Review | Red Flags

If we’re to build the revolutionary left today, we need to reject the idea that regimes like the Soviet Union or Maoist China were socialist. Pete Cannell reviews a new book about ‘actually existing socialism’.

In the 1960’s I was a working-class teenager in a Tory voting town in the south of England. Sometime around 1964 or 1965 I decided that I was a socialist. I’d read books by Jack London and John Steinbeck found randomly in the public library. I hated the Tories, and I was fascinated by international events. Anti-colonial struggles, the Chinese cultural revolution and the Cuba Missile Crisis all had a radicalising impact. In August 1968 I was working in a brick factory when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia – there was no union, but we walked off the job and spent the day discussing what had happened. 

Two months later I was in London, a student and walked accidentally into a Vietnam Solidarity demonstration. That jump-started my journey into socialist activism. 

In the Cold War world, it was easy to be against the US and the British government – but how to make sense of Russia and China? They were supposedly socialist countries pitted against Western imperialism but were hierarchical, repressive and often at odds with each other. Russia used its military strength to crush workers’ uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

I started to read more about the revolutionary ideas of Marx and the history of the Russian and Chinese revolutions. My questions became sharper – it was clear that there had been a workers’ revolution in Russia in 1917, but why had Russia (and China) ended up as a repressive state with no evidence of workers’ control or workers’ democracy? How was it that after the Second World War a whole raft of countries in central and eastern Europe had come into existence with internal regimes modelled on the USSR, and yet there had been no workers’ revolutions there?

Understanding that in the USSR, Stalin had overseen a counter-revolution that instituted a period of ferocious capital accumulation on the backs of the workers and peasants was an eye opener. It made much more sense that, rather than representing ‘actually existing socialism’ (AES), the USSR, its satellites and China were state capitalist. Most importantly it showed for me, and many of my generation, that the social democracy of the Western bloc and the state ‘communism’ of the East were not the only alternatives. We could look to a liberatory version of revolutionary socialism that was anathema to both blocs in the Cold War.

In the sixties the word ‘communism’ was tainted by its association with the states who claimed it as their ideology. Those days are gone, and today a new generation of revolutionaries are reclaiming communism for themselves. This is a good thing. But it’s also problematic if we simply reclaim the word and fail to think about our history. This is the subject of David Camfield’s important new book Red Flags. 

Despite the demise of the AES states, the right still employs anti-communist rhetoric. Where once they could label their opponents on the left as dupes of actually existing states – now it’s more likely to imply adherence to a failed and discredited ideology. It’s understandable that people push back against this. 

… sympathy for whatever capitalism’s champions denounce can come easily, especially for people unfamiliar with the societies that anti-communists portray as evil. 

Red Flags starts by reflecting on the weaknesses of simply being anti-anti-communist. This can result in socialists viewing Russia and similar states as models to be aspired to and emulated.  David Camfield underlines the problems with this through careful Marxist analysis of the social and economic dynamic of AES states. He looks at Russia, Cuba and China in detail. In the 20th century in Russia and Eastern Europe (and still in the 21st century in China) these countries had a powerful ruling class and a working class that had no control over the means of production. There was often a level of state provision for workers that no longer exists. But this was also true in the social democratic states of the Western bloc.  David Camfield concludes that these were simply not countries in transition to communism – they were class societies where working-class self-organisation was harshly suppressed.

Does any of this matter or is it simply a scholastic argument? I would argue that Red Flags is timely and important because after half a century of neo-liberalism the revolutionary left is marginal internationally and we urgently need to rebuild. And at the same time global capitalism is driving us into a maelstrom of intersecting crises, global warming, war and grotesque and growing levels of inequality. 

Our species is in dire need of replacing capitalism with a way of organizing our relationships with the rest of nature and each other that is liberatory and ecologically rational. 

To achieve this requires the development of mass revolutionary movements that look to the tradition of revolutionary socialism from below. And this requires building a left that is rooted in the present reality but learns from the past. As David Camfield says in the final chapter of Red Flags:

If AES teaches us anything, it is that a transition towards communism will only get underway as the outcome of a revolutionary process that, to repeat Luxemburg’s memorable words, ‘can be begun and carried out only by the masses of people themselves,’ one that ‘can be brought to victory only by the great majority of the working people themselves.’

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David Camfield joined a discussion on the book at a meeting organised by Greater Manchester rs21.

Order a copy of Red Flags from your local independent bookshop.