casualtidalwavepoetry

[casualtidalwavepoetry]

Bukharin, Stalin, China, Socialism

The Second Chinese Revolution of 1927 (as it is likely referred to only in Trotskyist historiography) is one whose story must be told, as it is the point when the prospects for revolutionary Marxism were subordinated to a non-Marxist peasant guerrilla movement led by Mao Zedong, and the rest is history, including the so-called "deformed workers' state" i.e. Stalinist-style bureaucratic regime that would eventually come to characterise "socialism with Chinese characteristics".

Specifically, what must be dealt with is the legacy of Bukharin, the man who is often credited with being one of the central influences, outside of a rediscovery of Marx and Engels' views on the Paris Commune, that drove Lenin's break from Kautskyan social-democracy on the question of the state in State and Revolution. For, at that point, Bukharin was a left-communist, who celebrated Lenin's recognition of his faction's views on the state and the need for a libertarian organizational form that would manifest in a "commune-state" basing itself on democratic workers' councils.

Bukharin and his left-communist faction would view Lenin's decision to go through with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany and around the same time, to suppress the "commune-state" and replace it with a dictatorship of the party (rather than the proletariat) as a profound betrayal. They would also proclaim this a betrayal of internationalism, claiming that the Bolsheviks should have used the situation to support revolutions in the territories ultimately conceded to Germany. They would not be alone in this, as the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, a party that had until then been in coalition with the Bolsheviks, would exit the workers' state over this with a similar "internationalist" perspective on the treaty and launch a revolt, a revolt that would be brutally suppressed and eventually used as justification for the shift to a dictatorship of the party.

Of course, Bukharin would not remain a left-communist for long. With the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921, he would become a vocal advocate of this policy and begin his steady shift to the right, eventually culminating in his role as primary representative of the Right Opposition. Stalin, the supposed "centrist", would then align (after Lenin's death in 1924) with Bukharin in a rightward move and purge their shared enemies from the party, after which Bukharin and his fellow Right Oppositionists would themselves be purged when Stalin, as Trotskyists would have it, "zigzagged" to the left and began adopting elements of the Left Opposition's program, only dropping the crucial element of restoration of workers' council democracy (i.e. the "commune-state") and pursuing these elements with no attempt to build democratic support for them among the workers and peasants, and in fact forcing them on the masses in a brutal and totalitarian manner.

In 1911, a bourgeois revolution had overthrown the Qing dynasty in China, but the emerging regime (led by the bourgeois party the Guomindang or GMD) had failed to unite the country or throw off the yoke of British and Japanese imperialism. In terms of the state, this led to a military dictatorship, and in terms of foreign policy, to diplomatic agreements with the British and Japanese, and eventually, an acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles ceding German possessions in China to Japan. In a vindication of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution, the nationalist bourgeoisie of a country under imperialist domination had proved incapable even of delivering on the demands of democracy and anti-imperialism.

Versailles sparked off the May Fourth movement in 1919 that protested against Japanese imperialism and the government's weak response. The example of Russia led Marxism to spread among the Chinese masses, as they saw, in line with the theory of Permanent Revolution, that defeating feudalism and imperialism required overthrowing capitalism and fighting for socialism, as the nationalist bourgeoisie would align with imperialism rather than fighting against it. Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao of the New Culture movement were two leading Marxists who helped popularize Marxism among the Chinese masses.

The Comintern would work alongside them to facilitate the formation of a party in China as an internationalist revolutionary workers' party (the Chinese Communist Party) committed to a dictatorship of the proletariat and ruling out alliances with the bourgeois GMD.

Enter Stalinism. In 1922, as imperialism continued to threaten China, the CCP would form an anti-imperialist united front with the GMD, where unity would be shown on the question of imperialism but the CCP would remain independent and build support among the masses for its continued existence as a working-class Marxist party representing the interests of the toiling masses.

Except, in the same period, the Stalinist bureaucracy was growing in influence within the Comintern and forcing the CCP to slowly abandon key elements of its program. This culminated in GMD leader Sun Yat-sen demanding the CCP dissolve itself into the GMD to "further" the united front.

Enter Bukharin, former "internationalist", left-communist and advocate of a "commune-state". Except now, Bukharin was firmly in the Right Opposition and helping Stalin transform the Comintern from a facilitator of an international socialist revolution to an instrument of the USSR's foreign policy. In early 1923, Stalin and Bukharin would force through a motion in the Politburo of the CPSU, based on a farcical interpretation of the CCP's 1922 resolution regarding the united front, to argue that the CCP should in fact dissolve itself. Trotsky would be the only opposing vote against this motion.

