“Actually existing socialism” and the communist transition

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, communist political currents aligned with the Marxist-Leninist regimes in Russia, China, and elsewhere have experienced major decline. Nevertheless, in recent years, organizations like the Communist Party USA and Party for Socialism and Liberation have experienced a modest resurgence through their involvement in antiwar movements, Black Lives Matter, the Palestinian liberation movement, and a growing online left media ecosystem.

This resurgence has contributed to an uncritical embrace of so-called actually existing socialism (AES) as a model for communist transition among a new layer of radicals and Marxists. U.S. leftists, disillusioned with crumbling public infrastructure and privatized welfare states, often view the rapid modernization of state institutions and provision of universal social services under these states as a meaningful alternative to the alienation of exploitation of capitalism.

The support of self-identified socialist states for some anti-imperialist movements and economic development projects in the Global South also position these regimes as adversaries of imperial dominance by the Global North, especially the United States. The relative weakness of anti-imperialist movements in the West provides fertile ground for a mythical glorification of these regimes’ otherwise inconsistent anti-imperialist record. But the contemporary reimagining of AES through developmentalist, redistributionist, and anti-imperialist lenses obscures the forms of class domination and oppression in these societies.

David Camfield’s new book, Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left, is a concise and insightful intervention into the renewed debates on the legacy of AES. Red Flags analyzes the revolutionary transformations that shaped the unique forms of class rule in the Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China, and Cuba in order to demolish anticommunist and “anti-anticommunist mythologies surrounding these societies.

Following economist Jacques Sapir, Camfield characterizes AES regimes as “mobilization economies,” in which the state mobilized “all available resources, on a non-commercial basis.” The regimes prioritized the geopolitical interests of their respective party-state bureaucracies by imposing distinct forms of “state capitalism.”

While Camfield’s “reconstructed historical materialist” analysis and lessons he draws for the Left are mostly spot-on, his use of state capitalism as a framework to understand AES is less convincing. In this review, I will briefly summarize Camfield’s central arguments about AES before discussing their broader theoretical and political implications.

Why wasn’t AES socialism?

Camfield locates the renewed interest in AES regimes in anti-anticommunism. Since Western anticommunists (of liberal and conservative variants) have equated communism with fascism, the decline of the neoliberal consensus that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse paved the way for the revival of anti-anticommunism.

Camfield argues this tendency grew among certain Maoist currents in the 1960s’ New Left and has become more prominent as the disillusionment with neoliberal capitalism has led many to a search for alternatives in recent years. Anti-anticommunists’ nostalgic embrace of rival regimes to Western capitalism (including AES regimes, but often other developmentalist regimes too) raises real problems for the socialist left today as apologism for class oppression under AES regimes becomes more widespread.

Contrary to the claims of their proponents, the bureaucratic one-party regimes governing AES societies never aimed for democratic workers’ control or the abolition of exploitation and oppression. Camfield shows how workers experienced forms of political and economic domination under state managers who pursued economic goals that mimicked capitalist growth.

However, in the aftermath of rapid industrialization campaigns and wartime mobilizations, the AES command/mobilization economies experienced technical stagnation that made it difficult to develop the productivity of labor. This dynamic made it increasingly difficult for them to both maintain the social provisions they created during revolutionary upsurges (education, housing, health care) and compete militarily with capitalist empires. The survival of the redistributionist policies, as well as their episodic anti-imperialist campaigns, was contingent on their contribution to the survival of ruling party-state bureaucracies that overwhelmingly adopted capitalist methods of production in the face of stagnation.

Out of the three regimes discussed in Red Flags, only the revolutionary Russian state briefly embraced the goal of initiating a genuine communist transformation. After the fall of tsarism in February 1917, soviets (democratic workplace councils) seized power from a weak provisional government by October of that year. But the viability of the Bolshevik-led soviet regime depended on support from Russia’s small-peasant majority and, more crucially, an anticipated communist revolution in the more economically advanced Germany. When the German workers’ revolution failed, and the Russian Civil War depleted the ranks of Bolsheviks, Soviet democracy collapsed. By the end of the war, the soviets had become a bureaucratic extension of the party-state led by the Communist Party.

To stabilize a war-torn economy, the Bolsheviks introduced pro-market reforms under the New Economic Policy. After Vladimir Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin’s “socialism in one country” faction seized control through a power struggle within the party, and repressed dissident factions by intensifying the political persecution that had commenced during the Civil War.

The 1928 “Great Break” launched waves of forced collectivization of land, rapid industrialization, and mass relocations, resulting in millions of deaths. “The first example in history of a government seeking to transform an entire economy and society through planned action by the state,” was driven by a perceived threat of war and a grain procurement crisis. While labor remained decommodified and workers held some leverage due to the absence of urban unemployment, workers remained alienated from their labor and the state, as they were compelled to pursue state economic targets and were banned from advocating for their interests through independent organizations. After World War II, as economic growth stalled, and decades of reforms failed to resolve this stagnation, the party-state gradually embraced a broader capitalist restructuring.

