons, albeit one of the Spanish and not the French line. Wikipedia is of course not a perfectly reliable source, but if this is true it is a wonderful illustration of my point, so I felt it worth a mention. And if it isn’t, my point still stands.
ʰFeudalism in France divided people up into “estates” in multiple senses. Firstly of course there were the estates of land, the feudal fiefdoms divided up in telescoping or pyramidal structure, with the peasants held in thrall and tribute to the lord of their manor, he to a lord higher up than he controlling a larger area, and so on up to the king. Secondly, the various classes in the political-economic system were referred to as making up three “estates”: the first was the nobility, the ruling class that controlled the means of production and the state; the second was the clergy, the priestly stratum of intellectuals and bureacrats that served them and built up the culture and ideology of their rule via the church; the third was a sort of an “other” category but principally denoted the peasantry and town-dwellers. It was within the third estate that the bourgeois class developed, from the intensification of nobility↔peasantry and town↔country contradictions and from the movement of people into the towns as aforementioned, and the contradictions between the peasantry-and-bourgeoisie and the ruling feudal class(es) and their order built up quantitatively over time until they were resolved in a protracted series of explosions of qualitative change in society- bourgeois revolutions, starting with that of 1789. Thusly was the feudal order and its “estate” system abolished, and capitalism established in France.
