The Patient Anarchist

I: Introduction

With the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian government having just passed, I would like to share my thoughts on the relationship between the state, capitalism, and communism. There is a lot of propaganda floating around that treats the state and capitalism as mutually-exclusive opposites, and on the other hand, that treats the state and communism (and/or socialism in general) as so synonymous that they would seem indistinguishable.

I hope to cut through all this propaganda, and to explain the true relationship between these three, one that neither dichotomizes nor identifies any of the three in an absolute sense. Rather, capitalism is entirely enclosed within the state (contrary to the fantasies of the right-libertarians), that is to say, the bourgeois state; and there is some overlap between other aspects of the state (i.e., the proletarian state) and the socialist transition from capitalism to full communism, which involves–through the complete annihilation of capitalism–the replacement of class differences with the notion, “from each according to his (or her) ability, to each according to his or her need”, the withering away of the state, and the replacement of money with a gift economy.

What I’m saying now does not contradict what I’ve said elsewhere about the state and capitalism always being together; rather, what I’m saying now clarifies and refines what I said before. For me, the ultimate goal is still anarcho-communism, but I have grown more patient in my wish for all the world to achieve this goal.

II: Getting from A to Z

I still regard the transitional phase between capitalism and stateless communism to be the state capitalism complained about by George Orwell and Milovan Djilas; I just consider state capitalism to be necessary, and thus a good thing (or at least a necessary evil), an unavoidable part of the transition between today’s neoliberal nightmare and the socialist dream. To get from hell to heaven, one must pass through purgatory.

Anarchists typically complain of the ‘back-stabbing’ of Bolsheviks during such difficult times as the Kronstadt Rebellion, Lenin’s turning against Makhno, and Stalin’s meagre helping of the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Many anarchists fail to grasp that, for the revolution to succeed, it must be global, not just local; at the same time, local victories must be defended in the most organized way possible, and not have their defence diluted in the name of disorganized and weak ‘permanent revolutions’.

Revolution can’t and won’t be achieved all in one fell swoop; there will be many small revolutions whose gains must be protected while other revolutions are attempted elsewhere. And the danger of counter-revolution mustn’t be trivialized: much, if not most, of the ‘oppression’ of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s can be attributed to the difficulties and pressures caused during the aftermath of the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, rather than to Lenin’s supposed ambition.

It is not only wrong-headed, but absurd, to think that we can go from A, a neoliberal capitalism led by an idiot man-child in the Oval Office, to B, full communism, with every business fully collectivized, no more money, and no more state. To achieve our goals, we can’t just go from A to B, but from A to Z, with every intermediate step of B, C, D, etc., fully considered, planned, and worked through. The B of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), openly acknowledged by him as ‘state capitalism’ (as stated in ‘On Cooperation’, Tucker, pp. 707-713), or the B of China’s “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics“, must be acknowledged. (I just wish the CPC would move on to C, D, and E some time soon [contrary to those leftists who think it has moved on]: even Job’s patience had limits.)

In the cases of such socialist states as the USSR and Cuba, though, that movement to C, D, E, F, and quite a few steps beyond, definitely happened. In the 1930s, Stalin moved past the NEP and collectivized agriculture, which, granted, was fraught with such problems  as the selfish hoarding of the kulaks (and selfishness is regarded with bizarre admiration by right-libertarians), especially troublesome during bad harvests (a peasant resistance that was from a much smaller part of the population than is usually assumed), forcing the Stalinist regime to suppress them as ruthlessly as it did. In industrializing the Soviet Union, however, and protecting it from such counter-revolutionaries as the Nazis (whom his Red Army defeated, and thus he deserves the lion’s share of praise for saving the world from fascism), as well as building a nuclear arsenal to defend the USSR against that other genocidal monster, the US war machine, he transformed Russia from a backward, agrarian society into a superpower in a matter of a few decades–no mean feat.

