The First Fruit of Revolution

Popular Understanding

Within the contemporary Marxist-Leninist movement, five states, as well as multiple historical states, stand in prominence and awe for their achievements: Actually-Existing Socialism (AES). Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, those five states are: the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Cuba, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. However, the simplicity of this presentation is deceptive, as no concise definition of the term AES exists, and bound up within its contemporary usage remain the contradictions of previous generations.

First and foremost, the term AES is generally understood to refer to the five aforementioned still-existing countries, as well as historical Marxist-Leninist governments around the world. In lieu of a concise definition, three key characteristics appear as the assumed criteria in the term’s popular usage:

1. That the country in question underwent a proletarian revolution, and is/was then governed under a dictatorship of the proletariat (DotP).

2. That the revolution and ensuing dictatorship is/was led by a Communist Party.

3. That the State is/was demonstrably Socialist in its character and orientation; i.e. that the State oversees/oversaw the development of the country’s Socialist character, on a clearly-delineated path towards achieving Socialism, and, ultimately, Communism.

As a starting position, the three-part criteria goes a long way as a popular understanding of what Actually-Existing Socialism is, and is helpful for discerning individuals hoping to understand the transitional demands of Marxism-Leninism. However, what such an understanding gains in nominal clarity is lost in its over-complexity and lack of broader context. While useful in retroactively understanding the basic contours of the five present AES countries and past experiments, such criteria become less useful when utilized further.

Towards a Scientific Definition

First and foremost, the first and second criteria may lend to more confusion than clarity, as identifying the revolutionary dictatorship as separate from the Communist Party raises questions regarding the fundamental character of both: if the revolutionary dictatorship does not, by its very nature, require the Communist Party, then, from the Marxist-Leninist perspective, the Party is a mere contrivance. Rather, it is the Party’s leading role as the vanguard of the progressive forces in society that must necessarily place it at the forefront of the revolutionary movement: the name of the organization itself is not so important as its material functionality within the field of struggle, save for historical and political purposes. As Lenin remarks, the question of the name of the Party is incomparably less important than the question of the attitude of the revolutionary proletariat to the state (The State & Revolution).

Likewise, since the dissolution of the Communist International in 1943, the name Communist Party, which had originally been employed for the purpose of precision and clarity, as opposed to broader designations, such as “Social-Democratic,” “Socialist,” etc., has since, in lieu of any reputable new centralized International to speak of, been similarly broadened to the point of no longer being completely clear. Communist today can be taken to refer not only to the so-called Orthodox Marxists, who praise Marx and hate everything which came after, but also to the so-called Leninists (Trotskyists), who do likewise with Lenin, Anti-Revisionists who do likewise with Stalin & Mao, Maoists who have invented their own self-referential cosmology, Khruschevites who remain obstinately grounded in the world as it was in the 1980s, the Eurocommunists who are more Euro than communist, etc., etc., and, finally, the new era of Marxist-Leninists, who, much to the chagrin of those others, take all of these developments holistically; not towards reliving the past, but rather towards reshaping the future. Within such context, referring generally to a Communist Party appears overly broad.

Therefore, fuller clarity would arise from simplifying the first and second points to reading as:

That the country in question underwent a proletarian revolution, and is/was then guided by the leadership of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard.

Furthermore, the final point on the Socialist character and orientation of the State encounters similar difficulties. It is abundantly clear that, in the present age of liberal-imperialist hegemony, Communism has yet to be achieved in the sense of a classless, moneyless, and stateless society of complete liberation. Rather, the task of the Actually-Existing Socialist entity is precisely the development of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the class of working and oppressed peoples; that, through developing the social relations of production and productive forces, from the leading position of control of the commanding heights of the economy through centralized planning around mankind’s social needs, that the economic and social conditions for Socialism may be established. Fundamental to this development is the inherent contradiction between Socialist liberation and capitalist exploitation; ultimately finding their final negation in the emergence of Communist society. A key shortcoming of the final point, then, is a lack of clarity around those fundamental aspects of what may be said to encompass a Socialist character and orientation, and by what measure they are to be “demonstrable.”

