Nation-states, those geographical entities you see on a map of the world, appear to be the fundamental, and natural, units of the global system. There are big ones, small ones, old ones, new ones, rich ones and poor ones. Powerful states oppress the small or weak, squeeze them of wealth, bomb them into submission or occupy them outright. Nations without a state, like the Palestinians, can suffer even worse.
Hatred of Western states’ hypocrisy and aggression has therefore led many people to identify with states, such as China or Vietnam, whose independence from the West was achieved via self-described “socialist” or “Marxist” regimes. Yet socialism’s real meaning is lost by its reductive association with “Third World nationalism”, “state-led economic development”, or anyone who claims to be “anti-US”.
For Karl Marx and Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, socialism is when the working class runs society in its interests, something achievable only through international revolution. Fake communism’s ugly vision—the national rule of a self-defined socialist government—reflects a politics in which practically anything goes except workers’ democracy.
The real Marxist tradition
So what’s the genuine socialist tradition? First and foremost, Marxism begins with social classes, not states. All states are divided into rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. The United States, for example, is much richer than Cambodia. Yet American billionaires and Cambodian capitalists have far more in common with each other than they do with the workers they each exploit in their respective countries. So the inside of an Amazon warehouse in New York City bears much closer resemblance to a Phnom Penh sweatshop than a Manhattan penthouse.
Without the world’s division into states, two workers on different continents would feel a much closer affinity than a worker and boss within the same territory. Nationalism, the ideology of nation-states, encourages workers to identify with those who exploit them.
Although opposed to all oppression and therefore committed to the right of national self-determination, Marxists are not nationalists. Marxism aims to organise mass working-class struggle for the overthrow of capitalists and capitalist states in every country, with the goal being the creation of a global socialist system.
Second, Marx was never “for the state”. Educated elites wielding state power for the common good is a dream as old as philosophy. Marx had an entirely different approach: the state is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Even the most democratic capitalist republic disguises and upholds inequality by protecting the “equal” right to profit and exploit others. As capitalism concentrates extreme wealth at one pole and a gigantic working class at the other, the state maintains the status quo. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement for businesspeople, and for government bureaucrats, generals, judges, and politicians, for whom state power is their own kind of private property.
Instead of looking to perfect the state, Marx wondered where an equal society without private property or the state could come from. He found the solution to the problem in the modern working class: workers own no private property (by this he meant wealth-producing property, not personal property), but have to generate more and more wealth, therefore property, for the very people who exploit them.
If the working class ruled society, he reasoned, it would govern in its interests too. But, unlike all previous ruling classes, workers actually create the wealth they seek to control. Since modern industry cannot be divided up, and every workplace depends on every other to meet our human needs, the working class can enjoy the fruits of its collective labour only as one big collective.
Marx’s socialism is the product of class struggle, not state policy. A working-class revolution has to seize the entire economy from below, smashing through the repressive state with democratic, bottom-up power. Society will gradually shed all need for authority, coercion and violence against anyone, as complete social equality replaces the oppressive division of society into classes. That’s real communism.
Marx did not conspire to install rulers who really agreed with his theory. Anyone who teaches you how to ride a bike by riding it for you, will take you for a ride. Workers themselves have to overcome society’s class division by developing skills, habits and structures for self-government and the abolition of classes altogether. They learn this through direct, mass, and ultimately revolutionary struggle against exploitation.
Yet, as capitalism developed, so did state power. “State socialism”, rather than withering before Marx’s facts and logic, only grew in attraction as a potential model. After the defeat of a European-wide revolutionary wave in 1848, French Emperor Louis Bonaparte and Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck rose to power, building modern states with nationalised banking and industry, larger armies and police, and some limited social welfare.
In his 1852 pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote in disgust of this “enormous bureaucratic and military organisation ... this appalling parasitic body ... a state authority whose work is divided and centralised as in a factory”.
These were precursors to the kinds of developmentalist states that fake communists support as “objectively progressive”. China’s dictatorship, they claim, deserves support for unifying the country and raising living standards.
