Anti-communism is an asset for capitalism’s defenders. But it has not stopped the experience of living under capitalism from making growing numbers of people around the world, especially young people, increasingly critical of capitalism as a way of organizing society. Sometimes, and more often than was the case in the 1990s and at least the first decade of this century, anti-capitalist sentiment is also “anti-anti-communist.” This involves both rejecting anti-communism and adopting an attitude that is at least somewhat sympathetic to the USSR [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics] and similar societies. It should not be difficult to understand why many people critical of capitalism think this way. After all, the capitalist status quo with which we are all too familiar is horrible. Its defenders demonize communism. Thus, sympathy for whatever capitalism’s champions denounce can come easily, especially for people unfamiliar with the societies that anti-communists portray as evil.
Here I must pause to address the question of what to call societies organized along the lines first developed in the USSR (these societies are distinct from countries governed by parties that claim to be socialist in which private firms continue to control most economic activity, such as Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua). There is no term for them that is universally accepted. Anti-communists often call them “Communist” (as have a few anti-capitalist radicals critical of them). However, this term has generally been rejected by their governments and supporters, who have maintained that these societies were not yet communist but only moving in the direction of communism as they understood it. They described this social order as “socialist,” often using the term “actually existing socialism” for it. Many communists who are critical of these societies call them “Stalinist.” Some anti-communists have used the same term. For now, this book will refer to them as so-called “actually existing socialism,” abbreviated as AES. Here this is simply a generic neutral term for these societies, used without accepting the claim that these societies were evolving towards communism or any other claim about them. What they were and whether they were in transition to communism are crucial questions that this book addresses.
Importantly, anti-anti-communism is distinctly different from a perspective that opposes both capitalism and AES as ways of organizing society rooted in domination. It is the latter response that is expressed by a phrase from the radical left in the 1960s: “The ‘Communist’ world is not communist and the ‘Free’ world’ is not free.” But where [Donald] Trump and [Joe Biden] put a minus sign, today’s anti-anti-communists tend to put a plus. When the subject is Communism, anti-anti-communists generally combine sympathy with at least some criticism of the perceived shortcomings of Communist societies and movements. But sometimes contemporary anti-anti-communism flows into outright endorsement of some version of Communism, whether that of [Joseph] Stalin or Mao [Zedong] in the past or China and Cuba today.
Anti-anti-communism is not a new phenomenon. It was a feature of the culture of part of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s. “We refuse to be anti-communist,” declared Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, central organizers in the mid-1960s of the emerging movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Many people in North America and Western Europe who took part in the movements of that time started by adopting an anti-anti-communist stance and went on to become involved with what was often called the New Communist Movement (NCM), a sizeable current of the radical left that looked above all to China for inspiration.
Today, long after the disintegration of the NCM and the end of the Cold War between the U.S.-led “Free World” and the “Communist” states, anti-anti-communism has a somewhat different flavour, one that more often acknowledges problems in AES societies. Ethnographer Kristin Ghodsee and philosopher Scott Sehon present the situation this way:
On the Left stand those with some sympathy for socialist ideals and the popular opinion of hundreds of millions of Russian and east European citizens nostalgic for their state socialist pasts. On the Right stand the committed anti-totalitarians, both east and west, insisting that all experiments with Marxism will always and inevitably end with the gulag. Where one side sees shades of grey, the other views the world in black and white.
In other words, Ghodsee and Sehon see anti-anti-communism (their source for which is anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who rejected anti-communism in the Cold War U.S.) as the alternative to a right-wing position. They do not 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. They are explicit about their criticisms of Communism: “this does not mean that we are apologising for, or excusing the atrocities or the lost lives of millions of men and women who suffered for their political beliefs.” After dissecting today’s anti-communism, they conclude:
Responsible and rational citizens need to be critical of simplistic historical narratives that rely on the pitchfork effect to demonise anyone on the Left. We should all embrace Geertz’s idea of an anti-anti-communism in hopes that critical engagement with the lessons of the 20th century might help us to find a new path that navigates between, or rises above, the many crimes of both communism and capitalism.
In her 2018 book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, which has been translated into over a dozen languages, Ghodsee argues that although “state socialism” ultimately failed, for much of the twentieth century it “presented an existential challenge to the worst excesses of the free market.” Its collapse led to the end of efforts to regulate markets and redistribute incomes. Moreover, these socialist experiments had many positive aspects. The state guaranteed citizens employment and housing. It provided public child care and implemented other measures to promote women’s education and participation in paid work, including in jobs that had traditionally not been done by women. “There was a baby in all that bathwater. It’s time we got around to saving it,” Ghodsee concludes. While those public services and rights undoubtedly existed, this way of evaluating them — “cherry pick[ing] from the Soviet policy pantheon,” as theorist Sophie Lewis puts it — treats them as if they can be considered apart from the oppressive features of AES with which they were entangled. This approach is similar to the one taken by people 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. As Lewis observes, Ghodsee never asks “the question of what an anti-capitalist, non-capitalist, post-capitalist society worthy of those names might actually look like.”
In recent years anti-anti-communism has become more common on the left than it was for several decades after the collapse of AES. Often this is a diffuse mood that surfaces in social industry posts. But it also crops up in articles in widely read left-wing publications. For example, in 2022 journalist Liza Featherstone looked to the history of the East Bloc to criticize the U.S.’s failure to guarantee workers any paid vacation time. In an article on the Jacobin website, possibly the most-read English-language radical publication, Featherstone argued that Communism:
took summer vacation seriously. Long before any other industrialized nations, the Soviet Union’s Labour Code obligated employers to provide two weeks of paid vacation. The 1936 Soviet constitution specifically included a “right to rest.” To that end, the Eastern Bloc communist countries not only provided the time off but invested in affordable vacation spots for workers. In the late 1930s, the government increased spending on resorts, health camps, campgrounds, and other vacation spots, including spas. Some of these offered activities, such as volleyball or mushroom hunting.
This kind of nostalgic response captures the spirit in which today’s anti-anti-communism engages with AES. The anti-anti-communist stance is quite different from one that is ruthlessly critical of social domination and assesses both capitalism and AES from that perspective — the approach once expressed in the previously mentioned slogan “The ‘Communist’ world is not communist and the ‘Free’ world’ is not free.”
The soil of anti-anti-communism today is fertile ground for perspectives that are not just sympathetic to AES but enthusiastic about it. Writer Barnaby Raine observes that
there is a new if modest proliferation of radicals now who would have baffled 1990s commentators; young people in Europe and North America who want to sound like the old Communists. On podcasts and on social media, in political parties and in unions, they salute authoritarian state power past and present. They speak, they say, in the name of socialism. They amass thousands of followers online. They are not the dwindling band of pensioners who remember subsidised cruises on the Volga. They don an aesthetic of kitsch cheek or unsentimental realism or, somehow, both.
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.
*Excerpt for Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Left provided by Fernwood Publishing.