The CCP would fiercely oppose this, but under the threat of Comintern discipline, would be forced to dissolve itself into the GMD. Under the absolute authority of Stalin and Bukharin, the Comintern bureaucracy was committed to a stageist theory of revolution: a bourgeois revolution to establish a bourgeois democracy (a phase in which the communists would have to subordinate themselves to the bourgeoisie), followed by a socialist revolution set conveniently at some far-off point in the future. This assigned the GMD the leading role in any future revolutionary process and additionally dealt a massive blow to the CCP, as the Stalinist bureaucracy provided the GMD with essential military funding.

The next few years were characterized by the CCP working to organize the masses even as the Comintern provided all its support to the GMD. From 1925 to 1926, as the threat of foreign imperialism grew, the CCP led large sectors of a strike wave in factories under foreign ownership, and the masses under their leadership developed a more advanced class consciousness and grew in strength, threatening GMD hegemony.

In possibly the biggest farce of all in this period, the Comintern had inducted the *bourgeois* GMD as an honorary member organisation in 1926, while also directing the CCP to stop workers from forming soviets (democratic workers' councils) in order to preserve this alliance with the GMD. This was a consequence of the Comintern's abandonment of socialist internationalism and adaptation to Stalin and Bukharin's theory of "socialism in one country" which misused the failures of world revolution (especially the defeat of the German Revolution in 1919 and 1923) to argue for the preservation of the Soviet state at all costs, even if it meant alliances with bourgeois sectors to maintain "peace". In China, this meant an alliance with the much larger GMD even as it suppressed the growth of the Chinese communist movement.

As the strike wave grew and the CCP and GMD moved closer to outright confrontation, Trotsky began campaigning for the communists to leave the GMD, as they were being subjected to increasing restrictions by the GMD leadership.

The consequences of Stalin's forcing of CCP subordination to the GMD would lead to the debilitating defeat suffered by the CCP in the Second Chinese Revolution of 1927. In April 1927, thousands of workers in Shanghai launched a general strike against Japanese imperialism and formed bodies of working-class self-organisation. General Chiang Kai-shek of the GMD, perceiving this as a threat, ordered the launch of a bloody suppression of the workers and the CCP membership in a period known as the White Terror, where communists and workers sympathetic to communism were hunted down across China, detained, executed, or disappeared.

The Stalinist bureaucracy then forced the CCP to take more adventurist steps, all of which were ruthlessly suppressed by the GMD. In the aftermath, committed Marxists like Chen Duxiu and others would form the Chinese Left Opposition as a section of the Fourth International. But the remaining membership of the CCP would retreat to the countryside and join Mao Zedong, who decided it would be the peasantry and not the proletariat that would be the revolutionary subject of the inevitable revolution, a non-Marxist political choice that, along with other non-Marxist political choices taken subsequently, would lead to the bureaucratic dictatorship established in China in 1949.

Bukharin's role in the demise of the Chinese Revolution cannot be overstated, an ignominious role for a man who was once an advocate for a "commune-state" yet was part of the Stalinist bureaucracy when it directed the CCP to stop workers from forming democratic workers' councils (the basis of any "commune-state"), was an "internationalist" to the point of rejecting Brest-Litovsk yet helped construct the theory of "socialism in one country" and consequent to it advocate for the CCP to subordinate itself to the GMD, was once on the left of the Bolshevik party yet committed to the non-Marxist theory of stageist revolution and helped destroy the CCP's class independence. Of course, Stalin was the source of all this, and yet Bukharin played a role that has been often overlooked.

Socialism in China, genuine socialism, was pushed off the political stage forever in 1927, and what reigned in its stead began with denying the revolutionary role of the proletariat.

[casualtidalwavepoetry]

Capitalism and Democracy

Capitalism (or liberalism, for that matter) is not inherently connected with democracy, far from it. The more common socialist criticism is that political and juridical equality coexisting with a dictatorship of capital in the economic realm makes "democracy" as it exists a mask for a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But it's even more than that, as the political and juridical equality so proudly held up by liberals is also the result of class struggle, and did not automatically come along with capitalism (or liberalism).

