Partial Victory is Not Total Defeat

July 16, 2026

Tibor Szamuely

David Camfield’s Red Flags is worthy of note as perhaps the most recent attempt to restate the third camp position which, during the bipolar confrontation between imperialism and socialism that traversed the 20^th century, equated the two. This position, much like the now often associated view that sees plantation slavery as a form of capitalism despite the clear absence of constitutive structural features of the latter in the former, occludes the history of the modern revolutionary process as a history of the progressive transformation of production relations in indissoluble organic unity with their organically associated juridical expression. We are instead left with an illegible panorama in which modernity appears as an arbitrary series of shifts among various vaguely defined forms of domination confronted only by a resistance from “below” that is diffuse, molecular and without any lasting victories in empirical history.

This position functions today as a superficially Marxist restatement of the Foucault-inflected narratives of power and resistance which defines left-liberal academia in the ongoing neoliberal epoch. As such it provides a default framework for those, frustrated with the clear conformism of the above tendency, who are at the same time unwilling or unable to break with its essential premises. This position further, despite the protests of its proponents to the contrary, feeds the neoliberal zeitgeist of accommodation to actuality by systematically obscuring the qualitative advances towards the constitution of a free society in the 20^th century. These qualitative structural transformations are erased in favor of a narrative of the monolithic persistence of domination that leaves the realization of reason in history as simply a pious wish, not a tendency with world historic conquests. If the Black Book of Communism naturalized the neoliberal Restoration by painting any liquidation of the nexus of bourgeois private property and indirect market regulation as a world historic crime, third camp socialism reaches the same endpoint by way of an equation of capitalism and the incomplete process of its overcoming. One damns the revolution to hell, the other erases the lasting significance of its results. And it is the latter, not the former, that appeals to those frustrated by the limits of bourgeois politics.

I

Camfield begins by setting the stage with the observation that since the receding of the high tide of post-Soviet imperialist triumphalism, bourgeois anti-communism of the Black Book variety has met with an increasingly skeptical reception in political culture. He labels this trend as “anti-anti-communism” and defines it as a rejection of anti-communism that is conjoined with “an attitude that is at least somewhat sympathetic to the USSR and similar societies.” This is the attitude whose increasing popularity troubles him and has motivated him to write the book now under consideration. It troubles him because “anti-anti-communism is distinctly different from a perspective that opposes both capitalism and AES as ways of organizing society rooted in domination.” Here already, in the simple phrasing of this statement, we can see the denial of any legible progressive logic in the structure of the historical process.

One can argue, as many third campists do, that AES was simply a form of capitalism and therefore incapable of pointing the way to the resolution of the constitutive contradictions of this social form. One can further argue that AES was a regression behind capitalism, a renewal of archaic forms of personal domination, or simply a transition of societies characterized largely by such archaic forms towards capitalism proper. Camfield does not bother with such specifications. He simply characterizes capitalism and AES as “rooted in domination” with the expectation that this is sufficient cause to oppose them both. With the same vacuous logic, one could argue that it was necessary to oppose both slavery and serfdom on the one hand, and bourgeois private property and self-ownership on the other. After all, both are “rooted in domination”. This would even be true in a certain abstract sense. However, it would obscure the concrete dynamics of the historical process. The fact that both the “civilized and refined” exploitation which characterizes bourgeois private property and the bondage of slavery and serfdom which characterizes older forms of class property are alike forms of “domination” is no cause to equate the two. Even the incomplete realization of bourgeois emancipation via the Napoleonic Code was a sacred illumination worthy of holy war in comparison to the depraved barbarism of the Russian serf-owner, and only a Linguet or a Fitzhugh could disagree.

All forms of “domination” are not created equal and this is precisely what Marxists mean when they enjoin us to take the “class character” of a given institution into account. There is no freedom and domination in general. There are only specific levels of development of the productive forces, which constitute the determining preconditions for given complexes of production relations with their necessary expressions in given juridical forms. These forms in turn provide a greater or lesser premise for the free development of the personality of the producers. And at every step of the way along the twists and turns of the real historical process, the defense and advance of these preconditions of free personal development is inextricable from the most brutal exercises of domination. Before Marx, Leopardi already knew this when he reflected on the inherent conjunction of civilization and barbarism. If communism can finally resolve this terrifying contradiction, the process of getting there can only appear as its crowning confirmation, and the moral objections of the Camfields of the world can hardly make this process easier.