The question of “demonstrability” is of a particularly acute importance in understanding and analyzing any historical or contemporary revolutionary movement or entity, as bound up within it is the inherent variability of material conditions and lived realities across time and place. If taken dogmatically, without contextualization within the society itself as it exists at that point, then few, if any, Socialist projects may be said to have ever truly existed. Rather, by understanding such development as situational, and therefore relying on the creative application of Marxist-Leninist principles to those lived realities, a far more robust, scientifically valid, living understanding of world-historic development may be grasped.

Therefore, fuller clarity would arise from elaborating the third point to read as:

That the State is/was characterized by the dictatorship of the proletariat’s control of the commanding heights of the economy, and centralized planning thereof, towards the development of advanced productive forces and Socialist relations of production, resting principally on the creative application of Marxism-Leninism to real-world conditions.

And so, finally, a concise and concrete definition for Actually-Existing Socialism in the new era may be presented as a single sentence:

Actually-Existing Socialism refers to a country which has undergone a proletarian revolution guided by the leadership of a Marxist-Leninist vanguard, characterized by the dictatorship of the proletariat’s control of the commanding heights of the economy and centralized planning thereof towards the development of advanced productive forces and Socialist relations of production through the creative application of Marxism-Leninism to the material realities of that society.

Theoretical Background

The theoretical basis of Actually-Existing Socialism within the Marxist-Leninist worldview arises, first, from the understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat (DotP) as the material development of institutional State power in the hands of the working and oppressed themselves under the guidance of the Party.

In his Critique of the Gotha Program, Karl Marx states:

Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

In The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin states:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.

In Foundations of Leninism, J. V. Stalin observes:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the instrument of the proletarian revolution, its organ, its most important mainstay … carrying the revolution to the complete victory of socialism. The revolution can defeat the bourgeoisie, can overthrow its power, even without the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the revolution will be unable to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie, to maintain its victory and to push forward to the final victory of socialism unless, at a certain stage in its development, it creates a special organ in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat as its principle mainstay.

Taken cumulatively, the dictatorship of the proletariat appears as the organization of State power in the transition between capitalism and Communism, that is, the organization of State power under Socialism, but is also, and most fundamentally, a vital instrument of maintaining the achievements of revolutionary action. Thus, in briefer terms, the dictatorship of the proletariat is understood in Marxist-Leninist theory as Socialism in its earliest material form: the first fruit of revolution. In modern terms, it is Actually-Existing Socialism.

This development in the understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat evolved throughout the previous revolutionary periods, naturally, as bound up within it is the contradiction of Socialism as emergent and material reality over and above previous iterations of Socialism only as ideal to be strived for. That is, that under Marx’s formulation in 1875, the notion of organized revolutionary power achieving such heights in the hands of the proletariat was purely theoretical; the only extant example towards which Marx and Engels could refer was that of the Paris Commune, which was brutally suppressed after only two months, and never held any territory to speak of beyond the barricades within the city itself. While Marx and Engels would envision the birth and extension of this power into the material world over and above mere yearning, Lenin would oversee the first successful attempt to truly establish that power in the material: the Soviet Union as the first and foremost example of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and thus Actually-Existing Socialism, in history. The first fruit of the world-historic emergence of Socialism in the real. Following Lenin, Stalin would in turn further synthesize the theoretical understandings of the dictatorship with the lived realities and unique conditions of the early Soviet Union up to the outbreak of the Fascist War; further identifying the singular necessity of that dictatorship within the context of building real Socialism.

It would be out of these conditions specifically that the expression Actually-Existing Socialism would be born in the middle period of the 20th century: specifically to denote the development of Socialism in the real, not merely theoretical, as had at that point emerged in numerous countries.