The USSR and Cuba created free healthcare, free education, and other social services. They also aided national liberation movements in Third World countries around the world. Similar benefits could be found in other socialist states, such as those in the Eastern Bloc, North Korea, and China during Mao’s rule. We may see states in these countries, and a not-yet-fully developed communism, but by any reasonable measure, their efforts showed remarkable progress towards Z.

Cuba, a Third World country with a US-imposed economic embargo stifling its growth for over fifty years, has almost 100% literacy and superbly-trained doctors that often go to other poor countries to help the sick there. Impressive.

Contrast these achievements with the truly backward movement of the US over the past thirty years. Reagan (as well as Thatcher in the UK) started our neoliberal nightmare with union-busting, deregulation, and tax cuts to the rich. Bill Clinton gave some crippling blows with the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which essentially took away the social safety net; and his repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is believed by many to have lead to the 2008 financial crisis, in the aftermath of which George W. Bush and Obama helped only the super-rich.

Today, consider all of Trump’s cuts to education (and poor quality US education/student performance is nothing new), the arts, etc., while the already bloated US military budget got a further bloating, thanks to support not only from the GOP, but the Democrats, too! Then there’s Trump’s brilliant (<<<sarcasm) idea to have, for every one new regulation, deregulation of two things…not that it’s a particularly workable idea, of course.

As if the situation weren’t bad enough, we have right-libertarians who delude themselves that our current neoliberal mess is somehow not at all capitalist, merely because of the existence of a state and some regulations; therefore, the solution is apparently to deregulate all the more! These right-wing ideologues fail to see how the “free market” creates the monopolies that result in the very crony capitalism they imagine to be the opposite of ‘true’ capitalism; thus capitalism can enlarge the state, rather than exist as its antithesis. They achieve this ideological sleight-of-hand by imagining that the state exists more or less in one form–some variation on socialism–rather than acknowledge how the state can serve the rich, or serve the people.

III: The Bourgeois State vs. the Proletarian State

In The State and Revolution, which opened my eyes and my mind to Leninism in ways nothing else could, Lenin clearly distinguished two kinds of government, either of which involves one class dominating the other. The wealthy and powerful will use the state to rule over the workers, or vice versa. The wealthy will never annihilate the workers, because they need workers to provide their wealth; but the workers could eventually obliterate the bourgeoisie, which would result in the withering away of the state. Anarchists must be patient in waiting for this end result.

Only a worker’s state is a socialist one: all others are properly understood to be variations on the bourgeois state. The neoliberal American state, as well as all those countries that bow to US interests (including Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the countries of the EU, the UK, and the puppet governments in Brazil, etc.), are all bourgeois states. The social democrat states of the Nordic model are market economies with some concessions to the people (i.e., strong unions, welfare, free education, and universal healthcare), but are still bourgeois. And fascist, or quasi-fascist, states like Italy under Mussolini, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, and Chile under Pinochet, were bourgeois, not socialist.

What must be emphasized is not whether there is a state or not, but rather whose interests are served by that state: the rich, or the people? Countries with free healthcare and education, near 100% employment and nearly 0% homeless are clearly head and shoulders above countries whose states contribute to wealth inequality, and finance war and corporate welfare instead of healthcare, education, and a social safety net for the poor.

When the poor are oppressed, I feel every sympathy for them; when capitalists in socialist states are taxed appropriately, so the poor are provided for, I feel no sympathy for the ‘poor rich’. The issue of taxation is the next point I need to address.

IV: Two Needful Considerations Regarding Taxes

We often hear right-libertarians complain, “Taxation is theft!”, while giving no consideration to how the overworking and underpaying of workers, imperialism’s rape of other countries’ land and resources, and underfunding of taxpayers’ needed social services are all theft.

The petite bourgeoisie screams as loudly as does the moyenne/grande/haute bourgeoisie about lowering taxes, but it’s the latter who largely benefit from those tax cuts. It never occurs to those lower-to-middle class right-wingers that they get a return on their taxes through those social programs…provided they’re provided.