Indeed, Camfield’s righteous indignation against this “domination without adjectives” is at such a fever pitch that his attempt to differentiate his own negation of AES from that peddled by Cold War anti-communists does not get off to a promising start. Kristin Ghodsee, a writer whose own work leaves no doubt that she would hesitate before a consistent defense of the workers states of the 20^th century, is castigated for failing to “acknowledge a third possibility: refusing both anti-communism and nostalgia for AES and being deeply critical of both capitalism and AES from a left-wing perspective that yearns for a better world.” This is regardless of his own citation of Ghodsee’s observation “that critical engagement with the lessons of the 20^th century might help us to find a new path that navigates between, or rises above, the many crimes of both communism and capitalism.” If this kind of moralistic equation of imperialism and the workers’ states, that even many opponents of the bureaucracy of the latter would consider intellectual scabwork, is insufficient as an avowal of third camp faith for Camfield, we are already left to wonder near the beginning of his exposition what substantively differentiates his own narrative from the Black Book one he sets out to escape.

The reader’s skepticism on this account is further reinforced when Camfield specifies that Ghodsee is guilty of defending the social rights that the workers’ states guaranteed to the producers, on the presumption that “they can be considered apart from the oppressive features of AES with which they were entangled.” This is equated with Lea Ypi’s similarly frustrating insistence that the Albania of her youth was a socialist society. If even Ghodsee and Ypi, social democrats who not only go out of their way to condemn Stalinism but even indulge in sweeping moral equations of the power relations characterizing the two systems, are excessively apologetic for Camfield’s taste, it’s hard to see how he can maintain the pretense of a rupture with anti-communism. According to Camfield, Ghodsee’s qualified defense of the social rights guaranteed by the workers’ states embodies the same error committed by those who:

argue that we should not be anti-capitalist because Western capitalist societies have positive aspects like civil liberties, multi-party elections, and unions through which workers can defend themselves against employers and fight to improve their pay and working conditions.

This is a bizarre accusation. The democratic rights of the working class under the bourgeois-democratic state order are not a product of “capitalism” per se but of the struggle and relative strength of the working class within this order as an antagonistic factor. The system of capitalist private property does not require these rights to reproduce itself, and they are of value to the working class mainly as means through which it can facilitate its accumulation of force for the overthrow of this system.

The social rights of the immediate producers in the economies premised upon monolithic state property were a structural feature of these economies. Economies which, like the rights of the working class in bourgeois democracy, were a product of the struggle and relative strength of the working class; a qualitatively further development of the impact of this struggle. To see the political rights of the workers under bourgeois democracy and the social rights of the workers in the workers’ states as incidental features of two discrete systems of totalizing domination is to ignore the determination of both by the balance of forces in the class struggle. In both cases the necessary starting point is an unequivocal defense of the conquests of the working class within and beyond bourgeois society, whether those conquests appear in the form of union rights in bourgeois democracy or monolithic state ownership constituted in the course of socialist transition.

Camfield goes on to observe:

Why does any of this matter today? There is a great deal at stake in how we respond to anti-communism and what we make of AES. If anti-communists are right, attempts to replace capitalism are misguided. If AES was, and in its remaining holdouts still is, a better way of organizing society, then anti-capitalists should look to such societies and the Communist political tradition associated with AES for instruction and inspiration. If AES is not such an alternative, anti-capitalists will need to look elsewhere.

