The “AES” Doctrine: Wrong Then, Wrong Now

The doctrine of “Actually Existing Socialism,” or AES, is an ideological phenomenon which was begun by the CPUSSR in the Khrushchev-Brezhnev era. It is widely regarded as a propaganda tool of specifically that party and its allies in specifically that time period, but in reality it is a way of thinking which continues to have some influence in socialist and “socialist” political thought. Whether or not that titular phrase is used, it is a perspective that keeps appearing in discourse and so is one that I must address. The basic premise of the AES viewpoint is this: the primary focus of the communist movement should not be on determining the best possible way to construct socialism going forward but on defending those socialist societies (or more accurately societies which claim or appear to be socialist) which actually exist, and furthermore any criticism of the politics and economics of said societies should be secondary to general support for them (the adherents of this doctrine speak much of “critical support,” but it is no secret that this “critical support” is far more supportive than it is critical). To the followers of the AES doctrine, the way to work toward revolution is to just keep on defending “socialist” states abroad until those states somehow accomplish worldwide revolution for them. This is a deeply flawed way of looking at the world, for a few reasons.

Firstly, this attitude is one that courts stagnation over revolutionary change and encourages the maintenance of current conditions over progress towards new ones. The AES believers are not concerned with criticizing or trying to improve the way things are, they want only to preserve pre-existing systems even as they acknowledge those systems are far from perfect (they know perfectly well that the things they defend are problematic, this is why they always pretend their support is “critical” in nature- but of course, they never do any actual criticizing). How do we square this with Marxism? The Marxist study of material dialectics tells us that no pre-communist system can stand perpetually, that society is always changing and progressing through internal struggle over social contradictions and that our duty as communists is to aid this struggle by criticizing all aspects of society and struggling against all unjust contradictions. Meanwhile the AES doctrine tells us that we should not be worried about criticizing or changing society, only about preserving the contradictory and deeply flawed things we already have. These ideas are simply incompatible. AES thinking is un-Marxist and counterrevolutionary, it is purely opposed to the advancement of society through dialectical struggle which is the cause of real communist thought.

Furthermore, the doctrine of defending that “socialism which actually exists” over building new socialist societies has, in practice, always amounted to a doctrine of defending revisionist and pseudo-socialist capitalist systems instead of supporting the cause of genuine socialism. In its original use under the Khrushchevite CPUSSR, this doctrine was used to defend the revisionist descent away from socialism of the Eastern Bloc, while discouraging and pooh-poohing any criticism of that deterioration and doing likewise to any attempts to stop it or otherwise construct genuine socialism anywhere. “It is not the place of the proletariat and their communist leaders to criticize society or seek to improve it through struggle,” cried the Khrushchevite oligarchs, “it is their place only to defend our governments and believe us when we say we are socialist!” The AES doctrine as espoused by the Khrushchevite Soviet state and its allies was not a defense of socialism, but a refusal to accept the actual truths of Marxist thought. It was a defense of the destruction of socialism.

And today too, the AES doctrine continues to show itself, in different places and using different words but unmistakably following the same flawed logic, as a defense of false socialism, not of real socialism. With regard to the various “socialist” states that exist today, we may say they are not socialist in a genuine Marxist view; they are not socialist because they do not follow the socialist economic model of putting ownership and control of the means of production in the hands of the workers who fuel production through their labour. We may prove that not one of the currently existing states which the mistaken comrades who subscribe to forms of AES doctrine uphold as “socialist” actually follows this model with a brief examination of each of their economic systems.

CHINA

It takes only a tiny bit of examination to show that the Chinese economy is not socialist anymore. Let us look to the production of one particular Chinese commodity- oil, let’s say- and show how it is a system of production run by and for the bourgeoisie at the expense of the workers (capitalism), not a system of production run by the workers for their own benefit without exploitation from the bourgeoisie(socialism). Who owns the facilities that produce China’s oil, and thus has control of the surplus value produced by labour in those facilities? Is it the workers? No. It is a conglomeration of capital known as the Sinopec Group, and its subsidiary Sinopec Limited (among other, similar conglomerations of capital like the CNOOC Group, which are smaller). And these sums of capital, for all their government’s red posturing, are no different from any other sum of capital: they and their owners are tyrants over the labour-power of the workers. Indeed, Sinopec Limited works no differently from a similar mass of capital in the US- you can invest your own capital in it at the New York Stock Exchange and begin extracting value from the labour of the workers to grow said capital by stealing the surplus value produced by the proletariat(1). This is in no way socialism.

