Please Stop Talking About "True Communism"

If you're one of those marxists who defends communism by arguing that the "true communism" promised by Marx and Engels has never yet existed, then please stop.  This is not a very good argument for communism because this is precisely what liberals argue in order to claim "communism is good in theory and bad in practice."  Indeed, they use the fact that "true communism" has never existed as proof that it cannot exist because it is little more than a utopian doctrine.  ("That Marx meant well," the liberal anti-communist will argue, chortling slyly, "It's just too bad he was proved wrong by those horrible communist revolutions of the twentieth century!")  Thus, if you're making some sort of idealist argument about true communism––as if communism is a Platonic form in which the material world has not yet learned to participate––then all you're doing is telling the liberal anti-communist that s/he's correct.

Utopian Marx: "Where is my true communism? Peace out."

One of the key contributions made by Marx and Engels was not a theory of "pure communism" but the theory of revolutionary science.  Utopian fleshed-out descriptions of some "true communism" are hard to find in the work of Marx and Engels; when they spoke of communism they were intentionally vague, indicating only that it was a classless society where humanity had passed from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.  They did not precisely think it was inevitable since it needed to be actively established through revolution, a messy business that could always fail, and that this was necessary for human progress.


What they did speak more about, however, was establishing socialism, the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, which could possibly be the motor that would allow for the liquidation of class divisions.  They also spoke quite a lot about making concrete analyses of concrete situations, scientifically assessing historical junctures, the fact that every generation can only solve the problems it encounters… they had little patience for utopian pronouncements about communism.  Indeed, because they were historical materialists and not utopian idealists their argument regarding communism was only about its necessity based on a scientific assessment of capitalism and the historical motion that produced capitalism.


All of this is to say, if you think of yourself as a marxist and are still talking about how the true beauty of communism has never been realized (and are perhaps saying this as a response to some criticism about actually existing communist regimes so as to "save communism" from their supposedly bad legacy) you might be a liberal.  At the very least you're some sort of utopian idealist who isn't doing the hard work of historical materialism.  Or maybe you're a lazy reader of Marx who thinks that Capital was really about describing the "perfect" communist system––which is to say, you haven't read Capital and you might even, to trick people into thinking you've read it, refer to this book by its German title so as to sound knowledgeable.

"Ah yes, but have you read Das Kapital where Marx describes his theory of communism?"

Whatever the case: please stop using this argument to "defend" communism––it isn't helping.  You're just making the liberal anti-communists happy by making their arguments for them and calling it communist.  After you make these arguments, they can go home and chuckle to themselves at how obviously out to lunch those whacky communists are because they keep talking about some utopian communism and calling it "scientific" when they can't seem to understand the empirical method.  Even worse: when you make this argument in front of people who might otherwise be open to politicization––and who know viscerally that capitalism needs to go––you end up offering them little more than quasi-religious mystification.

Look: Marx would in some ways agree that "true communism" has never existed because he believed that communism was classless and thus lacked a state, which can only exist in class-based societies.  Thus, it is quite true that communism has not actually existed because communist governments, by virtue of being governments, have presided over states.  But this is a rather banal point because, really, even Lenin and Mao would agree with you here; both of them understood that they were building socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, that might possibly birth communism when the class struggle under socialism was won.  Marx and Engels also spoke of this socialist transition––it was towards this transition, though in a more nebulous manner than the actually existing socialisms of the twentieth century, that their manifesto was aimed.

All of this is to say that communists need to stop talking about the failure of "communist states" to be "truly communist" because these states were only ever trying to build communism through the period of socialism––a historical necessity that could always lead to failure because it is still a period of class struggle.  They need to stop denouncing these actually existing socialisms as failing to be "properly communist" because concrete struggle in the concrete world is not a dinner party or an abstract philosophical argument; it is a messy business about overthrowing the ruling class and building a classless society.  And a classless society, as all of these revolutionary communists understood, is not something that will emerge one beautiful day when we all learn to be utopians and participate in the ideal form of Communism.  This is a process that is fraught with confusion, struggle, setbacks, and failures from which we need to learn.

We will learn nothing about getting closer to our "true communism" if we keep speaking of this communism as if it is divorced from time and space.  If Marx and Engels' key contribution was their scientific method, then we need to use it honestly engage with the world historical revolutions that produced examples of actually existing socialism––communist movements devoted to building communism––and, rather than disavow them, celebrate their history-shaking successes while at the same time scientifically critiquing and learning from their actual failures.  When we denounce these moments because they were not "true communism" we denounce a revolutionary understanding of communism because we are saying that every actual attempt to build communism was garbage because it wasn't pure.  History, however, is not abstractly pure because it is made by (just as it makes) humans producing and struggling in given socio-historical contexts and human production/struggle is not the same as a concise and abstract mathematical equation.  To be sure, there are universal insights about the motion of human history; the particular articulations of these universals, however, are always messy.

This "true communism" business needs to stop.  The fact that I can look "communism" up in a bourgeois highschool textbook [as I did the other day] and read, amidst claims about totalitarianism and anti-democracy, that "no true communist system has ever existed" means that I should not have to hear the same anti-communist bullshit reproduced by self-proclaimed communists whose understanding of history is the same as a highschool textbook that hasn't changed its position since the beginning of the cold war.  (As an aside: it was also funny that a highschool teacher argued the same thing about communism to one of my comrades a couple days before we found the textbook he was using to teach his students.  Yet again: the educators need to be educated.)  So stop making the arguments your liberal contemporaries are making, fellow communists, stop fetishizing a true communism and instead follow the lead of Marx and Engels and critically engage with the world historical communist movements.  Maybe then we can stop confusing people who might be interested in communism in the first place.

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