Whether taxes are a good or a bad thing depends on two important considerations: who is being taxed, the lower, or upper classes; and how is the tax revenue being spent. If there’s progressive taxation, taxing the wealthiest the most, the middle classes far less, and the lower middle to working classes hardly at all to not at all, you have a valid case for taxes. If the tax revenue is spent on such things as education, free healthcare, and unemployment insurance, even those in the middle classes get a return on their taxes, for they may benefit from those social services as well as the poor.

Contrast this validation of taxes against the system in the US. The middle classes pay a moderate level of taxes, and the moderately rich pay high taxes, while the super-rich pay far less in taxes than they should pay. (While the US’s taxation is kind-of-sort-of progressive, with the huge, egregious exception of the super-rich as pointed out above, in the UK, the tax system is the inverse opposite of progressive. On top of that, consider the income tax evasion of the super-rich worldwide, as well as their non-declaring of income.)

To make matters worse, way too much of US tax revenue goes into the military, while healthcare, education, and other social services are left in a totally ineffectual state. Obamacare was portrayed as ‘socialism’ in the mainstream media, when it was anything but. The neoliberal cuts to such vital things as welfare and social services that started with Reagan continued from Clinton to Bush (whose tax cuts for the rich hardly created jobs or boosted the economy), to Obama, and finally to Trump; at the same time, the military budget increased and increased, up till the gargantuan increase supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Such insanely high military spending, hardly a good use of tax revenue,  does result in a bloating of the state, but it’s a bloating of the bourgeois state, not the proletarian state.

Taxation in a workers’ state would be the opposite of the US way of doing things. The only qualification to this contrast would be a sizeable amount of tax revenue going to the military (in defence against counter-revolution, as North Korea has been doing, not for the sake of imperialism), and even this budget would be Lilliputian compared to the US military budget. This need to defend against counter-revolution is part of the justification for a temporary, transitional state, something anarchists must be patient about, and this leads me to my next point.

V: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat

One cannot establish socialism without a plan. All efforts to establish communism in one fell swoop have resulted ultimately in failure. As thrilling as the Paris Commune was, it lasted a mere two months’ time before it was brutally suppressed. Theorists like Marx and Lenin discussed what they thought were the fatal errors made by the Communards (not seizing control of the bank, not taking the fight to Versailles to secure their gains–Marx/Lenin, p. 97), and proposed ways to improve on future revolutions.

This learning from one’s mistakes, developing newer and better theory to raise the chances of success in future revolutions, is the basis of scientific socialism. There is often a poverty of theory in anarchism that results in sloppy acts of rebellion (e.g., Black Bloc members randomly destroying property in protest at G8 or G20 summits, etc.) instead of planning effectively.

We want direct action that brings results, not adolescent acts of defiance that ultimately do nothing to change the system. Was Makhno’s anarcho-communist experiment a valid one, or was it an exercise in thuggish banditry, one that ironically had all the authoritarianism it claimed to be opposed to? Is this latter possibility the real reason Leninist authoritarianism suppressed Makhno? Whichever is the correct interpretation of events, his anarchist experiment didn’t last–that we know for sure.

Anarchist Catalonia was another thrilling experiment during the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939; but even Madrid’s socialist government wasn’t strong enough to fight off Franco’s fascists. I wish Stalin had given more help to the Spanish Republicans instead of fretting over the anarchists, or whether Trotskyists were, among them. Franco’s victory assuredly encouraged Hitler and Mussolini (who’d helped the Spanish Nationalists) to carry on their warmongering…and we all know what that led to.