In 1688, the so-called "Glorious Revolution" was launched in England. This revolution did not politically disempower the monarchy or the aristocracy, but is regarded as important in Marxist historiography for the deeper change it unleashed: the beginning of the process that would turn England into the world's first capitalist state. The Administrative and Financial Revolutions launched by the regime after 1688 laid the groundwork for a capitalist economy.

And yet, capitalist England did not grant the right to vote even to the property-owning middle classes until the Reform Act of 1832. It was the socialists of the English Chartist movement whose sustained struggle for suffrage led to more reforms granting voting rights to the working class over a period starting in the 1850s, and it was not until 1928 that female suffrage was instituted.

The narrative of capitalist "democracy" is a sham, from stem to stern, and democratic rights are the hard-won inheritance of the exploited and oppressed masses, not boons bestowed by liberals in their infinite wisdom.

[casualtidalwavepoetry]

The "un-Jew" derogation, and the "Jews and the left" narrative

Of late, anti-Zionist Jewish advocates for Palestine have been subjected to a qualitative shift in the accusations regarding their supposed betrayals of Jewishness. Where they were earlier subjected to the accusations of being "self-hating", now many are straightforwardly tarred as antisemites with new terms like "ex-Jew" and "un-Jew" to describe the sheer scale of their purported destruction of intra-Jewish solidarity.

As this article from My Jewish Learning explains, there are cases where an accusation of "self-hatred" can be about normative ways of being Jewish and can therefore, on the part of the accused, be about a rejection of normativity, but there are also in fact such cases where Jews have spread bigotry so horrific about Jews and Jewishness, like Sam Roth, that they can be fairly accused of being "self-hating" (I personally would go so far as to call Sam Roth an antisemite, but maybe that's just me). Just like the community of "ex-Muslims" (to raise one pertinent example), many of whom do not subscribe to bigoted stereotypes about Islam but whose religious trauma understandably leads them towards attitudes that can be seen as overly critical and sometimes may cross over into areas where it's difficult to distinguish internalized Islamophobia from legitimate grievances, unfortunately also contains such luminaries as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Taleb Abdulmohsen (the Christmas market shooter in Germany, who was in fact an atheist and an Islamophobe, despite all sorts of ridiculous narratives claiming he was just another "Islamist" terrorist) who do in fact hold deeply bigoted views about Islam.

Of course, as the article above explains, this is absolutely unhelpful when talking about different political perspectives, and anti-Zionists have on occasion turned the charge back onto Zionists, including Herzl himself. Herzl, in fact, wrote an article in the Zionist newspaper Die Welt, entitled "Mauschel", that was so inflammatory in its tone that it has been taken to be an antisemitic rant, not least because Herzl's accusation that any Jew who opposed his plan for Zionist settlement in Palestine was a "Mauschel" (a word with antisemitic connotations) made this a not entirely unreasonable interpretation.

To be clear, "apostasy" of any form (broadly taken to be any kind of rejection of a certain identity) can in fact lead to holding certain perspectives that can be indistinguishable from bigotry, as in the case of Roth or Abdulmohsen, and this is therefore not restricted to Jewishness. Without legitimising Zionism, however, one can also recognize the unique dimensions of Jewish "apostasy": the lack of a state with a majority Jewish population and Jewish rulers has meant that Jews all over the world, for much of their history, have been minorities and have not had state power on their side, a situation probably experienced by few other minorities for the length of time Jews have experienced it, and thus probably only somewhat similar to other minorities with diasporic experiences, like the Romani people; and that this lack of power has meant that Jewish "apostasy" has taken on an existential tone not seen with any other minority, the large majority of whom have not had this experience for the length of time Jews have had it. The combination of these factors, along with the fact that ethnic, religious and other dimensions have historically been intertwined in Jewish communal identity in ways not similar to most other communities, leads to "apostasy" being treated as a threat to the very community.

There are complications here, of course, particularly with the idea that only a state can protect minoritized communities from persecution, and then there is the very question of how this perspective can lead to dehumanising commentary on those minorities who are not currently aligned with any form of state power but have engaged in massive efforts to transform society so that alignment with state power is not necessary to protect minorities (are these activists just wasting their time?), and then there is the question of if the mere fact of minority status is being treated as a danger or the fact that this is used as a means of persecution and abuse. Of course, in today's world where statism is so mainstream the only questioning of it comes from libertarians who want the state gone vaguely for the purposes of "individual freedom" (which so often translates into freedom of enterprise i.e. unrestricted capitalism) or anarchists who insist the state is coercive but only offer voluntaristic communities as a solution, a solution that sidesteps many difficult questions, this perspective is not popular nor talked about much.