The above further elucidates the difficulties of his project. Camfield does not want to admit that “anti-communists are right”. But at the same time he wants to insist that the only actually extant process of overcoming capitalism was in no way a superior system and that “anti-capitalists will need to look elsewhere”. Unfortunately, history has provided us with nowhere else to look. The only logical conclusion a scientifically minded realist can draw from a blanket condemnation of AES is that the anti-communists are right. Camfield finds himself in the same bind as those who insist that conservatives are “misunderstanding” Animal Farm. There is no doubt that Orwell felt the same kind of repulsion towards the reality of capitalism that Camfield does, and that conservative readers of Animal Farm do not. However, whatever Orwell’s intention in writing Animal Farm, the meaning immanent in the text itself is that the actuality of the attempt to overcome capitalism is a tragic drama at whose conclusion we have returned to our starting point, having won nothing in the process but disillusionment. That is to say, conservatives understand the message of Animal Farm perhaps better than the author did. In much the same way, those who, like Camfield, unilaterally negate the legacy of the workers’ states, and who fail to commit themselves to a celebration, or at least a resigned acceptance of, capitalism as the highest extant form of human freedom, simply lack the spiritual courage to draw the logical conclusion from the results of their investigations

II

At this point we can hardly be surprised by what comes next:

This book analyzes AES societies and Communist politics from the perspective I call reconstructed historical materialism, an unorthodox anti-racist feminist marxism (I do not capitalize marxism to make the point that this is a living approach to understanding society in order to change it, one that was pioneered by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, brilliant imperfect thinkers in the nineteenth century, and has been developed by other people; it is not a system of thought given to us by revered Founding Fathers). This approach tries to develop what Marx and Engels called the “materialist conception of history” by bringing together their best ideas, the best ideas of later marxists, and insights arising out of contemporary struggles against oppression.

Here we see a typical proof of the unfailing unity (however subtle and mediated its various forms of appearance) between philosophical world outlook and political line. Just as Camfield wants to condemn the most advanced results of the class struggle in the 20^th century to the rubbish heap of history, he is likewise so allergic to the most advanced intellectual product of this struggle that he insists on clarifying his opposition to its systematic, totalizing aspiration by naming it only in lower case. And not only is his Marxism lower case, it is anti-racist and feminist. (No doubt an important line in the sand against well known misogynists and racists like Bebel, Luxemburg and Lenin.) Perhaps best of all, it is “unorthodox”. After all, decades after the fall of the USSR, there is little more that is courageously heretical than a preemptive disassociation from any assertion of Marxism as a totalistic worldview.

Marxism is not simply a disconnected collection of “good ideas” which can be indiscriminately mixed and matched with other equally disconnected good ideas. It is an integral system of thought whose programmatic conclusions flow inescapably from its ontological premises. And this system finds its superiority over its bourgeois Enlightenment predecessors in its methodology for grasping the historical process; a methodology which Marx summarized in his 1859 Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Those who want to tear some disconnected fragments out of the framework of this methodological whole and glue them together with dubious insights of bourgeois sociology or the moral-literary protests of radical democrats are playing a dangerous game of self-delusion.

Since the appearance of gender oppression and class exploitation in history, societies have been made up of interwoven social relations such as class, gender, sexuality, and, much more recently, race. At the centre of every society is the labour done to carry out its core activities of having babies, providing care, and producing goods and services.

In Camfield’s “reconstructed” historical materialism, hardly a trace remains of the governing logic through which Marx rendered history legible. Instead of a succession of modes of production characterized by the presence or absence of antagonistic class division constituted by the private appropriation of surplus, and by the specific mode of this appropriation with its necessarily associated form of legal appearance in the latter, there is simply a chaotic mass of “interwoven social relations”. This is not a reconstruction but a demolition, in which Marx’s logical differentiation of the essential and contingent features of given types of social formation finds no place. Methodology is reduced to the open-ended accumulation of concrete facts beloved by the historical school of 19^th century bourgeois economics. This is all too relevant to the evaluation of AES as we will soon see.

the reconstructed historical materialism I use in this book considers it possible — which, to be clear, does not mean likely, much less inevitable — and desirable for people to break with capitalism and at least start a transition to a kind of society that has not yet existed in history: a classless and stateless society of freedom in which people organize production to meet their needs and flourish — communism.