Marx, whose yardstick was human freedom, did not support capitalist progress for its own sake. He only relished its historical irony: every tool used to “perfect” humanity’s enslavement—science, industry, globalisation—also improves workers’ capacity to overthrow their masters and finally liberate humanity.
So despite being a demand of the 1848 revolution, Marx did not praise Bismarck’s unification of Germany. Instead, he called it “a satire of the revolutionary strivings involved, and thus the deadliest weapon in the hands of the irreconcilable foe” in an 1859 article for the weekly Das Volk.
Bismarck legislated government health insurance, old age pensions and workplace accident pay, inviting his free-market opponents in an 1881 parliamentary speech to “call it socialism or whatever you like. It is the same to me”. Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels called it something else, already in his 1877 polemic Anti-Dühring: states intervening to regulate and stabilise capitalism are the “personification of the total national capital”.
Third, Marx understood that to win socialism, workers would need organised, centralised resistance to the capitalists and their state. But this alternative political structure would have to be built by workers’ struggle itself. When the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 created a wholly new ultrademocratic system, Marx became its greatest champion.
The Commune opened every state position to election, paid them all “workman’s wages”, deprived them of special privileges and subjected them to re-election at any time. The police force was abolished and a standing army over the people was replaced by the people armed. Marx called it “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”, in his 1871 published address, The Civil War in France.
This vision of a democratic workers’ state was realised in Russia on an enormously vaster scale in October 1917. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party led an insurrection of the soviets (councils of workers, peasants and soldiers) with precisely Marx’s Commune-inspired writings in mind. Lenin’s pamphlet The State and Revolution, written that year, draws extensively from Marx and Engels to show that reformism (the main fake socialism of the time) had mangled the view of state power beyond recognition:
“The mass of the population will rise to take an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.”
Stalinism and its children
Stalinism, named after the dictator Joseph Stalin, whose counterrevolution destroyed Russia’s isolated workers’ state, turned the fetish for state management into “Marxism-Leninism”. In Stalin’s Russia, a ruling class of bureaucrats planned a fully nationalised economy to ruthlessly exploit workers and peasants. This model of state-run, breakneck industrial capitalism was called “socialism in one country”.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Russian-dominated empire that ethnically cleansed millions of non-Russians, organised the partition of Poland with Nazi Germany in 1939, and occupied Eastern Europe after World War Two. An international apparatus of bullshit artists taught socialists it was their duty to slavishly back the USSR-led “Eastern bloc” against the US-led Western one. They said that whole countries had been paved with socialism by Russian tanks, like steamrollers paving roads.
Geopolitical “campism”—taking the side of the Eastern bloc against the West—not only overshadowed working-class struggle but crushed it. When Hungarian workers, revolting against Stalinist rule in 1956, established a nationwide network of democratic factory councils, the Russians slandered it as a CIA-sponsored plot and invaded the country. After the “communist” Russian government massacred Hungarian workers, most communists worldwide parroted Moscow’s lies or abandoned communism in despair.
Stalinism acquired an anticolonial rebrand with the 1949 Chinese Revolution. The Communist Party led a victorious mass army into Beijing, defeating corrupt warlords and foreign imperialist powers, and establishing an independent, unified national state. So far so good—except the party followed the USSR in establishing a cult of personality around party chair Mao Zedong, totalitarian party rule and a regime of extreme labour exploitation.
Over the next decades, dozens of militarised, anticolonial revolutions followed suit, dousing Cold War Stalinism in a romantic Third World perfume.
Lenin versus Stalin in the colonial world
Marx and Lenin had championed anti-colonial revolutions, but with a very different outcome in mind: the oppressed peoples of the colonised world and European workers uniting to crush world capitalism. But revolutionaries in the oppressed nations needed to “uphold the independence of the working-class movement even in its most embryonic form”, Lenin argued in 1921, maximising the democratic space for workers to lead all of the poor in a struggle for socialism. They should not fall into line behind, or “give communist colouring” to, middle- and upper-class leaders of anti-colonial movements.