And many Jews do not want to hear from Marxists on this, given the persecution of Jews that, as many would remind us, took place not just in the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union, but prior with the prime example of what many consider the paradigmatic embodiment of dangerous anti-Zionist Jews, the Evsektsiia ( Jewish sections of the Bolshevik party) who carried out an anti-religious campaign and under the broad rubric of targeting the "Hebrew revival" movement, persecuted both religious Jews and Zionists (to the extent that even when the party and the state were relatively less persecutory, the Evsektsiia went out of its way to do so).

Oddly enough, there are also those who are slightly more sympathetic to the left's political project who turn to the period before the Evsektsiia, when its predecessor, the Evkom, composed primarily of non-Bolshevik Jewish socialists from Poale Zion (a Marxist-Zionist party) and some other anti-Zionist socialist political parties, were briefly integrated into the state in order to take the lead on antisemitic pogroms happening during the civil war, especially when those pogroms involved sections of the population who switched between revolution and counter-revolution using the rhetoric of antisemitism, and sometimes even Red Guard units.

Triumphalist perspectives on the Bolshevik revolution often elide this part, as if claiming the state of its own agenda took the lead on combating antisemitism and did not have to be, at least somewhat, forced into action by non-Bolshevik Jewish socialists who reported on pogroms committed by Red Guard units in their newspapers even when Pravda (the Bolshevik party newspaper) did not.

The point of all this is, the Evsektsiia and prior points in Western (and Eastern) European history where assimilated Jews supported state coercion forcing non-assimilated Jews to assimilate do actually constitute Jewish "apostates" aligning with state power.

But since 1990, the environment has shifted, a fact Zionists conveniently omit from their narratives. It is not anti-Zionism that is aligned with state power, but Zionism (in much of the world, even if not in the Middle East). Leftist anti-Zionism is only aligned with state power in the small number of countries that still claim to be "socialist", and Jewish anti-Zionism is not aligned with state power anywhere, nor with the coercive force of organizational forms other than the state (such as the community, especially because anti-Zionist Jewish communities are so marginalized they have practically no influence in a large-scale sense).

Those somewhat more sympathetic to the critique of Zionism and therefore to the left's political project have since begun to refer to the example of Evkom, particularly using a certain logic: the Bolsheviks could've easily taken advantage politically of rising antisemitism in sections of the population aligned with them and certain Red Guard units, given that those forcing them to take notice of the pogroms were Zionists, Bundists and others opposed to (or at least not entirely in sympathy with) their political project. But they did not, because they saw that antisemitic rhetoric functioned as a direct threat to the Revolution, as those supposedly in the Bolshevik base (peasants, auxiliary units allied with the Red Guards that switched allegiances, and some Red Guard units as well) using this rhetoric often used this to signify a shift to opposition to the Bolsheviks and to Soviet power and to prefigure shifts in allegiance from the Reds to counter-revolutionary forces. And they in fact went so far as to allow forces like Poale Zion (Zionists) and other Jewish forces they disagreed with politically to take the lead on combating antisemitism, even trusting such forces to report on antisemitism within Red Guard units.

These individuals state that the modern left should similarly take the rise in examples of violent right-wing antisemitism (such as the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue) as a direct threat to the left's political project, given that the rhetoric used in such attacks is often just a mask for an attack on immigrant rights and a broader attack on leftism, and should mobilize against antisemitism, dropping at least certain political disagreements with non-left Jewish political movements in order to beat back the forces of violent right-wing antisemitism.

This fails to take into account the simple fact that in North America and Western Europe, and in many other parts of the world, for that matter, Zionism is, as I pointed out before, aligned with state power. Israel is viewed as the only democracy in the Middle East, a necessary ally in the fight against terrorism, and a lone pro-Western force in a region full of anti-Western dictators and is thus the beneficiary of a militaristic attempt to shut down anti-Zionist politics wherever it manifests. Right-wing antisemitism is indeed a violent threat to the left's political project, and has always been. But pro-Zionist state power can do what the Nazis can't, which is criminalize the Palestine movement and still be seen as acting in the interests of basic human decency (after all, if there are indeed Hamas supporters hiding behind the rhetoric of anti-Zionism, who with any kind of humanist sensibility would oppose them being thrown in jail, or so many people ask).