A methodology incapable of differentiating the essential and the contingent in the analysis of the social totality will also be incapable of isolating the structurally determined trajectory of this totality from a mass of superficial empirical phenomena, liable to result in excessively pessimistic or optimistic assessments. If, for Marx’s historical materialism, socialism was the latent and inevitable endpoint of capitalism absent a complete collapse of modernity, in Camfield’s reconstructed version it is hardly even “likely”. Such a pessimism – in which socialism recedes from a necessity given by the level of the development of the productive forces whose coming can only be accelerated or delayed, to an arbitrary utopian wish – perfectly dovetails with a failure to recognize that our current moment follows upon the hard-fought reversal of a partial implementation of socialism which defined the 20^th century.

Camfield proceeds to cite Søren Mau who insists that:

Communism is the effort to establish institutions that can ensure the highest possible degree of individual freedom and democratic control over those aspects of human life that are, necessarily, shared by the members of a society....The fundamental condition of communism is that the basic conditions of the life of society are brought under democratic control

On the contrary, the fundamental condition of communism is the elimination of the mutually constitutive structure of bourgeois private property and market compulsion, and the formation of a monolithic state economy oriented to use value production. The investment of the currently dominant strata of society in the privileges of bourgeois private property ensures that the preconditions of communism can only be created by a systematic repression of organized resistance which will initially preclude both individual freedom and democratic control to an extent that can be determined only by the necessities of a given balance of forces, not by some a priori yardstick. Of course if the “communism” in question is a merely mental construct whose real world application is hardly even “likely”, none of these admittedly depressing qualifications matter; communism is simply a Kantian ideal against which the real world in which we must live can be measured and always to that world’s detriment. This is the hopeless discontent of an Ingeborg Bachman, not a practical program for the future.

Indeed, any possible bridge between our current vale of tears and the heaven of communism is explicitly precluded with Camfield’s assertion that:

It later became common among many of Marx’s would-be followers to think of “socialism” as a stage of development before the ultimate goal of “communism” is achieved...This was how the terms socialism and communism were used in the AES societies. In the USSR, for example, under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khruschev, the CPSU program predicted that communism would be achieved by the early 1980s, a claim that was dropped early in the 1970s. Nevertheless, philosopher Peter Hudis is correct to write that “the later notion that ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ represent distinct stages of social development — a staple of Stalinist dogma — was alien to Marx’s thought and only entered the lexicon of ‘Marxism’ after his death.

This is an audacious falsification, typical of the school of thought which seeks to rescue communism as an ideal state from any compromising association with communism as a real movement. Although the history of shifting definitions of socialism and communism in the USSR has its own share of mystification, there is no doubt that Marx saw the realization of communism as a protracted transitional process beginning on the grounds of a substantial continuity with the economic categories of bourgeois society. We need only recall Marx’s observation in Critique of the Gotha Program that:

…these defects [continuation of bourgeois right] are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

It is the Soviet civil law tradition that is in continuity with Marx on this point, not the utopian tangents of a Camfield or a Hurdis. The question of whether we term these stages of development the first and second stage of communism, or communism and socialism, is certainly of no particular interest.

After assuring the reader of the purity of the ideal of communism, Camfield returns to the assessment of 20^th century socialism:

When looking at AES societies from this book’s perspective that maintains that at the very least transition towards communism is possible and desirable, the most important question is whether they were in transition to communism or not.

By Camfield’s use of the term communism, the answer can only be an obvious no. Because what Camfield considers to be communism or socialism is what Marx called the “higher phase of communist society” in the Critique of the Gotha Program, the society in which:

...after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

The transition to the higher phase of communist society in the USSR and associated states was blocked first of all by imperialist encirclement which imposed rates of accumulation which prevented what Preobrazhensky called the qualitative aspect of socialism from fully developing. This fact is the full vindication of the protest of the Left Opposition against the Stalin-Bukharin theory of “socialism in one country”. However, this fact is balanced by another of equal historical significance. The substantial actualization of the lower phase of communism in the USSR and associated states, due to the elimination of bourgeois private property despite the burden of bureaucratic parasitism and persistent agrarian backwardness. This fact is the equally full vindication of the defense of the workers states against imperialism, which for neoliberal political scabs is taken as a cause for mockery of the Left Opposition. For someone like Camfield, the construction and defense of the lower phase of socialism, a struggle which defined the entire 20^th century and which created an immense barrier to unfettered capitalist barbarism on a world scale, is simply irrelevant except as a frustrating example of the failure of reality to live up to his utopian expectations.