The early Chinese Communist Party took this task to heart, organising millions into trade unions. By 1927, armed strikers had formed southern China’s “Government Number Two”, and a workers’ insurrection seized Shanghai. But then came Stalin. His agents in China browbeat the Communists into merging with the Nationalist Party—led by merchants and warlords through whom Moscow bureaucrats hoped to secure a stable alliance with an independent, capitalist China. Stalin demanded Shanghai open its gates to the Nationalist general Chiang Kai-Shek. The revolutionary workers obliged. They were slaughtered by the tens of thousands.
Fleeing to the countryside, the Communist remnants built “Red Bases” among farmers and returned to conquer the cities with practically zero working-class members. There were no mass strikes; factories were ordered to carry on production as normal. Immiserated farmers could not govern directly like the concentrated mass of urban workers. Instead, military party leaders took power for themselves. Marx’s 1852 description of the countryside’s relationship to strongmen anticipated well Mao’s subsequent police state:
“[The peasantry] cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, an unlimited governmental power which ... sends them rain and sunshine from above.”
The “sunshine” of Maoist land reform was quickly followed by the “rain” of forced collectivisation, forced labour and a catastrophic Great Leap Forward in which up to 30 million people starved to death.
The logic of states
Capitalist competition is global, brutal and constant. Therefore, Stalinist regimes, like all capitalist states, feel an urgent need to militarise, which they say is for national defence. The Nazis said the same about German rearmament; the Americans claimed they had to stop a “domino effect” by invading Vietnam; Mao’s China built the “workers’ bomb”, a nuclear weapon capable of wiping out hundreds of thousands of workers. The European Union today is spending hundreds of billions for military “self-defence” after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, itself justified as protection from “NATO’s expansion”.
Marxism aims to break this death logic, not perpetuate it. That’s why Marx, Engels, Lenin and Leon Trotsky, another leading Russian revolutionary, fought for international revolution. The world produces absolute abundance, but a single beleaguered country cannot shorten working hours while raising living standards—the basis of a stable socialist democracy. Spreading revolution is the only way to defeat counterrevolution without devolving into a class-divided garrison state.
Fake communism refashioned socialism into nationalistic grotesqueries: Peru’s Shining Path, Arab Ba’athism, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. The brotherhood of “socialist” states was often a band of hostile siblings, like when Vietnam deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979, followed by China’s invasion of Vietnam, and the Soviet Union threatening to invade China.
In response to Russian nuclear sabre-rattling, Mao had formed an alliance with US president Richard Nixon in 1972. Maoists performed a globally synchronised backflip and supported US-allied genocidal wars against national independence in Bangladesh and Angola. China provided diplomatic support to Chilean general Augusto Pinochet who, backed by Washington, toppled the left-wing government of Salvador Allende and repurposed a football stadium for the torture of socialists.
The Cold War is over, but campism has adapted to new terrain. Today’s “anti-imperialist” camp includes Vladimir Putin’s mafia oligarchy, Iran’s anti-communist theocrats, Beijing’s “communist” billionaires and, until his overthrow, the “socialist” torture dungeons of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Uprisings against repressive governments in this broad camp—such as in Syria, Libya, Hong Kong and Iran—are forever discovered to be CIA-funded Trojan horses, by Redditors trained in Marxism-Leninism.
Now, campism’s militaristic nationalism is pipelining some into the “anti-woke” right. The election platform of pro-Palestine UK politician George Galloway, and others in Europe, bundles together opposition to NATO, mass migration and trans rights. Harsh new anti-homosexuality laws in military-led Burkina Faso and Mali are defended as anticolonial “African sovereignty” as the countries realign from French domination to Russian and Chinese influence.
There’s much more to be said about Stalinist betrayals and distortions. But the substitution of national struggle between elites for class struggle led by workers is at the heart of the difference between fake communism and genuine Marxism. Some time in 1864, Marx wrote the opening line of the International Workingmen’s Association’s general rules: “Considering that the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class themselves ...”
If socialism is to have a future, it must return to Marx’s idea that socialism is the rule of the working class, or it is nothing at all.