Camfield shows that China and Cuba had even weaker ties to the goal of workers’ self-emancipation. The Communist Party of China, founded in 1921, initially aligned with the nationalist Guomindang regime under the Stalinist Comintern’s directives, but the party reoriented to a rural guerrilla strategy after the massacre of Communists in 1927. During its temporary reunion with the Guomindang against the genocidal Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, the party’s ranks swelled, allowing it to successfully defeat the weakened Guomindang after the war, despite Comintern efforts to force the two into coalition.

Although the Communist Party had broad support among the peasant majority after the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, its path to power through conventional warfare meant democratic workers’ control was never on the table. While private enterprise was initially tolerated, the party adopted a mobilization economy in the early 1950s. Five-year plans and the Great Leap Forward led to famine and tens of millions of deaths as collectivization of land and industrialization were ramped up.

Mounting internal fractures drove Mao Zedong to launch the Cultural Revolution to reassert control in the 1960s, resulting in more violence and mass death. After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping began to phase out market restrictions while retaining an authoritarian one-party regime. Institutions like the hukou system, which restricts worker mobility between districts, kept labor cheap and disciplined, enabling a gradual privatization of land and state-owned enterprises alongside economic integration into Western markets. By the 1990s, China had become a global industrial hub, fostering a new capitalist elite while maintaining the Communist Party’s monopoly on state power.

Cuba’s trajectory mirrored some of the same patterns as China, but without a path toward full economic independence. After centuries of Spanish colonialism and decades of U.S.-backed dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista, the July 26th Movement led by Fidel Castro overthrew Batista in 1959. While revolution enjoyed mass support in Cuba, the movement’s strategy was rooted in a struggle for anti-imperialist national liberation, not democratic workers’ control.

Under pressure from U.S. aggression, the regime aligned with the Soviet Union and became a party-state with a mobilization economy by 1965. While education and healthcare were modernized, industrialization never fully took off. This meant a political-economic dependency, enabling the suppression of independent unions, grassroots organizations, and dissent against the party-state. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba turned to market reforms to survive, but only managed to foster a small private sector while seeing many social protections eroded under budget pressures.

As Camfield clearly shows, these party-state regimes emerged from revolutionary and anti-imperialist upheavals but rapidly subordinated popular forms of democratic control to geopolitical imperatives. While workers’ democracy in Russia collapsed under civil war and geopolitical isolation, leading to a bureaucratic apparatus that ultimately imploded, in China and Cuba revolutions rooted in peasant mobilization and nationalist resistance led to party-states that consolidated power without providing mechanisms for democratic workers’ control. A shared disavowal of proletarian agency in favor of bureaucratic command, justified by geopolitical and economic pressures, unified these regimes’ paths to eventual embrace of capitalistic economic goals, whatever socialist coloring they used to justify their policies.

State capitalism?

Camfield identifies the mode of production as “state capitalism,” while suggesting that, more important than this terminology is the fact that actually existing socialism “involves class exploitation, is not in transition to communism, and is neither qualitatively superior to nor worse than capitalism.”

At its core, though, labeling these systems as capitalist rests on an overly formalistic interpretation, defining capitalism merely by the presence of wage labor, accumulation, and industrialization. This approach, however, sidelines Karl Marx’s understanding of capitalism’s historical specificity: the pervasive dominance of abstract labor and the subordination of use-value production to value production. These dynamics only become possible under the “dull compulsion” of markets, where workers must sell their labor-power to survive, and enterprises must sell commodities profitably to avoid collapse.

Camfield’s assertion that AES regimes were capitalist, though distortedly so, fails to account for their fundamental lack of market-dependent classes, the absence of generalized commodity production and capitalist crises. While it is true that the growth in the production of goods and services slowed throughout the 1960s-70s in the USSR, roughly parallel to trends in the world economy, this does not mean that economic crises of AES are capitalist. Although labor-power might have been formally commodified and managed to improve productivity relative to Western standards, it was not disciplined by the threat of unemployment or market competition. Camfield acknowledges this (52) but does not clarify how then economic crises under AES could be capitalist.

This is important because it was these systems’ inherent inability to sustain productivity growth in the absence of market imperatives that triggered collapse or capitalist transition, not capitalist crises of profitability. Surplus labor was extracted through the direct administrative command and juridical control exercised by the party-state, not the dull compulsion of the market. While Camfield states that the size of the Soviet “military industrial complex” and “the structure of the bureaucratically directed mobilization economy” drove USSR’s stagnation and its inability to take advantage of the productivity boost provided to the West by neoliberalism, he does not clarify why the absence of capitalist crises, or the presence of state forms of domination over market ones are not indicators of a distinct mode of production.

