Notes on Failure

All active leftist projects in the twenty-first century are in some fashion molded by the failure of socialism in the twentieth century, this is the collective trauma, the collective contradiction, which has scared the utopian ambitions inherent in the philosophy of social progress. Contemporary ideological groups have been forced to rationalize this contradiction in two major ways: first denial, and second disavowal. 

Those who engage in denial are the classic camp of MLs, Maoists, Latin American Communist enthusiasts and other forms of archaic state socialist apologists. This camp is also more tragically represented in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, as well as the other Rump Communist parties which have become terminal perennial entrapment schemes. This form of rationalization seeks to completely avoid acknowledging that the socialist project collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, that it would have burst at the seams with or without active western sabotage. 

The mode of denial necessitates a conspiratorial angle, some secret explanation as to why history is seemingly going backwards, the anthem of the CPRF all but says this: “the hour has come when the whirlwind of history is going in circles…”. This system is akin to a doomsday cult whose apocalypse has been postponed, the denialists would like for the history of the twentieth century to repeat, for a new wave of class consciousness to arise, for a new revolution, and for a second chance to administer the transitional socialist state, a second chance at communism. 

The problem is, the revolutionaries of the past century only had their chances once, replicating their tactics while alienated from their conditions may seem studiously orthodox, but it is as effective as christians awaiting the rapture. 

Disavowal on the other hand takes the form of the left who attempt to draw historical lineage parallel to that of the failed socialist project: Liberal Socialists, Anarchists, all manner of contemporary neologisms, and broad spectrum of socialist-adgacent economic theories. This camp may not be as tragic as the denialists, they are not weighed down by that ball and chain of orthodoxy, and they do not have to pretend the last century did not happen. Owing to this they have been leaps and bounds more successful in the last twenty years than their denialist peers, the largest socialist political group in the United States is the Democratic Socialists of America, in Europe and Africa the void left by the Soviet bloc was also neatly filled by Social-Democrats. Anarchists too have been the most effective extra-governmental organizers within the left globally, both of the major liberated territories who can be said to be actually “socialist”, Rojava and the Zapatista territories, practice a political theory akin to some form of anarchism. 

This group however also possesses a major flaw, their disavowal of socialist lineage has caused them to be easily formatted into the political system of the neoliberal global order. This goes much  more for the liberal socialists, as the Anarchists have a much more rightful claim to the disavowal of twentieth century socialism. Anarchism has been its own political treatise for multiple centuries, while the “Democratic-Socialist” contingent was until very recently always an appendage of the old Marxist-Leninist contingent. 

In disavowal socialists fail to recognize their own lineage, in doing so they are equally blind to a proper analysis and synthesis, not like the orthodox socialists who actively shun the basic analytical practices of Marxism, but for the fact they they may as well have no history, if they pretend a vast section of their own socialist lineage was completely foreign to them. 

The campus Trotskyist, bane of any college leftists existence, represents an odd double mix of these pathologies. They at once vocalize the latter, a strict disavowal of any action by a socialist state after the rise of Stalin and eventual assasination of Trotsky. Conveniently encapsulating within Trotsky their own personal visions of an “actual” soviet socialism. While simultaneously using this imaginary vision of an alternative “better” bolshevism to satisfy the need for conspiracy of the denialist camp. They fulfill a strange position of simultaneously disavowing and engaging in apologies for the twentieth century. 

The truth is we have already wasted thirty years. It is useless to escape the failures of socialism, we need to metabolize them. Socialism can only return in an actually effective manner insofar as it has adapted to its past failures, this adaptation demands ownership and recognition. As rhetoric says in Disco Elysium: 

“Yes! Abject failure. Total, irreversible defeat on all fronts! Absolutely vanquished, beaten, curb-stomped and pissed on — until *you* came along! *You* will reverse the fortune of the workers of the world. You alone, against every living thing, against every human alive: eight hundred trillion reál in the hands of an *impossibly* well organized ruling class; towering city blocks of bank-men who have the ears of prime ministers; million-headed armies of nations and the love of your own mother! You — against the atom, the charm and the spin. Where the whole world failed — matter failed to bend to human will; human will failed to get out of bed and tie its laces — you alone, single-handedly, will rebuild the dreams of the working class. You are The Last Communist. Now get to work, comrade.”