Contradictions

Bound up within the term Actually-Existing Socialism are, naturally, its antecedents: Ideally-Existing Socialism in the ideological, and Actually-Existing Capitalism in the material. Arising first in the material, Actually-Existing Capitalism may be said to be the state of affairs of not only the vast majority of the world’s countries in the present period, but the hegemonic order of the period itself: that of late-stage capitalist imperialism. It is within the emergence of this Actually-Existing Capitalism, birthed from the industrial revolution, that Ideally-Existing Socialism arose as its negation: in the belief that, as the industrial revolution raised the productive forces to world-historic new heights and dissolved the old social relations of the ancien régime, such developments should in turn then give rise to a nouveau régime of unfettered human abundance. As its name suggests, this ideal does not exist in the material, and served, rather, in its capacity as antithesis to the emergent real, as the longing for liberation among the newly-emergent proletarian masses. Therefore, these opposing forces may be understood as existing in spectra, and enacting on each-other a force of negation, spiraling upwards dialectically towards synthesis: the revolutionary rupture and emergence of Actually-Existing Socialism.

As it is that within Actually-Existing Socialism in the present era is bound up these contradictory forces, so it is that any development thereof is naturally acted upon in the cumulation of those unresolved contradictions: that no utopian socialism has yet to emerge, and dystopian capitalism remains the dominant form of economic relations, and that, even further, any movement towards one or the other introduces an active force which will be further met with a lesser reactive force in the opposing direction, tending ultimately, but not directly, towards the emergence of synthesis at a higher level. Actually-Existing Socialism is, thus, bound up to a problematic extent within the context of its own situationality: of the particulars of the ideal and real of the society within which it exists.

The situationality of Actually-Existing Socialism as bound up within the contradictions of ideal and real not only arrives at the point of being problematic, but arises precisely from it: prior to the formulation of Actually-Existing Socialism, as described here, dictatorship of the proletariat was understood to refer to Socialism in the real. That is, of Socialism as a State power. It quickly emerges, however, as a result of uneven development, that one such Socialist power shall, by its very situationality, arise at a position contradictory to that of another. It is precisely here that the Soviet Union found itself at loggerheads with the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Fascist War: the Soviet Union found itself in a new position as the preeminent superpower of the Socialist world, locked in a struggle against the United States for global hegemony, while Yugoslavia found itself in a position of relative power within the Balkans specifically, with a special designation as a semi-neutral nation belonging fully to neither the American nor Soviet camps. This unevenness in the real conditions of those countries quickly found itself reflected in contradictions of the ideals pursued by either side, escalating ultimately into the Tito-Stalin split, from which point both sides would continue to diverge in opposite, but ultimately convergent, directions, as both would collapse simultaneously in the early 1990s.

It is precisely in this phenomena of divergence that the term Actually-Existing Socialism would first be introduced in the Soviet bloc amidst the period of splits and degeneration following the death of Stalin: that the Soviet Union represented the singular, hegemonic Socialist motherland, and that any form of Marxism-Leninism diverging from it was thus necessarily revisionist (and, more problematically, were thus necessarily also open to Soviet intervention). Such pseudo-chauvinist attitudes would reach their highest expression in what Chinese critics would describe as Soviet Social imperialism, culminating in the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It is therefore a feat of historic irony that the People’s Republic of China, which would not have been regarded as real Socialism in the split period, has survived longer, and is now popularly understood to be the preeminent Actually-Existing Socialist power in the world, carrying on the legacy of the world Marxist-Leninist movement since the betrayal of the Soviet Union. It is likewise a proof that, while so-called Titoist and Khruschevite rejections of foundational Marxist-Leninist principles in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, respectively, were carried out under the pretext of applying Marxism to their real conditions, culminating in their own collapses, Chinese successes demarcate a path of dialectical balance between both practical creativity and ideological principle.

Modern Usage

Arising then from its historical and theoretical underpinnings, the popular understanding of Actually-Existing Socialism described at the beginning may thus be viewed in continuity with its essential purpose of denoting both real character and ideal orientation; a pole of delineation in contrast to its antecedents along a spectrum. It is, however, as understood here, possible for the term to be used with more clarity and scientific precision now, opening the door for further usage as a tool within Marxist-Leninist political analysis, as it clarifies the existence of the five AES entities in the world today, as well as the existence of what may be described as semi-Socialist entities, who may retain certain characteristics without full alignment to all criterion; such uneven emergence is thus a natural phenomenon which must be fostered and encouraged, rather than necessarily being viewed as inherently antagonistic.

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