Why Defend Previous Socialist Experiments and Revolutionary Movements?

A lot of opportunists—usually of the “left”-opportunist type, though right-opportunists may say this too—often ask this question. They would much rather dismiss the proletariat’s experiences of the past and present to promote an idealistic view of what a proletarian movement should look like, totally abstracted from the material conditions around it. We won’t spend much time defending events, groups, people, etc. in this article, but we will explain why we defend the USSR, China, and Albania in their revolutionary eras as well as the modern people’s wars in India, the Philippines, Turkey, and Peru. Before that, though, we will cite Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds to criticize “pure socialists” that oppose socialist experiences and dismiss our class’s past entirely:

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed. [Source]

Now, what causes us communists to defend socialist states of the 20th century? Why do we not just dismiss them as failures and brutal autocracies? Well, the socialist states were simply not as bad as anti-communists portray them to have been. As Marxists, we stand for what is true, and we stand for the proletariat; we are scientific, not Utopian, so we must attack lies and myths. This is why we work tirelessly to refute common objections to socialist states and socialism/communism in general: we recognize that workers are brainwashed into opposing communism with dishonest propaganda labeled as “history” in schools and in media, and we know that to support class conflict is to encourage workers to support communism, which is only possible when they don’t believe in fallacies against it.

We must also learn from these previous experiments. We now know what socialism in our own countries and conditions may look like thanks to the hard work comrades of the past engaged in for the USSR, China, and Albania. We also now know what specific policies may work, and what may not be good; the comrades of the past did not have that luxury, so we must take full advantage of it. Furthermore, those socialist states represented the furthest the proletariat has gotten toward communism; China during the Cultural Revolution was the closest to communism we have seen, and the USSR under Stalin and Albania under Hoxha were not so far behind. Dismissing them because of all sorts of excuses does us no good.

What about revolutions that occur right now? As communists, we recognize that violent revolution is the only way to end capitalist relations of production and initiate socialism, the transition from capitalism to communism. Thus, all the bourgeois objections of revolutionaries being “terrorists” can be safely discarded, for the bourgeoisie has used and continues to use terror against the proletariat, and so the proletariat must do the same. Ongoing revolutions show us tactics and strategies in people’s war that we may use or discard as needed. They also agitate the masses in nearby countries, and their successes can agitate working people globally, as the October Revolution did for example. Dismissing revolutions because of minor errors they make or because of their supposed brutality is silly. Remember that as Marxists, we are not opposed to violence in general, but we support the masses and oppose the enemy’s violence:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable. [Source]

Just as socialist states represent the proletariat’s highest points in its class struggle so far, ongoing people’s wars are the international people’s current high points in the class struggle. The comrades in India, the Philippines, Turkey, and Peru are the most advanced of us all, and we must support them for that reason. They lead the people right now, and we may criticize our leaders all we want, but we must support them in the end so long as they genuinely serve the people (as they do, and they have done for decades).

We should name criticisms of socialist states and people’s wars, but ignoring them because they did not or do not exist perfectly or without flaws is infantile! The dialectical processes of criticism and self-criticism are all the more important when judging past and present revolutionary actions and movements, but the metaphysical and usually idealist tendencies to regurgitate lies against them and to simply “think up” some “perfect ideas” for revolution is anti-Marxist!