Even among the broader population, opposition to Zionism is the least acceptable element of the left's program. The reformist left can point to polls showing substantial levels of support for universal healthcare and a Green New Deal, but anti-Zionism that goes beyond "immediate ceasefire and hostage deal" is deeply unpopular, and even then, the student movement for Palestine raising these demands is even more unpopular; as was seen in polls in 2023, the majority of Americans supported an end to the war in Gaza but also simultaneously, a large number of Americans supported the jailing of students protesting for that very outcome.

This does not excuse the fact that, for example, even though the Corbyn debacle was definitely an excuse to shut down the reformist flank of the UK Labour Party, there were definitely individuals who said deeply antisemitic things while claiming to be anti-Zionist and these individuals were sometimes defended by Corbyn and others and other times their rhetoric was downplayed or ignored. This could also lead to the dangerous perception that the left can only work with non-left Jewish forces (including, as with Poale Zion, Zionists) to tackle antisemitism when the left is in possession of state power.

But, as it stands, the left's political organizing, especially that of the *revolutionary* (not reformist) left, is actively threatened by Zionism. This can lead to the dangerous choice to not address instances of antisemitism (genuine antisemitism, including that masquerading as anti-Zionism, not anti-Zionism in general) in favor of an all-consuming emphasis on Zionism, which is categorically the wrong choice. But the left is not in power, and therefore simply cannot be construed as the kind of danger that the Evsektsiia was, especially when pro-Zionist state power would and has thrown leftists in jail for protesting Israel's war in Gaza, and is therefore far more of a danger to the left than the left is to Zionism or individual instances of antisemitic individuals aligned with the left are to Jews.

[casualtidalwavepoetry]

Why the "semi-state"?

Those who align with any part of the broadly described "anti-Stalinist far left" might very well ask, why, in my post on "Socialism and Modernity", I insisted on the "semi-state" as the Marxist organizational form that should be seen as the realisation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and stated that even the Russian regime after Lenin and the Bolshevik party suppressed the "workers' state" should not be seen as the "dictatorship of the proletariat". After all, this aligns with neither the majority (anarchist or libertarian communist) anti-Stalinist perspective nor with the minority (Trotskyist, generally) anti-Stalinist perspective (on the "far left", that is, excluding "social-democracy", "democratic socialism" and other such centre-left political movements). They might also ask why I insisted that this "semi-state" only really existed in Lenin's head and in the pages of State and Revolution, and the "workers' state" that actually existed (until spring 1918) was heavily distorted by the realities of civil war, foreign invasion and economic blockade, and implied that this should be seen as a deeply flawed realisation of the "semi-state".

The Trotskyist perspective, of course, has the disadvantage of insisting that the far more pertinent distortion began with the bureaucratisation of the USSR in 1924 (possibly referring to the consolidation of power carried out in this period by anti-Trotsky forces led by Stalin, Zinoviev and others, since Stalin's actual rise as individual dictator is more often dated, at the earliest, to 1926). Disadvantage, not because this is "inaccurate"; this period is, after all, very much the period that irrevocably made it possible for Stalin to carry out the bureaucratic counter-revolution that resulted in the permanent defeat of Red October and turned its legacy from one of emancipation and hope to one of totalitarianism and the so-called "dialectic of Saturn" (the revolution "eating its own children" and other such narratives that insist the Russian Revolution's demise and transformation into bureaucratic domination was written into its very DNA).

There is also the pertinent question that this does not make enough of a distinction between the political regime and the social content of the state, a common distinction in classical Marxism. For example, Lenin considered all bourgeois states to be class dictatorships of the bourgeoisie, although their outward form could be "democratic" or "dictatorial". The Russian state, in terms of social content, can thus be described as a dictatorship of the proletariat regardless of the changes in the political regime from "semi-state" (or "commune-state" as sometimes referred to by certain Marxists) to one-party dictatorship under "war communism" (which featured the outlawing of other broadly left-wing parties) to the period of partial reintroduction of market mechanisms under the New Economic Policy (which is when factions were banned within the Bolshevik Party), and eventually even to the bureaucratic distortions of Stalinism.

The disadvantage here is, of course, the fact that such narratives can lead to dubious justifications like insisting that socialism, as a struggle for power, can often result in such atrocities, or that Lenin and Trotsky meant such measures as the outlawing of other parties or the ban on factions within the Bolshevik Party as temporary defensive measures amid a struggle for survival where even other left-wing parties often joined the White forces who were intent on destroying the Revolution and not as permanent features of the Russian transitional regime between capitalism and socialism.