But let’s contrast these failures with the successes of the 70-year existence of the USSR, with Cuba, with the Eastern Bloc, and with North Korea. The Soviet Union fought off a counter-revolution from 1918-1921, then fought off internal, treasonous dangers during the 1930s (revisionism that continued to exist right to the dissolution of the USSR), and finally did the lion’s share of fighting off and defeating the Nazis. Cuba foiled the Bay of Pigs invasion, and has successfully dealt with an embargo for over fifty years. The CIA and Cuban exiles tried to kill Castro over 600 times. The Eastern Bloc, gained after the defeat of fascism, lasted roughly forty-five years, in spite of all the West’s attempts to thwart it at the time. And North Korea, having been bombed to the Stone Age during the Korean War, lost 20% of their population, and traumatized to this day, rose from the ashes, is, relatively speaking, a thriving country (in spite of how Western propaganda portrays it as a basket case), and has created a nuclear deterrent to make the US think twice before ever bombing it again.

While the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc ultimately crumbled, they made the anarchist attempts look like still births in comparison. These are clear examples of how to bring about and protect a socialist revolution, Cuba and North Korea even more so. Consider also North Vietnam’s humbling of the US, while the latter’s cowardly napalm campaign only proves what murderers their army were and are.

Only a well-protected revolution can guarantee that transitional process of going from A (capitalism in its most brutal, naked form–i.e., today’s) to Z (full communism, with the withering away of the state, production to provide for everyone instead of just for profit, and the end of the use of money). The withering away of the state requires a temporary, transitional workers’ state to make the dream of socialist anarchy possible. Dialectics: a) an unregulated (or minimally-regulated) capitalist state, as we have over most of the world today, b) a regulated workers’ state, and c) stateless communism.

To bring about the final resolution of present-day contradictions, anarchists must be patient. Mao Zedong, who in his youth had anarchist tendencies (i.e., he’d been influenced by the ideas of Peter Kropotkin) before embracing Marxism-Leninism, said that the Chinese dictatorship of the proletariat would take one hundred years before the state finally withered away: now that is patient anarchism. (Marx and Engels were also patient anarchists; so were even Lenin and Stalin, properly understood. These four theoreticians simply accepted the exigencies of the time, namely, that a protracted period of class struggle to wipe out all traces of capitalism had to come first before full anarchist communism could come into being.)

One hopes that the current Chinese dictatorship would switch to that of the proletariat sooner rather than later, though, especially with the prediction that the hegemony of the American empire will have crumbled by the 2030s, and that China will be among those superpowers, like Russia, that supplant it (or at least they will all coexist), and that leaders like Xi Jinping will do more than just talk the Marxist talk. Then, who knows? Maybe…just maybe, the Chinese state really will wither away by 2049.

VI: The Aftermath of the USSR’s Catastrophic Collapse

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the Western media portrayed it as a triumph of liberal democracy over totalitarianism. The Cold War was over! No more need to worry about nuclear war, because Russia and Eastern Europe were to join the capitalist world. It was seen as the “end of history”. Communism was seen as discredited.

The invalidating of communism was seen as further proved when we saw the economic turmoil Russia had been plunged into, for the Soviet planned economy was blamed for the debacle of the 1990s; but a more careful analysis will show that matters were more complicated…and more sinister…than met the eye.

Oligarchs rose up in Russia, buying up state property and assets under Boris Yeltsin’s incompetent, alcoholic leadership, and causing terrible wealth inequality, while the socialist safety net of the USSR was no longer there for the unfortunate to fall back on. Capitalism, not socialism, is what ruined Russia.

George Soros helped with this switch-around, and while he has been a vocal critic of the excesses of “free market” capitalism, his ‘left-leaning’ should be taken with a generous dose of salt: he’s a billionaire, so you should consider where his real class loyalties lie.

When the USSR collapsed, along with the end of the Warsaw Pact and the reunification of Germany, Moscow was promised that NATO would not expand or move eastward. Anyone who has been following politics for the past 25 years knows what a broken promise (translation–blatant lie) that was: NATO troops are currently lined up along the Russian border, after unsubstantiated stories of ‘Russian threats to the Baltic region’ started popping up in the media during the 2016 US election campaign. It should be clear who the real aggressors are.