“But,” I hear the faithful students of Xi and Deng crying, “Is it not true that the majority of capital invested in Sinopec Limited is part of the Sinopec Group, and that the capital of the Sinopec Group is held by the state?” This is true, as Sinopec Limited is a subsidiary of the Group. But simply being run by the state does not make an enterprise socialist. For a state-run enterprise to be socialist, the state running it must be a proletarian state of the kind espoused by Lenin, and the Chinese state is not. The Chinese state may hold this capital and use it for the good of its constituents, but its constituents are not the Chinese proletariat but the Chinese bourgeoise. How do we know that it is the bourgeoisie and not the proletariat who hold the reins of the Chinese state? By the sheer power held in Chinese society by the rich, power which can only be held because the state defends it. Consider that, according to the annual surveys of the überrich carried out by both Forbes and Business Insider (which are childish and idiotic bourgeois dick-measuring contests, but ones that are useful for keeping tabs on what the exploiting class are up to), China is as of 2020 second only to the US in its number of billionaires (the exact number being somewhere between Forbes’s 389 and BI’s 373). A state run for the sake of workers would not allow a few people to have this much wealth while workers in parts of the country remain desperately poor. The bourgeoisie can only hold this much money, this much power in a society where they control the state. After all, we Marxists know well that it is through command of central state authority that a class gains economic and social power, this is why our goal is to claim this authority for the working majority through a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Therefore, for the bourgeoisie to hold so much social and economic power, they must surely have a state that is protecting their interests. The Chinese state is a bourgeois one, and Chinese state-owned enterprises are therefore owned by the bourgeoisie through the state, not by the workers.

So China’s oil industry is run in a capitalist manner, and the economy it is part of is a capitalist one. China is a country with a capitalist political-economic system, plain and simple. And, to do away with one more falsehood, this is not comparable to the limited degree of capitalist investment which was allowed by the Chinese government during the era of New Democracy. The policy of an alliance of all classes within a country, including the national bourgeoisie, against the colonizer bourgeoisie who have come from imperialist states (the policy of New Democracy) is a necessary step for a colonized or semi-colonized country like China in the early 20th century to reach a point where its economy is developed enough for the dialectic of class struggle to advance to socialism, and the Chinese government under Mao was correct to allow limited capitalism for this purpose. But capitalism under New Democracy is highly limited and is always overseen by the proletarian authority of the party and workers’ semi-state to ensure the bourgeoisie do not take power, and it is allowed only with the key plan that it will be abolished and the national bourgeoisie will be made to become proletarians as soon as is possible. There is no such plan in China today. For all the posturing of “socialism by 2050,” the capitalist economy in China today is fraught with millionaires and billionaires who do as they wish utterly unaccountably. Capital in China is unregulated in its ability to exploit the masses, just as it is in the US or EU. The Chinese state proudly boasts of its “free market” economy, and indeed Xi Jinping announced this year that they do not plan to return to a system planned democratically by and for the workers(2). This is capitalism, and nothing more. The Chinese state and economic establishment are bourgeois and are the enemies of the Chinese proletariat, China’s political-economic system is capitalism.

To close the section on China, I will also mention that China is not only a capitalist society but an imperialist one. I will not, however, spend time elucidating why, as it has already been done by the brilliant comrade Austrian_Maoist1 in his video essay “On Chinese Social Imperialism(3).” I encourage the reader to watch it.