The problem here is that I do not condone the actions of Lenin, Trotsky or other Bolsheviks in the period before 1924 regardless of whether the rationale has elements of truth in it. Many anarchists who had helped lead the Revolution to victory were arrested in 1917, soon after Red October, even in the "workers' state" period. Of course, those sympathetic to the difficulties faced by the Red Army in preventing the White forces from destroying the Revolution can claim that even such measures were a consequence of an over-sensitivity to perceived threats and should not be seen as consistent with Bolshevik political beliefs. But the fact remains that these abuses took place, and cannot be condoned.

The deeper problem here is that the Bolsheviks were simply unprepared for the consequences of an attempt to build a libertarian "commune-state" in the midst of a brutal civil war supported by foreign armies (including the literal thousands of US troops who landed in Russia in 1918 to support the White forces, by the way). And while this can be claimed to be a natural consequence of not being clairvoyant, it also lies in the circumstances in which the theory of the "commune-state" emerged, circumstances that have been profoundly devastating for future prospects of socialism.

After the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels revised their theory of the state. Having experienced the first regime that could be described as a "workers' government", they reconsidered the idea that the working class could use the existing bourgeois state to bring about socialism, and even considered adding a sentence to the Communist Manifesto stating that the working class could not simply lay hold of the existing state machinery and use it for its own purposes.

However, Vladimir Lenin was a largely typical member of the Second International, albeit definitively in its left wing, until 1914. The betrayals of the Second International parties in 1914, when most of the social-democratic parties voted for funding the brutal carnage that was soon to emerge in World War 1, forced a change in his perspective. Lenin would go as far as to go back to Hegel in his drive to renew Marxism and free it from the Second International orthodoxy. Even so, until 1915 at least, Lenin believed the working class would indeed lay hold of the existing state machinery and use it for the purpose of bringing about socialism.

This perspective had been fostered by Second International orthodoxy, most prominently by Karl Kautsky, for decades. Lenin, by recovering Marx and Engels' perspective on the need to "smash" the bourgeois state and set up a new transitional regime, not even fully a state as its aim of keeping the proletariat in exclusive control of political power would eventually become redundant with the abolition of class distinctions and thus the very concept of a proletariat, broke definitively with mainstream social-democracy. The "semi-state" or the "commune-state" would exist only as long as the bourgeoisie were to be prevented from doing whatever they could to halt or reverse the transition to socialism, after which it would wither away.

This problem cannot be overstated. It was mainstream social-democracy, especially the kind many self-proclaimed "democratic socialists" seek to reconstruct (Kautskyan social-democracy, that is) within whose theoretical tradition regarding the state Lenin remained until 1915, and it was only when State and Revolution came out that he definitively broke with it.

The bourgeois democratic state gives legal and juridical equality to all under its control, but maintains a dictatorship of capital in the economic realm. This dictatorship of capital is bolstered by the media apparatus, the cultural apparatus, by electoral norms, by a host of mechanisms that ensure the political regime is never conquered by a revolutionary workers' party, and even if such a thing happens, the military and other repressive forces representing the bourgeois state can crush it. It is no tool for social transformation, even if the French Revolutionary version of it is brought about.

By the French Revolutionary version, I mean a regime with immediately recallable representatives who can be removed at any time (not just through elections every four or so years), voting rights for all at and above eighteen years of age who live in the territory regardless of birth or nationality, and other such features that do not exist even in modern Western-style democracies but existed in the National Convention government established following the French Revolution. Even if such elements are followed by the restriction that all representatives are to be paid a working-class wage, the representatives of the bourgeoisie will never represent the interests of the masses.

The soviets (workers' councils) that formed the basis of the "commune-state" had an additional factor; they were elected by workers and peasants, the exploited and the oppressed masses, and at no point were bourgeois political parties nor bourgeois voters represented. They were not just more democratic formally, they represented those who would never get their class interests to be represented in what Marx called, in the Manifesto, "a committee for managing the affairs of the entire bourgeoisie". The removal of the bourgeois Russian government, so often described as "anti-democratic", and the suppression of the Constituent Assembly, was indispensable for the transition to socialism because while the workers are supposedly entitled to democratic representation under a bourgeois regime, this rarely translates to anything more than action on some "bread-and-butter" economic issues, that too after unceasing protest; and unlike the workers who have no power under the bourgeois regime, the bourgeoisie just dispossessed of political power under a workers' state has multiple forces at its disposal to wreck the workers' state before it even achieves the most basic of its tasks in the transition to socialism.