The first signs of the US/NATO’s broken promise came with the Balkanization of the former Yugoslavia. The Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, etc. lived there in relative peace under the Titoist system. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, though, the IMF, the World Bank, Germany, the US, and NATO worked to undermine Slobodan Milošević’s efforts to maintain socialism by stirring up the old ethnic hatreds and blaming the killing on him, fabricating a charge of genocide (of which he was exonerated by the ICTY). Then came the US/NATO ‘humanitarian war’.

After NATO claimed the former Yugoslavia for US imperialism, they went after most of the other former Warsaw Pact members. An attempt was made to include Georgia (which was encouraged by the US to fight with South Ossetia, a country friendly with Russia) in NATO back in 2008, angering Russia and leading ultimately to the Russo-Georgian War. US imperialism interfered in the democratic process in Ukraine, getting rid of pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovych and replacing him with a government that includes neo-Nazis! In Russia herself, the US interfered with the democratic process by manipulating the 1996 Russian election to re-elect the hugely unpopular Yeltsin against what would have been a shoo-in re-election of the Communist Party.

…and US politicians complain about supposed Russian interference in the 2016 US election, an accusation they have never been able to prove.

What must be borne in mind is that the Soviet system, for all its flaws, was an effective counterweight against the depredations of Western imperialism. The Western welfare state of the prosperous 1945-1973 world was influenced by socialism, and was an attempt to stave off the ‘communist threat’. The USSR was frequently involved in helping national liberation movements in the Third World. With the Soviets gone, the US/NATO knows there’s been nobody significant standing in their way…at least not until Vladimir Putin pulled Russia out of the abyss Yeltsin helped put her in, and not until China began rising as a major global economic power.

Small wonder the US has been so hostile to these two countries lately!

Throughout her history, the US has been a warmongering nation, starting with the Revolutionary War, then the massacres of Native Americans, the taking of a huge chunk of Mexican territory, her imperialist bullying of the Philippines, the needless nuking of Japan, and the bombing of North Korea. But the so-called War on Terror takes the cake: look at what US imperialism has done to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Niger. Iran, North Korea, Russia, and even China are next on the list.

With all this killing in mind, we need to explore all the killing that communists have been accused of.

VII: A Re-examining of the Communist Death Count

Communists, admittedly, aren’t innocent of excesses when it comes to bloodshed. Millions died under their watch…but how many millions was it, really? And is there a context behind this killing that must be scrutinized to get at the real meaning behind it?

Mainstream sources tend to give figures of around 100 million dead due to communist repressions. But where do they get these gargantuan figures from?

While there is lots of documented evidence, including mass graves, photographs, etc., of the victims of the Holocaust (with six million Jews and five million non-Jews murdered by the SS), nothing in the Soviet archives indicates tens of millions killed during Stalin’s purges; actually, about 800,000 people were executed between 1921 and 1953. At worst, about 2-3 million died in the Gulag, while 20-40% of Gulag prisoners were released each year from the 1920s to the 1950s.

As for the ‘tens of millions’ supposedly killed under Mao’s initially problem-laden (i.e., bad harvests), but eventually successful Great Leap Forward, those exaggerated statistics are based on manipulations of censuses and death-rate figures from the 1953-1964 period. Right-wing writers like Robert Conquest, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (authors of Mao: The Unknown Story), and Stéphane Courtois, editor of The Black Book of Communism, who seemed obsessed with arriving at a total of 100 million killed by Communists, are all responsible for these error-laden, anti-communist smears. (Of course, Deng Xiaoping helped with the anti-Mao slanders in order to further his reactionary agenda of reintroducing the market in the 1980s.)

Among this demonization is the nonsense surrounding the Holodomor, which was really little more than a famine in the Ukraine; but the political right insists on portraying the tragedy as a ‘communist Holocaust’, a supposedly deliberate murder of Ukrainians. (The same largely goes for the Great Leap Forward.)