Namely, his expectation of unfettered, direct and participatory democracy under conditions of unavoidably permanent military confrontation:

Both political and economic democracy would be necessary features of evolution in the direction of communism because of precisely what communism would be. There would have to be democratic decision making about what goods and services would be produced and how work was organized as well as about all other concerns of the community. This far-reaching practice of participatory democracy would necessarily take place through new, profoundly democratic institutions created by the direct producers themselves — “not rule for the masses but by them.”

Such broad democracy is no doubt the precondition of the necessarily global transition to the higher stage of communism on a world scale. It is, however, precluded by the reality of constructing the lower stage of communism under conditions of imperialist encirclement and agrarian backwardness. This in no way indicates that the successful construction and defense of this lower stage was not a qualitative leap beyond capitalism and towards the final objective. The preservation of socialist property relations under conditions of protracted global class war entails the restriction of democracy for the proletariat, just as Hitler or Suharto had to restrict democracy for the bourgeoisie in order to preserve its property rights. This is also why many a bourgeois liberal, disgusted by fascism or military despotism, understood that it was the lesser evil in relation to the destruction of bourgeois property relations by the proletariat. Every class-conscious worker should feel the same about the crimes and corruption of Stalinism, insofar as this crime and corruption was bound up with a defense of the monolithic state economy.

III

For Camfield, the first step away from the brief and amorphous primitive purity of Soviet democracy is the political order of War Communism which he characterizes as follows:

In short, during the Civil War, the state relied mainly on force to appropriate the products of peasant labour. It relied on workers’ dependence on wages, along with political exhortation and coercion, for the appropriation of their surplus labour. But there was no cohesive social layer in command of state power, and control over society by central state institutions existed more on paper than in reality. There was still a degree of democracy as well as freedom of discussion within the Communist Party (CP), whose leadership headed the state. Thus what replaced working-class rule can be called a surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin. This was a historically unique phenomenon. It was the product of an unstable situation in which social supremacy had passed from the working class to the leadership of one segment of that class, a social layer whose power over society was not highly developed.

For Camfield, the soviets which coexisted with bourgeois property forms were an unambiguous example of workers’ rule. But when the element of the working class committed to the implementation of the political program of that class (the members of the Communist Party) move to implement that program, somehow we are no longer dealing with working class rule. Rather, we are face to face with something called a “surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin” which is seemingly rather problematic.

Now, in any possible situation in which the working class organized politically around the communist program seizes power in order to implement this program, this political class organized as a party will not coincide with the working class as an objective economic strata of bourgeois society. On the contrary, considering the immense difficulties and painful sacrifices involved in implementing the communist program, we can be confident that a significant element of the working class will vacillate or oppose the implementation of this program in the hope of avoiding further escalation with the capitalists. In a situation of pervasive politico-military conflict, allowing political rights to these elements would be a suicidal act. Therefore, the only possible form of rule by the working class is the dictatorship of a party incorporating only a certain fraction of the class as an economic strata. This party will have to exert authority over society as a whole via a system of state apparatuses, and organize the economic process, including the division between the consumption fund and the accumulation fund. Therefore, what Camfield calls the “surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin” is, in fact, the only possible concrete form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The key link in terms of the preservation of the democratic aspect of the proletarian dictatorship can only be the democracy and freedom of discussion within this party, which Camfield briefly touches on. An unfettered direct democracy cannot survive the rigors of a militarized class polarization, as we noted above.

The significance that Camfield attaches to the absence of a Bolshevik plan for one-party rule is misguided. In any revolutionary process, the revolutionary party, whether it appears formally as one party or as a coalition of parties will not directly coincide with the revolutionary class in sociological terms, and will exercise dictatorship on behalf of the class, as its representative. It is a feature of all class states that the ruling class rules, not directly, but via the mediation of its representatives.

If Camfield is to be believed however:

What they did have was a version of marxism in which the idea of a “workers’ state,” which is how the Bolsheviks perceived their state, was not understood as by definition workers themselves controlling society through their own new democratic institutions of class rule, which was how Marx, Engels, and Luxemburg had understood it.