But even Trotskyists do not stress the significance of the fact that this recognition of the need for a separate regime came so late to Lenin that the revolution was mere months away. They do not stress that this may have had some influence on why Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who had expected at least some bourgeois resistance, were relatively unprepared for the sheer scale of the attempts to smash the world's first workers' state. For one, the legacy of the "commune-state" has so often been claimed by libertarian communists, particularly those who claim Bukharin as an influence, that this is somewhat understandable, but also, this is not merely Bukharin's legacy, and given Bukharin's later not-so-positive role in the demise of the Revolution (including giving cover to Stalin), this has to be understood as also Lenin's legacy.

This does not align with the libertarian communist perspective, therefore, because that perspective often lionizes Bukharin for every one of his perspectives, including the support for the NEP to the point of swinging over from left-communism to the Right Opposition, and ignores his role in aiding Stalin's bureaucratic counter-revolution. It also does not align with the anarchist perspective, because some type of regime must exist in the transition period, and certain varieties of anarchism (particularly those that passionately defend Bakunin) refuse this necessity entirely to the point of being almost anti-political and claiming that free association of producers should be directly instituted without a regime, and others claim that the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, as represented under Lenin, is what they oppose, not the concept of a dictatorship of the proletariat in general (which can lead to justifications like claiming an anarchist dictatorship of the proletariat would only target the bourgeoisie - unlike the Russian workers' state that also imprisoned anarchists and other left-wing allies - and would thus be "defensive", as if the restriction of democratic rights, even if only for the bourgeoisie, is "defensive").

Bukharin is particularly important in this sense, because the eventual defeat of the Chinese Revolution of 1927, and the consequent hegemony of Mao Zedong's non-Marxist approach of subordinating the revolutionary proletariat to guerrilla peasant forces and other decisions in line with Stalin's betrayals of Marxism that caused China to become after the Chinese Revolution of 1949, in Trotskyist language, a "deformed workers' state", also owes some credit to Bukharin.

The "semi-state" was important, thus, not just for the eventual demise of the Russian Revolution, but also for explaining why, outside of Russia, every single "socialist" state never really became even a workers' state, let alone a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

[casualtidalwavepoetry]

Socialism and Class

According to what is generally referred to as "classical Marxism", class is a concrete social relationship to the means of production. Class is not, therefore, about income, educational attainment, or a vaguely defined social position broadly encompassed by the categories of "rich", "middle class" and "poor".

Class is a social relationship to the entities that enable the production of objects for use or exchange; a relationship defined on the basis of ownership/control or lack thereof of machinery, factories, land, etc. Thus, very broadly defined, the most direct correlation between the Marxist definition of class and the "common-sense" perception would rest on the axes of property ownership and the necessity to earn a salary or wage. Consequently, the "working class" (again, broadly defined in a Marxist sense) would include those who are not self-employed, do not own a business, and do not hold a managerial position, categories that can be summed up as "non-managerial wage workers".

Such a definition, of course, could have results quite surprising for those that think the Marxist definition of class is "out of touch" with the realities of contemporary capitalist democracy.

In the Marxist journal Spectre's commentary on Jacobin Magazine's 2021 study to survey working class voting behavior, for example, the authors raise this very pertinent criticism about what a definition of class should entail given the study's authors using a flawed definition based on educational attainment, and use 2019 US census data to find out what hewing to a more Marxist definition of the working class (i.e. very broadly defined as "non-managerial wage workers") would reveal.

The result is, in fact, quite revealing. Using the census data, it turns out that the vast majority of those with a "bachelor's or more" would in fact fall within the category of working class (88.9% of such individuals work for wages or a salary, and 82.7% work in non-managerial positions). This is also not much different from those with "less than a bachelor's" (88.3% of whom work for wages or a salary, and 91.5% of whom work in non-managerial positions).

The Marxist definition of class is not only relevant, it avoids straddling class divides by using indicators that serve as deeply flawed proxies for class, and shows that solidarity among those artificially divided by the possession or lack of a bachelor's degree is quite possible. It is not only not "out of touch" with contemporary reality, it is quite capable of illuminating aspects of contemporary reality conducive to the socialist project.