In lieu of “state capitalism,” the notion of state collectivism offers a more coherent and analytically precise alternative. It recognizes the bureaucratic party-state’s monopolistic control over surplus appropriation without erroneously importing capitalist dynamics where they did not genuinely exist. The party-state’s command over the economy, while effective during early stages of industrialization, proved incapable of sustaining developmental momentum without restructuring to introduce and prioritize the growth of capitalist markets instead of the state bureaucracy.

The question of communist transition

The key question for the Left, however, is not just a theoretical one on the transition from one mode of production to another. It is about forms of democratic organization that can withstand and overcome capitalist sieges in moments of upsurge. As Camfield argues, communism is the project of subordinating economic and political power and all aspects of everyday life to democratic control. Yet, the antidemocratic culture of the Communist Parties of actually existing socialism went beyond their embrace of labor exploitation.

State repression in these regimes helped crystallize forms of racial and gender-based oppression while legitimizing imperialist domination abroad. Camfield shows how the women’s movements’ initial gains in revolutionary moments were undermined by the reimposition of patriarchal laws later. LGBT+ people experienced similar forms of repression in all three Communist regimes discussed in Red Flags.

In the Soviet Union and China, minority populations were systematically subjected to forced dispossession and labor, coerced assimilation, and militarized surveillance. In Cuba, racism against Afro-Cubans also persisted, though in less repressive forms. The international solidarity of these regimes displayed has also been a matter of realpolitik, often sacrificing Communist and anti-imperialist movements in alliances with so-called progressive capitalist blocs against fascism.

AES regimes were coercive, however, not only because of their structures, but because of the pressures imposed on them by a hostile world system. Embargoes, sabotage, war, and isolation these regimes faced favored militarization, centralization of power, and the suppression of dissent in the name of survival. To centralize power and defend their revolutions, these regimes often massacred mass democratic movements that made their societies revolutionary in the first place. Camfield insists that the communist horizon today must be grounded in a conception of abundance, not based on state quotas attained through repression and exploitation, but one based on the guarantee that no one’s existence depends on hierarchy or deprivation.

In this light, the key task of communist transition is building democratic working-class organizations that can withstand domestic and imperialist pressures. As Camfield reminds us history is not predetermined, and the question of how democratic working class movements can seize political ruptures rather than letting them harden into authoritarian structures remains alive. A successful communist transition requires democratic working-class organizations to not just crush state or market-based forms of domination, but to also simultaneously transform state machinery to withstand a capitalist siege that will encourage militarization and authoritarian tendencies.

The Left’s main advantage today, relative to communists of the last century, is that capitalism has already created unprecedented global interdependence of labor and technology, and therefore also the material basis for international democratic planning. Camfield builds on this insight and communist thinkers’ works on the transition socialism to argue that workers’ democracy can only politically and militarily defeat capitalist empires through world revolution.

The tradition of anti-Stalinist communism Camfield builds on emerged in response to Stalin’s rise to power and against his notion of socialism in one country, enduring against dominant Communist currents under state repression, right-wing violence, and competition with official Communist parties. Camfield roots this tradition in the ideas of Marx, Frederick Engels, and William Morris, who emphasized the importance of working-class self-emancipation and democratic control. Rosa Luxemburg also embraced the same ideas in rejecting bureaucratic rule of party elites, particularly in the context of the Russian Revolution.

Other anti-Stalinist Marxist currents, including some Trotskyist currents that shape Tempest politics, have also advocated for democracy from below, working-class internationalism, and revolution against both capitalists and the bureaucratic rulers of actually existing socialism. However, in the place of a programmatic approach, Camfield leaves the reader with fragments of guiding principles and historical experience from the works of these thinkers that provide some direction but without enough clarity.

Camfield argues that the Left must recover the spirit of mass participation and proletarian internationalism that animated early revolutionary struggles, while soberly learning from authoritarian regressions of actually existing socialism. This means fostering revolutionary politics democratically accountable to movements from below, not insulated astroturf vanguards. It also means rethinking how revolutionary movements can build power across borders to avoid the fortress conditions of embattled socialist states. While Red Flags offers a compelling case for rejecting actually existing socialism as a model for communist transition, it only partially answers the strategic questions of how to construct a truly democratic and resilient revolutionary movement.

Nevertheless, Camfield argues that the failures of the socialist regimes of the last century should not lead to cynicism or fatalism. A renewed commitment to emancipatory politics, one not nostalgic for the past, but oriented toward a future in which collective democratic struggles for communist liberation can win genuine liberation. We still have nothing to lose but our chains and a world to win.

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Featured Image credit: / worker; modified by Tempest.