This, much like the claim above that Marx countenanced no progressive stages in the development of socialism, is simply false. Marx and Engels’s laments about the lack of authoritarianism in the Paris Commune and their admiration for the resolute “direct democracy” of the Committee of Public Safety are too well known to acquire comment. Luxemburg also was far too serious a politician to entertain this kind of fuzzy-minded nonsense. We can simply recall her comment in a review of Kautsky’s book against Bernstein:

The proletariat, says Kautsky, stands in no way behind all the other classes of bourgeois society, in terms of political maturity, at least insofar as its elite is concerned, which would self evidently take leadership in a seizure of power. ¹

Luxemburg summarized this view with approval. Camfield’s refusal of political representation has no base anywhere in the Marxist tradition. When Camfield imagines working class rule to end, in 1918, was in fact the moment of its real beginning, where the class began to implement its own program through its representatives. The chaotic ambiguity of the prior period was not and could not be the base of any viable project of socialist construction, and without its closure, swift bourgeois restoration would have been inevitable.

According to Camfield, though under the NEP, “individual workers enjoyed strong job security rights, protection against discipline, and the ability to file grievances over wages and working conditions. They also had some control over how they worked.” However this was a mixed blessing because:

…this did not give workers any control over the surplus extracted from them. Throughout the NEP years, the labour of the working class was alienated to a substantial degree. Since workers were unable to democratically shape the goals, pace, and methods of industrialization, the social layer at the helm of the state was bound to use the surplus labour it extracted from them for economic purposes that were hostile to the interests of the working class.

For Camfield, the proof of this hostility is to be found in the decision for rapid industrialization that closes the NEP period. A decision he contextualizes within the well-known story of increasing bureaucratization of the party. According to Camfield, the political representatives of the working class in the civil war period had two overriding objectives: “military victory over the counter-revolutionary forces that sought to reimpose the power of landlords and capitalists, and support for revolution abroad. This meant that during Civil War period:

in spite of the ruling layer’s undemocratic and often coercive methods, its wartime priorities had converged with the interests of the working class and, to a lesser extent, the peasantry. Workers and peasants would have been dealt a huge blow if the revolutionary state had been overthrown and the old exploiting class restored.

In reality, we can see, from Camfield’s own framing of the issues, that the decision for shock industrialization in 1928 was, in fact, in substantial continuity with the policy priorities of the Civil War, not only in terms of method but in terms of goals; the preservation of the system of monolithic state property against the external pressure of imperialism and the internal pressure of petty commodity production tending towards capitalism. There was no “break”, except in the imaginations of those desperate to disassociate their own utopian visions from the tragic and criminal but historically unavoidable realities of the class struggle in the 20^th century. This was something that the Left Oppositionists like who transitioned from being smeared as “super-industrializers” by the Stalin-Bukharin bloc during NEP, to working for Stalin when he too finally saw the light of “super-industrialization” understood. The system of proletarian state property had to be preserved for any hope of further advance against imperialism or purification of its own bureaucratic overhead. Those who see the capitulation of oppositionists as simply opportunism or delusion misidentify the existential stakes of the situation.

Camfield, to his credit, recognizes that “the low level of development of productive forces made it impossible for the USSR to industrialize without intensifying the exploitation of workers and peasants”. However, he ignores that the increase of the rate of accumulation relative to the consumption fund was, in the context of the preservation of the socialist state property relation, a necessary policy in the long-term interests of the immediate producers. Anything else meant defeat and catastrophic regression on a world scale. It is necessary to point out the deformations in this process induced by the bureaucratic monopoly of power, especially the perverse conjunction between the unavoidable attacks on the living standards of the immediate producers and the increasing institutionalization of consumption standards among administrative strata far in excess of anything imaginable by the standard of distribution according to work. However, this in no way modifies the fundamental content of the situation. Any reasonable capitalist would prefer that his investments remain his, even if managed by a board of directors whose expense account expenditures are dubious, than be expropriated and left homeless by the proletariat. Only pig-headed idealists of the Camfield school refuse to see a difference.