Linked to this kind of anti-Soviet propaganda is how the ‘Forest Brothers’, an Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance guerrilla movement linked to Nazi Germany back in the mid-1940s, are being celebrated as heroes in a short film (as contemporary anti-Russian propaganda) published and promoted by none other than NATO! Only that puppet of US imperialism would be low enough to vilify Communists while lionizing pro-fascist Jew killers.

The far-left is often more or less equated with the far-right in the horseshoe theory, something I once believed in years ago, but now realize is hopelessly wrong. The points of comparison between fascism and Communism are, at best, superficial: their authoritarianism, collectivism, and propensity to resort to violence all serve totally different objectives. Fascists use these three to strengthen their respective nations at the expense of other nations, races, or ethnic groups; Communists use the three to emancipate the global proletariat from capitalism, of which fascism is an aggravated version.

One group commonly associated with Communism, but who would more accurately be described as a kind of Asian nationalism, were the Khmer Rouge. The atrocities perpetrated under Pol Pot‘s rule of Cambodia are, contrary to popular opinion, not to be associated with Communism.

The Khmer Rouge’s ideology had, at best, a mere smattering of Marxism; deserving of far more focus was their xenophobia and ultra-nationalism. Rarely was Marxism-Leninism discussed among them, according to Nate Thayer; only Nuon Chea referred to the ideology, once, as a guiding party principle, of all the senior or other party members of the CPK, in all the interviews Thayer had with them from the 1980s to the 1990s.

They were opposed to modernization, something so crucial to socialists–as the one true way of ensuring the productive forces can provide for everyone–that even critics of Communism like Milovan Djilas acknowledged the need for industrialization in socialist states (see Djilas, The New Class, pages 15-18). Pol Pot’s ideal, in contrast, was ‘primitive communism’; this, combined with the US bombings of Cambodia, which caused a frantic desperation to produce food directly, meant that urban dwellers were forced into farming in the rural areas, which led to famine and starvation.

The Khmer Rouge, far from being the comrades of socialist Vietnam, fought them (the USSR supported Vietnam, while the Khmer Rouge were supported by the US and China [under the rule of “Communist” Deng Xiaoping]). Normally, there is at least a reasonable level of solidarity between socialist states. If the Khmer Rouge were Communists, they were pretty strange ones.

Most importantly, though, to come back to a discussion of the genuine Communists, the deaths under Stalin and Mao must be understood within the context of class war, or the aggravation of class struggle under socialism. There was, and is, always the fear of re-establishing capitalism within socialist states (consider what Maduro’s and Kim Jong-un’s governments have been going through to see my point); and the neoliberal nightmare of today, with the exacerbated state of imperialism and neocolonialism rampant in the Third World, shows how justified those socialist fears are of the “free market” insidiously creeping back into our world.

Stalin inherited from Lenin a USSR that had not so long ago fought off the White Army in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921. Added to that, Russia was an agrarian society, backward and lacking in modern industrialization. He also knew of the threat of the capitalists around the world (including revisionists within his own country!) were looming like a shadow over everything he’d tried to build.

Speaking of threats, several years into the implementation of the first of his three Five-Year Plans to industrialize the USSR, Stalin had to deal with an especially formidable foe: Hitler, who hated Communists and considered them a Jewish conspiracy. And the Nazis weren’t across the ocean, but right next door to Russia. Stalin had no choice but to speed up the industrialization of the Soviet Union, including working the Gulag labourers like slaves, in time to be ready to withstand a Nazi invasion. Attempts were made to stall Hitler, such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to buy time until the Red Army would be ready to face the SS.

Nazi Germany invaded in June 1941, and such battles as that of Stalingrad were among the bloodiest in military history. Far too few people in the West appreciate the huge sacrifice the Soviet Union made to rid the world of the Nazi menace: between 20-30 million Soviet Russians died, including 3.3 million POWs who were brutalized, given inadequate (if any) clothing–including in winter, and starved in Nazi concentration camps. We always hear of the heroism of the US and the UK who fought for our freedom in WWII, but their sacrifice was dwarfed by that of socialist Eastern Europe. The Red Army, who fought their way right into Berlin, making Hitler put a gun to his head, were the real heroes of WWII.