VIETNAM

The Vietnamese state ideology and economic policy today are very like the state ideology and economic policy of China. Much like the CCP’s habit of euphemistically referring to their capitalist political economy as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the CPV calls theirs a “socialist-oriented market economy.” But this is not what it is. If it were “socialist-oriented,” surely, it would be directed toward developing Vietnam’s system of production as one that can stand on its own and be run by the Vietnamese proletariat alone and for their own good, which would mean it would be directed away from keeping Vietnam’s production dependent on and influenced by the global capitalist-imperialist economy. So why is it that Vietnam is a member of ASEAN, a liberal intergovernmental union devoted to furthering economic integration and codependence with the openly capitalist systems of countries like Thailand and Indonesia? Surely working towards increased involvement in international capitalism is the opposite of being “socialist-oriented.”

And surely, if Vietnam’s economic system was being run as “socialist-oriented,” it would be moving steadily away from its use as an exploitable economically productive puppet for the imperialist countries that have brutalized it in the past. And yet, the opposite is happening. Since the declaration of the “socialist-oriented market economy,” Vietnam has steadily increased in the amount of its labour that produces use value to be stolen and sold abroad by western imperialist capitalists. Last year, nearly fifty billion dollars worth of Vietnamese-made commodities was sold to consumers in the US(4). Does that sound like Vietnam is living free of imperialist capitalism? Or does that sound like imperialist countries are living parasitically off the productivity of Vietnamese proletarians in exactly the manner Lenin described as characteristic of imperialism(5)? It sounds, of course, like the second. The sad fact is that Vietnam is not a socialist nation anymore, nor is it free from imperialism. The Vietnamese political economic system is part of the global capitalist one, and through it the proletariat of Vietnam remain exploited and mistreated by the worldwide forces of imperialist finance capital. Vietnam remains a capitalist country, and for its people to be free its current state and political economic system must be overthrown and replaced with socialist ones.

VENEZUELA

Venezuela (and Bolivia, whose situation prior to the fascist Añez coup was similar to the current situation of Venezuela) is an interesting case, as it has by far the least claim to the socialist title of any country on this list. Yes, the president is a self-described socialist. So? Even if we take this at face value and assume Maduro is totally dedicated to the cause of the proletariat, a system does not become socialist simply because a socialist holds power within it. A capitalist economy and state does not become socialist just because a “socialist” is the figurehead at the head of it. And indeed the political-economic system of Venezuela is, as can be quickly shown by actually examining it, a capitalist one. Where is it, one simply has to ask in order to find the truth, that the Venezuelan economy is controlled from? Is it from a series of local assemblies of workers united under the democratic leadership of a worker-run political system led by an organized vanguard of the workers (as it would be in genuine socialism)? No. No such assemblies and no such vanguard even exist in Venezuela. Instead, it is from the Caracas Stock Exchange, a fundamentally capitalist institution that would not even exist under a socialist system. Venezuela is therefore a capitalist country.

CUBA

Much of Cuban society is socialist in its principles and its class character, in the ways that the people act towards one another. Many workplaces in Cuba are democratically worker-managed, many resources are controlled by workers’ committees, etc. But the problem, the reason Cuban socialism has since its birth been rotting and decaying instead of flourishing, is that the communist party and proletarian semi-state are not leading the people democratically forward in the proper revolutionary fashion but instead dragging Cuba’s political-economic system backwards. This problem, this inversion of the way a vanguard party is meant to function, has been present in Cuban society since the founding of its current government and it only continues to worsen. When the new Cuba was first founded, whom did the new government of Castro and Guevara choose to side with on the international stage? They did not side with the genuine Marxist-Leninists of China, no, they denounced Mao and chose instead to betray the revolutionary struggle they had risen on the backs of by siding with Khrushchev and the revisionists of the Eastern Bloc. And this tendency of the “Communist” Party of Cuba to lead the workers away from instead of toward communism is only worsening today. Just recently, in 2016, the Cuban government agreed to re-legalize some forms of capitalist exploitation of labour-power(6). There may be some aspects of a socialist society in place in Cuba, and the people of Cuba may believe in the socialist cause, but without real communists in positions of leadership working to increase the power of the working majority instead of decrease it, Cuba is moving away from socialism instead of toward communism.