[casualtidalwavepoetry]

Socialism and Modernity

The fundamental limitations of the "why don't we have flying cars yet" argument: beyond the (admittedly reasonable) perspective that we wouldn't want the air to turn into the equivalent of a clogged-up arterial road, the argument is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of capitalist modernity, and of the "socialist" critique of capitalism.

Karl Marx viewed capitalism as "progressive" only in comparison to what came before it. Capitalism in his work was celebrated for unleashing the productive forces and enabling scientific and technological development, but only upto a point. Beyond that point, although not often explicitly stated in this exact form in his work, often restricted to the formulation that the forces of production come into conflict with the social relations of production, was a recognition that capitalism, after its progressive phase was over, was fundamentally a hindrance to the further growth of the productive forces, to the full flourishing of scientific and technological development.

Capitalist enterprises are fundamentally devoted to what Marx referred to as "capitalist accumulation". The inherent nature of their functioning dictates that they must derive more out of the production process than they put into it, that this "surplus value" or "capital" then must be reinvested in order to derive still more surplus value and so on and so forth. Often misunderstood as the "logic of profit", this is the basis of the capitalist system that remains regardless of "profit" or "loss".

Scientific and technological development, which form part of the growth of the productive forces, are subordinated to this logic as well. They must serve the purposes of capitalist accumulation, and are consequently directed narrowly in those specific directions that serve this purpose. The broader development of science and technology for the purpose of societal transformation is constrained, sometimes overtly limited and often fully halted, certainly never allowed to be unleashed in full.

Anarchic competition between capitalist enterprises further constrains the growth of scientific and technological development, restricting it to those "innovations" that help an enterprise accumulate more surplus value than its competitors. The state (or the government), referred to by Marx as "a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie", is committed to the preservation of this system.

In such a context, the futures of "Star Trek" and "Futurama", among other transformative futures envisioned by humankind, simply cannot emerge. The unleashing of the forces of scientific and technological development required for futures even more transformative than this, futures that Marx imagined could take place under a modernity freed from the limitations of capitalism, futures of a socialist society, are quite impossible.

The argument that "no true communist regime is repressive" is often presented as an example of a "no true Scotsman" fallacy. This profoundly reductive understanding of socialism is an unmitigated disaster. The "regime" envisioned in Vladimir Lenin's "State and Revolution", a libertarian "semi-state", was assumed to be for one purpose; to abolish class distinctions and carry out the transition to socialism, thereby rendering itself obsolete (in Marx's formulation, the state "withers away") and giving way to socialist society.

This "regime" never existed, except in Lenin's head and in the pages of "State and Revolution". After the Bolshevik seizure of power, Russia could add to its already considerable list of miseries (war, devastation and famine), an invasion by 14 foreign armies, a devastating economic blockade, a punishing peace treaty with Germany, and a civil war launched by White forces bent on the wholesale destruction of the nascent "workers' state".

Even this "workers' state" was rendered defunct before it could even begin the transition to socialism, by the need for rapid industrialization and the unpreparedness of the workers' state for administrating this vast country in the midst of such profound devastation. The Bolshevik party under Lenin suppressed what remained of it, "justified" by the need to suppress terrorist attacks launched on the Bolsheviks by their erstwhile allies and opponents in the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary parties. What emerged afterwards was not only not socialism, it was not even a "dictatorship of the proletariat". The states that claimed the legacy of the Stalinist Soviet Union (or defined themselves in opposition to it but still claimed to be "socialist") are even less claimants to "socialism".

"Repression" was claimed as a temporary necessity in Marx and Engels' work due to the realisation that the capitalist state's functionaries and the capitalists would make every attempt to destroy a transitional "dictatorship of the proletariat" before it could carry out its world-historic task of abolishing class distinctions and carrying out the transition to socialism. Without classes, there would be no proletariat and no "dictatorship of the proletariat" (which would be rendered obsolete) and what would emerge would be socialist society.

This society would free scientific and technological development from the constraints of capitalism and create a modernity transformative beyond the most expansive visions of capitalist modernity. Socialist modernity would place technology in a conscious, regulated relationship with nature, healing what Marx called the "metabolic rift" between human society and nature, and enabling a world where technology becomes part of the processes contributing to the sustainability of the ecosystem, rather than a destructive outside influence. This would lay the foundations for rapid scientific and technological development for the creation of transformative futures while maintaining a self-sustaining natural ecosystem. These futures would be radically beyond "Star Trek", "Futurama" or any other futures imagined under capitalism.