The Great Patriotic War was one of those few times one could truly speak of soldiers fighting for our freedoms. So many other wars have been thus rationalized, but usually they have only been imperialist competitions for land and resources, as WWI was. It is truly nauseating to hear anyone try to justify the current “War on Terror” as a fight for freedom, when the exact opposite has been fought for.

If there’s any one thing that shows Stalin as being in no way comparable to Hitler, it is his defeat of Nazi Germany. It is obscene how people, right-wingers in particular, try either to equate these two men, or to make Stalin seem worse, typically by basing their dubious assessment on not only grotesquely bloated statistics of those who died under Stalin (a ‘dictator’ who tried to resign multiple times, but couldn’t, because his people loved him too much to let him go [many Russians still love him, by the way]), but also minimized statistics of the victims of Nazi murder.

The SS brutalized and killed Jews, Roma, gay men, and the mentally and physically disabled because they hated them. Communists killed their political enemies, as did Nazis, of course, but consider the nature of those respective political enemies. Those who opposed Nazism were people of conscience, those who cared about the human rights of Jews, Roma, gays, women, and the mentally and physically disabled; many of these people of conscience were leftists, the first ones put in Nazi concentration camps. Communists’ political enemies were capitalists and traitors (those executed) and those leftists with otherwise reactionary views, the impatient leftists (typically those just put in the Gulag and then released).

All these political enemies of Communism were a danger to a political and economic system dedicated to human rights, equality, and anti-imperialism. Enemies of Nazi Germany were enemies of racism and imperialism. It shouldn’t be necessary to re-educate people on these matters, but fascist tendencies have been rising lately.

There is no denying that there were excesses during the Stalin era, some impatient leftists who suffered a far worse fate than the punishment they deserved; but Stalin’s wrongs were far fewer than those of Hitler. Part of the false moral equivalency of these two men is the fault of groups like the Alt-right; part of it is the fault of neoliberal capitalists who are doing everything in their power to prevent a resurgence of socialism.

If there is any moral equivalence to be made with Hitler, it’s the kind of people who financed him…capitalists, who have been responsible for the deaths of far greater numbers than even the highest estimates given of those killed under Communism.

VIII: Conclusion

We leftists have a lot of work to do in fixing what is wrong with our world today; but fixing those problems won’t come about by dreaming of utopia without planning and doing the hard work of going from A to Z. In a transitional socialist state, do you fear state terror, surveillance, militarized police, prison slave-labour, an all-powerful oligarchy? Does the US not already have all those things right now? If you fear things going wrong in a Marxist-Leninist system, I must ask you: do you think things could be any worse than they are now?

Now here’s a question that needs some kind of answer: have I, one who has called himself an ‘anarcho-communist’, and a ‘libertarian Marxist,’ become a tankie? I hesitate to label myself with that term, if for no other reason than because I find any such labels limiting (and the same goes for ‘anarcho-communist’ and ‘libertarian Marxist’, to be fair.)

I’ve done a number of ‘political compass’ tests, with slightly differing results, but here’s one I did for the sake of this article: take it however you will. Here’s another:

In any case, I consider myself, however contradictory this may sound, to be a libertarian-leaning Marxist with moderate ‘tank’ sympathies. I very much believe in the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and I see the need for some kind of vanguard to lead and educate the working class, though I’m not sure I’d define such concepts in as particular a way as the average Marxist-Leninist would. I prefer at least some elasticity in their application.

For me, anarchy is an aspiration, though, not an immediately realizable state (pardon the pun). So, to make the kind of progress towards a point when the state will no longer be needed, because no class war will exist anymore, we’ll have to be patient anarchists.

Robert C. Tucker, The Lenin Anthology, W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1975

Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, Harvest/HBJ Book, New York, 1957

Karl Marx & V. I. Lenin, The Civil War in France: The Paris Commune, International Publishers, New York, 2008