What this proves more than anything else is the importance of Maoist theory to the success of proletarian revolution. The failures of anarchism prove that the revolutionary seizure of power by the workers must be led by a central authority of some form, the most logical form being an organized vanguard of the workers which leads the charge to construct and participate in democratic bodies of central workers’ government. This is Lenin’s theory of the Democratic Vanguard Party. But all too often, as in the case of Cuba, the party disconnects from the masses and begins to lead them away from communism instead of towards it. The solution to this is the Mass Line, the Maoist method of leadership. The leadership of the party must not be above the people but among the people, must move among the working people and learn to understand their struggles in order to construct a government in which said people can democratically express their needs and wants and achieve them efficiently. Without the application of Mass Line leadership, any would-be socialist society will end up like Cuba: with the beginnings of socialism in place, but with the masses being led away from the advancement of the class struggle instead of towards it. This is no true socialist society.

And so, in Cuba specifically, what is needed is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist party that applies Mass Line leadership in order to unite the scattered fragments of Cuba socialism into a strong and sustainable socialist Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Until this happens, Cuban society will continue to move further and further away from socialism.

THE DPRK

What, I must ask the reader, are the key characteristics of fully established communism? There are many important aspects of the communist world we seek to build, and any socialist system must be organized and led in such a way as to move society towards all of them- recall that Lenin tells us “the goal of socialism is communism;” the role of socialism in the material dialectic of history is to move society towards communism and so to be called socialist any socialist system must do so. One crucial aspect of communism, which any answer must include, is that it transcends borders. Fully developed upper-stage communism is a system in which contradictions between nations have been resolved by past dialectical class struggle and thus no longer exist, and so the world is united under a single social system of genuine freedom for all. Therefore any socialist society must follow a programme of internationalism, it must work not merely for the good of itself but also to help communists in other countries spread proletarian freedom and justice worldwide in preparation for this glorious future. So, is the political programme which guides DPR Korean society- that of the WPK- internationalist?

The core philosophy of the WPK is Juche, an ideology founded by the revisionist leader Kim Il Sung. It is difficult to speak with much certainty on the subject of Juche from anywhere outside the DPRK, as that is the only place it is studied on a large scale and there are no ideological authorities on it to consult outside the DPRK. But here is what we know: the Juche idea dictates that “man is the master of everything and decides everything,” meaning that human will is the supreme power in nature and through the determination and self-sufficiency of a group of people they may accomplish any goal(7). In practice, what the WPK seems to mean by this is that they believe in the supreme power of the Korean people and their nation, as most discussions of the practical application of Juche are all about the power and might of the Korean people and their self-sufficiency from the rest of the world. So we may fairly say that Juche is a Korean nationalist ideology. Now, it is possible for nationalism and proletarian internationalism to coexist within the political line of a Marxist party dedicated to national liberation. But nationalism can only be compatible with Marxism when it is a secondary and subordinate ideology to the principal view of Marxist proletarian internationalism. However, the WPK have made it very clear that Juche is their dominant and supreme political philosophy, that it is the main component of their political line. Indeed, the government of the DPRK proudly states that the WPK is “guided solely by the Juche idea in its activities(8)” (italics mine). The WPK has given up internationalism, and it is governed supremely by nationalism. So we may definitively state that, at least in ideological terms, DPR Korean society is not guided by a proper socialist line of internationalism.

But of course actions are more important than ideas, so does the DPR Korean government act in an internationalist way? No. The DPR Korean government does not aid efforts at proletarian independence abroad, and in fact it has a history of doing the opposite. In 1988, the DPR Korean state happily put the profits of its state-bourgeoisie over the good of the global proletariat by selling weapons to Alan Garcia’s government in Peru for use in fighting the revolutionary rebels led by the PCP(9). I must ask the reader, what kind of communists would sell weapons to fascists specifically for the purpose of fighting against communism?! No true workers’ government would ever do such a thing. It is a heinous act that spits in the face of internationalism and of Marxism in general. This disgusting crime against the cause of the international proletariat proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the WPK and its government are profit-hungry grifters and not proletarian internationalists of any kind. And as they are not proletarian internationalists, we know they are therefore not working towards the spreading of socialism or the construction of global communism. And we know that the goal of socialism is communism, so to be called socialist a society must be directed in an internationalist way. Therefore, since the WPK are not- in actions or in ideas- internationalists, DPR Korean society under their direction is not truly socialist.

