By Ian Goodrum

It’s time to quit shying away from a positive communist politics. Turning away from the past only gives our opponents ammunition.

Pavel Filonov, GOELRO (National Plan for the Electrification of Russia), 1930.

It’s dangerous, and spreading fast. If we don’t act now, it might be too late to contain it before it throttles this nascent socialist wave in the crib.

Luckily, the symptoms are easy to spot. Just ask any self-described communist or “leftist” about the socialist experiments of the last century: the USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, DPRK and so on. If they’re a carrier, it should be simple to tell; their head will drop, they will avert their eyes and begin stammering something about failures and mass deaths and suddenly that leftist will start to sound a lot like a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society.

If these folks are to be believed, the past is the past and the socialist politics of the future will avoid the errors of those countries — and if this person is afflicted, the errors will be all they can talk about — through unexplained wizardry, usually technological advances.

With allies like these, willing to toss aside the entire 20th century to appease the mildest questioning, is it any wonder people see the left as impotent?

Democratic socialists correctly point to a need to develop a positive politics in response to neoliberalism’s collapse — a vision of what a better world can specifically do for people. Inevitably, what this ends up looking like is a repackaging of Scandinavian social democracy, which does no Muslims or non-whites many favors in the convincing department. When pressed about the states presided over by communist parties, the dissembling begins. “Sure, they had good ideas,” they’ll say. “But,” they continue, everything fell apart, nothing good happened, it’s time to try something totally new with zero cues from history. Compelling stuff.

What we as Marxist-Leninists must develop is a positive politics of our own. The Norsephiles are quick to use programs of universal health care and free education as a model for the United States, and that’s enough for some to be convinced. But there’s more to socialism than a tepid imitation of Sweden. We sorely need a similar shorthand that goes even farther, and uses examples from those countries the afflicted members of the broader left would have us forget.

It goes without saying a new communist program would include free health care and education. Yet under socialism, universal rights to material security don’t end there, the way they do in social democracy.

Ruling parties enshrined in their constitutions the sorts of rights capitalist countries have yet to codify into law, nearly a century after the Russian Revolution. An entire chapter of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 is a list of rights, which include “the right to work…the right to rest and leisure…the reduction of the working day to seven hours…annual vacations…the right to maintenance in old age…equality of rights irrespective of race…women [guaranteed] equal rights with men.” [1]

We don’t have to go around quoting directly from the Constitution of the Soviet Union — unless you want to! — but anyone who’s sat down and read the whole thing will have difficulty arguing today’s post-revolutionary constitution won’t have quite a few similarities.

So what does the communist bullet point list of policies look like in the modern age? Unsurprisingly, there are still parts of Marx and Engels’ ten-item plan[2] which could be included. But key to our movement is distinguishing what we want from what we can characterize as Socialism Lite: all the nice free stuff without any of that stopping capitalism business.

We can talk about housing, and the end of homelessness.

That’s compelling to anyone living in a city like New York or San Francisco, where landlords rule supreme. Guaranteed housing has been a key, recurrent part of socialist constitutions since the beginning. How does this shake out in reality, though? For this, we turn to — gasp! — a historical example. In East Germany, a place Socialism Lite would have us think was all Stasi, all the time, monthly housing costs in the form of rent or loan payments were capped at four percent of income.[3]

Ask anyone to divide their monthly paycheck by 10, then divide that by two. Then knock off a bit more. Then have them picture paying that much for rent every month, in a country where rents regularly go over 50 percent of income. That should generate some interest. While you’ve got their attention, throw in a $2 utility bill, like they have in Cuba.[4]

Home ownership was different, too. If a person wanted to build a house, the government would send the necessary building materials and equipment on a one-percent interest loan. Homebuilding by a community became such a common occurrence people made an event out of it, and locals would pitch in with their collective construction experience to put together a dwelling.

Sounds like some actually existing socialism to me. You ignore the past, you ignore positive examples like these.

We can talk about employment, and the fear of unemployment.

It’s no great secret much of the power of the capitalist class is derived from the threat of unemployment and the maintenance of a great mass of unemployed at any given time. Removing this anxiety from the equation is essential, and for anyone who’s been unemployed, it’s yet another distinguishing feature of socialism that makes it appealing.

Ensuring everyone has work or the opportunity to work, while providing adequate pension for those who can’t, has been talked to death in the West without ever seeing the light of day. Meanwhile, in socialist countries, this is and was a fact of life. Before perestroika, structural and cyclical unemployment were unheard of in the Soviet Union.[5] The terror over the possibility of losing one’s job was practically nonexistent.

With so many firms in the West laying off employees and no government program to help the people who fall through the cracks, the eradication of unemployment should be a top priority. Yet the imaginations of so many who consider themselves on the left begins and ends with health care and education. The people want more, and so should we. Refusing to acknowledge these accomplishments to accommodate the fantasies of anti-communists does us no favors.

We can talk about capitalist crises.

Perhaps most importantly, the programs we’ve discussed — including the ones already present under social democracy — are ironclad. Barring a complete upheaval of the political and economic system, as we saw with the end of the Soviet Union, the socialist states of the 20th and 21st century refused to abandon these guarantees at the first sign of trouble.

While post-war capitalist governments provided a halfway decent safety net for their working classes for a few decades, the welfare state was and is under constant attack. Periods of economic slowdown led to a “privatization creep,” when capitalists and their state representatives raided public coffers to shore up profits in times of low growth.

Contrast this with socialist countries, who even in their most desperate moments — Cuba’s Special Period, the DPRK’s Arduous March, the USSR’s era of stagflation — maintained public ownership and administration of health care, housing, education and employment security. These services were not up to the same standard during this time, what with it being a crisis period and all, but they were not demolished in some craven attempt to kickstart the economy. It takes a counter-revolution to reverse this pledge, as we’ve seen in the post-Soviet economies, where living standards and life expectancies have nose-dived.

This might seem like Marxism 101 to most who read this, but the pressing need to re-articulate these positions shows the public still has an overwhelmingly negative view of our ideology’s history. If the exchange of “Socialism has failed!” “Well, that wasn’t real socialism!” is commonplace as experience suggests, then radical assertions of socialism’s successes must be the balm to these mealymouthed non-defenses. I’ve yet to meet many people who respect someone who kowtows to their opposition at a moment’s notice.

No doubt there is a great deal of propaganda to break through in making these arguments. Combatting the prevailing narrative will be difficult. But attempting to recruit and expand a left organization with a message of starting from scratch — or worse, using fragile social democracies as examples — is a losing gambit.

People want results, and if you can tell them that under socialism, rent was 4 percent of income, or that everyone had a job and didn’t worry about getting fired, or that basic services weren’t in danger of being rolled back when capitalists decided they want more, that’s a foundation you can build from. It’s persuasive to anyone who’s had to work for a living; that is, the people we ostensibly want on our side.