David Camfield’s new book, Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left, is a concise and insightful intervention into the renewed debates on the legacy of AES. Red Flags analyzes the revolutionary transformations that shaped the unique forms of class rule in the Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China, and Cuba in order to demolish anticommunist and “anti-anticommunist mythologies surrounding these societies.
Following economist Jacques Sapir, Camfield characterizes AES regimes as “mobilization economies,” in which the state mobilized “all available resources, on a non-commercial basis.” The regimes prioritized the geopolitical interests of their respective party-state bureaucracies by imposing distinct forms of “state capitalism.”
While Camfield’s “reconstructed historical materialist” analysis and lessons he draws for the Left are mostly spot-on, his use of state capitalism as a framework to understand AES is less convincing. In this review, I will briefly summarize Camfield’s central arguments about AES before discussing their broader theoretical and political implications.
Why wasn’t AES socialism?
Camfield locates the renewed interest in AES regimes in anti-anticommunism. Since Western anticommunists (of liberal and conservative variants) have equated communism with fascism, the decline of the neoliberal consensus that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse paved the way for the revival of anti-anticommunism.
Camfield argues this tendency grew among certain Maoist currents in the 1960s’ New Left and has become more prominent as the disillusionment with neoliberal capitalism has led many to a search for alternatives in recent years. Anti-anticommunists’ nostalgic embrace of rival regimes to Western capitalism (including AES regimes, but often other developmentalist regimes too) raises real problems for the socialist left today as apologism for class oppression under AES regimes becomes more widespread.
Contrary to the claims of their proponents, the bureaucratic one-party regimes governing AES societies never aimed for democratic workers’ control or the abolition of exploitation and oppression. Camfield shows how workers experienced forms of political and economic domination under state managers who pursued economic goals that mimicked capitalist growth.
However, in the aftermath of rapid industrialization campaigns and wartime mobilizations, the AES command/mobilizatio
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