LAOS

Laos is in generally speaking the same boat as Vietnam and the DPRK- it is a semicolony of Chinese finance capital, and this fact is disguised by the fact that both countries hide their capitalism behind red veneers. But these veneers cannot hide the facts: Laos does not have a socialist economy, but a capitalist one in which its workers are exploited by the imperialist Chinese bourgeoisie. Furthermore, the Laotian government of the LPRP is not the proletarian state of a Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, it is a bourgeois state and a comprador of said Chinese imperialists and their finance capital.

To demonstrate the nature of the relationship between the capitalist class of China (the imperialist bourgeoise), the Lao state (the comprador puppet of the imperialist bourgeoisie), and the Lao masses (the exploited working proletariat and peasantry in the imperialized country), let us look to a particular example of Lao-Chinese economic relations: the ongoing construction of the China-Laos Railway, also called the Vientiane-Boten Railway. This railway is planned to connect the Lao capital of Vientiane to China, enabling transportation of people and resources between the two. “But how could this be bad,” I hear the reader crying, “surely this kind of mutual support between nations is just the sort of proletarian internationalism a socialist society ought to practice?” Well, it would be, if it was mutual support. But it is not. You see, the project of constructing the railway is part of a Chinese economic policy called the Belt and Road Initiative(10). And the purpose of the B&R is not to share resources equally amongst nations, it is to allow the Chinese imperialist bourgeoisie to efficiently extract use value from the other nations involved in order to grow their own coffers at the workers’ expense. The B&R is the same program by which Chinese capitalists’ and bankers’ predatory lending has trapped several countries under the yoke of debt they must work to pay off, thus giving up vast quantities of their labourers’ surplus value to the finance capital of the Chinese ruling class(11). It is the same program by which the Chinese imperialist bourgeoisie- through channels like the stock exchanges of Hong Kong and other “free trade zones”- have conspired with the imperialist bourgeoisie of Russia to divide up the world amongst themselves for the sake of the exploitative growth of their finance capital (11). The B&R is at the heart of the economic machinery of Chinese capitalist-imperialism- and this is the same program active in Laos! Would a socialist society or a socialist government allow a parasitic imperialist program like this to infiltrate its borders and exploit its working people for the sake of foreign capitalists? Certainly not! The Lao economy is not socialist, it is a semi-colonial capitalist economy and its government is not a democratic workers’ state but a comprador puppet regime of the Chinese bourgeoisie.

IN SUMMATION

So, it is clear there are no proper socialist societies still standing, and there are certainly no socialist states we may trust to aid the proles of the world in working toward communism. All the AES doctrine-adherent “communists” who focus their political efforts on defending their favorite revisionist governments- from the Dengists who insist that the way to achieve revolution is to just keep licking the boots of Xi Jinping until he does it for them, to the western Jucheists who insist that the DPRK must be defended at all costs and before all other priorities- are working against the revolutionary struggle of the working class whether they know it or not by diverting energy away from real class struggle in their own countries. In the end, the AES doctrine is simply a delusion which appeals to those uneducated in Marxism. It is a waste of time, and the enemy of the movement of the proletariat. The way to achieve communism is not through worshipping revisionists, it is through studying the scientific philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and applying it to the conditions of each country in the world in order to build socialism there, until every country is socialist and we may enter the age of global communism.

SOURCES NOT MENTIONED IN TEXT:
1: https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:SNP/QUOTE

2. https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/china-xi-planned-ecoonomy-hong-kong/2020/05/23/id/968726/ [among other coverage of this event]

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKVUZvXtzeY&t=0s&ab_channel=Austrian_Maoist1

4.https://www.statista.com/chart/18483/change-in-us-goods-imports-from-top-partners/

5. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter 8, VI Lenin

6. https://www.engagecuba.org/cubas-private-sector/

7. https://korea-dpr.com/juche_ideology.html

8. https://korea-dpr.com/politicorganization.html

9. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/03/23/Peru-orders-weapons-from-North-Korea/1562575096400/

10.https://www.chinadailyhk.com/articles/51/115/170/1556600196548.html

11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKVUZvXtzeY&t=0s&ab_channel=Austrian_Maoist1