5. 20. 2025

What Can We Hope For?

David Camfield

The fall of the state projects sometimes called “actually existing socialism” (AES) in Eastern Europe and the USSR from 1989–91 was widely interpreted as the end of communism and any other project of constructing an alternative to capitalism. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protestors by the Chinese military fed into the same view; if the Chinese Communist Party survived as a ruling party, unlike its counterparts in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it was only through bloody repression. Around the world, parties that supported AES lost much of their support. Radical left forces that were highly critical of AES but considered it better than capitalism also suffered. Over time, the widespread perception that the alternative to capitalism had failed reduced the appeal even of radical politics that held that AES societies had not been in transition to communism at all. This belief in a historic failure fed into the mood expressed in the saying of unknown origins reported by cultural studies scholar Fredric Jameson: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” 

Nevertheless, the realities of capitalism fuelled global surges of anti-capitalist sentiment and politics in the short-lived global justice movement that began in the late 1990s, in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–09 and the austerity drive that followed, and more recently in response to climate change, how states handled the COVID-19 pandemic, and racism. This sentiment has often boosted support for reformist socialism: the left social democracy of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, Bernie Sanders and the kind of politics dominant within the Democratic Socialists of America in the US, and the like. Today there are also many people who dream of freedom, of liberation, of a future more radically different from the present than what left social democracy seeks. However, they often think politically in terms of abolition, feminism, trans and queer liberation, degrowth, and/or anti-capitalism without also being communist (the point is not whether people use the term “communism” to name the society for which they wish to fight but what kind of society they wish to see established). The mood captured by Jameson is still very widespread. 

All strands of communist politics have also been affected by how their political magnetism has been depleted by the ending of what we can call the classical workers’ movement over the closing decades of the twentieth century, decades in which employers and states inflicted major defeats on the global working class. Of course, there are still unions and, in some places, other mass organizations of the working class. What no longer exists almost anywhere are, as I once described them in an article for the online edition of the magazine Salvage, “configurations of workers’ organizations with a strong relationship to at least a small but significant minority of the class that affirm a commitment to the creation by workers of a fundamentally different society.” What is more, “infrastructures of dissent” – defined by theorist Alan Sears as “the means through which activists develop political communities capable of learning, communicating and mobilizing together” – are much weaker than they once were. 

In part because of these developments, popular discontent arising from changes in society that have worsened life globally for many people since the Great Recession is being tapped and moulded by rising right-wing forces. These include both fascist and other far-right organizations, which aim to do away with capitalist democracy altogether, and a larger set of forces that want to weaken it further. Together they make up an “array of antidemocratic and reactionary forces seeking to reassert class rule and privilege, to exit the crises of our times on terms set by capital, to bring a specific kind of order to an increasingly unstable world,” as theorists Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber perceptively observe in an article for the magazine Spectre. In these conditions, is communism a meaningful political project?

Before addressing that question, one objection needs to be discussed: even if socialist revolutions happen, the global ecological crisis will make transition to communism impossible. Upheavals stemming from climate change lie ahead, along with other dimensions of the crisis, including more pandemic outbreaks. Humanity needs to shift to non-fossil sources of energy as quickly as possible – an enormous undertaking. Doing this while at the same time allowing imperialized countries of the South to improve the lives of their inhabitants will require reducing energy use in imperialist countries. The use of many non-renewable resources must also be reduced, agriculture transformed, food systems changed, and many forms of pollution stopped. According to some ecologists, people would not be able to both make such changes and also move towards communism, which they believe would involve ecocidal industrial growth. My response is that this is true for a transition towards “productivist” communism – one that would ignore or downplay the limits of our biosphere and retain most of capitalism’s technological structure and the wasteful, consumer goods-fixated, car-dependent, jet-travelling way of life spawned in the imperialist countries during the post–World War II economic boom and then spread around the world. But there is no reason to assume that people who had taken control of society and started to reconstruct it would take a productivist path. The extremely democratic institutions of self-government they would have created would provide an unparalleled framework for debating which priorities would shape the democratic planning of production and the reorganization of social life. Within that framework, and no longer shackled by capitalism’s ecocidal drive, it would be far easier than in any capitalist society to argue for ecological concerns to be prioritized. “Private sufficiency, public luxury” could be a principle in the transition to an ecological communism, which is a goal worth fighting for no matter how severe the ecological crisis gets. Without such a transition, capitalism will make it impossible to achieve all of the far-reaching changes that are urgently needed to address our dire ecological situation. 

Is There Any Hope for Communism? 

Returning to the question of whether communism is a viable political project today, it is not hard to understand what capitalism is doing to humanity and the rest of nature. Some of this was touched on at the outset of this book, and much has been written about it. Capitalism is doing what it is doing because of the essential character of its social metabolism. This is driven by its irrational logic: the competitive accumulation of capital on an ever-larger scale and at an ever-faster speed. Capitalism operates as it does not because of an imbalance that can be corrected but because of its inherent systemic imperatives. As the saying goes, “The system isn’t broken. It was built this way.” This is why it is necessary for humanity to move from capitalism to a better and entirely different way of organizing social life. 

Whether communism is possible is where the major problem arises. Even many sympathizers are skeptical because we have not yet had a historical experience in which people have really begun to reconstruct society in the direction of communism, yet we do have a history of defeated revolutions and the disastrous experience of AES. Moreover, we are all affected by living in an age in which there is a sense that history is over, that we live in a world of the eternal present, that the future will be like the present, but probably worse. This context clouds our ability to see that the world is not closed but “open, incomplete, unfinished,” as the Italian historian Enzo Traverso puts it. We can better appreciate that openness if we understand that the present is just a moment of history. Over time humans have organized societies in a wide variety of ways, even if societies have been structured by a limited number of modes of production. 

The status quo that we often take for granted did not have to be as it is. It is the outcome of events and processes shaped by clashing class and other social forces in particular times and places. It is not the inevitable culmination of laws of history that could not have unfolded otherwise. Nor is it the product of random chance. Consider just one counterfactual scenario: if the Russian Communist Party’s surplus-extracting state of proletarian origin had been overthrown in the early 1920s, it would have been replaced by a horrific counter-revolutionary military dictatorship: “The world would have had a Russian name for Fascism,” as Trotsky once put it. At the same time, communist politics would not have been distorted by Stalinism, and AES would never have existed. The history of the twentieth century would have been dramatically different. 

Unpredictable novel happenings with far-reaching consequences are part of our history. Philosopher Ernst Bloch sees history as punctuated by such transformational happenings, those that are “radically new in history”; he calls one of these a novum. While Bloch generally sees the novum as good — the Russian Revolution is an outstanding example — theorist Alan Milchman argues that a novum can also be bad. He gives the example of the Holocaust. The emergence in the USSR at the end of the 1920s of a new form of capitalism under rulers who used the language of marxism can also be seen as a bad novum. Recognizing that such happenings occur should reinforce the idea that the future will not be the present projected forward in a way that we can predict in detail, as a glance at forecasts made in the late twentieth century or earlier should remind us. There are many possible futures. Some would be much worse for humanity than the world as it exists today, others merely worse. In spite of the inescapable effects that capitalism’s ecological crisis will have on all possible worlds, other futures would be better, even much better.